Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Four forwards with impressive numbers

But extremely varying wraps. TD, everyone knows he's a star. Dwight Howard, well he's the definition of a manchild. People go on an on about his upside, but if he keeps up what he's doing now, that's enough for me. Carlos Boozer was almost hounded out of town for being a no show in the first year of a six year, $65 million deal with Utah. Now people think he's actually earning that. Which brings us to Andris Biedrins. Nobody expected him to be putting up numbers like this, and nobody expects him to maintain it for the season. We'll see. As it is, he's top 15 rebounding, top 5 field goal percentage, top 5 blocks.

The lines:
TD @ GSW
22pts (9 of 18), 16 boards, 4 assists, 1 steal, 6 blocks, 5 turnovers

AB vs SA
18pts (8 of 15), 15 boards, 4 assists, 1 steal, 6 blocks, 1 turnover

a win for golden state surprisingly

DH @ Jazz
21 pts, 16 boards

CB vs Magic
21 pts, 9 boards (mind you, AK47's back and he took a little of the scoring and rebounding slack off Boozer, putting up an AK-like 11 pts, 5 boards, 5 assists, 3 steals, 4 blocks)

a win for the Magic, suprisingly

the only surprise I need now is GS to win @ Orlando.

In other news, I got my results for Honours yesterday. And they were good.

Sunday, November 26, 2006

FACT

i am bitterly disgusted by the behaviour of the federation against copyright theft. They put out a really funny anti-piracy ad and i am forced to watch it before my lano & woodley dvd.

Somebody made a factual addition to their entry at wikipedia referring to this proper Gandhi, but it was removed by the thought police. Instead, we now have this:

"FACT's adverts appear at the beginning of many videos and DVDs, urging consumers to check whether they have a genuine copy, and providing contact details to report any illegalities."

Which version do you prefer?

The essence of pure flavour

if it's pure gold in science journalism that you're after, please: dig in.

Kind of surreal

Seeing this clip

Coming out of the clothesbox

It's time I outed mice elf. I am an avid fanatical bozo of the NBA. i like:

Amazing athletes. These people are tall, fast, powerful, have stamina and entirely imposing. My all time supa vaforit e is Latrell Sprewell. When he busted on the seen he was an instant success, which lead to the pinnacle of his career, the Landlord (3pt Phoenix? Owns it. Baseline Seattle? Owns it. Tell 'em about Orlando. Owns it.) series of shoe adverts. He then went through the Strangler phase, which included him strangling is boss. Then he played with an original manchild Kevin Garnett. Now he runs a fish gutting operation out of East River on the Hudson, Mississippi. Times is tough, but he'll always have his first team defense and all nba second team credentials to reminisce on/upon.

Then there's the 720 dunk. Are the general public aware of this feat? I think if they were it would radically alter their weltanschau. there should be a video of these running perpetually in a medi-yum such as televiJohn. i tried this manouevre down at my local court, and the judge threw me out. When i tried it at my local basketball court, i managed 540 degrees but couldn't get it in the hole, to quote Niles Standish.

Good commercials. The LeBrons Nike series is quite good, which many people understand to mean very good.

Good commentators. I remember joking with my schoolfrenz about the dude from the one from NBA Action! Tasty dishes! We're havin' a block party!

in other news, i was shocked and amused by this

Two stuff

These withered hands
have dug for a dream
sifted through sand
and
left over nightmares

ooover the hill
a desolate wind
turns shit to gold and blows my soul crazy

the end
oh the end
we live again

oh I grew weary of the end

That day I found Beck again. Somewhere along the line I'd lost him. Been to the Museums of the mars volta, the Westmeads of ween and the Petershams of crash test dummies. Back the soul mass transit system's just pulled in to Platform 1 at Becksville, and it's good to be back.

Dude can write lyrics.

But the real reason I wrote is to inform you of what is undeniably a return to form of ...The [zoom out clouds] Siiiimpsons...

They got a movie trailer. You MUST WATCH IT NOW

Sunday, November 19, 2006

It's about time I give credit where it's do

Tony Martin is one cool dude. Well, he's funny. And it was on his radio show that I discovered the talents of Stan Bush. There's also some very funny clips of politicians saying strange things at his website (below).

Comedian's with the knack for making you laugh are a rare breed indeed, and they cost quite a bit, then you have to get a license, use a leash in many areas. It's just not worth it.

But these are:
Tony Martin's latest incarnation
Shaun Micallef
Lano & Woodley

They're all from the Austrealand Region, my beloved ice cream bar.

You've got the touch

You've got the power.
After all is said and done, you never walked you never run. You're a winner.

Stan Bush is my personal motivational speaker and his words in song form are killer. Do yourself a favour and listen. It does get a bit old after a while, but don't we all? Don't we all.

You love reading science news stories

Some psychologists believe that if scared rats are any indication of human behaviour, we shouldn't rush in to treat the fears of recently traumatised people. Hmmm.

But can they tell how many donuts I ate last week? I'd like to see them try. Some researchers have examined ancient teeth to find out what ye olde hominid ate.

Potent potable - I mean painkiller discovered in saliva. I love it because just when people think they know about the body, they discover a totally new compound right there in somebody's spitball. Of course, you'd have to be a Pavlov's dog (or padlocked door) to drool enough to get any kind of effect.

My next article will be entirely self-generated. That is, I am seeking out the news meself. Oooh, I wonder what I'll find!

Thursday, November 02, 2006

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

The Summer of George

Actually, this is A Sports Guy's preview of the summer of sport which is presently crashing down over our heads even before the season has turned.

League
The tri-nations are just not as exciting as many regular season NRL games. Maybe if the Kiwis had SBW, and maybe if they had Benji, and maybe if the Warriors were a force...then we would see a contest as gripping as a Grand Final or State of Origin. You know, where you are generally interested in the game the whole way through? Which brings me to...

Cricket
I'm sorry people, but any sport that causes this much ink to be spilled had better translate into great entertainment. But who can say they are gripped by cricket the whole way through? Not the commentators, who are forced into rotation to maintain freshness (TV) or mundane patter occasionally interrupted by commentary (radio). Yes, it has its damn good moments, and part of the hook is that you have to watch the whole freaking five days in case something happens. Some parallels to the slow burn of soccer there. But you can't seriously maintain that you won't be reaching for that remote, or finding yourself absolutely not wondering what you're missing as you have a beer in the backyard.

Tennis
Always the bridesmaid, never the groom. Tennis can generate drama, but is capable of perhaps more boredom than cricket. The problem here isn't the game itself, but the fact that 95% of games are shite. The good ones are damn good. Spanning a couple of hours, the length is reasonable. And the emotion of it all, after a marathon (can we try another metaphor here, please? How 'bout triathlon, because they're harder) five setter... Tennis also has a strange stable of commentators that always manage to grab some attention. Whispering John Alexander, effusive Bruce McAvaney, happy to be there Sandy Roberts, frail John Barrett. And incisive, insightful commentary from Newk. What I like about him was that as Rafter was trying to get out of a difficult period in a Wimbledon semi, he'd say "I was just talking to Pat about this on Wednesday, and we agreed that he needs to be more, not less aggressive on these kinds of points." After which Rafter would win the point and there would be a moment of silence.

Basketball
The cool friend who isn't cool any more. Not sure what happened, but this once-on-the-cusp sport has failed to deliver for so long that we might as well call it Braith Anasta (Love your work Braith, but it was either you or Mark Philippousis. Have you noticed how for the last four years "my best tennis is ahead of me"? He'll be saying this from the seniors tour). Thing is, I watched a game the other day as part of Nine's new 'commitment' to basketball and the players were rudely talented. You had these up and comers who nobody's ever heard of draining threes, taking it to the hole and generally showing the kind of promise that NBA scouts would drool over. A little schooling, a few tats, some work in the weight room and these guys could be on $20 million contracts. And yet there's the defending champs, drawing a crowd of 1,500 to their home games and being ignored by the press. I don't know what would give Australian baketball the props it deserves, and the people who run the NBL have no clue either.

Snooker
Watching a professional female snooker player wearing a visor mishit so badly that she grazed the white ball and sent it three millimetres to the left - priceless.

Football
Why the obsession with the EPL?

Social success went to our heads

This was my way of summarising a story I wrote about some evolutionary scientists and mathematicians interested in the Machiavellian hypothesis - that the explosion in brain size that occurred in Homo sapiens from about 350,000 years ago to about 50,000 years ago was driven by social competition. It works a little like this:

Have little brain --> can't do jack
Brain gets a bit bigger --> can deceive, form alliances, flatter etc
Those with slightly bigger brains can do more of the social scheming and get more intercourse and pass on more genes for bigger brains.

~~~

The acquisition of knowledge in the sciences these days is astounding. Yet Craig Venter couldn't have put it better when he said that we don't know shit. I think this statement means different things to different people. To me, it shows an appreciation for the complexity of the life that saturates the world we live in. In my opinion - which I'd like to think is factually correct - we can't ever explain everything, if only for the simple reason that there are more species than person-hours to understand them. The sooner we realise our limitations, the sooner our priorities reflect reality.

The thing is, a layperson might interpret Venter's comment as an attack on science or its validity, which I think if you look at Craig Venter's history, it wasn't.

The continual hyping of research (which is an industry and which I am now a small part of) is rarely accompanied by serious and thoughtful commentary on what we know and what we don't; on how sure we are of the things we think we know; on why we fund what we fund; and what this knowledge means for us all. Does it mean that we understand life? That a cure for cancer is just around the corner? That we understand ecosystems?

Even if we could get better media analysis of science, I'm with David Suzuki and that communications theorist he quotes in a recent book, that science blurbs are part of an overall pattern of information flood which renders the receiver unable to do anything. It's all too damn passive. Just like this blog! At least you can post a comment if you please.

~~~

By the way, the hypothesis that lies behind all medical research (which is the vast majority of all research) is that we should live forever, free from pain, suffering and abnormality. I couldn't begrudge a sick person treatment but wait a couple of decades for the science to advance and lots of people - and politicians - will be asking themselves questions about this. This is too meaty a topic for further exposition here.

Sunday, October 29, 2006

Apparently this one has been hit over 2200 times

(Subliminal) erotic images float through my head
say you want to beee my one shot girl

Finished Thesis

The Role of Tropomyosins in Neuronal Morphogenesis. An analysis of knockout mice lacking exon 9d from the gamma Tropomyosin gene.

I was going to call it Gone Tropo, but I felt that it was too wordy. Does anyone know how I can post it (or a draft, for legal reasons) here as a pdf?

A Sports Guy

Welcome to the first official column from A Sports Guy, something I hope to turn into a regular feature here at Hammertime's Brog. Either that, or it's a one off.

I would like at the outset to declare my indebtedness to Bill Simmons (The Sports Guy) and other good sports writers at ESPN.com. What I feel Australia lacks is sports writers that are 'always good'. You know how some writers just always do it for you, no matter what they write about? Bill Simmons and Douglas Hofstadter are two such scribes.

Australian sports writing has its moments, and there are many who are readable. But don't all readers deserve more than just 'readability'? I want to laugh, I want to look forward to the column and tell my friends about it. I would not be so bold as to suggest this column will be anywhere near as good as its inspiration, or that of another amazing non-conventional-subject writer, Lester Bangs. He really changed my perception of music. I just throw my hat in the ring. The more voices the better, in my opinion.

[By the way, just saw a great interview with Paul McGeough on SBS's Dateline. As Negus put it, a sane perspective on an insane situation.]

I was inspired to start spreading my fingers over the keyboard by an article I read by Phil Gould. He does tend to polarise people, but I will say this about him - he is often entertaining. So I thought I'd better write something about league, that much maligned Australian contact sport.

I'd like to talk about two players, who in their own ways are freaks. Matt Utai and Greg Inglis. At his best, Utai is unstoppable. Sterlo always says he is so hard to stop from 15 metres out, but he's hard to stop anywhere. Inglis at first seems slender, and fast. Then he seems big, powerful, agile and damn fast.

Utai was at his peak during the Bulldogs enhanced funding days of 2001, 2002, 2003. He always seemed to be running down the sideline and generally straight at, then through a series of defenders. You just felt sorry for the bloke trying to tackle him, even though they were usually bigger than him. He was pretty fast, too. I wonder what he was like in his junior years.

Generally a small run for Utai was 15 metres. a good one 35 metres. He seems to have this bulk that just throws defenders off without any contribution from his arms. I wonder if he's ever palmed off anyone.

By all indications Greg Inglis was the freak in juniors that he still is now. I don't know why sheer pace is so impressive, but it is. Something about seeing one guy who you know is really fast struggling to keep up with the other. A good example is Billy Slater being chased by Luke Patten once. The Dogs got up, but Slater scored one of his typical (btw it's shocking how quickly he's gone from 'freak' to 'teammate of Inglis'. He's still got game) 95 metre tries and laughed in Patten's face when he finally knew he'd beaten him.

The pace Inglis showed in beating Brent Webb in the test was impressive. He's done that to him before, maybe round one against the Warriors. Apparently he's still growing. Projections are 6' 11'', 130 kg, who can sprint 100 m in 11 seconds. He'll be able to pick up and grip one of those exercise balls (while inflated) with one hand.

By the way, Roger Federer is a freak. He's the only guy to win 10 titles in a year three years running. His current undefeated streak is 24 games, still 11 shy of the mark he set last year. But it's the way he plays that makes him a freak. I remember when he was just one of those juniors who are touted as promising. He actually appeared on the tour and didn't do much for a while, apart from beating Pete Sampras (pretty impressive, although how impressive will it look from about 2012, when Federer has more Wimbledons than Sampras?) He could have been another Richard Fromberg, but he went even further.

I would pay for a highlights video that blended Utai, Inglis and a sprinkling of other freaks - your SBWs, your Noa Nadrukus, your Brett Mullins (I remember this one time he was chased down by Matt Seers and everyone was shocked because no one else had ever chased him down. At least that's how I remember it. In fact, while we're here, I hereby ask for suggestions on most surprising / impressive chase downs. It could be Paul Harragon on that Canberra centre, Albert Fulivai. Thanks to their exhaustive database, I can now reveal that he played 44 games over 6 years. He scored tries at the impressive rate of one every two games, or less impressive 3 and a half per year). I spose what they all have in common is being really fast and/or demolishing the defence.

First it cutteth,
then it taketh slack

Monday, October 16, 2006

For once, they used my title!

Well, mostly. I did not have the foresight nor the wherewithal to append ', not pink'. still, pretty close!

This research is about whether people partition colours into the same lexical space across cultures. Check out the article at Cosmos now!

Sunday, October 15, 2006

Ant Algorithms Are Adaptable

or
Ants From Broken Homes Turn Out Ok, Computer
or
Ant Housing Market Bullish
or
Ants Pave Way to Understanding of Complexity

an article I wrote for Cosmos magazine. I managed to fit a reference to Douglas Hofstadter in my interview with the researcher for this article, but couldn't find a way to sneak it into the article. Perhaps the brog is the best place for that.

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Sluggish Sperm Story

My latest offering to the good people of Cosmos.

This isn't much of a blog these days. Not much news, little nonsense, few musings. Until I finish my thesis, things might not get much better. But when I do - boy oh boy!

Thursday, September 21, 2006

How now, brown mouse?

Another Cosmos article.
Smear the mouse, and it will darken. It will also be less likely to become cancerous. Read on, I urge you

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Water + Bubbles = Freedom

Hurt + Bandaid = Toxic Shock Syndrome
Love + Guitar = Splinter
Hunger + Flames = Burger

Alternative Lyrics to Someplace Only We Know by Keane

I came upon
a foreign land
I knew the pathway
like my own home land

Is this the place
we used to go?
is this the place
they know as Gulp'n'Blow?

Oh sympathy!
Where have you gone
I'm getting old and I need someone to move on

So tell me when
you gonna let me in
I'm getting tired of
drinking juice from my bin

and IF you have a minute why don't we go
TALK about it someplace with an eagle
THIS could be the end of everything
so why don't we go, baby to montego