Night Sky

I seem to have almost completely stopped writing anything original. Here's another link that I found interesting.

Scientific American has a slideshow on the evolution of the night sky. It's pretty awesome. I love the Calvinistic fashion in which they describe the future of our planet.


Here's one image titled - 'Andromeda Rising'.
© 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc. All Rights Reserved.

IPL auction

It's hard not to talk about the IPL auction when Chennai has a team and is spending like crazy. Although I think 'Chennai Super Kings' is among the stupidest things I've ever seen in print, I'm quite excited - what with the likes of Hayden, Dhoni & Murali in the ranks. Is Dhoni worth $1.5 M? I certainly hope so. However, although I dislike his mug, I think Symonds would've been a better choice.

On a forum I read, someone debated the usefulness of a strong bowling attack on a flat pitch in the 20/20 format. If I remember correctly, the bowling in last year's T20 Cup (it wasn't an official WC, mind) was pretty spectacular and one of the (surprising) reasons that the matches remained competitive. Pundits say that 20/20 will make bowlers obsolete and pitches boringly flat (not that the subcontinent's pitches are anything but), but I, in the tradition of Levitt & Dubner, believe that the new format will result in the resurgence of & necessitate a strong bowling attack.

On with the auction!

I hope I'm in Chennai for a game or two. I'm glad they're starting the matches late in the evening (8 pm, I believe) because the May maasam summer will be a little too much for most of the players. I think the MAC will fill up for quite a few games, hopefully for regional clashes like Hyderabad-Chennai & Bangalore-Chennai.

*sigh* If only Ranji would be followed thus...

Flash of a Firefly

I'm supposed to be writing a recursive-descent parser for CS421, but ended up watching this instead.

'Life After People' is a History Channel documentary that, well... I suppose the name is fairly self-descriptive. I found it through this blog. Watch it. It's really quite fascinating.



It's sad to know that life will go on long after I'm gone, and even sadder (based on my new-found knowledge from the doc.) is the fact that the tenuous grip we hold over the planet, claiming to be its masters is ephemeral and fleeting. National Geographic magazine once described the timeline of the visible universe (since its birth 13 billion years ago) as one long summer day - and the era of humans was merely a flash of a firefly at sunset. We'll soon be dust.

--
Postscript - armed with this fatalism, I wonder whether the CS421 homework actually needs to be done... after all, we'll all be dead in 80-90 years.

Edit - I do have one small problem with the assumption the documentary makes. How exactly are people going to 'vanish'? If the human race were to die out, it would be in exactly that fashion - through some invincible worldwide epidemic or in a disastrous nuclear winter. It would take at least 30-40 years for all of us to die, I would guess (though I have absolutely no authority to make that statement). We couldn't just vanish, could we?

Edit2 - The last 6 minutes are really amazing, very HG Wells's 'The Time Machine'-ish.