Thursday, March 10, 2011

UG Sports - 14: Cricket world cup round up

Boy oh boy. What a world England's been having. Normally, watching England play is like watching paint dry - dull, boring and cliched. But something has happened to the team this world cup. Maybe it's the fresh, sparkling Indian water they are drinking.

First came their thrilling match against India. The harsh lights of Bangalore, a rabidly partisan home crowd, and a century by Sachin Tendulkar - perfect recipe for a disaster of colossal proportions. And yet, the English fought back in style. The target was seemingly unreachable - 338. But Andrew Strauss played a captain's knock and England made it....just. They tied. A last ball tie. That night, hospitals across India and England were flooded with cardio patients, I bet.
Whew, that was a close game [bbc.co.uk]


Next they played their cross-channel rivals, Ireland. The Irish are newbies to cricket and on an island obsessed with rugby, cricketers usually get second billing, if at all. An easy match practice for England, right? Wrong. England chose the wrong day to take it easy. They amassed 327 runs and took the rest of the day off. Minnows Ireland were floundering at 115-5 when a flamboyantly pink-haired Kevin O'Brien decided to take matters into his own hands. A frighteningly powerful pair of arms, those. Clearly thinking this was just another net practice session, KO clobbered every English bowler all across the park with utter ruthlessness and dangerous ease. He scored his half century in just 20 balls and his century in 50. And just like that, the Irish engineered one of the greatest upsets of cricket. As England were left cursing "Oh Brien", the handful of Irish fans who dared to attend the match went wild. Accolades poured in from the home island, congratulating the team. KO has arrived.

Showed those pesky English a thing or two, didn't we?[perthnow.com.au]

You'd think a team beaten that badly would be demoralized and deflated like a day-old balloon. Judging by their performance against formidable South Africa, England is an exception. Although South Africa got them out cheaply for just 171 runs, England's bowlers won them yet another thriller. The proteas were in a very commanding position at 123-3, but over the next few overs, their middle order collapsed like the financial markets of 2008. James Anderson and Stuart Broad went on a rampage, a venture in which they were ably supported by slower bowlers like Swann. In the end, South Africa fell short by 6 runs. Hats off to these resilient English.

Yeah that's the way home, buddy. [stuff.co.nz]

That's it for this week. More next week.

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

And of course Henry the Horse dances the waltz!

One of the loopiest and certainly one of the most delightful songs ever:


Being for the benefit of Mr. Kite by the Beatles (from Sgt. Pepper's lonely hearts club band)


The story goes that Lennon spotted an old poster advertising a circus act featuring Mr. Kite and that every act/person/animal featured in the song was taken straight from this poster. Also, the zany sound effects in the middle of the song were supposedly created after the producer instructed the technicians to chop up the physical audio tape into pieces, throw them in the air, and randomly re-join them. As with all Beatles stories, one can't be too sure about the absolute veracity of this one. Very interesting, nonetheless.

What is Harvard afraid of? Bad weather, it seems

Look, it is no secret to anyone in the game that medical schools sometimes behave like a whimsical child who arbitrarily changes his ice-cream preferences every five minutes inside a Baskin Robbins. A school might, for example, take months to process your  application but process someone else's application with weeks. You may get rejected without any rhyme or reason while your cat may get in with a shitty interview.

In any case, my friend (and loyal reader! Let's call her DL) told me how she emailed a certain school in Bahstun (hint: its name starts with the letter "H" and rhymes with "Arvard") last month just to check up on them and be like, "Oh hey, what's up? Looked at my stuff yet?"

Check out what this school sent her back:
Thank you for your e-mail and your interest the MD Program at Harvard Medical School. The school is closed due to a weather related emergency. We will answer your e-mail as promptly as possible upon our return on 3/3/11.

Seems like they were shoveling snow for a month. Poor sods.

BTW, thanks DL!

Friday, March 4, 2011

Wishes for the day

Eh I am kinda tired right now and I have to wake up early tomorrow morning to go work in lab. So here we go:

  • I want to follow American Idol again. I hear it's getting quite good. "Nail biter", "Surprisingly good", and "really good" are words that I have heard being used to described it so far and I am a sucker for such descriptors.

  • I want to hear back from medical schools already. You are very annoyingly coy medical schools. Time to get it done. Don't waffle around, alright? I am tired of obsessively checking my emails every 30 seconds. 

  • I want to be a freshman again. Life was very uncomplicated then. Plus dining halls have very delicious desserts.

  • I want the weekend to be here already.

Thursday, March 3, 2011

My day in pictures

This was my breakfast:
The most important meal of the day done right

For lunch, I had the fine gourmet cuisine served by the experts at Panda Express. As is customary, I got a fortune cookie with a little nugget of wisdom:


Damn right I am!


This came in the mail for me (and don't you dare go OMG CDs are so archaic):
The best of Judas Priest
And finally, I made me some mighty delicious dinner:

Who needs moms when I can cook so fine?

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Coming to a street corner near you, a drug called Charlie Sheen!

Oh boy. Charlie Sheen is at it again. He gave a couple interviews, to TMZ and ABC, talking about the current mess he is in.

Take a look at what he said:
“I am on a drug — it’s called Charlie Sheen,” he told ABC. “It’s not available because if you try it once, you will die. Your face will melt off, and your children will weep over your exploded body,” he said, adding, “Too much?”

And:

“You borrow my brain for five seconds, you’d be like, ‘Dude, can’t handle it, unplug this bastard,’ ” he said, adding that his brain “fires in a way that is — I don’t know, maybe not from this particular terrestrial realm.”
That's right folks. Charlie's brain is so powerful because it is an alien brain.

Between him and Gaddafi, the news cycle has been terribly busy. 

Obviously...

I was goofing around on the internet and somehow ended up in the dark, murky world of ultra-technical quantum mechanics/particle physics/mathematics articles on wikipedia.

The article was called Renormalization Group. Don't ask me what it means because I clearly have NO FRICKIN' CLUE. This ain't Kansas anymore.

These technical articles are usually accompanied by an endless stream of very intimidating equations that are just packed with symbols and arcane operations. But something caught my eye. Well, take a look at it:



For any positive Λ′ less than Λ, define SΛ′ (a functional over field configurations φ whose Fourier transform has momentum support within p^2 \leq \Lambda'^2) as
\exp\left(-S_{\Lambda'}[\phi]\right)\ \stackrel{\mathrm{def}}{=}\  \int_{\Lambda'  \leq p \leq \Lambda} \mathcal{D}\phi   \exp\left[-S_\Lambda[\phi]\right].
Obviously,
Z=\int_{p^2\leq \Lambda'^2}\mathcal{D}\phi \exp\left[-S_{\Lambda'}[\phi]\right].
Obviously, the obviousness of Z is obvious...

Duhhhhh, right? I mean how can you not know what Z is? Quite obviously, Z equals all that. Looks like someone chewed up a bunch of variables and puked them out.