Day: 22 July 2007

On visualisation tools and Day 5 theatricals

Apologies to those uninterested in cricket, I’ve just risen from a long and pleasant afternoon, unable to drag myself from the coverage of the Lord’s Test, with unavoidable and frequent sorties into Carnoustie to watch Padraig ease out Sergio. The match between England and India looks poised; the balance of power is with England, but there could be enough in the Indian middle order to make a fight of it. Tomorrow promises much, especially if the two teams manage to drag the game beyond teatime.

I have this feeling of anticipation that is so rare with Test matches nowadays, and it brought to mind my memories of a Test nearly 30 years ago.

England v India. The Oval, 30 August to 4 September 1979. Test number 854.

It was the one where Gavaskar scored 221 and India scored 429 for 8 against a target of 437. At the time, if I remember right, only two teams had ever scored over 400 runs in the fourth innings to win a match, and they were Bradman and Co  going where none had gone before at Headingley in 1948, and India’s 406 for 4 at Port of Spain in 1976. [Since then there has been at least one more, Sarwan and Chanderpaul pulling off the Great Escape and beating the mighty Australians by scoring 418 to win at Antigua.]

I was spending the night with some college friends on a campus just outside Calcutta, it was a time when we had no television in India, when international battery-operate transistor radios were rare, and even rarer on student campuses. [Why battery-operated? Because power cuts (or load-shedding as we called it) were common, and we were in a power cut. It was after 10pm local time, everyone was huddled around the lone radio, and we kept getting interrupted by people coming back for the night and wanting to know the score.

So someone came up with an ingenious plan for the last 20 minutes. Three sets of candles. One set showing the number of runs India had left to get. One showing the number of balls left. One showing the number of wickets left.

At the death we had 9 candles lit for the Runs To Get, 2 for the Wickets Left and none for the Balls To Go. Match drawn.

What wonderful impromptu visualisation.

Other than the Tied Tests, I don’t think I’ve ever seen all three counters come down to single figures. BTW here’s a link to a brief video on the event, concentrating on Gavaskar’s innings, considered to be one of the six best performances by either side in Tests between the two countries. And it’s in my VodPod.

Give me a missed call

I’m always fascinated by the way people find unusual and unintended uses for the functionality provided by designers of technology.

A particular example I’ve been tracking for a while is the “Give me a missed call” approach I first saw practiced in India. It’s been around for quite a while now; if you want to delve into it, this post at kottke.org is a good place to start, to follow as you wish; in fact as a general rule kottke and smartmobs are good places to dig around for stuff like this. It is by no means restricted to India, as the Kottke post shows.

Why do I find this so fascinating? Because I think it has something to do with abundances and scarcities and the Because Effect, in a strange kind of way.

It’s all about affordability. Over thirty years ago, when I was still in Calcutta, international calls were (a) operator-based (b) very expensive and (c) often person-to-person. I’m sure there were many reasons why such calls were prohibitively expensive; to many of us, at least one of the reasons was some form of artificial scarcity.

And the response to this situation delighted me even then as a fifteen-year old stripling. A neighbouring family created a simple code, agreed in advance, to solve a simple problem. Their children tended to travel abroad while waiting for university offers and acceptances. They would call their children wherever they happened to be, person-to-person, with the first name of the synthetic “callee” or recipient, carrying the message, and the surname identifying the addressee. So a call for Stanford Philip would translate to “Philip, you have an offer letter from Stanford waiting for you at home”.

It seemed ingenious to me. Completed calls became expensive and “scarce”, while person-to-person not-completed calls became free and “abundant”.

Today’s equivalent is “give me a missed call”. I think there’s a lesson here for all of us.  And that is this:

When you create an artificial scarcity, the market will create an artificial abundance in response.

Comments?

….With hope in your heart….

Lazing on a Sunday afternoon, after family time at church and at lunch. Watching the cricket. And realising that I still hold out hope for India managing to get something out of this game. As long as England are bowled out before tea, and as long as the target is around 400, I live in hope. Could make for a very exciting day’s cricket tomorrow.

Reminds me of being at the Ataturk stadium with Isaac in 2005, when it was half-time and Liverpool were 3-0 down. And we started singing You’ll Never Walk Alone.

Hard to believe, I know, but it’s possible to get passionate about cricket.

Of Spelvins and Plinges: Another Sunday ramble

Sean brought this to my attention, the blog-published story of Lorem Ipsum. Most of you have probably seen it as the standard filler text in sample templates from Microsoft PowerPoint. I’d seen it used in journalistic circles as filler for “to be completed” sections of dummied-up versions of magazines, but my sparse knowledge of it predated the web. So thank you Sean.

The way my mind works, the Lorem Ipsum reference took me back to Calcutta’s quiz league of the 1970s. I remember being asked who George Spelvin was; it wasn’t long after that when we were asked what the English equivalent of Spelvin was.

So, for those of you who hadn’t heard it before, here are the links to George Spelvin and Walter Plinge. I believe there used to be an equivalent for airline staff deadheading, but the use of fictional names in that context fell away for obvious reasons.

Of bottlenose dolphins and false killer whales

Sean asked how on earth I came across Wholphin. [For those who are interested, a wholphin is the name given to the offspring of bottlenose dolphins and false killer whales, as in this story here.]

In addition, Wholphin is a DVD magazine of unseen films. And part of the McSweeney’s stable, including the books, McSweeney’s magazine and The Believer.

Where else would I find dialogues like this:


EXCLUSIVE!
LEAKED EXCERPTS FROM
A SCREENPLAY WRITTEN
BY MY GRANDPARENTS IN
AN ATTEMPT TO CASH IN
ON THE SUPERHERO-
MOVIE CRAZE.

BY AARON SPIEWAK

– – – –

INT. CONDO OF JUSTICE—DAY

(GENIUS MAN and CLASSY LADY are receiving top-secret e-mails from the PRESIDENT, when disaster strikes. A strange noise, then the screen turns black.)

GENIUS MAN: It’s Mr. Internet. He’s locked us out of American Online’s Internets … again!

CLASSY LADY: Blast! If we don’t stop him, he’ll soon gain control of the world’s children, while they’re surfing the World Wide Web!

GENIUS MAN: Off to Mr. Internet’s lair, on Microsoft Computer Island! To the GeniusMobile!

CLASSY LADY: The GeniusMobile has been sounding funny. Did you get it checked like I asked?

GENIUS MAN: I was doing our taxes. I’ll get to it this week. (Grabs keys.)

CLASSY LADY: Remember your glasses this time. You almost ran over Sadie Zuckerman last Friday.

GENIUS MAN: That was because it was about to rain and you were talking to me. (Pats his shirt.) Where are those glasses?

I’ve been a McSweeney’s fan for a long time.  And of Wholphin from its inception.