a blog about information
There was a time when the most ridiculous headlines were to be found in the Sunday Sport: Killer Plant Stalks Queen Mum, Aliens Turned Our Son Into An Olive, London Bus Found On Moon, London Bus Disappears From Moon, and so on.
Today, you can find such headlines everywhere. See if you can spot the real headline amongst the set below:
Man killed wife in Facebook row
Legal case against God dismissed
Killer chef cooked dead boyfriend
Iran makes huge ostrich sandwich
What can I say?
Stephen Lewis, while commenting on a recent post of mine, referred in passing to Fowler. Henry Watson Fowler. Here are my two favourite excerpts from Modern English Usage:
I have written about them before, but that was before Google Books; I couldn’t resist embedding the original text in a rewrite, and in the expectation that many of you weren’t regular readers when I last wrote about Fowler.
Yes, it’s about cricket. I noticed that the current Indian team has made 109 Test centuries between them. Last time around, in the first Test versus Australia, the inclusion of Kumble drove that number up to 110. [Oddly enough, Kumble has scored the same number of Test centuries as Dhoni!]
Now that’s a big number, it isn’t often that a team boasts a century of centuries. To put it in context, the current Australian team’s comparative number is 86. I went and looked at the team under Steve Waugh, at a time when it boasted Justin Langer, Mark Waugh, Matthew Hayden, Ricky Ponting, Adam Gilchrist and Damien Martyn. When I look at the lifetime totals for that group (which also included Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath) the number exceeds 170. But when I try and find the highest total as an actual team in an actual Test, the best I can do is 91, in October 2002, versus Pakistan in Sharjah. I think that’s the biggest, the others just didn’t score centuries quickly enough to afford the exits of the Waugh brothers.
Very unscientific, very anecdotal. But the number to beat is 110. As in the total number of Test centuries scored by a Test team as constituted in a real Test and only including efforts up to and including that Test.
Any offers? Enjoy your weekend trying to get to a Nelson or beyond.
An aside. Imagine what you would need from Cricinfo in terms of database access or web service or RSS feed, such that you could write a program that could work out the answer. Let me know your thoughts.