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Saturday, Sep 26, 2009 - 19:54 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

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The Hundred Thousand

Thanks to all you wonderful readers, this blog has passed 100000 pageviews sometime on the 20th of September. Hardly overwhelming by most standards, but still kind of nice for an unfocused vanity personal blog. Don't wait up for the millionth visitor, though, as at current readership it'll take a bit over 16 years.

Due to the recess week and the completion of all the labs/homework thus far, this was setting up nicely for a legendary post, but all that time went... somewhere, so please do be disappointed.


43 (Four Three)

The underwhelming bits will come later, as we begin with perhaps the best Manchester derby in history (video highlights):

No Adebayor, but Tevez was back and expectant of applause from the Old Trafford crowd. In any event, he got Cristano Ronaldo's usual reception from opposition fans, and looked honestly befuddled, as if he really believed what he said. Hard to dislike such a guy.

It was City's turn to be rocked by a second-minute goal by Rooney, who withstood two unconvincing sliding challenges to slot it in from close range. Four points in the bag for my Facebook Fantasy footie competition, then.

United were always one for histrionics, and "England's Number One(s)" Ben Foster and Rio Ferdinand combined to gift a goal from a nothing ball that fell innocently just outside the penalty area. Foster dawdled, and Tevez was soon upon him (Tevez's good at that). Foster, recognizing only the existence of his left foot and regarding his right leg only as an annoying necessity to stand on, attempted to shift the ball back into his own area to grab. Of course, Tevez booted it right out of his hands and squared it for Barry to finish.

Really, they don't dock fantasy football points (well, for the Facebook edition at least) for conceding throw-ins, Foster. Just bleeping pass it out into touch! That was a potential ten points gone, but given the way the match turned out, I was never going to claim the clean sheet bonus.

Tevez kindly refused to humiliate his former colleague by celebrating (hint, hint, Adebayor), but nearly rubbed it in when he struck the post as the first half wound down. Architect was Rooney, whose attempted backheel pass was a lot more obvious than he probably thought.

Second half, and Darren Fletcher heads it in. The young Scot's come a long way since he was disparaged for getting in the United team only because he was Ferguson's son (Ferguson does have a son named Darren, who won the league with United in 1993), and more importantly, that was five points for my fantasy footie. This was however cancelled out by a superb long-range shot by Craig Bellamy, and while Foster couldn't be blamed for that, it still doesn't look good.

Park Ji Sung was, despite his new contract, limited in attack, and United were given more bite as Antonio Valencia replaced the Korean. By now, defenders should all know that Valencia has exactly one trick up his sleeve, which is to dribble slowly diagonally towards goal, and then cut sharply with his right foot and sprint straight forward in the hopes of creating enough space to cross; if he fails, he will slow down... and try the exact same thing again. Well, it still works, so...

Berbatov had a few chances to score, but only managed to raise Shay Given's stock with several headers right at the City keeper, such that Given would have to deliberately jump out of the way to let them go by him. But of course the sportswriters are all hailing Given's "magnificent" reflexes, which is sort of a given. He was replaced by "the new Ronaldo" Michael Owen Oh-Seven, and Ferguson's son scored another header for more fantasy football points for me. The match up to this point would already be worthy of joining the ranks of the classics, but the show was just getting started.

City needed a goal to get a draw, but were getting nowhere close until the very last minute of normal time, when Rio Ferdinand decided to go for a completely unnecessary lob to cement his "cultured defender" attribute in the next release of Football Manager. He hit Barry instead, who released Bellamy, who Ferdinand couldn't catch up with but at least forced wide. Foster appeared to have a decent chance of preventing the goal... before he slipped prematurely.

I switched off the TV in disgust about three minutes into the four minutes minimum of extra time, but was alerted to a miracle by a loud roar that reverberated around the neighbourhood, upon which I rushed to the remote control in time to catch countless replays of Michael Owen bending in the winner. One goal can't make one a United legend, but if there was a goal that could, at least since 1999, then it would surely be this one. Cristano Ronaldo, who?

 


[Shoutout to a superbly funny Youtube channel on Tottenham Hotspur (they don't need much help to be hilarious, I know)]


Manchester City manager Mark Hughes was less than impressed, and fumed that the referee gave United far too much time, or in other words, "Fergie Time". The explanation for most United sympathizers is that:
  • The original extra time announced was 4 minutes minimum, which is anywhere from 4:00 to 4:59
  • City scored after the extra time was fixed, and celebrated for a long time (can't blame them), which ate up about 45 seconds
  • United used an extra-time substitute to gain more time - chalk up another 30 seconds
  • From these alone, there would be anywhere from 5:15 to 6:14 of added time, not including the common tendency for referees to wait until a last attack is completed
  • Owen scored well within the expected range (at about 5:30), and the referee then added more time for that goal, thus the eventual total of almost seven minutes
And we have the other side, which says:
  • Ferguson paid off the referees again! The league is crooked!
The Guardian newspaper is happy to stoke the flames, and gleefully reports that in the previous seasons, United had an average of 3:11 of stoppage time when they were leading at Old Trafford, but 4:17 when drawing or losing.

But wait - United in fact get the least stoppage time at home on average, out of the Big Four. They have 3:25, compared to Liverpool's 3:30, Arsenal's 3:44 and Chelsea's whopping 3:49. And the Guardian cheerfully neglects to mention if these teams also get their fix of extra-extra time when things aren't going their way. Hmm. Also, wouldn't away teams have an incentive to time-waste far more than usual if they are on the way to getting a result, let alone at a nominally stronger side?

In the final analysis, Evra and Giggs were sublime, incredible for the latter who is now dribbling by defenders half his age like nobody's business. O'Shea and Anderson were fine, Vidic hard as always, and Carrick sadly meh. Poor Foster couldn't have done his World Cup hopes any good, though - perhaps he might try to collect small advantages (video) to get back on his feet?

Might as well keep all the soccer-related stuff together, and here's this week's predictions (currently on $471.50/$450):

$50 on Everton to beat Portsmouth (at 1.90) - Everton may have won only 2 of 6, but Pompey have lost all six so far
$50 on Liverpool (-1.5) vs. Hull (1.95) - Merseyside double on the cards...


10100 (Googol)

The next number is a stupidly big one, and when misspelt is the name of a stupidly big company. Yes, it's Google.

They made a teeny change to their famously clean front page recently, increasing the size of their search box. At first, I thought it was my browser settings doing the deed, but it turns out that it's just Google keeping ahead of the cluttered competition.

Borrowed non-fiction from the regional library for a change, and pulled The Search - How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture (2005) by John Battelle off the shelves.

Come to think of it, the Internet would be next to useless without a way to find useful stuff on it, precisely because of its hugeness. Ah yes, so search the darn thing, can't be that hard, right? Wrong.

A little history: There were only *gasp* a hundred websites or so in 1993, and a bit more than half a million in 1996. Before that, there were files on servers that boring academic people shared freely with one another, assuming that they knew exactly what name the file had. Otherwise, they turned to the Archie index/search engine, which at least let them search the filenames. Not particularly helpful if you forgot exactly which readme.txt you were after, but it was a start.

Then the Internet got big. In those wild frontier days, one approach was that used by Yahoo!, which was to employ humans to categorize websites into a big directory (see 1996 incarnation at the Internet Archives). The other approach was to use tireless web robots to trawl for new links and add them to a database, beginning with the WWW Wanderer, and later WebCrawler.

Building a database was, however, the easy part, available to anyone with sufficient processing power and bandwidth (Altavista was born as an advertisement for DEC's processor). Giving users what they want when they searched was rather harder. How do you tell that this blog, for instance, is a better match for "bert's blog" than some random site repeating the words "bert's blog" over and over again?

Google's general approach was quite simple - as with academic papers, where the most important papers were much-cited by other papers, they figured that the most relevant websites would also be the most-linked by other websites. In addition, it seems logical that any website linked to by such prominent websites must themselves be rather prominent too. Put these two simple assumptions and a lot of difficult math together, and you get PageRank (read original research paper) and a behemoth with a market valuation of over US$100 billion.

I'll skip the trials and tribulations of the company's founders, who tried unsuccessfully to sell their search tech to Excite, Infoseek and Yahoo!, among others (Yahoo! did end up using Google for search results for a while), and go right to where they're making the dough. No, it isn't search, not directly at least. It's advertising, with approximately two-thirds from their own websites (including the ubiquitous search engine) and the rest from AdSense (hint: it has long been on this blog), which makes up 97% of its total revenue of over US$20 billion a year.

Google also literally holds the power of life and death over Web retailers, who prosper if they come up near the top in a Google search, and die horribly if they ever drop beyond the first few pages of results. A whole industry has sprung up around getting those coveted top few spots, and Google responded by more or less kicking commercial sites off the list in 2003, helping their own bottom line in the process (since retailers who essentially got free advertising, now had to buy ads from Google).

One final bit about Google - its "Don't be evil" mantra is getting harder to live up to, at least in engagement with China and the blatant censorship regime in place there. Try searching Google.cn for Tiananmen, for example, and you'll get next to nothing compared to the international version. To be fair, they admit that "据当地法律法规和政策，部分搜索结果未予显示。" (i.e. "Some search results not returned to comply with local laws."), which is by itself not limited to China (e.g. Nazi sites are filtered out in France and Germany for the same reason).

But as evil goes, the Nazis are nothing on humans in general in their treatment of chickens, or Planet Chicken - The Shameful Story of the Bird on Your Plate by Hattie Ellis would have you believe. Forced into prodigious feats of round-the-clock egg-laying with artificial light, stacked in cages that forbid any movement, overfed till their legs twist and hearts fail, potentially dipped alive into scalding water for defeathering due to their throats being improperly cut... this is the fate of most of the over 10 billion chickens alive today.

We could pay slightly more for ethically-bred free-range chickens, the author says. Their meat and eggs are better too. Perhaps. But I'll stick to my chicken rice, drumsticks and McNuggets for now, thank you.


Both sides make a convincing case. How?


The final book review is on Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine 30th Anniversary Anthology, a collection of seventeen short SF stories. My favourites included Speech Sounds (Octavia E. Butler), on the breakdown of civilization without speech and symbols, Dinner in Audoghast (Bruce Sterling), on the inhabitants of an ancient African city being blissfully unaware of their impending doom (a black swan event?) and Over There (Mike Resnick), a yarn about the famously active ex-American president Theodore Roosevelt participating in World War II.

The best, if maybe saddest, of them all was The Children Of Time (Stephen Baxter). It follows five kids, each born hundreds of millions of years apart in yet-to-come ages of Earth, as they live through an Ice Age, an impact event, a time of a tropical Antarctica, a flat and featureless New Pangaea, and finally a cavern world where the few remaining descendants of Man would never see the sky. Which is in fact inevitable, if we do not reach for the stars.

Ironically, I don't rate Asimov's own Robot Dreams story all that highly.

Other recent reads: Karen Miller's Empress and The Riven Kingdom, Moorcock's The New Nature of the Catastrophe and King of the City, Herbert & Anderson's Paul of Dune and Preston & Child's The Wheel of Darkness.


400000

An (officially irresponsible?) "alternative" opinion on the Straits Times editorial on rising HDB flat prices. HDB's official stance is that it pegs its prices to market rates to be fair, before subsidizing the market value.

In a way, this makes sense, as some locations must be much more popular (and valuable) than others, despite the cost of building the blocks of flats being about the same. Then selling at cost would be unfair in a sense as balloting would have to take place, and some lucky new owners start off with a "better" flat than others. Why not then make those who want better flats pay more, or as the editorial put in other words, "...There is little doubt that state housing is affordable, whether new or resale, if one considers carefully precise matching need.", i.e. no money go live in two-room flat in the boondocks lah!

However, it seems probable that in relative terms, public housing is getting more expensive. Figures are hard to come by, but one typical example has a three-room flat costing just 20 months of an average person's income in the late 1970s, compared to five years or more today, i.e. wages have not kept pace with housing prices. (If anybody at all has reliable information to the contrary, please enlighten me and I will willingly retract this insinuation.)

Some have blamed this on a rise in demand caused by the authorities encouraging immigration, which was not sufficiently offset by new construction. This may well be true, but high property prices is a sticky situation. Imagine if prices fell across the board by 25%; current homeowners would likely be in a world of pain, especially if they needed to sell in an emergency, since the worth of their property might not even cover the amount they owe to the banks (this just happened a lot in America).

So it goes back to the theory of true value: Is about 110 square metres of living space really worth half a million dollars? Hmmmmmmmmm.


6700

Finally got fed up with jumping through hoops to get the 3220 connected to my PC, so when Singtel informed me that my plan was expiring, I decided to retire it. This time, I selected the Nokia 6700 classic. Having a handphone offering more megapixels (five) than one's camera is probably a sign that times have changed. Didn't want the metallic version due to it being a fingerprint magnet - black is beautiful! The entire package feels a bit on the heavy side, but that gives an impression of solidity, kinda like PC power supply boxes.

The microUSB connector worked like a dream (at least compared to the CA-42 cable), which redeemed Nokia in my eyes somewhat. First thing I did was to transfer all my old contacts and SMSes over with the Nokia PC Suite, which also means that I'll never have to worry about losing this data as long as Gmail is around. Muahahaha.

We end with an ad by Mr. Ham, photographed with the 6700:







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