Sunday 7 December 2003

Lies, damn lies and ... I'm not a sports fan but occasionally I will tune into a sports programme on TV (usually while waiting for Après Match). The one thing I hate about those programmes is there is always someone how says 'Well of course Team X deserved to win" despite the fact that Team Y beat them 18-Nil. The reasons then given range from better use of the ball or some such subjective factor. Completely ignoring, of course, that no matter how good your ball control or team coordination that if you can't put the ball in the net and stop the other team from scoring you don't deserve to win. Anyway, the New Zealanders have taken this to the extreme and Hugh Morton, a statistician at Massy University there declared that New Zealand really was the best team. Australia was second best, while England, the team that actually won the tournament was third best. And how does Mr Morton arrive at this conclusion? Well according to the December 6 edition of New Scientist, instead of giving four points for a win, he gives and takes away points based on whether the win was narror or large, the relative ranking of the opposing teams in each match and so on. 9:33:34 PM    comment []  Google It!

What do you do after you sell your business to eBay for $1.5bn? You go into the launch vehicle business. I've already blogged the fact that Elon Musk, founder of Pay Pal, which he sold to eBay, set up his own space launch company called Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX). Well Musk has unveiled the companhy's Falcon last week outside the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC and announced plans to develop a larger one, the Falcon 5. The Falcon 5 will use five engines in its first stage, all versions of the single Merlin engine used in the first stage of the current Falcon. The Falcon 5 will be able to put up to 4,200 kilograms into LEO for $12 million a launch. Musk said the Falcon 5 will be available starting in 2005. The first launch of the smaller Falcon is planned for late March of 2004 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California; it will carry the TacSat-1 experimental satellite for the US military.[spacetoday.net] 3:55:12 PM    comment []  Google It!

© Copyright 2004 David Stewart. Last update: 01/01/2004; 11:18:05.