The Melting Point
I don't know whether it's just an NCAA men's basketball finals thing, or if it extends to other sports (I'm sure it doe), but I've noticed for many years that there's this moment when you can tell a team is suddenly melting down. I saw it many years ago after we drove 17 hours from Palo Alto to Seattle to see Duke play Seton Hall in the national semifinals. Duke was favored and had a big lead when one of their players Robert Brickey went down with an injury. Duke melted immediately. Seton Hall routed them.
Sometimes it happens right before the end of a game, as it famously did in 1982, when Fred Brown of Georgetown passed the ball to James Worthy, giving the national championship to Carolina. It went Carolina's way again years later when Chris Webber of Michigan called for a time out when there were none left, turning the ball over and the game with it.
And it happend yesterday when Carolina was up by about 10 and Georgetown scored an easy layup off a back-door pass. I said to The Kid, "Georgetown is going to win this. Carolina has just begun to melt down. You can see it." And they did. It was awful. Carolina would have been lucky to have lost in regulation; but the game went into overtime, which was five minutes of straight hell for the Tar Heels. Georgetown scored at will while Carolina took one desperate doomed shot after anther. When Tyler Hansbrough went to the line for two foul shots near the end of the bonus period, I told the kid "He'll miss them both. Watch." Bear in mind that Hansbrough hadn't missed a foul shot for the whole game up to that point. He'd hit something like ten in a row. But he clanged the last two. It must have pained Roy Williams to look at the faces of his kids and know there wasn't a damn thing that could be done. They looked like This Can't Be Happening, which is the worst look in the world for a team like that to have at a time like this. You've got to go calm and find deep reserves of Resolve and other stuff like that. They didn't have it. Georgetown did.
Gotta like Georgetown. Impressive team.
[Later...] I see Hansbrough quoted in the paper this morning saying the problem was that the team's shots "just didn't fall". Well, yeah. But Basketball is a game of psychology as well as skill. Georgetown got into the Tar Heel's heads enough so you knew the Heels were going to lose, long before it happened. So did the Heels. And so did the Hoyas.
# Tuesday, March 27, 2007 by Wil
Scientists Create Sheep That Are 15 Percent Human
Professor Esmail Zanjani and colleagues at the University of Nevada-Reno have created sheep that are 15 percent human at the cellular level. Half the organs in the sheep are human. The idea, of course, is to harvest those organs to transplant into human patients. From the article: 'He has already created a sheep liver which has a large proportion of human cells and eventually hopes to precisely match a sheep to a transplant patient, using their own stem cells to create their own flock of sheep.' One scientists worries, however, that the work could lead to new viruses that cross from animals to humans.
# by Wil
MS Says Vista Selling At Twice XP's Pace
Several readers made us aware that Microsoft said today that it sold more than 20 million Windows Vista licenses in the first month after the OS's general debut on January 30. This compares to 17 million licenses of XP sold in the first two months after its release. (Just a coincidence the announcement came out a day after this community's speculation, surely.) Most of the coverage of this story, picked up from Reuters, looks like it follows an MS press release. The Associated Press dug deeper, noting that since XP's release the overall PC market has grown by almost a factor of 2, so it would be a surprise if Vista didn't do twice as well: "...51 million PCs were sold to consumers worldwide in 2002; this year... 96 million consumers will buy a computer." Also, Microsoft's 20 million figure includes the backlog of upgrade coupons bundled with XP computers sold since last October.
# by Wil
FCC Votes Yet Another Study of Net Neutrality
yuna49 writes to let us know that the US Federal Communications Commission last week announced a Notice of Inquiry (PDF) into: "...the behavior of broadband market participants, including: (1) How broadband providers are managing Internet traffic on their networks today; (2) Whether providers charge different prices for different speeds or capacities of service; (3) Whether our policies should distinguish between content providers that charge end users for access to content and those that do not; (4) How consumers are affected by these practices." eWeek reports that the study is targeted at whether broadband providers are treating some content providers more favorably than others. Distinctly absent is any discussion about port filtering or other restrictions on Internet usage. The two Democrats on the Commission pressed for a broader "Notice of Rulemaking" to move more quickly towards a policy of non-discrimination. The Republican majority ignored these arguments and voted for an Inquiry, to which the Democrats acceded.
# by Wil
Record Labels Struggle With the Album's Demise
Supplying yet more evidence, if more were needed, of the dire straits the music business increasingly finds itself in — reader cphilo sends us a NYTimes article about the death of the album as the mainstay of profit, and the record labels' struggle to adopt to the new realities. The article notes the trend of the labels signing artists for a single song, maybe two, and a ring tone.
# by Wil
Million Dollar Laptop
For those of you who don't know what to do with all your money, why not a one million-dollar laptop from the U.K-based company Luvaglio? With 128GB of solid state disk space, Blu-ray, and a detachable rare diamond that acts like a power button and a security key