canspice.org

A couple of submissions from friends to break the bad baby name drought. The first comes from one DPP, and it’s about teachers in the UK ‘profiling’ children by their names. It’s hard not to make fun of names like K’tee, which I thought was a Vulcan character from Star Trek and not a mashup of Katie, and Gyaike, which is apparently the way stupid people spell Jake. There’s also Chevaughn, which I think might be pronounced ‘Kevin’, but I’m not entirely sure.

The best part of that article is the actual point of it: there’s some sort of correlation between stupidly-spelled names and the child’s behaviour. One teacher, upon circling names on her roster to flag ‘bad’ ones before meeting the kids, reports a 75% hit rate. Sure, there are ordinary names like Wayne and Kyle in the bad list, but if you look at the ‘good’ list there’s not a hyphen to be seen. Every name is normal. I’m disappointed that Brad isn’t in the good list.

The second submission is from the fine folks at blather, and it’s the ‘Complete Silly Names’ list from Cornwall County Council. It’s a cornucopia of naming hilarity, with the Odd Couples list and the More than Double Barrelled list. The names go back into the 1500s, showing that bad names aren’t a recent innovation. A few good selections:

• Emily Grace Pyne Coffin
• William Alexander Wood Forest
• Nicholas Bone married Priscilla Skin
• Phillip Phillips married Phillip Loggins

Then there are the names of people. Just taking from the A-C Surnames list we’ve got Araminta Bunster Burne, Narcissus Backway, and Absolom Beaglehole. As Paul says, “and of course, Fanny Cobbledick isn’t funny at all.”

When Fernando Alonso came third in the 2005 Brazilian Grand Prix, he clinched the 2005 Formula One Drivers Championship and Kimi Raikkonen ended up in second. And now that he’s not won it, it’s up to his boss to point fingers.

McLaren Mercedes team principal Ron Dennis has backmarkers to blame. Cars and drivers that race a couple of seconds a lap slower than the frontrunners, they’ve been in the spotlight recently with the elimination of Juan Pablo Montoya in the Belgian Grand Prix by Antonio Pizzonia and his contact with Tiago Monteiro in the Turkey Grand Prix. Ron Dennis is making the argument that backmarkers, being multiple minutes behind the leaders and having no way to catch up, should know their role and just get out of the way when they see the almighty black and silver McLaren cars come up behind them.

To which I say one word: bullshit. How about pointing the finger at your own team, Ron? How about pointing the finger at Kimi himself for flat-spotting his tire in the European Grand Prix, causing his suspension to fail on the last lap? How about pointing the finger at your own team for his mechanical failures at Imola and Germany? Or his engine changes in France, Britain and Italy?

Let’s take a closer look at these six races:

• San Marino Grand Prix. Kimi Raikkonen was leading the race comfortably until his driveshaft failed on lap 9. It’s hard to say how he would have ultimately finished, but given his pace a podium finish was nearly guaranteed, and he probably would have won. Let’s give him 8 theoretical points and Fernando Alonso 10 for the victory. Actual points: Raikkonen - 0, Alonso - 10.
• European Grand Prix. Raikkonen was leading the race when, on the last lap, his suspension failed because of heavy vibration set up by a flat-spotted tire. Alonso was second behind Raikkonen and was gifted the victory. Theoretical points, had Raikkonen finished: Raikkonen - 10, Alonso - 8. Actual points: Raikkonen - 0, Alonso - 10.
• French Grand Prix. A popped engine in practice meant Raikkonen received a 10-spot grid penalty, so he had to start from 13th. Still, he managed to work his way up to second. It’s likely that he would have won the race had he started in 3rd, where he qualified. Theoretical points: Raikkonen - 10, Alonso - 8. Actual points: Raikkonen - 8, Alonso - 10.
• British Grand Prix. Another popped engine. Started 12th on the grid. Finished 3rd. It’s hard to say if he would have got past Montoya for the victory, given McLaren doesn’t believe in team orders, so we’ll slot him in in a theoretical 2nd place, just ahead of Alonso. Theoretical points: Raikkonen - 8, Alonso - 6. Actual points: Raikkonen - 6, Alonso - 8.
• German Grand Prix. Hydraulic failure on lap 36, which put him out of the race. Given his pace (he was leading by around 12 seconds at the time) he would have won easily. Theoretical points: Raikkonen - 10, Alonso - 8. Actual points: Raikkonen - 0, Alonso - 10.
• Italian Grand Prix. Another popped engine. Qualified 1st but had to start in 11th. Got held up by Jacques Villeneuve for a portion of the first stint, and ended up fourth. Odds are that had he not blown his engine he would have won the race. This would have bumped Alonso down to third. Theoretical points: Raikkonen - 10, Alonso - 6. Actual points: Raikkonen - 5, Alonso - 8.

So in those six races Raikkonen actually obtained 19 points when he could have obtained 56, and Alonso actually obtained 56 when, if Raikkonen had finished where I placed him, he might have only received 46. Right now the Drivers Championship would have Raikkonen leading with 131 points and Alonso with 107, and we’d be proclaiming Kimi Raikkonen as 2005 World Champion.

But no, Alonso is the World Champion. And who’s to blame? Strictly speaking, nobody’s to blame as Alonso is an excellent driver, Renault is an excellent team, and they both deserve as many kudos as possible for their great achievement.

But if Ron Dennis is to point fingers, he should point them away from the backmarkers and towards his own team. Being a sore loser does not befit you, Ron, and it makes the sport look like it’s populated by whiners.

Not to take anything away from Fernando Alonso winning the World Championship, but this weekend’s Brazilian Grand Prix was boring. Other than the traditional mashup at the first corner (Mark Webber and David Coulthard made a sandwich of Antonio Pizzonia, and all three subsequently exited the race), nothing happened. Sure, Juan Pablo Montoya made a stunning move to get past Alonso on lap three, but that was the last bit of excitement in the race.

Takuma Sato didn’t even get involved in anything, that’s how dull the race was.

Alonso won his championship title, being the first Spaniard and youngest driver to do so. Montoya and Kimi Raikkonen finished one-two, the first time that’s happened for McLaren in five years, and that put McLaren two points up on Renault in the Constructors Championship battle with two races to go.

Hopefully those two races can deliver more excitement than this one did. It’d be a challenge not to.

I watched the 2005 Wales Rally Great Britain last night. It was going like gangbusters, with Sébastien Loeb on par to strengthen his lead in the World Rally Championship. He was storming away with the victory, well ahead of Petter Solberg and Marcus Grönholm. Marcus was swearing like a Finnish pirate after losing his brakes on the first day and Colin McRae (no relation to my lovely wife) was making his triumphant return to Rally. It was shaping up to be an historic event.

Then I fast-forwarded past the commercial break after the second day (WRC events span three days) and noticed that there were only about five minutes left in the recording. Normally, as one would imagine, the last day takes up at least a third of the hour and a half broadcast, and not five minutes.

The reason for this was tragic: Markko Martin crashed heavily, and in the accident his co-driver, Michael Park, died.

It always comes as a shock when a driver (or co-driver, in the case of WRC) dies in the course of a race. Automobile racing is amongst the most dangerous sports in the world, and even though efforts have been made in recent times to make all aspects of the sport safer, it still involves hurtling heavy machinery around a course at high speed. Rally cars can hit 200kph. NASCAR, around 300. Formula One cars, well over 350. Bring those speeds down to zero in a fraction of a second and you’re going to cause some kind of damage to the human wrapped up in that metal, fiberglass and carbon fibre shell. Unfortunately, at times, there’s a death.

And to some extent we, the fans, are to blame. NASCAR fans watch for the Big One — the big wreck that inevitably comes every race, taking out a quarter of the field. Formula One fans always know that Turn One is ripe for accidents. To some extent there’s a thrill of seeing cars get demolished at high speeds. And whenever safety measures come into place that inhibit or stifle speed and competition, fans generally get in an uproar. For the most part, the safety measures are important and necessary, and regardless of the bitching and complaining, most people agree with their intent. Nobody wants to see a return of the horrible crashes of Formula One, where cars and drivers went careening through crowds of spectators. Nobody wants to see drivers be airlifted by helicopter to the nearest hospital.

Yet the crashes are exciting. Thrilling. They’re a part of the sport, and they make the sport fun to watch. It’s amazing to see a car roll at 250kph, yet also see the driver walk away when the car comes to a standstill against a tirewall. Watching sidepods explode in a blizzard of carbon fibre, watching tires blow out, watching cars tumble into a forest and catch fire, that’s fun.

But crashes are fun only when nobody’s seriously injured. Crashes don’t need to involve death. They shouldn’t involve death. The sport doesn’t need another Ayrton Senna, another Dale Earnhardt, another Greg Moore. And this weekend, motorsport has to do the unfortunate task of adding another name to the list: Michael Park.

We can only hope that the list doesn’t get longer any time soon.

In July, a group of Spanish astronomers, led by Jose-Luis Ortiz, announced that they’d discovered an object now known as 2003 EL61, which is a Kuiper Belt object nearly as large as Pluto. At the time, a separate group of astronomers, led by Michael Brown of Caltech, had been tracking the same object to try to learn more about it. Dr. Brown sent a congratulatory email to Dr. Ortiz.

Now Dr. Brown says something foul is in the air and wants Dr. Ortiz to be stripped as the discoverer of 2003 EL61. Why? On July 20 he’d sent an abstract to the American Astronomical Society that contained his internal name for the object, K40506A. Between July 26 and 28 computers from the same institute that Dr. Ortiz works at accessed Dr. Brown’s telescope logs that contained this internal name, apparently accessed by doing a Google search for K40506A. On July 28 Dr. Ortiz made his announcement.

This understandably has people up in arms on either side of the debate. First, Dr. Ortiz’s side says that he’d been observing it for some time (since March 2003) and would have announced the discovery anyhow. Also, Dr. Brown shouldn’t have put data on a public webserver if he wanted it to be private. Dr. Brown’s side says that Dr. Ortiz’s group should have at the very least acknowledged that they’d seen Dr. Brown’s data instead of giving the impression that they hadn’t. To this date nobody from Dr. Ortiz’s side has even admitted to looking at Dr. Brown’s data.

There are two problems here: The first is astronomers sitting on data. It’s a common habit, and it really points to the ego of scientists. They are human, after all, and most of them would love to see their name associated with such a major discovery. There’s a tendency to sit on data and try to figure it out yourself, rather than getting the data out in the public for other astronomers to try to collaborate on.

The second problem is the sheer childness of it all. As P. Clay Sherrod of Arkansas Sky Observatories says, the whole thing “gives the appearance of respected scientists as school boys fighting over a deflated football even though recess period has long ended with the ringing of the bell.” It’s a bit of a blight on astronomy, especially with the story in the New York Times (registration may be needed).

On the other side of the playground, astronomers recently announced the discovery of a record-breaking gamma ray burst. GRBs aren’t fully understood yet, and there’s international campaigns underway to try to figure them out. GRBs are essentially giant explosions. They get their name by their characteristic bright and short burst of high energy photons called gamma rays. Gamma rays, luckily for all of us living on Earth, don’t get through the atmosphere, so they have to be detected by satellites. When one goes off and the satellite spots it, the satellite relays the GRBs coordinates down to a network on Earth called the Gamma ray bursts Coordinate Network (or GCN), which astronomers can then use to try to observe the GRB with other telescopes. GRBs fade rapidly, so it’s important to get as much data as early as possible.

This whole process happened on 4 September 2005. The SWIFT telescope spotted a GRB. Shortly after this, various telescopes observed the field and eventually Subaru Telescope found the object is about 13 billion light-years away. It’s the farthest-known gamma ray burst, and it happened when the universe was about 500 million years old.

This shows what you gain through collaborative science instead of hoarding your data. For time-sensitive science like gamma ray bursts, one group cannot even begin to get enough telescopes pointed at an object to figure out what’s going on. If you look at the list of telescopes reporting results, you’ll see telescopes from all over the world, of all sizes, of varied wavelengths. Keck is a privately-owned telescope operated by CalTech, Subaru is run by Japan, the VLT is operated by ESO, and the various robotic telescopes are operated by a similarly-wide range of groups. There’s no way one astronomer, or even a group of astronomers, could get time on all of these telescopes. Opening up the data for public consumption as soon as possible is the only way for this science to happen.

If only people like Michael Brown and Jose-Luis Ortez realized this. I hate to sound like an after-school special, but working together helps you achieve more than you would alone. These two results from the astronomical world are fine examples of that moral.