The Game of Love, Unity and Murdered Coaches.

If you don't know what cricket is it's about time to find out, for the cricket world cup is underway in the West Indies. India look as though they are about to go out and Pakistan have departed minus their coach, who departed in the dearly sense of the word.

Here is a brief guide to cricket:

1/ How to bat for Kazachstanis.

2/ The game's jargon explained by Willow and Stumpy.

3/ The tea towel explanation of the game, and also in German.

4/ An actually quite helpful explanation of the game.

5/ Of course all this knowledge is no use if you don't play with style. Curtley Ambrose demonstrates.

So having got through all that you have deserved a few beers, just keep the number of the coastguard to hand.

Lame Ducks Fail to Quack

The Bochumer Cliche reports...

Torpedo Entenhausen looked like ducks out of water in their 12 (Twelve, 0b1100, 0o14) - 3 defeat. The defence had been hoping to be as mean as Scrooge McDuck, but instead it was open day at the money bin as the opposition went into an early lead. Fowl play saw both sides reduced to 10 players, and despite endofphil breaking his season's duck by feathering the ball into an empty net, the goose had thoroughly been cooked. The Entenhausen keeper twaddled off with 10 minutes remaining, and the performance has to be put down as "phooey, phooey and phooey".

The Fartela

Following on from the great interest in my discussion of the mole, I thought I'd move on to the Candela, a unit of light intensity. This is one of the seven base units of the SI system, and most people would assume that it is important.

Why, in this case, despite studying physics for longer than is healthy, have I never used the unit Candela? Or seen anyone who used the unit? Or derived anything from this unit? Or ever bought a 10 Candela lightbulb?



The Candela describes how bright a light source is. Whichever way you look at light, the important thing is that it transmits energy, and the energy in a certain time is a power, measured in Watts: Hence the 60 Watt lightbulb. A Watt is already defined in terms of metres, kilograms and seconds, so it would appear that light intensity doesn't need its own base unit. A pre EU-directive shopper may wish to disagree, though.

Imagine that you bought a 60 Watt light bulb, and found out that it didn't light up despite drawing the full 60 Watt. It might give you a warm feeling, or a sunburn, but if the wavelength isn't between 400 and 700 nanometres you won't see anything. This is why the Candela is needed: it combines the power emitted with the sensitivity of the human eye to find the perceived brightness of something.

[Mid post rant: German Gangsta Rap fucking sucks. Think 2 minutes of the same rhyme repeated with the odd different ending word, interrupted by gunshots. Kezboards fucking suck too, whz the fuck does windows think that opening a new tab makes zou want to tzpe differently. Smokers and internet cafes suck too.]

This seems fair enough, and most useful to know when buying a lightbulb, or looking for a new star to orbit your planet around. But why make it a base unit? The Candela is strictly only of any meaning to a human with working eyes. In the kingdom of the blind, how many Candelas does a lightbulb emit?

Seeing as the Candela describes the human perception (brightness) of an physical property (flow of energy), why not do the same for the other senses, and give them each an SI base unit. Sound is a wave, which transmits power, but humans only hear certain wavelengths (most people would say frequencies, but I'm trying to be consistent). Multiply the sound wave power by a human ear function, and you have a new unit: the Bella. Sounds for which the ear is sensitive would earn more Bellas than those at the limit of human hearing.

Smells are concentrations of certain molecules in the air, best measured physically as moles/cubic metre (although it may depend on the speed of those molecules, too, for all I know. Physicists don't worry much about smells, or personal hygiene). Multiply this concentration by a wuffiness factor which describes the sensitivity of the human nose and you have a new unit: the Fartela.

So why is the Candela a base unit? I think it is something to do with unification. This website lists lots of old units of perceived brightness: The Hefner Candle, the Violle, the Apostilb, the Blondel, the Footlambert, the Nit, the Skot and the Stilb. The world's photometric experts were probably so besides themselves with happiness when the Candela came into standard use that they made it a base unit.

Writing this, I've grown to like the Candela. It's useful, practical, and although it probably shouldn't be a base unit it surely deserves recognition in the google calculator.

The windscreen wiper.

I have learnt a most useful german gesture: Der Scheibenwischer ("The windscreen wiper"). The meaning is described here in german, and a quick translation is

Move your hand to and fro in front of your face. It looks like the windscreen wipers on a car. This gesture means "You must be crazy!".

I'm writing about this because Sascha Dum, a footballer with Alemannia Aachen, received a red card (video here, 3:40 in). Most neutral observers seem to think that only half a wiper cycle in the direction of the referee warrants only a yellow card, and that a red card should be reserved for a full double-cycled (left-right-left-right) wiper movement.

I wonder what happens if a player does this in an international competetion. What would a south american referee make of it all?

She's the 1.66053886(28) × 10-24 moles

Here's a useful google calculator calculation: How many moles is a baker's dozen?. The google calculator will return any dimensionless unit in moles if you ask nicely, such as lightyear/foot (both distances), or kilogram/electron mass (both masses). The former means that a mole of footsteps will transport you millions of lightyears, the latter that a mole of electrons will weigh much less than a bag of sugar.

Google calculator thinks that a mole is just a large number. This is how I would think of it, too. The official definition of a mole is, however, as follows.

1. The mole is the amount of substance of a system which contains as many elementary entities as there are atoms in 0.012 kilogram of carbon 12; its symbol is "mol."

2. When the mole is used, the elementary entities must be specified and may be atoms, molecules, ions, electrons, other particles, or specified groups of such particles.

An amount of substance is "defined to be proportional to the number of specified elementary entities in a sample".

This is of course a load of bollocks (number yet unspecified, but hopefully less than a mole). The phrase "atoms, molecules, ions, electrons, other particles" is ridiculous. Do other particles include cows, donuts, shoes, ships and tins of sealing wax? If not, why not? If so, why not add a couple to the list:

...the elementary entities must be specified and may be atoms, molecules, cows, ions, dildos or other particles.

And don't go all "complex objects" and "elementary particles": an atom isn't elementary in the slightest, and despite the name can be cut open at will.

Why do the SI want to make this distinction between "elementary entities" and everyday objects? Why not use moles to count things? The problem is that the mole is defined in terms of kilograms, and the definition of a kilogram is "equal to the mass of the international prototype of the kilogram." The fact that all known masses are dependent on a lump of metal in Paris staying intact has annoyed scientists for a while. One cow is presently 1.66053886 x 10-24 moles of cows, but if the prototype kilogram loses mass—and in the last century it did—it could in the future be less.

Another problem is that nobody knows quite how many units are in a mole. This is why there is a (28) in the brackets of the title. This means that you could add (or subtract) 28 to (or from) the last two digits (86) and still be within the margin of error. So a cow could as much as 1.66053904 x 10-24 moles of cows, or as little as 1.6605358 x 10-24 moles of cows.

So presuming google calculator and I are correct in treating the mole as a counting unit (and who would wish to doubt this), all scientists don't know how many things they have, and are continously losing/gaining them too, depending on a lump of metal in Paris.

One way out of this crisis would be to count in units (the one), and define the kilogram in terms of electron masses. Thus scientists could again count with with the rest of the population. I don't think the chemists would like it, though.

As a reward for sticking with this post, here is The Answer in moles.

[Disclaimer: The Answer in moles contains error bars and may increase or decrease with time. The author accepts no responsibility for future changes to The answer in moles.]

Some Other Team 3 - Torpedo Entenhausen 1

I joined a football team in the "Spare time league" and made my debut for Torpedo Entenhausen this week. I ran around a lot and caused a bit of trouble for the opposition, who weren't so keen on running but felt that at least one of them ought to run after me. This means that I can play again next week.

I have acquired the ironic nickname the "Kopfballungeheuer", which translates as "The heading monster". Despite being the tallest person on the pitch, I kept missing the ball, and on the occasions when I made contact the ball bounced off my head in a random direction.

Some links:

Elf defence for 'lingerie thief'

Comedy stretcher bearers

I have finally fallen for the google calculator. Calculations with units included are definitely the way forward and cut out many of my mistakes.

Intelligence and dental assistents

I impressed three young female dental assistents this morning by telling them where they were, leading them up two flights of stairs and sending them down a corridor. After passing halfway down the corridor they remarked that I seemed to be most intelligent. I think it was the map-reading ability that did it.