In the final group games, India easily beat South Africa and Pakistan beat Sri Lanka, the latter being a see-saw game in which the ever-mercurial Pakistan did well to restrict Sri Lanka to a low score of 236 and then seemed to be cruising towards a comfortable victory at 92/1 before experiencing a batting collapse that left them reeling at 162/7. But a stout rearguard action saw them reach the target.
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England defeated Australia today in a rain-shortened game with the result that Australia did not make the semi-final round of the ICC Champions Trophy tournament, a shock for this perennial cricket powerhouse. As a result, Bangladesh now joins England (who had already qualified) in that round, a result that must be causing massive celebrations in that cricket-mad country. Bangladesh have shown that they are no longer capable of just the occasional win, since their first match with England was closely fought and they also beat New Zealand. They also beat England and eliminated them from the 2015 World Cup and now they have done the same for Australia. In 2015 they made it to the quarterfinal round and thus this is their best showing so far. If they and England win their semi-final games against opponents that will be determined after Sunday and Monday’s games, the final will be between them, mirroring the opening game.
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The International Cricket Council Champions Trophy tournament is underway in England right now. This consists of 50 over one-day games and features the top eight teams in the world. The teams are split into two groups of four that play round robin games, with the top two in each group going to the semi-final round. Although Bangladesh edged out the once mighty West Indies to qualify for the eighth and last spot in the tournament, it seemed like it and Sri Lanka would not make it to out of the group stage, with Pakistan possibly joining them for an early trip home. Australia, India, and South Africa seemed the likely contenders for the trophy, with England and New Zealand close behind.
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Some of you may have seen this item about a girls soccer team being disqualified from the finals of a tournament because Mili Hernandez, an 8-year old girl with short hair, was suspected to be a boy even though she was not.
The Springfield club told WOWT that a misprint in the team’s roster identified Mili as a boy. Her family brought several forms of identification, including her insurance card and a doctor’s physical form, to prove she’s a girl, but the team was still disqualified.
Teach coach Mario Torres told KMTV in Omaha that tournament officials did not handle a clerical mistake properly.
“Even if it was a mistake, they did not need to humiliate her or kick the entire team off the field,” Torres said.
PZ Myers informs us that the switch to the new host server occurred last night and went pretty smoothly and that the only glitch seems to be that the list of approved commenters (i.e., those whose very first comments were approved by the editor of each site) has disappeared and so your first comment after the switch might have to be approved by me again. I’ll monitor the site more frequently than usual to do so.
As visitors to any of the FreethoughtsBlogs site will have noticed, there have been server problems that have periodically made the sites unavailable during the past few days. But PZ Myers says that we are shifting to a new webhosting service this week that one hopes will be more reliable. The move should be invisible to visitors to FtB and also (I hope!) to those of us who write the blogs.
In the past few months I have been getting repeated requests for collaborations on this blog. People send me emails saying that they like what I write (always gratifying to hear!) and that they have interesting content that they could contribute and are willing to pay me for the privilege of doing so. These requests often sound like they are coming from genuine people (except for one feature that I will discuss later) and at the beginning I would write back politely declining the offers. I realized that they may not be real when I would get repeat messages from the same people reminding me of their earlier message and requesting a response. Ever since then, I have treated them as spam and simply deleted the emails without replying
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Based on my experience in driving in Australia and New Zealand, I have written before in favor of ’roundabouts’ (or traffic circles as they are known in the US) as superior to four way stop signs at intersections. But they are not popular here even though there is evidence that they result in fewer accidents.
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I had never had a serious problem with pop up ads. There would be occasional ones but not so many that they were a nuisance that required action. But suddenly starting with the last week I was flooded with them. They seemed to be mostly from a few legitimate business sites like Hotels.com and another for discounted eyeglasses. I don’t know why they started.
I downloaded AdblockPlus and it has stopped the ads so the problem has gone away. But I am curious why they suddenly exploded. Anyone have any ideas?
I have expressed my puzzlement with several aspects of the national spelling bee competition, especially the fact that the words have become increasingly obscure over time. (For example, in 1932, the winning word was ‘knack’!) One question in my mind is why such a pointless activity as spelling highly esoteric words has become so attractive that young children spend countless hours learning to do so and then subject themselves to sweating it out in front of cameras and large prime time TV audiences in a format that seems to revel in their agony. To win this contest requires knowing the spelling of 150,000 to 200,000 words. This is astonishing when one considers that Shakespeare used only about 33,000 words in his plays and this is considered to be close to the upper limit of most people’s vocabularies, even those who have high levels of formal education. So these competitors are learning to spell a lot of words they will never, ever use.
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