About Last Night. The T20 World Cup Final (Photos)
A few West Indies fans in a sea of sad
Well, I was there. The West Indies came from way behind and pulled off a stunning win over Sri Lanka. You could feel the mood in the crowd go from surprise to elation at the run of excellent early bowling from Sri Lanka, getting two maiden overs and getting the powerhouse Chris Gayle out for three. Then, somehow effortlessly, Samuels destroyed Malinga for six after six. However, when their innings ended I thought Sri Lanka was winning. But then we couldn’t hit fours or sixes at all. Then we all got out. Then it was over.
The stadium alight, when Sri Lanka first took the field.
There’s nothing sadder than a quiet stadium, and in the last five overs it was deadly still. Sri Lanka was so down at that point, depending on bowlers to become extraordinary batsmen where even our top-order had failed. It was like watching someone getting punched in the kidney over and over again until they died.
The West Indies after winning, Gangam Style.
On the plus side, there’s no one better to lose to than the West Indies. Their charming team still brought smiles to the faces of dejected fans by dancing Gangam Style around the grounds. They played incredibly, showing will and resolution beyond their reputation for brute force batting. No one deserves it more. Much respect, amidst the dejection.
Posted on Monday, October 8th, 2012 in Photography, sport.
Mohsin Hamid, author of How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia, has a nice 
I’m happy to be featured in Echelon magazine’s 40 Under 40 feature, profiling young people who contribute to the economy in some way, mainly in business but also in terms of innovation and thought leadership. It’s an interesting article not just in that I’m in it (mainly for work on indi.ca and 
I won’t add too much commentary, but just read I guess. The youngest Rajapaksa, Rohitha (Chi Chi) has given an amazing interview to the 
In 2009 this strange character appeared on the Sri Lankan Internet scene, getting angry, flaming, trolling whatever. Then he started naming anonymous bloggers, posting comments as people’s kids, nasty stuff, for which I removed him from 
It’s Gangnam ;-)
The defeat is a direct result of the MA-RA came to watch the mach live in the stadium.
Many astrologers have prdicted this for sometime and wonder why the royal astrologer did not see that coming :)
To be fair by him, it was reported that he was in two minds about attending the final, just for this reason. Hopefully he’ll keep away next time.
so why didnt we win the other two times he didnt come?
nope.. this is all BS, he came along and in case of SL winning the cup, was to do the honours and present the cup for the winning SL team captain and once the coming colors went bad.. ran away from the award ceremony.
what a shame… cricket is a game maaaaan, you lose some day and you win some day… this is typical MA-RA
It’s interesting to see how superstitious and backward many Sri Lankans are. I’m amazed at the number of people who actually believe that the presence of the president at the cricket grounds caused the Sri Lankan cricket team to lose to the West Indies – and this includes very many educated, westernised Sri Lankans. I suppose its no surprise given all the “auspicious times” and “horoscopes” that many in the island subscribe to. Has it occurred to these people that just maybe the Sri Lankan cricket team didn’t play well and that maybe the West Indies played an awesome game?
anee baba, what is this logic ane? you are thinking too much no? apale baba, lokka apita apale ne?
About MR’s preence at matches, most people dont believe it. They only say it because they dont like him.
I dont like him either. But sometimes I have to admire his deviousness. Also, he seems to reserve the devil’ s own luck for himself.
Judging by how many times I’ve heard the “we lost because the president was there” it’s pretty clear there is a quite a significant number of Sri Lankans who are mired in superstition (and idiocy). Sri Lanka will unfortunately always remain a backward and primitive society as long as such superstition is given pride of place. The Sri Lankan cricket team on the day clearly did not handle the pressure of a final well, and they clearly did not play better cricket than the West Indies.
by your brilliant logic, sir, whenever we say to someone “all because of you, men!”, we are all being “backward and superstitious”, blaming our close friends for our ill-fortune. god forbid us third-world folk being sarcastic an whatnot! pish posh!
You must be right about the team’s performance that day, of course. But it’s more fun to blame it on the other villain.
kp, I don’t think it’s an an exaggeration to state that by and large the Sri Lankan population are a superstitious lot. What’s interesting is that this superstitious paradigm extends to the educated, urbanized elite as well. I think the ‘let’s blame the president for the loss of the Sri Lankan cricket team’ idea has moved beyond sarcasm. It’s pretty obvious there are many who actually believe that the presence of a certain individual (in this case the president) at the stadium actually caused the Sri Lankan cricket team to lose. Yes, it is primitive and backward.
In this case I’m willing to consider that people who say “we lost because of the president” not because of superstition, but rather out of desperation, and for fun. There are two reasons for this.
1. I’m one of the people who blame it on the president just for fun.
2. Majority of the rest of the people who blame it on the president will vote for him come next election. They don’t think he’s cursed.
And it’s not only Sri Lankans, many Americans are quite backward too. Presidential candidate Mitt Romney thinks he’s going to have some fun in planet Kolob. And look at what American think about evolution.
http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-500160_162-965223.html
That’s pretty crazy.
One more point, many people who embrace science and reject superstitions actually don’t have good reasons to do so. They don’t actually learn science. Many of them haven’t read anything Feynman or Robert Trivers ever written. They deny certain claim a priori as superstitious, even though they don’t exactly know why they should be denied a priori. Their answers would be something along the lines of “its against science, or common sense”. Ask them is it possible that God created the universe, they’d say no, or that the probability of that being true is epsilon where epsilon is like one upon googolplex. Ask they whether it’s possible that the universe is a computer simulation created by a super-intelligent alien and they’d assign a higher probability. But ask them why they assign a higher probability to the latter, they won’t be able to give a good philosophical answer, other than that the god hypothesis is crazy.
This is not a defense of superstition. I’d be the last person to do that. What I want to say is even though person may not be superstitious, he/she may still be running the same kind of cognitive algorithms inside their brains that causes other people to have superstitious beliefs. You might read Richard Dawkins and say goodbye to god and astrology. But there’s still a long way to go until you realize that Austrian economics is bullshit, or that collapse-interpretations of Quantum Mechanics doesn’t make sense, or that Desmond Morris’s evolutionary explanation for love is teleological nonsense.
i think our resident genius needs to explain to us plebs how the collapse interpretations don’t make sense. especially when the vast majority of those of us who’ve actually studied QM as a subject tend to stick to a collapse interpretation.
Refer to the comment made by me at 2012-10-09 11:19:02
Enough about cricket. We should now be asking why the secretary of the JSC is being beaten up by thugs.
The reason to beat the sec of JSC is to send a strong signal among the legal faternity that there is only one way of justice in this land and that is the Chinthanaya way of doing.
The judges and JSC was trying to go against the executive and the Medamulana chandiya have send the clear but minor message in taking away the sunglasses and a cheap mobile phone after punching few blows to the sec.
the next will be what came for Lasantha W., watchout folks ..
If Sri Lanka had won the T20 WC, MR would have had a field day increasing prices of essential food items because our idiots would be partying for weeks not giving a rats ass about anything else that happened. The attack on the secretary of the JSC coincided with the finals with the hope that SL would win and people would be blinded by the victory, but that backfired.
The resident moron has studied QM? Amazingly I don’t find it surprising.
The vast majority of collapse interpretations are consciousness causes-collapse-interpretations.
1. They assume that consciousness is a fundamental thing in reality, when all the knowledge accumulated through other fields of science reject that idea.
2. They fail to see that the mind itself is made up of particles and therefore adding an observer.
3. Try writing a computer program according to a collapse interpretation. “Observation” and “Observer” and “Measurement” are not clearly defined. Those who came up with collapse interpretations thought that since they can think of an observer, and the idea of observer feels simple to them, reality itself work that way. It’s very much like saying that Thor causes thunder. Thor seems simple to a human mind. But try coding Thor and you’ll never come to the part of him causing thunder. Collapse interpretations are even worse. It doesn’t even have a clear idea as to what constitues an observer. So they’d moronically wait for the computer to figure it out, thinking that observers are obvious to computers just like to humans.
4. Collapse interpretations think that probabilites are out there in reality. This is the worst kind of mind projection fallacy there can be.
Those are some objections to collapse interpretations. I’m not surprised that you are one of those who believe them. Science isn’t a democracy. What’s stupid is just stupid. But in any case, many world interpretation and its variants are getting popular lately.
2. They fail to see that the mind itself is made up of particles and therefore adding an observer.
Should be
2. They fail to see that the mind itself is made up of particles and therefore adding an observer means a change in configuration space
What gaga is this?
The most common interpretation that treats collapse as real is the Copenhagen interpretation, nowadays it’s mostly Copenhagen-consistent histories interpretation. I’ve never in my life heard of this mind causes shit to collapse, when talking about the Copenhagen interpretation. And all this measurement & observer talk is also ancient history. If you want to sound fancy talking about QM these day use this word a lot : decoherence
Decoherence has kind of settled the measurement paradox, or as i was taught, successfully sidestepped it.
That’s what gets taught these days in universities. And personally I’m agnostic when it comes to all these interpretations. And I admit I also don’t understand some of them too well.
Now this is damn well close to the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Consistent-histories interpretation is not a collapse interpretation at all. You claim you’ve studied QM. What exactly did you study? Well, it’d do you good to at least read the Wikipedia page on this before you talk nonsense about consistent-histories. Wikipedia says:
In contrast to some interpretations of quantum mechanics, particularly the Copenhagen interpretation, the framework does not include “wavefunction collapse” as a relevant description of any physical process, and emphasizes that measurement theory is not a fundamental ingredient of quantum mechanics.
So basically, you were saying that consistent-histories was a collapse interpretation when it thinks wavefunction collapse is not relevant for anything. Moron.
And consistent-histories isn’t the only interpretation that uses decoherence. If you’d taken time to actually read the literature, you’d see that MWI heavily uses dechorence. I have a neo-Copenhagenist view of consistent histories. Consistent histories is basically just Many Worlds from a different point of view. Both have no wavefunction collapse. In MWI you use wave equation and in consistent histories you use path integrals . These are equivalent formalisms.
Even if you are don’t have a neo-Copenhagenist attitude towards consistent-histories and think that its ensemble of worlds actually exist, still you cannot classify consistent-histories as a collapse interpretation.
It takes a moron to say consistent-histories is collapse interpretation.
Since you are a moron who thought that consistent-histories is collapse interpretation (predictably because you don’t understand shit about the underlying math but have heard physicists say that it is Copenhagen done right), I don’t even have to write this. But I like having fun. You said,
I’ve never in my life heard of this mind causes shit to collapse, when talking about the Copenhagen interpretation.
Moron. Where have I ever said that Copenhagen interpretation is a consciousness-causes-collapse interpretation. What I said was many collapse interpretations are consciousness-causes collapse interpretations. Back in the dark ages of Quantum Mechanics, even the most brilliant of men, John von Neumann thought mind causes shit to collapse. Read his book “he Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics”.
Stop quote mining!
The collapse wiki is talking about and collapse i’m talking about are very different. I’ve said pretty clearly decoherence resolves the measurement paradox, or at least side steps it. If you knew what the fuck you are talking about you’d have some sense not to mix the two meanings of collapse.
And neo-copenhagenist view of Consistent Histories sounds like crock to me. You’ll need to explain to us plebs what that means.
Also what do you even mean by saying both are equivalent formalisms. They have to be unless what’s the point. All mathematical formulations of quantum, & classical, mechanics have to be equivalent.
Let’s focus on the moronic statement you made that Consistent-histories interpretation is a collapse interpretation, and the comment you just made that what the collapse wiki is talking about is different to what you mean by Collapse-histories.
1. If what is described in the wiki (the one Gell-Mann advocated) is not what you mean by Consistent-histories interpretation, please provide a link to someplace where it is properly described.
2. Does that interpretation include the collapse of the wave-function. (since whatever you think you are talking about is using decoherence, I suppose not)
3. If whatever the interpretation you think you are talking about does not include the collapse of the wave-function, on what basis are you calling it a collapse interpretation?
So where did i say consistent histories is a collapse interpretation?
This is what i said
The most common interpretation that treats collapse as real is the Copenhagen interpretation, nowadays it’s mostly Copenhagen-consistent histories interpretation.
the modern copenhagen interpretation borrows a bunch of stuff from the consistent histories interpretation it’s a bit of mix of both. that’s why i wrote Cophenhagen-consistent histories interpretation.
To the point,
No modern interpretation “collapses” a wavefunction and dissolves the classical quantum boundary arbitrarily. That process is handled by decoherence and is a fairly well defined process. How the notion of measurement effects system is another question all together.
Also why do you even need path integrals for consistent histories? A basic matrix formulation is all you need, and that’s all even wikipedia uses.
Do you consider being vague and trying to sidetrack your opponent are virtues. If not, please stick to the main point and be specific when replying. For future reference, when someone enumerates his questions, that means he wants you to specifically answer each one of them separately.
1. You haven’t provided a link to where your “Copenhagen-consistent histories” is properly described. This shouldn’t be hard as “vast majority of those of us who’ve actually studied QM as a subject tend to stick to a collapse interpretation……The most common interpretation that treats collapse as real is the Copenhagen interpretation, nowadays it’s mostly Copenhagen-consistent histories interpretation.
I’d be surprised if this Copenhagen-consistent histories interpretation doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page, when most of you guys who have studied QM tend to stick to a collapse interpretation, and Copenhagen is the most common one, and nowadays it is mostly Copenhagen-consistent histories.
I mean even when most of you guys who have studied QM do not stick to non-collapse interpretations, Consistent-histories, which according to both you and me is a non-collapse interpretation, has a Wikipedia page.
So where’s the link to this modified Copenhagen interpretation?
2. Now obviously, this Copenhagen-consistent histories interpretation, which is a mix of both Copenhagen and consistent-histories, must have have real wave-function collapse. That’s why you are calling it a collapse interpretation. That’s also why you are saying that consistent histories is not a collapse wave-function, because having the appearance of a collapse isn’t the same as having a collapse. Please answer the second question.
3. Now there’s no way that this Copenhagen-consistent histories interpretation does not have a real wave-function collapse. Consistent-histories, since it is using decoherence, just like MWI and its variants, have the appearance of a collapse. But you called it a non-collapse interpretation. So having the appearance of a collapse is not enough to be called a collapse interpretation. You need to have a real wave-function collapse. But in case if CCH doesn’t have a real collapse, answer the 3rd question. Just why are you saying CCH is a collapse interpretation and Consistent-histories a non-collapse one?
It’s only a game people… I was there that night and WI just outplayed us – period. They deserve the victory. At least we didn’t lose to India or Australia – now that would have been unthinkable.
Looking at the angles of your pics, it looks like I may have been seated quite close to where you were Indi.