Sportsmanship

A few days ago, my brother came back home all pissed-off after playing in a round of the inter-schools tennis tournament.

When asked why he was so miffed, he recounted how he was playing the final match when his team was already up 4-0, which meant they had already won the series. As it was getting late, and the end-result was an already forgone conclusion, his own teammates started turning against him, encouraging him to throw the match, while cheering for the opponent, who was a clearly better player. Even the coach had left ,and the teacher-in-charge expressed his impatience. Worse still, the umpire, who was his team captain (they have this interesting arrangement where the umpire's from one school while the linesmen are from the other), started making dubious calls against my brother, just to speed up the play. How incensed my brother must have been to have his friends turn against him. Where's the sportsmanship? Perhaps the organizers should consider forgoing all matches when the final result of the match-up is uncontestable, thus preventing such an ugly scenario from happening again.

Anyway, here's an interesting link, where some guy developed a context free grammar for generating pretty pictures. The syntax is easy enough to pick up but oh man, I couldn't get anything too exciting out of it. Sigh aesthetics and me just don't quite work out.

Another very cool link, where some guys at Stanford developed a cool algorithm for generating images from the viewpoint of the projector or lightsource. Check out the video, where they demonstrate how they can use their technique to see around corners. Way cool.