This is getting silly. I fully expect to hear tomorrow morning that the bit of trouble John Terry was having with his foot has worsened to the point of losing a toe and that team doctors have ruled David James out of the game due to previously undiagnosed old age.
EDIT It’s Wednesday now!? I thought it was Tuesday all day. OK By “tomorrow morning” I meant “in the next 10 minutes”.
EDIT: No they were fine. And YAY England won.
The University of Oxford have appointed pure mathematician Marcus du Sautoy to the Simonyi Chair for Public Understanding of Science. This makes him Richard Dawkins’ successor, although I doubt Graun Unltd will be giving him his own category just yet. As well as being a very distinguished researcher, MdS is pure win as populizer. I loved Music of the Primes and his his Faraday Christmas lectures for kids were pitch perfect. Here he is with his Recreativo Hackney team mates and the infinity of primes:
Since I am know on someone’s blogroll (thanks Yemon), I think I should have some content. I am not going to post about maths right now though; I’ll have the slides for my upcoming talk here when they are done but now I’m going to talk about a football coach and names.
Now, I don’t much care for Luiz Felipe Scolari. He is kind of violent. He says stuff like “If I found out that one of my players was gay I would throw him off the team.” . He admires Augusto Pinochet. He encourages players to put special pebbles in their socks for luck. He seems to really under-value Nani. Above all, he’s now manager of Chelsea football club (bad enough in itself) and seems to have misused his role as Portugal coach to help Chelsea (encouraging Ronaldo to leave ManU and Bosingwa to go to Chelsea).
Anyway he is right about something. Namely his name. As he told the Torygraph, his name is not “Phil”. It’s “Felipe”. And in related news, my name is not “Mateus”. About a third of the people I am introduced to here in Portugal feel the need to tell me that here “Matthew” is “Mateus”. Well, it isn’t. That’s my NAME you are messing with. I’m not a king, or a pope, therefore my name does not translate.
Thanks.
Epsilonica 