Maradonna supports the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo

class war, Football
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The Argentine football team supports the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo at the worldcup

As you should know Bob, during the Argentinian dictatorship of the seventies and early eighties, the Argentine military waged a dirty war against its own people, disappearing thousands of trade unionists, activists, socialists and other leftists and all other sorts of socalled subversives. Most of the disappered were first tortured then killed, were often young, in their tens, twenties or thirties, sometimes had children of their own who also disappered, being adopted by the very same people who tortured and murdered their parents. And it was not just leftists who got disappeared: ask too many questions and you would be tortured and murdered as well. But some of the mothers of disappeared people refused to be intimidated and kept asking the government where their children were and when they got no answers, they started a silent protest on the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, keeping up throughout the dictatorship even though several of the original mothers were disappeared in turn. They did not stop when the dictatorship ended, but kept up demanding answers, keeping up their weekly protest until 2006, when finally a government was elected that wasn’t interested in continuing the coverup. In later years, as the truth did start to come out the mothers also campaigned for the truth about the children of the disappeared, those adopted by their killers.

It’s not surprising then that the Argentine football team chose to honour these women at the start of the Worldcup, by calling for them to win the Nobel Prize for Peace. If any groups deserve it, they are. What is surprising is how little attention this gesture got in the mainstream meda. I myself only read about this today, on Inveresk Street Ingrate. You would think this should’ve gotten more coverage, as such a political statement is not exactly common amongst footballers. The Worldcup itself after all is tainted by having been held in Argentine at the height of the dictatorship, in 1978. Perhaps this is why it was slipped by almost unnoticed?

Metal Monday: N is for Nuclear Death

'Eavy Metal, video
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Two bands today representing the letter “N”. First up, Napalm Death, the UK grindcore/death metal pioneers. Influenced by punk and hardcore like so many other metal bands getting their start in the eighties, theyt took it further than most. In the first video, if you blink you miss their record breaking song “You Suffer”:



They got a bit more “mainstream” later on in their career. Here’s an example of their later style:



The other “N” band is Nuclear Assault, which you could call an Anthrax spinoff as Danny Lilker, ex-Anthrax bassist was a founding member. They of course play thrash metal with their earliest records having a decidedly apocalyptic flavour. No wonder considering the band was formed at the height of the Reagan era, when it really did seem like the missiles would start flying any minute now. Now unlike James Nicoll, who watches Threads as escapism, I still get nightmares thinking to much about nuclear holocaust and some of their songs I just cannot play therefore. This is “Game Over”:



And this is “Critical Mass”:



They all think it’s over

Football
Published on 2 Comments on They all think it’s over

the ball was over the line

But unfortunately the referee decided otherwise. It can be difficult sometimes to see if a shot that doesn’t thunder into the back netting has actually crossed the line, but not when it’s half a metre or so behind the line. But the linesman was too far away to see properly and the ref didn’t overturn his decision and so England was denied a valid goal that would’ve been the equaliser. If England now exits the Worldcup it would be the ideal situation for the tabloids to wallow in that sense of outrage and injustice they like so much when it comes to football. But it should never have happened. Goal line technology is neither exotic nor expensive and it would’ve seen what the refs couldn’t.

You might wonder why such a multi-billion dollar industry like football doesn’t use such technology in its most important tournament, but it all comes down to seventyfour year old FIFA president Sepp Blatter, who adamantly refuses to introduce it. The Dutch football commentators at Voetbal International seem to believe it’s a combination of his age and his belief that it would be too expensive to use as it would need to be used in qualifying games as well and poorer countries couldn’t afford this. This last reason is of course utterly silly, as it is up to FIFA to make the rules and they could easily decide to only use it in the finals, hence sparing themselves this embarassement.

But you wonder if there’s more going on than just the innate conservatism of an old man. Using goal line detectors and other technology means referees are going to make fewer subjective calls. leaving less room for error — and fraud. Because we know there’s a multi-billion dollar betting industry sprung up around football as well, not all of it legal and we also know that players and referees both have been bribed in several national leagues to throw games already. Can we therefore be sure the Worldcup is safe?

Sensawunda

Science, science fiction
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Centauri Dreams on the increasingly many brown dwarf stars that are being found in our stellar neighbourhood and how cool they are:

In fact, it gives me pause to reflect that the focaccia I baked the night before last needed higher temperatures (500 degrees Fahrenheit) than the coolest of these brown dwarfs can supply. Most of the new objects in the Spitzer study are T dwarfs, the coolest class of brown dwarfs known, defined as being less than 1500 Kelvin (1226 degrees Celsius). One of the dwarfs in this study is cold enough that it may represent the hypothetical class called Y dwarfs, part of a classification created by a co-author of the paper, Davy Kirkpatrick (Caltech).

Brown dwarfs may be the most common stellar objects around as this representation shows. You wonder if brown dwarfs could have planets and if so, whether those planets could have life on them and if so, how it’s adapted to the extremely cold temperatures such planets must suffer from. Of course, from a hypothetical intelligent species arising on a planet around a brown dwarf, we ourselves would be exotic extremophilic lifeforms: imagine being able to exist at temperatures where water is a liquid!