Noulakaz

The blog of Avinash, Christina, Anya and Kyan Meetoo.

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Make Yourselves Heroes

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Tomorrow, my Liverpool FC will once more play against Milan AC in the Champions League final. Two years ago, we won in, arguably, the best ever final.

The Liverpool players have worked hard to get to the final and they are ready.

I know that Liverpool FC will win tomorrow. This is written in the stars.

I am proud to be a Liverpool FC fan. We are not going to war. We will respect Milan AC. Our players have a job to do. They are professionals. And so is our coach and mastermind, Rafael Benítez. Every true Liverpool FC fan knows that Rafa has a secret plan against the Milan AC players. With Rafa, we can win over any team. Barcelona and Chelsea can testify.

I predict that Liverpool FC will win by 1-0 tomorrow and the scorer will be… Captain Steven Gerrard!

An update at 02:05 on 24 May:

Liverpool has lost the game 1-2 with, believe it or not, two goals by Inzaghi. I watched it at home with three Liverpool fans and we mostly agreed that Liverpool (and especially Gerrard) did not play a great match. Liverpool was, during long stretches, better than Milan AC and Gerrard and Xabi Alonso should have scored.

Anyway, congratulations to Milan AC :-)

Pierre-Gilles de Gennes is dead

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Pierre-Gilles de Gennes died four days ago. He was a French physicist and Nobel laureate.

From Wikipedia,

His Nobel Prize was awarded for “discovering that methods developed for studying order phenomena in simple systems can be generalized to more complex forms of matter, in particular to liquid crystals and polymer”

When I was a student at the INSA de Lyon, he once came (I think it was in 1997) to explain precisely what this meant:

“Bubbles!”

Yes. Pierre-Gilles de Gennes spent his time trying to understand what bubbles really were and how they were formed. He told us that it was important to know this, for example, in order to build safe factories for chemical products.

What impressed me most on that day was how passionate he was for his bubbles. And I guess he had an influence on me and that’s why I am so passionate for the things I like…

(Photo by AP Photo/Remy de la Mauviniere)

3+1 beautiful articles to read…

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Photo from Flickr

I am happy to have checked Reddit the other day because through it I found three beautiful essays by Mike Tarver and one by Larry Wall:

  • Why I am Not a Professor OR The Decline and Fall of the British University – Gasp! I am amazed by the parallels between what Mike Tarver writes and what we are doing here in Mauritius. Ok… some parts are a little bit caricatural but I’m 100% with him when he says that the University level programmes should be much tougher than what they are now. I wonder what percentage of my UoM students would have managed to succeed if they were given the exams I had when I was in France ten years ago… I’ll be even bolder: Universities should be elitist!
  • Hackers and Fighters – Is there a correlation between studying computer science and knowing about computers? Is a street programmer better than the computer science graduate? Is there a way to teach programming so that a computer science graduates become as good (if not better) than a street programmer?
  • The Bipolar Lisp Programmer – Having read this article, I must now confess that I am Bipolar! A Bipolar has “intellectual acuteness and [does] not [take] things seriously. The not taking things seriously goes with finding it all pretty easy and a bit dull. But also it goes with realising that a lot of human activity is really pretty pointless, and when you realise that and internalise it then you become cynical and also a bit sad”. Mike Tarver refers to the Lisp community in his article and it’s now obvious why I am such a big fan of Scheme and Haskell…
  • Perl, the first postmodern computer language – It is easy to guess that this one has been written by Larry Wall. And it is beautiful! Before reading the article, I did not like Perl (even after having read Programming Perl). After reading the article, I want to give Perl a chance to convince me once more… I’ll definitely buy Learning Perl. The article focusses on the difference between a modern programming language and a postmodern programming language. Postmodern? How can that exist? In fact, Larry Wall argues that the modernists oversimplify problem solving. Modernists puts the focus squarely on the hammer and the nail. He says that a good postmodern problem solver uses different tools to solve different problems hence the necessity for something like Perl.

(Beautiful photo by Doorgesh!!!)