Snickometer Causing Troubles?

Yesterday, May 24th, I had gone to see a cricket match. It was the Royal Challengers Bangalore vs the Gujarat Lions. Though the match was incredibly interesting another thing caught my attention: The Snickometer. This particular technology caught my attention due to a particular incident in the match.

The bowler Dwayne Bravo was bowling to the batsman AB De Villiers(like this blog if you love him too!!!!!) and the ball just passed the batsmen on his left side and was declared a wide. Dwayne Bravo was furious at the umpire's decision.

Later a screen displayed the snickometer and it clearly showed that the ball had not touched the batsmen and hence was rightfully called a wide.

For more info on wide balls: https://www.lords.org/mcc/laws-of-cricket/laws/law-25-wide-ball/

What amazed me was that the snickometer could detect very small interferences and hence today's blog is about the SNICKOMETER.

The snickometer(snicko for short) was actually invented by an English computer scientist Allan Plaskett. It was first used in 1994 in the UK.

The actual technology of the snickometer is very interesting. It has three parts:

(a) A very sensitive microphone located in one of the stumps
(b) An oscilloscope which measures the sound wave
(c) A high speed camera which records the ball passing by.



These components make the snicko very useful in t20 matches where every decision by the umpire can change the flow of the game.

When the ball nicks the bat, the oscilloscope trace will pick up sounds. At the same time, a high speed camera records the ball passing the bat, and by the shape of the sound wave you can determine whether a disturbance has occurred or not.

This is an extremely useful system but comes with a minor flaw. The snickometer can distinguish very well between two different points of contact. For example if the bat and the pads are extremely close it is difficult to differentiate whether the ball has hit the pad or the ball.

Snicko is now an essential part of modern day cricket. Getting to know about it increases your knowledge and can be very well classified under the "Did you know?" section of any group.

Lebron's choice: One three pointer? or Three free throws?

Lebron James(to those who don't know) is a professional basketball player who plays in the American basketball league NBA for the team Cleveland Cavaliers.



Now the question is:

Should he take a three pointer? or instead Take three free throws?



The point labelled 5 is the free throw line.
The points 1,2,3 and 4 form the semicircle called the three point line.

As seen from the picture above the free throw line is much closer to the hoop than the three point line is.
But we must keep in mind that Lebron James must shoot from the free throw line three times but only once from the three point line.

So assuming we decide that the three free throws are better then let's calculate the % of successfully scoring the shot.

The average free throw % of the NBA is 75.7%

So for the first shot the % is 75.7
Similarly it will be so for the remaining two shots.
The chance of converting all the three free throws is 43.3%
The three point average is a meagre 35.4%
So it is much better to take three free throws than to take a single three pointer.

In my next blog I will be calculating this % with specific players, thus getting an understanding of how a player plays.

ASCII : Alphabets in Computers

 ASCII : Alphabets in Computers

The storage of numbers is relatively easy to understand as, computers are very simple at the basic level. Computers use Base - 2, meaning they count in powers of two. This also means that computers have only Humans on the other hand count in Base - 10, meaning we  two digits, namely 0 & 1. Humans count in the powers of 10, so we have 10 digits (0-9). For example,

32 = 3 x 10^1  +2 x 10^0 ("^" means raised to the power of)

For computers,

32 = 1 x 2^5 + 0 x 2^ 4 + 0 x 2^3 + 0 x 2^2 + 0 x 2^1 + 0 x 2^0

Each 2^x represents a "bit". Think of each bit as a slot. In this slot a zero or one can be placed. The bits are also represented as powers of two in their order. For example : the fourth bit is 0 or 1 into 2^4. Nowadays, computers have either 32 bits or 64 bits meaning the maximum value that can be stored is 2,147,483,647. Note : we can DISPLAY numbers greater than this. But on a 32 bit computer, this is the maximum value you can STORE.

So, if every possible configuration of the bits (slots) is used up to represent unique numbers, where is the place for letters? Computers need to be able to process letters for being useful to us, otherwise, the are just expensive calculators.

Here is where ASCII comes in. ASCII stands for  American Standard Code for Information Interchange. ASCII helps us to store and display letters on our screens.

In the ASCII encoding (fancy term for saying configuration of letters), a letter is given a unique numerical value. When the computer receives this value, it processes it as a letter. The value of "a" is given a value of 97. Note : "a" is different from "A" as they are considered as different characters.

You must be wondering, if every possible binary value is represented as a number, and each letter is represented by a number, how does a computer know weather we mean "a" or just 97?

Actually, your computer doesn't .

In reality, your computer is just hardware. What makes it really run is your operating system or software. The Operating System is the main piece of software. Windows, OSX and Linux are all operating systems. Now if you open your web-browser like Chrome or IE (Why do you still use this?) you are running another piece of software on top of your operating system.

Think of it as a cake  : Your hardware is the base, your operating system is like frosting and applications are like the cherry on top.

So, when you press the KEY on your keyboard, your operating system identifies it either as a number or a letter, while your HARDWARE processes it as a number/alphabet. In this way computers can identify numbers and letters uniquely and helps you type. 

When you open notepad, you can be sure that whatever you want to write actually happens.

-Raghav M

Will You Take The Bet?

Today's blog is sort of different. It works on mathematics and requires a bit of logic. This question was posed by minutephysics and I thought that I would elaborate on it a bit.
The Questions is quite simple: There are a hundred people standing in a line in a room. Each of you take a one dollar bill and write your number(in the row) on the one dollar bill and hand it to me. Now I take these 100 one dollar bills and randomly put them in boxes also numbered from one to hundred. One by one you enter the room and are allowed to look in 50 of the boxes. Now here's the deal. If you all happen to find the one dollar bill with your number marked on it I give you each a hundred dollars.





A few rules however apply:
1. All of you are allowed to discuss a strategy to win
2. You will enter the room in one way and leave another
3. Once you come out of the room you are not allowed to tell the others what you saw.

So the question is:

Will you take the bet and hope to get a $101 profit?

The choice is yours.........

Comment your answer below.

What Should I Know About Dark Matter?

Well lucky for you if you're reading this (unlucky if you're a theoretical physicist in CERN reading my blog{highly unlikely}) dark matter hasn't been proved to exist. Now you might ask me "why am I lucky?". Well you're lucky because if dark matter was proved to exist it would be a MASSIVE breakthrough in the field of physics. Dark matter is probably one of the most sough after discoveries in the world now and a the person who discovers it is guaranteed a Nobel Prize in Physics for sure.



Another common thing is associating dark energy with dark matter. Dark energy is also hypothetical but many discoveries have shown that it must be there too.

Now here's a reason why dark matter should exist. Our universe exists sort of like a huge carousel with the stars rotating around like a ponies. In the middle it's suspected to be a black hole. Now this carousel picture isn't fitting the mathematics. According to mathematics the stars should have been flung off from the carousel by now. Reality as we know it is different. Our universe is stable(for now and is bound to change any second) and we see no stars flying off. Scientists explanation for this is .............(drumroll) DARK MATTER.



A second observation, which dark matter is used to explain is the fact that we are existing now. Observations of  the cosmic background radiation, the "afterglow" of the big bang fireball, show that matter in the beginning was spread very evenly throughout space. Dense regions, having stronger gravity than their surroundings, dragged in matter and became ever denser. But this process is too slow to build a galaxy as big as the Milky Way. To explain our existence it is necessary to postulate a large amount of Dark matter whose extra gravity greatly speeded up galaxy formation.