Bob Simpson and helmets in sport

The death of Bob Simpson reminds me of when I used to watch him in Sydney grade cricket. I particularly remember a century in a little over an hour, without balls hit in the air and with fielders around the fence. Incidentally the Western Suburbs team at the time had a better bowling line up than Australia, since it included the recently retired Alan Davidson at the height of his powers, Graeme Corling, and Johnny Watkins and Simpson to bowl spin, and a guy who bowled medium pace or spin who Tony Grieg said would have been a sensation on English conditions.

Simpson never wore a helmet. For fast short bowling he would watch the ball closely as it whistled past his nose. The problem with helmets is that they give the batters a false sense of security. Yes, they will stop you from getting a broken jaw and other external damage. However they don't offer enough protection against concussion which is more likely to have long term consequences. Helmets should give the batters confidence to keep their eye on the ball and evade it. Instead we see the dangerous option of turning their back. Players facing fast bowling need to be trained to do the right thing without thinking.

Update on who to eliminate in STV (preferential) voting

 As I said after Australia's 2022 election (https://grampsgrumps.blogspot.com/2022/05/who-to-eliminate-in-stv-preferential.html), we should eliminate candidates who can't win against any remaining candidate. The 2025 election reinforces this. There have been several cases where one candidate has a good lead but can't win against either of the next 2 candidates. The result is then determined by who finishes 2nd. This causes 2 problems:

• The voters who backed that leading candidate are deprived unnecessarily of their right to influence the winner with their preferences.
• Voters may feel that they have to vote strategically to get their preference between expected 2nd and 3rd candidates counted. This means that they don't get to indicate the policies they really prefer, and might even prevent their preferred candidate winning if she has more support than expected. Avoiding strategic voting is one of the key advantages of STV over 1st past the post.

Eliminating the candidates who can't win is easy by computer if the votes are digitised, 

If forced to do it by hand you can make a lot of progress this way. If there are N candidates then draw up an NxN table. For each vote, for each pair of candidates X and Y: if X has a higher preference then add 1 to his square against Y and subtract 1 from Y's square against X. We can have lots of people doing this at once on different lots of votes, then add the tables at the end. When all votes completed, we eliminate every candidate that only has negative numbers. We  can also eliminate groups of candidates at the bottom who can't combine to get ahead of any other candidate. Then repeat.  No redistributing preferences needed. Hopefully at the end there is one candidate who wins.  If not then we do have to see who can't win. And if we end up with X beats Y and Y beats Z and Z beats X, or worse, then we have to do something more arbitrary, like eliminating the one with the lowest top preferences, as now, or the most bottom preferences, as I somewhat prefer.

Impressive Adelaide scholars

Speaking of AI and quantum and English: I just saw this insanely impressive talk:

https://youtu.be/rGAynRTUMVI?si=h4jpSsZC2D5RZcBG. May I say how nice it is to hear an Aussie accent. However Phiala Shanahan talks at high speed, and I wonder if the rest of the world can hear it all. [I once gave a talk in the US and the South accent people had trouble understanding me.]

I notice that Dr Shanahan is from Adelaide. Another impressive Adelaidian is Terry Tao. I think we can assume that genetics are not involved. Maybe it's the water. They get their water from the Murray River. I once visited Adelaide during a drought in the Murray-Darling catchment. The water was horrible. But maybe there's a magic ingredient.