The latest technology

Adidas shows off the inside of its new football, featuring computer technology which tracks the ball's progress around the field and over the goal line.



As we can guess, this is a step towards doing away with controversial goals or un-goals.


By the way, how is `sepak takraw' doing as an international sport? A less interesting question is, how is Malaysia doing in `international' sepak takraw...

Ball

Remember this ball?

Adidas, who created it prior to the 1970 World Cup called it the `Telstar'. The formal name is truncated icosahedron. My kampong mates called it `bola', for obvious reasons.

It is made up of 32 panels; twelve are pentagons (the black ones), and twenty are hexagons. Mind you, many cartoonists got the colours the other way around, or even the shapes wrong.

Why this combination of geometrical shapes? It is simply because this is the most effective way of creating a nearly spherical object from flat panels. Any other combination of regular shapes will result in the ball having unsatisfactory bulges and points.

More on that next time...

Sad

I feel sad.

Really sad. One Malaysian girl will most probably be jailed for more than 7 years in Japan. Another will be prosecuted in China. Both have been caught and charged with trafficking drugs in the respective countries.

Both of them claim that they have been duped by some foreigners. I find that quite easy to believe. What I find hard to believe is the fact that they, and many others like them, have been easily conned and tricked by these unscrupulous drug traffickers. Are Malaysian (girls) that gullible? Even the educated ones?