23. november 2002

Doping Accusation Backfires In Canada it is ice hockey. In Brazil it is football. In England it is cricket. And here in Norway the sacred sport is crosscountry skiing. And messing with the national icons does not go unpunished. The nordic disciplines have been rocked by a number of doping scandals over the last years. Numerous athletes from Finland, Russia and other countries have been caught by a rigurous testing programme. And it's not surprising that both foreigners and locals alike have questioned why no Norwegians have been caught. After all, Norway's athletes have totally dominated men's crosscountry skiing since the early 1990s. In the Winter Olympics on Lillehammer 1994, the results were spectacular for the home country, and the domination did not end there. Norway's athletes beat competitors that have later been exposed as frauds. Some of the fraudsters have openly accused the Norwegians of not being better, but such accusations could reasonably be rejected as sour grapes. The fact of the case is that the Norwegians have been tested continuously all through this, 365 days a year, and not one of them has been caught. Yet, the suspicions have come to the surface from time to time. 'Rikets Tilstand', a documentary on Norwegian TV2, gave the microphone to one of the critics, physician Helge Oftebro, who made vague claims but refused to give names or other specifics. The journalists may have thought they had found a smoking gun when they published an alleged list of 150 'medications' ordered from drug producer Astra by the 1994 olympic team, and when they found that 72 liters of plasma expander allegedly disappeared from the olympic village. The next day Astra could prove that the journalists had simply misinterpreted a list of all the medications from Astra as a shopping list, and that the actual order had been for no more than 20 different, not-too-suspicisious medications (which could fit comfortably in a handbag). Also, experts gave evidence that all the 72 liters of plasma expander was returned to the hospital after the Olympics. TV2's already speculative case crumbled, and both active athletes, leaders and other journalists turned on the TV channel. Friday TV2 capitulated. The station chief Kåre Valebrokk publicly apologised, and so did Gerhard Helskog, the journalist responsible for the documentary. TV2's image is seriously injured, and there is as before no evidence whatsoever that any of Norway's famous olympians ever cheated. 10:50:02 PM    comment []

"Convergence" in for another Beating I had a few quite scathing comments to Gregg Easterbrook's Wired article about the (imagined) convergence between science and religion some time ago. My comments were also put on the Occoquan.. Raven thought he deserved another beating, and gave him one. He calls the article "a truckload of meaningless styrofoam platitudes and half-baked conceptual fiddle-faddle." I wished I had thought of that sentence. 8:53:48 PM    comment []

Which Digital Camera I guess I'm not the only one wanting a good digital camera these days. Cnet has run a test of 4 megapixel digital cameras recently. The winner is the Canon Powershoot S40 (picture) with good mention of the more advanced G2 model too. 8:39:28 PM    comment []

MSN Messenger back up, sort of I bit the bullet and decided to upgrade to 5.0 after MSN Messenger had refused to let me in for more than 24 hours. When I restarted, it actually allowed me to log in, but all my contacts were gone. Now it pops up requests to be added from the people in my old contacts lists at random times. I think this could have been done more intelligently. 6:09:57 PM    comment []

How to avoid pissing off google As we know, google is a friend of us bloggers. Perhaps someone at google likes bloggers, or perhaps it's just a coincidence that the clever algorithms make our blogs the preferred links for a lot of quite esoteric searches. Some people have tried to fool google (in the old days, all good webmasters knew how to fool AltaVista!), but that is a very bad idea for a number of reasons. This article, found by Rayne, explains how to not annoy the good people & clever algorithms at google. 6:42:37 AM    comment []

Strange matter may have caused seismic disturbances Some scientists link some very unusual seismic disturbances with the postulated existence of 'strange matter' in the universe. According to theory, the big bang created not only the matter we know, but might also have created matter formed by a different form of quarks, elementary particles that normally create protons and neutrons. It was assumed that if such matter hit Earth, it would cause seismic disturbances in a particular pattern, as the high-speed material passed through the planet. And in 1993, two events otherwise unexplained were recorded by the world's seismographs. Unfortunately, such date is no longer recorded, so further studies into these events are unlikely in the foreseeable future. 6:14:13 AM    comment []

Miss World Contest Cancelled Riots by Muslim youths have left more than 100 dead in Nigeria, and the unrest has been spreading to the capital. The Miss World contest is cancelled and is moved to London, scheduled for Dec 7. Nigerian President Olusegun went on television appealing for calm, and blamed the unrest on a newspaper article deemed disrepectful towards Islam, not on the pageant itself. He promised those responsible for the offending article would be brought to account. I realise the Nigerian authorities are between the rock and the hard place, but what is the sense in promising to crack down on a newspaper article, when Islamic mobs ran around killing indiscriminately? Apparently, when these people's 'religious feelings' are hurt, they can do whatever they want, and everybody just have to put up with walking on eggshells to avoid provoking them. 3:33:50 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2002 Jan Haugland. Last update: 01.12.02; 02:51:19.