Links ...

1. Michael Nielsen looks at the most remarkable graph in the history of sport to show why Don Bradman is so truly, so fantastically special. Here's something from the comments thread:

   Bradman was famously interviewed in 1980, and asked how he thought he’d perform against contempoary opposition.

   “Oh, I reckon I’d average 50 or 60″, he replied.

   “But you averaged nearly a hundred in your career, and you played against some of the best bowlers in history!” said the reporter.

   “Yeah,” said Bradman, “But you’ve got to remember I’m 72 years old now.”

   Nielsen has another interesting post on the pre-history of the World Wide Web:

   "Berners-Lee didn’t succeed because CERN was doing fundamental research. He succeeded in spite of it."

2. Rahul has a wonderful tribute to his doctoral thesis adviser, Prof. Sriram Sastry, who has won the 2009 2009 Lars Onsager Prize awarded by the American Physical Society.

3. Malcolm Gladwell on University of Chicago economist David Galenson's work on two kinds of genius: Why do we equate genius with precocity?

4. John Hawks on the utility of theoretical models in biology, excerpting six key ideas from a book by Peter Turchin.

5. Doug Natelson: What's interesting about condensed matter physics?

6. Sunil Mukhi, his father, and a budding passion for rock and roll.

7. Finally, a wicked cartoon from XKCD.