Sorry, Pluto - The Umpire Is Always Right

At first, solar system astronomy and international cricket would appear to have little in common, apart from both being in the news this week. But there is a link between the issues of Pluto's status as a planet and the ball-tampering saga from the England-Pakistan test match. In both cases, there is an umpire in the middle of the situation whose job it is to make decisions about what's acceptable and what's not. And some people are not happy with the umpire.

In the case of Pluto, the umpire is the International Astronomical Union. Faced with various views about what constitutes a planet, the IAU has produced a definition that leaves Pluto out in the cold - a planet is more or less spherical, orbits the sun and clears other objects from its orbit. That last bit was the kicker - Pluto apparently doesn't clear other objects from its orbit; specifically, it's orbit passes inside Neptune's, and therefore it's behaving outside the new "rules".

(Update: it's been pointed out that Neptune obviously doesn't clear its orbit either, so why is it still a planet? Conversely, the two are in a resonance pattern that means they will never come near one another, and their orbits do not actually intersect. So the IAU's rules either don't apply or they should apply to both Neptune and Pluto. It's easy to see why many astronomers are disputing the new definitions.)

Some astronomers have expressed their disappointment with the verdict. They'll made it clear that they will continue to debate it. Others have been philosophical about the matter. NASA's position is nicely diplomatic: "NASA will, of course, use the new guidelines established by the International Astronomical Union," said Dr. Paul Hertz, Chief Scientist for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters. "We will continue pursuing exploration of the most scientifically interesting objects in the solar system, regardless of how they are categorized."

Pluto, at least, has handled the news gracefully and continues to orbit unperturbed.

In the test match, on the other hand, there are two umpires out in the middle, and for over 100 years, those two men out in the middle have been the ones with the final say in regards to anything and everything that happens on the field during the game.

In the England-Pakistan test match, the umpires saw something they thought looked like ball-tampering. They inspected the ball. They spoke to the Pakistan captian Inzamam-ul-Haq, and concluded that the ball HAD been tampered with, and penalised the Pakistani team. Inzamam then refused to lead his team back onto the field after the tea break. After half an hour and two requests by the umpires for the Pakistanis to resume the field, the bails were removed and Pakistan were deemed to have forfeited the game.

Since then, we have heard an extraodinary amount of discussion on the part of several people about whether the umpires acted properly. Australian umpire Darrell Hair has been singled out by several figures in Pakistani cricket, notably PCB chairman Shaharyar Khan, former England captain Mike Atherton, and former Pakistani players Imran Khan, Javed Miandad and Sarfraz Nawaz. There has been a general implication from these figures that Hair has a bias against Asian players. These same people insist that there is no evidence of the ball being tampered with, and that Hair was wrong to end the match. The fact that Hair has in the days after this controversy erupted offered to stand down if the ICC was willing to compensate him for lost earnings has only complicated the picture.

let's consider the possibilities:

1. That Hair is biased against Asian players, and fabricated the accusation of ball-tampering. (But if this is the case, how did he convince fellow umpire Billy Doctrove to agree to it?) His offer to stand down is because he knows he was in the wrong.

2. That Hair is biased against Asian players, and wrongly concluded that Inzamam was tampering with the ball. His offer to stand down is because he knows he was in the wrong.

3. That Hair is not biased, but mistakenly thought that Inzamam was tampering with the ball. His offer to stand down was the result of the stress and pressure brought about by the implications of bias made by various commentators.

4. That Hair is not biased, and Inzamam was tampering with the ball. Hair's offer to stand down was the result of the stress and pressure.

5. That Hair is biased, but Inzamam was tampering with the ball. Hair's offer to stand down - probably still the result of the stress and pressure, but maybe a bit of the other as well.

Regardless of any of this, there's one thing that is (or ought to be) abundantly clear - Inzamam was absolutely wrong to not bring his team back onto the field. The umpires allowed them more time than they needed to get back out and resume play, and in failing to resume the field, the Pakistanis steered the game to only one possible result. In any sport, a refusal to continue play by one side can only be interpreted as a forfeit. Regardless of whether Inzamam and the rest of the Pakistan team thought they were being hard done by, they should have finished the game. Former legendary umpire Dickie Bird summed it up correctly: "Everybody should have used a little bit of common sense, tried to finish the Test match then thrashed it out behind closed doors."

Inzamam now faces a charge of bringing the game into disrepute, but therein lies another testing moment, but in this case for the ICC - Inzamam's decision not to return to the field was clearly wrong, but will the ICC deal with this in a way that does not undermine its own authority? If the ICC fails to discipline Inzamam, its credibility will have dealt a serious blow.

The ICC will also need to address some of the spurious rhetoric coming from the Pakistanis. Pakistan tour manager Zaheer Abbas said the news of Hair's offer was a "huge victory" for his side. A huge victory? Hardly. Zaheer went on to say, "This also proves our protest on the fourth day of the final Test was legitimate..." Does Zaheer really believe that not returning to the field and forfeiting the match is a legitimate way to protest a decision by an umpire? If so, he should get completely out of cricket and all other organised sport today.

Maybe Hair is biased. Maybe the Pakistanis have a problem with non-Asian umpires who don't put up with crap from the players.

The simple fact remains - during play, the umpire is always right. You might not agree with the decisions, you might think the umpire is an idiot, or has it in for you - it doesn't matter. You finish the game, then you can lodge your protest, have the debate, whatever.

During play, the umpire is always right - even on Pluto.

Unthink

I was reading Tim Bray's blog the other day titled "Unswitch", and the follow-up to that blog, where a number of people responded to Tim's dissatisfaction with Safari. I mentioned the blog to a colleague as we were installing Firefox on his laptop.

His reaction was quite interesting - he told me that he would be quite happy to only use Safari and didn't really want another browser on his laptop. (The reason we were installing Firefox is because one of our online applications, an important one in our organisation, doesn't play nicely with Safari.) Further to this, he is happy to confine himself to using Apple's Addressbook, Mail.app and iCal, and has changed over from MS Word and Powerpoint to iWorks. He likes this arrangement because it's all so seamless.

Now, I can understand that... up to a point. It's nice when applications work well together, and Apple's applications do play very nicely together. But does that mean that Mac users ought to look disdainfully upon software that doesn't play nicely with Apple's own offerings? And why does my colleague want to restrict himself to a single browser? Having another browser doesn't stop him from using Safari for his general surfing. So what's behind his desire for one browser only?

At this point, I must confess that I am the sort of person who has multiple applications for all sorts of things. I like to try new applications, and if I like them, I keep them, and use them. The browser I mainly use is Camino, but I know that there are some things that Camino doesn't work well with, such as those wysiwyg editors you find included in many web applications. So I have Firefox as well, which handles those things that Camino objects to. I also have Opera, which handles certain java applets that even Firefox finds hard to digest (such as the searchable database at ChessLab). I also have other browsers, for other reasons.

Does it matter that I have several browsers? Not as far as I can tell. It's not like email clients, where having more than one client on an email account could be a recipe for disaster. For me, it's like having a set of tools where I can pick the one that best fits my need at the time. The same goes for text editors. For more heavy-duty crunching, I have TextWrangler, and I use jEdit for working with Lilypond files, but I've taken to using TextForge for the simple stuff.

And yet my colleague is clearly not alone in his "one browser to rule them all" way of thinking. It's not just Safari advocates - I'm aware of Firefox supporters who would happily see all other browsers (and certain operating systems) go the way of the dinosaur. What's behind this way of thinking? Honestly, no one browser is that good, and having more than one browser is no real strain. Is it a desire for simplicity? I could understand that. But I don't think that's it.

My suspicion is that, for some people, it's akin to politics and football teams and racing cars, e.g. "I'm a BrandX man." You know, that "draw a line in the sand" thing that leaves some of us walking away shaking our heads.

For others, like my colleague, I think it's something even worse - a desire to not have to think. "I don't want to have to remember which browser to use where, I just want to click on it and go." "I don't want to have to decide." They want the decision already made, no choices, a straight line to follow. So, one browser, one word processor, and so on.

Why is this worse? Because it leads into something else Tim Bray mentioned in his "Unswitch" article - infofascism.

I used to think that it was the Dark Side who were the main perpetrators of this (and I still gnash my teeth whenever I find myself using a certain Word processor that thinks it knows better how to format my document than I do - and yes, I do have the autoformatting turned off, and the preferences set to suit my way of doing things, and the #$%&! thing still finds ways to annoy and frustrate me.) But I've come to realise that others, including Apple, also try to impose their desires on their users.

For example, my colleague, conceding that Safari was not sufficient because of that web app he must be able to use, asked me to transfer his bookmarks from Safari to Firefox. (One browser, remember - if he has to use Firefox, he'll use it for everything.) I asked him why he couldn't do this himself, and he pointed out that Safari didn't have a menu option to export its bookmarks. What the...?

A quick look at Safari and, sure enough, there's an option to import bookmarks, but no export. I tell him (and myself), there must be a way. A quick search on the web shows how to reveal a hidden menu in Safari called "Debug". It includes the option to export bookmarks. Problem solved.

But why is that menu hidden by default? Why does Apple assume that you will not want to export your bookmarks from Safari? Even if Safari was the best browser on the planet, isn't it presumptuous of Apple to conceal options in the software you may want to use, and to make it that little bit harder to switch to something else?

Don't get me wrong - I'd rather have my Mac than a Windows box any day. OS X has opened up a whole new arena to me via X11. I'm now able to work with stuff that previously would have required setting up a separate machine to run Linux. Which gets at the very point I'm trying to make. Computers allow us to expand and explore our thinking. When software starts channelling us into certain ways of working that lead us to not think, that narrow our options, something's gone wrong.

Or maybe I'm overstating the case. Maybe there's plenty of people out there who prefer to have the software developers do a lot of the thinking for them, making their lives a bit simpler. Maybe.