James Webb Space Telescope First Flight Mirror Completes Cryogenic Testing

The first mirror segment that will fly on the James Webb Space Telescope, built by Northrop Grumman Corporation, has completed its first series of cryogenic temperature tests in the X-ray and Cryogenic Facility at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. "We’re excited that we can support the James Webb Space Telescope with our world class cryogenic and x-ray telescope test facility," said Helen Cole, project manager for the Webb Telescope activities at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala. "The test performed here are crucial to the success of the program since they’ll ensure the mirrors and components will be able to withstand the extreme cold temperatures of space."The mirror segment is the first of 18 flight mirror segments that will be joined to make a giant, 6.5-meter diameter (21.3 ft.) hexagonal mirror. The segments will be subject to temperatures of -414 degrees Fahrenheit in a 7,600 cubic-foot helium-cooled vacuum chamber at NASA Marshall. Engineers will measure how the mirror changes shape going from room temperature to cryogenic (frigid) temperatures, as the metal expands and contracts. They can model these changes to some extent, but not perfectly. The mirrors will be polished to about 100 nanometers (a human hair is approximately 60,000 to 120,000 nanometers) accuracy at room temperature, based on the expected changes. Then it will be cooled down to cryogenic temperatures and engineers will measure the mirror's surface, creating a "hit map" of unexpected changes. > High resolution imageArtist's rendition of the James Webb Space Telescope in orbit. Credit: NASA "This is what we have done so far with the first flight mirror segment," said Jonathan Gardner, Webb Telescope Deputy Project Scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. "Now, engineers will warm it up and polish out the "hit map" areas to get the mirror to 20 nanometer accuracy - a process which will take months. The mirrors will then be brought back down to cryogenic temperatures to verify the increased accuracy." In addition to this testing, engineers also did some "cryo cycling." That means going up and down in temperature (without polishing in between) to test the repeatability of the changes.Since there are 18 mirror segments, each measuring about 1.5 meters (4.9 ft.) in diameter, they will be tested in batches of six and chilled to cryogenic temperatures four times in a six-week time span. It takes approximately five days to cool a mirror segment to cryogenic temperatures. All flight mirror tests are expected to be completed in June 2011. The Webb telescope is scheduled for launch in 2013. Northrop Grumman is the prime contractor for the Webb telescope, leading a design and development team under contract to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center."It has taken years of intense effort for the Webb Telescope team to begin flight mirror cryotesting and we’re gratified that testing was successful," said Martin Mohan, Webb telescope program manager for Northrop Grumman’s Aerospace Systems sector, Redondo Beach, Calif. "Along the way, we’ve had to invent entire manufacturing and measurement processes because no one has ever built a telescope this large that has to operate at temperatures this extreme."The James Webb Space Telescope is the next-generation premier space observatory, exploring deep space phenomena from distant galaxies to nearby planets and stars. The Webb Telescope will give scientists clues about the formation of the universe and the evolution of our own solar system, from the first light after the Big Bang to the formation of star systems capable of supporting life on planets like Earth.

source: http://www.nasa.gov

About NASA's Education Program

NASA’s journeys into air and space have deepened humankind’s understanding of the universe, advanced technology breakthroughs, enhanced air travel safety and security, and expanded the frontiers of scientific research. These accomplishments share a common genesis: education. As the United States begins the second century of flight, the Nation must maintain its commitment to excellence in science, technology, engineering and mathematics education to ensure that the next generation of Americans can accept the full measure of their roles and responsibilities in shaping the future. NASA will continue the Agency’s tradition of investing in the Nation’s education programs and supporting the country’s educators who play a key role in preparing, inspiring, exciting, encouraging, and nurturing the young minds of today who will be the workforce of tomorrow. In 2006 and beyond, NASA will continue to pursue three major education goals: -- Strengthening NASA and the Nation's future workforce -- Attracting and retaining students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM, disciplines -- Engaging Americans in NASA's mission.

source: http://www.nasa.gov

Explorations of the self and the modern individual, 1790-1930

The individual, the potentially isolated hero, had stood at the centre of romantic fictions since the Middle Ages. The early novel(l)a had placed the story itself at the centre: it was driven by plot, by incident and accident, rather than being the story of a single larger-than-life figure. And yet, the individual had returned with a wave of satirical romances and historical pseudo romances. Individuals such as Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Pamela, and Clarissa reintroduced the old romantic focus on the individual as the centre of what was to become the modern novel.
Ancient, medieval and early modern fictional characters lacked certain features that modern readers expect. Epics and romances created heroes, individuals who would fight against knight after knight, change (as an Assyrian princess) into men’s clothes, survive alone on an island – whilst it would never see its personal experience as an individualizing factor. The early modern novelist had remained a historian as much as the author(ess) of the most personal French contemporary memoir. As soon as it came to relating the facts and experiences, it became a question of proper writing skills.
The modern individual changed. The rift can first be seen in the works of medieval mystics and early modern Protestant autobiographers:[106] moments in which they witnessed a change in their very experience of things, an inner isolation they would only be able to communicate to someone who had experienced the same. The sentimental experience created a new field of – secular, rather than religiously motivated – individualizations which immediately invited followers to join. Werther’s step out of the value systems that surrounded him, his desperate search for the one and only soul to understand him, inspired an instantaneous European fashion. Napoleon told Goethe he had read the volume about a dozen times;[107] others were seen wearing breeches in Werther’s color to signal that they were experiencing the same exceptionalism. The novel proved the ideal medium for the new movements as it was ultimately written from an individual’s point of view with the aim to unfold in the silence of another’s individual mind.
The late 18th-century exploration of personal developments created room for depictions of personal experiences; it gained momentum with the romantic exploration of fictionality as a medium of creative imagination; and it gained a political edge with the 19th-century focus on history and the modern societies. The rift between the individual and his or her social environment had to have roots in personal developments which this individual shared with those around him or her, with his or her class or the entire nation. Any such rift had the power to criticize the collective histories the modern nations were just then producing. The new personal perceptions the protagonists of novels offered were on the other hand interesting as they could easily become part of the collective experience the modern nation had to create.

The novel’s individual perspective allowed for personal reevaluations of the public historical perceptions and it allowed for personal developments that could still lead back into modern societies. The 19th-century Bildungsroman became the arena of such explorations of personal developments that separated the individual from, and then reunited it with, his or her social environment. Outsider perspectives became the field of mid-19th-century explorations. The artist’s life had been an interesting topic before with the artist being by public definition the exceptional individual whose perceptions naturally enabled him to produce different views. Novels from Goethe's Wilhelm Meister (1795) to Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913-1927) and James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) created an entire genre of the Künstlerroman. Jane Austen’s Emma (1815), Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856), Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1873-77), and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-72) brought female protagonists into the role of the outstanding observer. Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist (1839) and Gottfried Keller’s Green Henry (1855) focused on the perspectives of children, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866) added a drop-out student who became a murderer to the spectrum of special observers whose views would promise reinterpretations of modern life.
The exploration of the individual’s perception eventually revolutionized the very modes of writing fiction. The search for one’s personal style stood in the centre of the competition among authors in the 19th century, now that novelists had become publicly celebrated minds. The destabilization of the author-text connection, which 20th century criticism was to propose later on, finally led to experiments with what had been the individual’s voice so far – speaking through the author or portrayed by him. These options were to be widened with new concepts of what texts actually were with the beginning of the 20th century.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org

The novel as national literature, 19th-century developments

By the beginning of the 19th century, prose fiction had moved from a field of questionable entertainment and precarious historicity into the centre of the new literary debate. The traditional task of literary historians, to review the sciences, was referred to professional academic journals. The evaluation of artistic merits and the interpretation of the fictions became the main work of the new literary historians who turned poetry, plays, novels and romances into "literature".[87]
The change in status had been made possible partly by recent generations of authors who had provided such works to be reviewed. The audience was likely to buy what had been discussed and publicly evaluated in order to participate in the ongoing debates. New copyright laws[88] made the new production financially attractive. Early 18th-century authors had been paid for their manuscripts; they basically received a share of the immediate profits expected from a single edition. The new laws allowed long term strategies of literary fame: the publication of small first editions that critics would first have to evaluate before they could expect to find a wider and more permanent circulation. Authors could begin to wait for their breakthroughs with a reasonable chance to make their profits in years to come.
The new public reception created a sphere of up-market works deserving to be read as "literature" whilst it allowed the ongoing fields of fiction to survive and to become the modern mass market of "popular fictions", "trivial literature". The developments resulted temporarily—at the beginning of the 19th century—in a division of three market levels: The old chapbooks survived into the 1820s. The modern trivial market had by that time evolved out of the once prestigious belles lettres. The celebrated great works of literature were on this market the new field that required new marketing platforms and an enormous amount of official and public support. The latter was provided profusely by the new institutions of literary life and national education the continental European nations established in the first half of the 19th century.
What made "literature"—fiction and poetry—such an attractive topic to promote was the impact literary life could win in the modern nations' cultural life.[89] Germany's states embraced the new field of education in the first decades of the 19th century.[90] That nation, which had neither a nationwide religion nor a unifying national political debate, had begun an intensified search for unifying topics a century earlier. The comparatively European decades of the Nine Years War (1689-1697), the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714) and the Great Northern War (1700-1721) had left the intellectual elite disenchanted. At the end of the 1720s scholars from Gottsched to Bodmer and Breitinger had turned German-language poetry into a field that the entirety of German-speaking intellectuals could agree on as a common platform. By the 1750s it had become clear that the new debate was to become the essential activity of new "literary" journals and that it would include the modern novel. The events of the French Revolution finally turned the new object of debates into a serious secular alternative to the entire field of exchange that religions and territorial politics had previously dominated.

The individual German states and France adopted the new subject as part of the national school curriculum during the first decades of the 19th century. Practical reasons spoke for the new field. Whatever one had previously done with religious texts at schools and universities could be done just as well, if not more fascinatingly, with plays, poems and prose fiction. One could interpret these texts, read them to improve one's personality, acquire new ideals and a strengthened sense of morals as a reader of good literature. School education could implement the new text base in a continuation of all the traditional text-oriented classroom and teacher-pupil activities.[91] The idea of a literary Western canon was a novelty and a transfer of the religious canon debates.[92] Entirely new formats of appreciation of "literature" developed: authors were not only discussed in journals and newspapers. They began to give public readings of their latest novels[93] and eventually assumed new roles as public voices. The novelist as an outstanding artist and as an individual could better that the party politician or the religious dignitary dare to assume the role as the national sage, the far sighted judge, the voice of the nation.
New histories of literature were written in order to formulate the fundamental lines of interpretation required by the new canons. They broke with the prior tradition of histories of the sciences and they broke with the traditions of previous histories of poetry. As narrative and interpretative projects they rather resembled Pierre Daniel Huet's 1670 History of Romances. What was different now was the national perspective: histories of literature would discuss the developments of the literary genres for individual nations and languages. The decisive history of German literature that created the model for numerous others, Georg Gottfried Gervinus' Geschichte der poetischen National-Literatur der Deutschen, appeared between 1835 and 1842.[94] The decisive history of English literature was, by contrast, the work of a continental author Hippolyte Taine’s four volume Histoire de la littérature anglaise (1863) arriving in English in 1864. It opened with a look back on the new definition of literature and with a statement of the importance literature, fiction, had gained through the developments:
HISTORY, within a hundred years in Germany, and within sixty years in France, has undergone a transformation owing to a study of literatures. The discovery has been made that a literary work is not a mere play of the imagination, the isolated caprice of an excited brain, but a transcript of contemporary manners and customs and the sign of a particular state of intellect. The conclusion derived from this is that, through literary monuments, we can retrace the way in which men felt and thought many centuries ago. This method has been tried and found successful. We have meditated over these ways of feeling and thinking and have accepted them as facts of prime significance. We have found that they were dependent on most important events, that they explain these, and that these explain them, and that henceforth it was necessary to give them their place in history, and one of the highest.

Great Britain had developed a commercial production of the belles lettres, independent from the Dutch and the Parisian trendsetting markets, at the beginning of the 18th century. It had turned Shakespeare into its author of supposedly eternal fame by the 1760s. A rediscovery of the past had followed, with such doubtful discoveries as the Ossian-fragments. Critics discussed fiction in the media.[96] The English word "literature", however, hardly gained its modern meaning as a compound of poetry and fiction before the 1870s. England had traditionally united state and church under one head. It had for the last two centuries enjoyed an open political exchange. Hence, the continental secularisation, the search for new national topics of debate was uninteresting in England. In the USA, a national canon of literary works was impossible until the 1840s: there simply was not a large enough volume of material. Due to these special situations, the market divide between trivial and great literature remained rather indistinct in the English speaking world. The commercial importance of fiction on the book market,[97] its massive distribution through the new 19th century circulating libraries, the journalistic interest in discussing modern authors of plays and fiction, and the reforms of the educational systems of the second half of the 19th century remained incentives for the English speaking countries to follow the continental European path.

Fiction eventually became "literature" in an arrangement of win-win situations. It suited the publishing houses. It suited the modern nations searching for new secular topics. It suited the advocates of improved morals—the new discussions of literature focused on questions of values and morals[98] The 19th-century developments in Europe and the Americas preluded in all these aspects the 20th-century globalisation of Western literary life. It did, however, not culminate in comparable confrontations between "developed" secularised countries and "underdeveloped" religious regimes and downright dictatorships. The 19th-century European and North American implementation of literary life, and of fiction as its privileged platform, found hardly any resistance in the nations affected. They competed with each other as "Kulturnationen", as exporters of Western civilisation, and they shared the institutions that provided, monitored, evaluated and basically organised the new exchange. The new Literary life was rooted in the intellectual life which the early modern “republic of letters”, the “respublica literaria”, the early modern scientific community, had generated in discussions of its own subject "literature", the sciences, since the 16th century.[99] The 19th-century nations adopted the one public debate that had traditionally styled itself as free, democratic, "republican" throughout the last centuries. The material literary critics would discuss was new: a production of art. The discussion itself promised, however, to stay as open as it had always been. To change the topic from the sciences to plays, novels and poems was designed to generate a wider exchange and one of greater impact. The scientific organisation of the entire exchange promised all groups interested a say in the ensuing literary life.
The adoption of modern national literature as an academic subject became with this organisational background one of the first steps in a larger rearrangement of the sciences as disciplines. From the Middle Ages into the 18th century four sciences had been taught at Europe's universities: theology, law, medicine and philosophy. The new system offered natural sciences, sciences of modern technologies, social sciences and the humanities. The latter became the institutional roof of all the discussions of history and culture—a realm new authors of literature would be aware of from now on.
The developments did not lead to stable definitions of terms like "art", "literature" and "culture". They much rather utilised and institutionalised the controversies these words generated. To this day, scholars and critics continue to debate what literature should be, which works are the most important, what defines the true work of art etc. The controversies of "art", "literature" and "culture" define the nations who adopted the new cultural exchange while they serve within these societies as platforms on which all groups can be expected to voice their topics and demands, both in new works of art and in the critical analysis of these works.
What was specific to the 19th-century debate was, in hindsight, its immense interest in fixing personal responsibilities. "Good works are those that will always leave room for new interpretations", is a common statement reflecting the strong link between literature and its public discussion. 19th-century artists would face a choice: to create works of higher quality, pursuing an eternal truth or merely to become mercenaries of present conflicts, functionaries of the commercial market fed by their works. The alternative of claiming one had to create "art for art's sake"[100] also threatened to turn into a battleground over responsibilities. How does one handle art "responsibly"? What are the "demands" of art? Does the author truly act on behalf of art, or is this a cheap excuse for otherwise offensive and irresponsible behavior? Aestheticists, promoters of "art for arts sake" such as Algernon Charles Swinburne and Oscar Wilde, eventually headed the lists of irresponsible authors produced by 19th-century defenders of public morals.

sorce: http://en.wikipedia.org

The medieval romance and its rivals of shorter works

The European tradition of the novel as the genre of extended prose fiction is rooted in the tradition of medieval “romances”. Even today, most European languages make that clear by using the word roman roughly the way that English uses the word novel. The word novel claims roots in the European novella. Yet, epic length or the focus on a central hero giving the work its name (as in Robinson Crusoe or Oliver Twist) are features derived from the tradition of “romances”. The early modern novel had preferred titles that focused on curious examples of modern life, not on heroes.
The word roman or romance had become a stable generic term by the beginning of the 13th century, as in the Roman de la Rose (c. 1230), famous today in English through Geoffrey Chaucer's late 14th-century translation. The term linked fictions back to the histories that had appeared in the Romance language of 11th and 12th-century southern France. The central subject matter was initially derived from Roman and Greek historians. Works of the Chanson de geste tradition revived the memory of ancient Thebes, Dido and Aeneas, and Alexander the Great. German and Dutch adaptations of the famous histories appeared in the late 12th and early 13th centuries.[12] Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde (1380-87) is a late example of this European fashion.
The subject matter which was to become the central theme of the genre in the 16th and 17th centuries was initially a branch of a broader genre. Arthurian histories became a fashion in the late 12th century thanks to their ability to glorify the northern European feudal system as an independent cultural achievement. The works of Chrétien de Troyes set an example, in that his plot construction subjected the northern European epic traditions to ancient Greek aesthetics. The typical Arthurian romance would focus on a single hero and lead him into a double course of episodes[13] in which he would prove both his prowess as an independent knight and his readiness to function as a perfect courtier under King Arthur. The model invited religious redefinitions with the quest and the adventure as basic plot elements: the quest was a mission the knight would accept as his personal task and problem. Adventures (from Latin advenire “coming towards you”) were tests sent by God to the knight on the journey, whose course he (the knight) would no longer try to control. The plot framework survived into the world of modern Hollywood movies which still unite, separate and reunite lovers in the course of adventures designed to prove their love and value. Variations kept the genre alive: unexpected and peculiar adventures surprised the audience in romances like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1380). Satirical parodies of knight errantry (and contemporary politics) appeared with works such as Heinrich Wittenwiler's Ring (c. 1410).
The shift from verse to prose dates from the early 13th century. The Prose Lancelot or Vulgate Cycle includes passages of that period. The collection indirectly lead to Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur compilation of the early 1470s.
Several factors made prose increasingly attractive: this “low” style was less prone to potentially annoying exaggerations; it linked the popular plots to the field of serious histories traditionally composed in prose (compilations such as Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur claimed to collect a historical sources for the sole purpose of instruction and national edification[14]). Prose had an additional advantage for translators, who could go directly for meaning, where verse had to be translated by people skilled as poets in the target language. And prose survived language changes: developments such as the Great vowel shift changed almost all the European languages during the 14th and 15th centuries. Copyists of prose had an easy job to deal with these shifts while those who copied verses saw that rhymes had broken and syllables got lost in almost every second line.
Prose became the medium of the urban commercial book market in the 15th century. Monasteries sold edifying collections of saints' and virgins' lives composed in prose. The customers were mostly women (the interiors of many of the 14th- and 15th-century paintings of the annunciation show how far books had spread into the urban households that painters usually depicted as the blessed virgin's bourgeois environment.[15]) Prose became in this environment the medium of silent and private reading. It spread with the commercial book market that began to provide such reading materials even before the arrival of the first commercial printed histories in the 1470s.

source:http://en.wikipedia.org

Science v art in clash of cultures

It's first a clash of ethos, of philosophies and even of time, more than a semi-final. Here is truly man against machine, the art of cricket against the science of it, cricket's future and cricket's past. South Africa's progress to this point has been smooth, well-planned, calculated and inevitable, as if their players were born to do this. Pakistan have got here in shambles - losing games, winning some, treating it all as a bit of fun - and the players not so much born to do this are struggling to discover why they are doing it at all.
South Africa lack nowhere and nothing. If Jacques Kallis and Graeme Smith are the efficient drones at the top, there is heart in the middle, with the ever-frail skills of Herschelle Gibbs and the creativity of AB de Villiers. Even Albie Morkel, in whom there are glimpses of Zulu, thankfully smiles more. They've always had pace, but now they even have spinners, who are not batsmen forced to bowl. Sure, they are a little one-dimensional (watching videos of Umar Gul's yorkers?), but they are spinners - South African and successful; how often have we said that in the past?
The whole machinery is intimidating, determined to iron out all kinks, the mission pre-programmed; with seven consecutive wins in this format, they have apparently also taken the inherent unpredictability of this format out of the equation. They are well-trained, well-oiled, and their psychologist talks about 120 contests and of processes over outcomes and how choking is not really an issue anymore. They win even warm-up matches and the dead games because every game counts. They are cricket's future.
Pakistan are the past. They are wholly dysfunctional, but just about getting along, though unsure where they are going. They don't control their extras, they don't run the singles hard and they field as if it were still the 60s. They are least bothered about erasing the flaws because any win will be in spite of them. They did hire a psychologist though, and you can only imagine what those sessions were like and how much they actually talked about sport and cricket. There are permanent mutterings of serious rifts. They may not bat, bowl or field well all the time, but sometimes, they do what can only be described as a 'Pakistan': that is, they bowl, bat or field spectacularly, briefly, to change the outcome of matches. You cannot plan or account for this as an opponent because Pakistan themselves don't plan or account for it.
It can come from any person, any discipline, but on evidence, it is likelier to come from the bowling. The batting needs Shoaib Malik and Misbah-ul-Haq to really get their show going. A piece of fielding brilliance cannot be discounted, but generally both Pakistan and West Indies have happily disproved the dictum that in T20 cricket you have to be Jonty Rhodes to get anywhere. Heroes will likely be found among the Umar Guls, the spinners and maybe even Mohammad Aamer, who is a throwback to the late 80s and early 90s, when Pakistani fast bowlers were born ready to play international cricket.
The pressure on South Africa however, will be greater. They are expected to win this and anyway they will always have the whole 'chokers' tag to deal with until the day they actually lift a big trophy. It doesn't help that they look as good as they did during the 1999 World Cup, though they are easier on the eye. Pakistan, as Younis Khan said before leaving for England, won't much mind a semi-final spot; Kamran Abbasi rightly noted that they may have had an easier ride to the semis than most but no country has had a rougher two years. Clearly they'd love to win it, but they have already achieved more than many thought and a loss wouldn't be the end of the world. But importantly, as the only side to make it to the last four in 2007 and 2009, they have underscored their significance in this brave new, T20 world, a world in which they absolutely cannot be ignored.

source: http://www.cricinfo.com

Afridi on song as Pakistan enter final

The South African juggernaut was brought to a screeching halt by Shahid Afridi who, with a little help from his team-mates, dumped the tournament favourites out of the World Twenty20 and secured Pakistan's place in the final. Afridi put in an all-round performance of tremendous intensity, lifting Pakistan to a defendable total with an aggressive yet methodical half-century, before bowling a spell that left the South Africans struggling at Trent Bridge.
The clinical South African side, unbeaten in the competition, were favourites going in to the semi-final and their bowlers fought admirably to restrict Pakistan to 149 when, at one stage a total of 170 seemed on the cards. With the exception of Jacques Kallis, though, their batsmen failed to give the chase any sort of direction. They were suffocated by Afridi and the offspinner Saeed Ajmal and their inability to score enough runs during the middle overs left them with too much to do against the pinpoint accuracy of Umar Gul's yorkers.
South Africa had reached 40 for 0 in the sixth over when Mohammad Aamer gave Pakistan an opening, holding a skier of Graeme Smith off his own bowling, minutes after the South African captain had been dropped by Gul.
Afridi, high on confidence after his innings, came into the attack in the seventh over but was immediately driven by Herschelle Gibbs to the cover boundary. That was as bad as his evening would get. He bounced back, bowling Herschelle Gibbs with a straight and quick delivery and, an over later, he got AB de Villiers the same way. South Africa were 50 for 3 and struggling.
Kallis and JP Duminy prevented the fall of any more wickets but they were unable to raise the run-rate. Afridi got the ball to turn, bounce and hurry on the batsmen and finished with 2 for 16 while Saeed Ajmal, the offspinner, was also difficult to score off because of his variations.
The situation was perfect for Umar Gul to do what he does best, hit the blockhole. After an indifferent first over from the Radcliffe Road end, he ran in from the pavilion and fired in yorker after yorker. It didn't matter who was batting, those deliveries were impossible to hit. Duminy and Kallis could not get the ball off the square. It was Ajmal who struck the decisive blow when he had Kallis caught on the long-on boundary, realistically ending South Africa's chances. They needed 23 off the last over, a responsibility Younis Khan handed to the 17-year-old Aamer, who had bowled three overs for 15. He gave only 15 more, and sent Trent Bridge into raptures.
Pakistan coach's Intikhab Alam had said on the eve of the game that his team would be looking to set a target of around 150. Pakistan got exactly that after an innings which followed a strangely symmetrical pattern. They dominated the first five overs, scoring 43, while South Africa fought back between overs five and ten to keep Pakistan to 68 for 2. Pakistan once again controlled the game between overs 11 and 15, reaching 120 for 3, but South Africa conceded only 29 off the last five overs.
Pakistan's early dominance was due to Akmal, who was intent on smashing the ball from the start. He cut Dale Steyn twice for four in the first over and lofted him cleanly over long-off in the third. In between, he crashed Wayne Parnell to the midwicket boundary and raced to 23 off 11 balls before top-edging a pull off Steyn to mid-on.
Pakistan had raced to 47 for 2 after six overs, with Afridi pulling Jacques Kallis twice through midwicket but South Africa then cut off the boundary supply. Afridi and Shoaib Malik didn't hit a boundary for 24 balls before Afridi slogged Roelof van der Merwe through midwicket. He cut loose against Johan Botha, making room to loft the offspinner thrice in a row to the cover boundary before unveiling a delectable late-cut to snatch 18 off the over. The 50-partnership had come up off 49 balls but Pakistan had begun to accelerate, with Afridi placing the ball into gaps consistently, plucking twos.
South Africa desperately needed Afridi's wicket and it was duly picked up by JP Duminy, who struck with his first ball. Afridi tried to slog sweep and skied the ball straight to AB de Villiers at midwicket who took a vital catch with ease. South Africa celebrated the wicket with more relief than joy.
Malik had played a more subdued, anchoring role until then, but began to step up, scoring his first boundary - a sweep off van der Merwe - off his 30th ball. He soon added another, hitting Duminy over extra cover, but eventually holed out to long-off. Younis and Abdul Razzaq were the two new batsmen at the crease and Parnell and Steyn bowled with extreme accuracy to deny them loose deliveries at the death.
A target of 150 appeared less than what Pakistan were on course to get when Afridi was at the crease. But Afridi the bowler ensured that it would be enough.
George Binoy is a senior sub-editor at Cricinfo.

source: http://www.cricinfo.com