“I firmly believe that the interests of the team will be best served if I step down and allow another player to gain additional experience of captaincy in the one-day international arena.

“Katherine McLaine recently earned a doctorate from the University of Texas for her thesis entitled ‘Whose Immortal Picture Stories?: Amar Chitra Katha and the Construction of Indian Identities’. Ironically, that made her the first person anywhere in the world to get a doctorate on Indian comics.

“Like any late bloomer, I was eager to make up for lost time.

“I have a PhD, and I have an uncomfortable feeling everytime I read articles like this.. The feeling isn’t because I am not aware of these tricks and pitfalls. It’s because I don’t truly know them, to the point where they’re drilled into me, second nature. I don’t truly know them because I was never formally taught them. They were just things I picked up in lay reading. High schools should have a class to cover this particular skillset.. But we don’t have such a class. Even though we have known about these skills for decades. The process by which the implications of scientific results percolate through the education system is basically broken.

“Randomness is different from homogeneity.

“When a school district or state contracts to have its students take a standardized test, they also purchase rights to the scores of a “comparison group,” and test vendors are competing in part on just how low a comparison group they can offer.

“In my life as a scientist, the thing I worry about the most is, What are the right controls? You send a paper off for publication, and you’re stricken with doubt: Did I do it? Did I use the right controls?

“Enter the Time Machine browser in search of your long-lost files and you see exactly how your Mac looked on the dates you’re browsing.

“There’s a man named Andrew Wagner who lives in the same condo where I’m staying at Sundance. Three times I have encountered him there, and heard him pitch his movie, “The Talent Given Us.” The pitch is: The movie is a fiction film in which his parents, sisters and friends play his parents, sisters and friends. It’s not really a documentary about his family, but on the other hand it is inescapably about their personalities and his feelings about them.

I [eventually] went to see it, in one of those press screening rooms in the Yarrow Inn with the folding chairs on the risers. The screening began ominously with the Sundance host advising us, “If you want to exit, go out at the back of the theater and do not use the side door, which opens onto a locked courtyard.” As the lights went down and the movie began, I had fantasies of doomed critics, unwisely fleeing bad movies through the wrong door and freezing to death in the locked courtyard.

And then — well, then I saw a wonderful movie, one of the most original, daring, intriguing and seemingly honest films of the year. I say “seemingly” because I have no idea how much of the story is true. One thing is for sure: Wagner’s parents, sisters and friends are good sports.

“The Galápagos Islands derive their name from galápago (saddle), after the shells of the aptly-named saddlebacked Galápagos tortoises indigenous to them.