Babylon Bee: some greatest hits

Best Babylon Bee satires in recent weeks..

If you have ever had a political opinion, been to church or been married, you'll like their stuff.

Wild Wild West Dot Com - You've neighbors you didn't ask for

Thousands of people who care nothing for me are now my neighbors.   They vote me up and down at will when I appear in the digital swamp. They give me a jingle from the call centre and email me from Kenya.   Seems like the whole world is ready to put in their two cents for free.    It’s the Wild Wild West.com

It's complicated

Back in the day in village and tribe, we met our neighbors every week and were probably kin.  We took great interest in their sexual unions, their work and kids, status, belief and doings.  Without written law, we apparently shaped life with story-telling, shaming, kinship rules and brute force.    True, we now have nations and clubs and corporations  complete with  recorded  votes,  constitutions, patent law, health officers and enforcement officers.

But we’re simultaneously back in the village, an increasingly global culture, thanks to the speed of light.   The word "neighbor" is built around the word "nigh" or "near" and everyone with a cell phone is now near you.  Though we be thousands of miles apart, we can connect in less than a second and pay less than a penny for the touch.  So we're neighbors now. “Connect”  means “reach out to” and “like”.   It also means “target”.  (Think “deplatforming” and “doxing”).

Our institutions haven’t caught up. They are somewhat hierarchical.  The internet neighborhood is a looser network that admits initiatives from a lot of nodes.  The second is becoming more important than the first.  Managing what happens in your information neighborhood is getting to be as powerful and important for safety, wealth and health as voting for your MP and Senator.  Somehow managing the information neighborhood and managing the geographic neighborhood must co-exist.  The impetus for change is arriving at the speed of light.  Institutions will be playing catch up.

Story-telling, shaming, rules of association and force have regained great power.  How do we tame and civilize them?

Pill reminder, better than postit notes

Make this pill reminder at home for free and brag a little.
I drew seven circles in a clump,using the pill bottle base
and labelled them Monday to Sunday.
When I take a pill, I put the pill bottle down on tomorrow's date.
That's all. 
If the pill bottle is sitting on today,
I haven't taken it yet.
 I was having a hard time remembering at 11 pm
if I had taken the pill at 8pm or was it the day before?

This won't work for everyone but is great for a single prescription.  Someone could print a bunch of these on plastic and sell them by the dozen.

Google lies to you every day

Ground-breaking stories on the US food chain in a time of Coronaviryus have been posted on Conservative Tree House.   Google makes sure you and I don't hear from them.  They don't fake the story, they hide conservative sourced information.   Have a look for yourself:



The search term is
"conservative tree house food chain"
in GOOGLE and DUCK DUCK GO..
Google acknowledges the site exists (but not the topic) in fifth position.  Duck recognizes the site and the topic for all five top spots.

Who knows what you watch on the internet? Touché from Dilbert

Chernobyl Came Back As Bat Virus: History Doesn't Repeat But It Rhymes.

"To report that 15,000-30,000 people have died, when the actual number is 56, represents a big error.     (snip)      The greatest damage to the people of Chernobyl was caused by bad information. These people weren’t blighted by radiation so much as by terrifying but false information."   [Michael Crichton  Fear, Complexity, & Environmental Management]

US Coronavirus deaths were modelled at 1.7 million, then at 270,000 or so, then at 100,000 and now less again.  The original high number has sort of faded from the news.  The plan to flatten the curve has sort of faded too, now that emergency rooms are underutilized, but the lockdowns and 'alarums' persist.   The story editing has all happened in the last ten weeks.

Apparently against every Coronavirus death it makes sense to write off hundreds of millions of dollars, disregard individual rights and call for extreme measures.  Last year, 34,000 people in the US died from Influenza A and B but a few million dollars at most was spent that year against those deaths. People went about their lives with fewer edicts handed down from experts armed with models and armed with political beliefs as well.  Very smart people can be very wrong.  Sometimes knowing how smart you are insulates you from self examination.

Back to Michael Crichton:

Is this really the end of the world? Earthquakes, hurricanes, floods? (and pandemics [ed]) No, we simply live on an active planet. Earthquakes are continuous, a million and a half of them every year, or three every minute. A Richter 5 quake every six hours, a major quake every 3 weeks. A quake as destructive as the one in Pakistan every 8 months. It’s nothing new, it’s right on schedule. At any moment there are 1,500 electrical storms on the planet. A tornado touches down every six hours. We have ninety hurricanes a year, or one every four days.

That reference to Chernobyl?  I also read the book Midnight in Chernobyl, not relying on the Chrichton quote.

Cat humor in a time of Coronavirus

Found at Instapundit's open comment page.

Not Knowing Is Okay

Not knowing stuff is okay.  This applies to the question, "Is there life after death?" and "If you died tonight, do you know where you'd go?"      My experience says "No" but isn't probative.  Newton's mechanics does a nice job explaining how a satellite orbits the world but doesn't explain time, light  and the shape of space around black holes.  So, all my personal proof is against "Life after death" and that's enough for now.  Maybe someday an Einstein of the Afterlife will explain it.

Richard Feynman speaks for me:

“I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here. I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.”

The last little bit I don't have an opinion on:  "Without any purpose, which is the way it really is ...."

Be a gentleman and treat her like a lady:

Courtesy gets bad press today.  Holding a door open to let the lady enter first can trigger rebukes. But I recommend it.  The ladies who don't like that can say so but it doesn't make our world a kinder place.

My mother put "scientist, husband, gentleman" on my father's gravestone. Over the years she told me to be a gentleman.  This meant taking my hat off in the presence of a lady, giving her my seat if none are free, holding the door for her and letting her enter first, keeping to the curb side of the walk so her clothes wouldn't be splashed with mud from passing wagons, being a shield if there's trouble, not making her shake my hand, keeping a leash on my tongue even if scolded, reaching first to pay, and volunteering to do out-in-front dangerous and heavy stuff.  A lot of it stuck.

Why not?  A little structure makes relationships easier to launch and sands down some of the rough spots which are plentiful in all of us.

I recently lost my wife of twelve years.  We had nine years of honeymoon and three of marriage.  By that, I mean, we occasionally walked without holding hands and I didn't always open the car door for her.  So, nine years honeymoon, three years of a good marriage.

Would you believe, there's a web site to generate your own "change my mind" meme.

Don't believe news about the end of the world. It's complicated.

Don't be an information victim. Embrace diversity instead of shutting it down with rules.   This article on complex systems upends the fear -mongering news which is always nattering about the end of the world and need for drastic measures and new values.   http://www.blc.arizona.edu/courses/schaffer/182h/Climate/Fear,%20Complexity,%20&%20Environmental%20Management%20in%20the%2021st%20Century.htm

"Explains everything"

Read about Yellowstone Park management and weep.

Haemoglobin molecle with detail suppressed

Check out some of those flow charts explaining how the world works and then take a look at the picture of a haemoglobin molecule, thousands of times more complex than the explanation deemed sufficient for the whole world.

Y2K?  Chernobyl?  Coronavirus?  Population Bomb?  The world will freeze?
What actually happened compared to the panic headlines and books?   Oops, I included Coronavirus before the consensus moved on.

Colour shows electrical variation in a working heart
at one moment of the cycle.  Try to put that on paper.

A Hierarchy of Heterarchies Saving Us From Excesses of Coronaviralism And Acronymic Despots

Astonishingly, President Trump has promoted federalism over a unitary executive for the economy to recover. His guidelines have stirred very little acrimony because they sound responsible.  They leave all implementation to the invididual states but define a metric, just like "weights and measures" is a core job of central government.  ( Article 1 Section 8, Congress shall have power "To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures". )

  Christopher DeMuth of the Hudson Institute writes:

Throughout history, national emergencies have led to a more powerful and centralized federal government and to the transfer of federal power from Congress to the executive branch. This time, the federal response rests largely on state and local government and private enterprise, with a wave of deregulation clearing the way. The Trump administration has seized no new powers, and Congress has stayed energetically in the game. .... When asked why he has not issued orders for nationwide home and business lockdowns, he has emphasized that the intensity of the epidemic varies widely and is best met by calibrated state and local judgments—and added pointedly that such steps would conflict with the Constitution.

This is consistent with Presdent Trump's approach to international deals, calling for bilateral and multilateral agreements instead of relying on a centralizing formula with WTO, UN, WHO, International Court and so on.

Look up "Heterarchy".    He opts for heterarchy over hierarchy.  A little more accurate is a slightly disordered hierarchy of heterarchies, to describe the whole field of world trade and the whole of US federalism.  A heterarchy has redundancy with some nodes having more than one way of influencing more distant nodes.  A hierarchy allows top-down control.

Some light peeking through the fog of coronavirus war

Check out the NY Post article whose title says it all:
"Coronavirus going to hit its peak and start falling sooner than you think".
https://nypost.com/2020/03/08/coronavirus-going-to-hit-its-peak-and-start-falling-sooner-than-you-think/

There are parallels between tulip bulb mania and the quarantine orders ramping up like atomic bombs.competing to go off first.  And yet some places in China and Iran had corpses lying in the street waiting to be picked up.  God grant us a little time (months) to sort out the data and work up prophylaxis and vaccine.

We are emerging from a fog of deliberate misinformation and a fog of general data disarray.  The scariest factor apart from the danger to the health-compromised elderly is our own reaction.   Our willingness to believe the worst, to believe that that which we greatly feared has come upon us.  Our institutional impulse to out-virtue the competition by being more resolutely cautious than it.  Our atavistic inclination to fear strangers and prefer our tribe and family above all others.

Goodbye Never Trumper. Hello Never Bernies.

This prediction is like shooting ducks in a barrel.  Lots of Democrats are going to vote Trump this time round.    "I'm doing okay personally and will survive four more years of orange-man-bad until the (D) party gets its shit together..

Two good cups of coffee from one Keurig K cup (Update)

When you know the first four ounces of coffee are strongest, the rest is easy.  Run 4 ounces into my cup.  Then 8 ounces into my wife's cup.  Then 4 more ounces into my cup.   Strong enough for great coffee taste, a little milder than one original cup.  Costco sells their brand of coffee for about 40 cents/K cup.  This split takes you to 20 cents/cup, competitive with brew-from-scratch.

Update:  My wife suggests a tweak:  Drip all 16 ounces of coffee at once into something hot.  Then pour two 8 ounce cups to get a perfectly matched pair of drinks.    BTW, a hot cup for a hot drink keeps it hot far longer.  I like to pour really hot water from the tap or kettle into the cups, dumping it back out when I'm ready to make the coffee.

Did Google lie or leave a poison pill when support for Windows 7 ended January 14th?

I took a screen shot of Windows7 goodbye message to me on the 14th.
That night, I shut the computer as usual.
On the night of the 15th, as I tried to shut down, Windows took over to make 5 updates.
What was that about?

Did they "misspeak"?
Or did they add a poison pill to force me out of Windows7 in a while?
If I trusted the Windows people, I wouldn't speculate.

Manimals and Feminals

Men and women are compound. WHO we are is an emergent operating system that manages the WHAT we are.   The WHAT is sexually-specialized human mammals that have their own operating system.  The former is like Windows.  The latter is like DOS.  Let's call the latter Manimals and Feminals.  Manimals and Feminals have their own agenda and it's alway on, evaluating each other for sexual fitness and survival.       The Manimals and Feminals are top dog in a cellular society of billions (which is hosting and trading with trillions of viruses and bacteria). Those cells have delegated some of their survival to the M and F.  (The organs can be hexadecimal codes and the cells can be binary bits in this metaphor .)  The M and F have delegated a lot of their survival to the operant personalities.    All are having their say everywhere all the time.   This renders humourous our wondrous society so that compound beings are arranging a coffee rendezvous to plan a Christmas party but evaluating M &F breasts and muscle at the same time, while also oxygenating blood and purging wastes in a largely unconscious manner.  They don't quite fit together but we kind of blink at the spots where operating systems are in conflict.  We do the same every day and night with waking and dreaming, blinking and forgetting as required, so the narrative works out.

Culture, family and government are losing layers of management. Big changes coming.

Cheap speed-of-light communication is doing away with layers of management. The person at the end of the line is almost as informed as the person at the front of the line, and can make decisions accordingly.  Large corporations (which have only existed for a few centuries) have shed layers of management but less obviusly government and culture are doing the same.  In large corporations, there are fewer subsidiary bosses than fifty years ago.  Government with layers of senators, elected representatives, ministries, committees, lobbyists, parties and NGO's are being faced with the same challenge.  The voter on the street can easily be more informed than elected representatives were a hundred years ago.  The same challenge is happening in culture, and is especially so for the narratives that hold society together to share common values about what family is for, about children, about life and death.

What does it meant to lose a layer of management in culture?  For one thing, kids are educated in a monoculture with a few adults and hundreds of data -bleeding peers.  For another thing, kids from a one child parent family who are in turn descended from a child of a one parent family.......have no siblings, no brothers and sisters.  They also have no aunts and no uncles and no cousins.  The nuclear family has parents and grandparents and everybody elese is society.   This in turn means that government and popular culture are being recruited to structure what faith and kinship used to look after.   Neither is properly fit for such a role and both will change profoundly and rapidly over the next few tens of years.

Diet shortcut - Measure one thing only: The Pareto Principle

Rewards of weighing less are good looks, better health, knees that stop hurting, and more.  But, having to measure all those calories is off-putting.  Eliminating all  my favorite food from the menu is unappealing.

Plan B will work for many of us.  It's the famous Pareto principle:  You get about 80% of the benefits from 20% of the effort in ust about everything you ever try.  This works for diet.

Say you gain 10 lbs a year and start to look like a blimp and have lower energy.
The math is simple:  One pound of weight gain is just about exactly 3500 calories eaten and stored.
Ten pounds a year translates to eating 100 calories a day too much. 
(The math:  3500 calories x 10 lbs in a year divided by 365 days in a year = 95.9)
CUTTING ONE HUNDRED CALORIES A DAY FROM MY DIET WILL STOP THE BLOAT AND CHANGE MY WEIGHT BY 10 POUNDS A YEAR.
Nothing else has to be counted.  No special foods have to be eaten.

Where is the low hanging fruit to pluck?
It will be one high-calorie treatsie per day.  Maybe two.
Here are a couple examples:

I'd have a few cups of coffee every day with whipping cream and sugar.  My fix was to just have the one cup a day with the works and the rest black, or even just with milk and half the sugar.  The black coffee is zero by itself.  The enriched cup was over 80 calories per shot.

Making supper, I got in the habit of taking a tiny sip of Drambuie every so often.  Drinking alcohol is like drinking fat.  It's high energy.  I weighed the bottle before and after dinner prep and discovered

about 120 calories were sneaking into my diet in those repeated sips.  My fix was to cut the Drambuie and if I want a ddrink, I'll sip a couple ounces of red wine while preparing supper.  The wine has almost one fifth the calorie energy of the Drambuie.

Bacon with liquid fat

Another huge fix is choosing when to use butter or bacon fat in preparing a meal.  Drained bacon has less than half the fat of a couple uncooked slices.  The left over bacon fat usually goes into frying the eggs or the hash browns.  If you decide to fry the egg on a no-stick pan or with a tiny dab of butter, you are ahead about 100 calories each time.   The same goes with frying mushrooms.  I always loved butter-fried mushrooms but can hardly tell the difference from mushrooms fried in a good no stick pan with liberal salting on top.  And the mushrooms have more shape and character.

Bacon that is drained

One or two low hanging fruit fixes, made a habit, can change your weight 10 lbs per year.  No other action or counting needed.  Thank you Pareto.

https://metanoodle.blogspot.com/2019/08/diet-shortcut-measure-one-thing-only.html

https://metanoodle.blogspot.com/2019/08/calorie-cheat-sheet-for-your-diet.html

https://metanoodle.blogspot.com/2019/08/why-does-my-weight-go-up-and-down-when.html

https://metanoodle.blogspot.com/2016/01/losing-weight-successfully-you-manage.html

Calorie cheat sheet for your diet.

You manage what you measure.  This means you have to do some weighing or calorie counting to get a handle on your diet.  You'll never get it perfect  because food, delicious food, is usually mixed up stuff and not a perfect match to what you read in the diet book.

Five comments: 
-I put everything "per gram" so you don't have to mix up "servings"  "1/2 cups" and "per 100 grams" measurements.   
-Put your pot or plate right on the scale and and you can zero out after each thing.   After measuring for one new recipe, put the  cals/gram onto your cheat sheet.  Close is usually good enough.
-If you are like me, you always find a way to cheat.  Like not counting the sips of drambuie or thinking your coffee with a nice dollop of cream and sugar  (100 cals?) is the same as your coffee with milk and a tad of sugar (50 cals?).   In the coffee example, "the extra" in four cups of coffee is more than 10% of your daily calories.     500 excess calories per day or 3500 per week means you will gain a pound a week.
-What you weigh on the scale goes up and down for lots of reasons besides calories.
-Your actual weight goes up and down for non-calorie reasons.

A diet app or a calorie-counter book is one solution.  It gives you a lot of stuff to count and to look up in the search box or the index and takes quiet a while.  It works.
If you do a lot of counting for a month, you get a handle on what a good-for-your-diet meal looks like.  This means you estimate stuff in your head and you can cleverly keep your breakfast and your lunch so they tend to repeat and are easy to count.  Unfortunately, after a while I get careless at estimating and gain again.   Here's where a cheat sheet comes in handy to keep me honest without making too much busy work.

My cheat sheet suggestion is below. ( It's a spread sheet link so you can edit it for yourself   (shift-click)  with some  favourite food and treats.  My most common foods are listed (calories per gram) and I can see them on one page and can usually figure the whole meal from this one page.   Down below is an even simpler wallet-size cheat sheet, listing a few categories of food.  This is helpful when you are eating out.  You can eyeball the calories in a plate of food using it and one simple rule:  A cup is about 250 grams of food. 


And here's a wallet-size version for dining out.  Not very accurate but useful.  (Why grams?  Because grams are grams but ounces can be imperial or US, quite different.)  And remember, a cup is about 250 grams.

Calories per gram
(high to low)
Oils                 8.5
Butter             7.0
Nuts                7.0
Sugar              4.0
Hard liquor     3.5
Red meat        3.0
Hard cheeses  3.0
Bread,pizza    2.5
Jams               2.5
Chicken          2.0
Salmon           1.8
Most seafood  1.1
Beans, spuds   1.0
Red wine        0.7
Berries            0.45
Veggies heavy 0.4
Veggies light   0.2
Mushrooms     0

H8 is also Great.

The definition of "hate" :  "To passionately dislike."
This is human nature, to passionately like and dislike some things, to be tepid and lukewarm about others.  Making it a crime is over-reach.

Hatred is an appropriate emotion when well-targeted.
It seems a third of America passionately dislikes President Donald Trump.
They are h8ers/haters and in my view mistargeted, but natural nonetheless.
Let them conduct themselves lawfully.


And a poetic reference in the post caption:
"Some say the world will end in fire....

Corn as high as an elephant's eye in Chilliwack

From a short camping adventure near Chilliwack BC this July.

Why does my weight go up and down when I am on a diet? Also, weigh in tips.

It's frustrating to get big ups and downs of your pounds day to day and even hour by hour.  About six pounds a day, mostly water, goes in and out.  See picture showing my 90 day weigh-ins.  The trend-line is steadybut the road is bumpy.

We measure pounds to indirectly measure calories.  3500 calories skipped is a pound of fat lost. (Roughly accurate).    But what I eat and drink and pee and breathe out are also pounds, mostly water, and not pounds of flesh.  If my diet is consistent, my daily flesh loss will be consistent.

My goal is to lose one pound a week or 2-1/4 ounces per day (Equivalent to the weight of six cherries every day).  It turns out that the amount of stuff (mostly water) that goes in and out of my body every day is 40 times bigger than that.  No wonder it's hard to get consistent results every day.

Here's a graphic.  Below it is my data from measuring one day.  The numbers are a fair fit.  (I think "metabolism" refers to some of your fat being taken out of reserves and put into the daily mix for activity.)

I weighed everything I could for one day and compared it to an online graphic.  Here's the information: (A millileter of food and drink is pretty close in weight to one gram.)

IN:
Food by weight:  1180 grams
Beverages by weight:  1630 grams.
Total:  2810 grams or  6 pounds and 3 ounces.

OUT
Urine by weight:  1780 grams
The brown stuff:  150 grams.
Total:   1930 grams or  4 lbs 4 ounces.

My beginning weight:  196.6 lbs.
My weight 24 hours later:  196.2 lbs.
The obvious IN and OUT don't balance and yet my weight stayed about the same.
Poo is a much smaller factor than pee and the rest of the loss must be in moisture that my damp breath and sweaty skin gave out.   Besides  that, extra salty dishes will temoprarily bump your weight as water is retained.  (You'll see marks where your socks imprint the skin).  Cut your salt back for a couple days if you want a great weigh-in.

And herewith, a couple weigh-in tips.
-The wise ones tell us to weigh just once a week and they are probably right since there is so much intraday variation.  On the other hand, if you don't like that, weigh as often as you are curious.
-If you use something several times a day like butter or liquor, just weigh it once, at the beginning and the end of the day.  I used to like a tiny sip of Drambuie at regular intervals and it added up to to a lot of calories, even though it was just a teaspoon at a time and "not worth weighing".  For a while I weighed the bottle morning and night.  Then, armed with the new information, cut the Drambuie from my diet.
-Your lowest weight of the day will almost certainly be when you get up in the morning, after having peed and having breathed out a lot of moisture.  This could be two or three pounds every night.
-In case you wonder, your towel picks up about a third of a cup of water (80 grams) from drying your skin.  People with long hair will get a larger number.
-If you like to weigh early and weigh often, take the things you usually wear around the house during the day (in my case this excluded shoes but included a cell phone, belt,  and long pants) and weigh them on a kitchen scale.  In my case, this worked out to 3.0 pounds, less if I wore shorts.  Subtract that figure to get your naked-as-the-day-you-were-born number.
-Your scale isn't perfectly accurate.  It's hard to read a spring operated scale closer than a pound.  An electronic scale may give a couple readings the same but ten minutes later give a different reading, say .4 or .6 pounds up or down.  An e-scale that has been bumped may need to recalibrate.  This means the second reading will be more accurate than the first.  UPDATE:  We changed from sculptured floor tile to smooth tile and the digital scale began to be remarkably consistent. If the floor isn't really flat, you are probably getting some false readings.

Robot subs with A-bombs

How does this sound?  A nuclear sub is fitted with several mini robot subs, each kitted with an A-bomb.  Launch the mini, have it travel a thousand miles to an enemy coastline and then blow itself up on the seabed, undetected.  The result is a killer tidal wave, triggered by a 10 to 100 megaton bomb.

Russia just launched the Belograd submarine.  This is one of its untested capabilities, the Poseidon AUV  (autonomous underwater vehicle).
h/t  Strategy Page.

Five-Pin Bowling Tips for Average Bowlers Plus 'One Weird Tip'.

As a much-improved average bowler, I've some five-pin bowling tips.  There's so little on-line about five pin, probably because it's just big in Canada, that even a greenhorn who learned a few things has a contribution.  Also, I've got an excuse for you:  The tip from an experienced player may not work for you until you have muscle memories of throwing a ball thousands of times.  (Prove it to yourself by trying to apply your latest throwing skill to throwing with the other hand.)

I was bowling about 110 per game.  Then I started bowling almost every day for exercise and to feel like I fit into a league.  With about 25 sets of three games bowled per month for ten months, the average moved up to 170.   (BTW a fast pitched set of three games burns just under 200 calories, making room for more cake at dessert.)

TIP 1:  Practice.
That's pretty obvious but that's what made the difference.  Some people have a naturally good aim but even someone like me can catch up with practice.  (If you join a league and do extra practice bowling that isn't a pre-bowl, you can probably get discounts.  Bowl BC has a card that gives any league player 3 for the price of 2 games.)

Tip 2: Everything you do to deliver the ball that doesn't give the ball direction and motion is style, not bowling.  You can stand at the foul line, move your hand back, then let it fall forward while letting go of the ball and do quite well.  Most of your points come from the last fraction of a second before you release the ball.  Remembering this can help.  Improve the last quarter second of every shot.  Only when you are touching the ball are you aiming it.  ADDED:  Follow through.  This is great advice but doesn't mean a thing after your fingers stop touching the ball.  The rest is ballet.  That last fraction of a second is where you have the most influence.  That last fraction of a second is also where a lot of people give their wrist an unhelpful little flick.  That's also why I like a longer windup.  It gives me a tiny extra moment to adjust the aim, like shooting a long-bore rifle instead of a pistol.

TIP 3:  Use the marks on the lane to aim
People kept telling me this but I didn't believe them.  Instead, I'd aim for the pins.  My score jumped the day I finally used marks.  Aiming for the nearby mark is easier to correct than aiming at the far away pin, since you likely look down briefly while throwing and then have to quickly re-focus to release the ball.

TIP 4:  Watch how others in your league make the approach, and make your own choice.
It seems all the hot shot bowlers have a similar style but that's not true of regular league players with scores in the 100-200 range.  Some run up three steps, some stand at the foul line.  Some fire the ball like a bullet, others let it idle down the lane.  Some have a whisper ball and some let it land with a clunk.  I've even seen good scores consistently coming from shooting the ball from between their legs.  There seems to be an ideal form for top bowlers, but there are so many other things the average bowler can do to improve, don't fret form.

TIP 5:  A faster ball quite often takes out extra pins.
Older skilled  bowlers usually have to take it easy but it's still true that a faster ball adds a few points.  Every few dozen games when I'm trying for the last 2 pin, my hard ball drops in the gutter and jumps back out to take out the pin.  A slightly off-centre knock on the headpin can take out two to five pins depending on the impact energy.  After a fast ball, one flying pin may miss the outside 2 pin but still get it after bouncing off the side wall.  The slow roller  often leaves one or two pins behind, despite a tight aim. Every other game, I have a shot that takes out pins on one side and also the number 2 pin on the far side. Sometimes, I don't even see that other 2 pin fall down.  Apparently a hard hit pin from the first side can hit the string of the other 2 pin.  The string moves just enough to trigger a point.  (Points aren't recorded by the pin-to-floor contact but by the motion of the string over a drum).   Now read Tip 6 for the easiest way to get a faster ball.

TIP 6:  Try a longer back-swing to allow more aiming time.
I see good bowlers with a short swing but for me, it works better to have a longer back swing.   I even let my arm rotate a bit to free the backswing to reach pretty much up to shoulder height.  The reason for this is I find there's a tiny faction of a second before releasing the ball when I can fine-tune the aim.  I don't know about you, but I like a chance to patch my mistakes and that fractional second of awareness that comes from a longer forward motion, gives me that chance.  A longer backswing, gave me a chance to aim twice, once for the big picture and once for finer control.   A side benefit of the longer backswing is that the ball picks up forward momentum, without extra effort on your part, while dropping from shoulder height.  That ball, being a little faster,  may take out more pins.  ADDED: It takes little energy to swing the ball further behind you but it picks up quite a bit extra speed dropping forward without you using muscle.   In every game, there's a couple frames where a soft ball swung forward with a little more momentum would have taken out one or two more pins.

TIP 7  Lose the Curve Ball
Apparently a curve ball is the key to top scoring in ten pin bowling.  From what I've seen, that's not true for five pin.  It's untrue, even though I know some strong bowlers who throw a curve and do very well.  A strike with a curve ball is the result of correctly calculating two motions instead of one motion.  Why make it so complicated?  Incidentally, a fast ball with a spin doesn't have enough time to curve much and goes pretty straight.  A slow ball with spin will change direction in the first half of the alley and then settle down to go straight.

Tip 8:  Keep a calm place in your mind
I know this is important but haven't mastered it.  Having a quiet picture of the pins down there, a picture that doesn't get jostled as you move forward and move the ball into the backswing, seems to help.  Treating the backswing as an incidental while I focus on the pleasure of releasing a tight well-tracked ball, seems to help.   Holding the picture just of those lovely black marks on the alley in mind and treating all other physical activity up to the release as background chatter, seems to help.  The common feature is "a calm place in your mind".  Someone did MRI scans of pro and amateur golfers making a shot.   The amateur brain lit up everywhere with concentration.  The pro just lit up in a few spots.

Tip 9:  Animal spirits
Animal spirits, energy, a feeling of health and eagerness seems to help a lot.  How I handle the rest of my life and my weight and exercise and relationships,  helps me bowl.  A run of dispiriting shots tends to make the next shot poorer.

Tip 10:  Luck
I've asked some bowlers how much of their score is luck.  One says 20%.  A second thinks more.  When I look at a spreadsheet I kept for six months, I see games ranging from 118 to 264.  Roll with the punches and enjoy the occasional great game. For peace of mind, I look for tight shots.  If all the balls are close to where I meant, I'm pretty happy even if the score is disappointing.     When you get two or three head pins, you may feel bad, but I feel good.  The points are low but the skill is high.   By the way, you'll probably be a little luckier on your second game!  I kept track of hundreds of 3-game sets for a while and the middle game averaged about 5 points higher.  It seemed like the first game was partly warmup and by the third game I was tiring.

Tip 11: Change targets as you get better.
When I started, my goal was to keep the balls out of the gutter.  That was it!  A bowling coach told me that after you start getting the head pin more often, practice aiming for the 3 pins or aiming for the 2 pins, even before the head pin!  Learn the "crooked" shots the same way you were learning "straight down the middle".

Tip 12:  Grip    You hear people saying "It slipped".  It's often true.  This is a big deal because it's the last fraction of a second that decides how the ball aims.  The balls are heavy and large for a hand to grip but if you look closely, you'll see they are not all the same size.  If you give your hand a wipe with a damp cloth or rub on some anti-slip paste that the alley probably sells, you'll improve the grip.  If you have a choice, pick balls with a polished look.  The natural moisture in your skin will grip them better. 

Tip 13:  Don't feel bad ignoring advice from pro bowlers.  They are probably right but there's no place in your brain to file the information.  You have to lay down tracks with lots of throws and approaches to make your own map.  Then their advice begins to make sense.

Tip 14: Have some fun and make friends.
The same coach reminded me of this.  It really doesn't matter.  You're getting exercise (100 to 200 calories burnt in a set of three games depending on your energy).  You're making friends.

Tip 15: For seniors with a slow ball:   A lot of older bowlers make do with a very slow delivery because they have lost some of their youthful strength.   Swing the ball up behind you a little further, and then it will fall forward with more force when you release it.  Gravity does the job for you.   This is the same action as Tip 6 but for a different reason.   I think you'll take out several more pins every game.

Tip 16: "One Weird Tip" as they say.
I've been finding I do best when I don't look at the pins or even the mark on the lane half way down.  After confirming the pins are in place,  I let my face drop and my eyes focus on the centre-line board of the alley at my feet while raising the ball behind me. As I bring the ball down and forward, I move my gaze smoothly forward along that one floor board so that I'm looking at both the floorboard and the tips of my fingers as they release the ball.  Why does this help me?  Maybe because it avoids sudden changes of eye focus and ties the AIM to the MOMENT OF RELEASE.

Footnotes:  Some other little things:  Don't wear a tight shirt sleeve that can't move freely.  Empty your pocket on the side you shoot from so you don't bump your wallet while delivering the ball.   Remember to show courtesies to the bowler to your right.  Remember there are some lighter balls available, if you ask.  If you really need it, there is a ball made with a thumb hole.  (If your wrist is weak, that's helpful, but the flat spot at the finger hole will often cause your ball to wander left or right).  Let your bowling neighbours give you tips.  (They may not be right or you may not be ready to listen to them, but you'll probably learn something)

Tip 17, The Confession:

There's so much I don't know.  Some of the best bowlers slide and have pads on their shoes and slippery powders to add.  Some of the best bowlers polish their balls regularly during play. A lot of the good bowlers pay attention to how well dressed (oiled) the lanes are and observe no-spin balls that none-the-less pull left or right on certain lanes, depending on how recently the lane was dressed.  They will also switch between balls of different hardness to change how well the ball grips the lane.

The future, ten pin version has a machine that shows perfect strikes every time:  It is unbeatable! 👌🤣

 
  

Last updated:  July 10 2022

Goodbye LIttle Brother, Hello Big Brother

One-baby-families summon big government.  Demography rules and it means "goodbye, little brother, hello Big Brother".  The math is easy.  You can explain it to a kid in Grade Three.  After two generations of one-kid-only, this is what you get:  No brother and no sisters.  No cousins.  No aunts and no uncles.   Say goodbye to a support system  and shared values outside the nuclear family of three. Going to church as a family for Thanksgiving, and singing Christmas carols with people from your neighbourhood, saying the Lord's prayer and singing "God Save The Queen" before class, cheering for the same hockey teams, watching Bonanza and Ed Sullivan Sunday nights and talking about it Monday morning: It's all extinct or trending there.

We need family and community.
Today's alternative has to be collective. 
The top candidate is The Deep State. 
A close second and gaining is the shame-chamber of Social Media.

The generation I'm looking at is the one coming right after the precious snowflakes now in the news for their petty rage.  These young adults will have no kinfolk, just parents and step-parents, and tons of grandparents.  Demography is merciless.  These folk will ask for more government and get it.  They will join digital tribes and mobs in exact measure as the family shrinks.  We need family and community.  This is today's price.

Goodbye little sister, little brother.
Hello Big Bro.

I prefer popular government to gentry rule

Those baying against populism must prefer unpopular government.     You've heard "Trumps rise proves how dangerous populism is for democracy" (NBC)  Enough of that!  I'm thinking back to Barack H. Obama's fund-raising trips to LA.  The secret service shut down entire streets for his cavalcade to by-invitation-only celebrity luncheons in gentry homes.  I compare that to crowds of ten and twenty thousand streaming out to hear Donald J. Trump in person.  Tickets free.  No roads closed. You don't have to show your wallet to get in.  In other words, a populist appeal and one unprecedented in my lifetime. .  

At the end of the day, and by that I mean by tomorrow night, we'll know if popular is coming out ahead.  Trump has been flying out for one and even two GOTV talks with hearty endorsements every day.    Congress folks will be glad of the ride on Mr. Trump's coattails.

Trump's Rise Proves How Dangerous Populism Is for Democracy

Trump's Rise Proves How Dangerous Populism Is for Democracy

Village idiots are back

Thanks to social media, the exercise of power has reverted to our neighbours, our digital neighbours. Doxing, shaming, hounding and generally keeping everybody in line is the new norm. We are giving up the freedom of the city and reverting to our old ways, pre-industrial village ways. The exercise of power is the character of government. Although parliament and congress retain powers of taxation and death over citizens, the social media village has its own laws that have garnered greater and more immediate reach. We’re at the beginning of this digital atavism. Until protocols are built to guard freedom of choice on the privately run webs, we will be pushed a little further into the night, away from civility (”Civitas”, Latin word for “city”) and towards paganism with iphones. ( “Pagus”, Latin word for “countryside”)

Clown car media parked beside Melania Trump

What's happening in Turkey as June 24 election nears

After reading Strategy Page's article on Turkey, I feel usefully informed.  Decide for yourself if this helps:
Turkey Goes To War With Itsself.

Full text of the Joint statement by US and North Korea, signed by Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un on June 12 2018

Source:  https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2018/06/12/president-donald-trump-and-chairman-kim-jong-un-signing-ceremony-video-and-pictures/#more-150483

English language competency by culture and race: California education stats 2017

Here's the source for the California department of education charts: https://public.tableau.com/profile/theresa.chen#!/vizhome/PercentofStudentsMeetingorExceedingStandardsonSmarterBalancedAssessment2017/Sheet1
hat tip to Ace of Spades.

The legend:  "Grey" is in the middle, average for all students.

Asian

Native American

Latino

Filipino

Mixed race

Black

                                                 

White

Playful means Clever. Dog likes to go sleighing up hill and down hill on his own

You know you'll want to show this video clip to someone else.

In the same spirit and the same season, this Russian crow gets the same results with a jar lid.
Carry it back up the roof and do it again.



Which brings me to a book recommendation:  Octopus
These mischievous, big-eyed, distributed-brain creatures are from the mollusc family with snails and clams and what not.  They separated 600 million years ago from the stream that led to crabs, spiders and bugs  and from the stream that led to fish, canaries (via dinosaurs), puppy dogs and humans.

Along with squid and cuttlefish, they are the only members of their family tree with what we call brains, some 200 million neurons distributed down the arms and to the steadfast eyes.  Meet your first aliens.

Six seconds to live: General Kelly

The NYT is shocked to learn that General Kelly is a patriot.  You can figure from this they knew the Obama people were not.
Quoted at the link:

"For all of the talk of Mr. Kelly as a moderating force and the so-called grown-up in the room, it turns out that he harbors strong feelings on patriotism, national security, and immigration that mirror the hard-line views of his outspoken boss," Baker warns.

I was moved moved to read this selection from a patriotic speech by General Kelly:

"It took exactly six seconds from when the truck entered the alley until it detonated. You can watch the last six seconds of their young lives.I suppose it took about a second for the two Marines to separately come to the same conclusion about what was going on once the truck came into their view at the far end of the alley. No time to talk it over, or call the sergeant to ask what they should do. Only enough time to take half an instant and think about what the sergeant told them to do only a few minutes before: “Let no unauthorized personnel or vehicles pass.” It took maybe another two seconds for them to present their weapons, take aim, and open up. 

By this time, the truck was halfway through the barriers and gaining speed. Here the recording shows a number of Iraqi police, some of whom had fired their AKs, now scattering like the normal and rational men they were, some running right past the Marines, who had three seconds left to live.For about two seconds more, the recording shows the Marines firing their weapons nonstop. The truck’s windshield explodes into shards of glass as their rounds take it apart and tear into the body of the son of a bitch trying to get past them to kill their brothers – American and Iraqi – bedded down in the barracks, totally unaware that their lives at that moment depended entirely on two Marines standing their ground.Yale and Haerter never hesitated. By all reports and by the recording, they never stepped back. They never even shifted their weight. With their feet spread shoulder-width apart, they leaned into the danger, firing as fast as they could. They had only one second left to live, and I think they knew.The truck explodes. The camera goes blank. Two young men go to their God. Six seconds. Not enough time to think about their families, their country, their flag, or about their lives or their deaths, but more than enough time for two very brave young men to do their duty. Those are the kind of people who are on watch all over the world tonight for you, and as amazing as this selfless act of sacrifice may seem, it is the norm. In all the years I have been both enlisted and an officer of Marines, I have praised them and have chewed them out. I have promoted them and unceremoniously disciplined them. I have hung decorations on them and court-martialed them. I have visited them mangled and broken in military hospitals around the country, in lonely defensive positions across Iraq, and in brigs. I have known thousands of them over nearly 40 years, and I can tell you without hesitation or qualification that I never met one who would have run from his post that morning."

C02 Climate Science Not "Settled" But Settling Fast. A Dozen Tweaked Models Now Show Doubled C02 Response Is Smaller, Or Trivial.

The left side of the chart is Chicken Little territory. The data points added to the right of the shaded trend-lines are thought provoking.  Tweaked models and sober second thoughts are more credible.  This was originally published with data to 2013.  The update dramatically extends the pattern to 2017 although the sources vary.   h/t  smalldeadanimals