How not to throw the discus

Four days without rain or overcast skies or freezing winds. Real live sunshine. We’re beginning to feel human again.
While we were watching the movie, Serenity, last night at a friend’s place, our host was recording some of the Olympic Games on his HDD. (It’s something we can do too on our machine, although we haven’t actually done it yet.) Anyway, amongst the various things that we picked up on after the movie was finished, were some of the Decathlon events: the hurdles and the discus throwing.
A couple of odd things stood out. In one of the hurdles heats, one of the contestants leapt up with all the others to race, and then stopped, and did nothing more, while the other hurdlers ran on. No explanation from the commentators – he was just ignored, as though he’d never been in the race to begin with.
And then, as we were watching the discus, we pondered on how easy it would be for someone throwing the thing to miss the opening and send it crashing into the nets. And immediately one did! A gentleman by the name of Roman Šebrle, who was the top man in the Decathlon discus. How frustrating for such a thing to slip from an athlete’s fingers. Our host reckoned it was because Roman had spat on the discus before he threw it!
I didn’t know Šebrle as a name, so I kept hearing it as Roman Chevrolet, which seemed to be how the announcers were saying it. Crikey, what a romantic sounding name – it’s the sort of name you give to a hero in a romantic novel!
We also watched a bit of the Russian/American volleyball game. I think if you added up the amount of time they spend playing and the amount of time they spend hugging each other, the latter would come out on top easily. The game is played in a pretty boring fashion, really, with massive serves that almost invariably cause nothing else to happen in that volley. When they do actually all get to chase the ball around, it's over in seconds.
I watched the table tennis the other night: at least in that game they get on with it, and while some of the rallies may be very short, a good number have some action in them. I don't know who the two guys were, but one was a tall Scandinavian and the other a Chinese from China or Hong Kong. The Scandinavian wiped the floor with the Chinese, which apparently wasn't supposed to happen.
And one other thing we caught up on: the women's Taekwondo. There was a New Zealand girl in this, and she and her opponent spent so much time hopping back and forth from foot to foot and never actually doing more than sizing up the opposition that the referee had to keep stepping in and reminding them they were supposed to be fighting - and giving them penalties for not doing so. Not one of the highlights.

John Pratt

The picture of Solomon's Temple in the previous post comes from an article by John Pratt which I discovered on the Net. But who is John Pratt? He tells us that he loves 'puzzles, science, math, calendars, and enjoy connecting ideas from a wide variety of disciplines.' He has degrees in physics and math from the University of Utah, and a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Arizona. He teaches astronomy at a state college and keep notes for that class on this web site. He also does computer programming, has three software patents, and hosts a few websites such as for the Utah Table Tennis Clubs.

(By the way, my wife and I purchased a table tennis table - and bats and balls, of course - last Christmas, and have it set up in our upstairs lounge. We've played heaps, and get plenty of exercise rescuing the balls from under tables and chairs and sofas. I've actually improved, and can almost give my wife as good as she gives me.)
To continue on about Mr Pratt. Most of his publications have been about chronology, and he says it's unlikely you'll want to read them. (The sort of thing that most people would take as a challenge, I suspect!) He's also written a calendar conversion program to convert from our calendar to others.
On top of this he's invented a pictorial periodic table which he hopes might make chemistry more fun. It can be used as memory pegs for memorizing long lists of other items too. (There you go, another reason to check Mr Pratt out further. Anything to do with memory is always of interest to me.)
He finishes by saying, 'If you like tough brain teasers, I think I have found a great logic puzzle in the Bible which you might want to try.'
I've just had a very quick look at his memory pegs idea, and it's very sensible. As he points out, most memory pegs are random, whereas his approach is more intelligent. Good on him!

Moving right along...!

The need for self storage is huge these days, with half the world’s population seemingly constantly on the move – and I’m definitely not talking about refugees.
What did people do in the past? Probably what our kids still do: leave all their gear with Mum and Dad. It’s just as well we’ve got a large house. At one time we had all the furniture and most of the belongings of my son and daughter-in-law packed into the room I’m typing this in, packed to the gunnels, in fact. And we also had various other items belonging to the other children, stuff they’d left (and in some cases forgotten about) and stuff they intended to pick up…some time.
Here in Dunedin we’ve got several storage facilities. The old Roslyn Mills, where my mother worked for many years, has now been partly turned into a self storage facility. And it’s amazing how much you can pack into a small space. I remember helping shift someone who’d had most of their stuff in storage. We walked down this alleyway of what was rather like a prison without any little windows in the doors to see the prisoners, arrived at what appeared to be a pokey little ‘room’, and found that it contained, quite happily, a houseful of goods. When we have our furniture stacked around the room, we don’t realise how little the space is that it would take up if we packed it all on top of itself. Not so convenient for the average householder of course, but it would leave quite a bit of floor space free. (To put up a large table-tennis table, as we have.)
Moving.bz (haven’t seen one of those suffixes before) is a great site to figure out in advance where you’re going to put all your gear. And what’s more it has some very good advice on the whole process of moving.
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