Some Blog Site

Summer is the time for fresh fruits and vegetables, and one of the items in late August and early September is corn.  We were given several ears of corn by a farming family.  The children and I were in charge of getting the corn ready for cooking, and then my wife would handle the actual cooking part.

So I showed the kids the art of proper shucking.  I showed them the tassel and how to remove all the silks from the ear of corn.  Okay, you can never remove all the silks, but close enough.  They left that part to me anyway.  I also showed them how to shuck the corn – pull each one off and you’ll eventually get down to the kernels.

I saw that my demonstration piece had a hole that went through several shucks.  So I put a couple of them back (I hadn’t removed them so they were still attached at the base of the ear) and then showed the kids how the hole went through each layer.  I told them a bug must have eaten through it.  Then we got to the kernels and I showed them that the hole went right through the kernel.  At that point, the older child informed me that a worm was on the end of the ear of corn.  My response was that was the one that had been eating our corn.  So we threw him away (him being the bug, or the corn, as we did dispose of both).

The next day, I got home from work a little late, and the family was already eating dinner.  My son then informed me that there was a caterpillar on the window.  It was actually on the window frame, and it was not a caterpillar but another corn worm.  I assumed it was another worm that had escaped from the bag of corn, but my wife was not happy with the thought that there could be more corn worms roaming the house.  I threw that one away and we have not seen any since.

The Labor Day weekend was a relaxing one. The weather cooperated quite nicely, and one late afternoon I sat outside reading a magazine while the kids played in the large plastic tub better known as a kiddie pool. It was filled with water, of course, which made all the nearby vegetation jealous as they have not received much rain lately and were probably thirsty.

Part of my job as a parent is to ensure that the children share, play together, avoid injury, have fun, etc. So I would take breaks from my magazine to help them with the hose, pick some apples from the tree and throw them in the pool, or whatever. The older son wanted to bob for apples, so that’s what the apples were for. He made me go first, so I tried a couple of times and did get anything. He went next and spun the apple around so the stem was up, then he just bit the stem and pulled out the apple. The younger son didn’t want to play.

A little later, after I had read some more, I heard the older one telling me that his brother had dunked him in the pool. It is not uncommon for one of the two to do something not nice to the other, and then the other comes to me and complains. So when I heard that he had dunked him in the pool, I assumed it was a complaint and started to proceed down the let’s-play-nicely path. But I was mistaken, as they were both in a good mood.

It turned out that they were pretending to be at a dunk tank, as they had seen real-life dunk tanks in operation at both a local festival and a local fair. The kids had set a T-ball tee in the pool and a plastic chair next to the pool. One child would sit in the chair and the other would throw apples at the tee. If he hit the tee, the other child would slide himself off the chair and into the pool. So he wasn’t complaining, he just wanted me to watch the operation.

For those who were wondering, I did empty the pool by dumping its water into the closest flower bed. At least some of the plants also enjoyed their Labor Day holiday.

“Please let a little water be brought and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree;”
– Genesis 18:4

Kraft is promoting their salad dressing made with real ingredients. My first thought was “Can there be fake ingredients?” Isn’t anything that goes into a product an ingredient? The only way for an ingredient to be fake is to mislabel it (which is a violation of federal law).

I first noticed the ads in the grocery store. There was a TV playing Kraft ads in one of the normal aisles (as opposed to the TV intended for the captive audiences waiting in the checkout lanes). It’s hard to turn around in public these days without seeing a TV. But that’s off the subject. I saw that the Kraft ads were for their new line of salad dressings made with real ingredients. What does that say about their other salad dressings.

So I captured a screen shot of their ad from their website. It’s an annoying Flash ad, so you have to sit through a bit of it before you see the following screen.

After looking a little closer though, I saw that the ad didn’t really say the dressing is made with real ingredients. It says it is made with the flavor of real ingredients. What does that mean? Fake ingredients but real flavor? I give up. It’s just a bad campaign. I am Some Blogger, and I disapprove their message.

“These things I have written to you concerning those who are trying to deceive you.”
– 1 John 2:26

Since there is some debate about the best way to measure who won the Olympics (correct answer: “We all did”), I thought I would prepare the results using several different methods so that various countries could claim to be the winners.

Most of the debate, at least here in the USA, centers around do only golds count (China won) or do all medals count (USA won). The seemingly official method is to count by golds, but there are some other ways.

Since there are too much data to put into one post, I’ll summarize the results in this post and also point to another page that contains the unsummarized data.

Summary: Panama or India won the 2008 Olympic games

If the official ranking is by gold medals won, the ranking should be normalized by how many athletes competed to get those golds. Some other methods are to adjust the ranking by the countries’ GDP, population, or area.

A country’s economic ranking (by GDP) is the best indicator of how well that country will do in the Olympics. Of the top ten Olympic gold winners, eight of them were in the top ten GDPs. The other two winners were still in the top twenty GDPs.

But I prefer to normalize the Olympic rankings by athletes or, as they are sometimes called, delegates. How many contestants did a country send to win medals? And how many medals did they win? It’s more of an efficiency rating, but I think it is better than comparing medals to the general population.

I also prefer to use a weighted ranking (gold = 5 points, silver = 3 points, bronze = 1 point) and rank the countries by points, not by gold medals and not by total medals. It is interesting to note that the ranking of countries by gold medal has the same result as ranking them by points. The points system provides a clearer picture of the order, as there are a number of countries that did not win a gold medal. If the ranking is by gold medal only, then those countries receive the same rank. A points system provides for finer resolution of the ranking.

When one adjusts the points total by number of athletes sent to the Olympics, India is the winner. They were the only country to earn more than one point per athlete or, as I ranked them, less than one athlete per point.

For the complete data, please view the charts on the 2008 Olympics Results page.

We received our vouchers from the government for the digital-to-analog TV signal converters. So we went to the store last Saturday and bought a couple converters. I hooked up one of them as soon as we got home, and it is a vast improvement.

I was skeptical beforehand – getting the converters only because we will have no choice in a few months. Since we live on the fringes of some TV stations’ ranges (the analog signal is slightly fuzzy at best), I was expecting that the digital signals wouldn’t be clear enough. Since digital signals are all-or-nothing, you can’t get a fuzzy digital signal. That means you can’t watch a fuzzy station, but then some stations that are on the edge would be gone completely. With analog, a station on the edge could be tolerated for a while.

That’s what I was expecting. But it seems that the digital signals travel a better than the analog signals, because I think we get more channels now with the converter. Some of that is due to the extra channels that each station has (e.g. 7, 7-1, and 7-2), but we are getting other stations that we couldn’t before. And they’re all clear. Which is what I knew would happen, but it is so nice to actually see it. I was surprised how clear it is, after I have spent the last 8 years with fuzzy reception in my rural area.

Occasionally, the digital station will fade out, which means that it just stops, as opposed to getting static-y temporarily. I would rather it get fuzzy for a little bit than just disappear, but there’s not much I can do about that at this point. I am glad we got the converter boxes that allow the analog signal to pass through to the TV still. That way I can still view the old station if the digital signal is not strong enough. That will last until February for most stations, but I will still get to watch CBC over analog for a while.

Our church recently had a carnival/festival and there were some contests for children. Some of the contests (throw a football through a tire, carry an egg on a spoon, pop the balloon with the darts, etc.) had prizes, and one particular contest was awarding live goldfish (in plastic bags filled with water) as the prize.

No one in my family won a goldfish by playing that game. But we knew the people manning that booth and, unfortunately, they had some fish leftover at the end of the day. That meant that they had to get rid of them somehow, so they gave us a fish.

We already had an empty fishbowl from years ago, and the fish-givers gave us fish food, so we thought it wouldn’t be too bad. It could have been worse: someone else there was giving away puppies (not for a contest, but for anyone who wanted one). So we took the fish home and setup the fishbowl.

The fish did not have a name. We got the fish on a Saturday, and my wife named the fish on Tuesday. I came home from work, and we sat down to eat dinner. As part of the dinner conversation my wife referred to the fish as “Floaty”. Sure enough, he was quite floaty. So now he resides in a different plastic bag – until next Tuesday when he moves to his new home courtesy of the garbage truck.

“Therefore the land mourns, And everyone who lives in it languishes Along with the beasts of the field and the birds of the sky, And also the fish of the sea disappear.”
– Hosea 4:3

The current Olympics in Beijing, China, are interesting to me because of the medal count. The official method of listing the winning countries is by order of gold medals, not by total medals won. This is interesting because out of the last few Olympics, the total medal winner has been the same as the gold medal winner.

This Olympics is different, because China is winning the gold medal count and the USA is winning the total medal count. I thought I would do some research on this, and you, the reader, get to benefit from that. How? I don’t know yet.

At first I wondered if it had to do with China’s being the host country. Some may argue that the host does receive favorable treatment and scoring, but I looked at the trend and I think it just has to do with China’s effort to improve themselves in international competition.

First up, China’s medal count trend. Look at how both the gold medals won and total medals won have been increasing from effectively zero several Olympics ago. Now they’re one of the leaders.

Next up, China’s increase in gold medals trend. Look at how their percentage of medals has been changing toward more golds and less of the other medals. I have extrapolated the data and found that, if the current trend continues, all the medals that China wins will be golds by the year 2028. They won’t even bother with the silver or bronze medals. If the Olympic ranking system goes for gold, not total medals, then that is how countries should play – for the gold. China is the only country whose gold medal count is more than half of its total medal count.

Don’t worry though. Even though all of China’s medals will be gold by 2028, they won’t win all the events that year. So there will still be gold medals available for a while. I also checked out how long it will take for China to win all the events, and that should occur in the year 2108, at a venue still to be decided by the IOC.

So either China will end up with all the medals, or their rate of medal winning will level off at some point. If they haven’t claimed all the medals by 2108, then you can find me and I will try to revise this post with the correct information.

“Also if anyone competes as an athlete, he does not win the prize unless he competes according to the rules.”
– 2 Timothy 2:5