River

highway at night

two bright currents of headlights:

a river of cars

Daily Haiku Prompt: river

 

A Morning Laugh

Yesterday morning after finishing my breakfast, I asked my PSW (let's call her Juliet) for some help.

Meanwhile, M was still working on his breakfast while watching tv. He tried to change the channel on the remote control.

"Juliet, please help me stand up," I said.

"I don't think I can help you with that," replied Alexa.

 

Winter Scene and Classic Movie

Winter Scene

snow on hilly road

we watch cars slide back down it --

classic winter fun

Classic Movie

Two For The Road:

driving each other crazy

classic MGA

(Photo c Barbara Etlin)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hw4Jc1zZTGk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpB-9YB3aOs

daily haiku prompts: road and classic

Moonrise

 not just a mirror

moon displays her lovely face

but hides her dark side

she rises to her zenith

a breeze pushes clouds away

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbaOsTwTM40

Photo by Michael Starkie on Unsplash

Daily Haiku Prompts: moon, rise, breeze

Paradise Lost: Tanka for the Blue Jays

we came very close

although winning is better

we can still be proud

they had some great players and

we were tough competitors

"Can We Fix Our Nation's Broken Heart?"

 Found this new (to me) song by Stevie Wonder. He wrote it a year ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKSz3n3qP6g

Statistics...and Baseball

I don't like statistics. 

I dropped it in second year university and (Bell) curved myself into an English major, which was clearly where I belonged.

All's well that ends well.

I've never liked sweeping generalizations, which often seem like stereotyping. M used to say I dealt with everything by exception. Statistics tries to make sweeping generalizations to try to predict the future.

The only concept I mastered in Statistics was 

The Gambler's Fallacy. 

An example of this is tossing a coin for heads or tails. Most people think that, after a lot of heads tosses, the chances that there will be a tails next is more likely. This is wrong. 

Every coin toss has a 50% chance of being heads.

And 50% chance of being tails.

What happened before has no effect on what is going to happen next.

People who gamble, especially in professional sports, want to read the future by looking at the past. It comforts them to see that a horse has good breeding, has won in other races, and so on. Or that a superstar baseball player (although very talented and skilled) will provide the magic fairy dust for a win every time. 

But a team is just that: a group of people working together. Using a Psychology term, there are too many uncontrolled variables to predict accurately. Any player can get injured. Any player can drop out because he hasn't recovered fully from a past injury. Something could affect a player's mood. The order of the lineup has to be matched to the other team's. And so on...

It's useless to look backwards to predict the future. 

You might as well use a Magic Eight Ball.

https://www.mysticmag.com/magic8ball/

Oh, by the way,

Go Blue Jays!