I’m Addicted to Snooker and I Don’t Even Know How It’s Played
The Cholent: Can "the algo" be food for thought? The Jerusalem fires may be a test for ourselves
Snooker Becomes a Cause for Introspection
Sometimes “The Algo” serves up weird stuff. Just this past week, I started getting clips of Snooker tournaments. For some reason I find them fascinating, but I have no idea why. At first glance, I really shouldn’t have any interest in it:
I’m not very good at it myself
I don’t have much of an ability to become good at it as I have no access to a pool table (I’m not sure if there is even a single pool table in the entire Gush Bloc)
The rules of the game are not obvious, as sometimes there are almost no balls on the table, and sometimes there are dozens of them. Why?
My only exposure to it is from the clips I see in my Facebook feed, and these have been exclusively of the same two opponents, so I know nothing more about the sport
So why do I watch them? I think the reason is based in a few things:
Primarily, it is the mathematical, physical (as in physics), aspect of the game. For every end result the player is trying to achieve, there is an angle and a force that will achieve that objective. But the player doesn’t know those calculations, and also can’t calibrate them precisely in the heat of the moment. Yet they still successfully get the balls into the pockets! That’s amazing.
Trying to figure out exactly what is going on in the game is part of the puzzle. Sure, I could look up the rules to Snooker (which I think I did the last time this happened to my feed), but why waste more time when I can make up my own assumptions about what is going on?
Partly related to the first reason, it is always exciting to see people at the top of their field. I have no idea if the two people I am always seeing are full-time players or they only do this on the weekends (I would hope it is the latter, but you never know).
Aspects of this curiosity carry over to another sport I enjoy, which is auto racing. I’ve made it one of my assignments for the blog this year to follow the F1 tournament for 2025. I’ve been doing ok, but I am a few races behind (for the same reasons I didn’t post to the blog for a few weeks). In auto racing, you have people who do a seemingly simple thing we can all do (drive a car, hit a ball with a pointy stick) but they do it in a way that we could never do ourselves that if we attempted to do at their level we would either fail miserably, or worse, harm ourselves or others. There is also a surprisingly large science component to designing the cars as well as driving them.
If you allow me to philosophize a bit, my question for myself and my readers is: are our jobs, our purpose, to excel at our field? If we get paid for doing something, does that mean we are the best at doing it, or are we just meeting the needs that our employer requires from us? Is success being one of these two people that show up in my Snooker clips, or can one declare success as soon as they cash their first paycheck, whether they excel at their profession or not? Let me know in the comments.
Israeli Fires and Social Media Dumbness
It happens every time there is a forest fire here in Israel, and it really gets my goat: large portions of the population immediately assume that it is terrorism and blame the Arabs without any proof. Here are some of the images I received/saw during the past day:
To just emphasize how ridiculous this is getting, let’s analyze the tweet that accompanies the picture of the map above. It says:
The fire map shows something unusual — while Israel has 29 active wildfires, there are ZERO in Palestine Probably the answer is simpler than it seems, but maybe it’s something divine...
Now, I think the original post on X is implying that it is some sort of divine retribution against the Jewish state, but on Jewish X and Facebook it is being used a source to blame Arabs for being behind the fires, since there are (almost) no fires in the "so-called” West Bank. But let’s point out a few obvious things:
There is no source or date for the data on this map (huge red flag)
There is actually a fire pin inside the PA/West Bank, a little north of Hebron
There are like four pins (including a car one???) in the Mediterranean Sea
I’m just going to go out on a limb and say this image is either fake or AI.
Now, what is happening here is that many truths are being combined and then being blanket applied to an extreme case. Let’s examine:
Arabs do set fires to terrorize (the reason this is not covered by mainstream media is multifaceted and beyond the scope of this post)
Hamas themselves encouraged their followers to set fires (it is a new level of weird when you take blame and even encourage for something you could easily not be blamed for)
We ourselves do not want to look bad that we couldn’t manage a fire, so blaming the Arabs makes things a lot easier (it looks even worse when the current government cut funding to the fire department)
Last time I checked, in the real world, a bunch of truths that stand on their own can’t just be applied to any situation we want. As far as I can tell, there has been no mention as to the type of person/people that has/have been arrested. In fact, early reports say the fires may have been started by someone with nationalistic motives, which is perhaps an even worse terrorism than the one we are often the victims of.
Groups of Jews acting this way publicly has a few issues:
Giving the benefit of the doubt is one of the foundations of our religion
Falsely blaming others discredits our standing when it comes to legitimate acts of terror. If we don’t want to be victims of xenophobia, we shouldn’t practice it ourselves.
We are better and smarter than to fall for inciteful propaganda (that is probably the result of actual terrorists, again, life is weird)
Let’s do better, people.
Stickers! - https://the-cholent.printify.me/
Is the heat of the fires too much for you? Cool down with this countertop ice maker (or just shop on Amazon).