Blind man, 92, hits a hole-in-oneCLEARWATER, Fla. (AP) — Hitting a hole-in-one is hard enough. Now consider that Leo Fiyalko is 92 years old and blind.”I was just trying to put the ball on the green,” he said.Fiyalko, who has macular degeneration and has been golfing for 60 years, scored the ace with a 5-iron on the 110-yard fifth hole at Cove Cay Country Club on Jan. 10.Fiyalko tees off every Thursday with a group of golfers ranging in age from 70 to more than 90. He used to have a 7 handicap, but now needs help lining up shots and finding golf balls because he has peripheral vision only in his right eye.Jean Gehring was in Fiyalko’s foursome and watched his swing on the hole-in-one.”I could tell it went on the green,” Gehring said. “When we got up there I didn’t see it. I looked in the hole and there it was.”Gehring said Fiyalko was modest about the shot and had to be prodded to tell his wife about it after the round. Fiyalko’s friends at the club presented him with a plaque last week to commemorate the feat.
Sorry about your Pats, Dave.Peter Nuhn
Its a statistical improbability but that never stops people from claiming miracles, so yes I suppose it is.
Like when a town gets leveled by a tornado except for one house and they guy gets in front of the camera and says “God had his hand on us”. Yeah thats it I guess he hated all those other poor bastards, probably gays.
What
He must get his rocks off from stirring the pot and being generally antagonistic. Otherwise, he could just go frequent a xian blog.
Karen
Yeh but one would think he could find a way to do so without humiliating himself.
What,
I am sure phreedm was thinking he was so smart and finally gonna “show us” atheists.
Then he posts his brilliant comparison and waits….
But oops!!! He soon realized he hadn’t thought his ridiculous assertion through using logic, otherwise known as kryptonite to theists.
Poor phreedm, it’s almost sad…
Dawn
Whoa. Whoa. Stop right there …
Listening to Socrates here…. so a diamonium is kind of like a parrot that sits on his shoulder and tells him what not to do? Eh, okay, the guy was essentially a bum who went around and pointed out the stupidity of the moral absolutes that the various Athenian people believed in.
I think that xians need to listen to the wisdom of the content bums instead of the fallacy of the pope! No, wait, f$ck socrates for having a diamonium that sits on his shoulder, for that is the essence of self deception. Anything which appears to a person as external, that is not freely observeable to all, is a delusion. That being said, Socrates was a deluded individual even though he attained happiness and inner peace with his form of contentment with poverty and then death.
Eh, to that I say, to each his own. Can’t the desire for wealth and prosperity bring every bit as much happiness as the contentment of living without it? How could somebody who never desired such a thing as wealth be the authority on the outcome of those desires?
Or perhaps…. this is my conclusion…. Socrates was so happy to end his own life because he had denied himself the pursuit of the one thing that he never knew, that of wealth and political power.
What would have happened if Socrates had killed the moral parrot on his shoulder that told him what not to do? Would he have become an even more influential leader who would have gained the whole world but incapacitated his own sense of morality?
The reason this is bugging me is that I don’t want to become a bum, and that is where I always felt the holy spirit was leading me. I have so much potential, so should I listen to the f$cking parrot on my shoulder telling me to be lazy?
Eh, I’ll relax here, that must be a side effect of a life of brainwashing by the church! There is no god, and mankind has it within his ability to do great things, there should be no such sacrifice as the suicide of potential.
http://www.machineslikeus.com/cms/confucianism.html#comment-280
Blind people can have visual dreams, but only under certain circumstances.
People who were born sighted and then became blind tend to have visual dreams after they become blind, but as time passes, the visual portion of their dreams eventually gives way to purely aural dreams.
People who are born blind have not described what we would call a visual dream. However, there is no way to know for sure if people who are born blind NEVER have visual dreams. We could hook up electrodes and measure brain activity, but even if their “sight” neurons are firing, that doesn’t mean they perceive it as sight. Those “sight” neurons may either not interact with the brain (i.e. they “dead end” somewhere), or they may serve some other unknown purpose.
To answer phreedm’s question, we have to focus on those who are born blind, since obviously people born sighted know “colors” exist.
Dawn has already explained how blind people can come to trust us when we say sight exists. We can also explain the parallel between sight and sound. We can perceive different colors just as they can perceive different pitches.
We can also provide double blind studies proving the effectiveness of sight in picking one color from another. If we ask 10 people to pick the red ball from the green ball and the balls are otherwise identical, only a perception of color can explain why sighted people are able to reach a consensus. Ergo, sighted people can accurately perceive color.
In the end though, blind people either believe in a regularly-sighted person’s ability to perceive color, or they have to believe that every single study ever done about color perception is wrong or deceitful.
Differences in perception are a difficult thing to comprehend, only through logic and careful study can we come to a consensus between those of differing abilities.
On another note, I believe in the existence of elementary particles despite not being able to access the equipment that can detect them. I do this not because of a blind trust in those that run the equipment, but because there is a consensus amongst many different people who have access to similar equipment.
Logic alone tells me that either they’re lying or telling the truth, but logic together with repeatable experiments tells me that the likelihood of everyone lying is very very small.
On a side note, it’s easier for deaf people to understand hearing (in my opinion, being neither blind nor deaf). I had a deaf roommate in college who use to listen to really loud hip hop on his headphones because he liked the rhythms that he could feel vibrating his skull. It was mildly annoying, but I’m a patient man.
Abnormally low I.Q.?
This blind guy getting a hole in one is certainly a miracle of $cientology! This miracle took place in Clearwater, Fl which is the location of the $cientologist’s headquarters. Praise Xenu!
So I checked out the Virtue Perfume site. Did anyone else notice the ladies were topless?! I guess sex sells holy perfume, too.
Phreedm,
Check this out in response to your query about how to explain something like color, or non-belief etc. This is just FYI about the difficulties of propositional knowledge and the veridicality of experience.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary's_room
Virtue perfume “Smells like rib, for his pleasure.”
Zac
All of Phreeky’s arguments repeatedly ask the same question: “Why isn’t my imagination a good substitute for facts?”. It’s just embarrassing to watch him humiliate himself on a daily basis.
George w bush does the same thing when he and the neocons make facts based on decisons rather than the other way around. Is it any wonder that the current evangelical administration derides those of us in the “reality based community”?
Alex
Yep. You can thank Silver-Spoon Rupert Murdoch’s anti-american News Corp propaganda machine for that.
A brilliant response, alantham, one that far exceeded the trollish nature of phreedm’s original question.
I jes don’t git Phreedm’s bewildering godspeak…Mebbe it’s the guldang buckshot in my gums. He spews and stews but nothin’ seems to click…mebbe it’s them chiggers in his shorts…and Lordy, I is fixin’ to explain the Texas two-step to a double-amputee Vet…
Ah wus gonna ‘splane yuh suthun speek to these p’oh sinnas, but Ah re’lized ’twas no good. How dus a suthnah ‘splane chiggers to dam Yankees?
With 4 letters:
B-U-G-S
Yes, but knowing what chiggers are and experiencing the itch which results from the little critters burrowing into your skin are entirely different things, you see? According to Phreedm, one cannot know chiggers exist until he has made the unfortunate mistake of having a romp with a lady in tall grass. Clearly, I cannot possibly explain chiggers to Yankees.