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Updated 87 Days ago
Week #2 -Tee Time Tips for Golfing Greenhorns
After a brief scare last night when the airport sent my golf clubs on to Chicago without me (deep breath), I'm ready to talk about golf again this week.
Hopefully, if you have recently spent time on a golf course, you kept in mind my tip from last week. This time around, I have decided to tackle aspects of golf etiquette that relate to the green. You should already know that the person who is farthest from the hole goes first, you should pull the flag if you're already on the green, etc. There are many more unwritten and written rules for this sacred patch of extremely short grass, but here are a few to get you started.
Repair your divot marks.
Sure, most courses post it repeatedly on all 18 holes, including on most flags, but that doesn't seem to stop many greens from looking like Swiss cheese. The thought is that if you're good enough to loft that little white ball directly onto the green anyway, you know enough about golf to chip out your handy little divot tool. Clearly, this thought is flawed. Take a few moments to stick the tool's prongs straight down on one side of the divot, then gently push inwards. Repeat on all sides until the spot disappears, then gently pat down with your putter or foot. If you don't want to take the time to do so, then it's your own dang fault when your ball magically changes direction as you're about to sink a 40-foot putt.
When someone else is putting, do not walk onto or off of the green/move at all.
Even if you just realized that you (duh!) forgot to bring your putter with you from where you chipped on, or whatever your reason might be, stay where you are. It's rude and distracting to whisper, walk away or otherwise interfere with your compadres' concentration.
Do NOT step anywhere near your opponent's putting lines. (i.e. Anywhere near the path that their ball might take towards the hole.)
Also, don't step within one foot of the hole.
This should be self explanatory as well, so just be aware of where you're stepping if you're walking towards the hole to either mark your ball or retrieve it from the hole. Your arms should be able to reach in the hole and grab your ball without literally stepping up to the hole, so don't trample the grass there unnecessarily. Speaking of marking the ball:
If you think that your ball might be in the way of another player's putting line, put a ball marker down on the spot.
Don't try to cheat by subtly moving your ball marker to a slightly-improved lie. Your fellow golfers will notice, and besides, golf is a game of honor!
About The Author:
I just moved back to The Lou from CoMo and I'd love to hear from you. Shoot me an idea/comment/bored rambling at audrey@toastedrav.com.I am also an expert at the Chicken Dance, and I am willing to give lessons for a small fee.
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What is reCAPTCHA?
reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books.A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You've probably seen them Ñ colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.
About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.
To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.
But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.
Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times.