Just put your foot down with an awful whomp

Remember last week when I had a really good game of The Walking Dead pinball and I predicted humiliation for me every time we played it during league? We played it during league on Tuesday and, yeah, I flopped. I scored about 11 million, which is worse than I did the very first time I ever stepped up to the machine without any idea what it might do. This rounded out a night of one good game --- Theatre of Magic, the devilbunny-starring machine --- and a catastrophically bad Tales of the Arabian Nights and a poor Simpsons Pinball Party.

Before the night started the league's champion asked if I had tips for The Walking Dead and since I had no idea what I did to do well I had to hold out my hands, helplessly, and suggest, ``don't lose the ball?'' I hate the feeling he thinks I might be holding out pinball secrets on him, but surely my performance overall proves that I wasn't. And whatever it is was going around; our other pinball friend had a night only marginally better than me, thanks among other things to an outstanding game of The Walking Dead.

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Have you been reading my mathematics blog, by RSS or by Livejournal Syndicate feed? If you haven't, well, here's the things you've missed since my last roundup of posts:

• A bit more about Thomas Hobbes, expanding on an old post after some of my reading last month.
• Reading the Comics, January 17, 2015: Finding Your Place Edition, where I bragged about knowing roughly how to use a watch as a compass.
• A Venn Diagram of the Real Number System, which it isn't properly, but it's a nice picture.
• Convex hulls, the TSP, and long drives, which caused me to learn of a guy who visited all 50 United States in his week off work, by driving (except to Alaska and Hawaii).
• Reading the Comics, January 24, 2015: Many, But Not Complicated Edition, so labelled because there were a lot of comics but they weren't hard to explain.
• A Hundred, And Other Things, about a neat unit of measure that doesn't mean what it used to.
• Reading the Comics, January 29, 2015: Returned Motifs Edition, since there was another big bunch of comic strips but they were mostly about things I'd already discussed, but, it did cause me to learn the link between Don Quixote and blackjack.

Trivia: The first mass-produced baseball bats were made by A G Spalding and Company in a factory in Hastings, Michigan, in 1879. The factory burned down in December 1887. Source: A Game Of Inches: The Story Behind The Innovations That Shaped Baseball, Peter Morris.

Currently Reading: The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA, Diane Vaughan.