I entered the .22 competition at my shooting club last week. I have to shoot 3 sets of 10 rounds from 20 yards in prone position, kneeling position and standing position respectively. The highest score is 300 rings, 100 rings for each target sheet. A ring the unit to count how many points you get in shooting. There are 5 bullseye circles on the target sheet and I have to put 2 rounds into each circle. The center circle counts as 10 rings, the next round of circle is 9 rings, 8 rings and 7 rings. You don’t have any point lower than 7 rings, because you are not hitting any circles on the target.

I got 97 rings in prone position, 82 rings in kneeling position and only 72 rings in standing position. It is easiest to shoot laying down since you have support for both arms. It is hardest to shoot off hand standing, since you really have to have a stable hands. The first shooter got 295 rings, which means he hit the bullseye almost every time he fired a round. As expected, I came last in the competition, but I am not too far behind from the 2nd last place.

Shooting competition is fun, it tells me how well I shoot. I can see my effort from my practice since September. Nervousness in the competition affect my results. However I found the experience shooting in the competition helps me shoot better. My best score so far is 98 rings in prone and 85 rings standing. My goal is archive 100 rings in prone and over 90 rings standing. If I can score my goal constantly, I can put down the .22 rifle and start practicing handgun. I can only learn how to shoot one step at a time. It won’t work very well if I try to learn everything at the same time.

I never cooked spaghetti before, since I don’t eat spaghetti at home.  Somehow I suddenly want to eat spaghett, so I decide to give it a try.  I always think cooking spaghetti is easy and I am right.  My first attempt of making spaghetti is a success.  Spaghetti fits my A+B+C combo cooking philosophy.  Item A can be spaghetti or any pasta.  Boil a big pot of water, throw the spaghetti into the pot then wait until the spaghetti is soften.  Item B is the spaghetti sauce.  I just any ready made spaghetti sauce from the supermarket.  I wonder how the taste is difference in those 50+ selections.  Item C is the meat.  I picked ground turkey, I wanted use ground beef but Pat said turkey is more healthy.  I also add some shitaki mushroom slices.   Cook the meat first, then add the sauce and mushroom when the meat is cooked.  When every ingredient is heated, mix the spaghetti with the sauce and the dish is done!

Tonight two boys from Pat’s choir join us for dinner.  Both of them are university students.   To my surprise I got a very intellectual conversation from one of the guy.  Rarely I can find anyone who know enough theology, religion or philosophy knowledge to engage in a deep conversation.  He is a psychology major, so his point of view is quite different from my engineers point of view.  Our chat shed me new lights on how to see many things.

I finally have a clear understanding of the difference between innocent and ignorance.  Many people use these two words interchangeably, but they have different meaning.  Using book as an analogy.  Being innocent means you don’t know there exists such a book.  Being ignorance is you know the title of a book, but knows nothing about the content.

I learn the minimum requirement for Catholic mass is 2 people, the priest plus an audience.  The priest by myself cannot have a mass in law’s definition.  Then I pose the question what about a priest with a split personality, does it count as one person or 2 people.

We talked about what-if scenario, what if African conquer Europe in early centuries.  This leads to whether history has determine course of action or history is accidental.  I am defending our life will be pretty much the same using Hegel and he disagree.  Well, the fact that he knows the name of Hegel is quite impressive.

In addition, he explain some psychology to me.  One school of thoughts in psychology thinks how the human mind works are just reinforcements.  However main stream psychology reject this idea because the mind clearly able to change states, say from happy to sad, without any sensory inputs.  I try to defend the reinforcement theory using analogy from CPU design.  In semiconductor, alpha particulars can toggle the state of the electrons which causing bit error in the memory.  How about alpha particulars is the reason for human mind changing states without any reason.  The alpha particular excite an electron in a neuron, which cause a chain reaction eventually turn you from happy to sad.

I really enjoy tonight’s conversation.  However, Pat and the other boy said this involve too much thinking, and they got a headache just from listening to our talks.