Nice Strip Shame About the Results!

I haven’t written about the Sons last two games because I wasn’t at either of them, one due to a friend’s stag weekend and the other because Brechin is awfy far. Results of course haven’t been great but I’m confident Jim and the boys can turn things round. In the meatime, we’ll look good!

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If it Looks Like a Duck…..

A bit of fun.

My correspondent Almax used the phrase “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.”

The duck test is a humorous term for a form of inductive reasoning. It can be explained this way:

The test implies that a person can figure out the true nature of an unknown subject by observing this subject’s readily identifiable traits. It is sometimes used to counter abstruse arguments that something is not what it appears to be.

Indiana poet James Whitcomb Riley (1849–1916) may have coined the phrase when he wrote “when I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck.”

The term was later popularized in the United States by Richard Cunningham Patterson Jr., United States ambassador to Guatemala during the Cold War in 1950, who used the phrase when he accused the Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán government of being Communist. Patterson explained his reasoning as follows:

Suppose you see a bird walking around in a farm yard. This bird has no label that says ‘duck’. But the bird certainly looks like a duck. Also, he goes to the pond and you notice that he swims like a duck. Then he opens his beak and quacks like a duck. Well, by this time you have probably reached the conclusion that the bird is a duck, whether he’s wearing a label or not.”

Ah but………

Thanks to thispeanutlookslikeaduck.com

200,000

Sometime today this obscure outpost of the internet will welcome its 200,000th visitor since January 2008 according to the WordPress counter in the right hand column.

I’m told that WordPress blogs are better at getting up the search engines than any others which would perhaps explain why there are currently an average of over 500 visitors per day. However over 100 of these are , I have to assume, are regular readers because that is the number who visit the site address as their first page and not specific pages within it.

So thanks for looking in,and thanks too for your comments and emails particularly at a time when posting is fairly light (by my standards anyway!)

Craigendoran

This excellent photo of the pier from the 1890′s features the steamers Dandy Dinmont, Red Gauntlet and Lady Clare. The photo comes from Helensburgh Heritage Trust.

Compare with my own photo of the now derelict pier taken a couple of years ago (notice the Waverley in the distance)