Golfer aces the same hole 3 times in a row

Q: Does lightning ever strike twice in the same place in the sense of successive holes-in-one struck by the same golfer?

How about thrice?

A: Most remarkable was the performance of Norman Manley, who holed the seventh (330 yards) and eighth (290 yards) at California's Del Valle Country Club in 1964, says John Wesson in "The Science of Golf."

The thrice was achieved by Bob Taylor in 1974 on the Hunstanton Links course at Norfolk, England.

He holed the 188-yard 16th hole from the tee on the practice day of the competition, then did the same on both day one and day two of the competition proper — three successive holes-in-one on the same hole!

Record for the longest hole-in-one is tougher to assign, due to different conditions such as doglegs and favorable slopes.

But longest success on a straight hole was in Omaha, Neb., in 1965 when Bob Mitera holed a 447-yard drive — helped however by a downhill slope.

This record held until 2007 when Bret Melson aced the 448-yard, par 4 at the Ko'olau Golf Club in Oahu, Hawaii, "edging out Mitera by a massive one yard"!

Q: What harm can a zoo do to an elephant?

A: Do it in prematurely in the worst of cases, which may be more common than most of us like to think, says Scientific American magazine.

Zoo elephants have much shorter lives than their wild counterparts, according to a study of 4,500 elephants in European zoos and wildlife refuges. Median life span for African elephants in zoos is about 17 years, in the wild, 56; for Asian elephants, it's 19 versus 42.

Infant mortality runs higher in captives as well, especially among Asian pachyderms, suggesting that something during gestation or early infancy raises the risk for the zoo-born.

If there's a hope here, it's that the latest zoo practices seem more animal-friendly, which may yet be reflected in the statistics down the road.

Q: Imagine you're a psychology PhD student taking your oral exams when the professor quizzes out of the blue: "How far can an ant see?" Quick now, what do you remember about the compound eyes of insects?

A: The above student reportedly turned pale, mentally reviewed everything he had read about insect vision and then admitted "I have no idea," says James Kalat in "Biological Psychology, Ninth Edition." With an impish grin, the professor replied, "Presumably, an ant can see at least 93 million miles — the distance to the sun."

Groan! Yes, this was a trick question though it illustrates an important point: How far an ant — or a person — can see depends on how far the light travels. We see because light strikes our eyes, not because we send out "sight rays."

But that principle wasn't known until the Arab philosopher Ibn al-Haythem (965-1040) demonstrated that light rays bounce off any object in all directions though we see only those rays that strike the retina perpendicularly.

Send STRANGE questions to brothers Bill and Rich at strangetrue@compuserve.com