Its a little unclear in the bulleted list but in the volley ball example it becomes evident the author isn't talking about reflexes.
"Where do I pass the ball to if it comes to me? What is the current formation? Should I try to receive the ball, or will my team-mate go for it?"
There he's describing quick on-the-fly strategic choices eg. what is the best move to make in the next half second? So he can hit the ball but he can't do the quick thinking to know if he should.
I think most people have an opinion similar to NIMBYism. Everyone agrees there are too many regulations but no one agrees which ones are the extra. Every rule is someone's highest concern.
That's why part of the argument in Abundance is that current processes give too many people too much veto power. When every issue is someone's pet issue nothing can ever get done.
Helium and Lithium were also created in the pre stellar era of the universe, hydrogen was the majority by far but not the only element that wasn't created in stars. I think anything past 3 on the periodic table is exclusively stellar though.
A funny detail about this is that Feynman hadn't bothered to budget the $1000 for the prize. He thought someone would have to invent new tech to build the motor which would take years. If he had just gone a little smaller, say 1/100th of an inch instead of 1/64th, he might have gotten his wish.
Despite his disappointment he did keep his word and pay the prize. His wife was not happy.
This is conjecture but I'm pretty sure the idea of it even being an "index" is a stretch. More like people who work in disaster relief talking about their jobs informally. "I just got back from Town A. They had a tornado but it wasn't too bad. The Waffle House stayed open." "I'm heading to Town B. They've been having flooding so bad the Waffle House has been closed for 12 hours." That sort of thing.
Edit: Apparently FEMA contacts local businesses including Waffle Houses in the areas affected by a disaster to ask how they are doing. This makes sense as an added source of data to gauge the severity of an emergency. Still a stretch to call it the "Waffle House Index".
They're not saying the failure rate of tapes is 50%. They're saying if you survey attempts to do data restores from tape then 50% of the time not all the requested data is found.
I can't claim the same volumes you can but I did handle tape backups and recovery for a mid sized business for a few years. We only had one tape failure in my tenure but we had plenty of failed recoveries. We had issues like the user not knowing the name and location of the missing file with enough detail to find it, or they changed the file 6 times in one day and they need version 3 and the backup system isn't that granular.
Those are just the issues after the system was set up and working well. Plenty of people set a backup system running, never check the output, and are disappointed years later to learn the initial config was wrong.
Long story short 50% failure of tapes is ludicrous but 50% failure of recovery efforts is not.
The super bike is later in the book and temporary. When delivering pizzas he has a car so cool and intimidating it makes other drivers get out of the way so he can deliver pizza faster. But he actually wrecks it and looses the delivery job near the start of the book. For most of the story he doesn't have any iconic means of transportation.
"Where do I pass the ball to if it comes to me? What is the current formation? Should I try to receive the ball, or will my team-mate go for it?"
There he's describing quick on-the-fly strategic choices eg. what is the best move to make in the next half second? So he can hit the ball but he can't do the quick thinking to know if he should.