Michael Jordan's lifetime batting average

Euclidean geometry is of course the exemplar of logic.  Write a few definitions, formulate a handful of axioms, and you are off to the races.  It was very nice and clean, everything could be proved or disproved.  There were a few troubling things, in particular I remember that you could not trisect an angle.  It just seemed odd, why the hell not?  Was this something that slipped the mind of the Intelligent  Designer while He was measuring the horns of the triceratops?

But the way they taught it, Ms Hladick as I recall, all that logic was funneled into the world of geometry.  Some of the first proofs were grand.  Who doesn't recall the Pythagorean Theorem with those squares on the sides of the right triangle?  But as the course went on we were proving increasingly more trivial things.  If one triangle lies partly along the hypotenuse of a right triangle and its angles are such that...  See I have already forgotten.

But again I don't know why they didn't teach us to apply logic to our real lives.  Of course the real world is much messier than the land of points and lines.  But just as you can use those imaginary lines to build the Sears tower, you could use them to build a better life, a better society, a classical liberal society, where disagreements can be resolved with discussions.  But that ship has sailed.  In the new geometry the right angles will insult the isosceles.

I guess some people are born with hard-wired language skills that are better or worse than others, but it seems like most of our verbal skills are acquired by experience.  I think that is why children of writers and athletes tend to follow in the footsteps, books and basketballs are always lying around the house.  There's this guy Malcolm Gladwell who has become big in the cultural world.  When Michael Jordan announced that he was giving up basketball and taking up baseball, Malcolm said he would never make it.  Even though Michael was an excellent athlete, he had not spent the time in the batter's box that every journeyman infielder has, and you just can't make up that lack of experience with fine motor skills.  Michael Jordan's lifetime batting average is .202.

I used to think that fine motor skills were necessary to be an artist.  How did Rembrandt put that shadow into the corner of the woman's mouth so that her expression is just so?  It must have taken a skilled turn of the wrist.  But that turns out not to be so.  Anybody that can write script has all the motor skills of any artist.  Again I believe it is experience, the more you know, the more you can push down into the subconscious so that your conscious mind is not distracted by middling details as you pursue your great design.

Most people vote democratic or republican in every election, but about twenty percent of the people can go either way.  They like to call themselves independents but I prefer Beagle's term, wishy-washies.  Obama did indeed get people out of their LaZboys and into the polls in a way the big girl couldn't.  But also Trump got some of those former Obama voters to the polls to vote for him.  I remember watching CNN during one of those small state republican primaries.  It was freezing cold and the line of cars outside the polls were miles long.  Well, I thought, that gives me renewed faith in American democracy, and then I realized that most of them were braving the dark and chilly night to vote for Trump.