Baseball Miscellany

I don’t think you’ll see much difference. I like the aesthetic of it, but I don’t think it’s going to stimulate more/less running or result in more offense.

What’s geometry again?

It’s the arrangement of the countries on the globe.

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No, that’s geography.

It’s the study of rocks.

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What a great thread this is.

I dropped out of high school in the midst of my second freshman year when a coffee shop gig at the then-minimum wage of $5 an hour succeeded in motivating me where endless attempts by my parents and teachers and parents’ friends had failed. Once, my dad, a school lawyer, paid for me to undergo an exhaustive cycle of tests administered by a prominent UT psychologist to see if maybe I didn’t have a learning disability or three. This man confirmed what I’d been saying all along: “Devin’s plenty smart, he just doesn’t care about school.” I couldn’t, for whatever reason, motivate myself to give a damn. Math was a particular irritant.

(In fact what would have been our last big family vacation was cancelled on account of this dumbass failed seventh grade pre-algebra and had to take it over the summer.)

A GED and several peripatetic years of working in coffee shops and for minor league baseball teams later, I returned home and entered ACC with the zeal of a born-again or a freshly recovering alcoholic. Ended up having to grind through two or three remedial math courses before I could take one for credit. Naturally I really liked it. I went the Neil T route for my bachelors and acquired an MFA in playwriting but today I like math more than ever.

Matter of fact, recently bought a Newton biography for my father-in-law for Christmas. I said, You read it, then I’ll read it, then we’ll discuss. He gave it back a month later saying, You need to know a shit ton of math. So I ordered Geometry and Algebra II for dummies.

This is my first crack at geometry and I’m really liking it. Just got to the part where I need to go buy me a compass.

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I used to use a compass every day, but haven’t used one in probably 25 years. I use a protractor regularly though. Of course, I have several obscure geometry/map tools that the kids today have never seen.

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Sectors are cool.

Sectors are tangents’ bitch.

I had the slide rule my dad used at West Point on my credenza in my office when I used to work for Lockheed Martin. It was fascinating how excited some of the engineers and scientists would get when they saw it.

In a universe of nerdy shit, this may be the nerdiest thread of them all.

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I kinda sorta know how a slide rule works, but they were before even my time. I don’t think I could solve much of an equation with one. Of course, I’m not sure I can still solve an equation with a calculator.

I showed some kids a map wheel and Gerber scale once, and they were flaberghasted that you didn’t always just use a computer program. The idea of hand doing anything freaked them out. It was like explaining an ice box.

We can’t all be beer encyclopedias.

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I headed off to Rice with my trusty slide rule in hand. After one week of calculations for freshman chemistry labs, I said “fuck this shit” and blew my budget on some new-fangled TI scientific calculator (SR-50, if memory serves). It cost something like $150 at the time and was one of the best investments I made. I still use the little HP-11c that I bought after I graduated.

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I was a TI man myself, though I think we’d moved up to the TI-55 by my day. All the real eggheads used the HP calculators and looked down their noses at us hoi polloi, but the numbers were the same.

Probably in most parallel universes too.

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In my summer job (working with reservoir guys at Amoco), I got to use an HP-65 with the magnetic cards. Everybody fought over it.

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I ran a cash register at Eckerd’s, one of those newfangled digital NCR jobs that was cutting edge for 1979, except it was 1984.

Cosined

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Hey! I used a slide rule in HS! Makes me slightly more qualified to post in this thread, but not very.

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Touche