A. Are people ‘marked’ by the climates they grew up in?
You can see that I am not referencing cultures or societies…just the climate. In my life I have met some who have no connection to where they came from (weather wise), and many others who have been touched by their native clime.
Years ago I used to work with a friend of mine, who happened to be an émigré from Viet Nam. This idea was the source of a long standing joke between the two of us, in that I ( a very large Midwestern guy)always liked the frigid winters in Minneapolis. Since he was a much smaller, slight, and trim individual, he hated these cold months. As a result he would spend time waxing about how nice it was back in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City). In the humid summers our roles would reverse.
Growing up in the cooler continental climate in Northern Minnesota, I have always wondered about this idea, in that you must really like the cold winters here, otherwise you would have moved away long ago. I would imagine that life in a rain forest might have a similar means to separate the wheat from the chaff…
B. does too much information about something trivialize it?
I can see that there is a lot of truth in this supposition, in that apart from its Zen subtext, a simple look at how we (historically) have perceived Major League Baseball since the 1930’s can show some light.
In the 30’s and 40’s Baseball was really the national sport, it drew the best athletes, the greatest crowds, and everyone had their favorites. The fact that there was spotty radio coverage, a few news reels and the newspaper box scores limited access to the reality of what was happening during the game to what could best be called proxy coverage. Yet this limited coverage pushed this sport into the realm of myth. To the few who actually got to watch the game in the ballpark, since it only took place in real time, there was an ineffable sense that it was almost immediately in memory…
In Pro Basketball there are some comparable experiences, such as what those who got to see Wilt Chamberlain score 100 points in a game. It had no media coverage, other than the news services (i.e. newspaper coverage), and as a result is one of the unassailable myths of basketball…
Do modern professional sports seem more trivial than these sorts of exploits?
C. If certain kinds of mathematics are more effective in describing specific parts of physics, and specific computer languages are more effective at certain specific tasks, are specific human languages better than other in some specific tasks? If so, which languages are better, and conversely which are worse for some specific tasks?
