What's in a game?

Sports with its competitive nature is an all-consuming backdrop on american life for a vast majority of people. Not all-consuming in that we spend all our time on the sport that we love, just that when we spend our time with that sport it has our undivided attention. Or our divided attention in categories pertaining to the sport. You always talk baseball at the baseball game.

Through many baseball games at all levels from little league to major league, i find that i can communicate with people that share a common interest in a specific history, a means of sharing numbers and statistics of accumulation and performance, and a means of judging performance by a criteria that is not always fair, but strives to meet the standards set forth in the rules. We don't have to agree on the dimensions of the field - both teams have the same number of opportunities with the home team having last bats. The competition is strenuous, the performers have fun, and afterwards, win or lose there is another game tomorrow where the score stands at null.

Society here has taken to mixing its metaphors too much, and life has become a win or else game that is brutalizing competition everywhere. The idea that the game ends and the score resets to null is not a part of american life, but you wouldn't know that by following the way that the media keeps score. In baseball we get daily standings, in life, the dow jones market average must suffice. But the fairness and equity of the stadium game, especially in the junior leagues shines as a current beacon to yesterday, when life was not nearly as expensive, on personal energy, just to keep up. I think the current game of life has to end here really really fast.

The cooperation that happens between people when they interact in personal life depends on being able to work together for the benefit of all those working together - not for the benefit of all. Both socialism and capitalism as portrayed by the major parties and major media has led to this hybrid muddle in the middle, where all of us are tired of the extra innings that we are forced to maintain, just to break even monetarily. Having money generation as the only measure of value is like measuring all of baseball based on triples per team. If information were shared in research areas say like energy, instead of being taken out of play by a patent system that rewards innovation with personal wealth - then the advances of young fertle minds might make something happen, come up with new ways of addressing the problems.

So perhaps looking at science as a team sport and evolving science leagues is the direction to go with the learning. Remove science from the public school curricula entirely, because it doesn't belong competing in a world where generation of income is the only measure. Catchers would not exist in baseball if triples were the only performance measure for winning and losing. Set the rules of scientific endeavor down, get a team of umpire scientists that know what they are doing and differentiate performance measures and let people attack energy problems the way a batter might attack an 83 mph slider down the middle of the plate.