Re: If you can't calculate the angles on a 50-cent coin...
It may have been in a few places, but I seem to recall it best from _Starship_ _Troopers_ - "... a man who doesn't know maths isn't a man, he's merely a domesticated animal who has learned to wear shoes and not make messes in the house." (Or something in that vein.) This was given as the reasoning for the protagonist to continue to study - at least his maths - when he was sure he's muffed his 'prentice cruise as a "Temporary Third Lieutenant" and was heading back to post.
While I am somewhat inclined to argue that philosophy is wholly useless (it depends on just what sort of philosophy we are talking about here - logic, symbolic or otherwise, is always useful; and solipsism makes for wonderful extended sessions of mental gymnastics...) my mother and grandfather (her father) were of two different - yet related - schools of thought on basic education:
- (Mum) If you can read, you can figure out anything else you need to know. (For this reason, I was taking the newspaper to /kindergarten/ on a daily basis, because I never have napped well. The teacher stopped quizzing me the third day, because I was reading, understanding, and retaining.)
- {Granddad) If you can do maths, you can figure out anything else you need to know (he'd kickstarted me, extended sessions in his workshop with his textbooks or in the city library saw me working my way through first-year calculus by age twelve.)
Another quote from Heinlein, speaking in the person of Lazarus Long: "A man should be able to: " (at which followed some two pages of disparate tasks which a man ought to be able to do well. This was closed with what I have come to call 'Heinlein's Dictum') "Specialization is for insects."
This last has been a guiding principle of life for me.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
