Geometry and the War Between the Sexes

On Mondays Camera Girl is in charge of Princess Sack of Potatoes.  Which makes me her errand boy for anything that needs doing.  So today she wanted me to get the memory card from the game camera so she could show her protégé what kind of animals had eaten the food she stole from me.  Now, sure, the scraps she gives the wild beasts living in the forest are probably not premium protein anymore.  Bits of chicken fat and skin and whatever doesn’t end up on the menu for me probably shouldn’t arouse my sense of outrage.  But in these days of skyrocketing food prices, I’m acutely aware of threats to my survival.

But I digress.  I brought the memory card in and popped it in the card reader slot on my laptop and reviewed the numerous files.  But what we discovered was that Camera Girl had miscalculated the line of sight of the camera.  She threw her largesse too close to the camera’s location and thus the viewpoint was mostly above the location of the food.  Therefore, mostly what we saw were the animals before and after they were feeding and typically at the edge of the photo and moving away from the camera.

I respectfully brought this situation to Camera Girl’s attention.  But she said she did what I told her to do.  I carefully and calmly reminded her that I showed her the line where the camera would see the action but assumed she wouldn’t put the food right below the camera because it was elevated from the ground.  She told me what she thought about my assumption using a popular breakdown of the spelling of ass-u-me.

I thought this distinctly unfair.  But what I decided was to provide her with a clear target.  I said, “Do you see the pole banged into the ground?”  She said yes.  I continued, “Do you see the rainwater drain that ends near the pole?”  Again, she said yes.  I finished, “The line segment formed by the pole on one end and the end of the drain pipe as the other endpoint is the acceptable area to put the food.  Do you follow me?”  She said no.  I slowly and calmly said, “Huh?”  She said, “That’s not clear.  How will I know if it’s on that line?”

I remained calm.  I could see I was dealing with a non-Euclidean geometer and she was trying to involve me in a topological debate.  Therefore, I changed tack.  “Imagine the two points I said were the endpoints.  Instead think of them as two opposite points on the circumference of a circle.  In your mind envision a circle with those two points on the circumference.  Anyplace inside that circle will be an acceptable target for your animal slop.”  She shook her head and walked away.

So why did I write about this?  Well, I think it represents a microcosm of the male/female dichotomy.  Men use logical simplifications to model the world.  We like reasoning our way through problems.  Women want simple concrete rules to follow.  They don’t want to discuss theory.  At least that is the way women used to be.  Nowadays I’m not sure what they are.  Maybe they’ve become like men.

But even if they’ve adopted some of the practices of men I doubt if they’ve changed their nature.  There is a difference in the way the brains of men and women work.  We go about things in different ways.  And from my point of view, I think there is an advantage to this dichotomy.  These two ways of looking at things provide checks on each other.  Too much theory can lead to error based on differences between the map and the territory.  But at the same time without the imaginative leap and the simplification that modelling can provide many problems would never be solved.

I started to expound on this dichotomy to Camera Girl.  She told me the garbage pails needed to go out on the road today and walked away.  And so it goes.