Ball Knowledge

I want everyone to think about someone they admire for something great they did, invented, or changed. Now if all of those people were put together to see common traits, two traits would emerge above the rest: courage and disobedience. No matter what time period or industry, it’s visible in those who strive for change. Starting off with the science industry, Gilbert N. Lewis, who in 1916 proposed the idea of the covalent bond and the Lewis model, which were both met with skepticism, but by not listening to skeptics—who in this case were the “norm”—he was able to make his idea a revolutionary chemistry concept that we used a lot as a foundational topic in AP Chem; going all the way to the sports industry, the tennis legend Billie Jean King, who in 1970 boycotted against the pay gap in the tennis world, leading to equal pay in tennis today, where at the most recent Grand Slam both players won five million dollars. These are just a few examples, but the depth and time this idea goes back ...

  In a tennis match, winning comes from dozens of small points that eventually add up.In high school tennis, a win can take as few as 48 points but can go as far as 150 points. That’s more than triple, but either way, stressing over every single one doesn’t make sense . If your opponent hits an insane shot past you that you can’t do anything about, he still needs to win at least 47 more points. Whenever I play tennis, I think about Roger Federer’s Dartmouth speech: “What percentage of the points do you think I won in my career? Only 54%.” Him being one of the greatest players of all time yet only winning every other point and still earning 20 Grand Slam titles shows the power of his mindset: “It’s only a point.”  Federer’s commencement speech at Dartmouth had one major goal: to have graduates understand that things will not always go their way, but what’s important is how they see the bigger picture and keep moving. On the other hand, David Foster Wallace’s This Is Water com...

I never realized how much went behind memorials until I gained so much ball knowledge about them from class this week. Growing up whenever I traveled to many of these popular memorials, I always understood the purpose of mourning those who lost their lives or honoring important people. However, I never understood all the factors that go into creating those emotions. The environment, colors, materials and symbols all go so far in increasing the depth of the memorial. Seeing all these factors that the designer has to think of often creates multiple meanings and ways for people who are mourning to grieve and have a way to express their emotions. Through my research on the Hiroshima memorial in Hiroshima, Japan for the victims of the atomic bomb, I was able to gain a new perspective that a simple memorial does not mean a simple meaning. The memorial set up the viewer to view everything in a perspective that encapsulates the meaning of the memorial with minimal words. With one line about th...