Came across the pic below and immediately thought, "My 12 year old self would have been adamant that at $796 the Atari 2600 was a bargain." In other news I now find it incredibly hypocritical to bemoan how much we spend on the kids' video games, but that still doesn't stop me.
My kids, all three of them, have had an extraordinarily luke-warm attitude towards getting their driver's licenses and based on conversations I've had with some of their friends' parents they aren't the only ones. Sure there are still plenty of kids chomping at the bit to get their licenses the day they turn 16, but the percentage of kids who don't seem too excited about it seems much higher these days than when their parents were that age. Why is that? Netscape founder and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen might provide a clue in his answer to the question of why he's so excited about the potential of car-sharing services:
Ask a kid. Take teenagers 20 years ago and ask them would they rather have a car or a computer? And the answer would have been 100% of the time they'd rather have a car, because a car represents freedom, right?
Today, ask kids if they'd rather have a smartphone or a car if they had to pick and 100% would say smartphones. Because smartphones represent freedom. There's a huge social behavior reorientation that's already happening. And you can see it through that. And I'm not saying nobody can own cars. If people want to own cars, they can own cars. But there is a new generation coming where freedom is defined by "I can do anything I want, whenever I want. If I want a ride, I get a ride, but I don't have to worry. I don't have to make car payments. I don't have to worry about insurance. I have complete flexibility." That is freedom too.
While Andreessen is talking about the future of car sharing services (which by the way seem much more likely to succeed in dense urban environments than in small urban/sprawl environments like where my family lives) he's stumbled on an important influence on our kids today – they don't need cars to connect with their friends because they have smartphones, computers and game consoles to connect. Sure their parents had phones, but with the exception of the lucky few who had their own phone lines in their bedrooms they had to share the phone with the rest of their families and had zero expectation of privacy. Today's kids don't just have private phone conversations they have the ability to have private video chats which their parents could only dream about 30 years ago.
In the case of our youngest, who is well into his 17th year of life and has no desire to get his license, he doesn't even have to leave the living room to play games with his friends. Thanks to Xbox Live he plays games with/against them all the time. His dad had to use that shared family phone to call his friends to coordinate a time to meet at the arcade to watch each other play Galactica. Once that beautiful day in the early 80s rolled around when he got his first Atari system he called his friends over so that could play Atari football head-to-head!
The point is that teens are decreasingly equating a driver's license with freedom. In fact our youngest has flat out said that he's dreading getting his license because he doesn't want the responsibility. On the other hand his dad is pushing him hard to get the damn license so he doesn't have to keep getting out of bed an hour earlier than normal in order to get the kid to school in time to catch the bus to the career center!
But I digress. There truly is a large behavioral shift going on with the younger members of our society. Thanks to the mortgage meltdown many young adults no longer assume that homeownership is all that their parents thought it was cracked up to be, and now that people have mobile networks at their disposal they're no longer socializing in the same way either. Of course kids will still want to get together to party and act like the fools they are, but how often they get together and how they get there is changing very quickly and those habits and patterns will last into their adult years. It'll be interesting to see how it all shakes out.
Best line from this speech: "If you want people to think, give them intent, not instruction." Well worth ten minutes of your day:
Lately I've seen a rash of "Easy Ways to Write a Business Book and Make a Killing" type posts on the various social media channels I frequent. You'd be right to be suspicious of anyone shilling those programs because the truth of the matter is that any book worth reading likely had a great deal of blood, sweat and tears poured into it. Scott Adams, he of Dilbert fame, offers a glimpse into his writing process and reveals how hard writing a book really is:
Part of the problem is that writing a book is the loneliest job in the world, and an immense amount of work. It's hard to get started on a project so daunting. My new book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life, took two years to write. For most of that time, no one but me saw any part of it. My publisher and I have a long history, so he lets me run free after the general concept for the book is nailed down. I probably worked for 18 months without anyone else seeing a word of it…
For nearly two years I plugged away on a collection of ideas around my theme and I have to say that none of it worked until the next-to-last round of edits. With my layered writing process, success tends to be binary. The book is a lifeless bunch of ideas until the moment it isn't. As a writer, you hope that moment comes, but you can never know for sure. This is yet another case in which my natural inclination for optimism comes in handy. I tell myself I can smell a book before I can see it. I know it's in me; I just need to write until I find it. I'm not entirely sure if I am intuitive or irrational, or even if those things are different.
If you're planning to write a book, ask yourself if you are the type of person that can spend that much time completely alone, doing unpleasant work, while receiving nothing in the way of encouragement or positive feedback along the way. You won't even know if anyone will read your book when you're done. If you answered "Yes, I can do that," I recommend these steps:
He then goes on to detail the six major steps in his writing process and they are indeed daunting. As he points out, every writer has his own method but what the good ones have in common is that their methods all include a great deal of hard work.
Shakespeare as the Bard himself would have heard it. Way cool.
According to a piece in The Week there’s a correlation between the amount of time a man spends with his kids and the size of his boys:
“Researchers found that the smaller the men’s family jewels, the more likely their wives were to report that they were involved parents–spending a lot of time feeding, diapering, and playing with their toddlers…
Men with smaller testicles may compensate by taking more care with the fewer children they do have (compared to big balled men)….
But study author James Rilling, an anthropologist at Emory University, tells cbsnews.com, ‘It could also be that when men become more involved as caregivers, their testes shrink.”
I’d argue that marriage contributes significantly to shrinkage as well.
Google took an analytical approach to promoting better eating habits at its offices and some of the common-sense approaches they came up with would work in your office or home too:
Employees were eating too much of the free candy and that, the firm surmised, might hinder efforts to keep workers healthy and happy.
What if the company kept the chocolates hidden in opaque containers but prominently displayed dried figs, pistachios and other healthful snacks in glass jars? The results: In the New York office alone, employees consumed 3.1 million fewer calories from M&Ms over seven weeks. That’s a decrease of nine vending machine-size packages of M&Ms for each of the office’s 2,000 employees…
For Google, it’s more than just the candy that employees consume. In another case, the company tried to get workers to drink more water. So it stashed bottled water on eye-level shelves and behind clear glass. It then put sugary sodas on the bottom shelves of refrigerators and behind frosted glass. After several weeks, water consumption increased 47 percent while the calories consumed by drinking sugary beverages fell 7 percent…
But even the plates at the food bars have been Google-ized. To get people to eat smaller portions, the staff experimented with plate sizes, providing a big one and a small one. Nearly one-third of employees chose the smaller plates and didn’t go back for more servings. When Google posted the result in cafeteria signs, the overall use of small plates increased a further 50 percent.
Quite frankly in our house the best solution is to just not buy any of the stuff that's bad for you because not one of us has an ounce of willpower when it comes to food.
A fascinating post over at the Forsyth County Public Library North Carolina Room's blog explains why Shattalon Drive is Forsyth County's most unique road name:
“Shattalon” is not a legitimate word, rather, “Shattalon” is a unique word, which means that somebody made it up and it is applicable in only one case, to the road in Forsyth County which bears its name. It appears nowhere else in the world…
At that time, the section of road between Robinhood Road and the Yadkinville highway was usually referred to as Flynt Road, because it led to the Flynt land along the Yadkinville road. But he noted the trend that most roads were being named for the activities that occurred along them. Since there were several dairy farms on his stretch of the road, he envisioned it becoming Jersey Road, or Guernsey Road or something like that. But he was a progressive thinker and wanted his neighborhood to project a more modern aura, with a unique road name that everyone would find pleasing to speak.
There were only eight households on that three mile stretch of road…Sapp, Hines, Adams, Shields, Barnes, Petree, Cartner and Brown, the last three dairy farmers. So he wrote their names and began thinking. He experimented with combining the letters of their last names to find an appropriate name for the road and came up with a unique word, which was adopted…Shattalon…a unique word
His name was Carl Sapp, born in 1905 to Thomas Jackson and Minnie Norman Sapp in the Mount Tabor community of Forsyth County.
Map indicating the road. Source Forsyth County Public Library North Carolina Room blog.
A researcher at the University of Virginia has created a fascinating color-coded map showing where we live by race using 2010 census data. Below are screen shots of the Winston-Salem area and the Piedmont Triad:
Elon Musk's proposal for whisking people from point A to point B via pneumatic tubes isn't as revolutionary as you'd think. In fact, a New Yorker built a working prototype in 1867 that apparently thousands of people tried. Below is an excerpt from a blog post that looks at the various uses of pneumatic tubes in the 19th century and here's a link to the Bloomberg article about the working prototype:
Interestingly, a pneumatic tube system in London ended up playing a crucial role during the telegraphy era: Undersea signals originating from the US and making it into the UK didn’t have enough oomph left to make it into noisy London, so the telegraphs were printed out on paper and sent into London via the pneumatic tube system. In addition, like with Paris’ extensive system, there were local tube stations in many neighborhoods into which you placed your cylinder. That cylinder could carry messages of course, but it could also carry small physical items as well, including food and even, according to some recorded cases, proposals plus engagement rings. Kind of like a primitive Amazon Prime operating atop of a steampunk Internet system that could deliver physical items!
Befuddled 