When I was young, there was no designated driver. The one who fell down the least on the way back to the car drove home. Government laws and police enforcement did not correct the misconception that drunk driving was OK. Repeated education did – and yes, some are too stupid to learn and go to jail.

As you can see from the statistics presented in the NHTSA document, accidents caused by distracted driving have remained constant. If you actually read the document you will see that accidents caused by phones have gone up a few percent but that means other causes have gone down. Most likely this means some percent of drivers are easily distracted and will be distracted by something – today it’s the phone, yesterday it was the cigarette lighter.

Sometimes we do stupid things in life. Sometimes those stupid things are behind the wheel. I’ve personally drifted across a lane of traffic while reading a map on my steering wheel. That was years ago (pre-GPS) and I was fortunate the other drivers were alert and their horns corrected my error. So, yes, playing with your GPS while driving is dangerous but my personal experience is that it is less dangerous than trying to read a map.

Many things in life are risky and sometimes we can be endangered by the aggression or poor judgment of others. Yep, that’s part of life so I try to stay awake and alert but I don’t go running to the government to protect me. The government should, as I said, educate and mentor and penalize those too stupid to learn. Government protection in the form of intervention in what I can do or what others can do is, at least for me, not wanted. I prefer to take the risk and enjoy my freedom because, some things my friend are more important than being safe.

You must be mistaken. Washington is here to help. Clearly, the graph of distracted driving incidences over time has a hockey stick-like curve beginning in 2011 and 2012 where it approaches 100%.

Regrettably, I am driving a 1968 Karmann Ghia these days and I think the in-dash GPS wont be compatible with my car. I am planning to install an electric shock device to keep me from turning the radio dial while driving for everyone’s protection.

-Mark

I was born in 1986 and my parents wouldn’t let me have a chemistry set sadly. We lived in apartments so I guess blowing up your house is one thing, but blowing up the apartment building was another. This didn’t stop me from having lots of fun blowing stuff up in the woods and what not. Sometime in 1996 we got our first computer. I was given free reign on it, so I learned how it worked on both a software and hardware level. Later I talked my parents into letting me get model rockets and a gas powered R/C car. Building that car, which was literally in 3000 pieces when, I got it taught me a lot about mechanics especially when I took apart the engine. They look simple but they are not. I also had an electronics set, which taught me a lot of the skills I use today.

Some of my fun projects included, exploiting a-shell to make a calculator virus, breaking down parental protections on my GFs computer after finding we were being monitored(actually tricked the server into letting me upgrade to the full version free), building custom rockets from various parts sometimes intentionally wrong(dangerous but awesome), making one working playstation from the parts of two broken ones of different models, building my computer, building a r/c car, and pretty much breaking everything I could to figure out how it worked.

The issue is not the chemistry set. The issue is kids don’t leave the Virtual World anymore. If you ever saw the anime series Serial Experiments: lain(1998), we are almost there. Hopefully no weird cult will start making people commit suicide to connect. However unlikely it sounds, it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest, but I digress. The point is that the constant bombardment of social media interactions and online video games, has stolen the time when they can be alone with their thoughts, tinker, and READ. They don’t read anything anymore and despite having google at their fingertips they don’t even think to ask the questions. Furthermore, the kids are encouraged to be lazy. That R/C car that took me over a week to build is now ready to run out of the box. Same goes for the model rockets. The OS is starting to do more and more for you and most complexity, even in building systems, is gone. The latest Playstation and Xbox cannot be opened easily and for valid reasons software, even on calculators, has become more secure. These improvements are convenient but hobbies are supposed to be challenging. You had a chemistry set, I had my collection of hobbies, the common thread is tinkering. Tinkering is what is being denied and what needs to be encouraged. If you have a kid give him an arduino, some motors, some sensors, and the power of google and see what he makes. You might find its just as impressive as your chemistry experiments, assuming the drive isn’t dead already from the aforementioned problem.

I personally am very happy to have grew up on the edge of this change. The kids these days are probably going to all have serious mental problems from Vitamin D deficiency, due to lack of exposure to sunlight. You talk about climbing trees and riding bikes, both are rarely seen anymore as the arrays of LEDs consume them.

As far as the regulating people from themselves, totally agree, it must be stopped. The laws are unenforceable and once breaking minor laws is common place, society will start to crumble. Look at Greece, it is practically in their culture to cheat on taxes.

Our final year chemistry teacher spent the first four weeks of our first term teaching us all to make explosives safely. He was of the opinoin if you had gotten this far in chemistry then you were (the boys especially) going to try making explosives after school, He wasn’t wrong and all of us have our sight, fingers and toes despite making gun cotten, amonium tri-iodide, thermite and other interesting substances. Knowing when to stay and fight and when to run is a valuable life skill, regardless of the situation.

The day that we see a VIRTUAL chemistry lab in a school, where VIRTUAL chemicals are mixed together in a VIRTUAL beaker and the reaction is animated on a webpage, well it’s probably time that we sent all our students outside to play.

Thanks for a fun article

Ahh, you got me foaming at the mouth again. I should stop now.

Anyway…
You being lucky to have all your fingers is exactly what I’m talking about. I remember one event where I had on heavy gloves, a heavy winter jacket – backwards, safety goggles, and a heavy scarf covering any possible exposed flesh on my face and head. That was my protection in case the experiment went badly. As it turned out, it only caught fire and blackened a cement floor. But, like you, I have all 10 fingers and both eyes. Note that one of the fingers hasn’t worked very well in years – not because of a chemistry experiment but because a hitter tried to remove it from my hand while I was trying to block a volleyball. My point is precisely that. You are always at risk of being injured unless you sit on a couch and watch TV all day – even then a meteor could get you. We are giving up too much in our headlong attempt to circumvent nature and make life absolutely safe. Many people, not all, have a basic nature such that they will not have a full life unless they have adventure, experimentation, and risk. The modern rules are boxing in and frustrating these people and we are losing their creativity and massive contributions to society. All this to make the whiners and scaredy-cats feel better while they watch some reality TV show and eat nachos.

Ahh… foaming at the mouth again… time to say goodbye.

For locating a file on my (NTFS) harddisk I use a tool called “Everything” (bit of a strange name), it’s incredibly fast if you have a clue about the file name.
For searching file contents or on FAT filesystems I use “Filelocator Lite”, which allows even searching for regular expressions and offers a preview window to show where it found something in the file, so you can check without opening the file – great.

As for calculators – I use “PhyxCalc”, it behaves more like a scratchpad than a calculator, it’s fabulous (though only available in German – but how hard can it be to use a calculator). It can also calculate using units, so if you have a hex value of seconds and want to know it in minutes just type something like:
7FF_hs -> min and it will tell you: =34.11666666666667min (_h for hex, s for seconds, -> for convert to, and min for minutes)
Or: 3,6V/20kOhm->mA =0,18mA
It’s the best calculator I’ve used so far. It won’t do rocket science, but for that you probably want to use rocket science tools anyway.

The thing is though, Windows doesn’t feel as a complete pack if you have to install software for basic functions…

Many good points. Don’t even get me started on toll roads…

One comment: I noticed the yellow highlighter on the scanned book page… I smiled when I saw the phrase “… end of the carbon rod gets as hot as 3760 degrees Centigrade” *wasn’t* highlighted — I mean, that’s 6800 degrees Fahrenheit (!!!). Granted, it’s probably a very small region, but still… (Then again, to a human, anything over a few hundred degrees is probably all in the category of “ouch ouch OUCH!”)

I’m pretty sure that many of the chemistry experiments I did in high school many years ago are now verboten. I remember some fun ones with magnesium, others with steel wool, others with hydrochloric & sulfuric acids… don’t even get me started on the self-funded pyrotechnic experiments I did during summer breaks – in retrospect, I’m probably lucky to have all my fingers (not mention hearing & vision, close calls there too).