BFTP: Last old man in the woods

Nature deficit disorder refers to the phrase coined by Richard Louv in his 2005 book Last Child in the Woods that human beings, especially children, are spending less time outdoors resulting in a wide range of behavioral problems. Wikipedia

This old man has long enjoyed giving both his children and grandchildren the opportunities to enjoy hiking, camping, and just playing in nature. Whether scuba diving with my daughter in Cozumel, hiking in Abel Tasman with my son, climbing Harney Peak or canoing Quetico with my eldest grandson, or exploring Iowa's Effigy Mounds with his little brother, I believe our time outdoors was always a healthy thing. If my offspring retain a love of being in nature, I will feel successful as a parental unit.

And while I fully subscribe to the benefits to children as outlined in Last Child in the Woods, I also think we adults benefit from getting outside and among trees and bugs and mud and such as well. Sleeping on the ground. Having a little dirt in your panacakes. Cooling your feet in a clear creek. More of us, especially those who spend an inordinate amount of time behind a computer screen, need to get out more into the elements and away from our phones and our iPads and our earbuds. Standing under a tree is good for the soul. It's good for the psyche. It's good for the bod.

Now in retirement, I am happy to have good enough health to continue hiking and biking and snorkeling and other outdoor activities. None of these activities is horrendously expensive. I continue to plan week and month long hikes. I plan cross state bicycle rides. I could even see doing the pilgrimage of Camino de Santiago. (Once, of course, all the COVID travel restrictions are lifted! I am now limiting myself to in-state adventures.)

So everyone, start now. Take a walk at lunch. Soon you will make noon hour a sacred time, a temporal space carved out for you. Take your kid to a state park. Ride a bike with a grandkids. I bet they will remember the time more than the expensive gadget you last gifted them.

Hope you have woods nearby.

Original post 8/25/15

BFTP: Intelligence Deficit Syndrome

In his post Complexity-Induced Mental Illness, Scott (Dilbert) Adams, writes:

My guess is that I’m somewhere in the top 25% of humans that can survive high complexity without going mad. And I’m starting to feel the water line touch my chin.

As just one example, this morning I decided I will never again try to watch television with other people. It got too complicated. For starters, I can never find anyone at the same point in their binge-watching of a series. Secondly, I have to figure out if a show is on a premium channel, DVR, On Demand, NetFlix, or whatever. Then I have to find the episode where I left off. Then I have to hope my technology for serving up the show works. My TV takes about five steps just to power it on. If I am watching on my computer, that’s another level of complication. Rarely does “watching television” work smoothly these days.

I noted this complexity problem many years ago. I called it IDS - Intelligence Deficit Syndrome - the ability that technology has to make a person feel less than competent. Here are some examples I gave back in 2000:

See if any of these “technologies” have given you IDS:

• Having to use over 20 numbers to make a long distance telephone call. The number string for me to dial out from a hotel using my credit card looks something like this: 9-1-800-228-8288-507-555-1234-863-037-7459-2468 I count thirty-six numbers I have to remember.
• Having a stove with burners set in a rectangular patter and knobs set in a row. I have to look at the little diagram beside the knob every time I light a burner.
• Having one car with the wiper lever on the left side of the column and one car with the wiper level on the right side of the column. I wipe when I want to dim, and I still haven’t quite got the wash to work on a consistent basis.
• Pushing a glass door when you should have pulled on the door.
• Scorching yourself because you don’t know if counterclockwise makes the water in the shower hotter or colder. This is a common vacation trauma for me.
• Knowing what fewer than 50% of the buttons do on the VCR’s remote control. I never remember how to get out of the on-screen menu. At least my deck doesn’t blink 12:00, although I haven’t changed the time to accommodate daylight savings time. Let’s see, is that fall back or fall forward. Damn!
• Worrying that dragging the little disk icon on your Mac to the trashcan icon will erase the files on the disk. For some users I’ve made an alias of the trash icon and gave it a symbol that looks like an arrow. Eases the fear.

With the possible exception of a few 8-18 year-olds, most of us at some time suffer from IDS.

 The punch line in my talks about IDS was about the garage door opener pictured above having three buttons - one to open and close the garage door and the other two to exacerbate my feelings of intelligence deficiency.

And the world only seems to grow, more, not less complex. My phone takes a 650 page book of tips by David Pogue to master; my bike computer has a dozen function controlled by the combination of pushing only two buttons; and the MicrosoftOffice toolkit gets increasingly complex with each new release.

At work, staff were faced with websites full of links to how-to instructions. Making a hiring request required mastery of one system; OKing employee leave another; checking budgets still one more. Teachers used the SIS, the CMS; and, and, and ...

It's enough to drive a person to drink.

Which was exactly Adams's point in his blog quoted above.

Is growing complexity just an inevitable upward spiral of technology use - along with its attendant psychological toll on most of us? 

Original post 6/10/15

BFTP: The $3400 piece of chalk

I once walked by a classroom where the teacher was demonstrating how to solve an algebraic equation by writing it out and talking through the steps.

On a piece of paper with a pen.

• Under a $500 document camera
• Connected to an $800 computer
• Wired to a mounted $900 projector
• Displayed on a $1200 interactive white board.

If my math skills are right, that teacher was using $3400 worth of technology to do what could have been done using a piece of chalk on an existing chalkboard.

And should each of his 30 kids have had a $300 device in hand taking notes? Would this have been a $9000 solution to a spiral ring notebook and a pencil?

So what's the moral of the story, technophiles?

Orignal post 2/11/15