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Here are my non-predictions for 2010 (things that are guaranteed not to occur this year):
(1) Popular musicians will realize that Auto-Tune is a waste of time, and rather than sounding “cool,” they sound depressingly similar to every other Reggae-imitating popular musician on the planet. Complex harmonies and skill will mark a new breed of popular musicians.
(2) Political and religious debate, regardless of the slant or extremes of one’s viewpoints, will be thoughtfully and factually engaged in. Conspiracy theorists will look at the hard facts and science, and admit that they were completely wrong about everything from Obama’s birth location to the moon landings to 100,000-mile motor oil.
(3) Everyone filing taxes will check the box on his or her IRS return that reads, “Check here to donate $1 to the Presidential campaign fund.”
(4) Hillary Clinton will apologize for being unjustifiably rude to the student at whom she lashed out in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Rush Limbaugh will admit he is disgustingly pompous and makes conservatives look terrible. Jessie Jackson will promise he will never run for political office or try to get a peace treaty signed in the Middle East.
(5) Congress and the Senate will refuse to allocate pork into any legislation, and will account for every line of every regulation passed, determining to do what is right for the country as a whole.
(6) Peter Ruckman will unequivocally recommend the ESV for adults, and the NLT for younger children.
(7) Hollywood will create films, rather than remake them.
(8) The American legal system will espouse justice; the guilty will be appropriately punished, and the innocent freed. Nuisance and other patently ridiculous lawsuits or compensation claims will be declined by every lawyer who is presented with one, regardless of the fee offered or potential winnings.
(9) NASA will be given more money than the combined budgets of the film industry.
(10) Palestine will be given an independent state; in return, the Palestinian Authority will effectively police its own charges, and terrorist attacks on Israel will cease.
(11) Apple will slash prices on all its products, and open its operating system to run on virtually any computer. Steve Jobs will announce, “Yes, our products are good, but you people are stupid to pay so much for them.”
(12) Massachusetts drivers will become polite and demure.
(13) Soccer will replace American football as the most popular American sport, as millions of American football fans realize that watching an hour of commercials and another hour of people walking around doing nothing is not nearly as exciting as a real game in which the clock never stops.
(14) Sports fans will no longer claim participation in, nor credit for, their favorite teams’ victories. (“We” will not win or lose.)
(15) Americans will stop whining, and realize just how fabulous a country we have. Further, they will universally take an active part in its politics, and realize that political and community participation and individual responsibility should occur far before and in far greater degree than complaining.
(16) StarCraft II will be released. (Just kidding … I think.)
Which of your early childhood toys had an impact on your adult life? Do you think the toys were wonderful because of your innate personality or skills, or do you think the toys helped get those skills going?
That got me thinking about the toys of my youth, and it probably comes as no surprise that most of the ones I most treasured involved building in some way or another. Of course, now I do more “building” with software than anything else, as programming applications is in many ways very much like building things out of Lego, but programming hasn’t eclipsed my lifelong devotion to Lego.
The toolbox my dad gave me at age 2.
One of the first toys I was given wasn’t really a toy at all, but rather a toolbox full of real tools (some of which I still have, just as I still have the toolbox). “How it happened was like this …” When I was born, I was diagnosed as being mentally retarded. My early foster care seemed to confirm this (due to lack of stimulation). My adoptive father declared, “Well, if he’s not going to be able to work with his brain, we’ll teach him to work with his hands.” So, for Christmas, five months after turning two, I was given a set of real tools. Screwdrivers, a folding rule, a hammer (the one thing that wouldn’t fit in the toolbox), and a pair of pliers. I have very early memories of getting in trouble for taking the screws out of the bottoms of the kitchen chair cushions and losing them. I was allowed to take the handles off the kitchen cabinets. When I first started, I wasn’t strong enough to get the screws tightened well, and the handles would often come off in my mother’s hand.
Good, old fashioned, gravity-fed Hot Wheels® track.
Hot Wheels® track was another great building toy. Although I often drooled over pictures of the Hot Wheels® super charger, I had untold hours of fun constructing dual gravity-fed tracks and racing my favorite cars, all the while developing a better understanding of rudimentary physics. Even more longed-for than the turbocharger was a loop; I even tried building one myself when I was a little older, but couldn’t get it to work right.
The Playskool Take Apart Car
The Playskool Take-Apart Car provided many hours of screwdriver-and-wrench assembly experience. The axles were large screws. The headlights and taillights used smaller screws and nuts, as did the wooden sides of the car. One of the trickier parts was getting the tabs for the hood and trunk in the holes when assembling the sides. The one drawback to this was the lack of interchangeability of the screws, although the headlight, taillight, and side screws were all the same size, and the bolt holding the removable engine block in matched the screws that held the wheels and spare tire on, although the bolt head itself wouldn’t fit in the same places. The jack provided (the middle tool visible in the photo) was completely useless. As I was writing this, my wife Nichelle told me that she had one of these, too. These days, I’d recommend Lego Toolo as the nearest equivalent experience.
I had a 100-piece bag of colored wooden blocks.
Wooden blocks are an essential childhood building toy. Generally, my goal was to build the largest tower I could, often getting it to my own height, or nearly so.
Tinkertoys have now made a bit of a comeback.
The only real problem with Tinkertoys was that I didn’t have enough of them. The small set I had just wasn’t enough to build the dreamworthy models pictured on the can. Part of this was supply. I know it’s impossible to believe, but stores in the 1970s were typically horribly supplied. (Computerized supply chains, a need to compete with online retailers, and cheap manufacture and import have radically changed this.) My father and I went out to a number of stores one day to find more Tinkertoys, to no avail. (He bought me a Tonka excavator instead, a conciliatory splurge I’m sure my mother would have never tried.)
This isn’t quite the same, but is not entirely dissimilar to the giant Erector set I loved.
One favorite building toy I haven’t been able to find a picture of was a giant, plastic Erector set, which came with a large, cloth storage bag. My favorite thing to build was a large robot, using gears as eyes and a short beam for a mouth. The large, red gears supplied also served as hubs for the wheels, and they didn’t fit together very well, either seeming hard to fit or too loose. The e-rings provided to put over axles were brittle, and easily broken. To be honest, I was never the best builder with this; I remember working with my dad one some of the pictured models, but really did enjoy it.
The voltmeter my Dad built to test mats for automatic doors.
During my childhood, and until his retirement my father worked as a maintenance man (later exclusively in refrigeration) for Fernandez Supermarkets. One of the things he built out of an old cheese box was the voltmeter pictured above, which was used to test the circuits on the mats that used to trigger the automatic doors. Another non-toy, this was essentially “mine,” and had an internal 9-volt battery, which allowed me to experiment with simple circuits, conductivity, and voltage. (My kids currently play with this on occasion.)
Then, when I was 5, my world changed.
My first Lego set, the #480 rescue helicopter
My neighbor-and-friend Chuck Altwein gave me my first Lego set just before Christmas, the #480, Rescue Helicopter pictured above. This was followed by the general building set #125 from my parents. Another Christmas brought #190, the largest Lego set at the time, which I only decades later realized was actually a farm (it was all about parts, really). Another Christmas or two produced some of my other favorites, Universal Building Set #404, the Space Cruiser (my first “classic space” Lego set), the Galaxy Explorer a year later, and later still Lego’s first castle.
Although I got away from Lego in very late high school and through college, I would jump back into them in 1998. While I was well-and-truly-grown, Lego and MIT developed the most accessible consumer robotics platform made up to that time, the Lego MindStorms Robotic Invention System 1.0. I was blessed to have the now-defunct Construction Site store in Waltham accept a phone order and deliver one of the first 50,000 nearly-impossible-to-get units released in the United States at rollout. Now I’ve actively continued my Lego collecting for years, and am a proud owner of the MindStorms NXT, and use it in coaching First LEGO League and teaching robotics with other self-created programs (such as Robot Sumo) at the Academy for Science and Design, a public charter school in Merrimack, New Hampshire, where my son Isaac attends.
If you’ll pardon the indulgence, I’ll return to my original questions:
Which of your early childhood toys had an impact on your adult life? Do you think the toys were wonderful because of your innate personality or skills, or do you think the toys helped get those skills going?
For those of you who have wondered what my electronic workspace (and day) look like.
This is what my workspace typically looks like. It’s spread across two monitors, each running at a resolution of 1280 x 1024. (Click through to see it at full resolution.)
The Telegraph, reported a few days ago on research published in the Journal of Experimental and Social Psychology that proves exactly why my wife thinks I’m an idiot:
[R]esearch shows men who spend even a few minutes in the company of an attractive woman perform less well in tests designed to measure brain function than those who chat to someone they do not find attractive.
Nichelle (right) and I (left) on a recent date.
We can all picture in our heads the caricature of the stammering young man whose failed attempts at communicating intelligently actively destroy him in the eyes of the beauty he is trying to impress.
As it turns out, it actually happens. Researchers at Radboud University in The Netherlands experimentally supported the idea that cognitive function drops in males inversely proportional to how attractive they find the female with which they are interacting. They “carried out the study after one of them was so struck on impressing an attractive woman he had never met before, that he could not remember his address when she asked him where he lived.”
Clearly, my normally-well-functioning brain is doomed when faced with the overwhelming beauty of my fabulously stunning wife, Nichelle. I don’t have a chance of impressing her, and come off looking like a moron!
And now the research proves it.
(Thanks to Nichole DiVietro for pointing out which “Disney Couple” Nichelle and I most resemble.)
Quite some time ago, I started corresponding electronically with a young man in Tamale, Ghana, who wanted to expand his horizons and get to know people from around the world. This was possible via a computer center that the local embassy provides.
A high school graduate with decent grades, Amin desperately wanted to attend university. However, financially, this was out of the question for his family. A less attractive but still reasonable option was the Tamale Polytechnic school. Several months after we’d started communicating, he asked if I could help pay the tuition for the polytechnic, which costs about $650 for the three-year program. Tuition has to be paid up front.
Amin Issah, Ghana
There are a couple of things to bear in mind here: Americans have the reputation for being extremely wealthy the world over. In Mexico, for example, we are often stereotyped as having montañas de oro (mountains of gold). The other thing to remember is that Ghana is well known as one of the centers of internet fraud, especially so called “friendship” scams. I did a lot of investigation to see if everything was on the up-and-up, which is difficult in a developing country. I quickly came to learn how much I depend on the Internet for verifying just about everything, and this was impossible for much of Ghana’s infrastructure. I even called to see if I could pay the school directly, and it cannot be done.
But, other than due diligence, I had no reason to distrust Amin, and his work for the past six months has completely borne out my trust. I also felt this would be a good way to show the love of Christ in an unexpected and unanticipated way.sowever, I simply couldn’t afford to help him out completely. But he did have an uncle who was willing to foot half the bill, and I had some extra cash I could put into the second half. Amin has completed one semester at T’Poly, as it’s sometimes called, and managed to get all As and Bs. (I told him I expected As next semester.) Partway through I sent enough cash to cover a bicycle so he could get to the school and back for early classes (hitchhiking was unreliable, and the school is about 20km from his house). However, his grades were good enough for him to get chosen for a short, special field program in Navrongo, about 5 hours away by bus.
His work in the field program was evaluated well enough, and he has been offered an entry into the Land Management and Real Estate baccalaureate program at the University for Development Studies in Tamale.
To do this, he needs 597 GHC (Ghanian Cedis), about $409 by September 1. This isn’t that much money, except when compared to what I actually have at the moment.
Until now, I haven’t even told people about this unusual missions project, opting to see quietly and unobtrusively how God would work. Now I believe it is time to project this to a larger audience, who also might be able to help.
Update (September 3, 2009):
I was finally able to get through by phone to the University office in Tamale … and they confirmed that Amin was on the acceptance list as a Freshman student in the program. (I already had scans of his acceptance letter, so this was just a formality.)
I’ve received a couple of generous donations from our at-work small group Bible study that helped immensely with the money I sent to Amin mid-day yesterday. Ghana is on GMT, so it was nearly closing time when he got to the bank. There were many students there trying to do the same thing … so he was able to get the Western Union transfer and have the bank keep it to avoid carrying around such a large sum of money, but he wasn’t able to pay his tuition until this morning.
Amin wanted me to pass this along to you all: GOD help them tooo when they in a bondage like how i was and u all came together and resqued me through the powers of GOD. (His spelling is usually excellent; he obviously in a hurry.)
Amin leaves on Saturday to take up residence at the university in the city of Wa. He’ll complete the on-site admissions process on Monday. After that, he will need to pay his residence fees and medical fees, about another $175.
He is very excited and very grateful for our help.
I am grateful as well—the contributions made so far are a big difference for me. (Of course, I’ll be happy to accept further donations.)
Our unnamed west Manchester Thursday evening small group study (a ministry of Heritage Baptist Church) will be starting up again tomorrow, after several weeks in hiatus, and we’ll be studying Francis Chan’s Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a Relentless God. Below is a brief YouTube introduction with the author.
I suppose if we were to call ourselves anything, it might be “RNA,” or, “Recovering Neofundamentalists Anonymous,” as we try to get out of the “Christian bubble” that many of us (especially me) have spent decades in, and seek to better follow the Savior.
We meet at the Gagnon’s house, which is actually in the exact geographic center of our congregation, or was the last time Erik DiVietro plotted it out.
Running a small group Bible study for the past year has been fascinating. Pastor Erik helped train me in running one, which was a challenge, because (by his own admission), he tends to take over all discussions. Nichelle will tell you I have the same tendency, so for me one of the most challenging things as a leader is to just shut up, and allow silences while people ponder the discussion questions, and give them time to come up with answers or further discussion.
Other challenges come up from time to time. One of my more recent decisions was to outlaw political conversation. Not only was this distracting (although we’re quite informal), to be honest I ultimately came to the conclusion that I was too often getting ticked off by the ridiculous nonfactual, counterfactual, and noncontextual statements that seem to flood the political arena, regardless of one’s political preferences. Let’s just say some of our attendees learn far enough right, politically to make me look like a liberal by comparison. (I suppose I should blame all the NPR I listen to.)
Always, I am thrilled by the insights and discussions we’ve had, and find the small group format to be a particularly rewarding way to study the issues and doctrine presented in God’s Word.
NaNi often makes sure that I stick to my diet, “No cheating, Dad,” and helps encourage me when exercising. (Nichelle sets the diet and the overall schedule; you should consider using her if you need a very reasonably priced personal fitness trainer.)
Last night NaNi rode her bike with me while I ran two miles, as she often does.
NaNi - My Little Personal Trainer
Everyone really enjoyed seeing her out riding, with me running along right behind her. I got comments like, “She’ll make sure you keep your speed up,” and everyone we passed greeted us with big grins.
On the final block of the two miles, I sprinted ahead of her. As I passed her, she called out, “Now, that’s what I like to see!”
As almost all of you probably know, New Hampshire is facing major budget issues. The New Hampshire State Senate is currently trying to grapple with the deteriorating situation as state incoming revenue declines. This week, an amendment was proposed and approved in the Senate Finance Committee that would cap total charter school enrollment in the state for the coming 2009-2010 year at a level of 850, which is below current enrollment levels.
If this limitation stands as the bill moves through a full NH State Senate floor vote (likely this coming Wednesday June 3) and the following conference committee, this would be a MAJOR issue for the school. Depending on the exact level allocated to the school, this could mean ALL accepted incoming students would have to have their acceptance reversed, and it could even mean that there would have to be a “reverse lottery” to eliminate existing ASD students.
We strongly encourage you to take action on this issue, as it will affect your child’s educational choices and ASD’s quality.
One action you can take is to send mail to your elected representatives. The following link can be used to do this: http://tinyurl.com/lmku2l
Some parents may also want to call their representatives. While this can potentially be helpful, it is also very important that you express support constructively, perhaps with personal stories, but DO NOT ARGUE with them! Remember that the legislators are dealing with a very major set of issues around funding, and are facing many difficult decisions at this time. Being hostile and/or combative can easily create irate representatives, which would hurt much more than help and can be very hard to reverse. Please only call if you are sure you can keep the conversation positive.
The ASD and other charter schools have been through this before, but it has always required work to get the legislature to see our side. Right now, we are all working through the NH Chartered Public School Association at all levels of government to make sure that this amendment does not get passed into law. While we are working hard with all the charter schools, we will not know the final outcome until the end of June. We will do our best to keep you informed as we move forward.
Kent Glossop
Board Chairman, Academy for Science and Design
Chris Franklin
Director, Academy for Science and Design
Here’s what I added to the petition I submitted:
Please help public education continue to improve in New Hampshire by rejecting the proposed cap on charter school enrollment.
Our son is attending the Academy for Science and Design Public Charter School in Merrimack. We have seen firsthand just how much he has learned at such a place, which is far more challenging than the private school he attended previously.
A couple of days ago, Naomi said, “Dad, I made this for you!”
Naomi’s “Whimsical” Drawing—Click to see full detail.
Inspired by Hook, Naomi drew people parachuting from a burning airplane. Guess who doesn’t have a parachute? (I love the little frown face she put on me.)
, the biography of 
. Below is a brief YouTube introduction with the author.
, which I highly recommend.
