There were probably too many things lost from "our" (n-1th generation) childhood too. Things like marveling at the first TVs, playing with unspent WW2 ammunition, etc. I'm sure each generation has its own things that they miss and think are detrimental to have lost, however I'm not sure that overall it's worse for the current generation. Hard to say. Growing up, I certainly would have loved having near infinite amounts of programming help available for free, instead of trying to decipher something from a 50-times photocopied manual. I guess some things get better, some worse, change is the only constant.
>Growing up, I certainly would have loved having near infinite amounts of programming help available for free, instead of trying to decipher something from a 50-times photocopied manual.
Would you be as good of a programmer today if that was true? I remember spending an entire week trying to figure out how strings worked in QBASIC, when I was in 5th grade. There was no internet and I only had the Apple IIGS Basic manual to work with. I tried and tried and tried and eventually figured out that it had something to do with those $ symbols. Eventually I got the hang of it. I guess the point is, that challenge and struggle with simple things helped me develop the attitude to overcome truly difficult things later. Maybe this is more just memories of childhood than anything..
Fair point. Though who knows, it's hard/impossible to say. For some individuals, it might have been positive, for others, perhaps negative. Overall however, I would not say that today's programmers are of worse quality, on average. (It's hard to compare however, as clearly we have a 10/20/30 year experience gap over them.)
Familiar with all in your list, plus I'd like to add a few:
Lawn darts, BB guns, wrist rockets, bottle rockets (I know you said M-80s, I had those too, but bottle rockets could be shot at friends), can of WD-40 (with requisite red straw) plus a lighter, backyard archery set.
I guess you haven't had chance to join a conference call (Zoom, BlueJeans, Hangouts ...) where someone has a fan running in their relative vicinity?
At first I also didn't know why is one of colleagues sounding "weird" - never would've thought they had their fan running, until one product manager asked "Hey X, do you have a fan running nearby?"
Instead, they get apps that can change their voice and face in thousands of ways.
I mean I get the "born in the wrong generation" vibe, but at the same time it's easy to get blinkered and not realize what came instead. In a LOT of ways, they (and we) were born in the RIGHT generation.
Part of the fun in the fan is discovering the accidental feature. You play with it and transform what it can do, unconstrained (except by natural laws).
With an app, you’re using a tool for its intended purpose. There’s little joy in discoverability because you’re following the rules the developer set.
That’s why the fan can be more fun; it’s not generational. The fun is in exploring a novel feature in something you though you thoroughly understood.
When the novelty is over with the app, you delete it (was the hour of fun worth getting your data mined?) and return to the boredom (find the next app). With the fan, you simply stop and it continues to be useful. Without you taking deliberate action, everything returns to the way it was. Except for your mind, which metaphorically expanded and wants to see what else can be used in creative ways.
I can't tell if they missed the joke about losing 10 fingers and having to stop there, or if you missed their joke that you can insert the same finger multiple times as long as you only lose a bit of a finger each time.
Plenty of people raise their kids this way. When I see parents laugh when their kids fall down instead of panic, I smile. And the best part? The kids smile too, because they're actually looking to their parents for how to react.
I'd rather raise daredevils than anxious wrecks. My best friend has a kid who's always climbing on stuff, falling down, getting hurt. That kid is going to grow up to be awesome.
Plenty of people need to rethink their parenting then. I laugh when my kid falls down.
I scream when I saw my kid trying to stick a key into an electrical outlet, and I screamed when I saw my kid trying to put a finger into a vornado fan.
Modern fans aren't the same as the box fans we grew up with. And adult would likely walk away with an emergency room bill and a bunch of stiches. A small child would likely lose a finger.
If it makes you sleep better, most household fans are designed to not severe fingers. They use plastic blades (please don't buy household fans with steel blades) which are both light and dull. You might break it but a major cut is highly unlikely.
Yeah... if anything I would have said the opposite: I remember when fans were made of metal or at least had sharp plastic blades. Now, everything's designed for some combination of cheap construction and liability reduction. (And, also, feels a bit more "disposable"... the fans my parents had when I was a kid were designed to be taken apart to fully clean, and I do remember taking them apart and running them without the covers as I was "one of those" kids ;P but I think I'm just expected to throw these plastic fans I have away if they get dusty?...) I just purposefully stuck my pinky finger into my fan on fully speed and it didn't even hurt. (I guess I'll admit that the Vornado on the other side of the room looks a bit more intimidating, but I'm not sure I could actually get my finger into it anyway... the one where I succeeded was actually really hard as, despite my fingers being pretty slender and long, I could barely find an angle where I could touch the blade.)
Ever stuck your finger in a fan with a metal blade?
I have, know what happened? Nothing.
I have a couple 80-100 year old GE fans. Putting your finger in the front doesn't do anything but push it out. Which makes sense if you look at the shape of the blades. The side and back are a little scarier, but i'm guessing unless you really jab it in fast, or get unlucky in some way the worse that will happen is some scraped up skin. They are definitely not _designed_ to sever fingers, for that you need a tablesaw. And none of them have enough rotating mass or HP that you can't stick your finger in the back and actually stop them by keeping your finger against the blades as they try and push your finger.
So, I'm not saying it cant happen, but your kid probably has a greater chance of losing a finger in your car door, or various other places like that before you have to worry about the fans. If you want to experiment with this find something approximating a finger and give it a try, maybe the woody bits of a leftover piece of asparagus.
I have a scar from a poorly-stitched cut on my finger from a "vintage" fan. I wasn't trying to stick my finger in it; i was absentmindedly directing it away from me and my finger apparently missed the cage and interacted instead with the blade!
Glad I still have that finger. It didn't feel particularly close to being severed, it just cut to the bone and then pushed my finger out of the way. Kinda NBD, but ER visits to teaching hospitals are always annoyingly slow...
I watched my dad putting on a rubber glove to pull out a single prong from a broken plug stuck in an electrical outlet. I was perhaps 2-2.5 years old. I asked why he needed the glove. My Dad with his wry Irish humor said it was to get a strong grip.
I told him that I thought I could do it without the glove. He told me to give it a try and I did. What I did was promptly fall on my ass and that's how I learned the power of electricity.
Dad was an American but strongly identified as Irish. He said my great grandfather who I never knew spoke with an Irish brogue.
When I was 16 I was working on my ham radio's linear amplifier. I was certain that I had shorted all the capacitors but one still held a charge and once again with much more force knocked me on my ass.
For days I could see the line up my arm where the electricity travelled. After that I always grounded the capacitors three times just to be sure!
I didn't put a key in an electrical outlet, but in Paris when I was a kid I was having trouble sticking the plug in the 220V outlet so I held it tight by the prongs & plugged it in & boy did that feel weird. I never did that again.
I never told my parents about it because I would have gotten yelled at.
At camp we put crickets on the electric fence, but nothing happened to them, so I grabbed the electric fence, and that was a powerful jolt. I never did that again, either.
One xmas when I was less than 5yo I jammed a knife into our 240v socket and blew the fuse on the Electricity Board side of the fusebox.
They had to send an engineer out to turn the power on so we could continue cooking the turkey.
The other is from a sibling comment.
With primary school, 10 years old, we went to the Lake District and were introduced to electeic fences by everyone holding hands with the person next to them, and the teacher explaining that he would touch the wire with the back of his hand to avoid muscle contraction.
Because I was "that kid" I was placed at the far end of the chain, where I assume it tingled more.
That was fun.
We used to put PP9 batteries on our tongues for tingles.
Just for fun.
I do recall dangerously letting .22 blanks off with a brick and a piece of brick making an entry and exit wound through the outside fleshy part of my hand.
Couldn't let mum know that I was even bleeding in case she asked why!
Touching the wires hanging out of the wall where the clock hung was fab, until I flew across the room and sat on the sofa unexpectedly.
You really do learn respect for insulation at this point.
We had a broken arcade game at after-school, every so often someone would bump it and someone would have to reach around and push the switch that wasn't properly covered by the backboard in order to turn it back on. I reached around without looking one day and shocked myself. Today, it surprises me that it was using enough current to be noticable, and that it only needed to be pressed to turn on, not stay on.
Sure I assume so, certainly ones I've been to. I mean the camp obviously wasn't using electric fences to keep the kids in, but the surrounding farmers where using electric fences to keep their cattle/horses/sheep out of the summer camp.
As a kid - I've put two really long (sweater sewing) needles into power outlet.
I guess luckily I hit earth/ground with one of them - since we had differential (RCD) circuit breaker(s) installed it just shut off electricity in the apartment.
If I managed to hit both into real live and neutral - the differential breaker wouldn't have done a thing, and I wouldn't be typing this.
Well, for both cases the risk depends entirely on the (here unspecified) circumstances. Sticking your fingers in a fan where the blades have a low moment of inertia and the motor has low stall torque? You'll be fine. Falling down and hitting your head on the edge of a rock? Could put you in hospital for weeks.
No it’s a cognitive framing thing. The concept is to make a toddlers tumbles into not a big deal for them. I think it is also in part an overreaction to the common “oh you poor baby” response which is thought to encourage children to be upset when they fall. I favor the Montessori guide approach of observing|ignoring and giving a kid a chance to make up their own mind to ask for help or deal with it themselves. The optimal approach probably depends on the kid.
Yeah, I think there's a middle ground between teaching a child to laugh at injuries and immediately having a protective, sensitive reaction. Personally, I tell my son, "You okay, bud?" in a positive tone and wait to see whether he needs comfort or is ready to get back to playing.
Everyone parents differently. I would be interested to see which culture the "laughing" reaction parents come from.
It really does depend upon the consequences of failure. Naturally, I want my children to learn to laugh at themselves when they fall off a bike.
In my case, I taught them this by laughing at myself when I fall off my bike, so I am modelling the outcome I want--them learning to try things, fail, and laugh--rather than some kind of "do as i say" style of parenting.
But even falling off bikes can have an unacceptable worst case. So we insist on helmets. It is bad parenting to allow undeveloped brains to suffer avoidable and entirely foreseeable concussions when reasonable precautions like proper protective gear exists.
I think that sums up our parenting approach: Model the risk tolerance we want to encourage, including both taking risks and managing the consequences intelligently.
You seem to assume that everything was 100% safe in previous generations. Actually it was not the case, and you don't see many 60 years old crippled by domestic accidents when they were small kids, do you?
I haven’t had as much trouble with those as they mostly do what it says on the tin. strcpy(), sprintf(), etc. all have slightly different semantics and even their “n” versions will do funky things if you don’t very carefully account for null termination. I find it way harder to use those because I have to keep remembering which of them does what regarding \0 at the end. And I guess now we have strlcpy() which is supposed to fix those issues but isn’t available on all platforms I use.