Chemistry sets, m-80s, model rockets, playgrounds, coaster brakes, whatever kids did before "play dates" and anything intricate with small parts.
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..
* Windows 95 removed all thought of the user as a programmer, killing things like QBasic.
* Apple was doing likewise, even killing Hypercard.
* The web wasn't in its prime yet, limited to HTML 2.0 and 3.2, and really lousy JavaScript.
* Even electronics was tough, since DIP parts were being replaced with SMT, and the service manual was starting to become a relic, but things like Arduino and RPi didn't exist yet, and making PCBs was $$$$$.
* Shop classes were on the decline in schools, but makerspaces weren't in yet.
I feel bad for kids growing up then. Short of installing a Linux distribution, kids were left out in the cold for being anything other than consumers of technology.
There was really a golden age in the eighties and early nineties, and we seem to be in another golden age right now.
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.
Love you Mom and Dad! 70s were great!
One uses the name of a toy in a derogatory manner, the other is a straight-up derogatory term for a group of people.
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?"
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.
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.
Is there a word in English which exclusively means hand-digits or fingers+thumbs or digits-toes?
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.
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.
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.
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...
Where is the fun in that? I say sharpen the blades and make it a real teaching moment.
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.
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!
At least, not so far. I don't plan on finding out if it really is "third time lucky" lol
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.
What? Why?
But these are not the lethal electric fences that you see in trashy science fiction movies.
These are specially designed to put out a high voltage pulse which gives a nasty bite, but is basically harmless.
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.
No guts no glory.
Obviously you don't laugh with big falls and broken arms.
But from my own childhood I can remember that kids are not subtle - if they are mocking you, you will know (names, finger-pointing, jokes, etc.). Whereas if a friend laughs with you about a silly fall, you get a completely different kind of scenario played out.
Coming back to your initial point, and being blunt: showing your children that clumsy falls can be funny, and not to panic about them, does not increase their cruelty towards other kids.
Everyone parents differently. I would be interested to see which culture the "laughing" reaction parents come from.
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.
After that, it's up to them.
We need a fan, and optional air filter. Not sure what other options there are...
At various ages we wondered if the kids could put their fingers in and touch the blades, and so prompted them to (while the fans were off, of course).
At no point could the kids' fingers get to the blades. Either their fingers were too short, or, eventually, too fat.
It's noisier than expected, but on low it's quiet enough and fine for our entire house during "normal" bad pollution days (PM 2.5 between 100 and 300). During severe smoke from wildfires (PM 2.5 > 300), I'm OK with it being noisy.
But I got my refurbed on Woot for like, $100, not the $450 brand new they wanted, which is lunacy.
The dyson looked cool, but the heat function was kinda useless unless you sat right next to it. i might get another one without the heat.
The medify seemed to work well, but it felt like it was poorly made. I kept thinking I could probably diy something just as good. Though the main reason I returned it was because the advertising claimed it came with two sets of filters, when it only came with one.
I bought both of these last year after almost a decade of wanting to get an air filter, and not doing it. The whole industry feels like a scam. This is why I stopped shaving 20 years ago.
Coway Air Mega
Coway Mighty
Blue Air
Medify Air
They're basically all equivalent and they all work.
The reason I like the Medifyair is because it can move the largest volume of air relative to those so it can clear a space quickly (and quietly). I also think it looks nice (though it is huge).
Of the rest, the Blue Air uses weird custom filters which I think cost a little more (though I haven't had to replace them yet). The Coway Mighty is also pretty small and mostly for a tiny room.
Relatedly, if you're interested in sensors I think the TemTop sensors are the best (I've tried a bunch of different ones, and a lot of them suck).
Some details on this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/AirQuality/comments/ikf1ed/are_ther...
For a modest house in the Bay Area during fire season, we needed a high MERV furnace filter and also two filters similar to their recommended models, so I moved up to the Medifyair. It arrived after the last fires, but it seems to work extremely well.
Hopefully, we won't need it this year...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25993512
I like consumer reports. You pay money for subscription and they provide you a non biased review.
I know the "you can never trust anyone who has affiliation links" argument, but if we follow that to its logical conclusion, Wirecutter should be strongly biased toward picks that give them the most money for referrals, and that's not really backed up by their choices. They pick cheaper choices pretty frequently, and it's possible to find picks where there's no apparent affiliate link at all, e.g., their pick for best "high-performance" subwoofer. One can posit, as was done in the thread you linked, that there might be deals directly with manufacturers that we don't know about, but "we can't be sure they're being underhanded without us knowing" doesn't actually get us anywhere useful -- the same could obviously be said about anyone, including CR.
In the review business it's better to be playing the long-term game if you're building a real audience. In Wirecutter's case their long term advantage is to make good reviews without regard to the affiliate payment.
There are already thousands of other websites that are just disguised ads. Wirecutter's differentiating features is that they don't do that.
They still have some reviews I think are pretty mediocre or products they chose that I think are bad, but generally I think they're worth looking at.
They make nonsense claims about their technology - none of which empirically hold up. They lie about it and are just generally full of shit, quoted below:
"In the summer of 2019, we purchased a Molekule Air (the flagship model) and tested it. We bought an Air Mini that fall and tested it in February 2020. At the time we tested the Molekule Air, the company claimed that its “scientifically-proven nanotechnology outperforms HEPA filters in every category of pollutant.”
Our tests proved otherwise. And by mid-2020, that language had been withdrawn, after many of the company’s claims were ruled against in a case before the National Advertising Division and upheld in a later appeal before the National Advertising Review Board. The Molekule Air turned in the worst performance on particulates of any purifier, of any size, of any price, that we have tested in the seven years that we have been producing this guide. The Air Mini outperformed it, but that’s not saying much: It still gave the second-worst performance we’ve ever seen.
Guide author Tim Heffernan asked Molekule CEO Dilip Goswami why the language was removed. He answered, “The point about ‘in all categories’ is that we see a device that outperforms across all of the categories. Right? So we’re not trying to say that individually, on any particular metric, we would be number one. Right? What we’re saying is, when you look across all the categories, we outperform HEPA. Right? And that’s what we’re attempting to convey with that. And so—it’s fair to say that we needed to re-examine some of the language to make sure that it’s saying what we’re intending to say.”
The NAD and NARB cases made clear that this was an understatement: All of Molekule’s quantified claims about the Air’s performance; all of its claims about superiority to HEPA; all of its customer and doctor testimonials about the ability of the Air’s filter to reduce asthma and allergy symptoms; and many of its claims to have been independently tested, were ruled unsupported. Other claims were ruled too broad."
"Buffeting" of air is not a practical issue when using a fan - you want a fan that can create a lot of air flow.
The Dyson fan comes across form first then making up reasons to explain the form retroactively. It feels like an interesting look is the goal rather than something that's actually better.
Am I wrong about this? Do people that have the fan like it? Is it better? I've only played with one in a store, but haven't owned one myself. I have owned Vornado fans which I liked.
Another one that comes to mind is the Molekule air filter which is basically fraud.
Large HEPA filters work, people should use them.
My favorite: https://medifyair.com/