Remember our post about the new Consumer Product Safety Act that will make it illegal to sell children's products unless they were tested for lead and phthalates?
Besides threatening to put local artisans and small businesses who can't afford the test (at $4,000 a pop), the law has another unintendend consequence: library may ban children's books in order to comply:
The Consumer Product Safety Act was passed by Congress Aug. 14 in reaction to findings that some toys imported from China contained dangerous levels of lead. President Bush signed the legislation, which includes stricter limits on lead levels in children's products.
The American Library Association said it fears the law has unintended consequences, and libraries may face the choice of closing their children's sections, banning children under the age of 12 or completing expensive lead testing for every book. [...]
This unintended consequence of the new law isn't the first to rear its head since Congress passed it. A flurry of complaints from second-hand retailers afraid of being bankrupted by the new requirements prompted the commission to release a clarification on Jan. 8 stating the law doesn't require all children's items to be tested.
However, it does make it illegal to distribute any children's item that exceeds the lead limits, said Consumer Product Safety Commission spokesman Joseph Martyak. Though libraries, schools, and thrift shops aren't required to test books for lead, they could face civil or criminal penalties if a book with an elevated lead level leaves its shelves.
Daniel Scocco of Daily Blog Tips, one of the largest and neatest blog about blogging on the blogosphere (say that three times fast!), did a nice write-up on Neatorama's new Upcoming Queue.
And right off the bat he gave you one good reason to submit your blog (if you've got original content) to the Upcoming Queue:
Neatorama is one of the most popular blogs on the Internet. They cover all sorts of neat, weird and interesting things. A great part of their stories is also sent by the readers themselves. I have been linked from them in the past, and it sent over 3,000 visitors my way in matter of 24 hours, just to give you an idea of their traffic levels.
Humans like to measure things - distance, mass, time, you name it, we've
measured it. And along the way, people have come up with some interesting
and unusual units of measurements:
Apgar Score - If you were born in the past 50 years or
so, chances are you have an Apgar Score. Indeed, it is the very first test all of us took.
The Apgar Score was devised in 1952 by Dr. Virginia Apgar to evaluate
the health of newborns immediately after birth, based on the Appearance,
Pulse, Grimace, Activity
and Respiration criteria. It ranges from 0 to 10. (Source)
atomus - In medieval time, the Latin Atomus
meant "a twinkling of the eye," the smallest amount of time
imagineable. Nowadays, it's defined as 1/376 minute or about 160 milliseconds.
Avogadro's
number - Us common folks say a couple to mean 2, a dozen to mean
12, a gross to mean 144, and so on. Well, chemists have got us beat: they
use Avogadro's number to mean 6.0221417930 x 1023, the number
of atoms or molecules in one mole. It was named after Italian scientist
Amedeo Avogadro, who looked a little like a Hobbit.
baker's dozen - If you buy a dozen loaves of bread,
bakers usually throw one in for free, so baker's dozen means 13. They
didn't do this out of the goodness of their heart: the practice came to
be in the 13th century, when a medieval English law made it so a baker could be punished
by chopping his hand off with an axe if he was found to be shortchanging
a customer. Tossing in an extra loaf of bread seemed to be a prudent way
of keeping one's hand. (Source)
barn - Those nuclear physicists are a funny bunch. They
define a "barn" (yes, from the saying "as big as a barn")
as a cross section of an atomic nucleus. It is 10-28 m2.
This unit of measurement is used when these physicists/comedians need
to quantify the scattering cross-section of particles. An outhouse
is defined as 10-6 barn and a shed is 10-24
barns.
baud(Bd) - With broadband Internet
and all, we thankfully don't use this anymore, but anyone who's old enough
to remember modems should know that baud (later supplanted by bit/second)
is the measure of the rate of data transmission over telephone lines.
The baud rate is the number of distinct symbols that can be transmitted
per second. It is named after Emile Baudot, the inventor of the Baudot
code used in telegraphy.
BB - Ever owned a BB gun? Well, BB doesn't stand for
ball bearing or bullet ball, it actually referred to the size of the pellet.
A BB pellet (0.180 inch or 4.57 mm) is between B and BBB size.
Big
Mac Index - a measure of exchange rates (actually purchasing
power parity) between two currencies. It was defined by Economist's editor
Pam Woodall to measure whether a currency is under- or overvalued. She
used a Big Mac because the burger is produced in about 120 countries.
(Source)
The easiest way to explain this is by an example: say you want to know
whether the exchange rate between the dollar and the British pound, say
$2 = £1, is fair. You take the price of a Big Mac in the US ($3.57)
and in Britain (£2.29). The idea is the price of a Big Mac should
be equal in both countries, relative to their currencies - the implied
purchasing power parity is 3.57/2.29 = 1.56. But the exchange rate is
2/1 - so this means that the pound is overvalued against the dollar by
28% (2 divided by 1.56).
blink - Oh, every few decades somebody proposed that
instead of using 24 pesky hours, why not divide the day into units of
10. Basically 1 day is divided into 10 hours, each hour into 100 minutes,
and each minute into 100 metric seconds or blinks. A blink works out to
be 0.864 second, which ironically is twice the time it takes for you to
blink your eye.
carat - A measure of how big a diamond is. The unit
carat came from the Greek word keration meaning a carob bean,
which was used as a standard weight in ancient Greece. It's now defined
as 200 milligram.
cubit - A biblical unit of distance. It is the distance
between a man's middle finger and his elbow. It is about 18 inches or
45 centimeters. A cubit is divided into 6 palms or 24 digits.
In Ezekiel 48: 34 it was written that the size of the New Jerusalem or
heaven is 4500 cubits on each side. That translates to about 1,046 acres
or 1.63 square mile - about 3/100th the size of San Francisco.
Needs more donkey power
donkey power - A third of a horsepower, about 250 watts.
farthing - An old English word for quarter. A farthing
means 1/4 of a penny.
flock - Ever wonder how many birds are in a flock of
seagulls? A flock means 2 score or 40.
fortnight - A fortnight is two weeks or 14 days. The
12th century word comes from "fourteen nights." Geeks have adopted
this in a humorous way: instead of saying seconds, they say microfortnight
(which comes out to be about 1.21 seconds).
Gillette - American physicists Ted Maiman, who made
the first working laser, used to compare laser output power by how many
Gillette razor blades it can burn a hole through. A 2 Gillette laser can
only through 2 stacked razor blades.
googol - The googol was invented in 1938 by mathematician
Edward Kasner, who asked his then 8-year-old nephew Milton Sirotta what
he would name a really, really, really large number. A googol
is a large number indeed: it is 1 followed by 100 zeroes or 10100.
A year later, Kasner defined another number: the googolplex or 10googol(1010^100).
How big is a googolplex? Carl Sagan estimated that it would be impossible
to write out all the zeroes of the number, because it would take more
space than the known universe.
If googol sounds familiar, that's because Larry Page and Sergey Brin named
their company Google based on this word. They even called the Google headquarters
in Mountain View, California, the Googleplex.
Hobo Power - Radio personality Adam Carolla came up
with this one: a measure of how bad something smells. It ranges from 0
(not stinky at all) to 100 (lethal). A "robust fart" is about
13 hobo. At 50 hobo, the person doing the smelling would projectile vomit.
jerk - Ever feel a jerk of the car when you accelerate
fast? Well, engineers define a jerk as a unit of the rate of change of acceleration. 1 jerk
is equal to 0.3048 m/sec3.
jiffy - there are two definitions of a jiffy, both of
which are units of time and mean very, very fast. In computer engineering,
a jiffy is one cycle or one tick of the computer's system clock. It is
0.01 second. The second definition is the time required for light to travel
one centimeter, as proposed by American chemisty Gilbert Lewis. This translates
to 33.3564 picoseconds.
klick - It's military-talk for kilometer. The term became
popular in the 1960s among American soliders in Vietnam, though some believed
it had been used as early as the 1950s by soldiers stationed in Germany.
It probably came from the "k" and the "l" in "kilometer,"
but I suspect the soldiers thought it was cooler to say klick than kil-o-meh-tur.
(Source)
Man-Month - it doesn't exist, the Man-Month
is a myth: "Adding manpower to a late software project makes
it later."
Mickey
- Named after Mickey Mouse, a mickey is the length of the "smallest
detectable movement" of the computer mouse. It's about 1/200 to 1/300
inch or about 0.1 mm.
Say it after me: Mickey Mouse moves the Mickey Mouse mouse a Mickey.
millihelen - If Helen of Troy had "the face that
launched a thousand ship," then the amount of beauty needed to launch
a single ship is a millihellen. A negative hellen is the amount of ugliness
that makes a thousand ships sail the other way.
MegaFonzie - A measure of coolness. In Futurama, Professor
Farnsworth defined MegaFonzi as having 1000 times the coolness of Fonzie
of the TV show Happy Days.
moment - If you ask someone to wait a moment, you're
asking them to wait for a very short period of time. But how short? Turns
out a moment is a medieval unit of time equals to 1/40th of an hour or
1.5 minutes.
nybble - A byte is a unit of measurement of information
that can be stored in a computer (for example: a 1 gigabyte hard disk).
So what is smaller than a byte? A nybble, of course - it is defined as
half a byte.
Platonic year - a year without sexual relationships.
Actually, no - it's an astronomical unit of time (also called Great year
or Equinoctial cycle) basically measuring the period of time required
for planets to align. It's about 26,000 years, which is exactly how long
a year being platonic feels like.
Potrzebie
- In his first "scientific" article titled "Potrzebie
System of Weights and Measures", published in Mad Magazine,
Donald Knuth (yes,
the computer science legend) defined a potrzebie as the thickness of Mad
Magazine #26 or 2.263348517438173216473 mm. He also defined a unit of
force as whatmeworry and so on.
proof - You've seen this in a bottle of liquor: 100-proof,
80-proof, etc. In the 18th century, before hydrometer was a common instrument,
people used to "prove" that their alcoholic drink wasn't watered
down by using a "gunpowder proof." The alcohol and gunpowder
were mixed in equal proportion and then ignited. If the mixture burned,
then it is proof that the alcohol wasn't diluted.
Today, proof liquor is defined as containing 50% of alcohol by volume.
A 100-proof whiskey contains 50% alcohol.
Sagan
- Carl Sagan loved to say "billions and billions of stars,"
so in his honor, a Sagan is defined as at least 4 billion. So that you
know, there are nearly 100 Sagan (400,000,000,000) stars in the Milky
Way galaxy.
Scoville - Named after its creator, chemist Wilbur Scoville,
this unit measures the hotness of a chili pepper. A scoville is the dilution
factor of a solution of chili pepper extract until the "heat"
(the amount of the chemical capsaicin) is no longer detectable to tasters.
A bell pepper has a Scoville rating of 0, whereas a habanero has a rating
of 200,000 (meaning a solution of habanero extract needs to be diluted
1:200,000 before the heat goes away). The hottest pepper in the world
is the Naga Jolokia, with 1.05 million Scoville. A pepper spray is rated
between 2 and 5.3 million Scoville.
smidgen - Yes, it means "small" but how small?
A smidgen is exactly 1/2 a pinch or 1/32 of a teaspoon.
smoot - one smoot is defined as 5 feet and 7 inches
(1.7 m), the height of Oliver R. Smoot, then an MIT undergrad who during
his fraternity pledge was used by his fraternity brothers to measure the
length of the Harvard Bridge between Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts.
They simply laid him down on the bridge and drew a mark where his head
was, repeated the entire exercise along the bridge, and got a value of
364.4 smoots plus or minus one ear.
Oliver Smoot being used as a yardstick for the Harvard Bridge - source:
Smoot 50th
The next time your on the Harvard Bridge, look out for the markings,
which are actually used by the Cambridge police department to this day
to identify the location of accidents on the bridge.
Twain
- "Twain" is actually an archaic term for "two." If
you're thinking of Mark Twain when you read this, you'd be right. Samuel
Clemens, who used to work as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River,
got his pen name because "mark twain" was what riverboatmen
would yell out when they measured the depth of the river. It meant that
the depth is two fathoms (about 12 feet), the minimum depth required by
boats.
Warhol - Andy Warhol once said that "In the future
everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes." So, warhol is a measure
of fame. 1 kilowarhol is being famous for 15,000 minutes or approximately
10 days. Conversely, 1 milliwarhol is about nine-tenths of a second of
fame, which is about how long it'll take my brain to forget a name. (Source)
If you've ever wondered what Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (Ricardo Montalban, RIP) would look like if it were an Italian opera, you're in luck. Here's Le Wrath di Khan, by the genius folks at Robot Chicken: Link [embedded adult swim video] - Thanks John!
Aleta Meadowlark of the cleverly named Omnomicon blogged about her recipe on how to make this awesomely psychedelic rainbow cake: Link - via Unique Daily
What I want to know is this: will it make you poo rainbow?
You know the economy is bad when Wall Street banker's girlfriends are complaining about their lives. Here's a day-in-the-life of members of Dating a Banker Anonymous:
They shared their sad stories the other night at an informal gathering of Dating a Banker Anonymous, a support group founded in November to help women cope with the inevitable relationship fallout from, say, the collapse of Lehman Brothers or the Dow’s shedding 777 points in a single day, as it did on Sept. 29.
In addition to meeting once or twice weekly for brunch or drinks at a bar or restaurant, the group has a blog, billed as “free from the scrutiny of feminists,” that invites women to join “if your monthly Bergdorf’s allowance has been halved and bottle service has all but disappeared from your life.”
Ravi Somaiya of The New York Times has the story: Link
We've had our popular "I Love Science T-Shirt" designs in onesies and kids T-shirt sizes for a while now on Neatorama's Online Shop, but I thought I'd post a heads up here to show just how cute my son Zachary is. He has just turned 1 year old not long ago. :)
Link: I Love Science in Onesies/Kids sizes - the perfect gift for your aspiring scientists!
What is it about Hollywood and mentally challenged people? (I wanted to write "crazy people", but realized that's not PC).
Cineleet has an interesting post about movies that depict mentally challenged characters, from those who suffer from mental retardation, savant syndrome, to plain ol' derangement, and analyzed what made these movies so great:
The 2008 comedy Tropic Thunder highlights an inconvenient Hollywood truth: Oscar loves mental disabilities. In the film, Ben Stiller’s action hero character, Tugg Speedman, wishing to expand beyond his stereotype, attempts to court Oscar sympathies by playing a mentally challenged farmhand. It ends up being a critical failure. This is because, as Tugg’s co-star Robert Downey, Jr warns him, “You never go full retard”. And he has a point.
The most critically acclaimed performances by characters with disabilities still retained something the audience could emotionally relate to.
For instance, take Dustin Hoffman's award-winning portrayal of the "idiot savant" Raymond Babbitt in Rain Man (1988):
Character: Raymond Babbitt as played by Dustin Hoffman
Mental Disability: Autism / Savant Syndrome Barry Levinson’s film features Hoffman as an “idiot savant” who possesses a phenomenal capacity to count toothpicks and cheese balls (and later, cards in Vegas). Hoffman’s performance arguably is one of the most ‘affected’ of all the characters on this list, and as such, the hardest to emotionally connect with, particularly for his brother (Tom Cruise), who’s self-centered and primarily interested in the estate their father left Raymond. But in the midst of his worst autistic episodes, Raymond’s primal instinct to care for his younger brother is the touchstone that makes this performance resonate.
What the Critics Thought: The Los Angeles Times called Hoffman’s performance made the film “hypnotically interesting”, and Newsweek’s David Ansen said the film was “made with care, smarts, and a refreshing refusal to settle for the unexpected”.
How it Paid Off: It took home four Oscars that year, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor for Hoffman.
For many of us, email has become one of our standard modes of working.
We live in our email inbox, doing everything from personal communication
with family and friends to carrying out complete projects through email.
Unfortunately, email has also come to overwhelm us, taking us away from
more important tasks, threatening to take over our lives.
There's a better way than living in your email inbox. Minimize your time
spent doing email, transform your email effectiveness by setting limitations,
and become an email master by getting your inbox to empty.
Limit Your Time in Email
If you spend all of your day in email, or going back to email and checking
for new messages, you'll never get much else done. Instead, make the decision
to only check email at predetermined times, and leave it alone for the
rest of the day -- that will allow you to work on more important stuff.
I recommend that you decide, in advance, how many times you'll check
email, and what times. Here are some tips:
• Number of times per day. How many times you
check email per day is a function of the kind of work you do. If you can
get away with checking email just once per day, that would be ideal --
you'd have very few email interruptions and your email habits would be
most efficient. However, for many people, twice a day is probably more
realistic. Others, who need to be able to get email more often because
their job orders are sent through email (customer service, for example),
might want to limit their email checking to once per hour (perhaps 10
minutes at the top of the hour). Still others might be able to get away
with checking email less than once a day -- every other day, twice a week,
or even once a week. If you can count yourself among these people, take
advantage of this and limit yourself to the bare minimum.
• Not first thing in the morning. A common productivity
tip is not to check email first thing in the morning, and it's good advice.
By checking email in the morning, you're allowing email to dictate the
rest of your day, instead of deciding for yourself what your Most Important
Tasks will be for today. You're putting yourself in danger of getting
stuck in your email and not getting out of it. Focus instead on getting
your important projects done first thing in the morning instead of checking
email.
• Turn off email notifications. Most email programs
have a way to give you an alert (through a sound or a pop-up message or
a blinking icon) that lets you know you've received a new email. If you
use such an alert, I highly recommend that you turn it off. It interrupts
whatever you're working on, and draws you back to email based on the schedule
of anyone who chooses to email you, not at a time you determine. Instead,
turn off alerts and only check email at predetermined times. You'll get
a lot more done this way.
• How to stick to this habit. It's easy to say
that you should only check email twice a day, but much harder to stick
with it when constantly checking email is an ingrained habit. How do you
stick to the habit of checking email less? You make it a priority for
a week or two. Put up a sign with the rule: "No email except for
10 a.m. and 4 p.m.!" (or whatever schedule you choose). Every time
you find yourself habitually switching to email, stop yourself. Breathe.
And focus on your work instead. Your reward: you'll get a lot more done.
Reduce Your Incoming Stream
One of the most important parts of any email strategy is to stop any
unnecessary email from getting into your inbox in the first place. Although
I get hundreds of emails a day, most of those emails never make it to
the inbox. They go straight to the spam folder or the trash. You only
want the essential emails in your inbox, or you’ll be overwhelmed.
Here are some essential ways to reduce your incoming stream of emails:
1. Junk. I recommend using Gmail, as it has the best
spam filter possible. I get zero spam in my inbox. That’s a huge
improvement over my previous accounts at Yahoo, Outlook and Hotmail, where
I’d have to tediously mark dozens of emails as spam.
2. Notifications. I often get notifications from the
many online services I use, from Amazon to WordPress to PayPal and many
more. As soon as I notice those types of notifications filling up my inbox,
I create a filter (or “rule” if you use Mail.app or Outlook)
that will automatically put these into a folder and mark them as read,
or trash them, as appropriate. So for my PayPal notifications, I can always
go and check on them in my “payments” folder if I like, but
they never clutter my inbox.
3. Batch work. I get certain emails throughout the day
that require quick action (like 10-15 seconds each). As I know these emails
pretty well, I created filters that send them into a “batch”
folder to be processed once a day. Takes a couple minutes to process the
whole folder, and I don’t have to see them in my inbox.
4. Joke emails. If you have friends and family who send
you chain emails and joke emails and the like, email them and let them
know that you are trying to lessen the huge amount of email you have to
deal with, and while you appreciate them thinking of you, you’d
rather not receive those kinds of messages. Some people will be hurt.
They’ll get over it. Others will continue to send the emails. Create
a filter for them that sends them straight in the trash.
5. Set expectations and publish policies. A great strategy
for reducing emails is to pre-empt them by letting people know not to
send you certain types of emails, and tell them where to go for commonly
requested information. You can post policies and Frequently Asked Questions
on your blog or website, email them to other people, publish them on the
web, or send out a memo to co-workers.
Process to Empty
So now that only the essential emails come into your inbox, the question
is how to get it empty in the least amount of time necessary? I'm usually
able to empty my inbox in about 20 minutes, although your processing time
may differ, depending on how practiced you are at the following methods,
and how much email you get, and how focused you keep yourself. However,
in any case, you should be able to get your inbox empty in a minimal amount
of time using these methods.
1. Temporary folder. If you have a very full inbox (hundreds
or thousands of messages), you should create a temporary folder (“to
be filed”) and get to them later, processing them perhaps 30 minutes
at a time until they've all been taken care of. Start with an empty inbox,
and use the following techniques to keep it empty, in as little time as
possible.
2. Have an external to-do system. Many times the reason
an email is lingering in our inbox is because there is an action required
in order to process it. Instead of leaving it in your inbox, and using
the inbox as a de facto to-do list, make a note of the task required by
the email in your to-do system … a notebook, an online to-do program,
a planner, whatever. Get the task out of your inbox. Then archive the
email and be done with it.
3. Process quickly. Work your way from top to bottom,
one email at a time. Open each email and dispose of it immediately. Your
choices: delete, archive (for later reference), reply quickly (and archive
or delete the message), put on your to-do list (and archive or delete),
do the task immediately (if it requires 2 minutes or less — then
archive or delete), forward (and archive or delete). Notice that for each
option, the email is ultimately archived or deleted. Get them out of the
inbox. If you practice this enough, you can plow through a couple dozen
messages very quickly.
4. Be liberal with the delete key. Too often we feel
like we need to reply to every email. But we don’t. Ask yourself,
“What’s the worst that will happen if I delete this?”
If the answer isn’t too bad, just delete it and move on. You can’t
reply to everything. Just choose the most important ones, and reply to
them. If you limit the emails you actually reply to or take action on,
you get the most important stuff done in the least amount of time. The
80-20 rule at work.
5. Process to done. When you open your inbox, process
it until you're done. Don’t just look at an email and leave it sitting
in your inbox. Get it out of there, and empty that inbox. Make it a rule:
don’t leave the inbox with emails hanging around. Now your inbox
should be empty and clean. Ahhh!
Write Less
Another key to spending less time in email but to make the most of every
email you send is to write short but powerful emails. So after all the
screening and spam filters, you’ve chosen the few emails you’re
actually going to respond to … now don’t blow it by writing
a novel-length response to each one. I limit myself to five sentences
for each reply (at the maximum — many replies are even shorter).
That forces me to be concise, to choose only the essentials of what I
want to say, and limits the time I spend replying to email. Keep them
short, but powerful.
Your limit might be different -- perhaps a seven-sentence limit works
better for you. Experiment with your limit for a few days to find your
ideal length, and then do your best to stick to the limit. The key is
in limitations: it forces you to only convey the key concepts while limiting
the amount of time you spend writing emails.
Leo
Babauta is one of the world's leading productivity expert and the founder
of Zen Habits, one of the Top 100
blogs on the Internet. Zen Habits covers topics of productivity, simplicity,
health and fitness, family and finances, goals ... and that elusive happiness
;)
Leo's new book, Power
of Less, The: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential...in
Business and in Life
It is a guide that will show you how to streamline your life and free
yourself from everyday clutter so you can focus on accomplishing your
goals.
---
Are you an author and would like to have your book featured on Neatorama?
Please email me about a possible
guest blog post just like this one!
Cartoonist David Reddick, who drew The Trek Life (before it went dormant back in 2007), has teamed up with Roddenberry.com Interactive Team to draw the adventures of the young Gene Roddenberry's adventures with Agent 4 and Agent 6, two alien beings who abducted him in error.
Here's the very first strip: http://www.genesjournalcomic.com/?p=33 - Thanks RJ!
Covenant school girls basketball coach Micah Grimes, whose team beat won 100 to 0 in a shut out ball game against a team from Dallas Academy, was fired Sunday for not apologizing for the win:
Grimes, who has been criticized for letting the game get so far out of hand, made it clear in the e-mail Sunday to the newspaper that he does not agree with his school's assessment.
"In response to the statement posted on The Covenant School Web site, I do not agree with the apology or the notion that the Covenant School girls basketball team should feel embarrassed or ashamed," Grimes wrote on www.flightbasketball.com.
"We played the game as it was meant to be played. My values and my beliefs would not allow me to run up the score on any opponent, and it will not allow me to apologize for a wide-margin victory when my girls played with honor and integrity."
Do you think that they should've invoked the Slaughter Rule? Do you think that Coach Grimes did the right thing by letting the other team lose so badly? Or was it unsportsmanlike conduct?
Dark Roasted Blend, one of my favorite blogs which sucks at least 30 minutes of my free time whenever I visit, has a really neat post about real and imaginary supercomputers. This one above is the Z1 computer, built by German engineer Konrad Zuse, who built the world's first programmable computer.
In this awesome animation titled "Tales of Mere Existence," Levni Yilmaz of Ingredient X tells us his theories and observations about youth and aging. One thing's for sure, George Bernard Shaw nailed it on the head when he said that "Youth is wasted on the young."
