Linkology: The Best of the Internet for 5/13/11
Every now and again I get to thinking that it really is a minor miracle I’m alive today.
I’m 42. Back when I was young and stupid, we didn’t wear helmets when we were riding bikes. We didn’t pad ourselves up like a linebacker every time there was a remote chance that our bodies might actually touch the earth. We just went and did fantastically dumb things, while our parents meandered about in the house, presumably smoking or drinking scotch or running AK-47s to Eastern Bloc sates.
We all rode BMX bikes. BMX, in case you’re not familiar with this noncurrent term, stands for Body Mutilation in the Extreme. Or Bicycle
Motocross. One was reality, one was marketing. I’ll let you choose which is which.
When we rode bikes, we didn’t ride peacefully on serene sidewalks wearing gleaming helmets as in-ground sprinkler systems ch-ch-chitted in the background. Oh no. If there wasn’t a chance you could die doing something as simple as riding a bike, then, well, you were doing it wrong.
What led me to realize that my being alive today is actually quite improbable was remembering that while we rode these bikes subconsciously seeking Great Bodily Injury™, we’d often build ramps off of which we’d jump our bikes. Repeatedly. With great velocity. That’s danger enough for most, and normal folks these days should have a serious case of the howling fantods just thinking about it.
But that’s not the half of it: we made ramps out of shoddy, sometimes wet splintered plywood, elevated off the ground by cracked, dirty bricks found at a nearby home construction site. Usually the launch angle these ramps formed came impossibly close to 90 degrees straight up, and you would think that any dumb kid trying to jump his bike off this would immediately launch almost vertically, ascend about four feet in the air, begin a grotesque half-twist as his body tried to adjust for the murderous orientation, and fall back to the ground, head back and shoulders first, with a wet thud.
Which is exactly what happened.
Almost every time.
More times than I care to admit.
Yet we didn’t stop.
The takeaway: Natural selection was trying so hard, but suburbia and Bactine jumped in and broke up the party.
Some links:
An inside look at the life of a trader – and how successful ones treat their work as a video game.
It turns out that some restaurants cherry pick parties by size.
Bribing the kids – new principles guided by new research on using rewards to shape behavior without undermining intrinsic motivation.
Have a good weekend, everyone.
###
More links:
MIPRO Consulting main website.
