15-year-old Jacksonville, Florida resident Bridget Brown was bored. That happens. It’s August and she’s 15.
She had been saving money for a car, but then a better idea came to her.
Why not make a daytrip to Dollywood with her little brother and a friend, aged 13 and 11, respectively. I think we’d all agree that she’d be better off with the car. And it would have been a good idea to discuss it with her parents first. She didn’t.
Bridget grabbed her cash, called a cab, and headed for the airport with boys in tow. Once there she bought three round-trip tickets to Nashville. They went through security without ID, which is allowed if you are under 18.
Once in Nashville, the trio was confronted with the minor detail that Dollywood was still 200 miles away. (Flying to Knoxville would have been a better choice.) Without an obvious way to get there, they panicked and called home. Not that clever, but hey, she’s 15.
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It’s time for one of my periodic post-topic cop outs, in which I string together a collection of little things I want to bring up because I can’t think of a topic worthy of an entire post.
Links
I’ll start with a link. Promise you’ll come back afterward.
Best headline ever.
And another:
Much worse than confusing adverse with averse.
Man Sentenced to Poker
I generally like the law. But sometimes professionals in that field, lawyers and judges, can spend so much time concentrating on the minutiae that they lose sight of the big picture. They make one tiny logical step after another until they get lost in the forest they couldn’t see for the trees.
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How old am I? So old that when someone says Facebook I still think of what was colloquially called The Facebook, the hard-bound directory of Harvard’s incoming class, so vital in laying the groundwork for your future cabal to control the world. The website was named after it. I find myself now wondering a) does Harvard still print it and b) if so, what do the kids call it now?
Some time ago, I made the decision to rise above such faddish things and not join. What’s the point of having a computer and going on-line if you are just going to use it to interact with other people? If I wanted to do that, I could do it in real life.
But I think I may have miscalculated. I had no idea just how pervasive Facebook would become. Two days ago, Facebook announced it had 500 million active users. That is a number so large it is difficult to put it in context. The planet contains, allegedly, 1.8 billion internet users, so Facebook has now roped in 28% of them. At the current rate of growth, 10% a month, they should have everybody around September 2011.
I plan to sign up for an account then. Because I am the last person on Earth who would join Facebook.
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Regular readers of BMA, and I know there are dozens of you out there, know that there is nothing I like more than science. Particularly science extrapolated from a single experimental result and recounted in blogs.
For example, just last week the NYT’s Economix blog asked Do Hungry People Take Bigger Financial Risks? According to some scientists in the UK, hungry people, or at least 19 guys in their mid-20’s who hadn’t eaten lately, tend to take more risks. What’s more, the blog post describes an experiment different than the one in the paper that it links to, which tells me that there must be two scientific studies out there supporting this exciting new finding.
It is exciting because it confirms a previously held belief of mine, that the problem we have in this country is too much food and not enough risk taking.
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There are actually people who think that money might not be the ultimate source of human happiness. These fringe thinkers argue that what makes us 
happy are the mundane trivialities of days at the beach, good food, sex, and so on.
Of course, the counter-argument is that all those things can be purchased with money. Moreover, the more money spent on them, the more people tend to enjoy them. That could be because the nice stuff is more desirable so its price gets bid up. Or maybe the fact that more of that magical money stuff is involved means that it makes us more happy.
Recent scientific evidence supports the theory that it is money itself that brings happiness. Researchers at the University of Minnesota had college students count either $100 bills or slips of paper before dipping their hands in 122 degree water. The money counters felt less pain.
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Why not make a daytrip to Dollywood with her little brother and a friend, aged 13 and 11, respectively. I think we’d all agree that she’d be better off with the car. And it would have been a good idea to discuss it with her parents first. She didn’t.
Musings | Frank Curmudgeon | 
August 20, 2010 4:59 pm | 
Comments (18) 
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