Studio711.com – Ben Martens

As a parent, I now spend a lot of time thinking about how differently my son will grow up than I did. For example, instead of a 30 minute car ride planned days in advance, Elijah can see his friends from his back yard. Instead of living in the woods, the woods are a place we visit.

But being a nerd, most of my thoughts center around his experiences with technology. My generation is the last one who ever wrote a school paper using both a card catalog and something online (or from the Encarta CD-ROMs.) It was completely valid to hear someone say they looked up a topic in the book because nobody had written about it on the internet yet. And I vividly remember a world with no internet at all. That’s going to sound like making fire with sticks to my kids, not to mention my grandkids.

I also wonder how much every parent feels this way. I feel like my generation was pretty lucky to have experienced the world with no internet, but still be young enough to quickly adopt it as it grew. What other generations have had experiences like this? Our grandparents rode horses and buggies when they were young but transitioned to cars. That’s probably comparable but it was stretched out over a much bigger chunk of their lives.

And as I wrote about a couple weeks ago, what really blows my mind is to think about what tech is going to be like in 30 more years. Remember, technology advances exponentially, not linearly. Think about tech 30 years ago and compare it to today. Now double or maybe event quadruple that difference and that’s what 30 years more will look like.

I wonder if I’ll still be blogging.

Buying flowers for your spouse at the grocery store might not the most romantic way to give flowers (where romantic equals expensive), but Tyla gets really excited when I get them there instead of somewhere else. Why? Safeway flowers are magical. They seem to last FOREVER! Case in point: I bought flowers for Tyla on Friday, May 8. The photo below is what the flowers looked like when we came back from vacation on eight days later. You can hardly tell that they aren’t fresh! We’ll easily get two weeks, sometimes three out of the flowers. Try that with a fancy bouquet from the florist!

I suspect that it has something to do with the type of flowers that Safeway generally uses in their arrangements, but the end result is that we get pretty flowers for a very long time for a good price. Seems like a good deal to me.

While I’m excited about all the streaming options available for TV and movies, I’m still a fan of the Netflix disc service. I get full quality movies and a much bigger selection. Netflix disc service used to be a great option. I would ship out a disc on Monday and have the next one in my mailbox on Wednesday. It has slowed way down though and I think it’s because the discs appear to be going all the way to California whereas previously there was a distribution center in Seattle. This means that if I ship a disc out on Monday, I don’t get the next one until about Friday. Those extra days really cut down on the value I get from the service and has made me drop it. I’m going to try to use Red Box more since it’s cheaper anyway.

After having three hunks of flesh cut out of me because they were suspiciously heading towards skin cancer, it should be no surprise that I don’t mess around with sunburn anymore. Having a kid has amplified that since they can burn so easily. Tyla and I saw a “Sport Brella” at a concert in the park one time and decided to pick one up.

It’s basically a big umbrella that isn’t quite round on the top and it lays down on the ground to provide shade. You can stake it into the ground if it’s windy and the pole of the umbrella drives into the ground too. It sets up in a matter of seconds and does a great job providing shade anywhere you need it.

We don’t use it a ton, but we’re always thankful when we do get it out.

I had a random thought while putting away the groceries: why do we call that cold box in the kitchen a “refrigerator” instead of just a “frigerator”? What is frigeration and why does this box redo it?

The answer is pretty boring (so I thought it would fit in perfectly with the other blog posts here). The word “refrigerate” comes from the Latin refrigeratus, past participle of refrigerare “make cool or cold.” So the “re” part of the word isn’t the prefix that means to do again.

A common generalization is that grandparents have a hard time keeping up with technology (though there are exceptions of course.) My grandparents were born before about 1930. Think about what the world looked like back then. That’s horse and buggy territory. Technology has come a LONG way since then.

Humans have a bias toward thinking that progress happens linearly meaning that in the next 80 years, we’ll see roughly the same amount of progress that we did in the previous 80 years. If that’s true, I can’t even begin to imagine what the world will look like when I’m heading for assisted living.

The truth is even more remarkable though. Instead of progressing linearly, technology is advancing exponentially. This means that not only is technology advancing, the rate of advancement is also increasing. We will advance more this year than last year and so on.

It’s hard to think about this or observe it while you’re in it, but if you look back in history, it’s a little more obvious. It took us thousands of years to go from horses to cars, but the cars from just 50 years ago are relics compared to what we have now. Similarly, computers were huge and bulky for the first decades of their existence, but now they are getting small, faster and more powerful every year.

The amount of data that we collect is rapidly increasing too. At a recent Big Data conference, one of the speakers estimated that 90% of all the data that the world has was generated in the last two years. By 2016 the total amount of data will double every two months and by 2020, it could be doubling every SECOND. Even if those numbers are a bit off, it helps to show what exponential growth looks like.

With all that in mind, how will I ever keep up with technology as I grow older? Grandparents have a hard enough time now. With the exponential growth of technology, is it hopeless for us who think we are sort of in touch now? Probably, but maybe we’ll be able to abstract technology away from the user in such a way that the user doesn’t have to understand much about how it works to get value out of it.

I’m not a futurist and I struggle to bring this post to a reasonable conclusion. I don’t have any magic answers but this stuff has been on my mind a lot lately, especially when I see Elijah interacting with any technology. He’s going to look back on these times as the technological stone age, and it’s awesome to think about what the future world will look like.