The bad old days

Too often we glorify the past. To a point, this kind of reverence is helpful to teach ourselves humility, in that we do not consider ourselves greater than our ancestors. However, extreme nostalgia clouds our judgment of all previous periods: we voluntarily abandon the ability to objectively identify what changes are actually improvements.

It is my hope that readers of various ages and demographics permit themselves to be gently reminded how so many of the things they might take for granted were nonexistent within the lifespan of our parents or grandparents. The goal of this post is to help spread the spirit of contentment for the present and optimism for the future. 

The criteria for this list are:

1. There was a well-defined problem in the past which may remain relevant today. It may have had no solution at all at the time. It should not be excessively obscure or too far in the past (in the view of the author).
2. If the problem had a process, tool, or material to manage it, this is considered inconvenient or undesirable by today's standards (and in the view of the author).
3. By modern standards, the problem has been dealt with so effectively by other means, and the technology so prevalent, that there are reasonably mature human beings alive today who have never heard of the older alternative.

I want this to be an organic, growing list which takes into account trends that others point out. Please leave a comment if you have an idea that meshes with my three criteria for inclusion. Leave a comment with the following two components:

• A general subject (e.g. "Internet access", "Music", or a topic not yet started)
• One or two sentences to describe the problem in the context of how it is to be detailed in one paragraph.

Internet access

• Before the mid-2000s, most US families had dial-up internet. This required internet users to wait for a connection over their phone line rather than having a continuous internet connection available to them. It also meant that phone usage over the same line was impossible, and anyone who picked up any phone in the house was likely to boot you offline. The connection over dial-up is accompanied by a fairly noisy connection signal involving actual dial signals over the public switched telephone network. It is demonstrably worse in every single way compared to DSL, cable, or satellite internet.

Phone access

• At one time, payphones were ubiquitous as a way to place a call when outside the home or office. In my earliest memories from c. 1990, a local call was 25 cents; long-distance calls were substantially more. The prevalence of cell phones in the 2010s make payphones increasingly difficult to find except in poorer neighborhoods and very old facilities. As of this writing, most Americans of my age (25) will probably remember using a payphone at some point, but the children who are currently in elementary and middle school may go through their entire lives without having to use a payphone.
• Before the early 1980s, most phones in use in the United States were rotary-dial phones. This required the user to place a finger in the hole for the appropriate number, twist the dial, and let it return to the default position. Doing this for each digit is rather time-consuming by modern standards. I only have the faintest memories of seeing a rotary telephone in use, and it was at my great grandmother's house in rural Indiana perhaps 18-20 years ago. Even at the time, it was uncommon to see the old-fashioned Ma Bell rotary phones.

Music

• Electric power generation on a large scale was invented in the last quarter of the 19th century, and its processes were surprisingly mature by 1900, but most households did not have electrical power, even well into the early 20th century. The Victrola, a popular phonograph of the 1910s-1930s, was available in a hand-cranked version, which was substantially less expensive. Until the onset of the 1930s, most phonographs were hand-cranked.
• The vinyl LP record was released in 1948 and was the primary high-fidelity means of playback all the way until the Compact Disc (CD) of the early 1980s. LPs are not actually obsolete, since they are still used for vinyl recordings on rare occasions. Before CDs, vinyl could be either cheap and extremely low quality, or very expensive and high quality. The amount of care and attention that vinyl records required to maintain their sound is a bit fastidious by modern standards.
• The first viable competitor for the record was the cassette tape, which was extremely popular in cars due to its greater resistance to vibration. Unfortunately, cassettes are very vulnerable to prolonged temperature differences. The degradation of sound quality after leaving tapes in a car throughout a hot summer is very pronounced. Most surviving cassette tapes from the 1980s or 1990s that spent their lives in a glove compartment or center console are almost unplayable. There is still more maintenance required than CDs, since cassette decks do need to have their head cleaned by playing a "cleaning" tape. In practice, I have never actually seen these used; most motorists did not keep their cars long enough for the cassette deck to degrade noticeably.

Vehicle starting

• Before electric starters, motorists had to start a vehicle by turning a hand crank which was connected directly to the crankshaft. The sudden forward motion of the crank when the engine started meant you had to cup your hand rather than firmly grasp it; the punishment for poor hand posture was a broken thumb. If the engine kicked back, the punishment was a broken wrist or arm. As the technique for starting these cars becomes more obscure, but the cars themselves still remain, its danger becomes even more real. Members of historical societies who lack the proper technique will be far more likely to break their arm in starting a Locomobile than veteran drivers of 1905, who were more accustomed to the process (and probably had bigger arms as a result).
• In cold weather, modern vehicles will probably start up on the first crank and require very little warm-up time before they can be safely operated. For very cold climates, vehicles are sometimes fitted with block heaters, a plug-in electrical device that heats the engine block directly to aid in starting. All early vehicles were unlikely to start at all in such conditions. Any of these were common in very cold climates at various points in time.
• Draining the engine's oil overnight so it could be poured back into the engine when warm
• Placing hot coals on the engine block
• Pouring boiling water over the engine block

Vehicle maintenance

• Batteries once needed to be topped off regularly with water. Today few automotive owners even know of any battery maintenance.
• Motor oil has gotten a lot more expensive over the years, but the engine's requirement has greatly diminished. Almost all vehicles of 50 years ago would consume oil in regular amounts, and need to be topped up with oil. It was impossible to treat an engine of 1963 with the same careless abandon as an engine of 2013.

Vehicle safety

• Vehicles generally lacked seatbelts until the 1950s. Even then, the seatbelt used was a lap belt which did not cover the shoulder, so it did not stop a passenger from hitting the dashboard.
• Vehicles before the 1970s generally did not have collapsible steering columns. If the driver did not have a shoulder belt, an accident at high speed was likely to cause a massive impact right in the chest area, with disproportionate likelihood of causing lethal injuries to the heart and/or lungs.
• Vehicles before the 1970s generally did not have shoulder belts. As stated before, lap belts offer much less protection than the combined lap/shoulder combination. By modern standards, lap belts alone would be considered practically useless. Shoulder belts and lap belts in combination are still the most important safety feature ever added to vehicles, and should be worn 100% of the time when in a non-parked motor vehicle.
• Vehicles generally lacked airbags until the early to mid-1990s. Until the turn of the 21st century, two airbags was the common number (one for driver, one for passenger.) In the first decade of the 21st century, side-curtain airbags became common, and other airbag placements would proliferate throughout the interior of modern vehicles. Vehicles made from 2010 onward are massively safer than those made even 15 years earlier.
• US vehicles of the 1940s-1960s had a very large amount of chrome on their dashboards, which could reflect light directly into the motorist's eyes in the wrong conditions, making him or her momentarily blind. Largely due to changing styles rather than a concern for safety, this trend was on the decrease by 1965, and by 1969 there was almost no dashboard chrome left.
• Automatic seat belts were extremely common on US cars from 1990 to 1995. As a result of US federal legislation, automakers had to ensure that all new cars were equipped with at least one form of active safety, and the choices were automatic seat belts or airbags. Airbags would be much better, but automatic seat belts were cheaper. Rather than doing nothing at all, the government decided to form a meaningless compromise that resulted in automatic seat belts becoming ubiquitous. The depressing thing is that automatic seat belts merely automate the process of buckling the shoulder belt, and don't do anything better than ordinary seat belts. As a result, airbags were obviously the superior solution for safety, and they became mandated by 1995, making automatic seat belts obsolete. My parents had two Ford Escort wagons from 1993 that had automatic seat belts. My grandfather's 1989 Honda Civic did not have it, but I did own a 1991 Honda Civic that did have this installed. I remember them as being perfectly ordinary as a child, but as the years went on I found them very restrictive and irritating. If you don't ride in a car made from 1990-1995 in your life, you may never know what an automatic seat belt is. It's a jarring experience if you're new to it!

Building safety

• Asbestos was used universally in building construction during the early 20th century. Usage remained steady until it began to fall off in the 1970s, and during the 1980s it was banned in certain building insulation applications. Asbestos is an amazing material, with extraordinary resistance to fire, electricity, and chemical damage. For centuries, it was a peerless insulator. But once a building reaches the end of its lifecycle, tearing it down will cause asbestos fibers to become airborne. Repeated scientific studies have verified that continued exposure to asbestos causes life-threatening respiratory conditions. Asbestosis is a highly painful way to die. The lack of asbestos in modern buildings actually makes them substantially cheaper to clean up after demolition, which makes them more economical over their lifetime.

Public health

• Smoking of cigarettes was once conducted by a decided majority of American males, and a much larger percentage of American females than today. Smoking was popular from the outset of the 20th century, and continued to gain in popularity up to WWII and into the 1950s. The first major condemnation of smoking for its health hazards was the landmark 1964 Surgeon General's report. The Surgeon General's Office has periodically released reports that inevitably describe smoking as a serious risk to the health of the smoker and all others around the smoker. In today's society, smoking of tobacco is much less common, and its popularity continues to decrease every year. Despite libertarian objections, no-smoking zones have been implemented in many public areas of the United States.
• Fluoridation of water is something that most Americans deal with every single day when they drink tap water. Fluoride is added to most of the US public water supply to improve dental health and fight cavities. In the 1964 movie Dr. Strangelove, fluoridation was considered a Communist plot by the primary antagonist, the insane General Ripper. Although a minority objected to fluoridation, the general public placed a great deal of faith in the scientific establishment in the 1950s and 1960s, and did not object to the widespread application of fluoridation. Prior to the widespread use of fluoride toothpaste in the 1970s, fluoridated water was the only way to raise the dental health standards of the nation collectively.
• There was once a time not long ago when parents feared very seriously for the lives and livelihoods of their children. Polio affected tens of thousands of children per year prior to 1954, and those who survived the disease were often handicapped for life. The polio vaccine was developed in 1952 by the famous Dr. Jonas Salk, and immediately entered intense testing on a small scale prior to its announcement in 1953. In 1954, the polio vaccine was subject to the largest-scale human experimentation in US history, eventually involving 1.8 children across the United States. The favorable conclusion of the test was announced on April 12, 1955- the polio vaccine was found to be safe and extremely effective, and at unprecedented speed almost complete vaccination was undertaken. More than 100 million doses were administered in the US over the next four years. By 1961, only 161 cases were reported. Polio took much longer to eradicate worldwide, but it was finally declared eradicated in 2012.
• Even greater a threat than polio was smallpox. The bane of civilization for centuries, smallpox has killed countless millions of people of all ages and classes. Various outbreaks have totally depopulated great cities throughout history. Because of the intense contagiousness and worldwide scope of the disease, it was impossible to eradicate it immediately. In fact, Edward Jenner's invention of the smallpox vaccine in 1796 is considered the first-ever vaccine, but the more-dangerous technique of innoculation persisted well into the 20th century, and smallpox continued to remain a threat in Africa and Asia. Worldwide, from 1800 to 1950, there was insufficient willpower and funds to destroy the disease, so it remained a threat to all people. Starting in 1950, the Pan American Health Organization undertook an eradication of the disease from the Western Hemisphere. Beginning in 1958, worldwide efforts were managed by the World Health Organization. WHO's Smallpox Eradication Team was led by Donald Henderson from 1966 onwards- at this point, millions still contracted the disease every year. Working on a global scale and with close cooperation with local authorities, they fought every single outbreak until the disease was declared eradicated globally in 1979.

Libraries

• Although the Dewey decimal system remains in place for physical order of a library, there was once a physical card catalog system to assist lookup of books. Each book had a card that located it. If you wanted to find a book, you had to look up an actual piece of paper that contained the code where you could find it. If you see the movie Ghostbusters from 1984, the opening scene shows huge cabinets full of cards that correspond to the inventory of the library. If such pieces of furniture still exist in modern libraries, they are mostly ceremonial. The real organization is handled by a computerized database in almost all libraries.
• Public libraries were once considered primarily valuable because of the books they contained. Although 20 years ago most libraries did have computers, the computers were usually just green-screen terminals that linked the user to a card catalog of the books in the library. By the early 2000s, internet service in libraries was becoming relatively common. Libraries have continued to remain relevant because they are a place where free internet is available. In poorer neighborhoods, as I have seen in Houston and Cleveland, as well as in small towns, the public libraries are full of kids playing online games and checking Facebook, job seekers printing out resumes, and elderly persons acquainting themselves with new technology. In this way, the public library has actually become more valuable to society than ever.

Cooking

• For those without much culinary expertise, it may come as a surprise that the old-fashioned way to obtain a non-stick surface was to season a cast iron pan with a layer of oil which would be baked in at high temperature; continued use over the years would keep up a jet black and silky smooth surface, but a brand new cast iron pan will disintegrate your eggs very easily. The solution came on two fronts: stainless steel in the mid 20th century, and Teflon, first marketed in France in 1954 and the US in 1961. The great majority of cookware surfaces on products sold in the 21st century are nonstick, but cast iron and carbon steel continue to be sold for niche markets.

Why do all Monopoly video games suck?

For one of the best board games ever, Monopoly has gotten poor treatment in the digital realm.

The board game

I am a very big fan of a game of Monopoly on a plain, unadorned board. There is nothing like the joy of starting a Monopoly game with your family or best friends. If you want to have some unpredictability, you'll need more than two people. On the other hand, because so much of the game is spent on players planning their moves, six or more players is unwieldy. With three to five players, you've got a fun game going.

One of the most charming factors about Monopoly is its accessibility. There are metal tokens for player characters, there are title deed cards, there is money, and there are houses, hotels, chance cards, and community chest cards. But none of this clutter adversely affects the ability to start a game and play it. While firmly outside of the realm of real life, all of the mechanics of the game are sensible.

The single most endearing factor about Monopoly is clearly its customizability. With all of these game elements in play, and several ambiguous board locations (Free Parking?) there are many opportunities for players to experiment with new rules, and keep those that tend to speed gameplay or make it more exciting.

Probably all of my readers have played to the end of a Monopoly game at least once. But if the money supply is kept stagnant except for GO money, the following problems arise:

1. Each player starts with $1500 and can only get it from other players or from passing GO and obtaining $200 each lap of the board. This puts a firm brake on the supply of money needed to buy property and trade.
2. The only other way to obtain money is through the pittances available on Chance and Community Chest. But what these cards giveth with one hand, they taketh away with the other: street repairs, school tax, as well as the income tax and luxury tax squares, will have the bank eating up more money than it would yield from the second place beauty contest opportunities.
3. When in Jail, according to the traditional rules, you can still obtain money from your properties. It makes Jail a cushy place to be.
4. Free Parking is simply a blank square. It is begging for more meaning.

We can solve all of these problems with the addition of very common "house rules":

1. Free Parking Jackpot: Start with $500 under Free Parking. All monies taken from players on Luxury Tax, Income Tax, Chance, or Community Chest go straight into the Free Parking pool. Basically, whenever the bank is owed money, it goes into the Free Parking pool instead. Whoever lands on Free Parking gets the jackpot. After the jackpot is won, it's started off again with $500 from the bank.
2. No rent can be collected from players in Jail. In the late stages of the game, Jail is a luxury because players inside don't have to go around the board for three turns unless they roll doubles. Players should have a disincentive to go to Jail, and this can be enforced by not paying them for their own property usage while incarcerated.
3. Random bargaining. For example, if a creditor asks a debtor to pay only half because that would prevent his or her bankruptcy, it is allowed. Whatever satisfies the creditor is OK.

The video game version

Why shouldn't Monopoly prove to be a decent video game? I know it would have to be priced lower than most modern video games, since a Monopoly board, if not in your closet already, can certainly be found for under $20. With the game mechanics already so well-known, it sounds like development should be quick and painless, and correspondingly cheap. A video game version of Monopoly should exist, because it would solve the biggest problems with the game as it currently exists.

• Length. Some rounds take hours and hours to conclude, and it would be nice to save the current state of the game and get back to it at a later time, without leaving the board and all of its cards and doodads sitting on the kitchen table.
• Cheating. If the banker is a computer, and the dice rolls are truly randomized, cheating is practically impossible. If you like playing with your cousin Frank but you know he's a cheater, this could let him get in on the game.
• More variations. People shell out decent money to buy countless specialty versions of Monopoly. There is almost no cost associated with porting different "skins" to the digital board and pieces. Why hasn't it been done? Why can't we have a choice of various game modes?

We should start with a list of some of the attempts that were made before sorted by console, with the year of release, and a review score following. This is by no means an exhaustive list; there are well over a dozen unique Monopoly games.

Sega Genesis, 1992, 60/100 (Sega-16)
Nintendo 64, 2000, 50/100 (X64)
Playstation, 1997, 42/100 (Gamespot)
Nintendo Entertainment System, 1991, 6.25/10 (Electronic Gaming Monthly)
Windows, 1995, 60/100 (PC Games)
Windows, 1997, 3/5 (High Score)

Current version for sale

The Playstation port of Monopoly suffered from other even worse reviews, but I've given the most median score I could find. Generally they are rated poor-to-middling. The most recent EA version, released in 2008 for PS3, Wii, and Xbox 360, is not generally considered a classic either, scoring 54% for PS3 and 56% for Xbox on Metacritic.

They are sometimes rated higher in retrospect, after prices plummet and you can find an old-gen Monopoly game for spare change. But if the low expectations engendered by depreciation actually affect how good a game is, then surely we would all be ignoring the new franchises out today and spending our time on carts from Second Time Around. Come to think of it, that actually sounds appealing to me, since the cost of a new video game console and $50-60 games is a bit perilous to me. But I'm not everyone.

The problems

Let me take an archetypal example of the problem with Monopoly video games: Monopoly for SNES, a game that I owned and never liked. Why was it bad?

1. Transactions should be natural and quick in Monopoly. Instead, with the necessity of switching between menus and submenus to find the right property and select the correct amount of money in your deal, dealing becomes a hassle and something you'd rather avoid. At its heart, Monopoly is a board game with many different actions that are done most comfortably with human hands, and it is hard to apply the same level of choices to a video game with just a handful of buttons.
2. Turn-based video games don't allow continuous communications between players. Table-talk is essential or any board game would be stiflingly dull.
3. The rules of the game cannot be adjusted infinitely. There was no ability to change the rules, which means it proceeded at a rate that I found dull.
4. It's hard to graphically improve the real world. We're all used to playing Monopoly in board game form. Video games can hardly make haptic tasks like rolling dice and handling money any better than the real thing. The makers like to incorporate sound bites and animations as well, and while these might be funny the first game you play, it's annoying to hear the same one-liner again after the one hundredth time you've been released from Jail.
5. Computers are not your friends. Monopoly is not like chess. We do not play Monopoly or most other board games to become masters with the highest ranking. We play because the experience is fun with our friends and family. Computers are stiff bargainers and utterly joyless in deal mongering.

Despite all these problems, Monopoly remains a perennial remake for each subsequent video game console generation. The general lackluster feel of each video game seems to have no effect on the popularity of the board game itself. Some board games are less popular than they were before, but Monopoly is the flagship of the huge Hasbro enterprise, and it still sells in significant quantities and earns considerable revenue for Hasbro, helped no doubt by the presence of nearly 100 specialty versions.

Can any board games translate well to video games?

Definitely. Chess is almost better in digital form than physical form. Chess is an art form with no random chance whatsoever, where there is such a huge continuum of expertise that poor players will never defeat superior players. This factor is a bit of a barrier to entry for those who are not prepared to learn how to improve, and a point of embarrassment for many poor players (me included). Playing against a decent chess AI will usually also end in defeat, but at least chess experience can be gained this way without congratulating a human being for beating you.

Chess's seriousness is part of the essence of it. Nobody expects a chess AI to be a wordsmith. And that's worked for the entirety of video games during the 20th century, which could only support the logic involved in predicting how to win the game, not how to entertain you.

The future

A board game like Monopoly is fun in its original form because it involves human beings who are playing a game. The table talk, bickering, random gags, haggling, and even cheating are elements of human interaction that add in intangible ways to the gameplay, but haven't yet been emulated by computers.

Robust human-computer interaction is predicted by most experts for the coming years. Researchers for companies and universities have been trying to make robots more lifelike, with more advanced mannerisms and gestures. This is an extremely ambitious task that will no doubt take decades to complete. However, the task of believable computer personalities simply in the digital realm (using inputs from a user's keyboard and returning text or even voice responses) is more readily achievable and I think that it will start to appear in user interfaces and video games long before physical robots start to do so. Robotics will be expensive for a very long time to come, but computing power is still expanding with Moore's Law, and a purely software-based human simulation will be more sooner developed, and more readily available, than a human simulation which incorporates a physical body.

I am not myopically worried about making a good Monopoly video game. What I suggest is not so much a proposal that adding intelligent human-like AI to Monopoly would make it a good game, as a proposal that we can use the mechanics of Monopoly and an observation of the social behavior involved, in order to improve the state of human-computer interaction. When computers become decent social companions in a game, they are one step closer to being decent companions in the real world.

As far as this one game is concerned, I think that there will always be a role for Monopoly on a home video game system. It's just such a shame that it never translates as well as it should. The ingredients for a classic Monopoly video game shouldn't be hard to isolate. I think you should start with:

1. A user interface that lets you see your own properties, and those of your others, with relative ease, so even though you can't blow on the dice and whisper your demand, at least you know right off the bat what you don't want to roll to stay alive.
2. A huge variability in rules changes. They have been getting better at this in more recent versions.
3. Computers which are unpredictable and entertaining. Let's throw in the option of making your opponents gullible 8-year-olds, or by plying everyone at the table with booze.

Are we getting smarter?

The following is a reworded re-post of a Facebook note that I wrote in 2007.

If you believe in the validity of IQ (intelligence quotient), then the inevitable conclusion of the Flynn effect, which states that IQ scores tend to rise over time, is that we are getting smarter. Going back one generation would see marginally lower IQ scores, and going back one more would compound the effect. Wouldn't it be great if we could entitle ourselves to a pat on the back for just being born in this time period? How great does it feel to be the smartest generation that ever lived?

However, I don't think that IQ is a measurement that stands up well to the course of time. If you extrapolated backwords and accounted for regional differences, the inhabitants of Salina, Kansas, USA in 1895 would not appear to rank high in terms of brainpower. And yet here is their 8th grade final exam:

8th Grade Final Exam: Salina, KS -1895
Grammar (Time, one hour)

1. Give nine rules for the use of capital letters.
2. Name the parts of speech and define those that have no modifications.
3. Define verse, stanza and paragraph.
4. What are the principal parts of a verb? Give principal parts of "lie," "play,"' and "run."
5. Define case; Illustrate each case.
6. What is punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of punctuation.
7 - 10. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.

*****************************************
Arithmetic (Time, 1.25 hours)
1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.
2. A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
3. If a load of wheat weighs 3942 lbs., what is it worth at 50cts/bushel, deducting 1050 lbs. for tare?
4. District No. 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?
5. Find the cost of 6720 lbs. coal at $6.00 per ton.
6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.
7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft. long at $20 per foot?
8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.
9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance of which is 640 rods?
10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt.

********************************************
U.S. History (Time, 45 minutes)
1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided..
2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus.
3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.
4. Show the territorial growth of the United States.
5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas.
6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.
7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Bell, Lincoln, Penn, and Howe?
8. Name events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, 1865..

*******************************************
Orthography (Time, one hour)
1. What is meant by the following: Alphabet, phonetic, orthography, etymology, syllabication
2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?
3. What are the following, and give examples of each: Trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals
4. Give four substitutes for caret 'u.'
5. Give two rules for spelling words with final 'e.' Name two exceptions under each rule.
6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each.
7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: bi, dis, mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono, sup.
8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fare, last.
9. Use the following correctly in sentences: cite, site, sight, fane, fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.
10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by syllabication.

*********************************************
Geography (Time, one hour)
1. What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?
2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas?
3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean?
4. Describe the mountains of North America.
5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Denver, Manitoba, Hecla, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fernandez, Aspinwall and Orinoco.
6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S.
7. Name all the republics of Europe and give the capital of each.
8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude?
9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers.
10. Describe the movements of the earth. Give the inclination of the earth.

Please share your opinions and tell me if you think that was a cakewalk. If you didn't, then remember to show your elders a little more respect.  And before you mention how most students never got further than 8th grade or high school, try and imagine how much harder they had to work for their college degree. Try and understand how many of them still had to get degrees in order to build the society and technology of the 20th century. The old men and women of today might not know some things you know, but they know a lot of stuff that you don't know, and might never have to learn.

What the hell do Jains eat?

Adherents of Jainism subscribe to a principle of non-violence so open-ended that I am struggling to think of any carbon-based life that is available for their consumption. Jains, for example, refuse to consume beer or yogurt on the basis of the microorganisms that inhabit it, or eat food stored overnight, to avoid harming the bacteria that have grown in it. The general trend of the Jain diet is lacto-vegetarianism, but with some strange prohibitions on many vegetables, and with the community divided on the acceptability of dairy products.

The following is an incomplete list of foods that Jains cannot consume:

1. Meat
2. Eggs
3. Cabbage, because it is a root plant which is killed by uprooting it
4. Potatoes, for the same reason
5. Yeast
6. Beer
7. Wine
8. Vinegar
9. Gelatin
10. Garlic
11. Mushrooms
12. Fruits that bleed a milky sap when cut
13. Beansprouts
14. Carrots
15. Turnips
16. Any food item that has been prepared the previous day (it must be thrown out)
17. Onions (Oh my God no)
18. Water that has not been filtered in a traditional way
19. Rennet (used in the production of some cheeses)
20. Honey, on the basis that it involves violence towards bees to collect (????)
21. Food cooked at night because it must be done by artificial light, which attracts and may kill insects (?!?!). Jains take a vow to never cook food after sundown for this reason.

Some (but not all) Jains follow even stricter observations, in addition to strict veganism, and abstain from the following:

1. All cheeses
2. Milk
3. Vegetable greens, on the basis of pain to the plant when plucking the leaves
4. Fruit which is bright red, giving the appearance of meat, like apples, tomatoes, and watermelon

Holy fricking God. No meat or booze or potatoes. Not even onions or apples or honey. This is way beyond vegetarianism or veganism. This is like an intentional abstinence from everything that has flavor. If I end up in Hell, it will be something like this. I'd jump in front of a bus if I felt like I had to live that way.

Are we getting smarter?

(This is a slightly edited repost of a blog post that I made all the way back in 2007)

The commonly-upheld Flynn effect simply states that the IQ of people go up over time (presumably with increasing technology and modernization). It was empirically observed over many circumstances for decades, though it has seemingly tapered off to nothing in the developed Western world. Though controversial, it is probably true that IQ does increase. 

But is IQ a meaningful measure of intelligence?

I don't think so at all. In fact, I think that a system where you extrapolate backwards to find that a genius like Aristotle has an IQ of about -1000, which is less than a slab of blue cheese, and brilliant men like Newton would have been stupider than house pets, then there's probably a problem with the system. I think that a system which seeks to give each generation a proactive pat-on-the-back for being smarter than their parents, is dangerous and hostile to human development. Instead, we eradicate the old knowledge to make room for the new. Pushing the envelope while ignoring the fundaments means that little is effectively learned.

I sometimes visualize intelligence as a fixed amount of railroad tracks. We can uproot the tracks and move them to the front of the line to keep going in the right direction, but we always have about the same quantity of track.

I would like to challenge the intelligence of my readers by sharing with them an 8th grade test from a town in Kansas in 1895. Does this sound like it should be hard? I bet all college graduates think they would be able to blow it away.


If the Flynn effect is correct, the average person of the time was slightly mentally retarded by today's standards... and this is Kansas, so you'd probably think they were even more lacking in intellectual sophistication. So have at it. Do you think you know your three Rs: reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic?




8th Grade Final Exam: Salina, KS -1895

Grammar (Time, one hour)

1. Give nine rules for the use of capital letters.

2. Name the parts of speech and define those that have no modifications.

3. Define verse, stanza and paragraph.

4. What are the principal parts of a verb? Give principal parts of "lie," "play,"' and "run."

5. Define case; Illustrate each case.

6. What is punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of punctuation.

7 - 10. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.

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Arithmetic (Time, 1.25 hours)

1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.

2. A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?

3. If a load of wheat weighs 3942 lbs., what is it worth at 50cts/bushel, deducting 1050 lbs. for tare?

4. District No. 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?

5. Find the cost of 6720 lbs. coal at $6.00 per ton.

6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.

7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft. long at $20 per foot?

8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.

9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance of which is 640 rods?

10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt.

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U.S. History (Time, 45 minutes)

1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided..

2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus.

3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.

4. Show the territorial growth of the United States.

5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas.

6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.

7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Bell, Lincoln, Penn, and Howe?

8. Name events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, 1865..

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Orthography (Time, one hour)

1. What is meant by the following: Alphabet, phonetic, orthography, etymology, syllabication

2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?

3. What are the following, and give examples of each: Trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals

4. Give four substitutes for caret 'u.'

5. Give two rules for spelling words with final 'e.' Name two exceptions under each rule.

6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each.

7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: bi, dis, mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono, sup.

8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fare, last.

9. Use the following correctly in sentences: cite, site, sight, fane, fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.

10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by syllabication.

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Geography (Time, one hour)

1. What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?

2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas?

3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean?

4. Describe the mountains of North America.

5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Denver, Manitoba, Hecla, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fernandez, Aspinwall and Orinoco.

6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S.

7. Name all the republics of Europe and give the capital of each.

8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude?

9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers.

10. Describe the movements of the earth. Give the inclination of the earth.

Now, I didn't expect that anyone in their right mind actually sat down and tried to do it, but did you notice the perhaps excessive difficulty of the questions? I honestly can't think of a single person in memory who would have known the answers to those questions in eighth grade. Even now, many years later, I think it would take a veritable renaissance man to do well on this exam. You may claim that some of the questions are merely period knowledge, and we should not know of them except as a historical curiosity... but most of them, particularly the understanding of business arithmetic and orthography, are still very helpful today. 


If you weren't going to college, weren't leaving town, and your parents were illiterate, isn't it kind of important that you at least know how to write a bank check? What I love about the old days in this regard is that teachers taught their students to fully grasp enough of the world that they could survive by 8th grade. If we put an 8th grader from the year 2011 on the streets, it's a sure bet they would need to acquire more skills to survive.

Let's not even mention that five-hour length... longer than the SAT, and a helluva lot longer than the average college final. The kids would have crimson asses from sitting on those hickory benches by the time they were done. Of course, they might have been crimson anyway, because kids were hit with a proper piece of wood at the discretion of their schoolteachers.

Most of these children who took this test would not have been thinking of eventually going to college. But if they could do well with this broad basis of knowledge, they'd stand a pretty damn good chance today! And they got by pretty well without college degrees back then. In a current world where college is an expected result of high school, public education up to grade 12 is often seen as a stepping stone without accountability... and colleges, run as they are by unrealistic academics who make up for their unrealism by creating an insular college bubble world, are even more destabilizing to a person's sense of reality.

No, ladies and gentlemen, I do not think we are growing any smarter. I don't think that we should lambast our ancestors for being primitive, and I think we should properly respect the elders among us now. There is a Flynn effect only because we make IQ whatever it needs to be to accomplish it. If we are on a peak of any sort, it is a peak very unmomentous indeed, because every single generation behind us has experienced the same peak in their own time.

(Unfortunately, I do not have a source for the 8th grade exam from Salina, KS. But I promise that it was actually cited at one point.)

Wagons and moon rockets

Today I'm going to pick on Buick in order to ask a question.

The 1996 Buick Roadmaster Estate Wagon rode a version of the GM B-body fundamentally unaltered from the Carter administration. It achieved a combined fuel economy of 18 mpg with a 260-hp 5.7L V8 engine, acceleration from 0-60 in 7.8 seconds, 5000-lb towing capacity, and was extremely well-equipped at a 1996 price of $27,575. It's pretty overweight, at 4563 lb. This car was derided as "antiquated" and "obsolete" with accordingly lackluster sales, and was dropped, along with all full-size RWD GM cars, in 1996.

On a personal side note, these cars are somewhat special to me, particularly in their anachronistic simulated woodgrain side paneling. Antediluvian though the appearance may be, the noise made by their Corvette-derived LT1 engine still stirs the heart of any red-blooded American. The horn does not honk quite so much as sound a low shout of arrogant aggression. Some people may have bought the Roadmaster because they were not yet ready for a truck and they felt that V8, body-on-frame, and rear-wheel drive was the layout that God intended. But I imagine  that the criteria for purchasing it were mostly practical for most buyers, just as they would be today. What family hauler does Buick currently offer in the modern age?

A 2011 Buick Enclave is better equipped with many electronic doodads that our grandpas couldn't have conceived when designing the Roadmaster. Thanks to "modern" technology such as front-wheel drive and a 288-hp 3.6L V6, this car weighs more at 4780 lb, achieves 0-60 in a breathtaking 7.7 seconds and returns an astonishing 19 mpg. Unfortunately, some towing capacity was lost in the transition to FWD, so this vehicle will be rated at merely 4500-lb. This car has won multiple awards from respected automotive reviewers and sells considerably more rapidly than the earlier Roadmaster. When the cost of the Roadmaster is adjusted to 2011 dollars, they are approximately equal in value for the same specifications: $37,000.

How is it that this pudgy crossover SUV can be lauded as modern when a car that came 15 years earlier was chided for being old-fashioned, though both cars achieved almost identical results in fuel economy, comfort, performance, towing capacity, passenger space, and price? Does the half-century-old storied Roadmaster nameplate and collectible-classic styling tend to work against the big wagon? Does the Enclave's SUV profile, with all the glitzy, cheesy style of a Walmart auto accessory aisle, do it favors that I cannot perceive?

If the 1960s United States could, on its own volition, visit the Moon with manned landings, on multiple occasions, why does the task of merely repeating that goal seem impossible, even if earnest support from the Russian and European space agencies were present?

Maybe the stigmatization of wagons was so complete that the big wagons passed unmourned in 1996. I am unable to comment with direct experience because I was not suitably advanced in age in 1996 to make note of car buyers' habits. But surely $4 gas snapped enough people out of the SUV craze that some major automakers put pen to paper on the next round of wagons, picking up where design stagnated in 1996?

No. For the same reason that in planning a return to the moon in 2020, we didn't recycle the Saturn V rocket. A rocket that never lost a payload or crew, which turned out to be the most reliable link in the whole Apollo program, is far too old-fashioned and unreliable to be used in the 21st century. The Constellation Program would have gotten us back to the Moon with a clean-sheet design, but it was scrapped in 2010 by the Obama administration.

If you are considering buying a truck or SUV, I do not fault you for your decision at all. You have demands for moving people and cargo that need to be fulfilled, and you can only buy what is for sale. Likewise, I do not fault NASA for failing to return to the Moon or create a manned Mars mission, either. They are making do with what is available. We have not given them a blank check since approximately 1966. But perhaps we could innocently ask our dealer why automakers make vehicles today that are no more advanced than 15 years ago, with more weight and bulkier styling.