X a day

Thought about sticking a cartoon or a joke or a foreign word in the kids lunch every day. They'd open it up and it would be a few seconds of humor or thought. Maybe it would get passed around if it was good enough. Found a few X a day calendars which I'll use. Also bought a joke book but it's remarkable how few good jokes there are or maybe it's more like reading sheet music. For jokes to have their full power you have to encounter them as a performed thing. Just reading a book of jokes (unless you're a professional!) falls flat. 

Always Returning

It seems that The Long Now should make it a practice of inviting previous speakers to return and continually give updated versions of the same lecture. The Short Now strives for newness above other values and the Long Now probably shouldn't. It should find a subset of topics and speakers and return to those ideas regularly. Something more akin to a mediation. 

Historians

"The other thing historians are forbidden to do is talk about the future because history and the historians discipline is based on facts. And the problem of the future is that it doesn't have any facts yet." Stewart Brand

Starting with the premise that things are more accurately probabilistic than causal this becomes a much more interesting statement. There are no facts about the past, there were probabilities about the past (and outcomes, but that's probably less relevant). Likewise, there are probabilities about the future (and there are outcomes here, too). There's more symmetry here than expected.

Dream of a giant board game park

There is a life-size game of life. You play with your physical self and walk the board. It's probably the size of a miniature golf course with the appropriate hill and dale. You probably have to have someone running around as the spinner and the banker -- both jobs that would keep you in good shape. This would be a fun project to get someone like parker bros to sponsor. Equally fun would be monopoly or sorry.

Also, there should be a worldwide project to make public chess boards -- either large size or chess pavilions.  

Drivers miscommunicating

Drivers waiting at a stoplight. When the light turns green the second car's driver honks immediately. The first car's driver is startled -- the light just turned green, why is he honking? The stop at the next light, the second driver honks immediately after the light turns green. The first driver didn't even have a chance to begin driving. This repeats and subsequent lights. The second driver was just telling the first driver when to go.

Gratitude

A friend of mine told me a story of visiting Kenya. He recently got back from an Outward Bound trip that spent part of their hike with Masai people. They have a particular word for the Westerners on adventures like this which translates into 'people who put a heavy load on their backs and go looking for problems.'

Humor aside, my friend and I talked about the tendency of materially well-off people to take trips where they deprive themselves of those comforts. Most of these are very modest deprivations -- sleeping in a tent, eating more packaged food.

The discussion turned to when these people return home. They (or we) are often so appreciative of what we didn't have. Sometimes we're offended by our own excess -- why do I need all this stuff? -- but we're also grateful to have clean water and warm shower in a way we didn't appreciate before we took our trip.

We agreed that is probably one of these reasons we do these things. It helps us re-value the important things. Those things grow ordinary, dull or invisible with everyday use. When those things and PEOPLE are absent for a period, we realize what's important again. 

One of my kids is away at camp for three days. His 8-year old sister wrote some notes to herself and hid them in her desk and bathroom drawer. They say things like 'remember how much you missed him when he wasn't here.' She told me she did this because next time she's mad at him she's thought this would make here rethink that. 

Sweet things for breakfast

When did we begin to eat sweet things for breakfast. There aren't other meals where the main dish is so expressly sweet (orange juice, waffles, pancakes, toast with jam, french toast, sugared cereal, yogurt with fruit, pastries). For lunch or dinner things this sweet are only eaten at desserts, if at all.

This is particularly interesting because it probably has some impact on both the metabolism and the palate. If you start your day with sugars it probably impacts your chemical desire for sugar throughout the day as a primary energy source. Also, having something sweet in the morning probably also tunes your taste towards sweeter things. These are anecdotal thoughts but they seem directionally right.

Orange juice and other fruit juices are new. In the West most fruit is new outside of maybe apples and pears. Jam is interesting to research but adding sugar to jam's can't be more than a few hundred years old because of the rarity of sugar until recently.

Anything with syrup is probably a few hundred years old or less, but that's worth researching when it came into the diet, especially breakfast.

And if you classify breads and cereals as sugar-like because of their carbs, that encapsulates most breakfasts that are not eggs and pork-related.

I wonder how dramatically you would shift the diet and weight if most breakfasts with non-bread or cereal and non-sugar. It would be a huge change to palates alone to have a savory only start to the day.