This is Getting Ridiculous

Strangely enough, Scott and I flew on Northwest Airlines through the Detroit Airport twice this week.  In light of the news of the attempted terrorist attack on a Northwest Airlines flight into Detroit I felt particularly interested in the story.  The details in the news reports are a bit sketchy so far, but flying back home on Sunday I really felt like we were reaching a new level of ridiculous in air safety.  I think the folks who want to do harm will find no end of ways to cause trouble.  Until we chain everyone into their seats naked we probably won't be able to stop everyone.  Think about the weapon that could be made out of a nail file or a ball point pen. 
 We were told in our flight to NYC from Detroit that we weren't going to be able to leave our seats for an hour prior to landing.  Since we'd just barely made the connecting flight by running (yes again) to make the plane, we didn't have time to stop and go to the bathroom or grab food etc.  So the flight time of 1 hour and 8 minutes just barely gave me enough time for a bathroom break.  What if the flight had been 59 minutes?  Would they have made me pee my pants?  I read in a New York Times Article that the new restrictions might require people to keep their laps free of objects as well.  They didn't tell us about or try to enforce that rule.  But like I said, if someone is really trying to do damage they're not going to be bothered by that rule or any rules.  I took a few classes on terrorism in college and basically we concluded that terrorists "win" by creating an aura of fear that makes people change their habits in disproportion to the action of the terrorists.  One man on one plane means that everyone everywhere has to pay to feel like a prisoner trapped in their seat.  The new rules are ineffective and they just hand victory to the bad guys.  I'm just hoping that this knee jerk reaction is followed by moderation similar to the liquids ban turning into a fewer liquids rule.

Rant over.

Here are a few pictures to prove I saw winter this year.  Also The Book Shoppe is Scott's mom's store.  It's adorable.  She lives upstairs and the store is downstairs.  Best of all it's on the main street in town named, get this, Story Street!

From Christmas 2009 Iowa

From Christmas 2009 Iowa

I <3 the Internet

Warning stream of consciousness ahead!

Well I guess it all really started from a magazine. Today at work we recieved our regular subscription to Museums magazine. It sounds really exciting, I know but in it was an article by an interesting woman who I sheepishly admit I thought was a man because it was about gaming. She wants to use gaming in all sorts of great ways, including saving the world and having a game designer win a Nobel Prize. In the article she talked about happiness and how video games are really great at producing happiness based on some basic principles happiness researchers (yup they exist) have found. This all connected to museums because she thought museums should be at the forefront of creating happiness and that they could use the principles of gaming to do so.

Sooooo I've been thinking lately about my degree topic (educational technology) and how the part I'm really interested in is individualized instruction. I really think that's where technology has a chance to shine instead of just being annoying and hard to work/incorporate into the classroom.

When I first heard about gaming and ed-tech I thought, 'eh'. I've seen Scott play and play and play and didn't really want to have much more involvement than that. But when my professor described the way games can become really great individualized instructors my interest was piqued.

Anyway, back to Jane McGonigal, who happens to be the lady I was talking about earlier. She's awesome. I found her blog and she has some great stuff there and great ideas in general. I am always a fan of the "make the world a better place" ideas. But doing that while having fun is even better. She talks about how people spend 20 hours a week on World of Warcraft and compares that to the amount of time it's taken to build Wikipedia to it's current state. Basically WOW players could have make Wikipedia in a few months. She also links to this site where you play a game of exchanging and building on ideas the Signtific Lab. Their name bugs me because I always want to pronounce the G. So that was interesting, so is her Top Secret Dance Off. You can browse her blog for yourself to find all these crazy things.

I don't know if this gets anyone else excited, but I can't wait for the future and to meet people like her and to create games to educate people well and change the world and GRRRR just DO something with my life.

p.s. I was going to make a super secret dance and post it, but I made the super secret dance video and decided that it should remain secret.

News from the Front Lines

You may have heard in the news about Lehman Brothers filing for bankruptcy. For those of you who don't know, it was a 150 year old investment firm that was the fourth largest on Wall Street. I'm not sure how this news hit the rest of the world, but in New York it was huge news. Two of our good friends got their start working there for two years. They still have friends who worked there. Walking past the morning coffee carts you can overhear conversations between people discussing whether or not they expect to have a job by the end of the week and that is in midtown where there aren't really many financial jobs, so it still remains to be seen what the fall out from all this will be. New York City depends on tax revenue from all the wealthy financial industry folk in order to run the city and when they don't earn money, the city doesn't either. That means that subway stations don't get painted and there might not be as many firefighters around.
Despite the fact that this is all not the greatest news for New York, personally I think it's about time the tax payers stopped bailing out Wall Street for the risk the people flinging money around decided to take. Many people were surprised that the Fed didn't step in to help this time like they did with Bear Sterns, I'm happy they didn't. Legislators have bought out Freddie and Fannie and they're all in a tizzy over the housing market being down, but how is it that when food prices go up it's a problem and when gas prices go up it's a problem, but when housing prices go up, it's not a problem? The housing bubble is all intertiwned in our country's financial mess and that bothers me too. I hope to own a home one day, but right now I'm priced out of it. Housing prices need to drop so the honest hard working joe schmoe who actually saves their money and doesn't borrow more than they can pay back has a chance.
Excuse my rant, I don't typically like to be too political, but sometimes I think people need to understand what all these things mean to them. I'm guessing the majority of people think that it doesn't affect them, but it does. The money that I pay to the government should go into things like schools, not into pockets of already wealthy risk takers.