Newsflash: Shorts Cooler than Pants??

I recall seeing an article within the last year or so as a headline on Yahoo, titled something like:

"Taylor Swift Beats Summer Heat by Wearing Shorts."

Umm. Thanks. Apparently, like millions of people around the world, she has discovered that short pants promote cooler body temperatures than long pants. Congratulations to whoever was paid to write that shorts are cooler in the summer than long pants.

The benefit of technology is what must be mastered by its users: the ability to access huge amounts of information. Its beautiful that so many people can learn so much. Its great that people can make a living sharing that information, or just do it because they want to. Its not great that people might believe the most important information they can share is, essentially: "Woman wears short pants because they are self-evidently more comfortable in hot weather." Remember, this was a headline on a website that is attempting to bill itself as a serious news source on the internet.

Let's let information and access afforded by technology be something to build with instead of something to zone out with. Go check out something important or different: the geography of Asia, the history of a ghost town, photos of Death Valley, or recordings of whales.

Hopefully I won't have to write a companion piece when someone puts on a jacket in winter.

Technology and Cars

There is a simple thing I wish car companies would understand:  they are car companies, not tech companies.

If you're interested in buying a car, you are likely interested in what makes it a great car… NOT what makes it work with your iPhone.  Its a car.  If I wanted something to magically integrate with my living room entertainment center, then I'd just stay in my living room.  Think about the Bugatti Veyron, for a second.  The Veyron is an unbelievable car and a masterpiece of engineering, but it doesn't have many of the interior amenities that most car companies consider essential.  While comparing one of the world's most desirable supercars to the average person's Toyota or Chevy is ridiculous, it just seems that the consumer shouldn't have to buy a multi-million dollar automobile to get a driving experience free of touch screens, navigation, and screwy smartphone integration.

So, dear car companies, please consider the following:

• Please focus on how the car looks
• Please focus on how the car drives
• Please understand that not everyone is satisfied with only 2 or 3 interior color options (I like blue and red, but other people like green, yellow, purple, etc…  black, grey, and beige are boring and uninteresting)
• Please understand that many "concept cars" would backlog your production line if you actually made them, while the cars actually brought to the market are a faint and boring shadow that doesn't sell. (Cadillac, I'm talking to you.  The El Miraj concept was gorgeous.  The CT6 is crap.)
• Please leave the cumbersome, intrusive, finicky "infotainment" centers at the warehouse.
• Many consumers never use the boatload of computer junk in modern cars
• You can build a car that is a better consumer value by leaving the extras off.  Most drivers already know where they are going or can look it up on their phone, rendering navigation meaningless.
• Driving is safer if there's less to deal with while driving.

And no, voice commands aren't the answer.  I much prefer having a conversation in my car to a conversation with my car.  

Video Games

If you played video games for just 10 minutes per day… that’s not bad.  Only 10 minutes out of 24 hours?  Sure.  BUT – 10 minutes per day is:

- 70 minutes per week
- 4 Hours and 40 minutes per month
- 56 Hours per year (over 2 full days)
- 560 Hours per decade – (that’s over 23 full days!)
- At $10 an hour, 10 minute daily video game playing totals to $5,600 per decade.
- At an average typing speed of 40 words per minute (wpm), that’s enough time to type 1,344,000 words per decade: the length of 28 novels that are about 50,000 words each.
- At an average human walking speed of 3mph, that's enough time for a person to walk from Boston to Oklahoma City (about 1680 miles) per decade.
- You could watch Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space” music video about 8,400 times per decade.

That is staggering, isn’t it?  There's just one problem: 10 minutes of video games per day is a pittance.  What is realistic?  Harris Interactive published a study in 2007 that found "average" kids ages 8-18 played 13-14 hours per week. In fact, the 13 hour per week benchmark holds for ALL U.S. gamers ages 2 and up, according to NPG Group in a 2010 study. That works out to about 1 hour and 51 min. per day.  That is:
- 13 hours per week

- 52 hours per month (more than 2 full days)

- 624 hours per year (26 full days)

- 6,240 hours per decade (260 full days – that’s over 8 solid months of time)

- At $10 per hour, 13 hours per week of video games is $62,400 per decade.

- Typing at 40wpm, that's 14,976,000 words per decade: the length of 300 novels of around 50,000 words.

- At 3mph, a person could walk 18,720 miles per decade - that's just shy of walking from the southernmost point in South America to the northernmost point in Alaska… and back.

- You could watch Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space” music video about 93,600 times per decade. 

Sounds bad doesn’t it?  Now, lets get really freaky: to a hardcore gamer, 2 hours per day is nothing.  NPD ranks the "hardcore" gamers at 22 hours per week – that’s more than 3 hours per day.  But in 2010, NPD Group identified one category of people as “Extreme Gamers,” estimated to be about 4% of the U.S. Population.  What is extreme?  48.5 hours per week playing video games.  Close to 7 hours per day.  48.5 hours a week - more than two full days of time and more than some people work per week - becomes:
- 194 hours per month (more than 8 full days)
- 2,328 hours per year (97 full days!! – more than 3 solid months per year)
- 23,280 hours per decade (970 full days – more than 2.5 solid YEARS per decade)
- At $10 an hour, 48.5 hours per week becomes a jaw-dropping $232,280 per decade.
- At 40 wpm, that’s 55,872,000 words: more than 1,100 novels of about 50,000 words
- At 3mph, a person could walk around the equator of the earth nearly 3 times.   
- You could watch Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space” music video about 349,300 times per decade. 

The first cost of video gaming is unimaginable amounts of time.  When I say "full days" and "solid months," that's exactly what I mean.  All of the figures above are based on full 24-hour blocks of time.  It is a shame to consider the potential innovation, discovery, and creation that could occur when someone is dwindling their life away.  Sadly, more current statistics don't show improvement.

Most people playing video games are not paid to do so.  Playing a video game doesn’t hone a skill set, teach you calculus, or let you practice a craft.  Moreover, they cost money: hundreds of dollars in equipment, along with many games priced at $50-60 apiece as new releases.  And within the span of a couple years, the hardware will be outdated (requiring new hardware) and those same games will only depreciate in price.  In other words, they really aren't that good of an investment.  Mobile games are also a large money drain and time drain, with free titles such as Candy Crush effectively pulling users into addiction and getting the user to buy "features" for the game… a purchase which does not buy anything real.  All those $0.99 purchases add up.  $0.99 per day for a decade is several thousand dollars.

Often, the video game debate is raging around content - "Do violent video games promote violent behavior?" and "Are video games harmful to my child?"  Let's save the content for another debate because the frequency alone should be considered a crisis.  Even the first example here (10 minutes per day) shows a big chink in the armor of "everything in moderation."  There's a running joke on the internet:

"Why haven't you ever seen a Lamborghini commercial before?  Because the people who can afford them aren't sitting around watching TV."  …or playing video games.

How are you spending your time?