Friday Four
Friday, August 02, 2013
1. Here's the complete run-down of my
two-year-old daughter's reaction to getting a booster shot yesterday:
"Ouch!" A nurse had earlier commented that most other children
her age do not sit still for their exams like she did.
Lately,
she's been starting to interact with other kids at the playground and play
make-believe. The other day, she was "driving" the firetruck model installed at
a park and told me so.
"Well, where are we going?"
"Magic
House."
2. Have you ever found
yourself flipping through the pages of a SkyMall catalogue during a flight?
Have you ever subsequently wondered about the company behind the astonishing
array of bizarre items? Go
to town, then.
3. Have you
ever done a double take when asked whether to opt in to (or was that
out of?) an email list? Have you ever wondered why some
setting on your smart phone was buried under six menu layers and governed by a
radio button next to some mumbo jumbo? Welcome to the sleazy world of dark patterns.
Suddenly disabling text selection makes sense. They want to discourage people from bypassing their paywall by copying the job description and pasting it into Google as a search term. They don't want people to get to the true source. In this case the job was published on bloomberg's [sic] careers site where you can apply free.Cass Sunstein would be proud. (And Nick Corcodilos would probably say, "Par for the course", regarding the above example.)
4. I guess Item 2 of this list of "New Kinds of Anxiety the Internet Gave Us" (NSFW) explains the "Helvetica Rules" bumper sticker I found myself driving behind the other day.
-- CAV
2 comments:
'my two-year-old daughter's reaction to getting a booster shot yesterday...'
My son slept through his first couple boosters (newborn and age 2); the nurse told me she had never seen that before.
'"Well, where are we going?"
"Magic House."'
This is just more evidence for my hypothesis that the St. Louis 'Magic House' unlike most Children's Museums (e.g Boston, San Diego, Toronto, Vancouver) was designed to appeal to children rather than adults by putting a whole lot of fun activities into a very small space. (Probably because they were restricted on space and had no choice, but for whatever reason, it worked out superbly; it’s what kids like.) It is simply the best venue for children ages 3-8 that I have ever seen. I took my niece and two nephews there along with my son on a visit a few years ago, on their way to Florida. All three of them told me later that they enjoyed it better than Disney World. (another theme park made by adults, for adults)
Based on a prior visit to Disney Land, I suspect my daughter would also rank Magic House over the Magic Kingdom. It was obvious that the most fun she had the whole time was when she played in a water fountain. She wasn't talking much then, though.
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