Remember that song when you were a little kid, “The wheels on the bus go round and round”? If you don’t remember, here are some of the words to remind you: “The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round.” I bet when you were super young you didn’t realize that this song is about technology! And the technology part isn’t the bus, or the part about going round and round. The technology part is the wheels!
The wheel has been around for a long time, but not as long as the circle. Actually, wheel was invented when a caveman drew a circle and another caveman was like, “Hey if that thing was puffier, I bet it would roll down hills super easy.” (This was all said in caveman language.) Other stuff was invented from circles too! In medieval times, a bunch of guys were staring at a picture of a circle and one was like, “Hey, if we made this things out of fancy material that would break if you dropped it, I bet it would be a totally sweet thing to eat food off of,” and that’s where plates came from. In the fifties, a bunch of musicians looked at circle pictures and one was like, “Let’s put music on these things, and make it so you have to spin it to get the music out,” and that’s where records, and eventually CDs, came from!
In fact, the invention of the wheel was so impressive, that now, when inventors try and make something really big and crazy, people say they’re reinventing the wheel. I think this is sort of stupid! I wouldn’t be that hard to reinvent the wheel, because it’s already invented. You could just take a wheel, make some new designs on it and be like, “look at my new invention!” That’s why I think we should change the phrase, “reinvent the wheel” to “invent something that is as hugely important to how things work on Earth as the wheel was when cavemen made it a while ago, probably using rock tools.”
If you don’t think the wheel is important, imagine a world where they were never invented. There would be no cars or bikes or mopeds. When you wanted to leave and sound cool, you couldn’t say, “Let’s roll!” because, without wheels, rolling might never have been discovered. Instead you would say, “Let’s leg!” because people would either walk everywhere or ride horses. Parking lots would smell like a farm because they would be filled with horses tied up to stuff. Then if you went to a movie and it was awesome, you’d be really excited until you went out into the parking lot where the gross horse smell would make you forget the awesomeness of the movie.
So wheels have made for a better world, but I, for one, think that, if we keep using them, they’ll get totally boring and lame. That’s why it’s time for car scientists to really start trying to make hover cars! Also, it would be cool if car scientists made cars with a button you could push and the car would change color. That way, if you pulled into a parking lot and there was the same car as yours, you could press the button and feel like an individual.
Categories: Technology · history
Tagged: awesome, history, horses, hover cars, humor, Technology, wheels
Have you ever been hanging out with your friend, and everything is normal until all of the sudden he puts on some weird shoes and says, “hey man lets go shoot some hoops”? You might think that what your friend wants to do is throw hula-hoops in the air and try and shoot them with a BB gun. But actually, your friend is talking about playing the game of basketball.
Basketball is the game where there are baskets and two teams trying to get the ball into the right one. One lame thing about basketball is that the teams know which basket is theirs at the very beginning of the game. I think it would be cooler if the teams didn’t know and had to guess. Maybe the announcer could give say things that seemed random but were actually clues. At the end, they would tell everyone which basket belonged to which team and then, on the big screen above everything, there would be a flashback to all of the clues and then the players would be like, “We should have known all along!” and it would be really suspenseful.
Unlike other games where you can grab a ball and run with it, in basketball you need to bounce the ball everywhere you go. This is called dribbling. Nobody is sure why dribbling exists, but there are theories. Here’s one of mine: the guy who invented basketball threw a party to show people his new game where you run around with a ball trying to score points. To look cool, he had a special new ball made and at the party, the ball was still hot and fresh from the ball factory. So when the guy went to show people how to play, he couldn’t hold onto it for very long at a time and had to bounce it. Since there were girls at the party, he pretended it was what he always planned to do so he wouldn’t look like a loser in front of them.
If you’re watching basketball on TV, you might notice that when people score a normal basket, they get two points. What if other stuff was like this? Like lets say you used to be a sailor, and you are walking to your new job, which is in a boring office. Your walk goes past a lake and there is a guy with a boat who’s like, “One boat ride for dollar, step right up!” You miss the water and have some time and a dollar, so you’re like, “Ok.” He takes you around the lake, but when you get the place where you should get off, the guy starts going around again. When you ask him what’s going on, he’s like, “One boat ride is twice around the lake.” You’d be late for work. That’s what it would be like if life was like baskets in basketball!
Basketball is a really great game to play with friends. While not everyone is as good as the pros, anyone can play basketball and have fun, unless you get creeped out by the sound that a basketball makes when it bounces on a basketball court. Then basketball would be more scary than fun.
Categories: Life stuff · sports
Tagged: awesome, history, humor, sports, Technology
Sometimes, when I’m watching television, I think, “Man, this is so great that I don’t need to stand at all in order to do this! I wonder what it was like to watch television before chairs were invented.” Then I feel better when I remember that chairs were invented before television. But this doesn’t mean that chairs weren’t changed by technology, by which I mean, chairs were changed by technology!
One thing is that there are less stools around. Think about it: there’s no front or back to a stool, so you don’t know which way to sit on it! With technology being so advanced that you need to pay attention to it all the time, a stool would be dangerous. If there were a bunch of stools around a television, you might sit down with your back to the screen. Then you would still hear the funny stuff that people say, but you might miss it when someone makes a funny face, or when the joke is that someone falls down. It was like this in school too! In subjects that were hard and boring, like math, there were chairs so you would pay attention. But in subjects that were fun and easy and didn’t mean anything, there were stools, like in art class.
Another thing is that chairs have more cushions than before. A long time ago, it was dangerous to get comfortable so chairs weren’t as soft as they are now. The danger came from the fact that, to keep things from getting too boring, someone could randomly yell, “Draw!” and everyone would have to jump up and shoot old-timey guns at each other. This has been replaced by action-packed television shows that don’t require getting up fast, so chairs are softer.
But television isn’t the only kind of technology that has affected what we sit on. Office technology has been big for chair history too! A long time ago, when people just wrote stuff on paper and then sent it out using mail or trained eagles, chairs at desks didn’t have to move at all. Now, with so much stuff on desks, like a computer, a printer, a fax and speakers, desks have gotten bigger and you can’t reach everything from one place. This is where the rolling chair comes from. When there’s so much technology that we need to build desks that have really high shelves to put it all on, they might invent rocket chairs, or if people starting keeping their office stuff in several different rooms because they have so much of it, chairs would need to teleport.
If you look at pictures of old chairs and pictures of new chairs, you might think, “what are chairs going to look like in the future?” That’s just the thing: the chairs of tomorrow will probably look sort of the same. There will always be chair artists and chair scientists trying to make the coolest-looking and most comfortable chairs possible, but there will always have to be a place for your butt and a place for your back. (Unless technology is invented that makes it so people can get rid of their butt and their back. If that happens, chairs could look like anything!)
Categories: Technology · history
Tagged: awesome, chairs, changes, future, history, humor, Technology
In the olden days, when computers had just been invented, you couldn’t pick a cool background because computers had numbers instead of pictures. These early computers are called calculators. Now computers let you choose any sweet picture to use as your background. But like they say in superhero movies, with great power comes great stuff to think about. A lot of places are offering free wireless internet, which makes choosing the right picture more important than ever. Here are some pictures to consider for your computer:
Rocket Ship Taking Off: Not many people are allowed on rocket ships, because they’re really scientific. So if you put a picture of a rocket launching on your and someone is like, “Hey, nice picture,” you can look cool by saying, “Oh yeah, it’s a hobby of mine.” The first thing people will think is “Whoa that’s cool that he’s been to space.” The second thing they’ll think is “Wait, if space is his hobby, what kind of super crazy stuff does he do for a job?” Then they’ll be more impressed!
“This is a Replacement Computer”: Is your laptop getting a little old? Do you feel embarrassed to bring it out in public? There’s an easy way to fix this! Just take everything off your desktop, and set your background to be a picture that is all white except for a thing in the middle that says “This is a replacement computer.” Then if someone says, “That’s a lame laptop,” you can be like, “Yeah it’s the one that the computer-fixing store leant me while they worked on my real laptop. I broke it mountain climbing.” (Warning: this one requires some mountain research. Try searching “ten most awesome mountains” or something.)
Kittens: A while ago, kitten pictures would just be for girls, but that has changed thanks to new kitten picture advancements. Now you can get pictures of kittens wearing cool sunglasses or kittens in an awesome sports car. I even found a kitten picture where a kitten was giving a middle finger! And I didn’t even know kittens had fingers!
Standard Background: A background that your computer comes with says, “I just got this thing and I don’t know how to use it.” But sometimes that’s exactly what you want to say. For example, let’s say you’re near a really pretty girl who’s using a computer. You might be able to get attention by pretending you don’t know anything about how to use yours. Say things like “What is up with all these buttons with letters on them?” or “What kind of typewriter is this anyway?” The girl might feel bad for you and come over to help. When she tells you what to do, be like, “Oh wait, I think I get it.” Then start doing a lot of cool computer stuff. That way she’ll think you’re super smart since you learn so fast, and she might be into smart guys.
If you’re computer has a setting where the background can change, make it be changing between a bunch of really old paintings that are famous. Then just stare at it, and if someone walks by, say “Just some stuff I’ve got in the hallway at my house.” Then say your house is a castle. (Warning: Don’t let anyone come see the art in your castle, unless you really have art and a castle.)
Categories: Life stuff · Technology
Tagged: awesome, calculator, humor, laptop, pictures, sweet, Technology
When people came over to my house when I was a kid, they would see our big satellite dish and be like, “Whoa! Does you dad work as a spy for the government and get super secret updates beamed through that thing?” And I would be like, “Yeah.” They would think I was really cool, and then for dinner we would have frozen pizza and my friends would be like, “if your dad is a sweet spy, why do you guys eat frozen pizza? Shouldn’t you have a pizza chef, like from Italy, that works for you full time?” And that’s when I would have to admit that my dad wasn’t a spy for the government and that our satellite dish was just for TV.
Satellite is the opposite of cable. The difference between satellite and cable is that satellite television comes from outer space and cable comes from wires that run underground in the sewer (I think). There’s good stuff and bad stuff about both of them. Like if you have satellite, you feel cool because you’re talking to things in space every time you change the channel, but then if there was an intergalactic war, what would happen to TV as we know it? By having cable your supporting earth by saying no to space, but then if the sewers flood or alligators start gnawing on the wires, your picture might get fuzzy (I am pretty sure cable is in the sewers.
The big satellite dish I had when I was kid was from the time before they started making the really tiny ones that everyone has now. While the new small ones work better and don’t take up your whole back yard, I like the old big ones more. It’s kind of like having a rhino instead of a poodle for a pet. The poodle would be better behaved in the house and win more dog shows than the rhino, and with a poodle you don’t need to worry about it getting moody and trampling your car. But at the end of the day if you have a poodle, you can’t be like, “I have a pet rhino” and make people think you’re cool.
The sweetest thing about big satellite dishes was that they actually moved. One summer, me and my older brother, Lester, got walk walkie-talkies and I sat out next to the satellite dish with a piece of paper and Lester changed channels. He would tell me over the walkie-talkie what channel he was turning to and I would see where the dish pointed and make a channel map on my piece of paper. I got really into it, like I could see where the satellite was pointing and know what channel someone was watching without even looking at my map. Even these days, I still think stuff like, “There’s a storm coming in around channel five” or “There’s a cloud that looks like a laptop over channel nine.”
So what can we use those big dishes for now? Well if you live off a highway and you had a barn, you could hang a sign on the barn that says “Spot” like it’s a dog house and you could put the dish in front of it half full of dog food. Then you could make money on a roadside attraction for the biggest in the world. (And you don’t even need to have the biggest dog in the world to do it! You just need to point to the barn and say, “He’s sleeping”!)
Categories: Technology
Tagged: advice, awesome, cable, humor, old, satellite, Technology
Cell phone reception is like a wedding reception because they both involve talking to people. If you go to the wrong place, your wedding reception could be really bad, like a place where there are lots of bees or a tropical island where a violent tribe that hates weddings lives. This stuff is pretty easy to avoid because there will be clues, like big bee hives or burning wedding cakes all over the beach. Going to the wrong place can also make your cell phone reception bad but it’s not as easy to avoid. That’s why it’s important to know the steps to take if it happens to you.
Step 1: Before you end up in a place with bad reception, keep an eye on your bars. If you are driving and you notice that your bars are going down, ask yourself, “Is where I’m going really that cool? Cool enough to not be able to talk on my cell phone? And if it is that cool, won’t I want to call someone and tell them how cool it is?” (Important: this only applies to the bars on your phone. If you drive past a bar, like where people watch sports and drink beers, and it goes down, like the whole bar falls over, this does not mean you are losing cell phone reception. In fact, if you have cell phone reception and a bar falls over while you drive by, you should probably call someone.)
Step 2: If you end up in a place with bad cell phone reception, try not to panic, but if you really want to, you can panic a little bit. Think about it, your cell phone’s not working, so who’s going to know? It’s not like someone’s going to call you up, hear your panicky voice and then uninvite you to a bunch of sweet parties for people who are always calm.
Step 3: Don’t scare the locals. The people around you have bad cell phone reception so who knows if they’ve even seen a cell phone before. Keep your cell phone in your pocket.
Step 4: If you forget to put your cell phone away and someone asks you what the thing with buttons and a screen is, say you’re a scientist and you invented it.
Step 5: See what other technology these people are missing. If they don’t have computers and televisions, drive home, grab your computer and your TV and then come back. Show the people your stuff and say made it all and when you said you were a scientist before, you meant that you were a wizard.
Step 6: Once they believe you’re a wizard, run for mayor. You’ll get elected (who wouldn’t vote for a wizard?).
Step 7: Since the town doesn’t have cell phone reception, it’s probably pretty lame, so only stay mayor for a little while. Make sure to stay long enough to be able to mention it when you’re trying to get jobs or when you’re talking to attractive girls.
Categories: Technology
Tagged: advice, awesome, Cell phone, humor, sweet, Technology
When you eat Chinese food at the mall for the first time, you feel sort of sick. The next time, you don’t feel as sick. If you keep eating Chinese food at the mall, you get used to it and you don’t feel sick at all, just like you’re eating normal food. Well, think of technology as the opposite of mall Chinese food for your eyes.
By technology, I mean technology with screens. An mp3 player won’t hurt your eyes, unless someone with really good aim throws one at your eye really hard. A computer keyboard could only hurt your eyes if a bully made you type up his essay using your eyeballs while the computer teacher isn’t looking. The bad thing about screens is they can hurt your eyes even if you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing: looking at them.
The proof of this is nerds. Nerds always hang out on computers doing nerdy things with hundreds of tiny letters and numbers, making them stare at the screen really hard and really close, which hurts their eyes. That’s why nerds always have really big glasses. This is actually an example of something that you learn in science in high school called cause and what happens next.
The scary thing is, with the internet being so awesome that you want to be on it all the time, you could be at risk of hurting your eyes and getting big nerd glasses too! Here’s what you should do to avoid this: go around the internet for a while, but then, for at least an hour everyday, sit at your computer with your eyes closed, click the mouse, and pretend to be on the internet! And if you get bored clicking around your favorite real sites, you can make up sites in your head! There’s no limit to the internet in your imagination!
This might seem unfair. You might be like, “Why have eyes if I can’t even use them?” Well remember, eyes are good for other stuff besides technology with screens, like driving or noticing when there’s a door to open before trying to walk through a doorway.
The problem is that eyes are weak. Your eyes are like technology because sometimes new stuff comes out that they doesn’t work with. But your eyes aren’t like technology because you can’t buy sweet upgraded eyes to make your them work with new stuff. There is actually only one kind of eye-upgrade you can get and it’s glass eyes, but those are only upgrades for people who start out not having any eyes at all. For those of us with normal eyes, glass eyes are a downgrade.
So the only thing we can do to help our eyes is be careful and I don’t just mean when it comes to technology. There is other stuff that hurts your eyes too! For instance, the sun makes it light outside so that you can use your eyes better, but if you use your eyes to look at the sun for hours straight, it might start to get dark all of the time for you. That’s why they sell sunglasses at the drug store: because they’re healthy!
Categories: Health · Technology
Tagged: awesome, eyes, Health, humor, satire, screens, sunglasses
Let’s say you meet a girl and she invites you over to her place for dinner. She seems normal but when you get there, she’s got forks made out of rocks and bones and the meal is uncooked meat. This would mean that the girl is a secret caveman and you’d be like, “Umm… hey, you don’t need to be like this. There’s new stuff, like microwaves, that you could use.” Well if you’re going to make her upgrade her stuff, then you better upgrade your stuff too. That’s right, I’m talking about mirrors! We have all this sweet, awesome technology, but our mirrors are still like they were when people rode horses everywhere and houses were made out of hay and mud. I’ve got a few ideas for new features to bring mirrors into the modern age. Check them out!
Image Saver: Ever wake up with sweet hair, see yourself in the mirror, shower and forget what your sweet hair looked like? Well with mirrors that could save images, you’d be able to relive that awesome hair whenever you wanted. I would take a picture every morning. That way, if there was a scratch on my face and I forgot when I got it, I could go to my mirror archives and be like, “I didn’t have it on Monday, but I did have it on Tuesday. I must have played with a cat sometime on Monday or really early Tuesday morning.”
Beard Button: Beards are like plants; they take long to grow and sometimes they suck. A beard button would be a button you could press that would make a digital beard on your reflection. Then you could choose to shave or let it grow with confidence!
Fake-Breaking Soft Glass: Sometimes in movies, when people are mad at themselves they punch their mirror and it cracks and they seem relieved. Well in real life, you only get more mad at yourself if you do this, because it might not crack and if it does, you have to go to the hospital. Well, with mirrors built out of soft glass that make fake cracks when you punch it, you wouldn’t get hurt at all! It could also have a remote so that if you were mad at someone, you could be like, “look at my mirror,” and then secretly press the button on the remote making it crack and they would think they were really ugly.
Scrolling Ads on the Frame: Have a mirror and need some extra money? Well with this feature, you could rent out the frame around your mirror for scrolling ads. Then when your friend is in your bathroom combing his hair for a big night out, he could be like, “Huh, I should get some paint!” (That would be if the ad is for paint.)
Picture-in-Picture Back of Head View: Do you have a wacky barber? If you do, you may be walking around for days with his initials shaved into the hair on the back of your head and not know it. Well a picture-in-picture view of the back of your head in the corner of your mirror could help you avoid this and other back of the head related problems. All you would need to do is put a camera right behind you every morning!
Categories: Technology
Tagged: advertising, advice, cameras, humor, mirrors, picture, sweet, Technology
February 17, 2009 · 1 Comment
Imagine that you’re driving to get a burger and it’s getting kind of dark out, so you go to turn your lights on but they don’t work. You get nervous so you start breathing really heavy and that fogs up all of your windows. Then you roll down your windows and stick your head out to try and see. But it turns out you’re driving behind a truck delivering blindfolds to stores, and one of the blindfolds flies out of the truck and wraps around your face! That sounds pretty dangerous, right? Well, that’s what it was like for people in boats before the compass was invented, except they didn’t need to worry about on-coming traffic and sometimes there were sharks and cannon balls involved.
You might be like, “The compass? What the heck is that? I’ve never even seen one of those things!” Actually, you probably have! Think about it: have you ever gone to camping store and seen something that looks like one of those old-school watches with no wrist bands that you put in your pocket? But when you picked it up you were like, “This thing is totally busted! It only has one arrow that wiggles all the time and four times that are all letters!”? That was a compass!
The letters were N, S, E and W and they didn’t stand for times. They stood for ways you could go. Those ways were North, South, East and West because compasses were used before Up, Down, Right and Left were invented. People would get confused about which way was which, so they came up with ways to remember using the first letters of all of the directions like “Never Eat Shredded Wheat,” or “Never Eat Soggy Waffles.” They were always about food because they were made up by hungry people taking trips on old boats and the people running the trips always packed too much shredded wheat and dropped the waffles into the ocean by accident.
It’s fun to make up your own thing to remember which way the directions go on the compass. Here’s mine: “Not Every Stupid Walrus Nibbles Eggs, Stupid.” (Mine has more words than the old one because I went around one and a half times.)
We can thank the compass for many of the awesome things that we have today. For instance, you know when you eat something that your roommate made and it tastes lame, so you put salt on it? Well, imagine if the explorer who was looking for salt didn’t have a compass: he could have gotten mixed up on his trip (while running away from a bunch of natives, having just taken their hot princess to be his new hot wife) and found a bunch of clay instead. Then if your food was bland, all you would have to put on it would be clay and that would just make it taste muddy.
The compass is still around today, but it has a sweet screen and it’s called a GPS. A GPS is way sweeter than an old compass, because it can talk to you, so you kind of can drive blindfolded.
Categories: Technology · history
Tagged: explorers, history, hot wife, humor, lesson, school, Technology
February 12, 2009 · 1 Comment
There is a knife that street thugs use called a switchblade. Sometimes people call it a switch. So when you hear about the “switch to digital” that is going to happen on February 17th, you might get nervous like some street thug is going to find digital in a back alley and stab it. Well, this isn’t what they’re talking about. The switch to digital means that TV is going to come through a digital thing instead of a rabbit-ears thing, so there’s going to be more digital than ever. Well, before you’re like, “my whole life is going to change,” here is some stuff that won’t happen when we switch over:
1. You need to get rid of your rabbit ears as in the TV thing. You don’t need to get rid of your rabbit ears as in the things your pet rabbit uses to hear stuff.
2. The digital signal will not get into your light bulbs and make them flash red and green, turning your apartment really scary.
3. You are driving along and all of the sudden the evil professor bursts up through the road in front of you in a space pod! He’s like, “Meet your doom, arch nemesis!” but before he can get a shot off, you fire your laser missiles and he gets totally fried! Then a hot girl voice is like, “Level complete. Now leaving digital game sphere.” This won’t happen. But maybe someday!
4. If you have a boomerang and you throw it, the switch to digital will not stop it from coming back. If it doesn’t come back, chances are you are just bad at throwing a boomerang.
5. Even though the TV signal will be digital, your favorite actors in your favorite TV shows will not be replaced by weird almost-human-but-not-quite-there-yet androids.
6. Your alarm clock will not be able to read your mind, set itself and then wake you up by giving you a back massage with its new, digital hologram hands.
7. If you dream that you email someone, the digital signal will not mix with your dream waves and send that email for real. If people say that they are getting emails that you thought you sent in your dreams, you might be a sleep-emailer and should talk to your doctor.
8. Groceries won’t become something that you can download.
9. Let’s say you order a large pizza. It comes and it’s not large enough. The digital signal won’t let you click on the pizza and resize it to be bigger but more blurry, like in those programs where you can mess with pictures.
10. The digital signal will not mix with lightning to make crazy digital-lightening that strikes the antennas on top of skyscrapers causing them to walk around and punch other skyscrapers.
So now that you’re not worried (or excited) about the switch to digital, you’re probably like, “So Landrew, what things will change?” I’m not entirely sure but I for one am going to stay away from telephone poles, trains and eggs.
Categories: Technology
Tagged: advice, awesome, current events, digital, humor, switch, Technology
