Tag: Storage Omaha

Smartphones Changed the World

Advancements in technology come in leaps and bounds, so it didn’t take long for smartphones to render a wide variety of everyday things obsolete. Smartphones offer the ability to do many of the same things that older gadgets were capable of, but in smaller and more portable forms.

Take a stroll down memory lane for a look at some of the things rendered obsolete by the rise of the smartphone.

Not-So-Smart Phones – In a world of smartphones, these old fashioned mobile phones basically did nothing but call, send text messages and perhaps, if you were lucky, allow you to play a cheeky game of Snake. They are now thoroughly antiquated and more or less obsolete. The precursor to the modern mobile phone, they were extremely useful in their time and happily ran for days without needing a charge.

Film Cameras – The traditional film camera has basically long since been pushed from the mass market by the modern age of the digital camera. No longer do we need to rely on reels of film or trips to the local shop to get them processed. Digital cameras, SD cards, smartphones and modern computing systems mean we can snap away happily and see the results of our photos instantly with far less hassle and expense. Pro photographers and retro snappers still use film cameras for certain artistic purposes. But few others do.

Pagers and Beepers – Pagers were originally designed and built in the 1950’s but they didn’t really take hold in terms of popularity until the 1980’s. These one-way communication devices were often used by emergency services, doctors and safety personnel who needed to be reachable at all times, even when away from a landline telephone. The rise of smartphones in the early 2000s saw the decline in the use of pagers and beepers but due to the durability, resilience and better coverage they continued to see use for several more years and, as an example, Canada was still paying as much as $18.5 million for its pager service in 2013.

Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) – The forefather of the modern mobile phone, the personal digital assistant offered limited access to a lot of modern capabilities we’ve come to expect, including internet access, word processing, touchscreen functionality and more. They quickly became obsolete when smartphones started to gain favor, but before that time they were a firm favorite with businessmen across the world.

Polaroid Instant Cameras – Polaroid cameras originally came to market in the mid-1960s and at the time presented a marvel of technology that allowed people to see the photos they were taking seconds after they were snapped without having to wait for someone else to develop them. For years, Polaroid instant cameras were a wonderfully expensive marvel of photographic convenience.In recent years, the rise of the digital camera and smartphone photography has meant that Polaroid’s technology essentially became an unnecessary nicety and declining sales forced the company to file for bankruptcy twice. You can still find Polaroid cameras and films on sale, but it’s niche at best.

Public Telephone Booths – The iconic phone booth is essentially a monument to telephone history and now just a tourist attraction or somewhere to shelter from the cold. The public phone booth has been rendered obsolete by the rise of the mobile phone. There’s rarely any need for a coin-operated telephone when you have a phone in your pocket.

Rotary Telephones and Wired Landlines – The wired telephone is another piece of technology that nears obsolescence after being replaced by a computer that we carry around in our pocket. The wired telephone dates back as far as 1844 and it has seen many iterations over the years. One variation was the rotary dial telephone which featured a dial arranged in a circular layout so the user had to turn the dial for each digit off the phone number they were trying to call. Except perhaps as a novelty, rotary phones are long since a thing of the past. Wired landlines are following close behind as modern smartphones have become ubiquitous.

Portable Dictation Devices – Dictation devices, often referred to as “Dictaphones” after the company name that became synonymous with them, came in various formats and used several different data mediums that included both cassette tapes, mini and micro-cassettes. These gadgets were mostly used to record interviews, conversations and lectures for later note taking or write ups. Each became obsolete as time passed by and the storage medium fell out of popularity. Digital dictation devices still exist, but even they are verging on extinction as most mobile phones are capable of offering the same functionality without the need for another standalone device.

GPS Navigation Systems – Many car manufacturers still choose to install them in new vehicles, but as a standalone unit, GPS navigation technology is nearing the end of its lifespan. Current smartphones are more than capable of getting the modern human from point A to point B with the use of navigation apps like Google, Bing and Apple Maps. Once again, advancements in mobile technology have forced other older technology into obsolescence.

Calculators – Although no doubt still used in some schools and offices, the humble calculator is a simple technology that’s surely reaching the end of its lifespan. With calculator apps available on smartphones and tablets, as well as easily accessible calculators on computers and laptops, there’s barely any need left for these independent devices.

Unmarried Folks Are Changing Everything

It wasn’t long ago that being single after a certain age was considered a recipe for lifelong misery. Up until 1970, the average woman married before she was legally old enough to have a drink at her wedding, and the average man married at 23. A woman still single at the ripe old age of 26 was what the Japanese call Christmas Cake – past her pull date and destined to spoil. A man not married by the end of his 20s was considered irresponsible, if not “deviant.”

As late as 1976, 93% of women aged 25 to 29, and 90% of men that age, had already married. By 2014, that was true of only 46% of women and 32% of men in that age group.

The rising age of marriage since the 1980s has worried many. In 1986, Newsweek darkly warned that a woman unmarried at age 35 had only a 5% chance of ever finding “Prince Charming,” while a single woman aged 40 was more likely to be killed by a terrorist than to find a husband. According to a chorus of marriage promoters in the 1980s and 1990s, singles were lonely, unhappy unproductive members of society. Only marriage could turn them into useful citizens, reliable employees and happy, healthy individuals. Many believe this today.

So it was a radical idea in the 1980s when the Buckeye Singles Council of Ohio called for a National Singles Week to celebrate the lives and achievements of single Americans. It’s called Unmarried and Single Americans Week now, and takes place in the third week in September.

But as researcher Bella DePaulo notes, things have changed – slowly but radically – for unmarried and single people. New research shows that most never-married individuals, whatever their age, lead happy, healthy and helpful lives. On average, unmarried individuals have a wider network of friends than married couples and visit more frequently with neighbors. They also provide more practical help to parents, other relatives and coworkers than do their married counterparts.

And it is no longer true that marriage delayed is marriage foregone. Marriage has not become obsolete. It just takes up less space in our lives and in society as a whole than it used to. Today unmarried people comprise more than 45% of the adult population in the United States. They head more than 47% of our households and make up fully half of our workforce.

These figures are sometimes taken to mean that Americans are turning their backs on marriage. In 2014, the Pew Research Center predicted that one in four adults might never marry at all. But most Americans still marry, although at older ages. As of 2014, 80% of Americans had married by age 45, the same percentage of that age group as in 1976.

Many marry even later. Sociologist Philip Cohen estimates that 85% of white women and 78% of black women will marry. This is a smaller racial difference than is usually reported, because, although black women have significantly lower marriage rates than white women until their early thirties, they actually marry at slightly higher rates after about age 33.

Cohen calculates that a white woman who reaches age 45 without marrying has a 26% chance of marrying at some later point, while a never-married black woman aged 45 has a 49% chance of doing so.
The fact is, marriage is alive and well, but it has become only one of a series of living arrangements and interpersonal entanglements that most Americans will experience in the course of their lives. Cohen notes that back in the 1950s, Americans could, on average, expect to be married for three-quarters of the prime years of their adult work and family lives, from age 18 to 55. By 2015, marriage occupied “only about half of those 37 years.”

Alternatives to marriage have multiplied in the later years of life as well as the earlier ones. For people in the middle years of life, marriages have actually become more stable over the past three decades. Marriages begun in the 1990s are lasting longer than those that began in the 1970s and 1980s, and those begun in the 2000s seem on track to last even longer.

But the divorce rate of people over age 50 has doubled since 1990, and the rate for people 65 and older has tripled.

Marriage is no longer the only, or even the chief, place where people make most of their major personal, occupational, residential and financial decisions, or where they incur obligations to others. More than a third of women who give birth in any given year are now unmarried. And at the other end of the age spectrum, older adults are the fastest growing group of cohabitors in the country.

This is a game-changer, both for our emotional lives and our social policies. As a society, we can no longer act as though married couples are the only people who need support for their caregiving obligations, from employer-provided healthcare for dependents to legal recognition of their interdependencies.

We need to stop treating every unmarried person as an incomplete half of a married-couple-in-waiting. Certainly there are lonely and depressed singles out there. But often these are divorced or widowed people who depended too much on marriage as their support system and failed to maintain the friendships and reciprocities that singles tend to cultivate more carefully than their married counterparts.

New Bike Extends Commuters’ Reach

Whether considering living in the heart of the city or nearby suburbs, many folks enjoy or depend on bikes for recreation and commuting. New technology can widen the horizon.

A number of companies make e-bikes, with electric motors that typically have a range of 30 miles or so, but curbed.com says Delfast plans to introduce a new model with a range of 236 miles, potentially offering a week’s worth of commutes on one charge. Curbed describes the bike as “a hybrid between a mountain bike and a motorcycle” that features GPS tracking and a remote starter. It’s expected to launch on Kickstarter for less than $2,500.

New lighting options can keep you safer. The Laserlight attaches to handlebars and projects a bike icon about 20 feet in front of the cyclist to warn pedestrians and drivers of its presence. The Lumos Helmet uses dozens of LEDs to increase a bike rider’s visibility and offer turn signals. And WingLights are small LEDs that attach to the handlebars to provide turn signals as well.

A rider who’s truly committed to the cycling cause might check out cargo bikes. More common in Europe but starting to gain fans here, cargo bikes offer a large, safe basket between the handlebars and front wheel that can handle an infant’s car seat or the groceries for a week for a small family.

Too Little Sleep May Lead To Risky Decisions

A new study, published in the journal Annals of Neurology, suggests that chronically shorting ourselves on sleep may trigger impulsive risk taking, and we may not even realize it’s happening.

The study observed a group of participants, ages 18-28, while they slept only 5 hours a night for a week, as compared to another group getting 8 hours a night. Twice a day they were given a decision-making task with two outcomes: either receiving a set amount of money for certain, or gambling for a higher amount and getting nothing if they lost.

The results became more pronounced as the week went on. At the start, less sleep didn’t influence the participants’ decisions, but as the sleep-deprived nights added up, more and more of them took the bigger risk. Eventually almost all of them did.

The researchers were also interested in how the participants perceived their decisions – if they saw them as more risky than they’d otherwise be, given a few more hours of sleep. Most of the participants said they didn’t see any difference. “We therefore do not notice that we are acting riskier when suffering from a lack of sleep,” said Christian Baumann, study co-author and professor of neurology.

While occasional risk-taking has its benefits, the results from this study are concerning because the participants’ risk-taking seemed to become impulsive, and their awareness about why they were taking more risks was phased out along with their lost hours of sleep.

The study had a few shortcomings worth mentioning. First, it was a small study that serves best as a pilot for future research to replicate. And the participants were all young males, who, some evidence would suggest, are prone to making riskier decisions even under stable conditions. But the way their decision-making changed as the effects of sleeping less took a toll suggests that the results can’t be written off to gender or age.

Sleeping too little is already linked to attention deficits, especially in younger people. Recent research is pointing to a possible reinterpretation of ADHD as a sleep-related disorder. Attention and decision-making are abilities that operate from a shared axis in our brains, so it’s no surprise that something affecting one would also affect the other.

The good news is that for most of us this is a problem with a solution, although we’re up against some tough distractions to reach it. A diet of streaming, social media and video games is eating up more of our evening hours, along with the traditional sleep erasers like stress.

We can choose to put a positive spin on findings like these and use them as incentive to reclaim the nighttime territory we’ve ceded to distractions. The science is clear that the benefits of sleeping a little more are hard to overstate.

Recognizing Our Worst Fears

One of the most terrifying segments in George Orwell’s novel “1984,” published in 1949, centered on Room 101 in the Ministry of Love. The dreaded room was the final destination for anyone opposing the ruling party. It was the place where those rebelling against the party were forced to confront their worst fears.

Room 101 would not be a great place for anyone with a phobia – an extreme or irrational fear of or aversion to something. It is natural for humans to have some sort of fear and no matter what the fear is, it can dramatically impact someone’s daily life.

Be warned, some of the following most common fears may illicit strong emotions.

1. Arachnophobia – fear of spiders. This may be the most common fear for both males and females. While some spiders are considered to be harmless and good for nature, many individuals still see spiders as being creepy and crawly insects that can kill us when they bite. The fear of spiders generally starts when we are young children, it is something that many adults fear and the fear tends to be quite strong.

2. Trypanophobia – fear of needles. For many, going to the doctor can be stressful, especially when we are due for a vaccination. Trypanophobia usually is something that is learned over the years. Many adults who do not like needles tend to express their emotions in such a convincing manner that those around them tend to pick up on this fear, thus leading to more individuals not liking needles.

3. Hemophobia – fear of blood. For some, the intense fear of blood can cause a wide range of problems. Those with intense fears of seeing or touching blood tend to lose consciousness and pass out and even become weak. Blood can harm an individual, but the blood is just fluid that transports oxygen inside our bodies. Without it, we could not live.

4. Nosophobia – fear of having a certain condition or disease. This one actually can lead to many issues. Many medical students at some point may experience these feelings. Closely related to hypochondriasis, some people truly think they have a particular disease so much that they have died. Usually this phobia is first caused from intense study and researching diseases and health and it spreads from there.

5. Mysophobia – fear of germs and general contamination. You may know this common condition as germophobia. Mysophobia can affect individuals in different ways. What starts as a generalized fear of contaminations can lead to extreme anxiety of contact with others and the outside to where the person may avoid everyone at all costs. In addition, those with mysophobia tend to shower and bathe multiple times every day, sanitize the skin often and avoid any type of sharing of any kind.

6. Astraphobia – fear of thunder or lightning. Children have many fears, in part because they are startled quite often due to lack of experience. Astraphobia is one of the most common fears among children. For those who experience strong summer storms, the fear becomes real at a young age. Usually with this phobia come anxiety and the tendency to want to hide under or within things that protect the body for overall comfort. With more exposure, this fear has been known to vanish.

7. Cynophobia – fear of dogs. Phobias tend to develop at very young ages and while many tend to resolve at young ages, some can linger into adulthood. The fear of dogs is a common phobia that starts at a young age and is usually a result from a negative experience with a dog as a kid. This can linger into adulthood and cause the adult to avoid dogs at all costs.

8. Pteromerhanophobia – fear of flying. This common condition affects most adults and children at some point. This fear is usually developed through a movie, news story or some fear that an aircraft will fall and crash from the sky. While many fears tend to be irrational, this is quite possibly the most common fear that adults can have.

9. Nyctophobia – fear of the dark. Most children face this fear at a young age. Sometimes it can follow into adulthood. When kids are young, there is no surprise that the mind can wander and cause this fear. Darkness tends to lead to unknown territory for many kids and it can take years before this phobia resolves itself. This phobia generally is resolved once adulthood sets in, but some adults experience this fear.

10. Claustrophobia – fear of small or enclosed spaces. This very common phobia can last well into adulthood. Some studies have estimated that up to seven percent of the world’s population suffers from claustrophobia.

There are many other phobias that afflict children, adults or both. These include agoraphobia – fear of crowded and open spaces, ophidiophobia – fear of snakes, acrophobia – fear of heights, gerontophobia – fear of getting older, and glossophobia – fear of public speaking.

It’s probably a good idea for anyone with a phobia to avoid the Ministry of Love, and particularly Room 101.

Great Inventions from the Heartland

From agriculture to high tech, sports to personal comfort, inventors from America’s heartland and Canada have given us great inventions.

A Canadian gym teacher from Almonte, Ont., James Naismith, is credited with creating the game of basketball in 1891.

St. Louis, Mo., native John S. Thurman devised the world’s first powered vacuum cleaner in 1898 and named it the “pneumatic carpet renovator.” The enormous gadget had an internal combustion engine and traveled from house to house on a horse-drawn cart as part of a mobile cleaning service.

In 1913, aviation pioneers William Purvis and Charles Wilson were awarded a patent for the world’s first helicopter which they developed in Goodland, Kan.

Quebec-born Arthur Sicard produced the first snow blower in 1925, and today he is hailed from January to March by Canadians trying to clear their driveways.

And probably no one gave the world such a lift as Moses (Moe) Nadler. The Montreal-born Nadler invented the Wonderbra. Nadler was the founder and majority owner of the Canadian Lady Corset Company.

Women have been using improvised tampons for thousands of years – for instance, soft papyrus was the material of choice in ancient Egypt – but the first modern tampon featuring a tube within a tube applicator was invented by Dr. Earle Hass in Denver,Colo., in 1929.

One of the most notable and important Canadian inventions ever, insulin, was created by Dr. Frederick Banting, an Alliston, Ont., native and Nobel laureate. He shared credit with his colleague Dr. Charles Best.

A colossal 90% of land in Iowa is dedicated to farming, so it’s only fitting that the gasoline-powered tractor was invented in the state. John Froelich built the very first one in Clayton County back in 1892.

Next time you take out the trash, thank Winnipegger Harry Wasylyk, the man behind the modern-day garbage bag. He, along with Larry Hansen of Lindsay, Ont., invented a disposable green polyethylene garbage bag – they were first intended for commercial use at places like hospitals and quickly became a household must. The invention was marketed by Union Carbide as the Glad bag.

In 1936, Omaha’s James Michael Curran invented the first ski lift, without which the modern ski industry couldn’t function. Before Curran’s invention, skiers had to use tow ropes powered by horses or engines to get up the mountain. Seems strange that this one comes from a flat-lander!

Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird, it’s a plane, no, it’s Superman, a hero across the globe but one who was created by American writer Jerry Siegel and Toronto-born artist Joe Shuster in 1932.

Heart patients the world over have engineer Earl Bakken of Minnesota to thank for developing the implantable pacemaker. The battery-powered device was invented by Bakken in 1957 at the Medtronic workout in Fridley, following a blackout that killed one of his patients, who was dependent on a large, mains-operated pacemaker.

The classic breakfast cereal Cream of Wheat was first manufactured in 1893 by wheat millers in Grand Forks, N.D., and the semolina-based porridge fast became America’s most popular breakfast staple, enjoyed in homes up and down the country.

South Dakota-born nuclear scientist Ernest Lawrence was awarded the 1939 Nobel Prize in physics for the cyclotron, the particle accelerator he patented in 1935, and the precursor to CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.

Known as the “Space Suit Father,” innovator Siegfried Hanson of Wisconsin developed the early Mark I space suit during the 1950s, playing an important role in the Space Race, which began in August 1955 and continued up until the early 1990s.

Illinois engineer Engineer Martin Cooper developed the first handheld mobile phone in 1973 while working at Motorola in Schaumburg, Ill. Dubbed “the brick,” the bulky device measured 10 inches and weighed a hefty 2.5 pounds.

Fake ‘Facts’ You Learned

Think back to everything you learned as a kid. Think harder and you’ll probably realize how inaccurate a lot of those “facts” were. Much of what we’ve always assumed as common knowledge is flawed. Here are a few of the lies many of us have believed since we were kids.

Chameleons camouflage to blend in. Nope. The real reason chameleons change color is to control their body temperature and to express mood. As you can guess, darker colors absorb more light, so they’ll swap to a lighter color to stay cool. In terms of emotion, they’ll darken their shade when they’re scared and brighten when they’re excited.

Vincent van Gogh cut off his own ear. Probably not. But historians believe the real story is that van Gogh actually lost his ear in a heated argument with his friend and fellow artist Paul Gauguin. Apparently Gauguin, also a fencer, severed his ear off with his sword. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam stands by the original story, but several books dedicated to the artist’s life support this lesser-known theory.

Dogs have cleaner mouths than humans. Really? Dogs do not brush their teeth or floss, so no, their mouths are not cleaner than ours. You won’t find humans eating trash or licking out of toilet bowls, either. It is true, however, that the healthier the dog, the cleaner they are. It’s believed the clean mouth myth comes from the fact that dogs’ wounds heal after they lick them. It’s not their mouths are especially clean, it’s just a similar practice to us washing a wound to prevent infection.

You know the expression, “Blind as a bat” but did you know bats can see almost as well as humans. In fact some larger nbats see much better than humans. However, at night, their ears are more important than their eyes – they use a special sonar system called ‘echolocation,’ meaning they find things using echoes.

Pluto isn’t a planet. Don’t believe that, the ninth rock from the sun was reclassified in 2006 as a dwarf planet, but that nonetheless is still a planet.

Goldfish only have a three-second memory. Bull. The evidence shows that fish are just as smart as birds and mammals. According to studies, they can remember things for three to five months.

Isaac Newton discovered gravity when an apple fell on his head. Not quite. It is somewhat true that he discovered the law of gravity one day when he was sitting beneath an apple tree. But the revelation didn’t come to him because of one hitting him on the head. He did see one fall from a tree, which made him wonder why apples fall straight to the ground instead of sideways.

The blood in your veins is blue. Nope, it’s red, like all blood. Despite what you see when you look at your forearms, blood is red. Your veins may appear blue because of how light reflects and how it’s absorbed by your tissue. Your veins pump deoxygenated blood, which absorbs more red light and as a result appears more blue. The deeper the vein, the bluer it looks.

Bulls get angry at the sight of red. No, they are aggressive to a waving object of any color.

Camels store water in their humps. The humps are fat which provides them with about three weeks of energy. Camels’ kidneys and intestines do retain water.

Your nails keep growing after you die. Fingernails can only grow if new cells are produced, which is not possible long after death. Once the heart stops beating, nerve cells die within three to seven minutes.

The North Star is the brightest star. Nope, the North Star, aka Polaris, is actually 46th in brightness. But it is the closest brightest star to the north celestial pole.

You can see the Great Wall of China from space. While parts of the man-made structure can be seen with radar imagery taken from space, the Wall’s materials are too similar in color and texture to its surroundings to be distinguished from space.

Dogs are color-blind. If Rover could talk, he’s call that a fake fact. Man’s best friend can see the world in more than just black and white. Dogs can actually see in combinations of blue and yellow, which includes a lot of grayish-brown varieties. Their sight can be compared to a human with red-green colorblindness.

Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb. He was the one who filed a patent for it, but several others contributed to its invention before him.

Christopher Columbus thought the world was flat. Contrary to what you were probably taught in elementary school, Christopher Columbus was smarter than what we give him credit for. The Italian explorer knew the world was round even before embarking on his expedition. The fact that the world was a sphere was actually known 1,300 years before Columbus set sail. It is true, however, that many Europeans started to believe the flat earth rumors during the Middle Ages.

Fortune cookies were first made in China. Only if you spell China as California. Fortune cookies were an American invention, not Chinese, though there are debates about who was the originator. One well-known version is a Chinese immigrant living in Los Angeles created the cookie, while another claims that a Japanese immigrant started it in San Francisco.

Heat mostly escapes your body from your head. Your parents probably told you to wear a hat so you don’t get sick. While it can help keep you warm, your head doesn’t allow for any more heat loss than any other part of your body does. Any exposed part of the body will release heat equally.

Have Some Eclipse Fun

When midday becomes night on Monday, Aug. 21, more than 80 million Americans have a chance to see an eclipse of the sun. Aside from the frantic hunt for eye-protecting glasses with which to view the eclipse, here are some simple questions to help put you in the mood.

(Answers are at the bottom)

1. In 1953, Catholics rushed to the movie theaters after their priests said the Legion of Decency had condemned this movie.

2. Andy Williams enchanted the masses with his 1961 hit scored by Henry Mancini with lyrics by Johnny Mercer.

3. An additional full moon that appears in a subdivision of a year: either the third of four full moons in a season, or a second full moon in a month of the common calendar is known as?

4. When was the last time any part of the country experienced a total solar eclipse?

5. When was the last total solar eclipse to cross the entire country?

6. Frankie Laine topped the charts with what sunny tune in 1949?

7. When was it the dawning of the Age of Aquarius with a medley including a sunny tune?.

8. An appropriate song for today first came out in 1939 and has become a favorite through the years. The title?

9. Stephen Foster gave us this gift in 1852. If you follow the horses, you hear it on TV every year. The lyrics include “The sun shines bright…”

10. Who told us “The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow”?

Answers below:

EclipseAnswers

Going, Going, Gone!

When we think of how far we’ve come since the year 2000, it’s easy to focus on what we’ve gained. We’ve gotten iPods, smart phones, driverless cars, text messaging, GPS, social media, Wikipedia, nearly every TV show and movie in human existence available on demand and an AI-based computer that can lick just about anyone at Jeopardy.

At the same time a good many things are going, going, gone! These are things that everybody took for granted in the 20th century but have become almost entirely obsolete today.

Computer labs
In high schools and even colleges, there was a specific room on campus where they kept all the computers. Nobody had their own computer. Back then that was as absurd as saying “I could fly commercial, but I prefer to fly my own plane.” So you went to these rooms and used one of the computers, and then you left and you didn’t have access to a computer again until you went back to that room! Nowadays everyone has their own computer of some size.

The busy signal
It’s really strange the things you miss. Back in the days of landlines, calling somebody and getting a busy signal used to be annoying. But today, in an age of digital phones, we’d be glad to hear a busy signal. Because if you heard one, you had some solid information. The person you were trying to reach was home, just on another call. Going straight to voicemail can mean anything. But that beep-beep-beep was a reason for hope!

Watching crappy daytime TV on sick days
You know why so many people who came of age in the late 20th century have such fond memories of former Price Is Right host Bob Barker? Because when we stayed home sick from school and watched TV all day, we always ended up watching The Price Is Right because it was the only thing on. It was that or some terrible soap opera or the local news. Can you imagine anyone today watching a game show they were vaguely interested in over and over and over because it was the only option?

VCRs
DVDs arrived in the U.S. in 1997, and it didn’t take long for the new format to make VCRs feel like cave drawings. It looked bad when The Washington Post gave the antiquated technology a tongue-in-cheek obit in 2005 – “It passed away peacefully after a long illness caused by chronic technological insignificance and a lack of director’s commentary tracks” – but when Japanese newspaper Nikkei rang the death knell for VCRs last summer, it was officially over.

Getting film developed
Walking past a “film processing” desk at a pharmacy can be downright creepy. It’s like driving by an abandoned drive-in movie theater. You want to crane your neck just to get a better look, as if maybe you’ll see the ghosts of former customers, picking up their photos and saying, “I can’t believe I got these developed in under 24 hours!” Next time you’re there, take three dozen photos of the film-developing station with your phone, then look at them immediately, just to remind yourself how far we’ve come.

Dot matrix printers
The only places where perforated printouts still reign supreme are at thrift-store “electronics” sections and car rental offices. Even though they were a pain during their prime, especially when they jammed (which was, you know, always), we can’t help but get a little misty-eyed when we hear the purring of a dot matrix in action.

Television static
If there’s no picture on your TV in 2017, it just means you didn’t pay your cable bill. But even then, we never get the electromagnetic noise that was so frustrating (and weirdly comforting) for several generations of TV watchers. It seems that younger generations often don’t even have cable because everything is available from streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime.

Slide projectors
Is it possible that future generations will never know the horrors of sitting through an aunt’s vacation photos in a living room slide projector show that feels like waterboarding torture in which you have to pretend to smile? How is that remotely fair?

Fax machines
When was the last time you actually sent or received a fax? About as close as you get to that today is seeing a fax number on someone’s old business card. Nobody needs a fax machine anymore since everything is done over email.

Polaroid “instant” pictures
Kids today have it so easy. For them, an “instant” picture is any image they capture on their smartphone, and it’s accessible nanoseconds after taking it. But with Polaroids – which ceased making instant film in 2008 – “instant” meant “in a few minutes, after you shake the photo violently for some reason and then wait and wait and wait for what seems like an eternity for the image to slowly appear.” It’s hard to believe that we were ever so patient.

Landlines
Phones were once connected to walls with fiber optic cables. No, I’m totally not kidding. They worked just like any other phone, except there was no screen, or Internet connection, and it didn’t tell you the time, and it had zero apps.

Dial-up internet
To connect to the Internet once required a landline phone which you would plug into your computer. Then your computer would attempt to “call” the Internet. Sometimes your connection would get interrupted if somebody in the house picked up another phone, and you’d yell, “Mom! I’m trying to check my email!”

Getting lost
Before every car and cellular phone came with their own global positioning systems, it was entirely possible that you could venture out into the world and not have any idea where you were. It was called “being lost,” and you either had to find somebody to give you directions or find a map. Or maybe you’d just stay lost, and keep wandering until you stumbled onto something familiar, or just figured out where you were going out of dumb luck. Being lost wasn’t so bad, if you can believe it. It was a weird thrill to have no clue when, or even if, you’d arrive at your destination.

CD case binders
There’s a whole lot that feels conspicuously absent now that music has become digitized and is no longer a physical thing. Nobody owns a Walkman or Discman anymore. But the weirdest disappearing act is the CD binder, which you’d fill up with CDs before a car trip or any outdoor excursion, and then invariably realize too late that you forgot the one CD you wanted to hear.

“Blind” dates
There was a weird thrill to showing up for a first date and having no idea what the other person looked like. No more. Thanks, Tinder.

Cursive writing
Kids today not only can’t write in cursive, some of them can’t even read it. Does it matter? Other than signing a check (another thing we have nearly stopped doing), cursive might very well be a lost art. Sure it’s cool, but it’s cool like being able to read Beowulf in the original Old English is cool. It doesn’t have real world applications.

Floppy disks
Pre-2000, a cloud was a collection of condensed water vapor hovering in the sky. It’s what made rain, not where you stored all of your computer files. If you wanted to save important documents, you needed something like a floppy disk, which could hold up to 240 MB of memory. But then came the floppy-less iMac in 1998, and eventually the iCloud, which made floppies seem adorably quaint. If you still have dozens of floppy disks, maybe you could repurpose them as plant holders or drink coasters.

Library card catalogs
You know what would be a far more entertaining version of The Hunger Games? A bunch of kids from 2017 compete in a death match where they have to find a book in the library using only the Dewey decimal system. In the end, everybody gets paper cuts and nobody finds their book.

More Is NOT Always Better

When it comes to supplements, more is not always better. Vitamins and minerals are essential to health, but that doesn’t mean that megadoses will keep you out of the hospital or make you live longer. Some, in fact, may be harmful.

Reader’s Digest reminds us that in most cases it’s preferable to get these nutrients from a balanced diet. High doses of certain vitamins and minerals may be appropriate for certain people, though. Talk to your doctor about supplements if you are a woman of childbearing age, are a vegetarian or vegan, have limited exposure to the sun, are an athlete in training or suspect for any reason you may be malnourished.

Here’s the lowdown on eight common supplements – most of which are vitamins you probably don’t need.

Beta-Carotene
For most healthy adults, the recommended daily allowance of beta-carotone (in the form of vitamin A) is 3,000 IU for males and 2,130 IU for females. Some of its highest food sources include carrots, spinach, kale and cantaloupe. Some people take is as an anti-cancer antioxidant, but the supplements can actually increase risk of lung cancer in smokers and hasn’t been shown to prevent any other form of cancer.
Recommendation: Don’t take it.

Folic Acid
Aim to get 400 micrograms of folic acid a day. It’s found in fortified bread and breakfast cereal, legumes and asparagus. Because it’s been shown to reduce the risk of neural tube defects in newborns, some women take it while pregnant. But some doctors warn supplementation of food with folic acid could be fueling rising rates of colon cancer.
Recommendation: Only women who are pregnant or may become pregnant are advised to take it.

Selenium
Aim to get 55 micrograms of selenium from natural sources like Brazil nuts, tuna and beef. Some people take selenium to prevent cancer, especially prostate cancer. But those good intentions could actually be working against you – one major study found that taking selenium could actually increase risk of high-grade prostate cancer in men who were already high in the mineral. Selenium could also be one of the worst supplements for diabetes. Another 2007 study found a 50% increased risk of type 2 diabetes in people who took 200 micrograms a day.
Recommendation: Don’t take it.

Vitamin B6
Adults between 19 and 50 should aim to get 1.4 milligrams of vitamin B6 from baked potatoes, bananas and chickpeas daily. After age 50, you should aim for 1.5 milligrams. Some use it to prevent mental decline and lower levels of homocysteine (an amino acid associated with heart disease), but the studies are mixed. Two studies failed to show cognitive benefits, and while B6 does reduce homocysteine, it’s not clear whether this prevents heart attacks.
Recommendation: Take it only if your doctor recommends it.

Vitamin B12
Vitamin B12-rich foods include fish and shellfish, lean beef and fortified breakfast cereal. It’s a vitamin vegetarians and vegans tend to be low in. Aim to get 2.4 micrograms from those sources every day. Vitamin B12 deficiency, which can cause anemia and dementia, is a problem for some seniors, so supplements can help. However, high doses of B12 have not been proven to prevent cognitive loss, and they don’t boost energy.
Recommendation: Take it only take if your doctor recommends it.

Vitamin C
Vitamin C can be found in citrus fruits, melons and tomatoes. Adult males should get 90 milligrams a day, while women should aim for 75 milligrams. Some people take it to protect against the common cold, but a review of 30 clinical trials found no evidence that vitamin C prevents colds. There are some exceptions though. It may reduce the risk in people who live in cold climates or experience extreme physical stress, such as running marathons. Smokers may need extra vitamin C. Studies haven’t backed up claims that high doses of vitamin C can fight cancer and heart disease.
Recommendation: Most people don’t need C supplements.

Vitamin E
Vitamin E – found in vegetable oil, nuts and leafy green vegetables – has been thought to prevent heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. Try to get 15 milligrams a day from food. Not only have studies failed to show that vitamin E supplements prevent heart attacks or cancer, but high doses may increase the risk of strokes. One study found that vitamin E from food – but not from supplements – helps prevent Alzheimer’s disease.
Recommendation: Don’t take it.

Zinc
The daily recommended allowance for zinc – found in oysters, lean beef and breakfast cereal – is 11 milligrams for males and 8 milligrams for females. There are claims that the mineral can prevent and treat symptoms of the common cold, but the evidence doesn’t hold up. A few studies suggest that cold symptoms are less severe and resolve sooner in zinc users, but others show no benefit. High doses can actually weaken the immune system.
Recommendation: Don’t take it except for occasional use of zinc lozenges or sprays for colds.