Today we go deep into artificial intelligence, pirates, and why kids’ play is crucial to all human beings. Several hidden gems throughout will give you a nice mental coffee break this morning in between all that crushing it you will be doing today!

An article in The Hechinger Report talks about the importance of play in early childhood development.   In a quote in the paper, a professor from Miami University, Doris Bergen, says:

Play experiences can be the practice of living a life. Do kids play “house” or “cops and robbers”? What are they doing? They are setting up a practice reality, making rules, determining dominance, and figuring out where negotiations are possible. Kids’ play is usually done without the interference of adults; the kids are learning communication, socialization, and what constitutes fairness to the group. Talk to old people, and they all tell stories of seat belt-less car rides, street light curfews, and sneaking out of the house. We left our homes and found our friends, and started playing. We made up the rules and learned how life worked in our little kingdoms.

The report cites several studies showing the benefits of play. None of the findings seem surprising, but constant reinforcement for old people is necessary. The one statement in the article that resonated the most with us was that play isn’t good for kids alone but for all mammals. As Dr. Stuart Brown puts it, “human beings – and, in fact, all mammals – have an innate need to engage in playful activities as a part of healthy development.”

Nowadays, gamification has expanded from actual games, typically online games, to business and education. Innovative teachers and schools are finding ways to incorporate fun and play time into learning—like hiding medicine in peanut butter. Instead of teaching, work now and play later, we can move to; play now, and play more later. One play might be structured and monitored but has all the game elements.

We see it all the time; kids are the most relentless species on the planet; like angry water, you can dam it up for a little while, but it will eventually leak or, in some cases, flood back to the place it wants to be. Why not innovate and find ways to teach and help a kid develop through play? Everybody gets what they want!

One caution, old people tend to overdevelop what works, part of playtime for a kid has to be unstructured, and the rules need to be created and managed by the kids. You can’t ride the bike for them; you help them balance, push them off and let them go!

P.S. Grammarly repeatedly told us that the term “Old People” might be derogatory to some people. Some of the writers on this piece are “Old People,” who have assured us that it is derogatory and like it that way!

Before we can remember calling Internet Goblins “Hackers,” we called them pirates. The term “pirate” probably dates back to the days of radio signals or before. We remember reading stories of pirate radio in England, consisting of a boat carrying a radio signal to play banned music. From there, we can move to Christian Slater in Pump Up the Volume; Slater played a teenager with his pirate radio station, where he could anonymously speak his truth and play cool music. Fond memories for us!

Today we read a story on a website we haven’t reviewed before, take that as a disclaimer, but the story, like the website, is damn interesting. In the report by Alan Bellows, a TV station in Chicago was briefly taken over by a Max Headroom mask-wearing pirate twice in one day. The hack occurred 35 years ago, on November 22nd, 1987, and the article discusses how complicated and expensive a hack like this could have been. More impressive, no motive has ever been discovered, and no one has ever been arrested in this now Cold Case. 

Max Headroom as a TV/Radio waves pirate hacker sounds like a good book/movie. Someone get working on that!

Nvidia has released what sounds like a response to a new Google Text to a 3D model initiative announced earlier this year. We read an article in ars Technica that walked us through what Nvidia is doing. The report also includes a demonstration video. The tech is in the early stages of development, but impressive. We aren’t sure when they will release it or how it compares to Google’s product.

As a writing team that relies on AI daily, the only quick comparison we came up with was desktop publishing and office applications that began in the 90s. Those applications moved certain business functions from an office full of people to a single person or small team, now able to create everything from accounting reports (that we used to use green sheets for) to designing websites and brochures without a typesetter. For you youngins, a green sheet was a piece of paper that looked like a spreadsheet, and typesetting was what you used to have to do to print a newspaper, newsletter, or brochure. Yes, kids, we were dinosaurs.

The article also referenced DALL-E, the AI generator that can take text and create a design based on the reader. We signed up for an account and will start playing with text to design this week.

As often as we reference The Guardian, we are starting to think about dual citizenship! Today The Guardian hit us with lots of ways to Cheer us Up! In the U.S., most of the States went through daylight savings time. This means the sun rises and sets earlier. We are heading into a stretch of nights in a blanket of colder temperatures. The Guardian gave us a list of fifty-three ways to cheer up; here are our favorites.

Each one of these ideas comes with a further explanation at The Guardian. Some of the words were new to us, and some of the ideas were very British. Go to the full article for a fun read, we thought about adding our pictures or explanations to the list, but instead, we believe it’s better just to put them out and let you decide what you want to do with them. 

There is a new documentary about David Bowie. We haven’t seen it yet, the trailer is below, and we will have a more profound write-up after we watch it. After hearing everyone from The Sex Pistols, to Pixies being influenced by David Bowie more than any other artist, we want to dive deeper.

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Ziggy.

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Thank you for spending a few minutes with us!

With A Shout Team