Rant: I Hate My Parents - Academic Success & Childhood Neglect

[Astronuc]

My parents bought us How and Why Wonderbooks, and we collected a large number on various subjects, e.g. dinosaurs & paleontolgy, rocks & minerals, rockets & missiles, . . .

I had a model railroad, and built models of aircraft and ships.

My god-father bought me microscope, and I did the kinds of things Evo described.

I had a chemistry set, which I shared with my brother, and a 100-in-1 electronics set. My brother like to make concoctions, I did pyrotechnics.


During the day, if I wasn't in school, I used to roam around town with friends. Two of the managed to collect all sorts of electronics and laboratory equipment from various places.

We'd go out of the city limits and shoot fireworks at each other.

By the time I turned 14, I started working.

 

[Kurdt]

I never liked reading that much. I always saw it as a bit of a chore, so I spent a lot of my childhood avoiding reading things.

 

[Redbelly98]

My parents bought us How and Why Wonderbooks, ...

I remember those.

My parents bought me an electronics set when I was about 9. We happened to be living overseas at the time, and they ordered it from a German company. The instructions were in German. We didn't speak (or read) German

But I did build several balsa wood model airplanes as a young teenager. Complete with a rubber-band-powered propeller! But only one of them ever flew decently. On one of the failures, I realized that the tail flaps would help the plane gain altitude, so obviously tilting them up the maximum amount would make the plane go higher. And it did, sort of. After a level launch, that plane curved into a straight-up trajectory, which it couldn't maintain, and then came crashing down to the ground . Well, I did learn what it means for a plane to "stall" from that.

 

[Evo]

But I did build several balsa wood model airplanes as a young teenager. Complete with a rubber-band-powered propeller! But only one of them ever flew decently. On one of the failures, I realized that the tail flaps would help the plane gain altitude, so obviously tilting them up the maximum amount would make the plane go higher. And it did, sort of. After a level launch, that plane curved into a straight-up trajectory, which it couldn't maintain, and then came crashing down to the ground . Well, I did learn what it means for a plane to "stall" from that.

I used to love those balsa wood airplanes! Mine worked.

I also used to carve boats and other things from balsa wood. My mother would buy these huge long blocks of it. I used to carve soap into animal shapes. Ok, this was before the internet, before cable tv, no vcr's or DVD's.

 

[Astronuc]

I also used to carve boats and other things from balsa wood. My mother would buy these huge long blocks of it. I used to carve soap into animal shapes. Ok, this was before the internet, before cable tv, no vcr's or DVD's.

Before pocket calculators, before PC's - i.e. The Modern Dark Ages.

32 kB RAM was a big deal!

Some nostalgia - http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Apollo-Guidance-Computer

 

[turbo]

When I was studying engineering, we had to use slide rules. Even when Bowmar came out with a 4-function calculator, we still had to use slide rules. The calculators were over $300, and the school thought that it would be an unfair advantage to wealthier students to allow their use. Since they cost more than half a semester's tuition, that was a fair assessment.

http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/bowmar.html

 

[mjolnir80]

your parents try to give you a good life if they knew that you would have been happier if they had tortured you I am sure they would have done it

 

[Janus]

I WISH I had a chem set when I was little. I don't think they even make them any more...

They do:

http://www.physlink.com/estore/cart/CHEMC500ChemistrySet.cfm

http://www.discoverthis.com/chem-c3000.html

The ones I had as a kid fell somewhere between these two.

 

[Janus]

This talk about encyclopedia's reminded me of something. Did anyone else have a set of these as a kid?

 

[Redbelly98]

I used to love those balsa wood airplanes! Mine worked.

I just didn't have much luck (or skill, to be honest) with model planes back then. Also had a brief try with the gas-powered variety, that attached to a line and circled around you. Never could get the thing to fly even 1 time around before it crashed to the pavement. After 2 tries (and the painstaking repair job in between), I gave up.

But, I did enjoy building the things.

 

[Redbelly98]

This talk about encyclopedia's reminded me of something. Did anyone else have a set of these as a kid?

Not that I recall. But I see they put Physics in its rightful place at #1 on the list of technologies

 

[runner]

when you start to feel sorry for the hand that was dealt to you, check out the story of Dr. Ben Carson. Dr. Carson is the Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital and performs some unbelievable brain surgeries.

childhood background:

born in the inner city in Detroit

mother could not read, but she made him and brother read books weekly and write a report which she then checked off.

at one time in his life he had a violent temper.

more recently:

he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian honor.

he recently performed a surgery on a young girl from Texas and removed the right half of her brain. http://wjz.com/local/surgery.jessie.hall.2.741266.html

he's an example that circumstances do not have to define the person. check out his books and listen to clips on youtube... good stuff.

 

[Evo]

I just didn't have much luck (or skill, to be honest) with model planes back then. Also had a brief try with the gas-powered variety, that attached to a line and circled around you. Never could get the thing to fly even 1 time around before it crashed to the pavement. After 2 tries (and the painstaking repair job in between), I gave up.

But, I did enjoy building the things.

My brother had one of those motorized ones, it was rather difficult.

I loved the balsa wood gliders, I'd whittle the parts until they flew right. Now I need to whittle some balsa wood. I can still feel my knife slicing through that soft wood. Damn you Redbelly!

Who else here made the plastic model planes, boats and cars? Between my brother and I, I don't think there was ever a time when the house didn't reek of model glue.

 

[_Mayday_]

Hate is such a strong word.

 

[turbo]

Who else here made the plastic model planes, boats and cars? Between my brother and I, I don't think there was ever a time when the house didn't reek of model glue.

I used to assemble plastic models of all types. My favorites were planes. I'd paint them with squadron colors, thin some black paint and add "soot" aft of the exhausts, and in the case of bombers that often took a lot of fire, like unescorted B-17's, I'd heat up a pin in an alcohol lamp flame (courtesy of the chemistry set) and use it to melt the plastic to add "bullet holes" to the fuselage. I had to put all my paper-route money and money earned from regular mowing and snow-removal jobs into my savings account, but my parents usually let me accumulate money from returnable beer, soda, and bleach bottles that I picked up alongside roads and in "unofficial" dumps in the woods, etc to buy models, glue, and paint.

 

[BobG]

When I was studying engineering, we had to use slide rules. Even when Bowmar came out with a 4-function calculator, we still had to use slide rules. The calculators were over $300, and the school thought that it would be an unfair advantage to wealthier students to allow their use. Since they cost more than half a semester's tuition, that was a fair assessment.

http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/bowmar.html

For a lot of the introductory courses, that probably would be a fair assessment. The funny thing is, slide rules were more functional than most of your scientific calculators until the introduction of graphing calculators that handled complex math problems. There was no way you could solve a quadratic equation on an HP-35 as quickly as you could on a slide rule. On the other hand, the first HP-35 had a light next to the on/off switch so you could tell whether or not the calculator was on. I guess that prevented poor students from scratching their head and puzzling over why the LED wasn't lit up with their answer in spite of entering so many numbers in the calculator (HP deleted the power light on their second edition).

Of course, the drawback is that it might be easy to learn how to multiply, divide, etc on a slide rule, but learning how to set up your order of calculations to get quick and accurate results is a lot harder. And all those extra scales on the more expensive slide rules eventually led to the same problem students had with calculators. If you rely on them too much, you hit a brick wall on the problems with magnitudes higher than your log log scales go. Those really simple slide rules (like Nestler AN-23R that Einstein and Von Braun liked so much) never ran into those types of problems since you never forgot the basics. Of course those wouldn't solve quadratic equations directly for you either and you had to pull the slide out and turn it over to solve complex math problems, vector problems, or trig problems.

 

[mormonator_rm]

I hate this "family" system where random people are allowed to have kids and do WHATEVER they want to them short of physical abuse or neglect. I think society should send all kids to a place where parents like mine can't inflict irreparable damage on them.

Sorry for this rant but its not fair! :(

Well, it surely must be sucky to have to choose to hate your parents...

If having the state raise all our children is the alternative, then I think I'd like to stick with the already sucky "family" system and take my chances, rather than turn it over to the even suckier "Big Brother/Nanny State" system and have no chance at all...

 

[Janus]

Who else here made the plastic model planes, boats and cars? Between my brother and I, I don't think there was ever a time when the house didn't reek of model glue.

I didn't go in so much for cars and planes, but I did have some battleships ( I remember building the Bismark, and a one of those "cutaway view" models of a submarine ).

I also got into building tanks. I built a Panzer, Sherman, Tiger, Panther, etc.

 

[NoTime]

I just didn't have much luck (or skill, to be honest) with model planes back then. Also had a brief try with the gas-powered variety, that attached to a line and circled around you. Never could get the thing to fly even 1 time around before it crashed to the pavement. After 2 tries (and the painstaking repair job in between), I gave up.

But, I did enjoy building the things.

I must have rebuilt mine about 10 times before I learned to fly it.
When I did finally get it to go around a few times it fell apart due to the hack quick reassembly i did.
Later I learned that you can only loop one so many times before friction in the control wires prevents you form being able to control it.

 

[Andre]

My brother had one of those motorized ones, it was rather difficult.

I loved the balsa wood gliders, I'd whittle the parts until they flew right. Now I need to whittle some balsa wood. I can still feel my knife slicing through that soft wood. Damn you Redbelly!

Well that certainly triggered very old memories. I built dozens of those, all self designed, which turned out to be a bad idea. But that didn't matter.

 

[binzing]

Cool Janus. Maybe I'll have to get one. But hey, I'd rather just buy the materials for just a few "creations" (smoke mix, BP, etc.) in bulk.

 

[Astronuc]

I didn't go in so much for cars and planes, but I did have some battleships ( I remember building the Bismark, and a one of those "cutaway view" models of a submarine ).

I also got into building tanks. I built a Panzer, Sherman, Tiger, Panther, etc.

I did 1/72, 1/48 models of aircarft - bombers like B29, B24, . . . , Avro Lancaster, and fighters P38, P40, P47, P51, F4F Wildcat, F4U Corsair, . . . .

I built a few modern ones of which my favorite was the North American's F107 and Convair's B-58 Hustler.

I also built a naval battle group built around CV's Hornet and Yorktown, BB's New Jersey, Iowa, and Missouri, and some crusiers and destroyers.

I built models mostly from Revell and Monogram.

http://www.revell.com/catalog/catalog/Aircraft-7-1.html

http://www.revell.com/catalog/catalog/Ships-2-1.html - sure don't have the selection they used to.

 

[turbo]

Some of my favorites included B-24 Liberator, B-17 Flying fortress, P-38 Lighting, and a pretty accurate-looking version of the Lancaster dam-buster with skipping depth-charge under the belly. I also really liked the PBY Catalina with the machine-gun blisters and retractable landing gear. Growing up in Maine, I saw a lot of sea-planes - they are really popular for getting to remote lakes.

 

[BobG]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reid_W._Barton
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel_Carroll
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kane

These are examples of people who had parents who were nice enough to nurture their thinking abilities from a young age so that academic success was natural and that is allowing them to have amazing careers. They have an amazing basket of skills that they carry around with them and have all these versatile mental abilities that make doing math and basically anything else supereasy for them.

Compared to their parents, my parents are a complete joke. Between the ages of 0 and 18, my parents had almost complete control over my identity and what activities I participated in and where I went to school. And the choices they made have been detrimental for me. They had tons of resources yet I spent MASSIVE amounts of my childhood just doing nothing (i.e. watching TV, playing video games, trying to be accepted socially, traveling in cars or airplanes, having the most trivial conversations imaginable, eating deadly desert food filled to the brim with saturated fat and trans fat, listening to music in my room (while doing nothing else) for prolonged periods of time, trying to be rebellious, shopping for clothes that were "better" than the ones I currently had, playing with random "for-the-masses" electronic toys like Bop-It or little robots or race cars or whatever,... the list goes on and on)!

Did you have older brothers and sisters? If so, maybe you're not so unjustified in hating your parents. You only need two kids to replace the parents. The rest are just spares. The only way they get any attention is if something bad happens to one of the older ones.

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1672715-1,00.html

I like the bird that spaces out its eggs so they hatch a day apart. That fourth one born is practically guaranteed to die and it had better be a pretty abundant year for that third one to live (unless something bad happens to one of its older siblings).

I was the oldest in my family. I found my spares to be particularly eerie. It was kind of like being followed by vultures. They always grinned when something bad happened to me. They even told my parents when the police drove me home. The second oldest was particularly eager to snitch on me. They were just aching for something bad to happen to me.

 

[Evo]

I was the "Middle Child". My brother was older and he was a "boy" so he could do whatever he wanted. I also suffered from anything he didn't want to do. I wanted so badly to learn how to play the piano, but since my parents paid for piano lessons for him and he gave it up, I wasn't allowed to have lessons. I never could figure out the logic in that. He did poorly in school (elementary through high school) because he didn't care, so he got paid for making anything better than an F, I made straight A's and got nothing because "it just came naturally" for me. No, I actually read my school books and did my homework. Then my younger sister was seven years younger, so she was the baby that could do no wrong.

I was the weird dorky kid in the middle that every year at the beginning of school when we were asked to write about what we wanted to be when we grew up, I would write that I wanted to be a mad scientist working in my laboratory. That always got a stare from my teachers.

 

[Redbelly98]

I loved the balsa wood gliders, I'd whittle the parts until they flew right. Now I need to whittle some balsa wood. I can still feel my knife slicing through that soft wood. Damn you Redbelly!

Better some wood than your thumb ...
Speaking of which, hope it's doing better.

Who else here made the plastic model planes, boats and cars? Between my brother and I, I don't think there was ever a time when the house didn't reek of model glue.

Yup, those too. There were these models of characters from horror films, where some parts (faces, hands) were made of glow-in-the-dark plastic. I built maybe 3 of those. Man, was it creepy in my room at bedtime

I was the oldest in my family. I found my spares to be particularly eerie... They were just aching for something bad to happen to me.

LOL

 

[rewebster]

I was the "Middle Child". My brother was older and he was a "boy" so he could do whatever he wanted. I also suffered from anything he didn't want to do. I wanted so badly to learn how to play the piano, but since my parents paid for piano lessons for him and he gave it up, I wasn't allowed to have lessons. I never could figure out the logic in that. He did poorly in school (elementary through high school) because he didn't care, so he got paid for making anything better than an F, I made straight A's and got nothing because "it just came naturally" for me. No, I actually read my school books and did my homework. Then my younger sister was seven years younger, so she was the baby that could do no wrong.

I was the weird dorky kid in the middle that every year at the beginning of school when we were asked to write about what we wanted to be when we grew up, I would write that I wanted to be a mad scientist working in my laboratory. That always got a stare from my teachers.

From what you keep saying about your job, are you saying you didn't fulfull that childhood dream?

 

[Cyrus]

Any child who did not make plastic models missed out!

This is probably the last one I've made. I used to make these things constantly as a kid. We had a place called the 'squadron shop'. It was a dedicated plastic model hobby shop for aircraft. They had display cases that I would look at growing up full of models made by world class builders. These things were of the quality to be in a hollywood movie. Every little detail was there and then some. But sadly they went out of business a few years ago. Now you can buy their squandron brand tools, like files, knives, hemostats, etc.

Its a boeing 777 that came in all white plastic mold. I then glued it up and painted the body white and the wings gray. The silver along the leading edges and belly of the fuselauge is made from thin cigarette foil pressed onto it. The wing is weather with oil stains near the control surface hinges. The pencil just gives you a sense of scale. Its about a foot and a half long and in span, so pretty big as far as plastic models go.

http://img57.imageshack.us/img57/2017/pict0234dx5.jpg

Sadly, this is one of the only models I have left. That damn squadron shop was a bad influence on me. I wanted my models to look PERFECT like the ones built by those world class modelers. If there were imprefections when I was done, Id throw it in a box or just stop building it.

You can kind of make out the painted squares on the engine intakes. If you look at the real engine, they have slightly different colored panels inside the engine that make that pattern. It was b*** to paint inside them... Another hard part is to get rid of the seam that shows when you glue the two halves of the fuse together. It makes a line that runs down the entire length of the top of the plastic. You got to put putty in there and wet sand, wet sand, wet sand, wet sand, finer finer, finer...

 

[Evo]

Cyrus, that's a thing of beauty. Anyone that really got into making models understands what goes into making them works of art as opposed to just "gluing" them together.

My brother loved the WWII German planes for some reason. My mother and her family were almost constantly on the run from the Germans during the war, first in Europe, then in North Africa (her father was also a Captain in the French Navy, yeah I guess they had a Navy). Anyway, she said they could tell if the planes above them were American or German from the sounds of the engines, I still remember the sounds she would make immitating them. She said that at night the air raid sirens would sound and you would hear the whistle of the bombs dropping. One villa where they had taken up residency had a vacant villa across from it and the Americans had turned it into an ammuntions depot. During one raid, a bomb was dropped directly on the depot. Luckily the bomb was a dud and didn't go off, thanks to that I am here today.

 

[Redbelly98]

I must have rebuilt mine about 10 times before I learned to fly it.
When I did finally get it to go around a few times it fell apart due to the hack quick reassembly i did.
Later I learned that you can only loop one so many times before friction in the control wires prevents you form being able to control it.

I'm having trouble understanding why that would happen. Aren't you turning your body to keep facing the plane? But then it seems you could get rather dizzy after a while. Did you just keep facing the same direction, so the lines would twist around each other as the plane went around?