Multitasking can be expensive, too—and dangerous. I learned that lesson a few years ago. I was writing a text message on my phone as I pulled up to a stoplight. Sadly, I misjudged the distance between my car and the one in front because I wasn’t fully paying attention. I hit the other car, though no one was hurt. Still, it was the most expensive text I’ve ever sent. And I learned my lesson.

I’m often asked if this is a generational phenomenon. Specifically, “everyone knows kids are better at multitasking.”  The problem? “Everyone” is wrong. Their brains, especially the limits imposed by short term memory, are the same as those of adults. 

dysfunctional families

It would be hard to argue that the Samsa family is not dysfunctional. As has been pointed out, Gregor, the son, is not only financially supporting his parents and sister, but paying off his father's debt. Although there is a hospital right across the street from their home, none of his family make any attempt to cure him. When Gregor's mother asks Grete to bring the doctor (who is never brought), "they communicated by way of Gregor's room" (p. 2309), suggesting the patterns of dysfunctional families, in which no one is able to communicate directly. Instead of trying to help him in any way, Gregor's family do everything in their power to prevent him from leaving his room; his father behaves threateningly, often, and violently, more than once--especially when he throws the apples at Gregor, one of which might be responsible for his death. When Gregor's sister Grete assumes responsibility for feeding him, she feeds him garbage: "old, half-rotten vegetables; bones left over from the evening meal, caked with congealed white sauce; ... a piece of cheese, which two days before Gregor had declared inedible ..." (pp. 2316-17, emphasis mine). Gregor believes that his sister is bringing him "a wide assortment of things" "to find out his likes and dislikes"; and when "she left hurriedly" he thinks she does so "out of a sense of delicacy"; and when "she even turn[s] the key," he thinks she's doing so "just so that Gregor should know that he might make himself as comfortable as he wanted." Gregor's interpretation of to his sister's treating him with such blatant disgust, as if he were an unwelcome vermin, suggest that his family is already in the habit of neglecting him, and he is in the habit of rationalizing and justifying this--all very strongly suggestive of a dysfunctional family.

Kafka's approach to the story reflects the very ordinariness of the situation, the dysfunctional family, that his story deals with. The science-fiction writer H. G. Wells once advocated that the writer "limit himself to only one marvel ... when everything is possible, nothing is interesting." Kafka limits himself to only one marvel, Gregor's transformation into a beetle, for a different reason than Wells: if there were any more fantastic occurrences, the story would probably seem fantastic and bizarre, perhaps a profound and horrible vision (such as Dante's Inferno); but by limiting himself to one marvel, Kafka makes the metamorphosis seem almost normal, and the Samsa family, especially Gregor, almost take it for granted. When the story begins, the transformation has already happened; in the story, it is more of a pre-existing condition than an event, mirroring the fact that the dysfunctional family, and the pain and shame that it causes, are normal, pre-existing conditions: "When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning ... he found himself changed ... into a monstrous vermin" (p.2301, emphasis mine). (And the phrase "one morning" suggests the ordinariness, the routine, the humdrum-ness, of Gregor's life, into which this has happened.) Situations with dysfunctional families are dull and ordinary, and Gregor's situation as a beetle, and his family's situation with him being a beetle, become dull and normal.

The narrative tone is very matter-of-fact, unemotional, making no judgements, finding nothing unusual, as if writing about the most normal occurrences. It is not by accident that he uses the word "when," or similar phrases, many times: they give a feeling of "this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened," a feeling of humdrum reality: "When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning ... he found himself changed ... into a monstrous vermin" (p.2301). "Just as he was thinking all this over at top speed ..." he hears his mother knocking. The word "when" lubricates the slow flowing of life in this story (which is like the slow flowing of ordinary life), in order to mimic the feel of ordinary life, resulting in a grim, dead-pan parody of it. The word "when," and similar phrases (e.g., "just as ...") also serve to convey Gregor's passivity; for the most part, he responds "when" other people say or do things, or when he wakes up to find himself "changed into a monstrous vermin," rather than acting on his own initiative, letting himself be motivated by anything that he really wants or needs.

This is the effect of the particular way in, and degree to, which Kafka distorts reality in "The Metamorphosis."

Contrary to some reports, Reiffel told CNN, the device would not have "blown up" the moon. "Absolutely not. It would have been microscopic, so to speak. It would have been, I think, essentially invisible from the Earth, even with a good telescope."

Reiffel had some brilliant minds on his team. One of them was an up-and-coming graduate student named Carl Sagan. Sagan went on to become one of the world's most renowned astronomers, creating the book and popular TV series "Cosmos."

But after working on the moon program, Reiffel said, Sagan violated security when he mentioned the still-classified project on a job application. "He did formally break the classification status of the project", Reiffel said of Sagan, who subsequently died in 1996.

Malacca

Fourth voyage

Fourth voyage

Before leaving for his fourth voyage, Columbus wrote a letter to the Governors of the Bank of St. George, Genoa, dated at Seville, 2 April 1502.^[63] He wrote "Although my body is here my heart is always near you."^[64]

Columbus made a fourth voyage nominally in search of theStrait of Malacca to the Indian Ocean. Accompanied by his brother Bartolomeo and his 13-year-old son Fernando, he leftCadiz on 11 May 1502, with his flagship Santa María and the vessels Gallega, Vizcaína, and Santiago de Palos. He sailed to Arzila on the Moroccan coast to rescue Portuguesesoldiers whom he had heard were under siege by the Moors. On 15 June they landed at Carbet on the island of Martinique(Martinica). A hurricane was brewing, so he continued on, hoping to find shelter on Hispaniola. He arrived at Santo Domingo on 29 June but was denied port, and the new governor refused to listen to his storm prediction. Instead, while Columbus's ships sheltered at the mouth of the Rio Jaina, the first Spanish treasure fleet sailed into the hurricane. Columbus's ships survived with only minor damage, while 29 of the 30 ships in the governor's fleet were lost to the 1 July storm. 

ocean

The Bahamas ⁱ/bəˈhɑːməz/, officially the Commonwealth of the Bahamas, is a country consisting of more than 3,000 islands, cays and islets in the Atlantic Ocean, north of Cuba and Hispaniola (the Dominican Republic and Haiti), northwest of the Turks and Caicos Islands and southeast of the US state ofFlorida. Its capital is Nassau on the island of New Providence. Geographically, the Bahamas lie in the same island chain as Cuba, Hispaniola and the Turks and Caicos Islands; the designation of "Bahamas" usually refers to the country and not the geographic chain. The country's population, numbering around 354,000, lives on a land area of 13,939 km² (5,382 sq mi).

Originally inhabited by the Lucayans, a branch of the Arawakan-speaking Tainopeople, the Bahamas were the site of Columbus' first landfall in the New World in 1492. Although the Spanish never colonized the Bahamas, they shipped the native Lucayans to slavery in Hispaniola.

Europeans

Trade by Europeans between different parts of South and East Asia was often more profitable than supplying the home countries. In the 1530s, the Portuguese shipped substantially more cloves, nutmegs, and mace to India and Hormuzthan to Portugal. The buyers in Hormuz were "Moorish merchants who pass[ed] it on, over Persia, Arabia and all Asia as far as Turkey." From at least the seventeenth century, the same products were taken to Bengal by the Portuguese and the Dutch. English merchants found that they sold "Exceedingly well in Surratt" and other Indian and Persian stations. The Dutch between 1620 and 1740 marketed one-third or more of their spices, notably cloves, in Asia: Persia, Arabia, and India. Japan was served by the Portuguese from Macau and later by the Dutch, but the demand for cloves and spices generally was said in the early seventeenth century to be relatively small and prices were consequently low.

Despite its festive name, tinsel painting has nothing to do with Christmas decorations. It involves applying transparent paint to glass, followed by a layer of shiny, metallic foil. Although it has been around for centuries, it experienced an extraordinary rise in popularity in the 19th century. A new exhibit at the American Folk Art Museum showcases the country’s largest collection of tinsel paintings and asks the question: where did tinsel painting come from?

“Tinsel paintings were part of the American cultural scene as early as 1832. What is interesting is that tinsel painting was predicated on the use of tin foil — you have to have it,” explained Dr. Laurence Lerner, an art historian who recently lectured on the exhibit. “So where did people get it? We know that people were wrapping bon bons and druggists were using it to wrap cream. We also know that Colt was making an experimental cartridge for the marine corp out of foil.”

To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We've got it down to four words: "Do what you love." But it's not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated.

The very idea is foreign to what most of us learn as kids. When I was a kid, it seemed as if work and fun were opposites by definition. Life had two states: some of the time adults were making you do things, and that was called work; the rest of the time you could do what you wanted, and that was called playing. Occasionally the things adults made you do were fun, just as, occasionally, playing wasn't—for example, if you fell and hurt yourself. But except for these few anomalous cases, work was pretty much defined as not-fun.