Brian Gongol
Why yearbooks matter
Schools shouldn't be the only institutions that produce them: Businesses and communities ought to, as well. We oftentimes don't even realize how much institutions matter to us until, like Woolworth's stores in the UK or Eastern Airlines in the United States, they are gone. We often commemorate and eulogize great institutions once they're gone, but it's much better to keep them fresh and well-polished while they're still around -- and yearbooks can play a role in making that happen. Related: Lots of people have weighed in on the matter of why newspapers are having trouble, but few seem to realize that the "newspaper" is really an archival institution that happens to use rolls of dead trees for now, and it has a lot of life left in it as long as it fulfills that archival role intelligently and adapts to changes in technology without forgetting its central mission. A newspaper can't really fire people into profitability. It should be noted, though, that lots of people think that youth alone is sufficient to make one an expert on the future of media. That's preposterous; if financiers are really taking their guidance from a 15-year-old who declares newspapers and Twitter alike to be irrelevant, then they're being fooled by the superficial attractiveness of youth. A lot of self-declared "social media experts" have tried to make their marks on the world by producing fluff-driven manifestoes about being "now" and not being "old". They are just as out of touch as someone trying to recreate the Hippie movement. Cultural generations are rarely as special and unique as they think themselves to be. Many an institution has outlasted its critics and competitors: Consider the 969-year-old Weihenstephan brewery. Technology, tastes, and consumers change, but an institution that knows itself and adapts to the world around it can survive. Youth and fresh ideas can be good, too, but sometimes they're just why everything is sub-optimal, to put it kindly.
"Cherry-picking" methods of growing more food could cause more humans to starve
The world's productive capacity for food has grown dramatically over the last century, but so has the population. If we don't use a variety of tools to continue increasing food production -- including genetic modification -- then there's a very good chance that many people will go hungry. The world already produces lots of bizarre plants. Though we should be prudent about what we try to create in the laboratory (and should realize that there will always be unintended consequences to our actions), it's naive to pretend as though all nature is perfect and all human interference is wrong.
Who have you outlived?
Or, to put it more grammatically, longer than whom have you lived? Online calculator determines the number of day's you've been breathing and offers a sort of leaderboard of famous people who died at or around your age. Rather interesting.
Air traffic all over the globe in a 24-hour cycle
"The pipe makes civilization possible"
