Corinne was uncomfortable but not in unbearable pain late monday night when she went into labor. When we finally decided to head into the hospital, the doctors didn’t really take her seriously because she was so stoic about the whole thing.

(*a side note about Corinne: She will be sure to let you know about paper cuts, stubbed toes, mild headaches etc. But when she’s in real discomfort, she turns inward and goes completely calm. This is surely a sign of intense inner strength, and it makes doctor evaluations difficult.)

By the time the docs got around to checking her out, they discovered that we needed to get moving or the baby would be born in the triage ward. An hour later, Joseph was born, Tuesday morning at 5:49am. It took three pushes.

It’s been fairly smooth sailing since then. The whole family was home on Wednesday afternoon, sleeping soundly in their own beds. Corinne’s mom came Thursday, and has been a huge help with Joseph and Ada, especially since I’ve been working long hours this week to support my team at the Consumer Electronics Show.

We’re anxious to see how tiny Joseph changes in the coming weeks. We’ve been told that babies start to show personality after two or three weeks, but I’m hoping he stays just the way he is now: a happy, adorable little lump.

Anyway, I’m walking home after picking up family dinner at McDonald’s tonight, a situation that has literally NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE, but Corinne was desperately hungry and didn’t feel like ordering from the falafel place that we usually go to when she’s desperately hungry. So I’ve got my big bag of food and my other bag of drinks, and I’m feeling pretty good about things. I’m a provider, I’m thinking. I work hard, and I keep my family fed. Like a dad should. 

I get home and lay out our high-calorie spread. It’s Ada’s first Happy Meal, so we marvel at how adorable the tiny fry carton is, how sensible the apple slices are. Corinne suppresses her gag reflex over Ada’s McNuggets, opens her Chicken Selects, and we tuck into our food.

Only Ada won’t eat anything. Not fries, not McNuggets, not apples, not anything. She only drank half her chocolate milk! We were confounded. Billions of dollars in R&D and consumer research have been spent to scientifically guarantee that children will like Happy Meals, and she won’t eat it. She’s flying in the face of decades of science!

Guess that was our first and last family meal from McDonald’s. I suppose that’s fine. But, they did just install a new soda dispenser that lets you use a touchscreen menu to add in syrups and flavoring. Pick from the 34 base drinks, and then add orange, cherry, strawberry, raspberry, lemon/lime, or whatever else. There’s gotta be at least a couple hundred drink options.

(Word of caution re. Raspberry Coke Zero: don’t do it.)

In his video on The Big Think, Clayton Christensen says America has retained its innovator’s status through our immigration policies, by stealing the best minds from Asia. (This is hard to refute.) But conditions will soon be favorable enough in India and China that those math/science/engineering geniuses will just stay put, and then we’ll be a nation of humanities grads.

That’s what I was wondering as a I read Stiglitz’s Vanity Fair article. We can reform and improve our education system, but my question is, can we do it in a way that emphasizes the hard sciences? That’s a cultural shift more than a funding shift; and if it doesn’t happen, we’re improving the education system just so we can make more humanities grads.

Note: I have nothing against humanities grads, except on a macro level. I minored in Philosophy, read a lot of interesting thoughts by Greeks and Cartesians and empiricists, and had fun doing it. And a journalism degree isn’t much more useful than a humanities degree–I got lucky. (As did Corinne with her anthropology degree.)

Anyway, Christensen is right when he says that our schools are failing to teach math and science in a way that is intrinsically motivating.

A tiny example with a sample size of 1: I was good at math once–I even skipped a grade in math when I was 12. But a string of bad teachers in JH/HS completely turned me off to it. I went from being a year ahead to a year behind, took Algebra 2 my Junior year, and decided to never take another math class. Once you’ve decided in high school never to take another math class, that has a huge impact on the areas of study that are open to you. The sciences are out, computer science and engineering are out, economics and business school are out, even marketing is out.

I went to college knowing I wanted to major in Comms and be a journalist, but as I said: I got lucky and found a good job after graduating. Plenty of journalism grads, philosophy grads, and humanities grads don’t. Meanwhile, we’re importing engineers and scientists, and even so, can’t fill our engineering openings.

I remember reading an article about James Dyson, the British inventor (who makes a killer vacuum–we just got the DC41 and love it!), and he was bemoaning the fact that he literally can’t fill his engineering positions. There just aren’t enough industrial engineers in Britain to fill the available jobs. The same is true in Silicon Valley. TechCrunch did a series of articles four years ago with the then-presidential candidates, and one of the main questions was what they would do to fix the H1B visa shortage. The engineering talent pool just wasn’t big enough, and we needed more immigrants.

His conclusion: It’s going to be a long, long time before our economy gets better.

I was thinking of my 11th-grade history class with Ms. Wara as I read Stiglitz’s column. Ms. Wara taught me that World War II ended the Depression. Stiglitz says yes, that’s true, but why? Because arming ourselves for a world war was an unprecedentedly large public spending campaign. Basically, the U.S. poured rivers of cash into the economy, and did much of the heavy lifting to shift the structural focus of the economy from agriculture to manufacturing. It was a belated shift, but it had to happen and a world war provided both the rationale and the popular support.

“The long-run prospects for the economy would, of course, have been even better if more of the money had been spent on investments in education, technology, and infrastructure rather than munitions, but even so, the strong public spending more than offset the weaknesses in private spending.”

We have no world war to spur us on in our next structural shift: moving from a manufacturing economy to a service economy. Stiglitz argues that, while the shift has been underway for years (and we’ve been feeling the pain of it for years), it’s going to take massive amounts of public spending on infrastructure and educational upgrades to get us to where we need to be, but the public support just isn’t there.

OK, so, the freak out comes when you have Stiglitz on the one hand saying “it’s going to suck for a long, long time,” and then you’ve got Clayton Christensen on the other hand saying “actually, even Stiglitz’s solutions might not fix the problem.”

Christensen is one of the brightest business minds in the world (and possibly a wizard), and he delivered a sobering message on The Big Think: The brightest business mind in the world is pessimistic about our future.

You should watch the video yourself (it’s only a couple minutes), but his point is that prosperous societies don’t innovate. He actually says that “prosperity is the enemy of a technical education.” That the children of prosperous parents  study “Greek philosophy and Asian mythology,” while the children of struggling parents study math, science, and engineering. Which one of those societies will have a higher GNP? Which of them will invent the next generation of amazing technologies? And which will be a nation of humanities majors?

She has moments like this from time to time. The way she’s taken to the iPad is, in some ways, very heartening for a geek like me. She’s intuitively known since she was 18 months old how to navigate on the iPad and our iPhones, launching YouTube or Netflix and selecting the videos she wants to watch. Or she can pick the game she wants to play. I tell myself she’s a technological genius, but it could just be that iOS is THAT good. (She certainly hasn’t figure out how to use my Windows Phone.)

The problem with her iPad affinity is that I use it as a solution to sticky situations. When she’s grouchy or I have something I need to get done, I can hand her the iPad and she’ll happily watch videos as long as I let her. We use Corinne’s iPhone to keep her occupied when we eat out, and she eats more when she’s staring at a screen (but then so do I).  I might have even (gasp) let her watch Curious George with the sound off in church this morning. Part of me says “Anything to keep her quiet through the meeting!” and the other part says “You’ve ruined her forever…she’ll never sit still again!”

That’s Issue #1: A video screen takes the place of behavior training.

Issue #2 is, I think, potential more impactful: She never sits with a show for more than a couple minutes. She’ll watch a bit of Curious George, then move on to Winnie the Pooh or Jungle Book, then on to Yo Gabba Gabba and then Dinosaur Train and Kipper. And, of course, she eventually ends up floating in the lake of swill called Disney Channel programming (the worst in the industry, by far).

What happens to a brain that can jump around between entertainment options in 30-second increments? We probably don’t know…Ada might be the first generation to be exposed to such an environment.

And should she be? This is a terrible question to be asking right before winter starts and she’s stuck inside for four months. Sorry Corinne!

P.S. — We really do try and limit her TV consumption and find other things to do, as is evidenced on Corinne’s blog. For instance, today we put on Bing Crosby and decorated our new Christmas tree. It’s the first natural tree I’ve ever had in my life (my family is allergic), and the first tree that Corinne and I have had in our 8+ years together. Fun!

But my life isn’t lacking for analysis of Steve Jobs. Every writer and “thought leader” in the free world has been writing about Steve Jobs as a business icon, an iconoclast, a model of uncompromising passion. My favorite bit of analysis is Daring Fireball’s recap of Malcolm Gladwell’s recap of Isaacson’s book. Go check it out, it’s great.

So I was camped out on the couch for a few hours this weekend, nursing a cracked rib from the Turkey Bowl and watching the Star Wars prequels on TV. And man…I knew they were bad, but every time I watch them I’m stunned anew by their badness. They. Are. Terrible. You knew that. They’re as bad as the originals are good.

And I thought of the narrative that we use to explain the dreadfulness of those prequels: George Lucas had total creative control, and he just wasn’t up to the task. He didn’t have the taste or the skill to fix a stupid script, plodding story, sub-par effects, and terrible acting performances.

I’m not sure I completely buy that narrative, but it’s useful as a counter to the Steve Jobs hero worship we’re engaging in right now. Few executives enjoy absolute power the way Jobs and Lucas have. Absolute power can once in a while lead to an iPhone. More likely, it leads to “The Phantom Menace.”

There’s something funny thing about those Dr. Pepper 10 commercials (besides the fact that they should incite us all to boycott the brand forever). My hypothesis: The gender-diet-divide that Dr. Pepper confirmed in its research exists largely BECAUSE of bad advertising that tells the genders what they’re allowed to eat. It was marketers who convinced us that it’s manly to eat a bunch of crap. Now it’s marketers who are giving us a way to drink diet soda.

I could name many, many examples of how this gender-diet-divide is established, but here are a few. Have you ever seen a man in a yogurt commercial? Then there are those awful Miller ads, which tell us to “man up” and drink the correct cheap beer, or else our friends will think we’re gay and laugh at us (that’s actually the message of these ads). And then there have been years of terrible fast food ads, aimed solely at men. The BK ads by Crispin, the Carl’s Jr. ads; even Wendy’s was moving in that direction by “doubling the bacon.” McDonalds was one of the few exceptions, probably because they prefer to segment by race instead of gender. (That’s a whole ‘nother post.)

Anyway, those commercials for Double Decker Bacon Atomic Greasebombs gave men permission to be disgusting and obese. Thanks! But of course, no such permission was extended to cut down on our caloric intake–and we certainly couldn’t drink the same sodas GIRLS drink. What a dilemma!

Good thing we now have Coke Zero (with the tag line “duh duh, da-duh duh duh“) and Dr. Pepper 10 (tagline: “It’s not for women!“).

I’ve blogged about the advertising race to the bottom before–it’s kind of a pet issue of mine–but even I was amazed by this Ad Age article about the Dr. Pepper 10 campaign. It’s like everything that’s wrong with marketing and business, all wrapped up into one short article.

Each “super conference” crowns a single champion each year.

The four super conference champions play a two-round tournament to pick a champion.

The ecosystem of meaningless-but-fun bowl games doesn’t really change.

No more realignments–if a school wants to move to a different conference, they’d need to relocate the school itself.

No independents allowed.

The system would be more inclusive, ensure regional rivalries, make sense from a TV standpoint, easier on the students (for travel-time reasons), provide a conclusive champion each season, and it’ll never happen. It would need to be imposed by the NCAA, which would in turn need to get buy-in from a critical mass of university presidents and ADs. The conferences and the BCS power structure are way too powerful.

But it would be nice, right?

I’m not a fanboy, but I like Apple products, for the most part. My household has a couple iPhones, an iPad, an iMac, and a few Airport devices. But I also have a ThinkPad and a Windows 7 Phone, and I like them, too, for different reasons. My coworkers are constantly asking me why I don’t move to a MacBook Pro for my work machine, but I like having a different OS at work than the one I use at home. It makes the computing experience different, and I want to feel different sitting at my home computer than I do when I’m working.

Experience matters. Use case matters. This, more than anything else, is what I appreciate Steve Jobs for. I was talking to a gadget-obsessed friend yesterday who was hyping WebOS and saying it was far superior to iOS. When I pointed out the learning-curve differences, he derided the users that don’t want to spend a couple days figuring out a new OS. But the fact is, my 2-year-old daughter can navigate an iPad; iOS’s level of intuitiveness is important for a use-case that involves a two-year-old.

Steve Jobs spoiled us into thinking that we shouldn’t HAVE to spend time learning a new device. From the moment we take an object out of the packaging, we should intuitively know how to do what we want to do. Some Apple products go even further: we take our cues from the device, and do what it wants us to do.

That’s the genius of Steve Jobs. Whereas Microsoft products provide the power and features to satisfy a huge ecosystem of partners and a huge base of users with different needs, Apple stubbornly insists that we conform and immerse ourselves in the experience of the device.

That partly explains why I use a different OS at work than at home, and why I can’t pick a favorite phone. My Windows Phone is, in many ways, more powerful than my iPhone (it’s certainly faster and makes better phone calls). And yet I use it much differently. It doesn’t beg to be experienced the way my iPhone does. I can’t even really explain why, but I don’t browse the web as much, I tweet less, and I don’t really use Foursquare or Facebook on my WP7.

We can blow out the micro, anecdotal user experience and see the macro differences. I’ve been in San Diego for the past few days, and spent an evening walking around a mall here. Outside the Apple Store, a collection of flowers and Post-It notes commemorated the passing of Steve Jobs. Inside, crowds were handling various devices–pinch-and-zooming, browsing, marveling at the light weight and polish of the devices on display.

Around the corner was an empty Microsoft store, offering a free Windows Phone with every purchase of $500 or more. I like Microsoft products and the heightened capabilities they provide–but they just don’t beg to be picked up and played with.

I saw a tweet yesterday that said “Steve Jobs was mean to engineers and nice to users.” That about sums it up. That attitude is now the core attribute of Apple’s brand, and perhaps we won’t miss Steve Jobs on a “product level” of iPhones and iPads.  But that attitude will have a profound effect on what the future looks like, as Apple and others dream up the next generation of revolutionary, usable technologies.

It would be even funnier if this guy wasn’t a registered voter (but also less ironic). It’s also funnier because I actually know this guy and he considers himself a Christian…albeit a Christian who’d rather murder than pay the taxes that go to support the poor and old retired people. Dude, how much are you actually paying in Social Security taxes? Also, why do you hate America and democracy so much that you’d assassinate the duly elected president in order to get out of paying them?

But here’s the real kicker: If time travel DID exist, you’d be arrested for treason because the Time Cops would see your Facebook post and know what’s up. Maybe they wouldn’t even arrest you; they’d just go back in time and make sure your mom and dad never met! (You can’t beat the Time Cops).