LIFE STYLE
Blast From the Past
August 10, 1831
As the Charles Doggett set sail from Salem, MA, Captain William Driver saluted the flag he had been given by friends, exclaiming, “Old Glory!” as the 24-starred banner unfurled with an ocean breeze. Driver coined the term 178 years ago, and his flag, with a small anchor sewn in the corner of its blue canton, was the first to be called by this now-popular nickname.
August 16, 1870
The first publicly recorded demonstration of the curveball was given by pitcher Fred Goldsmith in front of a large but skeptical crowd at the Capitoline Grounds in Brooklyn, NY. He placed three poles along a 45-foot line of chalk and threw a baseball that started on the inside of the first poll, curved around the outside of the second pole, and finished on the inside of the third poll. To this day, batters are left standing with a bewildered look as the curveball breaks over the plate for strike three.
August 24, 1932
Flying in her single-engine Lockheed Vega, Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly solo coast to coast. She left Newark, NJ, and traveled 2,448 miles to Los Angeles, CA, in 19 hours, 5 minutes. Not one to rest on her laurels, she beat her own record the next summer when she made the same flight, shaving nearly 2 hours off the time.
—Andrew Matthius

Tech Tools
AT YOUR FINGERTIPS
You may be all thumbs, but your iPhone knows how to get things done in a flash. Has your cell increased your productivity lately? Speed up your routine with one of the following iPhone applications available online at itunes.apple.com.
reQall Dictate all your notes or reminders, and they’ll be added to your reQall calendar. Even better: receive an alert via your phone’s voice message, text, IM, or email. Price: Free or $25 for Pro Version
Air Sharing Wirelessly connect to your computer and transfer files to your iPhone with an easy click and drag for reviewing on the go. Price: $5 Standard and $10 Pro
Email ’n Walk For those of us who can’t type and walk at the same time—it just got easier. With this app, the message you’re typing appears over a view of where you’re going provided by your phone’s camera. Price: $1
CardStar Make your wallet thinner without spending a dime. Ditch all your membership and loyalty cards with this app by entering their barcode numbers. Your phone can then be scanned at each entry or checkout. Price: Free
Take Me to My Car Your car may seem like a moving target, even when it’s parked. Never again wonder where you left the thing. This app records the location of your last parking spot and then leads you back there with turn-by-turn GPS directions. Price: Free
Bump Fist bumping is not just for NBA stars anymore! When two people have this handy app, all they have to do to swap contact info is bump fists with their iPhones in their hands. Price: Free
Medscape Mobile WebMD launched this free app for physicians last month. It provides a comprehensive drug database, drug interaction checker, clinical reference tools, medical news by specialty, CME, and a directory with 400,000 physicians, 57,000 pharmacies, and 6,000 hospitals. Price: Free
Epocrates This app gives instant access to drug prescribing and safety information for more than 3,300 brand and generic drugs. Its Pill ID feature searches physical characteristics such as color, shape, score, and coating to find a drug’s name. Price: Free —A.M.

LEISURE
Where can you reach older Americans these days? Only 28% of adults 65 and older browse the Internet daily according to the Pew Research Center’s recent survey on aging. Its June report “Growing Old in America: Expectations vs. Reality” noted seniors’ daily habits. The same percentage of older adults—83%—that takes prescription medicine every day also reads a book, magazine, or paper. Watching an hour of television is a daily habit for 77% of older adults. An overwhelming majority, 90%, talks with family and friends on a daily basis. Growing old may retire you from the ranks of early adopters, but staying in touch the old-fashioned way—facetime, word of mouth, the printed word, and network television—still does the trick.

The seniors surveyed find time every day for driving (65%), shopping (39%), hobbies (43%), praying (76%), napping (40%), and vigorous exercise (22%). Some of the benefits of the golden years that over half of older adults enjoy include more travel, more financial security, more respect, and less stress. Of course, growing old does have its challenges, but it may not be as bad as you think. Over half of 18- to 64-year-olds expect some level of memory loss, but only 25% of seniors said they actually experience memory loss. The ultimate question may be are seniors happy, and the answer is they’re about as happy as everyone else. About 43% of adults 75 or older say they are pretty happy, while 53% of 18- to 29-year-olds have the same response. —A.M.

We Are the Web
Facebook has helped social networkers stay in touch with family and friends, waste time playing games, and find out what kind of cake they are by taking a quiz. Now a Facebook-assembled group of artists has created a short animated film set to premiere in theaters in November.
Last fall, with funding from Intel and Dell, Hollywood veteran Yair Landau launched Mass Animation to democratize filmmaking. He posted a call on Facebook for animators, both professional and amateur, to contribute scenes for his five-minute short Live Music. His company provided downloadable Maya animation software, the soundtrack, a Romeo and Juliet type love story about a guitar and a violin, and the first scene to set the movie’s overall style. About 17,000 people downloaded the software, and 57,000 people from 101 countries became fans of Mass Animation’s Facebook page, according to the New York Times. The democratic method extended to editing, too: Mass Animation fans voted for their favorite submitted scenes. Landau, the movie’s director, chose the 51 winning animators from 17 countries, who received $500 for each scene. They will see their names scrolling on the silver screen this fall when the short opens for TriStar’s animated feature Planet 51.

Landau left his job as president of Sony Pictures Digital to tap into the potential of crowdsourcing—outsourcing work to the public. “My aim was primarily to prove that you could bring a group of people together on the Internet and create good work,” he noted in the Times. Landau’s next project is crowdsourcing a feature-length film. —A.M.