Yet Another Word Game
2022-01-19 00:00:00 +0000
Wordle 214 5/6
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Those that know me inevitably come to know my love for/obsession with word games. I am a religous solver of the New York Times daily crosswords, and I have even been known to participate in online crossword tournaments. The little piano riff that celebrates each solved puzzle rings out over my morning coffee, more often than not accompanied by a deep sense of personal satisfaction. I poke at the Spelling Bee throughout the day, anagramming my way through the lulls between meetings. When I watch Jeopardy, I always ace the “Before and After” or alliteration categories. It comes as no surprise that I love Wordle, the new word guessing game taking the internet by storm.
Something about solving the daily Wordle lights up every word-obsessed synapse in my brain. Trying to think of every five letter word I know, increasingly more narrow parameters, little yellow, gray and green boxes! How exciting! On one momentous day, when I guessed the Wordle in two tries, I pumped my fist in the air like Tiger Woods winning the Masters. Maybe it’s this little jolt of victory that keeps me coming back, day after day. A quick reward, a flash of dopamine in the midst of long, uninterrupted days on Zoom.
Or maybe I am predisposed to being a Wordle freak. After all, I already devote part of each day to word games. Wordle scratches at the same itch that had me poring over Richard Scary’s word books at a young age. The same itch that gave me a rather odd habit of trying to use the biggest words I knew in coversation with my classmates in grade school. Regardless of where my deep, enthusiastic love for Wordle and its contemporaries comes from, I still keep coming back for more.
A New Look at Home
2022-01-11 00:00:00 +0000
Growing up in North Carolina, one thing always separated me from the majority of my classmates: I was truly Tar Heel born. My schools and neighborhoods were filled with families that had moved from New York, New Jersey, and Chicago, or immigrated from India or Pakistan. It was apparent to me at an early age that Cary, my hometown, was a place where people settled, not where people were from. The common joke was that the town’s name was actually an acronym, “Containment Area for Relocated Yankees.” This certainly rang true for my family of carpetbaggers. However, my family is just one example of a much larger plan that took Cary from a glorified railroad station to the second largest town in the United States.
To understand why my parents moved to North Carolina in 1994, you first have to understand the North Carolina of 1950. Tobacco, furniture, and textile manufacturers employed nearly one-third of all workers in the state, and incomes trailed the national average. State leaders began to organize an effort to attract “modern industries” and raise incomes for residents. Central North Carolina was home to three top-tier research universities - Duke, the University of North Carolina (UNC), and North Carolina State University (NCSU) - yet was failing to support a local research economy.
These leaders came up with the idea to create the Research Triangle Park (RTP), a private venture supported by the three universities. By 1959, the first five companies had set up shop. RTP’s growth took off in 1965, when IBM announced the construction of their 400-acre campus. As an economic driver, the idea was wildly successful. Between 1969 and 2012, the area saw gains in overall population, per capita income, and Gross Domestic Product. Between the 1980s and 2005, per capita income growth in the area around RTP outpaced the rest of the state and the national average. Since 1970, an estimated 1500 new companies have been established in the Triangle to support the universities and RTP.
My family is a microcosm of this plan. IBM transfered my father to their RTP office in 1994, where he and my mother bought their first house. They raised two daughters in Cary, and eventually sent one to UNC and the other the NC State. My sister now works for her alma mater at the NC State Center for Environmental Farming Systems. We seem to validate every level of this economic development scheme - if you get a big company to come to your area, they’ll bring highly educated and highly paid employees, and they’ll invest in the local economy, and their children will attend the local universities and stick around to get jobs in the area (or at least one of them will).
However, this scheme fails to hold up for families that are not already sitting high up on the socio-economic ladder. My research for Prof. Thomas Day’s Regional Innovation and Growth class revealed concerning mobility problems in my home region. The great Research Triangle plan worked for some, but now we must make it work for all.