Two points, one on the off topic and then one to get back on topic :wink1:
So far as learning to ride a bike... when I was first learning, I tried on a `full-sized' bike, and I was dead hopeless. I tried for weeks, maybe months... I was 6 years old, so memories are a bit hazy. But despite everyone's best efforts, I was an abject failure; that much, I remember!
One or the other of my parents had the inspired thought to buy me a bike half the size of the bike I was trying to learn on. I was quite tall for my age, so this would have beeen a bike appropriate for maybe an average-sized four year old. With something that small, it's difficult not to learn balance skills pretty quickly, and I did. After two weeks on that bike, I climbed onto the `full'-sized bike and rode like a champ without the slightest loss of balance.
I remembered this lesson many years later as a downhill ski instructor trying to get students to roll their knees into the radius of the turn while shifting their weight to the outside ski to set up the next short-radius turn. It's a very tricky skill, but crucial to effective parallel turning (not to mention race technique). At my ski school, we started all students older than about 13 years old on 180 cm. skis and worked them up to just under `full-length'. It wasn't approved, certified Graduated Length Method, but we got them carving beautiful parallel turns in two lessons or less that way, and they developed impeccable technique even after progressing up to 205 cm skis. One day, while I was marvelling to myself how great a job we were doing there, the memory of my own bike-learning experience came back to me all at once, and I suddenly understood why our method worked so well...
Now for the on-topic part: obese kids. I spent the day at a huge air show at Rickenbacker Field in Columbus, with the Air Force demo team, the Thunderbirds, performing outrageous aviation feats in their F-16s... don't get me started on that, or we will be really off-topic... but the point was, as depressing as the obsesity problem with the adults was, what I saw of the kids there was almost heartbreking. There were dozens of kids under 10, no exaggeration, who you could see the writing on the wall for twenty-five years up the line: major blood-pressure problems, cholestorol monitoring every six weeks, borderline diabetes, dangerous heart conditions... People aren't getting it. Up to the middle of the 20th century, we had a relatively lean population. The next couple of generations showed an alarming increase in adult obsesity related health-problems. And now we're seeing it in progressively lower ages. I saw not just fat but morbidly obese pre-teens all over the place today... a day is coming when many young adults will simply not be able to get health insurance at any price, because the insurance companies will look at their mandatory fitness profiles and decide that they just aren't worth the risk.
I don't know how effective Nickelodeon's gesture will be, but it's great publicity for a very scary problem that could be easily solved if people only did a bit more physical activity on a daily basis... like, e.g., martial arts... eh?
