if Age > 40, then Technology = ?!?

The other day my mom found an article about a woman and her impression of how youngsters are better able to adapt to new technology than their parents. (Read the article.) She found the title of the article amusing, because I had informed her just last week about the "blue screen of death" — she'd seen the screen, caused the screen, but had never heard it called that. So she recommended the article to me based on the title alone. But yeah, the author is pretty spot-on. My favourite paragraph is this one:
Somehow, teenagers understand how things work, why they break down and how to fix them. They incorporate new inventions into their daily lives and use them as casually as a toothbrush. Past the age of 35 or 40, the mental switches start to turn off, and gadgets and machines become a mystery.
This was evidenced the same day when she was showing me how to replace the line in the weed-whacker. I could tell that she'd loaded the line wrong — no wonder it never fulfills it's "self-loading" promises. I replaced the line correctly, having never used the piece of equipment, let alone read the instructions. Technology is just one of those things that's going to keep evolving, and I'll try to stay around to show her how it works.