I have decided that I need a new tripod. The one I have was my dad's from his days of portrait and wedding photography. Probably purchased around 1963. I have never used a tripod much except for time exposures but now at my advancing age (66) I am finding hand held to be a little challenging some days. Definitely not all of the time, but there are times when a tripod would be a smart addition. I have shopped B&H and Adorama and quickly became overwhelmed with all of the choices. I don't do video and I am on a fixed income so I'm looking for something under $200.00 all included. Suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I would be mounting a Canon 7D on it. No extremely heavy lenses at this time. I would be carrying it around with me from time to time. Thank you.

Let me suggest that they are highly intelligent too. For example, they may actually understand what's inside of that phone you carry around. Most of the people I've met in my life could never get to that level or even pass the courses that impart that level of knowledge and understanding. I would not call someone highly educated if they didn't take courses or get degrees that required a high degree of intelligence to understand them. Maybe that's my opinion, and I don't want to get into any fights about it. It doesn't matter anyway. The shortage of Americans in the tech field speaks for itself, and I think it's a cultural problem.

There is a lot of randomness at work in the area of intelligence. It isn't controlled by a single gene. Do you think that the parents of Einstein, Shakespeare, Mozart, Beethoven, Newton (and many others) had the gifts of their children? At the same time, and I learned this in school, the offspring of intellectually gifted parents tend to fall back toward middle of the IQ bell curve. As long as we have billions of people reproducing across the world, we will have gifted people. The downfall of this country's world standing in technology and art may just be the downfall of our culture of excellence, with reduced expectations of our children and the watering down of education. Our tech industry is already being buoyed up by highly educated immigrants from Asia and India.

jerryc41 posted a link about someone who stole a gold plated lunar lander model from a museum...another sad example of the delinquency our "civilization" can produce. My son collects rare movies and gave me a copy of "Idiocracy" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy (not to be confused with ideocracy). This movie is based on the premise that ignorant, parasitic people tend to reproduce in greater numbers than highly educated people and in hundreds of years, the average intelligence of the population will decline to the point where society can barely survive, let alone advance intellectually or morally. The movie's a satire but the theme is chillingly believable and anecdotally, jerryc41's link shows the kind of people out there ready to take the low road. And considering how we're dumbing down our educational system, perhaps we're already headed down that road. Thoughts?