Spelling antics

There's a certain period of time with children when you can T-A-L-K in F-R-O-N-T of the children by S-P-E-L-L-I-N-G thing O-U-T. Primus cut that short when he learned to read quite early, so we didn't get much time, and now he's also doing it to say secret things in front of his little brother. But not always with 100% success. At the end of dinner the other night;

"Mama, Daddy, I'm F-O-O-L."
"You're what?"
"I'm F-O-O-L. I don't want any more dinner".

and then later, after the bath, when he wanted to go upstairs and read his book:

"Daddy, I want to go upstairs to read H-A-R-R-Y P-O-T-T-Y".

Well, it's a start, I guess. He's usually a bit more accurate than the above would indicate.

Foreign Narratives

The boys were in the bath the other day - Primus playing a complicated game, and Secundus watching and learning avidly. I was dressing Tertia, who was finished in the bath, but was listening into Primus' play narrative as he explained it to me in a rapid-fire train of thought:

"...and Mr. Blucky [the blue plastic hippo] jumps on this [a foam toy with a face cloth draped over it floating in the bath, like a boat or island] and then he has to jump off to get to the wormhole [the foam/cloth platform is being moved back and forth across the bathtub] but the baddy is there and he has to get the gun and fight the baddy to get to the next level when he goes through the wormhole and if he jumps off here or here or here [he indicates various spots on the foam/cloth's path] then he falls in the lava and dies and when he gets to the next level he loses his weapons but he can get the bow and arrow and fight the next baddy [he rearranges the baddy, which is a toy boat with some plastic tubing next to it] but the baddy on the next level is more dangerous but then he can go through the next wormhole and get to the next level and..."

The kid is in a bath, playing with plastic bath toys, but he's playing a platform game! Like flippin' Prince of flippin' Persia! I've noticed it a bit before - a lot of their games seem to be computer games transliterated in to real life. It's standard terminology among his peer group and other kids his age to "Pause" and "Unpause" a game. All the games they play seem to be strongly influenced by playstation and computer games.

I know I'm going to sound like a crotchety old man, but I find it weird. They're into the same aliens and robots and monsters and swashbuckling derring-do that I was into as a kid - even Star Wars, the formative mythology of my own childhood, has come back. But they've got a different narrative structure to anything I remember from my childhood, and a different language for controlling their games. I suppose that we did this to our parents as well, and Primus's kids will also bewilder him with the way they play.

Conferencalicious

Most of the details of my life are in another blog, so I'm not visiting this one much. I'd originally thought this one might be a sort of quick blurt of the day type blog, but that's all elsewhere, so this one is for random thought and stuff that requires more detailed blather.

My conference poster went well. It's the first one I've ever done - I never went far enough as a student to get to make a poster for a conference, so it was all a bit weird, and since I'm not a student I didn't have a supervisor to tell me how to do it properly, but it turned out OK. And I've got new software for diagrams, and discovered I already had good page layout software, so all was good. Actually, seriously, Pages is really good page layout software for the uninitiated. I was surprised. I was very happy with how well the poster turned out.

The bad bit was that I had to give a presentation to go with it. I didn't expect that when I signed up for the deal, and am generally terrified of public speaking. Nearly had a meltdown when I discovered I was presenting in the big auditorium that would happily seat a few hundred. I was enormously relieved when only thirty or so people actually turned up. And the presentation went OK, though I think I confused the audience a little (my presentation was a little too techy for the conference). My colleague presented the other poster I worked on (I did most of the poster-making on both of them), and his went down well, and because the subject matter was appropriate for the conference (educational conference, and his was on the exam item bank we're working on) we were asked lots of questions afterwards and there was a lot of interest in what we're making.

On another note, this was posted on metafilter, and is nice and creepy:

Recognition

It's nifty sometimes when you notice the way your brain functions. I was in the queue our favourite chinese BBQ place, when I saw someone in the queue ahead of me that I recognized. You know how it is when you recognize someone - it's a "Bam! I know that guy" feeling. There's obviously specialized
brain hardware to take care of that sort of thing. But that really important bit of brain hardware doesn't always link to that actual useful information about the person.

So there I am, thinking "I know that guy. Who the hell is he?" I ponder a while. He doesn't look quite right. Has he had a haircut? Wearing something unusual? Older? In the wrong context?

I don't know about you, but my brain stores people by contexts. If I know someone from work, then they're stored as a Work Person, and if I bump into them elsewhere, I'm all "Hi there, person I recognize but don't know who the hell is". Often when walking though the street I'll see people who work in shops I frequent, who don't necessarily recognize me, and who look confused when I do the wave-or-nod-of-recognition thing that people do when the see people they kind-of-know in the street.

So back to the BBQ shop, where I'm standing there now thinking "hmm. He's definitely out of context. Doesn't look like someone I work with; can't really figure out where in my world he'd fit". This was gradually followed by a "hmm. He looks less crazy than usual". A glance about the shop at the guy chopping a duck up with a huge meat cleaver reminds me that The Guy should normally be waving a meat cleaver around dementedly.

In a pizza shop.

Hey! It's that guy From Fat Pizza! (Better not do the wave-of-recognition thing - might freak him out... though he's probably used to it)

That's it - Bobo!

By this stage I've noticed him glancing across at me, mildly amused at me looking at him, seemingly pleased that his minor level of celebrity has got him recognized in Campsie.

Well anyway, it's good to know that Bobo agrees with my taste in Chinese BBQ. And who'd've thought he would have a daughter?

Sorry to bore you with this. It was interesting at the time because there was a part of my brain sitting there watching the whole process of recognition and recall going on which I actually found much more interesting than the event itself, as it demonstrated the interactions between different brain modules as they each did their dodgy job of trying to extract information about something in front of me.

Stupid horsies

In keeping with my fine tradition of deep understanding of All Things Sporting, I declared today that the Melbourne Cup would be won by "A Brown Horsie".

Of course, which flippin' horsie wins?

This flippin' horsie:

The only non-brown one on the track.

It wasn't too bad. No-one was going to let me bet on my horsie choice anyway.

He's a bright boy

I'm not sure when kids are supposed to start asking these questions, but I've recently had conversations with six-year-old Primus about:

• The concept of nothingness. His contention: "There is no such thing as nothing". My reply: "well, what have you got left in a bag when you had one apple, and someone takes it out?". I had to point out that if there was no such thing as nothing, then you wouldn't be able to take out that last apple because you wouldn't be able to have nothing left. He seemed to get it - there is such a thing as nothing, but it's not the same kind of thing as "things". I refrained from hitting him with the concept of Concepts.
• The extent and composition of the universe. This went along the lines
  P: "Daddy, where does Gold come from"
  Me: "They dig it out of the ground"
  P: "But how did it get there?"
  Me: "It was there when the Earth formed" (which cued a sidebar discussion about what elements are and some examples of elements vs. things that are made of combinations of elements)
  P: "But how did it get into the stuff that made the earth?"
  Me: "Well, it was created when another star exploded..." (which started a discussion of nuclear fusion and how elements are created in stars, which he kind of understood because he remembered the They Might Be Giants song I sometimes sing them in the bath, followed by the explanation that heavier elements like gold and iron are only created in supernovae)
  P: "Ah. But where did the stuff that other star was made of come from?"
  Me: "Well, that's what the universe was made of after the big bang. It was mostly hydrogen with a bit of helium and smaller bits of stuff like lithium and boron"
  
  
  And from there it got a bit complicated, with his queries prompting me to explain the big bang and how the universe was really small early on and grew into what we see today. And how the Universe had a defined starting point, and about the possible heat death of the universe and the Big Rip.
  
  P: "But what was outside the really small thing?"
  Me: "There was no outside - that tiny little thing was the universe."
  P: "But what was outside? There has to be something."
  Me: "Nothing. You can't have anything outside the universe. The universe is all there is!"
  P: "But there's not such thing as nothing!"

I've got to say, this is a lot more interesting than the pure "Why?" phase, even though it's essentially the same game.