Always Another Windmill

When Dr. Sears & all the rest have got you down, this looks like a promising antidote.

The Telegraph, Idle parenting means happy children:

“There is a way out of this over-zealous parenting trap, a simple solution that will make your life easier and cheaper. It will make your kids’ lives more enjoyable and also will help to produce happy, self-sufficient children, who can create their own lives without depending on a Mummy substitute. I call it idle parenting and our mantra is: ‘Leave them alone.’ “

(snip)

I will confess my many parenting errors. I am a disaster-prone, chaotic layabout and so should warn you not to listen to my advice. Certainly my friends say the idea of me advising other parents on childcare is absurd.

With that caveat in mind, let us go forth, throw away the rule books, forget what other people think and enjoy family life and all its joys and woes.

My approach to bedtime increasingly resembles this approach. I secretly suspect that the moment I really no longer care when he goes to bed or if he puts himself to sleep by shouting and singing loudly for 2 hours will be the moment that he starts falling asleep in 15 minutes.

Coversation at bedtime tonight, as I’m leaving the room to let Zag work out his squirming/kicking/thrashing/singing thing out on his own for a little while:

Zag: Don’t go!

Me: I’ll come back when you’re ready to stop fighting with me and you’re ready to try and go to sleep. I don’t want to lie in here and fight with you about going to sleep.

Zag (with a slight hint of incredulousness): You don’t want to fight with me?

Me: No.

Zag: Why not?

Me: I don’t like fighting.

Zag (really incredulous now): You don’t like fighting?

Me: No.

Zag: I like fighting!

Me: Yes, I had noticed.

James MacDonald on Making Light:

“It’s like Barack Obama saw his shadow and we’re going to have six more weeks of campaigning.”

It could be worse; we could be fated to repeat the last six weeks of campaigning over and over until the dems get it right.

So, in spite of all the recent outrage over comments and sermons made by the Pastor of the United Church of Christ church where Barack Obama has been a long time member, a recent survey by the Pew Center finds that there has been little reduction in the number of people who incorrectly believe that Obama is a Muslim.

There is little evidence that the recent news about Obama’s affiliation with the United Church of Christ has dispelled the impression that he is Muslim. . . . Nearly one-in-ten (9%) of those who heard a lot about Wright still believe that Obama is Muslim.

I suppose they must just think the UCC is some kind of Muslim church or something.

(Via Crooked Timber.)

Fafblog, the entire universe’s only source of Fafblog, is back, and now better than ever, after suddenly vanishing almost 2 years ago. Where has it been? Searching for the fabled Ur-Pie? Locked away in Guantanmo, or a secret undisclosed location? Traveling at the speed of light to distant galaxies? We may never know.

“The triumphant cry of revolution will call out through the streets: Vive Fáfnir! Vive Gibléts!” says Giblets. “Radical Fafbloggists will demand a new era of Fafno-Gibletsian rule over the cosmos, and none will be able to stand in their way!”

Fafblog! back to save the universe.

This would be so much fun. For Zag, of course. After we move.

Musical Furnishings

(Via MAKE magazine.)

We somehow ended up done with dinner about an hour earlier than usual tonight–usually I whisk Zag straight from dinner to toothbrushing and getting ready for bed. WB and I decided that it might be fun to watch one of the Wallace & Gromit shorts, “A Grand Day Out” in which W & G build a rocket to take a vacation eating cheese on the moon. It should be just Zag’s kind of thing–there’s a dog, tools, cheese, a space ship, and a robot–what’s not to like?

Especially as Zag has been really into rockets and spaceships lately. When we play with his assorted people, we almost always end up with at least one of them flying around in a space ship. He even had me build him a space ship out of his Duplo (pictured above), which he loves.

And robots he’s liked forever. Every now and then we go through phases of having to be robots quite a lot. And sometimes, Zag will suddenly turn into a robot, which happened briefly while we were eating dinner tonight. (This always calls to mind a short TMBG song, the entire text of which is “Here’s hoping that you don’t become a robot! Clang clang clang clang , whoops too late!”)

But despite all this, there was one problem. Somehow, some time ago, Zag became convinced that he doesn’t like Wallace and Gromit, or that he will like them later, when he’s bigger. To the point where even suggesting watching one can push him right up to the brink of a tantrum, shouting that he wants to watch something else.

Well, with some gentle coaxing along with the promise of a family evening together with the added incentives of popcorn, we finally coaxed a first reluctant agreement, and then I got him to help me get out the DVD and put it in the player. Whew.

So we start. And he’s sucked in instantly, of course. It was fun talking with him about it as we watched together.

A few minutes in, he exclaims joyfully “I like it! I like it! Daddy, Daddy, I like it! I like it, Daddy!”

And when we reached the end, he instantly burst in to tears, sobbing “I really like it. I REALLY REALLY like it. I want to watch it again.”

We eventually managed to pull him away, promised we could watch it again soon, and moved on to reading a few books before bed.

He sang the theme music while we got ready for bed.

Playmobil Security Check Point

I’m finding a new love for Amazon based on customer comments like the ones for this product.

(Via a long complicated chain of sites I can’t began to reconstruct)

These look like fun: Bloxes

How can I not like something that brings together the fun of origami and Lego? Zag would probably like them, too.

Too bad they cost ~$3 each ($59.95 for a pack of 20), which probably prices us out of the market. I figure you’d need at least 2 or 3 packs to be able to do much fun. The wall pictured above, for example, looks to contain ~100 of them, or almost $300 worth.

That’s well out of toy range (sigh). Zag and I will do just fine playing with reused shipping boxes.

Photo by Scott Robbin, used under a Creative commons by-nc license.

I, for one, welcome our new Supercompter Overlords:

Blue Brain scientists are confident that, at some point in the next few years, they will be able to start simulating an entire brain. ‘If we build this brain right, it will do everything,’

Fortunately, we’ve got a little time to prepare ourselves for the inevitable machine revolution:

In fact, the model is so successful that its biggest restrictions are now technological. . . . Markram estimates that in order to accurately simulate the trillion synapses in the human brain, you’d need to be able to process about 500 petabytes of data (peta being a million billion, or 10 to the fifteenth power). That’s about 200 times more information than is stored on all of Google’s servers. (Given current technology, a machine capable of such power would be the size of several football fields.) Energy consumption is another huge problem. . . . But if computing speeds continue to develop at their current exponential pace, and energy efficiency improves, Markram believes that he’ll be able to model a complete human brain on a single machine in ten years or less.

(Via kottke.org.)

Ok, I think I had seen before somewhere that you can buy Uranium Ore on Amazon (just $29.95!)

What I find extra alarming is that Amazon is recommending that I buy it together with a book titled “Forbidden Lego: Build the models your parents warned you against.”

Also, see reviews of one gallon of millk. But be warned, if you try drinking milk while reading these reviews, it may leak out of your nose.

(via Scatterplot)