One of the things I enjoy about expertise is that it lets you see more when you look at the world.  A medical background lets you look at skin, breathing, and heartbeat, and see lifestyles, health, and disease.  Knowing about architecture lets you look at skyscrapers and see history and philosophy.  Psychology, among other things, lets me look at a cute kid and see the construction-in-progress of adult cognitive architecture.

Piaget was a weird guy.  It should not be possible to sit around watching your kids, asking them occasional questions, and create a testable scientific theory that survives more or less intact for 75 years.  He was good at noticing things--mostly, that kids don't think like adult human beings, and that they go through predictable progressions of alien thinking on their way there.  The things that he noticed are really easy to see, if you know what you're looking for.  Impossible not to see, in fact.

So we're waiting at the midwife's office.  Also in the waiting room are a father and his 2-year-old (mom is getting her check-up).  The kid alternates between fascinated shaking of a water bottle, and fascinated pushing of one wheeled-cube ottoman up against the second wheeled-cube ottoman.  Clearly mass and vectors are the discoveries of the week.  He can't figure out yet what these objects will do to each other without manipulating them physically--no surprise; outside-the-head thinking is pretty standard for the first two Piagetian stages.  You'd expect to see it up through about age 7 for most kids.  What I'm trying to figure out is whether he's in the Sensorimotor or Preoperational stage.  He should be right at the boundary, on one side or the other.  Finally I kneel down beside him and ask to borrow the water bottle.  I hold up a board book and stick the bottle behind it.  He's looking at me the whole time.

"Do you know where the bottle went?  Can you look for the bottle?"

He starts looking immediately, obviously having fun.  What's really entertaining is that he first looks in a basket on the other side of the room.  Only after he catches sight of the bottle out of the corner of his eye does he come over to fish it from behind the book.  Textbook early pre-op--knows that objects keep existing when they can't be seen, but doesn't yet have a clear idea of the properties of that existence.  Can they teleport from one side of the room to the other?  Do they change size randomly?  Do they stay where you put them?  He doesn't know yet.  But he's working on it.

I'm going to make a very strange parent.

Too much walking and standing and working has kept my back sore, but I didn't want to miss the conference. Ice is good, also ibuprofen gel with menthol. We finished up with afternoon of rest, writing and pool time tomorrow, to make up for three days of walking miles round the conference.

Non-work highlights; huge dragonflies, easily the size of a London mouse. The excellent lunch on Tuesday: Marriot World Resort does the best conference food bar none. John Mayer playing 'free falling' and 'message in a battle' (the accent!), which I parsed as 'I'll send an SMS to the world' and saying he prefers BlackBerry to Pampers...

Long-time lurker, first-time poster...

A bit graphic, but shows the power of unity......
Dog Pack Attacks Gator in Florida
At times nature can be cruel, but there is also a raw beauty, and even a certain justice manifested within that cruelty.
The alligator, one of the oldest and ultimate predators, normally considered the 'apex predator,' can still fall victim to implemented 'team work' strategy, made possible due to the tight knit social structure and 'survival of the pack mentality' bred into canines.

See the remarkable photograph below courtesy of Nature Magazine. Note that the Alpha dog has a muzzle hold on the gator preventing it from breathing, while another dog has a hold on the tail to keep it from thrashing. The third d og attacks the soft underbelly of the gator.

( Not for the squeamish! )

(Thanks to Dad for forwarding this.)

Long time, no posts other than the business stuff (that's friends-locked - let me know if you'd like to see it).

Things have been a bit busy for the last couple of months. IIRC, the last time I posted was just before Passover. We took the train from Chicago to Rochester, and David thoroughly enjoyed the trip. He got to sleep on the train, wake up on the train, eat breakfast on the train, go for a walk on the train, say goodbye to the train as it left the station in Rochester, say hello to the train when we got back on it ... I think you get the idea. He REALLY enjoyed the trip. We got a nice (if brief) visit in on both ends of the train trip with the Ropers.

Since then, we've been rather busy:

( We've got landscaping )

( the kids are growing like weeds )

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/292050663/vintage-japanese-rob.html

Wired's posted a photo gallery from the new show of vintage Japanese robots opening at the Sci Fi Museum in Seattle.

Iconic graphic designer Tom Geismar, whose firm Chermayeff & Geismar has created memorable logos for Mobil, PBS and other U.S. institutions, has been collecting the shiny bots for decades.

The Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle will exhibit toys from Geismar's collection in Robots: A Designer's Collection of Miniature Mechanical Marvels through Oct. 26. The vintage robots on display reflect Geismar's trained eye. "I've really restricted myself to ones that appealed to me as interesting, imaginative designs," he says.

Link

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/292050664/sofabookcase.html

If you know me, you know I love bookcases built into EVERYTHING. This sofa (the Flexform Oltre) with bookcases in the arms: no exception. Link (via Cribcandy)

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/292050665/laika-the-astrodog-t.html

This 1958 Japanese tin toy features Laika, Sputnik 2's brave cosmo-dog. Poor Laika. Link (Thanks, Erin!)

See also: Laika - graphic novel tells the sweet and sad story of the first space-dog

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/292043886/microsoft-and-nbc-en.html

Danny O'Brien from the Electronic Frontier Foundation sez,

Vista users are complaining that Media Center refuses to let them record broadcast digital TV shows on NBC.

Here's a screenshot of what they're seeing.

After we won the fight to stop the Broadcast Flag three years ago, over-the-air digital TV shouldn't have any copy controls -- and if it did, Microsoft shouldn't have to obey them.

Is it a bug in Vista's DRM systems? Did Microsoft and NBC cut a deal? What other receivers out there are going to obey the broadcasters instead of their owners?

Link (Thanks, Danny!)

Oh, and that bit about bicycling around in the noonday sun looking for my lost security badge ... while wearing a tank top for one of the first times in the season? ( Not such a good idea. )

I spent part of yesterday afternoon making backup copies of my data. This morning, I had a copy of Windows XP with Service Pack 1 that I installed on my system. Service Pack 2 was on a separate disk, and when I went to Windows update, discovered that Service Pack 3 had been released. I had to find and use the drivers CD that came with my system. I didn't install everything I had under Vista, but I think I have enough for me to be able to move forward for the next couple of weeks. That is, once I get the built-in Tomcat server configured.

Ah well. This beats whining about all those "out of heap space" errors I was getting, and not being productive.

Does any of this make sense to anyone out there?

madrona and smitty_de_smith and I sorta came up with this draft over dinner tonight

ttto: "The Farmers and the Cowboys" from OKLAHOMA!

CHORUS:
O the Shadows and the Vorlons should be friends!
O the Shadows and the Vorlons should be friends!
One side just wants evolution
The other side wants revolution
But that's no reason why they can't be friends!

I'd like to say a word for the Vorlon--
He eschews both extremes and takes the middle.
He eschews EVERYTHING but navel gazing,
And bugs us with the most annoying riddles!

Now, I would like to speak up for the Shadows--
They keep the dull times off us pretty often.
They sure made life exciting for my Home World,
Who's population's mostly now in coffins!

We should be feeling sorry for the Vorlons.
Their encounter suits ain't got no bathroom zipper.
They ride light years on end, with some few tortured souls for friends!
I sure feel sorry--for poor Jack the Ripper!

O the Shadows and the Vorlons should be friends... (KICK! POW!)
O the Shadows and the Vorlons should be friends...(ZAP! RAWR!), etc....

Anyone wanna add some verses?

Maybe it's the type of chicken broth I use (store bought) but I think the flavors are way too intense for a risotto. I have pleurotte & porcini mushrooms at home and I want to make a risotto because I love the texture but with what should I replace the chicken broth?

I was thinking about peeling the mushrooms and making a simple broth out of that. With a bit of white wine.

What do you think? How do you make your risotto?

And thanks to katsuki's cute piglet videos just posted, I discovered...

( Yawning Baby Duck! )

The Little Guy is back in the hospital again, we did the "from doctor's office via ambulance on Basic Life Support (i.e. oxygen)" drill again, only I was the PIC this time; jenkitty was home trying to get some rest - she's come down with the Little Guy's cold.

So he's back in the same room we had on Tuesday, at Swedish First Hill, and once again I'm pleased with the quality of care we're getting through these folks ... but I really want our Little Guy to be hydrated and able to eat and sassy and breathing well on his own without need for supplemental oxygen or nebulizer treatments.

All good energy, wishes, prayers, etc gratefully accepted.

Hey, my name is Cullen. I'm 25 and have been on T for about 1 month now. I'm also quite small so I have a hard time passing for over 12 which is awkward at work lol.

( See Pictures of Littleboi )

A comrade in arms on the event-driven vs. threaded debate has switched sides and is now a threading advocate. He's been having doubts for awhile but was finally convinced by an article about threaded vs. event-driven approaches in Java. I'm not so sure, though it's clear that some of the long-standing reasons that threaded approaches were bad are starting to go away.

My main complaint about threads is that the concurrency model they represent is too hard for most people to use and requires way more discipline than the average programmer seems capable of.

My secondary complaint is basically that they introduce latency. Every synchronization operation represents a piece of data that has to be communicated between threads. I wrote a long pondering article about threads and latency awhile ago.

One thing I've noticed is that reads are usually much more frequent than updates. This makes things like memcached a good idea. I think of memcached as essentially being NUMA without hardware support.

I think it's clear though that some level of threading is a good idea nowadays.

One interesting thing that Java has done that I think is an overall useful concept is making some data structures immutable so that no locking operations are required to access them. Python does this too.

This is going to require some thinking.

http://www.metafilter.com/71726/Beyond-the-Torture-Debate

Beyond the Torture Debate On May 6th the American Strategy Program hosted an event with Philippe Sands, Professor of International Law at University College London and Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff for Colon Powell. Mr. Sands was in DC to testify to the House Judiciary Committee about the findings in his new book, Torture Team, which examines the legal implications of the Bush administration's policy of torture. Col. Wilkerson was on hand for commentary on the subject. The event was moderated by Patrick Doherty, deputy director of the American Strategy program. The event was recorded and posted by the New America Foundation to YouTube. It is 1 hr 31 minutes long, but well worth it.
The event was recorded and posted by the New America Foundation to YouTube. It is 1 hr 31 minutes long, but well worth it.

HOLY FRAK!

And it gets even better:

Season 4 Trailer for Episode 408
Here's the first Trailer for Episode 408 which will air 2 weeks from today:


http://www.sendspace.com/file/gl217g


Lots of Spoilers in this one!

Via bluecrushfan

OMG, I have a horrible horrible love for piggies, wild boars, etc.. My father worked with pigs so ever since I was a little girl I couldn't get enough of seeing them, being around them, and petting them.

Post more if you have them!
( Piglets! )

Err. I got a bit busy doing some stuff I volunteered for at the recent Denvention meeting. It was programming stuff and I couldn't help noticing that there were a lot of people I'd ordinarily expect to see on programming who hadn't submitted a programming questionnaire. It isn't too late if you're one of those people. Or if you know someone who is. You can find the questionnaire at
https://www.denvention3.org/wcdb/partsurvey.php

And the answers for 10 Lines #14...

( After the cut )

15,250 / 30,000 (50.8%)

1214 words today, which took all day. It has not been a day for flow. I was hoping to get closer to 2200. But sometimes you take what you can get and tomorrow is another day.

What are some variations on flavoring for cinnamon rolls? 

I finally have my dough recipe all nice and tweaked, and want to branch out flavor-wise.  I don't have much experience with sweet breakfast pastries due to diet restrictions (long story).

I'm thinking something orangey?