entirely safe and fun

Jenn knit the squat, repulsive idol, no doubt inspired by “an unprecedented dream of great Cyclopean cities of Titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror.” She survived to take the photo, sanity just barely intact. Now she wants to be rid of it – you can help!

What thing is this, pausing before a cyclopean door?

Poor Johansen’s handwriting almost gave out when he wrote of this. Of the six men who never reached the ship, he thinks two perished of pure fright in that accursed instant. The Thing cannot be described – there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God! What wonder that across the earth a great architect went mad, and poor Wilcox raved with fever in that telepathic instant? The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.
- H P Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu

Available now on Etsy, courtesy of our friend Jenn — an awesome knit finger-idol of Cthulhu, sure to provide hours of sanity-ripping fun! Buy it and make regular sacrifices, and you might even be eaten last!

Meanwhile, back at the Rancho…

Dante managed to be born in the middle of tomato season here at the (notional) Lazy P Rocking C Rancho. After a mind- altering tomato experience last year, I decided to go with organic and dry culture this season, which is to say that once I had gotten the transplants established using a normal watering schedule and two applications of worm castings, I stopped watering the vines, other than a quick mist on the five or so very hottest days for temperature control. The theory, drawn from enology, is that we lower yield to concentrate sugar in the remaining fruit, which we force to be made with as little water as possible.

We planted five varieties of small tomato: some bog-standard Roma, an odd green striped heirloom, cherries, grapes, and tiny pear-shaped yellow ones which looked cool on the nursery tag. This photo doesn’t make the scale very clear, but picture the largest tomato (the green one) as being about three inches across. The fruit is turning out perfectly, the best I’ve ever had under any circumstances, and it’s beautiful too. The grape tomatoes, in particular, are meaty and strawberry-sweet, perfect sliced in half with a heavy dusting of black pepper on the cut side.

This posting is mostly directed at my future self, as a reminder to be patient when growing tomatoes. Good soil maintenance, good transplant management, then laissez croître.

Clean babies are agreeable, but how efficient are they?

Just a few new pictures are up on Flickr, available here.

Last night, Punam and I bathed Dante; it took about half an hour. I couldn’t help but think that my surface area must be an order of magnitude greater than his (I outweigh him about 25:1), and it only takes me about seven or eight minutes to shower. Data, clearly, needed to be collected!

I settled on a simplified model of the body that would be a fairly close estimate and would only require seven measurements: Consider the torso and each limb as a cylinder, with length measured in the obvious way and circumference measured around the middle part (above the knee, below the elbow, at the bottom of the ribcage), then fit a sphere around the head (circumference measured as if for a hat). Here’s what I got, for Dante and for myself, in cm:

Multiplying each length by its corresponding circumference gives us the surface area of the cylindrical components. The head’s SA is just c²/π. Adding up the results, I estimate Dante’s surface at 6435cm² and mine at 37719cm² — just about six times greater. Dante (3.2kg) has a SA:mass ratio of 2011cm²/kg compared to 460 in my case, which underlines the commonplace that babies have to work a lot harder than adults to thermoregulate (roughly four times harder). But more importantly for our purposes, we learn that Dante’s totally factitious Bathing Efficiency Coefficient is 6435 cm²/30 min = 3.57cm²/sec against my 78.6cm²/sec, so we can conclude that bathing him is quite inefficient.

That said… we’re not going to skimp on it or anything. Clean babies are very nice to have around.

Edit: Forgot that each kind of limb comes in pairs. Doubled their contributions, updated numbers, point still intact.

Remember: Pork, not tubes. Tubes photo by wheresmysocks (cc-by), barrel photo by MissBeckles (cc-by-nc-sa).

Now comes it to my attention that Senator Ted Stevens, crown jewel of the spectacularly corrupt Alaskan delegation to Washington, had his home raided by the FBI while I was engrossed in baby matters. His shameful record of waste and cash politics were in some danger of being overshadowed by his laff-riot “Series of Tubes” gaffe (“[...] an Internet was sent by my staff [...] again, the Internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes.”), which would have been a shame, because clearly he deserves to be remembered as the consummate Beltway parasite, elbows planted square on the lid of the pork barrel. Maybe now he’ll get his chance, and history books of the future will talk about Stevens and his colleagues the way that current history books talk about Tamany Hall or Crédit Mobilier.

Incoming freshmen, then. Way to go, Alaska!

OK, out of my system. More baby pictures soon. Did you see the new ones linked from my last post? They are very cute.

Michael took this picture: “He’s got his little gyan mudra there. A very Zen baby.”

Punam and Dante and I came back from the hospital to hang out with Punam’s mom at home on Saturday. It’s been a happy couple of days, and we’ve even had a few visitors! Our friends Chuck and Michael came by to meet the baby and take some pictures — new ones are available in the same Flickr set as before (tagged with “day three”).

Dante celebrated his very first Monday in Silicon Valley style, with a morning meeting (with his pediatrician) set for 9:30 that didn’t actually start until about ten minutes later, because nobody wants to meet before the sun is over the yardarm. He’s getting right into the swing of things. I’m afraid to bring him to the office because he might lay his hand down on a keyboard, accidentally write a Perl script (this is uncomfortably easy to do), and be mistaken in the labor crunch for an exceptionally tiny summer intern.

Punam and I have added this young gentleman to our family.

When two hours old you are, not so neatly your hair will be done, eh?

It is beyond debate that he is quite the cuteness! He was born 2 Aug 2007 at 6:41AM, weighing 7 lbs 6 oz and measuring 21.5″. We gave him the name Dante Quinn — Dante after the poet and medieval prototype of the Renaissance man, and Quinn after the mighty Eskimo.

There’s a Flickr set with plenty of photos, which you can look at by clicking here. Enjoy!