entirely safe and fun

28 Aug ‘07, 6.53pm PDT PST: by ccreitz

Thus, let’s battle our pokemans. It makes perfect sense!

The skeptical look runs in the family.

New pictures are up, tagged with tagged with “day twentyfour”. Many of these are pictures of Dante’s namakarana, or naming ceremony, which we held on Saturday afternoon. Some of our guests took pictures; if that describes you, and you’ve got your photos up on the web, I’d really appreciate it if you could send me a link (email or comment). Thanks to Parashuram for sending his along!

There is also quite a bit of general-purpose cuteness, much of it taken by or featuring my sister Abby — thanks to her for letting me put these photos up.

Last night, I awoke to a strange, high-amplitude sound coming from the vicinity of Dante’s crib, like someone rubbing a giant eraser on a stretchy plastic bag. Needless to say, I was concerned, and jumped up to check out the situation. It turns out that the boy has worked out a way to make a noise louder than anything he can produce with his larynx by sucking very hard on two non-adjacent or non-parallel fingers, e.g. on his thumb and index finger, or index and ring fingers. It’s an awful whistling, screeching sound like something out of Lovecraft, and it’s (unsurprisingly) effective at getting him fed. It could also help him find work in Hollywood, voice acting for man-eating aliens that jump out of the ductwork.

Modern guides to baby-rearing suggest that it’s OK to get babies to soothe themselves by sucking on a hand or finger, and in particular that it’s preferable to having them cry or to getting them hooked on exogenous soothing fetishes like pacifiers. But if this is going to be Dante’s hand-sucking technique for the foreseeable future, geez. Is there somewhere I can sign up for crying instead?

His hand is slightly wider than my thumb, so his home rows on a QWERTY keyboard would be DF and JK, with S and L being long reaches.

More pictures are up, tagged with “day twenty”. There are a few gems in there, such as Dante’s first MySpace-type glamor photo (exhibiting a touch of Internet Disease, in fact, to hide his baby acne!).

Given the amount of time that I’ve been able to spend with Dante since his birth, it could not have escaped my attention that he is an insanely detailed scale model of a full-sized person. I read sometimes about the model-makers who, when building a 1/128-scale replica of a battleship, turn 1/128-scale pistons for their perfect 1/128-scale steam engines, complete with 1/128-scale scoring along the axis of compression to simulate years of 1/128-scale service at 1/128-scale sea… a baby is like that. Somehow, in seven pounds of flesh, there needs to be room for all the fiddly little parts that go into a full-grown person. Not just the big, obvious stuff like a pancreas, but a whole collection of tiny pancreatic nodules, populated with the requisite Isles of Langerhans. Not just a 5%-scaled intestine, but hundreds of sphincters along its length to facilitate peristalsis, and billions or so of villi to increase intestinal surface area. Not just two soft, pink feet, but ten toenails, copying adult toenails with an otaku’s obsessive perfection.

Dante hangs out with Debra. Cuteness is still a critical skill for two-week-olds, but they are beginning to develop others.

Our old friend Debra visited us this weekend and, as we went along, took a bunch of pictures which make up the bulk of the new slug of photos tagged “day eighteen”. Thanks to her for letting me put them up.

Beginning his third week of life, Dante has started becoming responsive to his environment. He is beginning to track people with his eyes a little bit, lifting his head toward things he wants for a few seconds at a time, and reliably getting his hands to his mouth whenever he feels the need. It all points to a time when he will have the ability to feed and move himself, rather than relying on baby appeal to move adult muscles in his service… but for now, his first endogenously motivated activities just serve to highlight how cute he is, and provoke nearby grown-ups to more strenuous activity on his behalf.

I understand that everything that my son does at this point in his life is part of an instinct that babies have evolved to efficiently mine their parents for resources, and that his “cuteness” along with my deep need to respond comes straight from the stupidest mammal part of my brain, being a manifestation of parents’ instinct to be exploited to a greater or lesser extent by their offspring. I can’t help but marvel at how deep our biases, in the learning theory sense, run — that is, at how much information about the nature of the world is simply encoded into our bodies before we even have to make decisions, or to learn new behaviors or policies. Well underneath the level at which I can reason about my reasons, I simply know that a crying baby requires attention, and it’s very stressful to be around one. Conversely, it’s very calming to be around a happy baby. Consequently, babies and adults form a homeostatic system that stabilizes on happy babies and calm adults, which presumably has good evolutionary consequences.

This sort of instinctual model of the universe, present and rich even before learning can take place, is a theme that’s run through my thinking about machine learning in the decade I’ve been working on it, making me think that the conventional wisdom about high-bias ML systems like expert systems (said CW being that those systems are old and busted) is completely wrong. Successful living and learning systems in the real world carry an immeasurably great bias in every aspect of their design: most feet are flat because the ground mostly is flat too, and they’re mounted on the bottom of a creature because a part designed to touch the ground needs to be below all the other parts… and that’s just feet. How much more bias, subtle or profound, must inform the architecture of a learning organ? And why should we expect “purer” learning systems, drained as completely as possible of bias, to succeed in making predictions about a world so complex that real organisms, embodying huge amounts of background information, can barely cling to life?

Any theory of human nature based on a blank slate reflects an astonishing naïveté and lack of insight. Careful consideration of what is packed up in our notion of “cute” reveals its irreparable lacunae. John Locke is considered the concept’s most important proponent among Anglophone philosophers; I think he must never had any children (edit: sure enough), which, married with a lack of introspection, might have allowed him to convince himself that there is no immutable human nature, that humans have no instincts. But how would such impoverished creatures survive and learn in such a phenomena-rich world?

Update: Coincidentally, Jen Kirsch of Juror2, who drew es&f’s banner, recently put up a new piece with a very expressive infant in it. She gets a lot of mileage out of her sticks, which are evocative and imaginative and, yeah, cute.

Why “Dante,” anyway? Punam and I had a big piece of paper stuck to our wall, and we just wrote down names we liked over the course of a month or so, reading combinations out loud until we settled on “Dante Quinn” as being euphonious, pronounceable by everyone, and having appropriate meanings, referents, and connotations — “Axel Wiley,” for instance, sounded like a comic-book supervillain and so got a pass… for this child. Because we didn’t really settle on it until the very last second, I never had an answer for people who asked me what we’d call him, so I came up with a little joke to put it off: “Well, we’re going to wait for an omen at his birth. If the sky opens up, turns red, and rains blood, we’ll name him Joe, just like his uncle!”

I don’t have an Uncle Joe, so there’s a second, Wodehousian, joke in there, so subtle it’s not quite even funny.

Fast forward to today. I went to Safeway to pick up cannelloni makings this afternoon and was greeted by the Sun pictured above, with Dante and his grandma Krupa, prominently featuring what day but Dante’s birthday! It lacks the drama of the Johannine (the Divine-ine) nightmare in my joke, sure, but it has a certain class nonetheless. Cayce and the Dead Sea Scrolls!

Any rate, new pix of the boy are up, tagged with “day thirteen”. There are some really cute ones in there!

“It is true that he has many bad hair days, but he stands above such considerations as serenely as stands a cloud over a mountain, or a dollop of sour cream over a potato.”
- from the Legend of Dante

Just a few more pictures up, tagged with “day twelve”. We’ve been busy with all kinds of fun activities! Dante, being a baby just twelve days old, finds himself with no empirical basis on which to infer anything about the world in which he finds himself, and so wears this radically skeptical expression most of the time, apparently waiting for necessary truths to be revealed to him by the Cartesian “natural light” (as opposed to the Anheuser-Busch Natural Light). Lacking as he does in philosophical sophistication, he doesn’t know yet how thoroughly Descartes’ methods and conclusion have been refuted by later developments in epistemology. Silly baby!

Also, as we’ve bathed him, we’ve discovered that his hair, which we thought was curly, isn’t. In fact, his “puppy coat” bears a suspicious resemblance to my (and my mom’s) Anarchy Hair, perfectly straight and sticking out of his head at a right angle to the tangent of the scalp, except on the sides where it grows straight down. Barring fundamental advances in hair product technology during his lifetime, he’s doomed to decades of buzz cuts and hats, just like his pa. Of course, I know better than to bet against technology. Here’s hopin’.

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.

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!