entirely safe and fun

New photos are up on Flickr, tagged “month four”. My favorite is this one, which is festive and seasonal and smiley, but there are others… with some of Dante’s baby friends… Rule of Cuteness #12. More babies = more cute. The relationship is not linear, either, but rather exponential, until you can’t resolve the individual babies anymore.

The boy acts so much more like a tiny person now than he did before. He takes conversational turns with his noises, occasionally decides to mimic facial expressions, smiles and giggles, and has taken to making a pretty wide range of sounds, with four or five different vowels now. It gets harder each week not to try and interpret what he’s saying as underformed English, no matter how many times I reassure myself that it’s impossible that he would be producing meaningful signals of any sophistication. He’s also become more demanding of attention, as he rolls around now and has become a potential danger to himself and others. The scariest moment so far was the first time we found him sleeping face-down, nighmare-provoking after all the back-to-sleep coaching we got over the course of Punam’s pregnancy and during Dante’s perinatal care. Of course, babies sleep just fine on their stomachs, have been doing it since the dawn of time, etc, but the power of the modern culture of scaring new parents to death cannot be denied.

Some of you may have heard that we had a moderately strong magnitude 5.6 quake centered right under San Jose on 30 Oct. Like (happily) everyone else, we’re all fine, none the worse for the experience. In fact, it was kind of a fun ride! But the long-distance capacity of the phone network was strained, so we couldn’t make calls to let everyone know what had happened. So I have turned to the Internet to let everyone know that Dante rode the whole thing out in style, camped out with me and his mom under a doorway.

A kind of funny story: Punam and I were in Bangalore on New Year’s Day. We went to the Leela Palace for the brunch buffet, which, to my delight, offered pork and sauerkraut per the German tradition. I happened to notice that one of the bussers had a bottle of cleaning fluid which bore a most auspicious name…

And then, during an episode of the drama Parrivaar on ZeeTV, I couldn’t help but notice a familiar bottle in the hands of a servant. I wasn’t even watching it full-screen, just in a PiP window while I figured out which football game was likely to be most enjoyable.

It is astonishing how, given just a few pixels, smeared out by JPEG artifacts, I was able to pick out a weak brand identity to which I was exposed just once. In the screen grab on the left, the enhanced portion was created by applying edge detection, probably replicating what my retina had to work with (once you add the colors back in), and you can see it’s not the kind of data you’d want for an OCR project, yet my recognition was instantaneous and thoughtless.

The clear corollary to all this: everyone needs a recognizable, colorful brand to maximize their memorableness.

Like this, maybe. People are really sensitive to primary colors. That red, in a region of high contrast, is good for getting attention, right? It worked for the red lettering on a yellow background on the bottle of Colin cleaner.

And now, robot dancing! There are some excellent new pictures of Dante up, tagged with “week five”. You need to see them! Dante is bathed, his hair is temporarily tamed with the application of water, and he has an encounter with a robot (or maybe not — this, after all, is “コレジャナイロボ: IT IS NOT THIS!”, a sort of Engrish antinomy with the Pentateuchal “I am that I am.”).

Update: I was finally moved to do some research on this robot, a gift from some of our East Coast friends. I am a very, very poor and very, very slow reader of Japanese, so this was a painful process. It turns out that Zarigani Toy Works, in Japan, produced this highly generic and yet crappy toy robot to ensure that when an adult gives it to a child, that child will be disappointed that it isn’t the right robot, already a likely a priori outcome due to the large number of robots from which a Japanese adult would have to chose. The small child might, in fact, say, “kore ja nai!” — “This isn’t it!” (or more poetically, “IT IS NOT THIS!”). I’ve turned to Google’s machine translation engine for a doubly hilarious crib to share with the world…

“As for wanting this - it is!!” The scream of sad it is given out from the child who opened the present. Christmas of pleasant expectation suddenly, in the shambles. Is there such experience? If possible, it is something which we would like to avoid. But life, many risks as for the how story which enters into the dying hand so there are no desired ones. In order to obtain desired ones also it is good to know that in a some opportunity also effort is necessary, probably will be.
As for “[korejiyanairobo]” the exquisite copy impression, with parenthesis trick, the it probably is to convey to the child with the effect of trauma class.
Please try by all means as a sentiment education toy.

Just a bit uglier than this guy, they were… cc-by-nc photo by finstr.

I decided that moblog postings — those made from my phone and usually containing little to no text — will look better if they’re taken out of the usual run of the site’s layout and put on their own page. To that end, I’ve added a link to the moblog up above in the menu area, added a little widget to display my most recent few moblog posts over in the sidebar, and retained the ability to see those posts by clicking on the Category link or in the by-date archives.

One nice thing is that I can now come up with a new template just for moblog entries, if I decide that would be fun. So far, meh. Maybe later.

For now, I just hardcoded everything and inlined the code changes, but perhaps going forward I can package the changes into a plugin. Here’s what I had to do:

29 Aug ‘07, 9.09pm PDT PST: by ccreitz

Literally everything. I didn’t do anything else! Challah, strawberries, fresh figs, brie, and fresh red currants, too good to do anything but serve it forth.

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.

“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’.

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.