Did you eat the shoehorn?

I'm the extremely proud father of a precocious 2 year/2 month old boy, Ender. He's always been a talker, speaks English and Russian, I suspect (entirely without bias of course) at a 3 year old level.

He's also not overly serious or somber, definitely sees the humor in things, as appropriate for his age. But for young children, slapstick is the natural limit of comedy. A flatulent sound, for example, is just plain objectively funny, as most any toddler can see, and it seems to remain so until (overly?) society-minded mothers scold this knowledge out of them. (I leave all judgments about that entirely to the reader.)

Other kinds of humor, jokes and situational comedy, require a lot more intellectual development. It makes sense. Humor is about the unexpected, irregular, unusual, and when your experience is limited, you don't know what qualifies. Why can't someone row a canoe down an asphalt street? Why shouldn't an octopus sort the mail?

At home we have a shoehorn which hangs from a table-cart that stands by the front door, for keys, purses, and the like. Ender loves to take the shoehorn and play with it, after which the shoehorn eagerly engages us all in an epic game of hide-and-seek. This is just the state we were in recently; the shoehorn had been AWOL for at least a week, even after a fairly thorough search of our home.

During such a state, while I'm putting on my shoes I would jokingly chide my son, "Gee, this would sure be a lot easier if I had my shoehorn! Do you know where is the shoehorn, Ender?" A week ago I added a new angle: "Did you eat it?" He answered simply, "No," and we continued getting dressed to go out on the playground.

But Ender wasn't finished with it. A minute or so later, after he was dressed and we were heading out the door, he realized — that was pretty funny! Ender eating a shoehorn, indeed! He had made "an unexpected integration" that is humor, at which point he began to repeat saying "Did you eat it?" and laughing. For about 10 minutes this continued, long after we were on the playground.

These are the moments that fill a parent's heart with joy and pride.

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That's the end of my story, but it has an epilogue. After the event I told this to several people, my parents included. A few days later, my dear mother sent us this creative little poem. (Posted with permission.) Thanks, Mom!

THE BALLAD OF THE SHOE HORN
By Rosalyn Robertson

Who ate the shoe horn?
I’d really like to know.
This question continues to haunt me
No matter where I go.

Mr. White Bear just sits and smiles
I really think he knows something,
But won’t tell us for a while.

Did the shoe horn get on Ender’s scooter?
And take it for a ride?
Stuffed monkey wouldn’t take it –
He has too much pride.

The next time I go to the park
I’ll ask a duck or two,
“Have you seen the shoe horn?”
If only someone knew.

I’ll go to the library to take a look
Do you think someone put it in a book?

I can’t find it anywhere,
But I’ll just keep looking
Maybe it will appear one day
When Tatyana is cooking.

(Tatyana is Ender's wonderful mommy.)

I'm not so clever

For most of my life I've been confronted with the obdurate dogma of Creationism, which pretends that the earth was created intact in a week some 6,000-10,000, ignoring an earthful (and beyond) of evidence to the contrary. Whatever evidence we have that the earth "appears" older is as God created it, they say. (Oh, that God is one tricky-dicky Dude!)

I created the perfect response, which highlights the absurdity of this position:
"You are mistaken. God created the world from nothing indeed, not 6,000 years ago, but just 5 seconds ago, including you, complete with all your memories of childhood, indeed, your memory of beginning to read (or hear) this very sentence."

(I posted this as a comment on YouTube not long ago, and received a terse reply, "That is one mindf***." It looks as though sarcasm is lost on a certain segment of the population. Oh well!)

I created this little saying several decades ago, and had never heard it elsewhere before or since. I thought I was very clever. Then recently while starting Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth, I encountered this quote from Bertrand Russell, "We may all have come into existence five minutes ago, provided with ready-made memories, with holes in our socks and hair that needed cutting." I was shocked, even upset. There was my idea in black and white, stolen by a respected logician who passed away when I was a toddler. Alas, my bubble had burst. Perhaps I'm not so clever as I thought.

Hello, World!

Hello, World!

That's a fitting start to the opening post of a computer programmer's blog. When programmers are learning a new language or environment, the first thing we do is execute a program to perform a trivial task, print that message by convention. This introduces us to the basic elements common to any program in that language/environment, apart from all the complications involved in doing something truly useful (creating windows, opening databases, etc.).

However, I don't intend to write much about programming here. I've had some ideas on various things recently, in particular insights in science, that I wanted to "put pen to paper," to use the now-dated metaphor. It's mainly for my own psychological benefit, although maybe I'll have some readers who will enjoy reading those ideas. Here's a little about me, to offer the perspective from which I write:

First, I love the sciences, always have. Science fills me with excitement and wonder in the same way religion does for most, but for the exact opposite reason. Science is always pushing back the boundary of what we know, revealing a universe of great order and beauty. The organizing agent is, of course, not an Intelligence (for that is a form of order which requires an organizing agent) but Natural Law. Natural Law, on the other hand, is not a form of order and requires no cause; it is the foundation of both causation and order. Science never says, "we cannot know, so you must just believe." (Science rarely says there are things we cannot know, and when it does, it specifies a highly-delimited limitation of knowledge and leaves it at that.)

For the same reasons, I'm equally skeptical (nay, disdainful) of religion which does command "Believe!" The authority to be believed is one or more of a "holy" book, a prophet, or the sect's current witchdoctor(s). The reasons given that they are the final authority is invariably a circular argument.

A:   Believe the Bible.
Q:   Why?
A:   It's the word of an omniscient, infallible God.
Q:   How do you know?
A:   The Bible says so.

Logic does not, of course, permit such circular reasoning. The religionist's retort: "Who needs logic?" (Answer: "You do!")

Which brings us of course to the ultimate and proper authority for human knowledge: Reason, whose method is logic. This is a concept well-grasped by the Enlightenment-age intelligentsia and politicos, but is sadly eschewed by those of our age. Reason puts your mind in touch with reality, validates your ideas, provides absolute and objective knowledge — and it is the only thing that does.   From Reason, egoism, individualism, and capitalism logically follow, by a long and detailed chain of reasoning I have learned elsewhere, and you can too.

(The method of religion, on the other hand, is called Faith, although it hardly deserves the moniker "method." It amounts to, "Believe it because you feel like it," a behavior which Ayn Rand aptly described as "putting an 'I wish' before 'It is'."  With faith, you can "confidently" believe anything at all, including "If I die while killing you, I'll be richly rewarded in the afterlife," which is why it is such a horrible, dangerous, and deadly thing.)

On other areas, I love being a daddy. Watching a little mind develop is another thing that brings joy and wonder. I'll describe more about my beloved son soon enough.

At chess I used to be quite good, but now play too rarely. I play piano, and in my youth I achieved a certain measure of skill. However, I am only marginally talented at music, thus I have a definite upper bound beyond which practice and skill-development cannot take me. Still, I enjoy playing and singing, but I don't expect to win any talent competitions.

When we happen to catch them at dinnertime, my wife and I enjoy Idol, Got Talent, Dancing, and Survivor. My two don't-miss TV shows now are Dollhouse and Lie to Me. I read mostly nonfiction. I finished Greene's The Elegant Universe on string theory not long ago, and I'm currently reading Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth about the evidence for evolution. (I've long known the broad principles, and I'm enjoying learning many specific details.)

Finally, I created an elegant programming language based on Smalltalk and wrote a compiler for it. I think it's great, but I'm a terrible salesman or "community organizer," so I'm pretty much the only one who knows or cares about it. I plan to blog about that elsewhere.

That's enough for now. Cheers.