Hold the milk

I've had some sort of a stomach problem the last few weeks, that's left me fatigued and constantly clutching my aching abdomen. It's still a bit of a mystery what's causing it (my hunch would be giardia, but so far I am, thank goodness, missing the key symptom: noxious flatulence). However, after a visit to the doctor on Thursday and pending the results of a couple of tests, I've been told to drop the dairy from my diet.

For what it's worth my equally unscientific hunch is that my problem isn't lactose intolerance; but the experience of going dairy-free is also proving a lot easier than I'd have expected. Part of this is probably down to the fact that my mum is paying an Anya visit, which means we all get wonderful meals cooked for us. Part of it is also that I actually eat less dairy than my self-image as a cheese-eating surrender monkey would suggest. And part is probably down to the fact that a soy flat white, while no substitute for a proper coffee in beverage terms, does the job pretty well as a caffeine delivery mechanism.

But it's also making me rethink my attitude to eating dairy. Giving up dairy just isn't that hard. And it's a pretty awful industry in a lot of ways: I think a utilitarian, Peter Singer-style argument could even be made that it's less ethical than certain types of meat-eating.

I'm quite resigned to the ethical minefield you immediately stumble into when you start thinking too much about what you eat, and so I'm fairly sure I'll be back on the butter once the doctors give me the all-clear. But I might think twice in future about the number of lattes and flat whites I put away over the course of an average day.

Suffixes

At first, Anya could only speak Japanese. Or rather, the language she did have shared that difficulty that Japanese has around multiple consonants. Every syllable was either a vowel, or a consonant followed by a vowel--ena-ga-li-sha, rather than english.

She grew out of that a while ago, but recently this stuff has got a whole lot more sophisticated. She's obsessed with suffixes! So three of her favourite words--mama, daddy, and nummy (food/tasty) are increasingly now mummets, nummets, mamia, nummia and daddia.

This is quite an interesting process, in terms of language. Essentially, she's learning the rudiments of inflection, at least through play. Lots of languages have a rule of one-concept-one-word: in Mandarin Chinese, you can't really change the meaning of a word or its context in a sentence without adding extra words. Others have a lot of inflection: in Latin, "amo" (I love) means something very different to "amat" (he/she loves), although the root of both words is the same. English I think is somewhere in between: most of our inflections regarding tense, case, and person have been dropped, though we still add -s for the plural of nouns and the third person of verbs, and -ed for the past tense.

At the moment of course, she's just playing around. I don't think she remotely understands inflection and I don't think she's using it with any intent beyond the pleasure she's taking in saying funny things. But I think it's interesting that she's picked up this linguistic habit so easily. And I wonder, if she'd spent her first 14 months around people talking an inflection-less language, whether she'd be playing this game at all.

Who wants to be a millionaire?

Every time I start to get blase about Australia's crazy housing market, something happens to blast me out of my complacency.

Kate was at the ATM today and, just for fun, went in to ask how much we could borrow. The answer they threw back was A$1.2 million. In case you think that means we're rolling in it, you'd be wrong. Certainly we're doing OK: in Australia, our household income is probably towards the upper end of the income distribution. A sensible fiscal policy would see us paying more in taxes. But we're not A$1.2-million-loan rich; not even close.

That loan, based on a quick look at a few mortgage calculators, would likely eat up 70% of our combined net income--even at current historically low interest rates. We'd have to cut our current non-housing spending by nearly half, and that's before accounting for council tax, water rates, maintenance costs, and the compulsory mortgage insurance we'd be taking on. Am I alone in thinking this is insane?

Furthermore, we'd only need to provide a few months' worth of pay slips to get the bank's approval--they wouldn't want to pry into our bank statements to see how we'd cope with such a drastic drop in disposable income.

Now I can actually understand why a prudent bank might make that loan. We have an unusually large amount of savings--sufficient for a deposit of more than 20% of the house price, although not with a loan that size. If we default on the loan, as we surely would, the bank gets the house. And assuming the percentage fall in the housing market is a bit less than the value of the deposit, they'd likely still be in the black once they come to sell it.

But I can't understand why an honest bank would make a loan on such easy terms, or why a prudent regulator would permit it. Unless these easy terms being described are just a marketing gimmick to hook us in before offering a more conservative mortgage--which would be dodgy trade practice in its own right--this bank is showing deliberate negligence about their borrowers' ability to pay up. That's fine in terms of their own interests, but in terms of their borrowers' interests, it's really just a high-class variety of loan sharking: conning people into debts they can't pay off by exploiting their shaky understanding of personal finance and compound interest.

You can be sure that if we took out the loan and did default, the bank would be quick to trot out the same mantra we've heard from creditors everywhere since 2008: "These people were greedy and borrowed more than they could afford. We're the innocent victims and need to be paid in full."

But when I think about a personal loan, I see an expert and a novice sitting together in a room. In the case of a mortgage, the novice homeowner will likely carry out this negotiation only a few times in their entire life; the expert bankers will be doing it hundreds of times a week, or more.

Most of us have only the dimmest ideas of how our incomes and living costs change over the course of a lifetime; mortgage lenders, on the other hand, have vast research departments with decades of data about this stuff. I'm sure they're pretty quick to trot this information out, once borrowers go delinquent and they need to modify the loan. The studied indifference about doing so in advance is just immoral.

Film: Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Wednesday was exciting: we went out to see a film. This doesn't sound a big deal, but it's actually something we've been seriously deprived of since Anya came along. When we've had a chance to take nights out before now, we've been more likely to go for dinner or to gigs, which are both pretty much irreplaceable experiences; so far we've mostly watched films on the sofa at home.

Anyway, a chance meeting in the park means that we've now retained a babysitter, Michaela, so we can go out when we want.

The film we saw was Werner Herzog's latest documentary, which is all about the cave art uncovered in 1994 in the Chauvet cave in southern France. This is the oldest reliably-dated artwork in human history, but the cave environment is so fragile that only a handful of researchers are allowed to visit each year. Herzog persuaded the custodians to allow his crew to visit.

One unusual aspect of this film is that it's shot in 3D. It was the first 3D film I'd seen and, for the first few minutes while my eyes adjusted, they were watering profusely and tears ran down my face. But it's a great example of why, whether this technology succeeds or fails, it can be used for more than just blockbusters: with all these dark, claustrophobic shots of cave walls the 3D brought to life a place most of us have no chance of actually visiting.

Herzog has some sort of instinct for uncovering eccentrics, and sure enough there's a circus performer-turned-archaeologist who had to give up his visits to the cave at first after he started getting intense, recurring dreams of lions; plus a master perfumier, who hopes to find out undiscovered caverns trapped behind ancient rockfalls not by feeling for the cool air, but by smelling their odour emanating from cracks in the rock.

But for the most part, he does the right thing and steps back, keeps quiet and let's the images do the talking. That's a good strategy; indeed, my main criticism is that the soundtrack at times becomes a little too obtrusive and jarring, unlike Herzog himself. There's an odd flight of fancy near the end involving albino crocodiles at a weird vivarium near the caves heated with waste water from a nuclear plant, but for the most part he's rather distant and respectful. Which feels right for a documentary about something so ancient, so fundamental and so fragile.

The strawberry diet

Anya has always hitherto been a complete omnivore. Pretty much anything we gave her, she would inhale indiscriminatingly before bouncing off to work down the calories with an intense stair-climbing workout.

But these things start to change with toddlerhood. She's not picky yet, but she's starting to rank her foodstuffs a bit. And guess what? Sweet stuff comes top.

We've been fairly sparing of the sweet things we've given her so far. She first tasted ice-cream two weeks ago, when we were having an early dinner with our friends David and Kathy and their nearly-three-year-old Ellen. After a brief moment of confusion, the glucose started to work its magic on her synapses and she started doing her impression of a boa constrictor dislocating its jaw to swallow a pig.

Obviously we're wary of that getting out of hand, but we give her fruit all the time. She can finish off a tangerine in a couple of minutes, eat half a pear without pausing for breath, chomp an apple into sauce within seconds. But most of all, she loves strawberries.

This morning she woke up before six, so I gave her a bottle in an attempt to get her back to sleep. Sometimes this works. Not this morning, though: 20 minutes later I was up and giving her the usual breakfast of weet-bix with peach puree. Feeding her breakfast in these circumstances can be tough, because she's already full of milk; after about half-a-dozen spoonfuls, she was getting bored.

Anyway, I tried out what I thought was a clever daddy strategy: I cut up a strawberry into tiny bits and strewed it over the weet-bix. At first, she allowed this into her mouth, but after a few minutes of bulldog-chewing-on-a-wasp facial gymnastics she gobbed the weet-bix down her front, happily pronounced the result "nummets!" (yummy) and went reaching for more bits of strawberry. Reader, I'll admit: after a while, I just gave up and just let her eat the rest of it. I'm telling myself that I'll have plenty of time to try to get the better of these food battles; but Anya's clearly got herself an early lead.

Even better than the real ding

Since Anya's completely obsessed with bunnies--which, for those who haven't been keeping up, are called "ding-ding-ging" in Anyaspeak--we had to take her to the petting zoo at the Spring fete that was held on Saturday in the Scientology school that's directly behind our house.

Yes, you read that right. It's a primary school for Scientologists, but aside from handing us a bag containing L. Ron Hubbard's guide to an ethical life (sample advice: "Always remember to brush your teeth"; sample wild claim: "This is the first non-religious guide to an ethical life ever written", give or take two and a half millennia of philosophy; sample creepy bit: "the insane are incapable of learning and must be avoided"), it's pretty much your everyday school. So, they do building work that's vaguely inconsiderate of the neighbours, have music classes, run around the playground screaming at each other, etc. And in the Spring holidays, they have fetes.

So. Anya is completely obsessed with her ding-ding, a little square of fabric with a bunny head on it that accompanies her to bed. We have three identical models so that there's always one in use, one being washed clean of chewing/puddle/soil/food marks, and one being dried. But, except on one occasion when she was a lot younger, Anya's never seen a real live bunny.

When we first went into the petting zoo, we were handed a guinea pig. Anya wasn't too sure what to do with it, and was much more interested in the grey bunny being held by the girl next to us: flinging her arms around and yelling "ding-ding-ding", caught up in a sort of toddler Beatlemania. I tried to teach her to pat the guinea pig but she wasn't interested until the little girl went off and we got our hands on the ding-ding.

And then she became rather subdued. I've seen her like this before: I call it the 'meeting-her-god' moment. I think she was quite simply awe-struck to be in the presence of a living bunny; while she patted it a few times under my guidance, she seemed to be half-fearing that touching it would be a form of sacrilege.

Without E

Doing without 'p' is hard, but writing is particularly tough if you can't fall back on our font's most popular symbol. It's a trick which 'La Disparition' pulls off, but not a thing I could sustain across any significant gap. Too many words contain that symbol, and you quickly run out of ways to twist your diction into familiar forms without using a contraband glyph.

You can't talk about things past, as most 'past' words contain a standard suffix with that symbol; our most common word is also out of bounds--that most particular kin of 'a'; on top of that, using pronouns is full of pitfalls.

That said, I think this would work as a parlour activity to maintain a sharp mind, and I'm struck that it's not popular, away from that solitary book. As a sort of brain gym, it suits comparison with doing crosswords: you must show a broad vocabulary, plus agility in positioning words and adjusting your gist, if you want to carry it off. A list of synonyms (I can't put its usual tag) would aid this task; but it's a fun and satisfying distraction to do it without any support. Still, this is similar to wading through syrup if your writing is usually quick, and I think for now that 200 words is inough.

Ractical roblems

There's a reason that blogging has been light of late, beyond just laziness: a key has fallen off my mobile, making it hard to write stuff without using a host of stratagems to get around its absence.

Obviously I can't directly tell you which letter because I can't write it, but it's the first letter of a country bordering Germany, the former Czechoslovakia, Russia, Lithuania, and Belarus, which rhymes with 'Roland'. Oh, and the headline of this blog is a clue. In future, '*' will stand in stead of the ineffable letter.

Now I'm trying it at length, it's actually oddly easy to just substitute alternative words. Years ago I bought, but have yet to read, a translation of the Georges *erec novel 'La Dis*arition', titled 'A Void' in English. The novel's claim to fame is that it doesn't use the letter 'e' anywhere, instead taking a range of roundabout ways to get the same ideas across. Translating such a book, while retaining the 'e' ban, is clearly the work of the insane.

My letter is clearly an easier one to miss out, but I'm struck now how easy it is to get by without letters you once thought essential. Ah, good old English language, with three ways to say just about everything: a nightmare for those trying to learn it, but handy for those whose mobiles are falling to bits.

Make the pie higher!

George W Bush was roundly mocked for his comment, when asked about inequality during the 2000 election, that the country shouldn't be focused on who has the biggest share of the pie: "We ought to make the pie higher!", he said.

But he actually made a decent point, one which seems to have been forgotten nowadays.

Real economic growth is becoming impossible in rich countries because corporations are hoarding money. US corporate profits are now at a 60-year peak, relative to GDP; cash holdings by businesses are also at record levels.

In normal times companies would be investing this windfall, but they aren't because they see dismal prospects for demand. One reason for this is that the ordinary people who they depend on for sales are short of cash. For decades, incomes have barely kept pace with inflation. The best way people found to get ahead in recent years was to take on a mass of mortgage and credit card debt; paying that down is now further choking off disposable incomes. With unemployment at historically-high levels, salaries everywhere are now being trimmed again, skewing returns even more towards capital rather than labour.

This column by Reuters' Jim Saft puts it brilliantly:

"At the moment it is hard to see what will break the Gordian knot presented by lack of confidence and unwillingness to invest or spend. But it is possible to start sketching the outlines of what a recovery would have to look like.

"Corporate profits must stabilise and probably fall as a share of GDP, as more of the fruits of production are directed towards workers (and consumers). Businesses will have to take far more risk by ending the accumulation of cash and liquid assets and instead investing in far less liquid fixed assets and creating more jobs.

"Reversing three decades of corporate policy and central bank theory, wages and other forms of compensation will have to start rising faster than prices for a time. Corporations and central banks will have to tolerate a period of “inflationary” wage gains.

"It is not clear how lower corporate profits would play out in equity prices. Prices would suffer from shrunken margins, but presumably gain from faster growth. It is possible to imagine a scenario in which the economy recovers but equity prices languish. It might be the only way for the economy to recover."

At the moment rich countries are in a vicious circle where as the economy grows weaker, the share of production going to capital rather than labour grows. As labour's share of production shrinks, so does demand for goods and services, further weakening the economy.

Companies are doing their duty to their shareholders by maximising their profits. But the overall result of an economy where everyone is doing this against a backdrop of moribund demand is that shareholder returns are ultimately weaker: profits are just making up a larger slice of a smaller pie.

I think societies work best when people are working together, with confidence, towards some mutually-beneficial outcome. But of late we've exchanged that vision for a desperate, zero-sum struggle over control of a dwindling resource. That certainly doesn't benefit the poor who are likely to lose out, but it doesn't help the winners much, either. We'd all be much better off making the pie higher.

Why we need Occupy Wall Street

I'm a bit late to this because I've been busy obsessing over my beautiful daughter, but I want to add to the growing chorus in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

One thing that's been far too lacking through this financial crisis, barring the Greek protests and the Spanish indignados, has been a vocal and active movement angry about what has happened. I actually see the Occupy Wall Street crowd as having the same sort of function, in that sense, as the London rioters. Clearly I'd rather bump into some articulate New Yorkers than the London rioters in a dark alley; but the fear is part of the point. Political and economic elites need a bit of fear at their backs if they're going to be spurred to change anything.

Looking back on the 20th century, it's easy to assume that all the concessions to justice, freedom and equality made over the course of the century came about because they were the Right Thing To Do. But, historically, elites don't have a great record of giving up their power and privileges out of the goodness of their hearts. The progress that has been made has usually been because elites felt that some short-term concessions were needed for their long-term security.

For example, people had been complaining about the effects of poverty in England since the Peasants' Revolt. It was a grand concern by the start of the 19th century, and became a tubthumping populist issue by the time Dickens was in his pomp. But all this achieved nothing until the rise of socialist parties led mainstream politicians to start fearing for their careers and the stability of the status quo. Germany and the UK started establishing social programmes within a few years of the SPD and the Labour party getting their first electoral successes.

Likewise, the existence of the Eastern Bloc was a huge incentive throughout the 20th century for Western countries to improve their citizens' welfare, lest they turn to Communism instead. The rolling back of those advances over the past four decades tracks pretty closely to the decline and fall of the Soviet empire.

I can remember fearing nuclear annihilation as a child in the early 1980s, so I'm not going to paint the Cold War as some sort of golden age. And, clearly, government spending as a proportion of GDP has mostly been on the rise in recent decades--even if the range of social provision has narrowed, inequality has risen, and the tax base has focused further down the income scale. But, as Francis Spufford's short story collection Red Plenty demonstrates, the competitive tension that existed during the Cold War was virtuous: countries on both sides of the iron curtain truly felt a need to demonstrate to their populations that theirs was the better system.

The West won that battle hands down but since it lost its fear I feel it has lost its way, too. Elections rarely threaten major changes: it has become a commonplace that lobbyists have a greater influence over policy than the voters who put politicians in office. We live in the era of Margaret Thatcher's "There Is No Alternative", but in these difficult times more than ever, we need to realise that there is an alternative to the status quo.

I don't believe elites will realise that on their own. But when confronted with mass, middle class protests, as during the poll tax riots, they are sometimes forced into realisation. Here's hoping.

Mourning in America

I do want to write something about the Occupy Wall Street movement but it's taking some time to get my thoughts together, so this is just a quick post on the outpouring of grief for Steve Jobs.

I'm not really bothered either way about Apple as a company. They make some good products--Kate has an iPhone and iPad which I enjoy tinkering with--but after some bad experiences with an iMac back in the day I've never wanted one for myself. I'm certainly a bit turned off by the cultlike attitude of some Apple users, but the devices are smart and do merit a degree of devotion.

What I'm more struck by is the way Jobs' death has become an occasion for an outpouring of mass grief. It reminds me of the death of Princess Diana in the UK, or Steve Irwin in Australia; further afield, the British public's mourning of Princess Charlotte in 1817, or the Chinese commemoration of Hu Yaobang that sparked the Tiananmen Square protests.

All these seem to be great collective rituals that mark not so much the life of an individual, as the moment when a nation swings about some real or perceived historical fulcrum.

So Diana's death, and Princess Charlotte's, were about a desire to cast off aspects of a certain hierarchical, dour quality in the British establishment; Irwin's was a wake for a larrikin Australia as it receded from the reality of an increasingly slick, metropolitan country. Hu's death, like that of Tunisia's Mohamed Bouazizi earlier this year, marked a culmination of popular frustration with a repressive society.

In that sense, what meaning are people drawing from Steve Jobs' death? My guess is that the mourning here is for the passing of a certain vision of America that never quite existed, though perhaps should have. Here was a figure for both sides of the culture wars, an unabashed former member of the counterculture who was also CEO of the world's second-biggest listed company. An entrepreneur and a manufacturer, at a time when America is worried it is running out of both. An American whose products have become world-leaders, at a time when America is losing its global leadership. Someone whose company has grown while America's economy has stuttered, and who seemed to be winning rather than losing from his relationship with China.

I don't think that's at all a complete portrait of the man. He was also a tyrannical control freak who cancelled Apple's philanthropic programmes when he took over in 1997, denied the paternity of his daughter in a particularly shifty way, bullied and alienated his colleagues, showed little interest in the string of suicides and poor conditions at his supplier Foxconn, and deployed armies of copyright lawyers to tie up his competitors in often-spurious courtroom battles. But an image is already being created to suit the myth.

That's really not meant to denigrate the man; merely to take him off the pedestal onto which, post-mortem, he's being hoisted. Like most hugely successful people, he had a mixture of good and bad qualities, and was fortunate enough to find a concordance between the single-minded pursuit of his own interests and the desires of a broader public. But before we start seeking our salvation by turning him into a sort of secular saint, maybe we should start looking to the ways we can help ourselves without the intercession of the faithful departed.

The joke

We've known for ages that Anya has a sense of humour--she laughs and shrieks with delight all the time, and first cracked up when she was about four months old.

But she's done a couple of things the past few days that look like rudimentary jokes. I honestly can't tell if they are or if I'm just reading too much into them; I'd be interested in the insights of psychologists about when joke-making develops.

Anyway, the jokes. Don't worry if you don't laugh out loud: it's more the manner in which they were done that was joke-like. She makes us laugh for real all the time just by clowning around.

1: On Saturday I was putting her to bed and we were looking at one of her favourite books, which involves a procession of a baby, a duck, a mummy-like woman, a dog, a girl on a horse, a boy on a bike etc., all heading to the seaside. Since many of these are things for which she knows the words, we often point to the baby, or dog, or mummy, and repeat their names in Anyaish.

Well, this time she did that, but she was getting it all wrong: she pointed to the mummy, and said "buh-bee". Then grinned at me with a twinkle in her eye. Then she pointed to the baby, and said "hah-hah-hah" for dog, and grinned at me again. Now I can't swear that she wasn't just getting confused--and she might have been looking at me for guidance about whether she was getting it right or wrong. But she knows these words well and uses them correctly, ooh, a couple of dozen times a day. It certainly seemed that there was something deliberate, and smile-worthy, about the error.

2: We bought her some 'crayon rocks' at the weekend. These are little pebble-shaped crayons that are easy to hold in a toddler's hand and scribble with. They also, frankly, look a bit like sweeties. So Kate was sitting with her on Sunday playing and scribbling, and Anya took one of them and held it near her mouth. She then made the mock nibbling gesture that we make when we're pretening to eat up her feet, or eat her food, and said 'nyum-nyum-nyummy' with that same twinkle in her eye. What she didn't do is what she normally does with things she wants to eat: stick it in her mouth and start chewing.

Obviously I might be reading way too much into these two incidents, but they certainly resemble one classic definition of a joke: a knowing reference to something that both parties know to be untrue, impossible, or nonsensical. And she's seen plenty of examples of jokes so far: the mock tummy-biting that has been cracking her up for the past nine months depends on the idea that her parent is simultaneously loving and gentle, while also behaving a bit like a savage tummy-biting beast.

Still, it's one thing to imitate that playful behaviour; quite another to extract from it a sort of theory of humour and apply it in a different context, as she seemed to be doing with the book and the crayons. Indeed, that definition of a joke seems to me to depend on the child having a theory of mind, which she isn't likely to develop for another couple of years.

I'm inclined to think she has started telling jokes, since I'm a proud dad who values humour highly. For the same reasons, you should probably treat me as an unreliable witness.

Don't innovate, litigate!

Last week at work I sat in on a court hearing where Apple is trying to stop Samsung releasing its tablet PC computers in Australia. Samsung had hoped to have these on the shelves by today, but there's every possibility now that it could be the new year before they're released.

It doesn't matter much to me either way which way this case goes, but it was frankly a bit depressing sitting through what felt like an attempt to use the courts to ban a product to stop it competing with the iPad.

I'm no expert on patent law, but many of these big technology disputes of late seem to relate to companies' patents on processes rather than specific pieces of technology. I can see why that approach appeals to a maker of consumer products: after all, most of the individual components that make up an iPad are manufactured by Apple's suppliers, who presumably own the patents. Even with Apple's more integrated, customised approach to product design, a lot of what it's doing is assembling other people's components in a very whizzy design and marketing it cleverly. With that set-up, what can Apple claim copyright over, if not processes?

So we have the sort of case that was discussed last week, where Apple is asserting Samsung copied its method of swiping a touch-screen, and the way that the touch screen distinguishes between meaningful taps and accidental knocks.

It seems to me that these sorts of processes shouldn't really be patentable. Apple's not asserting that Samsung has pilfered technology from them, but that it shouldn't be allowed to make products that work in the same way as Apple's.

To me, this would be analagous to an early car company patenting not the internal combustion engine, but the petrol-powered motor vehicle. It would probably have resulted in vastly greater profits for the car owner, but there would probably be a lot fewer cars on the road. (No bad thing, you might say.)

The technology industry has so far always done very well at innovating to make products that people want. And traditionally there have been pretty low barriers to entry--Bill Gates knocking up his first operating system in his garage, etc.--which have meant that people with simple good ideas have a decent chance of turning them into marketable products.

These patent wars seem to change that. Indeed, they're distorting the very shape of the industry--the consensus on Google's recent takeover of Motorola's handset maker is that it was intended to provide Google with a patent shield, a treasure trove of intellectual property which it could throw at any competitor alleging infringements.

If that is the direction this is going, then future Steve Jobses won't just be able to piece together their first Apple Macs and build a company from nothing. Such a litigious environment will favour big companies that can hire armies of lawyers, not little start-ups with big ideas.

After all, the graphical user interface on which Apple's early success was built was first developed by Xerox; if they'd had a patent for "method of operating computer through visual representation" and sued Steve Jobs for infringement, would Apple ever have grown big enough to launch its own patent suits?

Clothed in Tyrian purple

This girl just loves pulling clothes around her neck. She was playing dress-up like this all afternoon, like some child Roman emperor.

She bangs the gongs

I'm just having an early-morning play with Anya and I've had a great demonstration of how babies are really little empiricists.

We have a big metal mixing bowl she loves playing with. It's got everything: an intriguing shape, dim shifting reflections in its surface, and it makes a satisfying "bong" when she batters it.

This morning she was bashing it with a wooden spoon and seemed to notice that, when she held it aloft with one hand on the rim, it makes a particularly dramatic, Rank Organisation-style clang. She then put it down on the ground so the ring was muted by the carpet, and banged it again. Listened; picked it up again and made the full-volume "bong".

She repeated this enough times that it was clear she was basically doing an experiment to see if holding the bowl up was what turned it into a gong. And I suppose this is what babies are doing all the time, any time they learn a new skill or fact about the world. But I've not often seen such a pointed illustration of it.

As usual, the photo misses the key moment, so you'll have to take my word for it till I get a phone with a better camera.

New videos!

I've finally got round to uploading some videos to Anya's YouTube stream so you can see some moving pictures evidence of some of the stuff I've been going on about.

Here's a bit of walking, from when we were up in Queensland last month:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LpbVbw8B5k&w=560&h=315]

 

Here's some chatter from the same holiday:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFzNYgALvhc&w=560&h=315]

 

And finally, a bit of kissing and possible narcissism:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opRVAgOGsWc&w=560&h=315]