children
aardvarchaeology | October 14, 2009
Autumn is starting to get nasty in Sweden, and immediately the Fake Advertising Mom pops up on billboards and in magazines. Sometimes she's even part of a Fake Advertising Family.
Here's what I mean. I don't claim 100% accuracy, but I believe I can usually tell on sight whether a woman has given birth and nursed a baby or not. It's part of the difference between girls and women. There is also the simple issue of at what age women usually have kids in the West. So when the travel agencies want to illustrate parenthood and show us a cute 7-y-o kid being held by a really pretty, pert, skinny…
aardvarchaeology | October 11, 2009
I took Friday off from work and drove with my friend Anders to Avesta, an industrial town in Dalecarlia, where our friend Pär and his lovely wife, both teachers, have recently settled. We spent the afternoon and evening walking in the sunshine, admiring their house, eating like kings, listening to some pretty far-out and eclectic music (including Earth, Heino, Om, Demis Roussos and Sunn) and playing the Swedish 70s board game Marinattack. It's notable for coming with an electronic device that replaces dice and outcome tables. They kicked my ass five games in a row. The shame!
Then on…
aardvarchaeology | September 10, 2009
I never was much of a game console nut. My video game crazes mostly played out on the PC. But I did play the Atari in the 70s, the C64 in the 80s and the NES and SNES in the early 90s, when I wrote for Nintendo mags and borrowed the hardware from my employers. The SNES was the last console I paid any attention to.
11-y-o Junior loves all kinds of video games, particularly on-line multiplayer ones like Roblox and Runescape. But he's also installed emulator software on the PC and played a lot of old games that originally ran on machines he's never actually seen. He's got a Wii which allows him…
aardvarchaeology | September 6, 2009Played the new German board game Finca that my friend Eddie the heathen goldsmith brought along. It's an abstract system lightly dressed up in a story about harvesting and distributing fruit and greens on Mallorca of all things. Good fun though! Then we played Blokus, always fun too.
Took a sunny six-hour bike trip with my 11-y-o son, had kebab & fries, found three geocaches, failed to find two. It's great when your kid is big enough that he can keep up for hours like that! Quality time.
Went to Circus Brazil Jack with my 6-y-o daughter. As usual a mix of the semi-desperately cheezy and…
grrlscientist | September 1, 2009tags: facebook, twitter, internet, technology, cyber stalking, Onion News Network, ONN, humor, satire, fucking hilarious, streaming video
There are times when I am grateful for having been shunned by my family since the age of fifteen: Christmas being the most notable among them. But the Onion News Network reminded me of yet another reason to be happy I don't have to deal with them: Facebook and Twitter! In this streaming video, 'E-Mom' Gloria Bianco shows Jim and Tracy how geographical distance is no longer a roadblock to shamelessly interfering with the lives of your children.
aardvarchaeology | August 10, 2009I was brought up to believe that I am special. I was told that I am unusually smart and gifted. Whether or not this is true, it has given me a deep-seated expectation of myself to do great(ish) things, to achieve a bit more than the average Joe, to stand out from the crowd, to gain recognition.
Most people of course achieve very little that is noteworthy beyond the solid humble everyday victories of a quiet life. I'm sure that most people do not have a sense that this is in any way insufficient. I'm also sure that many of these average achievers have talent and potential far beyond that…
edyong | July 11, 2009
As Eddie Izzard notes in the video above, the English, within our cosy, post-imperialist, monolingual culture, often have trouble coping with the idea of two languages or more jostling about for space in the same head. "No one can live at that speed!" he suggests. And yet, bilingual children seem to cope just fine. In fact, they pick up their dual tongues at the same pace as monolingual children attain theirs, despite having to cope with two sets of grammar and vocabulary. At around 12 months, both groups produce their first words and after another six months, they know around 50.…
aardvarchaeology | July 3, 2009Today is my last day as a daycare customer, provided that my views on having a third child don't change radically one day. I've enjoyed the fine service of the Igelboda daycare centre for six or seven years straight, but come autumn, Juniorette will become a 0th grade schoolgirl. She's not yet six years old but already an avid reader. And she's an experienced public speaker after over a year as a daycare representative on the school's environmental board. Spatially speaking, the change will be negligible as her new classroom is in another building on the same school grounds.
ddobbs | June 12, 2009
Jim Schnabel has an interesting story at Nature, free to all viewers, on the tetchy difficult of assessing how TV affects kids. I've often wondered whether the rise in ADHD diagnoses was due at least partly to TV. This story looks at a researcher who -- amazed at how riveted his infant son was by TV -- found this seems to be the case.
Christakis decided to try to address these questions with research. Together with several colleagues, he examined a database called the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. After analysing some 1,300 children for whom the appropriate data were available, they…
aardvarchaeology | June 1, 2009Living in a country that hasn't seen war for two centuries, and never having done military service, I'm completely baffled by war rapes and the post-war rapes that have become part of the cultures of certain African countries. Particularly the high incidence of child rape going on e.g. in Liberia and Congo.
The appeal of gambling I sort of understand.
The appeal of drugs and drink I sort of understand.
The appeal of corruption and personal enrichment I sort of understand.
And I sort of understand the strategic military value of demoralising the civilian population by ordering e.g. Japanese…
grrlscientist | May 31, 2009tags: religion, atheism, godlessness, Keep Porno Out of Day Care Centers!, humor, funny, satire, edward current, streaming video
This video reveals Hollywood's latest assault on our culture; stripping preschoolers of their innocence and filling them with unchaste ideas. [4:15]
aardvarchaeology | May 26, 2009[More blog entries about health, ears, cold; hälsa, öron, förkylning.]
When she has a cold, my 5-y-o daughter often suffers temporary hearing loss. Her ears don't get infected, there's no pain or fever -- she just can't hear very well, sometimes for weeks. The reason is that the lining of her eustachian tubes becomes swollen, obstructing them, and then fluid leaks out of the walls of the middle ear, flooding it and putting a damper on her audio. These days Swedish doctors try to avoid putting drainage pipes through kids' ear drums. Instead the excellent Dr. Claes Wibom (who's now treating…
aardvarchaeology | May 9, 2009
On 30 April I asked, "Dear Reader, how old was your parent with the same sex as you when they had their first kid? How old were you when you had your first kid? Is the length of your education significantly different from that of the parent in question?" As of 7 May, I had 20 responses that covered all three parameters I asked for.
Proportion of respondents who have a significantly longer education than their parent: 55%
Median difference of age at first child for the entire population: 5 years
Median difference of age at first child for respondents whose education is significantly longer/…
aardvarchaeology | May 4, 2009My buddy from the Swedish Skeptics, author Peter Olausson, reports on a recent visit to the Ekehagen prehistoric reenactment centre in Västergötland.Ekehagen Prehistoric Village
By Peter Olausson
In Ãsarp near Falköping, in a landscape littered with passage tombs, you'll find Ekehagen. Founded in 1983, the centre has a number of houses built to show what Prehistoric life was like in Scandinavia, from huts of the Mesolithic to a farm of the Middle Iron Age (no Vikings).
Note: This is not a museum. Walking around on one's own and studying the buildings etc. might work for people who already…
aardvarchaeology | April 11, 2009
13 September: Samuel and Ludvig play the piano at Ludvig's aunt's house in Viggbyholm.
12 October: Playing Pandemic at a gaming convention in Gröndal.
21 October: A mechanical excavator is delivered to my dad's property to start work on the new sauna.
21 October: Seminar about Open Access at the Research Council.
purepedantry | April 9, 2009A study discussed over at Live Science confirms what I have always suspected:
An eight-year study of 218 couples found 90 percent experienced a decrease in marital satisfaction once the first child was born.
"Couples who do not have children also show diminished marital quality over time," says Scott Stanley, research professor of psychology at University of Denver. "However, having a baby accelerates the deterioration, especially seen during periods of adjustment right after the birth of a child."
An unrelated study in 2006 of 13,000 people found parents are more depressed than non-parents.…
grrlscientist | April 1, 2009tags: sand monsters, animation, children, streaming video
This streaming video presents a fascinating world of sand animation where a child fights monsters, dragons and ghosts with the power of his violin's sound, a melody that is able to make all these scary characters run away [4:45]
edyong | March 30, 2009
For all appearances, this looks like the skull of any human child. But there are two very special things about it. The first is that its owner was clearly deformed; its asymmetrical skull is a sign of a medical condition called craniosynostosis that's associated with mental retardation. The second is that the skull is about half a million years old. It belonged to a child who lived in the Middle Pleistocene period.
The skull was uncovered in Atapuerca, Spain by Ana Gracia, who has named it Cranium 14. It's a small specimen but it contains enough evidence to suggest that the deformity was…
sporte | March 30, 2009A few weeks ago I heard a story from a friend in Oklahoma. She works with high school science teachers, helping them learn how to add biotechnology to their courses.
One teacher, in particular, has taken the new science activities to heart. Her students did so well, they won a science competition and were asked to fly somewhere to accept the prize.
For many of those students, this would be their first trip on an airplane and their first trip outside of rural Oklahoma. It was pretty exciting!
But there were some unexpected problems.
Some of these children were illegal.
Just like the…
edyong | March 30, 2009For any animal, it pays to be able to spot other animals in order to find mates and companions and to avoid predators. Fortunately, many animals move in a distinct way, combining great flexibility with the constraints of a rigid skeleton - that sets them apart from inanimate objects like speeding trains or flying balls. The ability to detect this "biological motion" is incredibly important. Chicks have it. Cats have it. Even two-day-old babies have it. But autistic children do not.
Ami Klim from Yale has found that two-year-old children with autism lack normal preferences for natural…