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request for poetry




child is 15 weeks old today

that is almost 1% of being 30 years old, which is approximately how old I am

... weeks as a unit of time are weird because they feel so short but you only get like 4000 of them total



cribs should not tell me about my baby suffocating


Irrationally annoyed at the bit of US law which mandates that cribs have warnings printed on them about babies suffocating. I do not wish to read about babies suffocating every time I put my child to bed. A removable tag, fine; printing it on the crib itself, not fine.

Anyway I fixed it.

This entry was edited (4 weeks ago)
in reply to Kevin Gibbons

Agree that's so macabre! A good example of people being insensitive to like... adding low-level bad experiences to people's lives? (In this case, admittedly aiming to avoid the extremely bad experience of a baby suffocating).


Science demos


I've been curating a list of interesting science demonstrations one could do at home with only relatively small investment of time and money. For example, did you know you could make a cloud chamber sufficient to see tracks of cosmic rays using just some dry ice, alcohol, and craft supplies?

I've tried to be reasonably thorough without sacrificing quality, but I'm sure there's some good ones I'm missing. Any favorites?

writing.bakkot.com/science-dem…

in reply to Kevin Gibbons

I have only done a small fraction of these myself but I'm going to make a sincere effort to work through as many as I can with my kid/kids. I feel like a good science class should have a lot more of this stuff and significantly less memorization. You can memorize stuff once it's motivated, not before.
in reply to Kevin Gibbons

These are great! Some things that come to mind:

in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

Ooh, nice. The water boiling one is especially great; will add. (I love AlphaPhoenix; gotta binge the rest of his stuff at some point. Already have at least one of his other videos on the page.)
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

Added both! The first as just a note on the existing Schlieren section. Let me know if you come across any more.


David Mears reshared this.

in reply to Kevin Gibbons

wow, these are shockingly good. I feel like I noticed an example a while ago, but I'm not able to recall it now.
in reply to Kevin Gibbons

Apt indeed! The writing I thought of in this vein is the 1909 short story "The Machine Stops" by E. M. Forster, which describes things like the internet.


Hello world!


Obligatory "I'm new here" post. I'll post some other things soon; posting on Facebook has been feeling aversive and it's the only social media I ever use.

Meanwhile, in what may be news to those of you who know me: I have a child now! Interested in talking to other child-havers. She's two months old. This part is honestly kind of boring - babies start out _extremely_ limited in their abilities. Her most recent milestone is that she can now somewhat consistently move her hand to her mouth. I expect it to get more interesting later. She's cute though!

I'm also interested in programming languages (I'm one of three editors of the JavaScript specification), math, language, and reasoning about the world in general. I have a draft of a long essay about reading the news I need to get around to finishing someday and if that sounds interesting to you feel free to poke me about it. I might end up using this instance for that kind of somewhat-less-polished-but-therefore-actually-existing writing.

in reply to Kevin Gibbons

I hope y'all can successfully make it up to East Bay this weekend, I am interested in meeting this small new friend of yours. (Weirdly, I had a dream the other day where I met Sage, and she was already a toddler)
in reply to kip

Also interested in reading your essay about reading the news
in reply to kip

Still planning on trying! It'll be the longest car trip she's been on by a factor of two.