[OT/ANN] Now I'm a father

[kee nethery]

On Jan 5, 2004, at 3:59 AM, Ryno Swart wrote:

>
> How I wish I had known about these signs! Here is an amazing 
> experiment you can try, Malte... I did it with our newborn, some years 
> ago.
>

In the book "The Scientist In The Crib" one of the authors relates an 
experiment he performed on a bunch of newborns for a period of time. He 
would make arrangements to test each newborn as soon as possible after 
the birth. The earliest he tested was 40 something minutes. Figured I'd 
try it on my son and he got the test after about 5 minutes while they 
were cleaning him.

Put your face in front of your baby and stick out your tongue. What 
happens is that they stick out their tongue.

OK, now think about this. Baby has not been using their eyes except for 
a handful of minutes. They have this thing in front of them that they 
have never seen before (a human face), and that thing does something. 
They have enough prewired stuff going on to know:

1. That the new sensory input they are receiving can be interpreted.
2. That the movement they see is actually one object.
3. That the object in front of them is doing something
4. That they can probably do the same thing.
5. That to do the same thing they have to move specific muscles.
6. And that they have a desire to do the same thing.
7. And then they can put it all together and stick out their tongue.

Way amazing to interact with a baby that is just 5 minutes old.

To relate this to Revolution (since this is the Revolution mailing 
list) it would be similar to launching Revolution for the first time 
and it creating a stack that learns what you want it to do by the way 
you move your mouse and type on the keyboard and then builds one part 
of that stack 5 minutes after initial launch. :-)  (OK so relating this 
to Revolution is a stretch.)

Kee