"iPad baby seat inspires campaign to stop the parenting apocalypse."

Check out the Fisher-Price the Apptivity Seat. Link goes to an article in the L.A. Times, not to Amazon, as you might suspect, but if you want to buy one, here's the Amazon link. The L.A. Times article includes some snark from comments at Amazon, stuff like:

"This product is great. Exactly what I was looking for. Everyone should own one of these. Fisher-Price does it again. Hail Satan."

But let's be fair-minded. Let's compare this product (with the iPad inserted) to the usual distract-a-baby devices. There's television and there are those horrible mobiles people hang over cribs. Here, for example, is the Fisher-Price Discover 'n Grow Twinkling Lights Projector Mobile. Why would we think that is better than an iPad? First, you need to ask, what are the iPad apps for babies?
Check out Infant Visual Stimulation By Think Design Studio and Early Sensory Stimulation for Your Infant. These things look better than the DVDs of Disney movies or episodes of "Sesame Street" that people put on the TV for babies, and they seem immensely better than those nightmarish mobiles.

Here's a NYT article — "New Milestone Emerges: Baby’s First iPhone App" — with some info on how much time babies spend in front of various screens. (American Academy of Pediatrics says the amount for children under 2 should be: zero.)

The survey found that children under 2, on average, spend an hour a day in front of screens — engaging in activities like watching television, using computers, viewing DVDs, playing with mobile apps. Children ages 2 to 4 averaged two hours a day, and those 5 to 8, two hours and 20 minutes.

It seems to me, in the real world, an Apptivity Seat with a high-quality baby app is a pretty good idea compared to the alternatives, unless the alternative is holding the baby in your arms and talking and singing or whatever the real, old-time human interactions were. Of course, we still do that much of the time, but not all of the time. In that off-the-lap time, what's the baby supposed to do? Not for too long, of course.

NOTE: If you told me it harms the development of the baby's eyesight, I would completely change my mind on this. Personally, I believe staring at the computer caused me to start to need reading glasses, but maybe that would have happened anyway, and I had the bad habit of locking on to the computer screen, for many hours a day, often more than 10 hours a day.

"For his senior thesis, he turned the Bill of Rights into a play. 'I made each amendment into a character...'"

"'The First Amendment is a loudmouth guy who won't shut up. The Second Amendment guy, all he wanted to talk about was his gun collection. Then the 10th Amendment, the one where they say leave the rest for the states to decide, he was a guy with no self-esteem.'"

From the Wikipedia article on David E. Kelley, the TV writer and producer (who made "Ally McBeal," "Boston Legal," and a lot of other shows). The play in question was written while he was an undergrad at Princeton. He later attended Boston University School of Law and was a lawyer before he branched out into TV writing.

How did I end up on that article, of all articles? I got there from the page on Michelle Pfeiffer (who happens to be his wife), and I was reading about her because we were talking about the movie (which I love) "The Witches of Eastwick," which we were talking about because the Susan Sarandon character in that movie is an elementary school music teacher who has some scenes with the band that are reminiscent of the school band scenes in "The Music Man." (Sarandon is inspired by the Devil, and the Music Man is a bit of a devil, a trickster palming off a fake system for kids playing musical instruments.)

And we were talking about "The Music Man" because Meade was singing "'Til There Was You" as a consequence of my asking for more examples of songs about nature seeming to express the feelings of the singer, such as "Close to You," which begins "Why do birds suddenly appear every time you walk near." I rejected "'Til There Was You" as an example of what I was looking for, since it's not a fantasy about nature, but a true statement of the singer's increased awareness of the beauty of nature. "There were birds in the sky/But I never saw them winging/No, I never saw them at all/'Til there was you."

The "Close to You" fantasy is really the same idea, expressed subjectively. The birds seem to appear because love has heightened the singer's awareness of the existence of birds, but she doesn't seem to understand, as does Marian the Librarian (the lovely Shirley Jones, whom you can cause to suddenly appear if you click on that last link, above). The "Close to You" singer (let's pick Karen Carpenter) presents herself as baffled by the phenomenon. She asks "why?" Marian/Shirley is the fully/overly rational woman, the librarian with book-learning of the existence of birds, and she too has some fantasy — the notion of never having seen birds at all before the arrival of love. She means: I never really saw them. Or perhaps: Seeing without the emotional lift of believing that the birds are about this love of mine is not really seeing.

So continue this long train of thought with me as we circle back to the Bill of Rights and talk about the infusion of human emotion into that which is not human. Do you picture the rights as human entities with feelings and motivations, and if you do — or force yourself to do it — is the 10th Amendment a guy with no self-esteem?

I am outraged at the disparagement of the character of the 10th Amendment!

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

The man who knows the scope of the job he's been hired to do and doesn't spread himself thin taking over things that other workers have been doing for a long time — and know how to do better — isn't a sad sack. It's the guy with the inferiority complex who feels he's got to take over everything. Mr. 10th Amendment is smart and competent. He knows he's got plenty of important work that needs to be done well, he sticks to that, he has the integrity to resist seeking brownie points for doing extra work, he's not a jerk who can't trust the other workers to do things well enough, and he's not an egomaniac who thinks he's got the one right answer that must be applied to everyone regardless of the different ideas they might have and good experiments they might like to try.

I know you need a villain to pump some drama into your play, but I think in a theater piece about the Bill of Rights, the villain should be the federal government. The rights are all heroes. In my play.

"'Sparrow Face' Is The New Duck Face."

Please work on the new facial expression. It's from Japan. It's newer and subtler, but be prepared for cranks to say it's still duck face. No, it is not Duck Face. It's Sparrow Face.

To achieve the coveted “sparrow” look, open your eyes wide and part your mouth slightly, “like you’re a baby bird waiting” for a tasty worm.

Let's talk about Drudge's depiction of Obama coming after us sexually.

The underlying story is about how the government is requiring all doctors to routinely ask patients: "Are you sexually active? If so, with one partner, multiple partners or same-sex partners?" They want complete records on these things, and I suppose they're hoping most people don't care about their privacy anymore.

But quite aside from that policy, what's with that picture of Obama? Is Drudge trying to make Obama look like a sexual predator? Are people accusing Drudge of racism yet? Maybe he's just trying to portray the Obama as desperately, insanely hungry for all your information. He's grasping at it with his clawing hand.

Back up a bit and look at the whole 3 columns. The other hand in view is Putin's, gently adjusting his mirrored sunglasses. We can see Obama's weird eyes — spying eyes — as he clumsily grabs for his own people's secrets, but Putin's eyes are hidden behind mirrored sunglasses, and he seems skillful and analytical as he peers into America's secrets.


Meanwhile, it's a "WOMAN'S WORLD: YELLEN SET TO CHAIR FED..." Yellen is looking more Putinesque, exhibiting a stern seriousness.

Look at the series of headlines under her. Surely subliminal messages are intended. Note: "END OF THE PUMP?" That goes to a story about the Fed's quantitative easing policy, but there's a sexual theme across the top of the 3 columns this morning, and with Putin intimidating us, Obama flailing and spying on us, and the dour Yellen leading us into a "Woman's World," the "end of the pump" inspires dread.

The end of sex... it's coming to get you.

Did Justice Alito roll his eyes while Justice Ginsburg was speaking?

Garrett Epps and Dana Milbank think so.

Milbank says "Alito visibly mocked his colleague":

Ginsburg, the second woman to serve on the high court, was making her argument about how the majority opinion made it easier for sexual harassment to occur in the workplace when Alito, seated immediately to Ginsburg’s left, shook his head from side to side in disagreement, rolled his eyes and looked at the ceiling.

Epps:

... Alito pursed his lips, rolled his eyes to the ceiling, and shook his head "no." He looked for all the world like Sean Penn as Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, signaling to the homies his contempt for Ray Walston as the bothersome history teacher, Mr. Hand. 

I don't trust the descriptions of Epps and Milbank. Maybe we could get some more discussion of the meaning of Alito's head — from some observers who like him. And then I could calculate the truth from there. But what would be better would be  cameras in the Supreme Court chambers. This is a new argument for cameras in the Supreme Court — to protect Samuel Alito from calumny.

Amusingly, Epps begins his little article with:

I suspect that the cause of cameras in the Supreme Court suffered a blow on Monday. I am glad the nation did not see first-hand Justice Samuel Alito's display of rudeness to his senior colleague, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  Because Alito's mini-tantrum was silent, it will not be recorded in transcript or audio; but it was clear to all with eyes, and brought gasps from more than one person in the audience.

It wasn't clear to me, and I have eyes.

Nice of Epps to want to protect me and the rest of Americans who didn't make it into the courtroom that day, but I prefer to be free to look things and form my own opinion, not to get second-hand descriptions from partisans and polemicists.

And by the way, the notion that female Justices command stronger displays of decorum than male Justices is sexist. Show some real respect.

AND: Do I detect anti-Italian prejudice? Alito is too visibly expressive. He's like a movie character with an Italian name (Spicoli)? The rule is your face should be a mask? WASP-style?

ALSO: Remember the words of one of the world's greatest Italian-Americans:



MOREOVER: Want to bet that if emotions played across the visage of Sonia Sotomayor while Alito or Scalia were articulating some nugget of conservatism that media's Epps and Milbanks would tell us that this — this! — was the empathy Obama said was essential to judging?

AND: A new post highlighting comments about what's wrong with likening Alito to Spicoli.

"Call me naive, but I seem to have underestimated the universal desire to sit in a hard plastic chair and stare at a screen until your eyes cross."

"My father saw it coming, but this was a future that took me completely by surprise. There were no computers in my high school, and the first two times I attempted college, people were still counting on their fingers and removing their shoes when the numbers got above ten. I wasn’t really aware of computers until the mid-1980s. For some reason, I seemed to know quite a few graphic designers whose homes and offices pleasantly stank of Spray Mount. Their floors were always collaged with stray bits of paper, and trapped flies waved for help from the gummy killing fields of their tabletops. I had always counted on these friends to loan me the adhesive of my choice, but then, seemingly overnight, their Scotch tape and rubber cement were gone, replaced with odorless computers and spongy mouse pads. They had nothing left that I wanted to borrow, and so I dropped them and fell in with a group of typesetters who ultimately betrayed me as well."

David Sedaris — whose father worked for IBM — in "Me Talk Pretty One Day" (published in 2000), which I listened to, partly while asleep, last night.

Oculolinctus.

Eyeball-licking.

"My boyfriend started licking my eyeballs years ago and I just loved it. I'm not with him anymore, but I still like to ask guys to lick my eyeballs. I just love it because it turns me on, like sucking on my toes. It makes me feel all tingly.’...

‘Nothing good can come of this,’ Dr David Granet, a San Diego ophthalmologist, told The Huffington Post. ‘There are ridges on the tongue that can cause a corneal abrasion. And if a person hasn't washed out their mouth, they might put acid from citrus products or spices into the eye.’

I hope Rand Paul weighs in on this.

We the Peepers.

As used in the previous post — the last word of — I see how "peepers" could be a new coinage for "people" within the our newly understood world of pervasive surveillance. One might say:

We the Peepers of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity...

And:

... that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the peepers, by the peepers, for the peepers, shall not perish from the earth.

"Peeper" — "A person who peeps or peers; esp. one who pries or looks furtively, or in a voyeuristic way" — is an old word, I see, peeping into the (unlinkable) OED:

1607   T. Dekker & J. Webster West-ward Hoe ii. ii. sig. D2v,   Whose there? Peepers: Intelligencers: Euesdroppers.
1652   J. Gaule Πυς-μαντια 375   He..had his eyes put out; an apt punishment for all peepers, and Star-gazers.
1711   R. Steele Spectator No. 53. ⁋8,   I doubt not but you will think a Peeper as much more pernicious than a Starer....
2003   Gay Times Feb. 61/3   If you view others, without their knowledge or consent..then peepers can expect up to two years in the slammers.

A real Cloak of Invisibility.

"Titled 'Demonstration of an ultralow profile cloak for scattering suppression of a finite-length rod in free space,' their research, published in the New Journal of Physics, describes a cloak consisting of 66 µm-thick copper tape and 100 µm-thick flexible polycarbonate film which scatters and cancels out incoming waves."

“In principle this technique may be extended to visible frequencies; in fact metasurfaces are easier to realize than metamaterials in optics. However, the object size that can be efficiently cloaked with this method scales with the wavelength, so when applied to optical frequencies we may be able to efficiently stop the scattering of only micrometer-sized objects,” the research paper claims.

What does Jesus look like?

Leaflet — delivered to our door just now — caused Meade to say "Look: Jesus got a haircut."



I expect to see a nice-looking Jesus, but this is nice-looking to the point of too nice-looking. How nice-looking is Jesus supposed to be? Also, where did he plug in the blow dryer? At some point you'll say that's not Jesus, but, oddly enough, this isn't at that point.

What does it take for an image to be perceived as Jesus? Here, the words are a big influence. Let's strip away the context.



That seems less like Jesus than the slices of toast that evoke the Shroud of Turin. What's happening with the toast and this stingray and so forth is a mental process called pareidolia — the perception of meaning in "a vague and random stimulus." It's "a type of apophenia, seeing patterns in random data." The lack of detail invites our mind to provide the completion. We instinctively want to see something, and so we do. It's hardly surprising that our fulfillment often (but not always) gravitates toward the divine. The problem with the picture on the new leaflet is that it's too detailed and specific, and that blocks the creative contribution of our minds. Jesus looks like a particular guy, and that can't be Him.

And here's a story about a man who was kicked out of a darts tournament for looking like Jesus:

[Nathan] Grindal, 33, who has long hair and a full beard he started growing four months ago, was sitting in the crowd at the tournament when some nearby spectators began to chant, "Jesus! Jesus!" during the final match between Phil Taylor and Kim Huybrechts, ABC News reported. Others joined in the chant, until most of the 4,500 people in the arena were chanting the Almighty's name.

It got so raucous that security staff decided to remove Grindal, fearing his presence was upsetting the concentration of the players, as well as hurting the enjoyment of the viewers at home...

Grindal looked like this:

"'The Hobbit' looks really, really strange."

"At least it does when projected in 3-D, at the 48 frames per second rate (known as high-frame rate, or HFR) that Jackson intends as the preferred format...."

It’s not easy to describe the hyperreal, ultra-clear, sharp-edged look of the 48fps image, except by way of analogy. As one critic was heard to say on the sidewalk outside a Manhattan screening, “I turned that setting off on my TV.” Some viewers have said that “The Hobbit” has the harsh video shimmer of a 1980s soap opera, with, of course, many times the resolution. Another guy I know said the whole movie looked like a cutting-edge screen saver from the early days of digital imaging, around 2000 or so. That’s getting close. To me, “The Hobbit” looked like a prototype of some new computer game, or a demonstration video that some dude at Best Buy was using to sell a $1,700 HDTV monitor while murmuring, “Someday, man, all movies will look like this.”

So... it's some kind of sharpness beyond what the eye sees in real life, causing it to seem unreal? I'd be curious to check that out, but perhaps not willing to sit through it.