parenting

"You Won't Remember This Either"

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This sort animation moved me as I think of my son growing up.

The Animated Life: ‘You Won’t Remember This Either’
By By Jeff Scher
Published: January 6, 2009
A filmmaker turns his eye on his toddler in this animated short.

I will add the strangeness of being a dad has gotten to me lately. It is an amazing and scary thing to look at my son. He is full of life, joy, light and energy. He laughs at the simplest of things, and like most children he is fascinated with lent, mini blinds, day old Cheerios on the floor and wrapping paper. Jude brings me great joy, laughter and delight... it is amazing.

And yet, each time I look at him I am reminded of my own mortality. As he gains a head of beautiful thin hair, my own grows thinner. While he learns to crawl faster and walk even faster, I find it harder to get up out of couches as I used to. As he gets older so do I. Being a parent of one eleven month old really really has been a season of simultaneously expanding and condensing of time.

Freakanomic tidbits from a tearaway calendar

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Just some things from the 2007 Freakonomics tear away calendar which I thought are interesting.

July 24-
In Palto's Republic, when Socrates express a belief in the essential goodness of man, a student named Glaucon counters with the tale of the shepherd Gyges, who discovered a ring that made him invisible. With no one able to monitor his behavior, Gyges proceeded to do wonderful things - seduce the queen, murder the king, and so on. The story poses a moral question: can a person resist the temptation of evil if he knows his acts cannot not be witnessed?

August 1-
On a per capita basis, Switzerland, has more firearms than just about any country, and yet it is one of the safest places in the world.

August 12-
Among the many forms of customer sabotage, one of the most prevalent occurs in bookstores, where customers hide books by certain authors (Ann Coulter and Michael Moore, for instance) out of political protest. Some stores have even eliminated garbage cans, since too many partisan books were ending up in the trash.

August 23-
People often say one thing and do another. This gap represents the difference between what economists call a "declared preference" (what you say you'll do) and an "expressed preference" (what you actually do).

August 29-
Research has shown that when people are given a small stipend for donating blood, they actually tend to give less blood. The money transforms a noble act of charity into a discomfiting way to make a few dollars.

September 1-
Here are four factors strongly correlated with childhood test scores:
  1. The child has highly educated parents
  2. The child's parents have high socioeconomic status
  3. The child's mother was over thirty or older at the time of her first child's birth
  4. The child has many books in his home

September 1-
Here are four factors that are not strongly correlated with childhood test scores:

  1. The child's parents recently moved into a better neighborhood
  2. The child's mother didn't work between birth and kindergarten
  3. The child's parents regularly take him to museums
  4. The child frequently watches television