Language and thought

In grad school, we studied the idea that the thoughts that one is able to think are constrained by one's language.  In yesterday's New York Times is an extremely good article that brings this debate up to date.  At university, we were taught that language has no ability to constrain what one thinks, and I taught this point of view to my students.  My point of view softened a bit after some interesting discussion with my dad one day, and the article supports that softened point of view:  language does not absolutely constrain what can be thought, but it does influence what is thought.

A high level of self-awareness

Anja:  I'm not crying, I'm whining!

Yeah, you've really locked the place down

My office has this sign on the door:

Let's think for a moment about how 1994 this is.  Firstly, every single person in this company is given an HTC smartphone that can hold a micro SD card along with a USB cable that allows the phone to attach to a computer.  My micro SD card holds 16GB, which is enough to hold the entire contents of my computer.  Secondly, every computer in this company is connected to something called the Internet, which means that any file could be sent anywhere in literally dozens of ways.

Oh, and I bring a 30GB iPod to work every day, and today I also brought my camera, which contains an 8GB SD card.

Basically, the way that it works today is that employees sign a legal document in which they agree not to steal information, and companies trust that employees will respect their legal obligations.  The sign on the office door, in contrast, is completely meaningless.

Monster feet! (and yet more pictures)

Reiya's feet are well more than half as long as her calves.

She's also pretty cute.

Sitting on a bench in a park

Chieni is doing the Taiwanese one-month confinement (月子), and she is doing it at home so we have a lady who comes six days a week to cook, clean, and watch the baby when Chieni wants to take a nap.  On Sunday, the confinement lady has the day off and so it becomes my job to take care of Anja, bring Chieni's meals up to her, clean the house, and so on.  It's not particularly hard work, but it's a bit draining.  But yesterday, Anja and I managed to go out to the neighborhood park for an hour.  Yes, it's in the middle of a dense urban neighborhood, and yes it was 32 (90°F) degrees outside, but the sun was getting a bit low in the sky, there was some light cloud cover, there was a refreshing breeze, and I found a bench in the shade of some trees where I could sit while Anja played on the jungle gym.  And I realized that it's a very nice park:  there are lots of trees, relatively speaking, and although it's on an arterial, it's a quiet arterial with just a single lane in each direction.  I ended up really relaxing for ten minutes, and when we got back home I felt much better the rest of the day.

The Dora hat saves the day

Anja and I went to the zoo yesterday to get her out of the house while our confinement person (we've hired her to come six days per week for the first month) helped Chieni take care of Reiya.  After we parked the car and bought a Dora hat for Anja in the parking lot, we walked around the zoo in sweltering heat for a couple of hours.  When we got back to the car, we were really looking forward to air conditioning, but the car wouldn't start!  It was pretty obvious that the battery had died.  Having very little idea what to do, we walked over to sit under a tree for a minute.  Already there was the man who had sold us the hat earlier.  We started talking, and hearing what our problem was, he suggested that I call a taxi for a jump, and handed me a business card.  It turns out that people often turn their headlights on when driving through the many tunnels in the area to get to the zoo, and out of the thousand or so cars that use the zoo parking lot each day, several forget to turn their lights off, and their batteries run out of electricity.  (Our car complains if you leave the lights on, so our problem was that the battery was just old.)  This is an opportunity for a taxi driver to make $200 or $300 NT for five minutes' work, so the taxis all carry jumper cables.

So I called the number on the business card.  "I need a taxi", I said to the dispatcher, "but I've got a special problem:  I've got my own car–" "Dead battery?" the dispatcher interrupted.  "What's your parking space number?"  "I'm in the Taipei zoo parking lot–" "Yes, I know, but what's your number?"  "Seven."  "Okay, we'll be there in a few minutes."  It was when I expressed my surprise that the dispatcher knew exactly what my problem was that the hat seller explained what a common situation this was.

The taxi arrived about five minutes later, and with the assistance of the guy who was in the parking space next to mine, we quickly got my car started.  We started driving towards home, and I decided to drive directly to the garage that had fixed the car the last time it broke down (in an underground parking lot that the tow truck was too big to drive into, but that's another story).  When we got there, we were able to watch cartoons in the waiting room while we waited, and the car was fixed in half an hour.  So in all, we arrived home about an hour later then we originally planned.  Have I mentioned how convenient Taiwan is?  And the solution was thanks to Anja, whose Dora hat was the reason why I was able to talk to the hat seller after our battery died.

More pictures of Baby Reiya

Chieni has put up more pictures of Baby Reiya at http://picasaweb.google.com/chienimc/BabyReiya?feat=directlink.

Baby Reiya

Reiya Niamh Webster was born on August 9, 2010, at 11:25PM! She weighs 6 pounds 13 ounces.  Here are a couple of pictures:

More to follow shortly....

Math genius

I asked Anja how old she would be when her little sister turns 4, and she thought for a few seconds and then said "8".  I don't even know how she knew that.