serendipity

Bring out your dead

Ant farm

I know you're all dying for an update on the ant farm so here it is. First, the ants Uncle Milton sent are Harvester ants. That means not only do they bite, but they also sting. (Two for the price of one!) Before you can move them from the mailing tube to the ant farm you have to put them in the fridge to "calm them down." Yep. They're big and they're mean.

Bring out your dead

After they moved in they began to survey the landscape. They totally ignored the holes I obediently drilled for them, preferring instead to bury the guys who didn't survive the trip through the US postal service. I didn't see them perform a ceremony, but they have been very diligent in taking care of the dead pile. Someone is usually over there, moving heads and other body parts around the gel. I confess it kinda creeped me out to see a head being carried around in some guy's mandibles.

That's group number one, the morticians.

Stand up meeting

The second group are the executives. They are always in a meeting - the world's longest stand up meetings. It's possible that this is actually a corporate off-site. Or perhaps, since they lack a queen to boss them around and keep things organized, the meeting is just running long. It is illegal to sell queens for obvious reasons, I think. I mean there are people who release pythons into the Everglades and alligators into the sewers, why not release a few million Harvester ants into the backyard, especially after they have overrun their little gel box, right?

Work crew

The third group is the most interesting. They are in charge of construction. They turned their collective noses up at my holes and instead are busy making their own tunnels - just like it shows on the box. I just love it when things turn out like the picture on the box. I think I can count the number of times this has actually happened on one hand.

This ant farm is turning out to be a lot more fun than I thought it would be - and for all of us. I bet you're thinking that we need to get out more and you're probably right. But if you get an ant farm I bet you'll be watching them too. They're nasty little hard working buggers.

If anyone actually drops that plastic box we're going to have a couple dozen biting stinging giant ants running around the kitchen. How much fun will that be?

QOTD: Journey of the Magi

I found this poem in a book meant for children. It's a rather dark poem, and I only read it once to Cassandre, before she was old enough to really understand the words. I love it, but I don't think it belongs in a children's book of poetry.

'A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty, and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we lead all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

-T.S. Eliot

Oh darling, you're sooooo smart!

I read an interesting study recently on how we may be over-praising our children about their intelligence. The researchers looked into what happens when you praise children for being smart vs. praising them for the effort they put into their work. Which do you think was more successful? 

The whole article is here.

I've pulled a few excerpts:

When parents praise their children’s intelligence, they believe they are providing the solution to this problem. According to a survey conducted by Columbia University, 85 percent of American parents think it’s important to tell their kids that they’re smart. In and around the New York area, according to my own (admittedly nonscientific) poll, the number is more like 100 percent. Everyone does it, habitually. The constant praise is meant to be an angel on the shoulder, ensuring that children do not sell their talents short.

But a growing body of research—and a new study from the trenches of the New York public-school system—strongly suggests it might be the other way around. Giving kids the label of “smart” does not prevent them from underperforming. It might actually be causing it...

 

...By and large, the literature on praise shows that it can be effective—a positive, motivating force. In one study, University of Notre Dame researchers tested praise’s efficacy on a losing college hockey team. The experiment worked: The team got into the playoffs. But all praise is not equal—and, as Dweck demonstrated, the effects of praise can vary significantly depending on the praise given. To be effective, researchers have found, praise needs to be specific. (The hockey players were specifically complimented on the number of times they checked an opponent.)...

 

...Students turn to cheating because they haven’t developed a strategy for handling failure. The problem is compounded when a parent ignores a child’s failures and insists he’ll do better next time. Michigan scholar Jennifer Crocker studies this exact scenario and explains that the child may come to believe failure is something so terrible, the family can’t acknowledge its existence. A child deprived of the opportunity to discuss mistakes can’t learn from them...

 

...Truth be told, while my son was getting along fine under the new praise regime, it was I who was suffering. It turns out that I was the real praise junkie in the family. Praising him for just a particular skill or task felt like I left other parts of him ignored and unappreciated. I recognized that praising him with the universal “You’re great—I’m proud of you” was a way I expressed unconditional love."

 

Has anyone created a parenting group? That seems like the right place to put a post like this...

Supercrab Sunday

Krusty Krabs

10 of them. Fresh off the bateau.

You are what you search (or so it appears)

Two months ago my CEO pitched our company to a VC in a Palo Alto coffee shop. As he normally does, he did the demo on his laptop. The VC wanted to compare our product LeapTag (that link is also disclosure), against Google Personalized Search and logged into my CEO's computer to do it.

No one noticed that he never logged out.

Two months later my CEO gets an email from the guy, with a list of searches attached. "Are these your searches?" he asked. In fact they were. Search queries for the past two months - including some from just a few minutes before the guy sent the email. Needless to say, my CEO was horrified and wrote about the experience here.

Yesterday I was talking to him about his intended blog post and I opened up my own personal search history as part of the conversation. I'm not into online porn, or anything else I'd be embarrassed about him seeing, so I felt very comfortable doing this. Ten additional seconds of forethought might have changed that.

What was the first thing at the top of the list? "Threesomes."

Yikes. That was for a tongue-in-cheek post I wrote a while back. Next were a bunch of musicals, Oklahoma, Godspell, The Fantasticks, etc. Then some car stuff, the names of parts BMW said were broken and a search for the price of a new M5 (a girl can dream, right?). Where was all the work stuff?

I'm sure my work searches were there, I was just temporarily blinded by my own sense of embarrassment. Now my boss thinks I'm a musical loving, luxury car shopper in search of a good threesome. Great. I start to mumble something about how most of these searches are for blog posts and decide that giving away more information is not actually going to help. So I stopped talking.

It's actually amazing how much your personal search history reveals about yourself. And it's all out of context, building a profile of you (esp. if you used Personalized Search)  that you may never see. We think it's private, that as long as we periodically clear the toolbar history the information will be gone.

But it won't.

I think that would make an interesting QOTD: Post your personal search history. Would anybody do it without heavily editing it first? Perhaps. We spend so much time on meme quizzes to provide insight on Who We Are (what Tarot card are you?), posting your history would seems like an interesting next step. Would you do it?

I think we've discovered that this musical loving, luxury car shopper in search of a good threesome would not.