I hate you

Dear Js,

Can I say that? I don’t know. It’s hard for a dad to say that. But even if I can’t say it, sometimes my body sure feels like I do. I mentioned it to mama and she gasped in a “How could you – I thought I knew you” way. Then she said, “I may feel tired etc but I could never say that.” I said, “I know what I feel and it feels like when I hate something.” Kids are assholes.

Just listen to what you did today, J, in mama’s words: “He asked for oatmeal after I’d made eggs. Said oatmeal is now being eaten at a rate of 1spoonful/30mins. It’s been like this for 1 hour. j was for some reason conked out on me out of nowhere after a really good night’s sleep. Plans of going to Costco or doing anything else really are out the window already…”

Or how about the other night when – j – you cried all night and you didn’t want to sleep. We couldn’t do anything else that night either. No mama time no daddy time. Your bedtime is usually 9 pm but you were still up at 1 am. What were you doing? I guess 1 am is the perfect time to play charades:

We had to laugh. Because you were too cute. Also, because if we didn’t laugh we would cry. I think cuteness is an essential survival mechanism for kids.

Or tonight. I yelled at you because you pushed your sister. I was still upset an hour later. But as I was washing the dishes, there you came prancing and dancing in a circle in the kitchen, stomping to try to squeak your dino slippers. It’s easy to get mad but it’s hard to stay mad.

Anyway, now let me show you the latest thing that’s replaced Kimi in our house. It has also given us plenty of laughs in the last few weeks. Presenting… our new ROBOT ADVENTURES!

Mama called me one afternoon and said you had something to tell me. I heard your small voice: “Daddy… the robot is here…” I had told you it was coming after I bought it after we saw it on YouTube. And you had been waiting eagerly. When I got home, we ripped into the box and you read the cover, “Starter Kit. I would like it to be a Sister Kit.”

Don’t be fooled. Not all went as well as it did in the video. Let me tell you what happened before I started recording. At first you were reading the instructions. j was curious so she snatched it from you. You snatched it back and it ripped. You stopped and there was silence, then you said, “Daddy… can you please fix this with tape?”

Next, j picked up the motor and said “MOTUR.” You wanted it too so you snatched it from her. j snatched it back and put it in her mouth. That’s her latest thing. Her canines are here and she bites when she’s angry. I guess she thought, “If I can’t have it and I can’t bite my brother, I’m just going to eat this motor.”

I only started filming after you two calmed down. And for obvious reasons we only started building it after j went to bed:

Day two: we assembled the tracks

I explained the big picture earlier that evening. I didn’t know if you got me but at night, you explained it to me;

Then we put the tracks on

Day three: we took a break from robots. You got distracted by something in your closet — a box of Legos someone gave you for your birthday.
You didn’t know what they were or what “Star Wars” was but you wanted to make them. It was for ages 6 and up, so they clearly gave you the wrong present. But Abu did say that you were 3 going on 6…

Some crazy things I noticed:

• you know when you’re done with each step
• you move on and turn the page to the next step yourself
• you can verify your work against the instructions and detect errors/differences on your own
• when you make a mistake and backtrack, you roll back the steps in reverse order. Then when you fix the problem step, you proceed forward in order.
• you’re doing 3-D object manipulation in your head to match your model with the pictures in the instruction
• you can “see” pieces that are hidden from view, e.g a pair of wings — only one wing is visible in the picture but you look for 2 wing pieces
• insane attention and focus, even though you were tired and didn’t nap. Still, no frustrations despite repeated failures, and you refused my help when you struggled
• when you were done you went to tell mama a story you made up. You said they needed masks so no water splashed in their face, it was an underwater vehicle, etc.

Later, mama said that when you came to her, she saw a grown boy talking to her. Then you came back to examine it some more with me. You looked serious. Then you decided it was good and you smirked. You surprised me. Because you drove the whole process by yourself, and there were tiny tiny pieces at the limit of your finger control. Also, it was the first time you figured a build out on your own. I thought I had to guide you along and fill in the gaps as usual, but I didn’t.

Day four: you asked if we could finish making the robot. I was hoping you’d ask.

I couldn’t get the software to load that night. I was hoping to make it move so I could say, “IT’S ALIVE!” but I guess that had to wait until tomorrow. Or, at least until you went to bed and I got to work on it. I quickly found the problem, but I loved it so much I kept tinkering. I kept tinkering for hours until mama caught me sneaking into bed at 5am. I got everything to work but I undid everything I did so that I could introduce each piece to you in a sequence. Anyway, it was a Saturday so it was OK.

Good morning! Mama said it needed a name. You said, “It’s name is Bao.”

Bao moving! I showed you how we could teach Bao to move its wheels.

Then we taught it to turn

Then we taught it to use its eyes

Then we ran out of battery and we had to put Bao to sleep. What was cool was that you got to learn how Bao needs energy and you can see Bao slowing down when his batteries get low. That helped give me a new tool to explain why it’s important to eat and why you need to “recharge” when you get tired. You’ve been more agreeable with bedtime and these nights you sometimes say things like, “I’m just going to get a sip of water and go to bed.” Or, “I am tired so I will just read a short book and then go to bed.”

Day six: I loaded my full Ultrasonic car program:

You loved it but you wanted to save Bao’s batteries so you could show it to your old school friends during a playdate. Bao made a good babysitter

Later, I hooked up the IR remote. Your driving was terrible but then I realized it was because you had to pee

You were a better pilot after that

Later that night, we changed Bao into a 3-wheeled car. You didn’t want to help me. I tried to nudge you: “You can do it too with a screwdriver.” You frowned and said, “I only want to do special special things.” You looked like you were bored to tears. Maybe you saw me doing things you already knew. You weren’t as interested in this build as the first one. Instead, you played with the wheel pieces, you spun them, you put them on your head, you made a helicpoter… then you grabbed the unused tracks and put one loop in each hand and said, “I’m a robot”. Then you turned them into a crown. You said, “Look at me I’m the scariest king. You want a crown too?” And you put it on my head. When I was done, you said, “But I still give him the name Bawa even after he changes.”

Day seven: Sunday. I woke up and came down to investigate a strange whirring sound…

We turned Bao into a train

Mama had a go too

Day seven: Bao strong

Beep beep – CRASH

I asked mama if Bao was a good babysitter. Mama thought for a while, then said, “Oh, it helped me get the pot roast going.”

The most amazing thing – j, you pointed up above the fireplace and said, “Beest Beest.” You said something I didn’t understand. Then you said, “Moving. Moving.” Then you turned to the left and pointed at the robot. “Bao! Bao! Moving. Remote.” That blew my mind. What? Did you just connect two different robots – one propeller-driven one with gears and 12 legs, and another with 3 wheels and sensors and motors and a remote? Maybe somehow you classified these two things as the same kind. Mama said what they had in common was they both came as parts that she saw us build into things that move. Could that be it? You don’t know the word ‘robot’, but you managed to classify an abstract concept of “moving contraptions we built from parts.”

Anyway, what’s Bao up to these days? Take a look…

I bought a $20 smartphone to experiment with a “Cellbot-style” interface. A Cellbot is a robot controller paired with a smartphone to augment its communications, sensors and processing:

And j, you’ve become quite the pilot yourself. You also know where everything goes on the robot. You point and say things like, “Screw… Motor… Eyes… Batteries… Remote… Arrow.” You pick up everything I explain to J

So now you know that we can “teach” machines how to do things. So I asked you what shall we teach Bao next. You said you wanted to teach Bao to blink when he sees something… and when he feels lonely. Oooookay. No problem.

“That is the way to learn the most, that when you are doing something with such enjoyment that you don’t notice that the time passes.”

Playing when I was supposed to be working. I felt lonely playing with all this cool stuff at home. So I thought hey why not bring it to work? I could infect those guys with what I’m excited about, and get work done in an interesting way. So it’s like killing two birds with one stone. I figured I could also use these catchy things as “grabbers” to teach with. I had a workshop I had to lead anyway, so it was the perfect chance. I had to teach 9 people how to build something useful for work with Python, including 3 who didn’t know any Python. I’d done a few of these in the past, but I didn’t like how no one latched on to what they learned after they left the workshop. They could bumble along enough to complete the exercises, but they were either not motivated or confident enough to fly solo later. I didn’t feel like wasting my time again, so I needed to raise my game. And now, with these robot experiments, I think I’ve come up with the perfect way to teach beginners Python in-person, in a group workshop.

Did you notice the text-to-speech program I made for you above? Here’s what I did with it. The day before the workshop, I said, “I have a surprise for you tomorrow. If you have an Android phone, bring it with you.” Then at the start of the workshop, I pulled out my $20 phone from my shirt pocket. I said this is probably the first time in history that you’re encouraged to bring your phone to a meeting. And I explained about how that $20 phone was so cool. It has all the modern bells and whistles, it was more powerful than NASA’s lunar lander… and it can talk. Then I promised that within half an hour or so, every one in that room will know how to make that phone talk. And we did.

The phone became a feedback/reward mechanism and the difference in engagement was tremendous. I had them race to be the first to make the phone talk. Then they were like a bunch of kids… trying to make the phone say different things, giggling like you did when you made it say gibberish. Then I showed them how to hook it up with web2py like we did, so they could command it from a browser. Then I got them to make a nice interface, so they could type in a box and hit Enter. You should have seen them. Laughing and tapping away… and learning. But they were learning without even realizing they were learning. They thought they were playing! By the end of the day, they were experts. One of them even said that Python was her new favorite language (even though she didn’t know it before that day), and I upgraded the team so that all of them could now build modern web apps… and they were confident with what they knew.

That’s the funny thing about learning. Mama and I have been talking a lot about school. We visited an elementary school for J yesterday. Mama loved it. I wasn’t sure. I said it was probably the best we could find, but something wasn’t right. I didn’t know what it was. It was the most hardcore parent-participation school in the area, and they had similar philosophies with us, but something just wasn’t right. Maybe it was the group of kids all coloring around the table, and I noticed they were all on the same page. Or maybe it was looking around the auditorium and thinking I don’t know if I’d be friends with any of these parents. Or maybe it was because almost no other parents brought their kids. You two were the only ones your age there. Which made me wonder… if there are no kids your age there, is it because both parents work and they’re at daycare/pre-school? Or are their kids so rowdy that they didn’t feel comfortable bringing them? It’s hard to feel like a place is right for you when the other people who are there aren’t like you.

Somewhere along the way, I think I figured out why Bing works. Even though this school we visited had good principles, it still marched kids from “station” to “station.” And the problem with that is that’s not how J learns. That’s not how anyone learns, if you want them to be curious learners! Mama said, “They have to, how else are they going to manage X kids?” I thought for a while… then said, “Like Bing!” At Bing, the teachers don’t herd kids. They man different stations. And, the kids went to whichever station they were interested in whenever they wanted. That’s how you wandered over to the woodworking table one day, asked teacher T what was up, and he handed you wood, nails and a hammer. And that’s how you stayed long enough (40 minutes) to build your elephant. When you march kids from station to station, you’re forcing all kids to engage in a bunch of things sequentially. The problem is not all of them will be in sync with the activity at the right time. The beauty of Bing’s layout is that by splitting the teachers to the stations and letting the kids roam, each kid is engaged in parallel, independently, always precisely in sync with whenever they are interested. It made me wonder, could your elephant have been created in a conveyor belt school system (in any style of teaching?). I think we would have gotten half an elephant and semi-snuffed enthusiasm and curiosity. Your time would have been up before you finished, they would have started herding you away, you would have seen your friends leaving and you would have dropped what you were doing.

One crazy way to fix education? Homeschoolers mostly agree that they can cover the typical 12 years of education in 25% of the time. If that is true, does it seem like we’re paying for quantity, not quality in formal education? What if we could make education more efficient, like homeschooling? “Ah,” but mama objected, “because teachers are underpaid and understaffed as it is. There’s no way we could have close to 1-on-1 teaching like in homeschooling.” But wait, if homeschoolers can cover 12 years in 3, what if all kids just had 3 years’ worth of school to go to? Then… you’d have 12 years’ worth of teachers to focus only on teach 3 years of school. Which means you could get 4 times the number of teachers for every student. This way, teachers can extend the Bing model (beyond pre-school) where you man activity stations/rooms and let kids roam free, instead of herding them like cattle. Not only could this solve the underpaid/understaffing situation, it could improve the quality of education every child gets. But of course, this could never happen, because it’s too crazy… Or is it? After all, isn’t this how we learn in the real world today? What do we do when we’re interested in something? How do we learn? Yup, we just go right ahead! Search Google. Watch how-tows on YouTube. There are even free MIT courses. You can email and follow your favorite experts. Shouldn’t we prepare our kids for what the world has become? I.e., a world where you can “look it up”, “figure it out” after you start, and connect with experts and peers anywhere in the world.

Curious convos

J: “Why can’t fish come out on land?”
Mama: “They have no legs”
J: “Why can’t we put wheels on them?”
Mama, while looking at me: “Like Bao?”
J: “Yea”
Mama: “OK, you have two problems to fix. They also can’t breathe on land.”
I was already picturing robo goldfish scooting around the house in mobile aquariums.

J: “I’m looking in the mirror, and I look beautiful!”

J, sad: “Can we bring back the dinosauuuuuuuuurs? I really want to see them walk.”

*silence in the living room*
“J, do you need a nap?”
“No, I’m just bashing into the couch”

Me: “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”
J: “Twinkle Twinkle giant sun!”
Me, thinking: (That is… correct… there is nothing tiny about our massive sun. Silly song.)

Mama: “Big potty or little potty?”
J, roaring: “BIIIG ONE! Little potty is too SHORT NOW!!! MY KAKA IS BIG!”

j, our morning ambassador…
“Morning… truck”
“monning… dog”
“Good monning moon”
“Good munning… moon”

Mama: “I need 3 hard drinks like now…. The next batch of 400 questions from Joshua might just compromise my mental health…. He’s on the topic of death at the moment. Also telling me to just cut my leg off if it hurts but that it might bleed a lot. That we can figure out how to help need grow a new one. What would happen if he kills the dog. Could we bring her back from her fossils? I. Can’t. Even. Lol”

Halloween trick-o-treating:
J to us on the sidewalk: “Stay there while I get some candy.”

J: “Mama! I have so much love in me, I could hug you for 100 days!!!”
Mama status: overgrown heart lol

New developments

Hyperspace – J was playing, mama read a few lines and asked if he was still interested. J said yes. So kept reading, thinking you’ll get bored with this dense pictureless physics book. Then you surprised mama. You appeared next to her by the armrest, staring at her, still holding your toy. She continued reading the first 5 pages and you were asking questions non-stop all along the way. When mama read the part where they did their research at the Stanford Physics library, your eyes lit up. “Mama… that’s where I go to school… gasp* can we go there next time, and then after we can eat lunch at the front yard?” One day they’re gonna have a 3-year old visit their library. After a few pages you asked for a break, “Mama, can we listen to children’s songs now?” Mama said “…. hmmmm, what’s going on in that big head of his :)! We stopped right after he built the betatron and blew all the fuses in his house. I keep thinking ‘see, if he was in preschool full time these things might never happen!'”

You like to get to Bing before they open their doors, so you don’t miss out on anything. You were almost sad today because you took a long time to finish your lunch. But they opened the doors late, and you were happy – “Mama, it seems like we are just on time.” Then you ran in straight to the magnet tiles table and mama had to chase you to get her kiss. By the time she got there you had already built a house with a garden, and you made a base for j – “Here I made a base for you so you can build a house.”

J, two girls worked together to push you off the bar in the grove. One pried your hands and another pushed you off.

j, you can now do the polygon puzzles by yourself. J likes to help. He sets the boards up for you and tells you what they are, like “Mariposa, j.” Mama tries to tell you to not help her do them, but that you can help her take out the pieces. You show j all the different boards she can make. j, you can translate the shapes, but your rotation is not quite there yet.

j: mama noticed something interesting. You skipped third person. J used to say “J wants to do X”, instead of saying “I want to do X.” But you never did that. You say “me” and “mine”. But you don’t say “you” either. It’s always daddy, mama, J, Kimi, man, aunty.

J, you’ve been wearing undies to bed. We’ve stopped buying diapers for you.

You two like to help mama with laundry at home. j rolls them into balls and stacks them. J likes hanging.

j bit skin off J’s shoulder and tummy self defense.

I almost murdered someone who rang my doorbell at 5pm this afternoon. I was looking after you two alone, and after a sleepy j cried for 30 minutes I finally put her to sleep. It wasn’t even one minute before the doorbell rang and she flailed around surprised and shocked and started crying again. If whoever rang the doorbell was still there when I opened it, there would have been BLOOD.

j you blow me a kiss when I say goodbye. You also smile and wave. It’s hard to leave.

J, we took your wall down and you said it was okay. j’s not eating small things anymore so we can share everything. You still don’t like sharing everything, but when you do, you two are fantastic playmates.

This week in pictures

j – you picked some balls from the basket, then pointed to the cardboard slide, “Slide slide slide. Out. Slide.” Then you said “Pillow” and you put it under the slide to prop it up.
“Ball… RUN-NING!”
“Rolling?”
“RUNNING!”
“Rolling?”
“RUNNING!”

We taught Bao how to listen to Bluetooth

Tricky wheel. You tried to get it upright after I rolled mine to you

Elmo song? NO!

Leaves falling

Wagon

Dancing

‘It’s just mama’

Peekaboo Izeeyoo

Where’s the ball?

Interesting things. How to spot a dad. Table tennis boss.

Meteor explosion captured on Milky Way timelapse :

I had a crazy dream. It was strange. I don’t usually have crazy dreams or remember them. But for some reason I did that night. I was walking by the beach with mama. There was a big wave sculpture that looked like a ramp.

Except, imagine that instead of grass, the ramp was channeling waves. The waves would come in from the ocean and swirl around it like a skateboarder. I watched it for a while until I noticed that next to the wave sculpture was a beach house. I thought how cool it must be to live there. The beach house transformed into a luxury tower, whose owner recently passed away. And then a realtor unlocked a side gate to give me a tour. We climbed many flights of stairs through a garden before we got to the living room. The place was fully furnished, and I imagined how the previous owner lived there. It was for sale, but it looked like it was being rented out for events. Because my tour guide led me to an open event space where there was a long dining table with half-eaten exotic foods and messy plates. I wondered what was the next “experience” in the itinerary for those guests.

We exited on the other side of the building. We were next to a hospital. There was also a club on the street, but the rich owner of the beach house had paid him to move the line to the other side of the street, away from his property. I kept walking with my tour guide. Then we saw a fat guy slide down some stairs.

Like a Jackass show, there was someone waiting at the bottom of the rail and the fat guy kicked him in the chest. A camera crew filmed the stunt. Then the fat guy started running toward me. I jumped over a rail and ran. He kept chasing me. I ran around the top of a hedge and he cornered me next to a cliff. When he got close enough, I swung under the rail and pulled his pant leg until he slid off without me. I watched him tumble like a snowball. It looked really bad.

I walked against the crowd and duck away from the lights and emergency response people. I found my tour guide. He took me to a garden and led me to a secret entrance. He held the door open but I said I’m waiting for mama. I wondered what was behind the door. What was it like in their world?

But I had no idea where mama was, and I was going to miss my chance to get in. Then I saw the fat guy again. He was bruised and dirty. He was now slamming walls and crashing through them. I shoved my tour guide friend out of the way to save his life. I slipped past the ramming bull and slid down the stairs. He roared down but I tricked him and hopped over and sneaked behind a wall and out of his view. I called mama and said, “Where are you???” It sounded like she was talking to someone else so I yelled, “I’m up here and a crazy fat guy is chasing me-” then she said “Fuck you” and hung up. I was confused because that wasn’t like her at all.

Next, I’m back with my tour guide friend and he’s complaining about how they won’t let him in. He was sad and ranting about all his problems to me like we’re best buds. He was dressed sharply and his hair was slicked back. He also had some sort of New York accent.

Then I woke up. The end. WTF? Yeah, I know…

Love,

Dad

P.S.: I started a new place to geek out here: secretsciencelab.com
That’s where I let myself go a little and share fun “science projects.” I only have our robot experiments there now. But later, I plan to include any other kinds of “science projects”, such as direct response split-tests or business systems. For example, I’d like to put up things like the mechanics for getting Uncle Jardy’s online business up and running. I’d like it to be a place to share my results for all interesting and useful “science projects”, that anyone can perform in this lab called life. And share it in a way that anyone else can “replicate the “experiment”, whether it’s just for entertainment (like the robots), to create income on demand or to have a happier life.

P.P.S. We went to one of your classmates’ birthday party. There was a fairy. What impressed me was how she stayed in character. She said she was a fairy, all the parents called her a fairy, and she never once broke character. When we ran into her in the parking lot, she put her things in her car but then she just stood around. She pretended to stare at the trees and the sky. I thought what’s she doing? Isn’t that her car? Is she waiting for someone to pick her up? It turned out that she was just waiting until we left before climbing into her car, so you kids wouldn’t see a fairy driving a car.