Friday Four

1. Baby hugs! The baby started her version of hugging a few days ago. She quickly walks up to one of us and wraps her arms around our legs.

Her sense of humor has popped up in a couple of new ways over the past week, too.

First, we have a routine for entering and leaving our apartment through the basement garage. When we leave, I lock the apartment door and hand her the keys to play with, and collect the keys as we leave the garage. When we get back, I open the door to the garage and hand her the keys, which I need to enter a cubicle housing the elevator and again our apartment. She quickly figured out when I need keys on the return trips, so she started holding up the keys at those points. She was quite proud of herself and beamed about this at first. But after a while, I guess that became old hat, so she tried to mix things up. Now, she sometimes holds the keys up, but refuses to let me take them, smiling and making a sound midway between a laugh and a "baby bark".

Second, she has lately had an insatiable appetite for our singing. She waves her hands like a conductor for this. Tired of my usual repertoire one day, I added a song about a train from one of our parenting classes/play dates. At one point, the song stops and I have to say, "Stop! Look! And listen!" as I make apprpriate hand gestures. On "listen", this means I hold my hands up to my ears, as if to gather more noise. She would crack up every time I did this for the first couple of days, and my best guess is that it's because it makes me look funny to her. I don't have the biggest ears in the world, but they do stick out a little, and adding my hands must make them look enormous...

2. According to a brief article at New Scientist, wood pulp -- treated to form nanocrystalline cellulose (NCC) -- is the next wonder material:

NCC will replace metal and plastic car parts and could make nonorganic plastics obsolete in the not-too-distant future, says Phil Jones, director of new ventures and disruptive technologies at the French mineral processing company IMERYS. "Anyone who makes a car or a plastic bag will want to get in on this," he says.

The process for creating NCC was discovered decades ago, but it seems that many technological improvements were necessary for cheap manufacture to become feasible.

3. I enjoyed reading about these "Four Geeky Laws that Rule Our World".

4. Heh! Google has added Bacon Number functionality to its search engine. Here's an example.

-- CAV