The Ruark Kids » Mersenne

First Crawling!

John — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 12:50:43 +0000

We’ve been trying for days if not weeks to get Thalia to start to crawl. It’s been tilting at windmills, especially given that Siena didn’t crawl until 11 months. But we’ve seen the hints of crawling before. In the few seconds Thalia tolerates being on her tummy, she sometimes had tucked a leg up, put the foot down, and if lucky found a good purchase with the floor that caused her to push herself forward rather than slip her foot back when she straightened out the leg. So she has the means.

What’s been lacking are the motive and the intent.

Fortunately, with Thalia’s increased interest in Arrowroot cookies (we’ve been unable to find Zwieback’s anywhere, and in fact Wikipedia seems to think that they been discontinued, oh no!), motive can now finally be acquired.

So I got Thalia nice and hungry by delaying her evening night-cap (4 oz. formula, soon to be cut with water, have you noticed how cherub contains chub?), set her on her tummy, and got down on the floor in front of her with one of the little Arrowroot cookies.

Voila! She took a look at that, screwed her face all up, and, over the course of a few minutes, managed to heave and push and drag herself over to me to acquire the prize.

It might not have been official crawling on the hands and knees, but it’s close enough to declare victory.

And, in other news, Siena finally found a new Mersenne prime, Mama got to operate on a wolverine, and I get to wish you a happy April 1st.

45th Mersenne Prime discovered?

John — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 02:06:26 +0000

The fine folks over at mersenne.org are reporting that they might have found a new Mersenne Prime, the 45th. This would be the largest known explict prime (I think that means they know all the digits). There is a chance the number will have over 10 million digits. Reading one digit a second for 24 hours a day, that would require over 115 days to read. Verification is underway on two separate systems, they report, and that will take almost another two weeks. Two weeks to determine is a specific number is prime or not! Amazing.

Link here: http://mersenne.org/prime.htm

Oh, and here’s a picture of Siena after shucking some corn:

Cheerios Rock!

John — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 18:53:21 +0000

At Siena’s last doctor’s appointment, our pediatrician asked, “Are you feeding her small solids like Cheerios yet?” I said, um, no, we weren’t really sure when to start that. He made a note–more of a check really–on his doctor’s tiny little pad of paper. Actually, each time I answered a question in some unfavorable way (no she’s not crawling yet; no she hasn’t been rolling over very much; no she isn’t saying anything other than Da Da; no she hasn’t discovered a new Mersenne prime yet), he made a little note. I was beginning to get worried about the number of notes he was making and what happens to that little notepad when we leave.

Thus inspired to advance Siena to the next stage of her culinary evolution, I bought a box of Cheerios. And I can say, without reservation or qualification, that Cheerios rock. I’d forgotten how small they are. She can down these things easily. So we spill a bunch on her tray, and watch her pound them into little bits (she likes pounding). Periodically she will manage to get one or two into her fist, and then begins the exercise to get the little inner-tube of oaty goodness into her mouth. She’s successful only about 30% of the time currently, and needs help putting them on her tongue when she fails and get frustrated.

She employs those little fangs of hers to cut them in half. Here we run into a problem. In Siena’s mouth-view of food, it seems to be that if a morsel is in her mouth yet outside the bounds of her teeth, then it’s better to let it languish on the periphery, shuffle down to her chin, and eventually fall to the tray or floor, than to try to scoop it up and swallow it. The practical upshot of which is that a good portion of Cheerios product that makes it into her mouth doesn’t actually get eaten.

Needless to say, the dog loves this entire process. The scorecard reads something like this: Dog-100, Siena-30.

P.S. I realize every other parent on the planet already knows about Cheerios. Nevertheless, it’s the little epiphanies of first-time parenthood that we are tracking here in the first place, so in the end, you just have to deal.

P.P.S. I need to remind myself to write a post about my grand unification theory of baby development and punctuated equilibrium.