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Tuesday, July 23, 2013

More Engineering Feats in the Lives of Babies

"It wasn't me! Never mind what you see in the photo!"

"If a pacifier weighing 1 ounce is dropped from a 3rd floor
window, how long will it take until it hits the ground?"
"I don't know, let's try!"

"But I thought you said the washing machine needed fixing."

Legal act of engineering at age 18 months:
Toy sticks and couplers

"So if this part of the track connects here, where should we throw it?"

"Trains should be able to run without tracks. As I've proven here, it gives
us much more freedom in where we can go."
"And then we wouldn't have to reconnect the tracks we dismantled!"

Monday, July 22, 2013

Engineering Changes in our Lives

Move over Thomas Edison -
Lucas is about to discover electricity


When babies are quiet...
they are learning something new like how to
plug in mommy's computer

Many may chide me for being unfaithful to my blog for so long. But let me pose this question: How long did it take you to get a college degree? A few years?  Or a month? I've been absent from the blogosphere for approximately a month. And in that time, I have accomplished many, many feats with my assistant and younger brother Lucas. One of those feats was to earn honorary degrees in applied science and electrical engineering. And it only took us a month!

Gravity discovered?
When Edison was inventing electricity, did the masses complain that he didn't live blog his attempts? Did anyone chide Isaac Newton for not tweeting immediately when he "discovered" gravity? Oh, wait. Mommy tells me there were no blogs, tweets or even internet back then. Okay, never mind. However, I know that we would not bother them if they were in the midst of important experiments. (Unless we were babies and then we would have found a way to improve the experiment in some way.) And thus, I took the example of the greats who have gone before me, and took a hiatus from blogging just so I could gain encyclopedic knowledge of the world around me and its physical laws.

Now I am free to recount what I discovered while earning my degrees:

1. the mechanics of closing doors and how that can affect one's fingers, or his brother's
2. the disassembly of toys and their many parts
3. the knobs on the gas stove
4. the kitchen drawer wherein lie the knives
5. electrical cords
6. electrical outlets
7. how electrical cords fit into electrical outlets
8. gravity from a 4th floor window (a pacifier was sacrificed in this experiment, not a baby)
9. how to wiggle out from car seat restraints like Houdini
10. how one's poo melts in a bathtub of warm water
11. a study on how running on the couch differs from running on tile
12. how to scale a bookshelf without ropes
13. where abba's tools are located
14. a look at the trajectory of chunky puzzle pieces aimed precisely at someone's head
15. the discovery of the switch for the guillotine-like electric shades
16. the on-off button for the fan

I may have even gotten a driver's license
in this amount of time

These are but a few of our science projects and experiments that we have been running here in our apartment while mommy and abba also have been running - after us. Most days our creativity is limited as the doors to extraneous rooms are sealed shut and we are kept within sight. But there are those moments when parents are caught off guard or those 20 seconds when a sole guardian runs to the bathroom for the first time of the day. That is when we resume our quest for answers to more scientific theories be it staring down from the window to the bushes four stories below or locating the iPad charger and fixing it securely into the wall. Or locating the iPad itself and trying to crack the code so we can play without restriction!

Hm, maybe for my next degree I'll pursue computer engineering and specialize in hacking mommy and abba's passwords!