:baby_symbol: Parenting advice - you're gonna get hit
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@Zerosquare said in
Parenting advice - you're gonna get hit:@dkf said in
Parenting advice - you're gonna get hit:Along with the painkillers for the parents.
Ear plugs are cheaper, more effective, and less addictive.
But then how will Big Pharma take over the world?
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@Polygeekery said in
Parenting advice - you're gonna get hit:My kids have wicked senses of humor. I'm very proud.
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@dkf said in
Parenting advice - you're gonna get hit:@acrow said in
Parenting advice - you're gonna get hit:But I posit that the headphones are even more important an accessory than the power supply.
Along with the painkillers for the parents.
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Today we go to a science museum. They have a game setup where they put a skull cap on you and you control the position of a ball by your brain waves. The person who is most relaxed "pushes" a ball into the opponent's goal. Within seconds of starting my kids realized it was more fun to make themselves angry and hyper and flip the rules of the game.
My kids are awesome. They had way more fun with their version of the game.
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As story with pictures.
A couple of days ago my youngest managed to lock the toilet door. While he was not in the toilet, but had just come out.
You see, there's this older type of toilet door lock in Finland, where you lock it from the inside by turning the handle up. A very simple mechanism. And while it's technically possible to leave the handle in an 11 o'clock position such that it might click itself into the locked position from the next bump, that very rarely ever happens because you have to turn the handle down to open the door. But... that didn't prevent me from having to figure out how to open one from the outside around 22:00, one evening this week.
And no, detaching the door handle doesn't work here, because this was the even older, simpler version with the inside and outside handles on separate axes.
Anyways, long story shorter, I figured I could see into the toilet by jamming my camera above the door. Although there was a frame board in the way of completely pushing something in, the selfie-camera was near enough to teh edge to manage to clear the door.
The screen constantly timed out though, so I started video recording to keep it on, so I could see what I was doing. Hence you get to enjoy stills from said video.
Here's me trying to... something with rope. First thing I thought of:
Unfortunately there wasn't enough of an opening at the side of the door to get any proper sideways force. The rope just kept slipping off. ...When it didn't just slip too low, anyway:
Next attempt was with iron wire. Notice the 2mm wire next to teh handle:
Took me 3 drilled holes to get one level with the inside handle. Different axes inside and outside, remember?
Here's me drilling the... 3rd hole, I think. In case you're wondering about the wrong ring finger, the phone mirrored the video.
to figure out how to prevent that; I rarely use the selfie camera anyway.
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Finally, after 30 minutes, I caved and drilled a much larger hole at an angle:
And was able to pull the handle with the iron wire.
Yay. Door is finally open. And nobody had to relieve themselves in the shower in the meantime either.
Now I just have to figure out what to do to the 4 holes on the door.
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@acrow This is why a typical American interior door can be unlocked from either side. On one side, you get the user-friendly lock, and on the other side, there's a tiny hole with a recessed button to unlock it from the outside. It means that you've never really locked the door, which helps when there are kids involved.
And training kids on them involves two parts: teaching them how to unlock them in an emergency, and then teaching them to only unlock them in an emergency.
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@PotatoEngineer Typical new doors in Finland have similarly a square key-hole on the outside for turning the lock in case of emergency. I assume that suitable keys are sold somewhere. I just use a pair of pliers for those.
The door in question here was from the 1960s. They've since been banned in the building codes, for a good reason. But old buildings still have them.
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@acrow Mine has a slot for a flathead screwdriver.
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@acrow said in
Parenting advice - you're gonna get hit:Now I just have to figure out what to do to the 4 holes on the door.
Tell your visitors that some shooting happened a few days ago, ...
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@BernieTheBernie said in
Parenting advice - you're gonna get hit:@acrow said in
Parenting advice - you're gonna get hit:Now I just have to figure out what to do to the 4 holes on the door.
Tell your visitors that some shooting happened a few days ago, ...
Those dang American tourists!
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My kids, so far anyway, have really awesome friends. Friends that I even like the parents of. But my oldest has fallen in with the most unique group. They're my kind of nerdy.
As an example, one of the kids in his friend group is an Indian boy who memorizes the statistics of military aircraft, ships and other stuff the way other kids might do the same with fantasy football players. This all seems odd to me, and the reason that I brang up his ethnicity, because Indian people aren't usually big military aficionados. They always seem more pacifist. But I've never known that many Indian people in anything more than a casual acquaintance sense so
do I know?Anyway, he's fun. Whenever he's over he borrows books from me which I used to always run by his dad until his dad told me not to worry about it because he wouldn't ever borrow anything that was inappropriate. Also, I assume his dad has never perused my bookshelf.
Then there's another kid who the first time I met him he was wearing an "Executive Outcomes" t-shirt. Which I also thought was odd. What kind of 12 year old boy wears such a shirt? It even had the stylized knight chess piece logo on it. Whatever, he may have got it from somewhere and just thought it looked cool or something? I mean, their logo is pretty awesome.
Then a couple of months later he comes over and he's wearing a "Sandline International" t-shirt. Okay, no way this is a coincidence.
"Big fan of Simon Mann, eh?He just starts gushing and fanboying about him.
So yeah, he also borrows books from me on occasion. We had an "Ibis Air" t-shirt made for him for his birthday. For his birthday party his parents bought a shitload of those styrofoam and balsa wood plane/glider kits and all of the kids mixed and matched parts to see who could make the coolest looking one, the one that flew the farthest, etc.
They're my kinds of nerds.
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@Polygeekery said in
Parenting advice - you're gonna get hit:This all seems odd to me, and the reason that I brang up his ethnicity, because Indian people aren't usually big military aficionados. They always seem more pacifist. But I've never known that many Indian people in anything more than a casual acquaintance sense so
do I know?They're just people and are all over the place, as usual. There are cultural differences in what values are extolled... but that sort of thing really doesn't matter at the level of individual families, especially when they're in another country.
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@dkf this is true.
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Feel tired story of the day:
Texas couple welcomes extremely rare identical quadruplet girls
Mercedes and Jonathan Sandhu just welcomed their third, fourth, fifth, and sixth babies earlier this month. Already parents to 3-year-old and 18-month-old little boys, the parents were surprised to find themselves expecting again.
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@homoBalkanus I once bought a dog-training beanbag to help with that, but the very next day I couldn't find it anymore. I think my wife disposed of it. Now I'm looking for a good inflatable bat.
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I don't really see how that will help, but here you go:
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@Zerosquare Does it shit inflatable
?
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@BernieTheBernie said in
Parenting advice - you're gonna get hit:@Zerosquare Does it shit inflatable
?That's gonna hurt...
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I just got in a heated argument with our 8 year old over whether or not Mark Rober was wrong in one of his videos. (He was, he didn't test the premise of the title of the video, he
)
"Daddy, he used to work for NASA!!"
"I literally don't care. Almost every engineer I've ever known was an extremely intelligent idiot."
"So you think you know better than someone who worked for NASA?"
"It depends on what we're talking about, but in this case yes, he's absolutely fuc"
"Honey!! He's eight years old!"
"Fine. Mark Rober is absolutely wrong and now it is time for bed but I will prove it to you tomorrow."It took me 20 minutes to assemble a proof of concept. The video was "Testing if you can blow your own sail" and Mark Rober says you can't and tested it with a flat plane of hard plastic, which is not a sail because it doesn't billow. The billowing will make a sail work like a really inefficient impulse engine sort of similar to how a Pelton wheel works, but not a wheel.
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@Polygeekery said in
Parenting advice - you're gonna get hit:Almost every engineer I've ever known was an extremely intelligent idiot."
...
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@Polygeekery said in
Parenting advice - you're gonna get hit:It took me 20 minutes to assemble a proof of concept. The video was "Testing if you can blow your own sail" and Mark Rober says you can't and tested it with a flat plane of hard plastic, which is not a sail because it doesn't billow. The billowing will make a sail work like a really inefficient impulse engine sort of similar to how a Pelton wheel works, but not a wheel.
He still argued with me. At 8 years old I'm not sure if he's ready for me explaining the appeal to authority fallacy.
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@Polygeekery said in
Parenting advice - you're gonna get hit:@Polygeekery said in
Parenting advice - you're gonna get hit:It took me 20 minutes to assemble a proof of concept. The video was "Testing if you can blow your own sail" and Mark Rober says you can't and tested it with a flat plane of hard plastic, which is not a sail because it doesn't billow. The billowing will make a sail work like a really inefficient impulse engine sort of similar to how a Pelton wheel works, but not a wheel.
He still argued with me. At 8 years old I'm not sure if he's ready for me explaining the appeal to authority fallacy.
Just get out the old paddle and remind him who the ultimate authority is
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Our one-year-old decided that between 4 and 6 is the perfect time to give her rendition of vagina monologues.
Send cocaine.
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Both of my kids are in high-ability programs at school. Lil'Dude is in 2nd grade where his high-ability program is one where they combine two grade levels, in his case 2nd and 3rd grade. So his class is labeled "2/3 HA" and it is said like "two three high ability". This school year he was on the "2" side of this class, next year he moves to the "3" but he will have the same teacher next year and be in the same classroom, etc.
This morning we are at the bus stop, it is the last day of school and the little elementary school kids and the parents are there start talking about what grade everyone will be in next year. They ask Lil'Dude who answers very matter of factly:
"I'm going to be in the same grade again next year."Sure, that is sort of
, but it is one of those cases where what he meant to say and what everyone would take that statement to mean are very different things. What people would infer from that is exactly the opposite of reality.
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@Polygeekery considering he's your son, I'm going to assume he's doing it on purpose to fuck with everyone.
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@homoBalkanus no, he honestly had no idea. He is an extremely literal kid and he doesn't notice anything. I said Happy Birthday to one of his classmates at the bus stop the other day and he wondered how I knew it was her birthday. He never noticed the obnoxious gigantic "Happy Birthday" sign that is in her front yard, which we drive past on the way to said bus stop.
"How could you have missed that? Even Stevie Wonder could have seen that.......that joke is before your time. It's funny because Stevie Wonder is blind."He then proceeded to argue with me that there's no way he could have possibly seen because of the blindness. Nothing I could do could convince him
.Then in many other ways his sense of humor is as sharp as a straight razor.
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@Polygeekery said in
Parenting advice - you're gonna get hit:It took me 20 minutes to assemble a proof of concept. The video was "Testing if you can blow your own sail" and Mark Rober says you can't and tested it with a flat plane of hard plastic, which is not a sail because it doesn't billow. The billowing will make a sail work like a really inefficient impulse engine sort of similar to how a Pelton wheel works, but not a wheel.
dunno what billow is, but at least in a closed system that wouldn't work, the same force you blow would push your mouth back that would ultimately push your foot and the boat with it back
a boat it's not a closed system, so you could turn your head and pull the air from one direction and expel into another, and if your lungs were powerful enough for it to be noticeable I guess you'd find a way
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@sockpuppet7 said in
Parenting advice - you're gonna get hit:@Polygeekery said in
Parenting advice - you're gonna get hit:It took me 20 minutes to assemble a proof of concept. The video was "Testing if you can blow your own sail" and Mark Rober says you can't and tested it with a flat plane of hard plastic, which is not a sail because it doesn't billow. The billowing will make a sail work like a really inefficient impulse engine sort of similar to how a Pelton wheel works, but not a wheel.
dunno what billow is, but at least in a closed system that wouldn't work, the same force you blow would push your mouth back that would ultimately push your foot and the boat with it back
a boat it's not a closed system, so you could turn your head and pull the air from one direction and expel into another, and if your lungs were powerful enough for it to be noticeable I guess you'd find a way
Look up "billow" in a dictionary and see if you can figure out where your logic goes wrong. I promise you that it works. It might be 5% efficient if it is lucky, but it does work.
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@Polygeekery said in
Parenting advice - you're gonna get hit:@homoBalkanus no, he honestly had no idea. He is an extremely literal kid and he doesn't notice anything. I said Happy Birthday to one of his classmates at the bus stop the other day and he wondered how I knew it was her birthday. He never noticed the obnoxious gigantic "Happy Birthday" sign that is in her front yard, which we drive past on the way to said bus stop.
Some 35+ years ago a kid psychologist attributed my weirdness to just being smart, bored, and preferring to talk to adults to having a high IQ. they missed things like depression, severe ADHD and/or whatever else there is wrong with me
Not saying you should be worried, just some bad memories triggering, as being extremely literal was one of my quirks on that age
I also have very low scores on some kinds of "iq" and very high on others. So the expectations were aligned on the high ones and when I failed on the things I'm bad it was lazyness or whatever. Not only others but I didn't understand this and that was (is?) a big source of frustration
Even these days I get complains about mistakes cause I'm supposed to be smart, and saying that actually with this kind of things I'm borderline a retard doesn't work well as a defense
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@sockpuppet7 Once upon a time an engineer's wages were high enough to hire a secretary to cover for the retarded side. The best part is, they worked both ways; the retarded stuff from customers would also be kept away from the engineers, giving them more quiet working time.
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@acrow said in
Parenting advice - you're gonna get hit:@sockpuppet7 Once upon a time an engineer's wages were high enough to hire a secretary to cover for the retarded side. The best part is, they worked both ways; the retarded stuff from customers would also be kept away from the engineers, giving them more quiet working time.
Nowadays we call that person a product owner or project manager, make them responsible for one or more teams of engineers, and then blame them if the engineers aren’t fully insulated from the business side.
