Efforts and ramblings

[sniffnoy]

Sometimes, factorial sucks. Fortunately, sometimes, lcm(1,...,n) works just as well.

So though its second meeting has yet to occur, Aaron has gone and turned "a few people reading Battle Royale aloud" into "reading novels aloud club". He is currently attempting to get RSO status for this, though it is currently entirely within Tufts. He's gotten quite a lot of people, but naturally most aren't going to come until we finish Battle Royale, since they'd be joining in the middle. What'll be next? No idea. I think best suggestion so far has been Ender's Game.

Apparently Wai Lee made a not-really-existent skateboarding RSO, though I don't know that he's gotten any actual money for it. But we do intend to buy actual snacks...

So today at dinner, Grant and Jim are there, and one of them asks me, "If we got Shuo's home phone number, would you call her?" I suppose so? I have to wonder why they are singling me out for this... apparently they managed to find this out somehow. Meanwhile apparently even Summer hasn't heard from Shuo in months. I tried writing Shuo an actual letter to see if the sheer singularity of the event might prompt her to reply, but no such luck. But again... why is it that they asked me if I would do it, rather than if I would join in it, or would want to be there? I don't like phones and would probably be entirely awkward just randomly calling her up. I suspect there must be some reason they singled me out, but what it is I have no idea. Unless they actually didn't mean to do so and I just misinterpreted the whole thing.

Something I meant to write about a while ago but never did: It happened one day at lunch that Hannah - the RHs' 3-year-old daughter, you'll recall - and for whatever reason I started telling/asking her about how many toes different animals have. She was saying all sorts of odd answers, like saying that people only have one toe, which confused me until finally Sarah told me that Hannah didn't know how to count yet. It hadn't even occurred to me. I mean, she can talk, she can think, surely she can count? But no, it doesn't work that way. She knew 1 and 2, Sarah said, and was learning 3, and Hannah chimed in "And 0!" forming her hands into big circles around her eyes. But if that's true, why did she say people only have one toe? Maybe she's good at recognizing that something is 1 or 2, but not that it isn't? And so tends to use those answers whenever asked for a number, maybe?

-Harry

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

We learned about the baby counting thing in my developmental psych class. Apparently cardinality is somewhat of a challenge for young children for numbers greater than 2. You ask for 2 of something and you'll end with six or seven, and then asking them to correct will lead to essentially a random walk.
The really strange thing is that when asked to count to say, ten, kids can often count to ten (1 2 3 4, etc) but can't count out exactly ten objects. The connection between ordinals and cardinals doesn't kick in until they learn about 4 or 5 (as cardinals).
It's kind of strange that she said 1 rather than 2, though. Children even as young as her ought to be able to distinguish between singular and plural since that uses a different system. Although supposedly above 4 it starts getting confusing, so maybe that's why.

[sniffnoy.livejournal.com]

Very interesting. I may be misremembering slightly, I'm writing this up several weeks after it happened. Interesting note about ordinals vs. cardinals - in fact I think I saw something that hinted at that, though I can't remember what it was...

Now, anonymous person, please identify yourself. Doesn't have to be any sort of "real" name (though a handle you use elsewhere would be nice), just something consistent so we can identify when it's you posting.