MorningLightMountain

a little something from an immotile

Archive for the ‘Family’ Category

A child of five…

Posted by Dan G on November 22, 2011

“A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.”

Groucho Marx

Some of the rules about computers and systems are so fundamental that a child of five (in this case, rather fortuitously, Loki) can understand it and extrapolate extra rules (or scenarios).

Starting from two statements:

  • A computer can only do what it’s told to do, by humans
  • Computers don’t make mistakes, humans do

He was very quickly able to reach these conclusions:

  • A computer can’t do what it’s not been told to do
  • If a computer makes a mistake, it’s because a human made a mistake

He doesn’t quite understand the nuance of how many humans could have made the mistake (he only considers the user at the moment, not the pile of software engineers / QA / project managers / etc hidden behind the curtains), but the seed is there.

Pedants may now bang on about hardware failure ;)

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Lerryns latest posts

Posted by Dan G on November 22, 2011

Lerryn’s just updated her blog with instructions for making Sock Monkeys and “knitting” with plastic bags – Jelly Bean Boom

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Jack – the robot that Loki (and Lerryn) built

Posted by Dan G on November 19, 2011

Lerryn visited the new Poole location for Dorset scrapstore on Friday (New location for Dorset Scrapstore in Poole), and thought our son Loki would enjoy a visit, maybe getting materials to build a robot with. She described the store to him and his immediate reaction was – build a robot (one track mind) so we visited on Saturday. He loved it and was picking things out left, right and center, imaging what part it could be, how many he’d need. Lerryn suggested the more structural pieces he’d really need and one of the fab assistants found a long length of  coiled foil air ducting.

With suitable materials they set to work, Loki dictating the design whilst Lerryn guided him in terms of what would actually work. He’d apparently already worked out how to do the hands when we were in the store – making sure to get exactly ten of the pieces of tubing he’d picked for fingers.

Loki made sure to get exactly the right number of fingers

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