She also is full of stories that a more mature mind might not discuss, like today when we walked by a bar, she told me about one time when she and her aunt were stuck in the bar’s bathroom and they couldn’t open the door.

Three year olds should definitely be treated as social moles spying on their own families. We can no longer freely criticize people that we know from the privacy of our own homes because she’s capable of parroting anything to anybody.

I recorded the following interview with her today to capture the state of her language skills. She will often go off onto tangents about things she experienced months ago. Her language for temporally positioning events is still pretty rudimentary, with “yesterday” meaning any time in the past.

The video starts with the end of her sentence, “What are you gonna do?” when she saw me setting up the camera.

We will know if she got in to the school near our house at the end of next week. After we finished filming, I gave her the camera to “take me a picture”.

Another way that this fallacy presents itself is when someone from a wealthy nation travels to a poorer nation, which is the only way to virtually travel back in time. Some tourists think, “Oh, how quaint that the people here take their clothes down to the river by donkey and wash them in the fresh river water! How natural! This is how humans should live. I envy these people.” Shut the hell up. No you don’t. There is no rational person that washes clothes by hand that would not prefer to have a washing machine to do it for them in a tenth of the time with a hundredth of the effort. Anytime the adjective “quaint” comes to mind, ask yourself if you really mean it in a positive way. As an immigrant back to The Old World, I catch myself falling victim to this fallacy sometimes.

What set me off on this little rant was a TED Talk, by Sherry Turkle, that I saw this morning about how the internet and smartphones and texting and social networking is making us more lonely. What? Are you out of your mind? I disagree with just about every point made in this talk.

As with absolutely everything, you can do smartphone social networking too much, but reasonable people set reasonable boundaries. Yes, I have been in a room with two other people, and every one of us was using their smartphone. But I’ve also been in a room with two other people in which all three of us were reading books. Does that mean that books are destroying our relationships? Down with reading! Why aren’t we talking to each other?! Give me a break.

The world is getting better for humans by almost every metric, but something in our brains makes us long for days of yore when life was actually harder than it is now. You know that quote by Stephen Hawking?

Time travel might be possible, but if that’s the case, why haven’t we been overrun by tourists from the future?

Perhaps it’s just that no one wants to come back and live in the relative squalor.

Enjoy…it’s all Euskera to me.

I have never met Diego or even heard of him until this accusation.

We have conversations like this on a daily basis.

She talks about taking her computer (she mispronounces ordenador as denador) to work, and also staying home to work like I do. She also mentions the “Mommy took a big bag of money from work!” allegation that I mentioned earlier, adding the spurious claim that her mother “hides her money on the floor under her computer”. I did search for said treasure, but in the end, I had to conclude: Myth BUSTED. Her abuela playfully tries to get her to give up some of the riches, but Nora counters with evidence that her abuela already has money in her wallet.

Let me provide some context for the second video. Nora’s abuela is currently out of work on medical leave because she has a problem with her knee, and she has to go to physical rehabilitation a couple times a week. Also, Nora went to the doctor yesterday with her mother because her mother’s got an ear ache, so a lot of their conversation is about doctors and medicine.

They discuss las barracas, general term for carnival rides or booths that trucked into small towns in Spain during that town’s holiday week. Nora remembers them well from the time she spent with her Spanish grandparents over the winter solstice holidays. Sometimes she likes to ride them, but she has a very low tolerance for noise and centripetal force.

At one point she switches gears to talk about Parchís, a Spanish board game that is a cousin of the game I know as Parcheesi™ (they share a common Indian ancestor), that Nora and her abuela like to play together.

Her gestures are so hilarious in this video. I’m sorry it’s so long, but the cuteness refused to wane enough for me to stop recording or make an editing cut.

What blows me away most about the current stage of my daughter’s mental development is just how observant she is at noticing causes and effects and intuiting the motivations behind the agents in her world. Of course she probably asked her mother “Why are we at a the doctor?” about seven hundred times when they were there, but she has understood the reasoning and generalized it to “when someone is sick or part of them hurts, they go to the doctor to get cured”. The daycare workers tell us that her verbal and reasoning skills are considerably more advanced than her peers. And yet, her ability to identify colors, numbers or letters are at about the level of a sleepy dachshund. No doubt those abilities will arrive soon, but it’s truly fascinating watching her develop. I’m enjoying every minute of it.

This occurrence is so common that I felt it didn’t deserve much more than a tweet. What I heard a few minutes later was, ironically, exactly that, a bunch of tweeting. It is fairly common for birds to be perched on my building’s antenna at dusk, but today there were so many that they didn’t all have a place to sit. And then I saw…

Flocking birds really must be one of the most gorgeous phenomena in all of Nature. The natural ebb and flow and organic rhythm of their movement is what ballet dancers mimic on stage. Up and down and left and right, all in perfect synchronicity, and…without a choreographer!

What I love most about flocking birds is that we scientifically minded apes, using computers, have figured out just how incredibly simple an algorithm is needed to create such a seemingly complex emergent phenomenon. I know, because I wrote a program to do it. And yet, none of the beauty of said phenomenon is lost by our understanding of it.

My ability to identify birds is almost as strong as my ability to identify flowers or mushrooms or insects in that it’s pretty much non-existent, so I don’t know if these were starlings, and could thus merit the awesome term murmuration, a word which came to the attention of internauts recently with that video from Ireland. My video is not nearly as jaw-dropping as the one from Ireland, but I was certainly mesmerized as I was filming it and the several times I’ve watched it since. I just wish I’d had a less obstructed view and a better microphone to capture the whoosh! as they changed direction in an instant.

As quickly as they arrived, they departed, leaving me feeling lucky to have witnessed their momentary aerial ballet.

I asked my mother for fifty cents
To see the elephant jump the fence.
He jumped so high,
He reached the sky,
And didn’t come down ’til the fourth of July

Searching for the origins of this rhyme has been quite interesting. It seems to primarily be a playground rhyme sung whilst jumping rope. There are some indications that the origin is from the African American traditions in the southern United States. For instance, it is included on the 1956 album Music from the South, Vol 5.

It later appeared as a verse in Rufus Thomas’ 1965 classic, Walking the Dog, which was covered by Jackie Shane, The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Sonics, The Count Bishops, Stevie Ray Vaughan, The Grateful Dead and Aerosmith, among others. Quite a list, eh? Here’s the original version, which I think might be the best of them all:

I suspect the version my daughter learned from her grandmother is much closer to the original playground chant. Without further ado, I present I Asked My Mother For Fifty Cents:

Here’s the original:

Here’s the remix by Yolanda Be Cool. The actual singing doesn’t start until the 30 second mark. Just try not to tap your foot, I dare you!!

When my parents were here, and Nora began talking about my ringtone as she does sometimes, my father realized that, using his iPhone, he could call my phone using FaceTime for free over my wifi network and make my phone ring. Absolute hilarity ensued. We did this about 75 times that night. No, really, that’s how many missed calls my phone had on it when I recovered it from Nora’s grasp.