Category: General

Fanart for a song by Jonathan Coulton.

My 7 year old son gets on the internet a lot, usually sites designed for kids full of flash games, Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, Noggin, PBSKids, sometimes sites tied to products like Pop-Tarts…. also he digs Homestar Runner. My daughter enjoys flash games too, though she’s not as much of a computer addict as he is.

Last night he was on a flash games site he’s been enjoying for the past few days. I don’t know how he got to it, but I’d seen it before, and while I’d been kind of iffy about the propriety of a site with a game called “spank the monkey” for a 7 year old (it involved physically whacking a monkey with a huge hand and he thought it was hilarious), it seemed innocuous on the whole, so I didn’t object.

Anyway last night he was there, in my field of view, playing on that site, and he told me he was taking a color vision test… Looked like a real color vision test, where you see numbers among the dots. No prob. Shortly thereafter the computer emitted a horrible shriek and put a scary ghostly face on the screen. It was a shock prank.

He’s 7. He cried, of course. I would have too at that age! (I remember being haunted for years by the image of an obsidian-and-turquoise-inlaid Aztec skull I saw in an anthropology book as a child…) We comforted and consoled him… it was about time for bed so we went and read books. He did pretty good dealing with it but insisted on my staying by his bed till he was asleep. And he got up a couple times during the night.

One thing that seemed to help was that I said it would have been better if the site had had some kind of blaster gun you could use to shoot the face to pieces, like a gun from Ratchet & Clank. BLAM! BLAM! I figured he shoots scary monsters to pieces all the time on the playstation, if I could put this in that context, a scary thing on the screen that wasn’t real, that was within his power, just like the monsters in video games that he could blast, it might help.

It seemed to. he actually laughed at that idea.

That’s me! Solving all our problems with violence!

But the question now is how to prevent something like this from happening in the future? I was doing everything “right.” I was in the room with him, I could see the screen from where I was sitting, he was on a site I knew about that was as far as I knew legit, he was talking to me about what he was doing. I guess the big thing is he was on a site that was not designed for 7 year olds.

So, new rule: kids — at least, 7 year olds — only go to sites specifically designed for kids. I’m thinking some kind of whitelist setup is going to be needed here. There’s some open source filtering software for me to check out, see if it does what I want it to do.

Live and learn.

I can’t help but believe this is an authentic communication from the great beyond.

This is so damn sad. A short Salon interview about a book about the fate of Nim Chimpsky, a chimp who was raised as a human child, until the research money ran out, at which point they realized they had no idea what to do with him. In his final home, a chimp sanctuary in Texas…

One graduate student described the response that all the [research] chimps had [upon being reintroduced to other chimps] as a nervous breakdown. Nim’s brother [and the subject of another study] Ally was so terrified and upset that he suffered a kind of paralysis for a while. They often pull out all their hair; they refuse to eat; some get beaten up by other chimps because they don’t know how to respond to them.

The former graduate students in New York believe that Nim had no idea he was a chimpanzee. One of them suggested to me that Nim might have thought he was going to grow up, lose all his facial and body hair and eventually look like the people who were around him. That would be a reasonable supposition. Throughout his life, Nim preferred to be with humans.

There was a children’s book all about Nim while he was in New York, basically a photo book, and Nim kept his one copy of this book safe, even though chimps tend to wreck everything. He would bring it down and show the other chimps, then bring it back to his bunk and keep it under his sleeping area so that no one could destroy it. He would just look at pictures of his New York City family, and himself, over and over again.

That’s the kind of story that just makes you angry at people.

Of course we have a hard enough time getting human beings to treat each other with respect, care, and dignity. It’s not too surprising we can’t be trusted to treat animals that way. Even when the whole point of the experiment was to find how similar an animal could be to a human being…

Come to think of it, it’s quite possible the people who conceived of the experiment were behaviorists (the main foes of Noam Chomsky for a long time), and barely could bring themselves to believe humans actually have thoughts and feelings, much less animals.

I was just thinking that if you took _why_the_lucky_stiff and took away his LSD and X, and gave him cocaine and PCP instead, you would have Zed Shaw.

I’ve just been watching a video of _why doing a presentation on Google Video, and he’s pretty much like you’d expect from reading his work. (Or listening to the soundtrack…)