Things you may not know about babies

Some things I didn’t know myself.

  • Babies are basically legally blind when they are first born. A newborn baby is greeted with a mere smudge in the direction of a light. As time goes by they soon gain some sort term vision and will recognize faces if closer then a foot after a few weeks. Even then, their ability to differentiate different colors is limited until their eyes develop more. At around seven months a baby can see almost as well as you can. For more information check out this page on visual development.
  • Babies don’t have kneecaps so to speak. They have knees but they don’t start to ossify until around age three.
  • Newborn babies must be burped in order to ensure the peacefulness of the household. Many parents learn quickly to burp their baby often. What some parents might miss out on though is the nature of burping itself. In order for a burp to be successful the person burping must be orientated upwards. Otherwise any solids or fluids in the stomach will come along with the gas. That being said babies do not require much burping or really any at all as soon as they start sitting up and moving around. So burp often until your child develops the strength for locomotion.

That’s all I’ve got at the moment.

Bookmark Roundup 1

I have this collection of well meaning bookmarks that just expands until I have to dump them somewhere. I’ve tried out some of the social bookmark sites but none of them have the one feature I really need which is to somehow give me the time to go through them.

So I thought I’d post them here with a brief description.

  • I found this pretty good list of Vista tips. My tip would be just don’t install Vista.
  • STADS is a program to easily switch out the default audio device. Unfortunately support for multiple audio devices is lacking. I’ve yet to try out how Vista handles this with it’s improved mixer.
  • A photo gallery of sexy Star Wars recruiter posters. I really should have one of them as my wallpaper. Though my current wallpaper isn’t bad.
  • Here is an interesting interview with John Carmack about the ongoing debate to Ray Trace or not.
  • I’ve always wanted to learn how to Silkscreen so I could make my own witty T-shirts.
  • WordNet® is a large lexical database of English. In other words it’s an online dictionary/thesaurus thing that’s also available for download.
  • The United States Navy Electricity & Electronics Training Series seemed like a good place to brush up on my electronics.
  • The css-discuss wiki seems like a real good place to get some design advice.
  • One of these days I’ll memorize a solution to the Rubik’s Mini Cube. For now I have a few general moves and then I stab around in the dark until it magically solves itself.
  • If I ever invent something this Online Machine Shop might be a good place for some prototypes.
  • I’m the proud owner of a partial Lego Mindstorms kit. The Bricx Command Center looked like the best free software out there to control and program it.
  • We really hate how outdated the game Guess Who is. If you ever wanted to design an accurate game the 2000 Census seems like a good place to start.

I think that’s it for this round. I hope you enjoy all the things I’ll never have time for.