25 Weeks

I have no idea what is wrong with this god damn baby site. It says that the little guy is roughly the size of a rutabaga. A rutabaga! A cross between a cabbage and a TURNIP! Again with the turnip. Sigh. So the statistics on my baby's size are going to have to wait. Cabbage is cool. In french men have a little sweet nothing they say to their lovers "Ma petite chou", translated "My little cabbage". It is supposed to imply honest love. And if you remember the cereal conversion we are back on Riboflavin (Cabbage is a good source of this). And according to Wikipedia's article on cabbage

Some claim it is effective in relieving painfully engorged breasts in breastfeeding women.

This I find terribly terribly humorous. Rutabaga I guess had a good reputation until about WW1 where it became a food of last resort. The baby site should take such things into consideration when attaching a size to my baby. For we all must admit that '[we] have one language but it is not [ours]" -Vaguely from Jacques Derrida.

So... My baby is about 13 inches, a baker's dozen of inches if you will allow me the weird turn of phrase. Cool idea on the origin of Baker's Dozen, of coarse stolen from Wiki:

The oldest known source and most probable origin for the expression "baker's dozen" dates to the 13th century in one of the earliest English statutes, instituted during the reign of Henry III (1216-1272), called the Assize of Bread and Ale. Bakers who were found to have shortchanged customers could be liable to severe punishment. To guard against the punishment of losing a hand to an axe, a baker would give 13 for the price of 12, to be certain of not being known as a cheat. Specifically, the practice of baking 13 items for an intended dozen was to prevent "short measure", on the basis that one of the 13 could be lost, eaten, burnt, or ruined in some way, leaving the baker with the original legal dozen. The practice can be seen in the guild codes of the Worshipful Company of Bakers in London.

Bitsy, the next potential worlds smallest cat, is 6.5 inches tall and weighs 1.5 pounds. So my baby, standing if he could, would stand at twice the height, but at the same weight of the world's smallest cat. I know I'm lazy... I got distracted by turnips.

Okay NOW the baby.

Remind me about the awesome I have planned for week 27... That is 3 weeks away! This past friday the baby turned into a 24 week old fetus and I had quit smoking for roughly 24 hours. So want to know what is really awesome about the baby right now? He weighs in at about 1.25 pounds and he will gain .5 pounds this week. My child will experience a 40% weight gain in a week. Let me put that in perspective for you. I weigh 220 pounds. If I gain 40% of my current weight I will weigh 308 pounds. If I put that on in 7 days I will need to consume 88 pounds or roughly 308000 calories in that time period. Soooo confession time, I love Burger King. Always have. I love their fries and I enjoy a Whopper with cheese. This meal would not be complete without Dr. Pepper either. All this weighs in at about 1790 calories. I sense a stomach ache. Essentially I'd have to eat 25 Whoppers with cheese, Large fries and Large Dr. Peppers PER DAY FOR A WEEK. In order to put on the proportion weight my baby is. Of coarse the cool part is just a single Whopper with Cheese, fries and the soda and I'll gain roughly .5 pounds.

23 Weeks

So I'm a little sad today. Turns out my baby is the size of a mango (roughly 13 inches and 1.1 pounds) and mango is in the same family as poison ivy. I tried to find a weight conversion that consisted of finding out how much one leaf of poison ivy weighs and then noting that goats will graze on poison ivy I had an idea. I looked up a popular docile dairy goat breed that has found its way into the hearts of Maine farmers, Oberhasli, and the typical goat of this breed needs about 5-6 pounds, says 5.5, of dry food a day. I was going to see how much my baby's worth of poison ivy could feed said goat in a day. THEN I knew that this goat can produce as much as 4655 pounds of milk a year (this is roughly 1034 Gallons). Now a gallon of milk is about 16 cups and a serving size of Lucky Charms has a serving size of about 1 cup. So suppose you like your cereal to milk at a 2:1 ratio then this goat can produce enough milk for 33088 bowls of Lucky Charms. I was going to cut this by the amount of Poison Ivy my baby would be and then draw the conclusion of how many people my baby could supply with 83% of their daily allowance of Riboflavin (based on a 2000 calorie diet of coarse). **ANOTHER EDIT: So turns out I'm a moron, i don't need to know the weight of a leaf. Suppose a goat ingests my baby's weight in poison ivy, this is about 20% of his daily feed in a day. In one day the goat may produce 2.8 gallons, not accounting for leap years. 20% of that production is .56 gallons or 9 cups. This would correspond to 9 people who can get their Riboflavin from Lucky charms... AWESOME.**

Instead I went with something more mundane. My baby weighs 1.1 pounds which may be transformed into 7700 Grain, a very precise measurement of gun power. A common round now found in M16s is the 5.56mm which comes in 10 round "stripper clips" (a small piece of metal that holds the bottoms of each round). Each of the 5.56mm rounds is 77 grain so my baby, if he were made of gunpowder could arm 100 soldiers with a clip for their M16, or probably more practically arm 5 soldiers with 20 clips.

After thinking about the gunpowder conversion I found out that typical "old-school" gun powder is 73% Saltpeter (this makes my baby .803 pounds of saltpeter if he were again composed of gunpowder). Alton Brown, one of my favorite foodies, has a recipe for Corned Beef that calls for 2 tablespoons saltpeter for a 5 pound brisket. Alas, i couldn't find out how much 2 tablespoons of saltpeter weighs so I couldn't find out if my baby's .803 pounds of saltpeter could brine my 220 pounds if I were a brisket. I'm guessing it could and then some, but I wanted to be sure.
**EDIT: So I found out, through the guidance of Lydia that Saltpeter is 2.109 g/cubic cm. Doing all the necessary conversions results in my baby's .803 pounds being able to brine 29 pounds of brisket for corned beef.**

Conversations.

I've noticed recently that I am incapable of wanting to discuss anything but my baby. He isn't even born yet. Golly gee willikers! It is kinda funny what me sort of prepping myself for fatherhood and my impending career as a professor have done to me. I've become absolutely infatuated with mentoring and advice giving. I'm sure many find my constant suggestions annoying, but I feel like I cannot help it. Soon there will be a little dude asking me the craziest questions.

Another funny thing that has been hitting me is Halloween. This holiday is going to rock so hard it hurts for like the next 15 years or so. Next year I have 3 costume designs:

1. I dress like a Gundam and the baby like my pilot and I carry him in a harness.
2. I dress like a fighter jet and the baby, in a harness, like a missile.
3. Lydia, Me and the baby dress like Olive Oil, Popeye and Swepea.

That is all I can think of now. My bet is that by next Halloween we will just be happy to put the baby in a silly costume and carry him around a bunch. I think it would be awesome if EVERY day he was in a halloween costume except for October 31st itself. hehe talk to you later guys.

Building off of yesterday

The new Hummer 2 has 325 horsepower at 5200 rpm, 1 horsepower is 33000 foot-pounds/min. My baby is about a foot long and weighs about a pound. Thus a Hummer 2 has the required power to fully displace my baby 10,725,000 times in one minutes. Let the first displacement go up one foot from zero, then back down to zero, then down to negative one foot and then back to zero. this corresponds to 2,681,250 cycles per min. This translates into 44687.5 Hz, roughly the highest frequency you find in dog whistles.

Faithful followers.

So faithful readers... yes both of you. Sorry it has been a while since I've written. I've been a little busy with school and shit. It is official that I will be doing thesis work on consensus modeling which i'm currently finding pretty exciting. I'm also doing some research in expression of networks in some very cool ways (as Rank 1 matrices and such).

My baby is 20 weeks old. That is 10.5 oz. and 10 inches head to toe (it isn't curled up as much any more so measurements don't need to be made head to bottom). Supposedly that is the length of a banana. I worked it out. My baby weighs as much as about 66 cubic centimeters of titanium. This is about half the average precipitation in Osaka. So if it rained titanium for 6 months, then a measurer thingy (I can't find a technical term) would collect my baby's current weight. RAD.

Baby update

So it turns out that my baby really likes a booming male voice. In one of Lydia's classes her professor has such a voice and she sits out front. It is in this class that the baby enjoys a good jazzercise. I find this really exciting. My baby's hair is sprouting now on the head. If its a boy he better enjoy it while it lasts. We are having trouble with boy's names right now. Last I knew a list comprising of Malcolm, Pascal, Jude, & Ari were on the table (at least my side of the table). Looking at my baby site they have some strange suggestions for unique names: Banana, Boston (i actually like this one), Hamilton, Espn (you've got to be kidding me! at least Nesn would be better :P), and Sprout. One of their weird names, Cyprus, is actually pretty bad ass. Oh my baby is 6" head to butt and the arms and legs are in proportion. Doing some "idealized" segmenting that means my baby's head is about 1.5" and the body is the remaining 4.5" meaning the arms are about 5". Cool. 5" pythons, or delicate branches, in there. Using my body as a proportionate measure my baby has a 1" fist! So if my baby could hit as hard as i can it would have roughly 4.5 times the impact.... AWESOME.

Formation

It is pretty spectacular how deformed a fetus is while growing and how everything still just comes together and falls in place. This week my baby's ears have achieved their final position but stick out a little. For some reason I have a vision of Will Smith-like ears on a baby in momma's belly. That is some special kind of silly.

The baby site reports that my baby is the length of a green pepper, roughly 5.5 inches long. I prefer to think of the BL 5.5 inch medium gun. For those that don't know the measurement on artillery such as this, i.e. the 5.5 inches, is the caliber or diameter of the projectile it fired. So while it will be roughly 10 years until my baby weighs as much as one of the projectiles fired by said gun it is as long as they were wide.

17 weeks...

My baby is now 17 weeks old. I love the rediculousness of baby sites. My baby weighs 5 oz. and according to Baby Center that means my baby weighs as much as a turnip... A TURNIP?! How is that supposed to connect to me? I'm not the prince-archbishop of Salzburg! Incidentally my baby weighs the same as a box of Digiorno: Pepperoni Garlic Bread Pizza does on the moon. See that would be how you connect to the average dad about the weight of their baby. Compare it to something that tastes good and put it in a cool place.
(EDIT: In case you're wondering the apparent conversion from earth weight to moon weight is roughly 1/6)