Meet Max

We have reproduced! Max is one month old now. Here's his birth announcement photo, where he looks adorable:

Apart from when he's asleep, this is what he looks like most of the time, though:

I am proud to have spawned a baby infant:

So far, he is a little demon out to make sure we never sleep. I love him, but at some point he'd better grow out of the helpless newborn blob phase. At least there's plenty of time to read books, papers, and contrarian blog posts about child development, the (non)-effects of parenting on eventual personality and behavior, and how to maximize a baby's IQ.

My totally benign mad dad science experiments thus begin. First up: I need to get a sweet EEG cap with active electrodes that can be comfortably worn by baby Max for hours per day so that he can start learning to control robots, lights, sounds, and more with his plastic baby brain while he's learning to control his limbs anyway. I don't know what kind of robots yet, but how cool (and not creepy) would it be to have a two-month-old riding a robot spider around with his head lighting up red whenever he cackles maniacally, emitting discordant mood-related noises based on his brain's electrical activity?

Totally cool. Let me know if you have any tips, expertise, or cautions about such EEG-controlled baby infant robot hackery. Better yet, if you want to team up, since I am no pro at either EEG or hardware. Yet.

I also want to get a solution for lifelogging everything (audio, hopefully video) from the baby's perspective, even better if we can stream speech recognition and start counting words and doing spaced repetition learning on his nascent vocabulary. Anyone seen any cool tech that could be hacked together for this and perhaps placed either on a baby or on his robot steed?

Nick

Hacking on CodeCombat, a multiplayer programming game for learning to code. Mastermind behind Skritter, the most powerful Chinese character learning app.

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