Updates are in order.
The other week Isaac started signing including pointing, waving, nodding, and so on. He started standing on his own with gusto, and almost takes steps. He also loves crawling all around, giving kisses, getting hugs, playing peek-a-boo, pattycake. His babbling is a little more orderly, and he'll go into phases of saying "aba" (Korean for daddy), but it's still pretty babbly. However, he's quite adept with his hands. He started eating just about everything he can eat at this age, and likes to fill up with us whenever we eat. He is, in my estimation, a fairly easy baby, having a minimum of fits and squirms, and mainly only if he's tired.
Orry started drawing faces and objects with more discernable features. Like small circles and dots for eyes, and spiders with many legs and so on. He uses Korean more for introductions and phrases like thank you, and demonstrates a lot of new concepts and ideas every day it seems. He likes to go on excursions with Bonnie during the day, and well, he likes just about everything. He was in a really whiny phase lately, but seems to be on the tail end of it (I'm not holding my breath there). He is partly well mannered and an all around good and fun little tot. He likes "studying" Korean flashcards, and entertaining himself with reading materials, as I reported earlier. He is quite reasonable and growing more aware of his emotions.
Bonnie gets the MVP award for the last few months (if not years). And she also earns the Most Improved award. She has been gobbling up Korean food like a Korean lately, and also learning the language more than any of us. We got some books in Seoul that she's going through and I think it helps her fill in some language gaps. Plus, last week she went to this reading-to-your-tots center and got some easy Korean books that she's excited about, and all that really helps language acquisition.
I get the math award, for my continues studies and practice of applied mathematics. In a way I am making up for the lazy practice of math since my high school days. I am the type that likes to learn the theory and structure, even at the cost of believing what is taught as opposed to rigorous investigation of mathematical proofs. The upside is that I conceptually understand a good bit of the relationship and know-how of various fields within mathematics. The downside is I have always been mostly unpracticed with the mechanics of working out the applications of theory, and working on "real-life" problems that use mathematics. As it turns out, this is precisely actuarial work. So I am getting a new training on material that is pretty familiar. Apart from that, I eat and sleep and play with the tots and Bonnie a few hours each day. And I teach a few English classes each week at school, as required by my employment. My fun classes are kindergarten and sixth grade.
The mountains are snowy again, but this morning was so calm and pleasant that I suspect Spring is on its way again.
Ants, they say, weigh on average .3 milligrams, which is 3x10^-7 kg. There are between 10^16 and 10^17 of them, those little rascals. This means there are between 3x10^9 and 3x10^10 kgs of ants. Which is another way of saying three billion to 30 billion kgs. Humans, on the other hand, weigh an average of 50 kg (5x10^1kg), and as you know, there are fewer than (but close to) 7 billion (7x10^9) of us. So we weigh, collectively, less than (but close to) 350 billion kgs (35x10^10). It looks like we outweigh ants by a factor of ten.
However, I could not find good sources for the weight of an average ant, nor for how many there are. I put these figures together from a wikipedia article on biomass, which was very much less than reliable. For a good wikipedia article, though, that is well sourced, and interesting, check out this ant wikipedia entry. And, for a good read, if your anterested at all, check out Journey to the Ants. In online form, I read about a supercolony in Japan that had over a million queens and their respective colonies interrelating in one humungous ant city. I also read somewhere that an ant colony of normal size has has many brain cells as a human. Again, I am skeptical.
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