Also Sprach das Technokind

dOur house has many night-lights. This shouldn't come as any surprise. The children need them, and the children tend to move around a bit at night. I hated night-lights at first; I couldn't imagine how anyone could possibly sleep with a bizarre little glow at ankle-level in a corner of the room. But eventually I came to accept them - even embrace them. And tonight my relationship with night-lights took on new life.

Tonight, Daniel seemed to be pressing a button on a night-light in Madeleine's room, after lights-out. I had fled the boys room, since they seemed to have no intention of going to sleep, and took refuge in Madeleine's room, with the laptop. This was a good haven; Madeleine was quite happy in bed with Amy in our bedroom, so her own room served, as usual, as an excellent late-night/early-morning "office"... But Madeleine was making her rounds, and suddenly yelled out to the boys, with whom she had apparently been discussing the matter previously: "Boys - I found him! He's in my room!" So suddenly I had company.

Daniel entertained himself by doing what appeared to be pushing a button on the night-light, plugged into one of the sockets, causing it to flicker on and off, on and off, in rapid, more-or-less rhythmic, fashion, like a strobe light. It turned out that he wasn't actually pushing a button, though; he was holding his hand over the light-sensor. Normally, the light sensor picks up that light is on in the room, and causes the night-light to turn off, or otherwise fails to pick up any light - because the room is dark - and causes the night-light to turn on. So it's an excellent toggling mechanism, to ensure that the night-light is on only when needed, in response to the lightedness or darkness of the room, at any moment.

But with Daniel's hand over the sensor, the night-light went into a kind of vicious circle - or virtuous circle, if you're six or eight, rather than an old grump like me. The light-sensor was already on when Daniel entered the room, since the whole room was dark aside from the Laptop of Unending Onlineness, on my lap. By holding his hand in front of it, Daniel effectively reflected the light from the night-light onto the night-light's own sensor, causing it to turn off. However, once it turned off, the room became authentically dark again, and the light would turn on. As the light would turn on, it would reflect off Daniel's hand, on to the sensor, and the sensor would turn the light off. With the light off, the night-light would turn back on again. And so on. And so on. Many, many times in a single minute, like an especially sadistic disco, at the risk of being redundant.

I was annoyed at what I thought was Daniel pushing some little-known strobe-light button on the night-light. But at that moment, the workings of the virtuous circle, the dualistic cycle of ever-flickering light-and-darkness, was explained to me - by Ian. Ian understood exactly how Daniel's (and Ian's) clever engagement of the night-light worked, and he explained it in terms extremely close to ones that I would have used; the main difference between his (actual) explanation and my own synopsis was that he omitted a few eccentric metaphors. But there is another difference: Ian was the one who figured it out! I grilled him to find out where he had heard such an precise, technical explanation of the dynamics of a much-abused night-light, and, for that matter, where Daniel got the idea of confusing and confounding a night-light in this wackily creative way, to elicit such a chain reaction. It turned out that the boys discovered this dynamic quite serendipitously one time, when one of them - Daniel, I think - accidentally held his foot over the night-light. And Ian was the one who had figured out the mechanics of it, in exactly the terms he used to present it to me.

Ian is eight. I am olde - so olde I spell olde the olde waye... And yet he was the one to discover Ian's Law of Night-Light Schizodynamics, and explain it in comprehensible terms to Daddy, after Daddy yelled at Daniel for pushing a non-existent strobe-light button on an extremely rudimentary household gadget.

I think next maybe I'll let Ian look under the hood at my Corolla, and see if he can think of some way of feeding it a slightly less expensive fuel than refined petroleum, like maybe water or air or vacuum...

(January 2, 2012)