Hsin-Hao Yu's Personal Blog

(SPOILERS) We watched a video of Cirque du Soleil’s O. I actually watched the show live in Las Vegas with my wife many years ago, but I had completely forgotten how it begins. Before the curtain opened, a clown invited a man in the audience to participate in a little sketch. The man was reluctant first, but eventually agreed to play along. As he approached the curtain, he was suddenly sucked in to the fantasy world of O in a very spectacular way. The next scene revealed that the man was actually part of cast, who was planted in the audience.

As a PhD student, I took a class in animal behaviour. I didn’t work very hard and have forgotten most of it. However, since I became a father, I have been thinking more about this class. One of the papers I read was the classic “The social function of the intellect” by Nicholas Humphrey, first published in 1976. The paper is packed with insightful analogies. For example, Humphrey offered an interesting interpretation of Robinson Crusoe. According to him, Crusoe’s life on the island was a relatively simple and easy one, which he managed without too much trouble. His life only became challenging after the arrival of Friday.

I know that overgeneralisation is a controversial topic in the study of language acquisition, but here is an example: Zoe (4yo) used to say “even better”, but recently she started to say “even gooder”.

An interesting topic I studied in an animal behaviour class was about the concept of culture in animal societies. I started to think about the transmission of culture recently because I noticed that my 4yo daughter Zoe’s childcare playgroup has developed their own culture. When Zoe started to use a new word, I used to assumed that she learned it from the childcare educators. But recently I noticed that the children are teaching each other. For example, Zoe referred to her gym teacher as “torch Aaron” or “toch Aaron” instead of “coach Aaron”. I thought it was her own coinage until I heard other children talking about “toch Aaron”.

We were watching a gun fight scene on TV. Zoe (4yo) asked “Why are there so many pew-ers?” Me: “what’s a pew-er?” She answered: “The thing that goes pew pew”.