Fallacy. The real problem is real-time, complex, intelligent decision on incomplete data. Humans are remarkably able to do this, but machine intelligence still hasn't progressed far enough.
Imagine an autonomous vehicle that has to do about 10 decisions a second (this is not enough, but this helps clear matters). If your system is 99.99% accurate this means an error every 1000s, i.e. every 15 minutes or so. You wouldn't be able to drive very far.
There are no real-world intelligent decision systems that are 99.99% accurate in the world today. Far far far from it. Complex real-world decision systems are more like 60% accurate, just like the face recognition system that got a trial at Logan Airport a couple of years ago.
Like Neal Stephenson remarked on Slashdot yesterday, everyone is afraid of self-replicating nano-technology until one realizes that while the hardware is progressing very fast, the software is still crap.
Just like the X-prize hasn't put anybody in orbit yet or the Turing prize so far has only resulted in conversations that are funny for 5 minutes, the real thing is still not within grasp. It looks like it but it's not.
The bump in speed is only 0.13 GHz, you'll find that your "1GHz" 12" iBook has in fact a 1.07GHz CPU. The difference in speed is insignificant. What is significant is the price drop and the included Airport express.
Personally I found that SPEC numbers don't reflect the level of performance of the machine when I'm using it. You need to run your own benchmark.
Speaking of the IBM compiler it doesn't improve things as much as could be hoped vs. GCC. The Apple version of GCC is actually quite good. It has improved tremendously since the 10.1 days, by at least 20%
On some of my own benchmarks it matches the IBM compiler.
Orson Welles continued to direct exceptional movies, such as "The Lady from Shanghai", "Othello", "MacBeth", "Touch of Evil" and "The Trial". All in all he is credited with 38 features to his name.
"Citizen Kane" was a watershed, it is still today a very modern film. What happened is that his access to Hollywood was severely curtained after William Randolf Hearst, a media mogul at the time, took "Citizen Kane" as a direct attack against him. He tried to have the film banned. He didn't succeed in that but he got Welles blacklisted.
For the rest of his life Welles spent most of his time putting together enough money to make the films he wanted. "Citizen Kane" made him as a filmmaker but also unmade him. He only somewhat recovered from this towards the end of his life when he received an honorary Oscar for "lifetime achievement".
Note that his various films received almost all the awards that it is possible to receive in filmmaking, such as the Golden Lion in Venice and the Grand Prix at Cannes.
There is a lot of orchestral music composed after Schoenberg that is nothing like you describe.
I like Ravel and Shostakovich myself. I think Ligetti is worth listening to (e.g: Lux Aeternam, the weird choral music associated with the Monolith in "2001"). Messian had his moments. Berg can be amazing (go and see "Lulu", his last opera). Let's not forget Boulez.
In fact most of the orchestral 20th music is worth listening to. Unlike Mozart it doesn't flow into your ear but just like Mozart it doesn't take the listener for an idiot.
In case you were not talking about "contemporary" music, maybe you'd like to listen to a spot of Blues, Jazz or R&B or plain old R&R, all fine creations of the 20th century. It's not Beethoven but it's not Britney Spears either.
With all due respect I think you are the ignorant person here (that's OK we all are), or maybe you only pose as one.
Precisely. In the modern 20th century Western civilization we develop several independent ways to completely and utterly anihilate ourselves, something we never had before. Many have put a positive spin on it (no global war since) but others still believe that we are ultimately doomed.
Just like in the case of nuclear weapons where sanity has mostly prevailed so far despite a number of close calls, governments should be the entities with the power, clout and vision to do the right thing for the future, when individuals clearly cannot be expected to see beyond their immediate short term interests.
Some governments have tried and some haven't. It's not a matter of sacrificing anything. I don't see the countries of governmments who have ratified Kyoto and other international environmental protocols getting any poorer. On the contrary, they are now developing the means for them to become less oil dependent, something that will become increasingly more precious as time goes on.
And so now your machines act as open relays for spam once in a while or God knows what else and somehow this is worth it? What about your other duties? Have they not suffered from all the time you spend looking after these machines?
What do people do on these machines that requires admin access? do they start installing doom3 on them and having little impromptu LAN parties?
Clearly you haven't been trying a recent Linux distribution. Linux works very well now for everything on the desktop, arguably better than MacOS, and I say this when I love my iBook.
You'll find that with the same memory (DDR200) a single opteron has higher memory bandwidth than the PIV and that moreover this bandwidth scales linearly in MP settings with the number of processors, whereas the Xeon's remains constant.
Safari has one huge failing: it doesn't display the URL of the links when you hover your mouse over them like mozilla/firefox does in its status bar. In fact I have not found a way to display the real URL of a link in Safari short of looking at the source of the page, or copying and pasting the link in an editor, which is hugely user-unfriendly. In these days of phising attacks this is unacceptable, and this is why I use firefox on MacOS/X.
Memory moves are more efficient in 64-bit mode. Memory bandwidth in the Opteron/Athlon64 is much better than with Intel. This is even without the new register banks that come with these processors.
The corporate Dell lines aren't so bad. Sure they are unupgradable but they are easy to maintain (no screw to open them, everything pull apart very simply, neat plastic rails for disks, very accessible motherboards). They are designed to run office though, don't try to play games on them (it will work but not very well), and they simply don't overclock. The BIOS will not give you any option in that regard.
One other thing they have going for them is that they are extremely quiet. I have what I consider a very quiet *underclocked* SFF PC that I purpose-built myself with large low-speed fans next to a Dell, and the Dell is quieter. The SFF PC only makes a kind of whoosh sound of displaced air (no fan noise whatsoever), but as for the Dell, not only do it fans run quietly, they have better *turbulence* control. I know of water-cooled PCs that are noisier.
The consumer level Dells (Dimension) is complete and utter crap however.
There was a time between the release of Windows NT 4.0 and the advent of MacOS/X 10.1 when Microsoft arguably had the better O/S, on all fronts you can care to mention: security, usability, adherence to standards, stability, ran on better hardware (alpha!), etc.
I'll always remember the John Carmak.plan entry when he started working on Mac/OS 8 to port Quake 3. "you have to be at peace with rebooting". It was so true it infuriated all the Mac fans.
Now of course WinXP has lost its ways. it only runs on 32-bit Intel, cannot be put on the Internet more than 20 minutes in an unpatched state before being hacked and makes no sense on headless servers, whereas MacOS is finally getting 64-bit support on reasonably beefy G5, looks gorgeous and runs beautifully.
For a moment Apple looked perilously close to the brink though.
Concorde was fast and sleek but few people could afford or justify a ticket to go from London or Paris to NYC in a few hours. Concorde operations broke even but never repaid back the R&D budget spent on it. Remember that Concorde was a British-French national project, not a private endeavour.
Since then no one has come up with a reasonable alternative to Concorde, because it is all driven by the bottom line. Most people will put up with staying in a cramped cabin to go from Sydney to London for 30h (I know what I'm talking about because I've done it many times) if it means paying $1500 rather than $3000. It's not that bad and you get over it quickly.
Air travel supplanted ships because it became actually cheaper. Until the 70s most people still came to Australia by boat because it was cheaper. The big Boeings and MDDs changed that.
To be an enormous success that will change the face of travel as opposed to a pricey technology for the happy few, space travel has to become incredibly cheap, so that flying from SYD to NYC costs the same or less than a plane ticket does right now for the same distance.
Is this going to happen? Well if it is possible it will, it is as simple as that, but I'm not optimistic that it will happen in less than 10 years.
For all of those who rail that NASA (or NASDA or ESA) haven't done their jobs, I'm pretty much convinced that putting things into orbit using current rockets technology is already as cheap as it can be, for the simple reason that the satellite market is already a commercial venture and that there is fierce competition between the Americans, Europeans, Japanese, Chinese and Russian space agencies to drive the prices as low as possible. Any newcomer will have to (a) absorb the cost of R&D and (b) run an even tighter ship than any of these agencies to be able to compete. At the moment it doesn't look too good on the bottom line.
As for human travel in space it is still incredibly dangerous, as the recent space shuttle disaster reminds us. CEO might want to travel fast, but they also want to arrive in one piece.
So, what's the plan? Innovation. Someone somewhere has to come up with a new cheap, efficient and safe space drive.
Maybe Rutan or someone like him will be able to put a sputnik-equivalent something into orbit within 10 years but unless he can make it incredibly cheap by some unknown means then it simply won't fly.
Right now the rubber-NOX engine suborbital flight is a very cool stunt. I just hope they have something much more interesting up their sleeve.
Wing warping worked well enough well into WWI. They had dogfights with wing-warping technology then. It might even come back soon in new jet fighters in aircrafts with "intelligent skins". You'll see.
Your post is akin to saying "horse and carriage was a dead-end technology". Of course it was, everything is, except it worked very well for thousands of years until something better came along.
Similarly silicon wafers are a dead-end technology, the Internet is a dead-end technology, and definitely rocket-powered space flight is a complete dead-end technology that will never get us to the stars.
Except no one has found a better alternative as yet.
I'll say this: we started doing exactly what you recommend: letting our daughter sleep with us (or close to us with the crib in the room), and attending to her every needs whenever she cried for the slightest reason.
It didn't go the way it went with your son. She did not settle in any way, did not become independent, required a lot of attention to fall asleep and still woke up every 2h. Think about this. Every 2h she needed anything from 5 to 15 minutes of attention to get back to sleep. I can tell you this because I've actually kept a log that I can send to you if you don't believe me.
Every 2h, sometimes more frequently. No matter what we did. For months. We went to doctors to see if anything was amiss. Nothing.
After 6 months of this both of us we were like zombies. That's when I go depression from the lack of sleep and started contemplating suicide. My wife was getting some sleep through the day but I had to go to work.
We sought professional help. They recommended "comfort crying", which sounds horrible but consists of teaching the child how to get to sleep on their own. Maybe I'm not explaining it well but it involves comforting the child but not to the point where they fall asleep, they have to take that step on their own.
We went to a sort of day clinic, there were about 6 other couples in a situation similar to our own. They showed us a video of a 4-year old child and their parents were was still going through a similar thing: demanding a long and involved ritual to fall asleep: in his case a particular piece of music being played and requiring to be in the arms of his father for about 30 minutes until he fell asleep in his arms. And still the child was waking up several times a night and had to be attended to. I honestly don't know how the parents survived.
The video went on to describe the technique and how after a week of it that 4-yo was sleeping through the night. That's what I mean by "it works".
Most babies learn to fall asleep on their own but a few simply don't and you have to teach them. This is what "control crying" is all about.
It *works* in the sense that two nights (2) after going through the technique my daughter fell asleep relatively easily (in 15 minutes or so) and did her first full night sleep ever, at about 8 months of age. She slept about 8h and so did we and boy did it make a difference.
Since she's lost her ability to fall asleep by herself a couple of times and we've had to apply the technique or a slight variation of it to account for the difference in age about as many time.
I'm absolutely 100% certain that this is not child abuse. It *works* in the sense given above. There is no endless crying. The very first night you do this can be a bit hard but that's it. After it the child learns and doesn't cry anymore.
Go to your nearest book store and look for books with titles like "teach your child to sleep", you'll find some similar technique described in there.
Since I've talked to my parents and they have told me that I have a sister who went through a very long period of poor sleeping patterns. Their solution had been to let her stay with them all through the evening until she eventually fell asleep on the couch through sheer exhaustion. My parents have told me that my sister kept doing it well into school age. My other sister and myself just fell asleep normally and slept through the night from a young age.
So it's not something the parents do, it's something having to do with the child.
Maybe your next will be a poor sleeper and you'll remember what I just described. If so good luck.
> you think it's ok to try to manipulate a baby that > doesn't understand waht's going on
I find your reply very judgmental, if you want to go down that route co-sleeping is just as manipulative. Everybody's situation is different. You are happy with co-sleeping, fine, what can I say?
My wife didn't want to sleep with our daughter because she (my wife) was not sleeping very well and she was generally unhappy to be tied to the baby 24/7 like you said. If the mom is cranky and tired because she doesn't get enough sleep even when she should be, this is definitely not good for the family.
Yes parenting has changed a lot and will continue to change. What this means to me is that babies are much more adaptable than they are made out to be and a large number of practices are in fact acceptable.
It's not BS, and it's not particularly damaging. What I'm talking about is sometimes called "comfort crying". You don't abandon your baby in the room, you go in and out every few minutes, comforting them all the time until they sleep. within a few days they learn to go to sleep very fast and without fuss. For older toddler you have to explain what you are doing and why , but it works just as well.
Some parents don't like their children sleeping with them because it can create a wedge between the parents and because either the parents or the children or both may not sleep very well.
If you become sufficiently sleep deprived that it damages your sanity or threatens your couple you've got to do something. The above works and is recommended by a large number of children specialists.
Some baby/children sleep very easily and some don't. Because yours sleeps well doesn't mean you've got the magic formula. Maybe the next one will be different, or in a few years you'll have sleep problems with nightmares and all. It's part of the package.
It will not damage your child if you explain to them why you can't or don't want to sleep with them. That's perfectly fine you know. Some parents are not happy sleeping with their child, and it's 100% OK I believe.
A child insisting to sleep in the same bed as both parents can be very disruptive. If it threatens your sanity or your couple you've got to do something.
It will damage children if you do close the door and let them cry for hours, but it will not do anything bad if they cry for five minutes. You go in and out of their room always comforting them every few minutes but you don't stay with them until they sleep. It may require nerves of steel the first night because your child may not like it at all, but it gets quickly much easier.
It's called "comfort crying" and it's taught everywhere here in Australia to new parents. There are even videos, hotlines and volunteer associations that help you go through the steps if needed. You'd think that if it were child abuse it wouldn't get this sort of publicity. In 2-5 days your child learns to go to sleep by themselves and there is no fuss anymore. It's not BS, it works.
I personally know a particular family who have let their children sleep with them until they themselves asked to have their own bed. The "continuum theory" it's called, there is a book by that name. It's not for everybody. This particular couple is now divorced.
Many babies cry themselves to sleep, that's how they learn to go to sleep on their own. If you try to avoid them crying at all costs you'll end up having a very dependent child who won't be able to go to sleep if you are not in the room patting them until they are soundly asleep. It can be a little inconvenient if you like to have a life.
Not all children are like that but it happened to us and it's very hard to undo.
Slashdot Mirror
Fallacy. The real problem is real-time, complex, intelligent decision on incomplete data. Humans are remarkably able to do this, but machine intelligence still hasn't progressed far enough.
Imagine an autonomous vehicle that has to do about 10 decisions a second (this is not enough, but this helps clear matters). If your system is 99.99% accurate this means an error every 1000s, i.e. every 15 minutes or so. You wouldn't be able to drive very far.
There are no real-world intelligent decision systems that are 99.99% accurate in the world today. Far far far from it. Complex real-world decision systems are more like 60% accurate, just like the face recognition system that got a trial at Logan Airport a couple of years ago.
Like Neal Stephenson remarked on Slashdot yesterday, everyone is afraid of self-replicating nano-technology until one realizes that while the hardware is progressing very fast, the software is still crap.
Just like the X-prize hasn't put anybody in orbit yet or the Turing prize so far has only resulted in conversations that are funny for 5 minutes, the real thing is still not within grasp. It looks like it but it's not.
FYI I'm a researcher in AI.
They only *became* freely downloadable for the .NET 2003 version, not the 2001 one. It was big news at the time.
Don Knuth is one of a kind though. An incredible perfectionist too.
The bump in speed is only 0.13 GHz, you'll find that your "1GHz" 12" iBook has in fact a 1.07GHz CPU. The difference in speed is insignificant. What is significant is the price drop and the included Airport express.
Personally I found that SPEC numbers don't reflect the level of performance of the machine when I'm using it. You need to run your own benchmark.
Speaking of the IBM compiler it doesn't improve things as much as could be hoped vs. GCC. The Apple version of GCC is actually quite good. It has improved tremendously since the 10.1 days, by at least 20%
On some of my own benchmarks it matches the IBM compiler.
Orson Welles continued to direct exceptional movies, such as "The Lady from Shanghai", "Othello", "MacBeth", "Touch of Evil" and "The Trial". All in all he is credited with 38 features to his name.
"Citizen Kane" was a watershed, it is still today a very modern film. What happened is that his access to Hollywood was severely curtained after William Randolf Hearst, a media mogul at the time, took "Citizen Kane" as a direct attack against him. He tried to have the film banned. He didn't succeed in that but he got Welles blacklisted.
For the rest of his life Welles spent most of his time putting together enough money to make the films he wanted. "Citizen Kane" made him as a filmmaker but also unmade him. He only somewhat recovered from this towards the end of his life when he received an honorary Oscar for "lifetime achievement".
Note that his various films received almost all the awards that it is possible to receive in filmmaking, such as the Golden Lion in Venice and the Grand Prix at Cannes.
There is a lot of orchestral music composed after Schoenberg that is nothing like you describe.
I like Ravel and Shostakovich myself. I think Ligetti is worth listening to (e.g: Lux Aeternam, the weird choral music associated with the Monolith in "2001"). Messian had his moments. Berg can be amazing (go and see "Lulu", his last opera). Let's not forget Boulez.
In fact most of the orchestral 20th music is worth listening to. Unlike Mozart it doesn't flow into your ear but just like Mozart it doesn't take the listener for an idiot.
In case you were not talking about "contemporary" music, maybe you'd like to listen to a spot of Blues, Jazz or R&B or plain old R&R, all fine creations of the 20th century. It's not Beethoven but it's not Britney Spears either.
With all due respect I think you are the ignorant person here (that's OK we all are), or maybe you only pose as one.
R&R works fine here with NVidia 6111 drivers, dual-monitor settings and FC2. What doesn't work for you?
Precisely. In the modern 20th century Western civilization we develop several independent ways to completely and utterly anihilate ourselves, something we never had before. Many have put a positive spin on it (no global war since) but others still believe that we are ultimately doomed.
Just like in the case of nuclear weapons where sanity has mostly prevailed so far despite a number of close calls, governments should be the entities with the power, clout and vision to do the right thing for the future, when individuals clearly cannot be expected to see beyond their immediate short term interests.
Some governments have tried and some haven't. It's not a matter of sacrificing anything. I don't see the countries of governmments who have ratified Kyoto and other international environmental protocols getting any poorer. On the contrary, they are now developing the means for them to become less oil dependent, something that will become increasingly more precious as time goes on.
Honestly I don't understand.
And so now your machines act as open relays for spam once in a while or God knows what else and somehow this is worth it? What about your other duties? Have they not suffered from all the time you spend looking after these machines?
What do people do on these machines that requires admin access? do they start installing doom3 on them and having little impromptu LAN parties?
Clearly you haven't been trying a recent Linux distribution. Linux works very well now for everything on the desktop, arguably better than MacOS, and I say this when I love my iBook.
Look at the numbers, and read the benchmarks.
You'll find that with the same memory (DDR200) a single opteron has higher memory bandwidth than the PIV and that moreover this bandwidth scales linearly in MP settings with the number of processors, whereas the Xeon's remains constant.
AMD calls this hypertransport.
Safari has one huge failing: it doesn't display the URL of the links when you hover your mouse over them like mozilla/firefox does in its status bar. In fact I have not found a way to display the real URL of a link in Safari short of looking at the source of the page, or copying and pasting the link in an editor, which is hugely user-unfriendly. In these days of phising attacks this is unacceptable, and this is why I use firefox on MacOS/X.
Memory moves are more efficient in 64-bit mode. Memory bandwidth in the Opteron/Athlon64 is much better than with Intel. This is even without the new register banks that come with these processors.
The corporate Dell lines aren't so bad. Sure they are unupgradable but they are easy to maintain (no screw to open them, everything pull apart very simply, neat plastic rails for disks, very accessible motherboards). They are designed to run office though, don't try to play games on them (it will work but not very well), and they simply don't overclock. The BIOS will not give you any option in that regard.
One other thing they have going for them is that they are extremely quiet. I have what I consider a very quiet *underclocked* SFF PC that I purpose-built myself with large low-speed fans next to a Dell, and the Dell is quieter. The SFF PC only makes a kind of whoosh sound of displaced air (no fan noise whatsoever), but as for the Dell, not only do it fans run quietly, they have better *turbulence* control. I know of water-cooled PCs that are noisier.
The consumer level Dells (Dimension) is complete and utter crap however.
There was a time between the release of Windows NT 4.0 and the advent of MacOS/X 10.1 when Microsoft arguably had the better O/S, on all fronts you can care to mention: security, usability, adherence to standards, stability, ran on better hardware (alpha!), etc.
.plan entry when he started working on Mac/OS 8 to port Quake 3. "you have to be at peace with rebooting". It was so true it infuriated all the Mac fans.
I'll always remember the John Carmak
Now of course WinXP has lost its ways. it only runs on 32-bit Intel, cannot be put on the Internet more than 20 minutes in an unpatched state before being hacked and makes no sense on headless servers, whereas MacOS is finally getting 64-bit support on reasonably beefy G5, looks gorgeous and runs beautifully.
For a moment Apple looked perilously close to the brink though.
Concorde was fast and sleek but few people could afford or justify a ticket to go from London or Paris to NYC in a few hours. Concorde operations broke even but never repaid back the R&D budget spent on it. Remember that Concorde was a British-French national project, not a private endeavour.
Since then no one has come up with a reasonable alternative to Concorde, because it is all driven by the bottom line. Most people will put up with staying in a cramped cabin to go from Sydney to London for 30h (I know what I'm talking about because I've done it many times) if it means paying $1500 rather than $3000. It's not that bad and you get over it quickly.
Air travel supplanted ships because it became actually cheaper. Until the 70s most people still came to Australia by boat because it was cheaper. The big Boeings and MDDs changed that.
To be an enormous success that will change the face of travel as opposed to a pricey technology for the happy few, space travel has to become incredibly cheap, so that flying from SYD to NYC costs the same or less than a plane ticket does right now for the same distance.
Is this going to happen? Well if it is possible it will, it is as simple as that, but I'm not optimistic that it will happen in less than 10 years.
For all of those who rail that NASA (or NASDA or ESA) haven't done their jobs, I'm pretty much convinced that putting things into orbit using current rockets technology is already as cheap as it can be, for the simple reason that the satellite market is already a commercial venture and that there is fierce competition between the Americans, Europeans, Japanese, Chinese and Russian space agencies to drive the prices as low as possible. Any newcomer will have to (a) absorb the cost of R&D and (b) run an even tighter ship than any of these agencies to be able to compete. At the moment it doesn't look too good on the bottom line.
As for human travel in space it is still incredibly dangerous, as the recent space shuttle disaster reminds us. CEO might want to travel fast, but they also want to arrive in one piece.
So, what's the plan? Innovation. Someone somewhere has to come up with a new cheap, efficient and safe space drive.
Maybe Rutan or someone like him will be able to put a sputnik-equivalent something into orbit within 10 years but unless he can make it incredibly cheap by some unknown means then it simply won't fly.
Right now the rubber-NOX engine suborbital flight is a very cool stunt. I just hope they have something much more interesting up their sleeve.
Wing warping worked well enough well into WWI. They had dogfights with wing-warping technology then. It might even come back soon in new jet fighters in aircrafts with "intelligent skins". You'll see.
Your post is akin to saying "horse and carriage was a dead-end technology". Of course it was, everything is, except it worked very well for thousands of years until something better came along.
Similarly silicon wafers are a dead-end technology, the Internet is a dead-end technology, and definitely rocket-powered space flight is a complete dead-end technology that will never get us to the stars.
Except no one has found a better alternative as yet.
I'll say this: we started doing exactly what you recommend: letting our daughter sleep with us (or close to us with the crib in the room), and attending to her every needs whenever she cried for the slightest reason.
It didn't go the way it went with your son. She did not settle in any way, did not become independent, required a lot of attention to fall asleep and still woke up every 2h. Think about this. Every 2h she needed anything from 5 to 15 minutes of attention to get back to sleep. I can tell you this because I've actually kept a log that I can send to you if you don't believe me.
Every 2h, sometimes more frequently. No matter what we did. For months. We went to doctors to see if anything was amiss. Nothing.
After 6 months of this both of us we were like zombies. That's when I go depression from the lack of sleep and started contemplating suicide. My wife was getting some sleep through the day but I had to go to work.
We sought professional help. They recommended "comfort crying", which sounds horrible but consists of teaching the child how to get to sleep on their own. Maybe I'm not explaining it well but it involves comforting the child but not to the point where they fall asleep, they have to take that step on their own.
We went to a sort of day clinic, there were about 6 other couples in a situation similar to our own. They showed us a video of a 4-year old child and their parents were was still going through a similar thing: demanding a long and involved ritual to fall asleep: in his case a particular piece of music being played and requiring to be in the arms of his father for about 30 minutes until he fell asleep in his arms. And still the child was waking up several times a night and had to be attended to. I honestly don't know how the parents survived.
The video went on to describe the technique and how after a week of it that 4-yo was sleeping through the night. That's what I mean by "it works".
Most babies learn to fall asleep on their own but a few simply don't and you have to teach them. This is what "control crying" is all about.
It *works* in the sense that two nights (2) after going through the technique my daughter fell asleep relatively easily (in 15 minutes or so) and did her first full night sleep ever, at about 8 months of age. She slept about 8h and so did we and boy did it make a difference.
Since she's lost her ability to fall asleep by herself a couple of times and we've had to apply the technique or a slight variation of it to account for the difference in age about as many time.
I'm absolutely 100% certain that this is not child abuse. It *works* in the sense given above. There is no endless crying. The very first night you do this can be a bit hard but that's it. After it the child learns and doesn't cry anymore.
Go to your nearest book store and look for books with titles like "teach your child to sleep", you'll find some similar technique described in there.
Since I've talked to my parents and they have told me that I have a sister who went through a very long period of poor sleeping patterns. Their solution had been to let her stay with them all through the evening until she eventually fell asleep on the couch through sheer exhaustion. My parents have told me that my sister kept doing it well into school age. My other sister and myself just fell asleep normally and slept through the night from a young age.
So it's not something the parents do, it's something having to do with the child.
Maybe your next will be a poor sleeper and you'll remember what I just described. If so good luck.
Thanks for reading.
Hi,
> you think it's ok to try to manipulate a baby that
> doesn't understand waht's going on
I find your reply very judgmental, if you want to go down that route co-sleeping is just as manipulative. Everybody's situation is different. You are happy with co-sleeping, fine, what can I say?
My wife didn't want to sleep with our daughter because she (my wife) was not sleeping very well and she was generally unhappy to be tied to the baby 24/7 like you said. If the mom is cranky and tired because she doesn't get enough sleep even when she should be, this is definitely not good for the family.
Yes parenting has changed a lot and will continue to change. What this means to me is that babies are much more adaptable than they are made out to be and a large number of practices are in fact acceptable.
Hi,
It's not BS, and it's not particularly damaging. What I'm talking about is sometimes called "comfort crying". You don't abandon your baby in the room, you go in and out every few minutes, comforting them all the time until they sleep. within a few days they learn to go to sleep very fast and without fuss. For older toddler you have to explain what you are doing and why , but it works just as well.
Some parents don't like their children sleeping with them because it can create a wedge between the parents and because either the parents or the children or both may not sleep very well.
If you become sufficiently sleep deprived that it damages your sanity or threatens your couple you've got to do something. The above works and is recommended by a large number of children specialists.
Cheers.
With all due respect,
Some baby/children sleep very easily and some don't. Because yours sleeps well doesn't mean you've got the magic formula. Maybe the next one will be different, or in a few years you'll have sleep problems with nightmares and all. It's part of the package.
It will not damage your child if you explain to them why you can't or don't want to sleep with them. That's perfectly fine you know. Some parents are not happy sleeping with their child, and it's 100% OK I believe.
A child insisting to sleep in the same bed as both parents can be very disruptive. If it threatens your sanity or your couple you've got to do something.
It will damage children if you do close the door and let them cry for hours, but it will not do anything bad if they cry for five minutes. You go in and out of their room always comforting them every few minutes but you don't stay with them until they sleep. It may require nerves of steel the first night because your child may not like it at all, but it gets quickly much easier.
It's called "comfort crying" and it's taught everywhere here in Australia to new parents. There are even videos, hotlines and volunteer associations that help you go through the steps if needed. You'd think that if it were child abuse it wouldn't get this sort of publicity. In 2-5 days your child learns to go to sleep by themselves and there is no fuss anymore. It's not BS, it works.
I personally know a particular family who have let their children sleep with them until they themselves asked to have their own bed. The "continuum theory" it's called, there is a book by that name. It's not for everybody. This particular couple is now divorced.
Which is best for the children?
Many babies cry themselves to sleep, that's how they learn to go to sleep on their own. If you try to avoid them crying at all costs you'll end up having a very dependent child who won't be able to go to sleep if you are not in the room patting them until they are soundly asleep. It can be a little inconvenient if you like to have a life.
Not all children are like that but it happened to us and it's very hard to undo.
Come on, what are you talking about? Assembly language itself is syntactic sugar!
Horray for the olden days when you entered the binary code with rotating dials and a button. Who needs a loader? Who needs an O/S!
Twin peaks, directed by David Lynch.