Assaulted in the street

[simont]

I was physically assaulted in the street on the way home from the pub just now…

… by an extremely tiny puppy, who ran up behind me and collided with the backs of my legs, provoking a loud yell of surprise before I realised I hadn't been harmed in any way.

How sweet. But also rather unexpected and startling; it must surely have noticed that there was something in its way?

Comments

[meihua.livejournal.com]

Hehe - it's like small children. For some reason I don't understand, small children seem to be able to avoid walking into posts and pillars, but not legs. It's like if the object is moving, they believe it can't hit them. Collision detection is implemented incorrectly in small brains.

[simont]

Perhaps if the object is moving they believe it can get out of their way?

[meihua.livejournal.com]

Pretty sure that's cognitively impossible - isn't there that study on what age people realise that these other things are "self-aware people" who make choices too?

[simont]

That was kind of my point, actually (well, to the extent that I had a point at all and wasn't just being silly). If they haven't realised the legs belong to a separate self-aware person, then they might decide the legs will get out of their way just because they would like them to, without stopping to think about questions like whether the legs' owner has noticed them or is willing to move out of the way.

[meihua.livejournal.com]

Ooh, you used a funny italics tag. Why didn't you use i.../i? Is this some "good practice" thing I'm unaware of?

[simont]

I generally prefer to use tags that say something about the semantic content of the text they enclose, rather than directly dictating its physical presentation. So I'll switch between <em> and <cite> depending on whether I'm emphasising something or referring to something someone else said, even though both are usually rendered as italic. I will drop back to <i> in cases where neither of those reasons for italic is the one I'm thinking of, notably when I'm typing an equation and care about it enough to italicise the variable names. (Ideally I'd switch into MathML at that point, but it's not yet sensible to do so.)

The aim, in principle, is to arrange that if someone imposes a different CSS stylesheet on the page in their browser configuration, and it happens to treat those tags differently from each other (unlike the default one), then it should all look nice for them. I strongly suspect that in fact nobody is doing anything of the sort, but switching tags depending on context has become entirely habitual to me and I barely notice I'm doing it except when I momentarily can't decide which one is appropriate...

[meihua.livejournal.com]

Ooh. I'll keep those in mind - thanks. :)

[meihua.livejournal.com]

I think small children have the piece of mental kit which says "this moving bit of the world moves when I want it to" (my body, my parents' bodies when I certain actions like cry) and "this moving piece of the world isn't under my control"

Sorry, I'm interested in all this stuff! Tell me if I'm taking it too seriously! :D

[simont]

I was mostly being humorous, but I was doing it in a way that I thought might have some connection to reality, based on stories I've heard about friends' children (of widely varying age).

There's the child who talked to his mum on the phone and hadn't grasped the idea that when he pointed at something at his end and said "it looks like that, mummy" she couldn't see what he could see. Then there's the child who said it wasn't fair mummy because she had to get her own stuff ready for school every day and mummy never got it ready for her, which could conceivably have been conscious selfishness but I prefer to interpret it as an understanding of the concept of fair division of labour without a corresponding understanding of the fact that mummy also has to do a hell of a lot of her own work that the child (perhaps wilfully) isn't seeing.

So my one-line comment at the top of this thread was intended to suggest that the child thought it would be a fair division of labour if the child made the effort to avoid stationary objects and moving objects made the effort to avoid the child (and, like the second example above, didn't consider that the moving objects had other stuff of their own to do and the labour to be divided did not solely consist of stopping things crashing into that particular child), and also that the child hadn't realised that even if this were the case the moving people would need to notice the child there before they could make the effort to avoid the collision (like the first example above, failing to draw the distinction between what they can see and what other people can see).

It wasn't intended as a serious theory (since I was consciously conflating behaviour of very differently aged children), but it was vaguely intended to bear enough relation to actual childish thought-errors that parents reading it might grin ruefully.

But I was a bit drunk last night, and a bit lazy, and half of the above thought process happened in my subconscious without bothering to reveal its working to my conscious mind, so I didn't really communicate any of that very effectively :-)

[meihua.livejournal.com]

*giggles* Sorry. :) It's annoying to post a cheeful lazy funny post and have a perfectionist jump on it!

But this kind of thing *is* fascinating. I love the way that all the bits of mental kit jumble themselves into place and start producing Thought...

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I was mostly being humorous, but I was doing it in a way that I thought might have some connection to reality, based on stories I've heard about friends' children (of widely varying age).

LOL, well described, that's how so often I say something, sometimes two often, but can find it difficult to convey.

I would have guessed that children observe moving objects generally *do* miss them -- eg. legs conveniently go round them, etc, and now expect that (not yet able to spot the exceptions of when the leg's teleoperator didn't see them, nor realising that it might be nice to take some of the responsibility).

[pizza.maircrosoft.com (from livejournal.com)]

didn't they do some experiments with ... smarties? and the way that the kid's perceptions of what was in /their/ smartie tube affected what they believed about what was in everyone else's smartie tube, and how that changed with age? but I can't remember any details.

I cycled into a dog once (fortunately not hard. it ran off again apparently unhurt) when it failed to get out of my way as I was expecting it to. The two ladies walking it didn't seem remotely bothered.

[simont]

This one? (Just googled for "smartie" and "experiment".) Apparently a 3-year-old, after finding out that a Smarties tube actually contains pencils, will immediately believe that his mother also knows it contains pencils. Whereas a 6-year-old will be able to comprehend the concept that he might know something his mother doesn't, and will therefore realise that unless his mother has also checked carefully she will still think the tube contains Smarties.

[rmc28]

Our cats are hopeless about avoiding moving legs. They like to hover in the corridor and then go "PANIC! Something is coming! Run away!" and then run in exactly the wrong direction, resulting in kicked cat and mild swearing from human.

The toddler walks into lots of things, moving and still, but is excellent at climbing.

[teleute.livejournal.com]

If puppies are anything like kittens (or at least, if this puppy is like my kitten) running into things is half the fun. I assume that's the motive anyway. Othello tends to run into nearly everthing, sometimes twice.

[sparrowsion]

Sometimes, we will hear a melifluous CLANG from the kitchen as a cat runs into the bin. To be precise, as Parsley runs into the bin. No, to be really precise, as Parsley once again forgets that his stopping distance on lino is non-zero and slides into the bin.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Aw. That's a wonderful visual.

[teleute.livejournal.com]

Well, yes, the bamboo flooring in the bedroom doesn't help Othello any ;-) But it hasn't encouraged him to slow down.