Shall we have the same bet as last time?

Damn straight. I am not at all competitive about my kid. So he's gonna be way less fucked up than the rest of yours'.

Short Kids & Growth Hormones
 

If the thought of having short children bothers you sufficiently, you could opt to give them HGH shots. The shots cost over $20,000 a year. Double blind studies by Eli Lilly suggest the shots can cause a kid's ultimate height to be 1.5 to 3 inches taller than it otherwise would be. The shots are only -- medically -- approved for kids whose height is at least 2.25 standard deviations below the median.

The stuff seems expensive, but it's hard to say, given that short people tend to have worse prospects in career, with sexual partners, etc, etc.

WoPo article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp...&notFound=true

Short Kids & Growth Hormones
 

Wow - our kid might reach 7' with these shots and genetics on his side.

-T(Where the hell would I find pants to fit him?)L

Large Numbers?
 

Well, at least we can agree that some people should stay away from statistics....

The Law of Large Numbers is not the source of your "comforting" observation. Quite the opposite: what the Law of Large Numbers says is that if you keep randomly selecting kids to compare to your 90th-percentile kid, in the long run, 90% will be thinner.

The observation that 10% of a very large group of kids is still a very large group is, on reflection, also not very comforting. (Well it's a little bit comforting, but only because it reminds me of one of my favorite paradoxes, the one of my favorite paradoxes, the one about taking a grain of rice away from a heap....)

If you want comfort, however, we could actually do the calculation about your randomly-selected group of ten kids (actually, I'll limit it to 9, since most randomly-selected groups of 10 won't even include your hypothetical 90th-percentile kid :)). If you randomly choose 9 kids, the chance that all of them will be thinner than the 90th percentile is exactly 0.387420489 = 0.9^9. So, in fact, it's only a bit more than a third of the time that a kid in the 90th percentile will be heavier than 9 other randomly-selected kids.

Next time you step up to the plate, just try not to crack baltassoc in the head, ok?:D

Large Numbers?
 

Is anyone else humming Gilbert and Sullivan now?

Large Numbers?
 

Yeowch. I'm going back to the FB, where my touchy-feely approach to mathematics and other fact-based sciences is more welcome.

Large Numbers?
 

Nuts!

Chunky Monkey
 

There is an easy solution to that. Stop wearing underwear. Of course, then you probably would want to stop wearing skirts and dresses, too IYKWIM.

Large Numbers?
 

You don't think touching a scientist is welcome?

Tell that to whomever is touching Eva Silverstein.....

http://superstringtheory.com/people/gifs/evas.jpg
Eva Silverstein with her favorite equations

Hah! got you AG.

the leaving is the hardest part
 

L'il Ty (who is, for these purposes, four years old) is having a really hard time saying goodbye to people. When his mother went out the door this morning, he sobbed in the doorway as she left, and 15 minutes later, when I got out of the shower, he was standing in the front door sobbing again. When it's time to drop him off at pre-school, he does well until it's time for a goodbye hug, and then he doesn't want to let go. If I'm going to get to work, I need the help of the teacher with a crowbar and some pepper spray. OK, not quite, but there's more sobbing.

This seems like a phase. Any suggestions for dealing with it?

the leaving is the hardest part
 

Squirt gun. At least that works with my cat and I don't see how it would be much different with a baby dinosaur.

the leaving is the hardest part
 

It is a phase. Keep smiling and leave him quickly. If he can sort of tell time, point out on the clock exactly when you'll be back (and get there on time.) Once he realizes that the people who leave keep coming back, this will quickly pass (as long as you don't train him to pitch a fit by allowing his behavior to delay your departures.)

Alternately, you can beat him. Then, he will be happy when you leave, and things will go much smoother at drop-off.

the leaving is the hardest part
 

Are you my mother?

the leaving is the hardest part
 

Alternatively you can point up at the sky and yell "Look its an airplane!" and then when he turns to look, dash out the door. Of course, that will only work maybe twice before he catches on. That is when the squirtgun comes into play.