The kids are having Pizza. One of the pizza slices had a trapped air bubble and looked engorged.
Yoshi: Looks like there is a crater in your pizza. (from her angle she could only see the gaping hole).
Sempi: (from his side he can only see the bulge) No it is the opposite of a crater. It is a meteor.
TIL the opposite of a crater is a meteor.
We're at a restaurant waiting for our food. My 9yo is discussing large numbers.
Sempi: Did you know that googol is 1 followed by 100 zeroes?
Me: Yeah.
Sempi: And googolplex means 1 raised to the power of googol.
Me: Technically it is 10 to the power of googol because 1 to the power of anything is just 1.
Sempi: Ok. (whatever).
Me: Also Google is named after googol.
Sempi: I know.
Me: Google's first office was called Googleplex, named after googolplex.
Sempi: Oooh. Cool!
Vian (6yo): Is that the biggest number in the universe.
Yoshi: I read that there aren't googolplex number of atoms in the universe.
Me: Well technically there is a number that is so unimaginably large. It is called Graham's Number.
Sempi and Vian: Oh. How many zeros does it have? 1000?
Me: No it is so big that you can't even imagine it. (I try reading the wikipedia entry without success)
Me: I can't quite explain it very well because I don't fully understand it myself.
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Next day I'm walking Vian to school. We're doing imaginative "talk play". Vian is describing a generator in Minecraft that can produce something infinitely.
Vian: It just keeps generating it forever. Actually that's not true, it only goes up to that number that you couldn't explain.
Me: Graham's number?
Vian: Yeah, that.
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I'm so proud that Graham's number is a casual quantity in our household now.
The kids like to scare me by trying to jump out from under the covers and yell "BOO!". I like to pretend that I'm scared of their tactics. The other day I decided to return the favor by suddenly entering their room and yelling "BOO!". I managed to scare Vian and he started giggling in fear and shrunk back under his comforter.
Me: Hey Vian, looks like I scared the bejeezus out of you.
Vian: No! No! I'm not scared. I don't even have any bejeezus, so you didn't really scare any bejeezus.
Me: Whoa! It's very late, we should have started getting ready for bed 20 mins ago.
Sempi: 20 minutes isn't that much. If you think about it, it is only 4 time 5 minutes.
Sempi: And if you think about it, 5 minutes is just 5 times 1 minute.
Sempi: And if you really think about it, 1 minute isn't that long.
That's the spirit. I should remind him of this conversation when he starts doing planks.
Sempi gets very creative when he's building Lego structures. So I asked him about it.
Me: How did you get so good at building these lego creations, Sempi?
Sempi: I don't know, I just like building things.
Me: Would you say that I should just keep building things and I'll get better over time?
Sempi: It is easy to create something for yourself. You know what you want and you can make a place for a boat or an airplane in your creations. It comes easily when you know what you want.
This sounded vaguely familiar and then I realized this is a paraphrasing of one of Paul Graham's advice about startups.
Build something you yourself want.