Thanks, Steve Jobs

Orla has a new iPad game, Toca's lab. You do experiments on these funny blob-like creatures and cause them to change into another funny blob-like creature. But each one corresponds to an actual element in the periodic table, so we found ourselves talking about the periodic table and the various elements - which ones are gases, which ones are metals, which ones form the air we breath, which one forms coal and diamonds etc etc. It's a great game. Conor also has his own iPad game, a Fisher Price one where he can make little giggly characters appear and move around by touching the screen.

This seemed apt today as it's 7 years to the day since Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone. It's easy to forget now how revolutionary it was, back in the dark ages of the late 2000s. I wonder how that will seem to Orla and Conor when they are older.

At bed-time tonight I read Orla "The Tortoise and the Hare" from the version of Aesop's fables I bought her for Christmas. She asked who Aesop was and I told her that no-one is really sure, but he may have been a storyteller who lived in Greece a long time ago. Totally unprompted, she then told me this story:

"A long time ago sailors thought that Magnesia was haunted; nails came out of their boats. But then people realised that the problem was the magic stones that attracted iron. Because they were from Magnesia they called the stones magnets".

She learnt that from the iPad too.