Word: toying
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...prices of the rarest robots - the $500-range machines intact in original box and Styrofoam - quadrupled, so Nakamura took a deep breath and hopped on a plane to Japan to hunt out the best deals. "It was the first time I'd traveled somewhere just to fulfill my toy fetish," he says of his trips down narrow Tokyo alleyways to check out tiny toy-shops. "But Japan is a mecca for robot collectors, so I knew...
...enamored of the colorful chunks of metal that in 1994 he named his magazine after the mightiest of them all, Giant Robot. The hip 'zine delves into Asian-American culture and spots the latest trends from across the Pacific - from wasabi-flavored potato chips to schoolgirl porn. Today's toy robots, says Nakamura dismissively, tend to be cobbled together with cheap plastic. Die-cast robots, on the other hand, are emblematic of the kind of Japanese craftsmanship that transformed the nation's image from shoddy imitator in the 1960s to technological leader just a decade later...
...totally hot girl in Algebra I. A few of the guys evolve flawlessly. One week they're collecting baseball cards, and the next they're driving Mustangs and dating Teresas. The rest of us retreat into a sort of refined hyper-geekdom. As kids we may have played with toy soldiers or plastic tanks or HO railways. Now slightly more mature, we get deeply, almost disturbingly (to our parents) into very specific aspects of military modeling. It is at this stage that many of us discover Japan, or at least its sophisticated plastic model culture...
...parents should be putting down the brain toys, what should they be picking up? For one thing, the kids themselves. If interpersonal skills are the true predictors of how well a child will do in school, parents are the best tutors. Experiments reveal that by the time babies are two months old, they are already fluent in the complex language of their parents' faces, and count on them for their sense of well-being. "Think about the human face," says Sparrow, "the wrinkles, the expressions in the eyes - and think about the infant brain being stimulated by that." To believe...
...focus on the one tongue they hear spoken most frequently. Parents can take advantage of this brain plasticity by introducing a second or even third language, but only if they intend to speak them all with equal frequency until the child is fluent. Merely buying the occasional bilingual toy or videotape will teach kids little, and it certainly will not make it easier for children to learn for real when they get to school...