Karen's my pattern girl!
So check it out. Karen drew that picture when she was four. Two months shy of five years old. She was a preschooler. The draftsmanship is very good for that age group, but that's not what interests me. The subject matter is, in my experience, very unusual. Karen was showing us her early childhood art, and there is pictures of flowers, people, dogs... but there's just as many pictures of round balls with a pattern of straight and squiggly lines in them or identical flowers all in a row. Karen was fascinated as a young child by patterns. But this one's even cooler.
So what pattern do we see here, class? Besides the obvious "four by six rectangles". After the __more__ i talk more about it. When i was looking at the drawing, weirding out over how it could have been drawn by one so young (and normal -- this isn't Google's "I'm feeling lucky" hit for her name we're talking about here), it seemed that there was another layer of pattern. It's the colors. The outline color of the top row of rectangles is the inner color of the bottom row and vice versa. The second row and second to last row are likewise colored, as are the middle rows. Okay, seriously? Who does that? At FOUR YEARS OLD???
So next time Karen and i are talking about how the Republican Party might have a slight problem or two, or we park our compact Japanese minivan between the Chevy Suburban and the other Chevy Suburban that her family members own, or we discuss moving to another country for a year, and Karen asks how she turned out so different, i'll say "You've always been this way, pattern girl."
One of the things that computers totally suck at, compared to the massively parallel multithreading human brain, is pattern recognition. And Karen kicks butt at that. Maybe that's one of the reasons i like her. But she's almost never genuinely surprised by a plot twist in print or on screen. It's diverting to quiz her halfway through movies to see how it'll end. Except we didn't anticipate the gay sex scene in Brokeback Mountain. We were both like "whoah, where did that come from, cowboy?"