Two reasons to go to Big Fat Whale

This week's Big Fat Whale is particularly hilarious, especially if you're a snobby elitist like both me and its creator, Bostonian Brian McFadden. Regarding this strip, McFadden blogs, "I am aware that the tone of this cartoon and posting is extremely elitist and loaded with film snobbery. It is also 100% accurate, except for the part about the bees."

Earlier this week, Brian McFadden also blogged about something particularly mindblowing. I'll quote it in its entirety.

Last weekend, in a fit of insomnia, I caught a series on Discovery Science called The Baby Human. I'm a big ol' nerd, so of course it was fascinating. But there was one experiment they performed on babies that was the most awesome thing in the entire universe. They'd have kids of a certain age, maybe 18-24 months, where they'd have them play with three toys for a while. I remember a little tikes car, Steve's Big Red Chair, and a slide. Then they'd go away for a while. When they returned to the room with the toys, they had been replaced with miniature scale models. And here's what makes the experiment so awesome, the kids wouldn't realize they were scale models. They were so emotionally attached to the toys, that they kept trying to squeeze into the Lilliputian models. They had no idea how retarded they looked. It cracked my shit up. Obviously, if given any opportunity, I will try to perform this experiment myself, just for shits and giggles. Think about that before you ask me to babysit.

Does anyone know if this works? I mean, I've heard of all sorts of strange child-behaviour psych experiments, but this one sounds too insane to be true. Here's a paper (pdf link) that describes an experiment that "proves" that babies can count. I've done the "the object is here, now it's gone!" thing with my infant neices and nephews. (I'm sure my fomer-psych-major friends could tell me the name of that reaction.) It's highly amusing, but I need more.