In the beginning, nothing unusual happened. Mom and Dad were ecstatic to see us all together. Clark beamed a very big smile when his Uncle John sang "I'm A Little Teapot." And his parents were glad for the time away from baby-care duty.

It was all too innocent, I realize now.I 'm a bachelor, never married, with no kids. So time with Clark was just as new for me as it was for him. The problem was that I forgot to turn off my analytical engineering mind when I was with him. And that's when it slowly hit me.

Over that three-day weekend, I personally observed that for every single pound of formula and fluids that went into Clark, at least three pounds of "stuff" eventually came out. Just like Avanti touting its "new" line of Astro products, this baby was creating an awful lot of something out of nothing. Babies clearly violate Newton's Law of the Conservation of Mass. You know, that "matter can be neither created nor destroyed" hooey.

I further noticed how Clark would flail his arms and legs about like a perpetual motion machine, and that got me thinking even more. After estimating the mass of his arms and legs and then carefully measuring the distance of motion and the timing of his movements, I calculated how much kinetic energy he expended within a 24-hour period.

I then added up the caloric content he was getting from his formula — and concluded that babies also violate that other silly old belief, "Energy can be neither created nor destroyed." On the contrary, for every kilojoule a baby consumes, it expends at least four or five kilojoules of energy. Easily. (If you add acoustic energy, that ratio readily grows to eight to 10 times energy consumed.)

It all became abundantly clear when I thought again about Newton's life. Even though he was the father of physics, in real life he was nobody's father. Newton never married, never had any children. He had postulated his silly mass and energy conservation "laws" with no knowledge of babies. And then I darkly realized that mothers have known all along that Newton was wrong but have withheld the full truth from the rest of us, for reasons not yet known to anyone but them.

I can't wait to tell my therapist of this new conspiracy I've uncovered.

John Cooley runs the E-mail Synopsys Users Group (ESNUG), is a Contract ASIC Designer, and loves hearing from engineers at jcooley@world.std.com or (508) 429-4357.