John Scalzi explains at MetaFilter: Background: I got the Jonathan Coulton Artificial Heart super-deluxe edition in a box and when I saw the LP, wondered if Athena had actually ever seen one before. So I decided to show it to her and record her reaction. Note that she was aware I was recording her; it would be hard to miss the camera. (The box also had a wind-up music box, which she was similarly flummoxed over. I don't think she's ever had a wind-up music box; all of hers have been digital.) There are in fact no other LPs in the house; I think I may have owned 4 or 5 in my life. I mostly had tapes, followed by CDs, and by the time Athena was born in 1998, my entire collection was on CD (and later MP3s). I think it's entirely possible Athena's seen LPs on movies, etc; I think she probably also assumed they were representative of CDs, because “circular object containing music” = “CD” in her experience. This is, of course, why I wanted to record her looking at an LP in the first place. I swear I don't understand why people think her holding the LP at the edges means she's held an LP before; that's how she holds CDs and DVDs and video game discs, so it's a pretty natural thing to carry onto another disc-shaped object. Also, as she noted to me when people on my own site started harping about the edge holding, “How else am I supposed to hold it? It’s big.” Also, as a possibly relevant fact: we live in a small rural Ohio town where there are more Amish than hipsters. Way more.
