I read a sci-fi short story once about a boy who went into a toy store and bought a pet black hole enclosed in some sort of glass case. It came with its own "food" to keep it alive and instructions explaining not to feed it anything else once the food ran out. Well, the boy brought the black hole home and fed it ubtil one day the food ran. Then he tried feeding it some other things in his room. Nothing bad happened so he continued to do this until one day the glass case vanished in front of his eyes and then things in his room started to be sucked into the black hole. In terror, he ran downstairs just as his bedroom door disappeared. The story ends with the boy running down the street while behind him his house implodes. More a horror story for nerds really which is why I like it.
Somehow my brain saw an analogy between feeding a black hole and raising our one year old daughter. The thought goes that providing appropriate stimulus to a small child usually results in the child learning to do new things which is fascinating to the child's parents. However, at some stage the child becomes self-sustaining, that is it learns on its own and not always with the most desirable results (climbing the furniture for instance). And that is where the analogy ends because at least this baby black hole can be taught to do the right thing.
I would love to know what the name of that book was.
