It's probably the longest ever gap between editorials on IT Reviews, but this time I have a better excuse than previous occasions when the editorial lunch stretched to rather more than the statutory three hours: I became a father in February.

As other parents will know, the birth of your first child is an incredible experience, combining elation, amazement and joy with concern, stress and previously-unknown levels of tiredness, particularly for the first month or so.

Things have settled down a little now, and I'm able to step back slightly and see what's changed. Obviously I have less 'free' time now than before, and in fact I look back and wonder what on Earth I was doing with all my spare time before my daughter came along. I'm working harder now, fitting more work into less time so that I have time to play with her and watch her develop.

That development process is fascinating. Being an IT nerd with a psychology degree, I could probably sum up her first few days of activity as a short computer program representation:

10 sleep
20 if (awake) {cry until fed}
30 excrete
40 goto 10

But it wasn't long before things became rather more complicated, and by the end of the first month, the complexity of the program that could have represented her behaviour would have been far greater than that of any program I've ever written.

And that's just to represent her external behaviour, of course, with no consideration for her physiological and mental processes, the development of the neurons in her brain and so on and so forth.

Despite this incredible complexity, there are plans underway to model the human brain using computers, which will raise all sorts of interesting problems should they even come close to success, not least ethical ones.

Yet such a mechanistic description can't begin to explain the intense emotional bond between parent and child. When I see her smile, it's not enough to simply describe the muscles that move her mouth and eyes, the electro-chemical signals that cause them to move or the neurotransmitter effects that relate to her good mood at the time. Nothing can describe the feeling unless you've experienced it yourself.

I intend to make the most of this, so please bear with me if these editorials remain fewer and further between in future, at least until she's old enough to slam doors, play her music too loud and 'borrow' my car without asking.