The controls engineer shrugged, spreading his hands. "Sure, but with the single transducer to monitor eight tubes, we won''t know for three to five minutes after the pump command is sent.""Can we live with that?" asked the manager, glancing around the table at each member of the assembled group of microbiologists and car chemical engineers.One of the engineers tapped at his personal digital assistant, then spoke up, "Even at 32 mils a minute, the pressure buildup from the recirculation pump heater won''t be enough to trigger the relief valve. massager I think it''s in the noise."

THERE MUST BE SOMETHING PRIMAL about big trucks, something that draws Riley to the noise and excitement. Work trucks are big, brightly colored, loud. They are stronger than anything in his daily life, and they probably seem unpredictable in a wonderful way. They are rough, with a potential for destruction not unlike his own impulse to hit, kick, pinch, and bite when he is frustrated. He and I spend a lot of time in our car, too -- a much milder sort of machine -- so he knows all about piloting large metal vehicles down the road. If Mama seems powerful driving the car, think how omnipotent a boy must appear in his imagination, perched behind the wheel of a backhoe. In an earlier era, a toddler might have watched men with bows and arrows, or a brace of oxen, and would have been given his own, boy-size replicas to play with. But nowadays, diggers and dumpers are what introduce him to that important, yearned-for, grown-up world. When Riley first became interested in construction vehicles, I would sometimes shyly, casually approach moms of girl toddlers. "Does she ... like trucks?" I would ask, car usually earning a pitying look in reply. "Oh, sure, she likes them, but she''s not crazy about them." Well, Riley is crazy. Absolutely nuts. Lately, as I try to keep him from stomping ants and bullying other kids, I''ve been wondering if maybe it really is a boy thing, as people say. Something to do with his biological makeup. "A boy''s being vibrates to the rhythm of testosterone," say Don and Jeanne Elium in their sometimes infuriating but always interesting book Raising a Son: Parents and the Making of a Healthy Man. This hormone, they say, drives boys and men through a repetitive cycle of emotional buildup and eventual, sometimes-violent release. More benignly, it makes them really like trucks, with these machines'' barely contained violence, power, glorious potency, and superior force. Trucks are, let''s face it, cool!

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