Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Isn’t that cute? The pension fund Einstein used, which still has a
monopoly on many faculty pensions, doesn’t want to hear any bad news
about Sinclair broadcasting.

TIAA-CREF now has a boilerplate “Sinclair letter”–I got two identical
copies, with two different signatures, in response to my efforts last
week to get them to divest. The letters “explain” that they can’t tell
me if they got rid of SBGI or not, and that none of their funds drop
stocks for “political” reasons.*

On their website, they’ve posted a different justification for holding
onto Sinclair despite customer protests: that they don’t care about
“short-term
fluctuations”
in share price. The bone-headed management and PR skills of Sinclair’s
ongoing management? TIAA-CREF doesn’t seemed to have noticed
those.

 I’m guessing that somebody high in TIAA-CREF really likes Sinclair for
reasons not clear to me.

My guess is that if you take time to contact them, you will soon have
your very own copy of the letter to read.

Red Sox! Red Sox! Red Sox! Red Sox! Red Sox! Red Sox! Red Sox! Red Sox! Red Sox! Red Sox! Red Sox! Red Sox! Red Sox! Red Sox! Red Sox! Red Sox! Red Sox!

We now return to our regular scheduled blogging.

Bush’s New England campaign coordinator James Tobin may be the unnamed co-conspirator in a 2002 case of NH election tampering.

If Ashcroft’s Justice Department has its way, however, you won’t know the truth until after November 2.

It took years for the Justice Department to bring wrist-slapping indictments against two lowly scapegoats for NH phone-jamming in 2002.

Scapegoat #1 Chuck McGee decided “one of the best ways to disrupt the enemy [Democrats] is to disrupt their ability to communicate.” Several local telemarketing firms told McGee “No way!” when he asked them to take out the Democrats’ phone service on election day.

But “an official of a national political organization” loved McGee’s plan. This official urged McGee to contact a “former colleague” Allen Raymond (now scapegoat #2), and “to mention the official’s name”. (Quotes taken from a July 29, 2004 story in the Union Leader.)

James Tobin–Bush’s New England regional campaign director–has been identified by Democrats as the enabling official. Tobin quit once his name got into the papers. But what did Tobin do or didn’t he do? How widely known was his role by the Republican insiders who kept him in positions of trust for the two years since the phone-blocking?
Ted Kennedy and others are demanding that John Ashcroft should stop using the Justice Department as a stonewall against Democrats’ efforts to get answers to these questions.

At last this cover-up is out of the NH newspapers and into USA Today!

Long ago, in a galaxy far away–that is, in 1990 or so, when I was
doing an oral history of math for the Institute for Advanced Study–I
coaxed lots of the Institute’s math and physics types into a softball
team that I christened the Princeton Eulers.

Despite weekly practice and gallons of Gatorade, we had an unspeckled
record of gallant defeat–one year by a ragtag team of historians, the
next by a pick-up team from Princeton University. We did have the best
Tshirts and the best pizza party, which we financed by selling An Abelian Grape,
my $1.50  photocopied collection of math-and-physics jokes I’d
heard over lunch, literally cut-and-pasted from dot-matrix printouts.

Mathematical biologist Joel Cohen
was our most generous patron–he bought 10 copies! Then he suggested
that he and I should merge science-joke collections for a real book.
Two years later, Simon and Schuster’s Fireside (paperback) house
published Absolute Zero Gravity, by Betsy Devine and Joel E. Cohen.

Within months, our editor left Simon and Schuster, leaving our book an
orphan, soon out of print. Of course you can still get copies on the
web–but I urge would-be-readers to avoid sellers who want $25 or more.
It’s a little paperback book that originally sold for $8–and the jokes
that went into it have been widely told elsewhere since then. I still
get people emailing me “great science jokes” that are word-for-word the
version I wrote down for AZG.

If you recently tuned in just for
Nobel-Prize-family-backstage-surprises
blogging–or if you’re an old reader who wouldn’t mind hearing less
about Nobel Prizes–well, this situation categorically reminds
me of a joke I once wrote for Absolute Zero Gravity:

1. According to Fields Medalist Enrico Bombieri, there are three kinds of mathematicians: those who can count, and those who can’t.
2. I happen to believe that people can be divided into precisely two
   categories: those who believe that people can be divided into precisely
   two categories, and those who don’t.
3. If you agree with me, let me ask you this: which category is Bombieri in?

But I digress. If you are a Nobel-only reader, you can avoid the rest of this blog by subscribing to the RSS feed for its just-Nobel-gossip posts. If you prefer Nobel-free blogging–well, as they say for New England weather changes, just wait a while…

What a weekend! We had our annual family pumpkin-carving party, Frank
got about 8 million more invitations to do things of which at least 4
million were extremely tempting–and Judith Meskill effervesced into our family scene, en route to blogging Jeff Pulver’s VON conference for WeblogsInc.

So, you ask, which of these jack o’lantern’s was carved by a Nobel
laureate?

No, not the pumpkin pi (bzzzzt), that’s the work of biologist Dr.
Mrs. Profligate.

Answer, not one of these pumpkins was carved by Frank. He drifted
off into recreational physics after hollowing out the rightmost
pumpkin up top.

6 carved jack o’lanterns shining in the dark.

Friday, I finally had lunch with Jim McGee (McGee’s Musings).
This was a long-delayed pleasure, prompted by Buzz Bruggeman who urged
us to get together.

How long delayed? So chaotic were both our summers that, when we
finally sat down to the buffet lunch at the Bombay Club, Jim was toting two carry-ons, headed back to Chicago.

I won’t duplicate Jim’s generous and witty blogging of our talk.
Jim is a knowledge-management honcho, and it shows when you talk to him
or read his stuff. Just one of Jim’s comments that I found fascinating:

“In our society, we tend to privatize profits and socialize costs.”

I just Amazon-ordered Garrett
Hardin’s Filters Against Folly: How to Survive Despite Economists, Ecologists, and the Merely Eloquent,
as recommended by Jim.

p.s. If Buzz Bruggeman web-troduces you to Jim,
don’t waste two months before having lunch with him!

just put up some more photos of recent events: http://www.funnybits.com/Nobel2004Oct/index.htm

Nobel section of this blog: http://BetsyDevine.weblogger.com/newsItems/viewDepartment$nobel

Nobel blog of Robert Engle, one of last years laureates in economics.

Nobel’s formal events require white-tie-and-tails or (there is an exception!) “national costume.” Unfortunately, the national costume of physics is anything-goes-topped-with-a-funny-logo-on-your-Tshirt.

I’ve been doing online “research” on what people wear* to all the various parties in Sweden–the Engle family blog was a great resource. They went to three balls in one week…wow!

As a direct result of this research, I got Frank to come shopping with me and buy some non-sneakers.