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

Dang, what is it about January? I the days are short, but my previous January 20 posts are just so grumpy! Sparing you links to either of them, I’ll celebrate instead with my 10 favorite posts from 2003. (My favorites from 2004 are already out there.)

Oh, yes, and some of my favorite 2003 graphics–which one doesn’t match up with one of the posts?

• What’s next, a-fay izzle-shay?
• So, what do you look like, really?
• Rated ahrrrrrrrr….*
• Segway versus Vespa: A2O or AOS?
• Immortality by proxy: Alice in Wonderland
• Beauty and mystery of snow
• Immortality by proxy, part 2
• To be thankful for…
• At least our visitors didn’t have bolts in their necks…
• Email to the universe

It wasn’t postmature ignitulation–but something like that happened to our old furnace while I was shopping. When I got home, the house was full of dark smells and weird heat–and the basement, when I checked it, was billowing smoke!

Three loudly-sirenaceous-red-firetrucks full of kind-and-cheerful-firemen later, the dirty firebox of my furnace was still smoldering but at least not billowing smoke all over the house.

‘You need to get the furnace cleaned every year,” said the fireman. Well, I usually do, but, dang, 2004 was busy with both daughters graduating, both daughters moving (twice), one daughter getting married, and just as things are starting to settle down Frank gets that Nobel phone call, and one of the things that slipped my mind was the furnace.

Not that I’m complaining, especially since our house did not blow up.

At least not yet.

Non-sequitur postscript–Don’t miss AccordionGuy’s double Bill Gates!

does not equal

It just so happens that when
Longing for the Harmonies came out, Frank and I were a tad bit distracted elsewhere. But now we’re baaaaack, and trying to make sense out of what we’re supposed to do about it. [I posted the table of contents here.]

As a longtime geeky fan of Amazon, I’ve been messing around over there with their bells and whistles. And do they ever have a lot of both!

I signed up as an Associate, stuck more Amazon links onto my blog, put an Alexa toolbar on my blog, got my own page of Friends and Associates, wrote a review of a Lafuma mesh recliner I really liked,…and now I’m starting to think, wait a minute! I’m stuck to the tarbaby here, getting deeper and deeper, losing to this Amazon alligator, and mixing my metaphors too! What do all these things have to do with Longing for the Harmonies?

BTW, many thanks to Jason Kottke for showing me how to create an Amazon text link that links to the page I want.

Oh, and a million more thanks to the people who bought LFTH and other stuff from my Amazon Associate account–you guys are the greatest!

Who will feed my Titan addiction today?

Wired News?

Data beamed back from Titan, one of Saturn’s moons, sketched a picture of a pale orange landscape with a spongy surface topped by a thin crust. “The closest analogs are wet sand or clay,” said John Zarnecki, in charge of instruments analyzing Titan’s surface.

Or CNN?

“Titan a ‘creme brulee’-like surface”

“We think this is a material which may have a thin crust, followed by a region of relatively uniform consistency,” John Zarnecki, the scientist in charge of experiments on Titan’s surface said at a televised news conference from the control center in Germany.

Zarnecki said one of his colleagues had suggested another analogy: creme brulee. “But I don’t suppose that will be appearing in any of our papers,” he said.

Aw, c’mon, John, why not? I’m glad CNN had the good taste to include it.

All things Titanical, cont’d. Thanks to BoingBoing for pointing out this great old Time Magazine cover. I also turned up some fun results from the new Technorati tag game for “titan” and “orange.”

To AMITY AND MIRA:

“In vain does the God of War growl, snarl, roar, and try to interrupt
with bombards, trumpets, and his whole tarantaran. . . . Let us despise
the barbaric neighings which echo through these noble lands and awaken
our understanding and longing for the harmonies.” — Johannes Kepler
(1571 – 1630)

Introduction    xi
    
Acknowledgments     xv
    
i. Uniformity of Parts     
Prelude i: Reply to Keats (on the Rainbow)     3
1. The Nature of Color: We Are All Color-blind     6
2. Spectra: Music of the Spheres     12
3. Earth-stuff and Star-stuff     16
Rhapsody on N (The World Between)    20
    
ii. Uniformity of Structure    
Prelude ii: Radical Conservatism     25
4. The Cosmic Order of Galaxies     29
Doppler Shift     34
5. Expansion and Uniformity     38
6. Inferno and Afterglow     41
Three Ages    49
    
iii. Transformations    
Prelude iii: Treiman’s Theorem     55
7. New Star     58
8. The Weak Interaction     62
Ego and Survival     71

iv. lnevitability     
Prelude iv: Levels of Equilibrium     55
9. Universal Chemistry     58
10. Cooking with Gobar     62
11. Explosions and Fluorescence    71
    
v. Quantal Reality     
Prelude v: In the First Circle     99
12. Light as Waves     102
13. Light as Lumps     109
14. Laves     113
15. Branching Worlds     119
Frustration and Uncertainty     130
A Quantum Lottery    133
    
vi. Radical Uniformity in Microcosm     
Prelude vi: Back to Pythagoras     137
16. The Indistinguishable     143
17. Fields     155
Maxwell Redux     165
Virtual Particles    170
    
vii. Transforming Principles     
Prelude vii: The Search for Depth     173
18. Antimatter     177
19. Quarks: A Peculiar Chemistry     189
20. Colour     196
21. Gluons     200
How Asymptotic Freedom Discovered Me     207
22. Asymptotic Freedom     218
In Praise of QCD    226
    
viii. Symmetry Lost and Symmetry Found     
Prelude viii: Relative and Absolute     231
23. Interchangeable Worlds     235
24. More Perfect Worlds     240
25. A Suggested Unity     247
Coda: About the Table     259
26. Salt Mine     261
27. A Little Matter    265
    
ix. Radical Uniformity in Macrocosm     
Prelude ix: Genesis Machines     279
28. Horizons     285
29. Inflation    290
    
x. Quest     
Prelude x: No Firm Foundation     303
30. Families     306
31. Dark Matter     315
32. Hidden Harmonies     335
    
Notes    343
    
Index    349

Email from Bert, regarding my orange bloggery, blogged here with his permission:

Hey Betsy, I even had an orange shag rug in my living room!

My favorite Orange blog thing actually is mostly green yet speaks volumes about orange?????

Neeka’s Backlog has been coming mostly from Kiev during the recent political events:

http://vkhokhl.blogspot.com/

Orange has a special meaning in the Ukraine. In their recent presidential election, pro-Western candidate Viktor Yushchenko was nearly poisoned with dioxin (Agent Orange). Supporters, wearing orange to show solidarity, went on to triumph–even though his opponent got millions of rubles in campaign funds from Russia.

Neeka reports that the “orange revolution”, now being more broadly defined as anti-Putin and pro-democracy, has spread to St. Petersburg, where retirees are protesting cuts in their benefits.

This doesn’t sound good for Bush’s friend “Pootie-Poot.”

Love this CNN headline! “Images of orange Titan elate scientists.” Scientists are cool-color hunters–gosh, who knew?
Look for ESA to offer a new line of Titan-orange merchandise, cashing in on the fad for time-shifting back to the seventies:

I will now, gratuitously, list a few of my favorite orange blogs:

• “Improvident Lackwit” filters the universe through quotes from the Simpsons.
• Halley has an orange-y thing going on at the top of her sizzling home page.
• The new “blog blog” by multiple-and/or-serial-blogger Dave Pell.
• Susan Mernit’s tech-backstory blog always makes me feel in the know.
• Will JOHO change to crimson now he’s at Hahvahd?

Even more gratuitous use of orange from my past:

vs.

I’m not complaining–I’m enjoying my real life one heck of a lot. And WW Norton just re-published the paperback version of Longing for the Harmonies, a book Frank and I wrote together that a whole generation of kids (maybe you?) used to learn about fun non-math physics.

Norton mailed us some paperbacks–the cover is new, but the text is an old friend. I love re-seeing the graphics I did with MacPaint and my dot matrix printer. I’ll post some another day.

Meantime, I even got an Amazon Associate link to help me track its statistics:

Anyway, if you buy a book by clicking on a link in my blog, I might ultimately get 50 cents.

Messing with html and hoping to get 50 cents does somehow feel more like the real me than dressing up in an evening gown every night–but the real me enjoyed that too, a month ago!

Wow, I just signed up as an Amazon Associate–check this out!

Now, I”m trying something else out:

Meanwhile, here’s my Associate link:

Starting at 3 a.m. EST tomorrow (January 14) NASA will have live Web TV coverage of the Huygens probe touching down on Saturn’s moon Titan.

According to NASA, this artist’s conception

More Cassini Huygens linkage:

• Landing preparations underway
• European Space Agency (ESA) has Cassini-Huygens home page
• ESA will post video highlights online
• NASA coverage
• Expected “footprint” of images
• Good summary of mission
• Weird: Huygens will be blasting modern music as it descends…

Will Kurt Vonnegut’s sirens be found on Titan? Tune in tomorrow and find out for yourself.

Grrr!
I posted this story to the home page, then came back to find it had
disappeared…twice! Will the third time be the charm? Or is some evil
sci fi force at work in the bowels of Weblogger.com? I guess that’s
something else I’ll find out, tuning in tomorrow…