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

Frank Wilczek and Betsy Devine in LKAB mine, Kiruna, Sweden

I’ve been getting email from readers frustrated by the many Nobel stories I started to tell but never found time to finish. One person called it “blogus interruptus.”

For example, I started several times to blog about Kiruna but never got much past telling you that it has as many space scientists as reindeer herders (about 500 of each). On December 17, Frank and I spent the morning with Sverker Fredriksson and Ingrid Sandahl visiting the huge LKAB iron mine, which employs another 2,000 of Kiruna’s 24,000 non-space-scientists and non-reindeer-herders.

Here are a few LKAB facts I jotted down:

• You could build 12 new Eiffel towers every day with the iron ore dug up at LKAB.
• Every night around 2 a.m., the mine does its blasting–which makes the town of Kiruna vibrate slightly.
• Iron ore is easier to ship and grade if you process it into uniform pellets.
• LKAB backs up its goals (quality and safety) by paying company-wide bonuses based on how well the goals are met.
• People who work in LKAB mine agree that theirs are the best jobs in the best company in the best town in the world.

That last item, however, seemed pretty widespread among people in Kiruna. I just hope space scientists and reindeer herders don’t ever get into fights with the people of LKAB about who does, in fact, have the best job ever.

Mother Nature sent me a free sample of old-age hearing loss back when I
was a mere young sprout. I went for a long noisy car ride and, when I
got out, a whole bunch of neurons inside my left ear had decided to quit.

There are some good sides to this problem (and there are some good
reasons my children occasionally tease my by singing Monty Python’s “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”)
For example:

• I can sleep in a noisy bedroom just by pointing my right
  ear into the pillow.
• Sometimes I “hear” some truly remarkable
  things–like a radio ad for a restaurant with “ballet parking.”
• And I
  get lots of practice on filling in the blanks.

At Harvard Square’s Boston Chowda* the other day, I kept
overhearing the cellphone talk of a 6-foot-tall blonde goddess at the
next table.

And so on — I’m giving the Mad Lib
version, of course, because my polka-dot hearing kept cutting out every
time she lowered her voice. So I got to fill in the blanks with my own
idea of what would be a fun story–for example, that the
wrong-party-clincher was Julie Christie and Johnny Depp told the
goddess she looked good.

In real life, it was probably much less glamorous–but who cares? Certainly not my optimistic imagination.

A Hollywood party like the one I pictured–hey, it probably even has ballet parking!

• Return to Normandy
• Thoughts on Passing By…
• Scenes from an American Election
• A Final Reunion
• Takhuna Memorial
• Scenes from the Baltic xxx
• Give Me Liberty xxx
• News From Ukraine
• xxx
• Public Education and Human Rights

Amazing 2004–never before has any year been described by so many different top ten lists!

Now, as for the top ten events in cryptozoology–that would probably be among the top ten things I know nothing about. Still, I can’t help wanting to jump in the game, if only by picking out my ten favorite blogposts from 2004. In chronological order, that would be:

1. Return of the King: The absolute best moment (January 11)
2. Re-thinking the virtues of fire-engine red (April 3)
3. The fog of Robert McNamara (April 6)
4. Look–up in the sky–it’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a … journalist? (April 25)
5. Bullied by bullet points (May 2)
6. Garlic salt and bacon grease (May 27)
7. The broken internal clock of Gerald Jay Sussman (June 3)
8. Travel broadens the…something (June 15)
9. Dramatic theory with mosquito continuo (July 23 — this is my favorite of all, being mostly Frank)
10. Angst of a modern Hamlet (November 11)

After whittling down all my posts to a favorite ten, I suddenly realized–I’d forgotten to check the entire Nobel category. Drat, and now it’s after midnight. Well, here are my five favorite Nobel-related posts.

• The Nobel Prize from our dog’s point of view (October 6)
• We are in a metastable state (November 30)
• 1,000,000,000 seconds ago (December 4)
• Up to and including the Nobel Prize ceremony (December 10)
• Food presentation that will be hard to live up to (December 11)

Am I egotistical, picking out ten favorite blogposts? Go thou and do likewise, if you haven’t already…

The five platonic solids, left to right: octahedron, icosahedron, cube, tetrahedron, and the squishy one is a dodecahedron.

In other words, our lost suitcase was found–almost exactly a week after disappearing. (Thank you, Scandinavian Air, for finding it, and thanks to Continental for delivering it to our house at 1:30 a.m.)

Now, I was extremely pleased–though the next morning was soon enough to check on it–that my winter hat, two pairs of shoes, et cetera, were once again part of my life. Frank, however, was much more excited about his magnetic “stix and balls”* from the Nobel Museum, which he has now turned into five platonic solids.

“The Platonic solids were known to the ancient Greeks,” according to Steve Wolfram. Furthermore, “Plato equated the tetrahedron with the “element” fire, the cube with earth, the icosahedron with water, the octahedron with air, and the dodecahedron with the stuff of which the constellations and heavens were made (Cromwell 1997).”

Of course, if the heavens were made of magnets and balls, they’d also squish out of shape from their own weight. But I know Frank has some tricky un-squishing planned for the immediate future…

* Magnetic stix and balls are made in the UK, and various people sell them online, if you want some. Frank has 3 kits–they cost about $10 each.

Wow, thanks to the brilliant and sweet-natured Kevin Lawver for nominating this blog for a “Best Writing” Bloggie!

In January of 2004 I spent time trying to get Blogger blogs to yield RSS. That is, Scott Johnson did the actual geekery while I wrote some toy blogs with Rube-Goldberg templates–often with 4 or 5 posts in the space of an hour.

One of my favorites was blogged in the persona of Terry Pratchett’s giant world-supporting space-turtle A’Tuin:

A’Tuin tries to figure out what to put in his brand new weblog. A few millennia pass as he reasons it out, distracted briefly by drips from the Discworld above as an Ice Age ends. Finally the words come to him. Hesitantly, he pecks them out:

“Helllllo werld.”

So I hope you will all be more inclined to join Kevin Lawver in voting for my blog’s good writing when you compare it to much weirder blogs from my past such as “Giant Martian kittens make good friends” and “boat drinks r us.” (Hey, if anyone wants to vote for my boat drinks’ tagline–“The blog of tall blue libations with tiny umbrellas”–that would make my New Year even more fun and surprising…)

Anyway, thanks, Kevin!