Entries from June 2005
June 30th, 2005 · Comments Off on The Grandma-service part of this weblog
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Just found in my inbox: here is the official 1967 portrait of the 4th Prize winner in the Westinghouse Talent Search.
That is, the teenage Frank Wilczek.
Thanks so much to Katherine Silkin of Intel’s Science Talent Search for sending me this picture! |
Tags: Heroes and funny folks
June 29th, 2005 · Comments Off on Science ha-ha from my mailbox: Governmentium (Gv)
Berkeley just announced the discovery of the heaviest element yet known to science. The new element has been named “Governmentium”.
Governmentium has one neutron, 12 assistant neutrons, 75 deputy neutrons, and 224 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312. These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons.
When catalyzed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium, an element which radiates just as much energy, since it has half as many peons, but twice as many morons.
Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert. It can be detected, however, as it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact. A reaction that normally takes one minute or less will require a week or more if contaminated by any Governmentium.
The half-life of Governmentium is 4 years. It does not, however, decay, but instead undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutron exchange places. In fact, Governmentium’s mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganization will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes. The characteristic of moron-promotion leads some scientists to believe that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a certain quantity in concentration.
This hypothetical quantity is called “Critical Morass”.
Thanks for the funny email to Damian!
Tags: Learn to write funny
June 29th, 2005 · Comments Off on Funny ha-ha from my mailbox: Governmentium
NEW ELEMENT: GOVERNMENTIUM
A major research institution has just announced the discovery of the heaviest element yet known to science.
The new element has been named “Governmentium”.
Governmentium has one neutron, 12 assistant neutrons, 75 deputy neutrons,and 224 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 311.
These 311 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons.
Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert.
However, it can be detected, as it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact.
A minute amount of Governmentium causes one reaction to take over 4 days to complete, when it would normally take less than a second.
Governmentium has a normal half-life of 4 years; it does not decay, but instead undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutron exchange places.
In fact, Governmentium’s mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganization will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes.
The characteristic of moron-promotion leads some scientists to believe that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a certain quantity in concentration.
This hypothetical quantity is called “Critical Morass”.
When catalyzed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium, an element which radiates just as much energy, since it has half as many peons, but twice as many morons.
Tags: Learn to write funny
June 29th, 2005 · Comments Off on For spacious skies
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“For a Westerner to trash Western culture is like criticizing our nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere on the grounds that it sometimes gets windy, and besides, Jupiters is much prettier. You may not realize its advantages until youre trying to breathe liquid methane.”
Neal Stephenson.
Check out the rest of the essay this quote comes from, “In the Kingdom of Mao Bell“. Published in 1994, it deserves revisiting when China’s internet policies keep making blognews.
There’s a thunderstorm rolling in on the beautiful Bodensee–but thanks to this quote from soon-to-be-newlywed AccordionGuy, I could endure wind and hailstorms with real perspective. |
Tags: Editorial
June 28th, 2005 · Comments Off on Photographic evidence…
. . . that high temperatures do not destroy the magical mix of young scientists with older ones. More and larger photos can be found here.
Now I’m off to sleep, because tomorrow means new adventures.
Or, never mind the head of a pin, how many Nobel laureates can dance the Polonaise on a tiny dance floor in Lindau? About 47, I’d guess. after last night’s party.
Special kudos for stylish moves to Alan Heeger ( 2000 Chemistry) and of course Frank Wilczek (2004 Physics).
I love the part of traveling where you run into people you already know and like. Since December, 2004, Nobel prizewinners are about 99 44/100% of those people for me. And high on said list is
Aaron Ciechanover (
2004 Chemistry) who just taught me how to Skype.
Aaron, who won for studying ubiquitin, the useful protein-murderer in our cells, gave a talk yesterday about how cells do quality control by breaking down defective proteins. Just tag the bad protein with some ubiquitin, and a huge scribbly proteasome will find and destroy it. (I am simplifying quite a lot here.)
Cells that can’t recycle protein get damaged–old useless proteins get in the way of more healthy processes–so there are a lot of medical possibilities.
Metaphorical possibilities too. I wish all of us had some mental “ubiquitin”–a mechanism to get rid of bad ideas and outmoded beliefs, after testing them carefully to see which ones are defective…
Of course, my ideas are all perfect–including this one–but several of yours, well, they really do need some rethinking.
Above, last night’s amazing dessert at the 55th annual Lindau Nobel event. Topped by a hemisphere of sugar strands, this tower of alternating sorbet-and-ice cream looks like a tiny strange astronomy radar structure.
I am now in Lindau, five floors up from the beautiful Bodenzee (aka Lake Constance) in a lovely 19th century hotel-with-beach-and-boats. Frank Wilczek and 46 other Nobel laureates and more than 700 students from around the world are on Lindau Island doing scientist stuff.
Before jet lag sleepiness floors me, I got permission to share some info from my last-night dinner partner Hans Jornvall, who is head of the committee that picks Nobel laureates in medicine as well as a serious nature-lover and birder.
Hans told me something remarkable about Korea’s DMZ–a tiny strip of land with an unbroken row of North Korean soldiers pointing big guns into it from the north of it and South Korean soldiers pointing big guns into it from the south. Nobody lives there, nobody farms there, nobody hunts there–so it has gone back to wilderness, full of rare and endangered species. Nice to know there’s an upside to world non-peace.
Do not, however, go birding in Korea and then just stroll into the DMZ with your little Bushnells and Peterson’s. You will be summarily shot, by one side or the other.
Blogging owes some 84.3%* of its success to our pleasure in learning more about people we already know, even slightly or virtually.
I had the pleasure last week of trailing along when Dennis Overbye gave Frank a tour of the New York Times backstage. (Much more impressive than backstage at CNN, BTW.) So of course I had to read more about Dennis and I came across an excellent
interview with Edge about his book Einstein in Love
whose summation I can’t resist sharing:
I know lots of people like Albert. I might be like him myself. He was a hopeless romantic, he lived on anticipation. He was always yearning for the next thing. He was always envisioning some wonderful life with somebody else, while grimly enduring life with the woman he was with. If I think about it, I would say that that was kind of the key to his psychology, that he had the lure of the perfect situation, the perfect person. Of course if you’re Einstein, you want everything that you want your way and then you want to be left alone. So you want love, and you want affection, you want a good meal, but then you don’t want any interference outside of that, so you don’t want any obligations interfering with your life, with your work. Which is a difficult stance to maintain in an adult relationship; it doesn’t work. Everything has to be a give and take.
Einstein always felt Paradise was just around the corner, but as soon as he got there, it started looking a little shabby and something better appeared. I’ve known a lot of people like Albert in my time, I have felt lots of shocks of recognition. I feel like I got to know Albert as a person in the course of this, and I have more respect for him as a physicist than I did when I started, I have more a sense of what he accomplished and how hard it really was to be Einstein than I did before. It’s a great relief to be able to think of him as a real person. If he was around I’d love to buy him a beer ….. but I don’t know if I’d introduce him to my sister.
Now you know more about Einstein, perhaps, than you wanted to. He could tell us his own side of it, if he just had a blog.
* All such statistics are, and deserve to be, made up.
Jon Udell is working on a cool tool for this.
Why would you want it? As Dave Winer said, when he and Andrew Grumet created a script to find people who share your RSS subscriptions, “Think of it as your personal echo chamber.” Your bookmarking doppelganger probably links to webpages you haven’t found yet–but will holler “Wow!”, “Wee doggie!”, or “W00t!” when you do.
Jon Udell plans to compare user profiles from the popular shared bookmarking site Del.icio.us. (Not surprisingly, his announcement has attracted a lot of bookmark action from folks who use Del.icio.us, including betsythedevine.)
So you have to share your bookmarks before you can find out who shares them with you. For some reason, this reminds me of one of my favorite Kevin Marks quotes from Bloggercon 1: “I realized that I can read thoughts–but only if people write them down first.”
