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

…there is no Internet. So one final quick post before I run out the door:

If the clouds part tonight, watch for the solstice full moon and planet display. In fact, this week is your best chance since 1987 to observe the full moon illusion, because the moon in this June is much lower in the sky than usual.

No, the full moon illusion is not what you see in this animated gif, it’s something different. Put down your mouse, go outside, and take a look!

…we have reached a classic comic subplot. Frank has been invited to address graduation ceremonies at his high school–and at his elementary school.

Talk about dreams of childhood, (or nightmares of childhood)…

And, for another rich Shakespearian irony, the New York Times decided to cover last week’s Nobel Monument ceremonies in its Sunday Style section, with weddings and glitzy fundraisers. This photo was not online, but (thanks to the sharp eyes of my friend Roberta) I now have a sheet of newsprint featuring Frank and NYC’s teenage Nobel essay contest winners sharing a page with party animals David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger.

Those student essayists will enjoy all the Nobel festivities in December, so I doubt they much care where the NYT put their photos.

…clarinet beats oboe.”

I love it when Julie Leung and Lisa Williams blog their kid stories. So, even though my daughter Amity is already grown-up and has a Ph.D., I asked her permission to blog her clarinet-oboe comparison.

Then I forgot to blog it until today, when she told me about her trip home from a recent conference:

“Yesterday, I made one of the classic blunders. I picked out a very sad book to read on the plane, so that all the way from Minneapolis to Boston I was trying to cry very unobtrusively.”

At least she didn’t start a land war in Asia….

Inconceivable!

We live in a mysterious universe, and springtime is a mysterious process in said universe–which the existence of Morris dancers only makes much more so…

The Morris dance is common to all inhabited worlds in the multiverse.

It is danced under blue skies to celebrate the quickening of the soil and under bare stars because it’s springtime and with any luck the carbon dioxide will unfreeze again. The imperative is felt by deep-sea beings who have never seen the sun and urban humans whose only connection with the cycles of nature is that their Volvo once ran over a sheep…

Just one of many Terry Pratchett quotes about Morris Dancing…

Carolus Linnaeus (1707 – 1778) invented our double-barreled scientific naming (and shocked his contemporaries with his scandalous way of classifying plants: “Who would have thought that bluebells and lillies and onions could be up to such immorality?”).

Linnaeus was Swedish, but for varied odd reasons, detailed by
David Weinberger, his collection of specimens and the 3×5 cards classifying them ended up in London. Go read David’s entire post–it’s remarkable and loaded with intriguing photos–but here is my favorite theory-of-knowledge lightning bolt:

Linnaeus’ classification resulted from the nature of paper. Because you only have one card for each species, your order will give each species one and only one place. You will organize them by putting cards near cards like them, naturally producing an ordered series or a set of clusters.

As you lay out your cards, like next to like, you are drawing a map of knowledge. The largest units are kingdoms, not because Animals, Vegetables and Minerals somehow lord it over the particular creatures they contain but because kingdoms are the most inclusive territories on political maps. Knowledge thus derives its nature from the paper that expresses it: Bounded, unchanging, the same for all, two-dimensional and thus difficult to represent exceptions and complex overlaps, and all laid out in a glance with no dark corners.

+ = ????
Via the new King Kong blog, Andy Serkis has jumped out of his Gollum suit and hopes to direct Johnny Depp in his next movie.

Gollum directing a movie–imagination boggles, yesss, my preciousss, it absolutely boggles.

…and that goes for Uncle Walter and Aunt Billie (who came with us to the Stockholm ceremonies) and cousins Cheri and Patti (and many more!) and cousin-in-law Jim too.

But this special picture shows Frank with his mom and dad after the Nobel Monument ceremony yesterday. It’s the first of all the many “praise Frank!” occasions they’ve been able to be part of. And we are so glad they came.

This is a town where kids from NH (like me) get freckles on the roofs of our mouths from staring up at the tall buildings. Then, just turn your head to something else amazing:

• Wow, it’s the Chrysler Building!
• Hey, that says “Carnegie Hall”!
• Isn’t that the place where they shot The Apprentice?

When we arrived Sunday, south Lexington Avenue was a huge Puerto Rican street fair (we’d missed the parade.) Later, hunting for dinner, we found a city block (Lexington, 27th to 28th Streets) full of Indian restaurants, and not just Indian restaurants but restaurants

• kosher,
• vegetarian, and
• South Indian.

In fact, one restaurant posted a warning sign on its door “This South Indian restaurant is kosher but not vegetarian.”

What a great city, and btw, I recommend the Mysore masala dosa at Udipi Palace.

In 30-plus years of physics conferences, Frank and I have ended up in some gnarly lodgings–spartan dormitories in Swansea and in Dresden come to mind, as well as a Paris hotel room so tiny that its double bed took up 99 and 44/100% of the floor.

More recently, we’ve found ourselves at the upper end of the scale–suites with gilt edges and amazing views. Grateful as I am to the hosts who treat us so kindly, I’m very happy here in NYC’s Park South Hotel, which costs about $500 less per night than the St. Regis–but unlike the St. Regis has free and reliable Internet.

Oh, how I love a good, not grand, hotel room with its own ironing board and little coffeemaker!*

Grand hotels so very often have neither. Instead they have butlers, valets, and room service. If I were a millionaire, I might really like this, but I am not a millionaire and I don’t.

What I prefer is to get my clothes ironed within 2 minutes after I notice that they are wrinkled–without paying $10 per garment, plus a tip. What I prefer is to make my own small pot of very bad coffee when I wake up, instead of waiting for room service to deliver a large pot of very bad coffee.

And I bet even millionaires would prefer those things too.