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

There are certain problems with having a wife who blogs. For example, if you say something funny to a bunch of your high school classmates, your wife is likely to scribble it down on a paper napkin so that she can blog it later.

Then, four months later, she re-finds the paper napkin. So today (ta da!) I’m blogging two fine Frank Wilczek quotes!

I went off to college planning to major in math or philosophy–
of course, both those ideas are really the same idea.

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In physics, your solution should convince a reasonable person.
In math, you have to convince a person who’s trying to make trouble.
Ultimately, in physics, you’re hoping to convince Nature.
And I’ve found Nature to be pretty reasonable.

Now I’m headed to the blogless backwoods of NH–while I’m gone, read the folks on my blogroll, assuming they don’t all decide to take time off now also.

The IgNobel Prizes have their own funny blog, and you should IMHO be reading it.

A lot of bottles…

Have you read Stu Savory’s intergalactic cometary warning?

It’s 3:25 a.m. in Stockholm, our flight leaves at 6:50 a.m. Blogging own my inner thoughts would come out close to “Mmmzzzzz,” so farewell.

Kudos to NASA! (Hey guys, why not hire me to do your graphics?)

Robot ad placement at its most disturbing: An ad for “old-fashioned hot dogs” attached to BoingBoing’s demo of vintage LSD scare-story about talking hot dogs with ketchup in their hair…

p.s. Einstein’s sister had moral issues with hot dogs–she loved them, but she was a vegetarian. Her famous brother kindly encouraged her, “You know, in your case, I believe the hot dog could be considered a vegetable.”

Similarly, my non-hot-dog-eating husband defended me at a physics picnic against some knowledgeable passerby warning about all the bad stuff they put into hot dogs (I eat one about once a year.) “What’s inside your hot dog,” said Frank, “is protons, neutrons, and electrons.”

A leafhopper in a glamorous lady’s hat? Actually, what I’m talking about is the art of bugging people, but very politely. And here I mean not bugging innocent strangers, but politely bugging people whose job is to help you, but who have decided that they really don’t have to help because….well, let me just tell you the story. We got into Uppsala pretty late Friday night, and the promised Internet connectivity of our hotel room was busted, zero, zilch.

Next morning, we tried lots of plug-and-unplug-and-restart-and-etc. on both our computers. Nope. So my goal for yesterday, (Saturday, alas) was to solve our Internet problem before Frank came home from the Lepton-Photon Conference.

The front-desk staff was sure (on zero evidence) that my computer had to be the problem. Nothing they could do if my computer was the problem, so very sorry.

I kept my cool, and I also kept politely coming back with new ideas about how my problem might get solved.

Polite, even friendly persistence is the best way I know to turn people-who-don’t-want-to-solve-my-problem into people-who-do-want-to-solve-their-own-problem, which is that I keep turning up, hoping they’re going to help me.

They finally agreed to let me try the connectivity from a different hotel room–and it worked! Then, since nobody knew how fix the cable to our room which was clearly broken, they “gave” us an empty single room just for its Internet.

In one way, this less convenient than having an Ethernet hookup in our own room. But in another way, it’s better, because here I sit typing this all by myself while Frank is peacefully napping down the hall.

Anyway, the Polite Bug is what Julie Kavner in This Is My Life would call a “life lesson” from Sister Age. Just keep on politely bugging the people who are supposed to help you, and even if they weren’t planning to help you….they will.

“Philosophy is the study of questions that can’t be answered,
Religion is the study of answers that can’t be questioned,
and Criminal Justice is about right and wrong.”

The Meeting of Nobel Laureates in Lindau houses its laureates in nineteenth century summer splendor–lawns, wooded allees, lots of roses, afternoons on the terrace looking out over Lake Constance while women in long skirts bring chilled white wine or Eischocolade.

And meanwhile , at the Hotel Bad-Schachen, in our gauze-curtained room, or on the stone terrace, or under the sycamore tree on its green bench , there were between two and four bars of wifi Internet.

If you plan to visit Lake Constance–it’s in the leisurely fruit-growing “Grüss Gott” part of Germany, tucked up against Austria and Switzerland–and if you are not too wedded to air conditioning, I recommend the lovely Hotel Bad-Schachen, formerly the White Swan Hotel.

This blogpost, formerly 2333 in my old blog, needed a rescue because of bad XML. It was originally posted 7/2/05; 2:51:57 AM. Thanks to the Wayback Machine, which helped me re-find it!