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

Thoughts of spring, from New Hampshire…

Elsewhere on my blogroll:

• Three beach chairs for Niek, Reality, and Myth
• Dave Winer on RSS: “What matters is adoption and forward motion.”
• Renee says she and Halley might start a tag-team to help (male) techies improve their dating skills. That would be fun to watch…
• A very happy blog-birthday to Susan Mernit–or should I take out an ad on Yahoo! Personals?

I’ve spent a lifetime battling mess and confusion, moving bits of information and solace around to where I think they’ll do the most good. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that mine is a mug’s game, something that can’t be won. But, like the veriest videogame addict, I keep on battling, happy for each small victory.

Frank is a First-Law-of-Thermodynamics person. Balanced, honest, square–the energy in equals the energy out. I realized this yesterday as I lay in a beach chair watching him swim and swim and swim away all the calories of his really-quite-restrained breakfast.

So I guess I’d have to admit ours is a mixed marriage.

Just one more physics concept that you’ve surely noticed: reversing time’s arrow. Lots of experimental work going on all around us, most of it expensive.

But who am I to judge? Botoxers, sports-car drivers, and entropy warriors–we should probably all get together on one secret handshake.

Brand-new data came out yesterday–the best picture yet of the early, early universe. Jim Peebles (who long ago taught me graduate quantum mechanics) flew down to St. Thomas yesterday with four papers in an unopened envelope; he had pledged not to look at them until exactly noon. Did he wait? I asked. I did, said Jim Peebles.

Wired calls it “the smoking gun” for inflation; the NYT calls it the “earliest signs yet of a violent baby universe.”

I also love this quote from the NYT article:

“Inflation theory, which was invented by Alan H. Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been the workhorse of Big Bang cosmology for the last 25 years…

Dr. Guth, who is at a conference in the Caribbean, was said to be walking around with a big smile.”

I can confirm that Alan Guth is smiling, since I sat next to him at breakfast this morning. But then, so were all the rest of us–what a beautiful morning!

And if Frank hadn’t left his computer in the room, I’d be out enjoying it, instead of sitting here blogging.

Today, my fingers longed to be typing up blogposts about the people and ideas and adventures of SXSW. Instead, I’ve spent the day packing for a trip trailing Frank to a totally different space–St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands. (I hope I made that sound pretty tough…)

Web connectivity there is dubious, I’m afraid, so I’m leaving my computer at home this week.

And, to misquote Willie Nelson, my mistranslation of a favorite song

On the road still,
like a band of the gipsies, we descend the road.
We are best friends, insistent on the fact that the world is turnin ‘ our manner,
and our manner:

Is on the road still:
Just cannot wait to still obtain on the road.
The love of life I is music of makin ‘ with my friends,
and I then not to wait to still obtain on the road.

Back soon–if I get on the web I’ll send some photos to Flickr. Or check out some of the great blogs on my blogroll…

“I never remembered where the park was, what it was called, or how to get there, but only thought of it as the place where I would dazedly wander at 1 am while holding his hand in the moonlight…”

Read the rest, you know you want to go back to that place in your own life.

(One great side effect of SXSW is that I’ve discovered so many new blogs, including several written by Liz Henry.)

Just a few quick soundbites from Monday’s SXSW keynote, where communitymeister Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia interviewed communitymeister Craig Newmark of Craigslist:

Jimmy: “The biggest conflict we see at Wikipedia is not between left and right, but between good guys and jerks.”

Craig: “Yes! The biggest, most vicious conflict we see on Craigslist is not political. It’s in the pet forums.”

Craig: “Crooks are early adopters of technology. As more and more technophobes start coming online, the vast majority of them are good people. So, more and more, good people outnumber the bad guys.”

Craig: “When you talk about the wisdom of crowds–you must also be worried about mob rule. You have to be careful.”

More juicy outtakes (Hillary Clinton fetishes?) at Will Pate, Frank Gruber, and a very close transcription from Auscillate. Me, I should be packing!

…even though some of my favorites are running against others of my favorites:

• Heather Champ’s FlickrBlog
• …and Flickr itself
• Josh Schachter’s Del.icio.us
• Cory Doctorow’s BoingBoing
• Matthew Mullenweg’s WordPress
• Jason Kottke’s Kottke.org
• Joshua Micah Marshall’s Talking Points Memo

Uh oh, here they come–the Bloggies!

FlickrBlog won. Heather Champ, 2004 Lifetime Achievment winner, picked up the prize and said, it’s also the blog of Stewart and Caterina Fake…

BoingBoing won! And it won again! (Lifetime Achievement) Cory Doctorow isn’t here, but David Pescovitz accepted…

Weblog of the Year (and winner of other awards): PostSecret.

Julie Leung

We make masks when we blog. We choose which sides we want to reveal. We choose which sides of those we love we want to reveal.

Lisa Williams

My husband and I met PGE, in the Pre-Google Era. Now there is so much info out there, encouraging you to evaluate the other person. But tthat assumes you know what will make you happy. I know that I don’t.

Jeneane Sessum

I will out anything about myself that I choose to. But the blogworld has changed a lot since I started blogging.

George Sessum

I read her blog and say, “Oh, that’s what’s going on.” And we get a lot done speaking on the telephone. Face to face–well, there’s our daughter Jenna.

Derek Powazek

(On having inadvertantly turned down a packet of Sweet N Low with Heather’s URL on it) Is there a bigger insult than to refuse schwag at a conference? Once I found out, I begged for that packet of Sweet N Low!

Chris Pirillo

We met online–at Match.com. She asked me, “Are you one of those guys who is going to send me pictures of your naked chest?” I did a double-take. Then I pointed her to RentMyChest.com.

Ponzi Indharasophang

Funny is hot. Funny is very hot.

Heather Champ

I got email from France, attacking me for robbing the cradle when I married Derek.

p.s. Lisa introduced George Sessum as “probably the only person in this room who has played music with Chuck Berry.”

via Ole Eichorn, here’s Hubble’s view of the spiral galaxy aka M101..