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

Ashmolean Museum at 6 a.m.

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine.

…under the cloudless 5 – 6 a.m. sky of beautiful Oxford.

Look closely at the Ashmolean Museum’s facade, and you can see the sharp shadow that each statue is casting.

More images of Oxford springtime on Flickr. One shot that isn’t there–it came out too blurry, to my regret–a patch of old moss on a very old wall with a jiggly silver line from end to end where a little snail had taken its own morning walk, even earlier than I did.

I realized this morning — Snails are bloggers!

snow.

Originally uploaded by hrútur73.

…did I mention that it’s May 21, 2007?

Then again, did I mention that I’m on a stopover in Iceland?

In 10 minutes I’ll board a different plane and fly to London where, I very much hope, it won’t be snowing.

Wish me luck!

Update–in Oxford. Lanscape green not white. Cloudy skies but the drizzle is rain not snow.

Big pink roses in gardens promise better weather–and smell so lovely.

Jet-lagged Betsy promises, see you later!

Linnés Hammarby

Originally uploaded by pk01.

On May 23, Sweden says happy 300th birthday to the scientist just quoted–the not-very-modest Carolus Linnaeus.

The bright-red cabinet shown is Linnaeus’s “hard disk,” quips its photographer. Linnaeus’s claim to fame was his simple method for organizing the vast confusion of plant and animal species, using two-part scientific names. One giant step for Homo sapiens!

One could do the math (though I won’t) comparing the complexity of all those genomes to the number of infobits on the Internet. David Weinberger’s new book Everything is Miscellaneous makes a compelling case that we Web 2.0 folk are creating value as each of us mini-adds our own tags, playlists, and hyperlinks to that vast digital pileup of miscellanity.

David says that Linnaeus’s reliance on paper to organize his thoughts fell far short of the tricks computers can do with pixels and bits. Very true–and yet, no matter how smart computers become, there’s still an important role for human beings in finding some simple thread through the world’s vast labyrinth and putting that thread in the hand of a fellow seeker.

As Weinberger himself does — and as Linnaeus did.

Radcliffe Camera with tea drinkers

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine.

Headed for Oxford, beautiful Oxford, tomorrow.

To see, among other glorious sights, the Radcliffe Camera, which Tolkien hated–it was his imaginary basis for the temple of Sauron.

I love JRR Tolkien–but would he like me? He didn’t like modern stuff–Saruman’s dirty orc-factories. He liked hobbit yeoman farmers with loyal servants.

My own French-Canadian great-grandparents poured out of picturesque farmwork into dirty factories. Freedom, they wanted–maybe just one small chance for a better life.

And just a tiny few of them got that chance–my father’s grandfather Hugo Dubuque became a lawyer, called in his obituary “a credit to his race.”

My French-Canadian mother’s aunt Leda Charpentier didn’t go back to school on the day she turned 12 because that was the magical age to start work in “the mill.” Leda’s luck turned later, when the mill owner rented her out to some friends as a temporary maid/helper.

And my own luck began when, many years later, Leda’s orphaned niece Clothilde struck the warm-hearted fancy of maiden ladies for whom Leda was now cook-housekeeper. In time they adopted my mother and sent her to Smith. I remember those lovable maiden ladies, including “ma tante” Leda, from my own early childhood.

But back to Oxford, back to JRR Tolkien. How foolish it would be for me to try to refute Tolkien because my family history doesn’t fit in with his fantasy. I love his fantasy–reading through one page of its watered-down quotes puts tears in my eyes.

Part of growing up is re-finding the missed connections where cranky cynicism cut us loose from stuff we once loved. I’ll be looking for Tolkien’s magic next week in Oxford–even as I (maybe) drink tea next to Sauron’s temple, which Tolkien, on so many levels, would have despised.
***

Frodo: I can’t do this, Sam.
Sam: I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.
Frodo: What are we holding onto, Sam?
Sam: That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo… and it’s worth fighting for.

Energy in New Hampshire

Originally uploaded by John Edwards 2008.

Because my little sister gave me one. But that’s not the only reason…

I’ve been trying to hold back on supporting a candidate for President this time–because I remember way back to the 2000 primary in NH, when Bradley vs. Gore got so hot that many Bradley-ites (OK, my family) ended up disillusioned and sore at heart.

Yes, in November of 2000, my mom drove to the polls and cast a vote for Al Gore–while holding her nose. But she didn’t give money to Gore. She didn’t campaign for him. If election day had been rainy, she might have stayed home. Configure my mom as a lot more unhappy Bradley-ites– you do know that Bush won NH in 2000?

In 2004, Kerry beat Howard Dean in NH–but Kerry didn’t break the hearts of us Dean-supporters. And NH Democrats later went all out to help Kerry beat Bush in the *real* election in 2004.

I like John Edwards. I like Barack Obama. I like Hillary Clinton. (Not necessarily in that exact order.) It saddens me that Obama and Clinton staffers are taking nasty punches at each other’s candidates. I like it that Edwards’s staffers seem to be pro-John, not anti-Barack or anti-Hillary.

Billions invested, a cast of thousands waits for colossal collisions…

No, not Nascar but fans of CERN’s particle-smasher, expecting suicide crashes of proton-on-proton by 2008. (Nice article in the NYT by Dennis Overbye, plus lots of pictures.) Frank and I head to Switzerland May 30 for some tours that I hope will create less controversy than Robert Scoble’s!

I bugged Frank at dinner for a plain explanation of what these new experiments–higher energies than all previous ones–are going to show. Translating his words into my own simplified words–we’re smashing a giant metaphorical goose-egg to find out which of three kinds of stuff might lurk inside.

• Possibility #1: Evidence for supersymmetry(golden goose egg!) A bunch of new particles whose behavior strongly suggests we’ve discovered a matching set to the ones seen before–squarks, gluinos, and similar strange etc.
• Possibility #2: New totally weird stuff (metaphorically–I dunno–mermaids swimming in eggyolk?). Stuff nobody predicted, so we have to go back to zero and re-tool our theories to fit the new mess–maybe with a suspicion that CERN’s detectors weren’t working properly.
• Possibility #3: Just what we’ve seen before (awww, egg yolk and egg white). The same exact particles we already know about, doing the stuff that we already understand.

Bonus links!!!

• I stuck the particle-smashing image from the NYT next to the rose window of the Cathedral of Chartres (a high-minded collaboration on a massive scale that predates CERN by just a bit less than 1000 years) because Frank says that particle colliders are the Gothic cathedrals of our era.
• The very first image on the World Wide Web was those amazing singers Les Horribles Cernettes! (Thanks to Lubos Motl for this info.)
• Cernettes singing “You Only Love Your Collider” in RealMedia video.

Little Golden Book _The Color Kittens_

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine.

The Color Kittens by Margaret Wise Brown was one of my favorites and long after I could read it to myself I loved my mother’s dramatic readings of it. Especially that “wonderful kittens” line.

And now it’s been reissued–and I got a new copy as a wonderful Mother’s Day present.

I photographed the “wonderful kittens” page lying on my now-blooming and also wonderful azaleas.

Treetops with contrail

Originally uploaded by Janebug.

…because it means that I’ve had to lie on my back and look up into treetops–which I recommend to you!

Yesterday evening, the treetops were fuddled by wind, Morse-coding fast overlapped leaf-patterns against the sky. Tonight is much calmer–fewer branch motions and many more manic twee sparrows, flying in for a few friendly “tweets” before settling to bedtime.

Meanwhile, high up above treetops, airliners seek Logan Airport, leaving long sunset-tinted contrails behind. And way-up-high-sky-winds drift those contrails across the treetop-marked sky–just as those same winds push cumulus clouds around. Why did I never, before tonight, notice that contrails are just a funny-shape kind of cloud?

And when did I ever before stare up into sky-treetops? One quick assessing glance, maybe, when I was a kid, before starting my own climb up the tree’s branches. Now that I’m 60, I look and appreciate without demanding to conquer.

Tonight gives new meaning to that old New England saying, “Look up, not down.”

Or to quote all of it,

“Look out not in.
Look forward not back.
Look up not down.”

Good advice, and may you enjoy it without having to get any pinched nerve in your neck!

Here’s a fun science mystery with surprising ways to catch bad guys and metadata flavor–which makes it hard to know where to begin this blogpost…

Bad guys are juicy–suppose that you’re a bad guy. Suppose you want to fake bookkeeping data or election results. Well, bwa-ha-ha, bad guy, you’re going to leave a mathematical “bad-guys-R-us” slimy trail–because fake random numbers like yours don’t obey Benford’s Law. Real ones do.

Benford’s Law describes–oddly, nobody understands why–many if not most huge collections of numbers.* Baseball statistics, lengths of rivers, areas of counties. Half-lives of radioactive isotopes. And vote counts, when those vote counts aren’t tampered with.

Big numbers have nine choices for their first digit–1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, or 9. Right? So you’d expect that one-ninth of all big numbers would start with each of those digits.

Bzzzt, wrong! Almost 1/3 of Benford-law-following numbers start with 1–just for example. Naive human fraudsters, on the other hand, create fake numbers that mostly start with 5 or 6–poking their inventions into what they imagine is anonymity’s forgiving middle.

Now for the dirty math books–I knew you were waiting–Benford’s Law was found, independently, in 1881 (Simon Newcomb) and 1938 (Frank Benford). Lisa Zyga at PhysOrg.com says:

Benford and Newcomb stumbled upon the law in the same way: while flipping through pages of a book of logarithmic tables, they noticed that the pages in the beginning of the book were dirtier than the pages at the end. This meant that their colleagues who shared the library preferred quantities beginning with the number one in their various disciplines…

Yes, dirty library-book pages! Important pre-Google metadata about what people before you found interesting.

Bad guys who created fake election data imagined that they were just creating new data–but Benford’s Law meant they left metadata behind. Forensic teams who want to find election fraud can use Benford’s Law to find out which sets of data have bad guys behind them.

Now, as for you good guys, for deeper insight into metadata, I recommend David Weinberger’s new book, Everything is Miscellanous. Meanwhile, for you bad guys, one message of both David Weinberger and Frank Benford is paraphrased clearly in Matthew 10:26:

…there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known.

Uh-oh. And I consider my own self a good guy.

* p.s. Not all data sets follow Benford’s Law. Both Wikipedia and Zyga give counter-examples, such as (to quote Zyga) “data sets that are arbitrary and contain restrictions..For example, lottery numbers, telephone numbers, gas prices, dates, and the weights or heights of a group of people.”

Perfect together–who knew?

Family Circus cartoons, each with random text from Friedrich Nietzsche.

Thanks to Pen-Elayne for bringing us all one much-needed guilt-free Mother’s Day moment.