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

Ah 1999–the summer my husband Frank Wilczek almost blew up the universe, as recently dredged up by the latest New Yorker.

Fans of the universe will be glad to know that you were in no danger, because I was on the job on your behalf.

1999 Betsy: But the universe is not going to blow up, right?
1999 Frank: Of course not.
Betsy: You really thought about it and it’s not.
Frank: Yes, I did. And no, it’s not.
Betsy: Good, because if it blew up I’d be so mad at you…

The New Yorker starts their version of this story when Scientific American decided to publish…

…a letter to the editor about Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, then nearing completion. The letter suggested that the Brookhaven collider might produce a “mini black hole” that would be drawn toward the center of the earth, thus “devouring the entire planet within minutes.” Frank Wilczek, a physicist who would later win a Nobel Prize, wrote a response for the magazine.

Wilczek dismissed the idea of mini black holes devouring the earth, but went on to raise a new possibility: the collider could produce strangelets, a form of matter that some think might exist at the center of neutron stars. In that case, he observed, “one might be concerned about an ‘ice-9’-type transition,” wherein all surrounding matter could be converted into strangelets and the world as we know it would vanish. Wilczek labelled his own suggestion “not plausible,” but the damage had been done. “BIG BANG MACHINE COULD DESTROY EARTH” ran the headline in the London Times. Brookhaven was forced to appoint a committee to look into this and other disaster scenarios. (The committee concluded that “we are safe from a strangelet initiated catastrophe.”)

“I know Frank Wilczek,” Engelen told me. “He is an order of magnitude smarter than I am. But he was perhaps a bit naïve.” Engelen said that CERN officials are now instructed, with respect to the L.H.C.’s world-destroying potential, “not to say that the probability is very small but that the probability is zero.”

One missing piece of this widely-quoted version–The letter Frank wrote for SA was never published. Frank wrote them a carefully detailed reply to a non-physicist’s black-hole concerns. What SA published, with Frank’s name at the end of it, had been edited down to much more a dramatic nub by somebody somewhere inside SA.

If I’d just had a blog then, we could have talked back to this story in real time.

Air conditioning, 1959

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine.

Two bathing suits–as you can see from my suntan–that’s all it took to get through the hottest of summers, pre-air-conditioning.

There were lots of cool places, even when fear of polio shut down the swimming pools. Our barn’s old cellar, shady and full of good earth smells. Our annual treehouse. A nearby mini-pine forest that had (I think) once been planned as commercial Christmas-trees.

Today in Cambridge in May, temperatures floated in between 80 and 90. After multi-errands to air-conditioned places, this felt too hot! But then I found a shady place outside, a book to read, a little breeze, and the distraction of visiting squirrels and sparrows soon brought me back to the idea that this is fine weather.

Cats talking babytalk (e.g. iCanHasCheezburger) are no longer the silliest thing on the web. Today’s Invisible Lawnmower Prize for Inanity goes to this list of top-ten corporate reputations. Excuse me, Cision (formerly Delahaye Index), but even Numo the hedgehog would look down his little nosicle at your selections–

# 1 on your list is…Microsoft????

Ummm–the security holes in their software, year after year? The ongoing antitrust mess? The embarrassment known as Vista? Heckuva job building that reputation, Microsoft!

# 6 on your list is… Exxon Mobil????

After spending millions of dollars for multiple years to
create fake public doubt about global warming, ExxonMobil declared in 2007 that they will be changing their tactics. Instead, they’ll now be funding doubts about what we should do to address global warming. I don’t think this really makes them good corporate citizens.

# 8 out of 10 is… Wal-Mart Stores????

Wal-Mart’s giant PR blunders in 2006–including the loudly-outed fake grass-roots-iness of Working Families for Walmart–may give some small support to the idea that in 2007 they’re doing better. But–in the top ten of corporate reputations????

lol PR guyz. You can has cheezburger, but you look like m0r0nz.

Greg; Philadelphia, PA

Originally uploaded by eatingsnowflakes.

“When I have visitors from China, I take them to genuinely American-Chinese restaurants like the HongKong in Harvard Square. They really like that! Because Chinese food in China is one thing. Fake-snobby ‘real’ Chinese food in the US is different. “

Thus, at dinner tonight, an eminent Chinese historian who’s been part of the Sidney Coleman poker cabal with me for more than 20 years. Which just goes to show that even old friends can surprise you!

The earliest American-Chinese food, I learned, was stuff like chop suey, chow mein, and egg foo young–never heard of in China. In the seventies, American palates were introduced to kung pao chicken and moo shu pork.

“It’s funny,” John told us, “many people deplore the corruption of Chinese restaurant menus with inauthentic American-Chinese food. But what I dread is seeing the old egg-foo-young stuff replaced by the fakery of so-called ‘authentic’ Chinese restaurant food.”

By the way, our entire dinner conversation took place at a Japanese sashimi restaurant!

…though that’s a good thing, says David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous — the info-pop page-turner (think Blink or Freakonomics) seen here in my kitchen’s miscellaneous drawer. What is miscellanous, when we mean that in a good way? Big heaps of information, spread out all over the Internet so that its different bits get tagged by many people for many different reasons. Anything that puts more information into that huge heap of (virtual) mess is good–hyperlinks! playlists! statistics! messy folksonomies! The book (much less miscellanous than this review of it) does a fine job of whacking a much-needed path for a human brain into the hugely intertwingled confusion of modern possiblities for organizing and understanding reality.

Now I must warn you about this book’s bad side-effect. It is full of “aha!” moments that you’ll start quoting to other people. And explaining to them. And since you will probably not explain these ideas with as much humor and clarity as David, their eyes may glaze over when you are just getting warmed up. But will you bear with me for just a few of my favorite bits, just some really short ones?

• “Information is easy. Space, time, and atoms are hard.” p. 5
• “Discovering what you want is at least as important as finding what you know you want.” p.9
• “Metadata is what you already know and data is what you’re trying to find.” p. 104
• “Printing requires documents to be declared to be finished at some point.” p. 145
• “Humans have purposes because we have needs because we’re not gods.” p 170

But even if your friends will stand still for your explanation of David’s “Three orders of order,” they will probably run when you threaten to read to them out loud the quotes and anecdotes that make the book so lively. Really, just tell your friends to go buy their own copies.

Disclosure–I am a blogfriend of David Weinberger, and his publisher sent me a free review copy. But I’ve also blog-argued with David about some of his other writings, so I think you can consider my praise for this book as sincere. Especially since David is such a sweet guy that he even links to the only bad review that I think his book’s gotten.

Greensburg [pre-tornado] has a great BIG WELL-come for YOU!

Originally uploaded by jschumacher.

Route 54 runs kitty-corner into Kansas– “smooth open highway” (says my long-ago diary) “through fields that got greener and lusher, wheat giving way to corn, as the day went by,” said day being June 18, 1987.

Greensburg, Kansas, now so sadly in the news has two local sights of great local pride. One is The World’s Second-Largest Stony-Iron Meteorite. The other is The World’s Largest Hand-Dug Well, 109 feet deep and very cool at the bottom, which is why it made an excellent trip-interruption stop for two little girls, then 12 and 5, in those long-ago not-very-air-conditioned days.

These two magnificent sights were housed right next to each other, so after lunch “at Burke’s coffee shop, enjoying their display of vintage beer ads inside and their little replica western town out back”, we admired the meteorite and then climbed doowwwwn the well before setting off again, “past Wichita, Emporia, and El Dorado…dinner in Ottowa, all you can eat smorgasbord for $3.99.”

Later, my 39 year-old self recorded with disappointment “a very chaste sunset, preppy shades of cream and fading denim.” But the people of Kansas–they were something special– “uniformly friendly, from Tom who swept the hall outside our motel room and brought me a free cup of coffee to every cheerful, pleasant waitress everywhere we stopped.”

And Greensburg itself–its warmth, its civic pride–Greensburg was memorable–so much so that I got email today from my then 12-year-old, “sad news from the home of the hand dug well.”

The Kansas town just tornado-smashed into kindling was little Greensburg. On Friday an F5 class storm leveled the town–this is the strongest and very rare kind of tornado, not seen in the US since 1999.

Says CNN:

Greensburg is best known for having the world’s largest hand-dug well and being home to a 1,000-pound pallasite, or stony-iron, meteorite. After the storm, the structure around the well was gone, and there were reports the meteorite was missing.

So, if you are one of the people who thought, “A tornado in Kansas? No big deal” — the goal of this blogpost is to ask you to think again. And I hope that Tom, and all like him, will be OK.

NYCNight

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine.

Remember that old song?

Here’s a view of Manhattan from the 40th floor of 7 WTC on Greenwich Ave.

Springtime in Manhattan is surprisingly lovely.

NYPD Museum

Originally uploaded by happytam.

Frank and I strolled from west to the east of Manhattan yesterday, from Battery Park to the New York City Police Museum.

This photo shows some old billy clubs, one of which doubled as a teargas dispenser. Irish officers of that earlier era might whittle their own out of “bog oak” shipped in from the Old Country. And the point of a billy club, editorializing here, isn’t to kill or even arrest your bad-guy target, but to stop him from doing some stuff you don’t want him to do.

The museum has more than 100 years’ worth of artifacts, plus a bunch of police-narrated videos on different kinds of crime fighting. “Every time we arrest one, all the rest get smarter,” says one policeman–talking about the arms race against–not spammers or malware authors–but the organized gangs who steal automobiles.

Another POV that might be some help against internet crime:

“Crime doesn’t pay–or does it? Our goal is make the criminals work hard enough that crime does not pay.”

That seems like a much more plausible goal than catching all internet bad guys to send them to jail.

Jim Clash of The Adventurers" with Frank and Betsy

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine.

…and even more so when hanging out with Jim Clash for his Forbes TV show The Adventurers.

Another adventurer (the one who took this photo) was Kevin O’Brien, whose adventures involve exploring caves and the waters therein. Watch out for Gollum, Kevin!

Before the show, I got to geek out with cool TV studio toys, and afterward we went out to lunch at the Gotham. Now, if only Jim had told us about his own terrible South Pole adventure before I ordered that plate of petit fours…