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

Baby delivered this morning by UPS

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

On our doorstep before 8 a.m. this morning — Frank’s brand new book, The Lightness of Being!

I decided that our family cradle, now repurposed to stuffed toy storage, would be an excellent place to take this newborn’s photo.

A thoroughly modern baby, this book even has its own website, “LightnessOfBeingBook.com, and its own Flash animation there. Some early reviewers call it lively and cheeky — others describe it as masterful and deep. Eh — it’s a particle, it’s a wave — it’s quite a book.

And what a great way for new babies to get delivered!

Nothing says geek love quite as tenderly as the virtual gift of a unique, symmetrical object in hyperspace. (Although maybe the d12 Handbag of Holding comes pretty close.)

Hyperspace has an infinite number of symmetries, but Oxford mathematician Marcus du Sautoy has already assigned such choice names as “Hollygon,” “Poppygon,” and “The Vanilla Beer Group.” So do not delay or the name you want may be taken!! Your donation goes to help children in Guatemala through Common Hope.

Thanks to Tingilinde for the link! The image above, btw, has nothing to do with hyperspace and everything to do with nostalgia for the imperfect dot-matrix symmetries of MacPaint.

“Marine experts have given 25 octopuses a Rubik’s Cube each in a study aimed at easing their stress levels in captivity,” says UK’s revered science journal the Daily Mail.

I never found my stress reduced by a Rubik’s cube, but then again I am no octopus. Octopi are Einsteins and Houdinis of Invertebrata. But the goal here is not to keep their giant nerve fibers tuned up — it is to find out if they are “octidextrous” or tend to favor one tentacle over the others. This research is crowdsourced, with aquarium visitors keeping track of which (labeled) tentacle gets used for which objects.

So how does this relate to octopus stress? The plan is to serve them octopus food to the favored side, assuming they have one. Interesting and maybe related fact: although most of us are right-handed, formal dinners feature food served to us from the left. Maybe that’s one reason those can be so darn stressful?

A pound of sugar and a pint of beer

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine,
photo by Amity Wilczek.

That was the daily diet of the wasp colony that built this huge paper nest in 1857.

Before you envy this self-indulgent diet, bear in mind that the wasps got their sugar dissolved in their beer.

This magnificently well-fed colony soon drew the attention of nearby wasps, who abandoned their own nests and moved in to help build the ever-growing mansion. They were welcomed “without the least show of opposition,” says the exhibit label.

So if you plan to write up the history of open-source software or BarCamp, please give appropriate credit to these pioneers.

(For more information, see a closeup of the label.) It’s now on display in Oxford’s Museum of Natural History.

…was made even better when analyzed by a philosopher?

I long ago blogged the “shaggy guru life is a fountain” story, including a re-telling by philosopher Robert Nozick in his book Philosophical Explanations.

Today I made the sad discovery that my source-link for the Nozick quote now goes to a dead page. Fortunately, I long ago copied what I found there, at least what interested me, so I’m going to add here a different Nozick story version and his comments on it:

A person travels for many days to the Himalayas to seek the word of an Indian holy man meditating in an isolated cave. Tired from his journey, but eager and expectant that his quest is about to reach fulfillment, he asks the sage, “What is the meaning of life?” After a long pause, the sage opens his eyes and says, “Life is a fountain.” “What do you mean life is a fountain?” barks the questioner. “I have just traveled thousands of miles to hear your words, and all you have to tell me is that? That’s ridiculous.” The sage then looks up from the floor of the cave and says, “You mean it’s not a fountain?” In a variant of the story, he replies, “So it’s not a fountain.”

The sage feels none of the angst that led the seeker to the cave. So, who’s missing something: sage or seeker? The story suggests a contrast of attitudes. I’ll call them Existentialist and Zen, meaning only to gesture at the traditions these names evoke. The Existentialist attitude is that life’s meaning, or lack thereof, is of momentous import. We seek meaning. If we don’t get it, we choose between stoicism and despair. The Zen attitude is that meaning isn’t something to be sought. Meaning comes to us, or not. If it comes, we accept it. If not, we accept that too. To some degree, we choose how much meaning we need. Perhaps the sage achieves peace by learning not to need meaning. Perhaps that’s what we’re meant to learn from the sage’s seemingly meaningless remark that life is a fountain.

Wow, so the alternatives here are stoicism, despair, or a bland Zen acceptance of “whatever”? I don’t think so. My advice, Mr. Nozick, is stay off those mountaintops. Eat fruit, make new friends, ride a bike, and do things you care about. Oh, and read The Fourth Bear by Jasper Fforde or Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal. Since you like that fountain joke, you should like their books too.

Napoleon I Crowns Josephine Empress of France

Originally uploaded by mary hodder

Particle physicists take on hard-to-answer questions — and some recently took on a historical riddle: Was Napoleon I poisoned by his St. Helena guards?

No, says the latest issue of the CERN Courier:

To examine Napoleon’s hair, the team used the technique of neutron activation, which has two important advantages: it does not destroy the sample and it provides extremely precise results, even from samples with a small mass. The researchers placed Napoleon’s hair in the core of the nuclear reactor in Pavia and used neutron activation to establish that all of the hair samples contained traces of arsenic.

So, was he poisoned? No. His hair had (what would be for moderns) high levels of arsenic even when he was a boy.

One surprising result (they tested a lot more hair samples besides just Napoleon’s) was the high level of arsenic found in everybody’s hair in the nineteenth century — 100 times greater than was found in more recent hair.

Future experiments planned by the Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events (Cuore) group in Pavia include studying the rare double-beta decay and measuring the mass of a neutrino.

Fellowship of the rings Part 1

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Beneath Shakespeare Cliff, all over Lonely Bay’s really quite lonely beach, lie broken and sea-smoothed bits of gastropod shell.

We’d seen such rough shell circles in New Zealand restaurants, used as napkin rings. That’s why we quickly had rings on our fingers (though no bells on toes.)

There’s something about New Zealand that makes people smile. How about this sign from coffeeshop Mariposa in Port Wells?

UNATTENDED CHILDREN
WILL BE GIVEN AN ESPRESSO
AND A FREE PUPPY.

We formed many hypotheses about Shakespeare Cliff. Mine was that William Shakespeare jumped off after some bad reviews. Frank says that it wasn’t William Shakespeare at all, just his boyfriend Cliff. So, which of them really wrote all those wonderful plays?

We just got email from our friend Piotr Haszczyn in Poland with a bunch of links to recent Polish news articles, whose contents (I hope) are guessable from the photos on them:

• Four photos of Frank in Babice School, meeting its children and staff: This looks like a serious article about Frank’s visit to his Polish grandmother’s home town and the really nice ceremony put on by Babice School.
• Photo of Frank with Betsy smiling, photo of Frank with Uncle Walter joking around, plus a title that plainly mentions pierogi: To make Americans happy, just feed them pierogi!
• Photo of Frank next to Nobel monument in NYC; photo of Frank’s Babice cousin expertly repairing some complicated machinery: Polish men look good in hats…and they are all very smart.

The internet and newspapers being what they are, those links may vanish–but our memories of a great party most surely will not.

Smoked salmon with horseradish-flavored whipped cream

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Mmmm graphics!

The FoodPairing website illustrates food inspiration of two different kinds:

1. Food combination: (quoting the site) “A list was made of 250 food products each with their major flavour components. By comparing the flavour of each food product eg strawberry with the rest of the food and their flavours, new combinations like strawberry with peas can be made.”
2. Food swapping:(quoting the site) “A food product has a specific flavour because of a combination of different flavours. Like basil taste like basil because of the combination of linalool, estragol, …. So if I want to reconstruct the basil flavour without using any basil, you have to search for a combination of other food products where one contains linalool (like coriander), one contains estragol (like tarragon),… So I can reconstruct basil by combining coriander, tarragon, cloves, laurel. The way to use it is to take from each branch of the plot one product and make a combination of those food products.”

Thanks to the always-inspiring Tingilinde for the link!

Nyhavn with Christmas market

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

One of the many good things about traveling is that it gives you a new perspective on home. For example, in the US I often hear complaints about how awful it is (and how dreadfully “American”) that the stores all start “Christmas shopping” so early.

In Stockholm, Christmas got started when October ended. And, here in Copenhagen, outdoor Christmas markets have been open for business since mid-November.

So the US is not the only place on our planet where storekeepers look forward to Christmas with all the eagerness of five-year-olds longing for Santa.