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

Mmmm! Let us all eat Marie-Antoinette-knows-what, but first let us photograph it and blog it here.

Thanks to Rebecca Blood for the link, giving me an excuse to re-post this gorgeous piece of Vienna liebeschaum from 2005.

Thanks to the American Dialect Society for remininding me just what words were new, way back in 2002, when I started blogging:

2002 Word of the Year: weapons of mass destruction or WMD, sought for in Iraq. Most Likely to Succeed: blog, from “weblog,” a website of personal events, comments, and links. Most Useful: google (verb), as in “to google someone,” to search the Web using the search engine Google for information on a person or thing…

Think that’s pretty funny? When they started in 1990, a most-useful new term was “laptop computer,” which they thoughtfully defined as “a portable personal computer weighting 4-8 pounds.”

When did the tipping point come for “blog”, “blogging”, “blogger?

When was the last time your Uncle Norbert said, over Thanksgiving pie, “Lucille tells me that you’ve now got something called a blob?” And now, didn’t Aunt Tillie suddenly friend you in Twitter, asking to be blogrolled? I think comments are open here, though I’m still not totally sure how WordPress works…

Thanks to Resource Shelf whose link to new words just added to the OED sent me on that trip down memory lane…

Here you see Einstein (happy birthday, professor!) on the front porch of the Princeton house where Frank and I later spent about eight happy years.

It’s an artist’s conception, so you don’t see any tourists ringing the doorbell.

Welcome to my new blog. Please pardon me if it’s now a (messy) open house. I had been planning to fix it up more before sending out any virtually-engraved invitations. Things moved too fast for me.

Einstein’s ninth law is that nothing moves faster than gossip through the blogosphere.

Or maybe something moves faster–but that something sure isn’t Betsy!

The oxygen atom, thinking about the scientist Eve

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine.

My new career, glamor photographer–this is fun! But then, my first 637 careers were fun also…

Career number 638 is “scientist wrangler.” I have to organize 5 volunteers with laser beams who will–but I don’t want to spoil the ending.

“Scientist wrangler.” That sounds a bit like my career number 432. And 527 and maybe 611 also…

Via our friends at Annals of Improbable Research, the TSA has new advice to travelers:

We encourage everyone to pack gel-filled bras in their checked baggage.

In other improbable news, tune in later today for the webcast of Atom and Eve, Friday, August 25, 2006, 7:00 pm, Austria time (6:00 pm in London; 1:00 pm in New York; 10 am in Los Angeles; and, to quote (as one so often should) Marc Abrahams, “other times in other places, of course.”

Driving near Harvard Square is…educational. The world’s most aggressive drivers are totally vanquished by the world’s most entitled pedestrians.

Today, as I struggled to drive my car through a short green light, Frank took me to a new level of enlightenment:

Betsy, to the pedestrians who couldn’t hear me: “I don’t suppose it means anything to you that I have a green light here.”

Frank, in the persona of a pedestrian: “It means we can walk but we can’t make eye contact.”

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At the American Academy for Achievement’s 2005 International Achievement Summit, prizewinners each give a short speech to the student delegates–about 200 Rhodes Scholars, etc. from 50 countries. So we all heard some darn good speeches but of course my favorite was given by Frank Wilczek–short, pithy, informative, and very funny. And I quote:

Dear students,

In preparing my advice for you I asked myself “What would Einstein say?” And it occurred to me that Einstein, being an intelligent fellow, would probably start with a joke. Fortunately I happen to know Einstein’s favorite joke. It turns out to be quite relevant. Here goes.

A man is having trouble with his car; it frequently stalls. So he goes to a garage, and asks them to fix it. They replace the transmission and put in new spark plugs. But his car still doesn’t run right, so he takes it to another garage. At this second garage, the mechanic pokes around for ten minutes, then pulls a screwdriver out of his belt and tightens a screw. And now the car runs perfectly.

But the man is irate when he gets a bill in the mail for $200. He storms back to the mechanic, and says, “This is outrageous! All you did was tighten a screw, and you ask for $200! I want an itemized bill!” So the mechanic takes out a pad and pencil, and writes down an itemized bill, as follows:

Labor: turning screw $5
Knowing which screw to turn: $195

My first piece of advice is to consider very carefully the possibilities for what you can do, before choosing. This principle works on several levels. You should consider many different possibilities for what general sort of work you want to do, before settling into one. And when you have finished one project, you should think about many different possibilities for what to do next. And when you encounter a problem, you should consider various possible approaches, before investing heavily in any one.

It’s easy to give vague advice, but I will break new ground, and give you an algorithm. Many of you are probably thinking about getting married, and naturally you would like to maximize your chance of finding the best possible mate. I’ll give you an algorithm for that.

You have to estimate the number N of suitors that you can expect to deal with over your career in courtship. We’ll assume that you evaluate them one at a time, and that once you’ve broken up with one, then that one is gone forever. Then what you should do is this. Evaluate, but do not accept, each of the first N/e suitors. Here e is a number, the base of natural logarithms, approximately 2.7. Then accept the first subsequent suitor who is better than all the earlier ones. That is how to maximize your chance of getting the best possible mate.

For example, if N is 10, then you should evaluate but reject each of the first 4 suitors, and accept to first one after that who is better than them. In my own case, I estimated N=3. I dutifully broke up with my first serious girlfriend, but the second was better, and I married her. It worked out fine.

Of course the precise assumptions that underlie this particular algorithm might not always be appropriate, but the underlying lesson is much more general. You should put considerable effort into gathering information before choosing what to invest in. The great mathematician Henri Poincare, when asked how he came up with such good creative ideas, responded, “I generate a lot of ideas, and discard most of them.” This is also Nature’s trick, in natural selection.

My second piece of advice is to learn about the history of your endeavor. This has many advantages. By reading masterworks you come in contact with great minds, and get to feel how they operate. Often the original works are well expressed, and you can learn valuable lessons about how to express yourself. Most important, you can begin to see yourself and your work as part of a continuing narrative, that started before you entered, and that will continue after you leave. That is a beautiful thing to realize.

Happy birthday to George Friedrich Handel, seen here looking pierced and modern, who was born February 23, 1685. You’ve probably sat through his Messiah oratorio at least once (“Hallellujah! Hallellujah! Hallellujah! …” I’m sure you remember.) I’ve always loved Handel’s kind of music, as well as this complete diss of it, penned in 1765:

the Pleasure Artists feel in hearing much of that compos’d in the modern Taste, is not the natural Pleasure arising from Melody or Harmony of Sounds, but of the same kind with the Pleasure we feel on seeing the surprizing Feats of Tumblers and Rope Dancers, who execute difficult Things… Many Pieces of it are mere Compositions of Tricks.

That (and much more) was the very scathing opinion of Benjamin Franklin.

Check out the new kid in search–MSN search. Nice try, Microsoft, but you aren’t yet ready to knock little Google off the merrygoround.

I’m thrilled to be your number one “Betsy” (at least, the number one Betsy who isn’t an ad) … especially after your shocking treatment of Boing Boing…

…but don’t you think searchers will find it a little bit tacky that your top result for Linux is one of your own anti-Linux ads?

If you recently tuned in just for
Nobel-Prize-family-backstage-surprises
blogging–or if you’re an old reader who wouldn’t mind hearing less
about Nobel Prizes–well, this situation categorically reminds
me of a joke I once wrote for Absolute Zero Gravity:

1. According to Fields Medalist Enrico Bombieri, there are three kinds of mathematicians: those who can count, and those who can’t.
2. I happen to believe that people can be divided into precisely two
   categories: those who believe that people can be divided into precisely
   two categories, and those who don’t.
3. If you agree with me, let me ask you this: which category is Bombieri in?

But I digress. If you are a Nobel-only reader, you can avoid the rest of this blog by subscribing to the RSS feed for its just-Nobel-gossip posts. If you prefer Nobel-free blogging–well, as they say for New England weather changes, just wait a while…