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

I’m racing around getting ready to drive to MIT where I hope to live-blog Frank’s latest adventure–he’s appearing on Penn and Teller as one of their experts to talk about ghosts!

Penn and Teller, if you don’t know, started out as magicians with hugely successful and very funny stage show. They now have a TV show on Showtime called, er, “Tishllub.” (I’m assuming the censors of Google can’t spell that backward, but I’m sure you can.) Each episode pokes fun at some popular fakery–like UFO abductions or talking to the dead–showing the audience how its “results” can be fudged.

It’s a pretty amusing show, spiked with pretty surprising language. As Teller (I think it was Teller) explained, “We could get sued if we call somebody a liar, but our lawyers say calling them &#@@!! or **&^%$??!! is fine.” (Do their lawyers know about Michael Powell?)

Anyway, Frank won’t have to swear–at least, none of the experts on other shows did–and he has some pretty cool physics demos set up. This particular show will be about ghosts, a topic on which I do have more to say, but in another blogpost.

I just got email from Elizabeth Thomson at the MIT News Office…it seems she just got email from Odd Minde of Kiruna Sweden….

From: Elizabeth Thomson
Date: February 25, 2005 9:29:27 AM EST
Subject: Fwd: DNA from Wilczek

Betsy and Frank!

Received the following note, and EVERYBODY over here has thoroughly enjoyed it. Ultra-bizarre! Just noticed that bidding has now stopped, and the winner is….betsythedevine. Betsy: did you indeed recover the glasses?

Do tell!

Elizabeth

>Hello!
>In connection with your article:
>MIT’s Wilczek wins 2004 Nobel Prize in physics
>Elizabeth A. Thomson, News Office
>October 5, 2004; updated October 6, 2004
>I suggest you to look at:
>http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=6149217230
>Best wishes
>Odd Minde
>Rymdgymnasiet
>Kiruna
>Sweden

My reply:

Hi Elizabeth–yes, the package from Sweden arrived yesterday!

The Rymdgymnasiet students had packaged each glass in layers of bubble-wrap with labels “Betsy Devine” and “Frank Wilczek”. I hesitate to un-bubble-wrap them now, and maybe the bubble wrap is part of the story.

As you can see, I put the bubble-wrapped glasses over our fireplace, where some of Frank’s robots and Lego constructions seem to be happy to see them.

All best,
Betsy

p.s. Do you mind if I include your nice email when blogging this?

Rebecca Mackinnon is promoting Valentine sonnets. I’m not posting my efforts–Joho’s will beat everyone for humor if not for love–but, speaking of Valentines and love, I love this 1983 picture of Frank Wilczek with legendary physics bad boy R.P. Feynman.

Yes, that’s the Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman Feynman, the Challenger disaster frozen O-Rings Feynman, safe-cracking, bongo-playing, Tuva-loving, 1965-Nobel-Prize-winning, 1918-1988 Richard P. Feynman.

About this photograph–first, roll your mental cameras back even farther, to 1972, the year I met Frank Wilczek. When I think back to those intense happy days, I can remember earnestly playing Bob Dylan records and moving the needle to tracks I thought Frank “should” hear. And I’ll never forget his introducing me to Feynman, by which he meant the tattered red three-volume Lectures in Physics he’d read by himself in high school to learn about physics. He sat me down next to him on some seedy Grad College sofa, put the first volume into my hands, and waited to enjoy the delight I would surely feel as soon as I started reading. These books were an intellectual treasure that he couldn’t wait to share–only later did I find out they were also a part of his personal odyssey–if I hadn’t been in love with him before, I would surely have fallen in love with him right then.

Now–ten-plus years, lots of physics, and two great kids later–we get to 1983. Murph Goldberger sent us this photo of Frank with Feynman at his (Murph’s) 60th birthday bash. No wonder Frank looks happy–even if Feynman is teasing him and our friend Sam Treiman is giving him “devil horn” fingers…

The eBay auction is over! I outbid “oceanman” to win a unique souvenir of our alien encounter in Kiruna.

One surprise side benefit has been oodles of emails from our friends in Sweden!

Dear Betsy and Frank, Today you were mentioned in the newscast on national Swedish radio and there was also a story in the newspaper. You probably guess why. The story about the DNA bidding…

Still making waves…I saw a short article in todays paper about the glass that the students tried to sell at an auction on the internet- and that you bought it! It was great fun to see your names in the paper again.

Hello Betsy! I followed the bidding at eBay with “Frank’s DNA”. Swedish biggest newspapers, local papers and media write about it today i. e.
http://www.aftonbladet.se/vss/telegram/0,1082,64554414_852__,00.html…

Heh! Here’s my rough mini-translation: “One drinking glass as used by a Nobel Prizewinner in physics was offered on eBay by pupils of Rymdgymnasiet in Kiruna. Nobel Prizewinner Frank Wilczek drank from glass while visiting the school, and thereby deposited some genius DNA. Said DNA will never be used for a future clone, however, as it was his wife who bought it for 275 kronor.”

Even when you add an extra $25 for the novel experience of having said DNA delivered by FedEx–that’s a genuine bargain on my favorite DNA!

Bidding on Wilczek and Devine DNA continues, thanks to link-love not only from me but also from Greenpass Zoe (“People will do anything!”) and a lovely post by Julie titled “Clone Betsy Devine”. Frank, who is as we know a genius, points out that bidder “betsythedevine” is probably not too anonymous. Said bidder’s excuse is that he or she would enjoy a souvenir of an unforgettable encounter with blue and green painted aliens at the Rymdgymnasiet. Opposing bidder “oceanman” no doubt represents a secret evil clone-lab somewhere in the mid-Pacific.

The aliens were planning to destroy all life on our planet, but Odd Minde had persuaded them to hold off if the visiting Nobel Prizewinner and his spouse could give good answers to their many and diverse questions.

Fortunately, they liked the answers we gave (one of which was “42”), and instead of destroying the planet showered us with booty, including a puzzle showing the Northern Lights and a pin of a snowgoose (“kiruna”) that’s now on my jacket.

The eBay auction now has a photo of the ITEMS IN ACTION, but their photo doesn’t include the aliens, so I’m putting that up in this blog.

We’re oohing and ahhing over a new arrival these days–a trebuchet built by eccentric genius Kaden.
This was a suprise–and rather late–Christmas gift I ordered for Frank, after reading about Kaden’s toys in BoingBoing. I loved it that this particular hanging counterweight trebuchet was “based on the familiar Monty-Python “dead-cow-over-the-castle-wall” catapult.”

Kaden invites special requests–for Frank, of course, I wanted “lots of physics.” Kaden dug right into it:

This whole physics angle is challenging…I dug up a chunk of brass heat
exchanger tubing at Capital Salvage that I’m using half of the outer shell
of for the launch trough…representin’ thermodynamics in da hood, I guess.

I’m gonna put a hidden compartment in the inside of the weight box. Who
doesn’t like secret compartments, and the measurable discrepancy between
apparent volume and actual mass will serve as a piquant and ironic nod to
the ongoing uncertainty regarding Dark Matter.

Or not.

Levers we got covered.

More later…

K

The trebuchet arrived in a large wooden box stamped “ECCENTRIC GENIUS”–I’m sure we’ll find a use for the box somewhere too. So far we’ve used it to shoot blueberries (which the dog likes to fetch but also likes to eat), small potatoes, and more-or-less round chunks of portobello mushroom, which are too light to go far.

It’s a gorgeous object, and sits in front of the fireplace when nobody is using it to launch pieces of food. I asked Kaden if I could share some of his email, and he replied:

I’m glad the piece was well received, and that your fireplace is now
properly defended. Here’s some pictures I took of it prior to shipping…do
what you want with ’em, and blog like a crazed marsupial…as long as you
spell my name right.

It’s Kaden. Thank you, Kaden! We love our new toy.

One small step for blogging, one giant surprise for the blogger: check out this “Unique Nobel Prize Winner 2004 Memorabilia“

I’ll tell you more later, but for now, please just go there to help make their click-counter go up.

Of course, if you happen to feel like bidding on what would indeed make a truly unique gift for that special someone….

vs.

I’m not complaining–I’m enjoying my real life one heck of a lot. And WW Norton just re-published the paperback version of Longing for the Harmonies, a book Frank and I wrote together that a whole generation of kids (maybe you?) used to learn about fun non-math physics.

Norton mailed us some paperbacks–the cover is new, but the text is an old friend. I love re-seeing the graphics I did with MacPaint and my dot matrix printer. I’ll post some another day.

Meantime, I even got an Amazon Associate link to help me track its statistics:

Anyway, if you buy a book by clicking on a link in my blog, I might ultimately get 50 cents.

Messing with html and hoping to get 50 cents does somehow feel more like the real me than dressing up in an evening gown every night–but the real me enjoyed that too, a month ago!

The Nobel Foundation has posted some videos of the award ceremony and dinner, including a two-minute time-lapse film of the banquet, with Keystone Cops music, that is either hilariously funny or else a deeply tragic modern equivalent of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias.

Some other highlights, from my point of view:

The awards ceremony video (85 minutes, but you can jump around.)

Frank gets his prize at about 35:30, and the wonderful soprano Susanna Andersson sings a Rossini aria at 56:35.

The banquet (15 minute version)

I like the procession, the Mozart,… and, of course, a glimpse of Frank Wilczek at 7:35!