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

Newton in Trinity College antechapel

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

But isn’t a week of prelude to tardy springtime, really, worth any amount of jetlag?

In Cambridge (UK, not MA) we visited Isaac Newton’s apple tree; in Copenhagen, we wandered the house of Niels Bohr. More images, and perhaps more coherent writing, on my Flickr photos. I am so jetlagged that I am now almost as pale as Trinity College’s marble Newton, the statue that Wordsworth described in his Prelude, Book 3:

And from my pillow, looking forth by light
Of moon or favouring stars, I could behold
The antechapel where the statue stood
Of Newton with his prism and silent face,
The marble index of a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.

Newton voyaged alone, true, but his notes on his experience have let many others of us follow after him.

Frank Wilczek with hat and universe

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

The Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi) is sponsoring a conference on Grand Cayman Island, an excellent way to lure a lot of intelligent and very busy people to come spend some time together talking about foundational questions. They also have a truly interesting blog.

Furthermore, the beach at night is a good place to think about cosmological mysteries, even though it can be very windy, as Alan Guth discovered!

If you use Twitter, I strongly suggest that you start following LaBlogga, aka Melanie Swan. I just started, and I already feel more intelligent than I was yesterday.

Now, off with my computer and back to the fresh air! (Since I’m not invited to this particular conference, getting some beach time is the most intelligent thing for me to do here.)

Leonardo’s helicopter

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

…of Leonardo’s helicopter — John Graham-Cummings’s The Geek Atlas sounds like a fascinating travel guide. To quote its description at O’Reilly Books:

With this unique traveler’s guide, you’ll learn about 128 destinations around the world where discoveries in science, mathematics, or technology occurred or is happening now. Travel to Munich to see the world’s largest science museum, watch Foucault’s pendulum swinging in Paris, ponder a descendant of Newton’s apple tree at Trinity College, Cambridge, and more. Each site in The Geek Atlas focuses on discoveries or inventions, and includes information about the people and the science behind them.

Woo hoo, sign me up for the entire tour!

Happy New Year

Originally uploaded by Stuck in Customs

Pop, bam, fizz! Another New Year arrives, with fresh round of wild ideas from EDGE.org.

“What will change everything?” was John Brockman’s question this year. “What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?” He’s now posting responses given by more than 150 wide-angle guessers — people from actor Alan Alda to quantum teleportationist Anton Zeilinger — with Frank Wilczek and Betsy Devine filing separate guesses.
“Homesteading in Hilbert space,” predicts Frank Wilczek:

…The quantum world is a New New World far more alien and difficult of access than Columbus’ Old New World. It is also, in a real sense, much bigger… Our fundamental equations do not live in the three-dimensional space of classical physics, but in an (effectively) infinite-dimensional space: Hilbert space. It will take us much more than a century to homestead that New New World, even at today’s much-accelerated pace…

“Happiness,” counter-predicts Betsy Devine:

In the next five years, policy-makers around the world will embrace economic theories (e.g. those of Richard Layard) aimed at creating happiness. The Tower of Economic Babble is rubble. Long live the new, improved happiness economics! …

Here are other short samples from just a few more of the best:

“The robotic moment” says Sherry Turkle

I will see the development of robots that people will want to spend time with. Not just a little time, time in which the robots serve as amusements, but enough time and with enough interactivity that the robots will be experienced as companions, each closer to a someone than a something. I think of this as the robotic moment…

“A forebrain for the world mind” says Danny Hillis

…If there is such a thing as a world mind today, then its thoughts are primarily about commerce. It is the “invisible hand” of Adam Smith, deciding the prices, allocating the capital…I call this the hindbrain because it is performing unconscious functions necessary to the organism’s own survival, functions that are so primitive that they predate development of the brain. Included in this hindbrain are the functions of preference and attention that create celebrity, popularity and fashion, all fundamental to the operation of human society. This hindbrain is ancient….

“Molecular manufacturing” says Ed Regis

…Program the assemblers to put together an SUV, a sailboat, or a spacecraft, and they’d do it—automatically, and without human aid or intervention. Further, they’d do it using cheap, readily-available feedstock molecules as raw materials. The idea sounds fatuous in the extreme…until you remember that objects as big and complex as whales, dinosaurs, and sumo wrestlers got built in a moderately analogous fashion…

“We are learning to make phenotypes” says Mark Pagel

…the thing that we think of as “us”,can become separated from our body, or nearly separated anyway. I don’t suggest we will be able to transplant our mind to another body, but we will be able to introduce new body parts into existing bodies with a resident mind. With enough such replacements, we will become potentially immortal: like ancient buildings that exist only because over the centuries each of their many stones has been replaced…

“Malthusian information famine” says Charles Seife

…There seems to be a Malthusian principle at work: information grows exponentially, but useful information grows only linearly. Noise will drown out signal. The moment that we, as a species, finally have the memory to store our every thought, etch our every experience into a digital medium, it will be hard to avoid slipping into a Borgesian nightmare where we are engulfed by our own mental refuse…

“The use of nuclear weapons against a civilian population” says Lawrence Krauss

…Having been forced to choose a single game changer, I have turned away from the fascinating scientific developments I might like to see, and will instead focus on the one game changer that I will hopefully never directly witness, but nevertheless expect will occur during my lifetime: the use of nuclear weapons against a civilian population…

I join Lawrence in hoping that his prediction won’t come true.

Punkin chunkin: Old Glory air cannon

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Whew, we just got home from scary Halloween fun, with huge noisy machines that hurl or blast ginormous pumpkins across farmers’ fields!

Jon Hotchkiss is creating a show for Discovery Science Channel about Delaware’s annual Punkin Chunkin festival. It will air for an hour on Thanksgiving Day, hosted by improv comedian Brad Sherwood (of Whose Line is it Anyway, and he’s really funny!) with the physics explained (of course) by a Nobel laureate–who is Frank Wilczek.

And Betsy Devine is getting a credit too, I am told, as “Prop Ninja” for supplying marshmallows, rubber bands, and lots of other useful items you’ll see onscreen.

My Flickr photoset documents just a small chunk of the massive punkinology that I recommend you sit down to on Thanksgiving Day

George and Esther Dyson

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

My plan to have webfolk give “lightning” talks for scientists ended up in the schedule as 9:30 a.m. “lighting” talks.”

Nevahtheless, as Katherine Hepburn would say, an overflow SciFoo crowd showed up in Google’s “Damascus” room (seats 22) to hear Tim O’Reilly’s own explanation of Web 2.0, followed by stellar short talks by Esther Dyson (EDventure), Chris Anderson (Wired), Barend Mons (WikiProfessional), and Victoria Stodden (Harvard’s Berkman Center).

What was the premise here? As posted in SciFoo’s wiki for session suggestions:

Science Outreach 2.0? I see proposed sessions to have science “heard” by politicians (Eric W, Adam Wishart), to get more young people to fall in love with science (Chris Riley), and to get non-scientists involved in “spectator science” or “citizen science” activities (Margaret Wertheim, Jack Stilgoe, Karen James, Brother Guy).

Web 2.0 tools (blogs, wikis, social networks, web services) are great ways to reach out to non-scientists. What I’m proposing is a session on this useful subset of HOW-TO (a fairly new set of useful tools), a session where Sci Foo’s webfolk (and web-savvy scientists) might give “lightning” talks about “Here is a great web tool useful for scientists doing outreach, here is a quick demo of how it works, here is a URL where you can learn more about it.” Betsy Devine

Here are links to some of the websites that were discussed there:

• What is Web 2.0?: Original (2005) essay by Tim O'Reilly

• Tim also recommends "Howtoons" for kids, especially their "infamous marshmallow shooter."

• Epernicus.com: Science networking site, mentioned by Esther Dyson.
• 23andMe.com: User-friendly online DNA comparison tools, explained by Esther Dyson.
• BookTour.com: Science authors can get book-tour information out to the "long tail", explained by Chris Anderson (Wired).
• Wikiprofessional.org: Wiki-like tool for Medline that combines language tools and authoritative sources with user input, explained by Barend Mons.
• Victoria Stodden discussed the misfit between what copyright does and what scientists want to have happen to content they put online. To come, I hope, a link to the web-based license that solves these issues.
• GalaxyZoo.org: Collaboration inspiration, or how people showed up from all over the internet to help Oxford astrophysicists classify millions of computer-photographed galaxies, and a Dutch teacher named Hanny discovered a unique new astronomy object, not explained by Betsy Devine, though I would have done so if we had time at the end of the session.

George Dyson, seen in this photo being attacked by a palm tree at the Wild Palms Hotel, did not speak at my session, so this photo is somewhat false advertising for this blogpost.

Update: Jack Stilgoe (Demos) was at this session and blogged it.

Before the Sci Foo deluge

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

The Wild Palms Hotel will be wilder in just a few hours, as scientists, webfolk, and other high-tech high IQs arrive for Science Foo 2008.

Frank and I are not the only people here so early. I am pretty sure I saw Neal Gershenfeld across the patio. In the Sci Foo wiki, he has offered to demo some amazingly techno inventions. If he brought a fabricator, his luggage was hugely heavy!

Astrophysicists Angelica de Oliveira-Costa and Max Tegmark get here later this morning. Fortunately, even astro-visionaries like Max don’t need to pack any universe inside their suitcases to lead a session. The universe just plain follows them around.

Chris Anderson (long tail) and Chris Anderson (TED) will both be here. I remember once sharing a dorm-room with another Betsy and a third girl named Kedzie. Getting phone messages straight was a nightmare that year, and my sympathies go out to those two Chris Andersons.

Looking forward to meeting a lot of great people and hearing a lot of incredible ideas. I see myself here as a technical “enabler”, doing some scientist-to-webpeople match-making. But this Sci Foo (SciFoo?) blogpost is already long enough.

Poisoner eyes her victim

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

You already know to watch out for poisoned teacups, but what you should have been worrying about instead …

An internet-based team of “three people from the United States, three from the Ukraine, two from China, one from Estonia and one from Belarus” (says Reuters) stole credit card numbers by millions from US retailers, and sold them “… to people in the U.S. and Europe for thousands of dollars. The buyers then withdrew tens of thousands of dollars at a time from automated teller machines, officials said.” Even so, the chief conspirator’s lawyer sounds very confident that his client will never enter a jail cell.

After all…. the guy who made possible the NH 2002 election phone-jamming got his conviction overturned because the interstate denial-of-service attack on Democrats’ phones was not covered by Federal laws against phone “harassment.”

It’s hard for the laws against doing bad stuff to keep up with human innovation in stuff we can do. Maybe that’s how it should be.

But let’s hope the US Attorney’s office works smarter on identity theft cases than they chose to do in the matter of NH phone jamming.

"Beach book" says USA Today

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

I guess Dan Vergano at USA Today really likes Frank’s new book (yay!) — he wrote it up in a review of science “beach books” yesterday and urged his readers to “curl up with Lightness of Being.”

This inspired me to repurpose our teddy bears onto my old beach dune photo. They look happy, don’t they?

The joy of an old, forgotten photo

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

The dog of physics blogger Chad Orzel has a lot more to say about science than my little dog ever bothered to let me know about.

Chad Orzel’s dog on classical mechanics: “Classical mechanics is like a good bone. You can chew it, and chew it, and you think it’s all used up, but then you come back, and you can still chew it some more.”

My dog Marianne on classical mechanics: “Wow, I fell off the couch — again!”

Marianne would have loved virtual bunnies made of cheese.