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

After the Ig Nobel road show 2

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Last night in Oxford’s Martin Wood Theatre, Marc Abrahams kicked off the 11th annual Ig Nobel tour of the UK with a free Oxford show.

I think you can tell which cast member is the sword swallower (Dan Meyer)–to his right are Fiona Barclay (periodic table table) and Jim Gundlach (effects of country music on suicide.)

In the front row, Dan Meyer’s medical co-winner Brian Witcombe and
Caroline Richmond, who writes colorful obituaries for the BMJ. She told a questioner that she does get some protests, citing one doctor’s family who “took exception to my use of the phrase ‘snake-oil salesman’.”

John Hoyland, who writes funny stuff for the journal New Scientist, gave a great talk but left before the group photo–and Ig-Meister Marc Abrahams was with me taking photos instead of appearing in them.

Advice: if you attend any later show on the Ig tour, do not leave before the bank-robber promotional video.

Hedgehog Rescue 4

Originally uploaded by Bollops

Swedish hedgehog experts send out a call for help!

Too-early spring wakes up hibernating hedgehoglets to find no breakfast. No insects or worms yet–but many hungry young hedgehogs!

Although we are in England now (where Flickr-ian Bollops recorded his own hedgehog rescue in this photo), I am still hooked on Sweden’s news in English at “The Local.” Where else would I learn about hedgehogs in springtime,

• elf lessons in Lapland,
• Stockholm reindeer protests, or
• Hetz the theatrical dog?

Not to mention telecommuting witches…some of whose magic might help out those Swedish hedgehogs!

Kauri trees are huge!

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

The kauri tree is Mother Nature’s perfect tree. It goes up and up and out and out with no branches for quite a long way (no knots in the wood) and very little taper.

If you are looking for timber to make giant masts without splices or even fancy furniture, you probably want to do what early New Zealand settlers did, which is to chop down huge virgin forests of kauri trees.

Now just a few of the oldest trees are still left standing.

My children, seen here, are poised to defend this one.

James Clerk Maxwell and Alan Guth

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Who is that non-physicist craving a photo-op in between James Clerk Maxwell and Alan Guth?

Readers of this blog may recognize the scarf.

This moment of post-banquet serendipity took place inside the great dining hall of Trinity College, Cambridge. Frank and I arrived a bit late, missing the polite request that people not take photographs–quite understandable considering all the amazing things there that you’d need to photograph just to remember one half of them.

Dragoyle

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Here, from a collection of scientific instruments, is the lovely dragoyle.

Elsewhere In the he fascinating Whipple Museum of the History of Science, you can find “scientific” apparatus for phrenology (diagnosing head bumps and lumps to measure such human traits as “combativeness.”)

Phrenologywas once a time-honored way to do scientific study. Melvil Dewey gave "Phrenology" an entire integer (139) in his library decimal catalog system. For comparison, "modern Western philosophy" also got one entire integer (190).

The history of science is full of fascinating discoveries and proud achievements, but it is also full of cautionary examples and multiple proofs that calling something “scientific” doesn’t make it so.

Beautiful cold English December day

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

I walked several miles yesterday through the lovely cold green of an English December, under its pale sunlit sky.

Frank is here to discuss early-universe cosmology with a lot of the same friends who were gathered here by Stephen Hawking 25 years ago, back when the idea of inflation was just a tiny pre-nugget of its present, er, expanded state.

That was in summertime, a lovely English summer, with our whole family housed by Robin and Polly Hill out in Rupert Brooke’s own Grantchester. I did feel some misgiving when we jet-lagged four on the doorstep were greeted with a dismayed “My god, they’ve got a baby!”

(The form I’d filled out for our housing requirement had a space asking for “number of children.” Foolishly, I filled that space in “1*”, adding by * footnote that (in December, and planning a six-months-later visit) I was eight 1/2 months pregnant.)

Anyway, things got much better quite soon after that.

There is no better cure for the mental whiplash of packing and moving and shlepping your worldly goods onto one more long plane ride than taking a long walk through peaceful cool sunlit weather.

In fact, I think that I need another walk now.

Ice crystals in polarized light

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Al Gore’s Nobel Lecture includes a Nobel story that I didn’t know:

Sometimes, without warning, the future knocks on our door with a precious and painful vision of what might be. One hundred and nineteen years ago, a wealthy inventor read his own obituary, mistakenly published years before his death. Wrongly believing the inventor had just died, a newspaper printed a harsh judgment of his life’s work, unfairly labeling him “The Merchant of Death” because of his invention – dynamite. Shaken by this condemnation, the inventor made a fateful choice to serve the cause of peace.

Seven years later, Alfred Nobel created this prize and the others that bear his name.

The whole speech is worth reading, not least for Al Gore’s reminder that “political will is a renewable resource.”

Well worth remembering, as our shared future ticks closer.

Dorthe and JP

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Dorthe Dahl-Jensen and JP Steffensen are two of the climate scientists Frank and I met when we sailed around various icebergs in Chile, way back January-ish 2007.

These photos are from a little bit before we met them–they appear in Willi Dansgaard’s book Frozen Annals: Greenland Ice Sheet Research. Danish scientists have been capturing and cooking ice for a long time–and we know much more about our past and future thanks to their work!

Dorthe and JP gave us a wonderful tour of the ice-core research lab at Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute yesterday.

My photos don’t do it justice but they’re still undeniably “cool.” JP, I think my nose finally unfroze this morning!

Niels Bohr

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Hafnium was discovered here at the Niels Bohr Institute, and christened after the Latin name for Copenhagen. Its Hungarian discoverer was just one among many young physicists who flocked to Denmark from all over the world in response to the invitation of Niels Bohr…

…who is seen here in a handsome portrait sculpture, on display in the Niels Bohr Archive. It was a young Nobel Laureate who made this sculpture–not a physicist, but a laureate in literature (Johannes Vilhelm Jensen).

My point, and I do have one, is that Niels Bohr created in Copenhagen a center of very wide-ranging inspiration.

It happened on Sunday, November 18, peacefully, without pain, after long illness.

To several generations of physicists, Sidney was guru, clown-prince, and zen-master. Sidney was the centerpiece of a thousand stories from the time that he was just a loud-mouthed brilliant fifteen year-old aka Squidney rampaging into Chicago’s sci-fi fan community.

There’s a lot more to say but I’m too sad to say it right now. We loved you, Sidney.

As for how Sidney would like to be remembered–this photo by Lubos Motl is simply perfect: