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

Andalas

Originally uploaded by zombie squirrels.

Andalas the male mini-rhino, who likes to play kissing games with his male zookeepers, is still jetlagged and mopey two months after being shipped to Sumatra from the LA Zoo.

Meanwhile, his potential mate Ratu ” almost came to grief a couple of years ago when she wandered out of the enclosed area and into a village where terrified elders mistook her for a mythical pig-man believed to be responsible for raping their women and tried to kill her. Police and sanctuary officials chased Ratu for hours, finally recapturing her after she fell into a sewage pit.”

What’s the happiest ending to this rhino story? A mating ritual involving razor-sharp rhino teeth–and then, if the luck of these two star-crossed rhinos changes, maybe, just maybe cute baby Sumatran rhinos.

Surely Ratu and Andalas deserve some good luck this time!

“Captain John Smith was widely believed to be a liar .. he was also, arguably, the first American historian,” says the recent New Yorker article where I first learned the (cynical and condescending, hence surely pomo) term for autobiographical writing, “self-fashioning.”

Modern taste in biography enjoys debunking but sniggers at “inspiration.” (Middle-schoolers who wouldn’t know Trenton from Bunker Hill can tell you that George Washington owned slaves and badly-fitted false teeth.) One non-modern and inspiring antidote to this trend can be found at the Nobel Prize website, where untrendy and innocent new Nobel laureates try to create a brief history of the family and lifetime behind their scientific achievement. Just a few favorites, not coincidentally all physicists:

• Joe Tayior (1993), whose big childhood influences were ham radio and his family’s “deep Quaker roots.”
• Gerhard ‘t Hooft (1999), whose childhood ambition was to become “a man who knows everything.”
• Anthony Leggett (2003, and now Sir Anthony Leggett), whose family history reaches back to a cook on Nelson’s flagship the Victory.
• Frank Wilczek (2004), whose autobiography’s good qualities include photos of our family!

Many of the supposed lies of John Smith turned out, in the end, to be true. And some at least of his debunkers turned out to have their own ulterior motives–e.g., debunking an early Virginia colony in order to augment the luster of New England Pilgrims. And George Washington did a few things that make him worthy of being remembered aside from slave-owning, false teeth, and his failure to chop down cherry trees.

So, if you’re ready to join me in being cynical about knee-jerk cynicism, one inspiring place to start would be Nobel biographies.

Can’t read the headlines?

• All-singing, All-dancing Nobel guy
• Einstein: “Know when to hold ’em.”
• Extra dimensions? CERN says no.
• Want wit, wisdom? Eat salmon, soy!
• Turkey is no longer a superfood.
• Blueberries hold the secret of eternal life!

You too, or your sweetie, can be similarly featured thanks to this crazy promo page sponsored by Xerox.

… when its stepper motor is reprogrammed to play Beethoven’s Für Elise.

This is the kind of lovely geek achievement that gives you some hope for the whole crazy human race.

Thanks to Tinglilinde for the link!

Three Sisters
Originally uploaded by BigFrank.

They look so innocent, but….

Cows, in their intestines, produce methane gas. Lots of it–enough gas to become a problem for global warming.

Scientists have developed a pill that helps cows break down that methane, using its energy to produce sugar. Cows get fatter–methane goes down–and the whole planet becomes a happier place.

What good news from science, that gives us all reason to smile!

This is André Weil’s Law of Faculties — a theorem propounded by the mathematician André Weil (1906 – 1998), which appears on page 10 of Absolute Zero Gravity, a collection of science jokes I once coauthored.

Weil’s Law also gives insight into the problems inside our White House and Justice Department–which one former Reagan US Attorney analyzed rather cynically for the LA Times:

“The incompetence has been amazing … There are too many Stepford husbands in this administration: young men who are perfectly coiffed and have great clothes, but very few of them have ever been in a courtroom.”

Weil’s Law explains so much about the progression from young Karl Rove pushing George W Bush into politics because Bush looked so good in cowboy boots, down and around to George W Bush agreeing to turn Federal Emergency Management over to the inexperienced Michael Brown, an old college roommate of his pal Joe Allbaugh.

Lift a rock, and see Stepford husbands, all the way down.
…….
(thanks to Talkingpointsmemo for pointing to the Stepford quote.
……..
Not to disappoint any Bourbaki fans, I had the pleasure of spending many hours with Andre Weil for a 1990s project at the IAS, collecting an oral history from four retired mathematicians there. You can find transcripts in the IAS library–my only surviving mention from that era now on the web is a footnote in a memoir by Armand Borel.

About those Bourbaki meetings, Weil recalled with delight the way participants would meet to dispute mathematics with screams of rage, then emerge from the meeting room in perfect amity to enjoy an excellent dinner. One evening, Weil himself emerged from the meeting room a bit earlier than the others and encountered the hotel concierge standing outside the door. “Oh Monsieur,” she said with great anxiety, “I have been standing here for half an hour trying to decide whether I should perhaps call the police to make sure that nobody in there is being harmed.”

This memory gave Professor Weil enormous pleasure–and, remembering his pleasure now, I’m smiling too.

Male Brown-headed Cowbird
Originally uploaded by Justabird.

“The perfidious Mrs. Cowbird” is a heart-breaking villain in Maud Hart Lovelace’s story about a little girl adopted by robins.*

Cowbirds lay eggs in the nests of smaller birds–cowbird babies then shove aside their smaller nestmates.

Some bird species fight back–for example, by pushing a cowbird’s egg out of the nest. But, in a counter-strategy to that counter-strategy, cowbirds check up on their eggs, ransacking and destroying nests if the cowbird egg has been removed.

I’m glad Maud Hart Lovelace didn’t know about this. I cried enough childhood tears over Mrs. Cowbird.

……………………………
* The Tune Is In The Tree, now out of print.
……………………………

Thanks, Amity, for emailing a link to this study!
……………………………

p.s. In much, much warmer and fuzzier bird news, Dervala’s Ranger Tim and his bachelor rooster are more or less brooding some tiny Easter chicks.

Movable School
Originally uploaded by jessamyn.

George Washington Carver (1861(?) – 1943 ) has been both praised and debunked at great length by many people in Wikipedia (and elsewhere of course).

But did he invent peanut butter? Well, probably not–depending on how you define “invent” and how you define “peanut butter.”

The funny thing over in Wikipedia is how some people want to define and redefine peanut butter so that it means essentially “something that GW Carver could not have invented.”

For example, Carver could not have invented peanut butter because ground peanuts were well-known in Africa. So peanut butter was invented in Africa.

Also, ground-up peanuts appear in an 1885 cookbook. So peanut butter was invented in 1885. Not to mention that “nutmeal” was patented in 1897 by Dr. Kellogg. Er, did I say “nutmeal”? Sorry, Wikipedia calls that invention “peanut butter.” So, GW Carver didn’t invent it.

Yet another reason Carver didn’t invent peanut butter–his recipe just described some peanuts ground up, disgusting and oily. Real peanut butter is the modern stuff that somebody patented in 1922.

It reminds me so much of the Wikipedia ruckus over questions like “Did Dave Winer invent podcasting?” Of course nobody ever asks such silly questions except for the people who want to define the words “invented” and “podcasting” to make the answer come out that just about anyone, maybe your Aunt Lulu, might be the one who deserves every bit of the credit for podcasting, but it sure as heck is not Dave Winer.

No, whatever Dave Winer did in modifying RSS and blogware and aggregators so they could link audio files to RSS — or in promoting “audioblogging” including gathering all the major audiobloggers at Bloggercon in 2003, after which podcasting really took off–well, whatever he did deserves barely a mention because he really didn’t “invent” podcasting, and anybody can define “podcasting” to make sure that somebody else did “invent” it.

Now, most modern sources don’t claim that Carver “invented” peanut butter. Most of what he published about his research appeared in agricultural bulletins for poor farmers. There he extolled long lists of peanut recipes, urging farmers to rotate their cropland from soil-draining cotton to nitrogen-replenishing legumes like peanuts and soy. At the suggestion of Booker T Washington, Carver designed a mobile classroom on wheels to carry his message out to the desolate farmlands.

George Washington Carver was a big-picture guy, and his big picture was the desperation of ex-slave farmers bent low under the heavy load of King Cotton. The teaching, the research, the promotion of his findings–those were all little details in Carver’s big picture.

But no, Victoria, he didn’t invent peanut butter. Lots of Wikipedia readers can tell you that.

………………………………..
p.s. Clarification–my experience has been that *most* Wikipedia editors are sincerely trying to make articles better, more accurate and informative. But we do get some very persistent point-of-view pushers from time to time, and their antics are more fun to write about.

Lots of scary-metal-egg-meets-quaint-buildings footage in this 35 meg movie of the particle detector for the KATRIN experiment being towed at a walking-pace through the picturesque German village of Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen.

Modern villagers–think camphones, not torches or pitchforks–turn out to watch the giant’s passage, which also features a truck with 5 gazillion tires and foreigners uprooting street signs and hand-bending saplings out of the path of the monster.

Perky background music doesn’t detract from philosophical and psychological interest–or maybe it’s just that the movie is long enough to send your brain out for some real wool-gathering.

Tons more background info from Bee. Thanks to Tingilinde for the links and this photo.

…like the Equator.

Here in Chile, January is mid-July.

The hotel doors open wide to admit all the lovely fresh and flowery air from outdoors. Lots of sunshine making everything bright.

Best of all, to this refugee from Boston January–all this sunshine is still on view at 7 p.m. No sign of a sunset. And, lovely as sunsets are, I am in no hurry.