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

Consummation devoutly to be wished

Originally uploaded by wellohorld

This is soooo not fair!!

Bad enough that summertime Sweden gets way more daylight hours than we do, or that its population is loaded with Legolas-lookalikes — and now I discover that new iPhones just went on sale there three hours ago, at Swedish midnight, (Boston 6 p.m.)

Sadly, we moved back to the USA six months too soon.

Raiding SSC

Originally uploaded by mf_cailloux

“Dads visiting pornographic websites” were the most common complaint, but more than 100 Swedish children last year asked for help in dealing with Mom or Dad’s internet habits.

One 13-year old girl wrote:

“I know it sounds ridiculous but my mother has started playing the computer game WoW, World of Warcraft … This summer she has been sitting up all day and all night and she forgets what’s important to me. And when she’s not at the computer she’s like a lost soul. She just looks straight ahead and says nothing. I’m not doing so well.”

Kids aren’t well-equipped to compete for Mom and Dad’s monetizable eyeballs. The kingdom of Bhutan was recently shocked to discover that more than 35% of parents would rather watch TV than talk to their children. What do you suppose that percent is in the US? Are more than 65% of US parents passing up Warcraft and chat rooms and prime time TV to spend meaningful family evenings with Alex and Zoe?

Could some level 70 Paladin deal with this, please?

Allegorical figure by Bernini in clay

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Harvard’s art museums are just about to close for five long years, as the dignified public spaces where they have been housed get replaced by some modern architecture I’m sure I won’t like.

So even while racing around to unpack and repack, I did make time to revisit my favorite thing there, a more or less random collection of clay sketches Bernini made for his massively multiplayer baroque marble masterpieces.

If you get there before June 30, you can see them too.

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up an image of Minerva,
Bernini’s quick clay sketch of her has brought
Me more to meditate on than a casual observa might think I deserva.

Great Tew churchyard

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

… though it has been slightly buried by packing, then travel, then jet lag, and now the unpacking.

It has been wonderful spending a springtime in England.

Roses, campanula, hardy geraniums, and the peaceful, sleepy cooing of pale-gray doves.

Wide meadows with elderflower and hawthorn tree borders, whose stiles Miss Elizabeth Bennet might have slipped through on her long walk through the fields to Mr. Bingley’s house.

Small village shops where Alice in Wonderland might have bought apples or candy.

And in London, I swear that I once saw Bertie Wooster coming out of a tailor’s shop, proud of but unnerved by his coat’s rather daring new color.

But now my own real life is starting up again, which is a good thing.

Tolkien’s table, Merton College

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Is this the table where JRR Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings? Is it the setting he had in mind for Elrond’s conference where 4 hobbits, 2 men, and one each of wizard/elf/dwarf pledge their faith to a fellowship of the One Ring?

It may well be both of these, for it is a fine old stone table in the gardens of Merton College, one where (it is said) Tolkien would often sit outdoors writing on fine days like yesterday in the years after 1945, when he became Oxford’s Merton Professor of English language and literature.

Merton (founded in 1260 by Walter de Merton) has many lovely medieval spaces set among peaceful lawns and well-tended gardens. I would not be surprised in Tolkien’s vision of Lothlorien’s elegant retreat from a dangerous world owes something to his own experiences of life in this setting.

Green on green

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Even a skilled translation is like the reflection in water of what the original thinker was trying to say. But such reflections may also have charms of their own.

With this excuse, and with thanks to a friend in Babice for sending me a charmingly machine-translated from the Polish interview with Frank, here’s Frank Wilczek trying to explain the quantum mechanical problem of science and faith:

God this wide notion very different things under which understand nation. Physical theories meanwhile this sure abstract mathematical conceptions there in which is no place for free choice. Some are careful anyway, that science is uncovering this, what it is just God, or how oneself he manifests in physical reality.

I from second side like the conception of complementariness the advanced by Danish phisicist Nielsa the Bohra very. Then the philosophical conception which comes from with phisics. If you try to understand some arrangement, you can this do with different points of sight. Every of them describes one of aspects of studied arrangement.

But when you try to apply it simultaneously, then you fall in contradiction. They in phisics are on this very concrete examples. It in kwantowej mechanics was can qualify the position of particle or her speed, but it will not give to pit both these features simultaneously. They do not exist simultaneously we – can get to know or one, or second.

Bohr – and I for him he – was careful, that this principle is a lot of more general. That the different ways of understanding of world, different points of sight are. Every of them has something to offering. But if you try to apply it simultaneously, then you can fall in conflict. It can so just be with science and belief.

I like the modesty and good sense of Frank’s statement. It makes much more sense than the loud crowings of some who climb to the top of the tower of one single viewpoint (science or faith) to proclaim that the rival viewpoint must be purely nonsense.

Lilac and wisteria

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

OK (if you’re not English) can you guess which one of these is not the name of a city or town within a short drive from Oxford?

While you are thinking, here are some village names that we saw on road signs while driving past acres of springtime from Oxford to Cambridge:

• Chorleywood
• South Mimms
• Wormleybury
• Cherry Hinton

Ready with an answer on Slough, Staines, or Maidenhead? All three are real English placenames.

Jane Austen’s writing table

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

This tiny table at Jane Austen’s house in Chawton was where she wrote the jewel-like novels that made her famous. If I ever feel like complaining about my workspace, I’ll remember hers, set in one corner of her family’s sitting room.

The current issue of Physics Today has a beautiful obituary of Sidney Coleman, written by his longtime friend and collaborator Sheldon Glashow. The article is remarkable not only for its lively memories of physics “clown-prince” Sidney Coleman but also for having the best first sentence possible:

Cherished friend, colleague, and collaborator Sidney Richard Coleman, Donner Professor of Science at Harvard University, died on 18 November 2007 after a long struggle with Lewy body disease.

It’s illustrated by a snip from the photo above, a candid shot taken by Lubos Motl and donated by him to the Wikimedia Commons.
Shelley no doubt has more and funnier memories of Sidney than anyone else. Restraining myself from cherry-picking his essay, which I hope you’ll read, he quotes the tagline of Sidney’s 1962 thesis:

“What we do here is nothing to what we dream of doing.”

Sidney lifted that quote from Justine, by the Marquis de Sade.

A pound of sugar and a pint of beer

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine,
photo by Amity Wilczek.

That was the daily diet of the wasp colony that built this huge paper nest in 1857.

Before you envy this self-indulgent diet, bear in mind that the wasps got their sugar dissolved in their beer.

This magnificently well-fed colony soon drew the attention of nearby wasps, who abandoned their own nests and moved in to help build the ever-growing mansion. They were welcomed “without the least show of opposition,” says the exhibit label.

So if you plan to write up the history of open-source software or BarCamp, please give appropriate credit to these pioneers.

(For more information, see a closeup of the label.) It’s now on display in Oxford’s Museum of Natural History.