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

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Originally uploaded by simbi0tic star bubbles

In 1903, Mark Twain was already poking fun at his era’s version of Intelligent Design. For example…

According to Kelvin’s figures it took 99,968,000 years to prepare the world for man, impatient as the Creator doubtless was to see him and admire him. But a large enterprise like this has to be conducted warily, painstakingly, logically. It was foreseen that man would have to have the oyster. Therefore the first preparation was made for the oyster.

Very well, you cannot make an oyster out of whole cloth, you must make the oyster’s ancestor first. This is not done in a day. You must make a vast variety of invertebrates, to start with — belemnites, trilobites, jebusites, amalekites, and that sort of fry, and put them to soak in a primary sea, and wait and see what will happen. Some will be a disappointments – the belemnites, the ammonites and such; they will be failures, they will die out and become extinct, in the course of the 19,000,000 years covered by the experiment, but all is not lost, .. and at last the first grand stage in the preparation of the world for man stands completed, the Oyster is done.

An oyster has hardly any more reasoning power than a scientist has; and so it is reason ably certain that this one jumped to the conclusion that the nineteen-million years was a preparation for him…

Thanks for sharing to Tingilinde, where you can read the rest of Twain’s inspired nonsense.

Wonderful Tshirt hand-painted for Frank

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

what the back of this Tshirt says?

Thanks to Luis and Cinzia for Frank’s new favorite Tshirt.

Bloglines and Twitter underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
With good wifi, ’tis Paradise enow!

??
No, Omar, I don’t think so!

Originally uploaded by Orange Cremecicle

Susan Mernit astutely diagnoses her own reading shift to (more and more) on the internet. The New York Times and (more recently) Newsweek now look like problems in paper disposal rather than information–but Susan finds one very interesting exception:

“I am still a huge fan of monthly magazines–the womens/shelter/travel magazines that I get–Country Living, Oprah, Domino, Lucky, Sunset, Food & Wine, Blueprint–are tremendous fun and I enjoy browsing through them and savoring the photos, travel ideas, and things I like but will never buy.

So where’s the paradigm shift? Information versus entertainment.

Very astute, but let me shift her shift some more. I see the difference as more like fast food drive-through versus gourmet picnic basket.

Paper can’t compete with pixels on serving up small bites of information to people hungry for information that’s new–now!

Text on a computer screen can’t compete with printed take-anywhere pages that you savor slowly anywhere you want them–from deep in your favorite chair or on a beach blanket.

Mmmmm! Which not to say I don’t love RSS!

Toni Morrison

Originally uploaded by Careliu

From an amazing short talk I heard today by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, about the humanities in general and her writing in particular:

• “Standing on the outside looking in was a big advantage for me as a writer.”
• “We have all spent a lot of time and thought at the boundary, the border–at the edge. It’s a place the rich have to police. Those outside study the edge and plot to break through it. Those inside fight to maintain belonging or to belong someplace else.”
• “Literature is full of writers who betrayed their class (Harriet Beecher Stowe or Mark Twain) — who ran away from it to live in exile (Henry James) — who stood at the border so they could critique it (Ernest Hemingway, Herman Melville)”
• “A ruthless gaze at the center, whether from within or without the circle–that is the strength of the humanities. It has been my way to be at home in the world.”

Many thanks to Al and Bethellen for inviting me, as their guest, to today’s ceremony to see and hear Drew Gilpin Faust awarding the 2007 Radcliffe Medal to Toni Morrison.

p.s. And my sincere apologies to Ms. Morrison that my reconstruction of notes scribbled onto my program fail to do justice to her own Nobel-quality eloquence.

Well, maybe not totally Polish, but now I’m *in* Polish, and so is Frank (who was half-Polish to start with) in a new translation of our book Longing for the Harmonies. More on my newly discovered Polish attributes: Betsy Devine Z wykształcenia jest informatykiem, studia ukończyła w Princeton. Regularnie prowadzi w Internecie blog „Funny Ha-Ha or Funny Peculiar” poświęcony różnym zagadnieniom z pogranicza nauki, polityki i humoru. Od 1973 roku jest żoną Franka Wilczka.

Thanks–I think! What a handsome cover design–I hope we get one of these. Thanks to Ewa L. Łokas and Bogumił Bieniok [sic] for this translation and to the busy bots of Technorati for letting me know the book is now out on the Internet.

Frank and Betsy and a bit of CMS

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

This giant particle detector being built at CERN represents much more than a giant step for physics.

Scientific groups building it came from India and Pakistan –from the US and Iran — from China and Taiwan — in a collaboration of 37 countries and 2,000 scientists, including about 400 students.

The world could learn a lot more than physics here.

Finnish engineer in pink overalls underpins ATLAS

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

I spent today way down under the earth near Geneva, visiting CERN’s big particle detectors (still being built but expecting data in 2008.)

I’m told the engineer in charge of the scaffolding that helps other engineers clamber around building the big ATLAS detector is this woman, said to be from Finland.

Today deep in the earth, tomorrow up in the sky again, headed for home. So much good stuff, no time to blog anything more tonight–our taxi arrives at 7 a.m., groan, groan!

Heads outside the Sheldonian in Oxford

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

…as mine soon will be. We leave Oxford for Geneva (and CERN!) this morning.

Urgent note to self–pack now, blog later!

Lewis Carroll’s eyeglasses

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Amity discovered these eyeglasses yesterday in the basement of Oxford’s Museum of the History of Science.

Oxford is full of echoes of two Charles Dodgsons — one the shy mathematician of Christ Church College who miraculously didn’t stutter when talking to children– the other (using the pseudonym Lewis Carroll) the child-beloved author of such brilliant nonsense as Alice in Wonderland.

The display case says these glasses were Lewis Carroll’s but surely the one of these two who needed glasses was Mr. Dodgson.

Helium balloon inside Oxford’s New College

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Inside Oxford’s New College, old and new signs of intellectual life–a medieval scholar’s window with a modern student ‘s shiny “Congratulations” balloon, probably celebrating the end of his/her final exams.