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

“Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.”

Thomas Sowell, via Niek Hockx

I’m off to the airport, where Frank and I will meet the famous Niek, and then get on a plane for Saudi Arabia. I told Niek to keep his eye open for somebody wearing solid black from neckline to ankle and wrist. Not sure if I’ll be able to blog from Riyadh, but la vida es una buena aventura, and this certainly will be a big adventure.

Our hotel is an old Delft canal house, and our sunny room overlooks an old Delft canal, appropriately called the Oude Delft Canal. I strolled to the big town square called the Markt today, while Frank tried to replace some jet-lagged sleep. No actual rain fell on my mithril raincoat, but cloudy skies and a wet breeze made me glad I’d brought warm clothing for these few days. It is a lovely, classical Dutch civic space, with fake wooden shoes now on sale from every ground floor. Then, after seeing your dad off to his conference, I hopped on a train to Den Haag, to revisit the lovely Vermeers in the Mauritshuis (most notably Girl with Pearl Earring and View of Delft.)

To my delight, they also had Vermeer’s most ambitious painting on temporary loan from Vienna — “Allegory of Painting”, which he had on display in his own studio until his death. Allegedly, the chair in the foreground invites you to sit down in the artist’s studio so that Vermeer himself can (metaphorically) pull the curtain aside to reveal to you more of his art. Quite aside from the complex story the painting supposedly tells, it’s pretty spectacular in the sheer scope of what it imitates (glass, fabric, skin, wood, ripples of shadow, rays and twinkles of light, etc.) The museum was uncrowded except for a couple of surges of Japanese tourists, who seemed to be running some kind of endurance race. 30 tourists crowd together in front of one painting, 30 tourists listen to 2-minute spiel in Japanese, 30 tourists snap flash pictures of the painting, 30 tourists hasten away to another painting. Of course, much of the fun was also riding Dutch trains and trams again, not to mention wandering cheerfully over the bricks and cobbles of many small side streets. Also ordering a lunch of mixed appetizers and being very surprised that it included bits of raw hamburg(?)–which I did not eat, by the way. Now I’ll take a much-needed nap, but not before forcing this email into double duty as a traveler’s blogpost.

Love you a lot and xxx to all,
Mom

On page 32 of his new book,
Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, Richard Layard charts happiness versus per capita income of various countries. The country with the highest percent who are “Happy” or “Satisfied”?

The Netherlands, by a good bit.

Why? Dutch bicycles, if you want my opinion.

Holland has no monopoly on Layard’s big seven — family relationships, financial situation, work, community and friends, health, personal freedom, and personal values — factors he claims can account for much of happiness.

Here’s why the Dutch norm of bicycling everywhere creates more happiness:

• Exercise makes people’s bodies feel good.
• Exercise lifts people’s spirits.
• Bikers are not anonymous the way drivers are; hence their traffic interactions are much more civil.
• Riding a bike instead of a Hummer to work is just one example of the general Dutch aversion to flaunting wealth–the struggle to keep up with (or better) your neighbors creates much unhappiness in many cultures.
• Almost running over clueless American tourists who will go home and blog about you gets your pulses racing.

In that last area, Dutch bicycles have just made me happy as well.

Here’s my email-to-Kiruna version of the story:

Calling all Rymdgymnasiet aliens and their mentors!

The MIT news office wrote up the story of the DNA auction and posted it this morning. http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/wilczek.html

Now somebody else has already picked up the story: http://www.physorg.com/news3595.html

I’m sending you this email from Boston’s airport (I love wifi!) where we’re en route to the annual meeting of the Dutch Physical Society. They say it’s springtime there–I can hardly wait. Our own garden’s snow covering just barely melted and not even one crocus or daffodil has replaced it.

Best regards to all, and I hope you enjoy this story as much as I did,
Betsy

That’s the forecast for the next three days in Amsterdam. It rains at least once 220 days a year there, if my memory serves me right. But I’m still thrilled to be on my way there this morning.

In 1998, our family spent springtime in the Netherlands, while Frank was Lorentz Professor at the University of Leiden. I’ll never forget the miraculous fields of red and yellow tulips from every window of every railroad train. This tiny country accounts for a huge fraction of the cut flowers florists sell all around the world.

One day, a neighbor re-digging an opulent garden was throwing away a huge lavender plant. I lugged it home, because our rented house’s garden had plenty of empty space.

In the garden shed, however, the only shovel was a square-nosed item that looked to me like a lightweight coal shovel. Growing up in New Hampshire, with soil full of clay and rocks, I had only seen garden shovels made of hard steel with a pointy nose and a flat top to the blade for you to jump up and down on. I mustered my scanty Dutch and asked the neighbors to lend me their garden shovel. Their shovel looked just like the one in my garden shed. And once I started digging, I understood why–the soil (at least in Leiden, where we were staying) was almost as soft as sand for digging in.

I also remember the many baby coots growing up in canals, the flotillas of racing bicycles that nearly killed me many a time, and the flowering chestnuts that offered some consolation after the tulips all disappeared.

I’m off to be rained on, but if I just see some more of their wonderful tulips I won’t mind at all.

“When John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry developed the first digital computing machine at Iowa State University in 1937, little did they know that their invention would become an integral part of a sophisticated worldwide cat picture distribution system….”

That’s from How to blog good, which I discovered thanks to tipperography. More linky goodness from the world wild web…

World’s creepiest ever musical instrument?

via Gizmodo

Where is the hole in the pipeline for women in physics?

From Inside Higher Ed, a competitor–free!–to the pricey Chronicle of Higher Ed.

Super-simple electric bicycle mod from Neodymics

Frank Wilczek, “personal communication.”

Does your (written-good) blog have a snowball’s chance of whuffie?

I’m used to reading Suw at Chocolate and Vodka, but she’s also at HeardSaid and Strange Attractor and now at “infinite monkeys.” Suw, blog where you want, but give us one “Suw” RSS feed!

Fox Mulder has a blog? Oh sure, try to tell me it’s David Duchovny who has a blog… That’s what they want you to think. X-Files fanatics will be more suspicious… In fact, what if “This whole phenomena is a mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a government agenda“?

via Susan Mernit

Character test: can you stop reading halfway through this list?

It’s a collection of favorite literary characters* as chosen by “100 literary luminaries” (one of whom is Terry Pratchett, who liked Flashman).

Abandon restraint and dive into the list (Anne Elliott … Phillip Marlowe … the Cat in the Hat …) , enjoying the tiny blurb that goes with each choice and being reminded of your own special favorites.

Bonus list: an even-more enjoyable collection of
favorite characters sent in by indignant readers. Bonus surprise: the name of a blog superstar, who turns out to share said name with a Graham Greene policeman.

* Via Jason Kottke’s linkblog.

Don’t tell George Bush, but Frank Wilczek now seems to be famous in France, according to Google. A French astrological website specializing in famous people (including not only “scientifiques” but also “sex symboles”) has posted Frank’s astrological birth chart.

People who share Frank’s May 15 birthday, according to their list of notable Tauri, include twins Madeleine Allbright and Trini Lopez, both born in 1937–and, among many others, Socrates (466 BCE)!

Back to earth for a moment–Wikipedia has Socrates’s date of birth as June 4, 470 BCE, and the Encyclopedia Britannica isn’t even sure about the year, but what do I care?

It’s more fun to picture Socrates as Frank’s astrological alter ego. And helping people believe what they want to believe has kept astrologers in business for many, many cycles of Sun and Moon.