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

I loved meeting so many of Frank’s classmates from Martin Van Buren High School. The DC-based contingent is doing diverse things, lawyering and government bureauing and more. Neil Stahl is a Virginia doctor specializing in autoimmune diseases (that’s what “rheumatologist” means.)

I can’t believe I ate so much baked Alaska, but aside from that I had a wonderful time…

I tried to exorcise my inner sloth today by taking a walk to the Smithsonian Museum. (Frank and I are in DC at the Intel Science Talent Search Back in high school, he got a great boost from this fine program, which puts teens in touch with their inner scientist.)

The attacks of the Christian Right on evolution are making big news in school districts around the country. After Creationism was pretty decisively barred from public school science courses (because it’s a religious doctrine), the same folks regrouped and came up with “Intelligent Design.”

I’m glad to see that Bush’s pandering to Jerry Falwell et al. has so far not impacted our national museum. The Smithsonian still has wonderful displays on the creation of the solar system from space dust, the extinction of dinosaurs millions of years ago, and even the evolution of modern humans.

<rant>But, speaking of intelligent design, how intelligent is it to insist that the Bible’s a science textbook? I mean, if God really had it in mind to teach people some science, why the heck did he not start with something useful like, oh for instance, how to prevent childbed fever?</rant>

This gorgeous sloth image was slothfully snipped from an excellent Smithsonian photo on Flickr by GreyArea, because none of my own photos came out so well.

In case you young folks are wondering what equipment it takes to celebrate a one-billion-second-iversary, the answer is lots of chocolates and two flashing-lighted rave rings.

No, you don’t have to keep on wearing the rave rings for the next billion seconds.

Julie Leung posted a great nostalgic photo of the Fisher-Price “record player” (remember those?) that tinkles out music box notes read from plastic discs. How funny the same toy makes us both nostalgic–she played with this when she was a little girl, but my nostalgia is for being a young mom buying the Fisher-Price toy for my daughters!

Meanwhile, my kickball pal Kevin Lawver is off at SXSW (without me this year) and thinking about his upcoming thirtieth birthday!

Hmmmm, what was I doing just pre-thirty? Was I campaigning for social justice with a bumper sticker on my Fred Flintstone mobile? And what was the big cause back then? Something like “Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscripti catapultas habebunt”*?

(Thanks to Suw, by the way, for her link to all this useful Latin!)

* When catapults are outlawed, only outlaws will have catapults.

Julie Leung posted a great nostalgic photo of the Fisher-Price “record player” (remember those?) that tinkles out music box notes read from plastic discs. How funny the same toy makes us both nostalgic–she played with this when she was a little girl, but my nostalgia is for being a young mom buying the Fisher-Price toy for my daughters!

Meanwhile, my kickball pal Kevin Lawver is off at SXSW (without me this year) and thinking about his upcoming thirtieth birthday!

Hmmmm, what was I doing just pre-thirty? Was I campaigning for social justice with a bumper sticker on my Fred Flintstone mobile? And what was the big cause back then? Something like “Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscripti catapultas habebunt”*?

(Thanks to Suw, by the way, for her link to all this useful Latin!)

* When catapults are outlawed, only outlaws will have catapults.

http://www.lawver.net/archive/2005/03/08/h10_favorites_from_last_week.php

http://www.lawver.net/archive/2005/03/09/h08_the_thing_i_keep_forgetting.php

That’s 1,000,000,000 seconds, a US billion.

I blogged our funny wedding in NJ traffic court–that happened late in the evening of July 3, 1973.

10 seconds, 100 seconds, and 1,000 seconds later, we were still shell-shocked newlyweds, most likely still lost somewhere out in Dutch Neck, NJ.

10,000 seconds after we tied the knot–a bit less than 3 hours–we were eating cake-mix cake and ice cream to celebrate.

At 100,000 seconds (near the July 4/July 5 borderline) Frank was gone! He spent our “honeymoon” in Sicily at a physics summer school; I spent it in Princeton, doing much duller grand school thingummies, and missing him very much. At 1,000,000 seconds, a long 11 days later, our separate-honeymoon phase was still ongoing.

At 10,000,000 seconds, we get to October 26, 1973. We were happily sharing our married-grad-student-housing with two white mice. We had, in those long ago days, our own separate slide rules. (Computers were room-sized , $10,000,000 thingies.)

At 100,000,000 seconds, we’re all the way up to September 5, 1976. Frank was all the way up to being an assistant professor, our beautiful daughter Mickey had just turned two, and I was thinking about getting back to grad school.

Now, 1,000,000,000 seconds of marriage takes us to Friday night, March 11, 2005, roughly 11 p.m.

Now, if you think it’s geeky to celebrate powers-of-ten-iversaries, remember this: if we were truly geeky we’d celebrating powers-of-two-or-eight-or-sixteen-iversaries.

I’m sure looking forward to our next billion seconds!

You can’t see it in this photo–I have to leave a few surprises for Penn and Teller’s TV show–but Frank has been showing the camera some very, very spooky levitation effects. Here you see two actual physics demo ninjas–Markos Hankin and Patrick Ragsdale (the same Patrick Ragsdale who does scriptalias.com)–who set up these effects in MIT’s Junior Physics Lab. If something flies off the table or catches on fire, these are the folks who step in to make everything right.

Right now they’re just watching the show. I’ll keep you blog-posted on when you can do the same. Penn and Teller’s third season, with the segment on ghosts, starts later this spring.

Inside Frank’s office, the interview filming has started.

I’m not sure if I’m happy or sad that the giant, big-gestured Penn and the fast-fingered Teller aren’t here in person to ask Frank their emailed questions. (They’re in Las Vegas somewhere, appearing nightly in “an edgy mix of comedy and magic involving knives, guns, fire, a gorilla and a showgirl.” The MIT physics group could absorb all those elements with easy savoir faire–except for the fire, which would set off our overhead sprinklers.

Meanwhile, I noticed on the Penn and Teller Showtime webpage for “Talking to the Dead” that the “experts” are shown all together with links to their homepages. That is, the “Your mother is speaking with my voice” medium (Penn called her, if I remember this right, a “pigdog”) is on just the same basis as the respectfully photographed debunking psychologist…

Meanwhile, I am so tempted to stand outside Frank’s closed door and make a very soft and ghostly “Whoooooooooo”….

Here, on the monitor, you see Gilles Morin. Gilles is the sound expert on this particular shoot, but after getting his microphones set up he has been doing other helpful things like (here) sitting in the interview hotseat to be “lighted”…

Here are Scott Firestone (the director, from Firestone Productions) and Frank Wilczek surfing the web to track down nefarious claims being made about ghosts and physics…