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

You think you have seen sinister ducks?

Bwa ha ha — you haven’t seen sinister ducks until you’ve seen these ducks.

Sky treehouse at sunrise

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Let’s be more ambitious than Freud: What do Humans want? I am putting together a college-level course on the ways that Utopia is being multiply re-imagined in digital worlds.

Second Life is well-known as a place that sets people free to imagine new faces, bodies, histories, and futures. But Wikipedia is also a second life to many of its participants. If Second Life has multiple sexual genders, including a wide range of Furry and Gorean and scientific data visualization options, Wikipedia too has “genders”; people who come there to work out different desires.

Wikipedian fulfillment may involve some very strange couplings (wrong word, since far more than two people often become involved), quite often accompanied by virtual cat-on-roof yowling. Consider, for example, the passionate encounter of article-writer with article-editor. Or of somebody who just loves enforcing the RULES with a prankster who loves to break those rules.

Agenda-pushers for any agenda X would get no satisfaction were there not advocates for agenda not-X also eager to engage in back-and-forth pushing.

Yes, I am (mostly) joking. But the part of my course on “Gratified desire” will consider material well beyond Second Life.

Soft fluffy therapy dog

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

My sister’s little white fuzzy dog has now joined my own little white fuzzy dog in dog heaven.

My religion is, fortunately, also fuzzy enough to allow for dog heaven, although I’m quite skeptical about a human equivalent.

Dear Marie and Bill, I am so sorry.

bigmac

Originally uploaded by uuuuuli

Four Big Macs per hour.

That’s what the average Dutch worker earns — although the Dutch 17 year-old working at McDonalds earns a mere 1.05 Big Macs per hour.

Yes, the Big Mac Index (and its more elite rival, the Tall Latte Index) are semi-serious efforts to match wages to cost of living in different countries.

Why not expand this to comparing cost of living across the lines of social class. Conservatives are outraged that US auto workers can earn 10 Big Macs per hour, but they seem quite content that GM executives get $3M to $14M per year.

This makes perfect sense, however, because GM executives do not eat Big Macs. The relevant point of comparison should be something like dinner for one at Oxford’s Fat Duck restaurant, which costs $170.

The Big-Mac-Fat-Duck Index requires, then, paying the GM executive at least $1,700 per hour. If a GM executive puts in 50 weeks per year at 40 hours per week, that is 2,000 highly valuable executive hours they should expect to get fair pay for, which works out to at least $3.4M per year.

And this does not even count beverage, tip, or air fare from Detroit to the UK!

The executives who get even more than that are no doubt eating meals somewhere even more expensive.

Newton in Trinity College antechapel

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

But isn’t a week of prelude to tardy springtime, really, worth any amount of jetlag?

In Cambridge (UK, not MA) we visited Isaac Newton’s apple tree; in Copenhagen, we wandered the house of Niels Bohr. More images, and perhaps more coherent writing, on my Flickr photos. I am so jetlagged that I am now almost as pale as Trinity College’s marble Newton, the statue that Wordsworth described in his Prelude, Book 3:

And from my pillow, looking forth by light
Of moon or favouring stars, I could behold
The antechapel where the statue stood
Of Newton with his prism and silent face,
The marble index of a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.

Newton voyaged alone, true, but his notes on his experience have let many others of us follow after him.

These boots were made for Austin

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Ada Lovelace Day has arrived!

Picking just one “woman excelling in technology” is a bit hard, because there are quite a few whom I admire, e.g.

• Linda Stone,
• Mary Hodder,
• Esther Dyson, and
• Melanie Swan, whom I just met.

But I pick tech-trepreneur Lisa Williams aka blogger Lisa Williams, and not just because I have a photo of her wearing SXSW cowboy boots.

Lisa started with major computer-geeky creds and then built up and out, to test and evangelize (6 years at least worth of) new good stuff such as RSS and Bloggercon and podcasting. She has a good eye for what will be exciting, and she puts lots of skill and energy into making good things happen.

Lisa also writes about life in the geeky-young-mom lane, e.g. annotating her desk and giving advice to panelists e.g. “Bring one story to tell” but also “The best panelists are the sharpest listeners.”

More recently, she turned her tech skills to creating H20town, a hometown online newspaper. Being Lisa, she then branched out to find others like herself and built Placeblogger, mixing high-tech with low-tech can-do in equal proportions. Now she and Susan Mernit are teaming up, so who knows what the future holds for all of us?

In conclusion, I’m wishing a Happy Ada Lovelace Day to all of you high-tech high-flyers of every gender, but especially to Lisa Williams.

Frank Wilczek with hat and universe

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

The Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi) is sponsoring a conference on Grand Cayman Island, an excellent way to lure a lot of intelligent and very busy people to come spend some time together talking about foundational questions. They also have a truly interesting blog.

Furthermore, the beach at night is a good place to think about cosmological mysteries, even though it can be very windy, as Alan Guth discovered!

If you use Twitter, I strongly suggest that you start following LaBlogga, aka Melanie Swan. I just started, and I already feel more intelligent than I was yesterday.

Now, off with my computer and back to the fresh air! (Since I’m not invited to this particular conference, getting some beach time is the most intelligent thing for me to do here.)

Leonardo’s helicopter

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

…of Leonardo’s helicopter — John Graham-Cummings’s The Geek Atlas sounds like a fascinating travel guide. To quote its description at O’Reilly Books:

With this unique traveler’s guide, you’ll learn about 128 destinations around the world where discoveries in science, mathematics, or technology occurred or is happening now. Travel to Munich to see the world’s largest science museum, watch Foucault’s pendulum swinging in Paris, ponder a descendant of Newton’s apple tree at Trinity College, Cambridge, and more. Each site in The Geek Atlas focuses on discoveries or inventions, and includes information about the people and the science behind them.

Woo hoo, sign me up for the entire tour!

Harvard unfair to torrid sea vixen, others

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Dear Harvard,

Why have you locked up A Sea-Spell? Where are you hiding The Blessed Damozel? You own but are not displaying two of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s best and most famous paintings.

I understand that wall space is scarce with the Fogg Museum closed, but there is no excuse for keeping these two off display when you are devoting a room in your "pre-1900 western art" space to truly horrible "art" by somebody who wasn’t even born until the 1960s.

The Blessed Damozel isn’t happy and neither am I!

Yours sincerely,
Betsy Devine

This very morning, a Congressman named Michael Capuano put his energy, brains, and Somerville accent to work on a few of the banking types who made this big mess we’re in. What a pleasure to hear him.

One of my favorite bits I truncated for the post title: “I have some people in my constituency that actually robbed some of your banks. And they say the same thing. They’re sorry, they didn’t mean it. They won’t do it again. Just let ’em out!”

For more from his tirade, though this is still an informal transcript, keep reading.

By a show of hands, how many of your banks engaged in purchasing or investing in credit default swaps? In CDOs? Special investment vehicles — those off-books or somehow unregulated off-books activities. All or most of you engaged in the activities that created this crisis in my opinions.

Every one of those activities, but especially the SIVs — I believe they’re illegal.

We’ve had no prosecutorial action in the last administration. The new administration has a little time to figure this out. How can any regulated bank have on its books something that’s unregulated that for all intents and purposes does the same things the bank does. I hope to hear that answer in court someday.

You come to us today on your bicycles, after buying Girl Scout cookies, and helping out Mother Teresa. Telling us, “I’m sorry, we didn’t mean it, we won’t do it again. Trust us. “

I have some people in my constituency that actually robbed some of your banks. And they say the same thing. They’re sorry, they didn’t mean it. They won’t do it again. Just let ’em out!

Do you understand that this is a little difficult for most of the people in my constituency to take? That you’ve learned your lesson?

And it’s all the same people doing this. The same people who created SIVs, who created CDOs, who created credit default swaps, that never existed a few years ago. You created the mess we’re in.

And now you say sorry, trust us, and by the way we don’t even want the money. Interesting. No one’s ever come to me and said you must take billions of dollars.

If you don’t want the money, you can give it back. You just have to come up with the capital…

America doesn’t trust you any more.

I get a lot of money to put in banks. I don’t have one single penny in one of your banks. I don’t want my money to go into credit swaps and CDOs and making humongous bonuses.

Until that changes, I don’t believe anything will change. Until you change the people who brought you into SIVs.

Who was the brilliant person who came and said: Let’s do credit default swaps? Find ’em. Fire ’em. Tell me you fired them.

Get out of CDOs. Start loaning the money that we gave you and get it on the street.

Don’t say: Oh, well we’re not using that money for bonuses. C’mon! Money is all of a sudden not fungible in your entity. It’s fungible everywhere else, but not in your entities.

Get our money out on the street. And if you don’t want to give it back, don’t come here and tell me you can’t. Yes you can, as long as you live up to the requirements that are put on you now.

In the new world, that you created, we have to clean up. With that, Mr. Chairman, I yield back the remainder of my time.

Thanks to TPM for the pleasure of hearing Capuano telling the big banks what I would have liked to tell them. But he did it better. By the way, I’m proud to say he is MY Congressman.