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

Kevin Marks, whose contributions to Bloggercon 1 inspired my artistic-but-evil twin to create this image, is moving his X-ray vision and other skills from Technorati to Google. So say Dave Winer and a bunch of other people*. Will Kevin–(congratulations, BTW!)–be any different now he’s begoogled? I hope not too much, because Kevin was already super.

* Update, February 17. Three days after I blogged this, Technorati still hasn’t indexed this blogpost or added me to their list of bloggers linking to Kevin’s post. Sigh. Yes, I long ago “claimed” my blog at Technorati. Yes, two days ago I manually “pinged” Technorati that my blog had updated. No, I don’t think bloggers should have to bow down like that to the gods of “who’s in the web conversation” to be included in Technorati’s much-vaunted record of “who’s in the web conversation.” And it didn’t do me any good anyway.

The Google blogsearch, however, added my post about one day after I made it. Not very fast, but at least it was accurate.

Congrats to Harvard for doing something so smart as as president-ifying Drew Gilpin Faust, once aka Drewdie Gilpin, with whom I shared fourth-year math classes (just the two of us) way back when Concord Academy was an all-girls school.

Drew was then smart and serious and kindly (yes, I know those are funny words to describe a 16 year-old girl). With a little baby powder all over her hair, she made a perfect Southern Colonel for our senior class musical.

Now she has grown up even smarter but still warm-hearted and not so deadpan.

Drew moved to Cambridge just a few years ago as the dean of Radcliffe, which like Harvard has many brilliant and outspoken stakeholders–but unlike Harvard has less-than-infinite money. Hard to imagine how someone could survive that job–and some called her “Chainsaw Drew“? Ouch! But others (most) praised her low-key leadership, leading while listening, building consensus, to quote Newsweek, “without wielding sharp elbows.”

She will do a great job as the new head of Harvard!

• Postcard from a bobblehead in transit.
• The shaggy-guru “life-is-a-fountain” story.
• Aargh, dude! Pomos are indexing my Discourse!.
• Coders and cannibals: Can you tell them apart?.
• Blizzard in progress.
• Pioneers and people “early to the party”.
• Web 2.0 as a giant Schrodinger’s cat.
• I’m a Second-Law-of-Thermodynamics person.
• Hermit crab and the fingers of a blogger.
• Now we know what the little red hand really means.
• User-generated discontent. (coal barge)
• Phone Jammer Gate for beginners: A reference page.
• Tom, the loud cat, or enough politics for a while.
• Another week in yet another hotel room.
• Younger than springtime?

Who’s in charge of prosecuting the phone-jamming?

• Funny ha-ha: Tobin’s attorney on bloggers.
• A river runs through it…
• Phone-jamming: What real people think.
• Meet Guy Goma, BBC blooper-saver.
• Paku-paku, Mr. Pac-Man!
• Arms length? Maybe. Clean hands? No..
• Phone jamming wonkery from James Tobin’s sentencing
  .
• Warm heart, sharp wit: Freeman Dyson.
• Figs 2.0: The VC pitch from BC.
• Theory of something at a University 2.0.
• One second from eek!
• Some wounded veterans have funny ha-ha medals?
• Emblematic of life..but then, what isn’t?
• The path to wisdom leads past a big straw hat…
• One of those wonderful, wonderful moments at BlogHer.
• Big storm, and a tree squished Frank’s parked car…
• Terrifying thoughts from the Wikimania speakers’ lounge.
• My advice to citizen reporters.
• Summarize 3+ years of phone-jamming news in 3 minutes.
• “Paris Hilton” quantum effects on the two-way web.
• Amity inside Frank’s smooshed car, now minus the tree.
• Side view of surprising Swarovski waterfall.
• Opera postscript, and scientist-wrangling how-to..
• Alpine cemetery glows at night from candles lit on each grave.
• Judy and jewelweed inspire skunk-tomato story.
• Republican spinners heart “The View” of Rosie.
• The craziness inspired by four big, big cup holders.
• Happy 80th birthday to T D Lee!
• Frank Wilczek explains dark matter in 24 seconds.
• Searching for placeblogs, with town names from an old atlas.
• Dressed in blue jeans and (sometimes) dragonfly wings….
• If you live in NH, you need a woodpile…
• Could Frank Wilczek be right about this too?
• Breaking news: Not guilty by reason of saying ‘I take full responsibility’.
• May God’s blessing be with you, Ms. Vinny.
• Impossible problem checkmated by open-source software.
• Do you want your two-year-old forced to wear Manolos?
• Things to think about when you vote today.
• We’re in Norfolk, our suitcase is still in Boston.
• Thanksgiving goofs–just part of what families need.
• So many songs about rainbows…
• View from the backseat, ca 1989.
• To boldly go where I’ve never been before ….
• Funny ha-ha and peculiar–just five things?

Yes, the time of year I remember…

that I forgot my bloggiversary.

January 22. That wasn’t so hard, was it?

So here, in honor of this (fourth birthday?!!) season, are my favorites of the photos I’ve posted here in 2006:

And here are a few past strolls down memory lane–I’ll collect some of the best posts from 2006 later on, and post you the linkage.

Thanks for helping me make so much trouble for so long– as the blogmotto says, it’s all “for a better tomorrow.”

• Blog backstory
• My favorite blogposts from 2003 (my first year of blogging).
• My favorite blogposts from 2004.
• My favorite blogposts from 2005.

Betsy to Frank: Do you know who Jerry Rice is? I think he’s a football player?

Frank to Betsy: Yes, of course. He’s probably the greatest wide receiver of all time. Why?

Betsy to Frank: Huh–well, I just saw him at the gym. He seemed like a very sweet person.

Frank to Betsy: No, I don’t think you saw Jerry Rice, the world’s greatest wide receiver. Maybe somebody else whose name was Jerry Rice.

Betsy to Frank: Why couldn’t I have seen the real, famous Jerry Rice? Why would I have him mixed up with somebody else.

Frank to Betsy: Because I don’t think Jerry Rice works out at your gym.

Betsy to Frank: [Pause, as the penny drops.] Oh. What I meant was that I saw the real Jerry Rice today when I was at the gym. I was at the gym, and he was cooking something on a TV show.

Captain White Socks (1984 – 1996) entered our lives as a small, mostly-tiger kitten that Amity heard about from her camp-bus driver. Such was Cappy’s charm that it smote us all at once, even as we gasped at the giant fleas crawling out of his ears and over his tiny tummy.

Quick veterinarian action intervened.

Years passed, during which Cappy grew large and bold, treating our family with a courtly affection but expecting to be the alpha (neutered) male in his interactions with any outsiders. He was lordly (not to say a bit aggressive) and he may well have been chasing a car when he met his end. I had imagined that he (like our other cat Sylvester) always stayed in our back yard but kept away from the street.

It wasn’t so. There was a slight drizzle falling from the sky when I was summoned by the doorbell, and a very contrite driver, to look at Cappy’s now limp but still beautiful corpse, spangled with fog drops.

To my dismay taxidermists turned me down flat when I asked about getting Cappy “preserved” so that he could lie curled up on some mantel or windowsill. My children were baffled. We had been to Chincoteague and seen the body of Misty “mounted” (they don’t call it “stuffed”) for eternal memory. We had stayed in New Zealand with people whose parlors displayed even (now somewhat motheaten) dogs they had loved in their childhood.

But even though we were by then in Princeton, NJ, so that I was able to pester taxidermists all the way from NYC to Philadelphia, nobody wanted to “mount” our old Cappy so that we could keep him. “We don’t do pets,” more than one surly old-timer told me. Meanwhile, in our freezer, Cappy lay curled up in a giant plastic bag surrounded by frozen peas and fudge-ripple ice cream.

Frank, of course, had a truly unique suggestion: “Don’t say it’s a pet. Tell them I shot it.” Somehow, I hadn’t the chutzpah to try his method.

In the end, finally, I bought some beautiful cloth that was black and golden, like Cappy, to wrap him up in. We buried him in the back yard. Einstein’s back yard, which was our back yard way back then.

But if there’s a resurrection, Einstein can’t have him because we want Cappy back!

Yesterday ten tourists died in a fire in a popular Chilean hotel with no in-room fire detectors.

Why do US hotel owners spend good money to buy smoke detectors and install sprinkler systems? Intrusive government regulation of their business practices. The kind of thing nobody would have to contend if right-thinking economists could just shrink government down to a size drownable in the bathtub.

Chile’s economic model is still largely based on policies urged by Milton Friedman and applauded by right-wing economists in the US. But if no law enforces fire safety on all hotels, then pity each individual hotel builder, having to decide whether or not to pay for such an unusual and unproductive extra.

Meanwhile, even right-wing Chilean politicians admit that Chile’s private pension system, once touted as a model for what US Social Security should become, has turned into an unfunded disaster, with pension companies raking off one-third or more of workers’ savings and posting annual profit margins near 50%.

Democrats, please pull our government out of that bathtub.

Something beautiful in Wikipedia today: All 321 images being considered for Picture of the Year (2006). A few of my favorites:

• British fairground worker Albert Harris inside his “coconut shy” booth (# 8)
• Panorama of the British Museum reading room (# 71)
• Nuclear waste, who knew it could look so beautiful? (# 82)
• Satellite image of crops growing in Kansas (# 121)
• Beautiful blue day at Scheveningen (# 180)
• Ferrofluid spikes in a magnetic field (# 194)
• Clear glass, colored liquid, and the refraction of light (# 297)
• Black-headed gull descends like the Holy Spirit (# 300)

On a different battle front for the public domain, many Wikipedia editors stepped up last week to baffle multiple and diverse attacks on Wikipedia’s Dave Winer article, including several attempts to blank or delete the whole thing.

Wikipedians really are doing grand things for the future of information’s public availability.

Lots of scary-metal-egg-meets-quaint-buildings footage in this 35 meg movie of the particle detector for the KATRIN experiment being towed at a walking-pace through the picturesque German village of Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen.

Modern villagers–think camphones, not torches or pitchforks–turn out to watch the giant’s passage, which also features a truck with 5 gazillion tires and foreigners uprooting street signs and hand-bending saplings out of the path of the monster.

Perky background music doesn’t detract from philosophical and psychological interest–or maybe it’s just that the movie is long enough to send your brain out for some real wool-gathering.

Tons more background info from Bee. Thanks to Tingilinde for the links and this photo.

“Accountabalism” (says David Weinberger) results from “accountability” pushed too far–into the realm of “eating sacrificial victims in an attempt to magically ward off evil.”

Accountabalism tries to squeeze centuries of thought about how to entice people toward good behavior and dissuade them from bad into simple rules by which individuals can be measured and disciplined. It would react to a car crash by putting stop signs at every corner. Bureaucratizing morality or mechanizing a complex organization gives us the sense that we can exert close control. But grown-ups prefer clarity and realism to happy superstition.

Stop signs at every corner? Nobody wants that!

Centuries of thought about how to dissuade people from bad behavior, however, haven’t come up with great substitutes for punishment of the few people who get caught. Harsh punishment for drunk driving made that “insoluble” problem much less of a problem. The “insoluble” problem of men who beat their wives found a much better solution when researchers noticed that getting hauled off to jail even briefly cut recidivism better than years of counseling.

In the NH phone-jamming scandal, a NH judge sentenced warm-hearted family man James Tobin to ten months in federal prison. Sorry as I am for Mr. Tobin and his family, I think that such harsh “accountabalism” is needed to dissuade other politicians from breaking the rules on elections.

When our society has such a big stake in the outcome of individual decisions, we need to put up big stop signs and whomp people with big penalties if they go through them.

Update: David comments on my comment, says whomp-’em-if-they- ignore-a-major-stop-sign is accountability (good), not accountabalism (bad). What he’s against is magical belief that proliferates ever more, ever tinier stop signs. Well, of course, he explains it much better than that.

In fact, I doubt I’d have disagreed with his article at all if I hadn’t been doing that half-awake ought-to-be-packing-now-blogging-at-dawn from Kyoto.