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

Headed home from Cleveland this morning (at 5:45 a.m., ugh!) to Cambridge, where multiple BlogHers are in town for Corante’s Symposium on Social Architecture. I’m looking forward to exciting blogdish and tagtalk from Mary Hodder, who doesn’t get to Boston often enough, not to mention Lisa and Halley, and Liz, whom I just don’t get to see often enough, except by way of their blogs.

Throw a box into a cage full of chimpanzees, they fight for the box.
Throw a box into a cage full of bonobos, they have sex inside it.

Ira Flatow

Just a small sample of outside-the-box chitchat over breakfast this morning, with Ira Flatow and Star-Trek-deconstructionist Lawrence Krauss, not to mention Frank Wilczek. In other news, Frank is playing Sudoku with Mathematica, Lawrence has a new beard as well as a new book (Hiding in the Mirror : The Mysterious Allure of Extra Dimensions, from Plato to String Theory and Beyond), and Betsy Devine has much more good stuff than she can blog.

Fans of Science Friday, do you recognize this picture?

Well, if not, why not? It’s on the very first page of results if you Google-image-search for
ira flatow.

The image comes from a website describing a new book called
Math and the Mona Lisa: The Art and Science of Leonardo da Vinci–that sounds pretty good. Which goes to show you won’t go far wrong searching for Renaissance podcast-man Ira Flatow.

I just found out that my breakfast chat with Dave Winer made his very short list of podcasts that exemplify his “Vision for Podcasting.”

Wow! Thanks, Dave!

Now, although I’m one of the few people on the planet not podcasting yet, this was already my second Betsy-Devine-getting-podcast-by-podcasting-bigshot. (Tony Kahn of WGBH was the first; scroll down his podcast list looking for “Betsy Devine.”

Now, just like you, I’m thinking about starting my own podcast, so maybe the best place to start is a mashup of these two I’ve already done? Start with…

• Gladiator-striptease sound-effects, followed by….
• Singing a showtune about Massachusetts, followed by….
• Re-enactment of Halley’s Boston Blogger Beach Party, followed by….
• Limitations of “Don’t be evil” exemplified by gang warfare…

In fact, I have something quite different in mind–but then, don’t we all?

“…not as smart as he thinks he is. There’s a lot of that going around.”

Another awesome quote from Frank Wilczek. (He was talking about somebody who will *never* read my blog, so I can just about promise it wasn’t you.)

Microbiologist Rita R. Colwell addressed today’s APS meeting on “Oceans, Climate, and Health: The Cholera Paradigm.” Epidemic diseases now fly over the global travel networks “almost as fast as money.”

Although cholera outbreaks rise, and fast, in response to rising ocean surface temperatures, the US isn’t likely to be hit severely because we have good infrastructure delivering tapwater.

But mosquito-borne diseases may be another story. As air temperatures rise (spring flowers come two weeks earlier in DC than they did a decade ago), disease vector mosquitos travel north, adapting in realtime to shift their reproduction to shorter days and earlier spring seasons.

Scary stuff, fascinating talk. Just one of many, this year at the APS meeting.

We have two competing, antithetical missions for the Library of American Philosophical Society.

One is to make our truly remarkable collection available for study, just as freely and widely as possible. The other is to protect and conserve all its objects, to pass them on to the future in perfect condition.

Martin L. Leavitt, APS Librarian

I love this idea of two antithetical missions, which I suspect has a much broader applicability in political science, economics, family life, and you name it. I got to hear about it this morning in Philadelphia’s beautiful Library Hall because
Frank is a brand-new member this year at the APS.

Becoming an APS member doesn’t involve a propeller-hat or drinking games with older philosophers. Instead, it’s an opportunity for Frank and spouse to go to lots of amazing lectures on wide-ranging topics–for example, in this current meeting we’ll hear about Chinese poetry, Mayan hieroglyphics, and the courthouse iconography of justice.

I’m afraid we missed “Neuronal Replacement in the Adult Brain,” something I might need just to follow the rest of these lectures.

http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/ibm_shows_delicious_for_the_en.html
(Joho claims he’s rewritten this post with extra snark, or more well-targeted snark, or some other snarkification I didn’t grasp.)

http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2005/11/if_your_softwar.html
Advice to coders, funny, from code queen Kathy Sierra

Flying (two segments) from Kentucky back to Boston, I rampaged through Eurasia with help from Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. But, just in case my diet of mare’s milk went sour, my backpack contained a back-up paperback mystery. (Say that three times, fast!)

Even on long flights with many, many movies, a good book is more absorbing for longer times.

I remember one rocky flight from Chile, with a jolting emergency stop in Ecuador because one of the passengers had a health emergency, when I was completely absorbed by The Perpetual Orgy, a wonderful book of essays about Flaubert that I could have included in my blogpost about books with embarassing titles. (But that book was hardcover, an exception to my rule.)

Here’s a new challenge for Amazon’s API: create a mathematical formula that minimizes book weight and maximizes the number of 5-star reviews for two very different paperbacks. That’s a formula I’d use for picking my airplane-book-pairs.

Wouldn’t you love to eavesdrop on those brand new, mandatory ethics lectures for White House officials? Gee, this so reminds me of the NH Republican Party’s eight-point “Code of Ethics,” which they invented right after getting caught jamming Democrats’ phones in 2002 –illegal behavior which, we learn in 2005, was financed by Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff. I hope Bush will save some of my Federal tax dollars by brushing off the NH Republican code for his own team’s use. It sounds like exactly what he’s looking for.

You see, very conveniently, the NH Republican Code of Ethics–while forbidding “false or misleading attacks” and “any activity which would corrupt or degrade” the political process–didn’t obligate them to uncover or punish anyone’s past mistakes or crimes–or even to answer questions truthfully.

…with real nostalgia, by reading a few of the 300-plus list items in “You know you’ve been in Sweden too long when“:

• Your native language has seriously deteriorated, now you begin to “eat medicine”, “open the television”, “close the lights off”, “take a beer”, ”look upon everything” and tell someone to “follow with me” or “you needn’t to!” You start to say “for 2 years ago” and expressions like “Don’t panic” creep into your everyday language.
• The fact that all of the “v’s” and the “w’s” are together in the phone directory seems right.
• The first thing you do upon entering a bank/post office/chemist etc. is to look for the queue number machine.
• You accept that you will have to queue to take a queue number.
• You sing bawdy drinking songs instead of Christmas carols.
• As a student, you accept and even enjoy getting dressed in formal wear to go to a candle-lit 3 course dinner where you will alternately bang on your table and stand on your chair singing songs in praise of alcohol each and every time you attempt to raise your fork to your mouth.
• You are concerned when the picture on the front page of the paper is not of some completely random person watering their garden or of a child holding an animal.