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

Blogging owes some 84.3%* of its success to our pleasure in learning more about people we already know, even slightly or virtually.

I had the pleasure last week of trailing along when Dennis Overbye gave Frank a tour of the New York Times backstage. (Much more impressive than backstage at CNN, BTW.) So of course I had to read more about Dennis and I came across an excellent
interview with Edge about his book Einstein in Love
whose summation I can’t resist sharing:

I know lots of people like Albert. I might be like him myself. He was a hopeless romantic, he lived on anticipation. He was always yearning for the next thing. He was always envisioning some wonderful life with somebody else, while grimly enduring life with the woman he was with. If I think about it, I would say that that was kind of the key to his psychology, that he had the lure of the perfect situation, the perfect person. Of course if you’re Einstein, you want everything that you want your way and then you want to be left alone. So you want love, and you want affection, you want a good meal, but then you don’t want any interference outside of that, so you don’t want any obligations interfering with your life, with your work. Which is a difficult stance to maintain in an adult relationship; it doesn’t work. Everything has to be a give and take.

Einstein always felt Paradise was just around the corner, but as soon as he got there, it started looking a little shabby and something better appeared. I’ve known a lot of people like Albert in my time, I have felt lots of shocks of recognition. I feel like I got to know Albert as a person in the course of this, and I have more respect for him as a physicist than I did when I started, I have more a sense of what he accomplished and how hard it really was to be Einstein than I did before. It’s a great relief to be able to think of him as a real person. If he was around I’d love to buy him a beer ….. but I don’t know if I’d introduce him to my sister.

Now you know more about Einstein, perhaps, than you wanted to. He could tell us his own side of it, if he just had a blog.

* All such statistics are, and deserve to be, made up.

Jon Udell is working on a cool tool for this.

Why would you want it? As Dave Winer said, when he and Andrew Grumet created a script to find people who share your RSS subscriptions, “Think of it as your personal echo chamber.” Your bookmarking doppelganger probably links to webpages you haven’t found yet–but will holler “Wow!”, “Wee doggie!”, or “W00t!” when you do.

Jon Udell plans to compare user profiles from the popular shared bookmarking site Del.icio.us. (Not surprisingly, his announcement has attracted a lot of bookmark action from folks who use Del.icio.us, including betsythedevine.)

So you have to share your bookmarks before you can find out who shares them with you. For some reason, this reminds me of one of my favorite Kevin Marks quotes from Bloggercon 1: “I realized that I can read thoughts–but only if people write them down first.”

…there is no Internet. So one final quick post before I run out the door:

If the clouds part tonight, watch for the solstice full moon and planet display. In fact, this week is your best chance since 1987 to observe the full moon illusion, because the moon in this June is much lower in the sky than usual.

No, the full moon illusion is not what you see in this animated gif, it’s something different. Put down your mouse, go outside, and take a look!

…we have reached a classic comic subplot. Frank has been invited to address graduation ceremonies at his high school–and at his elementary school.

Talk about dreams of childhood, (or nightmares of childhood)…

And, for another rich Shakespearian irony, the New York Times decided to cover last week’s Nobel Monument ceremonies in its Sunday Style section, with weddings and glitzy fundraisers. This photo was not online, but (thanks to the sharp eyes of my friend Roberta) I now have a sheet of newsprint featuring Frank and NYC’s teenage Nobel essay contest winners sharing a page with party animals David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger.

Those student essayists will enjoy all the Nobel festivities in December, so I doubt they much care where the NYT put their photos.

…clarinet beats oboe.”

I love it when Julie Leung and Lisa Williams blog their kid stories. So, even though my daughter Amity is already grown-up and has a Ph.D., I asked her permission to blog her clarinet-oboe comparison.

Then I forgot to blog it until today, when she told me about her trip home from a recent conference:

“Yesterday, I made one of the classic blunders. I picked out a very sad book to read on the plane, so that all the way from Minneapolis to Boston I was trying to cry very unobtrusively.”

At least she didn’t start a land war in Asia….

Postscript: The NY Times today has a listing of top movie quotes. And not one quote from The Princess Bride is included????

Inconceivable!

We live in a mysterious universe, and springtime is a mysterious process in said universe–which the existence of Morris dancers only makes much more so…

The Morris dance is common to all inhabited worlds in the multiverse.

It is danced under blue skies to celebrate the quickening of the soil and under bare stars because it’s springtime and with any luck the carbon dioxide will unfreeze again. The imperative is felt by deep-sea beings who have never seen the sun and urban humans whose only connection with the cycles of nature is that their Volvo once ran over a sheep…

Just one of many Terry Pratchett quotes about Morris Dancing…

Carolus Linnaeus (1707 – 1778) invented our double-barreled scientific naming (and shocked his contemporaries with his scandalous way of classifying plants: “Who would have thought that bluebells and lillies and onions could be up to such immorality?”).

Linnaeus was Swedish, but for varied odd reasons, detailed by
David Weinberger, his collection of specimens and the 3×5 cards classifying them ended up in London. Go read David’s entire post–it’s remarkable and loaded with intriguing photos–but here is my favorite theory-of-knowledge lightning bolt:

Linnaeus’ classification resulted from the nature of paper. Because you only have one card for each species, your order will give each species one and only one place. You will organize them by putting cards near cards like them, naturally producing an ordered series or a set of clusters.

As you lay out your cards, like next to like, you are drawing a map of knowledge. The largest units are kingdoms, not because Animals, Vegetables and Minerals somehow lord it over the particular creatures they contain but because kingdoms are the most inclusive territories on political maps. Knowledge thus derives its nature from the paper that expresses it: Bounded, unchanging, the same for all, two-dimensional and thus difficult to represent exceptions and complex overlaps, and all laid out in a glance with no dark corners.

[Tag: technology]

+ = ????
Via the new King Kong blog, Andy Serkis has jumped out of his Gollum suit and hopes to direct Johnny Depp in his next movie.

Gollum directing a movie–imagination boggles, yesss, my preciousss, it absolutely boggles.