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

At the American Academy for Achievement’s 2005 International Achievement Summit, prizewinners each give a short speech to the student delegates–about 200 Rhodes Scholars, etc. from 50 countries. So we all heard some darn good speeches but of course my favorite was given by Frank Wilczek–short, pithy, informative, and very funny. And I quote:

Dear students,

In preparing my advice for you I asked myself “What would Einstein say?” And it occurred to me that Einstein, being an intelligent fellow, would probably start with a joke. Fortunately I happen to know Einstein’s favorite joke. It turns out to be quite relevant. Here goes.

A man is having trouble with his car; it frequently stalls. So he goes to a garage, and asks them to fix it. They replace the transmission and put in new spark plugs. But his car still doesn’t run right, so he takes it to another garage. At this second garage, the mechanic pokes around for ten minutes, then pulls a screwdriver out of his belt and tightens a screw. And now the car runs perfectly.

But the man is irate when he gets a bill in the mail for $200. He storms back to the mechanic, and says, “This is outrageous! All you did was tighten a screw, and you ask for $200! I want an itemized bill!” So the mechanic takes out a pad and pencil, and writes down an itemized bill, as follows:

Labor: turning screw $5
Knowing which screw to turn: $195

My first piece of advice is to consider very carefully the possibilities for what you can do, before choosing. This principle works on several levels. You should consider many different possibilities for what general sort of work you want to do, before settling into one. And when you have finished one project, you should think about many different possibilities for what to do next. And when you encounter a problem, you should consider various possible approaches, before investing heavily in any one.

It’s easy to give vague advice, but I will break new ground, and give you an algorithm. Many of you are probably thinking about getting married, and naturally you would like to maximize your chance of finding the best possible mate. I’ll give you an algorithm for that.

You have to estimate the number N of suitors that you can expect to deal with over your career in courtship. We’ll assume that you evaluate them one at a time, and that once you’ve broken up with one, then that one is gone forever. Then what you should do is this. Evaluate, but do not accept, each of the first N/e suitors. Here e is a number, the base of natural logarithms, approximately 2.7. Then accept the first subsequent suitor who is better than all the earlier ones. That is how to maximize your chance of getting the best possible mate.

For example, if N is 10, then you should evaluate but reject each of the first 4 suitors, and accept to first one after that who is better than them. In my own case, I estimated N=3. I dutifully broke up with my first serious girlfriend, but the second was better, and I married her. It worked out fine.

Of course the precise assumptions that underlie this particular algorithm might not always be appropriate, but the underlying lesson is much more general. You should put considerable effort into gathering information before choosing what to invest in. The great mathematician Henri Poincare, when asked how he came up with such good creative ideas, responded, “I generate a lot of ideas, and discard most of them.” This is also Nature’s trick, in natural selection.

My second piece of advice is to learn about the history of your endeavor. This has many advantages. By reading masterworks you come in contact with great minds, and get to feel how they operate. Often the original works are well expressed, and you can learn valuable lessons about how to express yourself. Most important, you can begin to see yourself and your work as part of a continuing narrative, that started before you entered, and that will continue after you leave. That is a beautiful thing to realize.

What an incredible party.

So
here we all were, riding on a bus to Golden Plate Banquet. Frank and I
turned around in our seats to ask George Lucas and Dorothy Hamill, who
were sitting behind us, if there were any tricky parts to the gold
medal ceremony. (They told us there weren’t.) Then we started talking
about the different things that go wrong at Oscar and Nobel ceremonies.

At the banquet, we sat with Frank’s Nobel littermates Aaron Ciechanover, Linda Buck, and David Gross–and John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival.

Flashback to 1970 or so when I was struggling to convince a
classical music fan that there was really good music in rock and roll.
Mrs. Krasner challenged  me to play her something convincing.
Because she loved Beethoven (crash, jangle, thump!)  I picked
Creedence Clearwater’s “Proud Mary.” I don’t think I really convinced
her to switch from Beethoven based on that playing, but I really enjoyed
telling John Fogerty the story.  He’s redhot on stage (and touring now!) but very sweet in person.

So why is this blogger laughing so hard? Just as Linda Buck got
ready to snap the picture, Sam Donaldson popped up behind her and
started giving her devil’s horns.

 
Isaac Asimov told Marvin Minsky, “Don’t ask any questions, just go.

That was good advice.

If this sounds as if I’m bragging–what can I say?
Blogging about it is as close as I can come to inviting all my blogfriends
to have this fun with me.

Thanks to my fidgety nature, I take notes, even on something as eloquent as the talk by Wynton Marsalis last night. So, by popular request, here’s my best record of some of what he said:

Music is the most abstract of all the arts. There’s nothing to see there. Music is nothing but an arrangement of somethings strung out along timelines.

The arts were born as entertainment….

Somebody in a cave telling the story of catching a fish *this* big.

The arts mature as education….

Words and paintings that describe the thing they’re about.

The arts are reborn as reenactment….

In a spirit of reverence, re-creating the work of artists you admire.

There are two kinds of music America gave the world. The blues. And swing. And each of these enfolds its own special kind of gift.

The gift of the blues is…optimism that is not naive. What’s the first thing that happens to a baby when it comes into the world? Smack! But then you go on from there. The gift of the blues is a vaccination against life’s pain.

The gift of swing is…embracing a mutual time. When you are playing and swinging, I can tell you the last thing you want is to hold back and think about what rhythms everyone else is playing with you. But you have to do it. The gift of swing is creating a shared time instead of insisting on your own time.

What you see behind Wynton Marsalis and his jazz band is not a backdrop. Those are huge floor-to-ceiling windows looking our over Columbus Circle and Central Park, as night slowly darkens the sky–in the Allen Room at Lincoln Center.

[In my old blog, this was post 2333, created 2005/06/03; I had to recreate it here due to XML problems.]

“Do you know Leon Lederman*?” asked a tiny, pretty woman, impeccably made up and wearing a pink cowboy outfit. “Leon is one of my favorite people.” Naomi Judd is a country singer, songwriter, motivational speaker, mother of two famous daughters (singer Wynnona and actress Ashley) — and just all-around full of surprises. She also has her own website (Get a blog, Naomi!), and a lot of zingy one-liners in the book Amazon let me search so I know that I want to buy it. Amazon doesn’t seem to have the CD with “Big Bang Boogie”, which she wrote for Leon, and to which he danced with her onstage at a concert. If I had to make a bet, I would bet that Naomi Judd is one of Leon Lederman’s favorite people too.

* Leon Lederman, Nobel 1988, is one of my favorite physicists too, and one of the best joketellers I’ve ever met. BTW, in physics circles, you meet some very good joketellers.

Left to right, Stephen Sondheim, Edward Albee, Sally Field, Denzel Washington, and James Earl Jones answer questions from the audience. Some of my favorite short bits:

James Earl Jones: “Creating a performance requires going down inside yourself to find what is really there. Much of what you will need to find and use involves parts of yourself you wouldn’t normally want to display in public.”

Edward Albee: (In response to a student question on why people chose to spend their lives in theater) “I write plays because I am a playwright.”

Stephen Sondheim: “In theater, when you see your work, it’s constantly changing, alive. And that’s a delight, even when you’re embarassed by what they’re doing.”

Denzel Washington: “My advice to you is fail big. In some lines of work, that might not be a good thing. But I never understood people who want something to fall back on. If I’m going to fall, I want to fall forward!”

Sally Field: “My advice to all of you? Take an acting class, and take it seriously.”

Earlier in the day, Sally Field (one of this year’s award winners) gave a longer and quite nitty gritty short talk about the sequential career problems of a life spent in acting:

“I have been a professional actor for 41 years. I have survived in a profession where there is no tenure. [After a year of playing Gidget on TV] I was 19 years old and I did not want to play a flying nun. For three years of my life, everyone had a flying nun joke. The actress who played the Mother Superior took me to see Lee Strasberg, and I began taking acting lessons. I worked as a flying nun all day, and at night I was Sartre’s “respectful prostitute.”

How do I transition into being old? How do I survive in an industry that has no use for women of age?

Joseph Campbell said you must enter the forest where it is darkest, and where there is no path. As an actor you enter the forest where it is darkest again and again and again. Where there is no path, and especially not your own path.

made a great funny short speech that ended with “I’m hungry”–the best kind of before-dinner speech–before getting his medal from four-minute miler Roger Bannister. Bill Clinton made an incredibly fascinating and incredibly long speech, but who would have expected him to do anything different?

I’m always thrilled when Frank gets a new award, but I’d never heard of the Golden Plate Achievement Awards. (Thank you, Mr. Google.) It seems the Golden Plate people like it that way–the press is not invited to their parties, but (in my capacity as Mr. Jennifer Lopez) this blogger is.

So here we are, in yet another hotel suite, this one the St. Regis in NYC, and as I head off for the gym I’m hoping that Katie Couric or Sally Field will be on the next treadmill over, because they’re here too for the next few days (among many others), doing symposia, meeting some fascinatingly brilliant grad students (200 I think), and getting their own Golden Plates.

More later, but one other big starstruck experience so far was dinnner last night in the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum. I kept hoping to see Big Bird or Snufflupagus. Anybody else remember Don’t Eat the Pictures?

More, from the press office of the President of Botswana…

If a song is playing and re-playing in your head, is it immoral to sing it for somebody else? Is it still immoral if you like the song replaying in your head?

OK, probably immoral, but here are my excuses for singing “Off to Massachusetts”* for Dave Winer’s podcast yesterday:

• Few people know so many rhymes for Massachusetts.
• When Dave’s winding road bends again toward Cambridge, this silly song could be a kind of anthem
• I got this CD as free blog-booty from the Little Women showfolk.
• It’s just the kind of song you feel like singing to serenade your scrambled eggs in any random hotel breakfast room.

Are songs contagious just from the lyrics alone? If you dare, read on for a small sample…

If you say “Come with me,
off to Massachusetts,”
Then to Massachusetts we will go
We will buy dishes there, maybe even two sets,
Buy the finest china then we’ll dine a while on Crepes Suzettes…

We will build model boats,
off in Massachusetts,
There in Massachusetts,
By the bay.
Put them together and
Wait until the glue sets
While we wait we’ll polka
For the folk along the parapets…

* “Off to Massachusetts” is a duet for Beth and Mr. March in Little Women: The Musical — You can play a small sample from
the Amazon page for the Little Women CD Amazon’s sample will give you a much better idea than my acappella rendition for Dave, but it’s also more likely to get stuck inside your own head.

Dateline, Monday May 31: Dave Winer is back in Cambridge — can we get a blog dinner going tonight? Don’t just hang out in your blogcave watching the flickering shadows? Glaucon You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners. Socrates Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave? Glaucon True, he said; how could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads? Socrates And of the objects which are being carried in like manner they would only see the shadows? Glaucon Yes, he said. Socrates And if they were able to converse with one another, would they not suppose that they were naming what was actually before them?…To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.

My bad, after breakfast with Dave (including my first ever Podcast), I discover that he’d got the dinner hour scheduled for Chris Lydon’s show.

Just goes to show I need to get out of my cave more often…

How would you describe Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? A book by Douglas Adams A TV show with Simon Jones A movie with Zooey Deschanel A book playing major roles in all the above The ultimate in Graphical User Interfaces If you picked #5, you agree with the ticket printers at Fresh Pond Cinema…

Tags: h2g2 , funny