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

Virtual reality ride in invisible glider over snowy mountain tops, tilting your wings and/or turning by moving the mouse. Serene and lovely. I am going to bookmark this to cool me off in the next heatwave but it is also an antidote to November’s wet-dead-leaf rain days.

Three Dee Whee!

Lay of the land

Originally uploaded by Elmazz

Funny but sad, banks are now foreclosing on “The Shire,” a housing development inspired by visions of hobbits who want to buy quirky thatched houses with modern conveniences. Dang, I would have liked to spend time in one of those houses (though maybe not if it meant moving my family out to Bend, Oregon.)

For example, the 3,200-square-foot Butterfly Cottage (says the Bend Bulletin) ,

overlooks an amphitheater, has 26-foot-high ceilings and interior finishes that include bamboo flooring, a Japanese soaking tub and granite countertops. The house has a “hobbit hole” in the backyard for storing garden supplies.

If Gandalf’s not liquid, maybe the Googles could buy this? It would make one heckuva great mega-yurt for group meetings!

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Where credit is due: I read about this in the latest edition of Dave Langford’s scifi fanzine Ansible. Bonus quote therefrom, from his long-ongoing saga of fun bits from bad writing:

Tripodal Stability Dept. ‘She crouched on a three-legged stool as if warming herself before the fire, but Will knew her chill would take more melting than that. He knelt down before her. The stool wobbled under her when he took her hands, the one leg shorter than the other that his father hadn’t mended in fifteen years gone past.’ (Elizabeth Bear, Ink and Steel, 2008)

MacPaint (and other) nostalgia: 1

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

‘So what is that funny hole?” I asked my kind young Mac trainer, pointing at the front of a big Mac Pro tower. Natalya, an anthropology major and certified Macintosh genius, speaks fluent customer-ese, and explained that the “hole” was a FireWire 800 port, something I’d seen before but left strictly alone.

To my chagrin (although also to my satisfaction, since I know it now) the FireWire 800 would have been almost twice as fast a way to synch my old Mac laptop* to my new Mac tower, a task that took more than 10 hours with FireWire 400. Which just goes to show that having loved Macintosh computers since 1984 is no guarantee that you can’t learn a lot more about them from somebody who was most likely born after 1984.

Here are some other things I learned in my first hour of Apple’s new One to One store training:

• What’s the top story right now on CNN? Has anything changed on my Wikipedia watchlist? You can make WebClip widgets from bits of webpages you like, then flash them up onto your desktop using the Dashboard.
• Want to move from a desktop full of writing projects to a desktop full of scrapbooking projects to a desktop covered with email resources? Leopard has a system preference called Spaces that lets you arrow-key around several different monitor screens, even if you have just one monitor.
• On a laptop, you can set preferences to “Left Click” by tapping your mousepad with two fingers.
• A new app called “QuickLook” lets you peek at graphics, Word, Excel files (etc. etc.) without having to open the big clunky program that edits them.

They say you are not old until you stop learning. Lucky for me that I still have so darn much to learn — and that Apple Store genii in Cambridgeside Galleria have so much to teach me.

* I dropped my Mac laptop last week. It still runs, but the funny noise of its fan and the very big ding in its casing suggest that it may not be running for very long into the future.

Before the Sci Foo deluge

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

The Wild Palms Hotel will be wilder in just a few hours, as scientists, webfolk, and other high-tech high IQs arrive for Science Foo 2008.

Frank and I are not the only people here so early. I am pretty sure I saw Neal Gershenfeld across the patio. In the Sci Foo wiki, he has offered to demo some amazingly techno inventions. If he brought a fabricator, his luggage was hugely heavy!

Astrophysicists Angelica de Oliveira-Costa and Max Tegmark get here later this morning. Fortunately, even astro-visionaries like Max don’t need to pack any universe inside their suitcases to lead a session. The universe just plain follows them around.

Chris Anderson (long tail) and Chris Anderson (TED) will both be here. I remember once sharing a dorm-room with another Betsy and a third girl named Kedzie. Getting phone messages straight was a nightmare that year, and my sympathies go out to those two Chris Andersons.

Looking forward to meeting a lot of great people and hearing a lot of incredible ideas. I see myself here as a technical “enabler”, doing some scientist-to-webpeople match-making. But this Sci Foo (SciFoo?) blogpost is already long enough.

Nothing says geek love quite as tenderly as the virtual gift of a unique, symmetrical object in hyperspace. (Although maybe the d12 Handbag of Holding comes pretty close.)

Hyperspace has an infinite number of symmetries, but Oxford mathematician Marcus du Sautoy has already assigned such choice names as “Hollygon,” “Poppygon,” and “The Vanilla Beer Group.” So do not delay or the name you want may be taken!! Your donation goes to help children in Guatemala through Common Hope.

Thanks to Tingilinde for the link! The image above, btw, has nothing to do with hyperspace and everything to do with nostalgia for the imperfect dot-matrix symmetries of MacPaint.

“Marine experts have given 25 octopuses a Rubik’s Cube each in a study aimed at easing their stress levels in captivity,” says UK’s revered science journal the Daily Mail.

I never found my stress reduced by a Rubik’s cube, but then again I am no octopus. Octopi are Einsteins and Houdinis of Invertebrata. But the goal here is not to keep their giant nerve fibers tuned up — it is to find out if they are “octidextrous” or tend to favor one tentacle over the others. This research is crowdsourced, with aquarium visitors keeping track of which (labeled) tentacle gets used for which objects.

So how does this relate to octopus stress? The plan is to serve them octopus food to the favored side, assuming they have one. Interesting and maybe related fact: although most of us are right-handed, formal dinners feature food served to us from the left. Maybe that’s one reason those can be so darn stressful?

A pound of sugar and a pint of beer

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine,
photo by Amity Wilczek.

That was the daily diet of the wasp colony that built this huge paper nest in 1857.

Before you envy this self-indulgent diet, bear in mind that the wasps got their sugar dissolved in their beer.

This magnificently well-fed colony soon drew the attention of nearby wasps, who abandoned their own nests and moved in to help build the ever-growing mansion. They were welcomed “without the least show of opposition,” says the exhibit label.

So if you plan to write up the history of open-source software or BarCamp, please give appropriate credit to these pioneers.

(For more information, see a closeup of the label.) It’s now on display in Oxford’s Museum of Natural History.

Napoleon I Crowns Josephine Empress of France

Originally uploaded by mary hodder

Particle physicists take on hard-to-answer questions — and some recently took on a historical riddle: Was Napoleon I poisoned by his St. Helena guards?

No, says the latest issue of the CERN Courier:

To examine Napoleon’s hair, the team used the technique of neutron activation, which has two important advantages: it does not destroy the sample and it provides extremely precise results, even from samples with a small mass. The researchers placed Napoleon’s hair in the core of the nuclear reactor in Pavia and used neutron activation to establish that all of the hair samples contained traces of arsenic.

So, was he poisoned? No. His hair had (what would be for moderns) high levels of arsenic even when he was a boy.

One surprising result (they tested a lot more hair samples besides just Napoleon’s) was the high level of arsenic found in everybody’s hair in the nineteenth century — 100 times greater than was found in more recent hair.

Future experiments planned by the Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events (Cuore) group in Pavia include studying the rare double-beta decay and measuring the mass of a neutrino.

Geeks can haz artistic photo effects

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

… especially when geeks take photos in low light and then enhance the heck out of their dark materials.

Oxford Geek Night last night was an interesting blend of Meetup with short but excellent unconference.

The Wikipedia “unconference” article seems to have been hijacked by proponents of exactly one specific brand of (un)conference.* But I think Kaliya Hamlin captures their essence and history quite a bit better:

The name “unconference” arose to describe conferences that step outside of the more traditional model — that is, presentations selected months beforehand, sponsors buying speaking slots, boring panels of talking heads, and high fees.

Gobion Rowlands talked about his company’s science-based Flash game “Climate Challenge” — I would have liked to hear more about the Flash and less about the company, but when keynotes are chopped down to only 15 minutes something has to go. (That’s because I’m working on a Flash game right now–I bet lots of the people there are thinking of their own startups and thought Gobion’s talk was absolutely perfect.)

Jon Hicks packed his 15 minutes with really useful “steal this idea” ideas about building a website “From Design to Deployment.” He also, bless him, posted the slides (pdf).

The five–minute talks, with countdoown clock, are also cool.

Only bad thing is that there are, by far, not enough chairs. I was surprised when I got there (early) to see that very few geeks had brought their own computers. By the time the talks started, with at least half us geeks standing up for all two plus hours, I understood why the laptops had been left at home.

* Update — since I didn’t like what Wikipedia said on “unconferences,” I dredged up some references (they supported my POV) and amended the article. But who knows what you’ll see now if you click this link?

“The central premise of Moneyball,” (says Wikipedia) “is that the collected wisdom of baseball insiders (including players, managers, coaches, scouts and the front office) over the past century is subjective and often flawed.”

Moneyball charts the rise of Billy Beane’s Oakland A’s by looking beyond “instinctive wisdom” about who does or does not “look like a ballplayer.”

Which brings me to a small blip from the Mercury News, on the conference She’s Geeky:

A venture capitalist who rejected Mary Hodder’s start-up for funding later told her he did so in part because Hodder had no male co-founder, and he thought she would quit because she’s a woman. Hodder didn’t quit. Her video search and social networking Web site, dabble.com, is doubling its registered users every 2 1/2 months.

Mary herself says the VC was not “a bad guy,” adding that “we all have our stereotypes, our biases, our prejudices.”

But how much more money, it seems to me, a VC will make who can Billy-Beane his (or her) bias. I’m sure Harvard drop-out Bill Gates didn’t “look like” success. To quote some statistics from Score:

• Women represent more than 1/3 of all people involved in entrepreneurial activity. (Source: Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) 2005 Report on Women and Entrepreneurship)
• Between 1997 and 2002, women-owned firms grew by 19.8 percent while all U.S. firms grew by seven percent (Source: SBA, Office of Advocacy)
• The number of women-owned firms continues to grow at twice the rate of all U.S. firms (23 percent vs. 9 percent). (Source: SBA, Office of Advocacy and Business Times, April 2005)

Score adds that “The greatest challenge for women-owned firms is access to capital, credit and equity.” I’m sure the big-money players who did bet on Mary will do very well.