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

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.

Galaxy Zoo is the project of some Oxford astrophysicists trying to classify millions of never-before-seen-by-human-eyes stellar objects that big computers have photographed.* It turns out that human beings are much better at doing these classifications than computers are. It also turns out that people all over the world enjoy doing this via the internet. (Insert words like “Web 2.0″ and “social networking.”)

Now learned Oxonians are trying to make it official that the name of one recently discovered object (maybe the first-ever echo from a long-dead quasar) should be “Hanny’s Voorwerp.” Why? Because this object was first seen and asked about by a young Dutch schoolteacher named Hanny, one of Galaxy Zoo’s many enthusiastic amateurs. “Voorwerp” means “object” in Dutch. After Hanny flagged this unusual blob, Oxford astrophysicists used their connections to get other astronomers around the world to start taking closer looks at this bit of the sky.

That’s just one of many surprises from the Galaxy Zoo collaboration, including an odd discovery in neurology aptly summed up as “People are screwed up, not the universe.”

Hanny will be visiting Oxford this weekend, and I’m guessing the Oxford guys show her a very good time.

* Everything in the universe is “Miscellaneous”–until somebody steps in to tag it with real information.

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.

Leonardo’s springtime

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

We took a long walk with Leonardo da Vinci through France’s springtime, yesterday.

Da Vinci spent his last years as the guest of the French king — his rooms and some inventions are now on display at the Château du Clos Lucé near Amboise.

The kids with us, including Frank, loved pulling the rope, turning the crank, etc. on all the working invention models. A “helicopter” that can be rotated by a even a small visitor was the special favorite.

Now I have to get ready to take yet another train trip.

This is my idea of a hotel lobby full of superstars–John Nash, Freeman Dyson, Shelley Glashow, and David Mumford have all turned up in “The Duke Hotel”, not far from Rome’s huge Festival della Matematica, which starts this morning.

Wow.

Tonight, Umberto Eco is giving a talk about “Perverse Uses of Mathematics” — in Italian, which I speak badly but understand well. (This is in contrast to Spanish, where I can easily make myself understood but have to keep asking my children what other people just said. Very mysterious.)

The Duke seems an unlikely name for a hotel in Rome–then again, it seems like an unlikely nickname for a movie star born in Winterset, Iowa. But The Duke is indeed a very Roman hotel–big beautiful bathtub, bidet, and balcony.

My plan for today is to sit in the Piazza Navona drinking coffee and writing about Sidney Coleman. There’s a whole chapter in the book I’m writing that swirls around Sidney and the Erice physics summer schools. Black Italian espresso is the perfect inspiration!

Advice from The (John Wayne) Duke that I should work harder on following: “Talk low, talk slow, and don’t talk too much.”

After the Ig Nobel road show 2

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Last night in Oxford’s Martin Wood Theatre, Marc Abrahams kicked off the 11th annual Ig Nobel tour of the UK with a free Oxford show.

I think you can tell which cast member is the sword swallower (Dan Meyer)–to his right are Fiona Barclay (periodic table table) and Jim Gundlach (effects of country music on suicide.)

In the front row, Dan Meyer’s medical co-winner Brian Witcombe and
Caroline Richmond, who writes colorful obituaries for the BMJ. She told a questioner that she does get some protests, citing one doctor’s family who “took exception to my use of the phrase ’snake-oil salesman’.”

John Hoyland, who writes funny stuff for the journal New Scientist, gave a great talk but left before the group photo–and Ig-Meister Marc Abrahams was with me taking photos instead of appearing in them.

Advice: if you attend any later show on the Ig tour, do not leave before the bank-robber promotional video.

Hedgehog Rescue 4

Originally uploaded by Bollops

Swedish hedgehog experts send out a call for help!

Too-early spring wakes up hibernating hedgehoglets to find no breakfast. No insects or worms yet–but many hungry young hedgehogs!

Although we are in England now (where Flickr-ian Bollops recorded his own hedgehog rescue in this photo), I am still hooked on Sweden’s news in English at “The Local.” Where else would I learn about hedgehogs in springtime,

• elf lessons in Lapland,
• Stockholm reindeer protests, or
• Hetz the theatrical dog?

Not to mention telecommuting witches…some of whose magic might help out those Swedish hedgehogs!

Kauri trees are huge!

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

The kauri tree is Mother Nature’s perfect tree. It goes up and up and out and out with no branches for quite a long way (no knots in the wood) and very little taper.

If you are looking for timber to make giant masts without splices or even fancy furniture, you probably want to do what early New Zealand settlers did, which is to chop down huge virgin forests of kauri trees.

Now just a few of the oldest trees are still left standing.

My children, seen here, are poised to defend this one.

James Clerk Maxwell and Alan Guth

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Who is that non-physicist craving a photo-op in between James Clerk Maxwell and Alan Guth?

Readers of this blog may recognize the scarf.

This moment of post-banquet serendipity took place inside the great dining hall of Trinity College, Cambridge. Frank and I arrived a bit late, missing the polite request that people not take photographs–quite understandable considering all the amazing things there that you’d need to photograph just to remember one half of them.

Dragoyle

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Here, from a collection of scientific instruments, is the lovely dragoyle.

Elsewhere In the he fascinating Whipple Museum of the History of Science, you can find “scientific” apparatus for phrenology (diagnosing head bumps and lumps to measure such human traits as “combativeness.”)

Phrenologywas once a time-honored way to do scientific study. Melvil Dewey gave "Phrenology" an entire integer (139) in his library decimal catalog system. For comparison, "modern Western philosophy" also got one entire integer (190).

The history of science is full of fascinating discoveries and proud achievements, but it is also full of cautionary examples and multiple proofs that calling something “scientific” doesn’t make it so.