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

Real-time results from CERN’s ATLAS detector

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Frank and I are in Bern on our way to CERN, as the LHC beams are finally online and being brought up to speed. The LHC beam got to Bern’s labs before we did.

But not much before we did — ATLAS recorded its first particle “splashes” on Nov. 20, not much more than a week ago.

The ATLAS group at Bern University focuses on data-acquisition and data-analysis. One of the many amazing things they showed us today is their giant realtime display of LHC information.

The lefthand side of the monitor (most of it not visible in this photo) shows many aspects of the LHC beam status. One young experimenter is here pointing to information about the most recent “event” recorded by ATLAS, from three different viewpoints. This was a cosmic ray event, which was superceded by a second cosmic ray event during the few minutes we stood looking at the monitor. (The beam status was “off” so collision events were not on view.)

The black rectangle with many particle tracks is a lovely revolving three-dimensional image of very the first beam “event” recorded by ATLAS. Wow.

I am definitely going to follow CERN on Twitter for more.

Things happen in layers

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

How very complex are the surfaces that confront us, walking through real life. And yet how much simpler they seem if considered as a succession of layers, each layer with its own time stamp and simple description.

Consider this Krakow wall’s layers as a series of event reports in some kind of blog. Translating its RSS feed into English, a few entries follow:

Description: Surface layer of city grime

pubDate: multiple/ongoing

Description:Graffiti incident, Antoni & Malgorzata

pubDate: 1987

Description: Broken fragments of stucco re-expose brick wall

pubDate: 1974

Description: Deterioration of paint starts to re-expose stucco

pubDate: 1943

Description: Painted stucco layer on top of brick wall

pubDate: 1934

I’m thinking back on my own life as a series of layers — heartfelt events whose legacy remains even when others succeed them. What would your life’s RSS feed say about you?

Ready for inspiration to strike

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

There is something magical about musicians in concert spaces before they perform. Years of aspiration and perfecting skill, weeks of practice with friends (and perhaps enemies) — in just moments now, one more wonderful chance for their public fruition.

Last night’s concert featured two works by Mieczysław Karłowicz, a string serenade and a violin concerto, followed by Beethoven’s Pastorale symphony (#6).

I had never heard Karlowicz’s music performed before and am glad I discovered it–not least because we share a December 11 birthday. Krakow’s St Catherine Church is a wonderfully high-arched space for listening to music augmented by the occasional twittering of its few sparrows.

This huge Gothic church sits in Krakow’s former Jewish district Kazimierz, brutally emptied by Nazis, now serving up platefuls of carp and earfuls of klezmer nightly in restaurants like Ariel and Klezmer Hois.

Vladimir Nabokov said of “articulate art,” but could also have said of music or science or any fine human endeavor, that it is a “melancholy and very local palliative.” There is something melancholy about musicians after a concert, even one that ends with a standing ovation, as last night’s performance by Capella Cracoviensis deservedly did.

Good morning, Krakow sunshine

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Long ago, the legendary hero Krak killed a dragon here by feeding it animal skins he had stuffed with sulfur. He was just the first in a long line of clever people who have made Poland’s ancient capital one of our planet’s most interesting cities.

The European Physical Society is holding its 2009 High Energy Physics conference in Krakow, so Frank Wilczek and Betsy Devine are here, full of high energy, ready to re-meet and confer and visit salt mines and listen to beautiful music and (in the case of Betsy) of course to blog.

Last night was a prize dinner of unusual interest, honoring CERN’s Gargamelle collaboration for the first great discovery made at CERN. This was one of the first big discoveries in physics (said Frank, in his after-dinner speech) that he was around to watch happen in real time — a discovery that was strongly challenged by many, when it appeared.

So why is great work done back in 1973 getting its first international prize in 2009? Giving a prize to an experimental group (instead of to its top members) is unusual — and it’s a novelty long overdue. Experimental results have for decades been produced by teams that may often include several hundred people. The EPS had to change its bylaws to do this, and somebody should give them their own cleverness prize for having done so.

Newton in Trinity College antechapel

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

But isn’t a week of prelude to tardy springtime, really, worth any amount of jetlag?

In Cambridge (UK, not MA) we visited Isaac Newton’s apple tree; in Copenhagen, we wandered the house of Niels Bohr. More images, and perhaps more coherent writing, on my Flickr photos. I am so jetlagged that I am now almost as pale as Trinity College’s marble Newton, the statue that Wordsworth described in his Prelude, Book 3:

And from my pillow, looking forth by light
Of moon or favouring stars, I could behold
The antechapel where the statue stood
Of Newton with his prism and silent face,
The marble index of a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.

Newton voyaged alone, true, but his notes on his experience have let many others of us follow after him.

Brilliant film maker Jon Hotchkiss

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

From my email outbox:

Hey Alyse and Jon and Brad  ….

We saw Punkin Chunkin on Thanksgiving night, on the HD Science channel–wow!  

You all did a great job turning that fun but chaotic event into real narrative, squeezing some of the chaos out but keeping the fun — and Brad was so funny!  The sky was so blue; the pumpkins so orange, and so many. Frank kept saying, they made it all look so good! And I totally agreed. Animations showing the science were a nice extra touch I hadn’t expected. 

Watching the show entailed a bit more expense than you might realize, since I went out and bought a TV and got our Comcast cable upgraded from internet to include HDTV with HBO. Our new Nintendo Wii, however, I can’t really blame on JonHotchkiss.com. 

All of it, worth every penny.

And getting my first-ever IMDB-able film credit? With the job title “Prop Ninja”?

Priceless.

Thanks and hugs to you all,
Betsy

Dutch dentist

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

This Dutch dentist’s window is full of no-nonsense examples of what a dentist can actually do for you. I love this, and this is so Dutch. Teeth that human beings might have or might want to have or might need to get help with.

No glossy photos of impossibly retouched glamor teeth.

Real teeth.

This is just one example of why I love the Netherlands and the people who live here.

Bird nest hidden in maze

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Hortus Haren, just south of Groningen, is the largest botanical garden in the Netherlands, but flowers were not the main attraction yesterday.

Just beyond its greenhouses is the insectarium, a small one that specializes in really big creepy things, e.g. tarantulas, a scorpion, stick insects, and cockroaches the size of dinner plates. OK, maybe I’m exaggerating on that last point. Cockroaches big enough to make Sarah Palin reach for the gun she uses when she’s hunting moose.

I learned a bit of Dutch when we lived here ten years ago, and one of the Dutch words I think is much better than its English equivalent is “kakkerlak,” which means “cockroach.” Another word where Dutch is better is “kikker,” for “frog.”

The “mystic” time tunnel, the Celtic tree horoscope, the rescued parrots, and the traditional Chinese teahouse that serves delicious traditional Dutch sandwiches are also fine features of the Hortus Haren. I recommend it! (But go with a Dutch friend or at least a Dutch dictionary–signs are all in Dutch.

Henry James

Originally uploaded by jadc01

I’ve been spending some time in the NYPL, reading old letters written to my godmother and namesake, author/editor/suffragist/ball-of-fire Elizabeth Garver Jordan.

Quite a few of these are from Henry James (1848 – 1913), whose books could not have been more different from her cheerful fictions. I transcribed for you, dear readers, one typed example (his penmanship is appalling) from Box 3, folder 14, labeled “James, Henry 1904 – 1905.”

I break it up here to give your eye some blessed white space, but his actual letter is one long breathless paragraph. James was on a lecture tour, and she had straightened out for him some problem about his reading at a convent school. I do not know the identity of Miss E. L. Cary, though an earlier letter from James thanks Elizabeth Jordan for introducing them. And “the whilom Parker”? Your guess is as good as mine.

95 Irving St., Cambridge, Mass., March 2, 1905

Dear Miss Jordan,

Forgive my again flying to you, in gratitude, on the wings of the great Remington. [Remington is a brand of typewriter.]

Your kind activity of yesterday, culminating in your second telegram, has given me the peace that passeth understanding. Tuesday fourteenth will beautifully do; by this I shall solemnly abide, and I am now writing to Sister M. Rita to this comfortable effect. I might have wired her directly yesterday — that came over me, to my confusion, ten minutes after I had wired you; but I lost, in my anguish and shame, all presence of mind, and just instinctively clutched at you. May the peace I just spoke of have been now completely brought to you! — with my renewed liveliest thanks.

Your letter is luminosity itself, and everything, I am sure, will go merrily forward. I don’t quite imagine what all those sequestered young souls will make of my profane lucubration; but that is their own affair, and I am fortunately not afraid of their being, as who should say, shocked or scandalized.

It interests me much to hear of your pleasant impression of the whilom Parker — so pathetic a figure as he had, these last months, appeared to the mind’s eye. If I had known you were to meet him, I would have asked you to kindly mention that I would have voted for him could I have voted for anyone — instead of being, through long absence, a poor practically disfranchised creature. But even that crumb of comfort I gather he doesn’t affect you as missing.

You must show me Mrs. Spencer Trask* on the first opportunity — for my curiosity is insatiable. Let me add, for your reassurance, that I have edged away from the “Pen and Brush” quite as gracefully, I think, as I have, with a fine discrimination, sunk into the arms (as it were) of Miss E. L. Cary — for a performance in Brooklyn, on the basis of the proper equivalent, on May tenth p.m.; so you see into what excellent “form” you have got me.
Yours most truly, Henry James.

*Footnote: Katrina Trask, author and wife of “millionaire banker” Spencer Trask. They created (much later) the artist colony Yaddo. Her writing is said to fit “easily with that of other society people with high literary talent.”

Elizabeth Jordan (1865 – 1947)

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Frank is on book tour for The Lightness of Being, but oh boy — he is much better off than poor Jack London!

How do I know? I’ve been reading Elizabeth Jordan’s boxes of letters, mostly from the years she was editor of Harper’s Bazaar (1900 – 1913). One of these came from Jack London, who was sadly following his Call of the Wild on a three-month lecture tour around the US, most recently landing him in a commercial hotel in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

In her own day, people speculated that she had a romance going with Henry James*:

The story runs that when Henry James proposed marriage to Elizabeth Jordan, he wrote a letter couched in so involved and complicated a style that she could not possibly understand it. She answered it in a note so illegible that he could not possibly read it.

Not bloody likely, says Ms. Jordan’s goddaughter (me) — not least because her penmanship was much better than Henry James’s. His 30-plus letters to her over twenty-some years are breathless and surprisingly flirty, when I can read them. I did transcribe one long one, blessedly typewritten.

I wish I had transcribed a long very sad letter from Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) on black-bordered stationery about how much he missed his wife, who had recently died. But I ordered a photocopy, which the NYPL says they will send me about one month from now. I’ll share it with you then.

* How times change — recent speculation is that she had a romance with Frances Hodgson Burnett, the author of Little Lord Fauntleroy!