some tasty tapas

So, I had planned to finally wrap up a nice long post on the acoustics of bells and change-ringing today, but then all hell broke loose on Wall Street and now I have to spend the afternoon at the bank withdrawing all my money and hiding it under the mattress. (Shh! Don't tell anyone!) Okay, maybe not, but I figure folks would prefer some lighter, tapas-style bloggy fare to take our minds off the pending economic apocalypse. We'll save the in-depth science for the weekend, okay?

* First, an amuse bouche: my latest post at Twisted Physics opens with an amusing video of comedian Brian Regan's reaction while trying to watch NOVA's The Elegant Universe. Other highlights over the past couple of weeks include a brief overview of the search for the Higgs; swooning over the new British TV series, Lost in Austen (Jane Austen, wormholes and time travel! Awesome!); revisiting a 19th century moon hoax; and honoring some notable NASA "firsts."

* Tom at Swans on Tea gets my vote for this week's funniest bit of mock dialogue with his post on "What (Not) to Say When You Meet a Physicist":

Resident: "If I let you in, you'll teach me physics!"
Burgler: "No, ma'am, I just want to ransack the flat."
Resident: "Well, alright." (opens door)

Scott Aaronson comes in a close second, though, for this dashed-off witticism while taking issue with Ray Kurzweil's conclusions in the latter's book, The Singularity is Near: "If the singularity ever does arrive, I expect it to be plagued by frequent outages and terrible customer service." Even the Wall Street Journal is showing signs of a budding sense of humor with a recent article on high-energy physicists at CERN taking improv classes to loosen up their style of communication.

* Over at io9, there's a terrific rundown tracing the roots of today's science fiction back through the centuries. For those who think it all started with Jules Verne and H.G. Wells -- think again.  

* Now that the Large Hadron Collider hasn't destroyed the world, we can go back to fretting about other, more mundane fears -- like killer hybrid cars! Aiieee! Via io9 (they've been on a roll, lately), I learned that there is actually a horror movie being filmed, in which a female mechanic gets trapped in a Chicago police garage overnight with a hybrid car gone berserk, a la Christine. It's called Hybrid (not to be confused with another sci-fi flick of the same name involving a half-man/half animal). Yanno, I thought my little red Prius had been acting a little strange of late. There's a small army of Priuses (Pri-i?) in the LA area, all with sophisticated onboard computers, and should they all form a network via Facebook or something, they could pretty much take us out. I'm just sayin....

* Personally, I'd also be worried about fungi, after reading this article about how certain fungi launch their spores outward with the fastest acceleration known in nature -- equivalent to a person traveling at 5000 times the speed of sound. Apparently this is necessary because the spores are so tiny, and so light, that air resistance would quickly overcome their trajectories if they didn't have such enormous acceleration. I had visions of armies of fungi flinging their spores against our best defenses -- tiny catapults! -- and this mental picture was only reinforced by Carl Zimmer's posting of a video of this sort of behavior, set to the tune of the "Anvil Chorus" from Il Travatore. Thanks for the insomnia, Carl.

* One wouldn't normally associate burlesque dancer/fashion icon Dita von Teese with science. But now she's the star of a new commercial from Wonderbra, "The Science of Sexy." (Again, h/t to io9. Give it a rest, guys! How many times can I link to your oh-so-excellent blog?) Your eyes do not deceive you -- the lab microscope magically morphs into a Wonderbra that lifts and separates, or, in this case, causes you to strut around the lab surrounded by backup dancers waving giant black feathery fans. Oh, and the Wonderbra will magically transform you from a mousy female science nerd in white lab coat and glasses into the hot 'n' feisty Ms. von Teese. I'll go out on a limb here and say the ad is going to prove "controversial." And rightly so. Just for the record, this is not what I mean when I talk about how it's possible to be both smart and sexy (although I've always rather liked von Teese's sassy attitude).

* Okay, put those popped eyeballs back in your head, because now it's time to get serious. Skulls in the Stars has an excellent post on "The Republican War on Intelligence" -- basically analyzing the weird shift within the GOP over the last decade from respecting education and expertise, to openly sneering at those who spend years and years acquiring knowledge and analytical skills (often living right on the poverty line to do so), and flaunting ignorance as being somehow superior. Excuse me? In what universe? That's where this whole "elitist" meme is coming from, and it's utter nonsense. Small wonder our educational system is going to the dogs, when the leaders of a major political party repeatedly stoke the fires of the "culture wars" by openly mocking intelligence and expertise -- and then turn around and claim they "support" education. News flash: the two go hand in hand; to value one, is to value the other. As the post makes clear, this is not about being "liberal" or "conservative"; it's not really about political issues at all, although the issue has become dangerously (and deliberately) politicized by the GOP. And it bodes ill for our continued future prosperity if such a mindset continues to flourish. Knowledge, acquired skill and expertise matter; covering one's ears and loudly proclaiming otherwise doesn't change that. [UPDATE: Sam Harris has an excellent article in Newsweek saying essentially the same thing, only better:]

"Ask yourself: how has "elitism" become a bad word in American politics? There is simply no other walk of life in which extraordinary talent and rigorous training are denigrated. We want elite pilots to fly our planes, elite troops to undertake our most critical missions, elite athletes to represent us in competition and elite scientists to devote the most productive years of their lives to curing our diseases. And yet, when it comes time to vest people with even greater responsibilities, we consider it a virtue to shun any and all standards of excellence. When it comes to choosing the people whose thoughts and actions will decide the fates of millions, then we suddenly want someone just like us, someone fit to have a beer with, someone down-to-earth—in fact, almost anyone, provided that he or she doesn't seem too intelligent or well educated."

* Which brings me to my final item: the passing of the brilliant novelist David Foster Wallace over the weekend. Lots of folks have been linking to his stellar 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College, in which he explores the true value of a liberal arts education; what it really means to think critically; and how arrogance and lack of self-awareness can lead even highly intelligent, educated folks into "blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up."

I've cherry-picked just a few choice quotes below (note the "..." where I've snipped), but you should really take the time to read the whole thing:

Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy's interpretation is true and the other guy's is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from....  As if a person's most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language.  As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice.

I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean.  To be just a little less arrogant.  To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties.  Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. ...

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.  It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.  Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed....

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted.  You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't.... The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

We've lost one of America's truly great intellects -- one who could plumb the depths of philosophical musings with astonishing, unblinking insight, and still come up with wryly humorous touches like the phrase "totally hosed." Now that's a gift.

Everyone seems to be citing DFW's best-known novel Infinite Jest in their bloggy tributes, but I was an even earlier DFW fan, having reveled in his very first novel (written while he was still in graduate school, and before he got all crazy with the footnotes), The Broom of the System. It's a surreal, half-cerebral, half-farcical romp involving Wittgenstein, Po-Mo psychobabble (penis envy and impenetrable membranes are everywhere), an underground army of the elderly, and the search for true love, or at least sexual fulfillment -- like much of his work, it almost defies description.

My favorite character was an enormously obese businessman whose wife left him for a svelte yogurt salesman after he failed to lose weight. In revenge, he resolves to eat until he grows to infinite size and fills the universe with his Yang-Self -- except he develops a crush on Lenore, the book's heroine, and decides he might leave some small corner available for her. At one point, he sends her a box of chocolates (all eaten) with a note nestled within the empty wrappers: "Be my tiny Yin." There's also a marvelous scene early on where frat boys play the drinking game "Hi Bob": basically taking a chug of vodka every time someone on The Bob Newhart Show says, "Hi Bob...."

Anyway, in DFW's honor, I give you the following YouTube video of an ingenious Rube Goldberg device for making a "Falling Water" cocktail. Now that's some physics with a twist! I think he would have appreciated it. If I could only figure out how to do the same to make a classic Sidecar. [UPDATE: the video doesn't seem to be embedding properly, but you can see it here.]

Comments

[Leitchy]

Jen, one of the links is bugged. There really is such a place as discoverymagazine.com, but they aren't affiliated with Discover Magazine, so the link should not have the "Y". :) Here's the correct URL:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2008/09/16/fungus-opera

Rock on, chica!

[Dave Mosher]

I just got in trouble with the ladyfriend for watching that nerdy burlesque wonderbra video on this post... THANKS Jennifer!

[Jennifer Ouellette]

Hey, don't say you didn't know what it was going to be like! :) I considered not embedding it, but everyone would have clicked on the link anyway just to see for themselves...

I will try to fix the broken link tonight. It's on Carl Zimmer's blog, The Loom: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com

[Ed]

I noticed that you mentioned that the world is still here after the CERN experiment. Well they haven't done it yet (the collision I mean). They only tested one direction and then the other. The collision (which may produce microscopic black holes) is scheduled later. See the schedule below:
What is the schedule of the ATLAS Experiment?
ATLAS Schedule 2008 and forward

10 Sept. -- First splashes of particles in the ATLAS detector as LHC circulates first beams (in both directions). No collision events were planned, but the particles in the detector were used to debug and setup the detector.

11 Sept.-early October -- Continued tuning up of LHC allows periodic particles into the detector for further setup of detector. Cosmic ray events are used for similar purposes.

Early October (perhaps earlier) -- First event collisions at the "low" energy of 0.9 TeV (colliding 0.45 TeV beam with the counter-rotating 0.45 TeV beam).

November -- First event collisions at energy of 10 TeV (colliding 5 TeV beam with 5 TeV beam). Previous world record is 2 TeV.

Mid-December -- Winter shutdown for cost savings and improvements to LHC and ATLAS.

April 2009 -- Restart LHC and ATLAS at energy of 14 TeV and begin several months of intensive data taking before next winter shutdown. First papers with early results may come in late summer 2009.

Next 15-20 years -- Continued data taking with publication of results on an ongoing basis.

[Peter Morgan]

A friend who watched The Science of Sexy wants the whole thing re-shot with Cyd Charisse. The science was better in the good old days.

[Jennifer Ouellette]

Cyd Charisse would be an excellent choice! Also a better dancer. :)

[ZZMike]

That one's almost as good - or maybe even better - than the famous Honda commercial:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkzr0naZnZ0

... which was shot in one take (I forget how many times they had to try it). Falling Water looks like one take, too, and as a plus has a few parallel processes.

[RD Padouk]

Hi Jennifer! I love your comments on how anti-intellectualism is absorbing the GOP. And since this Jus' Plain Folk bit seems to be working politically for them, we know that it has infected the population as a whole. Try to get a teenager motivated about science in such an environment.

[Jonathan burnett]

I just happened across this while searching for something else, I like it, keep up the good work!

The problem with education is it's buearacracy not it's financing. It already has plenty of our taxes fed to it, it's just misspent. It's no different from when we send money to help foreign countries, it all goes to build some palace or nuclear weapons and the people still live on rice.

If you look at that little pie chart you get when it's time to vote on your local school budget, look at where most of it goes... it's not books, not supplies, most of it is staff... wage and bene increases... and how much of that do you suppose actually goes to the good teachers as opposed to the bad ones and the management... and then there's the ol' "hurry up and run out of everything on purpose so we can cry poverty next year" (and don't even try to tell us that doesn't happen, we've all known enough state-employees and managers to know better).