Slowly Deflating Quiz.
Regular readers are familiar with the occasional pop quizzes I throw out. I try to make them fun and a little bit challenging but not too difficult because nothing annoys me more than trying to do a crossword puzzle and halfway through feeling like the antediluvian legal scholar who created it decided no one would make it past 42-across and just started making up words and I want to hunt him down and beat him with a dictionary.
Anyway I got an idea for a pop quiz while reading Sam Kean’s The Disappearing Spoon, which is a really cool book about the periodic table and the elements that comprise it. It’s not a heavy scientific text but full of interesting stories like how in 1915 the Germans covertly took over a Colorado molybdenum mine which gave them an advantage in World War I, but that’s another story.
And then I started writing the quiz down and realized I was insane. It relied on some pretty rarefied knowledge and the clues were such a stretch I think even most chemists would find it tougher than tungsten. The answers are all scientists who aren’t household names, with one exception. Think bushy hair and moustache and sarcastic synonym for “smart person”.
They are also all scientists who’ve had elements named after them which narrows it down but they’re mostly still obscure and to make it even worse all my puns are a real stretch. And this may surprise some of the laity but the naming of elements can actually be controversial. Dmitri Mendeleev created the first modern periodic table and realized there were a lot of undiscovered elements to fill the spaces. He named the gap elements things like “ekaaluminum”. “Eka” is Sanskrit for “one” and was the element Mendeleev predicted would sit under aluminum on the periodic table. He was right about there being such an element but the scientist who discovered it named it gallium. When Marie Curie discovered polonium in 1911 she named it in honor of her home country, Poland, which was not at the time a bona fide country and fighting Germany for independence. Now while the naming is less political scientists still rush for naming rights and some elements have gone unnamed for years while who really found them first is sorted out.
Still with me? Here’s the quiz. Get one or two and you can feel really good about yourself. Get more than half and you can non-sarcastically call yourself a smart person. Get zero and you get the grand prize: you can hunt me down and beat me with a dictionary.
Name the scientist suggested by the following puns.
1. He would prefer to wade.
Additional clues: called the “father of nuclear physics”, he won the Nobel Prize in 1908
2. Hard common vowel.
Additional clues: an Italian physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project
3. Ocean-going Star Trek villain.
Additional clues: the only living person to have an element named after him he discovered or helped discover ten elements
4. Heal him.
Additional clues: the only woman to have an element named after her (so far), she discovered both polonium and radium
5. One big mug.
Additional clues: a real smart person with a reputation for absent-mindedness. Think bushy hair and moustache.
6. Edict wash.
Additional clues: invented the cyclotron
7. Repair Bulgarian currency.
Additional clues: created the periodic table and predicted the discovery of many additional elements
This clue is also so far out if you get it without the additional clues you are either a science historian, a chemist, or are working in the wrong field
8. Doesn’t ring.
Additional clues: has a prestigious set of prizes named after him and invented dynamite
9. Hire Hunger Games star.
Additional clues: German scientist (oh, like that narrows it down) who discovered X-rays
10. A real sleeper.
Additional clues: Danish scientist who created a popular atomic model.
Answer key:
And all this is really an excuse to share Tom Lehrer’s The Elements. If you’ve all been paying attention you’ll know that since he wrote it the news of a few new elements has come to Harvard.
Dances With Dogs.
Many of us have daily routines, but something I only realized recently is how often our routines are shaped by things we don’t control. I like to think I set my own routine but circumstances help shape it. This occurred to me when my afternoon walk home from the bus stop changed. Every day for years I walked by a neighbor’s house that had a fenced front yard. And every day two dogs would come running up to the fence. They had their names stitched on their collars in bold letters so I knew they were called Major and Minnie. Major was a gray and white mix of, well, who knows, but at least part Boxer judging from his broad head and muzzle which I think makes Boxers look very thoughtful and distinguished. And Minnie was at least part Labrador retriever, but she was small and leggy with a splotch of white on her chest. I’d say hello as I went by. Major would whine at me and Minnie would bark and jump on him, clearly saying, “Play with ME!”
One day I walked up to the fence and they both stood up on their hind legs and wagged their tails. I didn’t put my hand through the fence—never, ever do that, kids—but I did put it up flat against the fence and let them sniff it. This made them happy although I’m not sure why.
A few years later a For Sale sign went up in the yard in front of the fence. I didn’t really think about it until the house was sold and one day as I went by Major and Minnie weren’t there. Then the new owners tore down the fence, and that’s when I realized that not only were my canine friends gone but there wouldn’t be any others to take their place. They weren’t my dogs and I only saw them for a few minutes a few days a week but they were part of my routine—a part I looked forward to. I missed them.
And then as I was passing another house I heard barking from the fenced in backyard. He’s some kind of Terrier mix and I have no idea what his name is, and I’m not going to cross someone’s yard to get close enough to let him sniff my hand, but we say hello to each other. We’ve become part of each others’ new daily routine.
Hidden In Plain Sight.
Placement of a work of art is incredibly important. Artists want their work to be seen and seen at its best. When Mark Rothko began working on paintings for the Mark Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas he worked to find ways to recreate the light in his New York studio. The project’s initial architect even left because of creative differences. Rothko simply refused to budge when it came to the specific quality of the light he wanted.
Anyway it’s a given that artists want their work to be seen, that they want their work to be as visible as possible, right?
So why then would three different artists put their work in a narrow space between a couple of buildings where it’s unlikely anyone would see it? It’s an even more difficult question when two of the works are especially elaborate. The third, in the middle, is by “UH”, whose tag I’ve seen in other spots around the city.
It’s especially frustrating to me because there’s just not enough space to get a decent picture.
It looks like they all also used the same color, a stark black. Maybe it was unintentional but it’s a reminder that nothing about art is as simple as black and white.
We All Have To Go.
Suppose you were a member of the Tennessee legislature and suppose you were an idiot. But I repeat myself. That’s not exactly what Mark Twain said, but at least I’ve got the spirit of the quote right. The legislature is considering a bill targeting transgender public school students, which it considers a threat and feels compelled to insist that these students be restricted to bathrooms of their birth gender rather than their actual gender. Tennessee is one of about two dozen states considering similar bills at the moment, but this isn’t the first time the issue has come up. A few years ago the legislature considered a bill that would fine anyone using an “incorrect” public restroom or changing room for trying on clothes and state Representative Richard Floyd said that if saw someone he believed was a man using a woman’s dressing room he’d “stomp a mudhole in him and then stomp him dry”. Floyd would later say that was just a figure of speech and that anyone who thought
he was actually making a violent threat was overreacting and if you believe that you might be a member of the Tennessee legislature.
These bills remind me of the first time I met my friend Jerry. We were part of a small group organizing a holiday party at a church. Actually my wife and two other people were organizing while Jerry and I were chatting. Since Jerry was already a friend of my wife I knew he was transgender, and I think he may have even mentioned it to me while we were talking. I think I said, “okay” and went on because, even though I’d never met a transgender person before, I knew it was just the way some people are. And then he asked me, “Would you stand outside the door while I use the bathroom?” Without thinking I said “Sure.” While he was in there I did start thinking. There were five of us in the building and it didn’t seem likely that the other three would barge in on Jerry. And even if they had their reaction would have been the reaction most of us would have. If you walked in on someone in the restroom you’d probably avert your eyes, say “Sorry!” and close the door as quickly as
possible. It’s also unlikely anyone who didn’t know Jerry would have guessed there was anything unusual about him. While most of us at the party were casually dressed Jerry had on a suit and tie. Later that night when the party was in full swing a complete stranger would look at him and say, “Dude, you look like you came straight from work!”
I didn’t mind being asked to stand outside the bathroom while Jerry went in. I just considered it a slightly odd request, but we all have our eccentricities. Except in retrospect I would realize this wasn’t an eccentricity. In retrospect I don’t even think of it as an odd request. It wasn’t exactly a public building but it wasn’t exactly a home either. And while at the time I had no idea that transgender people had been vilified it seems like that’s increased. Or maybe the vilification has been around longer than I realize and it’s just become more public as transgender people have become more visible. And while I’m a little older and a little wiser I still have no idea what it must be like to be the target of such anger. If I’m buying jeans and want to try them on in the store I take it for granted that the worst thing that’s likely to happen to me is that my waistline is larger than it used to be. If I want to use a public restroom the worst thing that’s likely to happen is that I have to wait outside the door because somebody’s in there. Maybe though I should be worried about running into anyone from the Tennessee state legislature.
More Fun With Technology.
Even though upgrading from an iPhone 4S to an iPhone 6 was annoying and felt like it should have been completely unnecessary at least there wasn’t that much difference. Or maybe that’s why it was annoying and felt like it should have been completely unnecessary. It was like the difference between McDonald’s fries and KFC’s potato wedges. Blindfolded I could tell them apart but only because of size and shape. They’re still just sliced potatoes deep fried in grease and I had to pay extra for the skins but that’s another story.
There have been a few nice surprises like the fact that Siri now has a whole spectrum of accents. Not that there was anything wrong with Siri’s old voice, just as there was nothing wrong with my old iPhone other than the fact that it was a couple of years old and I believe that tech companies pushing the belief that just because something is a couple of years old we should get rid of it is eventually going to bite them in the ass. Anyway Siri can now speak in languages from Turkish to Transnistrian and half a dozen English accents from the United States to New Zealand. So my phone now speaks to me in a British accent which is nice because now if I need directions or to dictate a text I don’t feel like I’m talking to a machine. I feel like I’m talking to a machine that sounds a little bit like Penelope Wilton.
It has been a little bit of an adjustment because Siri does seem to hear things a little differently now. For instance I went to create a reminder to call in refills of some of my prescriptions and said “Call in drugs”. And now I have a reminder that says “Colin Drugs” as opposed to Colin Baker or maybe Colin Hay, although he’s Australian. And sometimes I dictate texts and back when I got my first iPhone I discovered Siri spoke punctuation. I could tell Siri I wanted to send a message to my wife and say “I’m home period see you soon period” and it would spell out “I’m home. See you soon.” Then when I went to do this on my iPhone6 it spelled out “I’m home period see you soon period”. Yes, it spelled out the word “period”. Twice. What gives, Penelope? This was supposed to be an upgrade but this seemed retrograde.
Then I remembered Professor Thomas. She was an art professor I studied under in England. She was American but had married a British guy which I guess is why she peppered her speech with Britishisms. Her favorite was “full stop”. “This is Titian’s masterpiece full stop,” she’d say, or, “Expressionism was revolutionary full stop.” At first I thought it was just a weird thing she said but then I heard other British people say “full stop” and they meant the dot at the end of a sentence–what we in the U.S. call a period, although we also use “period” to mean completely different things. I’ve never gotten over the embarrassment of when I was in sixth grade and reading Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret and I was confused about what a “period” was so I asked a girl and instead of answering me she told her friends what I’d asked and they couldn’t stop giggling and I never did get a real answer until 10th grade biology. And it’s even more confusing when I think about how many women wish their periods would come to a full stop.
Anyway when dictating texts I remember to now say “I’m home full stop see you soon full stop” and this is what I get:
Even with the British accent some things haven’t changed, though. For instance:
They should walk into a pub, Penelope. And what gives with dropping the Oxford comma?
Such Gaudy Tulips Raised From Dung.
Because the weather is warming and flowers are starting to bloom where I am it’s time for my annual tribute to the humble dandelion. Or the not-so-humble dandelion. It’s hard for me to tell what plants are thinking. Sometimes it’s also hard for me to tell what people are thinking, although most express various degrees of consternation when I express my love of dandelions by blowing seeds everywhere.
Recently a friend said to me, “You know those are weeds, right?”
No, I don’t know. What’s a weed? It’s any plant that grows where you don’t want it.
By that definition I’ve never seen a dandelion I’d call a weed.
All Together Now.
Source: Encyclopedia Spongebobia
It was cold and windy. There was a light drizzle coming down mixed with sleet. My feet hurt and I’d been stuck in a late afternoon meeting in a building several blocks away from my office so my walk to the bus stop was even farther than usual. And I’d missed my regular bus by more than an hour. I didn’t have a schedule with me and experience has taught me schedules are unreliable anyway. Also I really couldn’t gauge how long the trek to my regular stop was going to be. It’s a rule of buses that even if you miss one another will be along eventually, but I wondered how long “eventually” would be. I really didn’t want to stand around on the sidewalk waiting for forty minutes to an hour but I really didn’t have a choice.
Then, still several blocks away from my bus stop, as I was waiting to cross the street I looked over and noticed half a dozen people huddled in a bus shelter. And it occurred to me that even though the bus they were waiting for would take me in the opposite direction of where I wanted to go it would, in about a dozen blocks, intersect with my bus’s route. It would be a short reprieve from the weather and there was still no knowing how long I’d be standing around but this bus could deposit me right at a stop where I could catch my bus.
The traffic light turned yellow. I didn’t have much time to decide. Would I or wouldn’t I?
I did. I shuffled over and joined the people in the shelter.
Now here’s the question for you: how did the people influence my decision?
But What Does It Mean?
I took this picture last year and put it aside because I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. I think it’s a really interesting piece of graffiti. The elaborate font is striking as is the color choice. Compared to the other graffiti around it this piece is really something special. But what does it mean?
It’s in an area that’s undergoing rapid development, right across the street from J.J.’s coffee shop (where I found some other interesting graffiti) in fact, where new apartments are going up all over the place and competing for space with restaurants, and local restaurants are competing with chains muscling in. It’s on the side of a building that was a small real estate office before it was taken over by a nearby comic book store that used it for overflow stock and then it was a tattoo studio. Now the building’s undergoing serious renovation and while they’re not knocking down the walls there’s no telling what’s going in there next but given the area’s gentrification it’s probably something expensive.
The fence around the construction site makes it hard to get a good picture of it now.
So is it a statement of futility in the face of local history and culture being ground up into a bland “nope burger”? Or am I overreaching in an effort to make sense of something that’s meant to be purposely senseless?
I’m going to get a little meta-critical here and say that the major role of a critic is to make sense of culture, to explain things in a way that will make them fit into a cultural narrative. That’s what makes professional critics useful even though the only difference between a professional critic’s opinion and the opinion of somebody on the street is the professional critic’s opinion is usually better informed. Better informed doesn’t necessarily mean better, but that’s another story.
And even though professional critics are paid to offer opinions I think even they sometimes have to admit they don’t know what to say about something.
I’m not a professional critic, just a guy with some opinions who can embellish those opinions with what I know about art, but I look at this and I have no idea what to say except that I like it. Professional critics may feel differently.
Remember What The Dormouse Said.
My hardback copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and my facsimile copy of Alice’s Adventures Underground.
Chances are you’ve recently heard or read something about going down the rabbit hole or someone grinning like a Cheshire cat or acting like a mad hatter or screaming “Off with their heads!” I could go on. It’s been more than a century and a half since Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland was published and there are still Alice references everywhere and artists across the spectrum are constantly alluding to or drawing on Wonderland. My wife gave me a Mad Hatter t-shirt which I have to remind myself won’t last very long if I wear it every single day. It’s almost become cliché. I was tempted to roll my eyes at the beginning of The Matrix when Neo is told to “follow the white rabbit”, and not just because I thought it was setting us up for his whole experience to be a dream. Which it was, sort of, and he even goes through the looking glass, but that’s another story.
I’m pretty sure my love of literature started with Alice, even though it really started with an abridged and kind of muddled and abridged version of Wonderland combined with Through The Looking Glass. It was a vinyl album of several of the songs from the Disney animated version and the sleeve came with an illustrated booklet that had the basic outline of Wonderland with the Walrus and the Carpenter and Tweedledum and Tweedledee thrown in because, well, Disney never planned on doing a sequel. Speaking from the freezer section Walt even said his heart was never really in Wonderland, but I was intrigued enough by this pocket version that I wanted to know the whole story. And I was born in a period when the Disney film had officially been shelved as a classic but before VCRs, so the only way to see the film was to either wait for its broadcast on one of the five TV channels or the occasional summer theatrical re-release. So the Christmas I was nine my parents obliged with a hardback copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which I still have. Some kids, when they finish a Harry Potter book, or even the whole series, turn right back to the beginning and start over. For a while that’s how I was with Wonderland. I’d begin at the beginning and go on until I’d reached the end then start over until I had practically every page and every one of Tenniel’s illustrations memorized. A few years later the Disney version did hit theaters again and I finally got to see it and was disappointed. It wasn’t the last but it was the first time in my life that I saw a film adaptation and said, “I liked the book better.” Most people I talk to feel the same way although it’s interesting how much of an influence the Disney version has. If I bring up Alice In Wonderland you probably think of Alice as a blonde blue-eyed girl in a blue and white dress even though Alice Liddell had dark hair. Anyway after seeing the movie I went back a reread the book. I still pull it out and read it once in a while. Even though there a million other books I still want to get to I’ve read Wonderland so many times I can get through it in less than an hour. And yet every time I read it I feel like I get something a little different out of it because of what I bring to it.
Lately it’s been tinged with an article I read called Alice’s adventures in algebra: Wonderland solved from the December 16 2009 issue of New Scientist. The author, Melanie Bayley, makes the argument that Wonderland is Dodgson’s way of attacking newfangled mathematical ideas that some of his contemporaries were mucking around with. Dodgson was a mathematical scholar at Oxford after all and, being thoroughly grounded in Euclid, it bothered him that some of his fellow dons were getting into things like imaginary numbers that had no connection to the real world. And I’m open to looking at Wonderland just about every which way anyone can think of but even after rereading the article several times I still feel kind of bothered about it. I have no problem believing that the Duchess, the crazy cook, and the baby that turns into a pig and the mad tea party are or contain subtle criticisms of some mathematical ideas Dodgson thought were too far out. But I think it’s too far out when Bayley takes the hookah-smoking caterpillar and says that scene isn’t about drugs but “I believe it’s actually about what Dodgson saw as the absurdity of symbolic algebra”. Maybe, but I believe it’s also probably about drugs. Unlike the mad tea party and the pig-baby and, for that matter, the Cheshire cat, the caterpillar is in Dodgson’s original story Alice’s Adventures Under Ground which he wrote for Alice Liddell and didn’t originally intend to have published. And eating the caterpillar’s mushroom Alice changes size, shrinking down to three inches high, which is the only way she can enter the Red Queen’s kingdom. Then during the trial she starts growing, maybe because the mushroom’s effects are wearing off. And Bayley even says the mad tea party is where Dodgson’s “satire of his contemporary mathematicians seems to end,” acknowledging that the whole of Wonderland isn’t a mathematical satire. In fact Wonderland–and I mean the place that Alice dreams of–is grounded in reality. At the end Alice tells the whole tale to her sister who closes her eyes and imagines and even hears Wonderland, knowing that as soon as she opens her eyes the sounds of the tea party and the Queen of Hearts and the gryphon will simply be “the confused clamour of the busy farm-yard”.
Am I a gryphon who was dreaming he was reading a story or a reader who is now dreaming he’s a gryphon?
I don’t want to be too critical because I think Bayley’s article is brilliant and makes me think differently about parts of Wonderland, which I always get a kick out of, but I have a problem with the idea that Wonderland is “solved”. A Cracked article called 6 Books Everyone (Including Your English Teacher) Got Wrong that cites Bayley’s article makes the mistake of assuming this is the answer. It’s a story, not an equation, and I think this touches on a much larger issue. I don’t believe art and science or even art and math are separate fiefdoms that never overlap–and I doubt anyone else really believes that, but it’s an easy mental trap to fall into. The arts are sometimes described as “soft” while math and science are “hard” even though they all inform each other and while modern math and science increasingly deal with uncertainties the arts have always been more about questions than answers. Where a mathematical equation is a question with a single answer a story doesn’t have to have an answer. In fact the best stories seem to be the ones that don’t have an answer at all, or that open us up to the possibility of lots of different answers. The riddle “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” may have been intended to be unanswerable but has at least a dozen different answers, including, “Because Poe wrote on both.”
I think it’s the unsolved and unsolvable nature of the story–of all stories–that keeps them alive.
And, yeah, I’m totally going there.