"I want to have your child. With my looks and your brains, it will be a perfect child!"

"But what if it has my looks and your brains?"

Freaky pic:



Stand back or squint to achieve the best effect.

And here's Einstein in shorts:



Bonus:

10 things wrong with the Freedom From Religion Foundation's atheist nativity scene.

(Here's my video showing the details of the creche, which is on the first floor of the Wisconsin Capitol, near some other holiday displays. You should watch the video to understand this list.)

1. Of the many figures in the display, only one is naked, ans it is a woman. This is the "clothed male, naked female" fantasy — promoted, presumably unwittingly.

2. The naked woman is Venus (the famous Botticelli Venus), and Venus is a goddess, a supernatural religious character, and therefore inconsistent with the overall theme of the display, which is that there is only the natural world and it's all we need.

3. The baby in the manger is huge in relation to the Venus figure, who is ostensibly the mother, so that is some scary cephalopelvic disproproportion, and yet naked Venus shows no signs of the C-section she would have needed to avoid death, unless we're to assume that baby got out of her body in some miraculous way, which is inconsistent with the theme of the display.

4. Atheism is promoted through a set of quotes from prominent figures — Thomas Jefferson, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Emma Goldman, and Mark Twain — in other words, by reference to the revered words of authority figures, which is the same method of arriving at beliefs used by religionists — whom we're invited to disrespect for thinking like that.

5. A sign says "may reason prevail" and ends: "Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds," which is not even a remotely credible belief, because it is falsified by every example of a person who is moved to altruism and charity by religion. Reason doesn't prevail on the very sign that says "may reason prevail."

6. In 2 places, the display invokes the solstice as an occasion for contemplating the natural world as the totality of what is. We're told it's "the reason for the season." Reason is a buzz word for these atheists, but what reason is there for a reason-fixated atheist to pay any special attention to the solstice? It seems they've gotten their atheism mixed up with paganism, which betrays the religious component of their thought structure.

7. There's a sign saying "Thou shalt not steal" — a quote from God, as reported in the Bible.

8. Right behind the "Thou shalt not steal" sign, there's an array of brochures titled "About FFR's Natural Nativity," which I think they want you to take, but I didn't take one because of the intimidating God quote about stealing.

9. There's a sign that says "Heathen's Greetings," but "heathen" is a religious designation. "Heathenism" is Germanic neopaganism.

10. Unless only one heathen is greeting us, they've got the apostrophe in the wrong place in "Heathen's."

The atheist creche in the Wisconsin Capitol rotunda.

We checked out the Christmas displays today...

The Freedom From Religion Foundation applies for a permit to set up a "slightly blasphemous" solstice display in the Wisconsin Capitol rotunda...

... in response to the nativity scene already set up by Wisconsin Family Action.

Freedom From Religion is cagily referring to a display with "a different type of wise people." I'm not sure where they will get decent looking statuary, but I'm picturing figures of Charles Darwin, Einstein, and — why not? — Christopher Hitchens, gathered around... what?... a microscope and a telescope.

Meade suggests a depiction of a young couple camping out at Occupy Madison, sitting solemnly at a table stacked with brochures about abortion rights. Arriving at the scene, via bicycle, are 3 bearded UW professors.

You've heard of the Anti-Christ. This is the anti-creche. Let's generate some more ideas for what this display might look like.

The media seem to have decided that what Gingrich said about immigration is the big story from last night's GOP debate.

So let's read the text:

BLITZER: Back in the '80s... you voted for legislation that had a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants...  Some called it amnesty then; they still call it amnesty now. What would you do if you were President of the United States, with these millions of illegal immigrants, many of whom have been in this country for a long time?

GINGRICH: Let me start and just say I think that we ought to have an H-1 visa that goes with every graduate degree in math, science and engineering so that people stay here. You know, about five blocks down the street, you'll see a statue of Einstein. Einstein came here as an immigrant. So let's be clear how much the United States has drawn upon the world to be richer, better and more inclusive.

I did vote for the Simpson-Mazzoli Act. Ronald Reagan, in his diary, says he signed it -- and we were supposed to have 300,000 people get amnesty. There were 3 million. But he signed it because we were going to get two things in return. We were going to get control of the border and we were going to get a guest worker program with employer enforcement.

We got neither. So I think you've got to deal with this as a comprehensive approach that starts with controlling the border.... I believe ultimately you have to find some system -- once you've put every piece in place, which includes the guest worker program, you need something like a World War II Selective Service Board that, frankly, reviews the people who are here.

If you're here -- if you've come here recently, you have no ties to this country, you ought to go home. period. If you've been here 25 years and you got three kids and two grandkids, you've been paying taxes and obeying the law, you belong to a local church, I don't think we're going to separate you from your family, uproot you forcefully and kick you out.

The Creeble Foundation is a very good red card program that says you get to be legal, but you don't get a pass to citizenship. And so there's a way to ultimately end up with a country where there's no more illegality, but you haven't automatically given amnesty to anyone.

Bachmann is called upon to respond. (Blitzer did a great job last night of creating mini-one-on-one debates within the debate.) She said it was amnesty and she worried about the vast numbers of people who would be able to take advantage of the program. Gingrich then got the floor again:

GINGRICH: Well, I mean, two things, first of all, in the DREAM Act, the one part that I like is the one which allows people who came here with their parents to join the U.S. military, which they could have done if they were back home, and if they serve on it with the U.S. military to acquire citizenship, which is something any foreigner can do.

And I don't see any reason to punish somebody who came here at three years of age, but who wants to serve the United States of America. I specifically did not say we'd make the 11 million people legal.

I do suggest if you go back to your district, and you find people who have been here 25 years and have two generations of family and have been paying taxes and are in a local church, as somebody who believes strongly in family, you'll have a hard time explaining why that particular subset is being broken up and forced to leave, given the fact that they've been law-abiding citizens for 25 years.

Blitzer then called on Bachmann, who, despite what Gingrich just said he "specifically did not say," says "I think the speaker just said that that would make 11 people -- 11 million people who are here illegally now legal." That one-on-one really highlighted Gingrich's superior intelligence and sophistication. Clearly, Gingrich has the ability to reach out to many Americans who feel empathy toward the people who are in the county illegally and to take a middle position that balances a large set of interests. I like that, but obviously the red-meat fans have something to complain about. He put some vegetables on their dish.

11/11/11!

What will you do with all the eleventosity today?

Something special at 11 a.m. and 11 p.m.?

Are you going to keep talking about turning it up to 11 or are you going to get annoyed at people who are debasing the sublime by continually making the same aged rock-music reference?

For variety: Here's the Grateful Dead playing "The Eleven" in 1968.

But who's into variety, when the whole point is sameness? You've got those ones all lined up. Is that exciting? Are you the kind of person who finds lined up numbers exciting... like 999? Or 666?

If you think 11/11/11 is exciting, imagine how folks wet their pants over November 11, 1111, the most digitally lined-up day in the entire history of the world. Mankind will have to survive — and maintain its numerical system — until 11/11/11111 for there to be another day like that.

Did anything happen on 11/11/1111? Not according to Wikipedia's compendium of things that have happened on November 11ths. Perhaps the most interesting — for us Americans, anyway — event that took place on history's thousands of 11/11s is The Mayflower Compact, in 1620. And in 1930:

1930 – Patent number US1781541 is awarded to Albert Einstein and Leó Szilárd for their invention, the Einstein refrigerator.

Albert Einstein invented the refrigerator?!

Speaking of cold, there's only one 11/11/11 event on that list. 11/11/1911, and the event is just that it was a very cold day in the Midwest. Well, it's 30° here in Madison, Wisconsin, and it's supposed to hit 41° at 11 when we reach maximum elevenosity. I think we can handle that.

ADDED: I'm getting justly slaughtered in the comments for not recognizing Veterans Day:



AND: I'm getting cold-shouldered in the comments for minimizing the weather event of 1911. From today's Wisconsin State Journal:

The freakishly warm and humid weather that sunny Saturday set the stage for Rock County's worst weather disaster....

Shortly before 2 p.m., it was 74 degrees. Then, in a matter of minutes, the temperature plummeted 10 degrees in downtown Janesville. By that night, it had fallen to zero.

A massive cold front had slammed into the warm air, unleashing a rash of storms and tornadoes throughout the Midwest.

"At the root of the reality distortion was Jobs’s belief that the rules didn’t apply to him."

"He had some evidence for this; in his childhood, he had often been able to bend reality to his desires. Rebelliousness and willfulness were ingrained in his character. He had the sense that he was special, a chosen one, an enlightened one. 'He thinks there are a few people who are special — people like Einstein and Gandhi and the gurus he met in India — and he’s one of them,' said [Andy] Hertzfeld. 'He told Chrisann this. Once he even hinted to me that he was enlightened. It’s almost like Nietzsche.' Jobs never studied Nietzsche, but the philosopher’s concept of the will to power and the special nature of the Überman came naturally to him. As Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 'The spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers the world.' If reality did not comport with his will, he would ignore it, as he had done with the birth of his daughter and would do years later, when first diagnosed with cancer. Even in small everyday rebellions, such as not putting a license plate on his car and parking it in handicapped spaces, he acted as if he were not subject to the strictures around him."

A paragraph from Walter Isaacson's fabulous biography "Steve Jobs." I'm reading it and loving it. I'll share some more stuff as I go along.

I'd give you a page cite, but I'm reading it in the Kindle (the app, on iPad) so I can only give you "Kindle location 2242-2251." Is that how we will do cites in the future?

"Oppo Research in the Tradition of Einstein."

Byron York finds a WaPo article "unintentionally amusing."

And disturbing:

But the article has a pretty clear subtext, and it is that the exchange of such information on the Internet should be controlled.

ADDED: The phrase "a scholar with two Ph.D.s" impresses some folks more than others.

"The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses..."

"... the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish."

So wrote Albert Einstein.

"For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions," he said.

"And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people."

And he added: "As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them."

So if you've been using Einstein in your pro-God arguments: Time to revise.

Silenced.

Portly Pirate says "I think we can all agree that a moment of silence is appropriate, can't we?" And so begins the outpouring of silence = death bons mots at the news that Marcel Marceau has died.

There's also "Walking Against the Wind." I was thinking of saying something along the lines of Walking Against the Eternal Darkness.

And before you unleash the now-conventional hatred of mimes -- there was a point, around 1972, when everyone started to say "I hate mimes" after years of finding mimes fascinating and profound -- let's remember the man who started it. His real name was Marcel Mangel, and his family changed that last name to Marceau to hide from the Nazis.

With his brother Alain, Marceau became active in the French Resistance. Marceau altered children's identity cards, changing their birth dates to trick the Germans into thinking they were too young to be deported. Because he spoke English, he was recruited to be a liaison officer with Gen. George S. Patton's army.

In 1944, Marceau's father was sent to Auschwitz, where he died.

Later, he reflected on his father's death: "Yes, I cried for him."

But he also thought of all the others killed: "Among those kids was maybe an Einstein, a Mozart, somebody who (would have) found a cancer drug," he told reporters in 2000. "That is why we have a great responsibility. Let us love one another."...

Marceau likened his character [Bip] to a modern-day Don Quixote, "alone in a fragile world filled with injustice and beauty."

Show some unspoken love today.

Something is wrong with the Chief Justice's brain.

Linda Greenhouse writes:

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. was hospitalized on today after suffering a seizure at his summer home in Maine, the Supreme Court announced.

The episode, described as a “benign idiopathic seizure,” was similar to one he suffered 14 years ago, according to the court’s press release. Idiopathic means that the cause of the seizure remains unknown....

“In the majority of seizures you see no anatomical cause,” [said Dr. Langer, who is also an assistant professor at Albert Einstein Medical College,] said. A cause could be a tumor, bleeding in the brain, a clogged blood vessel or an injury.

ADDED: From the Maine newspaper:

St. George Ambulance responded to a call at about 2 p.m. Monday of a man who had fallen 5 to 10 feet and landed on a dock, hitting the back of his head. The patient was ashen and was foaming at the mouth.

ADDED: This is the sort of thing that makes me glad I cut Wonkette from my blogroll a few weeks ago.

UPDATE: He looks okay now, doesn't he?

Science for Americans.

Steven Pinker, reviewing Natalie Angier's "The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science, notes the American aversion to scientific knowledge:

People who would sneer at the vulgarian who has never read Virginia Woolf will insouciantly boast of their ignorance of basic physics. Most of our intellectual magazines discuss science only when it bears on their political concerns or when they can portray science as just another political arena. As the nation’s math departments and biotech labs fill up with foreign students, the brightest young Americans learn better ways to sue one another or to capitalize on currency fluctuations. And all this is on top of our nation’s endless supply of New Age nostrums, psychic hot lines, creationist textbook stickers and other flimflam.

But Angier's book is for the adult who missed the chance to go into science but might read a snazzy enough popular book on the subject:

Every author of a book on science faces the challenge of how to enliven material that is not part of people’s day-to-day concerns. The solutions include the detective story, the suspenseful race to a discovery, the profile of a colorful practitioner, the reportage of a raging controversy and the use of a hook from history, art or current affairs. The lure that Angier deploys is verbal ornamentation: her prose is a blooming, buzzing profusion of puns, rhymes, wordplay, wisecracks and Erma-Bombeckian quips about the indignities of everyday life. Angier’s language is always clever, and sometimes witty, but “The Canon” would have been better served if her Inner Editor had cut the verbal gimmickry by a factor of three. It’s not just the groaners, like “Einstein made the pi wider,” or the clutter, like “So now, at last, I come to the muscle of the matter, or is it the gristle, or the wishbone, the skin and pope’s nose?” The deeper problem is a misapplication of the power of the verbal analogy in scientific exposition.

A good analogy does not just invoke some chance resemblance between the thing being explained and the thing introduced to explain it. It capitalizes on a deep similarity between the principles that govern the two things....

But all too often in Angier’s writing, the similarity is sound-deep: the more you ponder the allusion, the worse you understand the phenomenon. For example, in explaining the atomic nucleus, she writes, “Many of the more familiar elements have pretty much the same number of protons and neutrons in their hub: carbon the egg carton, with six of one, half dozen of the other; nitrogen like a 1960s cocktail, Seven and Seven; oxygen an aria of paired octaves of protons and neutrons.” This is showing off at the expense of communication. Spatial arrangements (like eggs in a carton), mixed ingredients (like those of a cocktail) and harmonically related frequencies (like those of an octave) are all potentially relevant to the structure of matter (and indeed are relevant to closely related topics in physics and chemistry), so Angier forces readers to pause and determine that these images should be ignored here. Not only do readers have to work to clear away the verbal overgrowth, but a substantial proportion of them will be misled and will take the flourishes literally.

Pinker is writing about writing: What makes a science book great literature? Pinker holds up Richard Dawkins's "The Selfish Gene" as exemplary and gets very specific about what works on a deep level to explain scientific ideas. Angier, he says, uses superficial flourishes, while Dawkins finds an analogy that invites and deserves contemplation.

Still trying to recover from that horrible "American Idol" last night...

Entertainment Weekly has some good advice for next season's final show:

Don't allow any non-Idol performers to take the stage — unless they agree to duet with one of the 12 finalists. Think about it: Instead of piping in a ''live'' feed of Gwen (who appeared to have a giant flower attached to her derriere) performing ''4 in the Morning'' with utter detachment, you could've forced her to show up at the Kodak and duet with Chris Richardson on ''Don't Speak,'' a number he'd already nailed earlier in the season. Can you imagine the watercooler buzz you'd have scored if Kiki had rescued Bette midway through her abysmal, convulsive ''Wind Beneath My Wings''? And for cryin' out loud, Tony Bennett's ''For Once in My Life'' was taken from his album Duets, and Melinda Doolittle's Memphis audition number was...''For Once in My Life.'' Do I really have to do the math for you?

Yeah, and end on time. Were they deliberately trying to screw us TiVo-users? Just because I fast-forward through all the commercials (and much of the music), you don't care about me? This is from the Village Voice's "running diary" of the show:

I got home a bit late tonight, so I'm not watching this show live; I'm seeing everything on DVR about ten minutes after it actually happens. But the show actually runs over, which means my DVR cuts off right before they reveal the goddam f[]cking winner of the season. Seriously, don't the producers know that some of us are watching this on DVR?

I'm going to say they do know, and they are not so much punishing us but training us to use the TiVo to record into the next time slot to hurt the other networks. It's a way to turn TiVo into a ratings weapon.

Here's a good line from the EW story:

And was I the only one envisioning Gladys Knight assessing the top six ladies at dress rehearsal and declaring, ''Only Melinda and LaKisha are allowed within three feet of me!''?

So true, both as an observation and as an appropriate attitude for Gladys Knight.

Anyway... I'm fine with the outcome, which I predicted back on March 21, when we were down to the final 10:

Let me just try to pick the order that they will leave (and we can look back and see how wrong I was): Chris R., Gina, Hayley, Phil, Chris Sligh, Sanjaya, LaKisha, Blake, Melinda, Jordin. So: Jordin to win.

So I'm fine that Jordin won, but now the show needs to go away for a long time so we can all forget how insufficiently enjoyable it was and, like the ninnies we are, start watching again next year. Or will some of us snap out of it?

Ah, I see that as I was writing this Jacob at Television Without Pity finally got his mini-recap up. For some crazy reason, he gives the show an A+:

The very excellent, very long night begins with a shouty, flirty duet... Ryan's "good friend" GWEN STEFANI, looking pants in a weird Astro Boy bubble tutu dress... KELLY CLARKSON!... Blake reveals that he has like fifteen powers of awesome beatboxing we didn't even know about... CARRIE UNDERWOOD, in a cute dress over pants... Carrie gives an awesome speech about her wild success. A huge contingent of awesome bald African kids... Sanjaya is compared to both Einstein and Abraham Lincoln, then performs "You Really Got Me" with Joe Perry in a wind tunnel... GREEN DAY ... ROOOOBEN... BETTE EFFIN' MIDLER sings "The Wind Beneath My Friggin' Wings" in a leather skirt and is one Parliament and a late night out from turning into Marianne Faithfull once and for all; it's cheesy and very very American Idol and unending. Randy and Paula, at this point, start making out down in the audience, while Bette Midler sings poorly and interjects God into every other line of the song, for some reason....

Blah! Well, I get it. If you watch the show, you watch for the crappiness of it, and since they over-the-top maximized the crappiness, it gets an A+. The A+ is logical. If you don't like this, why are you watching? This is the whole point.

"One fears everywhere the competition of the expelled 'brainy' Jews. We are even more burdened by our strength than by our weakness."

New letters from the "wild-haired Jewish-German scientist, renowned for his theory of relativity," Albert Einstein. Despite the material that relates to the Holocaust, like the quote I pulled for this post title, the press highlights his sexual misdeeds: "Out of all the dames, I am in fact attached only to Mrs. L., who is absolutely harmless and decent."

New ways to get lost in Amazon.

Have you noticed the new features in Amazon? I haven't seen any announcements on their main page, but if you go to an individual book, now, you can find all kinds of new, cool things. I'm not finding it for every book, and it seems as though it wouldn't be possible for books that are not open to the "search inside" function. But take, for example, "Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim." Let's look at the SIPs -- or "statistically improbable phrases":

Amazon.com's Statistically Improbable Phrases, or "SIPs", are the most distinctive phrases in the text of books in the Search Inside!™ program. To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside! program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside! books, that phrase is a SIP in that book.

SIPs are not necessarily improbable within a particular book, but they are improbable relative to all books in Search Inside!. For example, most SIPs for a book on taxes are tax related. But because we display SIPs in order of their improbability score, the first SIPs will be on tax topics that this book mentions more often than other tax books. For works of fiction, SIPs tend to be distinctive word combinations that often hint at important plot elements.

For "Dress Your Family," they've only come up with: "eight black men." If you've read the book, you know what that refers to. If you click on the phrase, you get all the other books with that phrase: here. Useful? Possibly not in this case, though still interesting, in a rather random way.

Then there are the CAPs (capitalized phrases):

Aunt Monie, Monie Changes Everything, Baby Einstein, The Girl Next Door, The Ship Shape, Full House, Nuit of the Living Dead, Blood Work, North Carolina, Slumus Lordicus, Kwik Pik, Great Dane, Puta Lid, Saint Nicholas, Anne Frank, The End of the Affair, Royal Pavilion, Who's the Chef, Apple Pan, The Empire

Each is clickable. You can then see other books that frequently use that capitalized phrase. Well, no one else is using Slumus Lordicus yet, but here are the Anne Frank references.

Then there's the concordance:

Concordance is an alphabetized list of the most frequently occurring words in a book, excluding common words such as "of" and "it." The font size of a word is proportional to the number of times it occurs in the book. Hover your mouse over a word to see how many times it occurs, or click on a word to see a list of book excerpts containing that word.

There are also "text stats," showing you how easy or hard the book is to read. Sedaris, it turns out, is awfully easy to read -- 7th grade level. Doesn't say how funny he is, though.

Let me check another, similarly funny, but much darker book I like, "Running With Scissors." Hey, that's even easier to read! Let's try "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time." Oh, that's easy too. Hmmmm.... that's got a SIP of "bloody dog," so who else is SIP-ing "bloody dog"?

James Joyce! All right, then. Let's get the text stats for "Ulysses." I see that's easy to read too, so they say. According to the Flesch-Kinkaid analysis, it's written at less than a 7th grade level, so if you're not ready to tackle "Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim"...

UPDATE: You can check text stats for blogs at this website. In case you're wondering, this blog has the following numbers:

Gunning Fog Index 10.31
Flesch Reading Ease 66.29 (higher is easier, with 100 being the easiest)
Flesch-Kincaid Grade 7.13

The numbers for "Ulysses" are: 9.0, 68.1, 6.8. Do you find this confusing? Generally, I think it's a good sign if your ease-of-reading stats seem low for the difficulty of the material.

Why so much tongue?

Don't ask!

Of course if you find anything slightly interesting, not to say titillating, about these images [of stuck-out tongues in ads], the marketers who use them will all but call you a pervert. Yahoo would not talk about the pictures of their tongue woman, though a publicist for the company made it clear she thought there was something a little creepy about being asked to explain it.

Responding to a phone message left at Fox, a spokeswoman who absolutely refused to give her name denied there was anything sexual whatsoever about the image in the "Thirteen" ads and said it was simply an accurate portrayal of the subject matter of the film, girls going wild.

It's not really a hard question though, is it? The stuck-out tongue reminds us of sex and at the same time expresses defiance -- cute defiance.

Now that it's the subject of a piece in the NYT Style pages, the stuck-out tongue is officially a cliché. The article -- I'm looking at the paper NYT -- features a lot of pictures of young women with their tongues out, but the teaser on the front page is that picture of Albert Einstein with his tongue out. The Einstein tongue-out picture is an even bigger cliché than the current mini-trend of young girls with their tongues out. I'll bet some of my readers have that Einstein picture within view right now. (Or is your Einstein poster more somber?) That Einstein photo is widely loved, and I'm sure it is used in plenty of ads too. But generally, the tongue ads favor young girls, not old men.

Bonus observation: It's always the front of the tongue that is displayed, never the back (except for the minimalist display needed to symbolize "yummy"). The back of the tongue [i.e., the underside] , I note, is the ugliest part of the body one can easily display. Yet our gesture of contempt made by sticking out the tongue uses the more presentable top side. Strange, no? Or is the underside so ugly that we keep it hidden even when we're trying to be nasty?

Inside the UW-Madison Physics Department.

After Fedjur class today, I packed up my laptop and walked over to the Physics Department where I was to be the guest speaker at the Chaos and Complex Systems Seminar. My role was to talk about blogging, and the audience's role was to ply me with questions that might draw out some useful material relevant to chaos and complex systems. Blogging, with all the attendant linking and Googling and ranking and so forth, is a complex system. I was to meet the professor, Clint Sprott, in his office, and as soon as I saw the place, I was getting out my digital camera. Of course, to me -- I've never studied physics -- the blackboard was a cool graphic display, reminiscent of a Cy Twombly painting:



But to Professor Sprott, these equations hold worlds of meaning that I cannot begin to think about. He is especially excited about this equation:



This explains so much about so many things. Ecology! The stock market! Friendship! It's the Lotka-Volterra equation:



If I only knew how to understand it, I would be quite profoundly amazed. Nevertheless, I love the way it looks and I can appreciate that it means a lot:



I go ahead and ask some dumb questions. Why write all the equations on a blackboard? I can understand a blackboard in a classroom, but it seems odd to me to have a big blackboard in your office covered with equations. Why wouldn't you sit at your desk and write the equations on a piece of paper?

Sprott explains that people get together in the office to talk about the equations and having them on a blackboard helps. It's the centerpiece of many lively debates.

I ask whether all physicists have a picture of Einstein in their office.



No, he says, some have Richard Feynman; some have Isaac Newton.

Time to head to the seminar, but first, let's stop in the tech room and get an adaptor for my iBook. The tech room is a glorious mess and the tech guys give me permission to photograph it for the blog:

Naming the dog.

In Canada, the biggest sitcom in years, according to the NYT, features a family that has a dog named bin Laden. I read this out loud, and John says, "Does that mean they like bin Laden or are they trying to insult bin Laden by giving that name to a dog?" I say I don't know, and this leads to a discussion of how some cultures think it's insulting to be made the namesake of a dog. John remembers that people in India were offended when President Bush named his cat India, and that one man had said "How would he feel if we named our dog Bush?" I say, "Bush would probably think it was nice." John notes that Doc in "Back to the Future" named his dog Einstein, and that clearly was not intended to disrespect Einstein. I say, "Still, Bush ought to have people to advise him about things that happen to offend people in other countries."



For more on the politics of that Canadian sitcom, read the article ("The show's edgy satire and depiction of a poor family taking on the system seems to capture the mood in Quebec in these days of scandals"). I'm thinking the Canadian sitcom makers named the dog bin Laden as part of a pattern of inappropriate behavior by this sitcom family. And I'm thinking actual bin Laden fans don't think it's a compliment to name a dog after him.