A gramophone and a coffin

On the mysterious & elaborate paper sculptures that have been fetching up in libraries etc. all over Edinburgh. (The one above is carved out of Ian Rankin's Exit Music.) Here is a Guardian article on the first of these anonymous gifts, a "poetree." Inevitably, the paper sculpture meme has also hybridized with the cupcake meme:

Tomonaga and the bottle

From Freeman Dyson's new NYRB piece on Feynman:

Feynman had looked forward to meeting Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, the Japanese physicist who shared the Nobel Prize with him. Tomonaga had independently made some of the same discoveries as Feynman, five years earlier, in the total isolation of wartime Japan. [...] Feynman and Tomonaga shared three outstanding qualities: emotional toughness, intellectual integrity, and a robust sense of humor.

To Feynman’s dismay, Tomonaga failed to appear in Stockholm. The Ottaviani-Myrick book has Tomonaga explaining what happened:

Although I sent a letter saying that I would be “pleased to attend,” I loathed the thought of going, thinking that the cold would be severe, as the ceremony was to be held in December, and that the inevitable formalities would be tiresome. After I was named a Nobel Prize awardee, many people came to visit, bringing liquor. I had barrels of it. One day, my father’s younger brother, who loved whiskey, happened to stop by and we both began drinking gleefully. We drank a little too much, and then, seizing the opportunity that my wife had gone out shopping, I entered the bathroom to take a bath. There I slipped and fell down, breaking six of my ribs… It was a piece of good luck in that unhappy incident.

After Tomonaga recovered from his injuries, he was invited to England to receive another high honor requiring a formal meeting with royalty. This time he did not slip in the bathtub. He duly appeared at Buckingham Palace to shake hands with the English Queen. The Queen did not know that he had failed to travel to Stockholm. She innocently asked him whether he had enjoyed his meeting with the King of Sweden. Tomonaga was totally flummoxed. He could not bring himself to confess to the Queen that he had got drunk and broken his ribs. He said that he had enjoyed his conversation with the King very much. He remarked afterward that for the rest of his life he would be carrying a double burden of guilt, first for getting drunk, and second for telling a lie to the Queen of England.

Dyson is on paper the obvious choice for a piece about Feynman; as usual there's a lot of recycling, but with an interesting twist. In an old NYRB review of a previous Feynman book, Dyson had categorized Feynman with Einstein and Hawking as physicists who have become "Wise Men" to the public. In the new iteration of this remark, Feynman has provisionally been dropped from the list, the Wise Men are "superstars," but the point is spelled out nicely:

Lesser lights such as Carl Sagan and Neil Tyson and Richard Dawkins have a big public following, but they are not in the same class as Einstein and Hawking. Sagan, Tyson, and Dawkins have fans who understand their message and are excited by their science. Einstein and Hawking have fans who understand almost nothing about science and are excited by their personalities.

(A point worth making is that Einstein and Hawking would arguably have been substantially less revered if they stood for something in the public mind that the public cared about -- evolution, say, or whether the universe had a beginning. Being a polemical figure reduces one's stature. The closest thing to Hawking in recent news was Grisha Perelman, but as a mathematician he is somehow too peripheral. To become the relevant kind of cultural figure one needs to be cartoonish and nonthreatening. Though arguably physics has never been threatening.)

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A bit of news today that will please many physicists: the journal Physical Review Letters (the Berkeley of the physics publishing hierarchy; the most prestigious journal that also publishes a lot of articles) has switched from a 4-page limit to a word count limit. Objectively this is reasonable and frankly somewhat belated; I believe (or at least hope) that the journals also intend to make articles available as single-column HTML files, it is extremely annoying to read two-column text on a laptop. I have mixed feelings about the new limits: I had just begun to get the hang of maximizing the number of words you could cram into 4pp. by rewriting each paragraph so as to have it end at the end of a line.

Caching out

Tab proliferation is one of the banes of my existence. Another is a tendency to overconsume caffeine, which exacerbates tab proliferation. This is not an exhaustive list.

1. English vs. American bears. English bears are less assertive, more abused, etc. My take on this is that the English are clearly right. Bears are intrinsically (a) short-sighted, (b) cute, (c) sporadically vicious. As I once wrote, they "live on strawberries and honey except for the occasional killing spree." Winnie the Pooh with a mild psychopathic streak would be an excellent caricature of an actual bear. Care bears have nothing, really, to do with bears. They might as well be care cougars.

2. For some reason I have Andrew Sullivan's "Why I blog" open:

As you read a log, you have the curious sense of moving backward in time as you move forward in pages—the opposite of a book. As you piece together a narrative that was never intended as one, it seems—and is—more truthful. Logs, in this sense, were a form of human self-correction. They amended for hindsight, for the ways in which human beings order and tidy and construct the story of their lives as they look back on them. Logs require a letting-go of narrative because they do not allow for a knowledge of the ending. So they have plot as well as dramatic irony—the reader will know the ending before the writer did. 

3. Geoffrey Hill: "I write / to astonish myself." I've always thought of "astonish" as deriving from "turn to stone" but the OED tells me this is probably wrong (the word is as likely as not to have come from Latin "extonare" which has to do with loud noises -- tones -- rather than stones).

4. Meteorite contamination is hard to avoid.

5. This paper about what should count as a "mechanism" in the philosophy of science is a excellent example of that field's decline into scholasticism.

6. I remember having a conversation a couple of days ago about the bases on which people are likely to discriminate against others in the future. My view is that they're likely to find something. Chesterton's essay "On lying in bed" captures the dynamic I had in mind quite well (I have very little sympathy with C's politics but much more with his attitude toward the future -- I share his dislike of fastidiousness about little things while also extending this dislike to fastidiousness about big things):

The tone now commonly taken toward the practice of lying in bed is hypocritical and unhealthy. Of all the marks of modernity that seem to mean a kind of decadence, there is none more menacing and dangerous that the exaltation of very small and secondary matters of conduct at the expense of very great and primary ones, at the expense of eternal ties and tragic human morality. If there is one thing worse that the modern weakening of major morals, it is the modern strengthening of minor morals. Thus it is considered more withering to accuse a man of bad taste than of bad ethics. [...] Especially this is so in matters of hygiene; notably such matters as lying in bed. Instead of being regarded, as it ought to be, as a matter of personal convenience and adjustment, it has come to be regarded by many as if it were a part of essential morals to get up early in the morning. It is upon the whole part of practical wisdom; but there is nothing good about it or bad about its opposite.

Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before.