sunday best-of blogging

most thinly veiled inappropriate comment: a coworker went out of his way to tell me how much he liked my outfit on monday. my outfit was exactly the same as every other outfit i've ever worn, except that the pants were tighter. this same coworker once told toadie, on a day when she was wearing an especially fitted shirt, how much better it looked than the "sacks" she usually wore. poor guy. he tries.

most porn-star-licious pet name: baby seemore, and yes, that is the actual spelling, but hold on to your hats, kids, because it gets better: baby is a little white dog who was brought to the hospital because he was vomiting, and when the doctor asked if he might have gotten into anything, the owner said he had been known to eat lotion and vaseline.

best forgotten bit of dane cook trivia: i seem to be the only person on earth who remembers that several years ago the cookster was chubby and doing promotional spots for the crocodile hunter on animal planet. this is a shame, because they were as funny as anything else he's ever done, and he's a damned funny guy. there's no need to worry about him not receiving proper recognition, though; every spot won an award while it was airing (you'll have to scroll down a ways for the evidence). i, personally, treasure their memory the way i do jon stewart's mtv stand-up appearance and file them similarly under the heading, "moment birds first suddenly appeared."

best gesture of selfless and unpremeditated affection: a man was walking with his dog when the dog suddenly sat down and began to struggle fruitlessly to scratch a spot that it couldn't quite reach, directly behind its right ear. the man, who had gotten more than a few steps ahead of his dog before he realized it had stopped walking, turned around, ran back to it, and scratched the bejeezus out of his dog's head. when he and his dog were satisfied, they gazed adoringly at each other for a moment and then went on their way.

best rescue of a cherished philosophy: the winners of the nobel prize in physics were announced on tuesday. roy j. glauber of harvard university won half the prize for his work demonstrating how the particle nature of light can affect its behavior, and john l. hall and theodor w. haensch shared the remaining half for other work that can be used to refine the precision of laser optics. now, the first article i read said this:

Hall, 71, of the University of Colorado, and Haensch, 63, of the Ludwig-Maximilian-Universitaet in Munich, won "for their contributions to the development of laser-based precision spectroscopy, including the optical frequency comb technique." Their research determined the color of light at the atomic and molecular level.

oh, this upset me. this upset me terribly, because one of my favorite ideas in atomic physics, and in general, is this, from werner heisenberg's on the history of the physical interpretation of nature:

according to democritus, atoms had lost the qualities like colour, taste, etc., they only occupied space, but geometrical assertions about atoms were admissible and required no further analysis. in modern physics, atoms lose this last property, they possess geometrical qualities in no higher degree than colour, taste, etc. the atom of modern physics can only be symbolized by a partial differential equation in an abstract multidimensional space. only the experiment of an observer forces the atom to indicate a position, a colour and a quantity of heat. all the qualities of the atom of modern physics are derived, it has no immediate and direct physical properties at all, i.e. every type of visual conception we might wish to design is, eo ipso, faulty. ...the knowledge of the colour of a body is only made possible at the expense of the knowledge of the atomic and electronic movements within this body.

an observable macroscopic body possesses a nature entirely different from the individual natures of its microscopic parts, and even that observed nature exists only at the insistence of the observer, and according to his or her enforced parameters. light can have color, based on the arrangement and movement of the photons making up the stream, but the photons themselves don't exhibit any such properties in any honest sense. we inflict a nature upon the objects around us, rather than truly understanding the full inherent nature of those objects, because that's the most our senses allow us to do. you can have the sum or you can have the parts, but you can't have it all simultaneously. of course, the idea of simultaneity is the subject of a different debate, one that i'll spare you today. my obscure point is that i adore this idea, that our most strongly supported knowledge is still at some level inference and supposition, because it keeps me, personally, humble and grounded. we can do the best we can do and that's all, even if it's never the best that can be done. i also think it's a great argument for not attempting to greatly alter or constrain naturally occurring phenomena, because there isn't a way to grasp the fullest full extent of your actions.

*whew* so, hearing that some men had determined the color of light at the atomic level made me very sad. it made me so sad that i couldn't accept it and went rummaging through the internet looking for some facts to refute it with, and, as it turned out, i didn't have to look at all far. differently, probably more appropriately, worded versions of the same article said this:

"...John Hall and Theodor Haensch share the other half of the prize for their development of laser-based precision spectroscopy, that is, the determination of the colour of the light of atoms and molecules with extreme precision," the assembly said in its citation.

"The important contributions by John Hall and Theodor Haensch have made it possible to measure frequencies with an accuracy of 15 digits," the assembly added. "Lasers with extremely sharp colours can now be constructed and with the frequency comb technique precise readings can be made of light of all colours."

that's better. the color of the light of atoms is quite different from the color of atoms. a photon is an energy-carrying particle emitted by an atom, so an atom can give off multiple photons that could collectively create light that was observed to be of a given color, while the atom itself was still free of any such characteristic. and i can carry on in my own private, gloriously unknowable idaho.

best collection of high-quality, easy-access shirley q. liquor sound clips: thank you, k.r. wilson kirkpatrick! shirley's section is at the bottom of his page. he doesn't have "the 12 days of kwanzaa," and that's sad, but if you play "hamsters" and "the white woman song" back to back, you'll cheer right up. please take the boy's advice and download these to your computer if you're going to listen to them multiple times, so the site can continue to function and we can all bask in ms. liquor's garishly eyeshadowed glow.

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