Wink, Wink

I was at a dinner party last night with an outspoken woman.  I don't know how the subject came up but she claimed to hate winks.  She said, "It's just so gross and slimy, and people who do it -- eeeew.  I just can't stand it."  So of course I defended winking.  Which meant I winked at her often, and at everyone else around the dinner table, for the rest of the evening.  The other four people at dinner caught on pretty quickly and started winking right back.  It was fun.  The outspoken woman would exclaim, "Eeeew!" when I winked at her in the middle of an unrelated conversation.  There are so many different kind of winks.  The four of us wink-defenders launched into a whole set of statements whose meaning was changed if you said them with a wink.   Sometimes when we winked at each other we could make one another laugh; almost always we made each other smile. 

I love winks.  You can wink at somebody to convey a million different things.  To me it's generally friendly and playful.  Sometimes it's flirty.  Sometimes its just an acknowledgment of a little specialness, and of the power of eye contact.  I see you, I see you seeing me, and isn't it fun?  Yes, sometimes winks are slimy, I guess.  But I just couldn't see the rationale for this woman's revulsion.  As dinner progressed she started giggling when I would wink at her, and saying, "you're really good at that."  She even tried to wink back a time or two.   Maybe she started to see it differently.

Find someone to wink at today.  If winking is outlawed, only outlaws will wink. 

Comments

[kristine]

When my husband and I were first dating, he used to wink at me and I'd tell him it made my heart leap in my chest. Now it's one of our disgusting married tics—he winks, and I clutch at my chest. Then we both giggle.

[b]

Delivery and timing is everything. never pull the trigger until you can see the whites of her eys. Bang with the index finger never hurts.

Master it and it is not slimmy

Nudge, nudge

[Da Goddess]

It's all about intent. Personally, I love winks. I love giving them and receiving them. You sound like my kind of friend.

[matt]

;-)

[Monjo]

Some people can not wink. I think I should go stand in front of a mirror and practice. Then I shall practice my duck and roll to avoid any slaps that could follow.

[Jeff]

Commonwealth v. Holden, 134 A.2d 868 (Pa. 1957).

Defendant is convicted of murder. Justice Musmanno's impassioned dissent discusses the many and varied interpretations of a winks, the alleged interpretation of which was crucial evidence in the case.

Says Musmanno - "Holden was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. He might have been sentenced to death. On a wink.... The refusal of this Court to grant a new trial, with so momentous a violation of the defendant's rights, duly noted and excepted to on the record, would suggest that here the law has not only winked but closed both eyes!"

[Scheherazade]

If anyone wants to email me a .pdf or word version of the case cited above, I'd love to read it. (But have no LEXIS/Westlaw access, alas).

[UPDATE: Thanks, friend, for sending it along. No need for further copies.]

[SF Librarian]

There's nothing sexier than a guy who knows how to wink at just the right moment, but it's hard to describe exactly what separates the ho-hum winkers from the experts -- it defies description. As Justice Stewart said, "I know it when I see it."

[Emily]

Sadly, as this post reminds me, winking is one of the things I just cannot do. I can flare my nostrils, wiggle my ears, cross my eyes, and raise one eyebrow - but for the life of me, I just can't wink! I envy all of you talented winkers out there.

[Margaret]

I think winking is very playful, but I don't have the knack for it. I look rather constipated if I even try.I will stick to smiling.

[PG]

I can only wink when I yawn. Which may be a mixed signal.

[Ted]

I think that it is totally cool if a guy or a girl winks at me. I find it really interesting for both of us to play catch with a toilet seat. It relates to the fourth dimension and area 51 due to overburdened government funds. Don't eat ch33z3 and spr1t3 at t3h same time. You will get high on water. Swimming pools are not for drunken sailors. Please keep that kind of irresponsible activity for you ship, mates. Remember that the price of gold is volatile, don't buy any long term positions in a skew. Electrosis of water is dangerous. Don't play with matches. Gasoline can set your liver on fire when not used in appropriate doses. Be sure to not leave your Ipod in the hands of criminals or in the premisis of a jail or other criminal facility. Remember, your alibi for winking is that you just blinked not winked. Don't try to get men that are with their wives it is not a good idea. Remember to always double check your multiple choice questions in case you chose an answer that wasn't there. Try to think. It's good for you. Getting rejected is the only way to succeed. Maybe your face is giving mixed signals of vomiting or other ailments mankind yet has to discover. Maybe Jack Layton can help us find the path with no obstacles that probably doesn't lead anywhere but then why would there be a path there because all paths in life lead somewhere but you just never know if the path is still there or it is changing due to increased industrial production. The release of the new Catarpillar truck series 440 features 600lb of torque with an astonishing 9000 horsepower or wait is it Caterpower? What is in your wallet? Mine contains a library card. Having fun isn't hard when you've got a library card. Don't know what fun can be done without no sun!

[John Candelstick]

Wow Ted you sure do have an interesting social life. Exactly what kind of loser are you to take all of that time to write that stuff when it doesn't even relate to the topic? Half of the stuff you said in their doesn't even make sense. Why do you like it if guys OR girls wink at you? Playing catch with a toilet seat is fun but it is not interesting. I prefer the more stable type of racing horse. If you give a man a fish, he will eat for a day. If you teach a man to fish, he will die becasue fish only contain so many amounts of proteins and essential amino acids that your body requires and is unable to produce.
To look into the heart of matter, nuclear physicists need powerful microscopes. These microscopes are called particle accelerators, and Jefferson Lab's particle accelerator, CEBAF, probes the nucleus of the atom by sending a stream of electrons crashing into it. Giant detectors help physicists paint a picture of what the nucleus looks like by allowing physicists to see what happens as a result of the collisions.
Currently, CEBAF produces a beam of electrons with up to six billion electron-volts (6 GeV) of energy. Physicists can choose how many electrons they want to send into a target nucleus, what energy they want the electrons to have, how often they want a bunch of electrons to hit the target, and the spin of the electrons when they hit the target. Changing these parameters gives physicists complementary pictures of nuclei.
Now, the community of nuclear physicists wants to upgrade CEBAF by doubling the electron's energy. This will allow physicists to get clearer pictures of the finer details of nuclear structure. This project, called the 12 GeV Upgrade, will offer a unique opportunity for nuclear physicists to expand our knowledge of the building blocks of everyday matter. In particular, it will allow groundbreaking research in the following five major areas.
1. Researchers will now be able to look into the structure of atomic nuclei, exploring how the valence quark structure is modified in a dense nuclear medium. These studies will give the world a far deeper and more fundamental understanding of the structure of atomic nuclei, with far-reaching implications for all of nuclear physics and nuclear astrophysics.
While the nucleus is built of protons and neutrons, protons and neutrons are made of quarks and gluons. The three permanent quarks in each proton and neutron, called valence quarks, swap gluons. This swapping of gluons glues quarks together into protons and neutrons and glues protons and neutrons into nuclei.
Nuclei are far from being a static, uninteresting collection of particles; they're both dynamic and complex. For instance, if you take a proton out of the nucleus, it behaves far differently than it did when inside. What's more, a proton in a nucleus with just a few other protons and neutrons behaves differently than one in a nucleus with many. The 12 GeV Upgrade will allow physicists to find out just how protons are changed inside nuclei.
To grasp this, physicists need a better understanding of how quarks build nuclei. They have theories that allow them to describe how quarks and gluons make nucleons and how nucleons make nuclei. But inside nuclei, quarks in one nucleon are interacting with quarks in other nucleons. In essence, the nucleus can be seen as just a collection of quarks and gluons.
Physicists hope one day to be able to describe how these interacting quarks build nuclei from the bottom up. The 12 GeV Upgrade will make a vital contribution to this program by providing a unique potential for discovery. Allowing scientists a peek into the inner workings of the very building blocks of matter will help them make discoveries about ordinary matter and the matter found in the hearts of stars, like our sun.
2. A second area of research that the upgrade will make possible deals with the Generalized Parton Distributions (GPDs), which will allow researchers, for the first time, to engage in nuclear tomography, discovering the true three-dimensional structure of the nucleon.
Since protons and neutrons are the building blocks of the nucleus, physicists often refer to them as nucleons. Currently, our pictures of these particles consist of form factors - equations that describe the shape of nucleons. There are also parton distribution functions, which provide a one-dimensional snapshot of where quarks are in the nucleon.
Painstaking probes of nucleons helped physicists develop these descriptions, but they're far from being complete, providing only glimpses at slices of the nucleon's shape. What physicists would like to have is the ability to integrate these slices, in much the same way that a CAT scan machine takes many different x-ray picture slices of the body and integrates them into a 3-D picture.
GPDs will allow that. They are experimentally measurable quantities that physicists can use to map out the location and momentum of partons -- the quarks and gluons -- inside a nucleon. For physicists to use GPDs to their full potential, however, high-quality data, such as that made available by the 12 GeV Upgrade, is needed.
3. The combination of luminosity, duty factor and kinematic reach of the 12 GeV machine will far surpass anything available up to this point, allowing the nuclear physics community a previously impossible view of the spin and flavor dependence of the valence parton distributions - the heart of the proton, where its quantum numbers are determined.
As building blocks of the proton, valence quarks provide a major contribution to the proton's physical properties, such as its mass, size, spin, and electric and magnetic fields. These properties, and others, are represented by the proton's quantum numbers. Physicists have shown that the 12 GeV Upgrade will yield a clear view of the proton and its quarks, as well as a snapshot of how the proton's building blocks influence its structure.
The 12 GeV Upgrade will provide a nearly continuous (high duty factor) beam of higher-energy electrons (luminosity) that will allow physicists to peer deeper (kinematic reach) into the nucleon. These qualities will allow physicists an unprecedented snapshot of valence quarks and their associated gluons in the proton.
4. Through search for exotic mesons, which contain gluons as an unavoidable part of their structure, researchers will explore the fascinating and complex vacuum structure of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) and the nature of confinement.
Nuclear physicists will also be looking at other forms of matter. For instance, mesons, which usually contain just two quarks and their associated gluons compare to the proton's three, can be studied as well. Mesons are already all around us; they're created by cosmic rays as they strike Earth's atmosphere, for instance. It's hoped that a special kind of meson, an exotic meson, will be created in an upgraded CEBAF.
These exotic mesons are produced by exciting the gluons that bind quarks together via the strong force. The strong force is manifested by quarks as they swap gluons. It is so strong, in fact, that you'll never find a single quark alone, a property of quarks called confinement.
The strong force is described by QCD. According to QCD, the strong force permeates the vacuum, the so-called empty space, at the level of subatomic particles. The force and its gluons become more concentrated near quarks, providing extra background energy for quark interactions.
Producing exotic mesons will allow physicists to test QCD's description of the strong force. Though predicted by QCD, many of these exotic mesons have never been seen before, and identifying them and their properties will provide information on the strong force, how it confines quarks, and how it contributes to the structure of everyday matter.
5. Lastly, through extremely high precision studies of parity violation, developed in order to study the role of hidden flavors in the nucleon, researchers using the upgraded CEBAF can explore physics beyond the Standard Model, on an energy scale that cannot be carried out even with the proposed International Linear Collider.
The Standard Model describes fundamental particles, such as quarks, gluons and electrons, and their interactions. So far, tests of this model have shown that it's accurate. However, the upgrade will provide new opportunities for probing the model's limits.
Discovering if and where the Standard Model fails will allow physicists to develop ever more accurate and inclusive theories of matter, providing insights into the fundamental particles that comprise the world around us.

[John Candelstick]

Sorry the following article is copyrighted from the website Retrieved November 20 from the internet:http://www.jlab.org/div_dept/dir_off/public_affairs/news_releases/2005/12gev.html. Sorry I didnt include that in the original post.

[deea]

I don't like winking, too, and I'd probably consider it rude and annoying if then someone started to wink all the time. The "ouspoken" woman had only expressed her opinion on smth and you started doing exactely the thing she didn't like. I think she was only trying to be polite when winking back to you.
No offence.