What is the Magyar for woodpecker?

When we came back to Ireland in 1990, we lived in a rented farmhouse out by Dublin Airport, maybe 12km N of O'Connell Bridge. My landlord mentioned that he had done his homework at the kitchen table by paraffin lamp until, when he turned 16, rural electrification f i n a l l y rolled out to his parish and he could see what he was doing after dark. I never got a date on that or indeed Paddy's DoB, but early-50s seemed correct. The Shannon Scheme went live in 1929. Our house was built in 1941 probably w/o the 'lectric. 

A few days ago, through the drizzle, I heard a car-door slam and went to chekkitout: because we were expecting UPS and they needed to turn where that car was probably parked. It was a white van and the driver was thrashing about in our shrubberies on the other side of the lane!?! Turns out he was a contractor for ESB networks checking to see if the electricity poles hereabouts were fit for purpose. I told him I knew that 'our' poles had been installed in Spring 1997. That's information but only a proxy for whether the poles were fit for purpose. And, he added, you're wrong: this pole was erected in 1956 ['56 as circled R]. I had to defer to his domain of knowledge and admit that I had been incorrect about the number of new utility poles (N = 1 [✓]) we got in 1997. And indeed, now I had the correct search-image, I walked downhill to other pole and found a similar tinplate label with "1997" on it.

Me, as a Network Know-nothing, might have put more credence in another sign [L] on the first pole saying "COBRA 1978". Both poles have QR-codes that will contain a lot more information about signage, location, quality, provenance, age; but I don't read QR. We continued to chat in the not-quite-drizzle. Transpired that this Effective had been born and brought up in Hungary but was here because the work was here. Go! Stay The New Irish. Hours of electronic training playing Grand Theft Auto really don't equip the Youth of Today to stand a ladder up against a pole in the rain. It was just as well that we'd had Glavey Tree Experts in July to thin out the jungle and trim some, fell some, trees around that electric pole. According to my new Magyar pal, the best tool for assessing the utility of utility poles is a hammer. Like a um woodpecker! The first few tonks by a woodpecker can assess whether wood is hollow enough to support insects enough to make this tree worth the effort. Apparently ESB networks had, several years ago, acquired a ship-load of Swedish poles which below standard wrt core integrity as per contract and these had attracted A Lot of woodpeckers in a futile hunt for insects.

I've noted before that hitting things with a hammer can yield key information for stone-masons. 

And farmers can get compensated for having ESB poles on their land. Who knew? 

And I'm sure you're hopping about for the answer to 
Q. What is the Magyar for woodpecker?
A. Our newly re-native woodpecker is Dendrocopos major = the great spotted woodpecker. In Hungary they call it nagy [big] fakopáncs or harkály. My Dec'25 conversation about birds was a lot easier [not to say charged with electricity] than one I had [Garrulus glandarius = Vlaamse gaai = Jay] with a monoglot farmer from Gelderland in 1975.

Two degrees of connexion

So what's it to be with crime - punishment or rehabilitation? Having done stupid, dangerous, illegal and cruel things in my life [but not all at once!] I vote for rehabilitation. Recent Blob disagreeing with the cries of bang 'em up and throw away the key for killers. 

The Boy 'takes' The Economist, and sends me their weekly Simply Science round-up. I read most of this and occasionally ask for a guest-link to the full article. Second week in December there was a piece on quantum physics about which I know as much as would fit on a photon. I perked up at “Don’t worry your head about what’s really going on,” was the attitude of the early quantum engineers, according to Paul Davies, a physicist at Arizona State University. “This is the so-called ‘Shut up and calculate’ school.” Those engineers ended up creating semiconductors, leading to the device that you’re using to read this, and much more. But only because Paul Davies (physicist, writer and broadcaster) [R] and I were both on the U.NuponT payroll at the same time in the 80s. Even back then Davies was a star and he started his meteoric rise to the firmament while hop-scotching through 7 prestigious Universities on three different continents. Knocking off 28 [!] popular science books along the way . . . as well as his day job pubs.

I double checked in Wikipedia that 'my' Paul Davies in 1980s Newcastle was the same bloke as the Economist sound-byter in the 2020s [✓]. My eye slid down the page to Davies was a co-author on the 2011 Science article "A Bacterium That Can Grow by Using Arsenic Instead of Phosphorus". Whoa! We know that paper! It was cited by Tony Kavanagh [on The Blob] - extraordinary claims require extraordinary levels of proof, and in this case not even ordinary levels of proof had been carried out. Eeee, he were quite cross, our Tony! Back in 2013, I didn't scrutinize the [N = 12] authors but in 2025 I was in name-and-blame mode and I saw John F Stolz on the list.

I know that guy too. He was in Boston University graduate school at the same time as me 45 years ago! He was doing a PhD on stromatolites and early-early microbial life-forms with . . . Lynn Margulis my late lamented friend and mentor. I guess he had something to add to The Arsenic Paper: having a lifetime of expertise in the oddbiome. As a co-author, you have, in the first instance, to trust that your colleagues are doing the work assigned to them. If we could flip eppendorfs AND grind multivariate statistics AND GIMP graphics then we wouldn't need graduate students and/or to 'buy-in' expertise from another institution. Paul Davies not so much??: Apparently he said "I had the advantage of being unencumbered by knowledge. I dropped chemistry at the age of 16, and all I knew about arsenic came from Agatha Christie novels." WTF? Why are you endorsing the paper if ya know nuttin'? It is entirely possible that, given the power of celebrity in our culture, that adding his name to the Arsenic Paper's author list helped bring it to the attention of the editorial board of Science - and then get it over the line and into print. Of course, that editorial board [and at least two independent referees] were culpable for publishing sexy without conducting due diligence - to get ahead in the Nature vs Science rating wars.

I must add that there is no suggestion that anyone on The Arsenic Paper was making stuff up or finagling the data or being dishonest. But when you think you've found something exo-biology extra-ordinary never found on Earth before then you need extraordinary levels of proof which means going the extra mile to be sure to be sure that you're not going to finish up with a red face.

Maybe I am the connecting link between Stolz and Davies: I'm quite prone to being credulous: my first reaction to a compelling sciencey headline is more likely to be Hey that's neat rather than sounds like a loada bollix. Perhaps Dulled Crap Detector DCD is a contagious virus and I was the vector. That Arsenic Paper was a) controversial and b) conclusively shown to be wrong within a year of publication but it continued in a zombie state to be available online in Science until July this year. when it was RETRACTED. Which is perhaps inappropriate? Because the team may have been wrong but they weren't doing anything wrong. If you can't be wrong in Science you're not close enough to the cutting edge. And <tsk!> the News&Views layperson summary to the paper (which I cited in my 2013 Blob) is still failing to flag that the original paper is suspect; giving ammunition and succour to bad-faith nut-jobs from the Planet Zorg.

And hello Jason Hosken at The Economist who put together the relevant Simply Science round-up which started me off on this rant: when you're looking for a quote next time maybe look over the shoulder of Paul Davies to find someone with less tarnish on their street cred.

Before I sign off, let's emphasize that we should condemn the sin and not the sinner. Everyone can make a mistake or even, like me, do stupid, dangerous, illegal and cruel things. The correct response is not to cross the street when we see them coming, refuse them work or healthcare. Then again it's okay to remember past transgressions and factor that into how we move forward. Life isn't black and  white  it's beige.

BobTheSidebar

After 2030 days contributing to MetaFilter, 
67 Front Page Posts FPPs, and 
1337 comments 
finally . . . BobTheSidebar. It's one of the advantages to having written +2 million words of copy: there is an extensive mine of material to cut and paste. No sucking the pencil required. Obvs, the intersect between what has interested me in the past and what might be relevant to MetaFilter today ie (Blob  MeFi) is not q u i t e ∅ the null set but - close.

But here I was able to rob a couple of Blobs [counting and Wageningen] to edify MeFi.

Except the Black hoggett

 Over on MetaFilter, there is a section where ppl can and do Ask questions and the community offer solutions. The Asks [a technical term] can be practical or peculiar but the responses must be on message and in good faith or they are likely to get deleted. There was a recent Ask about the experience and embrace of The Night. It has a bit of a "internet please do my home-work for me" vibe. But there were a number of nice responses from crepuscular and noctambulant MeFites. Like Paul Simon I'm a "hello darkness my old friend" sorta guy and have done dumbass things in tunnels and in bunkers [same link]. Spelunking is another, lesser, level of hazard; and it's no picnic at Sleat's Gill. The other example of finding comfort in the dark for me was when I barfed up a half kilo of undercooked cabbage in Sandymount 25 years ago.

But falsedmitri wasn't getting any of that from me. Rather I shared a part of my normal experience working as The Outdoor Man on our farmlet. I have found to my cost that, if sheep die [and they do!], it's Much better to find, and handle, them "fresh" rather than bloated buzzing and in bits.  Earlier this year The Beloved bought 4 lambs from a neighbour to keep flock numbers up to quota.  It seemed like a good idea at the time to include a pure black ewelet and three reg'lar Cheviots. They grew up together and are still quite stand-offish from the other older sheep in their new home.

My AskMefi answer: I "look the hill" on the regular counting the sheep, incl last thing at night. Sheep are just the perfick thing to count in the dark . . . except the black hoggett. She's often hard to locate in full daylight. Finding her (alert, on four good legs) in the shadows is a Win and a comfort. The very next morning I was out super early because a big front of rain was incommming - and who likes to BoPeep while soaking wet if it can be avoided? And I came up One short in the count. Dang!  But I heartened in twigging that BlackOne was the AWOL and it was more likely a hidden in plain sight than a expired in the bushes problem. And sure enough . . . there are two [2] sheep in this view:

Crap pixellated photo is only part of the perception problem.  Here's the clue:

It's like Antonioni's Blow-Up [1966] in which a professional photographer in London's swinging sixties may have found evidence of a murder in the background of one of his fashion pictures. If you haven't seen Blow-Up, you're missing something whoa weird.

My people My People

On St John's Day 2022, I broke out of the confines of Coronarama and drove across country to the University of Limerick UL to attend the 1st VIBE [Virtual Institute of Bioinformatics and Evolution] meeting after the lockdowns and disruptions of the pandemic. I've been involved in these events from the very beginning in 2002; and played myne host on two occasions 2006 and 2014. That June day in '22 started off with great promise as I sauntered across country in Summer sunshine but the weather turn cold with showers by tea-time and my voyage home was less exuberant. The weather was a pathetic fallacy of how I felt inside.

When I started "analyzing DNA and protein sequences" in 1990 that was the definition of Bioinformatics and our small lab in Dublin was really at the cutting edge. The sequences which I was analyzing were drawn from databases which were tiny by today's standards and I was expected to curate them carefully to eliminate sequencing duplicates and minor genetic variants but retain cases where two or more genes had accumulated changes after duplication from a common ancestor. My first paper considered all 45 genes that were then available for the fungus Aspergillus nidulans. I read every paper associated with each of those genes. In those days it cost ~€1 to sequence one DNA basepair. 20 years later the price was 10 million times cheaper.

And ten years later at the 2022 VIBE, The Effectives were a) 40 years younger than me and b) cranking through datasets which were 40 million times larger. Obvs, these young turks were not reading all the relevant papers, let alone with care and attention. And the analysis hinged on using "pipelines" of concatenated software, some of which they'd acquired off the shelf and some were hundreds of lines of Python all their own work. I had a nice nostalgic lunch with a couple of other crumblies and I did chat to some of the youngsters. But at the end of the day, driving home in the drizzle, I quoted Tennyson "

. . . The old order changeth, yielding place to new,

And God fulfils Himself in many ways,

Lest one good custom should corrupt the world . . .

and resolved to find myself an iceflow rather than going to the next VIBE. So I missed 2023 at QUB Belfast and 2024 NUIGalway but didn't miss missing them. 

In early 2025,  word went out that VIBE was coming full circle back to TCD to celebrate 25 years of sharing ideas about sequences and evolution in Ireland.

• Dublin is a lot more easy of access than Limerick, Belfast or Galway
• I got me bus-pass
• I'd been sort of supervising [by zoom and email] one of the TCD Effectives who might be presenting her work
• Having been at TCD man and boy, I know where all the t'ilets are - not unimportant for an old chap
• They promised a free lunch and there was hope for some merch

I had a great time. There were a few people of my generation, and several of the next generation with whom I'd worked back in the day. And I got to meet 'my' Effective as she stood by 'our' poster. I could follow many of the talks in the morning session - because they were talking more about evolution and less about pipelines. Some of them made me think and/or question my certainties. All in all, a pretty good day.

But come 5 o'clock I was done. I'd been awake for 12 hours. The afternoon session was leaning towards the software end of our field and I was lost at the second or third slide of each prez. But I had an Exit Strategy which was to go out to dinner with Dau.I and Dau.II. We went sub-continental and it was biryani dahlicious. They gave me a bed for the night and I went home by train into Storm Bram the next morning. Midmorning on a weekday Heuston Station is very quiet, and I was able to find a seat to wait my train. A while back Irish Rail installed a public piano in the station concourse and a young bloke was tinkling away on it to pass the time. But the tannoy called the Cork train and he left and nobody took cudgels to the keyboard. There was no Christmas Music which was a relief and a blessing and I had a rather good ear-book.

Eating the seed corn, Not

Dau.I-the-Book was recently working in Coolock Branch Library, settled in the shadow of the Nort'side Shopping Centre, Dublin 17. I wrote a tuthree book-reviews for their newsletter. Dau.I WAS SINCE promoted [woot!] and moved to other libradventures. But a former colleague messaged "your Dad's a scientist, maybe he's like this science book whc I noticed on the return-to-shelf trolley". Which is an engagingly naive view of the eclectic reading habits of yer average scientist. Most of us are woefully hyper-focused: knowing more & more about less & less.

That's how I got to read The Forbidden Garden of Leningrad: A True Story of Science and Sacrifice in a City under Siege by Simon Parkin. Lots to reflect on here. The key theme is the question "what / who shall be saved" . . . when armageddon arrives. As The End of Times are round the corner, these are not merely metaphorical meanderings. Parkin is at pains to use Latin binomers for the species which form part of the extensive but still meagre diet of Leningraders who survived the first dreadful Winter of the siege. Sorrel Rumex acetosella [✓], coltsfoot Tussilago farfara [χ]  - it's the carcinogenic pyrrolozidine alkaloids innit? 

When I was a schoolboy one standard history text was AJP Taylor's The Origin of the Second World War [1961]. It's been a while but I don't remember a chapter on Sleepwalking but that's a big part of how The Allies finished up in WWII. On 23 Aug 1939, one week before Germany invaded Poland, (and my mother sheltered [briefly] under the kitchen table) Foreign Ministers Molotov RU and von Ribbentrop DE signed a non-aggression pact. Over the next two years, the Soviets sold 1.6 million tonnes of grain to the Reich and continued to do so right up until the launch of Unternehmen Barbarossa on 22 June 1941. Stalin was a delusional ideologue: he wanted the world to mirror the ideals of Marxist-Leninism and really didn't like being told that he was wrong. Accordingly, bat-shit five year plans for Soviet agriculture resulted in famine and failure and those responsible were taken out and shot for not trying hard enough. From being students in the 1970s we were always aware of Nikolai Vavilov [stamp R] as a Good Geneticist, pally and parity with the Best of the West in the 20s and 30s. He was undone as a Morgan-Mendelist [=Darwinian whose understanding of the world was informed by him being a 19thCC capitalist], condemned as traitor and spy and replaced by Trofim Lysenko during WWII. Lysenko's theories of plant breeding and agronomy were pure Soviet and pure nonsense but very agreeable to Stalin and the Supreme Soviet. Adopting Lysenkoism possibly killed as many people as the Wehrmacht.

Apart from practicing the standard model of genetics, Vavilov was a pioneer in capturing diversity and studying the origin and biogeography of crop plants. He, his students and collaborators travelled widely through the 20s and 30s seeking out the oldest available peasant and taking samples, seeds and cuttings of obscure varieties of vital agricultural species: potatoes, wheat, rye, barley, pulses, apples everything. |This precious seed-bank of diversity (and potential resistance to plague and scourge) was brought back to Leningrad and propagated in the Institute's field plots. Vavilov was arrested on a field trip to Ukraine in July 1941 and disappeared into the gulags.

By August 1941, Operation Barbarossa had swept through the Baltic SSRs, surrounded Leningrad and the siege began. In Parkin's book, Vavilov is like the ghost of Hamlet's father: always off stage but always present. He inspired fierce and enduring loyalty from those who worked for the Institute: scientists, but also the secretariat, managers, gardeners, lab.techs, drivers, students and field-workers. Parkin interleaves chapters about Vavilov's prison journey with the main theme of desperate hardship in Leningrad.

The hook that makes the story is that a few dozen people living existing on starvation rations in sub zero [in °F!] temperatures did not eat into several tonnes of irreplaceable heritage seeds which they were hoarding against the dragons without. Those dragons included the German invaders, but also Commissars who didn't care two buttons about scab-resistant wheat, and rodents, and desperate citizens who had loved ones to care for.  Now here's the thing, several of the Institute's staff did indeed die of starvation [and from shrapnel etc.] but having a purpose, being part of The Project, gave the emaciated survivors a reason to live. The sunk costs from their time and trouble in saving the seeds incentivized them to save for the future.

The potatoes were a special case because frost would destroy the seed-tubers and so they had a sell-by date much much shorter than, say tomato seed - which can be good for 20 years. In the Spring of 1942, the citizens of Leningrad were given a commissariat reprieve. The delusions in Moscow and wilful [la la la can't see you] failure to anticipate - or respond appropriately to - Barbarossa had left Leningrad with absurdly depleted reserves when the jaws of the pincer clamped shut in August '41. As soon as the snow melted, there was a concerted effort to plant every available hectare with cabbage and spuds. And educate the people about which weeds were good to eat. The only place left to propagate mere heritage spuds was some fields about a mile from the front lines in full view of German snipers and artillery. The tractors had long ago be shot up and the horses eaten, so the Potato People had to turn sod with shovels and sticks in the dark. And carefully record the location and provenance of each little plot: on the ground and in the ledger. Always anticipating that they could, any of them, die on the instant leaving someone from the future to read their hand-writing. I am sure I don't have it in me to match their courage, determination and fixity of purpose. Hats Off! And hats off to Simon Parkin for digging up the story. brushing off the dirt to reveal a Truth for Our Times.

Media diet

Well, yeah, y'know that's just like your opinion, man.

Over on MetaFilter recently, there was a long and opinionated thread about the nature and ethics of piracy. It's quite difficult to square 
a) journalism is work, journalists should get paid
with
b) there was a time when MegaMedia loaded their intellectual property IP up on the internet and we-all could read it for free. 

I've always maintained that the World would now be a better a place if, like for electricity, we'd all been charged 1c for every MegaByte we 'used'. We'd be more thrifty on the servers. 

Free media was how it was at the Birth of The Blob in 2013/'14/'15. I could surf around the web and read news and commentary; quote something; add my own bit of Talmudary; and post it all on The Blob. Nowadays, not so much, I don't read Food & Wine or Vanity Fair or New Yorker or Nature or Science because they are all behind paywalls. Which is fair enough because journalists should get paid. I'll preen myself a bit by asserting that I always tried / try to add something extra to the debate in any Blobs I posted. Many failed to do that, merely re-churning the basic facts of the case often lifting whole phrases and sentences from the original. A practice [plagiarism] which we used to forbid our students at The Institute. Obvs, my years of Sunday Round-up (mostly YT) were an exception of whc I am now ashamed.

There are ways of circumventing paywalls often involving various archive sites which are trying to capture the ephemeral internet. Just to note that Nature and Science is a slightly different case. Both periodicals employ journalists to write copy: opinion, commentary, overview and explanation. These people are paid and readers should pay for access. But the majority of pages in any issue of these keystone publications are taken up with original primary scientific research reports.  For other scientific journals All the pages are scientific papers. The hard graft of creating the IP and writing about it is already paid for - largely by research grants from government or foundations. So Elsevier are gouging punters when they charge $50 to read one article. Other MegaPublishers are available. I've ranted extensively about this. Sci-Hub will get you older 'copyright' scientific pubs.

Fungible media. But Science is not my beef today. I didn't contribute to the MetaFilter discourse but my hot take is that it don't matter tuppence if you cannot access That article which someone else recommends. If you're alert and curious, the gap in your knowledge will be filled with something else . . . anything else? Literature is fungible, I guess I'm saying. There is plenty of choice [R Easons Waterford Ryw Station 1924]. All grist to the mill of keeping the grey cells active. And maybe less is more? My father enrolled in a speed-reading course at the age of 80 because there was so much to read but so little time. It killed him in the end. 

If you feel you spend too much time restlessly scrolling then cold turkey works for me. I've taken a fortnight off from YouTube, Metafilter in the past just to cool down. And I paused the Blob's Sunday Miscellany a while back because my TY links are contributing to someone else's glazed-eye dopamine issues aka GEDI.

Of course if you're alert and specifically curious you will have already subscribed to Matchboxes Quarterly or Model Railway Tunneller.