Moneta Roma Antiqua

A parapal on Metfilter recommended Moneta: A History of Ancient Rome in Twelve Coins (2024) by Gareth Harney. Obediently, I reserved a copy and it came to my local library quicker than average. The Blob's book-world has been in similar listicle-land before: 

• A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor 
• also A History of Ireland in 100 Objects by Fintan O'Toole;   
• A history of Ireland in 100 words by Arbuthnot, Ní Mhaonaigh and Toner. 

Moneta is not 12/100ths the length of those other books, because the publishing world doesn't work like that. It is, therefore, more discursive and less exec summ; and definitely not the worse for that treatment. Indeed, I ripped through its 300&some pages in a tuthree days and popped out the other end feeling better informed and indeed smarter.  I'd be quite the pub bore about it for the next couple of weeks . . . if I ever went out.

Harney's journey was set when, as boy, his father gifted him a small silver coin that was "Older than both world wars, older than Shakespeare, had already existed for a millennium when Harold took an arrow in the eye at Hastings". It takes a certain romantic imagination to evoke just how long the tiny artifact had survived and through whose hands it might have travelled. Roman coins have turned up in Ireland, Iceland and Indonesia: places where the writ imperial never ran.  

The book, not stinting its brief, features a lot more than the 12 coins which head up the twelve chapters: Wolf -- Nemesis -- Dictator -- Ides -- Pax -- Kingmakers -- Arena -- Zenith -- Philosopher -- Split -- Cross -- Collapse. You might, like me, guess that Ides centres et tu Brute; Arena centres the Colosseum; and Philosopher centres Marcus Aurelius: whose likeness continues to grace the Italian 50c coin [L]. I knew a lot more Roman history, myths and legends when I was 12 than when I'm 72. I hadn't thought about Romulus and Remus being orphaned and suckled by a wolf for decades but Chapter One dredged the image up from my memory and gave it a brisk polish. Where does memory lurk unbidden for so long and still be available for recall?

We were in Roma briefly in 1978 passing through in a Citroën Dyane on the way to Sicily. I remember the Colosseum, largely because it was crawling with cats and I was going to the 1st Conference of Cat Population Genetics and Ecology. But I am now booting myself that we didn't pause to marvel at Trajan's Column, which features on a golden aureus at the head of Chapter VIII, Zenith. The column is a story-on-a-stick with 23 helical turns unrolling to 200m of graphics show-and-telling Trajan's trans-Danube adventures conquering the province of Dacia. The column had to be 100 Roman feet = 38m tall to match the height of Quirinal Hill which was carted away in baskets to level the area for the Column and ancillary Forum. The column is a stack of 20x 32 tonne marble drums. Nobody denies that the Romans were determined and effective engineers.

The conquest of Dacia resulted in the acquisition of 320 of gold and 450 tonnes of silver. Much of that was minted into 30 million aurei and 160 million denarii to dole out to the Praetorian Guard and pay for bread and circuses. Ice cores from Greenland document the quality of the atmosphere over the last 100,000 years. There is spike in the lead Pb content, as a by-product of silver smelting, that peaked in the 2ndC and died away to nothing for the next 16 centuries until industrial pollution really cranked up in the late 1700s.

I could go on, but it's all spoilers, and you'll want to get the book out of the library when I return it. 

Report from Spring

blob lady bird lane lump buds blue fire

We're past the Equinox & Bealtaine & Liberation Day NL, and no late frost, so Spring must be sprong. As evidence I found the first ladybird Coccinella septempunctata this year (&/or several years) on mint Mentha spicata. And across the lane, blossoms on the damson tree [sorry about focus fail]. Having missed a late frost I have high hopes of damson Prunus domestica (jam) later.

Just uphill from the damson is a beleaguered apple tree Malus; much festooned in brambles, but that too is chock full o' blossom. And opposite the gate the lilac Syringa vulgaris is running a little behind the apple sporting only buds not blossoms . . . as yet. 

So much for fecundity! There has also been damage. I was making a last sweep outdoors as darkness fell on 29 Apr 26 when I spotted blue flashing light in the valley at The Cross 500m SE. I wondered and wandered through the fields a-piece to see who had been side-swiped at the junction. 
Answer: nobody. 
It was just a fire-truck and a tender and a few fire-fighters sitting and pacing, as if waiting for an emergency. It never occurred to me to look over my shoulder, and went to bed. I was just settling when our neighbour-across txtd me "Is the fire close to your house?". Clearly not close enough to have me throwing passports into a go-bag. A week later I was doing my annual Spring-scythe down the lane, so that the Blackstairs Walkers (due next Sat) might believe we cared about their free-passage. I tugged an eye-level swooping fern and tumbled a rock off the top of ditch. Lesson: Never play football with something larger than a football!

Tuesday, three days after 'our' fire made the National news, I walked up the hill to see, from the scorch-marks, how close to your house the fire had been. And, as important, whether it had eaten into 'our' common, thereby docking us all of our EU-subsidy for maintaining a fire-free special upland habitat.

It looks like one of the fires (there were several last week, locally) swept up from Wexford to have nip at the NE corner of our common [boundaries of whc in green]. The Government satellite will scope the details but it's looking like less than 2% of the 200 hectares comprising the common. Blazing heather is a Bad Idea: bad for ground-nesting birds, bad for heather, bad for beetles, bad for the soil microbiome, bad for micro-nutrients, and hill walkers get soot all over their spats. We took it in the neck last year. and in 2022. Please STOP.

Phoenix morning

Last month, I went up to Dublin for an evening symposium on The Idea of a University. It was interesting and informative; but 'ard work trying to take notes like a student. I was relieved to get away because I had a date to spend the night with m'daughters who are bunking together in Dublin 7. Bonus was going for yomp in Phoenix Park with Dau.II in the morning. We caught a bus [free travel for self & companion!] to the distant Ashtown gate and walked back. She is getting to treat The Park as her back-garden / personal gym. Most visits, she will detour to wave at her neighbour Catherine Connolly's house Áras. Like me with Condé na Déise, she is surprised [and quietly delighted] at how empty-of-people such a bountifully interesting area can be. It is 700 hectares in extent, which is a lot bigger than the back-yard of Louis Agassiz but you could still take a life-time of walks there and still be surprised by joy at some peculiar bosky dell or obscure monument: like the tree [R] beside which, on 19Sep15, John McHugh had a myocardial infarction and died coming to the end of a half-marathon and his 24th year. Tough chips, mate, but at least you got to get out to run like the wind while your knees were still up for it. Clearly his friends and relations, and random runners, continue to bide-a-wee and leave a bouquet, or a medal, or a mumbled prayer.

Apart from the Áras, The Park is notable for its several herds of European fallow deer Dama dama, which were introduced 350ish years ago and help keep the grass down. They do an even better job keeping the trees down, so new plantings must be caged in browse-proof fencing tubes until they are big enough and barky enough to take a nibble and survive. Poor deer inevitably run up a bill with ticks Ixodes ricinus but the OPW stoutly maintains that their ticks are not vectors of Lyme Disease Borrelia burgdorferi. Nevertheless it looks like the deer are in a mutualistic relationship with crows Corvus spp.w.r.t. ticks and we saw a tuthree birds pecking about on some cudding deer:

The photo is crap because me . . . we kept, as requested, 50m distant from the poor beasts. Definitely don't want to precipitate a Fenton FENton FENTON event and live in shame forever. FYI, the deer all have year colour-coded ear-tags, so they can be identified when it comes to the annual cull. Yes, about 90 = 15% of the herd is killed and sold for venison each year.

Another less obvious asset in the park is a little but annually increasing grove of oak trees Quercus robur to commemorate the Tidy Towns scheme. A new tree is planted on the regular next to a rather ugly little grave stone recording which community had the best window-boxes, and the most frightening Gauleiter of Litter, that year. It's been running for more than 50 years and the grove is expanding Southwards away from the main road.

Just a perfick morning. Would repeat.

Fib, memory

„Das habe ich getan“ sagt mein Gedächtnis. 
„Das kann ich nicht getan haben“ — sagt mein Stolz und bleibt unerbittlich. 
Endlich — gibt das Gedächtnis nach. Nietzsche (↓)

Dau.I the Librarian, is retro-actively pursuing a B.Sc. in Psych & Soc, after her MLIS. She has been interested in the formal academics of Psychology since she was a teen, so deserves to get a scrap of paper from yet more study of the subject. We-the-family get to hack at her project reports and submissions - thereby learning something new while polishing our crap-detectors. The family that strives together, thrives together? She recently lent me a copy of  The Rag and Bone Shop: How We Make Memories and Memories Make Us (2021) by Veronica O'Keane, who is now Prof of Psychiatry at Trinity College Dublin. This is on message for me because I've been interested in Memory . . . since before the birth of the Blob. The post-title is a riff on Nabakov's autobiographical memoir Speak, Memory [Bloboprev].

Prof O'Keane has lived in exciting times since she was reading psychiatry as a student 40 years ago. Back then, with a straight face, experts would explain Freud's peculiar obsessions with penises and little girls  and how talking might help people get over their madness. Since then tech has delivered much better molecular and cellular mechanisms for when the mind-trolley leaves the tracks of what society allows as normal. And anti-psychotic anti-depressive meds can give a life-changing fix to the unhappy for far less investment than hours, days, years of psycho-therapy. Yes, MegaPharm share-holders win big-time;  yes, there can be egregious side-effects; yes, we are over medicalising normal variation . . . but for hundreds of people in Ireland today medication allows them to get up in the morning and go to work and have a bit of craic, at the water-cooler and the week-end. 

The kind of neurological detail which is now available is that individual neurons in the right hippocampus will fire as a rat-on-a-grid pass a particular location. But that the next neuron to fire (as the next external location is crossed) is identifiable but not adjacent to the first. This is in contrast to Penfield's homunculus where the [sensory or motor] toe neuron is connected to the foot neuron etc. albeit on the scale of slabs of neurons rather than individual neurons. That's the modern nanotech break-through: scientists can monitor the inside of a single living cell.

O'Keane quotes Henri Bergson as believing intuition is based on memory . . . as it must be. Intuitions are the result of  experience and learning even if we might not have consciously been aware of the lesson. it is no surprise therefore that Elders are better at guessing than their children and youngsters. Life experience clocks up facts, inventories successful outcomes and learns from mistakes. Younger people haven't been around long enough to build up their have-a-punt database. Age must be the basis of my success at table-quizzes.

The chapter on false memory and how it arises is particularly on topic for me, because I've been called to jury service in May. I shall be super-skeptical about eye-witness testimony, no matter how tall the stack of bibles upon which it is sworn. Elizabeth Loftus, the grand vizier of the field, is cited. Memory is dynamic: every time we recall something it's like taking a china soup-tureen out of the kitchen. By the time we've finished showing it to the vicar, the matching ladle has fallen to the ground and been replaced with fire-tongs; the soup has been swapped with tea; and it's been chipped by brisk contact with the marble counter-top.

This book is not without its quirks and peculiarities [too much bigging up TCD for some?] but is a brave attempt to lay out the science and mechanisms of memory in terms that won't baffle Joe and Josie Poblacht.

↪“That’s what I did,” says my memory. “I couldn’t have done that,” says my pride, and remains adamant. Finally, memory yields. Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil.

I found me Da

The Census has been controversial since Mary and Joseph were required to register, in  person, at his Home Place in Bethlehem so that they could be enumerated by the Roman Imperium. 
Q. Why bother to do such head-counts?
A. Because numbers are essential for effective planning, and fair taxation.
Further controversy: on 30 June 1922 the early census records for Ireland went up in flames when the Four Courts, and the Public Records Office, were blown up during the Civil War [smoking ruin R]. But The Man had, for reasons of economy and archival ignorance, already dumped the original records for 1861-1891. So the earliest enumeration sheets for Ireland are for 1901 and 1911.  These records are searchable on-line, if you desire to find out who lived in your house or your home-place all those years ago. You can also get as nosy as you want about any other place which existed and was inhabited at that time. There was no census in 1921 b/c War of Independence. 

The Blob had a look at who was living in the Home Place in King's County in 1901 & 1911. In 1901, four sisters (aged Gwen 27, Lily 25, Alys 22, Myrtle 17) are living there with Lily's 1y.o. child. The three boys are all away from home having hi-jinks and adventures in the Boer War. By 1911, the oldest son has married, returned to his patrimony, and cuckoo-like ejected all his siblings . . . replacing them with - ahem -servants. There were a bunch of servants in the Big House in 1901 also. But it's pretty close exchange: 1 sister for 1 servant

My father was born in London in 1917 but returned to Ireland when his father was appointed Harbourmaster of Dunmore East in 1922.

The first census of the inhabitants of Saorstad Éireann, the barely solvent The Irish Free State, was rolled out on 18th April 1926 and, exactly 100 years later, these also became freely searchable. And there's The Da, aged 8½ asleep in his bed on the quayside in Dunmore. It's kinda sweet given that he was then younger than Gdau.II is now. There's also a 25 y.o. general domestic servant in that Tiny House - possibly sleeping upright in a kitchen press like a 21stC filipino maid in an Oligarch's flat in Central London.

Where's the rest of the family in 1926? 

• Gwen has married a solicitor called Alured and is living in Abbeleix. Confusingly, Alured is "two els" Allured  in 1911 and still living at home despite being qualified and 33 years old. 
• Lily has left the country with her daughter. She dumped the child's father at about that time and married Big Coal from NE England - or maybe didn't marry him? That was never clear when we got to know the couple in the 1960s.  The 'child' Periwinkle was 26 and making her mark as a golfer, dancer and avant-gardiste before she settled down after WWII in Glengarriff
• 
  Alys became Alice between 1901 and 1926 was married and widowed and is living on the shores of Lough Derg. My father's first cousin Posy was entered on that census form but scratched out by the enumerator [R]. I'm guessing that's because she was somewhere else on the night of 18-19 Apr 1926 - perhaps visiting her Aunt lily in England?
• Myrtle [married, war-widowed] was a Visitor in a Big House (many servants) in Co Meath.
• Hardress is still Patriarching in the Home Place; he married Big Sheep from Australia which allowed him to continue living in the servant-supported style to which he'd been accustomed. His Wife is Adoline in 1911 but [correctly] Adeline in 1926
• Evan has, hilariously and ironically, been transcribed as Ivan and married with two children 1F1M, 'only' two servants. His sister-in-law is visiting that Sunday in April. 

That sibship of seven, despite being "shy breeders" have many living descendants. 

• F1 = all dead now mostly in the fullness of their years: health prognosis good for me.
• F2 = 7 including me
• F3 = 18 incl. The Boy, Dau.I and Dau.II
• F4 = 6 incl Gdau.I and Gdau.II

But the family is finally 'daughtering out' as girls but not boys get born. Unless my brother's 30-something son pulls a chap out of the bag next time - a daughter was born to that line before Christmas 2025 - it's all up with the family surname.  No Lloss. 

Agora U

The Provost, Fellows, Foundation Scholars and the other members of Board of The College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity of Queen Elizabeth near Dublin aka TCD, like other Institutions across the world, is should be having an existential crisis in response to "AI". But Institutions have the inertia of a super-tanker: they keep going in the same direction because change is just . so . hard for the [old embedded complacent] people who hold {power | purse | policy }in their hands. In my section of social media [<coff> Metafilter] you have to be super-tippitoes if you want to advocate positively for AI. At least partly, this is because "AI" is not one thing, but a range of tools created by a range of actors, only some of which are The Axis of Evil. But what do I know? AI has tsunamied over me (and you) so quickly, so recently, that I am reduced to slogans with as much discrimination [both senses] as "Four legs good, two legs bad".

In 2018, the Fellows of TCD elected immunologist Cliona O'Farrelly [my old boss] as first female Chair of Fellows. In 2021, they voted for Linda Doyle, an engineer, as the first female Provost in 400+ years. On 22Apr26, as part of her exit strategy, the outgoing Chair of Fellows organised a symposium of Two households Six pundits, both all alike in dignity, In fair Verona Dublin, where we lay our scene on "AI and the Idea of a University". I booked in because it seemed like a good opportunity for Me to find out how to spell AI and learn what my Alma Mater was going to do about it: not least because the first speaker, after the Chair, was The Provost.  

Prizes:

• Most obscure cited reference John Kelleher for Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (1979) by  Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar. 
• Also for best $10-word: semiotics - see Umberto Eco 
• Best timekeeper (by far) Camilla Persello, Secr of Scholars, also by far the youngest panelist 
• The Whitehead Prize for talking waaaay over the allotted time?  redacted .
• Fewest on-message bullet-points (3) The Provost:
• Are we good enough? - the antidote to smugness
• Dreadnought AI - it's here & not going away: engage challenge resist
• Truth is grey not black&white
• Most embedded in certainties (and not in a good way, although my bloboprev guts are with him generally) Fintan O'Toole
• Also for mentioning Tim "The are no Short-cuts" Robinson whom RIP
• Most empathic speaker Jennifer Edmond - wish I'd been a student of hers.
• Shortest on-message comment from the Floor Ken Mealy
• Most valiant effort (largely successful) to rein in his tendency to ramble: Ian Robertson [whom bloboprev]. 

Exec Summ [filtered through my jaundiced eye]: 
[I was far better at taking notes in 1976: in 2026 I found that an idea I was in the process of capturing on paper was slipping beyond my ken because the next idea was demanding my attention. Sorry if I've missed something important in the discourse. Doubtless within a few days I will be inventing whole paragraphs]  
In my day [1973-77], teaching at Trinity was very heavy on the Medieval model: The Professor / expert stands by a chalk-board and imparts his [almost always His] accumulated experience; know-nothing students write down the content with a pen, in a book. Weeks or months later, Prof sets and exam to see how well students have retained his imparted knowledge. Students with the most legible notes and most retentive memory are rewarded with high grades. The highest graded students become professors in their turn. Nobody taught us Pittman's short-hand

At the AI-fest, Camilla Persillo pointed out that group learning, where students bat ideas around together without faculty in the room, can be the most exciting and productive learning experiences during college days: it's the synergy innit. Several of the other contributors, incl Ken Mealy, made the point that Content is So Yesterday; nobody now needs to take notes to recall Scads of Stuff when they can look it up in two tics on their device. The trick is a) to remember how to question the source b) have a well-polished crap-detector to critically evaluate the 'answer'. If the curriculum and the exams require memorizing Avogadro's, Bernouilli's, Charles', Dalton's, Euler's, Faraday's . . . Laws then there is no time left to teach ascertainment bias, availability error, anchoring bias, authority deference and other cognitive fails.

But whoa! Only some 21stC students have the time for group study with peers. It's fine if you are a Foundation Scholar with free food and rooms in College, or if you live at home a short jog from the city centre because your family's generational wealth is a lovely red-brick in Rathmines. Not so much if your commute is 90+ minutes to Outer Boondocks and/or you have to slave in the local Spar convenience store several evenings a week to make rent and/or care for your beloved but demented Grandpa. Inequality [of resources and opportunity] is a systemic failing of our FF/FG society regardless of AI. But AI provides an option for the dispossessed to help them knock-off assignments which they have no time to address in a medieval collegiate manner. 

Another much worked point was the desirability of being uncomfortable with your data or ideas. The phrase used is meaningful friction . . . and b'god it involves Effort. Prof Robertson asserted that the cognitive work of [trad] learning increased myelination and connectivity of nerves in the same way as weight-training or running increased the # mitochondria in muscle cells. [Protestant?] work makes you fitter and cleverer. Using AI for cognitive-offloading, let alone cognitive-surrender is a disaster for your education: over-use of AI might make you stupider after college than before. Prof Edmond's experience is that the smarter students work effectively with AI to produce even better deliverables . . . but the weaker [tired, poor, huddled] kids turn in shoddy because they don't have the spoons to discriminate own-self-okay from superficially convincing AI-slop.

All agreed [everyone present being invested in The Idea of the University!] that Agora University was first-and-foremost the collective intellectual interactions of the people [provost, fellows, junior faculty, scholars, students, that janitor who nailed calculus problems] present on Campus. It was also recognised that (in addition to reviews, recordings, re-thinkings; patents, papers, plays; dissertations, discoveries and degrees) the deliverable is Citizens. The more engaged, ethical, thoughtful, kind, inclusive, resilient, the Better. 

[[Personal sidebar: I was entirely off-with-fairies during my last two years studenting at TCD. The most exciting thing that happened to Evolutionary Biology in the 1970s was Sociobiology and the genetic basis of altruism. I spent several days out in the library of The Other University because they had the academic journals in which this material was published. I read, and wrote a long-form review of, EO Wilson's 1975 book Sociobiology. I've written about my off-piste investigation of inbreeding and fertility in the Habsburgs. I was stoked! But I was also failed! when it came to the exams. With different teaching methods and more me-adjacent learning opportunities I coulda been a contender for the next professorial vacancy.]]

Potlatch

Last week, I confessed to failing to finish a couple of books. Since giving up YouTube in January, I have a lot more time for reading books. But sometimes just sitting is better than sitting and reading something unfulfilling. As the days get longer, I will read less and get out more - although with earbbooks multitasking me asks ¿Por qué no los dos? When the family came home this Easter, Dau.II was uncharacteristically nose deep in a book The Heart-Shaped Tin: Love, Loss and Kitchen Objects (2025),by Bee Wilson a foodie confessional ramble which nods at Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia (2006) by Elizabeth Gilbert. Dau.II was reading it because foodie. I finished reading it because stuff.

So much stuff!  in Bee's kitchen, her friends' kitchens, our kitchen. We've come a long way since Cooking in a Bedsitter when our entire batterie de cuisine fit easily in a single orange crate. Now there is so much rarely used kit that, when company comes, pots need a good un-dust & up-scrub before use. Which is kinda shameful when far too many people subsist on a batterie de cuisine not much more than the possessions of a hunter-gatherer in the Kalahari. 

But the accumulation of stuff is not entirely my fault: people will give us things & only occasionally for pure generosity of heart. When The Management at The Institute decided to mark my retirement with gifts, they made sure to engrave my name and The Institute's to indicate the continuity of my indenture. Six months later they doubled-down with another gift and I doubled-doown on my rant. You don't need to read that again here. In other cultures - Japan and the Pacific NorthWest - gifting has to be reciprocal. If the return gift is more valuable, the exchanges can result in damaging loss as a runaway spiral ensues.

Valuable? Stuff, gifts and sentiment offer a neat alternative dimension of value. One of my two favorite everyday mugs is 20+ years in my cupboard or, as rarely washed, on the table. It [L] was given me by a caminante when we got together to compare notes on the process of pilgrimage. My other favorite mug was a £1.99 gift to me by me from Tenby near Pembroke Ferryport signalling that my family originally came from Wales. I don't think we are housing stuff because it was gifted to us and passing it on (to Oxfam) seems wrong or disrespectful. But we have enough clutter material household goods that it is sometimes hard to find a rarely used but then useful bit of kit - the Spong mincer for marmalade for example,

But enough of me! You can't borrow me from the library, but you can put a reserve on Bee Wilson's ruminations and insights into the baggage that adheres to kitchen kit. Who knew that her sister is Emily "Iliad" Wilson [whom bloboprev] and their father is A.N.Wilson, the British public intellectual and their mother Katherine "Shagsper sonnets" Duncan-Jones? Small wonder that both girls ended up as [Arts Block] researchers and writers.