Monday, 12 May 2025

Slots and wriggles

Occasionally, I'll be reading a book and come across a passage that makes me think "are we twins separated at birth?" because it sounds a bit like me. eee, but I do like a list, preferably alphabetical. So I took a frisson of recognition with "Adam's apples, beards, behaviours, breasts, clitorises, erotic orientations, gonads, hair, interests, labia, menstrual signs, penises, prostates, scrotums, skeletal proportions, uteruses, voices, vaginas, and vulvas".  Jakers? Wot's 'e reading now? 

Well, seeing as you asked, I ordered Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science (2015) from the library. Probably because I'd listened to an interview [as prev] by the author Alice Dreger. In case the title is ringing a bell, that disembodied finger pointing to high heaven, was one organ covered by Suzie Dent's 2024 Vital Organs: A History of The World's Most Famous Body Parts [whc prev]. Dreger's book hasn't much to do with The Digit, which features more as a talisman because Galileo is an inspiration as an early advocate of evidence over authority. She reckons that Galileo had a feisty sense of humour, which is always an asset in a hero. She is not without a wry quip or two herself: "Some sex variations occur at the level of sex chromosomes, some at the level of hormones, some at the level of hard-to-detect internal structures and some at the level of anatomical parts that you can see with the naked eye (assuming your eye isn't the only thing that's naked)"; indeed and ho ho.

Dreger has spent a lifetime hoping [we're not there yet] to establish common ground between activists and evidence. Her experience is that activists bond in an echo-chamber of like-minded advocates for a cherished cause . . . and are less open to contrary evidence than people who really don't have skin in the game. Pity, because, in an ideal world, truth / evidence would be the touchstone which informs all our actions even if it requires admitting we have been wrong. Dreger has saddled up to rescue biomedical researchers who have published evidence-based findings which run contrary to the prevailing zeitgeist.

She started off her career as a historian researching 19thC attitudes to, and outcomes for, those born with ambiguous sex or gender. That led her to meet many living people who didn't really fit in the binary M or F ideal. And that got her involved with Mike Bailey and his Trans Wars. Bailey promoted the ideas of Ray Blanchard that some transgender women have gotten there through autogynephilia - getting off on the idea of being a woman. The standard dogma was that sex had nothing to do with transgender. Dreger was indignant at coordinated ad hominem attacks on Bailey and his family rather than on the evidence he marshaled in support of his hypothesis. In defending Bailey against the misinformed hue and cry, Dreger herself was targeted by The Opposition in ways that were wearing and distressing. 

Later, Dreger put the hue-and-cry boot on the other foot to pursue Prof Maria New for pushing prenatal dexamethasone on pregnant women who might be carrying an XX fetus with Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia CAH [whc prev]. Dreger could find no evidence [it's that data again!] that prenatal dex had ever been properly trialed or evaluated before being pushed as safe and effective for both mother and child. The Feds (FDA, and the OHRP Office for Human Research Protections) investigated and concluded nothing to see here. Dreger begs to differ on that, but does concede that Maria New believed (she died last year) that she was giving the best available treatment to the problem of ambiguous presentation of gender at birth. Galileo's Middle Finger would read like a real life thriller in the vein of National Treasure if it just covered racing though the corridors of gender power. But there's more . . .

  • Napoleon Chagnon (1938 - 2019) was a US anthropologist who spent years living with, and gathering data about, the Yanomamö [two of whom R] in the jungles of Venezuela. He concluded from his data that [this tribe of] hunter-gatherers were not so much noble savage as savage savage and wrote it all up in Yanomamö: The Fierce People (1968). Like Bailey, Chagnon [rather than his science] was attacked by journalist Patrick Tierney in his 2000 book Darkness in El Dorado. Cudgels were taken up by the AAA American Anthropological Association who castigated Chagnon for his genetic determinism and sociobiology research ethics. Dreger spent a year working to help rehabilitate Chagnon and expose the bias and tendentiousness of Tierney's thesis . . . and the US anthropological establishment. Chagnon's last book was Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes – The Yanomamö and the Anthropologists (2013).
  • In 1998, Bruce Rind, Philip Tromovitch and Robert Bauserman  concluded "A Meta-Analytic Examination of Assumed Properties of Child Sexual Abuse Using College Samples", and it was published, after peer review, in the Psychological Bulletin. They found that not all victims of childhood sexual abuse (a very broad spectrum of adverse activity) were irredeemably traumatized by the experience. Ask me how I [N = 1] know this to be true.The Press and Politicians distilled this modest discovery as a "license for pedophiles" and made hay about degenerate scientists - rather than, like, reading the paper and criticizing the sample size [N = 36,000 as you ask] or the stats.
  • In 2000, Craig Palmer and Randy Thornhill published A Natural History of Rape. Their thesis was that there was a sexual element to sexual assault. That ran counter to the belief of some feminists that rape was all about [unequal] power and violence against women. Palmer and Thornhill also concluded that there was variation is the experience of, and recovery from, the trauma of coercive sex. Dreger interviewed Palmer some years after the event and they compared notes about how to deal with, and recover from, an ad hominem social media shit-storm.

Sorry, not sorry, that's as far as I go. There's no point in editorializing any more than I have because I'll either be preaching to the choir or being flung across the room [I hope your phone lands on the sofa not !ploosh!  in the kitchen sink]. Wikipedia will fill in the details, if you don't have time to read Galileo's Middle Finger. But Dreger's bottom line is carpe datum before you sound off with your certainties. It was easier to read the book detached [insofar as that is possible when we're getting one side of the argument] from, and skeptical of, the righteous certainties of the author.

Friday, 9 May 2025

Next Pres 2025

I was rabbiting on about the betting on the next Pope and then remembered that Paddy Power is usually running a book on the next President of Ireland. Michael D. Higgins swore up and down that he was only in it for the one term when we elected him in 2011. But he couldn't surrender the trappings of bling in 2018 and sojourned another 7 years in the Áras. He has to go now before November 2025. And a very wide field is

9/4 Mairead McGuinness [FG former EU Commissioner] Seen [R] eclipsing a star.

4/1 Frances Black [Singer-Senator]

6/1 Heather Humphreys [FG]

8/1 Seán Kelly [presumably the FG MEP, not Sean "fada" Kelly the cyclist from the Déise??]

8/1 Catherine Connolly [Ind TD WAS Leas-Cheann Comhairle ]

10/1 Bertie Ahern [FF]; Michael McDowell [PD] ; Frances Fitzgerald [FG]; Fergus Finlay [Lab. Barnardos]

16/1 Emily O'Reilly; Micheál "Taoiseach" Martin; Tommy Tiernan; Barry Andrews

20/1 Mary Lou McDonald

25/1 Mark Daly; Roisin Shortall; Miriam O'Callaghan; Jarlath Burns

33/1 Catherine Murphy; Joe Brolly; Holly Cairns; Cynthia Ni Mhurchu; John Finucane; Lynn Ruane

40/1 Luke Ming Flanagan; Enda Kenny; Peter Casey

50/1 Aengus O Snodaigh; Gerard Craughwell; Gerry Adams; Ruairi Quinn

66/1 Linda Martin; Sharon Keogan; Eamon O'Cuiv; Colm O'Gorman

80/1 Mary Davis; Olivia O'Leary

100/1 Leo Varadkar; Gareth Sheridan; Regina Doherty; David Norris; Kevin Sharkey; Pat Cox; Eamon Ryan; Ivana Bacik; Sean Gallagher; Philip Nolan

200/1 Tony Holohan; Richard Bruton; Dana Rosemary Scallon; Niall Boylan

500/1 Gemma O'Doherty; Damien Duff; Cecelia Ahern; Ryan Tubridy; Joe Duffy; Roy Keane; Shane Ross; Nina Carberry; Panti Bliss

Bookmakers are not making moral or ethical judgments in assigning odds but they are making value [max profit while min risk] judgments. But you have to ask why, of all the people in all the world, they are making public their assessment that nobody likes broadcasters Ryan Tubridy and Joe Duffy. Is it just Ukraienvy that gets stand-up comedian Tommy Tiernan shorter odds [16/1] than MaryLou "I am always serious" McDonald [20/1]. I captured these odds on 28 Apr 25. I'll try to remember to take another scrape in a month's time or at the end of June for comparison. As with polls and popes, the dynamics of probability / odds is more informative than a single snapshot.

Wednesday, 7 May 2025

Tagging the lobsters

I guess I'm Dr Know-it-Some ? South American capital cities; 19thC British politics; European railways; synonymous codon usage - I'm a handy addition to your table quiz team. Although codon usage doesn't come up often. I am hopeless with other areas of knowledge and expertise. But I'm willing to learn . . . enough to write 700 words for a Blob. I've really cut down on my YouTube perhaps because I am too broad-minded for The Algorithm?? But I recognise enthusiasts by the cut of their jib regardless of what their cargo is.

I have something of a grá for John Locker, a Geordie who now lives with his family in Cornwall because the fishing and weather is better than the North Sea. Vlogging their adventures with flounder Platichthys flesus and conger Conger conger turns out to be more interesting than watching paint dry. That's partly because his excitement is catching but it's also about the endless and colourful variety of what gets drug up from the depths. 

So last week Locker was crab-pooling along the rocky shore. I won't call it beach-combing because, contra me, he was ignoring buoys, cracked fish-boxes and hanks of old rope. It was a revelation to adult me how many crustaceans could be hidden in the crevices of rock-pools. Maybe not to 9 y.o. me because then I had time to immerse myself in those small contained worlds and really l◎◎k. Later he gets into a wet-suit and snorkle and plunges into the sea. After a bit he surfaces with "a berried hen" which was a totally new label for me. Female lobsters Homarus gammarus produce A Lot [10,000 to 100,000] of eggs but she keeps then about her person after fertilisation. There the larvae develop, changing colour as they do so, until, after about a year, the young detach from their mother's apron strings and start an uncertain life as a small nutritious piece of plankton.

People love lobster. One of the traumatic events of my life was going to a sea-food restaurant in New England with my boss. As a seafood noob, I got to sit inside the table looking out across the room. Just over Neil's shoulder was an enormous woman wearing a plastic bib voraciously tearing a lobster apart with the help of pliers lobster crackers. There was drool. My clam chowder was excellent. But the demand for lobster can easily outstrip supply and something must be done. 

Of course, in an ideal sustainable world, lobster fishers would toss back any berried hens that make their way into the pots. That would add 10k - 100k to the larval stocks. But that is a vague benefit for The Commons and The Future and a loss for the poor wet lobster-fisher on which the supply-to-table depends.  Chances are that none of those thousands of larvae contribute to the next generation; because prey. 

One way to tilt the process in favour of  survival of the species is to make it illegal to land / sell undersized [carapace < 90mm] lobster. It takes several years to get that big and to start reproducing. Another more recent [how recent depends on country] ban is on the landing of lobsters with a distinctive V-shaped notch in the tail. Occasionally someone gets busted by Sea-Fisheries Protection Authority. Those notches are put there by dogoodnik lobsterers who apply the mark to berried hens before throwing them back in the sea. It is not sufficient to ban the landing of gravid females because it is the work of moments for the unscrupulous to scrape the eggs off before tossing them in the boat's lobster-locker for sale.

It is article of faith that notching lobsters doesn't cause pain. Because we care about that too.

Monday, 5 May 2025

Seneschal at Scullogue

Last Sunday of April?  It's Blackstairs Cycle Challenge time! I can ride a bike, I have ridden a bike, I cycled 60km, for the craic, on Whit Monday 1969, when I was 14 y.o.  Not a bother, no training, just saddled up and cycled to the nearest beach and back. Almost exactly 40 years later, I should have been teaching part-time at The Institute when the car broke down in Waterford with The Beloved on board.  I cd/shd have cancelled class but reckoned that class was only 40km and 5 hours distant . . . and I had a bike. It was fine, I set off, arrived in good time, taught my 2 hour class and set off home for tea and medals.

Well. reader, the return trip was considerably more arduous. It wasn't really the fact that The Institute was 15m about sea level and Home is 200m higher. It was rather that the coastings downhill didn't compensate for many moderate uphills. On the final approach, not only could I not cycle up any incline; my legs were too wobbly to even push the bike and I had to collapse on the verge for 15 minutes. That's the difference between 14 and 54!

I'm still a fan of cycling - good for the planet; mighty for stamina; great in lycra - but I am now an infrastructure guy: I was in HiViz last year directing traffic and I was there in 2019 for the very first Blackstairs Cycle Challenge. In the interim? Coronarama! So, of course, I volunteered to help this year. Here [R] is Seneschal Selfie: point person at the most crucial intersection on the course: where the hard chaws [up for a 110km or even 140km jaunt around Mt Leinster] are separated for those with  more modest ambition, broken wind, spavin, strangles or colic. Miss the signs here late in the day and you could be condemned to wander the Plains of Wexford until the end of time. The Seneschal was en poste for 3 hours and the cyclists came in clots peletons, so I had plenty time to survey the face of our hill to work out where The Perp set the heather blazing on 12 Apr 25. And also to look closely at the signage - which is the same as last year with a new date superimposed on the post-board in not quite the same font. But then >!hark!< a distant chatter manifest in the West and another peleton whooshed past.

They would wave, or at least raise one finger from the handlebars, and many of them would disconcertingly say "Thanks".  Later, an ou'fella stopped to say the same thing, like, in person. I demurred "I should rather thank you for coughing up the entry fee and working your calves into knotted cords; I'm just standing here waving and gurning". To which he replied "Yes, but we enjoy this shit" wch, I guess, is fair enough.

Friday, 2 May 2025

Pointing the finger

And remember how much a hand can express,
How a single slight movement of it can say more
Than millions of words – dropped hand, clenched fist,
Snapping fingers, thump up, thumb down,
Raised in blessing, clutched in passion, begging,
Welcome, dismissal, prayer, applause,
And a million other signs, too slight, too subtle,
Too packed with meaning for words to describe,
A universal language understood by all.

That would be [prev in context] Hugh "Marxist" MacDiarmid suggesting that all human endeavour amounts to a bit of dust flicked heedlessly off God's cuff. I guess we're not usually conscious of gestures - either made by us or seen in others. But that's not to say either a) that we are heedless or b) that gestures don't matter. 

I think that gesture may be treated separately from Sign Language on which I've had a good bit to say: BSL .ne. ISL - Makaton - Koko - Haptic - Washoe - SingAndSign. Tom Scott agrees that they are different; that gesture is co-speech or paralinguistic communication. Maybe like the adverbs of the basic comms.

Lauren Gawne [the Southern half of Lingthusiasm] has f i n a l l y brought her book to publication: Gesture: a slim guide [that's an autopuff alert from Gawne which abstracts 5 cool facts about gesture]. The Blob has been quite the fanboi for Lingthusiasm, the podcast. They took their podcast to YT for episode 30 about Gesture. Obvs you're going to lose a lot in such a dialog if all the info is coming only through your headphones. That's a still clip [R] of Gawne gesturing a tomato rolling down hill. Turkish tomatoes roll exactly the same as English ones; but the accompanying gestures track the constraints of each language. Turkish (and french) emphasizes the down, while English privileges the roll.

If you are a normally unobservant person, you won't thank me for making you aware of co-speech. You'll never be comfortable watching your boss's left hand chopping the air to show herself she's in charge.

Wednesday, 30 April 2025

Deliveroooo

The redoubtable Dau.I and Dau.II came home for part of the Easter weekend, and it was delightful. I don't mind washing up 2x the number of plates, mugs and glasses - because the corollary is there are more cooks making and baking: whc yum yum. My quid pro quo is to make industrial quantities of Knockroti - for consumption and take-away, both. Anyway, they came, we ate, they returned to Dublin on Easter Monday. When their return journey was irretrievably committed, Dau.I realised that her rain-jacket was still hanging in the hall back home. And a few minutes later remembered that her keys (bike, front-door and office) were in the pocket. Dang! 

Could I mail her the keys asap?  I could/would not (who knows how long that would take; what would be the cost; what guarantees of delivery???) . . . but I could by-pass the Post Office and go to the train-station.  Costs nothing [Free Travel!] but time; and I have an audiobook on the go. Turned out that The Beloved had a meeting in the County Town at noon. Irish Railways are woefully under-utilized so there isn't a whole lot of flex in scheduling an out&return journey to anywhere from anywhere. But there was an option on:
Rural 10:10 → 11:15 Dublin
Rural 13:30 ← 12:25 Dublin
because Dau.II a) had the day off work b) lives 2 LUAS stops and a 5 min hike from Heuston Station. It worked as intended. I arrived at their flat, unloaded the jacket and keys and some more Knockroti; flubbed down and accepted a cup of tea with a slice of buttered brack. It was cosy and civilized until Dau.II stood up and firmly announced "I'll walk you down to the LUAS".  It was past noon and I was between 15 and 25 minutes from the station. It was fine, I sat into my train seat with +8 minutes to spare and the trip down country was uneventful. In any case, missed train? there was a another, quicker, at 13:15.

But it triggered the memory of a much closer-run transfer across Paris in 1989.  I retired [retire early and retire often!] from my last job in England in August of that year with the intention of walking up the coast of Portugal from Sagres to Corunna. I had no idea how long that would take; single airline tickets were riotously expensive; so I booked an open return rail ticket from London to Lisboa via Newhaven, Dieppe, Paris and Hendaye. A bit of a schlepp but certainly achievable.

Just before leaving, I discovered that I was requested and required to attend a job interview in Paris ten days after I started my walk. An Italian professor in France was going to decide if the EU should pay for me to move from UK to work with a Brit in Ireland; on a retraining fellowship in a more EUseful field than population genetics of domestic cats and pigeons. I had one friend, John, in Paris, whom I hadn't seen since we left college 12 years before. But I called him up and asked if he would please hold my charcoal-grey interview suit + a clean shirt & tie, until I flew in from Lisboa to CDG [on the EU nickel!] to collect it. A bit of an extra schlepp but surely achievable. I had 2 hours to make the transfer from Gare du Nord [from Dieppe] to Gare d'Austerlitz [to Lisboa].

I caught the Metro to John's flat where he fed me tea and toast for breakfast. We chattered away catching up on the last decade . . . until, with a start, I twigged that time flies when you're having fun and I had 25 minutes to make my train to Lisbon. I skeltered down four fights of stairs, flagged down a taxi and gasped "Le Gare d'Austerlitz, se vite que possible!", like I was in a movie.  The chauffeur responded with a supremely gallic shrug and set off at normal speed. At the station, I ran through the concourse and climbed aboard the last carriage 90 seconds before departure. I didn't reach my seat until we were chugging through les banlieues. Missing that train would have meant a 24 hour lay-over in Paris and a surcharge for changing the reservation.

Monday, 28 April 2025

Paddy Pope

Last week was Papa Francisco week, where we got far too much information about Santa Maria Maggiore and the seating of heads of state [in french, the language of diplomacy, so United States was seated closer to Ethiopia than United Kingdom]. This week it's Conclave time! And last week, I learned from MeFi that, in the USA, it is impossible to have a flutter on who will be the next pope. In some states it is just plain plum illegal, while in others, bookmakers won't play the game - perhaps worried about protest riots?

My contribution to the MeFi convo was to "ooooo data!" nip over to PaddyPower and scrape the current odds off their website. My heirs are grateful that I only bet on The Dogs, and then only when I am at the track on a Works Night Out. And it must be ten years since I last bought a Lotto ticket. Nevertheless, bookmaking is interesting because someone is devoting time, experience and expertise to setting  the odds. These odds are dynamic over time and their fluctuations are based on information; even if that may not be strictly evidence.  The Pope was buried on Saturday, and pretty much all the cardinal candidates for the job are gathered in Rome and showing form or making deals. When I first looked, before the funeral, I made a cut-off at >33to1 ["low" below] which put 22 (!) cardinals in the frame:

Candidate cardinale	24Apr25	Funeral	28Apr25
Pietro Parolin		2/1	2/1	2/1
Luis Antonio Tagle	3/1	11/4	10/3
Peter Turkson		6/1	5/1	5/1
Matteo Zuppi		7/1	7/1	7/1
Robert Sarah		9/1	11/2	5/1
Pierbattista Pizzaballa	9/1	15/2	11/1
Peter Erdo		11/1	11/2	9/1
Lazarus You Heung-sik 	low	9/1	9/1
Kevin Farrell		17/1	17/1	22/1
Cristobal Lopez Romero	17/1	17/1	17/1
Giovanni Battista 	low	low	17/1
Jean-Marc Aveline	20/1	20/1	20/1
Fridolin Besungu	22/1	22/1	33/1
Raymond Leo Burke	22/1	22/1	33/1
Mario Grech		25/1	22/1	40/1
Angelo Scola		25/1	25/1	50/1
Claudio Gugerotti 	low	25/1	25/1
Vincent Nichols		25/1	40/1	40/1
Francis Arinze		30/1	30/1	40/1
Wim Eijk		30/1	30/1	40/1
Mark Ouellet		33/1	50/1	50/1
Timothy Dolan		33/1	33/1	33/1
Angelo Bagnasco		33/1	33/1	33/1
Leonardo Steiner	33/1	60/1	60/1
Mykola Bychkow		33/1	33/1	33/1

what interests to me is that some rank outsiders - notably Lazarus You Heung-sik from South Career Korea - are now seemingly in the running. Meanwhile the chances of others have tumbled. What can Grech or Scola said or done to have nixxed them from the papal throne . . . this time round?