Damp damper

Our washing-machine went phut the day after we returned from our house-swap in Dublin. Luckily I was first up and had successfully run a load on the 30' superquick cycle that I always use on stuff that isn't dripping with mud or bolognese. We weren't tempted therefore to blame The Yoof who had the run of the house for the previous 3 days.

The LED console was showing a flashing faucet to indicate "low water pressure". I forthwith cleaned the grit-filter at the well-head and convinced myself that water was flowing goodo up to the back of the machine. It was therefore not Roy the Plumber territory but rather a job for Joe the Wash, who rocked up [asap] two days later. His multimeter said that a transponder [there are two] on the water inlet valve was broken and wash-machine central-command read this as insufficient water incommming. Joe didn't have the spare part in the van [dang!] but did have one at head-office and his Effective came along first thing on Friday to swap out the old and plug in the new.

While the lid was off I noted a couple of engineering essentials. The first is that the business core of the machine is suspended from two enormous bed-springs indicated by [↓] and also a huge lump of concrete - cast and serial-numbered to fit Bosch wash-drums. It must be a damper [prev] to provide some inertia to the system. A load of socks or knickers is not a problem because they are granular and can distribute themselves evenly round the drum for the spin cycle. A great wet floor mat not so much? 

When spinning things are unbalanced they can get into a resonance cycle and rock back and forth until the whole caboodle busts off its spindle. As happened in an ex-place-of-work with a steel ultra-centrifuge bucket going through the casing and a 10cm solid concrete wall beyond. The concrete block in the machine overwhelms any trifling wet-blanket unbalance.

Whatevs, I am delighted that [as with the central-heating oil-burner at Christmas] we don't have to trek into DID electrical to buy a new appliance because this one is beyond economic repair. Inside dope note to self: NEFF are the same as Bosch; assembled from the same parts in the same factory but twice the price. I heard it from a chap who is in the trade.

Oddly enough the two meanings of "damper" come from the same etymological root [M.E. dampen, like German dampf]. The reduce-amplitude concept indirectly through soggy → gloomy → depressed → less volatile. All the gases that displace oxygen in mines are also -damp.

Ash fight back

In the Summer of '76, I spent a few consecutive weeks being a spare wheel in a h u g e field near Arnhem in Nederland Centraal. The Effectives a) planted the field in a randomized pattern of multiple plots each containing 20 genetically identical potato plants b) sprayed the entire field with a uniform fog of late blight Phytophthora infestans spores c) scored each plant {1 to 10}[bloboprev 3rd para] according to how robust was its defense against this not-really-a-fungus scourge . . . after 3, 6 and 10 days. The data, its coding and analysis on a mainframe computer the size of a walk-in closet was an expensive undertaking but it was hoped and expected that the experiment would identify potato cultivars that could be used in subsequent crosses to generate [holy grail] blight-resistant spuds for Europe and the world.

50 years on there is a similar problem with ash die-back where Fraxinus excelsior that wonderful source of hurleys, axe handles, furniture and firewood is on the ropes from being attacked by Hymenoscyphus fraxineus, an ascomycete fungus: characteristic diamond-shaped lesions [R]. Now Dheeraj Rathore of Teagasc has written an RTE Brainstorm describing the fight back by his team at AshForFuture. A key element of that project is to document the variability of response to H. fraxineus among 1,000 genetically variable Irish ash trees. Same principle as my 1976 Potato Summer except that the trial field is in Lithuania where apparently Hymenoscyphus fraxineus spores are on the wind as thick as porridge. Preliminary results indicate that 1% - 3% of the trees are robustly fighting the fungus and remain symptom free. That sort of basic science, data-gathering, infrastructural effort is one boring but necessary requirement for lurching towards an effective solution.

One difference between potato and ash is that the generation time is much much longer in the latter. By the time a trad tree-breeder has done the second back-cross they've been given a clock and sent into retirement. It is timely that, since 1976, science has leapt forward in developing techniques to speed the process of developing designer crops which are vigorous & productive and resistant to a particular disease. Back in 2021, I suggested that anti-microbial peptides AMPs might be the tool to knock ash dieback on the head. That's possibly a case of to a hammer everything looks like a nail having spent 20 years of my research career hunting AMPs in the forests and prairies of genomic sequences.

Our crunching through genomes looking for novel AMPs is another far-from-the-coal-face infrastructural plank to make a functional edifice for fighting disease. Heck we didn't even wear lab-coats while driving our computers. The way forward is clear in theory. All they need to do is sequence the chunks of the ash-genome which are known to carry clusters of plant defensin genes and cross-check the variation against the dieback resistance score. The complete Fraxinus genome has been sequenced multiple times.

By a small-world Irish coincidence, it turns out that me and Dheeraj Rathore are besties co-authors on a paper documenting another genetic tool which can fast-track the delivery of specific genes into specific plants to boost their utility . . .

Years ago, alphaproteobacteria of the genus Agrobacterium were found to be capable of inserting particular genes into a wide variety of plant species. [whoooot GMO alert] Harnessing that ability sure did speed up the process of generating crop plants with enhanced cold-tolerance, disease-resistance and nutritional quality. Teagasc had been developing a different species of alphaproteobacteria called Ensifer adhaerens to carry out gene transfers independent of highly commercialized proprietary Agrobacterium systems. Rathore et al. 2015 was part of young Dheeraj's PhD thesis and my contribution was to supervise an even younger final year undergraduate in a project looking for antibiotic resistance genes in the genome sequence of Ensifer adhaerens.

All the lego bricks are there, still all in a jumble, but GMO ash trees resistant to H. fraxineus are a lot more solid for some science than woolly impractical wishful thinking. What can I do? You can find healthy-looking ash trees in the hedgerows across Ireland and grass them up to the lads at AshForFuture. I know that, come Summer, some of our own many ash will be greener and leafier than others on the same stretch of ditch.

Ingrained

It might be so that happiness is being true to yourself and finding your own level. When I was far too young to know what my true self might be, I entertained a fantasy about being a carpenter and maker of furniture. But I bottled it: not even having the oomph to ask. But that's okay, if I had gone that way, I would now, after 50 years of errors splinters and broken finger-nails, be pretty good at making tables. As it is I was pretty good at making sense of genomes, despite being embarrassingly ploddy at writing code. We only have one life so it's rarely possible to open the door to all the shops which might provide work which we are pretty good at.

Well before Christmas my Boston Correspondent P told me I must read Ingrained: The Making of a Craftsman (2024) by Callum Robinson. I don't buy books any more, but rather play the long game and wait for a shared copy to come available at the library. And I collected Ingrained just before the Twelfth Night cold snap. Perfect reading as I fired logs into the fire against the penetrating drafts.

I get the feeling that young Callum was saved by wood-work despite not being a Natural at visualizing in 3-D and not having an intuitive feel^↓ for the tools of his trade. It was OldBuck-YoungBuck challenging for him that his father was a truly gifted worker-in-wood in a way that seemed without effort. We haven't heard from the father if his feet were paddling gang-busters beneath the surface of his graceful progress. Right at the end of the book father and son had a whisky-fuelled heart-to-heart in which Robinson Père reveals that he stayed working with his hands despite an expensive education and professional quals because he . just . could . not . be a manager which was the only option for him to rise in his profession. Amen, brother.

And l👁👁k [L], The Boy done good! With a little help from the love of his life, from his father, from his hand-picked hand-crafting employees, from his therapeutic dog walks: he makes original, graceful, fit-for-purpose, quirky, quality furniture to die for . . . and get written up in Colour Supplements and commissioned by the great and the good - if they can afford it. Because hand-craft and quality come only from first class material and many hours of labour by people who can work magic with steel on wood.

↓ Intuitive feel is what my friend Elli had at the lab bench . . . and I emphatically did not. I am so glad I got out of lab work before I got good enough to pass muster . One self-inflicted spatter accident was one too many and it didn't seem likely to be my last. The rest of my life has been choosing low stakes outlets so that any of my talent which is death to hide is not lodged with me useless.

Gaudete St Fursday

Dateline Thursday 08:31 16 Jan 2025.
Lá Fhéile Fursa!

Sprang out of bed and yomped up the hill in the twilight to witness Sunrise on St Fursey's Day - which is becoming quite the tradition. Crystal clear the night before with Venus & Saturn coming towards conjunction in the SW; Jupiter near Aldebaran between Orion and the Pleiades; and Mars suspended below Pollux in Gemini. But sunrise? that was, this year, a dull grey sombre event:

Note to self: it really only takes 30 minutes from sofa to altar, and there's no advantage to setting off, like my father, in good time. That just involves hunkering down in the lee of the stone (the only local shelter) waiting for 08:31. There's nowhere to sit without getting a wet seat; although the almost vertical stone on the left does provide a sort of misericord support. Bring a feedsack? I slipped and sat down in the wet heather anyway on the way down.

20 minutes later and 170m lower down, there was a struggle between sun and lowering cloud behind The Thorn [last year]:

And now, 90 minutes too late, it's a bright sunny day in the yard. But can't complain: knees still up for it.

The cardinal done it.

Dau.I and Dau.II are now bunking together in Dublin Centraal. They rent a teeny tiny flat in a Late-Tiger apartment complex. Building regulations allow developers to build and sell apartments where neither the kitchen nor the bathroom have a window. But bedrooms must be at least 7.1 sq.m. with the width at least 2.1m AND have a window (or second door) for emergency exit. The floor area for a 2-bed apartment (assumed to sleep four people) must be 73 sq.m. in size. I haven't measured but their home might be a generous 75 sq.m. which is not absurdly smaller than our 'umble tumble farmhouse [95 sq.m.] but we have a kitchen with a view and natural light in the bathroom. And we can spill out into the yard if the weather is nice enough [predicted to be 3 days in July 2025].

The Daus have been playing 20-D orcs and dragons on the reg'lar last year with a couple of chaps. After one of the sessions in November they all imagined that it might be fun to rent a down-country AirBnB for a long weekend in the New Year - y'know fresh air, change of scene, throwing axes etc. The lads thought it might be nice to visit the Sunny SouthEast. After a few more encounters with grim-faced crusaders in taverns, Dau.II said "that's actually a ridiculous idea, when we could boot out my folks and go and stay there instead". It was presented to us as a neat bit of reciprocity: town-mouse and country-mouse seeing how the other half lives. "you could go out to dinner, share a bottle of plonk . . . and walk home" she said, and "think how many films with subtitles you could clock in three days" and "that Jane Clarke meets the weavers exhibition closes on the 19th Jan".

We woz willing and, well before Christmas, we agreed to do the house-swap from Fri 10th to Mon 13th Jan 2025. But a week beforehand the Sunny SouthEast took a moderate dump of snow followed by 5 days and nights of Baltic weather. But, despite anxiety, it was alright on the night! A thaw set in early on Friday and the roads were mostly snow-free when, in the fore-noon, we headed off to the train station with our free-travel passes. It's a little weird doing a free gaff at your offspring's but the flat is a lot more spacious and less vexillologically challenged than a room in the Hotel Generic.

We did make a flying visit to the Jane Clarke show and met the extended family of one of our neighbours . . . because Ireland is a very small place. But we were on our way to spend 2 hours with Men in Frocks [check out (last para) Colm Tóibín's wonderful skewering essay Among the Flutterers] watching Conclave at the IFI. Don't read any reviews! there will be spoilers. It is gorgeous to behold, there are neither car-chases nor helicopter gunships, and nobody dies . . . except the out-going pontiff - played horizontally with 'aplomb' by Bruno Novelli.  "Certainty is the great enemy of Unity" Good fun. Recommended.

As for house-swapping in Winter; good fun, would do again.

Bouncing the polytunnel

Did I mention that we had a dump of snow last weekend? I did, in passing. It's true that fallen snow is, like ice-cream, mostly air - let's say it has a density of 10% of liquid/solid water. But that can still be a lorra weight it spread out across a large structure. An under-engineered flat roofed sports complex in Tralee collapsed at 06:00hrs during the recent orange snow and ice warning for the South of Ireland [Galway to Dublin downwards, not the 26 counties]. I'm sure the structural specs took data on 100 year snow events, adding 50% for safety, to determine the size of the trusses. It's a roof: you don't want to over-engineer it because you then have to up-spec the walls to carry the additional weight. There will be an enquiry, everyone will lawyer up, nobody will lose their jobs or be sanctioned. Not least because the structure was opened in 1977, so most of those responsible are dead in the 80s or older.

We have a relatable situation in the polytunnel which has a 9m x 17m = 150 sq.m. footprint, with say half of it sort of horizontal. Well. flat enough to hold snow as it falls. On the night 04/05 Jan, we got 9cm of snow. Which is about 10mm of rain equivalent, except that it stayed on the polytunnel roof rather than running away. That's less than a tonne [75sq.m x 10mm = 750kg] of extra weight up there but it l👁👁ked a lot more under the bulging plastic. That 's polythene, which ripped asunder at the height of  the Darwinday Storm of 2014 but is generally good for plastic deformation. We have a convenient length of 50mm ⌀ plastic pipe that can reach all areas on the inside of the plastic, so I put a robust rubber glove on the end of the pipe and, starting at the bottom, bounced some of the snow off the roof. Gotta get the rhythm, bro. Over the next tuthree days, I bounced a little more; until almost all the extra weight was on the ground. No Tralee here . . . this time

You can see the effect in the picture for 2 of the eight bays of the tunnel: a gurt hape of heavy snow on the ground and a clean-ish track on the plastic where the snow has scoured off the algae. You can also see one end of the 2014 Darwinday rip covered with fresh white Fablon® since the 2022 refurb by Rene and Kamil.

We hazarded leaving the sheep [N = 15] in the 0.4 ha field adjacent to the tunnel and they've been getting a breakfast of sheep muesli and some rather tasty-smelling hay which we've had in reserve for the last few years [hey, thanks Syl!]. The sheep seem to be doing okay on such short commons.

Newton's needle

After Irvine's Foot and  Galileo's finger we have . .  Newton's needle

Ireland had its first really cold snap since Storm Emma in March 2018. The logistical difficulties weren't helped by us having a power-cut from 01:30hrs to 17:00hrs on Epiphaneve [05 Jan 25]. That background is probably irrelevant to the fact I managed to give myself thumb-poke in eye while turning in the bed. In any case, I 'saw' a bright light which couldn't be external / electrical. The following night, I woke up [screaming] with a connexion and got out of bed at 01:00 to capture the meander: much easier having had power restored. Newton jiggled a bodkin behind his own eyeball to see what he could see about how changing the shape of the orbit affected his perception.

That Newton was some man for one man - optics, cat-flaps, gravity, Warden of the Royal Mint, astrology. But he wasn't the only scientist up for auto-experimentation. Barry Marshall chugged down a glass of Helicobacter pylori, for one. And JBS Haldane went to absurd lengths in trying to increase the titre of CO₂ in his blood. Actually, those gaseous self-experiments were first visited upon young JBS by his father physiologist J.S. Haldane before Haldane Jr was old enough to vote and def'n'y before informed consent!

There are several other examples of adults doing sketchy things to children in the name of science. Bloboprev: In May 1796 Jenner inoculated 8 y.o. James Phipps, without informed consent, but with cowpox ‘matter’ from the hands of Sarah Nelmes, who had caught cowpox from a cow called Blossom. There really is TMI in that sentence but you get my drift. More recently, in 1990, UK Agriculture Minister John Gummer tried forcing his 4 year old daughter Cordelia to tuck into a beefburger not contaminated with BSE [whc bloboprev].

St Googler of Search reveals that self-experimentation is A Thing . . .

Or at the very least a book  by Lawrence Altman, The New York Times medical columnist: Who Goes First?: The Story of Self-Experimentation in Medicine (1998). Allen Weisse assembled the profit and loss in 2012 Tex Heart Inst J, 39(1):51–54. Self-Experimentation and its Role in Medical Research [free full text]. 465 examples culled from 200 years of medical investigation . . . resulting in 8 deaths and 13 Nobel Prizes. Four of the latter, as well as Marshall, have been Blobbed: Ramsay - Landsteiner - Banting - Metchnikoff.  

Don't try any of this at home kids!