The pipes are calling

Pat the Salt, BJB, has departed this Earth for further adventures elsewhere. Born in 1925, he grew up in Cardiff around the middle of thirteen sibs in the Hungry Thirties. He ran away to sea as soon as he left school at 14; and clocked up thousands of sea miles between Liverpool Halifax Fremantle Buenos Aires Oran. His ship was torpedoed in the North Atlantic in August 1942, but he wasn't for drowning. He lost all his kit, though. A few months later, through a rambling series of unexpected encounters, he was given a set of new-to-him bagpipes in Australia. And these became his signature dish ashore and afloat. By the time he returned to Blighty in 1945, his last Cardiff home had been blitzed, both his parents were dead and one of his sisters was full of shrapnel. But he made sure his younger brothers and sisters were fed and presentable if The Social came to the front door looking for orphans.

Evidence from the Irish Press [R] shows that he came to Ireland in 1948 and went on the tramp from Dublin busking at least as far South as Laragh Co Wicklow. He was probably heading for Passage East where he knew his people were buried. No work in Ireland, so he started with Kellogg's in Manchester where the family had washed up. In another life, in other times, that would have been an unexpectedly comfortable billet but he'd seen things you people wouldn't believe. Soon enough he was working for Elder Dempster in colonial Lagos, Nigeria. He survived, thrived and shipped up country to Kano in the Sahel near the French border with Niger.

Meanwhile elsewhere in the city a young woman of startling elegance and exotic beauty was nightly praying to St Patrick to beam her up out of this khaki dusty backwater to somewhere greener. Seeing a personable young chap with pipes she thought "I'll have him" and she did. Pat was then doing well in the groundnut trade, his wife Souad was working for BOAC out at the airport and the two of them scrimped and saved and did without to buy a farm back home in Ireland. And it was so. But trying to wrest a living, in the 1950s, from sixty stony acres near Dunmore East was even harder graft than shipping before the mast in wartime in the 1940s. Opening the first chic Parisian boutique in Waterford City wasn't enough to ensure solvency.  But while the farm spiraled down into murrain, blight and debt, the children were growing up honest, literate and determined. 

It's not about me, except to say that I bumbled on stage in this up and down drama about a year after The Farm was sold and Pat was wearing a white coat behind the counter of his store in Freshford Co Kilkenny.The joke was that, while my lab coat indicated I was a mere student of biology, Pat's showed he was a nuclear physicist master of a cyclotron in the ball-alley behind the shop. {Despite | because of}my very expensive education, I had a lot to learn. Insofar as I have any manners (and I don't mean fish-forks) now, is largely due to my being accepted into the family in 1973. Blimey, that's 50+ years ago. It's been a journey: all of us have put in restless miles a long way from where we were born.

Somewhere along the way, Pat's Australian pipes went missing. So I never heard him play The Minstrel Boy. About ten years ago, Pat and Souad, well into their free travel years, washed up in the centre of Tramore. They picked up with old friends and made new ones. One of the latter was, inter much alia, a piper. Pipers are a community in the same way as Cosa Nostra is a community.  Shortly thereafter, in a way maybe not so very different from the return of The Boy's bicycle, Pat's pipes mysteriously re-appeared. That piper had a daughter, TL, who was to the manner born a piper in her own right. As well as being an accomplished musician, that child had the biggest heart and the most generous hand you could ever hope to meet. They're grown up now, soldiering though college in another part of the country.

But in May this year, just before Pat turned 99, just after his care went full palliative, TL returned home to Tramore to play the pipes for Pat. Everyone agreed that to play the pipes in his bedroom would smither Pat's dentures and have his hearing-aids blow a gasket. So TL stepped out into the garden and gave her old pal The Minstrel Boy at full blast through his open window. Ah bless! is it dusty in here, or is it dusty?

AFOL LEGO BURP

How much information about the Tokio Express do you have capacity for? Tracey Williams doesn't think that a book's worth is TMI! On 13 Feb 1997, the container-ship Tokio Express was caught in a brutal storm between Land's End and the Scilly Isles and a freak wave carried away a number of TEUs which were washed overboard. Within a few weeks specific designs of Lego 'bricks' started to appear on Cornish beaches. Lego head-office supplied an inventory of the lost pieces and they are still being found nearly 28 years later. And not only in Cornwall.

pic.credit Caroline South

Ironically, a good proportion of the lost pieces were nautical themed: octopus, life-raft, flippers, sea-grass, life-jacket. The available inventory tells how many pieces of each type were hoiked off on their journey in 1997, so finders can assess how rare their pieces are. Green Dragons are the Holy Grail in the field.

I'm a beachcomber, buoys and rope division. Dau.I is a librarian, Northside Dublin division. She correctly surmised that I would like to read Adrift: the curious tale of Lego lost at sea (2022) by Tracey Williams. When I became one of the earliest unDanish adopters of Lego, aged 7 in 1961, there were only red bricks. The spaceships, dragons, flowers and helmets all came later. I really wouldn't count as an AFOL [adult fan of Lego] although several of my family wear that badge. With my failing eyesight, I don't imagine I'll become an ABOL [adult beachcomber of Lego] because the search image is too small. a BURP is a big ugly rock piece, see also LURP. 

What else did I discover? The standard Lego plastic is made of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene ABS, which come together in varying proportions depending on the polymerization conditions. ABS is hard, shiny, chemically resistant, stable, ductile (= un-brittle). All these properties contribute to making Lego the brick of choice for the last three generations. But also ensure that pieces can withstand the buffets of waves, sand, salt for decades before landing on a beach and getting a second life as a rather shabby collectible. 

My son the engineer put himself through Open University to get his first degree and is now designing signalling networks for British Rail. Make an error here and people will die. I like the idea that there are life-and-death averse B.Eng.s who are working for Lego tonking a concept brick 100x with a precisely weighted hammer and looking for cracks.

Hallowe'enish 2024

Clocks fall back an hour today! The EU have really dropped the ball on doing away with this nonsense.

• Surfing the Skookumchook Narrows, BC 
• Gazing at N Korea from PRC.
  
• Should absolutely ban school home-work [PDF chapter from (Caitlin) Moranthology]
• Don't whack trees . . . the NPWS will whack ye back
• Bruce "Mutagen" Ames [whom prev] dead: link to MeFi obit post
• Breadporn: more . . .
  
• Valencia:
• France:
• Pies in Murcia:
• Cleaning drains in Oz. "Where would you rather be? Fishing??"
  
• or less

Heyhey, a milestone of sorts. The Blob passed 2 million pageviews yesterday:

This ship has been sailing for nearly 12 years and has cluttered 2.5 million words into the internet servers. It's great therapy for me [whoa: oversharing TMI etc.] but I do check to see if it has utility for others. It took 3 years to pass 100,000 pageviews; and another 3 to pass the half million. So The Blob is doing the state some service?? But there is a strong suspicion that PVs are driven as much by B◎ts as human 👁👁. Case in point:

It is frankly incredible that as many, like, people checked in to The Blob last Thursday as in the whole month of September. I've seen these blips before, and then activity, as recorded by Blogspot, settles down to bumbling along at a few hundred PVs a day - much of that scrapers, spiders and bots but some real people [like you-hoo, dear reader] as well. Have a great day wherever you are.

Kokoro 心

A tuthree weeks ago, I was blathering on about ancient Greek customs and norms: with a xenia here, a pompḗ there and aretê in the middle. One of the delights of other languages is that words are diced differently there, so it's hard to get an exact synonym (with all appropriate baggage and nuance) for any word in foreign. A lot of mileage is wrung out of how hiraeth and saudades are untranslatable. But pick a word, any word, and you'll be missing some aspect of meaning when translating it to another tongue.

So there I was, two days on the trot, hangin' out at the Lafcadio Hearn Japanese Garden in Tramore. The first day, we were in Tramore with a surprising couple of care-free hours. We polished up our Annual pass [a snip at €70 /yr IF you plan to treat the place as your oasis of calm and live close enough to go a tuthree times with a friend] and headed out into into a brisk sunshiny autumn morning.  The garden hangs on the side of hill, so it is a challenge for those with a wheelchair or COPD. But for the rest of us, it is lovely: curling paths, well-placed benches, dappled shade.

The next day we were back to witness the Japanese ambassador to Ireland Marayama Norio 丸山範雄 laying the foundation stone for the new visitor centre at the Garden. ahem That didn't happen, probably because the new building scheduled had slumped like the ever-building National Children's Hospital. But Ambassador Maruyama [seen L with his bodyguard] did share some waggishly optimistic words about the future utility of the Kokoro Centre. This was complemented by some, mercifully short, speeches by The Minister, The Mayor and The Chair of the Board for the Garden. Two previous Irish Ambassadors to Japan, one rather frail, were also in evidence. The average age of the invited guests was about 65; which is a pity because it is subsequent generations who will be using and supporting the gardens for lifetime of the Kokoro Centre . . . if it ever gets off its foundations.

Everyone, even the monoglots, essayed to translate Kokoro into English. Nobody thought to cut to the chase and quote Lafcadio Hearn The papers composing this volume treat of the inner rather than of the outer life of Japan, for which reason they have been grouped under the title Kokoro. Written with the 心 character, this word signifies also mind, in the emotional sense; spirit; courage; resolve; sentiment, affection; and inner meaning — just as we say in English, “the heart of things.”

After speeches, canapés! Calling Logistics Manager! Someone decided to lay out the sushi and petit fours on a dazzling white cloth on a table on a balcony overlooking the garden. Which is fine in theory. Not so much if access to the balcony is along a narrow dead-end walkway past the jacks. But if that's what it is, then somebody needs to hoosh people (and their frames, sticks, entitlement and deafness) along, past the table, and out again to enjoy the garden. Not clogging up the access to provender . . . and the jacks [toot toot incontinence alert].

My first encounter with my doughty and dependable pal Rissoles [multiprev] was at a Home Ed gathering in Glendalough. It was agreed that a group photo would be A Good Thing but everyone continued to mill ineffectually about, gnawing rice cakes, and not controlling their kids. Rissoles (I believe it was the first time his family had been to such an event) stood up on a chair, called for silence and directed the milling herd to go East, the photographer to go West and let's just get this done!  And it was so. Y'gotta love him.

Kati

I wrote with nostalgic gusto about Old Measure, which was still in daily use in rural England in the late 1960s. So many etymologically unrelated names related by inconsistent multipliers: 8 furlongs to the mile; 14 pounds to the stone; 20 [UK] or 16 [US] fluid ounces to the pint. But that's very insular and introspective and frankly baffling for pretty much everyone under the age of, say, 50. 

I was processing the last? of the beans at the beginning of the month. There is only so many beanz and man can eat, despite being good for the heart, so I was blanching and freezing for Christmas, when we expect the family to be sharing þe sucking pigge. I needed to convert 7.5oz to grams and, although I knew it was about 210g, I asked my browser. As well as kg, lb, oz and several different tons, I was offered an answer in Tola or Catty. These measures of weight a) were outside my insular education b) had a whiff of spices.

Catty, kati, jin, 斤, is for measuring lumps and is about 600g or 1⅓lb avoirdupois. It was originally a word in Malay, and we derive tea caddy from the same source. About 600g because several cultures retain an old style incommensurate 604[.78]g = 1 catty. In the PRC, they've made international trade simple by redefining 1 jin = 500g or a 'metric pound'. That's how we used to buy cheese in Rotterdam in the late 70s "een pond van belegen kaas a.u.b." or "een half-pond" as the case might be. Dus! I've been misheard many times in Ireland with my Britse accent asking for "half a pound/kilo of sausages" and getting twice that because 👂"[I'll] have a pound of sausages".

Tola contrariwise is for smaller things, having been standardised by the East India Company in the 19thC as 180 grains = 3⁄8 troy ounce or 11.7g. Conveniently, the EIC rupee (which was a widely circulated and trusted coin) [see R] weighed 1 Tola. I know nothing about such matters, but the base unit of hashish is apparently 1 tola or more likely [short measure alert!] 10g. And 10 tola is a convenient and widely used weight for gold bullion. In these uncertain times that will cost you €9,000! although it's a good bit smaller than my pinkie finger. 

And while we're East is East, there's a Picul or tam 擔 which = 120 Catty. In Hong Kong this amount is called a stone. What with HK being British and all for 100+ years, this is a little wild because elsewhere in the Empire 1 Stone = 14lb in standard human body measurement [for those over 50] in these WEA islands. A picul at 72kg was what an 11st = 70kg man could be expected to sustainably carry on a shoulder pole. I like that reference back to the size and capacity of the human body to generate relatable weights and measures. In Nederland carpenters and others still measure in duim 👍 = inch from the width of a man's thumb. For longer measurements there's a furlong [prev] - the length of furrow that could be ploughed before the oxen went all lactic and had to be rested. It is 220 yds = 10 chains =~ 200m and there are 8 of them to the [statute] mile.

Ashley breezes past

The Met Bureaus of Ireland, UK and Nederland have had their corporate arm-wrestle and come up with their shared Storm Names list for the 2024-2025 season. Here they be: Ashley, Bert, Conall, Darragh, Éowyn, Floris, Gerben, Hugo, Izzy, James, Kayleigh, Lewis, Mavis, Naoise, Otje, Poppy, Rafi, Sayuri, Tilly, Vivienne, Wren. The names owned by Met Éireann wearing their green jersey. Vivienne of course named for Vivienne the Pirate Queen of the Nine Cattle Rustlers. We've been here before 2015 - 2018 - 2019 - 2021 - 2022 - 2023; so maybe we're running out of Trad Irish Names that only have a few silent consonants and fadas.  Storm season starts on 1st September each year but some years are slower off the mark than others. Storm Atiyah, for example didn't whistle through until the second Sunday in December 2019 fully 50 days later than Ashley.

Storms worth naming held off until this last weekend when Ashley was taken out of Pandora's Box and started whipping up waves in the Atlantic. Saturday lunchtime, I pinned the location of Ashley's Eye and asked for the Nullschool Wind App to predict its position 16 hrs ahead. 

Ashley's eye was predicted to be travelling at ~75 km/hr (the circulating wind going faster) in a NE direction and brushing her skirts against the West coast of Ireland. Ashley was accorded an orange wind-warning for 4 (later upped to 7) Wild Atlantic Weather counties from Noon Sunday and yellow for the rest of the island. We therefore made our storm preparations: filling some 5lt water containers and putting candles in candle-sticks. We needed to do this anyway because the ESB is giving us our second scheduled outage in a month tomorrow 09:30 - 14:30, Tuesday 22 Oct 24.

Saturday night and Sunday morning the forecast yellow rain came through but by the time I got up to count the sheep [N = 15, all present and correct!] before breakfast, it was barely spitting and the wind hadn't really got up.

By tea-time Sunday we had endured a few gusts but nothing really sustained and the wind-speed didn't seem to be in resonance with any local trees enough to whip off branches. So that was it. The tabloids tried to talk it up with emotive language (wreaks chaos, airport mayhem, horror map) and Rosslare ferries were cancelled, but Ashley herself had less bluster.

French Shore

tric-trac

• The reason St.Pierre-et-Miquelon is a collectivité d'outre-mer français
• Saving Lithuanian or lietuvių kalba as they call it
• Grady on landfill
• Hurr.Helene: Hickory Nut Gorge and ChimneyRock ⬤, NC geomorpology meets weather explainer: stream-capture; orographic lift etc. etc.
  
• Paramotor footage from Mark Huneycutt [whom see also last Sunday] 
• Guardian gives explainer on Ireland's Transition Year ( the only time when any education happens in Ir secondary schools).
• Royal Society opens its peer-review archives 1949-1954
• On the homogenization of McDs, a forgotten graphic artist, paying attention and a neat ending. via MeFi
• Speaking of MeFi, two days ago, I posted there about a 16thC card trick. I am a net sponger on MeFi; but still contribute more than most.
  

Rodents for larfs

I checked into the front page of RTE.ie a week ago and was given a surprisingly rich and varied array of Top Stories: scandal in a homeless charity; €500K anonymously gifted to schools in Cork; and the outfall fall-out of a report from the FSAI, the Food Safety Authority of Ireland. 

Of all the existential threats to global equanimity, hygiene failures in burger joints don't make my A-list. That's partly because the regulatory environment seems to work and a monthly report that fingers 16 perps across 26 counties (Glens Takeaway; Hearty Sunshine; Sizzlers; Grace’s Garden; Koffee and Kale; Café Sol; Osteria 99; Antonio's; Red Robin; Coolmine Shawarma; Polonez; Lord Lucan; Spar) is small enough that it's unlikely to catch me talking to the porcelain telephone. It's not my Polonez in New Ross [excellent fresh tomatoes; reliable fresh yeast], it's one in Walkinstown D12, for example. 

Then again, it might be that FSAI is so underfunded and the inspectors so overworked that they can't cover their patch effectively. But FSAI don't reveal their baseline - how many premises were inspected in September 2024 - so it is impossible to gauge whether 16 is a big number.

In 1998 we had a big knees-up to celebrate 25 years together and invited new neighbours and old friends from three continents. We decided to put together a short-list of nearby accommodation from fancy to hostel and send our guests a list. One of the neighbours did occasional B&B and The Beloved went to see what the available rooms looked like. While discussing costs on the upstairs landing, a mouse appeared behind the host's shoulder sauntering bold-as-you-like across the carpet between two of the recently viewed rooms. Similar unfortunate timing at FSAI: "a live rodent running across the floor of a food storage room" just when the inspector calls. Even though a single running case is an anecdote not data; it nevertheless gets you closed down - quite properly i.m.o.  Graphic images to add to the fun?: a "gnawed chocolate bar" in the food storage room and clear evidence of a rodent attack on a bag of rice. 

But many of the adverse events caught by FSAI are a tedious run of cafés, shops and take-outs being cavalier about basic levels of food safety hygiene: wash hand basins, soap, hot water; basic obvious cleaning; woeful ignorance about food safety culture. These are much more likely to cause the runs in clients than Speedy Gonzales whizzing through the pantry. Then again, if food premises can't get the in-plain-sight issues sorted, it's a strong indicator of failings at the invisible microbe level.

It's more than 10 years since I was channeling FSAI There's a Fly in my Soup and Now Wash Your Hands. It's time for another airing, so.

Two steps of decency

A couple of months ago, I sent A Conversation With … Emily Wilson PhD, Contemporary Interpreter of the Iliad, on Listening, Hearing, and Communicating to a couple of friends-for-fifty-years who were uniquely appropriate for the article: she read Classics and he read medicine in college and they got married.  A few weeks later they were in Ireland for a Class Reunion and we got to meet in Tramore. They gave me a copy of Emily Wilson's 2018 translation of The Odyssey . . . and some rather fancy Canadian tea.

I had a very expensive education with access to a pretty good library: top-heavy with Thackeray, light on thrillers. As a teenager, I read E.V. Rieu's 1946 translation of The Odyssey, which was the 1st volume published as a [eventually black-covered] Penguin Classic.Teenagers are frankly Scarlett about the niceties of translation: so long as the story rips along. I know the story in some detail but have no Greek. At about the same time I also read HDF Kitto's The Greeks in its Pelican edition. The Greeks was a key text for Robert Pirsig [Blobit 2017] in the writing of ZAMM Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. 

Kitto: "Thus the hero of the Odyssey is a great fighter, a wily schemer, a ready speaker, a man of stout heart and broad wisdom who knows that he must endure without too much complaining what the gods send, and he can both build and sail a boat, drive a furrow as straight as anyone, beat a young braggart at throwing the discus, challenge the Phaeacian youth at boxing, wrestling or running; flay, skin, cut up and cook an ox, and be moved to tears by a song. He is in fact an excellent all rounder; he has surpassing aretê.” That should resonate with Heinlein's Specialization is for insects analysis of what a piece of work is a man [Withnail]; and also with O'Grady & Pyke's I could read the sky. We are all, even the dullest of us, complex creatures: so it is invidious to label /summarize anyone as dull or narcissist or scientist. 

Wilson devotes the first 91/583 pages to setting out her stall with as much baggage as she is aware of. It is also helpful to have a classicist's explanatory insight on how Archaic Greek life and certainties differ from those of our own time. "Odysseus is a migrant, but he is also a political and military leader, a strategist, a poet, a loving husband and father, an adulterer, a homeless person, an athlete, a disabled cripple, a soldier with a traumatic past, a pirate, thief and liar, a fugitive, a colonial invader, a home owner, a sailor, a construction worker, a mass-murderer, and a war hero". Some of those descriptors [migrant homeless disabled] have a particular charge for our modern selves in contrast to the inhabitants of EV Rieu's immediate post-WWII world of 80 years ago.

As we see above Kitto is keen to lay out the nuance of aretê ἀρετή = virtue / excellence. Wilson spends as much effort on xenia ξενία = hospitality: the rights and obligations of hosts and guests. Perhaps in these troubled, othering, times we all need to reflect more on xenia than aretê ?? When somebody, anybody, rocked up to the door Greeks were obliged to give the stranger bath, bites, bevvies and bed.  An integral part of the process is pompḗ Πομπη = safe escort to the next destination. After the fall of Troy, Odysseus' son Telemachus goes off to glean some intel from his father's fellow warriors who have, like, actually returned home. Nestor provides the chap with a chariot and his own son Pisistratus as guide for the onward journey to Menelaus and Helen's palace in Mycenae. Hypnopompic same root.

They say that, when B&B's became A Thing in Ireland in the 1950s there was some [presumably bitch behind the back] outrage that people would charge money for accommodating wayfaring strangers [♪Riannon Giddens♪] who needed a bed for the night. In that world Two steps of decency required a host to see their departing guest to the door - to the gate - to the bus-stop . . .

Irvine's foot

Because things come in threes it is fortunate that we can now add Sandy Irvine's foot to Capitaine Legionaire Danjou's [wooden] hand and maybe Galileo's finger. But knock yourself out: Susie Dent has written a whole book on famous body parts Vital Organs . . . also on YT [45m].

Andrew Comyn Irvine was last seen on The Blob in 2021. . . or with George Mallory near the summit of Everest on 8th June 1924. They found Mallory's body in 1999. But Irvine had the camera which might retain the evidence that the intrepid Brits had made it to the highest point of the World a generation before Hillary and Tenzing. Now they've found Irvine's boot with what's left of his foot inside.
Q. How did they know that it was Irvine's boot?
A. Because the sock had his name tag on it!
They'll do a DNA test and compare it to his grand-niece Julie Summers who is also author of his biography Fearless on Everest The Quest for Sandy Irvine (2020, £20) But any reasonable person would consider it case closed. Sandy's sister Evelyn married his school-friend Dick Summers. It is claimed that Irvine had a fling with Marjory Summers the step-mum of Dick Summers; or something - I'm frankly Scarlett about illicit interwar bonking, given the reg'lar old-fashioned forensic evidence in this case.

That evidence [see L] gave me a frisson. Part of my very expensive education required me to leave home for about 3/4 of every year and go boot camp with hundreds of other chaps. Laundry still had to be done in those institutions and we were requested-and-required to supply the commissariat with 12 handkerchiefs [remember them?]; 12 shirts; 18 collars; 12 pantses; and 12 vests. WTF collars? Yup we had to attach the collar to each shirt with a pair of studs; also cuff-links. These had to come back to the correct locker, so each item was labelled with Cash's name tapes. As you see Irvine's [mother?] chose the default colour. In our family, for reasons lost in the mists of fading memory I was B.T.SCIENTIST in black, my brother's name tapes were blue and my sister's green. At about the same time (as Charles Windsor was playing The Pirate |King at Gordonstoun) Cash's won the right to say 'Manufacturers of Woven Name Tapes to Her Majesty the Queen.' 

PS MeFi commentary on foot of the story. Interesting idea: check Mallory and Irvine's pockets for [top souvenir] rocks rather than cameras.

Mid Oct Sun Aye Noe

Dang! Entirely missed the aurora borealis on Th 10/10

• ♩ ♬ ♫ ♪
  
• Mark Knopfler & Ruth Moody - Wherever I Go
  
• Kodo drummers - well fit
  
• Hayde - Wayfaring Stranger
  
• Home Free - Man of Constant Sorrow
•  0.4146825098 prime nerd land
  
• Mark Huneycutt flies again after Helene 
• E-scoots banned on trains - Lithium fire risk
• MegaProject California Delta Conveyance ≋≋
  
• MiniProject Mossy Earth make a wetland in Portugal
• Really, do we need another golf-course?
  
• Career change after mislaid job application
  
• Some centenarians are not 100
  

evidence based

Pundits can be a pain in the fundament. I am a big fan of the BBC podcast Sideways which allows Matthew Syed to talk about people who march to a different drummer; who look at the world that standard media and Jan Modal might consider a bit out there. If we all think alike, it may be cosy and non-confrontational but it might also be bzzzt wrong. The podcast is fun because it explores some peculiarity of the human condition, develops some makes-ya-think ideas,ties everything up with a Message and signs off after 30 mins. Malcolm Gladwell, with his breezy certainties, and tidy stories, is an exemplar of the genre. As some wag had it "My take on Gladwell: his books should have been magazine articles and his magazine articles should have been tweets." 

But now I've read Matthew Syed's second book Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn from Their Mistakes (2015). It's a book in form but it's really journalism in substance. Which is fine - chacun à son goût métier - so long as you don't expect reporting on science to be, like, science. Scientists are generally really crap at explaining their ideas to ordinary folks; so there's defo a niche for Syed and Gladwell and Jared Diamond [whose breezy hypothesis about the end of civilization on Easter Island was just demolished on MeFi]. Diamond also had theories about the end of Viking Greenland [blob].

Syed contrasts the response to mistakes were made in the aero and health industries. But there are many examples from business and politics. Key message is that some corporate cultures make it very difficult to admit error so there is no learning opportunity. Nobody likes to be wrong and we tend to double-down if errors are pointed out. If management mistakes are re-framed as "shit happens" and "nothing to do with me" then the errors repeat. 

When a plane goes down, by contrast, investigators will go to extraordinary lengths to work out why. The black box for Air France 447 Rio-Paris flight was recovered from the mid-Atlantic floor 4,000m below the surface, 2 years after the plane crashed. Despite the headlines, air-travel is famously safe: and this is because pilots and engineers fess up when things go pear-shaped. Reports are filled and submitted and collated and analysed. Most importantly, international warnings, recalls and advisories go out to minimise the chance of something similar happening again [ever]. Here's another near [1.3m = 5ft] miss story analysed in the book]There has been much recent 737-max criticism of Boeing for turning a premier engineering company into a shareholder's company. 

When you tally up the number of avoidable iatrogenic deaths it is, according to Syed quoting a 2012 epidemiologist referring to a 2000 report,  equivalent to two full jumbo-jets falling out of the sky every 24 hours [USA data]. An arresting image, indeed. But more recent analysis on much larger samples specifically looking at the problem of medical error finds that two full jumbo-jets might be 10x - 20x too high.  Nevertheless even if only 5% of deaths in hospital are due to mistakes, it's still too high. And, Syed sez, nobody is comparing notes; let alone sending reports, analysis and conclusions to a central repository. Au contraire, when they killed my father in 2001, his hospital records mysteriously disappeared. We see this all the time: when babies die or are incapacitated in/by hospitals, parents usually have to lawyer up to get to the bottom of it. Mostly, they just want an explanation, an apology and some assurance that no parent will have to suffer like them in future. It's ugly and makes it all about the compo; as if a €million will get their baby back.

Afrique. Later on in the book  Syed re-tweets a story from Tim Harford [multoprevo] about evaluating interventions to better educate young Kenyans. Aid agencies have $50 billion to spend in Africa each year. Harford's useful way of evaluation such large numbers if to divide them by the relevant population. If distributed evenly, that's  a little less than $1 a week each. Anyway, the study in Kenya was effectively a controlled experiment or randomized controlled trial RCT. They found that 

• lurrying textbooks [in English] into schools made no difference
• lo-tech flip-charts with engaging brightly colour pictures ditto brrrp! 
• otoh, dosing all the kids (and the teachers?) with anthelmintics to reduce the parasitic worm burden perked everyone up, ready to learn and less likely to pull a sickie. Result: demonstrable improvement in the LOs Learning Outcomes.
  

Don't believe a word of it until it's been replicated in Cameroon! Nevertheless it's probably better if you read (some of) this book than spending the equivalent amount of time restlessly swiping left-right or slack-jawed watching youtube. As Gladwell said of his own works "The mistake is to think these books are ends in themselves. My books are gateway drugs—they lead you to the hard stuff." Which is characteristically too clever by 'arf.

!! But why waste time with secondary sources when you can get the key ideas from the horse's mouth? I have been recently quite the fanboi for Sean Carroll's Mindscapes podcast. Mindscapes#1 was with Carol Tavris the co-author of  Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) [2007] on Mistakes, Justification, and Cognitive Dissonance. Also on YT.
Five years and 200+ episodes later Carroll returned to the theme in Mindscapes#233 with Hugo Mercier (co-author  of The Enigma of Reason [2017] on Reasoning and Skepticism. Also on no pics YT. In my reality, I absorbed these two hour+ blasts of erudition within a couple of days of each other. So it was a bit like binge-watching House on lupus in an all-night session.

Stick it to the man, dessert edition.

RIYC?? In the early 90s, a couple of friends of my sister left the Woo of Findhorn to settle and make a living in Ireland. They bunked with us for a few weeks. But as soon as they got some gig work, they left our spare room and rented a teeny tiny flat in Dun Laoghaire. One Saturday a few weeks later, we piled into the car for a surprise visit to our new pals K&L. For a jape, we paused at the garden centre at the bottom of our rural Northside lane and bought a massive sack of spuds as a house-gift. They were delighted to see us, gave us tea and we all went on a promenade along the East Pier. That Winter, The Boy got well into D&D and wanted to attend a session in Dun Laoghaire after school on Tuesdays. K&L, well obvs, offered to give him a bed for the night and make sure he brushed his teeth before going back to school in the morning. And it was so.

For a while L was working the night shift as a waitron in the Royal Irish Yacht Club. It was a club, for rich people, so the tips didn't appear as a golden rain and the management paid only minimum wage. But, at the end of the shift, the staff could take home any unsold desserts as a gratuity. "rrrr, thank ye for my wages, marster". K&L, whose ancestors had left in the 20thC and 19thC respectively, worked real hard at re-anchoring their dynasty in Ireland. But it just didn't come together in pre-Tiger Dublin and so they pulled the plug and went on to British Columbia. When we went to help them pack for leaving, they presented us with a neat stack of 6 RCSI dessert bowls. L had never been in a hurry to return the receptacles for her dessert 'bonus'. I guess I was, wearing my épater les bougies bonnet, happy enough to fence her loot.

After they left, K&L borned and raised a chap together who was about the same age as Dau.I and Dau.II. And then, just before Christmas 20 years ago, K had a heart attack and died. We were bereft, it was as if his heart was too big for this world. The only time the three kids met was when L came back to Ireland with her Boy and his father's ashes to scatter at the Home Place in Tulla, County Clare. On that trip L revealed that the sack o' spuds which we'd dumped on them as a joke a decade earlier had been a lifesaver. After the rent was paid that month, they had literally no money left for food. Morto, I was! At the time I was on a crazy tax-free EU-funded gig in TCD and would happily have given them a pound of rashers and a cabbage as well as the spuds! And son-of-K&L? He turned out well.

Vth Column

It's more than 100 years since the foundation of The State = Saorstát Éireann which didn't formally sever the last umbilical to the UK until Easter 1949 when the The Republic of Ireland Act 1948 came into force. The Free State / Saorstát had been minting its own coins since 1922 but they were the same size and denomination as British coins and the latter circulated freely in Ireland, at face value. UK paper money was also accepted in Ireland when I was student in the 1970s; although not vice versa - you'd get very peculiar looks if you proffered £5 Irish in middle England. 

One of the neatest buildings in Trinity College Dublin is the 1937 Reading Room which was commissioned in 1919 to commemorate the 491 students and staff who had perished [in uniform!] in The Great War. The Hall of Honour atrium wasn't finished until 1928. 'NIKH' is inscribed in foot-high letters on the outside portico although 'Victory' rang kinda hollow for the 491 and their grieving families. The functional rest of the building - serving as a Post-Graduate reading room - wasn't finally completed until 1937! 

One of the neatest features of the design is that the massive hardwood doors are studded with bronze pennies [as L]. I've always believed that these pennies all bore the date 1937 because that would be a cool nod to future post-armageddon archaeologists. Similar to the practice of putting coins under the foundation stone of many public buildings when they are a-building. Most recently, in August, I urged Gdau.I and Gdau.II to check out the doors when they went on a city break with their aunties. They were unimpressed! So the next time I had idle minutes in TCD, I went to look at the disappointment myself.

And WTF! There are no Irish pennies, let alone 1937 pennies at all at all. Rather they all sport the profile of GEORGIVS V DEI GRA: BRITT: OMN: REX FID: DEF: IND: IMP: = George V by the Grace of God, King of all the British territories, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India . . . who died in 1936. I was initially outraged that Trinity was acting up as a Fifth Column for Empire long after that ship had sailed from the 26 counties. For a Republic, there's a lot of this historical inertia about: Royal Irish Academy, Royal Dublin Society, Royal College of Surgeons, Royal Irish Yacht Club. But a moment's thought revealed that the doors were probably completed for the 1928 structure and, however bamboozled, those remembered inside died for 'King & Country'. And no, not Brian Ború (941-1014 Clontarf), High King of Ireland.

Lonelio Noleoni

 Grass-widder agane this w/e: just me n the sheep

• Jackie Lennox - Chicken Supper, Mushy Peas and Tanora - Tanora 
• adverse review
  
• is closed forever
• Veg rennet pecorino making
• UnVeg!! Reducing half-a-pig at hometo chops and sausinges
  
• Modular homes ? two bois have a rant
• Not a bike-shed
• TDs behaving badly
  
• Moel Fferna Slate Mine
• Retrogressive permafrost thaw megaslump
• Sean Connery reads Ithaka [prev] to Va♫gelis 
• Lee Marvin [→] b under a Wand'ring Star (1969!)
• HeyHo, a Proustian madeleine for me: ole gravel voice grrrrresonated with the miserable lonely 15 y.o. that was me when it came out. Never seen the whole movie.
• Portishead
  
• Ryanair know where you live how close together are your eyes
  
• Irish Spa Hotels sweep prizes 8/25 incl. #1 = Adare Manor in CondeNast Europe Resorts survey. 6/25 in the list are in Turkey [Asia ahem] so the whole process is suspect
• Not-Streetview: googlecars can't cover the whole planet: entrepreneurs and dogoodniks are filling the gaps.
  

Gavagai!

In't language wonderful? We make these sounds with lingua, lips and larynx [Ug Ug beep beep] and other humans (and some dogs) can understand them to carry a particular meaning. Not all other humans, of course; your {family | roomies | co-workers}will probably get your drift; but someone who has just struggled from a leaking inflatable through the grating roar of pebbles which the waves draw back  and onto Dover Beach - maybe not so much? [and every day, as someone with a tin ear, I thank St Fursey I grew up Anglophonic).

It's not fair, or sensible, to ignore that wet Somali refugee because, even if we SHOUT, he can't understand what we want. Not sensible? Because we are making a sorry hames of running things hereabouts and could really benefit from new ways of l◎◎king at the problems that haemorrhage our social capital and aggravate inequity, unfairness and exclusion.

That's why we need linguists (and signers, translators, grammarians); to see what falls through the cracks of communication when people speak to each other. I returned a rental-car the other day and pointed at the nearside front corner
Bob "those scuff marks were on it when I took delivery"
Avis "these alloys?"
Bob "I've no idea, it's your car"
Avis "No: do . you . mean . the . alloy . wheels?"
I'm glad we cleared that up, because extra charges have been anxious-making in the past.

The best ling thing on the internet since sliced infinitives is Lingthusiasm which I've riffed on before. In the latest of nearly 100 episodes they cite a linguistics 101 story about two lads in countryside who have no language in common. A rabbit exits the hedgerow and runs across the field and one man points and says "Gavagai!". What does the other person make of that single word - it matters because establishing the meaning might be the beginning of a beautiful mutually intelligible friendship. Probably "rabbit"?? But could be "fast" or "big-ears" or "I like a lorra shaggin' too" or "mammal" or "fox incommming". 

The Lingthusiasm discussion transitioned from [parts of] rabbit to a handy resource for inter-language comparison. Morris Swadesh (1909-1967), a student of Edward Sapir [of Sapir and Whorf prev]. . . became the GoTo for lexicostatistics and glottochronology. In 1952 he delivered a 215 word list of language universals, to facilitate the comparison of languages - how many members of the Swadesh List have the same root in, say, Hindi and Irish. IF all languages, and this is the hypothesis behind the lists, have a word for [alphabetically] - bird - come - drink - earth - foot - give - hand - know - leaf - many - neck - push - rain - tree - THEN you can be confident that speakers of two languages are talking about the same thing . . . and you can make your comparisons. You may be able to see the connexion with the Gavagai tale. I guess that populating the Swadesh List for a newly discovered language would involve the same sort of non-leading questions as used to fill a Linguistic Atlas: "What do you call the long, tapering, orange-coloured root vegetable with feathery green leaves?"

Anyway. Swadesh recognised / included only 5 colours [wot? no cerise or teal?] because, for e.g., blue is not universal. Here are those colours in 9 different EU languages. What I've done is sort the five words in each language alphabetically. Your task is to match the colours between each pair of languages. Maybe start with EN and Nederlands?

Maybe not so easy? - even when you exclude the two not IndoEuropean tongues = HU and FI. You may express your admiration for those 19thC scholars who wrangled the Indo-European family of languages to appreciate that they were all descended from PIE - a language spoken by central Asian shepherds maybe 5000 years ago. Swadesh Lists for more languages [Hausa Telugu Tagalog Klingon] than you can shake a stick at on wiktionary.

Answers

	EN	FR	HU	NL	PT	CZ	FI	IS	IE
87	red	rouge	vörös	rood	vermelho	červený	punainen	rauður	dearg
88	green	vert	zöld	groen	verde	zelený	vihreä	grænn	glas
89	yellow	jaune	sárga	geel	amarelo	žlutý	keltainen	gulur	buí
90	white	blanc	fehér	wit	branco	bílý	valkoinen	hvítur	bán
91	black	noir	fekete	zwart	preto	černý	musta	svartur	dubh

In context, you can believe that yellow and geel and gulur have a common [Germanic] origin. As for black, English has gone rogue by adopting blæc an Old English word for ink. But we keep the standard meaning in swarthy. Also ewe.

Other ways of being

I gorra new Podcast: Mindscapes run by Sean Carroll where he "hosts conversations with the world's most interesting thinkers. Science, society, philosophy, culture, arts, and ideas." I should be okay for a while because it's been running since 2018 and 290+ thinkers have given an hour of their time to the project. Sean Carroll was trained a cosmic physicist [PhD Harvard 1993] but has also been one of those Public Intellectuals like Steven Pinker. Cosmology is hard and physicists in search of new challenges were definitely the grit that niggles at the start of the rise and rise of molecular biology in the 1950s. Carrol has read Erwin Schrödinger's What is Life? for example and has ideas about evolution because he's read widely in the field and is interested in Life, The Universe and Everything including the antics of the diverse inhabitants of this our small blue planet.

Mindscapes 269 featured Sahar Heydari Fard on "Complexity, Justice, and Social Dynamics". She has not read Erwin Schrödinger's What is Life? but she is up to speed on, say, punctuated equilibria and other key issues in the evolutionary philosophy. So her convo with Carroll was quite high-falutin' but pretty interesting, not to say gripping. The question addressed was what tools are available to document and support change in society. Like 1950s physicists brought their ways of seeing to DNA, proteins and evolution in the 1960s; so with social dynamics today: maybe we don't need to re-invent the wheel if established complexity theory can be mobilized to make models to get our heads around really hard problems (and unintended consequences) in society. 

One of the biological theories that the philosophical physicist and the philosophical economist cite with approval is Wright's idea of adaptive landscapes. Acknowledging that the Perfick is the enemy of the Good enough. They like the idea of local optimum solutions that may not be The Answer but are pretty good in a particular place and time. But Wright's landscape is barely a theory, let alone a testable hypothesis - it's a metaphor! But Fard riffs off on the idea to imagine an actual landscape of communities all trying to get along with the cards they have been dealt - a maybe sharing some of Things That Work with other similar communities to save them having to re-invent the wheel er blackjack table [Mixed metaphor morass alert!].  But that's okay: matter a damn where the ideas come from; just seize those which seem useful. The podcast set my poor mind off in a number of different directions. 

① One was to reflect on our Kindred Neanderthals who kept on keeping on for 200,000 years - through climate changes the like of which we haven't yet experienced - sharing, propagating and using a very basic set of technological tools: chipped stones, tanned hides, sharp sticks and red fire. The Blob has asked, rhetorically, where do the ideas come from? in science. For reasons unknown, Neanderthals don't seem to have budged much on the implemented ideas front for a hella long time.

② I was talking to my neighbour Local Solar the other day. He asserted that he was, like me, def'ny a morning person. But he recognised that night-owls had their place too. He reckoned the distinction went back to when the common ancestor of Us and Neanderthals had just come down from the trees. It was desirable that someone in the clan should be awake to tend the fire (and keep watch for cave-bears). Groups which segregated for larks and owls [as we do for green eyes and brown], retaining some of each type, survived better while less bioclock diverse parties left the stage. I'd never heard that argument before and I've no idea if it's even testable scientifically. But I love the idea that we are selected to be diverse rather than identical (to a fallen angel?)

③ Carroll and Fard were also asking how stable societies can nevertheless embrace change. For hundreds of years Han Chinese carried out foot-binding on their infant girls. Then in the space of one generation, about 100 years ago, the practice was shoved into the dustbin of history. This collective decision worked where Edicts from Manchu Emperors in the 1600s had been brushed aside. How come? Lots of other cultural norms in that society - some of which seem weird to us - continue as before. When we came back to Ireland in 1990, it was still pretty darned white, pretty darned catholic and pretty darned bacon & cabbage. In 1996, when we moved to the deepest rural midlands, our nearest neighbour confessed that they'd just tried frozen pizza for the first time - induced to do so by their teenage daughter. Now there is a Chinese take-away in Borris (pop ca. 800), not to mention Polskie sklepy, black and amber GAA players and Grand Theft Auto. 

One way to make change in the way we live now is to present lots of options and give some of them a go. Immigrants? Bring 'em on!