Simpson's Gogglebox

I had an Epiphany on 6th of Jan 2026 and stopped watching YT.  60 days later, I acknowledged that by saying No to the algorithm, I'd freed up a lot more time to sit on the sofa page-turning books. Lack of YouTube doesn't affect my diet of earbooks half so much: my borrowbox coups are mostly consumed when I am out and about. I was in Tramore Library on a recent Monday morning returning a book and thought I'd browse the shelves. On my way to non-fiction (300 Social Sciences 400 Language 500 Science 600 Tech) I was surprised to see a Whole Block of shelves labelled Crime Fiction. There was more shelf-metres in that category that All of 300-699. I find that Quite Peculiar but I recognise I'm in the minority on that one.

During a brief gap in my jury-service days, I nipped down to the County Library and borrowed a couple of books. One of which was The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets (2013) by Simon Singh [rendered R]. I have name-checked Singh for kicking homeopathy; unaware of the unintended consequences [no placebo] of such righteous punching down. But generally Singh is a force for good: edutaining STEM more widely to diversify the lives of math-anxious folks and maybe making them [feel] smarter.

You're wrong if you know that Matt Groening made 800+ episodes of the Simpsons. The show's success required-allowed the hiring of a rotating roomful [nearly a gross!] of comedy writers. A Lot of them were [Harvard] college educated and their demographic leaned nerd science-guy [sex-ratio ~1F:4M. Singh ploughed through the footage and alt.tv.simpsons and interviewed the writers to winkle out the math references. A lot of them Easter Eggs which lit up the day of those who 'got' them. Getting them might require using VHS to step through a sequence frame by frame to find a subliminal nerdnik gag. The Simpsons writers were cracking jokes about Googol and Googolplex when Sergey Brin was still in High School

I was born too early for The Simpsons, by the time it launched in late 1989, we'd given up the ould telly several years earlier. But, during my YT years, I clocked enough hours to know that the cast live in Springfield, US; that Lisa is a genius and has an older brother called Bart. But I rate puzzles and Easter Eggs, [one of Singh's other works is The Code Book] and my lack of Simpsonology doesn't impinge much on my appreciation of Singh's book.

The book has several intercalated 'exams' where you can test yourself on the larfometer 

• What did 0 say to 8?
• Nice belt!
• What are the 10 kings of people in the world
• Those who understand binary and those who don't.
• Prove that a horse has an infinite number of legs
• Horses have an even number of legs: two hind legs at the back and forelegs at the front. That's a total of six legs, which an odd number of legs for a mammal. The only number which is both odd and even is infinity. Therefore horses have an infinite number of legs.
• Why do computer scientists confuse Hallowe'en and Christmas?
• Because Oct.31 = Dec.25 . . . and bin.11111 = Dec.31 

This seems the best chance I'll ever have to do Simpson's Paradox on The Blob. It forms half of the current book's Chapter 12 in which Congressional votes for the 1964 Civil Rights Act are tallied with unexpected results.

Because the Civil War is was still fresh in everyone's memory, having finished only 99 years previously, it is interesting to see how votes compared where Jim Crow hadn't run [North] and where it had [South].

Party	Northern	%	Southern	%	National	%
Democrats	145/154	94%	7/94	7%	152/248	61%
Republican	138/162	85%	0/10	0%	138/172	80%

These data show that, in percentage terms, as expected, Democrats were more in favor of civil rights than Republicans in both North (94% v 85%) and South (7% v 0%) regions BUT when the country as a whole is considered Republicans seem to be more Civil Righty. That's paradoxical, no? It hinges on several numerical diffs which are smoothed out if you consider only % of votes. 

• There are 3x more people and their representatives in the North than in the former Confederate States
• Democrats were the party of power in the South (Lincoln was a Republican)
• There is cross party lack of support for Civil Rights across the South; even the Dems there are luke warm  

One final thing to mention (which is the subject of Singh's Appendix 2) is Euler's Identity

e^πi + 1 = 0

A pair of Kings

 Did I mention that I was doing time as a juror? I did. 

At lunch on the second day, I mentioned to our Jury Foreman that I was going to the theatre that evening, and there was a Dublin train at 16:08. IF the judge finished on the dot of 4 ANDIF everyone stood out of the way ANDIF I could exit through the court rather than through the Jury Room and the warren of first-person-shooter corridors and stairwells THEN I was confident I could trot the 600m to the station and make that train AND have dinner with my extended family before the show. It is the nature of things that at least half our fellow jurors earwigged on the conversation. So when the lawyer was still on his feet at 16:05 two of the jury turned round in their seats and raised their eyebrows in sympathy with my flight plight. It was okay, I had a back-up bus with JJKavanagh at 17:10 and was able to dine on grazed left-overs before we all left for the venue at Club na Múinteoirí on Parnell Square.

The play we were all going to see was II a clever riffle-shuffling of two Elizabethan plays: Edward II by Christopher Marlowe and Richard II [as R] by Wm Shaxsper. It is a matter of historical record that the former was the Gt-grandfather of the latter and that both kings were from their crowns untimely ripped. Plays about monarchs of The Colonial Oppressor might seem a peculiar choice to show in The Republic, hmmm? But made a bit of sense in that it was brought here as part of Wilde Stages; the current incarnation of the Dublin Gay Theatre Festival. One snitty insider comment was that DGTF, in its 22 year, will find the money and a stage for any ould nonsense so long as it's Gay. 

It was kind of amusing that a) our family party almost doubled the mid-week audience b) was 90% female c) occupied the whole 3rd row. The rest of the audience was middle-aged to elderly blokes. Family members with better gaydar than me (I just wear BLT-Allied merch) said I was probably the only SWM in the dark  The elder king projected Presence as only an Ac-Tor can do. The other, The Beloved's 30-something neffy from ZA, was introduced to us near nekkid and sort-of-fetal broiling under the spotlights as Richard II. Although later he gets up and owns his patrimony. His Presence was why we were all attending alternative theatre way past my bedtime.

Who knows or cares now whether a fellow who died 700 years ago was gay? Not millennials, that's for sure: sex and gender don't seem to make no differ for my students or my childer and their pals. But at least some contemporaries believed that Richard II and esp Edward II preferred company and congress with men. 200 years after the facts, Holinshed's Chronicles maintain that Edward was disemboweled per anum with a red-hot poker "so as no appearance of any wound or hurt outwardlie might be once perceived" at Berkeley Castle in September 1327. 

I was not tooo distracted by the superficial campyness of the perf: corsets, codpieces, chiffon, tinsel crowns and petals. Underneath, the play is an eloquent discussion about the desirability, and even possibility, of renouncing great power and great responsibility [aka shirking one's duty] and walking into a less-stress sunset. That's important: in my family there is a generational thread of service and subservience of self. Is that a Good Thing? Would the world be richer if our ambition genes hadn't been shot off in the war?

Formally: The troublefome raigne and lamentable death of Edward the Second, King of England, with the tragicall fall of proud Mortimer . . . THE Tragedie of King Richard the fecond,
 

 

Tonn Nua Lá Nua Burj Nua

Two years ago we were part of a  l o o n n g tailback approaching the Luffany roundabout at the N end of the Waterford ring-road. We had seen the future and its works to mangle Lincoln Steffin's 1919 assessment of the neonatal Soviet Union. Because we have become dependent on energy: for the toaster, the uber, the video-calls, the wireless, that X-ray, those youtubes, the zone underfloor heating. Generating electricity is only part of it; creating the infra-structure to distribute, deliver, store. maintain and service the MWs is also required.

cw: I know buggerall 40min worth of advocacy about Offshore Wind 

. . . but should put in the work to know more. Last Tuesday, we invited Dave "Salesforce" Dempsey to talk at the Wexford Science Cafe about Offshore Wind Energy and we got a 40 minute tsunami of data and a hurricane of acronyms [OWE, DMAP, ORESS, GWh, CfD, CBF] and there was time for many questions and informed comments from the floor. One reason why the talk was lucid is that, while Dempsey wrote the book about "Industry Trends in Cloud Computing" [a snip at €130], he's recently had to teach himself the language, politics and numbers of a National Energy Plan. Fewer Curse of Knowledge assumptions! [wch bloboprev]

I think Politics is key here. Offshore was last mentioned at WxScCa when we had the Management of SETU, the ambitious SunnySouthEast multi-campus University, saying they were going to launch MW-engineering and energy-tourism courses at their Wexford Campus. But they don't have a [proper, like, with labs] Wexford Campus! That project is still bogged down in unresolved CPOs, site-changes, finance over-runs, NIMBY, judicial reviews ten years after it was approved in principle. It's like the National Children's NOTpital in small. I don't know if we [the people, politicians, players] are capable of delivering Big. Thinking Big we can do - just listen to blowhards and hurlers-on-the-ditch two pints down in any Irish pub. This is where EirGrid are at:

Tonn Nua [en: New Wave; fr:  François Truffaut nouvelle vague] is currently the most favoured and most advanced Designated Maritime Area Plan (DMAP) to launch the energy future of Ireland. If Tonn Nua works, then they intend to roll out ~50% larger capacity wind-farms further out to sea called Li Ban, Manannan and Danu. Tonn Nua is planned to have 60 x 15MW, bottom-fixed turbines spread over 300 km² more or less shadowing the Costa na Déise from Helvick Head to Hook Head. 60 x 15 = 900MW capacity - enough to power 800,000 homes. I use "shadowing" deliberately, because there will be complaints about The View from people who have bought sea-view retirement homes [with added toasters etc.] all along the coast. Few of them will be complaining on behalf of the crabs and conger which will have their homes turned over in the maelstrom of civil engineering.

Dave Dempsey  is not in the pocket of The Man or FAANG; he's made enough money to be independent. Like successful entrepreneurs, he looks at the horizon, thinks big and is prepared to take risks. Independent, sure; but also a Booster for Offshore Wind Energy. He expresses a resistance is useless vibe about Future Ireland. “I'd say it's better for your children to look at that than look at the Burj Khalifa or the Sydney Opera House when they wake up in the morning". Adding that there are 3,500 jobs to be had at peak rollout.

Any 15MW wind-turbine is massive and this is one reason for off-shore windfarms. The changes at Luffany roundabout were to accommodate the first bottle-neck in the delivery of 80m turbine blades from Belview Port to King's County. The blades for 15MW are 120m long. Road improvements to get those big boys where the wind requires them would consume the entire budget of Transport for Ireland. Offshore has no hedges. Nevertheless, 15MW turbines, their towers and blades, need some (flat and extensive) on shore ground  for assembly and maintenance. And they need it next week. Rosslare Europort plans to tender to provide this service but they are probably too-little too-late too-entitled. Pembroke Dock / Milford Haven across the channel in Wales, with it's deep-water harbour and existing oil refinery is well ahead in that race. In addition the brownfield site at the old [Tata] steel and heavy industry complex at Port Talbot is 100km East but within the logistic catchment and will get mighty devt grants from the UK government. See: it's not just for Tonn Nua: the winner will get the contracts for servicing all the future Irish, Welsh and Cornish Offshore projects.

The other issue is that the Irish Grid does not have the capacity to land anything like 900MW at Great Island at the head of Waterford Harbour. The Greenlink Interconnector from Wales, which comes ashore at Baginbun Co WX and tootles across county to Gt Island, has been live for a year now. But apparently, when Tonn Nua switches on, that route will all have to be dug up again to install fatter cables from there to Great Island. Some questions:

• Who is in charge of future planning at EirGrid?
• Who is cheese-paring at the cabinet table at Govt Centraal?
• Who among them has a Vision for Ireland longer than the next election ?

But there is "with one leap we were free" solution to the imbalance between supply [too much and uneven] and distribution [inadequate] & demand [insatiable]. Tonn Nua is owned by Helvick Head Offshore Wind DAC: a joint venture between ESB and Ørsted A/S, their Danish oppos. Helvick is already talking to 'private' customers to suck up the surplus when the wind blows faster than 10m/s. And at 03:00 hrs when all the toasters and TVs are asleep. Up above, by using "800,000 homes" I've fallen for the standard narrative where demand is imagined as from reg'lar folk just like me: coming home to their 2.4 children at 6pm and ALL switching on the kettle for a nice cup of tea after a hard day staring at a screen. But it's not like that any more: a single data-centre might need 100MW [the same as the entire city of Galway or Waterford] 24/7 and there are A Lot of data centres. They already the consume 3/10ths of Ireland's electricity and who knows how much water for cooling their chips and discs. Dempsey invites us to imagine 'green' industrial parks discretely tucked in behind the dunes: taking in energy from Tonn Nua, Tonn Dó, Tonn Trí . . . and spewing out Gbytes for MegaCorp.

IMO we should all be more intentional and more careful in our energy usage: a shirt could go two days between washes; two baths a week and showers the other days; walk to school; cycle to work; put on a sweater before putting on the central heating. You get my thrift. But I can see Offshore Wind as [part of] the solution to our energy needs. And I'll vote for the party which has a coherent sustainable energy policy in their manifesto: that budgets for safe clean decommissioning when the blades reach the end of their useful life. 

But I will be a very reluctant party to any proposal planning to fill the horizon with turbines which are enslaved to The FAANG Empire.

When things go wrong

. . . then things go down, Maritime division.

I have a couple of friends, one from Central Europe and one from South America, who met while working for the IMO [International Maritime Organization] in London. They were both competent adults, one qualified in international law. When we'd visit from gritty Geordieland, it was a different world. The IMO, and its ~300 workers, had diplomatic status, and didn't have to take the Calais ferry to avail of duty-free. In London, there were several bonded warehouses which served this market each producing a catalogue, like Argos, but with more cases of gin. Transnational ex-pats could order up a tax-free car to potter about the city attending embassy events, galas and conferences. Wheels were also handy for collecting crates of booze when it was their turn to host a party.

The IMO features in a book by William Langewiesche: The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime [2004]. He (1955-2025) was a prolific writer for inter alia The Atlantic, covering cover-ups and war-zones. He was on the ground at Ground Zero after 9/11 for six months and wrote it up long-form for The Atlantic. 9/11? did someone say Multiple Conspiracy Theories? Well there's plenty more The Outlaw Sea esp in discussing the fate of the MS Estonia, a RoRo ferry lost in the Baltic 30 years ago [Mentioned in passing in a 2014 Blob about Zeebrugge]. 

Langewiesche makes, but does not belabour, the point that the IMO has been subject to corporate capture. A great many great ships are owned by MegaCorp but registered in MicroNations like Panama, Liberia, Marshall Islands: the three [dwt deadweight tonnage] biggest Flags of Convenience FoC. Panama, for example, flags 30x more ships than the USA. MegaCorp uses FoC because regulations and inspections carried out by 'real' countries are . . . not convenient for shareholders. The Environment [bunker fuel alert] and South-Asian deckhands do not have a seat at the table when the IMO is in session - but MegaCorp is entitled to be part of the Liberian delegation (in an advisory capacity, like). The IMO is funded by nations pro rata by dwt. It's not the Marshall Islands (with a population less than Dublin California or our own Dundalk) who are funding the duty free lifestyle of IMO apparatchiks in London. It is rather Evergreen [2021 Suez prev], Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd.

The Estonia was a flag-ship for the recently created Baltic republic of the same name. Everyone agrees that, on a regular over-night shuttle between Tallinn and Stockholm the front fell off in a storm at 01:00hrs on 28 Sep 1994. Hundreds of white people died, so it was front-page news for a while. Although a Swedish company co-owned the MS Estonia they applied their inspections with a light hand: cutting the recently Soviet state some slack in becoming a fully compliant member of the Corporate West. An international committee investigating the tragedy was likewise reluctant to blame Estonians for poor maintenance and top-down management structure. The draft report suggested design failure. The German ship-builder commissioned a much fatter counter report and managed a successful reputational damage control campaign. Nut-job conspiracy theories [Jutta Rabe, bombs, KGB] didn't help reveal what really happened. Which is desirable to stop this sort of thing happening in the future.

The Outlaw Sea only devotes the middle third to the Estonia. The rest of the book includes stories of 20thC piracy on the High Seas; disastrous oil spills [cw: shadow fleet, threadbare hulls, under-paid crews, drunken captains]; and end of ship-life issues on the beaches of Gujarat and Chittagong. In our throw-away world it is just . too . expensive to dispose of agéd ships [asbestos, bunker fuel, TBT anti-fouling paint, copper, steel, bronze] using unionized [white] labour wearing hazmat suits. If Greenpeace achieves a corporate regulatory coup on South Asian ship-breakers, one likely consequence will be an up-tick of mysterious ship-loss at sea. 

Great read. It's 20+ years old now but I bet the basic principles are relevant today . . . with added shadow fleet. Next time you order garden furniture, solar panels, shoes, shirts, skirts, mutter a prayer for deck-hands and dolphins?

PIE for beginners

 If you're reading this, you are either a) struggling or b) part of the anglophonie. English is a bit peculiar because all the short words are "germanic" related to Nederlands and Frisian but the $10 words - from cooking, law, politics, science and tech - come from the South mainly Latin, via [Norman] French, but with a smattering of Greek. We'll ignore the obvious loan words like adobe, bungalow, chutney, divan, embargo, fjord, gulag, hummus, incognito, junta, klutz, mantra, nark, opera, poteen, Qi, robot, sauna, Tory, ukulele, veld, wanderlust, yacht, zero. These blow-ins can be a poser, but not a problem for linguists digging into the origin of languages. The origin of Language itself is another, deeper, more speculative, problem.

The Blob has had much to say about PIE (Proto Indo European) but, because there's 2½ million words schlubbing about in the archive, and because I eat more than I speak, I've had more to say about Pie [apple, mutton, lemon-meringue, scotch]. When Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global (2025) by Laura Spinney [critical review by Franis "Pagan" Young] was mentioned, I was all over it like a rash reserved a copy in the library. Spinney is a journalist rather than a philologist and so is better equipped to write a pop-sci account than someone who has internalized the phonetic alphabet. Not least because her investigation draws on three, previously quite separate, threads of research: linguistics (both written and spoken), archaeology and genetics. 

Since my pal Dan Bradley [FRS] pioneered the sequencing of ancient DNA thirty years ago in Trinity College Dublin it has become a booming speciality. Not just permafrozen mammoths and neanderthals but regular "recent" humans who may have spoken PIE or one of its many descendants. Now, the grave goods (bronze, beakers, beads) can be cross-referenced to the Y-chromosome of the honoured dead and inferences can be made about whether the interee was local or colonizing blow-in from the steppe. This doesn't always help with the language because there are cases where invading hegemons adopted the language of the natives, like the Vikings and Normans in Ireland; and also where their language because the aspirational prestige language of power, as with Normans in England.

I didn't twig that Baltic and Slavic were two different branches of the PIE bush. That would have added some friction to the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth aka Królestwo Polskie i Wielkie Księstwo Litewskie (1569 - 1795) before it was finally dismembered and gobbled up among Russia, Austria and Prussia.

Who doesn't love the fact that Elfdalian / Övdalian is a separate descendant of proto-germanic spoken by about 3,000 folk in one corner of Sweden. They have mobilised 7 extra letters to help with the pronunciation: Ąą, Ęę, Įį, Ųų, Y̨y̨, Ą̊ą̊ and Ðð. And, just to be contrary, the language was written in runes until just over 100  years ago. Needless to say, like all the Gaeilgeoirí in Ireland, all speakers are fluent in Swedish, because they need driving licenses. 

Spinney throws judicious hat at a Ukrainian [as opposed to Anatolian, south across the Black Sea] origin of Proto. Most likely a crew by the name of Yamnaya, who buried their dead in pits under kurgans [barrow, tumulus]  and sprinkled them with red ochre before covering them over forever. 

Did someone mention Ukraine? The War there has put a bit of a damper on excavations of known or new Yamnaya sites. Archaeologists are happy out digging with a trowel and a paint-brush but are understandably ill-equipped to deal with land-mines and unexploded munitions. But there have been some wins among the tsunami of losses. In 1930, the Soviets decided to build Azovpol a steel plant in Mariupol. They weren't totally oblivious to culture and when the zeks uncovered an ancient burial site, Mykola Makarenko was allowed in for an emergency dig. It was rushed but careful and the artifacts and drawings were lodged in the Mariupol Municipal Museum. In Feb 2022 the Azovpol steelworks turned into a meat-grinder during the Russian invasion. The stellworks were destroyed along with the museum and everything in it. Very slow hand-clap.

otoh, in 1956,  during the next five year plan, the R. Dnieper was dammed for hydropower and irrigation at Kakhovka. The resulting reservoir covered the oldest known Yamnaya site at Mykhailivka, putting it off-limits to further excavation. The dam was blown up by the Russians or sabotaged by the Ukrainians in June 2023 releasing 18 cu.km of water. 60 people and uncountable livestock were killed and 40 communities flooded  . . . but the meadows at Mykhailivka became accessible for the first time in 60 years.

But enough of these anecdotes, get the full overview by reading the book! I've returned 'my' copy to the library. 

Courthouse steps

It's a little more than 10 years since I was called for Jury Service. In 2016, I attended the County Courthouse, along with ~70 other citizens, three times over an elapsed week. On day two I came within an ace of making it onto a jury but was rejected by the defense counsel. I had some sour things to say back then about the cost and inefficiency of vindicating people's rights to trial by jury.

Well Tiocfaidh ár lá I was re-called to attend the Circuit Court in April and joined 75 fellow citz, crammed into a room with only 65 seats at the County Court House [view from the steps R] on Tuesday last at 14:00hrs. We were roll-called as if it was 1926, with no pretence at GDPR. Which enabled me to discover a) that my distinctively / uniquely named neighbour had failed to answer the summons b) the name of a distinctively-faced former colleague from The Institute whom I hadn't seen for 6 years. We watched by video the arraignment of someone in the main court room but he pled guilty. So no trial, no jury, and we were requested and required to return the following day at 10:30 for the reserve team match. 

It took the rest of the morning to reduce the mill of people to 12 who were a) unobjectionable to prosecution and defense b) not proffering a last minute excuse. Despite wearing my Tweed Jacket of Patriarchy TJP, I was accepted as one of that week's jurors. We were told that the case was estimated to take 2-3 days and that we should cancel other arrangements for Thursday and Friday with a outside chance of being required for the Tuesday. Then we went to lunch to be back at 14:10 sharp. Lunch was at the Hotel Generic with 3 choices: meat, fish, other meat. Enormous portions. Dessert = tea or coffee and a sliver of biscuit, whc fair enough: nobody needed more Kcals after the meat&carbs. The case continued until 16:00, most of which we spent in the tiny jury room as legal arguments surged back and forth in the court. Obvs I can't / won't give any details of the case. Or identify any of the jurors about whom I got to know rather TMI as we chatted idly in limbo or to, fro and at lunch.

I am the third member of our family who has recently been doing the state some service (jury division). Funnily enough all three cases hinged on evidence from cctv footage. In his summing up, our Judge referred to the admissibility of chinese cctv data. An unintentionally hilarious comment on the surveillance state we currently inhabit. He was, of course, referring not to the PRC but to the camera outside the Hop Kweng Schezwan Restaurant round the corner. One of the lawyers had a tendency to $10 dollar words (animus, disharmony) [betting they graduated from TCD]. At one point they asked if some key shrubbery was exuberant, to which the witness replied "wha'? it's about knee high".

It seems that, in our current state, anyone over the age of 65 can ask to be excused jury service. Which is further proof of the power of the grey vote. Every pensioner who refuses to serve the community (which is supporting us with free travel, fuel allowances and medical cards) is pushing an unwonted burden on someone younger who is currently struggling with a cost of living crisis, unattainable house prices, child-care and existential angst. Check your privs, Gramps! 

Anyway, I'm glad I finally got my chance to Do That Thing (many are called but few are chose etc.). But I have to say I left the courthouse on Friday evening feeling slightly soiled with what we had had to do. I ambled up the railway station where I was meeting The Beloved on her way down from Dublin.  A couple passed me on the platform and I heard her say " . . . that was not fair, the whole thing was based on a pack of lies". I'm about 60% certain (i.e. not beyond reasonable doubt but on the balance of probabilities) that they also had just come from the courthouse. It gave me pause.

One final comment: the courthouse has A Lot of steps: imposingly running up to the big front doors but also serving a warren of rooms and corridors inside. There is a single lift, so it is formally wheel-chair accessible but heck-and-jiminy I wouldn't want to try escaping from a fire.

Blackstairs Yomp 2026

Almost very year this century walk we have acknowledged the annual Blackstairs Challenge: an up and down yomp of 33km along and 1.5km up organised by the Wayfarers Hiking Club. We were here for them this time last year. Caisleán Bob is 300m up from the county road where the 13:00 cut-off check-point is located; so the tide of people, walking poles, ruck-sacks and gaiters drains away from us at ~12:45. We have always provided water:

The pixellated sign says "Trail Fairies / W A T E R". Over the last several years, for the craic, I've baked a few slabs of flapjacks for the troops and these all seem to disappear. 2.75kg flapjes / 180 hikers =  ½oz each. But not evenly distributed because some people take two and [so] some get none.

The weather in mid-May is usually pretty good: neither sno-blizzard nor sun-broilard but today was the drizzliest it's been for a few years. I felt I should add our agéd beat-up Aldi-speciaal parapluie to the support kit:

. . . not that any of these hardy hikers would cower under cover at the first splash of rain. 

Earlier in the week I was talking to an ex-Institute colleague, now also retired. He used to run the Institute Hill-walking Club whom we hosted 13 years ago. He said he'd never made it to The Challenge because the demand far out-strips supply. But he'd done the 33k route several times in a smaller group (saving €46 each on the registration and logistics fee). All good fun. I'm glad I was up early to set everything out, before it started to rain in earnest.

And the rain stopped shortly after the local cut-off time, which meant I could tidy up after 2026's challenge. Just about to close the gate when a delegation from Wayfarers Centraal came up the lane in a vehicle to deliver a bottle of whiskey: a much appreciated tribute which is getting to be a habit with them. Thanks! We took that dry moment also as a window for moving our sheep to a greener field. Then I strode up the hill to collect [another 2026 innovation] my water-warning sign [R] from the mountain gate. There behind the sign is the bottle of Jimmy. 

Not all great though. When I collected the sign, the mountain gate was open and my neighbour-above's cattle were out on the side of the hill munching through the heather. I called. The cows are meant to be there. But ne↑ghbour added the info that, when she went up to check the cows at noon, both gates were open. Which leaves the cattle with an unimpeded path all the way to the county road and Freedom. Wch is a mighty pain in the arse for their owner. Tsk! and, like, FFS.

Kangaroo Euclid

Most of us account [dyswidt?] math-anxiety an unfortunate outcome for any system of education. Some adults struggle making change from £5, or sawing a 8ft = 2400mm 4x2 into three equal parts. When I was in school, we were just moving out of rote-learning our times-tables and grinding through obviously artificial 'problems' that filled the pages of Pendlebury's New School Arithmetic [my edition is 1924]. Didn't make me no differ, I was 'good at maths' and institutionalized biddable, so the medium of teaching was largely irrelevant. I remember wetting myself when I cracked a code that was printed on the cover of the SMP text-book series that was the basis of math-ed at my school. But I gotta admit that teaching math there-and-then didn't light any fires. It wasn't FUN.

Gdau.I is in secondary school in England and "good at school" like me, and quite competitive: unlike me. With encouragement from her teachers, she signed up for an extra-curricular math jam called Kangaroo Math run by The UK Maths Trust, "the leading charity that advances the education of young people in maths". The programme is derived from Kangourou sans Frontières which in turn owes a debt to a programme started in Australia by Peter O’Holloran and Peter Taylor in 1978: hence the Kangaroo label. Gdau.I's parent shared a link to Past Papers [2015-2026] from the UKMT scheme: grey kangaroo is for younger kids while pink kangaroo is aimed at "A" Level = last two years of secondary school. As I say above, I was great at the tricks to get good marks in tests [incl "A" Level] for The Calculus and other advanced math stuff.

Kangaroo is attempting, like so many school-math reforms, to go beyond instilling basic numeracy in the populace. They are hoping to bring more kids over the threshold into math can be diverting and intrinsically interesting and maybe even inspiring; rather than a merely functional, doubtfully useful, skill. As the least competitive person I know, I could wish this was achieved without pitting children against each other. Because if there are winners, there are losers and that gives people's self-esteem a biff.

But, out of solidarity with the young herself, I've been plugging away at some grey kanga past papers . . . as an alternative to sudoku, like. The set-up is for each paper to have 25 multiple choice questions: starting easy and getting harder. It's good fun (for the likes of me) and I can, with furrowed brows, motor through Q1-Q15.  Beyond that, I have to mobilise a pencil&paper. But, because it's recreational, I give up on the last tuthree [difficult for 15 y.o.s] Qs because my life doesn't depend on getting 100%.

2016 Q12 Two kangaroos Bo and Ing start to jump at the same time, from the same point, in the same direction. After that, they each make one jump per second. Each of Bo's jumps is 6 m in length. Ing's first jump is 1 m in length, his second is 2 m, his third is 3 m, and so on. After how many jumps does Ing catch Bo?

Possible answers: A [10] B [11] C [12] D [13] E [14]

2019 Q9 In the diagram, PQ = PR = QS and ∠QPR = 20◦. What is ∠RQS? 

Possible answers A [50°] B [60°] C [65°] D [70°] E [75°] 

Don't know about you, but these Qs seem a bit more fun than Pendlebury's equivalent 100 years ago:

99. A ship 600 miles from shore springs a leak which admits 6 tons of water in 20 minutes. 60 tons of water would suffice to sink her but pumps can throw out 70 tons in 4 hours. Find her average rate of sailing that she may reach shore just as she begins to sink 

 

Batman and Moggyn

Seems my memory [of whc fallibility prev] told a fibby-whopper about my reading matter 50 years ago. In 2022, I maintained that I had been reading an Elizabethan translation of Isidore of Seville's De Natura Rerum. I wrote it up in CGN Carnivore Genetics Newsletter for which I was crimper-in-chief for several years in the early 80s. About ten years later, I left a complete archive of this niche publication in care of the library of the Genetics Department of TCD, my alma mater, when I was back there as an adult. About 10 years after that a new generation of geneticists threw the whole thing in a dumpster when they were "streamlining" their inventory. Some scientists are so fixated on the Future that they see no value in the past.

In March, I was on a unexpectedly deep dive looking for something to read and checked the TCD Library catalogue for that book. While I was 'down in the archives' I thought I'd check my Isidore reference. There I discovered that what I had actually spent an afternoon with in 1977 was:

"Batman vppon Bartholome his booke De proprietatibus rerum, newly corrected, enlarged and amended: with such additions as are requisite, vnto euery seuerall booke: taken foorth of the most approued authors, the like heretofore not translated in English. Profitable for all estates, as well for the benefite of the mind as the bodie. 1582. Bartholomaeus, Anglicus, 13th cent" TCD Catalogue Reference.

And it is possible to track down [at the rather wonderful bestiary.ca site run by David Badke in BC Canada] the passage which so interested me back when I was obsessing about coat-colour in cats in the 20thC.  The whole booke is searchable at the Wellcome Collection.

The Cat is called Murilegus, & Musio, and also Cattus, & hath that name Murilegus, for he is enemie to mice & to rats, and is commonly called Cattus, & hath that name of ravening, for he ravisheth mice and rats. Or els he hath that name Cattus of Cata, that is to sée, for he séeth so sharply, that he overcommeth darknesse of the night by shining of the lyght of his eyen, and the name Cattus commeth of Gréek, and is to understand slye and wittie, as Isi[dore] saith li. 12. And is a beast of uncertaine haire & colour: for some Cat is white, some red, some black, some skewed and speckled in the féete, and in the face, and in the eares, and is most like to the Leopard, & hath a great mouth, and sawie teeth & sharp, and long tongue & pliant, thin & subtill, . . .

There; I'm glad we set the record straight. 

 

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.