Black pots and white kettles

We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British
public in one of its periodical fits of morality.

Tom Macaulay
On Moore’s Life of Lord Byron

Shortly after midnight last Tuesday a balcony in Berkeley CA filled with students, most of them Irish, snapped off its moorings and pitched its human freight into the street below. Six died immediately and 7 are in hospital, 2 of them in very poor shape. It's the sort of story from which the press make a lot of hay and sells more copies. And, friends, we buy those newspapers or listen to the radio and shake our heads at the tragedy of it, and are sure to tell anybody who missed the news. It was the first topic of conversation at the Wexford Science Cafe that evening. This is a strong argument that utilitarianism (greatest good for the greatest number as if all men were created equal) will fail because we care a lot more about people with whom we can develop a sense of empathy. What has engaged the conscience of the Irish media this week: six dead J1-visa students, or a million black babies dying this year from diarrhoea, TB or malaria?

On Wednesday, the NYT continued its coverage with second-day reporting trying to put the tragedy into a wider context.  What is a J1 visa? for starters. Why do so many Irish youngsters avail of this opportunity to work in the USA?  What sort of people are they?  In the course of saying that J1 is generally seen as a great thing to do and a great opportunity to grow up and experience a different culture, the NYT piece quoted an article by Cahir O'Doherty in www.irishcentral.com from last September.  Mr O'Doherty suggested that some of the 8,000 2014 J1 students from Ireland had behaved badly and used the phrase shamed the nation in his headline. It's not super-sensitive of the NYT to dig this up at a time when flags were flying at half-mast and Enda Kenny our Taoiseach [Prime Minister] was offering condolences and receiving them from other heads of state. Joan Burton, leader of the Labour Party and Tanaiste [Deputy Prime Minister] on the other hand preferred a bit of retroactive censorship by calling for the removal of the offending article from the internet. Me I'd rather allow people, including the press, freedom to express ideas, even tactless and unpalatable ideas. It is just believable that the head of our government might have locus standi to express our collective grief but it was wearing yesterday to hear Chris Donoghue from Newstalk FM hectoring a spokesperson for the NYT to apologise for calling into question the innocence of all the dead and injured students.  I have read the actual words of the NYT article and I can't see the connection implied by the indignant Donoghue, but then I do have a blunted affect. If anyone is to be blamed for using the word shame in the context of J1-visas it is Cahir O'Doherty last year at Irish Central.  He could certainly have analysed some data a bit before trotting out one and a half anecdotes to blacken the names of all the Irish J1s who ever went to America.  Bad timing the NYT, though.

Mary McAleese, our last President, who probably shouldn't have been taking a public stance on the marriage equality referendum last month [but did], decided to write a letter to the NYT from her position as a) a former President of Ireland and b) a former holder of a J1-visa.  She invited the NYT to hang its head in shame for "reaching for a lazy tabloid stereotype". What is it with all this shame, though?  Isn't shame-calling all too stereotypical for Irish Catholics?

You'd hope for a little more empathy from McAleese because ten years ago she was at the receiving end of a tirade of self-righteous indignation and had to issue a grovelling retraction for comparing the position of Catholics in North Ireland to that of Jews in Nazi Germany. She later called her remarks 'clumsy and hurtful'; and a 'dreadful assertion', and also admitted that sectarian stereotyping cut both ways when she was growing up in Ardoyne, N. Belfast. Ian Paisley Jnr, giving a roll on his Lambeg drum, said "Her comments are completely irrational and are designed to insult the integrity of the Protestant community".  What she could have said is that her comments were substantively, or at the least qualitatively, true. Of course, there were no death camps in Northern Ireland but there was institutional sectarian prejudice: no matter what your skills there were jobs that couldn't seriously apply for, places where you couldn't safely live, schools where you couldn't enroll your children and flags that you couldn't raise in your front garden. There are many cases that have the whiff of Kristallnacht and McAleese's own family were forced to move from their home in 1972, so she knows, and still feels, what she is talking about. Do you think, after 30 years of The Troubles between the civil rights marches of the late 1960s and 1998's Good Friday Agreement, that nobody now knows or cares what school you went to when you apply for a job in Northern Ireland?  Acknowledging our own faults is an important step in making us better people but it is also important to say it like we see it rather than try to pretend we are all singing from the same hymn-sheet.

Rational borders

Eeee, but we do love an enclave: a little hold-out surrounded by a larger political entity OR we love an exclave: a pioneer in hostile territory.  They are often reciprocal, depending on your political point-of-view; but not always. The four-colour map theorem, which was proved by Appel and Haken in 1976, is pushed to its limits by the punctilio of medieval princes who insisted that a particular outlying field, church or hamlet was their property. These ancient asserted boundaries got locked into the borders of modern countries as kings, princes, electors and the maharajahs were put out to grass or up against a wall to make room for modern nation states.  I once spent an enjoyable afternoon fossicking around Baarle, and have given you an e-scoot round Berlin exclaves but I'm keeping Büsingen in reserve.  [R The colour-coded who-owns-what in Germany about 1800 CE] Brandenburg in pale blue is splashed out South and West from the heartland of Prussia.  It took two world wars to knock these fragments into a single Über-state and I don't think anyone is richer for the loss of interesting diversity except bankers.

This month, the governments of India and Bangladesh have finally agreed to some territorial exchange to sort out a clatter of exclave/enclaves in Cooch Behar where they are known as chhits.  It's been a long drawn out story since the Raj was separated in two by fiat of Louis Mountbatten the last Viceroy of British India. He announced the fact of partition on 3rd June 1947, at the same time announcing that Independence would be achieved a mere 10 weeks (!!) later at midnight on 14th /15th August.  The details were worked out by a Boundary Commission of five men chaired by Sir Cyril Radcliffe, but the hard decisions were all made by Radcliffe. When you reflect on the amount of time and money the Irish government has spent on commissions and tribunals to clear up its scandals, you might wish for the bloody, bold and resolute decision making of Radcliffe's team. Bloody is one of the operative words because when you draw lines across the map to achieve a utilitarian majority-rule ideal, there will be some actual people on the wrong side of the line. The fairness of Radcliffe's decisions is shown by the numerical equality of 'displaced persons' - 7,226,600 extra Muslims in Pakistan and 7,295,870 extra Sikhs and Hindus in India according to the 1951 census figures. That's about 3.5% of the total population in the sub-continent at the time. As seen in the film Gandhi and this mini-documentary, anywhere between 200,000 and 1 million people didn't make it far enough to become displaced but were murdered along the way.

The Boundary Commission devoted most of their severely limited time sorting out the densely populated Bengal and Punjab but when the dust settled the border between West Bengal [India] and East Pakistan was, shall we say, still leaky.  Rangpur was assigned to Pakistan while the district Cooch Behar joined India a couple of years later.  These two political entities were nevertheless hopelessly entangled [L map of part of the problem] the identifying numbers of the enclaves are far larger on the map than some the enclaves themselves. Holdings had, according to legend, been used as stakes in a long series of card/chess games between the Maharaja of Cooch Bihar and the Faujdar of Rangpur.  As in Baarle, there are enclaves within enclaves, but Cooch Behar has the only third-order enclave in the world: a bit of India in a bit of Bangladesh in a bit of India in Bangladesh.  This fragment is only 0.7 ha - about the size of a soccer field. But it is by no means the smallest enclave at issue; this is Natatoka a sovereign part of India about 20m x 50m in size. These are clearly trifles, but the largest exclave is 25 sq.km in extent and home to 20,000 Bangladeshis who cannot get access to electricity.

The absurdity and expense of these anomalies was recognised immediately and the Prime Ministers of the two nascent states had agreed by 1958 to tidy things up. But in democratic states such things cannot be decided by diktat and the problem started to inch its way through legal treacle to the Indian Supreme Court.  Matters were just about decided when the 1971 Pakistani civil war broke out which bloodily split that nation in two and negotiations had to start again with the government of Bangladesh. The two biggest respective enclaves were joined to the 'mainland' in 1974 by agreed corridors.  Actually, the Indian side of this bargain wasn't fulfilled until 2011 because constitutional lawyers needed to feed their families for a generation. The result of a bilateral agreement signed on 6th June 2015 is that India cedes 7,000 ha [70sq.km] to Bangladesh and receives nearly 3,000 ha in exchange.  You'd need to be a lawyer to be sure that this will sort out where each flag will fly.  The people who own the land are to be given the choice of what passport they wish to hold.  I hope it all works out without a massacre or two.

exsanguinate

I was up in The Smoke yesterday for a couple of meetings, and travelled up by WexfordBus, a private concern which offers a faster swisher and generally happier journey than Bus Eireann, the semi-state company.  I often take the laptop with me because they have WiFi but this time I just took a good book: the top of my Summer reading pile How We Die by Sherwin Nuland.  This is part of the end-of-life-issues jag that is not far from the surface of my mind - two funerals last week etc.  I'd been absorbing the skinny about Alzheimer's and as we drew out of Gorey I turned to the next chapter about how the heart will stop if the normal 6-8 litres of circulating blood drops by half.  Nuland is a surgeon in Newhaven CT and decided to illustrate the issues with a case-history about a 9 y.o. girl who had been knifed to death by a madman at a street fair in a nearby town . . .

Next thing I knew I was being shaken by another passenger repeatedly asking "Are you alright? Are you alright?" and the girl across the aisle was offering me her juice bottle.  The bus had stopped and the driver came back to offer me a seat up-front nearer the effective ventilation. It was all rather dramatic and it has quite possibly been captured on youtube <huzzah for smart-phones> for our Russian friends to marvel at.  I'm guessing I fainted . . . again; because I have a bit of a track-record on that.

• 1987 at an animal-handling course when they demonstrated that the best vein to tap for blood-sampling a rabbit is in the ear.  As the 5ml syringe filled up with black blood I heard the sea in my ears and had to sit down. I skipped the rest of the course. I was only working with mice anyway.
• 1992 The Boy had an asthmatic crisis and we whipped him into Beaumont Hospital as he was turning from blue to grey.  In A&E he was fast-tracked through the queue and after a jolt of adrenalin was settled in a cubicle. As the anxious parents sat beside his gurney, they took a blood sample and I felt a need for fresh air and a few minutes later The Beloved was told "Not to alarm you missus but your husband is two bays down with his feet elevated".  I'd never made it outside but had been dextrously caught by an A&E physician who was taking details from another patient.
• 1999 I went on a chain-saw handling course run by Coillte the state forest service.  I'd owned a chain-saw for a few years but had an irrational fear of using it, so the course was a way to get round this.  On the first day of five we spent the morning dismantling, reassembling and sharpening chain-saws in a shed in the Coillte complex.  After lunch we were shown The Video - a series of stills from Cork University Hospitals illustrating the damage chain-saws could do. After some initial blokey comments ["he'll never play the piano again" etc.], the room fell silent and when the lights came up one of the two burly farmers on either side of me said "You don't look well; you should put your head between your knees; open the window, there". But for being wedged between the farmers I would have been on the floor.  After the course, I had a rational fear of chain-saws.

I'm fine with blood; when I hand-sawed half-way through my thumb, I just stopped sawing and went to find a bandage. And I used to deal with the children's gashes.  It's something to do with syringes full of the stuff; or from yesterday's escapade, the thought of buckets-full.  In my days working in immunology labs, the post-grads were always looking for blood samples from 'normal' people to serve as a control. You couldn't, ethically, ask the students for a 10ml contribution - how could they say no, the poor dependent petals?  Accordingly, I often had an appointment with the phlebotomist - one who has been trained in the niceties blood-letting. We came to an arrangement: I'd find a chair, expose my left elbow-crook and look the other way whistling through my teeth, while the phlebotomist would do the biz. The things we do for science!

Long drop

Civilised people of the current time tend to be prissy about death and particularly about doing people to death. If we think that somebody or some animal needs to be terminated, we want this done 'humanely'. We'd like to think we've come a long way since 1209.  In that year, during the Albigensian crusade, the siege of Béziers was finally ended in an assault by the Catholic army. When asked how the sacking-and-pillaging soldiers were to distinguish between the heretic Cathars and the innocent Catholics, their commander Arnaud-Amaury, Abbot of Cîteaux, replied "Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius" [Kill them all, for the Lord knows them that are his]. And everyone in the city was slaughtered. Today we reserve that casual 100% solution to cattle, especially in the face of foot&mouth, TB or BSE, in our crusade for more hamburger. We don't go wholesale at people with a captive-bolt humane killer because that wouldn't be humane . . . except for race-horses and crippled sheep and animals in the chute on the way into the abattoir.

I've recently deprecated the sciencification of the death penalty in Oklahoma and other US states and suggested that the American justice system might build on one of the country's strengths and use a firing squad to expedite the final moments. At least that won't allow a poorly researched and hard to administer 'scientific' practice to demean science. It won't be the first time that science has been brought in to make being pushed across the Final Frontier more humane. Fade to 21 December 1821, Burrin Street, Carlow in the Irish Midlands . . .

Samuel Haughton was born just before Christmas 1821 in the family home near the bridge over the River Burrin.  He was a clever young Protestant chap and in due course went to Trinity College Dublin to read Mathematics but he excelled in a quite embarrassing range of scientific subjects [R from his obituary notice]. He was indeed one of the great Victorian polymaths. He was made a Fellow of TCD almost immediately after he graduated, was Professor of Geology for 30 years, but took advantage of his easy teaching load to study medicine for his own MD and held the post of Registrar for the University Medical School.  I could blog for the next two years about Sam Haughton and his contributions to science but I'll just talk about the 7th item on the list [R above]. “On hanging considered from a Mechanical and Physiological point of view.” which was published in the London, Edinburgh and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science in 1866, a journal that will not win prizes for the snappiest title.

Haughton wasn't the first to recognise that you could finish felons off quicker if you dropped them from a great height than if you threw a noose over a tree and hoisted the strange fruit up until their feet were no longer in contact with the ground.  In his paper, Haughton offered some mathematics about kinetic and potential energy, inertia, momentum, force and foot-pounds to show that he could understand physics [not me!] but knew that hangmen across the empire, not being Fellows of TCD, would need a simple formula. He suggested to divide 2240 by the weight of the perp in pounds and use the quotient as the length of the rope in feet.  This works out at 10ft 5in or a little over 3m for a man weighing 180lb = 80kg.  Heavier chaps get a shorter rope and women and children need to fall further - James Short, a child of 14 was hanged in 1783 in Dublin.  McCartney and Whitaker were clearly asleep at the switch when they wrote "Haughton drop is measured in feet and is the weight of the felon in ounces divided by 2240" in Physicists of Ireland: Passion and Precision. That would give 180 lb (80kg) me a drop of 14 inches (35cm) barely enough room to fit my enormous head under the gibbet.
You might well ask why 2240 should be used in the equation - why not 2000?  It's because 2240 is the number of pounds [lb] in an imperial ton of 20 hundredweight [cwt] each of 8 stone [st] each of 14 pounds [lb] . . . each of 16 ounces [oz]. Haughton wanted to keep it simple as the Imperial system of weights and measures construed 'simple'.

Haughton's paper was widely read (at least in London, Edinburgh and Dublin) and two years later Capital Punishment Amendment Act 1868 was passed which required that all executions were to be carried out within the ground of prisons rather than as a raree show outside. Out of sight put out of mind the disposal of the undesirable elements of society and so allowed the death penalty to be employed for another 100 years on these islands.  The first 'private' execution after the Act was carried out in Dublin on Andrew Carr.  The local hangman, against advice suggesting 8ft, thought that Andrew Carr needed 14ft to die quickly. Mr Carr's head was ripped from his body which made a bloody mess of the proceedings.  But those Utah firing squads must also take a bit of clean up.

No harm in a bit of gallows humour. The official executioner for about 20 years after 1868 was an ex-cobbler called Marwood which allowed for the riddle:

"If Pa killed Ma, who'd kill Pa? Marwood!"

Marwood is credited with the practice of putting the knot of the noose just under the left ear and he maintained that jerking the head sharply to the right was more effectual to the killing than the length of the drop. Execution is not tidy but I don't see how hanging is less 'humane' than what they did to Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma. 

What's the Point, Bob?

I'm still trying to figure out what The Point is (hmmm 42?)but I can answer the question without the comma
Q: "What's the Point Bob?"
A: "It's an exclave, silly!"
Point Roberts is a tiny fragment of the 'contiguous' 48 states that is no more contiguous than Hawaii or Alaska, although it is part of Washington state in the same way and for the same reasons as the San Juan Islands are. Point Roberts is a consequence of the Oregon Treaty, signed by Britain and the USA on this day 15 June 1846. Before then, the Pacific Coast was a distant and sparsely inhabited region of interest primarily to the Tlingit and Chinook and other First Nations who impressed each other with totem-poles [R] and potlatches. Mexico extended Northwards and incorporated all of California and Alaska was still under Russian jurisdiction until purchased for $7.2million by US Secretary of State William Seward in 1867.  The bit between was known to the Yankees as Oregon Territory while the Brits called it Columbia District - not to be confused with the District of Columbia in the other Washington. It was unclear who had sovereignty because the 1818 Treaty between UK and USA had established the 49th parallel of latitude as the border between The Lake of The Woods, where Ontario, Manitoba and Minnesota meet, and the "Stony Mountains" far to the West. On rather frankly Scarlett grounds the land beyond the Rockies was set up as a condomium/free-for-all for ten years. A lot happened between 1818 and 1846 and American settlers, traders, trappers and hunters were coming out West in increasing numbers. There was a fair bit of chest-thumping bluster under the slogan Fifty-four Forty or Fight which would give the US the whole disputed territory up to the Russian zone to the Republic. Cooler heads in Washington DC had another war - against Mexico - on their hands and didn't have the bottle to take on the Brits (again!) as well.

The Oregon Treaty settled everything by continuing the 49th parallel to the sea but also agreeing that the whole of Vancouver Island was assigned to Britain - "Canada" didn't exist yet. Point Roberts is the Southernmost end of a peninsula that dips below latitude 49 but is still part of the mainland - it's definitely not part of Vancouver Island, anyway!  So according to the letter of the Oregon Treaty Point Roberts is not outer suburban Vancouver City but a part of Whatcom County, Washington State, USA.  The locals [N = ~1300] call it affectionately Point Bob and bus their high-school kids all the way up into Canada and down to the County High School in Blaine on the far side of Boundary Bay, it takes 40 minutes. No worse than the time spent on school buses in parts of rural Ireland.  Point Bob is accordingly about as interesting as Bob Island, which is to say: not very.

Math deficit

I just heard about an analysis of the mathematical capabilities of high-school students who have been educated through Project Maths and found wanting in the mathability required by the University of Limerick. Project Maths is a new way of teaching core math concepts that is meant to be different from what has gone down in the recent past.  I can't work out what the difference is on PM website.  They are more keen to tell everyone the names of the people [aka PMDT] who have helped develop the project. UL have some longitudinal data from 2003 where they have objectively tracked the math-skills of incoming students and correlated their Leaving Certificate [LC] grade with their ability in what UL considers to be core math skills. The results suggest that there has been some Leaving Certificate grade inflation: what passes for a B-grade today would only scrape a C ten years ago. That's not so good for the country or for the work-load of Third Level academics. UL now offer special supplemental maths examinations to students who have booted their Leaving Cert. If you pass their test they'll take you into their science courses.  I've spent the last 3 years taking classes in First Year Quantitative Methods QM. At the beginning of each year I have a straw-poll to ask what grade folks have on their LC at Pass or Honours level.  The median grade is a bottom-scraping D in pass-maths.  For some I have no idea how they got even that, because they know about as much algebra as my mother, and she clocked a zero on one of her exams.  Nice people, not without skills, but gallopping with math-anxiety.

Some talking head was dissing the results of UL 's old-style vs project maths comparison because "sure it's only the first full year PM has been running".  Each year about 50,000 people take LC maths, so it's data not anecdote that is being compared.  It is just conceivable that this year's paper was anomalously easy or difficult but I'll stake €5 that next year the result will be the same.
In the tiresome requirement for 'balance' in our media, the radio wheeled out a supporter of Project Maths call Dr Aoibhinn Ni Shuilleabhain PhD BSc HDip in Education from UCD who said she thought PM was just fine . . . except that she's prefer to have more calculus and less of the statistics in the course. That annoyed me intensely because lack of statistical savvy is the the biggest deficit we have in fostering critical thinking ability in our student body.  We had our external examiners on site on Tuesday and I was ranting on about this and one of the externs cited her favorite numb-skull headline report as "40% of sick-days extend the weekend". The implication is that such sickies are a scam because the perp either wants to get away early for a weekend of partying or needs Monday to recover from the effects. But . . . duh . . . there are 5 days in the working week and 2/5ths of them = 40% are next to the weekend; so 40% is exactly the number you'd expect to be weekend-bridges if sickies were taken at random.

The woeful Irish Independent put their report of her opinion in their style/celebrity/celebrity-news bin because the rather symmetrical Ni Shuilleabhain is a "former Rose of Tralee". For the love of all that's holy, WTF has Rose of Tralee got to do with it?!  Well rather a lot actually. You see Ni Shuilleabhain used to date Irish talk-show host Ryan Tubridy and now she is a media personality in her own right.  The distinctly asymmetrical Steve Jones [R] got his launch as a media personality when he was invited to give the Reith Lectures in 1991. These were brilliant: in each of the six episodes I, a professional geneticist, learned something new and interesting; while simultaneously my parents, with no scientific training at all, found the whole series rivetting. Those Reith Lectures served as the skeleton of Steve's first pop.sci. book The Language of the Genes and since then he's become a much demanded public face of science and written several more successful books.  But how did he get the first gig? He was dating a researcher at the BBC who was party to endless discussions about "who will we get the year after next" and she said, in effect, why not ask my bloke? he talks a streak and it's really interesting. Now here's the skinny on The Calculus.  I was rather good at this when I was doing "A" levels in my last two years in school - I got a B in the exams and knew all the tricks for integrating this and differentiating that. But in 40 years as a professional scientist generating and analysing all sorts of quantitative data, I've never, ever, needed to use The Calculus.  Heck-and-jiminy, my woeful Latin has been far more use to me than Calculus.  Dr Ni Shuilleabhain believes otherwise but I'm telling her that calculus is good fun if you can do it, but not a requirement for being successful in Science.

Silver apples

William Butler Yeats, the poet, was born in Sandymount, Dublin 4, 150 years ago today: 13th June 1865. He died in the South of France in January 1939 as the world was tipping inexorably into WWII. He'd discussed the possibility of an exile's death with his wife and asked to be buried in the cemetery on the hill above the hotel.  Accordingly he was buried in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin.  Nearly ten years later a rattle of bones was bundled into a box and transported with pomp and circumstance back to Ireland aboard the Irish Naval Service ship the LÉ Macha.  There is some doubt as to whether there is any piece of Yeats, let alone his whole skeleton, lies beneath the gravestone to which poetry people, including my younger self, go on pilgrimage in Drumcliffe, Co. Sligo. The epitaph:

Cast a cold Eye
On Life, on Death.
Horseman, pass by!

Could as easily be written:

Move along please

Nothing to see here

Doesn't even smell of Yeats.

There is plenty of ammunition if you want to show that the great poet [Nobel Prize for Literature 1923, so he must might be good] had feet of clay.  But you cannot reliably claim that he had a surgical implant of 'monkey glands' to assausage his anxieties about impotence. That's wrong wrong almost right, in that he underwent a vasectomy in 1934 under the mistaken impression that recycling his sacred spermatozoa would cause more testosterone to course through his aged frame as if he was in his 20s again having the hots for the symmetrical Maud Gonne. She famously and repeatedly and repeatedly and repeatedly rejected his proposals of marriage, and had relationships in and out of marriage with several other men which has a sense of anyone but Willie about it. Yeats seepily started proposing to Maud's daughter Iseult as soon as she was old enough as if mother and daughter were interchangable in his rather two-dimensional view of women. It's certainly ludicrous to write off Maud Gonne as a mere poet's muse as she was clearly a person in her own right with decided and revolutionary views about the status of women.

Gonne, Gonne, gonad is about all most people know or care about Yeats, who has been a penance to generations of Irish school-children in the same way as Camões is forced upon their counterparts in Portugal. But if we look too hard at the foibles and failings of poets and only rate those who passed muster as to financial probity, sexual conduct, attitude to drink and/or consideration for others; why then we'd have a very short reading list.  It would be reduced to a handful of young people who died of TB before they could get up to any mischief . . . and the quintessentially nice Seamus Heaney.  Anyway, WB Yeats: it's his day today and I have to acknowledge that his earlier easier poems played a big part in my life and love when I was young and foolish.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.