How we Die

Lexicographers have knock-down drag-out fights between descriptivists, who report how the language is actually used and proscriptivists, who try to assert what is correct usage. We're seeing similar confrontations regarding end of life issues.  A good few weeks ago, I finally ordered a copy of How We Die by Sherwin Nuland, whom we've met before a) deriving benefit from electro-convulsive therapy b) causing me to faint dead away on the bus.  I've been looking forward to this book for a long time because it is billed as telling-it-like-it-is that, to the nearest whole number per 100, there are no dignified exits from this world.  In contrast to the Hobbesian characterisation of the life of man as "nasty, brutish and short", the death of man appears normally to be nasty, brutish and long drawn out.

If you're hoping for the facts from a surgeon who has spent a life-time trying to keep people alive through his ministrations and ultimately failed in every case, then this is a good place to start your investigations.  If you're looking for objective data about an exit strategy, you can find it here also but under a stern and emotive look of disapproval because Dr Nuland doesn't approve of euthanasia.  He gets far crosser about one case of a young doctor helping a woman, at her request, over the threshold than he does about his own interventionist ministrations that prolonged the suffering of his own cancer-riddled brother. Although, in fairness, he bitterly regrets not staying his hand in his brother's case.

He notes that 85% of the aging population of the US will succumb to Seven Sisters of the Shadows : atherosclerosis, hypertension, adult-onset diabetes, obesity, dementia, cancer, and decreased resistance to infection . . . not infrequently all seven in the one wracked body.  There is a lesson in this for consultants. When the aged person presents with their first acute episode, it would be very useful for everyone if a health audit was carried out at that stage rather than barrelling in to deal with the symptoms and effects of the critical disease state. You can ream out the aorta, insert a stent to keep this key artery open, sew up and de-glove.  But what is the point if the patient is riddled with metastatic liver-cancer or has gangrenous extremities from diabetic septicemia or lost her marbles a long number of years ago. By fire-fighting in one part of the body, you're winning only a little time for the next consuming flare up elsewhere.

But here's the thing: we each of us die but once, so don't gather much data on Ars Moriendi the art of dying.  Doctors OTOH have overseen many deaths and read the literature on countless more and so are in a better position to advise the dying and their relatives as to what are the options. Although it may seem that the punter should have the final say, there are some data to suggest that they shouldn't have the only say. Elderly white men are 5x more likely to carry out a successful suicide than the general population but for many this is misinformed because, on foot of multiple changes in the psycho-neuro-immunological milieu as we age, elderly white men are much more likely to suffer from a clinical depression. If you medicate this, the old buffers become better company, make more friends and can live happy and fulfilled for years after they don't top themselves.

But Nuland also acknowledges a tendency to Doc Knows Best in a paternalistic, patronising and controlling way.  He is scathing about Derek Humphry, founder of the Hemlock Society, and his cook-book for finishing the race under your own terms.  Nuland worries that the group which has the highest prevalence of suicidal ideation, as well as attempted and successful suicide [young men] are likely to come across this 1991 best seller and actually off themselves rather than just thinking about it. If old men and young men are both above average in their suicidal behaviour I guess the hard working middle-aged just can't find the time for such luxuries.  The poor buggers are too busy earning enough money to a) give their student offspring a booze-allowance and b) employ a home-help for their aged parents. I won't tell you what the easy way out is but will advise that swallowing paraquat or paracetemol/tylenol is not it.  Aw, heck, just read How Not to Commit Suicide:the iconic and richly informative essay by Art Kleiner originally published in Co-evolution Quarterly. The advice there is more or less summarised by Dorothy Parker

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

Nuland reflects on the fact that people who finish up as medical consultants are not a random selection from the population any more than are scout-masters or policemen.  Pedophiles don't just happen to like khaki uniforms and woggles and cops don't just happen to like guns.  Successful senior medics are ambitious and driven - they wouldn't have aced their Leaving Certificate at school and passed every exam in medical school otherwise. But their sense of self can get tied up in externals - the Mercedes, the stethoscope, gratitude from their successful cases, envy of their less successful peers.  They behave less well when their interventions are failing and too often aren't there at the very end - it's as if they lose interest when the battle is lost or that their self-esteem cannot take the assault of failure. It is really difficult for doctors to adopt a less-is-more approach to the care of the dying because all their training, and peer-pressure both formal and informal is about doing something. They may lose their jobs if they fail to act even when they know that action has so little chance of a successful outcome as to be messy, painful and . . . futile.

Shep Nuland died in March 2014 of prostate cancer at the age of 83. He died at home. I hope his carers listened to him.

Morphogen

It's Alan Turing's birthday - 103 today 23 June. My Granny lived to 108, so it is unlikely but conceivable that Turing could still be contributing to the scientific literature even now.  As we know from The Blob, he ate a green apple, laced with Prussic acid, and died on 7th June 1954 just before I was ready to make my appearance on the world.  Most of us associate him with his work on the application of mathematical abstraction to the problems of cryptography and computing.  His theoretical Universal Turing Machine is a key concept in the development of computers, his Turing Test is the gold standard for artificial intelligence and, of course, his work in Bletchley Park won WWII for the Allies.  Note to self: must get to see Cumberbatch in The Imitation Game.

But get this, Charles Darwin not only gave us the Origin of Species, he also explained how coral reefs are formed, noted that blue eyed cats are more likely to be deaf, calculated the recycling rate of earthworms, discovered plant hormones and knew more about barnacles than anyone except James Joyce [hilarious intellectual arts/science joke: Nora Barnacle . . . Bloomsday . . . geddit]. Turing also made a ground-breaking contributions in another field but it were so far ahead of its time and the mathematical ability of the scientists who stood to benefit, that Turing was long dead before his 1952 paper The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis was widely appreciated. Not being a polymath or a genius, I didn't even know about Turing's paper until I read an essay by Philip Ball on the reception and ramifications of Turing's paper in the festschrift celebrating 350 years of Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. Philip Ball is something else again, he seems to be able to write a book a month about anything at all so long as it's science.  The essay is for scientists, this video is for Joe Public.

Turing's paper gave a mechanistic explanation for a conundrum that had delighted and baffled naturalists since Aristotle and Pliny: how did the leopard get its spots? [whoopwhoop Kipling alert] Having made the observation, scientists, story-tellers and spoofers [not always easy to tell apart] have been quick to come up with an explanation for Why? Such as:
"Is a zebra a black horse with white stripes or a white horse with blacks stripes?"
"Neither, it is an invisible horse colored black and white so people don't bump into it by accident"
. . . but everyone had been woeful when it came to addressing How? Ball points out that Turing's paper only cites six sources; and concludes that this was because nobody before Turing had really thought about the issue.  One of those citations was D'arcy Wentworth Thompson's classic On Growth and Form, which took 1000 pages to investigate how simple topological shifts could create quite different physical forms in the natural world [L showing that our skull is essentially the same as a baboon's]. This implied that a simple mechanism might underlie the development of complex shapes from a simple spherical fertilised egg.

Turing treated this as a case of symmetry breaking and wondered what sequence of biochemical events could " . . . result in an organism such as a horse, which is not spherically symmetrical".  You don't have to be English to appreciate the waggish understatement but it helps.  Like Watson and Crick's famous "It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material." from the following year.  Turing didn't give us a clue about what those biochemicals might be but he did outline the mathematics for how waves could be generated - waves here representing concentrations of morphogens: chemicals which can change the attributes of colour, shape or form locally. Waves like the ripples in the sand at low tide or in the Sahara Desert are caused by simple physical systems. Turing was convinced, and wrote the math to prove, that a similar simple physico-chemical explanation was possible to explain a zebra's stripes.

you don't have to be able to read the maths to realise that Turing made a major contribution to explaining diversity in the natural world.  Philip Ball lists at least 40 subsequent authors - in fields as diverse as predator-prey relationships, criminology, developmental genetics, ecology, evolution and molecular biology - who have stood on the shoulders of this giant.

Hats off and have a slice of birthday cake.

Open mouth, insert foot

More on the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality. Sir Tim Hunt, BA, PhD (Cantab.), FRS, was born in 1943 and won 1/3 of the 2001 Nobel Prize for his discovery of cyclins.  These are proteins that regulate the cell cycle, determining whether cells will divide or not. Uncontrolled cell division is an adequate definition of cancer which is a lurking worry for straight white males SWM of sufficient age like me and Sir Tim.  His research had implications for the cure of some cancers and so I daresay he deserved his Nobel.  The trouble winning with the Nobel is that people ever after will listen to what you say; even if you don't have any special qualification to speak on the matter. For example, Sir John Sulston FRS, Nobel 2002 for his work on genome sequencing and development in nematode worms, is now invited to bang on about human population growth and planetary burden because that's what he cares about. I have a position on that too, but nobody is flying me to New Zealand to hear about it.

Earlier this month, Dr Hunt was invited to speak at the World Conference of Science Journalists in Seoul.  In the course of his speech he said "Let me tell you about my trouble with girls … three things happen when they are in the lab … You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you and when you criticise them, they cry."  Noting the sixth ("my") word in that statement it could be taken as a wry comment about a life-time's bemusement about the opposite sex OR it could be taken as a gross example of casual and institutional sexism by a straight white male who had used his position of implicit power to bully young women. Guess which tack the media took?  Now it is true that bullying happens in scientific laboratories and I know one SWM lab-head who doesn't feel that a one-to-one meeting with his female students has been productive unless somebody cries. But because this is not done in a public forum in front of a roomful of journalists, his behaviour is condoned by all his colleagues. The nearest Hunt came to having his remarks condoned was a patronising "poor old buffer, he grew up when men didn't know any better".

Far too many organisations fell over themselves in calling for Hunt's head.  He had to resign from positions at University College London UCL and  the European Research Council ERC, Nature bravely wrote an anonymous editorial calling Hunt's comments "jaw-dropping and belittling sentiments about women in the laboratory". OTOH, another press release from the ERC seems to imply that they are behind him and praise his work on gender balance. The Royal Society didn't (yet) revoke his fellowship and there is no mechanism for clawing back a Nobel Prize. The Times Higher Education Supplement THE employed some withering irony to expose the hypocrisy of UCL's support of women in science by comparing Hunt's case to that of fellow Professor and Serial-Sperm-Donor Gennadij Raivich who appears to be still on the UCL books after conviction for sexual assault. Satire is, in my book, a more elegant and ultimately more painful weapon than being compelled to fall on one's sword.

By coincidence, I was on youtube a few days ago and came across a remarkable explanation of inertia by Walter Lewin, a Dutch born holocaust survivor, who lectured at MIT.  He was so good at his job that, about the time I started bloggin', he launched a massive open online course MOOC called “Afraid of physics?” with the support and approval of MIT. These MOOCs gave access to science for thousands of people who could never afford to go to MIT, but they also give scientists access to thousands of e-students. Lewin was found to have been asking some of these foreign students for pictures of themselves with their white-coats and the rest of their kit off.  MIT decided he had “engaged in online sexual harassment in violation of MIT policies” and sacked him . . . and removed his on-line material. The latter response seems peculiarly medieval, a bit like burning the books of sinners lest they contaminate the souls of the faithful.  As Lara Dungan [below] said about the Hunt case: how can someone so smart behave so dense.

I didn't behave too well 20+ years ago when called upon to take an ethical position on the sins of Carleton Gajdusek, which were graver than Hunt's.

But satire wins!  Under the hashtag distractinglysexy, dozens of women in science shared pictures of themselves with their arm up a cow's rectum, invisible in bright orange hazmat suits, shovelling contaminated sludge and hugging their centrifuges. Woot!  The Saturday before last on the wireless Futureproof had coverage of the whole sorry Hunt story. Two comments seemed cogent. Presenter Lara Dungan asked a rhetorical "I thought these Nobellists were smart, how could Hunt be so stupid?" [I paraphrase].  A listener acknowledged that women [in science] in our culture might have a tendency to cry more often than men but Hunt, and everyone, should just get over it.  A tendency to weep doesn't make you less able to follow a lab protocol, to take criticism, to have creative ideas, to work all the hours that god sends or to take out the trash. I like that response a lot, it says that difference is okay, not better not worse, just different. As Caitlin Moran said last year, the more different approaches we have, the more likely we were to find a solution to the worrying times ahead.

Shit-sifting

More on making a living from cutting grass. We really haven't a clue about the complexity of the world but science is making baby-step progress to understanding who interacts with whom in an ecosystem. We were talking at the June meeting of the Wexford Science Cafe, about the complex micro-biological ecosystem which is the soil underneath a wheat-field. The top 10cm is filled with aerobic microbes - bacteria and fungi - as well as earthworms and nematodes and plant roots. Below that, a different dramatis personae holds the stage.  Everyone is happy or at least has come to an accommodation with the neighbours.  Then, sometime in October, Bob the Farmer comes with a 10 ton tractor-and-plough and turns the top 30cm of soil upside down killing all the anaerobic nitrogen-fixers with a blast of toxic oxygen and suffocating their upper-storey neighbours in the murk. This practice suppresses weeds, yes, but also forces a dependence on bought-in nitrogenous fertilisers.  See, we haven't a clue.

But the classic complex ecosystem that we do understand a little better is the African plains of the Serengeti. We know more because the actors are bigger-than-a-breadbox and have been studied for the last 100 years through binoculars and rifle-sights. We think we understand but there are still mysteries like - how does this seemingly parched and unproductive soil support such a huge and diverse biomass from antelope to zebra. A study by Tyler Kartzinel and Rob Pringle of Princeton described by National Geographic goes some way to explaining how everyone makes a living.  It turns out that they are all eating different food. It's no longer necessary or sufficient to roughly bin the mammals into grazers (zebras eat grass) and browsers (giraffes eat trees and goats eat the shrubbery).  How do we know the details of who eats what?  Now I've some small experience sifting crocodile shit to raise a few shillings towards my education. But a swat team from Princeton with binoculars and plastic bags has been scooping up the poop of known mammals and then running the samples through a DNA analysis that identifies the species eaten.  And whoa, the two species of Zebra Equus quagga burchellii and Equus grevyi eat grass, yes, but different species of grass. Now we know; but we didn't until Kartzinel & Pringle had the smarts to think of a technique to sort the input stream at the end of the digestive process. We've known for a long time that you can raise more tons of cattle and sheep on a hectare if you have them graze the field at the same time. I don't think anyone knew the details of how the pasture is partitioned, now we have the tools to answer that question.  Thanks Princeton.

The original scientific paper.

Saving the hay

A few years ago, I was at the English Scything Fayre at Muchelney in the Zummerzet Levels. There had been a plan to have me as a handicap on the Irish team, but we were delayed on a trip by narrow-boat down the River Avon and arrived too late to participate in the team event.  I did trial for individual competition but didn't "make the cut" [Hoot!, a pun, we must be in England].  I was only a beginner then and my 1m x 5m strip looked like very bad haircut when I had finished: all tufts and baldness.  Chris Hayes and Shannon père et fils athair agus mac were able to recruit a ringer with an Irish grandmother and did creditably in the competition. It's that time of year again and the British & Irish Scything Association have put up the results of last Sunday's competitions in Muchelney. If you're struck by the fact that Andi Rickard won the ladies championship by a staggering margin, and placed a creditable fourth in the Open stakes, so may want to see just how she did it.  I suspect that, if her rep didn't depend on it and/or she had to mow a acre, she'd compromise to a narrower swing. But it's wonderful to see what can be achieved in silence by a human being using appropriate technology. The French are asking débroussailleuse vs Faux, quelle est la plus rapide? The strimmer takes twice as long and destroys the peace on the Sunday afternoon with its shrieking. The scyther featured there (probably 2010) is Simon Damant overall champ for 2015, so he's not losing his touch.

The competition squares are a perch in size, this is an area 6.25 yards square, as near as dammit to 25sq.m. It is a peculiar, quintessentially Thomas Hardy, sort of measure until you reflect that it is 160th of an acre. If an ace scyther can knock their perch in 2 minutes, that suggests that an acre could be done 2hr40mins.  Four acres on a long Summer's day?  With time for copious draughts of rough cider?

One issue which is exercising the scythers is how to weight speed and quality when assessing one mower against another.  I can lick through my square and leave half the grass for the rabbits while Simon Damant or Andi Rickard will win almost all the grass as hay against a hard winter. This is a problem that an evolutionary biologist can relate to.  There is no such thing as perfection in the natural world; there is only good enough to survive and reproduce. In mowing you don't need to obsessively cut every daisy but you want to save as much hay as possible between showers.  It turns out <data alert!> that there is no correlation [L scatterplot with correlation coefficient r=0.08 =~0] between quality and speed among the 24 [two dozen] finalists.  Now we all agree that time is of the essence in the uncertain English climate but quality needs to be sensibly factored in; so how about:

score=speed *10/quality

If you achieve perfick quality then your speed would be the result whereas if your quality is 5, your resulting time is 2x your actual time. There is a smaller penalty if your quality is damned good. If you want an existential discussion on Quality try Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  On that basis, here are the results:

Name	Time	Quality	Score
Simon Damant	1.3	8	1.7
Ded Kalaj	1.3	6.5	2.0
Andi Ricard	1.8	7.5	2.4
Andy Coleman	1.7	6.5	2.6
Kevin Austin	2.0	7	2.9
George Montague	1.3	4.5	2.9
Richard Brown	2.9	8.5	3.5
Fergus Waters	3.0	7	4.2
Phil Batten	3.5	8	4.4
Mark Allery	2.2	5	4.4
Dan Britain	3.8	8	4.7
Chris Riley	5.2	8.5	6.2
Matthew Mugatroy	3.9	6	6.5
Nigel Adams	4.7	7	6.7
Jeremy Weis	4.1	6	6.8
Terry Stamping	3.4	5	6.8
John Fenn	4.9	6.5	7.6
Charlie Quinnell	6.6	7.5	8.8
Beth Tilston	7.5	8.5	8.9
Fergus Day	5.4	6	9.0
Anthony Waters	7.2	5	14.4
Olga Damant	15.1	9	16.7
John Adams	11.5	5.5	20.8
Mary Ellis	10.1	4.5	22.4

The scythers on the ground in Muchelney preferred to deal with the speed vs quality issue with a clapometer, and "The judges awarded places (as above) on speed but also taking quality into account".  My ordering is slightly different - Rickard pips Coleman for example - but everyone knows how my results were calculated.  If anyone wants to come down and help mow our Home Field in early July, there will be cider!

Animal feed

It's kind of weird that we have completely different standards when it come to dealing with animals compared to humans. We have the 'humane killer' out when a horse breaks a leg but keep sad old husks of Alzheimered people alive for months cultivating their bed-sores in a puddle of bodily fluids.  And the standards of food are suspiciously different.  Lamlac milk replacement is a third the price of tins of powdered milk from the oriental emporium. I think the sheep-muesli we boost our ewes and lambs with is quite tasty, and it is 35c a kg!  I wonder that we don't eat more 'animal' food more often.

Years ago when I was a smart-assed teenager, I was working in a feed-store for the Summer - loading bags of horse-feed into the backs of estate-cars and selling the odd slab of dog-food tins. My boss would open a tin of Chappie, the cheapest dog food, if he'd brought his hound in to work and the smell was something else when he poured this vile slurry into the dog bowl.  After the first time, I had to insist that he opened the tin outside.  OTOH, the up-mark brands looked 'good enough to eat'.  One evening I drafted a letter purporting to come from an indigent pensioner asking if there was any reason why Pedigree Chum, which "I" fed regularly and loyally to my dog Shep, wouldn't be a suitable alternative to the Fray Bentos Beef-Chunks in Gravy that "I" could buy for 3x the price in the supermarket.  I sent if off to Customer Service, Pedigree Petfoods and in due course received a diplomatic and informative reply.

I paraphrase "Pedigree Chum is certainly safe for human consumption, it is made from beef and highly nutritious. It is true that some of the meat might come from carcasses condemned because they carry too much liver-fluke but the high temperature and pressure of the canning process would kill any fluke eggs.  So Pedigree Chum is the best thing imaginable for Shep but is quite safe for your elderly self to consume as well."

I was reminded of this a couple of weeks ago when Mike the Vet regaled us with a story of sailing back from France with copious supplies of alcohol and other goods which were cheaper in French hypermarchés than in Ireland.  After one dreadful and potentially fatal night trying to reef sails in a storm while drunk, they all agreed to limit their intake to a nautical tot every night until they got home. But somehow relationships between Captain and the two crewmen had deteriorated to a considerable extent.  One evening the skipper volunteered to cook dinner and served up a dish of spaghetti with meat sauce which the crew declared was nutritious but bland.  Afterwards the skipper crowed that he'd served them spaghetti and dog-food because they were mutinous curs. Nobody died.

A few days ago, a more willing voyager into the unknown reaches of pet-food surfaced on the blogosphere. Anne Kadet decided to indulge in a 6-day dog-food binge. She started off with a bowl of Kibble which is the standard dried dog-food she bought for her own hound. It was gritty and gave her jaws a work-out. Like Mike the Salt above, she found that tinned pet foods was palatable but bland and really needed salt to go down.  A nutritionist pal advised that canned pet-food was safe because of the cooking/canning progress but that there had been several cases of Salmonellosis from eating dry Kibble. The best things that went down that week were Simply Nourish tins of dog food: tasty but ferociously expensive at $12.30/kg. You shd read Anne's whole article - it's funnier and savvier than I could make it.  But why do it for a jape when you can taste pet-food for a living?

The other side of town from The Institute, a pet-supplies emporium has just opened up which has aisles and aisles of indulgence for you and your companion animal: reindeer steaks, smoked salmon chunks, and tooth whitener.  It's like a little sliver of California has come to dreary ould Ireland.  My experience is that dogs would rather be scarfing down sheep-shit or very old road-kill which makes the comparative immunologist in me wonder how their digestive system copes with the bacteriological assault.

Cheap eats

Unknown Festivals Department. Today in Ireland and wherever the diaspora has a cousin of Michael Blanch is Lá Cuimhneacháin Náisiúnta an Ghorta Mhóir or National Famine Commemoration Day.  This is a ragged-arsed grudging sort of event that hasn't yet taken off. Michael Blanch, a nice chap from Tallaght, has spent much of this century barracking anyone who will listen to institutionalise the remembrance of the Great Hunger of 1845-1847.  You may hear more about it today if you live in Strokestown, Co Roscommon because that is the 2015 designated venue.  Chekkitout on Wikipedia to see the gradual collapse of government resistance to the idea or the CCIFV friendface page for pictures of Mr Blanch, the primum mobile, and his family.  This CCIFV is not to be confused with the Google-more-important [GMI] Chambre de commerce et d'industrie française au Vietnam. Currently the commemorations seems to centre on making a raree show or a pantomime of the tragedy by dressing up as mid-19thC peasants and walking to the haunting, Giacometti inspired, famine sculpture [R above] on the Liffey Quays in central Dublin. We all might get more into the spirit of those savage times by eating nothing but lumper potatoes for a month and then nothing at all for a week.  It would do something positive towards the obesity epidemic that is our current scourge.

I've gone on and on before about cheap food.  The assumption behind this is that, while in some cases, you get what you pay for, there is a also a helluva lot of mark-up in the price. You pay for a lot of unnecessary packaging, transport and advertising not all of which is really adding value to the food. Only 1 wine-lover in 10 could reliably recognise their favorite expensive tipple if it was presented in an unlabelled decanter.  Some yellow-pack products are every bit as good as their branded equivalent because they are the same thing packaged differently and sold cheaper because Aldidl has contracted to take 10,000 tons of the stuff under their own label.  You have to a) use judgement but b) more importantly use blind tasting experimentation to decide where you can shave $$$s off the weekly grocery bill and not compromise on quality.  I often cite a statistic I picked up when I was in Graduate School in Boston. In 1982 you could live for a year on $150 if you could tolerate a diet of soya-beans and lard with a little liver and a little orange juice. That's $12.50 pcm back then. Since, we've had inflation but also some falling off of the price of food and the debate over on Quora is whether you can live for a month in the USA allocating only $10 for food.

It seems to be possible if boring and you have a micro-credit loan of $30 to start off. That will buy you
25lbs rice @ $0.39/lb;
25lbs split peas @ $0.69/lb;
20lbs pork fat @ $0.25/lb
= 1,773 kcal/day in the FDA recommended balance of 32% fats; 55% carbs; 13% protein. I reckon you'd get scurvy on that diet but as in 1982 an occasional slug of OJ would soon clear up the bleeding gums.

The comment by Meghashyam Chirravoori suggests that a rather interesting vegan diet [potatoes Rs. 15/kg; Bottle gourd or onions Rs. 25/kg; Tomatoes Rs. 30/kg; sugar, rice, aubergine, spinach or okra Rs. 40/kg; sunflower oil Rs. 90/kg; Lentils Rs. 110/kg; 12 Bananas Rs 50] can be had for about US$18/mo. So it's not really cheaper to survive in the third world.  The main difference, given the number of people living on less than $2/day is the proportion of their income that goes on food. My reflections suggested that the Celtic Tiger youth of Ireland would think nothing of dropping €4 on a single lunch.  Eee when I were a teenager, I worked a 40 hour week bagging potatoes in a freezing barn for £6.50  . . . and we lived in a cardboard box in middle of t'road. 4 Yorkshiremen I - II.