42 days on the trot

The Appalachian Trail AT starts in northern Georgia and wends along the spine of the mountains that separated colonial America from the Wilderness until it finishes in the middle of Maine on Mt Katahdin. It is about 2,200miles/3500km long and travels through 14 states but it's not the distance it's the climb that sorts those who can from those who sofa: 515,000 feet or 160km! of altitude change.  You have to climb the equivalent of 18 Mt Everests . . . from sea-level not from the foothills in Nepal. It's not quite the same - no altitude sickness because the highest point on the trail is only a tad over 2,000m high: not much higher than Denver.  All this means that the AT is like the Camino de Santiago, of which I did a stretch, but on steroids.  It serves much the same purpose for many of its inhabitants - getting lost to find yourself; shedding some kilos and some quotidian anxiety; filling your boots with blood; seeing a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower.  It attracts all sorts but particularly gap-year youngsters and change of life [empty-nest; cancer survivor; divorced; widowed; replaced by a chip] people 30ish years older.

On the Camino Frances , the pilgrim motorway, in Spain there is one section across the corn-fields of Castile where it is >!shock!< 12km between cafes. You don't come across an ominous sign like [R] which says that you're on your own resources for 160km and where the bail-out escape routes are probably more arduous than continuing forward. Nevertheless every year a number of people aspire to be thru-hikers and complete the whole trail in a single season, usually starting at break-of-Spring in Georgia and following the seasons North. You are advised to allocate between 5 and 7 months to the task. By contrast, six weeks will see you from the French border to Santiago. Three quarters of those who start off the AT full of heroic intentions fall by the wayside.

There's an interesting thing happening on the AT even as we blog.  Scott Jurek, the ultramarathoneer, is running the trail hoping to beat the scarcely credible record of 46.5 days set by Jennifer Pharr in 2011.  He was out of camera but definitely present when I was writing about the free-runners of the Tarahumara in N Mexico.  He's run in the footsteps of Φειδιππίδη Pheidippides from Athens to Sparta in the now annual Spartathlon: that's a non-stop run of 250km which Jurek has won three times on the trot '06, '07. '08 finishing in about 23 hours. He's now 41 and reckons that this is his last chance at a really long endurance challenge. He started from Georgia on 26 May 2015 but early on he banjaxed his knee coming downhill too heavy and tore a quad (the muscles on the front of your thigh) trying to compensate.  Solution? Walk . . . a mere 50+ km for a couple of days . . . and then pick up pace again.  He's been catching up his gruelling self-imposed schedule since and as he leaves New Hampshire to enter the final state he is on time. It requires an average of 80km 50miles each and every day. You can catch him being interviewed on the hoof round about day 33.  And if you wake up in the middle of the night screaming "Where's Scott?" then you can find updates here on Runner's World.  He should be arriving on 7th July 2015, this coming Tuesday.  If any bears wanted to eat him, they've missed their chance.

As an old pilgrimage hand, I have been known to get snitty about people treating the Camino as a race, even a race against time.  If you're always looking at your watch, you're not watching the world. But I think that, like the Tarahumara, Scott Jurek was born to run and it's almost as if he can do no other. I'm not the one to wish holding him back.

If you want a slower paced long-form read about another sort of Appalachian Trail adventure, check out Jim Hammes aka Bismarck.

And there was a wall in heaven

Revelations Ch 12 v 7.
http://www.mobstr.org/home2.html
. . . that is [w]all.  Who?

Bats prefer rashers

As Emma Teeling at UCD is fond of asserting, a fifth of all the species of mammal on this planet are bats.  They make a living a remarkable diversity of ways.  The nine species of native Irish bats [ialtóg or sciathain leatháir {leather-wing}] are all insectivores but, like different zebra and their grasses, they clear the sky of different species of flying insects. The common Irish name of Myotis daubentoni, for example, is ialtóg uisce - the water bat - for its characteristic coursing over waterways hoovering up midges.  Just as you can study the DNA in antelope poo to determine what grass species dik-diks and springboks eat, you can analyse the droppings of bats under their roosts and see what insect wing-cases come through. That's all messy low-tech sifting and doesn't require DNA technology.

But not all bats are insectivores: the megachiroptera eat a lot of figs and nectar for example and there are fish-eating bats which scoop a square meal direct from the water rather than piffling about after thousands of tiny nibbly-bits. And of course there is Desmodus rotundus, the vampire bat [there are two other species which also diet on blood] which is in the process of re-adapting its fore-limbs to walking as well as flying.  They land close to their prey and hirple across the intervening ground before sinking their teeth into a pig's udder.  A National Geographic video is a [highly editted] anecdote; where is the data on what are the preferred prey for vampire bats? A team led by Rogério Gribel from National Institute of Amazonian Research in Manaus, Brazil sifted through really fresh vampire-bat shit to work out the species which contributed the DNA remaining after a pass through the bats' digestive system. It had to be really fresh and refrigerated because DNA degrades rather quickly into an unanalysable sludge.

Turns out that 60% of the bloody stool was from from chicken Gallus gallus with pig Sus scrofa a distant second at 30%, the other species: dog Canis familiaris and cattle Bos taurus made up the remaining 10% of the DNA.  They looked for human blood but didn't find any in 150+ samples from 20 different Amazonian villages.  That's all very useful and interesting - and a bit myth-busting about vampire-bats getting an armful each night from some chap sleeping in a low-hanging hammock.  But I liked the step further when they estimated the abundance of the various potential prey in the area and calculated that bats had a distinct preference for pigs which are much rarer on the ground than their contribution to the samples would suggest. So the National Geographic video cited above wasn't too far from the truth.That tells rather a lot about the behaviour of the bats and suggests that "keep a pig" is a way of keeping your own blood in its own leg.

Original J. Mammalogy article behind a paywall.

Pitcairn

At around the turn of the century, we were living in a small farrrm on the side of a mountain but I was working in Dublin.  It seemed sensible to have somewhere to stay in The Smoke and so I rented a civilised [kitchen, bathroom, living-room, parking] one-bed apartment in Dublin 4 and spent 3 or 4 nights there each week.  It cost £320 pcm in those far-off pre-€uro days. Then I negotiated a 20% decrease in pay in order to avoid the dreadful Friday weekend exodus and a couple of months later the landlord hiked the rent 28% and having my own place in town was no longer tenable. I threw in my lot with two long-haired botanists, both from England, and a long-haired cat from who-knows-where and stayed there Mo Tu We nights. Wednesday was the highpoint of the week as we sat in a row on the hairy sofa watching The Big Match out-doing each other with outragenglish puns on the names of the players and barracking the referee for his blindness.

One of the bots was the world's expert on the flora of Pitcairn Island and we got a months long blow-by-blow of his cunning plan to deliver a graduate student to Pitcairn for an extensive sojourn of field-work.  The paper-work was mountainous and the logistics formidable. A flight to Tahiti with Air France, then a short-hop [1600km!] to Mangareva in French Polynesia then a 32 hour boat-trip by schooner; finally landing through the surf in a long-boat. I think the deal was that he either spent 30 hours on Pitcairn or 30 days and he was anxious about missing his return trip. Yes, indeedy, Pitcairn is remote: 130^oW, 24^oS. So remote that it wasn't discovered by Europeans until Philip Carteret, Seigneur of Trinity in Jersey and a British naval captain, sailed by on 3rd July 1767.  The island was first sighted by an eagle-eyed Midshipman called Robert Pitcairn and named for him.  In 1790, famously, the mutineers (N=9) of HMS Bounty abandoned Charles Laughton , Trevor Howard Cap'n Bligh and settled on Pitcairn with some slaves Polynesian adventurers N=M6;F9+1child].  The wreck of the scuttled Bounty can still be seen on the seabed at Bounty Bay.

In contrast to the children of the Prague Kindertransporten, the Pitcairn Islanders have not gone viral, with the population bombling along [between N=200 and N=40] on the lower edge of what makes a community sustainable. St Kilda was after all depopulated by the British government in 1930 when its population sank to 3 dozen and didn't show any sign of increasing. It needs several adult men to manage the surf-boats by which all supplies are landed.  With 20/20 hindsight, in 2001 my botanical colleague might have thought twice about the advisability of abandoning a young woman in his care to several months alone in remoter valleys of this remote place. In 2004, a third of the adult males, all cousins, were convicted of shagging females of any age and any state of willingness or consanguinity.  This despite that fact that everyone is a Seventh Day Adventist since a successful mission there in the 1890s.

The government of Pitcairn is now trying to recruit immigrants.  But, no more than the Brits in 1939, they don't want any riff-raff. They will give you a free site to build a home . . . provided:

• you do build a house at an estimated cost of NZ$140,000 = US$95,000
• you can live on your money (you're not allowed to work locally)
• you're mad about diving
• you have at least NZ$30K in the bank
• you don't have any children under the age of 16
• you are prepared for a corvée building roads, cleaning toilets and rowing the goddam boat

Since the scheme was opened in 2013, there have been 700 expressions of interest but only a single application to settle in this tropical paradise.  Could be for you?

Mensch

Mensch n. a person of integrity and honour.  (Yiddish and German)

Nicky Winton just [1st July 2015] died.  He was born Nicholas Wertheim in Hampstead N. London and died Sir Nicholas Winton at the age of 106. His passing has been widely noted on both sides of the Atlantic but more or less ignored in Ireland because we have hardly any Jews left.  It may have recovered but a few years ago the congregation in Cork failed to achieve the quorum [minyan מִנְיָן] of ten adult (older than 13) males and so the synagogue was officially disbanded. Nicky Winton was born well-heeled, went to a fee-paying school, worked in a few different banks in Europe and then launched himself as a London stock-broker.  He was sporty in a skiing and fencing sort of way rather than soccer and also rather left-of-centre and anti-appeasement in the politics of the 1930s.

At Christmas 1938, he was persuaded by a socialist pal to skip their annual skiing trip and come and lend a hand with the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia BCRC.  It was chaos in Prague: In September Czecho had been dismembered and partly occupied by the Germans with the collusion of the British and French governments: "a quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing" N Chamberlain, UK PM. A desperate mill of displaced persons was in town and homeless: not only Jews but also Sudenten Czechs, Communists, active Socialists and certain other religious groups were deeply uncertain about the future.  Things took a plunge into the abyss after Kristallnacht 9-10th November 1938 with the Netherlands closing its borders to Jewish refugees. But the British government was persuaded by the Jewish establishment like Chaim Weizmann and the Rothschilds to open up their borders to a 'better class' of Jewish refugee children.  They had to be under 17; have a designated home to go to; and have someone who would stand surety of £50.  The £50 would exclude the riff-raff although it was couched as the price of repatriation when things settled down.

As a  Mensch, Winton couldn't stand there and watch as the children were swept into camps with or without their parents. He had to do something. His action turned out to be setting up a dining table in his hotel room and taking details and photographs of children who might qualify for refugee status in Britain. The BCRC was already working to the same end, but he got printed some letterhead calling himself the Hon.Secr. of the Children's Section of the BCRC.  His mother, back in London, went round her extensive and well-connected network to find the £50s and the homes. Winton, with Doreen Warriner, Trevor Chadwick and others supplied the names.  After three wearing weeks at the coal-face in Prague, he returned to his office in London and spent each evening sorting out and circumventing the bureaucratic treacle in which "his" list of young refugees was mired. It started with forgery and he was not adverse to a little light blackmail to get what he wanted. He was impatient with the leisurely mandarins who didn't believe it would come to war and impatient with Rabbis who didn't want Jewish children billeted with gentiles. 

He organised the paperwork and got the travel documents sent back to Prague, train tickets were bought, the Dutch government was squared because "his" Jews were in transit.  Parents kissed their children goodbye; the optimistic expecting to see them again after a few months, the realists having less hope. As the fog of impending war descended, Winton was not above forging travel documents when the genuine ones seemed too slow in coming. In all 660+ children, of whom 561 were Jewish, escaped as the jaws were closing to a new life in Britain. The first batch left Prague the day before the Wehrmacht marched in from the Sudentenland and the last shipment of 250 which was due to leave on 1st September 1939 never left: German trains and train-track were frightfully busy with the invasion of Poland. Despite a direct appeal from the Children's Section of the BCRC to President Roosevelt [R on the forged letterhead], the American government refused to take any of these refugees.  It's probable that FDR never even saw the letter - he had a country, still limp from the Great Depression, to run.

Not everyone, not even the Germans, were as certain as the BCRC that it would all end very badly for these children if they stayed where they were. They did after all, transit across Germany by train in order to reach haven in Britain.  die Endlösung der Judenfrage [Final Solution] wasn't codified in the Reich until January 1942.  In June 1940 they were hoping to ship a million Jews a year to Madagascar but that never happened.  When the war broke out for Britain on 3rd September 1939, Winton registered as a conscientious objector and drove an ambulance in Normandy. Afterwards he gave up such leftist half-measures and joined the RAF to fight.  After the war he was back in Europe working for a while at the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development IBRD in Paris where he met his wife. They returned to England and he settled down to a busy life doing bankery things, as well as charity work for the mentally handicapped and had three children. He also started a couple of old folks homes as a business and got impatient with increasingly stringent and intrusive health and safety regulations.

50 years after his Prague adventures, his wife discovered a ledger in the attic which listed all the children who had made it to England.  It was a complete surprise to her and probably a distant dream to him but the story leaked out to the press who set about tracing some of the survivors. That culminated in an emotional reunion orchestrated by Esther Rantzen and the teleprog That's Life. Excuse me, my glasses are misting up. It is claimed that, through natural increase over 4 generations, "his" children have 15,000 descendents.  Actually, it's probably only 2.5 descendent generations because although there are GtGrandchildren there won't yet be a 'full' generation of them.  That sounds a scarcely credible rate of increase but it's only 3.5 children per generation:

670 * (3.5 ^2.5) =  15,350

The best sources of information have been the Guardian Obit and BBC Hardtalk.  Best in that neither of them mentioned Schindler which is all too easy a characterisation of someone who did the right thing. He's been honoured [Sir] by the Brits and by Czecho [Order of the White Lion] and by science [minor planet 19384Winton].  But he doesn't qualify, as Oskar Schindler did, as one of the Righteous Among the Nations [חסידי אומות העולם‎] because his folks were Jewish. 

And it's probably important to read a rather sour alternative view of Winton's achievements, or we'll all get the feeling that we would have done likewise if we had been in his shoes in 1939. One of the points made in that essay is that politicians used the story of the Kindertransporten to make more palatable the prospect of accepting tens of thousands of "refugees" or "economic migrants" depending on where you stand on the issue. That's very topical with thousands of Mediterranean boat people being lifted out of the drink from unseaworthy scows by Irish sailors on the LÉ Eithne.

Overtoast

Technology is wonderful but capitalism makes us unsatisfied.  Is that a suitable definition of the economic system in which we find ourselves? We are induced to buy the next best thing by advertisements which make us feel inadequate or under-resourced. All too often our purchases are used once and then occupy space at the back of a cupboard until we move house and then they get thrown out. Have you ever bought something that turns out to be ill-considered or unfit for purpose?  I stopped myself in time in having another disastrous plunge into consumerism on Sunday last.

Working at The Institute has lots going for it and one positive effect is that I have 12 busy hours a day off-site between leaving home and returning for dinner. The weekend is devoted to catching up on the farm: chopping water and carrying wood and chasing yellow-eyed monsters with a death-wish round the fields. And The Blob fills any nooks and crannies in my days.  That means that I have been unable to contribute to the economy in any significant manner for the last two and a half years. Last Sunday we had to meet people in deepest Waterford and The Beloved suggested that we drop into the Harvey Norman emporium to see if they had anything on sale.  Partly this was because HN had a Mammoth 20% Off Everything Sale which was due to wrap up that evening.
Mr Harvey and Mr Norman met while trying to sell vacuum-cleaners on the same street in Sydney NSW.  They could sell sand to the Arabs but they couldn't sell aNNything to me . . . even at a 20% discount. The beds were bigger than our bedroom, the sofas were all covered in the skins of dead animals and I get vertigo on bar-stools, so the furniture wasn't getting any traction. I don't need a new computer and I go into a terminal apple-andoid-apple-andoid-apple-andoid dither when it comes to smaller electronic kit. The alternatives were to sit on a leather sofa scowling with folded arms near the entrance with all the other pissed-off-waiting-for-herself blokes OR wander into the kitchen appliance department . . .

With dropping jaw, I watched a video loop about a toaster. We all love toast: those Maillard reactions are what make food worth eating: we'd all die (of boredom) far earlier if we had to subsist on gruel and boiled spinach. But how difficult can it be? I've made toast on the end of a stick before an open fire, and under a grill and in a regular pop-up toaster which you buy for €25 from Argos. The KitchenAid Artisan 2-slice 5KMT2204BOB was calling to me but I was easily able to blank its importunities despite us both being Bobs. The appliance is full of those needless complications that are sold as features but turn out to be bugs - like electric windows in cars: when they fail you have replace the whole goddam door. Note the text on the still from the video [R]: who needs an engine to start the process off - the main advantage to timed kitchen gadgets (as with milking machines) is to have them switch off when finished.  No amount of bragging "the Artisan Two delivers exceptional culinary results" about any toaster's normal function makes toasting bread an adventure.

And just to show that having an over-specified choice of toasting colour is unreproducible, given the variety of bread, there is a button marked A Little Longer [L] which presumably has pale slices dip below the surface again for another blat of heat. Normal people, in contrast to HardlyNormal people, just push t'bugger down for another go-round and then press cancel. This A Little Longer feature is a solution to an unproblem.  The key word in the advertising is "style" - the 5KMT2204BOB is essentially a €200 fashion accessory. Over-engineered, over-priced and over-there in the house across the valley which is flood-lit at night. And it weighs in at 5kg, so at least you can be confident that your cat is not going to bat it off the counter-top by accident. I know this is a real problem because youtube is filled with clips showing such accidents.

In the tuthree days since I did the research to write this piece, Amazon-ads for this danged toaster have popped up in the wildest places of my restless surfing of the interweb. You'll never take me on this one Amazon - I've made a toasting fork out of two coat-hangers and a bamboo stick.

beaten to death for being right

Yes, you read the title correctly, not beaten to death for being white or the far more common beaten to death for being black.  That's one interpretation of how Ignaz Semmelweis [L] met his untimely end at the age of 47.  But we'll start at the beginning because he was born Semmelweis Ignác Fülöp on 1st July 1818 in Buda on the West bank of the Danube - y'know: opposite Pest.  Although his family was of German ancestry, his early life was spent in Magyar-speaking Hungary [or "in Hungary speaking Magyar"] where they follow the same patronym-first "Eastern"convention as they do in Kerala where my put-upon colleague comes from.

A bit of modern context.  When I was working in St Vincent's Hospital more than ten years ago. someone on the wireless [Minister? Head of the Health Service?] suggested that it might not be a good idea for doctors to wear ties on duty because they were an obvious source of patient-to-patient transmission: getting dunked in some yeuch bodily fluid by accident and then dripping away through the rest of ward-rounds.  That afternoon, I happened to overtake a couple of young doctors on the corridor and asked them if they planned to discard the old [school] tie any time soon.  They looked at me like I was mad and instinctively reached for their stethoscopes; the tie and stethoscope are key identifying symbols of a doctor's status.  No tie is a reason why women still don't rise as far or as fast in the medical profession.

Semmelweis was onto this [doctors being a vector for disease as dangerous in context as anopheles mosquitos [malaria] or badgers [TB]) 170 years ago.  He obtained his medical doctorate in 1844 choosing to specialise in obstetrics and obtained a prestigious position in Vienna as assistant to Geburtshilfe-Professor Johann Klein. In those days mortality from childbed fever was frighteningly common. We know now that this is due to infection, frequently by Streptococcus pyogenes; but 1846 was long before Pasteur had rubbished the theory of spontaneous generation and forced acceptance of his germ theory of disease. So Semmelweis's guess as to the cause of  perinatal infection was as good as anyone else's, but not better.  But he was notable in approaching the problem through the gathering of data rather than by reading what Galen or Aristotle had to say on the matter.

First off he noted that he and Klein were responsible for two clinics which had significantly different rates of mortality: 

and he racked his brain as to what could be the cause.  It was a great, if unintended, controlled experiment because the clinics admitted women to the two clinics on alternate days, so each patient population appeared to be a random selection of poor women who were unable to afford having the doctor or midwife come to them for a home birth.  But by listening to the women, Semmelweis learned that they were well aware of the survival chances in the first clinic and would back off and prefer the risks of a delivery "on the street" rather than be taken in care by the deadlier clinic.  Semmelweis noted that these street-deliveries had a better record than the hospital and after some faffing around with other explanations decided that the key variable was that one clinic trained doctors and the other trained midwives and that the doctors did courses in anatomy on fresh cadavers when they were available but the midwives didn't. The anecdote which convinced Semmelweis that cadavers were the principal cause was the death of a medical colleague after he was stabbed across the autopsy table by a clumsy student: the doctor's final symptoms looked suspiciously like childbed fever.

Convinced that he was right, from 1847 he compelled the students and doctors under his direction to wash their hands with a powerful disinfectant [chlorinated lime, we use it to sanitise swimming pools] between autopsy and delivery and within a month the rate of mortality in the first clinic fell to 10% of its previous high.  He didn't know what the agent of death was precisely but knew that chlorinated lime dealt effectively with the smell of death  . . . and the results of this simple intervention were compelling.

The response from the medical profession was either a) indifference or b) to reject his theory or c) say that this was already known and so wholly unoriginal. The following year, when his two-year contract ended, it was not renewed and he was forced to return to Budapest. Not before he got into a number of unseemly slanging matches with the medical establishment in Vienna. From Budapest he continued to enforce his hand-washing regime with conspicuous positive effect. But he also continued to barrack his medical colleagues for not seeing things as he saw them. He wrote up his findings and published them 12 years later in 1861 as Die Ätiologie, der Begriff und die Prophylaxis des Kindbettfiebers [The etiology, meaning and avoidance of childbed fevers]. He used this also as a vehicle to criticise his critics and so didn't win over anyone who wasn't already convinced. Several unfavorable reviews resulted and Semmelweis responded with a number of intemperate open letters re-asserting his position and insulting his critics in unparliamentary language.

He gradually went off the rails entirely and there has been a lot of post-hoc speculation about the nature of his madness - early-onset Alzheimer's and GPI [general paralysis of the insane = syphilis] from intimate handling of hundreds of prostitutes at work are the front-runners.  But let's consider an alternative hypothesis: not mad [bonkers] at all but mad [furious]. Suppose today that you believed in the rights of animals not to be casually consumed in scientific experiments or on the dinner-plate.  Suppose you knew you were on the high moral ground on this but that everyone around you considered animals to be unworthy of consideration equal to what was accorded to men. Suppose that this iniquity ate into your soul and you had a tendency to anger. Suppose that nobody would listen to you, especially after you had been insulting about their own professional practice. Wouldn't you be fighting mad?

Eventually his tiresome behaviour got too much for everyone and, at the end of July 1865, he was committed to a Vienna Insane Asylum by János Balassa, a highly respected medical professor from Budapest. Ferdinand Ritter von Hebra, another respectable doctor [Ritter von is "Sir"] agreed to take Semmelweis "to visit a new von Hebra clinic". Semmelweis, in his professional suit and tie, objected most strongly when he realised where he was being delivered and was beaten into submission by the guards, confined in a straitjacket, doused in cold water and purged with castor oil. He died of gangrenous septicaemia two weeks later. Twenty years later, Semmelweis's ideas fell into place as Louis Pasteur made clear that bacteria were the key to most of the contagious diseases which beset us.  We're very sorry that we didn't listen to Semmelweis and we've put him on postage stamps, but we're not as sorry as the thousands of women who died in the years between his discovery and its implementation.