Vehicular homicide 2017

We do love our cars. My mother called hers SS Independence and she drove it until she reached the age of 85. The idea that it was available 24/7 was comforting to her.  For several years after she stopped driving, she still kept the car in the garage in case her bicycling gardener needed to take stuff to the dump after his Thursday morning's work. But you can't get away from the fact that a car is a lethal weapon. Even my humble Toyota Yaris which can barely carry me and six feed sacks up a hill weighs in at 1,000kg. The inertia of that mass travelling at 80km/h is enough to homogenise the internal organs of any pedestrian who gets in the way.  Think about it? A .38 bullet weighs in at 8g and travels at 400 m/s, so the force imparted is about 1/10,000th that of a small car travelling too fast.

I have locus standi to sound off about this because I almost became a statistic 20 years ago when I was whacked off my bike by a woman looking for her phone while driving.  The bike was killed but I only broke 5 bones and walked away. The one question that everybody asked me was "were you wearing a helmet?". Last year cars killed 17 (seventeen!) cyclists on Irish roads. All the commentary includes an element of victim blaming which would be impossible to articulate if the crime was sexual assault. Why wasn't s/he dressed in fluorescent orange? with flashing 500W lights fore-and aft? and what about the helmet? In the 6 years before I underwent my RTA, me and my bike cycled 40,000km round Dublin - which is equivalent to once round the world - and never needed to 'use' a helmet, because although I was hit by cars three times, my head never got as far as the roadway. It's important for us to reflect on this as a society because cycling to work or school is an important part of the solution to the obesity epidemic. If cycling is only allowable on designated cycle-paths by people dressed up like Bibendum the Michelin Man, then only the young and superfit will do it - and they don't need the exercise!

I was reflecting on my NDEs because on New Year's Day, a spokesperson from the Road Safety Authority was on the wireless to announce that the number of people killed on Irish roads [N=158] was the lowest since records began in 1959!! That's an extraordinary achievement given that the population has increased by 70% over the last 60 years but more significantly there are 2 million cars on Irish roads this year which is six times = 6x more than in 1959.  You'll want to see the downward trend which shows a) that talking about a 16% fall in numbers of road-deaths 2016-2017 is as silly as talking about a 16% increase this time last year.

Yes, that is correct, more than 600 people were being killed each year by vehicles in Ireland in the 1970s. The upper line of dots indicate the raw road-death figures. The line below is road deaths per million people which makes the downward trend look more relentless and less susceptible to random fluctuations. Nobody is going to claim that some policy or intervention caused 2016 to see an increase in road-deaths.  We must also prevent anyone claiming that they or theirs are responsible for the down-blip in 2017. It's much more likely that both changes are stochastic "shit happens" random fluctuations.  Two interventions that probably have made a difference are 

a) the first government scrappage scheme in 1996, which gave £1000 to anyone who traded in a 10+ year old car for a new model. That got a lot of old clunkers, including our 13 year old Opel Astra, off the roads. We spent £8000 less £1000 on a new Škoda Felicia which we ran into the ground over the next ten years. 

b) the introduction of the NCT National Car Test in 2000. That ensured that all cars had functioning brakes, seat-belts, working lights and sound body-work.

It is remarkable, to me, that 23% of the people killed on the road in 2016 were not wearing seat-belts. Despite my suggestions [yes I've been here before], nobody has the courage to report how many of them were 'under the influence' at they time they offed themselves and their passengers . . . and those 17 unfortunates riding bikes.  In my previous rants, I spoken about 'worse things than dying' with RTAs. Being dead is one thing, with a certain finality, being injured in a car collision might be worse. So I looked at the stats for that. To be honest, I was expecting the relationship between deaths and injuries to have an average value with random fluctuations about the mean. 

But that isn't what I see from the graph of  injuries / deaths. from 1959 [records began] to 2007: there were about 20x more people injured than killed in RTAs. In 2008, they stopped reporting 'injuries' and started to clock only 'serious injuries' which came in at about 2x the deaths. What I find unaccountable is the steady increase in 'injuries' through the 1980s and 1990s. I can't imagine it's like the steady increase in the number of disabled war veterans through the 20thC: in WWI any sort of head injury was likely fatal but by Vietnam you had a much better chance of living . . . or maybe existing, with horrible injuries. For the Irish RTA injuries I wonder if it's related to our increasingly litigious  society: everyone including the family dog claiming to be injured from a bit of a tip in the car-park? If that's so, it may account for the switch to only recording really life-changing damage because the stats on whip-lash were getting inflated.

There you are now and there you have it. We done good collectively on making the roads safer during my lifetime. Pity about those cyclists.

Wood-stacks

This above is moh2o's cord of firewood, three different species in a well-built self-supporting pile. Well, I've finished Lars Mytting's Norwegian Wood and I feel like a failure. I wrote in the New Year about reading an early paragraph and rushing out to split some wood. I have a dreadful feeling that I was waaay too late. What I have failed to grasp is the separation of two stages in the life of fire-wood: a) drying and b) storage. It is much better if your get the wood dried down quickly to <20% moisture in a process of evaporation before the wood succumbs to the necrosis of fungal infection. Even invisible fungi can block the water-filled tubes of the wood, so that water cannot easily escape.

One of the last things Tadek, our wooffing Pole, did during his second winter with us was thin out a dense dark stand of laurel Prunus laurocerasus, which was sharing the bottom of our yard with the 6 tree apple orchard. The apples were probably heirloom species but were almost useless to us because the fruit was +5m up in the air at the end of wispy twigs. There was nothing near against which to lean a ladder. The reason for this was that the laurel and apple trees had been fighting for the light. It was so dark in the orchard that no grass grew. Tadek went mad with the chain-saw and cut down a LOT of laurel and then cut it into lengths about 30 cm long, and then returned to Poland. I started to stack the small-enough logs into a pile at the edge of the orchard. The bigger pieces, which were easy to split, I split. Then my competent friend René came up and said my pile would be at nothing unless I raised it off the dirt floor. So I threw down what I'd started, found a number of beat-up pallets and, with the help of a 12 y.o. Dau.II, stacked them all up again so that they were clear of the worms. It filled out at 1m x 1m x 5m and I covered the top with election posters weighted down with the gnarly unsplittable lumps. I opened one end of the stack last winter and am working through the rest now.

Stacking the wood in situ was a good idea because it meant less barrowing the stuff about, but tucked in a corner of the orchard; up against the dry-stone wall; covered with plastic was not exactly encouraging of water loss. It would have been better to stack them more openly where the sun and especially the Summer wind could whistle through to carry away the moisture THEN after a significant weight loss move t'buggers somewhere dry and convenient to the stove.  It's been the same with all my other wood stacks around the farm: too dark; not enough air-circulation. And especially, I have failed mea culpa mea maxima culpa to strip off the bark from the unsplit logs to expose more water-loss area. The bark is, by design, waterproof - if it wasn't trees would weep bitter tears down their trunks.

Lars Mytting and his compatriots actively go out into wood-lots and cut down trees - huge debate about the optimum time for felling. Or they get firewood delivered by authorized dealers - who guarantee them as less than a maximum moisture content. They get to choose their species and to some extent the individual tree (nice and straight, please, minimal knots]. We on the other hand have been able to rely / subsist on what has fallen out of the ditches (usually rowan  / mountain ash Sorbus aucuparia) or come crashing down from the crown (ash - Fraxinus excelsior & Scot's pine Pinus sylvetsris). This bounty tends to become available during winter storms and I try to cut them up there, then. When the fields are dry in the summer is the time to load up the Yaris and bring them to the yard. Since we had Young Bolivar working with us, we've had a nice airy wood-shed with hit-and-miss walls and a well-high roof but I should nevertheless dry the wood first in the breeze.

You should check out "artistic woodstacks" on Google Images: despite firewood being essentially ephemeral, some people prefer to make something beautiful as well as functional. "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful" Wm Morris.

A window on the world for the blind

⠠⠊⠞ ⠊⠎ ⠥⠝⠉⠇⠑ ⠇⠕⠥⠊⠎ ⠃⠊⠗⠞⠓⠙⠁⠽ ⠞⠕⠙⠁⠽

I was leaning on the gate at the end of the last century with a vacant look on my face when our neighbour-above drove a flock of his sheep past to his fields, which are one holding higher up the mountain than ours. Inevitably one hoggett was was bringing up the rear and I drew attention to the fact that she only had three legs. Neighbour knew about that and told me a story about his five year old youngest boy who had been playing 'farmers' in the barn. He found a syringe and a large bottle of penicillin on a shelf and decided he's treat one of the lambs like he'd seen his Daddy do. The massive overdose had been too much for the lamb, which had died. I never did find out what happened to the hoggett's 4th leg.

I was reminded of this because today is the Louis Braille's birthday [as noted above]. Louis was the youngest son of a smallholder from Coupvray in the Île-de-France.  You can't make much money on 3 hectares of vines and a potato patch but at least your family can be self-sufficient in wine. Le patron, Simon-René Braille, accordingly worked part-time as a leather-worker. At the age of 3, Louis was imitating his Papa doing some close work with an awl, when the point glanced off his work and into his eye. An infection set in, spread to the other eye, and within a few weeks young Louis was plunged into darkness. Dang!  But his parents and siblings were really supportive and determined that Louis was not going to vegetate in a chair in the corner of the kitchen and he was soon to be seen pottering about the village with a cane. At the age of 11 he secured a place at  l’Institution royale des jeunes aveugles, founded by Valentin Haüy in Paris, thanks to the sponsorship of the Maire and Curé of Coupvray.

Haüy had invented a system for reading and writing by touch consisting of letters embossed on heavy paper. With practice, the blind could pass their fingers across the letters and recognise them as different. The process was expensive to implement, so the available texts were short and limited in scope. Not really satisfying to a chap with relentless curiosity like young Louis. He was an accomplished musician and a natural mathematician and when he graduated from the school he was immediately given a billet as an instructor. He also played the organ in, and was a pillar of, the local church.

aNNyway, shortly after Louis started at the school, Capitaine Nicolas-Marie-Charles Barbier de la Serre [Charlot to his friends: kidding, they called him Bouchée-des-noms] of the french army came to demonstrate his night-reading cipher.  This cunning invention, using a series of raised dots, allowed communication between soldiers without betraying their location by speaking or showing a light. Braille realised that this was a much better system than Haüy but nonetheless too complex for normal use among the blind. Braille spent the next three years experimenting and perfecting a 6 dot system (reduced from Barbier's 12) which gives 2^6 = 64 possibilities. Plenty enough for 26 letters of the Latin alphabet, with codes for digits and punctuation - if you ignore Capitals. French, in contrast to German, is very parsimonious about Capital letters, English is somewhere between. Here's the basic code:

Now you can read the message at the top. You can write using this. The first word has three letters because the first character ⠠ is a <shift>prefix to Capitalise the next letter. Likewise, numbers are prefixed by a #, but laboriously on a digit by digit coding, which you can see in the recurring backward L of our telephone number ⠼⠊⠼⠃⠼⠑⠼⠑⠼⠛⠼⠁⠼⠛, that's an incentive not include superfluous digits when writing out π. hmmm Greek: how do the blind of Greece, Russia, India and Japan manage? They must have their own coding, in the same way as Irish Sign Language is different from British and much more Eurocentric. Also like the [Ancient] Greeks, the digits 1-9 are represented by the letters #a-#j. Actually for longer numbers, including my phonio, one # suffices: context determining whether letters or digits follow. After the basic Latin alphabet, each country is free to makey-uppy its own conventions for how to use the additional character set. Thus é in french is different from é in spanish.

English doesn't piffle about pedantically with accents, we just make the spelinge super-eccentric; but that does free up a number of braille characters. In Anglobraille these are commandeered for letter=word codes for common words - and, the, for - as well as for common suffixes like -ed and -ing and lots of other combos are used to take advantage of the redundancy in English orthography. fr = friend; tm = tomorrow; qk = quick. Those blind people were more than a century ahead of us in spkn txt.

Louis Braille was notably weak-in-the-wind - probably TB - and died shortly after his 43rd birthday in 1852, having definitely made his mark on the world. Chapeaux!

Five Years a-growing

Ah women in science and what I've written about them.

On the 5th of January 2013, a Saturday, I [R with ironic placard in training for the March for Science last April] posted my first Blob, with the intention of blogging the process of transition to a new job in The Institute. That transition must surely be complete now: I know where the t'ilets are, I can direct visitors to the Library, I know what I'm expected to teach in two weeks' time (mostly). But The Blob has acquired a life of its own, and I've written about things which have nothing to do with The Institute, or teaching or science. Although the rubric is Science Matters - because it does - I'm much more comfortable with it as The Blob. I've noted a few milestones:

• 1,000th post where I reflected on the Blob word-count compared to classics like Moby Dick and Ulysses.
• Millionth word = Zeugma

I didn't note the day when I had written more about what floats my boat than JK Rowling wrote about Harry Potter. That is a long while ago now. Because the word-count is about 25% longer than Harry Potter ever will be, Rowling having turned off that tap. I also failed to note the 2,000 the post at the time of posting about 2 months ago. But it seems appropriate to flag the fact that I've now been writing in this medium for 5 years, I don't know about you, but it's been grrrreat for me: all that stuff found out; those leads followed; those wwwabbit-holes that pop you out in the most surprising places. Every 200 posts, I skim it all off the www, paste into MS-Word, reformat and print double-sided on the colour printer at The Institute. That archive is now 12cm thick. I browse through it on rare occasions and sometimes find myself completely bemused: "Who wrote this shit? Oh, it must have been me. What was I on, when I wrote it, then? Because it makes no sense". I am not, therefore, without a sense of empathy for you Dear Reader, who have to struggle through something that would greatly benefit from a good Copy Editor.  The new term starts on Monday; I'm stoked and ready to trip along the Frontiers of Science with a pair of scissors and a basket for new copy.
What about Islands, I do love an island: Wordclouds courtesy of wordcloud

Non-invasive

Abdominal surgery can be dangerous even in modern times under a well-practiced surgeon. Quite apart from leaving a sponge or a clamp behind when they sew up, nobody can supervise the healing of the internal sutures.  If you're unlucky, you can get adhesions in the wrong places as the tissue remodels across the gap. So when Pat the Salt went all yellow on his 90th birthday 2.5 years ago, we were concerned that the removal of the gall stones blocking his common pancreatic duct would lead to trouble. The immune / inflammatory /healing system [it's essentially the same machine] tends to run down and get crotchety in old chaps like Pat and me. We were delighted, therefore, when the problem could be solved with a tube down his gullet and a brief pulse of ultra-sound to fragment the stones. At least, even if surgery was indicated, Pat could have signed an informed consent form having been apprised of the risks and potential benefits.

About 15 years ago, I was discovering and characterising immune genes while working in St Vincent's Hospital. The human genome was available and we were trawling through the chromosomal sequences looking for anti-microbial peptides. As evolutionary biologists, we asked whether these genes and their protein products might be present in chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes, our nearest relative. It turned out that a big cheese in Dublin Zoo was the son of our family lawyer and I approached him as a fellow member of the Protestant Mafia. "Next time you take a blood sample from one of the chimps, can we have 1ml to help push the frontiers of science?". Phlebotomists always take 10ml from sufficiently large animals [less for mice!] and there's always some to spare after the vet has carried out all the necessary tests. Well really, you would have thought I'd proposed to vivisect his daughter! We certainly could not have any blood for any purpose except to service the well-being of the bled chimp. The point being that our primate relatives cannot do informed consent, but effectively deserve the same consideration as humans, which rights are vindicated by the appropriate ethics committee. IF we filled in the appropriate forms, submitted an application, secured approval from StVs Ethics Committee and the Zoo's Ethics Committee then maybe we could get a chimpanzee turd to analyse. With PCR, and the fact that intestinal epithelial cells are continually being shed into the fecal matter, that would have been enough for our purposes. But the required bureaucracy put a stop to our gallop and we drifted off to chase down easier prey on the prairies of science.

These reflections on the recent past came to mind because of a paper published this year by Dan Bradley's [prev as Samaritan] group in TCD. They went back 1000 years to analyze the provenance of The York Gospels [R title page], a beautiful and exceeding rare Anglo-Saxon illuminated manuscript. Over the last 20 years, Bradley has built up an expertise in Ancient DNA - making sense of the signal that remains after the DNA of the originally living thing has degraded to wisps and fragments. They have to be super careful to avoid modern contamination because there is more, and better preserved, human DNA on a pair of unwashed hands than in a whole neolithic femur. Needless to say, librarians, archivists and curators have been unwilling to let scientists go at their inventory with a hole-punch . . . no matter what the scientific question. What they were prepared to do was allow Bradley's people to have [part of] the sweepings from a restoration project where the pages had been cleaned up with judicious use of a rubber eraser. The pages of the Gospels were made of parchment (cleaned, cured artiodactyl skins) which is pretty robust but even so, enough sheep and goat cells were present in the rubbings for Bradley to identify the species. Most of the pages were calf Bos taurus but some of them, maybe later infills for missing or damaged pages, were sheep Ovis aries skin. The original scientific paper [1Mb PDF] with details of methods and results. One of those details is the phrase ". . .large volumes of eraser waste (150-250μl)" that's about equivalent to the eraser on top of your pencil, which is a bucketful in nanotech speak.

Bradley and Co have to be circumspect and cautious in their reading of the data but The Blob can throw some of that caution to the wind. One of the sampled pages had sufficient material of sufficient quality to call the breed of cow which contributed it: it looks N European / Norwegian Red / Holstein-Friesan. [Norwegian Blue is a sort of parrot] Two other pages may fall outside that range, which may suggest a provenance from much further afield. That provokes an intriguing image of trading animal skins across the continent in the Dark Ages, like the stone axe unearthed near Canterbury with provenance from the Apennines in Italy [bloboprev].  They also found differences in the amount of human contamination of the artiodactyl traces. This is supposed to be either from more or less handling / reading on pages or more recent handling during restoration.

If you can find human DNA on the folios, you can also find traces of the human microbiome if you look for them. That's a whole other level of complexity because we are all toting about maybe 10,000 different species of bacteria and each one will have a characteristic DNA signature. The most informative way of approaching these data is a multivariate statistical analysis, comparing the Gospel traces with the known human microflora. We know that our different crevices and orifices harbour quite different communities. The bugs on the York pages fall decisively in the midst of the bacteria which inhabit our noses and skin and quite different from oral or fecal samples. This suggests that medieval scribes and readers sneezed a good bit but that they washed their hands between bathroom and lectern. Good thing too, it's The Gospel after all. The Muslim attitude to hand-washing has always been more proscriptive,

The Whole Wood

I know you're anxious about the jigsaw.

After the family mounted their camels and fled the mountain of washing-up to their own  places, there were 119 pieces remaining in the box. The following morning, I sat down at it and started to put pieces in place at the rate of about 6 per hour: in between washing dishes, fetching firewood, throwing some fill in the worst holes in the drive-way, and eating some quite peculiar combinations of left-over food. Later on I had another session at the jigsaw and tried a brute-force approach. I sorted the pieces by fundamental shape [they were as All Black as the Kiwi rugger team so colour was little help] as in the diagram: fat man, star, thin man, cross, pushmepullyou, asymmetric. Then I picked up each possible piece in turn and tried it in one place . . . iterate 100+ times. It got a little quicker as the pile of unplaced pieces diminished. At about 2345 on New Year's Eve, I sent a passive-aggressive message to all the jigsaw abandonneers saying that I had placed 1999 pieces and one was missing, presumed lost behind a mince-pie or thrown in the fire in frustration. Then on the very stroke of midnight, The Beloved pointed to the AWOL hiding in plain sight camouflaged on top of another very dark part of the assembled jigsaw. If you believe in that sort of thing, it's a good omen for 2018.
I got a lot more pleasure from starting on one of my Christmas gifts. Hel Ved, alt om hogging, stabling og tørking - og vedfyringens sjel was written by a journalist from Norway called Lars Mytting [L in his element] and published in 2011, and became a runaway best-seller. This might have been understandable if it was another Scandinavian page-turning whodunnit, but is actually a manual, as indicated by the translation Whole Wood, everything about chopping, stacking and drying - and the wood-burning soul. But it's a manual for a life well-lived quite apart from giving you the calorific content of a well-dried cu.m. of larch Larix europaea. The English language version (annoyingly for the US market so all the metrics are converted to feet and pounds) loses chunks of this meaning by making a cheap crack at The Beatles and Haruni Murakami and losing all mention of the soul: Norwegian Wood: Chopping, Stacking and Drying Wood the Scandinavian Way. Presumably on the premise that the purchasers of the English language version don't have room for a soul on the gun-rack of their pickup truck.

That's a shame because the book is nostalgic, lyrical and romantic as well as strictly practical and also, in its way quite compelling. Reading about the desirability of drying fire-wood before it is fit for the stove, I realised how wrong I had been to think of storing some large ash Fraxinus excelsior trunks in the round. I had the smaller stuff from the tree, which fell out of the ditch during Storm Ophelia, all cut to length and stacked in the woodshed. Accordingly, I flung the book down and spent a warming 40 minutes outside splitting the logs into cake-slices that would expose more surface area to the air. If nothing else, you should remove the (designed to be water-proof) bark from any logs if they are to dry quick enough to deter fungi. It was a gorgeous crisp dry Winter day - I can't imagine what I was thinking to be inside reading a book!

Can't cite Lennon's Norwegian Wood without noting also Bob Dylan's 4th Time Round

Recycling the details

The human eye is A Machine when it comes to pattern recognition. Small children can 'pick the odd one out' even when they couldn't easily articulate what exactly was peculiar about That One. In factories where everything else had been given over to robots, the QC quality control position was still held by a human, partly because it was too complex to write code to explain what was wrong with dented cans, leaking cornflake packets or brown and squidgy potatoes. My first paying job was working on a farm in the school holidays; my first three week Christmas time stint we were riddling and bagging potatoes. In 1970, a 40 hectare farm could carry the gaffer, his family, two full-time farm-laborers and their families, as well as a part-time grunt like me. Riddling needed all three of us, one to shovel hundreds of tonnes of spuds into the hopper, one to operate the ON/OFF switch and do the QC; and one to flip the gate at the far end to fill the next bag, tie off the full one, load it onto the trailer, and jink back in time to repeat ad nauseam. Bagging was the worst task because of the relentless time pressure rather than the physical lifting. QC was easy: you had to fetch off any absurdly large tubers, anything squidgy of any colour, and any potato-sized stones. The earth, and the tiny tubers fell through the grids of the riddle like the Sieve of Eratosthenes and eventually went to feed a couple of enormous porkers. The immediate reward was that the big 'n' ugly [and hence unsaleable] spuds were divvied up among the workers at the end of each day as a tip.

The Boy shipped out to New Zealand just before his 30th bday because the NZ Government allowed young (less than 30 y.o. which is quite old: Alexander the Great had conquered the world by 30) people to go out there to work for a year. After walking the Milford Track, he headed up to Christchurch for Christmas dinner with some very distant rellies. In the New Year, he went down to the job centre and was delighted to land a billet at the local recycling centre. His visions of hugging trees and saving the planet were sorely dashed when he found out what he was expected to do.

Every few minutes a truck would unload a batch of mixed dry recyclables into a hopper and the refuse was passed in front of him by a rattling conveyor belt. His task was to pick out certain items from the stream and chuck them in particular bins. It was far worse than me riddling potatoes, the belts were relentless and the work was flat-out. He couldn't believe that he had gone to the other side of the world to work in a sweat-shop for the minimum wage. "Fakk", he said, "I can't take this anymore, I won't come back after the dinner-break". As the morning hours crept by, this mantra changed to "Unless an empty tin of Milo comes by, I won't come back after the dinner-break". A few minutes later a mighty, industrial-sized tin of the malted milk drink passed before him, and he felt obliged to stay the full week working there. He spent the next 10 months working at the check-in counter for one of the local airlines - loved it.

Things have moved along since Christchurch, NZ 2006, let alone Berners Roding, UK 1970. For two reasons a) they've made machines that can handle the tedium and recognise the different types of packing b) The Man has reduced the definition of recyclable materials to a fraction of what we need to dispose of.  The Man has, indeed, issued a new set of diktats at the end of November 2017.  And many of these items must be pre-processed by the punter to become acceptable to the company that is lifting €500 a year per household for handling the waste. I could understand if Joe Public felt a little bit put upon. And that's supposing that Joe is fully on board with the principle and not drunk or hungover or mad at the the kids. For 40 years Ireland has been down with the bottle banks, for example, we've internalised that bottles are for recycling, but they cannot now be put in the recycling bin; not even carefully put in the recycling bin. You & I appreciate that those bottles get roughly handled and break after they leave home but maybe Joe doesn't. So

• Bottles = Bad
• Tetrapak milk and juice cartons = Good 
• IF rinsed
• but coffee cups = Bad [it's the plastic inner surface, silly]. 
• Cardboard boxes = Good 
• but pizza boxes = Bad [it's the cheese and tomato, clots]. 
• Amazon boxes
• IF you strip off the plastic inserts,
• Dog-food tins = Good
• IF thoroughly washed. 
• Plastic refuse bags are refused! 
• they get tangled in the machinery
• Aluminium take-way trays = Bad
• because they are difficult to clean. 
• The cost in the aluminium is all in the conversion from bauxite, once it is shiny we really need to keep it in circulation. 

And you can't save space by stuffing a small dry recyclable inside a large dry recyclable - it makes work for the operatives who have to separate everything; although you can flatten out your 2 litre pop bottles . . . IF you've rinsed them first. I'm feeling hacked off already and I'm not even in the system. This year 160 Irish shipping containers of mixed dry recyclables bound for China were refused shipment at Rotterdam because they were fizzing. It's like the single blood donor with jaundice who infected 1500 women with HCV.

So I'm not the only one in the country who is too dense to understand or too pissed off with the arbitrary rules to never make a mistake with the bins. Pat the Salt lives right in the centre of town; the walk from the chip shop takes exactly the same time as it takes to consume a fatburger and chips. He is expected to take drunken people's refuse out of his green bin and put them in the land-fill bin.  One failure could contaminate an entire shipping container and then he'll be shipped off to China. To be frank, part of him thinks he's there already: a Chinese consortium is doing up the decrepit Grand Hotel across The Square and Pat has suggested that the PRC has install a cell of watchers with telescopes who monitor the shipping traffic in and out of Waterford Harbour.

So let's have some relaxing time watching stuff getting sorted by robots and give thanks that we don't have to do it by hand:

• PET [prevI - prevII] bottles blue/clear vs other colours.
• Green grapes vs soft brown squidgy grapes
• PET fragments colour sorted

Did I say Happy New Year? No?

Athbhliain faoi Mhaise Daoibh