Sunday Miscellany 20 Jan 19

This A is for 'Orses, B is for bogwit trope can be constraining and I'm accumulating a bunch of other interesting-to-me links so I'll dump them out here-and-now before I go to Mass.

• Here's my 2019 sofa project: watching an old steel trawler being made sea-worthy. Part 2.
• Converting a double-decker bus to a holiday cottage
• Converting 17m trawler MV Smiling Morn into artist's studio
• Portsmouth NH to Labrador in a Cessna:  Flight Blogger Matt Guthmiller (who circumnavigated the globe solo) hitches a ride with a couple of guys on a round-the-world epic.
• Why It's Almost Impossible to Ride a Bike 60 Kilometers in One Hour WIRED - it's the build up of lactic acid, it's the technology of air-resistance, it's genetics.
• A different bike challenge; Lael Wilcox Races the Navad 1000 Across Switzerland
• Ed Pratt unicycles across China! Sweet, optimistic.
• Well 'ard: Jasmin Paris has just run the Pennine Way 425 km in 83 hours.
• Bertinet bakes bread in Bath: it's a combination of gallic shrugs and slappin' about that knocks a wet dough into shape
• Hotshots of the forest service: they go in where normal people would stay in the frying pan.
• Inis Meáin - A Journey to a Connected World
• Milling Lumber Alaska 
• Whisky in Scotland at Springbank Distillery. [prev] A different view / narrative on the process.
• Chefs and folks taste Pretentious Food Products
• Music: Family of the year sing Hero.
• Grandma's potato salad. If Grandma ever existed, she is long dead but her recipe lives on and scales up.
• BM Curator’s Corner Irvine Finkel on Cuneiform
• Shrews Blarina and mice Mus navigate a maze
• Borrrders, exclaves, enclaves
• Two years ago I wrote about The Indus Valley and its mysterious script
• Here's a recent article on the same theme: noting a $10,000 prize

Gutted for Giertz

Damn damn damn!

I wrote about The Queen of the Shitty Robots last May. That would be Simone Giertz, college drop-out who came back to make amazeballs contributions to The Public Understanding of Science. She's a hoot and her robots are the antidote to hubris - ya gotta love her. The tragedy struck when she put up an episode of her youtube channel to explain that she had a brain tumour (called Brian, because ridicule helps) but that surgery and therapy were in the offing and we'd see her later. Now it transpires that her tumor has bounced back, sooner than expected; and more distracting medical hell will have to endured. It is hard to see any good in this news because I am not Dr Pangloss who on learning that he had contracted syphilis said "Not at all, it was a thing unavoidable, a necessary ingredient in the best of worlds; for if Columbus had not caught in an island in America this disease, which contaminates the source of generation, and frequently impedes propagation itself, and is evidently opposed to the great end of nature, we should have had neither chocolate nor cochineal." I quote this from Candide this because a brain tumor is somehow the worst fate imaginable for a creative thinker.

I cannot, right now, bear to watch Giertz breaking the bad news.  My helpless rage might find some solace with MeFi commenter CynicalKnight. "I hate that a fun person is going like this. I'm going to my workshop to smash something with a hammer." I'll try that as soon as it is light tomorrow.

So you miss nothing, here's Pangloss in Voltaire's French:
Point du tout, répliqua ce grand homme; c’était une chose indispensable dans le meilleur des mondes, un ingrédient nécessaire; car si Colomb n’avait pas attrapé dans une île de l’Amérique cette maladie qui empoisonne la source de la génération, qui souvent même empêche la génération, et qui est évidemment l’opposé du grand but de la nature, nous n’aurions ni le chocolat ni la cochenille.

Linguistic shift

I mine A-Word-a-Day for quotations for the kitchen calendar and to keep my finger on the pulse of the quirkier aspects of the English language. This week they were floating a handful of adjectives with the challenge to re-coin them into nouns. It's a rather artificial conceit because very few neologisms invented by earnest wordsmiths, actually stick in the language. While vibrant new usage floats up from the ghettos and gets adopted by everyone. "Ooops, my bad" - do you use that phrase? It's an excellent recent example of recent adj-noun shift. AWAD uses "fat": noting that it was an adjective for 500 years before becoming a synonym for lard in the 1300s.

My contribution to the trope:
"Well I'm happy out! The Gaelic Athletic Association GAA in Ireland attracts fierce local loyalties. Each county plays in a strip of one, two or three colours and has acquired a nick-name, often from some real or supposed historical fact. One monnicker for Wexford is the Yellowbellies supposedly because Caesar Colclough, a 19thC magnate and a distant ancestor in my horse-riding protestant family, sent a team of hurlers to England wearing a distinguishing yellow sash. They comprehensively beat a team from Cornwall and the cry "Up the Yella'bellies" resounds down the years. Next time I'm watching a match in Innovate Wexford Park I'll try "Up the Xanthic" and hope I don't get tonked with a rolled up copy of The Enniscorthy Guardian."

In the interests of completeness, I have tabulated a list of the 26 counties and their nick-names:

Carlow	Scallion Eaters	Longford	Slashers
Cavan	Breffni	Louth	Wee County
Clare	The Banner Co	Mayo	Westerners
Cork	The Rebel Co	Meath	The Royals
Donegal	Herring-gutters	Monaghan	The Farney
Dublin	The Jacks	King's Co	Biffos
Galway	The Tribesmen	Roscommon	Sheep-stealers
Kerry	The Kingdom	Sligo	Yeats Co
Kildare	Lilywhites	Tipperary	Premier Co
Kilkenny	The Cats	Waterford	The Déise
Queen's Co	O'Moore Co	Westmeath	The Lakemen
Leitrim	The Wild Rose	Wexford	The Model Co
Limerick	The Treaty Co	Wicklow	The Garden Co

Some of these are clearly a bit pejorative, but even so will have been adopted with pride by the inhabitants. Like artists like Derain and Matisse who were damned as Les Fauves and rather liked the epithet. Actually some of these nicknames are new to me, but then again I've never watched a GAA match in Co. Louth.

Mary Oliver gone

Mary Oliver died yesterday of cancer but of 'a good age' having been born in 1935. She was an unpretentious poet of the natural world.  She shared her observations with a sensitivity to how the words sounded, and worked to make those words be an echo of the true voice of the world in which she chose to immerse herself.
"the world offers itself to your imagination / calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting" . . . In Blackwater Woods.

The Journey

One day you finally knew

what you had to do, and began,

though the voices around you

kept shouting

their bad advice--

though the whole house

began to tremble

and you felt the old tug

at your ankles.

"Mend my life!"

each voice cried.

But you didn't stop.

You knew what you had to do,

though the wind pried

with its stiff fingers

at the very foundations,

though their melancholy

was terrible.

It was already late

enough, and a wild night,

and the road full of fallen

branches and stones.

But little by little,

as you left their voices behind,

the stars began to burn

through the sheets of clouds,

and there was a new voice

which you slowly

recognized as your own,

that kept you company

as you strode deeper and deeper

into the world,

determined to do

the only thing you could do--

determined to save

the only life you could save.

The Journey with pictures. 

Fast now live forever

Because I was a perfectly ghastly person in a previous life, The Fates have made me convenor of the Wexford Science Café, which meets of the 3rd Tuesday of most months in The Sky and the Ground on South Main Street, Wexford [all welcome!]. It's been running for 4 years now and has featured many times on The Blob, because, well, Science Matters. "Running" would not be be the best verb to describe WSC's progress because convening a schedule of speakers is more like pushing a bus uphill. But enough of this passive-aggressive moaning, we've just had a Third Tuesday and nearly a dozen people turned up and everyone contributed to the discussion. So that's clearly a success.

We had on the table a May 2018 paper [see R under the watchful elbow of His Blobbiness] about the relationships among: periodic fasting, fatty acid oxidation, intestinal health and longevity. Here's the Executive Summary from the MIT Press Office. Of course as an impoverished independent scientist, you may be sure I wasn't going to shell out $31.50 to Elsevier to read the whole paper; but SciHub delivered. The discussion made us briefly Famous on Twitter. It is prolly a coincidence that Luke O'Neill was talking about aging on Newstalk FM the very next day. Calico, the company being admired by O'Neill, has a string of prestige papers on senescence. We've met their CSO, David Botstein before. The model organism for longevity is the naked mole rat Spalax ehrenbergi. They're right small but they live for more than 30 years. It may be to do with caloric restriction. Seemingly Spalax finds itself without food periodically and the hypothesis is that drives its long life.

Me, I'm a fan of the Harry "BIG" Secombe diet "You can each as much of whatever you like . . . so long as you don't swallow." I spent more than half my adult life toting around about 10kg of extra lard under my jumper. When I started working at The Institute six years ago, all I ate between breakfast [two small slices of toast] and supper was a modest cheese-and-nothing sandwich made on home-made sourdough bread. There's a canteen at work: cooked breakfast; cappuccinos; packed sambos; muffins, cookies; massive plates of meat-and-two-veg; dessert; candy-bars are all available. But I'm too mean, and frankly, too busy at work to go for any of those things - unless it's a free dinner with a visiting speaker. That didn't make much difference to my [over-]weight because when I got home, I'd have m'dinner and then graze through the bread-basket and cookie-jar. For the last couple of years, I do this far less often, indeed I metaphorically or actually brush my teeth immediately after supper most days. Consequence is that I'm down to a little less than my 18-to-30 weight. It's a real bind after Xmas - not only is that far too much cookies and calories in circulation BUT I see half price stollen in Aldi and 6 mince-pies for 45c. That makes them cheaper than potatoes, so it's hard to say No.

We spent some time at WexSciCaf talking about the 5/2 diet because that accords with the caloric restriction hypothesis. Deal is that you can eat around you for 5 days so long as you go cold turkey eat nothing for the next 2 days. That would be far too much for most Westerners so the advocates of 5/2 allow you 500Kcal a day on the off days. That's possible surely:

• Breakfast:
• 2 slices toast = 140 Kcal
• 10g butter =70 Kcal
• Total = 210 Kcal
• Lunch
• 2 slices bread = 140 Kcal
• 20g cheese = 80Kcal
• lettuce = zero
• Total = 240 Kcal
• Evening: 
• 2 satsumas = 50 Kcal
• Total Total 500 Kcal.

Another potentially beneficial regime is to have breakfast . . . in the old style where we used to not eat for 12 hours before the first meal of the day. The absence of food for that amount of time each and every night might trigger a spike of fatty acid oxidation which will turn over the stem cells, renew the cells lining the gut and make us live longer.

These diets have another thing going for them: they must be hard to monetize. Megacorp will surely find it difficult to make a product out of eating nothing. A few years ago my in-laws inherited an indoor cat from one of their descendants. This creature was fat, and it got fatter under the care of two indulgent pensioners. When it sat waiting for food, it looked like a heap of extruded ice-cream. They took it to the vet for a check-over and that charlatan sold them a €20 = 4kg bag of Cat's Slimming Pellets! Vastly more expensive than regular cat food, it seemed to work by being repellent to eat. I offered to buy them a 25kg bag of sheep muesli at €8.95 but my PhD was trumped by the Vet's B.Vet.Med.

Misogyny in the lab

Last week, I was doing some research on comparing recruitment videos in the Irish Institutes of Technology. A couple of days later, I was in class with my proposed New Irish film star and mentioned that I'd put in a word for him with The Suits if/when the next propaganda vehicle was to be made. One of his Old Irish friends whipped out his smart-phone and found the whiter-than-white video that had triggered my investigations.
"What did you think?", I asked.
"It was okay", he replied
"Did you see any black kids in the film?"
"Fakk ?!?"
He was a little rueful that, even in the year after he'd left school, he'd become part of the Patriarchy with all the privilege and selective blindness that comes with the position. We didn't even begin to discuss the second class citizen position of women in the film. The  Star , on the other hand, said that he'd noticed the discrepancy (of course) but for him also it was almost invisible because he'd been putting up with that shit his whole life [I paraphrase: he is far to well-spoken and mild-mannered to talk like a low-life]. Later on I shared the video with one of my teaching colleagues - he white and in his 30s and (of course?). For him also I had to point out the absence of blacks and the discrepancy in gender.

Being unable to properly see minorities and women could be classed as a sin of omission. There's a much murkier class of sin (of commission) in the world of science which has been exposed in an essay Surely, You're a Creep Mr Feynman by Leila McNeill in The Baffler. Now I am an admitted fan of Richard Feynman [multibloboprev] and his book Surely, You're joking Mr Feynman. Indeed, a few weeks ago I brought my old kindle to life and this weekend I was re-reading with enjoyment a couple of anecdotes from Feynman's memoirs. It is an indication of how Patriarchal I really am, that Feynman's reminiscence of his treatment of women struck me as bouncy and direct, if vulgar, rather than abusive. I don't believe that many of his interactions with students or younger women, or indeed any women, ended in tears - like those of one successful scientist I know. But it's pretty clear that Feynman got more women to bed because of the confidence that glitters from men who are at the top of their game. And it looks like he started to believe that he deserved these trappings of success and had a tendency to get foot-stampy if things didn't work out for him just like he wanted with the opposite sex. McNeill is quite hacked off that, for his fans, and they are many, Feynman is almost beyond criticism because his charisma blinds us all.

I looked for a picture of the great man and found an odd twist to the story which more or less backs her position [patriarchy locks shields to protect Feynman's rep] up. In 2014, XY science blogger Ashutosh Jogalekar posted a piece critical of Feynman's attitude to women. The very next day: the text of this post was replaced with the following statement: "The text of this post has been removed because it did not meet Scientific American's quality standards."  At some indeterminate time thereafter it was re-instated by the editors of Scientific American. Poor fellows, they must have been in an ethical turmoil to chop the article and then change their minds. I've read the post, but am too Patriarchal / insensitive to see what aspects of it required censorship. The censorship aspect, rather than the misogyny, might remind you of Rupert Sheldrake's cleansing from TED.

One of the threads which Leila McNeill pursues through her "outburst" is the idea that we shouldn't attempt to separate the science from the scientists. Being a genius is no excuse for being a Dick. She suggests that because science has this aura of the pursuit of objective truth, then scientists are excused seepy behaviour, because the science is pedestalled as some sort of Platonic ideal independent of those who contribute bricks to the edifice. But I think this aspect of her broadside is misplaced. Nobody who is in the game and has the least amount of sensitivity thinks that science is objective. Scientists I know really cherish their hypotheses, and tend to design experiments which confirm rather than challenge. Their credit, their status, their very livelihood depend of their ideas being right and that colours every analysis and interpretation of data.

And I certainly don't think that examples of arrogance, misogyny and bullying are more prevalent in science than in Hollywood, Bollywood, Wall Street, or Tibet. Every group or community I have had dealings with has had its share of Patriarchs throwing shapes because their sense of self[-importance] depends upon grinding some other poor bastard in the dirt.

Tree down

When we stopped bloggin' about it last week, our mighty Monterey cypress Cupressus macrocarpa had been shorn of all its top hamper and was but the backbone of its former wide-spreading self. It was another day's work to remove another 3m from the top to simplify the gestalt. As I worked to tidy up the fallen debris, I took time to reflect on how feeble people are until they tool up with chain-saw, axe and wedges and become Homo faber, the maker, and/or Homo destructor the destroyer of the natural world. One misplaced tonk with my splitting maul and I'd be off the Effectives List for the day with a burst finger, sprained wrist or massive bruise on my shin. All of which I have sustained in the past in similar circumstances. But tool use is part of the human condition and examples in the rest of the animal kingdom are few, far between and pathetic compared to using a hammer and nails; let alone constructing the Golden Gate Bridge or the Channel Tunnel. Until you're up close on a building site it is hard to imagine the relative size of people and their creations.

Check out the bottom part of the rebuilt Oroville [multiblovoprev] spillway. The 4x4 parked [R] in the middle of the concrete can fit 6 or 8 people and one of their hands is a single pixel at this scale. Those hands [and $1 billion] made this massive structure. With the macrocarpa trunk now reduced to about 3m of vertical biodiversity aka beetle hotel it is ready for its next role - tree-house. Peadar the tree-climber suggested that we leave a good length on the lowest limb of the tree to serve as a natural brace for the said house. It has to be at least 2m x 2m interior floor area, excluding balconies with sea-view; because it is my determination to force the grand-children to join Swiss Family Robinson and sleep up there as much as possible.  I think also that a helical staircase going round the trunk is the obvious way to sort out access. There is a helluva lot of fire-wood: