News nose newts

Noodles of Nything

• Master of Sushi Nosumu Abe runs Sushi Noz in NYC
• Nabucco, the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves. Me mother's favorite song.
• Nun's Chorus from Casanova - Kiri te kanawa
• Nunc dimittis
• Nisa and Shostak. Cross-cultural encounter.
• Nanook of the North building an igloo.
• Newcastle Utd. Farewell to Kevin Keegan; Geordie hero. 
• Negotiation: success is driven by empathy and listening
• Nick Offerman. A man of wood and words.
• with Wendell Berry Look & See trailer
• in his woodshop
• on making luck and sweeping floors 
• Navy US - anatomy of a tragedy: USS Fitzgerald collision (long form)
• Newts Lissotriton vulgaris doing alright in Ireland
• The nose have it, but Olfactory Receptors are found elsewhere in the body too.
• Nettle-stings, and serotonin. That's Urtica dioica

Too lazy to split

As I mentioned last year, the summer England won the World Cup (July 1966) I was living in Haslemere and had just turned 12. My father was a year from retirement from the navy and had yet to buy a house, so we were renting a 4 bedroom Edwardian mini-mansion with gardens back and front and a shed right at the bottom of the property where the shade of trees from the neighbouring woodlot made a lawn impractical. The rental agreement included a wide variety of garden tools including a handy axe with enough weight to split logs, so long as they weren't too knotty. I loved that axe. There was a large pile of damp lumber between shed and fence and I worked my way through it, getting more like Charles Bronson . . . a zen master with each outdoors day. With each passing week that summer, the lumps of wood got smaller and smaller until they was not so much kindling as toothpicks. Not much use for the purely ceremonial fire-place in the living room: a load of such wood disappeared up the chimney with an explosive >whoof< which left the room cold. Like the farmhouse where Dau.I and Dau.II were born 30 years later.

Not a bit like the Waterford 104 cast-iron wood-burning stove [like the one L] which is even at this moment warming the cockles of my hearth. Load up that sucker and, from a cold start, it will heat the room in about 25 minutes and need the door to be opened within the hour. It is super efficient and we have a lot of wood to service it. We've never been short of firewood on the Farrrrm because about 2000m of unmanaged hedgerow marked out the property and branches are always falling into the fields during stormy weather, While it might be neat and aesthetically pleasing to have neat stacks of split wood precisely 40cm long, it ain't gonna happen if I save pretty much every gnarly elbow and twig for fuel. And I tell ya b'ys, I'm not as fit for chopping wood as I was when I was 11. My wrists don't have their sproinnng anymore, so I'm a bit precious about protecting them from the shock of chop. Like an old fighter, I have to box clever rather than box hard.

The interior dimensions of the stove are 40 x 24 x 24 cm, but you can thread in something 10% longer if you insert it on the scow. The thing is to cut the logs less than 40cm long with the smallest amount of effort. If a branch falls out of the tree at 85cm, do you make two cuts or only one - with only 50% of the effort? I'm not great about making decisions, and when presented with such a dilemma, I often go make a cup of tea instead. When splitting logs, I just chop away; figuring that lumps smaller than maximum fit also have a place in the conflagration. But I do try to stop reverting to 1966 and generating a pile of kindling. All our kindling is ash Fraxinus excelsior twigs of which we get a bagful after every storm - the dead=dry twigs fall preferentially.

The biggest problems are knotty branch points where the wood-fibres travel every which way and it's damned difficult to split. The joy of wood-splitting is solving the puzzle of where and at what angle to >!tonk!<. Wood is best split as soon as felled, preferably in freezing weather. If you leave it a year, the logs tend to knot up as they shrink and the work is harder. I tend to throw the tricky pieces in a dry corner - after several years of microbiological action they often become splittable again. Nevertheless you don't want to carry on trying to split a gnarly lump if it will fit through the fire-door as it is. I have accordingly made an Waterford 104 orifice template [L in use] out of an offcut of plywood, which now hangs in the woodshed.  If fit = stop split.

Don't eat anything

☠I dunno, but sometimes the nanny state disappears up its own oompah in respect of risk assessment. I was idly flick-flicking through the paltry edutainment offerings of youtube and came across "Food expert fingers eight foods he refuses to eat". I can't find a link: it has effectively sunk without trace beneath my attention horizon. I only remember watching it because the first refused food was [raw] flour which was, to me, an unexpected source of coliform. That's because I now have a two week event-horizon for most things and had forgotten writing at length about the 2016 E.coli O121 in the flour outbreak that made a few dozen people sick: nobody died but 17 people were hospitalized. 64 bags of flour caused sickness but 5,000 tons of flour were recalled.  Since that flap 50,000,000 tons of flour has been consumed in the USA without ill-effect, yet parents are still being told to warn their kids about raw cookie dough. It seems disproportionate. If the children can't lick the bowl after making some baked-goods, they may wander off looking for other sources of oral gratification and lick the dog.  I don't buy it . . . or rather I do buy rather a lot of flour and it ain't made me sick yet.

☠That's just to soften you up for the recent CR Consumer Reports report on heavy-metal contamination of fruit juice. The problem here is that safe levels of chemicals in foods are set really low, so that there is no chance of adverse effect if the guidelines / regulations are adhered to. If the limit is set at 5 parts per billion you are probably okay if your batch is 10 ppb but you might start paying attention if your favorite bevvy clocks in at 50 ppb which is 10x or 'an order of magnitude'. That's why this denunciation is a little infair "Trader Joe’s Fresh Pressed Apple Juice was the only product above the FDA’s proposed 10 ppb limit for inorganic arsenic, with the three samples we tested averaging 15.4 ppb" Not least because the average of three doesn't give an inkling about the range about 15.4 ppb. If the individual values are 14 / 15 / 17 ppb, you'd be confident(ish) about the accuracy and reproducibility of the published value. If they were 6 / 7 / 32ppb you'd cry foul or outlier or contamination. For reasons none of them can stand over, chemists always measure things in triplicate - no more no less.
☠The Irish EPA currently set safe limits at

• 10 ppb = μg/l for arsenic As
• 5 ppb cadmium Cd
• 10 ppb lead Pb
• 1 ppb mercury Hg

☠There are lots of reasons why you should not buy juice: €1.50/lt for starters. Mums, make your own! 2 tsp of strawberry jam, 2 tsp sugar, 50mg vitC tablet; shake vigorously; drop into school bag while patting offspring on the head; job done.
☠I R delighted to report that Welch’s 100% Juice With Antioxidant Superberry is one of two juices which pipped up above 5ppb for lead. That's a damn-fool name for a beverage; which alone is enough to make a discerning consumer shun the stuff. Anti-oxidant just means there is some residual vitamin C. Because Superberry is wholly undefined I will assume that all the vat-lees and pipe-blowings at the end of the week are stirred up together and marketed as 100% juice.
'Tis a long way from Johnny Keats

O for a beaker full of the warm South! 

Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,

With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,

And purple-stainèd mouth;

that concoction was r'ared.

Giving a little

My working day at The Institute is 9-5 between first class and last. At 1705 the corridors are really quite dead-o. But if I get delayed an hour - marking lab books or making paper-copy for The Blob archive - the places comes to life again for the parallel world of Evening Classes. The concourse fills with grown-ups registered for vocational courses and qualifications which start class at 7pm. One such is an MSc in Pharmaceutical Regulation. This year, I've been asked to mentor three of the MScPR students on the matter of their research thesis. I know much less about PharmRegs than I do about HumPhysiol but this isn't seen as a handicap: I am a native English speaker; I know how to spell apostrophe; my crap-detector is good; I am not discombobulated by sesquipedalian verbiage baffled by long words. Each of 'my' students has sent me a 20 page research proposal and I've met 2/3 of them for the first of 10ish meetings between now and August.

One of the these essays was really really difficult to read. I googled up the chap's name and surmised that he came from Tamil Nadu in S. India. Being the pretentious git that I am, I started my response e-mail with வாழ்த்துக்கள் which is the Googletrans Tamil for 'Greetings'. 90% of the people of the province use Tamil as their kitchen language. Well it turns out I guessed wrong because my chap speaks Tamil but prefers Telugu, a related Dravidian tongue. Kannada and Malayalam are the other substantive branches of the Dravidian tree. Telugu and Tamil are about as related as English and French and have a different script: Telugu 'greetings'=  శుభాకాంక్షలు and is a totally different word. Think "Greetings" vs "Bonjour". The reason his proposal was so hard to read was because he ran his first draft through Turnitin plagiarism software, got a lot of hits and then went thesaurus-crazy: "Nourishment, Medication and Modernization Act (FDAMA)" instead of the Food & Drug Administration Modernization Act.

Like my pal from Kerala call Murphy Jimmy, in Tamil/Telugu the convention is family-name first, given name afterwards. Actually it's family-name + father's name + your name, which has a whiff of Icelandic patronymics. I've just twigged that even in two bordering countries with very similar languages the naming conventions can be upside down. Typically in Portugal it is Given-name, mother-name father-name while in Spain it is normally Given-name father-name mother-name. I wish folks would just keep it simple for my class registers at The Institute: which of the following is essential FFS: Maria do Carmo Mão de Ferro e Cunha de Almeida Santa Rita Santos Abreu ??

I asked my PharmRegs student who could help him with written English but he turns out to be sharing a flat with two pals from Tamil Nadu - they all came over together and all registered for the same course at The Institute. My boy reckons he has the best English and is thanking heaven that one of his roomies can cook; although he himself is learning to manage domestic issues from his mother via Skype. He can wash dishes though and has volunteered to do that at the local homeless soup-kitchen . . . as well as teaching first-aid in another venue across town. Sounds like an asset to me; I hope he doesn't go straight back to India with his qual.

St Feadhbar delivers the cure

Maybe you wouldn't have an enormous expectation of good coming out of the limestone karst country of West Fermanagh. But the patron of the village of Boho, St Feadhbar, has been looking down with compassion on people who go to hospital expecting a cure but leave by the service entrance in a coffin. Nosocomial infections waste far too many people in Ireland and elsewhere. It is the consequence of flaithulach doling out of antibiotics over my lifetime and the accumulation in hospitals of antibiotic resistant strains of a variety of microbial species. Somehow we haven't made enough progress to curtail transmission of pathogens since early adopter of hand-washing Semmelweis was beaten to death in 1865. Did someone mention hand-washing? That's certainly a Blobby thing. If you haven't heard of MRSA, then you really haven't been doing your homework; but you may be excused for not recognising CRE as another nightmare superbug.

But there are more of these hospital-acquired infectious microbes and some bright spark has gathered the the most costly of them together as a memorable acronym ESKAPE: Enterococcus faecium, Staphylococcus aureus as in MRSA, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Acinetobacter baumannii, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Enterobacter spp. that's CRE. Some strains of all these species are resistant to many of the antibiotics of last resort. Go to hospital with catastrophic burns and you may well acquire a Pseudomonas aeruginosa infection. Pray that you don't; because nothing will kill it short of caustic soda or a blow-torch, neither of which is readily available in the Burns Unit.

What to do? Well, we could send out scouts to round up some new antibiotics. It is unlikely that we have plumbed the well of microbial molecules which kill other microbes: heck we only have the sketchiest idea of how many different species there are in any environment, let alone have an accurate inventory of all their biochemical capabilities. Maybe it's as easy as digging up a spoonful of soil and testing its killing-power against a range of bacteria but undirected leaps in the dark are unlikely to receive funding from any grant-giving agency. The discoverers of Eleftheria terrae tilted the process by using an iChip to test unknown bacteria in their native environment. A consortium from Zagreb, Coleraine and Swansea did a literature search to find a most unlikely tale of the curative powers of the soils near St Feadhbar's Well in Co Fermanagh. With an extraordinary level of optimism, some of them went off to Boho with a [sterile] spoon and brought some dirt back to the lab and isolated a strain of Streptomyces; which they proceeded to test against the usual suspects. It slowed the growth of ESKAPE (Enterococcus, MRSA, Acinetobacter) and is presumably marked for pre-clinical trials to check whether it will kill those microbes in living mice as well as on Petri dishes in a Croatian laboratory. Clinical trials will also test whether the new therapy doesn't itself kill the lab mice.  The venture may come to nothing in terms of a marketable product [many a slip between cup idea and lip dollars] but it's surely better than sitting on our hands moaning about antibiotic resistance. In particular moaning about how Big Pharma isn't devoting enough resources to these scouting expeditions because they have doubtful impact on the financial bottom line. Crowd-funding these low probability first-finder events? Make a kit and a protocol to test random soil against ESKAPE strains and distribute that to all final year microbiology students in colleges round Fermanagh Europe. You first saw that here.

Note to self: follow up the genome of the Boho Streptomyces for its alkaline tolerance genes. I'm running a bioinformatic workshop at Environ 2019 to show tree-huggers and bee-counters how to hunt through genomes looking for particular biochemical skills: here alkaline shock genes but also phosphate solubilisation genes; heavy-metal tolerance genes; and, of course, antibiotic resistance genes.

Safety in the workspace

You can only die once but you can do damage to yourself so many times: ah the pain, the pain; I wish I hadn't done that. Sawing through my thumb as well as a 10cm Wavin pipe. Immersing myself in a vat of paint-stripper. Immersing my arm in a vat of pirhanas. Standing in the way of a txtn car driver. Splashing radioactive phosphorus in my eye. The feedback on these actions was more or less immediate - at least I knew I'd done something foolish at the time. Because the hazards were known knowns. Back in the day we used to pipette-by-mouth = suck up a precise amount of liquid into calibrated tube and run it into glass beaker: urine, phenol, microbial cultures . . . And I don't think that safety-glasses were A Thing in the 1970s. I spend much of my time in the lab at work now reminding students to put their safety-glasses, like, in front of their eyes.

I came through my road-traffic accident damaged but unbowed, although my bike didn't. The phosphorus in the eye maybe not so much: I'm still expecting a tumor 30 years later, although I can't even remember which eye took the hit. Which brings me to Canadian artist Gillian Genser who didn't want to handle any of those narsty man-made artifical things; she only dealt in natural products like mussel Mytilis edulis shells from which she crafted eerie amazing sculptures [R her Adam's muscles are made of mussels, geddit]. It took weeks and weeks of work and after some time on the project she started to feel ill: puka-puka, headaches, cramps. In Canada, a civilised country, if you fall sick then you get referred to [a succession of] medical specialists without having to sell your house. "When they asked me if I worked with anything toxic, I said no, that I only used natural materials". 15 years after adverse symptoms first started, she twigged (seemingly without much help from the medical consultants) that she had been inhaling mussel dust that was loaded with arsenic and cadmium because the invertebrates were grown in the South China Sea bathed in the industrial outfall from dozens of unregulated paint and plastic factories. That's what mussels Mytilis edulis and oysters Ostrea edulis do: they filter hundreds of litres of water a day accumulating minute frags of food and minute quantities of coliforms and heavy metals. Note the specific name for those shellfish edulis = edible. But maybe nowadays not so much. Irish water is still discharging raw sewage into Waterford Harbour right across the river from Woodstown oyster farm. Genser is still alive after 15 years of occupational toxicity but her QALYs are terrrrible.

I picked up this story from MeFi where, as ever, the commentary is at least as interesting and informative as the original story.

• While everyone wants an inexpensive, disposable glove to use with acetone, there is no disposable glove that offers protection from it or any other chemical in the ketone class.
• "Which I did barehanded, because I was eighteen and indestructible".
• "Almost all cities in North America have lead contaminated topsoil thanks to the years of leaded gasoline use" Don't be growing tomatoes in that stuff!
• "Anybody else remember using their teeth as a child to crimp the lead split-shot weights onto fishing line?"

Hybriskib

Greenland = Kalaallit Nunaat = Grønland is an autonomous part of the Kingdom of Denmark. The politics are complicated that Greenland left the EEC in 1985 because they wanted to kill seals and fish until they ran out of gas. Grexit caused significantly less hullabaloo than Brexit. Back in 1959, Greenland was an amt = county of Denmark and the government needed to maintain regular communications with the outlying territory. It's a bit like the daily Air France flight from Paris to St Pierre et Miquelon [prev] to assert that StP&M is really suburban Bordeaux. Commercial transAtlantic flights were not really A Thing back then. We travelled to Canada from England in 1957 on the SS Franconia.

The Danes designed a small ship for year-round service to Greenland. MV Hans Hedtoft [R 83m x 14m; on sea-trials] was built in Frederikshavn, finished in December 1958 and undertook her maiden voyage to Nuuk and points west three weeks later. Year-round service has to deal with icebergs and MVHH had a double hull, water-tight compartments and steel-reinforced bow and stern. Several people, with an excess of hubris and forgetting all about the RMS Titanic less than 50 year before, started to call her unsinkable. Hubris ὕβρις is the core of Greek tragedies: an overweening pride that invites retribution [nemesis] from the gods. And it was damn-foolish to build the vessel out of Lego.

On 29th January 1959, MVHH did indeed strike an iceberg at 1400hrs, ripped the bottom out of herself and sank with all hands 4 hours later. A life-belt was washed up in the Faroes 9 months later; nothing else was ever seen again. Someone had decided to send the parish records to the National Archives for safe-keeping: this irreplaceable record of history and genealogy was also lost. Xerox had started selling their first photocopier ten years previously but no back-up copies were made of the records - probably too costly and time-consuming. The ship was after all unsinkable: what could go wrong? Hybriskib - Danish for Ship of Pride.