P peppa pig

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• Paris, Jasmin [prev] has been [finally] picked up at MeFi - interesting commentary
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• Real penguins <leopard seal alert> don't be first in the water
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• Poppins hammered out on Pianner
• Pachelbel's Canon at Penn State hated by Rob Paravonian
• Pulp - Common People
• Pilolobus go biological 14m
• go silhouette with Ellen dG 3m
• π 3.1415926
• my mnemonic: how . I want a drink alcoholic of course . . . 
• For first 100 digits you need a song by Andrew Huang
• memorising more digits . . . 70,000?
• history of π by Simon Clark [prev]
• Srinivasa Ramanujan makes his play
• Euler's identity e^πi + 1 = 0
• Estimating π from random numbers through Euler's solution to The Basel Problem
• Palace of Memory with Joshua Foer - Bloboprev
• Pseudorandom numbers - the endgame for Feigenbaum's Constant 4.669201609...
• Pyrotechnics with Colin Furze -firing a truckful of rockets at a truckful of rockets
• Peter Ward scourge of the Damp Wally and Wally Builder 

Not returnable, sorry

Wednesday I was down visiting Pat the Salt on the Waterford coast. I had an hour before I had to pick him up from town, and as Garrarus Strand is only 5 minutes from Tramore; as the tide was rising; and as a storm was raising whitecaps I though I had time to stride manfully along the beach and get some fresh salt wind in what's left of me hair. At the far end of the strand I saw a spot of pale green. As I trotted along it got bigger and bigger until it manifest as an inflatable buoy 60cm tall and 40cm in diameter. I was delighted. On the way back along the tide-line I picked up another smaller buoy as well.

Because I know you care, I've taken a picture with my Yaris for scale. I do my best to repatriate these things [prev] because they are worth money to the owner and I'm trying to declutter.  So here's what was written on the end:
598-5755 E CH.80 / Allison Rianne / Dave Fraser / 1749.
I had a bit of a googlefish and landed an Excel file Vessel & Permit Listing - Greater Atlantic Regional Fisheries Office. Which said that Allison Rianne is a 42 ft [13m] fishing boat; Dave Fraser is the skipper; and they are both berthed in Harrington, Maine. That's 4400 km up the Gulf Stream, so I cannot return this one as easily as sending a few txts and popping over to Dunmore. I could call Dave because I've found his area code but that might be too weirdly disconcerting for him.

Accordingly I helpfully e-mailed the The Harrington Town Office which houses the Town Clerk, Tax Collector, Treasurer, Registrar of Voters, General Assistance Administrator, Administrative Assistant to the Selectmen, Bureau of Motor Vehicles Agent, and Inland Fisheries and Wildlife Agent. If this sounds like Parks & Recreation [Nick Offermann prev] it may be because Harrington is home to only 1000 people, so there are almost as many functionaries inside the Town Office as citizens on the outside. "Stormy weather on the Waterford Coast in Ireland! I've just picked up a buoy belonging to the Allison Rianne, skipper Dave Fraser, (821 Marshfield Rd, Harrington) from Garrarus Strand just West of Tramore. I do my best to return flotsam to its owner. But this one a little awkward to return because the Gulf Stream is relentlessly one way. Perhaps you could tell Dave, though, so he isn't fruitlessly scouring the waves for his buoy. I attach a photo with my Toyota for scale. Either it's a helluva big buoy or we have really tiny cars in Europe - both might be true." If I hear from Maine, I'll let you know.

Humpty-Dumpty goes Nunavut

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."  Nunavut.
Here we go: some compulsory homework rather than a neat 700 word exegesis Blob identifying a problem, sorting it out, tying it up with a pink ribbon and delivering it with your breakfast tea-and-toast. Sorry but it's interesting but a bit more than 700 words worth, so in this case it's worth scanning the original article and the MeFi commentary: "all the wrong answers are interesting".  Twain alert:

 "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. 

It's what you know for sure that just ain't so"

What do you actually know about the lads with kayaks and igloos?

1. One of them was called Nanook of the North in Robert Flaherty's factional 1922 film
2. They hunt seals from kayaks
3. They are partial to beluga Delphinapterus leucas fat.
4. They build igloos [recent]
5. The woman of the house was willing to bonk Robert Peary and Matthew Henson.
6. They have fifty words for snow [klaxon! no they don't]
7. They are no longer called eskimos except in some parts of Alaska. Inuit preferred.

A couple of quotes from the article:
"All these changes brought with them new English words that describe the new objects and their function. The changes also triggered a shift in the use of language." If you want to maintain a sense of cultural identity you have to make sure that you don't inherit the word for a new-thing along with the new-thing itself. French and Irish are fighting a rear-guard action trying to use ordinateur or ríomhaire instead of computer. Actually of course the language doesn't fight, l'Académie française and Coiste na Gaeilge, na Gaeltachta agus na nOileán fight on the language's behalf. When I needed to print new letterhead for INCBI in 1993 I applied to CnGnGanO for how to translate the neologism bioinformatics [a word defo not used by Douglas Hyde, or St Patrick]: they returned bithaisnéisíochta but had a debate about it, with a transliteration bioinformatici being considered.

“Eskimos Have Fifty Words for Snow” is an amazing phrase, because every word in it is wrong. But reversing it—announcing proudly that they don’t—only replicates that wrongness; you can’t say no to a bad question and be right. In other words, it is a have you stopped beating your wife? question. You cannot safely even address the question because it is framed as a condemnation; to maintain your innocence of assault-and-battery you have to challenge the very question. For the fifty words issue you need to redefine or at least deep-think "eskimo" "fifty" "word" and "snow" [you're safe with have and for]. The question of whether the words you have to use when speaking a given langauge affect your ability to think independently was briefly Blobbed in my piece about Lera Boroditsky six months ago.

Another take on Inuit-Snow

The myth of exceptionalism

I had a most interesting MI weekend propagating Joshua Katz's NYT quiz on the language used in These Islands and reflecting on the results. The "QI" Brother came back with a map-of-usage very similar to mine - no surprises there because we were at school together . . . and born in Dover. With the Wexford Science Café scheduled [not skheduled!] for Tuesday 19th Feb, I ordered the WSC troops to do the test on themselves and those about them and report aTuesda'.
And it was so, the most surprising finding was that Dau.II, despite being born in the same farmhouse and raised on the same remote farmlet as her older sister, talks the very best, slightly strangled, Home Counties middle-class southern like Father Bob. That older sister, who spent 5 of her young adult years living in England [Stroud, Gloucs], but should be otherwise identical, spiks, in fact, broad Irish like her Brother [and her Mother, data not shown]. The Boy's daughter Gdau.I otoh, was born seven year ago in Bath. Despite her father's Irish creds and her mother's in Manchester Cambridge Bristol, the youngster has picked up a strong streak of West-Country Wurzle.

At Wex Sci Caf, we came up with few surprises: two of our number raised in the UK had maps broadly similar to mine and Dau.II's [above bot left], the rest painted a broad swathe of red across the Southern half of Ireland despite a good bit of hopping about within those bounds and stints abroad. One thing we agreed on was that your identity is identified by the first [above the fold] 25 questions on the Katz NYT quiz. That's an interesting reflection on sampling, sample size and minimising effort for return. When MORI carry out a political poll to gauge public sentiment on Brexit or Fine Gael, they equip a team with clipboards and sent them to several areas of Ireland and ask their questions of 1000+handful of normal-looking random people. They don't ask 2000+handful of people because that would cost twice as much but wouldn't substantially increase the precision. Pollsters reckon that 1000+ gives an estimate ± 2-3% error. Obviously the 25 Qs in the quiz are words chosen because of their discriminatory power but the implication is that analyzing the usage of a few hundred informally written words [letters home, blogs, tweets] will identify the origin and upbringing of the writer to the nearest whole county. Like me at the compiler of Times Jumbo Crosswords. Outlying points like my usage of the word wean for infant is smoked out as an absurd adult-acquired affectation rather than evidence of a Scottish grandmother [which I have].

In some cases a single word will do. Scheveningen will discriminate genuine Hollanders from invading Germans very nicely. Schild also. . Thesche say-it-right tests are known as shibboleths from a typically bloody anecdote from the Old Testament, Judges XII:
5 And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay;
6 Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.
Nice! Remind me not to stop and shay hello to those men of Gilead.

What's this-all to do with Exceptionalism? Well only the fact that Brexit and the dismemberment of the EUropean Dream is hanging on personal identity "we are special in the eyes of god" politics. The Irish government, backed by Big Brother Brussels is insisting on an open border between Dundalk and Newry; Pettigo and Tullyhommon; Strabane and Lifford; Kiltyclogher and Cashelnadrea. The Ulster Protestants are insisting that they must be treated in every detail as equivalent to, and embedded, in the United Kingdom. Newlyn next to Newry; Turnham Green next to Tullyhommon; Strabane next to Stratford; Canterbury next to Cashenandra. . . like Norton-juxta-Twycross in Leicestershire. Certain strains of the political divide are holding up The Troubles as an armageddon in the gestation. But the Troubles are a fading memory even for those who lived through them as adults: I turned 18 the June after things kicked off on Bloody "Derry 1972" Sunday. I know that the average Brit, whatever side they voted in the Brexit referendum, has not the slightest interest or understanding of Irish exceptionalism on their border. They are mostly unaware of  the fact that [part of] Ireland left the UK before WWII; are bemused about the difference between the Catholic and Protestant versions of Christianity [it's the transubstantiation, fellers]; couldn't point to either Derry or Dublin on a map [like me with cities in China] and when they think about the Irish at all it is to say "a plague on both your houses". My brother was 20 minutes too early for a bomb in London's Oxford Street in the 70s: near-misses like that and actual victims known personally to Brits added a further level of disdain for The Other Island. It is tribute to British tolerance (mixed with disdain) that there were no pogroms, or street-spittings aimed at Irish people on the mainland during the Troubles.

more Blobbiness on linguistic maps

Native

We stayed a few days on Sherkin Island with our vet a couple of years ago. It's a ferry-trip from civilisation if you count Baltimore, Co Cork, as civilised [it has a post-office]. The extraordinary and eccentric Sherkin Marine Station publishes Sherkin Comment a tabloid newspaper about the natural world, originally quarterly, now it seems whenever they get a grant to defray the printing costs. They must be in funds because a stack of the 2018 edition appeared at the library in Tramore last week. There was an article addressing a burning question of ecology and conservation: Is Scots' Pine Pinus sylvestris [fine example R] native to Ireland? Getting a seal of approval for being native requires quite a bit of definition. Is a tree which came in behind the retreating ice-sheets 12,000 years ago a blow-in?  Many people take 500 years ago as the cut-off.
Gospel Inventory According the the Tree Council of Ireland:
Ogham - Ingles - Irish - Latin

ᚃ	Alder	Fearnóg	Alnus glutinosa
	Strawberry tree	Caithne	Arbutus unedo
ᚁ	Birch, silver	Beith gheal	Betula pendula
ᚁ	Birch, downy	Beith chlúmhach	Betula pubescens
ᚉ	Hazel	Coll	Corylus avellana
	Hawthorn	Sceach gheal	Crataegus monogyna
ᚅ	Ash	Fuinseog	Fraxinus excelsior
ᚈ	Holly	Cuileann	Ilex aquifolium
	Juniper	Aiteal	Juniperus communis
ᚊ	Crab Apple	Crann fia-úll	Malus sylvestris
ᚐ	Scots pine	Péine Albanach	Pinus sylvestris
ᚓ	Aspen	Crann creathach	Populus tremula
	Cherry, wild / Gean	Crann silíní fiáin	Prunus avium
	Cherry, bird	Donnroisc	Prunus padus
ᚎ	Blackthorn	Draighean	Prunus spinosa
ᚇ	Oak, sessile	Dair ghaelach	Quercus petraea
ᚇ	Oak, pedunculate	Dair ghallda	Quercus robur
ᚄ	Willow	Saileach	Salix spp.
ᚂ	Rowan	Caorthann	Sorbus aucuparia
	Whitebeam	Fionncholl	Sorbus spp.
ᚔ	Yew	Iúr	Taxus baccata
	Wych elm	Leamhán sléibhe	Ulmus glabra
	Probably		pre-Farming
	Hornbeam	Crann sleamhain	Carpinus betulus
	Lime	Crann aoil	Tilia europaea

There is an argument that IF the tree has a representation in Ogham THEN it is native because Ogham pre-dates the threshold for 'Native'. The native Irish seem to have been pretty good taxonomists; having separate names for the two species of oak [Quercus] and birch [Betula a distinction vital to the proper function of saunas]. The Irish for hornbeam at the bottom of the list - sleamhean -  means slippery; or shifty when applied to people. Slippery might better be applied to Betula pendula the supposed soapy [saponins!] component of sauna whisks.

Other people are more widely inclusive to tally up 33 species which are native or probably native. Part of the dilemma about Scots' is that pollen analysis = palynology says that the species was here early but seems to have died out around 4,000 years ago. It must have been some epidemic like Dutch Elm Disease or Ash Die-Back because the extinction was replicated across much of NE Europe. The tree was re-introduced from Scotland [hence the name?] with the plantations of the 1600s. Recent evidence from Fraser Mitchell, and his Effective Alwynne McGeever in TCD Botany Dept indicates that there was a refugium in Co Clare where Pinus sylvestris pollen has been found in sediment cores all the way back to the first post-glacial recolonisation. That's all very well but it will require DNA analysis to determine if any 'original' genetic stock is left in the genepool today or if the whole island has been swamped by the McInblows.

Happisburgh long long ago

Blink and ya miss it, b'ys. 

There is an archaeologically important site on the very edge of England in the village of Happisburgh. It came to prominence in 2010 when researchers found a bunch of flint flakes and a mammoth (Mammuthus meridionalis) tooth buried in sediments that were about 840,000 years old. The flakes were clearly made by flint-knappers and no dog or dolphins has ever mastered those skills; so these artifacts were evidence of human habitation much early than previously documented for NW Europe. As with the Piltdown Man discovered almost exactly 100 years previously there was a frisson of jingoism in the reportage - Brits First, those foreign-johnny hominids nowhere. Puffing Piltdown in an excess of patriotism looked rather foolish when the fossil was outed as an elaborate fraud/prank 40 years after its discovery. In May 2013, further coastal erosion and a storm exposed a jumble of trace-fossil footprints which were carefully recorded in a series of photographs by a team from London. They were there because the earlier archaeological investigations had primed people to expect them. The flint knappers must, after all, have walked along this coast. It is just as well that the site was small enough to capture on film in a few hectic days because the next storm lifted the foot-dinted sediments and swept them to fragments in the back-wash. The 3-D imaging was carried out by Isabelle de Groote of Liverpool John Moores U.

The best estimate of the age is based on the geological principle of stratigraphy: older sediments are covered by younger ones. Fossils in these over-lying layers put a limit on how recent the foot-prints and the flint-shavings can be. It turns out that a conveniently timed magnetic reversal also helps nail down the dates. Magnetic reversals = where the N and S poles flip over in a very short space of geological time. These events happen frequently if you scale time in millions of years and helped Marie Tharp make sense of the development of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Some people are suggesting that the North Magnetic Pole is getting a bit zippier than the normal stately 50km annual drift and that this presages a magnetic flip.

840,000 years is of the same order of magnitude as Raquel Welch fishing and John Richardson wrastling with dinosaurs in the film 1 million years BC. Much much older in time are the fossils that Mary Anning found on the beach at Lyme Regis.

As to footprints in the mud, I've been there before: with thieves in Crete - with Mary Leakey in Laetoli - with Lucy in Ethiopia.

Mutual Aid

When he was young, my late lamented pal Pepe Malpica managed the family farm in Extremadura while holding down a full-time job in Madrid. Every Friday evening he'd leave work, pick up his wife and two small boys and drive 250km SE to Cáceres. Late on Sunday evening, having put in 30 hours of solid work, the family would drive back to Madrid and sleep the sleep of virtuous work. When he came to TCD, on a well-earned sabbatical year in 1992, he compared his hard-chaw farming with farming in Ireland "The fields are green year round; the rains come reliably and rarely too much; all Irish farmers need do is turn the cattle out in the morning and call them back in, several kilos heavier, in the evening." The criticism was offered with an ironic twinkle that turned away indignation but there was a dig there as well. All things are relative and I don't imagine that Pepe would consider Extremaduran farming a doddle compared to hard scrabble subsistence farming in the Sahel trying to raise enough millet Pennisetum glaucum or sorghum/milo Sorghum bicolor to keep the kids from starvation.

 So much to contend with in Sub-Saharan Africa which are irrelevant in Europe: locusts, sand-storms, army-worms; and above all, drought. In the largely artificial capital intensive agricultural systems of The West, monocultures covering prairie-sized fields are not only possible but economically desirable. No farmer in the US Midwest, who can spell the word, believes that the relentless pounding of the soil with corn and soya is sustainable. It is only possible with a) cheap oil to drive the mighty tractors, b) Monsanto to kill everything that impacts on yield and c) depletion of the Ogallala aquifer until it squeaks.

It has long been recognised that intercropping food crops with other species can yield paradoxical benefits. The economic success of pre-Columbian MesoAmerican empires came from the mutually supportive Three Sisters triad of corn, squash and beans. Beans fix atmospheric nitrogen, so all the players can make proteins; the corn provides the bean-pole; while the squash provides water-conserving and weed-suppressing ground-cover. The fact that all three sisters provide something worth eating is almost a by-product: succotash, corn-pone, calabacitas con elote, all mmmmm good.

In the Sahel, the growth limiting factor is almost always water; even in the "old" soils of Africa, lack of minerals, nitrogen and phosphorus is not the deal-breaker. It has been recognised since the 1930s that some plants, like catclaw Acacia gregii and sagebrush Artemesia tridentata are valuable for hydraulic lift. In simple terms, these perennial shrubs can develop a root-system that can tap into deep water . . . and redistribute it where annual crops like millet and milo can use it. They're a bit vague about how this works but the transfer appears to take place underground which implies that the roots of different species are talking to each other.

Nate Bogie is a BSc+PhD Effective working Teamrat Ghezzehei's Soil Physics lab in UC Merced, California. They have zeroed in on a native West African shrub Guiera senegalensis which is tolerated in fields of millet and groundnut Arachis hypogea at least in Senegal where their experiments were carried out. The picture above says it all. The scrawny pathetic plot on the left is millet monoculture; the lushness on the right is millet with added Guiera. The final count was that added shrub multiplied the millet biomass by 10x to about 2 tonnes per hectare and the seed bearing capacity was increased seven-fold. Read the details of their research trying to tease how it works. For me, for now, the bottom line is that the association works . . . wonders.