Q

Quasi quetiapine quit-rent quorum

• Quechua
• Quokka
• Films
• Quarterstaff
• Monsignor Quixote: 2 hours of Alec Guinness, Leo McKern, Ian Richardson
• Quentin Durward 1955: never enough DerRING Do. Buck your swashles, lads.
• Q in Bond
• Goldfinger
• Moonraker
• Skyfall
• Licence to kill
• Tomorrow Never Dies
• Q = Arthur Quiller-Couch The Roll Call of the Reef [text]
• Qualidade de Vida
• Queen
• Quadratic equation explorer

Storyrock

When we bought the farrrm in deepest rural Ireland, Dau.II was not yet walking and Dau.I was still very short. They never went to school, but seem <amazingly> to have taught themselves how to read and write and cipher and treat each other and strangers with kindness and dignity. If they weren't spending 5 hours a day crammed into a room with 30 other small children and one distracted adult, what did they do to pass the time? Well they read a lot of books, watched a lot of DVDs, and shovelled a lot of chicken shit - if you want eggs and there are no shops anywhere close then you have to keep hens. Those eggs were broken into a lot of cake batter. But these domestic chores needed a certain amount of leaven lest they get stodgy and so the girls spent a lot of time in the car on the way to shops or singing or dance or tin-whistle or play dates. The car-time was talking book time but also round the houses and round the universe conversations like one of the last car journeys I made with Dau.II before she, like her sister, left home for the wide world. If The Beloved couldn't face the car and/or it wasn't raining stair-rods, they'd all get unto wellington boots and head up the hill to the mountain. As the legs grew longer so did the expeditions.

If the party descended from The Mountain Gate into the valley through the now ruined homestead of Hickey's, they could lay out the picnic things on the one part of the scenery that wouldn't be wringing wet:

This boulder became known as Storyrock for another part of the ritual: after lunch, stories would be told. I missed this whole chapter of their lives because I was off with the fairies in Dublin pushing the frontiers of science. When I finally got to visit Storyrock, many months later, I was amazed by the vertical side and the explanatory row of evenly-spaced indentations along its top edge [shown above R]. These were where the wedges had been driven to split off a whole slice of rock - for lintels and gateposts - as explained previously.  A chemo-geo-morphological analysis would reveal if our lintels came from Storyrock. I also noted that the top face of Storyrock was decorated with some crudely written letters. Sometime about 2010, in the wake of the discovery of the Ringstone, I went up with a camera to take photos of these presumed signatures of the rock-cleavers. They were crap - the photos not the cleavers - because the rock surface is a riot of lichen and moss, and dips and rises, against which the letters are hard to make out.  I was advised to prep the surface with shaving foam and a squeegee which would emphasise the indents and null the distracting colour changes. But I gave up shaving decades ago and it never happened.

Then last month the Hickey homestead was vandalised by agents of the ESB and I rose early one morning just as the sun was rising <caution Hoss-alert> to document the Aftermath. Storyrock was struck by the oblique light so that the shadows did duty for shaving foam at no extra cost [duty-free harharhar]. So now, I am able to reveal the names of the 19thC stone-masons of Knockroe, before the art of petrographology became more or less lost in the scream of con-saws:
Hobi:

Nial:

Dönitz

Or maybe his ɹǝƃuuɐƃǝlddop [how] ZioMip

If Adolf Hitler's brother Alois could work as a penniless waiter in The Shelburne Hotel in Dublin before WWI; I see no reason why a relative of Großadmiral Admiral Karl Dönitz couldn't be working as an itinerant stone-splitter at about the same time down the country.

Obviously further work is need on deciphering the message in these carvings but I put it to you that they are as important to Ireland's history and heritage as the the markings on the Ringstone. The world expert on the decorated stones of Ireland, Chris Corlett, replied to my announcement "I agree with you about the importance of this type of material, which is actually quite rare. I have often been surprised by how infrequent this type of carving is, especially in stone cutting areas". It's not only about the Kings and Queens and Heads of State, the humble workers They also serve who only strike a wedge. Milton.

Vernacular rocks!

Slip slipping away

We spent ~40 years raisin' sultanas children: The Boy being born in 1975 and Dau.II leaving home in 2013. That was partly choice and part force of circumstance but mainly because there was a gap of 17 years and 51 weeks between The Boy and Dau.I. Forty years is (or at least was) one estimate of the length of a working life. Approaching retirement, the weeks don't pass, they rush in no time at all I'll have no more 9am-Monday classes to get up for. For several years I have been quipping my students about my "two-week event horizon": if a conversation happened more than a fortnight ago, I need some prompting to remember it. I found my car keys on the grass by the woodshed a couple of weeks ago - before I'd lost them! That was a relief and I upgraded the key-lanyard to bright yellow to minimise a similar loss in the future. Here's a note to self: if you're going to leave your keys and spectacles in random places at home they will be easier to locate if you clear out all the camouflaging clutter. Now, when we might deserve a bit of break from child-rearing, we have instead switched generations to look after what's left (50%) of our parents. Because those parents are a generation older, and because of our own deficits, End of Life Issues loom large and lumpy. This is more than deciding on what colour the wicker coffin should be, it's about the trouble and expense of getting to it years or decades into an uncertain future.

Which brings us to Careblazers TV which was founded Dr. Natali, a board certified geropsychologist, so no more a Doctor than PhD-me is a Doctor. It's a youtube channel which gives help and supportive advice to carers-of-elders. In many cases, this acknowledges that the Elders are beyond caring much about anything. Here's one vid on dementia meds [36mins] which I found useful because it explained a bit about the classes of drugs, their mode of action, and something about their interactions. Without that you're just presented with a blizzard of damn-fool names: some proprietary, some me-too generics, some equivalent, some completely different; some Pfizer, some Glaxo. The information is delivered easy as a dialogue between Dr Natali and her rescue dog business partner, Guinness and Chris Martz [who has three dogs a surname and a proper degree] her favorite pharmacist in Scottsdale AZ.  I doubt you have the patience to sit through half an hour, so I'll give you an executive summary. Here's Chris and Natali chewing the fat:
There are two broad classes of drugs to deal with cognitive deficits of Alzheimer's and dementia:

• Acetylcholinesterase inhibitors
• Acetylcholine ACh is a neurotransmitter
• Acetylcholinesterase is an enzyme which breaks down ACh after it has made its run
• An ACh inhbitor therefore allows more ACh to hang around in the synapses of the brain keeping them active and firing when they're tired and would rather have a nice lie down.
• Aricept - Galantamine - Exelon: these are all Trade-names not pharmacy names although the latter are equally random coinages.
• Recommended for early / medium stage dementia. Does nothing for the progression of the disease but at least makes modest improvements in the symptoms
• NMDA inhibitors
• NMDA is an artificial analogue of glutamate.
• Glutamate, as well as being an amino acid found in all proteins, acts as a gee-up neurotransmitter.
• Too much glutamate / NMDA and the brain gets over-stimulated and bursts out in anger, psychosis and other difficult-to-care-for dementia symptoms
• Overstimulation can also result in cell-death (it's like blowing a cylinder-head gasket) and the result holes on the brain lead to memory loss etc. 
• Inhibit the neurotransmitters NT and hope that everything calms down.
• Namenda is the trade-name
• Advised for later when beloved elder is beyond help from Aricept.
• And of course you can buy the double whammy with both drugs in one pill
• That would be Namzaric.

You are advised to stop these meds if you don't notice any cognitive improvement - save yourself, your insurer or me the tax-payer a bunch of money and don't needlessly heedlessly trick about with the delicate homeostatic balance of excitatory and inhibitory NTs. BUT for god's sake give it 4 weeks to kick in and don't be chopping and changing your meds - that really wrecks your head.

Side effects: Diarrhea, nausea, vomiting, loss of appetite, increased weight, loss of bladder control, back pain, headache, bruising, drowsiness, or dizziness may occur. No surprises here: AcetylCholine is a one multi-tasking neurotransmitter triggers muscular contraction [bladder sphincter included] and a host of other systems and functions in the body.

Later on in their tete-à-tete, Chris and Natali talk about anxiety meds; of which SSRIs [selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors] are the class recommended for old buffers. Other meds like beta-blockers and benzos are not recommended for old folks because they up the risk for falls, stroke, and other immediately adverse outcomes. But one line which I found really helpful was that a No Med approach will be better than a pharma-driven solution to anxiety. That might require carers to, like, talk to their elders rather than talk at them and maybe listen to the answers and try to imaging what it must be like to descend into a booming buzzing confusion where nothing makes sense anymore and you don't recognise any of the people who are hoiking you up, sitting you down on the t'ilet, loading you into a wheel-chair, slapping plates of food in front of you without asking what you fancy . . . let alone getting annoyed with you because you can't wipe your own arse.  A month ago, Philip Grimmer, a GP in England, captured and tweeted [see L] one way of allaying suspicion and worry in one of his elderly patients. It went viral and was a lot cheaper and less intrusive than a pharmaceutical solution.

Trans-Atlantic Comms

I'm given to understand that some Waterford-and-Wider folks are hopping from one foot to the other for closure on the Harrington, Maine Captain Fraser's wayward buoy story. I didn't get any feedback from the local government in Harrington, so I turned to the Fourth Estate. [An idea that stems from Edmund Burke "Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all." Thomas Carlyle]. The nearest organ of the USA's justly famous Free Press is the Machias Valley News Observer ($1.60 but still editorially free!). Good timing! because Sarah Craighead Dedmon, the we-never-sleep Editor of MVNO, was in the process of putting that week's edition to bed. She asked for a higher resolution version of the photo, because MVNO has Standards in that department, and hammered out 200 words to fill in a bit of a hole on the back page of her paper. I'm dead chuffed by the whole story. Captain Dave Fraser seems resigned, if not exactly buoyant, about the loss of his kit. I like to think that the newspaper readers of Washington County ME will face the day with a little more Spring in their step. Schools were starting late there last week because of the latest dump of snow, so any feel-good story is sure to be welcome.

I made a facetious quip comparing the mighty size of Cap'n Fraser's buoy with my diminutive Red Yaris. Obviously the size difference is exaggerated by the perspective. Three days after retrieving the big blue buoy from Garrarus strand, I was back on a different beach and spotted a distant pink dot with my binoculars. Without the optical aid, everything beyond my outstretched hand is a blur. As I got closer, the pink blob revealed itself as the biggest buoy I've ever found. It was really light though, and I dragged it back to the car-park fondly imagining that it would fit in the trunk. It didn't but it didn't fall out either - wedge! There are various letters T(FN)M and numbers 320678 on my latest acquisition, I'll need some help tracking down its origin.

The pic [R above] of the blue buoy's ring-bolt is a final angle on the Maine buoy story. These bivalve molluscs have hitch-hiked across the ocean: it gives some clue about how difficult is the study of oceanic biogeography. A prize for the first person to identify the species.

Checksum tags

Where sheep tags meet combinatorial maths.

I'm a bit of a groupie for David Brailsford on the Numberphile channel. He's a bit older than me, so was an adult at a time when computers were just starting to gain traction as useful tools - even if they were the size of a walk-in cold-room and cost £1 million. Getting them to do your bidding was hard and you had to really understand how they worked to have them spit out anything; let alone the correct answer to your data-crunching problem. Somewhere in his noddle, Brailsford knows where all the bodies are buried and who did what to whom in the 1960s and 1970s when computer-literacy was a rare accomplishment. He knows Kernighan and Ritchie who wrote The Book. A couple of days ago, Brailsford was talking about Reed-Solomon encoding, and most of it was over my head. But Brailsford kindly pointed out that Reed-Solomon was a turbo-changed sort of Hamming codes, which I do kind of understand. Although, for many years I thought they were something invented by wireless hams to ensure correct transmission over shortwave radio. What's a belief that sounds like a bell? <Wronnnnng!> they were invented by Richard Hamming while working at the mighty Bell Labs with the likes of Claude Shannon and indeed, Ritchie and Kernighan and nine (9!) Nobel Prize-winners. Hamming codes work by transmitting a little bit more information and being able to thereby deduce if the data has been transmitted correctly . . . or at least with internal consistency.

Another way of doing this is to use checksums. A number to be transmitted is run through a little program which computes (and appends) an extra digit which is unambiguously associated with the original number.  Any message to be transmitted can, of course be converted to numbers, and indeed nowadays almost always is so converted with ASCII or Unicode schemes. On arrival, the incoming message can be checksummed and if everything matches we can be confident that the message was sent correctly: ie. without getting partly fuzzed out by an electrical storm or mangled by an incompetent at the keyboard.  For several years in the 1990s, this sort of thing was bread-and-butter to me because I'd be dealing with DNA and protein sequences, some of ridiculous length that would be hard to verify as being free of typos. I remember downloading a very large file of DNA sequences and their annotation when the internet was new and flakey. It arrived, I started to analyse it in good faith, and it was a couple of days later that I realised that none of the sequences had names beginning with T U V W X Y or Z. The last section of the file had been dumped out on the floor of the Atlantic as a "broken pipe". Start again, lads! If those data had been checksummed I wouldn't have wasted hours of time analysing an incomplete dataset.

Q. Ah the poor petal, what brought all that on, like a bad dream?
A. The sheep tags is what!
Friday 22 Feb 19 was the day assigned to ultrasound [multiprev] the ewes for lambs. This is a really handy thing to do because the number of lambs carried should dictate their feeding regime in the last months of pregnancy. It also helps tell you to look for an extra lamb if you wake up to find that the ewe scanned as having twins only has a singleton at foot. Sometimes the missing one is still inside, sometimes still-born and on at least one occasion really quiet in a corner. Sometimes you just have to put the MIA down to the fox. We were pretty sure that the sheep we ran up the mountain last Summer had been with the ram. While we waited for the Ultrasound guy, Paddy the Shear came to help us with the dosing [fluke, lung-worms / hoose, Cryptosporidia] and pedicure <snip, snip>.  At some stage I asked Paddy if he thought any of the ewes looked pregnant. As reflex, his hand snaked under the nearest sheep to palpate the udder. The continuing conversation was revelatory: Paddy was extremely skeptical that any ovine bonking had been happening on the mountain - it just isn't done to allow random males to be romping around up there because it screws up everybody's schedule of lambing. Lambing is a time of serious sleep deficit for shepherds and they want to limit it to a window of not more than 2 weeks . . . 5 months after the ewes are put to the desired ram. Red face - it looked like we were going to have the ultrasound guy on a wasted journey. Then again, the new intrusive Dept Ag regulations require that flock owners get their ewes scanned as an animal welfare issue - it's no fun for a sheep if she needs help with delivery and cannot get a [small] helping hand.

My job in the dosing and drenching was to record the ear-tag numbers as they went through the process and, like a good secretary, add notes like "loose teeth"; "scald - 5ml betamox"; "too frisky = to factory"; "missing ear-tag". As I did so I noted that there was some semblance of order in the numbers - 05396-07806 for example came in a batch, as "mountain-hardy", from our neighbour Martin. And twig this: Martin must have had 7806-5396 = 2410 sheep through his farm gates. But each number was followed by a random letter between A and J - must be a checksum I thought. Excluding I 'eye' because it might be confused with 1 'one'; then A to J could be code for numeric digits 1 -9.  Do you notice how 0049C is exactly nine higher than 0040C? Maybe the letters run a not-alphabetical cycle repeating after every 9th number?  That's a hypothesis . . . shot down in flames because 0046 is not followed by G like 0037

0037G	0048A	05901D
0040C	0049C	06152E
0041E	0050D	06356H
0043J	0055E	07802E
0044B	0133F	07804F
0045D	01495J	07805C
0046F	01497D	07806E
0047H	05396E	11637J

So there's a puzzle, and a challenge. It's like trying to decipher the Indus Valley script from fragmentary data. I have a box of unused sheep-tags that will be a larger and less fragmentary sample.

Direct Provision

[Try again: published by stutter yesterday]

When I left home in 1973 to go to college in a different country, I was too late to secure a room in the Halls of Residence and was assigned to digs in Sandymount. It wasn't really a home-from-home because my landlady had very (to me) peculiar ideas about what was appropriate. The arrangement was B&B for Mon-Fri and 3 meals on the weekends. I don't remember much about lunch during the working week, but I found the Evening Meal a very unsatisfactory chore. I guess I had other things on my menu but I remember dining chiefly, almost alternately, on a) a packet of Chocolate Goldgrain biscuits and b) fried whiting & chips. As I say, most unsatisfying. The Beloved was barracked in a hostel run by the Loretto Sisters, where she got two meals a day and shared a dormitory with 5 (five!) other young women. We hatched a plan to buy some food in Moore Street market and take it out to visit my pal Robert, a geologist who had a room in the TCD Halls of Residence. Robert said he'd be delighted to have visitors and nobody would care or notice if we used the kitchenette at the end of his corridor. And it was so: we went and bought half a red cabbage, a couple of pounds of potatoes and some other food and took the bus out to the Dartry Halls where we cooked them up a storm. It was the best meal I had that month.
This all came rushing back to me because of a passing remark by Rosey Kunene last Friday lunchtime. Rosey Who? Rosey Kunene; she a young woman from Malawi who came to Ireland as a refugee several years ago. She has been sharing a room in a Direct Provision centre [like above, the old Montague Hotel on the old N7 (now the R445) near Emo, County Laois], on the far side of the river from The Institute. She came to talk about the daily grind of a Displaced Person in Direct Provision DP/DP in BallyBoondocks to a cohort of Media and Publicity students at The Institute. At very short notice the rest of our community were invited to come listen. I've written about Direct Provision before: it is an Irish solution to the International problem and it is quite easy to get cross about its existence.

DP is run by the newspeak Reception and Integration Agency RIA and seems to be premised on this logic: IF someone has been so brutalised and dispossessed that they up-stakes and leave their country of birth THEN they will be grateful for "the basic needs of food and shelter". I'm sure this is true for short while. When I volunteered to meet plane-loads of Ugandan Asians as they de-planed at Stansted Airport in the Summer of 1972, they really appreciated the tea, hot & strong, and biscuits that we were doling out. It was also a relief that they were getting tea and finding their traps in a hanger and not in a dark, damp and muddy field. Within a short time, the whole displaced community, all 27,000 of them, had been absorbed and integrated into British society - mostly in existing Asian ghettos in Leicester and Bradford.

The problem with DP is that it meets only basic needs goes on and on and on, as the refugees wait for their next hearing, their next appeal against an adverse ruling, or for the RIA to find the papers which have been lost. Meanwhile, the agency and self-esteem of the refugees go down the toilet. As well as 4,000+ adults, here are 1,600 children in DP this week, 55% of whom have been in DP limbo for longer than 5 years. The RIA provide all meals, heat, light, laundry, tv, household maintenance and an allowance of €21.60 a week.  Aaaaaaaaaargh! What kind of a bean counter gives an adult an extra €1.60 a week?  The sort of bean counter who knows that bumping the allowance up to a folding-money €25.00 would cost the state [6000 * 52 * €3.40] €1million. Did you know that up until your first hearing you can work outside the DP Centre where you are billeted? But that after you have been refuse 'leave to stay' you can't?  Years go by when you can do nothing but wait for the chop.

Someone, for sure advised by a dietician, cooks 3 meals a day - rice potatoes rice potatoes - which you and your children can eat . . . or leave.  If there are a lot of Africans in a given DP centre some thought is given to provide 'African Food'. WTF - Africa is a continent. Imagine the boot being on the other foot and a clatter of white folks fleeing for their lives to China. The Chinese dietician googles up "European Food" and serves Wexford rissoles with borsch and cannelloni  - mmmm good but ooooo weird.  Rosey Kunene explained that the greatest coup you can achieve as a DP is to make a friend outside the DP who'll invite you home to use their kitchen.  Butttttt! rather too often that friend outside is a Polish or Irish fellow who is nice enough but quite happy to exploit the yearning for affection and human contact but less happy to acknowledge any children that might result.

The RIA spends a chunk of its budget gathering statistics and making monthly reports. The most recent is from October 2018. It is 18 pages long and full of statistics. Like this picture from October 2018

How does that differ from the same data six months earlier?

It's like those find ten differences puzzles in the children's pages of the newspaper.
Answer: They've opened a new Emergency Accommodation Centre [capacity 30] in Cavan. AND they have conjured a 27th county, as yet unnamed, between Limerick and Longford. What's the point of having an Effective in the RIA compiling statistics which never change? I'm too depressed to continue . . .

Hickey's desp'iled

". . . a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children" 

Wendell Berry

The quote emphasises the fact that we don't own The Ringstone, the neolithic artwork that we discovered on our property 12 years ago. We are holding it in trust for future generations - perhaps in the hope that they will be better equipped to make sense of it. Grassing ourselves up to the Archaeology Service of Ireland and getting the site mapped comes with some constraint: now The Man [Chris Corlett] knows about it, we can't ship it off to California or build it into the wall of a shiny new bungalow. I think it may indeed impact on planning permissions for the fields abutting the site. Neolithic? that's obviously part of our Heritage. The disintegrating 16ft touring caravan which we lived in while our Farm was getting renovated? Not so much. With 'Native' trees the cut-off is 500 years ago. Weirdly Antiques Roadshow now frequently covers toys and knick-knacks which were just everyday stuff when I was growing up and now command surprisingly high prices. I have to report a sorry tale of careless destruction, so that the ESB, a semi-state body, can tick a box [✓] about diminishing its corporate carbon footprint.

Access to Hickey's: used to be 2.5m wide and you had to duck past an occluding sceach, now you can drive a 20 tonne dump-truck straight in off Shannon's Lane. In the sun in the distance lower-right you can see the white deer-guards protecting the token un-Sitka trees in the plantation
There has been a recent rash of forestation up our valley. Not only upstairs where the bushy, rocky fields meet the commonage but right down to the fields beside which the R Aughnabrisky runs. At least our 0.4 hectare woodlot is a) native only [except - ooops my bad - for the lovely few dozen of larch Larix europea] b) a screen against the hideous steel sheds installed by my neighbour below. Several of of neighbours have recently sold up or leased their fields to a monoculture of Sitka spruce Picea sitchensis.  In December, I was moaning about the damage that might follow from Forestry Operations further up our lane. Well that damage is now manifest, and it was not directly to do with heedless messing with the drainage. The ESB's 15 hectare tract given over to Sitka runs in a narrow strip from the valley floor right up to the edge of the mountain and a much earlier plantation, which you can see in the pics above and we are expecting to be clear-felled any year now. At the top, the new planting crosses from one side to the other of Shannon's Lane that runs from the county road, past our place and up-up-and-away to the mountain. At the crossing, the mighty tracked digger drove straight through the little drive-way down to the steading we always knew as Hickey's . . . because the Hickey's lived there for a couple of centuries.

Hickey's was a sort of micro-clachan, although presumably all the sheds and dwellings were occupied by the one family and their stock. I'm sorry that I never made a photographic record of this one of the magical places where Dau.I and Dau.II played when they grew up on our farmlet. The Eastern gable of the main house [cottage, really) started up vertically from a massive erratic granite boulder [see above left]: the walls were about shoulder height high but no trace of a roof remained because the last of the Hickey's vacated two generations ago and the weather can be quite whippy-of-slates 300m above sea-level.

Every so often I would go up with some shears and trim back the brambles ‎Rubus fructicosus and hawthorn / sceach Crataegus monogyna twigs so that, by ducking and weaving a bit, folks could walk down and check out the clatter of small ruined buildings and the field walls that marked out the property. Someone must have instructed the digger-driver to leave standing any buildings; but now the context of those buildings has been largely obliterated. Which is a shame and a loss, because it's easy to smack something down but impossible to put it back like it was before - thaaaat's entropy. The fact that such heritage sites are protected must be a huge pain in the tits to contractors who are on piece-work [Picea geddit] to clear the site and plant it asap with 2500 30cm-high Sitka saplings to the hectare. Little wonder that they are careless in their clearing

But really did the digger-man have to clear 3 substantial boulders [two clearly visible above] from the old laneway and drop them from a great height right in the kitchen of the Hickey's family home, where they will sit like so many turds for the rest of time?