Random Book

Dau.I has been reshelving books for nearly six months so is nearing the end of her probationary period as a librarian for Dublin Corporation. The Beloved, her mother, was in Dublin a couple of weeks ago and went on an offspring work-place visit. Someone in there has a really nifty idea to boost readership. It is a really good idea, especially in these troubled time, to read outside your comfort zone. A few years ago I used to search through the random accession in a library basement - that protocol often turned up gems. Cabra Library Staff take sad books (books which sit on the shelves un-checked-out for longer than average) wrap them in coloured tissue and write an enigmatic tag on the outside. I was presented with a wrapped paperback saying

Adventures in China

The glory of Flight

The story of a life

Inside was Staring at the Sun by Julian Barnes [U2's take on that phrase -- Mika's -- The Offsprings' -- TV on the Radio's] . Barnes was a writer's writer back in the 1980s when I read fiction, his 3rd novel Flaubert's Parrot was a mighty success in Britain and also in France. I don't remember actually reading it but I do recall the hubbub among the chattering classes. Later he published A History of the World in 10½ Chapters to similar acclaim. Staring at the Sun came in between and was published in 1986. It was most disconcerting to read it in 2019 because it is the life-story of a near centenarian born in 1920 - like my mother in other words. The narrative tracks her adventures with a pilot [who stares at the sun] in WWII; her marriage to a different man and their childless marriage; her wholly unexpected post-menopausal pregnancy; her leaving home and raising the son as a single parent. It is peculiar but recognisably within the lived experience of that generation. But the story abruptly leaves the rails in a sort of Orwellian future fiction that is wrong because, in contrast to readers when the book came out in 1986, we know what happened in nineties and noughties and it's not like Barnes imagined it.

I'm happy to confess that it read a lot easier than most of the science books I struggle through: maybe Barnes deserves his tribs as one of the best writers of his generation. One interesting idea is that The Future creates an omniscient computer which people can interrogate about anything and everything. But much of this information is off-limits to ordinary people. There is a hint that the computer is actually a giant call-centre serviced by quite ordinary young women who answer what they can and bring down the shutters on questions that are beyond them. It's like Google / Wikipedia in the sense that you can find out a lot about what doesn't matter:

• who won the FA Cup Final in 1953; 
• the atomic number of Au gold; 
• the area of a standard tennis-court; 
• the body count at Borodino; 
• the number of stripes on the gopher Ictidomys tridecemlineatus.

But on the Big Questions, like

• What is Life? 
• Is there a god? 
• Who will win the FA Cup Final in 2020? 

the computer just offers the un-evidenced opinions of a couple of twenty-somethings.  That's okay: science doesn't do any better on those questions. But a well-written novel is given licence to explore the existential issues and may given guidance or even advice towards A Life Well Lived. Well I'm done with the Barnes Book now and returned it to the library. As we have a National Library Service, you can get it delivered to your local library - if you live in Ireland.

Scheißeberg

My Dad was a naval officer. Sailors have a long strong tradition in being able to make and mend. An essential part of any sailor's kit is his housewife [pronounced hussif  in the British navy] in the same contracted way that forecastle is fo'c'sle] - a roll of cloth containing needles, thread and a couple of spare buttons; a bit of wool for darning the socks etc. The young gentlemen from Dartmouth Naval Training College were expected to be able to clean, iron and repair their own clothes, make their own bed [to exacting standards], clean their living quarters and wash dishes. On other respects they were extremely privileged but they had to deal with their own shite.

Rutger Bregman went viral because he went to the World Economic Forum in Davos and spoke the truth to power - by suggesting that the rich nobs who hang out together in Davos could pay some [more] taxes. But he also identified the irony that a meeting billed as addressing climate change  had been a magnet for 1500 private jets. Being 1%-rich allows you to insulate yourself from having to rub shoulders with poor smelly untermensch who might ask you for the price of a cup of coffee. It would take a particularly persistent and needy pan-handler to approach you in your Learjet at 30,000ft.

What do you do if you are super-rich when you're not in the board room or flying to visit in someone else's board room? I mean after the gold-plated taps, and the yacht and the Bollinger bubbly [R $60/btl]. There's a certain class of rich person who has a bucket-list which is grander and more exclusive my bucket-list. My bucket-list owes much to Louis Agassiz - just let me find one four-leafed clover in the back-garden. There are a helluva lot of people who are among the 1% richest (about 70 million) but far fewer people (N=~4,000) have stood on the top of Everest. It only costs about as much as a car for the privilege and it's rumored that the poor bloody infantry sherpas will more or less carry you up as you've paid for the privilege. There's a recent MeFi thread asking what happens to the all shit that these experiential tourists produce: say, 30kg over the 2 months that they spend in Nepal or Tibet between the bracketing flights in the Learjet. Some bright spark has suggested that this year's 14 tonnes (!!) should be composted for biogas. Multiple sardonic comments from the MeFi community.

When I spend the night in Tramore to see The Beloved and hang out one evening a week with Pat the Salt her aged progenitor, we often take the dog for a walk through the darkened streets of the town . . . with a plastic bag for any dog-turds that might result from the exercise. Baggies are a very welcome change in the dog-owning community there: my boots are much cleaner that they used to be after an urban perambulation. Even rich dog owners do this - I doubt there are any 1%ers living in Tramore who would employ a dog-walker to exercise the dog and clear up the mess. In that sense dog-owners are like naval officers - although I suspect that only a minority could darn a sock.

In 2004 I walked the Camino Frances P2P - from the Portuguese border to the Pyrenees via Santiago de Compostella. It was quite democratic: all the pilgrims - both secular and religious - carried their own kit in a bag because that was part of the pilgrimage process. There were people on The Way who sent their luggage on ahead from bed to bed; but <judgemental> they weren't pilgrims, they were tourists </judgemental>. It's not about the money: it really didn't cost much for this service. It's just that IF you thus unload your physical luggage THEN it is doubtful if you are dealing with your psychological baggage in a productive way.

Michel de Montaigne [prev] had something to say about this: Il faut voyager pour frotter et limer sa cervelle contre celle d'autrui.  Bob-transl = Travel is necessary to scrub and abrade your mind against [the certainties] of others.  A Learjet is just a gas-guzzling echo-chamber.

There, The Blob has spoken.

UC dumps Elsevier

Word on the Vox street is that U.California has just broken off negotiations with Elsevier to save themselves a) being gouged b) $10,000,000.  UC is BIG: employing 180K staff and educating 240K students who all need access to the latest research if they are to stay in the University Rankings. Elsevier is the, originally Dutch now SolarSystem, academic publisher which everyone loves to hate. Commentary from MeFi. Thoughtful and measured bloborant from last October. Earlier musings on the process of academic publishing - reprints - getting paid to publish - nostalgia for current contents.

If you're not afraid of weeping check out this documentary on Aaron Swartz [who he?] the tragic hero of Free The Literature. If We-the-Academics could park the competition and engage in some collective bargaining then it should be possible to put these barky and demanding publishers back in their kennels [that's a riff on the tail wagging the dog metaphor]

Part of the problem is the drive for accountability, The Man can't just let academics off to beaver away at what they think is interesting. There has to be some sort of deliverable at the end of it. Ideally a well-honed mind which can inculcate thinking skills in younger men and women. It didn't used to matter what the Prof studied, so long as it was not obvious to all thinking people:

• the illustrations and marginalia of the Book of Kells
• sex and longevity in the naked mole rat Spalax Ehrenbergi
• the light spectra from distant Vega
• the backstory in the songs of Suzanne Vega
• the causes of disease
• the cause of happiness <not>

it's the process: assembling data; appropriate analysis; useful summary; dissemination of results. That process inspired as it was transmitted to students sitting at the feet of the Master (it used to be almost exclusively blokes). If something tangible came from the process - a new vaccine; a new communication medium; a new variety of rice - that was a bonus.

In my lifetime it's come down using money as the metric. My PhD generated a bunch data and analysed it all and cost . . . maybe $2,000 in consumables - mostly shoe-string travel. About 90% of that was covered by me and The Gaffer. I skilled up through the project:

• taught myself how to program a mainframe computer
• mastered the tools of multivariate statistics
• read a lot of books and papers
• dug deep in the history of colonial New England
• developed a critical appreciation of meat-loaf and American diners

That sort of project would have little credibility now because the institution expects their cut of the grant money - to keep the lights on, the toilets cleaned and the lawns mowed. I'm sure that's one of the reasons why molecular biology has experienced a relentless rise and rise. It's so expensive to run a modern molecular laboratory so you need grant money - BIG grant money - to make any sort of progress. We got through €1million+ investigating the immune response of chickens Gallus gallus to Campylobacter jejuni. Those expensive baby-steps still left us a long way from preventing Campylobacter-induced food-poisoning from dodgy chicken goujons. But UCD was delighted because they got 20% 'overheads'. When a new lectureship was floated in the Genetics Department in 1993, the key selection criterion was not who is the smartest, the best teacher, or the most interesting public intellectual but "who will bring in the biggest tranche of grant money?"  Pathetic really.

A plate of beige

I for several years in the 90s, I was invited to teach a short course in molecular evolution in Oslo. It was good fun and I think we all learned a lot. I learned that Norwegians have lunch really early in the working day which meant having to tweak the schedule for the course. I also got to appreciate the very understated, laconic sense of Norwegian humour. Lunch and funny collide in an explanation of matpakke by Ronald Sagatun and Mads Nilsson. The idea is that the lunch-time sandwich is always made at home (to save money) in a really predictable and unadventurous way (to prevent surprises). "It should be a disappointment when you open it. You're not supposed to look forward to your lunch." Here are the boys on Kvikk Lunsj [bloboprev] it is not a Kit-Kat!

Way-hay that's my sort of lunch! I make a sandwich every morning with two slices of (home-made) bread and a smear of butter separated by some cheese. If the fridge happens to have grated carrot or a leaf of lettuce or some pickle, I might put that on top of the cheese. The other day I replaced >!frisson!< the cheese with a fragment of cooked salmon. Years ago in the 00s, I worked one day a week in St Vincent's Hospital and my postgraduate student and his undergraduate student insisted that I come down and eat lunch in the canteen "like a christian". Fortunately, the canteen always had a student special on offer: lamb curry and rice; pork and red pepper and rice; chicken supreme and rice. The youngsters used to tease me: "Bob and his bowl of beige" was how they characterised their dining companion. It was probably good for me to have that socialisation even if only one day a week. They met me half way by ensuring the lunch was at 1300 ± 5 minutes, a preference inherited wholemeal from my naval father.

I've had occasion to laugh at my old boss [when he was the age I am now] who used to let out an involuntary whimper of pleasure if his wife put a chocolate biscuit in this lunchbox. I would never countenance anyone making lunch for me: they'd be sure to put too much, or too fancy, cheese and I'd fall into a drooling sleep shortly thereafter when I should be working. The Boy, aged 11, was assumed to be capable of making his own lunch . . . which turned out to a little adrift of the reality. But it's got to be said that, although his empty lunch-box was a source of concern to his teachers, it was a long way from starvation he was r'ared.

My late lamented pal Barry worked for several years as a painter and decorator in California. When he was on the job, someone on the crew would set off for the nearest convenience store at lunchtime and offer to bring back a submarine sandwich à la Barry. It would cost about $7! Making his own sandwich at home saved him $30 a week or much more than $1,000 each year. The "convenience" of a store bought sandwich was too steep for that working man. Any Norwegian would have canaries at what went into the Sub: heaping spoonfuls of tuna salad, handfuls of iceberg lettuce; a show of tomato slices; some chopped bell-peppers; extra mayonnaise. No wonder American working men are bending the scales.

Up yer Balkans

Let's waltz over to the other end of Europe and ask with AtlasObscura what-in-heck they speak in The Balkans. Like the whole Eskimos have fifty words for snow story, the answer to that question depends on definition. The word Balkan derives from the Balkan Mountains. which are located more on less where the word BULGARIA appears on the map above and [so?] the Balkan peninsula is defined as all the land South of where Ακρωτήριον Μαλέας / Cape Malea looks across at Κύθηρα / Kythera . . .  until it's not. Lots of Greeks would sweep their capes about them and leave the Balkans with a disdainful nothing to do with us, we're Greeks. Well I'm very sorry but if you participated in the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 then you are part of the problem ... solution ... Balkans. In 1971, I knew a helluva a lot about the Balkan Wars because I was doing History at school in England and we pored over The Origins of the First World War in fine detail.

I was looking for a more recent map of the region, but couldn't find one that was free of political tinder. Is Kosovo a country? What do we call the part of Jugoslavia that was Socialist Republic of Macedonia? A recent treaty with the Greek government has agreed on Republic of North Macedonia Република Северна Македонија. Although there was a huge protest in Athens when the terms of the Treaty of Prespa [June 2018] were actually implemented in February 2019. My ear to the ground is my [Macedonian] Greek roomie at The Institute who explains patiently why those people north of the current Greek border have no rights to the heritage, symbols, names and history of Alexander the Great Greek. I button my lip. But Prime Ministers Zaev and Tsipras [L with flags] look young and tie-less so I have hopes that the agreement will stick . . . until the next national elections.

If Balkan is defined as participating in the Wars before The Great War, then the Balkan languages include Greek, Albanian and Romanian [all Indo-European R source]. The last, weird-and-wonderfully, is a romance language ultimately based on Latin although the Romans only occupied Dacia across the River Danube for only 200 years 2 millennia ago. It's a long way to Italy, France and Spain. Albanian is an Indo-European tongue but on a distant branch not really any more like Slavic tongues than Irish or Greek or indeed Romanian. There are two dialects Gheg in the North and Tosk in the South. Tosk is, as in happens, a co-official across the borrrder on North Macedonia because several isolated Toskan communities were the wrong side a dotted line drawn by [k]nobs a long way away at another peace conference. And that's the problem in the Balkans - as it is in Belfast - if you see The Other as a SWOT threat rather than a SWOT opportunity. Me, I'm delighted that you can buy pierogi, garbanzos, pizza, camembert and cilantro is Irish shops and anticipate that we'll soon be borrowing words from Yoruba and Polish. And tbh I don't care a jot-or-tittle what your position is on transubstantiation.

Jugoslavia was set up after WWI as the Kingdom of the South [југ-; jug-] Slavs as a grab-bag of melting pot left over from the Ottoman Empire. Say what you like about Ottomans they were tolerant of People of the Book [Jews and Christians, as well as Muslims] in a way that many modern countries are unable to manage. There were several instances in the Balkan Wars where local Jewish communities fled their homes with retreating Ottoman troops because they feared a pogrom from the victors. Where is the largest and longest established Islamic community in Europe? Bosnia where +50% of the people are Sunni Muslims.

That's not so much an introduction as a random ramble through the distant reaches of The Blob. Let's revenons a nos Slavs and Dan Nosowitz' Atlas Obscura ramble through SerboCroat. Part of the problem is that Serbs, because they tend to be Orthodox have adopted a цириллиц алпхабет [cyrillic alphabet] while Croats are Catholics and look to the West for their latinica orthography. The fresh Balkanisation of the region, polarised by the wars that followed the demise of Jugoslavia, has resulted is a lot of unhelpful further-polarising selective deafness. That chap in the sentry-box the other side of the border? I canna gripe a worrrd t'bugger says. Here's how hard it is: the universal declaration of human rights is very worthy and inclusive:

• Croatian: Opća deklaracija o pravima čovjeka
• Bosnian: Opća deklaracija o pravima čovjeka
• Serbian: Opšta deklaracija o pravima čoveka [Опћа декларација о правима човека]

Can't see the diff, me. But, because of 'national' vanity and exceptionalism, you now get absurdities like Croat perps demanding a translator when up before the Serbian courts [and doubtless vice versa - I'm not going to be accused of demonising Croats]. It's like passportless folk from Oklahoma and Iowa insisting that the speak American rather than English. We've seen how you betray your origins by your usage of a very few words. Heck my own family segregates into Papishes and Planters. The unfortunate sectarians in The North cannot reliably identify the religion of their neighbours by their language or diction - they have twitch the net curtains to closely observe the school uniforms leaving the garden-gate next-door.

Seachtain na focail

Hi Folks, it's Irish Week! Seachtain na Gaeilge. Baby steps for those who weren't schooled in The Republic or who hated being hit for not knowing the language: today a word search:

BAINNE - BOB - CÁIS - CAISLEÁN - CAMÁN - FÁINNE - IASC - LUCH - MÚINTEOIR - PRÁTAÍ - ROTHAR - SEACHTAIN - SEACLÁID - SIONNACH - SLIOTAR - TAE - TEACH - ÉIRE
Well done, me. I knew the meaning of the green words - and he's never had a lesson in his life!

Woot! He know nothing

I am trying to persuade my final year research project students at The Institute that they are on the home stretch and that they should be wrapping up their analysis and thinking about what colour ribbon they want to tie it up with. As most years, I have a sample of the whole year-cohort: some down to earth, some from Zorg; some needy, some fiercely independent; some focussed, some flakey; all pushing the frontiers of science and learning how to think.  On Tuesday, I had to brace a couple of them as they wallowed in an existential crisis: reassuring them that they did know something; that they had given the Frontiers a damned good shove. It is sad really that these young adults aren't more robust. But, on my watch, they get told that they Can Do it; that they are unique in their talents; that there are a rake of things where they are smarter than, say, me. Actually, if research students don't have some sort of crisis about the-meaning-of-it-all, then they probably aren't close enough to the frontier. My old gaffer had a great technique - a retrospective through their lab-books - for demonstrating to her students that they had made a contribution.

My students are still, even after 4-5 months work, absolute beginners so I can usually get an answer to a niggling question quicker than they can. One of my quieter chaps is doing a comparative immunology project, looking at the variation of a handful of inflammatory modulators called acute-phase proteins. I was intrigued by the idea that we humans have only a single C-reactive protein CRP but a handful of serum amyloid-A SAA proteins. Different mammalian species have a different inventory of SAAs [SAA3 is alive and well in mice but that gene on its way out in us] but only one CRP. Is 'singleton CRP' true for all mammals? I asked, could you check in representative species for all / most of the mammalian orders?

Before he started his project he had really no formal idea that mammals can be classified into groups according to their shared attributes. Now he knows that a quarter of all 6,500 species of mammals are rodents and one fifth are bats. Long words like Artiodactyla [cow pig sheep llama camel and whale] and Tubulidentata [aardvark] trip off his tongue now. He showed me a list of mammalian orders and maintained that he couldn't find a CRP in most of them. I looked skeptical and asked if he'd tried homology searching with Blast rather than trawling through the annotation in Uniprot. He's so quiet that I didn't get a clear answer, so I said I'd give it a go myself and get back to him.

homology searching with Blast can be done at the NCBI in Bethesda MD. You send your sequence thither by internet, where a big server-farm compares it to every other sequence in a massive database; sorts the 'hits' in order of similarity and returns the results to your computer. If it's not too busy the answers comes back in a couple of minutes - which would be pretty amazing if we didn't have Google as a benchmark. The NCBI blast server has a really useful option: to limit the output to a particular taxonomy class:

The limiter doesn't have to be a species, it could be 'only frogs' or 'anything that isn't human'. You don't even need to be able to spell because the page does word-completion like Google.

So I'm rushing to get an answer to "do elephants have any CRPs?" while The Quiet Man is covering one of the other mammalian orders. The Latin for elephants and mammoths is Proboscidea but I'm in such a hurry that I accept Proboscia (taxid:216776) and hit <enter>. Two minutes later a <brrrrrp> No Hits Found message comes back which is really unexpected. Maybe The Quiet Man is correct, I think, maybe CRP is not a universal attribute of the mammalian immune response. But a little dig in the Sloughs of Incredulity reveals that Proboscia alata aka Rhizosolenia alata is quite a bit smaller than an elephant. Because it a diatom - a microscopic [about 50x10μm] alga with a silica impregnated cell wall. The fact that it has a little trunk like an elephant is no evidence for sharing a recent ancestor but it does give rise the the microbes name. Elephants do have [a single] CRP <phew>: if you/I do the analysis correctly.  Bit of a <duh> moment for me.