St Fortunatus Sunday

A few links to the outside world for the last days of lockdown.

• Loose ends
• SS Richard Montgomery, prev: packed with WWII munitions, due to have a haircut to remove protruding masts.
• A Franciscan, Dominican and Jesuit Walk into a bar
• André Leon Talley was brought up by his granny. An autodidact brought up in North Carolina by a cleaner and a sharecropper, ALT read a copy of Vogue in the Durham Public Library and cried "This is Me" and, in due course, it was. The link is to an interview on RTE about ALT's new confessional The Chiffon Trenches.
• John Oliver on The [US] Police: tired of John? skip to 31:30 for a less white take.
• Meticulous attention to detail: a 3 second gag from Airplane! is deconstructed via MeFi
• Keep it simple. A year ago I was writing about Lámh, a sign language for those with a limited vocabulary. Here it is in action for Ed Sheerin's Perfect.
• Silvia Angel - more Lámh: colours and animals
• Language: here's a theory that languages with more Ss and Shhs, like English and unlike Japanese, carry more spittle and more virus to neighbours
• Reasons I Drink by Alanis Morissette

Wider propagation of a quiz created for Greek Mythology Expert Gdau.I  More background on this grizzly theme on The Blob 

Imperial Math

I just dug out a copy of Pendlebury's New School Arithmetic [with answers!] 1924. It was first published in 1904 and reprinted 22 times over the next 2 decades. Must have been a desirable commodity. Looks like the planner at the publishers was not really on the ball. It must be cheaper to set up once, or a few times, and then print enough copies to satisfy demand. Then again, 20 years is a generation of new pupils coming through schools and looking to master compound interest, book-keeping, measurements, foreign exchange and graphs. The publisher certainly wouldn't want to plunge the whole warehouse space on this one book. If another book came out in competition with Pendlebury then the publisher would look a bit silly with stacks and stacks of unsellable stock.

Yes, yes, all very interesting about the economics of early 20thC publishing, but worrabout the 'Rithmetic?  You'd think that arithmetic would be the same as it ever was, since the Egyptians used a 3-4-5 triangle to to make their pyramids square but the past is a different country in ways that transcend the fact that pocket calculators only came on the scene in about 1975. Consider the gratituous difficulty of adding in units which are related by different multipliers. In sensible = decimal = "metric" addition "carries" numbers when they exceed ten. In summing weights, as in the top pictured  example:

• 16 oz = 1 lb [ounces ~ 30 g; pound ~ 450 g)
• 14 lb = 1 st [stone]
• 2 st = 1 qr [quarter]
• 4 qr = 1 cwt [hundredweight which thus weighs 112 lb)
• 20 cwt = 1 [long] ton [which thus weighs 2240 lb or as close a dammit to 1 tonne = 1,000 kg] 

Everything is chunked differently! When we bought potatoes in Moore Street market in the 1970s, it was typically as a quarter stone = 3.5 lb = 1.5 kg. Now nobody buys loose potatoes, let alone in such bonkers quantities. I've been here before where you can get help to sort out the second illustrative sum, which involves lengths. Exec.Summ: 12 in ; 3 ft; 22 yd; 10 ch; 8 fur; mile; 1760 yd = 1 mile. And don't get me started on the parallel wonkiverse of Troy weights.

That's not the only difference in a 100 year old arithmetic book. The interests and obsessions are quite different too. In the Problems at the end of the book, Pendlebury tries to relate the theory to practice in real life.

• 83. A besieged garrison have sufficient provisions to last them for 23 weeks at the rate of 18 oz per man per diem; but receiving a reinforcement of 40% on their original number, this allowance is reduced to 15 oz per diem. How many days will they be able to hold out?
• 99. A ship 600 miles from shore springs a leak which admits 6 tons of water in 20 minutes. 60 tons of water would suffice to sink her but pumps can throw out 70 tons in 4 hours. Find her average rate of sailing that she may reach shore just as she begins to sink
• 157. The proprietor of a boarding school having already 30 pupils, finds that an addition of 5 increases his gross yearly expenditure by £300, but diminishes the average cost per head by £1. What did his annual expense originally amount to?
• 194. A rectangular fold is to be made of hurdles 6 ft long, to contain at least 1,000 sheep allowing 8sq.ft per sheep. Find the number of hurdles  needed for the cases where one side of the fold consists of 10, 11, . . . 20 hurdles. Draw a graph shewing the relation between the total number of hurdles and the number on one side. Hence find the smallest number that will suffice.

Lots more where they came from.

hahahahaha incommmming

My late lamented compañero Pepe Malpica was rightly proud that his last publication was accepted in the first issue of PLOS One. Pepe was good copy and great fun because he'd often have a different way of viewing the world. PLOS One was, and is, exciting because of its business model: "papers are not to be excluded on the basis of lack of perceived importance or adherence to a scientific field". Submissions are indeed peer-reviewed but only to check the methods section; context, relevance and scientific significance are excluded from the reviewers brief. Good thing too, because a couple of peers bring their own baggage and [limited, because not infinite] experience to the table and you would not want them (or me, or you) to be the sole arbiters of what gets out into the public domain. You have to allow mavericks like Pepe to break out of the box and frame scientific questions differently. Otherwise it's just a mighty - and mighty expensive - echo-chamber.

In that sense, PLOS One can be a little like the IgNobel Awards whose watch-word is "first they make you laugh, then they make you think". Of course, for most people, most papers, most of the time are just zzzzzzzzzzzzz. And that's one of the most wonderful aspects of the electronic world we live in: nobody needs to take the whole journal to read the one paper a month that is of interest. That saves a lot of dusty paper.  "zzzzzzzzzzz" is on message because now we're looking at Hahahahaha, Duuuuude, Yeeessss!: A two-parameter characterization of stretchable words and the dynamics of mistypings and misspellings a recent paper in PLOS One. Because PLOS is the Public Library of Science y'all can read the whole thing without having to mortgage your firstborn for the subscription price. If you can read the whole thing without the Furrowed Brow of Bafflement then you're a brighter star than me. But the paper is useful because it focuses [my] attention on repeated elements.

1. Romanian soccer commentator Ille Dobre has the longest recorded single breath call of goooaaalll! When the pubs re-open be sure to impress your pals with that fact with or without a hat-tip to The Blob. And for the love of god without an attempt to emulate this feat - that way apoplexy beckons.If you need help being a bloke-in-a-pub, then Moss has you covered with Bluffball.
2. One of the advantages of having a thick-as-pig-dribble phone like my so so retro  Nokia 3310  is that each letter takes ~2 keystrokes on average, so it damps the temptation to writing incommmming rather than merely incommming. The other huge benefit is that its sad-sack text-only processor acts as a really effective emoticon filter - text me your 👱😜👿🙈 nonsense and it comes in as □□□□. Often this is the sole content of the incommming txt. But emojis, as well as being fashion accessories, are phatic comms [metaphorical hugs and mutual de-lousing] rather than data-comms [actual information].
3. Back in the day when it was either quill pens or typewriters [remember them?], you had a choice of upper case CAPITALS or lower case, all fixed width fonts so i occupied the same space as w. You will have noticed that The Blob is quite pedantic about putting species names Orycteropus afer in italics. Because that is how it is done. But in typewriter days no italics so, by convention, underlining was used to represent italics. I have seen folks trying to use another form of emphasis by backspacing and retyping the relevant word a tuthree times to make it bold. We haven't got there yet but there's great scope for incorporating colour into manuscripts to add meta-meaning to the text. 
• Kelly green "#4CBB17" will do for Irish references
• Orange "#FFA500" for marmalade excursions or fried fish
• Dull red "#990000" for fury
• Cambridge "#3d85c6" vs Oxford"#002147" if you're British
• There's a war on about what best represents the Democrats this "#3333FF" or that " #00A6EF" 
• and Republicans are divided been electric #DE0100 or plain #E9141D red
• But then again maybe this train has left the station with Emojis
4. Apart from being longer and consuming more electrons on the server, is there any downside to having hahaha or hahahaha? Nope! But there is a definite downside to having CAGCAGCAGCAG rather than CAGCAGCAG in your genome. This CAG-repeat is a stutter in one of our standard genes, called huntingtin or HTT.  CAG codes for the amino acid Glutamine and you and I probably have a different length of this repeated motif in that gene: the normal range being from 6 to 35 copies. Some families have accumulated a much longer CAG_n tract. The longer the repeated unit, the earlier and the more severe will be the onset of Huntington's Disease. HD is what killed Woody Guthrie. I can see I'll have to write longer and deeper about these trinucleotide repeat disorders of which HD is but one.

Actually (revenons nous a nos moooooutons), you might skip all the math and jargon in that PLOS One paper the conclusions are discursive and interesting.

Mass destruction denial

Loose Ends Department. I was lamenting the fact that, in a very short space of time last month, a couple of song-thrushes Smólach ceoil Turdus philomela whacked into our windows stunning themselves to death. Thrushes are doing quite well hereabouts, increasing rather than diminishing in numbers. Nevertheless, we'd rather make it harder form song-birds to kill themselves, even if they thereby provide food for ants.  But inertia kicked in and nothing was done to stop the carnage . . . until on a single day in the first week of June 3 more thrushes, two juveniles, did for themselves against the glass. Although I had cogitated about dangling an old CD or two in front of the window to trigger a this-ain't-right reflex in approaching birds.

In response to that post, my correspondent P in Boston shared her trick of covering the killer-windows with post-its. Not having a lot of them about her desk, the Beloved broken open a package of primary coloured cartridge paper and brightened up the gloomy facade of our home. A couple of days later, she was in funds, in town and in aviacare and bought a packet of offensively bright post-its. It is not true that you can't see out of the window; you just have to weave and jink a bit to see what's going on outside

Can Do

When duty whispers low, "thou must", the ou'fella replies "Can Do". The academic year is winding down with meetings of various kinds: deciding on grades, planning for an uncertain future and doing a certain amount of post-mortem on what went wrong (and right!) in the surprise-storm of Coronarama & Lockdown. Last week I was essentially missing in action on one of these Zooms because round about 1030 the neighbourhood wakes up and starts to stream video, upload photos and play violent on-line games. That's just about when meetings at Th EInstititute are getting going. Today I am going into The [real]Institute because this morning's meeting is accept-no-substitute for poor old Bob. For yesterday's zooming, not so much; accordingly I stopped at home hoping that the connexion would be alright-on-the-night. Well it wasn't, about 20 minutes before the off, the interweb turned to glue. I tried switching-it-off-and-on-again for the browser, the laptop and the modem but we were still flat-lining; and I was about to call it quits and have a restorative cuppa. THEN a voice muttered in my deep conscientious service mind "Trust in the plastic walls" was the Delphic message.

Which I interpreted as switch everything off, bag it and schlep us all up the steps to the polytunnel in the garden behind the house. Well, it worked a treat! I am probably not winning much height but it must be easier for the rays the rays of our wireless "broad"band to get through 200 μm of polythene than through 500mm of granite rubble or the double glazing.

I followed noise&bandwidth protocol and switched off my webcam. Which is tactful because it would be clear to my colleagues that, by a country mile, I have the biggest home office at nearly 150sq.m. In contrast, my work office is just a tad over 15sq.m and I share it with three other desks occupied by 5 other people. One of the hot-deskees, a part-time physicist who teaches only on Fridays, stopped bothering to visit after three weeks and now goes straight from the car-park to the lab and then home-again. This picture also shows that I have a whole drawer of different coloured bandito-bandannas . . . well at least two. As well as being capacious, my office is really well equipped: trowels, forks, knives; bamboos and flower pots; herring-barrels and buckets; sieved and unsieved compost; beans, peas, bees.

Better to light a candle than rail against the darkness 

[not original to Eleanor Roosevelt]

Sprouty

There is no point  in doing science unless you write it up and put it out there . . . even if the results are negative . . . especially if the results are unexpected. A week ago, I described my cup-o-soup set up for sprouting legumes. I can report that there was no difference in sproutability between the two packets of speckled lentils; one beyond and the other within, its sell-by. If anything, the older packet was greener, quicker than the less desiccated sample. There are too many variables to come down with any certainty but might it be that the old pulses sense that this is their last gasp and reprogram to get leaves out and up asap. You can see the 3-day progress picture above.

A week after Start of Sprout, I finished the lentil experiment by shaking the sprouts into a small sieve and rinsing them through with cold tap-water. Two modest heaps: speckled lentils L - lentilles vertes R. It is difficult to tell them apart at this stage and I'm taking them to be kitchen-equivalent. You don't want to exaggerate the nutritional benefits of sprouts vs beans: they are a little sweeter and more digestible because sprouting mobilises the starch, breaking it down into its component sugars so that they can be converted to energy for the exhausting business of growing up. It also reduces the concentration of phytic acid which has a habit of preventing the absorption of minerals, vitamins and micro-nutrients.

But I like the idea that you're allowing [natural] enzymes to do the heavy lifting of preparing the dried out, gravel-hard seeds for consumption by His Blobbiness. Every day soaking in moisture is 10 minutes less fuel for cooking. But let's not knock cooking! There is an argument that fire-for-broiling was a key step in human development. Boiling or baking: either could convert doubtful roots, seeds and dead animals into a tasty meal. Yes, it was hugely energy intensive but it was super-quick and it gave proto-people leisure to tell stories, plan hunts, educate the kids. Our nearest rellies spend pretty much the whole day chewing and burping their way though handfuls of leaves and fruit and haven't got to the bang-two-rocks-together stage even now. That was then, when there were only 4 million people looking for sticks to burn in the whole of Africa; now there are 4 million people scavenging for fuel within a day's walk of Nairobi. Bring on the sprouts, lads!

Permission to riot, Sir?

This is how revolutions start. There is powerful symbolism when statues to The Great Men of one regime are brought literally down in the dust. If you wabnt some background music to this post your could do worse than Gordon Bok and Co harmonizing on How can I keep from singing? The album is my current wash-the-dishes-and-be-happier singalong.

Appropriate Shagsper lines from JC. Brutus advocating to seize the day: "There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on the fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat; And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures." It's appropriate because the metaphor is nautical and yesterday's news today is that the toppled statue commemorates Edward Colston a Bristol Merchant Venturer (1636-1721). Colston built a fortune on the slave trade and later did philanthropic works with his black lives don't matter much BLDMM money. Down through the years The Man likes a bloke who endows schools, hospitals and almshouses, so Colston's name is interwoven in the fabric of corporate Bristol.

Bristol also has one of the longest established black communities in England. This was largely under the radar of white middle class Bristol until the St Paul's Riots of April 1980 when the black youth pushed back instead of being pushed around. Shocked they were, the middle class press at the time - it's not helping anybody if these chaps damage property; if they have grievance there are proper channels. 1980 was the year of the 1st pIRA hunger strike in The Maze. You may make what parallels you want.

Lots of people, not just in USA, are out and about affirming that Black Lives Matter BLM. Dau.I was bearing witness outside the US Embassy in Dublin yesterday afternoon. Given that black lives are disproportionately snuffed by Covid-19, there is perhaps no better time than to take to the streets. Slavery is no longer acceptable (except in some saudi sandy places) in part because some shouty and assertive people made their abolitionist case in public again and again. It took more than 100 years from Colston's death to get the Abolition of Slavery Act 1833 through parliament but eventually the tide of political and public opinion came to a new normal that said no person could own another. The current, slightly tired from constant repetition, protests and marching acknowledges that abolishing slavery does not immediately abolish racism, ghettoisation, tokenism and casual brutality.

Whatevs. On Sunday afternoon  a BLM protest used a bit of leverage to topple Edward Colston from his plinth. Not content with that, they carried the old rogue to the nearest harbour wall and dumped hissonour into the drink >!Ploosh!< Much joyous ironic and witty commentary on twitter and elsewhere. “He tripped and fell. We all saw it.” "Edward Colston is a dangerous agitator who was approaching the crowd aggressively with rope". Priti Patel, the British Minister of The Interior was shocked at the disorderly and lawless behavior. And she is not alone, and is it my imagination that the tsk!ers seem so full of misery and truculence compared to the carnival delight of the ploosh!ers? That so many people condemn the Colston Affair just goes to show that property rights vs personal rights settled down to the same old same old after they put out the fires in St Paul's 40 years ago. Then again, you might try to count the black faces in the toppling crowd - you'll only need one hand. If everyone goes home thinking that was a good afternoon's work then everyone should think again. You haven't begun to work through the changes necessary in yourself, in the tax system, in education, in the economy . . . to achieve a fair and equable society.  In Ireland, we've freed the gays; got votes and personal uterine control for women; but we still allow Katie Taylor to assault another woman in public for money. And we still keep refugees in shamefully disempowering and wasteful Direct Provision for years.