Sun Moon Stars

Talking heads

• Rory Stewart [bloboprev] has locus standi on Afgho
• locus sedens for 827 Kabul to Qatar [R] 
• How a River Runs Through It came to be made
• Geothermal energy Iceland style
• A4 doublings/ halvings to comprehend the CGP Grey Universe 
• Splitting? Froe beetle glut
• Jill Murphy dead at 72. Creator of Mildred Hubble a much more interesting witch than H@**y P⌀**er
• Bloke challenge: furthest distance possible by local bus in 24hrs

Goll dang plum perfick

We've had the whole family visiting for a couple of weeks. It's been most excellent altogether. Only reasonable amounts of he-said-she-said and only reasonable amounts of ice-cream. The parents of Gdaus have been working from home foreign, so the Aunties have been getting their nibling fix with the pandemic having put the kibosh on 2020. The best thing seems to be a bit of a rope swing at the bottom of the yard - this is clocking up more hours than the various available 'devices'.

Neighbour came by with a crate of windfall plums and invited us to scoop as much as we could use . . . 3.5kg which settled at 2.85kg after discarding the livestock and the pits. The standard wisdom is that fruit should be matched with an equal weight of sugar; but Dau.II and I decided to skimp the sugar down to 2.5kg. You can see from the tide-mark [L] that these quantities are close to the carrying capacity of my trusty jam-boiler. But the photo doesn't do justice to the pink and yellow sunset which materialised shortly after the brew came to the boil. And some wonder of chemical transformation made the final product 10x pots of a deeply satisfying plummy purple. 

There is a lot of virtue in jam: once it's made it lasts forever at room temperature. The same cannot be said about ice-creams.  After slaving over a hot stove for a chunk of the afternoon, the sun came out and ice-creams all round were ordered from the deep-freeze. We lolled about on the grass consuming cold saturated animal fat [except for the working parents!]. With silent aplomb, one of our two resident buzzards Buteo buteo swooped over the gate and settled in the lower branches of our tragic ash tree Fraxinus excelsior. It was like an omen and a blessing on the work of preserving the work of god with the work of human hand. A perfick day.

Mapping the territory

 We have all our descendants at home for a tuthree weeks, The Boy, Dau.I, Dau.II, Gdau.I, Gdau.II and a scatter of partners to make it not all about me. Simultaneously we are making a start on the 2021 Mountain Meitheal, whereby we trudge up the hill with our neighbours to alter the landscape a little. If there was no work-of-human-hand [and gob-of-sheep] up there, our dry-heath biome would quick enough revert to scrubby forest. This year we are again thrashing the ferns Pteridium aquilinum, because it is inedible to sheep and shades nutritious grass, forbs and heather from the best of the Summer sun. Turns out that a licence is needed to extirpate this species and that delayed the bracken-thrashing until it was much too late to be effective: the spores having come and gone and photosynthesis having replenished the fern's underground reserves. 

But having started the process we are obliged to follow through with the actual work. On Friday last week, I was up with the lads including three women, doing a day's work with my scythe. Neighbours turned up with a variety of cutting implements small and large. A scythe is by far the best tool for this task if the terrain is half-way rock-free [don't need to be flat]. But ferns are chest-high and opaque and a >!ding!< of the blade on an invisible stone will quickly take the edge off the tool. Bracken stems are also rich in silica which will also insidiously blunt steel. It was a dry light-breezy sunny day, and it was delightful to still get paid while having a tea-break and catching up on the community gossip. Our Ecologist Tom the Plant has been for a few yomps up our hill, at least once with me trailing along. From his desk in Galway Tom marked out 3x 20 acre plots and shaded them in on a satellite map:

Which is fine and dandy in theory but a step or two removed from actual boots on the ground. My task was to transpose theory into a practical delimitation of of the area of obligation w.r.t. bracken cutting.

There are many ways to skin this cat, but my preferred was to use Barry Dalby's 'mazing 1:25,000 map of The Blackstairs [relevant fragment L]. The sections of forestry South and West of the Common are the only obvious waymarks on both maps . . . and the mountain wall between them, of course. But the lines are straight and it is math-trivial to change between the different scales on the two maps: a ruler with mm ticks is key! The most wonderful function in Dalby's cartography is an app with which you can a) zoom in and so increase the scale/detail b) follow a blue dot across the app-map which represents to location of the device c) a cross-hairs in the middle of the app-view reporting the Lat & Long of that position.

My transposition indicated that the 2021 quadrat marched along the 450m contour-line which runs parallel to the mountain wall and about 180m distant from that obvious feature of the landscape. All I had to do was attach flags to the top of a dozen bamboos and traverse that contour installing these markers at regular intervals. Easy sitting at the kitchen table; challenging on the ground having to juggle glasses, phone, paper map. bamboos; foolish to essay this task alone on a Sunday afternoon in August. A few Winters ago, a neighbour's sheep dog fell into a deep hole among the steep granite boulder scree which makes up the SW face of the hill of the face of our hill. His phone fell in after from his frozen hand and he was never able to return to the exact spot to recover either asset. Last year, I fell prostrate on the hill, my sim-free smartphone popped out of my shirt pocket and it took two people 30 minutes to find t'bugger. Me, Sunday, I fell into invisible fern-covered grikes three times. I only grazed my fist once and sustained no breaks or bruises, but each time I reflected that I was bouncier 50 years ago.

Hopkins' Rule

Scientists like to simplify their universe. When I go across the lane to view the sheep I don't need to have a roll-call: Flossie, Mimi, Mittens, OldMa, Batty, Freda, Bambi, EasyPC, Penny, Maude, Bonkers, Xsoni, Nisette, Gismo, Yana, Thethra. No, I can just clock off "64 legs" or "16 sheep" and return to the kitchen for a reviving cup of tea. I have acknowledged a commonality among some of the white objects in the field. I exclude other white things - tinkle-tissue, thistle-down, hanks-of-wool-on-a-bush - because they are NotSheep. Clearly Bob's Rule of Sheep is trivial; but mightier people than I have formulated

• Hooke's Law on the elasticity of springs
• Charles's Law relating the volume and pressure of gases
• Bergmann's Rule: that for a group of related species, the larger members tend to be found nearer the Poles, smaller in the tropics [Climate change extension via Kottke]
• Allen's Rule about the size of appendages [legs, ears, wings] reducing in size as their owners live North; or indeed South. Fennec Vulpes zerda vs Arctic Fox Vulpes lagopus

< Observations in Physics and Chemistry tend to be more accurately reproducible: so Law; while Biology is inherently noisier, with more exceptions: so Rule. The post title is an hilarious riff on this, because I'm here to write about Hopkins' tape-measure!

To set the scene, let's think about Tenure. For scientists going all Ad Astra, apart from a Nobel Prize, the height of ambition might be Tenure at Harvard. Tenure is great in principle: it is a permanent contract so that the very best academics can pursue their researches even if these are edgy, rule-breaking, challenging, interesting or novel. Indeed, the powers-that-be should be hoping for something different or difficult from these academic elites. Obtaining this academic prize is a gruelling, multi-year "tenure-track" process of delivering academic jewels for peer-review . . . as well as schmoozing your colleagues / judges, mentoring younger people and developing inspiring teaching materials. And don't forget to volunteer for the boring admin tasks that someone has to do - timetables, Friday donuts, ethics committee.

There have been two scandalous stories this year about two senior, radical, black, female academics who have struggled through their tenure-track treacle only to be dissed at the final hurdle. Lorgia García Peña was denied tenure at Harvard and Nikole Hannah-Jones was refused entry to The Boy's Club in U. North Carolina. Both those links are to MetaFilter for not only the story but some hot take commentary from the liberal lefties who inhabit that section of the Blogosphere.  The real killer about failing your tenure application is that if you're not good enough for a permanent position at Elite U; then you're not wanted at any level and you are effectively sacked. Prof Hannah-Jones was, adding insult to injury, offered a five-year consolation contract at UNC. Sod off, she said, and took off for a proper job commensurate with her quals at [trad black] Howard U. in Washington DC. 

This kind of nonsense is the antithesis of Old Tenure as originally conceived: it is a bunch of patriarchs pulling up the draw-bridge behind their sorry arses. I have known a number of cases where the hot-shot goes quickly off the boil shortly after obtaining their permanency: metamorphosing in to a curmudgeonly lump of deadwood occupying an office which would better be given over to someone younger, femaler, tanner and feistier. As Michael Caine quipped in Educating Rita, the only way to dislodge a professor who has tenure is if he "buggers the bursar". Which has become no joke as a succession of tenured professors have been #MeToo revealed as shagging or bullying their students in an outrageous leveraging of the power differential.  

Mais revenons nous a notre Hopkins! You might think, therefore, that having obtained your tenure all would be fine and dandy. Nancy Hopkins was a hotshot developmental geneticist working in MIT in the last century. In her 40s, during a sabbatical with in Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard’s [who prev] lab, she had an epiphany! Zebra fish Danio rerio was the way forward for understanding the extraordinary process whereby a single fertilised egg becomes a moving, thinking, metabolising, complexly interacting member of its ecosystem. This change in academic direction required an extra 200 sq.ft of lab space . . . which seemed unaccountably unavailable for her, despite the tenure, and all. She had the impression that all the male PIs in her building had bigger labs than she did. But she took her tape-measure and a note book to generate the data to test her hypothesis.

• Tenured Prof Hopkins 1,500 sq.ft.
• more junior male colleagues, average 2,000 sq.ft.
• Tenured professors, male 3,000 - 6,000 sq.ft.

In 1994, she drafted a position paper which she shared with the 15 [M = 202!] other tenured, female, faculty in the MIT School of Science [including Sally "Prochlorococcus" Chisholm - prev] and Lisa "immunity" Steiner prev]. They were a) impressed b) pissed and signed a letter to the MIT President setting out their stall and, by implication, demanding redress. Committees were set up, affirmative action was applied and 20 years later the ratio of tenured female faculty had doubled from 7% to . . . 15%. Full story. A lot done, a lot still to do!. This story gave me an inordinate hand-clapping sense of joy when I first heard it. You can sit on your hands and moan or you can stand up and start counting.

More Women in Science.

Sun Day Mid Aug

Sunday All Day

• Dang! Nanci Griffith [R] died on Friday; I am bereft
• On Grafton Street [lyrics]
• From a distance
• Boots of Spanish Leather
• TikTok Blinding Light combo. 
• Very old fruit
• Chocolaterie
• Sharing gold between pals
• It's a blast at Sint Maarten
• St Ursula of Glin on spare time
• Penny Chisholm [prev] snags a Crafoord prize
• Mummify yore ass crazy people
• Andy Skateboard Anderson

Sweeter sweetener

Tuning into MetaFilter last week, I was brought to realise that "no added sugar" is not the same as green grow the rushes O "natural". The worried well asking about the safety status of food is A Thing on MeFi: {I left the chicken out on the counter last night | this cheese is beyond its sell-by | the dog ate only half the salmon}. . . should I ate it. The hive-mind (top heavy with USians) tends to be more leery about risk and less concerned about food-waste than, say, me. This Spring, a neighbour cleared out their dodgy freezer before going foreign for a while and I got a gallimaufry of frozen convenience food. I ate the last two salt and chili chicken burgers 7 days ago and they stayed down. Now I could have left these horrors out for the magpies but I reckoned that as Top Level Carnivore TLC hereabouts, I took precedence. All that remains is 3 loaves of beige sliced gluten-free "bread".

Concerning the Del Monte bb 11Apr20 canned peaches, I was sure they'd not deliver any coliforms let alone botulismus, and was about to give [FFS] appro. But others before me had twigged the “No Sugar Added” and balked: "ya wanna to be careful about old sucralose it tastes glaaark". What a difference an "al" makes as the spot the difference picture [R] reveals: top is the natural disaccharide white granulated sucrose the bottom is 1,6-Dichloro-1,6-dideoxy-β-D-fructofuranosyl-4-chloro-4-deoxy-α-D-galactose or sucralose. I've flagged the chlorine atoms which replace the -OH groups in three places.

This adulteration has two effects
a) it over-stimulates the taste receptors on the tongue making sucralose about 500x sweeter than sucrose
b) it bamboozles sucrase the enzyme which normally breaks sucrose into its constituent fructose and glucose. This allows sucralose to pass through the digestive tract unmetabolised and so taking its calories away unused. 
There are hints and assertions that sucralose fails to satisfy something in the brain and leads to a craving for other calorie rich foods. Maybe like aspartame affecting the microbiome.

Sucralose was discovered in the lab of Les Hough at Queen Elizabeth College, London in 1976 as part of a project sponsored by Tate & Lyle the sugar megacorp. T&L had access to hella quantities of sugar which was sold retail at €1/kg. They wanted to know if value could be added to the raw material so it could be sold higher up the economic ladder; not necessarily as food. Riaz Khan, a previous student of Hough's, was working for T&L. He phoned his old boss to ask for a sample of a chlorinated sugar. Hough was busy so handed the phone to Shashikant Phadnis, a younger more available research chemist. Khan said he wanted to test the compound which the lab had just purified. Phadnis heard this as taste the white powder and - the thought being the deed - dipped a small spatula into the powder and applied it to his tongue; finding a tiny amount to be  super sweet. By the time Hough returned to the lab, Phadnis had taste-tested all the vials in the lab finding many of them sweet and some sweeter than others! The first compound was thereafter called serendipitose. Don't do this at home kids . . . only in the lab.

Patent number: 4435440 "A method of sweetening a substance comprises incorporating therein a mono- or poly- chloro, mono- or poly- deoxy sucrose derivative having chlorine atoms . . ." is held by Leslie Hough, Shashikant P. Phadnis, Riaz A. Khan, Michael R. Jenner [Khan's boss] but vested in Tate and Lyle. Sucralose is marketed as Splenda.

YMMV but this reminds me of "I said take care of him not f*ing TAKE CARE OF HIM!"

Dishtub? WTF?

 It's a washing-up bowl! Where I "do the wup". People have been washing dishes since we moved on from dobbing out portions onto banana leaves. If you don't clean the dishes, the dog will; and absent a dog the plates will get crufty, crusty and thicker than they need to be. I grew up in a three sib home so the tasks were: Alice to clear; Bob to wash; Cecil to dry; Alice to put away. If my Sailor Dad was present andif it was Sunday, he would wash the dishes. We, his minions would pass the obvious dish-wash failures behind his back for another go-thtough; so as not to hurt his feelings. You will notice that there was no Derek to rinse so that didn't get done. Not rinsing the dishes was/is really common in England and it's kinda gross to my present sensibilities. I didn't learn about rinsing until I went to the USA as a 20-something.
flatware = silverware = cutlery
china = crockery = delft = dishes 

Ten years later, we were back in Ireland. The Beloved secured a training gig in Birmingham which required regular overnights in a Brummy B&B. She got pally with the owners, who shared that they had no tea towels. Because the Tourist Board decided that tea-towels were a potential fomite, to get their seal of approval, you had to show the inspector a dish-draining rack. Shortly thereafter I bought a robust triple decker plastic-dipped wire dish rack which screwed onto the wall over the draining board - feckin' bri'nt! You can see half the drip-tray of this machine behind the tap in the picture of Dau.I learning her craft in the last century [R].

One of the agreements nailed down very shortly after my parents married in 1950 was that the wup would never be left until the morning. I suspect that was a rather one-sided contract . . . except on Sundays, like.

Recently on Metafilter, someone tapped into the hive-mind to ask "What is the right way to hand wash dishes?"  This is my jam! It's like the answer to
Q Do you have a dishwasher?
A Yes, his name is Bob
Dishwashing machines are by no means universal in Ireland!  Anyway, here is my answer:

We live remote with a septic tank and drain field. Moi le plongeur is scrupulous about minimising fats and oils going down there. A neighbour had to dig up his drive and the pipework to deal with their fatberg. Two sheets of TP will absorb a lot and make good firelighters after. We have a double sink.

1. I start running hot water into a plastic wup bowl containing a squirt of dish-soap; glasses get washed first because they deserve a hot-water rinse in the hot tap water.
2. Cutlery gets dumped in next to soak
3. Cups & side-plates get dumped on top and washed with a brush and fingers
4. They get rinsed in cold water in the other sink 
5. Left to dry on a double-decker wire drainer
6. Cutlery next
7. Dinner & dessert plates next
8. Pans last.
9. Wup basin water, esp if potentially fatty, tends to get fired out the kitchen door in a satisfyingly medieval way.

If we have company, and more dishes, I stop when the drainer is full and have another session later.

Never, no matter how drunk, leave the dishes till morning

There is no way I use 20 gallons / 90 lt of water.

On dit que handwashing dishes consumes that amount of water while a dishwashing machine uses only 5 gallons = 20 lt. According to the MeFi discussion there are people who rinse dishes under a tap running cleaned drinking water straight to the septic system. For them favelas / townships / barrios are something you see on the National Geographic channel.