The Science of Cheese

🧀I'm having a great deal of fun reading A Cheesemonger's History of The British Isles by Ned Palmer as an eBook on my Borrowbox device. Ned Palmer consolidated his love of cheese by working for several years in Neal's Yard Dairy in London. He also developed formidable upper-body strength from turning heavy rounds of cheese to keep the cellar's treasures in peak condition and reducing the population of cheese mites Tyrophagus spp. [literally that is cheese-eater in Greek] to manageable proportions. In the course of his work hefting and selling cheese he got to know many of the artisanal cheese-makers who rediscovered and reinvented the lost arts of this cottage industry in the 1980s and 90s. The book's conceit is to pick one presently available cheese which seems to exemplify the techniques of a particular bygone era . . . and go visit the place where it is made. With luck, the cheese-makers will get some free labour out of their visitor but it's clear that some of the tasks cannot be done efficiently by a tyro tyrokomos τυροκόμος.There is a zen of cheese - good cheese is not to be bludgeoned and cheesemakers know when to step back and let the microbes do the talking. But when the the work of human hand is required, that hand must be practiced, committed and fast.

🧀Todd and Maugan Trethowen [R up to his elbows] started making their traditional Gorwydd Caerphilly in response to the demand for carefully made cheese towards the end of the last century.  It's no longer made in Wales because the logistics got too difficult in the remote valley where they started to revive a real cheese that was rather different from the plastic-wrapped blocks of "Caerphilly" sold by the tonne in Tesco. Like my late lamented friend Mario Fares and the options of PAML, Maugan Trethowen systematically altered all the parameters of their cheese-making process - e.g. heating successive batches of milk from 20°C to 50°C and carefully recording the outcomes. Gorwydd settled on 22°C as the optimum. Unless you do this, you may get good enough but you'll never get the best.

🧀Later on, in a discussion of witches and their effects on the neighbours' cheese, Palmer writes about curd which congealeth so it will rope like birdlime that you maie wind it on a stick . Ropey milk was part of my patter at The Institute when I was introducing the Lactic Acid Bacteria practicals in the Food and Fermentation Microbiology course. What the local witch-finder described above can be rendered in science-speak as the production of exopolysaccharides by Pediococcus spp. Pediococcus is also an LAB but fermenters definitely want to keep it out of the workplace for this reason. Scrupulous washing of hands is required in modern food production facilities but there is also an argument that the shelves, walls and ceiling of the cellar and, indeed, cheese-makers' hands are an important source of good bacteria which can fight off the black-hats more resolutely than bleach. 

🧀As a final anecdote about trade secrets, open disclosure and The Art, I'll quote Joe Schneider, who makes unpasteurized Stichelton in the same region of the English Midlands where Stilton enjoys Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) under EU law. The small print of that PDO specifies that Stilton is made from pasteurized milk. Pasteurization, by definition, alters the microbiology of milk and so makes a different product from what was created and marketed on either side of The Great North Road in the 1700s. Schneider's position is that you can control Listeria in more subtle ways than killing all the microbes in the milk. But "You can come to my dairy, take pictures, take notes, copy everything you like. You won't know how to make my cheese. I don't know how to make my cheese". This is like trying to follow a protocol that is detailed in the Materials and Methods of a scientific paper. My old boss had a standard operating procedure SOP when her students couldn't make it work. She'd phone up the rival lab and ask if they'd host the student for a couple of weeks. More often than not, student came back with a working method. Not everything can be written down, including the invisible indescribable background certainties which make things work . . . of course you don't leave the eppendorfs in the ice after you add the primers. 

🧀Colour supplement: Gorwydd Caerphilly -  Appleby's Cheshire - Coolea

Conversion 1400 g to 28 Kb

 August was busy like a hive is busy. We had almost the whole descendant family present at the same time for about a week and various lesser permutations for pretty much the whole month. There isn't a whole lot to do on the farrrm unless you're driving a tractor or chain-saw, so Dau.I and TGWIH graced us some time acting as catalysts for a significant de-cluttering. Actually much more than catalysts - they kitted out with gloves, overalls and Rosie-the-Rivetter bandanas and shifted a lot of boxes. None of those boxes went back indoors at the same weight. There's a certain amount of self-interest here because in 2019 both Dau.I and Dau.II came with me to England after my mother left for a nursing home and a life-time's matèriel has to be rehoused. They've seen what decisions have to be made when under the cosh of time.

There is no point in keeping books which I'll never read again; and every time we go through this exercise the bar for worth keeping is raised. Not only books but papers. The precious collection of scientific reprints upon which my PhD thesis and subsequent research was based? All gone! Ten years ago The Boy asked "These scientific papers, hm? If you wanted to read them again, they'd be available somewhere as a PDF, yes?"  They have indeed all been digitized. But the real point was to reflect on the likelihood that I would every need to read this old paper again when there are prairies of new things to think about. Last week I came across:

That's the 1990s in promotional wall calendars! High quality stock, glossy pics, room to record appointments and meetings. They've weathered a damp shed for 20 years with only a little mildew - but they're no longer pretty . . . or current. So I spent an evening transcribing the information into a multi-tabbed Excel spreadsheet. Each year is a sparse matrix: a lot of days when nothing particular happened. So 1.4 kg of card-paper has been converted to a searchable archive with a file size of 28 kilobytes. 

Every month for a couple of years in the early 90s I attended the C.U.C. But I had to sleep on the problem to remember that it was the Computer Users Committee rather than Credit Union Clondalkin. I am baffled as to the identity of several of the people with whom I had a power-lunch 25 years even now that I have their names. And really, if the Excel file corrupts itself, these data are of no interest to anyone. Nobody is going to write my biography! 

Mad meds

Years ago, after the Internet but before the WWW, there were Usenet News Groups where folk with similar interests and obsessions could come together to compare notes. It's where someone on rec.arts.books flagged for me The Lost Continent, Bill Bryson's first and funniest book. I made some contributions about maintaining dirt roads, the coexistence of chickens and orchards, what I read in my Summer holidays.  

I was asthmatic before it became ubiquitous - first attack 1956 following a temper tantrum about having to leave Duncannon after a week of sand and chilblains. There were no meds back then and I survived, until as a teen, I grew out of it. The Boy inherited that predisposition and had a near-death experience when he was 15. After that I took asthma [a bit] more seriously. Asthma and Usenet came together then and I used to lurk about the alt.med.asthma group. My only contribution there was to suggest that there might be some merit in The Buteyko Method of managing asthma through breathing exercises. Well! you would have thought I suggested roasting asthmatics on large bonfires. There was a shrill push-back from people who were wedded to their meds: if I don't have my inhaler charged at all times I . will . die. I was conflicted because I was alive . . . but the boy had been seriously ill,  without medical asthma intervention.

This see-saw between meds v. cure-thyself came whooshing back when I read a balanced piece by Devon Price about neurotransmitters, character, mental dysphoria and external impacts. It was flagged <surprize!> by MetaFilter. From Big Pharma's viewpoint, a great med is one which is prescribed for many forever. Statins, for example. This is supposed to be the argument why no MegaPharm financial controller is going to fund a search for novel antibiotics: there's not enough $ugar in a drug which is used for 2 weeks every decade.

I've known one case where the anti-psychotic Olanzapine gave an elderly raving relative a short-sharp shock that brought them back to earth and in a happier place. But it took a pro-active daughter to review that elder's daily pharmacopeia and get Olanzapine removed from the menu by increments over a few weeks. So far, there has been no relapse.  There is, accordingly, an argument that medication can be used, a bit like electro-convulsive therapy ECT? to reset an internal clock. The downside is that the homeostatic feedback of human physiology will, under some regimes, fight back against intrusive meds so that the dose needs to be eked ever upwards. And in any case, your body is not my body and our set-points will surely differ. It is important to work actively with your GP to get the dosage balanced to maximise benefit while limiting the wearing side-effects: headaches, constipation, tremors, flatulence, flushes, more headaches.

My contribution to the Metafilter debate assumed that there were few in the forum who had a stake in mental illness and were old enough to remember RD Laing [R looking baleful]: Interesting. It's helpful to tease apart proximate [mechanistic, neurotransmitter] causes from ultimate causes. RD Laing is 32 years dead but he tried to shift the the angle of attack: "Insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world." and "A child born today in the United Kingdom stands a ten times greater chance of being admitted to a mental hospital than to a university ... This can be taken as an indication that we are driving our children mad more effectively than we are genuinely educating them. Perhaps it is our way of educating them that is driving them mad."  RD Laing talked a strong line about medicalizing the neur-atypical and had a more holistic view of how society impacts on the vulnerable. In an ideal world, some of the money which is currently floating champagne parties in Pfizer, Glaxo and Bayer would be diverted to therapists, counsellors, down-with-drink campaigns and . . . house-builders. But my woofle is less informed and thoughful than Devon Price here.

Sun Sep

Start with song

• Anne Etchegoyen Lau Haizetara, from "Compostelle - Du Pays Basque à Saint-Jacque"
• With a choir of beretted Basques doing Xalbadorren Heriotzean.
• Let's have that again, belted out by Helene García Barrenetxea
• "Where are you, from which meadows?// The shepherd of Urepele,// You who have fled to the mountains,// Towards tomorrow// That lingers within memory" Lyrics
• That led to Basque girls going morris-dancing [R]
• Conchords have a proposition
• Music of the Sephardim
• Caitlin Rose Everywhere I go.
• Let the river run
• Okay, stop the music
• Ottolenghi and Dent do Christmas
• Ilhéu de Vila Franca
• Down with stroads: ugly dangerous and inefficient
• London Lympic Legacy

Unstrung hero

On 3rd September, my mother and grandmother had briefly got under the kitchen table in their home in Dover [as today R] after PM Neville Chamberlain announced that from 11am Britain was at war with Germany. After a few minutes, no death raining down from the skies, the dusted off their pinnies and continued to prepare Sunday lunch for the Patriarchy (Uncle John and Grampa) who were in a different part of the house reading newspapers. When we started to visit in the 1950s there was a patch of the ceiling paper of a slightly different design. Later on the house had sustained damage from a nearby explosion blowing in the window of the living room and sending a splinter of glass into my grandfather's eye blinding it. As kids we peered at his eyes discretely to work out which one was glass and which functional. The difference was harder to see than the damage to the ceiling.

Let us, on this day, pause to think about Larry Slattery of Littleton Co. Tipperary, whose plane crashed into the sea at Wilhelmshaven during the first raid over Germany carried out by the RAF on 4th September 1939. The raid, although commendably quick off the mark, was a disaster, half the planes got lost and returned their bomb-load to base, several Blenheims were shot down with most of their crews killed. Slattery the navigator/gunner was fished from the drink with a broken jaw and foot, patched up in Kriegsmarine hospital in Wesermunde and spent the rest of the war in Stalag Luft III POW camp. He thus acquired the distinction of being the longest held Allied prisoner of war.

Slattery was an accomplished violinist and was a founder member, and leader, of a 70-strong camp orchestra whose concerts were important for maintaining morale and sanity among those men for whom the war was over. The instruments were largely supplied by the International Red Cross. Indicating that, at least on an implicit level, the IRC recognised that mental health was as important as, well, health. When he died in the 1970s, fellow RAF survivors of a musical turn endowed a scholarship fund in his name to funnel money to needy young musicians. POW camps were run in parallel by their German captors and by an internal structure headed by the senior Allied officer present. The best camps maintained discipline and morale by organising classes and entertainments with whatever talents that were available. Slattery became fluent in German, for example. Stalag Luft III was the site of two WWII escape dramas The Wooden Horse and The Great Escape, but the majority of the kriegies kept on keeping on until the end of the war. 

Grooming

A discussion on MeFi about just how good bad was the algorithm for delivering you to social media advertisers yielded this wonderful riff from Mike Hoye:

Some friends and I used to antagonize each other by sending each other bizarre Amazon product links to playfully poison each others recommendations, but I think at one point we some how broke it and I spent a year and a half with this one ridiculous foot-long mall-ninja knife following me around no matter what I was shopping for.

• "Hey, guy buying children's socks: you also need a ridiculous knife, right?"
• "I'm good, Amazon. Thanks."
• "Hey, I see you're buying a soothing, uncaffeinated chamomile tea. May we also suggest this cheap-ass, fuck-off big mall-ninja shiv. What do you say?"
• "Um, no."
• "So. Coffee filters, dishwashing soap... and a shiv?"
• "Calm down!"

Well I don't know what I clicked on at all at all but I've been youtube-awash with a particular sort of grooming product called the Manscape Lawn-mower 4.0 - billiard play - army play - which is designed to trim down there . . . hence the metaphor of two pink snooker balls [L]. What could possibly go wrong?

• BeardTube thinks it's over-priced, under-powered and does a bait-and-switch on a replacement parts contract of $15 every 3 months.
• There are a load of counter reviews from articulate, desperately enthusiastic young men who are getting 20% of the take for their endorsement. 
• It is perhaps ominous that the trimmer is shipped with "Ball Toner" and "Anti-chafing Ball deodorant" containing soothing aloe vera. Cripes lads, if you'd just leave your pubes on, then none of these unguents would be necessary.
• Tommy Tiernan and Des Bishop are of the bumping uglies school of genital aesthetics. But whatever your position on whether groins are pretty, it's hard to accept that that removing the fur makes things more attractive. 
• Emilie Pine on the other side of the gender divide continuum also wonders why depilation is now so common and WTF the subtext is of removing / reducing that attribute of adulthood.

Gödel alKhwarizmi Bacon

The title is a piss-take on Douglas "Up his chuff" Hofstadter's long and pretentious book Gödel, Escher Bach - an eternal golden bore braid [Bloboprev]. Kurt Gödel, Muhammed "Mr Algorithm" al-Khwarizmi and Kevin Bacon are the only people mentioned by name in Milo Beckman's book Math Without Numbers. Although "pythagorean" and "platonism" gives a cautious hat-tip to a couple of ancient Greeks. It must be a deliberate no-name levelling policy to use circumlocutions for other famous mathematicians: 

• Dutch topologist who was booted off the editorial board of Mathematische Annalen [LEJ Brouwer].  
• Author of a book called Principia Mathematica [AN Whitehead and Bertram Russell].

And it's usually polite to cite your sources. Beckman includes a discussion of some infinities being bigger than other infinities similar to mine but I explicitly recognised that the idea is original to Georg Cantor not to me or Beckman. In the same chapter, Beckman joins a long list of people [incl Veritasium] who discuss Hilbert's Infinite Hotel Paradox. The thing is, it's easy to re-tell the story - heck, even I've had a go - but it's a different order of cleverness to have cast the problem in a way that can make it accessible to Joe Blowe and Jan Publiek.

Earlier on in the book, Beckman [and their illustrator M Erazo] show that one of two groups of things is obviously bigger than another. Changing up the picture beyond 3 or 5 {boxes, dots, apples} makes the illustration more visually appealing but lurries in a confounding variable because M's objects are all different sizes. Thus [starfish, halibut, digestive biscuit] has, because 300kg halibut, greater biomass than [crab, whelk, scallop, sea-urchin, augur-shell]. Been there before comparing "abundance" of Prochlorococcus and humanity.

The conceit of Math Without Numbers is explicitly stated inside the dust jacker "The only numbers in this book are the page numbers" but that is explicitly contradicted on p.124 with the statement "zero is a number". In fact numbers are mentioned on almost every page of the book but they are written out in english - seventeen - rather than roman - XVII - or japanese - 十匕 - or 'arabic' - 17. So that's a bit of old bollix. Why pick seventeen?

Wellll, because TIL that there are exactly 17 distinct types of 2-D repetitive wallpaper symmetry patterns with which a plane may be covered with no gaps. They right purty:

And that, in this our Universe, there are only 17 combos of mass and charge which are tolerable to make the fundamental particles from which everything else is constructed. They are far too small to be pretty but they have a certain orderliness:

For all my snippy snark, this book has clearly made me think. Not worth buying a copy, but worth checking out of the library. But we'll give Milo a chance to convince you otherwise:

• 5 minutes on the domino tiling chessboard puzzle . . . and buy my book