World peace, hollow laugh

 I'm gradually gobbling up the podcasts from Lingthusiasm, the podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne [prev - schwa]. I reckon that, if we knew more about how languages are used and where they come from, then we'd be more circumspect in how we speak. Although I've inducted them into the Women of Science hall of fame, the Lingthusiasts are more helpful in dealing with ethics, sensitivities and how to live tight.

Episode 1 gets to the heart of the matter with a deconstruction of Esperanto and the invisible certainties of Ludwig Zamenhoff when he invented the first "conlang" [bloboprev]. He was born in Białystok [Беласток ביאַליסטאָק‎ Baltstogė R], a city in NE Poland, whose train-station I have passed through on my way to pick mushrooms and eat pierogi up near the Lithuanian borrrder. If you live in a place where you might need Polish, Russian, Yiddish, Lithuanian and German just to do the shopping, then you might hope for better communication among disparate people. Zamenhoff has left no direct descendants, all three of his children and their families having been done to death in the Holocaust.

Gretchen "nerdnik" McCulloch came across and started to learn Esperanto as a read-all 12 year old. But flung the book across the room when she twigged that all the names applied to women [virino] were diminutives of the cognate man-names [viro]. This shockin' casually disrespectful view of the status of women is found in German and other languages, but Esperanto was starting from a clean slate and you'd expect better. All good though; because this insight into invisible certainties helped young Gretchen develop her feminist backbone. And her rhetorical crap detector "do people who think that if we all spoke the same language we’d get along, have they ever been in a family? Have they never had arguments?" Indeed, it takes more than language to foment distrust, othering and dispute. But, heck, if you're going to paper over the cracks of interpersonal communication with a universal lingo, at least think a bit about your own bias and prejudice. And World Peace requires more work of us all.

Today I learned TIL, that to land a gig on the International Space Station ISS [prev], you must be able to speak both RU русский and US English. If you can't speak the Other, then the space agency will put you through a crash course. The astronauts and космонавты up there have a convention that each will talk in their non-native language; on the evidence that this will minimise misunderstanding by keeping it simple stupid KISS. All teachers are wary of the tendency to woofle off into technical jargon and/or longer words to show who is the educated adult in the room. Apparently the actual denizens of deep space are evolving a creole which they call Runglish. Although Peggy Whitson, an actual astronaut, who has spent months and months on the ISS, has a different take on what is the language of space.

Quick to learn

Prologue. Many years ago, I had a week back in Boston with the family that adopted me during my PhD.  They had been attending a night class in oriental carpets and the last session occured during the week I was visiting. To everyone's surprise, the proprietor of the bazaar where the course was run, devoted much of the last session to a viva voce quiz on what his students had learned. Everyone passed and everyone therefore got a luck-penny square of carpet back for their troubles. In a spirit of inclusiveness, I was invited to try my hand and "won" a prize, too. It wasn't that hard, because (from a standing start) I'd learned a bit about carpet provenance and patterning from paying attention during the previous exams. Some day I'll be able to parlay that knowledge into a successful round at a table-quiz in Isfahan.

Sunday was Dia de Santiago and no better day for a bit of peregrinage a trek across the face of our hill. My excuse for this was the appearance of an old friend from foreign , let's call him Dan, who was in Ireland for some essential business travel and managed to ring-fence some AirBnB time locally. Last time he was here, he yomped up the hill adventuring with a a handful of his 20-something niblings rather than sacking out for tea and scones with the crumblies. He expressed a desire to tune into St Fursey's Altar which they had discovered on the last trip when it was still The Giant's Table.

We paused at the mountain gate. I showed him [because it's my jam] <teaching-moment> the most accessible example of indents carved in a granite boulder with a stone-pick prior to splitting the living rock with wedges. The story I tell is that some young feller started an over-ambitious project only to be told by an old-timer that he was wasting his time on that rock.  A snap-shot of the process is preserved for posterity in the partially excavated line of indentations </teaching-moment>. We set off uphill on a bee-line for the Marian Year Cross via the Giolleamh Eigin a distinctive sky-line standing stone about half-way to destination. On the way, Dan paused for a "miner's view" [R] and a slug of water and announced "there's another of those stones for your project"

And indeed it was; although much clearer after we pulled back the overlying heather. That's a coup: at least as good as my fragment of Persian carpet. Whereas the mountainside has dozens /hundreds of these worked stones, it is perfectly possible to walk by a fine example  completely oblivious to its existence because you're distracted by midges, fraocháns, chit-chat, or buzzards. One more catch like that and we'll have to call him Hawkeye. Me? I'm delirah to add another datum to my environmental inventory, worked-stone division.

Did someone mention fraocháns? It was Fraochán Sunday and Hawkeye had been introduced to the concept by the three young girls who live in the AirBnB. When we reached the Giolleamh Eigin, I indicated a convenient bush full of the ripe berries and ate one to prove they were edible. Hawkeye was delighted and put N=6 in his water bottle to share with his young pals that evening. Just as well that he forgot all about it, because at teatime, the girls knocked on his door with a neat slice of fraochán pie which would have completely wrong footed him in the potlatch if he'd made the first move.

The Good at his job Shepherd

I'm not knocking fiction; it's an effective way of laying bare life as she is lived to better understand how humanity ticks - even if all the characters are talking rabbits. But I don't read much of it, preferring "true" stories. My latest download from borrowbox is Unnatural Causes by Richard Shepherd. Shepherd is the last of the old style forensic pathologists: trained in an era of pipes and tweed-jackets and very dark humour over the mortuary slab. He's retired a couple of times but his experience and expertise are still valued by the small community of those who tidy up the dead. Not so much morticians with a deft needle, formalin and a touch of blusher; more those who come before, tidying up the loose end-of-life ends. Shepherd's position is that we-the-people owe it to the dead to discover and publish the cause of death, even if that task is messy, time-consuming and [therefore] expensive.

One of Shepherd's gripes is that when every aspect of life was privatized and cost-centred under Thatcher and Blair, there was often insufficient money to pay for a decent path report and so death certs were signed off without the cause of death being adequately investigated. Subsequent enquiries, for example, revealed that police and prosecutors didn't give-a-damn about how Stephen Lawrence was murdered in 1993 because the kid was black. You'll get a better post-mortem if you get offed at the beginning of the financial year! In the old days, forensic pathologists could do experiments and develop particular expertise through experience because they got their salaries on the regular. Today forensic pathologists are all independent contractors, so any spare time between cases is spent hustling for more business rather than stabbing pig livers and documenting the damage.

Shepherd started forensic work in the late 80s when a tumult of tragedies delighted the tabloids: Hillsborough, Zeebrugge, Marchioness, King's Cross, Lockerbie, Piper Alpha, Clapham Junction, Hungerford, East Midlands Airport. Not only was he Point Pathologist for several of these events, he was instrumental in setting up the infrastructure for better handling of such things in the future. Cost-centers really don't like investing in future Maybes, but infrastructural failure means a shameful response when, say, pandemic happens.

Unnatural Causes is, rather stiffly, confessional. Shepherd acknowledges that he could have done better with the optics of his messy profession because blunted affect [and a really sharp PM-40 see R] is necessary to do post-mortem efficiently. One ghoulish detail was caused outrage was the decision to remove the hands from some of the long-submerged bodies of the Marchioness so that the finger-prints could be properly identified with large specialist equipment that couldn't be transported to the mortuary. And the poor man could have done better flipping between his day job and his suburban family life. Helping the kids with their home-work and making together time with his wife 40 minutes after showering the smell of decay out of his hair at work. He couldn't square that circle and his first marriage wrapped up in divorce after the kids had left home.

Keeping the image and smell of death and dismemberment at arm's length for 4 decades and 23,000 autopsies eventually came to unbend his mind with PTSD, depression and panic attacks. If we cared about mental health of front-line workers, we'd budget for therapeutic help: £100 a week for a discrete ear isn't much money and it leverages better product at work. The adversarial nature of the law as it is practiced in their islands is damaging to justice and fairness. Senior council will not be nice about distinguishing between the professional competence and personal integrity of pathologists, police constables, or doctors. It's little wonder that these people hit the bottle [or, god forbid, the family] after a mauling by some toff in a wig at court.

Another insight is that a lot of tea is consumed in mortuaries. It is a necessary professional and social lubricant among those whose work requires them to be present but whose interests often conflict. The pathologist's call can mean more, or less, work for the police. Unnatural Causes may not be your cup of tea but I found it interesting and not gratuitously gruesome.

O Dia de Santiago

2021 is a Jacobean Year when St James's Day falls on a Sunday. It's an especially big deal for pilgrims and there will be a slightly more extravagant party than last year in Santiago de Compostella tonight. The last time I was there was 25th July 2004, another Jacobean Year, when I arrived with bloody socks and The Boy. We'd walked [following the flechas amarelas R]from the Portuguese border in four days. After the 2004 party, I trekked another 780km to the French border blowing off waist-lard in a cloud of carbon dioxide. I apologise for the consequent sea-level rise. But when the road finishes, the camino continues.

• Sing it?
• Cantiago by Cecilia Samartin
• Camino Song by Suzi and Mario
• Somewhere Along the Way by Dan Mullins
• Ultreïa
• Ditto with nuns, drums and chorus
• There is life after Santiago:
• Tally Ho: fair exchange and graciousness.
• The Irish Economy explained. Lovely drone footage.
• AirTags track your parcel
• Foil, Arms and Vaxx explainer
• Leave Her Johnny vocal coach crit
• Bo Burnham Welcome to the Internet
• Waymo autonomous cars

Spectral optics

Isaac Newton was a relentlessly curious experimenter. In one investigation he inserted a bodkin in behind his eyeball to see how distorting the sphere affected his perception. Apart from gravity, we associate him with the "visible spectrum"; spectrum has become a metaphor for other "within the normal" ranges. Actually, neurotypical folk [which might include me and you - I'm still awaiting a diagnosis] tend to Other people on the autistic spectrum. Othering, especially among school-children, can involve brutal, persistent mental-and-physical hazing, teasing and bullying. It makes life harder than it needs to be for the recipients of this attention.

Diary entry Friday 12 Oct 2018. "There’s a girl on Twitter called Greta Thunberg (we’ve been following each other for a while now) . . ." In hindsight it is hard to credit that, less than 3 years ago, St Greta of Climate was a distant marginalised voice just a girl on Twitter. That entry is from Dara McAnulty's Diary of a Young Naturalist a record shit-happens, mainly in Co Fermanagh and Co Down, from Spring Equinox 2018 to Spring Equinox 2019. In the middle of the book the McAnulty family moves from one side of Ulster to the other which causes a good bit of change-anxiety for young Dara and his younger sibs Lorcan and Bláthnaid who are all somewhere on the spectrum. But here's the thing, first day at the new school Dara is met by a young chap in his class who is his designated buddy; who also shares his interest in the natural world and also the unnatural world of Xbox gaming. There are poignant entries in the diary been here a week and no bullying . . . been here a month and no bullying. Now here's the thing: how is it that one school has systemic bullying and the other doesn't? and what are a) the Head Teacher b) the rest of the staff c) the parents and d) the Department of Education doing about it before the next academic year and the start of another round of institutional inhumanity. Note Greta Thunberg was also bullied in school.

I tease The Beloved about her guru Thich Nhat Hahn being Dalai Lama Light, but that's crass and buys into the Harry Potter Winner-takes-all-ism which is the bane of fame and reputation in our current world system. TNH has a different message, different tech, different presentation, it is othering to bang all elderly meditation blokes in robes into the same ashram as interchangeable cogs in the mindfulness industry. Likewise, it is easy to dismiss Dara McAnulty as Greta-lite on the ecowarrior charts. Obvs Dara is going to get some traction in Ireland because he is Our Ecowarrior but he's got something to say for all of us who are left of the planet. He says, for example, a benison over the 70% of British house sparrows Passer domesticus which didn't leave descendants from 1970.  That's not on the red-list by any means but I remember saying ~50 years ago that soon enough there'll be nothing left but rats, cockroaches, sparrows and starlings after all life's wonderful diversity had been swept clean by whatever Miscreant Humanity had been up to in 1970.

The McAnulty book is pretty impressive for a 17 y.o. but some of the extravagant praise by such Econames as Chris Packham and Robert Macfarlane seems a bit dodgy in its sub-text. It's a little like Samuel "Curmudgeon" Johnson's [prev] — 'Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.'  Where you substitute An autist's writing is . . .".  One thing that I really did get from the book is an insight into one autistic mind. Dara is at pains to note that his brother Lorcan, with whom he's been sharing genes and breakfast cereal for 15 years, has a quite different autistic mind and a different external presentation also.

Buuut, in the Acknowledgements, McAnulty tips a hat to Adrian, at Little Toller, for not trying to 'adult' my voice in the editing process. Which is nice, but a sensitive editor could have done all that and yet suggested some word changes so that this blobby reader was not brought up all standing at the choice of some not-quite-right adjectives. At 17 nobody has had enough time to read enough books or listen to enough podcasts to nail the current nuanced meaning of words in English. Getting this time / experience under your belt is one definition of wisdom insofar as that is different from intelligence [hint - it is]. FWIW, Greta Thunberg's book "No One is too Small to Make a Difference" is even slighter, both in page count and content, than Dara's Diary.

I look forward to seeing this chap develop. I may even get to meet him on a raptor watch if 'my' buzzards and 'his' red kites Milvus milvus finish up on the same mountain shoulder.

Humble hubris

I spent the 90s pushing the frontiers of science in computational biology. That's a whopping big amorphous field but my boss had peed on a lamp-post that marked a small section of the frontier of science. I was put to work with the pick of power and the axe of analysis reducing the forest of entropy to something we could understand. I wrote - and published - some software to make our sort of analysis more efficient. But I also used existing software because research was hard enough without having to re-invent the wheel for each analysis. In the course of stress-testing PHYLIP, a software suite written by Joe Felsenstein in Seattle, I revealed a bug in one of the programs. Joe duly added my name to a list of people who'd found one for the team. Felsenstein had/has a beard worthy of other computer gods like Denis Ritchie and Ken Thompson.

I was following a peculiar self promotion story on Metafilter which reminded me that I'd had a [mortifyin' in hindsight] transaction with Felsenstein about ten years prior to my public-service debugging venture. In 1982, I had to print half a dozen copies of my PhD thesis as well as the official copies for the university / department archives. 5 of those spare copies came back to me, because my thesis committee didn't need a permanent record of the labour. In my intense echo chamber, I thought my stuff was important and interesting and sent each volume out to people whom I admired in the field of computational biology. The only person who replied [it was before WTF? was a thing] was Joe Felsenstein at U.Washington, Seattle, who said . . . he'd passed it on to a Canadian graduate student because "Canadian Maritimes" appeared in the title. 

I tell ya, science is largely one enormous futility closet. You work away for a year, or three, or four, stumbling around until to find your feet and a compass and, after much effort you write the results up in a single manuscript. This document has to be written to a rigid format in peculiarly stilted language. Most scientific papers, despite the imprimatur of an editor and two independent peer reviewers, sink almost without a ripple.

Moranipause

My daughters are big fans of Caitlin Moran; who done good as a journalist and public intellectual without going to secondary school. When they've read the latest Moranifesto they pass it along to me; so I've become a bit of a groupie. Her latest More than a Woman (2020) brings us to date to share some perspective from the shoulders of a 45 y.o. holding up the world. It's a journey. How to Build a Girl was followed How to Be a Woman.  The position for the latest book is the caring professionals and amateurs are disproportionately women with more and more people in need of care. Often a woman will be responsible both as primary childcare and managing the disintegration of both her parents and her in-laws . . . as well holding down a regular job to pay half the gargantuan mortgage.

My residual desire for Social Media is currently met by Metafilter where people discuss things they come across in the media and blogosphere. Metafilter leans left, USA, BLT. All the Republicans have been driven out; and those who are hesitant about vaccines don't brag about it. One of the rules of Metadiscourse is that you must rein in the desire to contribute if you don't have skin in the game. Someone will perk up with Oh no, not #notallmen again if a patriarch like me bridles at being thrown out of the bus with the latest misogynistic monster of media. There is no pain that cis-het ♂ silverbacks can experience which comes close to every day life for black folks. It must be hard to live in a world where you are ex blokio officio responsible for all the wrongs in the world.

Moran addresses with this in a What About the Men? chapter triggered by having her youngest 19 y.o. brother coming to bunk in their married couple two kids London home. This young feller's position is that it's harder for him to navigate the 21stC than it is for women of the same age and demographic. Which comes across as whiny, snow-flaky and bring back National Servicey. Perhaps because she loves her brother, Moran is able to cut him and his peer-group some slack: partly because shouting at him/them is only going to polarize the dialogue even further. And send men in droves off to their cliché pubs, clubs, soccer and Men's Sheds. Still better to be complaining about the ref while watching Match of the Day, than failing to decide between pills or hanging and taking the car out for one last reckless spin. Nobody ever buys men flowers. Men are still dressed like, and behave like, it was 1921. Their roles and their emotional life haven't evolved in 100 years except that in addition to Breadwinner they've also added plongeur, chauffeur, aupair and boulanger to their To Do list. Indeed they can't play the Breadwinner card either because Herself is out to work as well. No wonder they are bewildered.

Another group who are all sheets to the wind in a sea of troubles are teenage girls. Eating disorders and self-harm are no respecters of money or social class and there is a lot of it about. Moran's take is that teenagers have had to shoulder a burden of responsibility about the state of the world which, because young, they are ill-equipped to deal with. This is made worse by St Greta of Thunberg being out there appearing to deal with the world's existential crises and setting an impossibly high bar on other teenagers to be similarly brilliant and effective. Their parents talk about how adults have fucked over the world but that the brilliant youth of today will sort it out for us all. Whaaaaa'? why are we laying the solution on the kids?  It's really hard to work out a script for parents of a troubled teen. One thing for certain, making them responsible for the emotional distress of the parents is no help at all. Moran didn't get her head and her role sorted until her daughter was beginning to see a chink of light in a cycle of anorexia and razors. There are loads of heads out there sounding off about the causes and cures of the epidemic but talk is cheap and mis-steps are legion. But not all of them have been there - as a parent or troubled teen. 

Moran has skin in the game, so is worth listening to. She deals with weighty topics with a light touch; sometimes laugh-aloud funny.  A dash of humility and hefty shake of compassion leaven the mix. The last chapter reflect on how her role is shifting from middle-aged woman to Hag. It won't lessen her responsibilities much just smooze them out a bit so they seem like a helping hand rather than an obligatory part of the daily routine. I suspect she's roughing out the chapter headings for How to Bewilder the Cailleach.