Kangaroo Euclid

Most of us account [dyswidt?] math-anxiety an unfortunate outcome for any system of education. Some adults struggle making change from £5, or sawing a 8ft = 2400mm 4x2 into three equal parts. When I was in school, we were just moving out of rote-learning our times-tables and grinding through obviously artificial 'problems' that filled the pages of Pendlebury's New School Arithmetic [my edition is 1924]. Didn't make me no differ, I was 'good at maths' and institutionalized biddable, so the medium of teaching was largely irrelevant. I remember wetting myself when I cracked a code that was printed on the cover of the SMP text-book series that was the basis of math-ed at my school. But I gotta admit that teaching math there-and-then didn't light any fires. It wasn't FUN.

Gdau.I is in secondary school in England and "good at school" like me, and quite competitive: unlike me. With encouragement from her teachers, she signed up for an extra-curricular math jam called Kangaroo Math run by The UK Maths Trust, "the leading charity that advances the education of young people in maths". The programme is derived from Kangourou sans Frontières which in turn owes a debt to a programme started in Australia by Peter O’Holloran and Peter Taylor in 1978: hence the Kangaroo label. Gdau.I's parent shared a link to Past Papers [2015-2026] from the UKMT scheme: grey kangaroo is for younger kids while pink kangaroo is aimed at "A" Level = last two years of secondary school. As I say above, I was great at the tricks to get good marks in tests [incl "A" Level] for The Calculus and other advanced math stuff.

Kangaroo is attempting, like so many school-math reforms, to go beyond instilling basic numeracy in the populace. They are hoping to bring more kids over the threshold into math can be diverting and intrinsically interesting and maybe even inspiring; rather than a merely functional, doubtfully useful, skill. As the least competitive person I know, I could wish this was achieved without pitting children against each other. Because if there are winners, there are losers and that gives people's self-esteem a biff.

But, out of solidarity with the young herself, I've been plugging away at some grey kanga past papers . . . as an alternative to sudoku, like. The set-up is for each paper to have 25 multiple choice questions: starting easy and getting harder. It's good fun (for the likes of me) and I can, with furrowed brows, motor through Q1-Q15.  Beyond that, I have to mobilise a pencil&paper. But, because it's recreational, I give up on the last tuthree [difficult for 15 y.o.s] Qs because my life doesn't depend on getting 100%.

2016 Q12 Two kangaroos Bo and Ing start to jump at the same time, from the same point, in the same direction. After that, they each make one jump per second. Each of Bo's jumps is 6 m in length. Ing's first jump is 1 m in length, his second is 2 m, his third is 3 m, and so on. After how many jumps does Ing catch Bo?

Possible answers: A [10] B [11] C [12] D [13] E [14]

2019 Q9 In the diagram, PQ = PR = QS and ∠QPR = 20◦. What is ∠RQS? 

Possible answers A [50°] B [60°] C [65°] D [70°] E [75°] 

Don't know about you, but these Qs seem a bit more fun than Pendlebury's equivalent 100 years ago:

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 

 

Batman and Moggyn

Seems my memory [of whc fallibility prev] told a fibby-whopper about my reading matter 50 years ago. In 2022, I maintained that I had been reading an Elizabethan translation of Isidore of Seville's De Natura Rerum. I wrote it up in CGN Carnivore Genetics Newsletter for which I was crimper-in-chief for several years in the early 80s. About ten years later, I left a complete archive of this niche publication in care of the library of the Genetics Department of TCD, my alma mater, when I was back there as an adult. About 10 years after that a new generation of geneticists threw the whole thing in a dumpster when they were "streamlining" their inventory. Some scientists are so fixated on the Future that they see no value in the past.

In March, I was on a unexpectedly deep dive looking for something to read and checked the TCD Library catalogue for that book. While I was 'down in the archives' I thought I'd check my Isidore reference. There I discovered that what I had actually spent an afternoon with in 1977 was:

"Batman vppon Bartholome his booke De proprietatibus rerum, newly corrected, enlarged and amended: with such additions as are requisite, vnto euery seuerall booke: taken foorth of the most approued authors, the like heretofore not translated in English. Profitable for all estates, as well for the benefite of the mind as the bodie. 1582. Bartholomaeus, Anglicus, 13th cent" TCD Catalogue Reference.

And it is possible to track down [at the rather wonderful bestiary.ca site run by David Badke in BC Canada] the passage which so interested me back when I was obsessing about coat-colour in cats in the 20thC.  The whole booke is searchable at the Wellcome Collection.

The Cat is called Murilegus, & Musio, and also Cattus, & hath that name Murilegus, for he is enemie to mice & to rats, and is commonly called Cattus, & hath that name of ravening, for he ravisheth mice and rats. Or els he hath that name Cattus of Cata, that is to sée, for he séeth so sharply, that he overcommeth darknesse of the night by shining of the lyght of his eyen, and the name Cattus commeth of Gréek, and is to understand slye and wittie, as Isi[dore] saith li. 12. And is a beast of uncertaine haire & colour: for some Cat is white, some red, some black, some skewed and speckled in the féete, and in the face, and in the eares, and is most like to the Leopard, & hath a great mouth, and sawie teeth & sharp, and long tongue & pliant, thin & subtill, . . .

There; I'm glad we set the record straight. 

 

Moneta Roma Antiqua

A parapal on Metfilter recommended Moneta: A History of Ancient Rome in Twelve Coins (2024) by Gareth Harney. Obediently, I reserved a copy and it came to my local library quicker than average. The Blob's book-world has been in similar listicle-land before: 

• A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor 
• also A History of Ireland in 100 Objects by Fintan O'Toole;   
• A history of Ireland in 100 words by Arbuthnot, Ní Mhaonaigh and Toner. 

Moneta is not 12/100ths the length of those other books, because the publishing world doesn't work like that. It is, therefore, more discursive and less exec summ; and definitely not the worse for that treatment. Indeed, I ripped through its 300&some pages in a tuthree days and popped out the other end feeling better informed and indeed smarter.  I'd be quite the pub bore about it for the next couple of weeks . . . if I ever went out.

Harney's journey was set when, as boy, his father gifted him a small silver coin that was "Older than both world wars, older than Shakespeare, had already existed for a millennium when Harold took an arrow in the eye at Hastings". It takes a certain romantic imagination to evoke just how long the tiny artifact had survived and through whose hands it might have travelled. Roman coins have turned up in Ireland, Iceland and Indonesia: places where the writ imperial never ran.  

The book, not stinting its brief, features a lot more than the 12 coins which head up the twelve chapters: Wolf -- Nemesis -- Dictator -- Ides -- Pax -- Kingmakers -- Arena -- Zenith -- Philosopher -- Split -- Cross -- Collapse. You might, like me, guess that Ides centres et tu Brute; Arena centres the Colosseum; and Philosopher centres Marcus Aurelius: whose likeness continues to grace the Italian 50c coin [L]. I knew a lot more Roman history, myths and legends when I was 12 than when I'm 72. I hadn't thought about Romulus and Remus being orphaned and suckled by a wolf for decades but Chapter One dredged the image up from my memory and gave it a brisk polish. Where does memory lurk unbidden for so long and still be available for recall?

We were in Roma briefly in 1978 passing through in a Citroën Dyane on the way to Sicily. I remember the Colosseum, largely because it was crawling with cats and I was going to the 1st Conference of Cat Population Genetics and Ecology. But I am now booting myself that we didn't pause to marvel at Trajan's Column, which features on a golden aureus at the head of Chapter VIII, Zenith. The column is a story-on-a-stick with 23 helical turns unrolling to 200m of graphics show-and-telling Trajan's trans-Danube adventures conquering the province of Dacia. The column had to be 100 Roman feet = 38m tall to match the height of Quirinal Hill which was carted away in baskets to level the area for the Column and ancillary Forum. The column is a stack of 20x 32 tonne marble drums. Nobody denies that the Romans were determined and effective engineers.

The conquest of Dacia resulted in the acquisition of 320 of gold and 450 tonnes of silver. Much of that was minted into 30 million aurei and 160 million denarii to dole out to the Praetorian Guard and pay for bread and circuses. Ice cores from Greenland document the quality of the atmosphere over the last 100,000 years. There is spike in the lead Pb content, as a by-product of silver smelting, that peaked in the 2ndC and died away to nothing for the next 16 centuries until industrial pollution really cranked up in the late 1700s.

I could go on, but it's all spoilers, and you'll want to get the book out of the library when I return it. 

Report from Spring

blob lady bird lane lump buds blue fire

We're past the Equinox & Bealtaine & Liberation Day NL, and no late frost, so Spring must be sprong. As evidence I found the first ladybird Coccinella septempunctata this year (&/or several years) on mint Mentha spicata. And across the lane, blossoms on the damson tree [sorry about focus fail]. Having missed a late frost I have high hopes of damson Prunus domestica (jam) later.

Just uphill from the damson is a beleaguered apple tree Malus; much festooned in brambles, but that too is chock full o' blossom. And opposite the gate the lilac Syringa vulgaris is running a little behind the apple sporting only buds not blossoms . . . as yet. 

So much for fecundity! There has also been damage. I was making a last sweep outdoors as darkness fell on 29 Apr 26 when I spotted blue flashing light in the valley at The Cross 500m SE. I wondered and wandered through the fields a-piece to see who had been side-swiped at the junction. 
Answer: nobody. 
It was just a fire-truck and a tender and a few fire-fighters sitting and pacing, as if waiting for an emergency. It never occurred to me to look over my shoulder, and went to bed. I was just settling when our neighbour-across txtd me "Is the fire close to your house?". Clearly not close enough to have me throwing passports into a go-bag. A week later I was doing my annual Spring-scythe down the lane, so that the Blackstairs Walkers (due next Sat) might believe we cared about their free-passage. I tugged an eye-level swooping fern and tumbled a rock off the top of ditch. Lesson: Never play football with something larger than a football!

Tuesday, three days after 'our' fire made the National news, I walked up the hill to see, from the scorch-marks, how close to your house the fire had been. And, as important, whether it had eaten into 'our' common, thereby docking us all of our EU-subsidy for maintaining a fire-free special upland habitat.

It looks like one of the fires (there were several last week, locally) swept up from Wexford to have nip at the NE corner of our common [boundaries of whc in green]. The Government satellite will scope the details but it's looking like less than 2% of the 200 hectares comprising the common. Blazing heather is a Bad Idea: bad for ground-nesting birds, bad for heather, bad for beetles, bad for the soil microbiome, bad for micro-nutrients, and hill walkers get soot all over their spats. We took it in the neck last year. and in 2022. Please STOP.

Phoenix morning

Last month, I went up to Dublin for an evening symposium on The Idea of a University. It was interesting and informative; but 'ard work trying to take notes like a student. I was relieved to get away because I had a date to spend the night with m'daughters who are bunking together in Dublin 7. Bonus was going for yomp in Phoenix Park with Dau.II in the morning. We caught a bus [free travel for self & companion!] to the distant Ashtown gate and walked back. She is getting to treat The Park as her back-garden / personal gym. Most visits, she will detour to wave at her neighbour Catherine Connolly's house Áras. Like me with Condé na Déise, she is surprised [and quietly delighted] at how empty-of-people such a bountifully interesting area can be. It is 700 hectares in extent, which is a lot bigger than the back-yard of Louis Agassiz but you could still take a life-time of walks there and still be surprised by joy at some peculiar bosky dell or obscure monument: like the tree [R] beside which, on 19Sep15, John McHugh had a myocardial infarction and died coming to the end of a half-marathon and his 24th year. Tough chips, mate, but at least you got to get out to run like the wind while your knees were still up for it. Clearly his friends and relations, and random runners, continue to bide-a-wee and leave a bouquet, or a medal, or a mumbled prayer.

Apart from the Áras, The Park is notable for its several herds of European fallow deer Dama dama, which were introduced 350ish years ago and help keep the grass down. They do an even better job keeping the trees down, so new plantings must be caged in browse-proof fencing tubes until they are big enough and barky enough to take a nibble and survive. Poor deer inevitably run up a bill with ticks Ixodes ricinus but the OPW stoutly maintains that their ticks are not vectors of Lyme Disease Borrelia burgdorferi. Nevertheless it looks like the deer are in a mutualistic relationship with crows Corvus spp.w.r.t. ticks and we saw a tuthree birds pecking about on some cudding deer:

The photo is crap because me . . . we kept, as requested, 50m distant from the poor beasts. Definitely don't want to precipitate a Fenton FENton FENTON event and live in shame forever. FYI, the deer all have year colour-coded ear-tags, so they can be identified when it comes to the annual cull. Yes, about 90 = 15% of the herd is killed and sold for venison each year.

Another less obvious asset in the park is a little but annually increasing grove of oak trees Quercus robur to commemorate the Tidy Towns scheme. A new tree is planted on the regular next to a rather ugly little grave stone recording which community had the best window-boxes, and the most frightening Gauleiter of Litter, that year. It's been running for more than 50 years and the grove is expanding Southwards away from the main road.

Just a perfick morning. Would repeat.

Fib, memory

„Das habe ich getan“ sagt mein Gedächtnis. 
„Das kann ich nicht getan haben“ — sagt mein Stolz und bleibt unerbittlich. 
Endlich — gibt das Gedächtnis nach. Nietzsche (↓)

Dau.I the Librarian, is retro-actively pursuing a B.Sc. in Psych & Soc, after her MLIS. She has been interested in the formal academics of Psychology since she was a teen, so deserves to get a scrap of paper from yet more study of the subject. We-the-family get to hack at her project reports and submissions - thereby learning something new while polishing our crap-detectors. The family that strives together, thrives together? She recently lent me a copy of  The Rag and Bone Shop: How We Make Memories and Memories Make Us (2021) by Veronica O'Keane, who is now Prof of Psychiatry at Trinity College Dublin. This is on message for me because I've been interested in Memory . . . since before the birth of the Blob. The post-title is a riff on Nabakov's autobiographical memoir Speak, Memory [Bloboprev].

Prof O'Keane has lived in exciting times since she was reading psychiatry as a student 40 years ago. Back then, with a straight face, experts would explain Freud's peculiar obsessions with penises and little girls  and how talking might help people get over their madness. Since then tech has delivered much better molecular and cellular mechanisms for when the mind-trolley leaves the tracks of what society allows as normal. And anti-psychotic anti-depressive meds can give a life-changing fix to the unhappy for far less investment than hours, days, years of psycho-therapy. Yes, MegaPharm share-holders win big-time;  yes, there can be egregious side-effects; yes, we are over medicalising normal variation . . . but for hundreds of people in Ireland today medication allows them to get up in the morning and go to work and have a bit of craic, at the water-cooler and the week-end. 

The kind of neurological detail which is now available is that individual neurons in the right hippocampus will fire as a rat-on-a-grid pass a particular location. But that the next neuron to fire (as the next external location is crossed) is identifiable but not adjacent to the first. This is in contrast to Penfield's homunculus where the [sensory or motor] toe neuron is connected to the foot neuron etc. albeit on the scale of slabs of neurons rather than individual neurons. That's the modern nanotech break-through: scientists can monitor the inside of a single living cell.

O'Keane quotes Henri Bergson as believing intuition is based on memory . . . as it must be. Intuitions are the result of  experience and learning even if we might not have consciously been aware of the lesson. it is no surprise therefore that Elders are better at guessing than their children and youngsters. Life experience clocks up facts, inventories successful outcomes and learns from mistakes. Younger people haven't been around long enough to build up their have-a-punt database. Age must be the basis of my success at table-quizzes.

The chapter on false memory and how it arises is particularly on topic for me, because I've been called to jury service in May. I shall be super-skeptical about eye-witness testimony, no matter how tall the stack of bibles upon which it is sworn. Elizabeth Loftus, the grand vizier of the field, is cited. Memory is dynamic: every time we recall something it's like taking a china soup-tureen out of the kitchen. By the time we've finished showing it to the vicar, the matching ladle has fallen to the ground and been replaced with fire-tongs; the soup has been swapped with tea; and it's been chipped by brisk contact with the marble counter-top.

This book is not without its quirks and peculiarities [too much bigging up TCD for some?] but is a brave attempt to lay out the science and mechanisms of memory in terms that won't baffle Joe and Josie Poblacht.

↪“That’s what I did,” says my memory. “I couldn’t have done that,” says my pride, and remains adamant. Finally, memory yields. Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil.

I found me Da

The Census has been controversial since Mary and Joseph were required to register, in  person, at his Home Place in Bethlehem so that they could be enumerated by the Roman Imperium. 
Q. Why bother to do such head-counts?
A. Because numbers are essential for effective planning, and fair taxation.
Further controversy: on 30 June 1922 the early census records for Ireland went up in flames when the Four Courts, and the Public Records Office, were blown up during the Civil War [smoking ruin R]. But The Man had, for reasons of economy and archival ignorance, already dumped the original records for 1861-1891. So the earliest enumeration sheets for Ireland are for 1901 and 1911.  These records are searchable on-line, if you desire to find out who lived in your house or your home-place all those years ago. You can also get as nosy as you want about any other place which existed and was inhabited at that time. There was no census in 1921 b/c War of Independence. 

The Blob had a look at who was living in the Home Place in King's County in 1901 & 1911. In 1901, four sisters (aged Gwen 27, Lily 25, Alys 22, Myrtle 17) are living there with Lily's 1y.o. child. The three boys are all away from home having hi-jinks and adventures in the Boer War. By 1911, the oldest son has married, returned to his patrimony, and cuckoo-like ejected all his siblings . . . replacing them with - ahem -servants. There were a bunch of servants in the Big House in 1901 also. But it's pretty close exchange: 1 sister for 1 servant

My father was born in London in 1917 but returned to Ireland when his father was appointed Harbourmaster of Dunmore East in 1922.

The first census of the inhabitants of Saorstad Éireann, the barely solvent The Irish Free State, was rolled out on 18th April 1926 and, exactly 100 years later, these also became freely searchable. And there's The Da, aged 8½ asleep in his bed on the quayside in Dunmore. It's kinda sweet given that he was then younger than Gdau.II is now. There's also a 25 y.o. general domestic servant in that Tiny House - possibly sleeping upright in a kitchen press like a 21stC filipino maid in an Oligarch's flat in Central London.

Where's the rest of the family in 1926? 

• Gwen has married a solicitor called Alured and is living in Abbeleix. Confusingly, Alured is "two els" Allured  in 1911 and still living at home despite being qualified and 33 years old. 
• Lily has left the country with her daughter. She dumped the child's father at about that time and married Big Coal from NE England - or maybe didn't marry him? That was never clear when we got to know the couple in the 1960s.  The 'child' Periwinkle was 26 and making her mark as a golfer, dancer and avant-gardiste before she settled down after WWII in Glengarriff
• 
  Alys became Alice between 1901 and 1926 was married and widowed and is living on the shores of Lough Derg. My father's first cousin Posy was entered on that census form but scratched out by the enumerator [R]. I'm guessing that's because she was somewhere else on the night of 18-19 Apr 1926 - perhaps visiting her Aunt lily in England?
• Myrtle [married, war-widowed] was a Visitor in a Big House (many servants) in Co Meath.
• Hardress is still Patriarching in the Home Place; he married Big Sheep from Australia which allowed him to continue living in the servant-supported style to which he'd been accustomed. His Wife is Adoline in 1911 but [correctly] Adeline in 1926
• Evan has, hilariously and ironically, been transcribed as Ivan and married with two children 1F1M, 'only' two servants. His sister-in-law is visiting that Sunday in April. 

That sibship of seven, despite being "shy breeders" have many living descendants. 

• F1 = all dead now mostly in the fullness of their years: health prognosis good for me.
• F2 = 7 including me
• F3 = 18 incl. The Boy, Dau.I and Dau.II
• F4 = 6 incl Gdau.I and Gdau.II

But the family is finally 'daughtering out' as girls but not boys get born. Unless my brother's 30-something son pulls a chap out of the bag next time - a daughter was born to that line before Christmas 2025 - it's all up with the family surname.  No Lloss.