Ingrained

It might be so that happiness is being true to yourself and finding your own level. When I was far too young to know what my true self might be, I entertained a fantasy about being a carpenter and maker of furniture. But I bottled it: not even having the oomph to ask. But that's okay, if I had gone that way, I would now, after 50 years of errors splinters and broken finger-nails, be pretty good at making tables. As it is I was pretty good at making sense of genomes, despite being embarrassingly ploddy at writing code. We only have one life so it's rarely possible to open the door to all the shops which might provide work which we are pretty good at.

Well before Christmas my Boston Correspondent P told me I must read Ingrained: The Making of a Craftsman (2024) by Callum Robinson. I don't buy books any more, but rather play the long game and wait for a shared copy to come available at the library. And I collected Ingrained just before the Twelfth Night cold snap. Perfect reading as I fired logs into the fire against the penetrating drafts.

I get the feeling that young Callum was saved by wood-work despite not being a Natural at visualizing in 3-D and not having an intuitive feel^↓ for the tools of his trade. It was OldBuck-YoungBuck challenging for him that his father was a truly gifted worker-in-wood in a way that seemed without effort. We haven't heard from the father if his feet were paddling gang-busters beneath the surface of his graceful progress. Right at the end of the book father and son had a whisky-fuelled heart-to-heart in which Robinson Père reveals that he stayed working with his hands despite an expensive education and professional quals because he . just . could . not . be a manager which was the only option for him to rise in his profession. Amen, brother.

And l👁👁k [L], The Boy done good! With a little help from the love of his life, from his father, from his hand-picked hand-crafting employees, from his therapeutic dog walks: he makes original, graceful, fit-for-purpose, quirky, quality furniture to die for . . . and get written up in Colour Supplements and commissioned by the great and the good - if they can afford it. Because hand-craft and quality come only from first class material and many hours of labour by people who can work magic with steel on wood.

↓ Intuitive feel is what my friend Elli had at the lab bench . . . and I emphatically did not. I am so glad I got out of lab work before I got good enough to pass muster . One self-inflicted spatter accident was one too many and it didn't seem likely to be my last. The rest of my life has been choosing low stakes outlets so that any of my talent which is death to hide is not lodged with me useless.

Gaudete St Fursday

Dateline Thursday 08:31 16 Jan 2025.
Lá Fhéile Fursa!

Sprang out of bed and yomped up the hill in the twilight to witness Sunrise on St Fursey's Day - which is becoming quite the tradition. Crystal clear the night before with Venus & Saturn coming towards conjunction in the SW; Jupiter near Aldebaran between Orion and the Pleiades; and Mars suspended below Pollux in Gemini. But sunrise? that was, this year, a dull grey sombre event:

Note to self: it really only takes 30 minutes from sofa to altar, and there's no advantage to setting off, like my father, in good time. That just involves hunkering down in the lee of the stone (the only local shelter) waiting for 08:31. There's nowhere to sit without getting a wet seat; although the almost vertical stone on the left does provide a sort of misericord support. Bring a feedsack? I slipped and sat down in the wet heather anyway on the way down.

20 minutes later and 170m lower down, there was a struggle between sun and lowering cloud behind The Thorn [last year]:

And now, 90 minutes too late, it's a bright sunny day in the yard. But can't complain: knees still up for it.

The cardinal done it.

Dau.I and Dau.II are now bunking together in Dublin Centraal. They rent a teeny tiny flat in a Late-Tiger apartment complex. Building regulations allow developers to build and sell apartments where neither the kitchen nor the bathroom have a window. But bedrooms must be at least 7.1 sq.m. with the width at least 2.1m AND have a window (or second door) for emergency exit. The floor area for a 2-bed apartment (assumed to sleep four people) must be 73 sq.m. in size. I haven't measured but their home might be a generous 75 sq.m. which is not absurdly smaller than our 'umble tumble farmhouse [95 sq.m.] but we have a kitchen with a view and natural light in the bathroom. And we can spill out into the yard if the weather is nice enough [predicted to be 3 days in July 2025].

The Daus have been playing 20-D orcs and dragons on the reg'lar last year with a couple of chaps. After one of the sessions in November they all imagined that it might be fun to rent a down-country AirBnB for a long weekend in the New Year - y'know fresh air, change of scene, throwing axes etc. The lads thought it might be nice to visit the Sunny SouthEast. After a few more encounters with grim-faced crusaders in taverns, Dau.II said "that's actually a ridiculous idea, when we could boot out my folks and go and stay there instead". It was presented to us as a neat bit of reciprocity: town-mouse and country-mouse seeing how the other half lives. "you could go out to dinner, share a bottle of plonk . . . and walk home" she said, and "think how many films with subtitles you could clock in three days" and "that Jane Clarke meets the weavers exhibition closes on the 19th Jan".

We woz willing and, well before Christmas, we agreed to do the house-swap from Fri 10th to Mon 13th Jan 2025. But a week beforehand the Sunny SouthEast took a moderate dump of snow followed by 5 days and nights of Baltic weather. But, despite anxiety, it was alright on the night! A thaw set in early on Friday and the roads were mostly snow-free when, in the fore-noon, we headed off to the train station with our free-travel passes. It's a little weird doing a free gaff at your offspring's but the flat is a lot more spacious and less vexillologically challenged than a room in the Hotel Generic.

We did make a flying visit to the Jane Clarke show and met the extended family of one of our neighbours . . . because Ireland is a very small place. But we were on our way to spend 2 hours with Men in Frocks [check out (last para) Colm Tóibín's wonderful skewering essay Among the Flutterers] watching Conclave at the IFI. Don't read any reviews! there will be spoilers. It is gorgeous to behold, there are neither car-chases nor helicopter gunships, and nobody dies . . . except the out-going pontiff - played horizontally with 'aplomb' by Bruno Novelli.  "Certainty is the great enemy of Unity" Good fun. Recommended.

As for house-swapping in Winter; good fun, would do again.

Bouncing the polytunnel

Did I mention that we had a dump of snow last weekend? I did, in passing. It's true that fallen snow is, like ice-cream, mostly air - let's say it has a density of 10% of liquid/solid water. But that can still be a lorra weight it spread out across a large structure. An under-engineered flat roofed sports complex in Tralee collapsed at 06:00hrs during the recent orange snow and ice warning for the South of Ireland [Galway to Dublin downwards, not the 26 counties]. I'm sure the structural specs took data on 100 year snow events, adding 50% for safety, to determine the size of the trusses. It's a roof: you don't want to over-engineer it because you then have to up-spec the walls to carry the additional weight. There will be an enquiry, everyone will lawyer up, nobody will lose their jobs or be sanctioned. Not least because the structure was opened in 1977, so most of those responsible are dead in the 80s or older.

We have a relatable situation in the polytunnel which has a 9m x 17m = 150 sq.m. footprint, with say half of it sort of horizontal. Well. flat enough to hold snow as it falls. On the night 04/05 Jan, we got 9cm of snow. Which is about 10mm of rain equivalent, except that it stayed on the polytunnel roof rather than running away. That's less than a tonne [75sq.m x 10mm = 750kg] of extra weight up there but it l👁👁ked a lot more under the bulging plastic. That 's polythene, which ripped asunder at the height of  the Darwinday Storm of 2014 but is generally good for plastic deformation. We have a convenient length of 50mm ⌀ plastic pipe that can reach all areas on the inside of the plastic, so I put a robust rubber glove on the end of the pipe and, starting at the bottom, bounced some of the snow off the roof. Gotta get the rhythm, bro. Over the next tuthree days, I bounced a little more; until almost all the extra weight was on the ground. No Tralee here . . . this time

You can see the effect in the picture for 2 of the eight bays of the tunnel: a gurt hape of heavy snow on the ground and a clean-ish track on the plastic where the snow has scoured off the algae. You can also see one end of the 2014 Darwinday rip covered with fresh white Fablon® since the 2022 refurb by Rene and Kamil.

We hazarded leaving the sheep [N = 15] in the 0.4 ha field adjacent to the tunnel and they've been getting a breakfast of sheep muesli and some rather tasty-smelling hay which we've had in reserve for the last few years [hey, thanks Syl!]. The sheep seem to be doing okay on such short commons.

Newton's needle

After Irvine's Foot and  Galileo's finger we have . .  Newton's needle

Ireland had its first really cold snap since Storm Emma in March 2018. The logistical difficulties weren't helped by us having a power-cut from 01:30hrs to 17:00hrs on Epiphaneve [05 Jan 25]. That background is probably irrelevant to the fact I managed to give myself thumb-poke in eye while turning in the bed. In any case, I 'saw' a bright light which couldn't be external / electrical. The following night, I woke up [screaming] with a connexion and got out of bed at 01:00 to capture the meander: much easier having had power restored. Newton jiggled a bodkin behind his own eyeball to see what he could see about how changing the shape of the orbit affected his perception.

That Newton was some man for one man - optics, cat-flaps, gravity, Warden of the Royal Mint, astrology. But he wasn't the only scientist up for auto-experimentation. Barry Marshall chugged down a glass of Helicobacter pylori, for one. And JBS Haldane went to absurd lengths in trying to increase the titre of CO₂ in his blood. Actually, those gaseous self-experiments were first visited upon young JBS by his father physiologist J.S. Haldane before Haldane Jr was old enough to vote and def'n'y before informed consent!

There are several other examples of adults doing sketchy things to children in the name of science. Bloboprev: In May 1796 Jenner inoculated 8 y.o. James Phipps, without informed consent, but with cowpox ‘matter’ from the hands of Sarah Nelmes, who had caught cowpox from a cow called Blossom. There really is TMI in that sentence but you get my drift. More recently, in 1990, UK Agriculture Minister John Gummer tried forcing his 4 year old daughter Cordelia to tuck into a beefburger not contaminated with BSE [whc bloboprev].

St Googler of Search reveals that self-experimentation is A Thing . . .

Or at the very least a book  by Lawrence Altman, The New York Times medical columnist: Who Goes First?: The Story of Self-Experimentation in Medicine (1998). Allen Weisse assembled the profit and loss in 2012 Tex Heart Inst J, 39(1):51–54. Self-Experimentation and its Role in Medical Research [free full text]. 465 examples culled from 200 years of medical investigation . . . resulting in 8 deaths and 13 Nobel Prizes. Four of the latter, as well as Marshall, have been Blobbed: Ramsay - Landsteiner - Banting - Metchnikoff.  

Don't try any of this at home kids!

A Pearson Person

All my post-grad life I've been buying up 25c copies of MJ Moroney's book Facts From Figures (1951) and giving them to younger people who have numbers to crunch. Because statistics is a) essential for effective science b) usually taught so poorly across these islands. Moroney strikes an agreeable balance between correct and accessible, but it's dated by being written before calculators, let alone Excel SPSS and R. As a 12 y.o. could calculate the variance of a [small] dataset with the help of a pencil, squared paper and Charlier's Checks. Nobody would consider teaching the skill to Gdau.I at the same age.

I was in Wexford Town Library early before Science Cafe in mid-December and found a copy of David Spiegelhalter's The Art of Statistics, Learning from Data (2020) call out to me from the 519.5 shelving. Spiegelhalter is frequently wheeled on stage for the Tim Harford's More of Less podcast when some egregious numerical bloomer needs to be exposed and explained to Joe Public . . . without being either stodgy, geeky or patronising.

There are some arresting patriarch-involving images. In explaining the prosecutor's fallacy, Spiegelhalter uses the following as a reductio ad absurdem: if you're the pope, then you're a Catholic is not the same as if you're a Catholic then you're the pope. Later, in a discussion of Bayesian statistics, he considers likelihood ratio = (the prob of dealing himself a royal flush, assuming the Archbishop of Canterbury is cheating) ÷ (the prob of royal flush assuming the ABofC is lucky). Which was funnier because absurd when the sentence was written than now with the 2024 Archbishop of Canterbury sheltering abusive paedophiles and resigning only with reluctance.

The self-styled Chevalier de Méré was a 17thC rake who gambled A Lot. He wanted to know which of two dicey games of chance was mostly likely to make him long-term money: a) throw a single dice 4x to get a single ⚅ or b) throw pairs of dice 24x to land ⚅⚅ [wrong wrong almost R]. Neither he, nor anybody else at the time, knew the correct mathematical way to calculate the odds, so he set to and rolled a heckuva lot of dice to [correctly] determine the answer. Hanc marginis exiguitas non caperet This is exactly what I did to determine the likelihood of winning while playing Klondike patience. The Chev wanted the right answer mathematically to save other gamblers from doing a similar multiple trial experiment and presented it to Blaise "God's Wager" Pascal [prev] who in turn shared it with Pierre "Hanc marginis exiguitas non caperet" de Fermat [prev]. Between them they started the modern ride in probability theory. People like me, who started calculating means standard deviations on paper ~60 years ago are now trying to get their heads around Bayesian stats and  prior and posterior probabilities. Spiegelhalter 2020 is helpful in this regard, while Moroney1950  ignored the issue entirely.

Reveal. Pearson Person? Both Karl "correlation" Pearson and son Egon "confidence" Pearson get a shout. But really, at heart, Spiegelhalter is a Bayesian Bloke

Handcrafted

I was a[n over educated] late developer. Didn't get a proper job, commensurate with all that training, until I was 29. Three years later, my contract with the university was renewed for another 3 years. We decided that if we were stopping in Geordieland we might as well buy a house rather than paying rent forever. Ah the privilege of being born in the mid1950s: so much choice. We 'viewed' +30 properties in the Summer of 1986 and eventually plumped for a dilapidated mid terrace in a respectable working class suburb of Newcastle upon Tyne. It cost £21,000 = the £15K mortgage about 1.3x my salary. The Boy was a tween, I'd just got a pay-rise, the mortgage was less than the rent we'd been paying, life was pretty good.

One aspect of feelgood was that The Boy could walk down the street on Mondays after school and buy his copy of 2000AD [for 28p - was that expensive?] a weekly SciFi comic which featured inter alia Judge Dredd an amoral law enforcer on a bike [L]. At about the same time, I started spending most Tuesday evenings in the basement of library learning the fine craft of book-binding. After a tuthree years, I'd put manners on all the oh-so-useful hardbacks bought for 25c at US yard-sales. Coming up for his 12th birthday, I made off with a year's worth of The Boy's 2000AD collection. Over a couple Tuesdays, I sewed them all together, constructed a hard-cover 'case' and bound it in maroon library cloth. With The Boy and '2000AD' in gold lettering on the spine, it made an acceptable gift. Albeit the size of a family bible.

Fast forward 6 years, we'd sold the house on Cheltenham Terrace [for £53,000 as you're curious] and embraced further adventures; starting with moving home to Ireland in 1990. At a free-gaff at the farmhouse where we lived out by the airport in No Dublin, a miserable entitled young bravo pal of The Boy [we never found out which/whom] made off with the 2000AD compilation volume. I'm all for wealth re-distribution so we finish up with a more equal society. But there really is a difference between things bought for money and things crafted with love [see recent].