Invisible handle extension

Boo-hoo, my favorite aluminum pot-belly saucepan is finally declared beyond the capability of ShonXrepair inc. When we found it in a Gt Boston yard-sale 45 years ago, it had already done a generation of service for an American family. Probably cast and assembled ~1950 at the height of Boomer material space-age prosperity. I guess the base was originally flat, so it would work efficiently on a 1950 vintage General Electric stove. Since then the saucepan's bottom has acquired a convex sag; but then so has mine. Worked fine with our gas hob.

In recent years, I Sugru'd up a crack in the wooden handle, first in blue and then green but now the internal bolt [steel] has rusted out - and I can't get the anti-grav hover mechanism to kick in. My old partner will have to join me in retirement. Eeee, they don't make 'em like they used to.

In other news, Dau.I the Book and Dau.II the Cook came down for Christmas. I was tasked to source a nice piece of organic bacon collar for the carnivorous half of the family. Obvs I went to Rathgarogue Organic Pork [whc Prev for eggs]. Cookie baked that on Christmas Eve to give oven-room for a chicken the following day. VegHalf had musharooms Wellington. A colourful variety of vegetable sides filled the corners. After dinner we sacked out to watch The Birdcage [1996] an American remake of the wonderful La Cage au Folles [1978] which we saw in a multiplex in Albany NY in Oct 1980. We were much younger then than our girls are now. Counting our blessings - it's been a crap Christmas for too many people across the county, the country and the world.

Disappointment calendar

In the 1990s, for several years, I made an Advent calendar for Dau.I and Dau.II. This required printing out two identical pages of 160gsm card covered with 24 randomly scattered rectangles. On the back sheet, I used the rectangles to frame 24 age-appropriate, ironic pictures [ZwartePiet ☻on the 5th; tools 🛠 on the 7th; Rudolf's nose ⬤ on the 9th; a menorah 🕎 on the 15th; a parcel📦on the 24th]. On the front sheet, I cut 3of4 sides of each rectangle with a craft-knife and then covered the whole thing with a holiday themed picture. Dobs of glue were put between the rectangles on the back sheet and especially round the outside edges and the two sheets pressed together. It was shoddy, shonky and crafted with love. Valuing my time at the minimum wage, each calendar was 'worth' ~€60 yoyos. Somewhere, there is an archive of these unique objets d'art for some definitions of Art.

Sometime in the second week of December 2025, there came into our possession a Kinnerton [who? about] Advent Calendar [as L]. I understand that Bluey is a TV doggonality which might be attractive to kids the same age as Dau.I & Dau.II were when I made Advent Calendars for them. Not all modern parents [or aunties?] value their time but some do and and so they buy an Advent Calendar: a snip @ €4.95. The Kinnerton Calendar front has far better production values that my home-made kludges but the rest is deeply disappointing: the 24 (35mm x 40mm) doors cover a 6 x 4 blister pack, each cell of which contains wafer of chocolate [by some definitions of chocolate] the size of a toe-nail. I kid you not, each door hides 1.7g of matter. The total edible part weighs in at 40g or 1½oz in old money.

"Our Safe Nut Promise means that you and your loved ones can enjoy delicious moments reassured that we really care about our products totally nut-safe". In this case, say one moment is < 2 seconds. Then you're paying €5 for ~one minute of  deliciousness. Or €300/hr - suddenly my home-made advent calendar is looking like Value!

Or to put it another way, this food adjacent product retails at €125/kg. More than 2x the price of insect health bars or in other blobwords cheaper than bayleaves but more expensive than nutmeg. 

Ingredients [did we say No nuts? we did in FI DK NO SE as well as English]
Sugar, Vegetable Fats (Palm, Sal, Shea in varying proportions), Dried Skimmed MILK, Dried Whole MILK, Cocoa Mass*,  Emulsifier (Lecithin), Vanilla Flavouring, *Rainforest Alliance Certified.

Fear not! The Blob has your back on Sal Shea Palm vegetable fats. Whatevs, today is Christmas Eve, last door for most Advent calendars!

What is the Magyar for woodpecker?

When we came back to Ireland in 1990, we lived in a rented farmhouse out by Dublin Airport, maybe 12km N of O'Connell Bridge. My landlord mentioned that he had done his homework at the kitchen table by paraffin lamp until, when he turned 16, rural electrification f i n a l l y rolled out to his parish and he could see what he was doing after dark. I never got a date on that or indeed Paddy's DoB, but early-50s seemed correct. The Shannon Scheme went live in 1929. Our house was built in 1941 probably w/o the 'lectric. 

A few days ago, through the drizzle, I heard a car-door slam and went to chekkitout: because we were expecting UPS and they needed to turn where that car was probably parked. It was a white van and the driver was thrashing about in our shrubberies on the other side of the lane!?! Turns out he was a contractor for ESB networks checking to see if the electricity poles hereabouts were fit for purpose. I told him I knew that 'our' poles had been installed in Spring 1997. That's information but only a proxy for whether the poles were fit for purpose. And, he added, you're wrong: this pole was erected in 1956 ['56 as circled R]. I had to defer to his domain of knowledge and admit that I had been incorrect about the number of new utility poles (N = 1 [✓]) we got in 1997. And indeed, now I had the correct search-image, I walked downhill to other pole and found a similar tinplate label with "1997" on it.

Me, as a Network Know-nothing, might have put more credence in another sign [L] on the first pole saying "COBRA 1978". Both poles have QR-codes that will contain a lot more information about signage, location, quality, provenance, age; but I don't read QR. We continued to chat in the not-quite-drizzle. Transpired that this Effective had been born and brought up in Hungary but was here because the work was here. Go! Stay The New Irish. Hours of electronic training playing Grand Theft Auto really don't equip the Youth of Today to stand a ladder up against a pole in the rain. It was just as well that we'd had Glavey Tree Experts in July to thin out the jungle and trim some, fell some, trees around that electric pole. According to my new Magyar pal, the best tool for assessing the utility of utility poles is a hammer. Like a um woodpecker! The first few tonks by a woodpecker can assess whether wood is hollow enough to support insects enough to make this tree worth the effort. Apparently ESB networks had, several years ago, acquired a ship-load of Swedish poles which below standard wrt core integrity as per contract and these had attracted A Lot of woodpeckers in a futile hunt for insects.

I've noted before that hitting things with a hammer can yield key information for stone-masons. 

And farmers can get compensated for having ESB poles on their land. Who knew? 

And I'm sure you're hopping about for the answer to 
Q. What is the Magyar for woodpecker?
A. Our newly re-native woodpecker is Dendrocopos major = the great spotted woodpecker. In Hungary they call it nagy [big] fakopáncs or harkály. My Dec'25 conversation about birds was a lot easier [not to say charged with electricity] than one I had [Garrulus glandarius = Vlaamse gaai = Jay] with a monoglot farmer from Gelderland in 1975.

Two degrees of connexion

So what's it to be with crime - punishment or rehabilitation? Having done stupid, dangerous, illegal and cruel things in my life [but not all at once!] I vote for rehabilitation. Recent Blob disagreeing with the cries of bang 'em up and throw away the key for killers. 

The Boy 'takes' The Economist, and sends me their weekly Simply Science round-up. I read most of this and occasionally ask for a guest-link to the full article. Second week in December there was a piece on quantum physics about which I know as much as would fit on a photon. I perked up at “Don’t worry your head about what’s really going on,” was the attitude of the early quantum engineers, according to Paul Davies, a physicist at Arizona State University. “This is the so-called ‘Shut up and calculate’ school.” Those engineers ended up creating semiconductors, leading to the device that you’re using to read this, and much more. But only because Paul Davies (physicist, writer and broadcaster) [R] and I were both on the U.NuponT payroll at the same time in the 80s. Even back then Davies was a star and he started his meteoric rise to the firmament while hop-scotching through 7 prestigious Universities on three different continents. Knocking off 28 [!] popular science books along the way . . . as well as his day job pubs.

I double checked in Wikipedia that 'my' Paul Davies in 1980s Newcastle was the same bloke as the Economist sound-byter in the 2020s [✓]. My eye slid down the page to Davies was a co-author on the 2011 Science article "A Bacterium That Can Grow by Using Arsenic Instead of Phosphorus". Whoa! We know that paper! It was cited by Tony Kavanagh [on The Blob] - extraordinary claims require extraordinary levels of proof, and in this case not even ordinary levels of proof had been carried out. Eeee, he were quite cross, our Tony! Back in 2013, I didn't scrutinize the [N = 12] authors but in 2025 I was in name-and-blame mode and I saw John F Stolz on the list.

I know that guy too. He was in Boston University graduate school at the same time as me 45 years ago! He was doing a PhD on stromatolites and early-early microbial life-forms with . . . Lynn Margulis my late lamented friend and mentor. I guess he had something to add to The Arsenic Paper: having a lifetime of expertise in the oddbiome. As a co-author, you have, in the first instance, to trust that your colleagues are doing the work assigned to them. If we could flip eppendorfs AND grind multivariate statistics AND GIMP graphics then we wouldn't need graduate students and/or to 'buy-in' expertise from another institution. Paul Davies not so much??: Apparently he said "I had the advantage of being unencumbered by knowledge. I dropped chemistry at the age of 16, and all I knew about arsenic came from Agatha Christie novels." WTF? Why are you endorsing the paper if ya know nuttin'? It is entirely possible that, given the power of celebrity in our culture, that adding his name to the Arsenic Paper's author list helped bring it to the attention of the editorial board of Science - and then get it over the line and into print. Of course, that editorial board [and at least two independent referees] were culpable for publishing sexy without conducting due diligence - to get ahead in the Nature vs Science rating wars.

I must add that there is no suggestion that anyone on The Arsenic Paper was making stuff up or finagling the data or being dishonest. But when you think you've found something exo-biology extra-ordinary never found on Earth before then you need extraordinary levels of proof which means going the extra mile to be sure to be sure that you're not going to finish up with a red face.

Maybe I am the connecting link between Stolz and Davies: I'm quite prone to being credulous: my first reaction to a compelling sciencey headline is more likely to be Hey that's neat rather than sounds like a loada bollix. Perhaps Dulled Crap Detector DCD is a contagious virus and I was the vector. That Arsenic Paper was a) controversial and b) conclusively shown to be wrong within a year of publication but it continued in a zombie state to be available online in Science until July this year. when it was RETRACTED. Which is perhaps inappropriate? Because the team may have been wrong but they weren't doing anything wrong. If you can't be wrong in Science you're not close enough to the cutting edge. And <tsk!> the News&Views layperson summary to the paper (which I cited in my 2013 Blob) is still failing to flag that the original paper is suspect; giving ammunition and succour to bad-faith nut-jobs from the Planet Zorg.

And hello Jason Hosken at The Economist who put together the relevant Simply Science round-up which started me off on this rant: when you're looking for a quote next time maybe look over the shoulder of Paul Davies to find someone with less tarnish on their street cred.

Before I sign off, let's emphasize that we should condemn the sin and not the sinner. Everyone can make a mistake or even, like me, do stupid, dangerous, illegal and cruel things. The correct response is not to cross the street when we see them coming, refuse them work or healthcare. Then again it's okay to remember past transgressions and factor that into how we move forward. Life isn't black and  white  it's beige.

BobTheSidebar

After 2030 days contributing to MetaFilter, 
67 Front Page Posts FPPs, and 
1337 comments 
finally . . . BobTheSidebar. It's one of the advantages to having written +2 million words of copy: there is an extensive mine of material to cut and paste. No sucking the pencil required. Obvs, the intersect between what has interested me in the past and what might be relevant to MetaFilter today ie (Blob  MeFi) is not q u i t e ∅ the null set but - close.

But here I was able to rob a couple of Blobs [counting and Wageningen] to edify MeFi.

Except the Black hoggett

 Over on MetaFilter, there is a section where ppl can and do Ask questions and the community offer solutions. The Asks [a technical term] can be practical or peculiar but the responses must be on message and in good faith or they are likely to get deleted. There was a recent Ask about the experience and embrace of The Night. It has a bit of a "internet please do my home-work for me" vibe. But there were a number of nice responses from crepuscular and noctambulant MeFites. Like Paul Simon I'm a "hello darkness my old friend" sorta guy and have done dumbass things in tunnels and in bunkers [same link]. Spelunking is another, lesser, level of hazard; and it's no picnic at Sleat's Gill. The other example of finding comfort in the dark for me was when I barfed up a half kilo of undercooked cabbage in Sandymount 25 years ago.

But falsedmitri wasn't getting any of that from me. Rather I shared a part of my normal experience working as The Outdoor Man on our farmlet. I have found to my cost that, if sheep die [and they do!], it's Much better to find, and handle, them "fresh" rather than bloated buzzing and in bits.  Earlier this year The Beloved bought 4 lambs from a neighbour to keep flock numbers up to quota.  It seemed like a good idea at the time to include a pure black ewelet and three reg'lar Cheviots. They grew up together and are still quite stand-offish from the other older sheep in their new home.

My AskMefi answer: I "look the hill" on the regular counting the sheep, incl last thing at night. Sheep are just the perfick thing to count in the dark . . . except the black hoggett. She's often hard to locate in full daylight. Finding her (alert, on four good legs) in the shadows is a Win and a comfort. The very next morning I was out super early because a big front of rain was incommming - and who likes to BoPeep while soaking wet if it can be avoided? And I came up One short in the count. Dang!  But I heartened in twigging that BlackOne was the AWOL and it was more likely a hidden in plain sight than a expired in the bushes problem. And sure enough . . . there are two [2] sheep in this view:

Crap pixellated photo is only part of the perception problem.  Here's the clue:

It's like Antonioni's Blow-Up [1966] in which a professional photographer in London's swinging sixties may have found evidence of a murder in the background of one of his fashion pictures. If you haven't seen Blow-Up, you're missing something whoa weird.

My people My People

On St John's Day 2022, I broke out of the confines of Coronarama and drove across country to the University of Limerick UL to attend the 1st VIBE [Virtual Institute of Bioinformatics and Evolution] meeting after the lockdowns and disruptions of the pandemic. I've been involved in these events from the very beginning in 2002; and played myne host on two occasions 2006 and 2014. That June day in '22 started off with great promise as I sauntered across country in Summer sunshine but the weather turn cold with showers by tea-time and my voyage home was less exuberant. The weather was a pathetic fallacy of how I felt inside.

When I started "analyzing DNA and protein sequences" in 1990 that was the definition of Bioinformatics and our small lab in Dublin was really at the cutting edge. The sequences which I was analyzing were drawn from databases which were tiny by today's standards and I was expected to curate them carefully to eliminate sequencing duplicates and minor genetic variants but retain cases where two or more genes had accumulated changes after duplication from a common ancestor. My first paper considered all 45 genes that were then available for the fungus Aspergillus nidulans. I read every paper associated with each of those genes. In those days it cost ~€1 to sequence one DNA basepair. 20 years later the price was 10 million times cheaper.

And ten years later at the 2022 VIBE, The Effectives were a) 40 years younger than me and b) cranking through datasets which were 40 million times larger. Obvs, these young turks were not reading all the relevant papers, let alone with care and attention. And the analysis hinged on using "pipelines" of concatenated software, some of which they'd acquired off the shelf and some were hundreds of lines of Python all their own work. I had a nice nostalgic lunch with a couple of other crumblies and I did chat to some of the youngsters. But at the end of the day, driving home in the drizzle, I quoted Tennyson "

. . . The old order changeth, yielding place to new,

And God fulfils Himself in many ways,

Lest one good custom should corrupt the world . . .

and resolved to find myself an iceflow rather than going to the next VIBE. So I missed 2023 at QUB Belfast and 2024 NUIGalway but didn't miss missing them. 

In early 2025,  word went out that VIBE was coming full circle back to TCD to celebrate 25 years of sharing ideas about sequences and evolution in Ireland.

• Dublin is a lot more easy of access than Limerick, Belfast or Galway
• I got me bus-pass
• I'd been sort of supervising [by zoom and email] one of the TCD Effectives who might be presenting her work
• Having been at TCD man and boy, I know where all the t'ilets are - not unimportant for an old chap
• They promised a free lunch and there was hope for some merch

I had a great time. There were a few people of my generation, and several of the next generation with whom I'd worked back in the day. And I got to meet 'my' Effective as she stood by 'our' poster. I could follow many of the talks in the morning session - because they were talking more about evolution and less about pipelines. Some of them made me think and/or question my certainties. All in all, a pretty good day.

But come 5 o'clock I was done. I'd been awake for 12 hours. The afternoon session was leaning towards the software end of our field and I was lost at the second or third slide of each prez. But I had an Exit Strategy which was to go out to dinner with Dau.I and Dau.II. We went sub-continental and it was biryani dahlicious. They gave me a bed for the night and I went home by train into Storm Bram the next morning. Midmorning on a weekday Heuston Station is very quiet, and I was able to find a seat to wait my train. A while back Irish Rail installed a public piano in the station concourse and a young bloke was tinkling away on it to pass the time. But the tannoy called the Cork train and he left and nobody took cudgels to the keyboard. There was no Christmas Music which was a relief and a blessing and I had a rather good ear-book.