Much add about Shagsper

A month ago, by accident / in desperation, I tapped into a rich seam of books about math-for-real-life by Rob Eastaway. I enjoyed it, noted another dozen books in the seam and placed a reservation on his Much Ado About Numbers: Shakespeare's Mathematical Life and Times [2024]. For Eastaway, books are both his medium and his métier. For me, I package my copy into ~700 word Blobs. Nowadays, while it might take a tuthree hours of work to get to a final draft, launching the post gives rather effective closure. In a fortnight's time, I won't remember most of what I write this week . . . but at least I'll have a record of what was floating my boat in the present moment.

For Eastaway, his pubs are ~100x longer than mine, and he has gotten A Lot of books off his ToDo list and into the public domain. But it all amounts to about 1 million words delivered. He must have a mental or physical notebook filled with great ideas which fail at the "can I work this up as a book" stage. And he also has to believe his agent and his publisher will continue to take a punt with any new manuscript when and if he finally gets it over the line. Me not so much! Each Blob is essentially one idea, with two riffs and possibly something dreadful I dredge up from the past. And being author, editor and publisher all together means fewer barriers to publication . . . and lower standards. Short-form (paradoxically?) Blobs means far more words in the oeuvre - at least 2½ million.

Much Ado About Numbers started when the BMA British Mathematical Association had its 2022 AGM in Stratford-upon-Avon and Eastaway was scheduled to do a workshop for teachers. I bet I could fill an hour with fact and foibles about Shakespeare, quotha. [rabbit-hole alert!] A careful reading of the complete works, and at least a dozen books about The Bard, and numerous visits to libraries and museums, and interviews with experts and obsessives . . . and two years et voilá another book.

It's a valiant attempt at introducing the Arts Block to the Math Department and vice versa. I'll just share one idea which is cogent because the math element of the issue was actively in the process of getting nailed while Shakespeare was sharpening his quill to dash off a few iambic pentameters. It concerns probability while throwing dice [in a low pot-house in Stepney, or elsewhere]. The standard belief in the 1500s was that throwing 3 dice to a total of 9 was equally likely as throwing a 10 . . . because of the current sense /theory of permutations. How do I love 9 (or 10), let me count the ways:

Total 9	Total 10
1,2,6	1,3,6
1,3,5	1,4,5
1,4,4	2,2,6
2,2,5	2,3,5
2,3,4	2,4,4
3,3,3	3,3,4

Six different ways of obtaining 9, six for 10: therefore same odds. But whoa! rookie error (but only since Galileo ~ 1618 and especially since Pascal and Fermat's 1654 correspondence, 40 years after Shakespeare's death, had key countervailing insights). The three dice are different [say, colours OR the order in which they hit the table OR Bob's Tom's Kit's] and this needs taking into account.

Total 9	Total 10
1,2,6 1,6,2 2,1,6 2,6,1 6,1,2 6,2,1	1,3,6 1,6,3 3,1,6 3,6,1 6,1,3 6,3,1
1,3,5 1,5,3 3,1,5 3,5,1 5,1,3 5,3,1	1,4,5 1,4,3 3,1,4 3,4,1 4,1,3 4,3,1
1,4,4 4,1,4 4,4,1	2,2,6 2,6,2 6,2,2
2,2,5 2,5,2 5,2,2	2,3,5 2,5,3 3,2,5 3,5,2 5,2,3 5,3,2
2,3,4 2,4,3 3,2,4 3,4,2 4,2,3 4,3,2	2,4,4 4,2,4 4,4,2
3,3,3	3,3,4 3,4,3 4,3,3

Thus there are 6+6+3+3+6+1=25 ways to throw 9 but 6+6+3+6+3+3=27 routes to 10. Smart gamblers might have known or intuited it but not the rubes. Heck, it probably wasn't general knowledge even after Pascal and Fermat cranked the numbers: look at how many people bet on a nag in the Grand National because its name sounded like a dessert. Lots of folk are just unwilling to do the math.  Of course, there is an app for doing dice probs - much easier than writing out permutations in HTML.

I've returned-with-thanks Much Ado About Numbers to the Library - your turn - I recommend!

Beechdrops

I was writing about hay-rattle Rhinanthus minor a peculiarly desirable meadow flower parasitic on grasses. Digging a bit revealed that it was part of  Family Orobanchaceae. Dang! that rings a bell I thought . . . but a distant one. The family name derives from the Greek ὄροβος (vetch, a legume) + ἄγχω (strangler). And that's the key to the family's success. Their roots invade the roots of grasses and legumes to dine off the products of their host's photosynthesis - collapse of grass, which allows other meadow species to thrive in the gaps. Orobanchs all engage in parasitism but some, like hay-rattle, do not inhale and retain the ability to photosynthesize. 

When we came back to Ireland in 1990, the TCD lab in which I started to work had just emptied of a clatter of exceptionally smart scientists who all, eventually, became Full Professors at UCD, the Other University.

One of them, Ken Wolfe, signed up as a PostDoc in Jeff Palmer's Bloomington Indiana lab; tasked to investigate what happens to the photosynthetic apparatus when a plant is no longer required to capture energy from the sun because it's gone full-metal parasite on its neighbours. This required Ken to learn which end of an eppendorf would open and how to extract and process DNA from a homogenate of tissue. He was notably more successful than me in his temporary sojourn as a real [white coat, safety glasses] scientist. In those couple of years, he mastered a whole new toolkit and sequenced the chloroplast genome of Epifagus virginiana [L in Arkansas pic by Eric Hunt] an Orobanch which is an obligate parasite on the roots of Fagus grandifolia the American beech: no other species will do.

If you are adept in the language of molecular biology you can read the whole PNAS paper. Function and evolution of a minimal plastid genome from a nonphotosynthetic parasitic plant.  tl;dr chloroplasts, originally free-living bacteria, have their own reduced genome consisting of a) a bunch of genes to make energy-capture proteins b) another bunch of genes to switch on the 'business' genes. Epifagus, no longer bothered about photosynthesis, has lost about 2/3s of the normal chloroplast genome. This suggests that chloroplasts do something else as well as energy capture. But the plant could also be still in the process of shedding baggage. That's a neat story about the pattern and process of evolution, all tied up from a standing start in two years.

Wolfe returned to our alma mater after his been-to years in the USA and played to his strengths as a computational evolutionary biologist, leaving the generation of primary data to others. Through the rest of the 90s he did World-class beautifully illustrated work on the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae genome. and also contributed to The Paper delivering the human genome.

At the turn of this century he became my direct boss which permitted me fly-on-the-wall status as another generation of brilliant people chipped away at the coal-face of science while I watched. I think I earned my salt; but not really in a tangible papers-and-grants way. None of my three good ideas in science happened during that gig. But I really learned a lot and continue to be grateful for being giving a seat at the table.

Making welcome

Friday 26 Jun 26 was International Day here & up the hill. Θ, my old roomie at The Institute, announced that she was bringing her research team away from the Mean Streets of SmallTown, Midlands . . . to get some fresh air and see some green fields. It was the end of a not-quite-record-breaking week of heat-wave and it was muggy hot in our kitchen. In prep for an alfresco tea-party I started putting up the garden parasol under the big old dying ash tree at the bottom of the yard. Two young women appeared pushing street-bikes past the gate. I made some quip about mountain bikes being quicker but more dangerous going downhill and they paused to chat. They turned out to be Danish and were heading for the telecoms mast on Mt Leinster having borrowed the bikes from where they were WWOOFing in the next county.  I urged them to leave the bikes in the yard and continue their trek unimpeded; they agreed.

An hour later Greece, Egypt, Kenya, Senegal [I think! defo Afrique-Occidentale française, AOF] and Mexico arrived . . . bearing gifts b/c Θ was ever of the generous hand: two enormous punnets of  enormous strawberries. I had already picked wild strawberries and golden raspberry earlier as finials for ziggurats of scone, butter, bramble jelly, whipped cream. See L for comparison: from what an unpromising natural base modern commercial strawberries have sprung. I like our wild strawbs, I graze them as I pass, but it would be work to gather a kilo for cake or compôt. It was like my pal Dan who picked a handful of fraocháns Vaccinium myrtillus as a gift for the daughters of his AirBnB host but was pre-emptively presented with a whole fraochán pie made by said daughters.

By the time the two Danish cyclists returned for their bikes having yomped up Mt Leinster there were no scones left, forgive me they were delicious. There are no mountains in Denmark: the highest point Møllehøj is 170m above sea-level. A pimple compared to the modest hills we call mountains in Ireland. Indeed, the two strawberries [L] are an apt metaphor for the comparison.

We've been here before with some of the same players. I was hop-skip delighted to hear that, of the July 2024 party, India is now a research officer for the DeptAg, while Benin is working for Tipperary County Council. GO! Ar aghaidh! the New Irish.

Hay rattle and roll

We have, mainly through inattention, created a Traditional Hay Meadow. There is grass in there, even some Lolium perenne, perennial rye-grass. If Irish agronomists had their way, a following wind and infinite money, the island's pastures would be 100% rye-grass; because scientific studies have shown it a) responds well to nitrates b) promotes faster weight-gain in livestock than any other forage species.

One of the consequences of our mowing / feeding / selective killing [ragwort bad; kill ragwort] practice is that we have A Lot [see L: >100 plants per sq.m in patches] of hay-rattle, gliográn, Rhinanthus minor. It was part of what got us nominated as Farmers for Nature last year. We were advised then to contact Wild Flower companies to seed-share. In June, at one of the Organic Open Days, we were button-holed by Saorla Kavanagh from Teagasc. She also waxed enthusiastic about us looking at getting cash for hay-rattle.

Hay-rattle [the round yellow or purple blobs L are the seed capsules] is in Family Orobanchaceae aka broomrapes. Most of the species in the family are parasitic on the roots of grasses and/or legumes including clover: they tap into the phloem and suck out the sugars generated by photosynthesis in the host. Hay-rattle is a pretty comprehensive disaster for farmers who want to grow livestock for money. But it is a useful additive in wildflower plantings on roadside verges and roundabouts, and bougie horse-paddocks If grass is suppressed, poppies and forget-me-nots, bedstraws and orchids can get their colourful flower-heads up and seen.

There is another possible viewpoint for maintaining a greater diversity of plant species where cattle and sheep graze. For us, it is quite possible to subsist on a diet of oatmeal porridge and buttermilk but that's an existence rather than a rich and healthy life.  A more diverse diet is going feed up our gut microbiome to better fight off pathogenic infections and release micronutrients and vitamins. I have an open mind on whether cattle self-medicate. My pal P did some work 40 years ago looking at how ovulation in kangaroos Osphranter rufus is driven by plant estrogens which become available after drought-break.

If I was the scientist I was when I was 18 y.o. I would have done a quadrat analysis to assess how many hay-rattle plants we have. That would require throwing a dart (. . . stick, rock, coat-hanger) at random into the field [with a string attached so it don't get lost] and counting the plants in a 1 metre square of which the dart is the SE corner . . . rinse, repeat say 10x. But 100 plants will do for order of magnitude estimate. We have 11 acres of trad.meadow over 4 fields. Round that down to 4 hectares = 40,000sq.m. I 'harvested' 10 hay-rattle plants on Monday evening and shook out [L] 2½g of seed - they are the size of tomato seed rather than poppy. That converts to 25g = 1oz per sq.m. or 1,000kg = 1 tonne in total! Wildflower folk are quoting €10/kg harvested. That's me on the piss tonight! or as soon as they payola.

Goaded by Saorla's call and with her help, we scared up some names and telephone numbers including Sandro Cafolla [bloboprev on ecotypes of Ash], who Wildflowers just over the far edge of our (tiny) county. He's been doing this for at least 30 years [and his website is about the same hand-cranked vintage]. We went on a courtesy call / informational interview there yesterday: mainly to see what machinery we'd have compacting the soil of our meadows. Could be a Hege 140 or a Hege 125  plot combine harvester.These teeny-combines were invented & developed by a German engineer called Hans-Ulrich Hege [1928-2021] to selectively harvest small plots for plant breeding stations, universities and experimental farms. They tread lightly on the earth. Alternatively a brush-harvester hauled behind a quad-bike. I R excite! New venture, bigging up biodiversity.

Keeping secrets from The Man

My Boy, The Engineer, who has worked in transport all his life, has internalised the NATO alphabet [whc prev] to ensure better comms over crackly, lossy, phone-line. That prevlink also hat-tips Clapham & Dwyer's Surrealist Alphabet [1936]: A for 'orses; B for mutton; C for th' Highlanders, D for ential . . .  Also relevant acknowledgment of l33t-speak [prev]

Meanwhile over on MeFi, someone was seeking advice help hints for deliberately obfuscating {The Man | search engines | algorithms}. The long tail of the internet can be a problem for seekers-of-public-office. Even if you deleted your {drunken | catty | racist} tweets, it has probably been snagged and archived elsewhere for {ill-wishers | neighbours | journalists} to pick up and beat you with: 👁Jim Gavin👁.  What we all could do with is a font / script which is readily readable by humans but won't be parsed into meaningful Ambonese Bodo Catalan Dogon English Farsi. My contribution to the MeFi debate: 

5° 👁 ◎♄λ⑂ ωᴙ¡✞ε |~ ᴙəβ∪ſ

 set me thinking about gussying up a complete alphabet where each of the Ascii/unicode representations of the 26 letters of the English alphabet is replaced by another symbol.

α ∀	ſ	λ ∖ £	Θ	▼
Б	Γ	Ш	ᴙ	ω
© ☾ <	♄	~ ♫ И ∩	5 ∫ $	χ ×
δ Δ	¡ 👁 |	0 ◎ ☉ °	✞ ナ ↑	⑂
ə ≡ 3	|<	π	∪	Z

No, you're welcome. Please feel free to use this idea in future. Like the sped arrow, none of your past expletives can be recalled, let alone erased. But we can all be more circumspect from now on.

Note: this is obvs a pain in ye hoop for you, or me, to implement. Cutting and pasting each letter is enough effort to ensure only the most telegraphic comms. DCODE.FR has your back for seamless translation to/from Braille Morse 1337 ogham and dozens of other options. I used it to generate the 6 x 4 block message [above L] as a maritime signal, for example. That site offers a "symbol font" whc is similar in conceit to my idea

Scaling up, organic edition

Karen Blixen had a farm in Aafrika; we have a farrm in the Irish Midlands. Insofar as we are farming, we are organic. We are not Certified Organic because we haven't found the energy to, or seen the benefits of, filling in the 12 page Form App21/15 from the Irish Organic Association or the 1 page Form ORG1/DAFM form from the DeptAg. All the successful Organic-at-scale farmers are chewing their beards at being unable to find and lease Certified-Organic fields. Maybe certification-process tail is wagging the organic dog ? Paperwork infrastructure and bureaucracy is holding up housing and hospitals across the land: maybe Perfect is the enemy of the GoodEnough.

Our organic is fine for us:

• Sow seeds in pots in the Spring
• Transplant to nature after the 1st week in May [last frost]
• Water on the regular 
• Reduce the number of competing weeds
• Pick off slugs and fire them over the hedge
• Remove withered, spotted or furry leaves
• Insert sticks to support beans and tomatoes
• Eat what has been left by the competition 

We don't make a living out of this! But surplus courgettes and tomatoes make almost as good a social glue gift as home-made scones or marmalade.

A couple of years ago, we signed up for Teagasc's Signpost webinars which are broadcast every Friday at 09:30hrs and later get archived for folks who were haying or calving when the live broadcast went out. I've made sour comment about the surplus mouths battened onto these webinars. And also ranted at the screen when presenters read their own slides [and run over time arrrrgh!] and so make the whole live exercise a bit redundant. But in general it's a data-rich way of spending an hour and I've learned a lot.

These Signposts have induced me off-site to attend three [3] Open Days in the last two weeks. Teagasc Centraal at Johnstown Castle near Wexford. A Somers Evening on a big commercial environmentally friendly farm at Oylgate. Scaling up Organic Tillage near Wicklow Town. I confess that I bugged out of two of these events when drifting drizzle turned to decisive rain. It's not just me getting wet, it's anxiety that my delicate, under-powered, low-slung Yaris will bog down in a bucketty mud-field.

But not before I'd been amazed at the tech with which proper commercial organic farmers address the problem of weeds. The next three images are lifted from a recent Signpost Prez.

This a GPS connected, solar-powered Roomba aka FarmDroid FD-20. You deliver it to a field of, say, carrots or onions. It remembers where it sowed seed 15 days ago [straight rows, precisely spaced]. When the sun comes up the beast starts trundling down the first 5m of rows. Anything green growing between rows gets a jolt from a laser, gives up the fight and dies. When the sun goes in, it stops, not least because clouds are associated with rain and you need to keep moving machinery off wet fields b/c soil compaction. But this baby is far lighter on the earth than a 5 or 10 tonne general purpose farm tractor. Yes it's expensive, but so is the kit for spraying herbicides from behind your GP John Deere and consumables are much lighter on the farmer's pocket and the planet.

Same problem, different solution. Thulit MF 1200 [above] Harrowing between rows has been the weed-solution since peasants were wielding a hoe, deftly detaching weeds from crop fields. Doing it mechanically requires a) skill b) tricking about with a spanner adjusting the tine-settings and tractor speed to optimize the weed/crop kill ratio. But in a large known field the soil quality [and weed-holding] will vary. Is it worth rejigging the tines for than awkward corner or is it better to accept some missed weeds or collateral crop loss. Precision tine harrows have each tine hydraulically adjustable from the tractor cab. I don't think that we're there yet, but GPS-encoded data could adjust tine angle and depth automatically to suit the micro-locality.

This kit also required precise row spacing. Instead of static tines, on the Lemken EC-Steer & EC-Weeder little propellers scoop out the weeds, maybe only turning if the associated camera sees a docken Rumex obtusifolius. We saw a similar camera driven solution to docks of the Somers [not organic] farm. They have a 30m-wide boom on the back of a tractor for spraying weeds; there are nozzles every 0.5m; each individually controlled. Herbicide is only released where/when it sees a dock! Big saving on the use/ release/ cost of 'chemicals'. They seemed to imply that a drone can act as the eyes for each nozzle.  Software aGoGo! 

One final demo to share. Flahavan's in Kilmacthomas, CoWD mill and sell organic oats. Current demand far outstrips supply. Weeds are a big problem with organic cereals. One part of the solution [blind weeding] is to clear, harrow, roll the field then sow the oats Avena sativa 55mm deep: at least 2x the usual depth. Wait two weeks then harrow to a depth of 30mm, hiking all the weed seedlings to oblivion. That gives the oat coleoptyles a clear run to get their heads up. The weeds under that regime exist, but they are struggling for light under a dense canopy of oaty leaves. Next door, the trad, shallow-sown, part of the field was spackled with yellow and blue flowers [aka weeds] at the same height as the oat seed-heads. 

On Sunday we drove up to Dublin on another mission. On the M9 just N of Carlow Town there was a field of barley with a great broad streak of scarlet running through it. Whoop whoop poppy Papaver rhoeas alert. I said "must be organic". 3 days later we're traipsing through another barley field at the Oylgate Open Day. Not a poppy to be seen! I mentioned this to an ex-colleague from The Institute as we stood in the drizzle at the next Open Day. Colleague is also a farmer in South Wexford and he pointed out that, whatever about docks, poppies are really not a thing in Wexford. Carlow, Kildare, Kilkenny: plenty of roadside poppies. Wexford: null. Who knew?.

Shifting Shape

We live quite remote, not Yukon remote, but enough that you don't want to run out of milk because driving to the nearest shop for more will double the cost per litre. Amenities like a cash-point, gas-station, or chinese-takeaway are much more remote. When we go visit Pat the Salt's old place in Tramore, it's different. The library, for one example, is so close you could hit it with a tennis-ball thrown from the garden. We were in town [in our bib-overalls and shedding straw] earlier in June and I popped up to the library to see what they had for non-fiction / science. 

Fair enough that most of the books in a small town library are General Fiction, that's what normal people go to browse the collection. It was kinda woeful that there was just over one shelf covering the whole of DeweyDecimal 500, that includes 510 Mathematics 520 Astronomy 530 Physics 540 Chemistry 550 Earth sciences and geology 560 Fossils and prehistoric life 570 Biology 580 Botany 590 Zoology. Compared to 10 linear metres labelled CRIME. What is this obsession among Citizens with over-stepping the bounds of the law?

BUT, I did find another book Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else [2021] by Jordan Ellenberg. to carry on from How Not to be Wrong [bloborecent]. Shape is more recent and also 400+ pages but the font is bigger. 

Another book I've just finished suggests that kids can be quite different in their learning styles and good teachers run through a variety of approaches to new material hoping / expecting that some kids will 'get it' in one way, while another bunch will prefer a different perspective. Really great teachers will stop their gallop and pause to ensure that the lesson is learned. Ellenberg confesses early in this book that he never got geometry, preferring an algebraic approach if that was available and appropriate. Euclid, like all the ancient Greek mathematicians / philosophers were embedded in geometrical models: if you couldn't scratch it in the dust, it wasn't real.

I was 'good at maths' and able to get to grips with arithmetic, geometry, algebra, even calculus as they came up in the curriculum. Even outside of class, I would riffle through puzzle books by Martin Gardner and others. One standard set of problems was "Series": being presented with a list of numbers and asked to guess work out what the next two numbers were:

• 2, 4, 6, 8, . . .; . . . 
• 10, 7, 4, 1, . . .; . . .
• 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, . . . ; . . .

The first two Series are changing by a fixed amount [+2 and -3] to generate the next number. But the 3rd one has gaps of 3 then 5 then 7 . . . between successive numbers. Those differences are changing by a fixed amount; maybe we called it a second order series back in the day?Having been drilled in my times-tables, I recognised that third Series as being of square numbers. But one day as a tween I had an Aha! to twig that they were called Square Numbers because you can draw them in the dirt as squares. And further, that was the reason why adding successive odd numbers to 1 [as in the diagram above R] generated the series of Square Numbers.

Because Ellenberg thinks better in the abstractions of algebra, he has had to struggle to make sense of the world through Shape. That struggle has compelled him to think through each problem clearly and that really helps him to explain the issue and solution cleanly.

Footnote on p311 resonated with moi-le-plongeur. "A disagreeable feature of the Erdös legend: it encourages some mathematicians to see domestic work as somehow beneath our station and beyond our capabilities at once. And yet we eat food and wear clean shirts. Fact: thinking about mathematics while washing dishes is good for both mathematiciansand, if your are prone to reveries as most mathematiciansare, the dishes".

I like his throw-away jokes, not always confined to the [copious] foot-notes. "A sporting event is not just an algorithm; it may also be intended to provide entertainment, generate tax revenue, narcotize a seething populace etc. -- but an algorithm is one of the things that it is". He discusses why a match between two players as best of three games [or 20 overs in cricket , or 5 sets of six games in tennis, or playing a league of other teams both Home and Away in soccer] is more likely to find the better players than the result of a single play. There is also a desperate, depressing chapter about how gerrymandering [whc prev] can be really effective in birthing a totalitarian state.