Agora U

The Provost, Fellows, Foundation Scholars and the other members of Board of The College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity of Queen Elizabeth near Dublin aka TCD, like other Institutions across the world, is should be having an existential crisis in response to "AI". But Institutions have the inertia of a super-tanker: they keep going in the same direction because change is just . so . hard for the [old embedded complacent] people who hold {power | purse | policy }in their hands. In my section of social media [<coff> Metafilter] you have to be super-tippitoes if you want to advocate positively for AI. At least partly, this is because "AI" is not one thing, but a range of tools created by a range of actors, only some of which are The Axis of Evil. But what do I know? AI has tsunamied over me (and you) so quickly, so recently, that I am reduced to slogans with as much discrimination [both senses] as "Four legs good, two legs bad".

In 2018, the Fellows of TCD elected immunologist Cliona O'Farrelly [my old boss] as first female Chair of Fellows. In 2021, they voted for Linda Doyle, an engineer, as the first female Provost in 400+ years. On 22Apr26, as part of her exit strategy, the outgoing Chair of Fellows organised a symposium of Two households Six pundits, both all alike in dignity, In fair Verona Dublin, where we lay our scene on "AI and the Idea of a University". I booked in because it seemed like a good opportunity for Me to find out how to spell AI and learn what my Alma Mater was going to do about it: not least because the first speaker, after the Chair, was The Provost.  

Prizes:

• Most obscure cited reference John Kelleher for Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (1979) by  Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar. 
• Also for best $10-word: semiotics - see Umberto Eco 
• Best timekeeper (by far) Camilla Persello, Secr of Scholars, also by far the youngest panelist 
• The Whitehead Prize for talking waaaay over the allotted time?  redacted .
• Fewest on-message bullet-points (3) The Provost:
• Are we good enough? - the antidote to smugness
• Dreadnought AI - it's here & not going away: engage challenge resist
• Truth is grey not black&white
• Most embedded in certainties (and not in a good way, although my bloboprev guts are with him generally) Fintan O'Toole
• Also for mentioning Tim "The are no Short-cuts" Robinson whom RIP
• Most empathic speaker Jennifer Edmond - wish I'd been a student of hers.
• Shortest on-message comment from the Floor Ken Mealy
• Most valiant effort (largely successful) to rein in his tendency to ramble: Ian Robertson [whom bloboprev]. 

Exec Summ [filtered through my jaundiced eye]: 
[I was far better at taking notes in 1976: in 2026 I found that an idea I was in the process of capturing on paper was slipping beyond my ken because the next idea was demanding my attention. Sorry if I've missed something important in the discourse. Doubtless within a few days I will be inventing whole paragraphs]  
In my day [1973-77], teaching at Trinity was very heavy on the Medieval model: The Professor / expert stands by a chalk-board and imparts his [almost always His] accumulated experience; know-nothing students write down the content with a pen, in a book. Weeks or months later, Prof sets and exam to see how well students have retained his imparted knowledge. Students with the most legible notes and most retentive memory are rewarded with high grades. The highest graded students become professors in their turn. Nobody taught us Pittman's short-hand

At the AI-fest, Camilla Persillo pointed out that group learning, where students bat ideas around together without faculty in the room, can be the most exciting and productive learning experiences during college days: it's the synergy innit. Several of the other contributors, incl Ken Mealy, made the point that Content is So Yesterday; nobody now needs to take notes to recall Scads of Stuff when they can look it up in two tics on their device. The trick is a) to remember how to question the source b) have a well-polished crap-detector to critically evaluate the 'answer'. If the curriculum and the exams require memorizing Avogadro's, Bernouilli's, Charles', Dalton's, Euler's, Faraday's . . . Laws then there is no time left to teach ascertainment bias, availability error, anchoring bias, authority deference and other cognitive fails.

But whoa! Only some 21stC students have the time for group study with peers. It's fine if you are a Foundation Scholar with free food and rooms in College, or if you live at home a short jog from the city centre because your family's generational wealth is a lovely red-brick in Rathmines. Not so much if your commute is 90+ minutes to Outer Boondocks and/or you have to slave in the local Spar convenience store several evenings a week to make rent and/or care for your beloved but demented Grandpa. Inequality [of resources and opportunity] is a systemic failing of our FF/FG society regardless of AI. But AI provides an option for the dispossessed to help them knock-off assignments which they have no time to address in a medieval collegiate manner. 

Another much worked point was the desirability of being uncomfortable with your data or ideas. The phrase used is meaningful friction . . . and b'god it involves Effort. Prof Robertson asserted that the cognitive work of [trad] learning increased myelination and connectivity of nerves in the same way as weight-training or running increased the # mitochondria in muscle cells. [Protestant?] work makes you fitter and cleverer. Using AI for cognitive-offloading, let alone cognitive-surrender is a disaster for your education: over-use of AI might make you stupider after college than before. Prof Edmond's experience is that the smarter students work effectively with AI to produce even better deliverables . . . but the weaker [tired, poor, huddled] kids turn in shoddy because they don't have the spoons to discriminate own-self-okay from superficially convincing AI-slop.

All agreed [everyone present being invested in The Idea of the University!] that Agora University was first-and-foremost the collective intellectual interactions of the people [provost, fellows, junior faculty, scholars, students, that janitor who nailed calculus problems] present on Campus. It was also recognised that (in addition to reviews, recordings, re-thinkings; patents, papers, plays; dissertations, discoveries and degrees) the deliverable is Citizens. The more engaged, ethical, thoughtful, kind, inclusive, resilient, the Better. 

[[Personal sidebar: I was entirely off-with-fairies during my last two years studenting at TCD. The most exciting thing that happened to Evolutionary Biology in the 1970s was Sociobiology and the genetic basis of altruism. I spent several days out in the library of The Other University because they had the academic journals in which this material was published. I read, and wrote a long-form review of, EO Wilson's 1975 book Sociobiology. I've written about my off-piste investigation of inbreeding and fertility in the Habsburgs. I was stoked! But I was also failed! when it came to the exams. With different teaching methods and more me-adjacent learning opportunities I coulda been a contender for the next professorial vacancy.]]

Potlatch

Last week, I confessed to failing to finish a couple of books. Since giving up YouTube in January, I have a lot more time for reading books. But sometimes just sitting is better than sitting and reading something unfulfilling. As the days get longer, I will read less and get out more - although with earbbooks multitasking me asks ¿Por qué no los dos? When the family came home this Easter, Dau.II was uncharacteristically nose deep in a book The Heart-Shaped Tin: Love, Loss and Kitchen Objects (2025),by Bee Wilson a foodie confessional ramble which nods at Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia (2006) by Elizabeth Gilbert. Dau.II was reading it because foodie. I finished reading it because stuff.

So much stuff!  in Bee's kitchen, her friends' kitchens, our kitchen. We've come a long way since Cooking in a Bedsitter when our entire batterie de cuisine fit easily in a single orange crate. Now there is so much rarely used kit that, when company comes, pots need a good un-dust & up-scrub before use. Which is kinda shameful when far too many people subsist on a batterie de cuisine not much more than the possessions of a hunter-gatherer in the Kalahari. 

But the accumulation of stuff is not entirely my fault: people will give us things & only occasionally for pure generosity of heart. When The Management at The Institute decided to mark my retirement with gifts, they made sure to engrave my name and The Institute's to indicate the continuity of my indenture. Six months later they doubled-down with another gift and I doubled-doown on my rant. You don't need to read that again here. In other cultures - Japan and the Pacific NorthWest - gifting has to be reciprocal. If the return gift is more valuable, the exchanges can result in damaging loss as a runaway spiral ensues.

Valuable? Stuff, gifts and sentiment offer a neat alternative dimension of value. One of my two favorite everyday mugs is 20+ years in my cupboard or, as rarely washed, on the table. It [L] was given me by a caminante when we got together to compare notes on the process of pilgrimage. My other favorite mug was a £1.99 gift to me by me from Tenby near Pembroke Ferryport signalling that my family originally came from Wales. I don't think we are housing stuff because it was gifted to us and passing it on (to Oxfam) seems wrong or disrespectful. But we have enough clutter material household goods that it is sometimes hard to find a rarely used but then useful bit of kit - the Spong mincer for marmalade for example,

But enough of me! You can't borrow me from the library, but you can put a reserve on Bee Wilson's ruminations and insights into the baggage that adheres to kitchen kit. Who knew that her sister is Emily "Iliad" Wilson [whom bloboprev] and their father is A.N.Wilson, the British public intellectual and their mother Katherine "Shagsper sonnets" Duncan-Jones? Small wonder that both girls ended up as [Arts Block] researchers and writers.

Sheepset

Yesterday, St Mark's Day, Dia do Revolução dos Cravos, 25 April, I was up betimes bustling from kitchen to sofa assembling the cast for First Pot of Tea when something Other caught the corner of my eye through the window. "Aurora" my scrabbling snap-mind delivered: we will try to make sense of the untoward. But I paused my bustle and went outside to ◎◎ it was a (murky) rainbow:

Oh-ho, I said, there is a pot of gold Up Sturra, we must look more carefully next time . . . and IF that rainbow is centred SE THEN the sun must be NW. And, out the kitchen window, it was:

That was 06:00hrs. 14½ hours later, 20:30 I was fossicking around giving a wrap to the day: battening hatches, counting sheep, watering the beans (very sad altogether so far this year) when I snapped this

Don't angst if you can't count 16 sheep, I did and N = 16 [✓] but I cropped the picture of some Ginnie-no-pals ewes off camera to right. Like the junior army officers in Lisbon 52 years ago, y'have to Carpe Diem.  We'll be a long time dead. Once more with jigsaw.

Gawping the peleton

In 2019, I [was] volunteered to marshal a local cycle rally.  I stood a road-junction a mile from home and separated the hard-chaws [110km and 140km] from the realistic recreational cyclists [50km and 80km]. I made my own sign, so that the choice was clear if I fainted dead away at the shock of seeing so many knotted calves and far too much lycra.  It started as a community solidarity initiative to raise a bit of money in memory of two young brothers who died in tragic circumstances in 2013.  The next 3 years' events were scrubbed because of CoViD and I was unavoidably elsewhere when thinks cranked up again in 2023.  But in 2024 and again in 2025, I was Colonel of the Cross where the L3001 leaves the R702 'main' road; and the shorter races turn for home.

It was ideal cycling weather: grass frost at dawn then cloudy with sunny intervals. Cycling is miserable if either a) it rains a lot b) the sun raises the temperature so that you feel the sweat - and therefore need hydration and therefore need pee-stops. What is ideal cool and breezy for aerobic exercise can be uncomfortably chilly if you're just standing around. But I didn't need my jacket or my water-bottle in the event. I was happy out, with a couple of podcasts on my device to while away the intervals between bikes. 

I've always tried to be the infra-structure guy: making it possible for others to do wonderful things. I left the house to walk to my station at 09:55 and got home at 13:10: just in time to make me a cheese-toastie for lunch before I got all hangry and out of sorts.

Oh, and I heard the first cuckoo Cuculus canorus in the valley this year.  That was a pretty good day.

In the wrong place

The family were downhome over Easter and Dau.II took a proprietorial walk through the fields. She reported that the top corner of one of those fields was carpetted with a particular sort of dicot sprout with 2 elongated seed-leaves and a robust reddish stalk. WTF? she enquired. I investigated and admitted that I'd never noted such a phenomenon before. But I formed a hypothesis that the pair of sycamores Acer pseudoplatanus in the ditch just to the South must have had a mighty year for seed set, as had several sweet chestnuts Castanea sativa down in the adjacent woodland. And sho'nuff Dr Google confirmed that sycamore seedlings looked just like that.

That was all a nothing-burger until Dr Google threw up "sycamore seedling poisonous to horses" on the off-chance that was what I was really after. Equine atypical myopathy, aka atypical myoglobinuria when myoglobin is detected in the urine because muscle tissue is disintegrating. But you'd only [call in the vet to] look if your previously happy horse is stiff, reluctant to move, collapsed. Regardless of treatment, it is typical that 75% of affected horses will be dead with 2-3 days. The proximate cause is a toxin called Hypoglycin A HGA.

It is a known thing that horses have a rough-and-ready digestive system: shovelling its outcome is what gives teenage stable-hands such prodigious upper-body strength. Sheep are ruminants and their dietary carbs get a double hammering mediated by a sophisticated gut-flora. Nobody is flagging HGA toxicity for ruminants, so I suppose that some guild of their microbiome is digesting Hypoglycin A HGA before it is absorbed through the gut wall to start to digest the muscle-mass. No quarter given in evolution. [note added in press: the sheep were moved from the traditional hay-meadow to the sycamore-rich field 3 days ago, and nobody's died yet]

But, as I say, I've never seen so many sycamore sprouts and who knows of what digestive heroics our mixed bag of sheep are capable. The family had buggered off to the Gaeltacht within hours of alerting me to the sycamore nursery; I R retire; I finished my book; I chopped wood and hauled water; . . . dum de dum . . .; I went across the lane to pluck sycamore as prophylaxis against an unlikely but devastating event. At 71¾, I am no longer limber as a 7 y.o., so I can't pluck at a sustainable rate for a working day. The weather  was Irish-changeable sunny with showers and my shop-steward won't allow me to get rained on while bent double. After a few sessions over three days, I had a bucketful of sycamores untimely ripped from mother earth. How many?

Well mates, I wasn't not going to count them as I went but I did weigh the whole harvest on our kitchen scales = 25oz = 700g. And I did count off a random selection of single plants until they tipped ½oz = 15g that was N = 30. My math indicates that I have killed [25 x 2 x 30 =] 1,500 potential trees in a natural selection exercise. How potential? When Sean the Forester was thinning our little woodland in 2022, we discovered a substantial sycamore in the NE corner of the plot. That's about 75m due West [and thus downwind] of the two fecund sycamores mentioned above. In 2008 that corner of the plot was still pasture, so in 18 years one seedling similar to my Easter-holocaust now has a girth of 85cm or ⌀ = 27cm at chest height. The height of the tree can be estimated by measuring a) a distance from the foot and b) the angle from there to the top of the tree and looking up a table of Tan= opposite/adjacent. In this case ~12m tall. That a much better place for a sycamore tree than shedding seed into pasture.

In the wrong place? I did eventually agree to go off-site for a tuthree days with  the family when they touched base briefly after Connemara. But on the morning of departure, our RCD [residual current detector] tripped OFF  twice! again. There was no way I was going away for two days if the 'lectric was going to fail the deep-freeze: & for me to return to a puddle of rotting food.  They went off, and I did some diagnostics, and the RCD behaved itself for 24 hours. [I think it's the extension that runs to the polytunnel - but it requires some positive testing of this hypothesis when there is only me at home]. Anyway, I did agree to go South-for-beaches the following day. But while way, I twigged >!Shazzam!< that an unintended consequence of having the Fronius app to monitor the solar array, is that I can remotely check to see if our router/modem at home is still powered up. And if so, assume that freezers and dehumidifiers are also working.  Here's a re-assuring snap-shot of an overcast day at home from 80km away.

 

maggie and milly and molly and may

 . . . went down to the beach(to play one day) [ee] 
[premature posting error on Friday! here released on schedule with added value].

may couldn't lift a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone. 
Which is just as well because it [L]was an interstellar messenger from the Planet Zorg cooling off in a rock-pool at Benvoy along Costa na Déise. I mentioned that my family left me alone with my weighty blanket after Easter and headed W to The Coral Strand = Trá an Dóilín in the Connemara Gaeltacht. I can just about handle having six extra [beloved] bodies in my own house . . . disappearing my charging cables tidying things up. But wrenching myself off a familiar sofa and, in a foreign environment, fighting over the breakfast cereal with m'fam? That was a too much for my agéd frame. Not to mention making a boarding-house queue with my fellow guests for access to the bathroom. At home, rain-or-shine, day-or-night, there is always the compost heap. So they went off and I stayed home and everyone was happy.

But they came back to the Sunny South East less than a week later and continued their live-like-there-is-no-tomo fun along the Waterford Coast. There is free-will, but in a sense they rolled their Ould Fella up in a bit of carpet, strapped him to the roof of the car and took him to Tramore. 

The timing was ungood because, a week before Waterford has been named the top destination in Ireland by Condé Nast Traveller, in a list of the must-see places to visit in Ireland. In particular they cite Trá na mBo so it will be even less of a Secret Beach than it has been since they added steps down the cliff and signage to get more footfall. I couldn't go: I was all tied up [nnggg nnnGG] with building works: being required to hold one end of a piece of timber and pass nails and screws to The Boy. But Dau.I took her niblings to Trá na mBo [you may call it cow-strand, if you live in England]. Together they made the rite of passage [woooooo] up the rocks and through the hole in the cliff to The Secret Secret Beach beyond. Which is important because Gdau.II is ten years old now - almost too old for Secrets.

I'm glad they didn't ask me for an opinion; because several years ago, I stopped making that micro-journey when it was clear that several tons of roof had collapsed since I last went to visit. But nobody died [Phew!] last week and they disturbed a seal, Phoca vitulina probably, who had hauled out at high tide. Seal probably thought "Fakkin' Condé Nast, I've been sunning myself here, minding my own business, for years - and now it's ruined by human yahoos".

One of the new additions at the car-park nearest to Trá na mBo is a box made of pallets and painted pink&blue with a scrap of fishing net atop to slow down the gulls. It says [in a rather spare, enigmatic ee cummings way - appropriate to a beach where one may encounter poets who are fluent in Spanish - and if you don't meet a poet you'll have to spout forth something yourself - do not mumble, the seals defo don't like mumblers.]

Tidy Towns
Beach Box
Swap & Share
Lost & Found 

Wedgies

Old Ray, the batchelor farmer who lived all his adult life in our home before we blew into the valley, got a little weak on maintenance in his latter years. The gutters got carried away in a storm and not replaced. When the house was built in 1941, the 'parlour' was constructed with a suspended ventilated timber floor. But in one corner water had penetrated the wall and rotted out a section of the floor-boards. We could see the join between original 1941 boards and the replacement. And some of the replacement floor-boards had themselves been assaulted by water and rotted in their turn. Sod that we decided and a) ordered new gutters chutes and down-spouts b) ripped out the timber floor brought the sub-floor to grade with rubble c) installed under-floor heating pipes throughout the ground floor and d) covered that with s sand-and-cement screed.

But the parlour floor undulated like drumlin country which was obvs unsuitable for our desired final finish in cork tiles for toddler comfort. I decided to fix this myself and bought a bag of levelling compound. How difficult could it be to follow directions on the packet and move things forw over the weekend while the contractor's team was home resting? A: quite difficult for an absolute beginner. The following week, the contractor's plasterer came with another bag of levelling compound, ignored the printed directions and made a much runnier solution which more or less spread itself. Hats off to experts!

But one corner of the floor was still a few mm out of true which only mattered when we wanted our handy light-weight Ikea 600x600 'coffee' table in that corner. Unless the legs were turned and positioned just-so, you could be guaranteed to spill your tea. For several years we solved this problem with a mop. Then Dau.II left home to live in Cork. One time we were visiting and Dau.II asked me to make a wedge for the bathroom door whose default position was closed. This was clearly not for the best, because the bathroom was entirely internal [no windows] and needed air-circulation against the damp. By providence, there was a builder's dumpster on the quay opposite their appt; & I'd given her a householder's tool-kit when she left home. I seized the feeble little saw from the tool-kit and sawed a suitable wedge off a bit of scrap timber in the dumpster. A few weeks later, Dau.II called to say "More wedges are needed!". Her pals from the HomEd house-share had been to visit and seen the utility of wedges to hold doors open.

I don't know how long it took me to make the connexion, but eventually I mobilized a Generalized Theory of Wedges GTW and cut a half-sized wedge to stop the Ikea coffee-table from canting about like a ship at sea. One residual problem was that a small beige wooden wedge was often hidden in plain sight against a beige cork floor. My solution was to paint stripes on one side of the table-wedge and write WEDGE on the other [as L at top]. 

We had a family full-house over Easter but when they left for 5 days in the Gaeltacht, I could not find the wedge. Two days later, I found it . . . in the kindling. But not before I addressed a supply-chain bottle-neck and made three more. I like the Dennis the Wedgace livery and am thinking, why not make a wedge-a-day set? as a wedge-hedge against uncertain memory - if it's Dennis it must be Tuesday etc. And hands up who knew that the Irish for TheWedge is AnDing?