Holy bumblebee, Robin

My correspondent P keeps up with general science much better than me. At the end of September, she flagged up a Nature press release about the latest submission from the Bat1k Project. Bats are important and diverse: 20% of all mammalian species are members of Order Chiroptera. Only rodents are more 'speciose' (25% of the ~5,000 known species). There is a whiff of marmite about both taxa: most people are squikked out by bats or rats or both but enthusiasts are really enthusiastic. Take Gdau.II, for example: she's 10 and mad about Capybaras Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris the largest rodent known to science, but she survives by keeping 2 surrogate guinea-pigs Cavia porcellus in a pen in a corner of the living-room at home. Cavies (1kg) and capybaras (50kg) are in the same family, who knew?

Another example is Emma Teeling, a zoology Professor at UCD, who is making it her life's work to get more attention and more money for research into bats.

Teeling is the Last=Lead author on a recent chunky report in Nature "Reference genomes and fossils revise bat family phylogeny and biogeography". She has had to herd 130+ researchers from 100+ institutions in 60+ countries to generate new genome sequence data + share existing ditto + put it in a digital hopper with the [sparse, patchy] fossil record and a good dash of location location, ecology, and geographic distribution for each species. Shake that hopper! This September 2026 paper has assembled and cross-referenced more or less complete genome data for ~100 bat species. Which is some way short of Bat1k's goal of 1,000 species: which would be just about all the bats still flying, breathing and giving up their DNA for science. That's terabytes of data for which appropriate analytical and statistical software has to be written, borrowed, debugged, tweaked and applied. The computers laboured and brought forth . . . results: . "CASTER analyses of mHR neutral windows recovered (T2; bootstrap = 89.9%, q1 = 34), but neutral window analyses of both bat-reference MULTIZ alignments (mRM and mRR bootstrap = 100 and 99%; q1 = 35 and 34, respectively)(Fig. 3j) and analyses of neutral dark SNPs (mHR, mRM and mRR bootstrap = 96.4, 100 and 100%; q1 = 0.383, 0.428 and 0.393, respectively; Fig. 3k) optimally supported T1". Nope?! I don't know what that means either, and I spent 20 years hewing at the coal-face of genomic analysis.

Journalists across the globe - CBC - Guardian - Mefi! - have done their best to abstract A Story from the technical findings. Their almost universal Exec.Summ. has been "Latest! Bats originated in Europe 65 million years ago". As I hint above, the fossil record for bats is kinda crappy, so it's been hard to find hard <tok> <tok> evidence at all, let alone the earliest credible example: a case has been made previously for Africa, but also for N.America. I don't have the smarts or the tool-kit to critically evaluate the Eurobats origin hypothesis which the press has latched on to. 

But I did notice that only one bat family (out of 21) achieved 100% coverage in this 10% preview to the Bat1k Project. Clip from Fig.1 NE quadrant.

That's because family Craseonycteridae contains a single genus and a single species Craseonycteris thonglongyai aka Kitti's hog-nosed bat aka bumble bee bat, BBB. This is the smallest bat (wt 2g len 30mm) known to science and one of the most recently discovered . . . in 1974 by Kitti Thonglongya, a zoologist in Thailand. He died suddenly shortly afterwards: hence the memorial eponym. It's hard to credit that a creature which would comfortably lie on a postage-stamp [the wing-span is bigger] can catch and digest enough food to survive the night given the high surface to volume ratio that comes from being small and which haemorrhages heat.

More on Emma Teeling [bloboprev, also as cailleach] who is a great Irish ambassador to Big Science. 25 years ago, in 2001she co-authored "Resolution of the early placental mammal radiation using Bayesian phylogenetics " - the definitive determination of the relationships among Mammalian Orders (aardvark, bats, carnivores, elephants and 2 dozen other fundamentally different ways of being a mammal). Lay summary by Elizabeth Pennisi. When I was in school, it looked like representatives of all the mammalian orders appeared >!shazzam!< in the fossil record fully differentiated and very widely distributed. In the same eye-blink dinosaurs were swept into the dustbin of history. In the fossil record (all we had back then) it was super abrupt. That 2001 Bayesian phylogenetics paper (and a couple of almost right earlier efforts) was based on the alignment of concatenated protein-coding gene sequences - lots of them; in lots of species. It gave the granularity to show that some Orders were closer to each other than others and shook down into four blocs of species [bloboprev] with shared ancestry and so peculiar commonalities. Sidelining the [patchy, crappy] fossils won evolution millions of extra years to generate the wonderful, peculiar, particular diversity we see in caves, jungles, plains and oceans today - from whales to Kitti's teeny bat.

Who said whales? In 1994, Dan Graur and Des Higgins showed that, from their DNA sequences, they are a subset of Artiodactyls (cows, camels and . . . hippos). After millennia stomping around in lagoons, slobs and mudflats, one mother protowhale decided she couldn't be arsed to get back to dry land to drop the sprog

20 years after sorting out the broad-brush phylogeny of mammals, Teeling was a founder enthusiast for the Zoonomia Project to fill in the details. A comparative genomics multitool for scientific discovery and conservation is another Big Data endeavour. looking at "the genomics of shared and specialized traits in eutherian mammals." What can carefully compared megabases, gigabases of ATCGs tell us about the core similarities [homeothermy, hair, four chambered heart, calcium, lactation, 2 sexes not three etc.] that we share with other mammals? AND expose the basis of shared oddities: 

• Afrotheria - one of the four great mammalian Superorders are a) based in Africa b) tend to extravagant noses (aardvark, elephants, elephant shrews, dugongs, otter-shrews); 
• Bats . . . fly, not all of them echolocate; 
• Cows chew cud
• Dormice come out at night
• Equids run on a single toe-nail (well, four - one at each corner): cows run on two. 

Those are kinda obvious and we probably don't need genomic analysis to crack the why? and how? But what about the immune system: is a species' complement of anti-microbial peptides due to evolutionary inertia, random accident or as a response to species-specific microbial assault. And how is it that bats tolerate so many pathological viruses about their person with not a bother on them? WTF that whales and dolphins don't need anti-microbial peptides?: there are plenty bacteria in the sea.

And placentas: they are the defining feature of [eutherian] mammals, you'd think they were all the same but they are structurally, functionally, wildly different across Orders. What is the genetic basis for these different solutions? It's not IL-17: these are functionally important for placental development but, all eutherian mammals have a full complement of genes for the IL-17 family of cytokines.

Someone (SFI Taighde Éireann? James 'FF' Lawless, the current Minsiter?) should give Emma Teeling a medal for Services in Infrastructural Support To Evolutionary Research SISTER! Because, as well as 

• teaching [which was a full-time full-on job for me in The Institute);
• mentoring [bloboprev on what that involves]
• dealing with the fallout of institutional misogyny
• managing her own research group [which is managing a small business with a turn-over of €500,000 a year];
• making batty discoveries of her own out in the field cave; 

Professor Teeling has also put in years of small-p politics and negotiation; channeled the pride and ambition of alpha-dicks; held the wayward to agreed deadlines: in order to glue consortia which created platforms and tools for everyone else to make their own great leaps forward in shedding light on The Tangled Bank.
All The Blob can do is to induct her into the Women of Science hall of fame.

Books Away!

Decluttering much? We had the painter in for the whole of August. I had to shift boxes of photos out of his way . . . and then back again. I foolishly started doing triage on the photos when the painting was in train rather than at my leisure in the Spring. Better still would have been to do it in the Spring of 2006! Painter stoutly affirmed that he could paint round the book shelves IF I bought an extra roll of masking tape ANDIF I covered the spines. I can take a hint! I stripped the contents of three groaning wall-mounted own-self-make shelf units into boxes; and then unscrewed the shelves and schlepped them down to the woodshed [they are not kindling yet, mind]. Without shelf-clutter, the paint job was quicker and neater.

Only one of those book-shelves went back up. So I had ~8 linear metres of books in crates and boxes [BookBoxOne R]. The wonders of modern e-tech allowed me to take a photo of the spines, annotate any which were too scuffed to decipher and send the data to my adult childer for first dibs. I'm not dead yet, dibs didn't establish ownership, it just won a reprieve from Oxfam. We live in a modest ~100sq.m. dwelling but my kids live in teeny-tiny homes to it is fairy nuff to hold books here. We all agree that it is neither fair nor sensible to hold onto books that none of us will ever read [again]. Releasing a beloved book allows someone else to share the joy. I think our collective has done pretty well: ~50% of those 8 linear metres is destined for pastures new. Indeed some of it is already shipped.

It's a dilemma because my [exclusive, discerning] taste in books does not have much overlap with 'airport books', whodunnits, or crinoline romances. Oxfam, like any retailer, wants to shift stock not have it getting cobwebs on the shelf. This has been part of my long-time reluctance to let it go. The TCD Library booksale is the ideal showcase for my discards: it attracts the curious and peculiar readers. But currently, is not receiving donations. Dau.I cherry picked a couple of dozen titles and got €1 each from Chapters on Parnell St in Dublin. The handful that Chapters rejected were dumped on exchanged for two as-new photo-albums at a charity shop. I have a small box of nauty books [several ~100 years old] for a sea-faring pal. Tried to offload not-that-old genetics and evolution books on another reader; who said no-tnx. 

A little better luck with Freams Elements of Agriculture [1918, 10th edn] for which I got a "will gladly host it" from an former colleague, now an Aggi Prof in UCD. What's not to love about the cutting edge of plough coulters from a hundred years ago? When my moved onto the farrrm 30 years ago, the haggard was a litter of ancient horse drawn ploughs and related paraphernalia. The collection was magpied over by a 14 y.o. farmer-son who cannibalized them to get a couple of working machines which he entered into The Ploughing - the annual aggie showcase and jamboree. I think he won prizes, he certainly deserved "Best Follower in Grandfather's Footsteps" with a medal for "Persistent Can-Do! The last horse-plougher from our bus-stop village died in the 00s. Dang! but it will be hard to recreate his embodied expertise after the zombie apocalypse and all the €150,000 tractors in the valley are immovable clutter.

On the Sunday before Michaelmas, our neighbour La Torbellina de Tenerife came for tea with her brother who had been visiting for a few weeks and been in our yard or at our kitchen table several times. We presented him with a copy of de Baeza's Brighter Spanish, a parallel text phrase book from 1930, and Brown's Madeira and the Canary Islands; a practical and complete guide for the use of invalids and tourists with sixteen coloured maps and plans and numerous sectional and other diagrams (1910). Much hilarity ensued from the changes wrought on the vocabulary and business models of 100 years ago. I think those volumes will be happier out in the Atlantic.

 

Cultish Bossbabe

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism (2021) Amanda Montell [R by Bigpurplehatguy] whom we've met "Wordslut" before. Like, most recently, other Blobs about words, their use and derivation, Cultish gets deep in the weeds of etymology. For Montell, 'cults' cover a wide spectrum towards extremes of malignant narcissism, Jonestown, Guyana and Reichsparteitag Nürnburg. Der Triumph des Kults is partly achieved by repeating a subset of the lexicon together. If you say something often enough it becomes, if not truth, at least the default. Thus, many objectively successful people believe in [their own] Meritocracy [prev Michael "Harvard Philosophy" Sandel]. In the pubs and clubs adjacent to Silicon Valley, it is a very easy flip to conclude that those at Grade 5 and below have failed through lack of merit and deserve their fate among the drones of late-stage capitalism.

I used to be quite smug about never being a member of anything "I was never a boy-scout". Then I signed up to MetaFilter . . . for the likes [✓] and the LoLs, like.  Dau.I maintains that The Blob is effectively a sub-site of MeFi.

Cultish is available on Borrowbox - I just returned it. It is read by actor Ann Marie Gideon, slow enough that you can crank up the speed to 1.25x and get through it in <10hrs without losing sense. 

Something said too much in specific contexts is a rough definition of jargon. The [over] use of specific words and phrases [evolution, clade, proteomics] is one way in which members can achieve solidarity. Montell introduced me to a new concept which also helps limit dissent [and smooth over cognitive dissonance] among the ranks: thought-terminating cliché TTC. This ante-dates Montell by about 50 years, and gets it's own entry in Wikipedia but it was new to me. Joan Didion characterised TTC as "It is a way of talking that tends to preclude further discussion, which may well be its intention."   If you can't achieve whatever goal in your fitness class, allowing the instructor to say "It's just karma, dude" allows t'bugger to let themself off their obligation of remediating your defects of fitness. Six-pack abs but lazy-arse upstairs!

One example of TTC "here we go again" gave me a little frisson of recognition. Our family devoted a year of our lives - and an elephantine carbon footprint - attending monthly meetings in Greystone to create the Home Education Network HEN. Gaaahd it was slow. One of our founders advised that we should devote the next N meetings, not to drafting a constitution or raising funds, but to sorting out our interpersonal relations through Consensus decision-making. The other professional Dad and I rolled our eyes and put a stop to that (nonsense). But we might well have been better off learning a different way of dealing with difference.

Difference? We could all do a little introspection on the theme of You are in a Cult whereas I am a member of a club. Too damned easy to dismiss The Other.

Harmless drudges

I was in Kilkenny's spanking new library filling in time before a visit to the dentist. It is, as all public libraries, richer in 400s "Language" than 500s "Science & Math". But I snagged (423.0922) The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary (2023) by Sarah Ogilvie. And I was rewarded in the snagging - it's great. 
The famous post-box [L cropped under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 from the work of Kaihsu Tai] outside 78 Banbury Road, Oxford where James Murray and 3000 others built the OED. We only know about the 3000 [!] because, in her last week as an Oxford lexicographer, Ogilvie opened a random box in the archive to reveal James Murray's address book. "It was one of those moments when things go into slow motion": as well it might for an archivist to discover The Archive.

She set out on an academic research project to track down and bring to life some of the ace, biased, crazy, dogged, eccentric contributors to the cause of describing the English language as it is used. OED has always been, thus, descriptivist rather than proscriptive = telling people to speak proper. It was an early example of crowd-sourcing. Biased? The English speaking world from America to Zanzibar was asked to read what they liked and thence choose illustrative usage quotes attached to words each reader thought needed that treatment. Thus, a District Officer in India might write 'slips' on khan, pagoda, puggaree, turban; while an ardent suffragette submitted emancipatress, womanist and hungerstruck. Or a doctor might abstract a lot of long words from an anatomy textbook and Editor Murray would feel obliged to include them even as they slipped from  normal usage. And if no wannabee amateur lexicographer turned up from Britain's African colonies? Then loan-words from Hausa and Swahili are invisible to the OED. The slips for Interesting contributors and editors have been shuffled and dealt by Ogilvie into 26 chapters from 'A for Archaeologist' to 'Z for Zealot'. 

Three of the top four contributors were banged up in Lunatic Asylums, while the 4th was an official in such an institution. One of them, William Douglas, submitted 150,000 slips over 22 years which works out at 2 slips an hour for two decades assuming a 60hr working week. Then again, he didn't have a day job. There were also 3 murderers 'on the books' only one of whom was convicted and in Broadmoor. 

Despite his protestations that all of English, [genital] warts and all, should be recorded in his OED, Murray baulked at including several common taboo words. Apart from the Obscene Publications Act of 1857, it was the 1890s: Victorian respectability was a powerful determinative force. In 1877, a bibliography of obscene literature was published by "Pisanus Fraxi" a clever-clogs pseudonym for compiler Henry Ashbee [it's an anagram of Fraxinus ash & Apis bee] who had accumulated the world's largest library of naughty books. He also submitted A Lot of slips from these works pour épater le bourgeois Murray and make him blush.

Ogilvie herself is recording a change in English usage: p.9 Where they lived, what they did with their lives, who they loved, the books they read. Bob: Surely that who should be whom? Scribens agrees: all the other grammar checkers, which are legion, don’t give a damn. I guess whom is on the way out. 
And "Harmless drudge"? That would be a lexicographer.

My PrecISSSS

It was a rather special weekend because The Boy, our firstborn Sun & Air, carved time from his busy working / parenting schedule to come on his ownio to visit his agéd parents. We didn't have a fatted calf about the places but I did buy some rasherses and sausinges and we had breakfast for lunch à trois on Sunday. Nothing like reddit/r/FryUp, mind! Either side of our Bunter Blowfest, we planted out 3 pot-bound exotic trees . . . for posterity, like. 

In normal chat and catchup, nobody is directing the convo and quite random things pop up. Turns out we've both been spending too much time on reddit/r/Ireland and had noticed a post about the International Space Station ISS making a pass across the Irish sky at 2100hrs. That was wrong in the detail by about an hour. so we missed the event. But, in any case The Event would have been a nothing-burger because it was 10/10th cloud cover. Being reddit, some wag offered "damn it if we had prep time we could have made a huge sign that reads: if you can read this please airdrop us some Taytos " The Boy was disappointed because he'd never knowingly seen the ISS. I have - 2018 and 2013: it's not rare like an eclipse. You just have to consult an almanac and hope for clear skies.

I took The Boy to the Dublin train at teatime on Monday. Later that evening, I checked the internet for Tonight's ISS show: 

Oooo, I had 40 minutes in hand. I also checked the sky which had a half moon and romantically scudding clouds. Just before 21:00 a faint satellite coursed across the sky in the same direction as the ISS was expected. But from my previous sightings, I was not fooled by this dullard. And then thar she blowes!

I coulda shoulda just watched with gob agape, because the ISS is bright and zippy; and rather wonderful even after all these years. But I pointed my device in the right direction and logged a tuthree snaps of The Event. Amazin' !! The crap-pic above doesn't capture the ghost-story clouds. I believe the other obvs star must be Altair = α-Aquilae while γ-Aql aka Tarazed is barely visible at 1 o'clock from Altair. ISS? would do again.

Isn't Alan clever?

The Vagabond and The Princess: Paddy Leigh Fermor in Romania (2017) by Alan Ogden

• Q. Can I walk?
• I can!
• Q. Have I walked?
• I have!
• Q. Have I gone on and On and ON about my walks?

But I am The Page to Wenceslas when compared to Laurie Lee, Eric Newby, Peter Fleming or Patrick Leigh Fermor and their earlier long-distance treks. I had indeed read all their walkie-books before I ever put one foot in front of the other.

Travel books are more, and better, than journals or diaries; because travel broadens the mind walking transforms the soul. The Buddhists of school of Plum Village practice walking meditation where they try [not tooo hard, mind] to become one with their breath . . . foot on the earth . . . other foot . . . breathe. But I'm not on that page. This here Page walks day after day until the blisters stop coming and peace settles on the shoulders. Fermor walked from Hoek van Holland to Constantinople in the mid-1930s, made friends, lost his cherry, encountered The Other and was never again at home in England. He kept a diary but lost it and relied on his memory to write up his journey 40 years afterwards. It is nostalgic, colourful, and exotic. It is not a journal but it does document a time and place which was swept into the dustbin of history by WWII and Yalta.

Aaaand 40 years after the publication of A Time of Gifts, a jobbing author with some knowledge of Romania (and the SOE in which Fermor served with success and panache during WWII) decided to write an in the footsteps of book about Fermor's Transylvanian adventures. Which could be wonderful and I got it out of the library on foot of being a Fermor Fanboi. There is some interesting info about the multi-lingual melting-pot aspects of Central Europe in the before times. I like the inclusive practice of using Romanian place-names but also tagging their Magyar and Deutsch identities, at least in the first instance. Thus Cluj (Hungarian: Kolozsvár, German: Klausenburg). We've encountered this before in Breßlau /Wrocław. But Author Ogden has a really annoying tendency to nit-pick about the failures of Fermor's memory:

Ogden 1 : Fermor 0!
on the prev page ' . . . slotted by embrasures, with a circular bastion at each corner'.  The bastions are not circular but polygonal and Paddy makes no mention of the prominent ravelins at each corner of the rectangular plan.
Ogden 2: Fermor 0!!
Fermor died in 2011 so he can't fight back. Slow triumphal hand-clap.

I learned a bit more about MittelEurop's ethnicities from the book but also from follow-ups on Wikipedia: 

• Székely maybe related to Attila's huns, they achieved a level of autonomy within the various empires into which they were subsumed and continued to speak a variety of Hungarian / Magyar. Ceded to Romania by the 1920 carve-up Treaty of Trianon, they were returned to Axis Hungary in WWII and then back to Romania. I have no idea whether they were sufficientlly endogamous to retain DNA distinction through 1,000 years in Transylvania surrounded by attractive Roma, Saxons and 
• Aromanians aka Vlachs are from further South into the Balkans but they speak a vulgar-Latin derived Eastern Romance Language not unlike the regular Romanian of Romania.
• Saxons are Germans, mainly from the low-countries encouraged East with various Ostsiedlung East-settlement schemes their lingo is like Luxembourgish. Saxony = Freistaat Sachsen is the Southernmost division of the DDR = East Germany. The Anglo-Saxons? they come from a non-contiguous part of Germania called Niedersachsen = Lower Saxony: a Land wedged up against the Northsea convenient for jumping to the first substantial island off the coast of NE Europe.

Diversity rocks! 

WOFFAL!

For months and months, I've had a book lurk unread in my Borrowbox reading list. Finally, a week ago, I brought 21st Century Yokel [2017] by Tom "never 'eard of 'im" Cox into play and it was a treat. He was born in the same year as Caitlin Moran [prev] and had a similar early career trajectory: working-class kid from Up North with a good ear and zeitgeist taste gets job as mainstream music journalist in London. They've branched out on different paths since then, but are both still writing and still lol funny. Tom Cox has a good dozen books out and about.

Cox [as R on a Devon cliff] found the pace and prices of late 20thC London a bit much and went upstakes to the country, first in Norfolk and then to Devon. He reflects in one chapter about the richness and variety of landscape to be found in such a small island as "Great" Britain. It ranks 9th after Honshu, ahead of Ellesmere. The coast of Devon and Cornwall is all cliffs, storms and sandy bays [much like Costa na Déise] while East Anglia is is a pancake haunted by fogs, and getting eaten away through erosion [bloboprev].

Cox embraces the fractal nature of landscape, asserting that there is a life-times interest and engagement to be had in the square mile surrounding his home outside Totnes. Indeed any square-mile, if you live nearby and pay attention. It's like Louis Agassiz spending the Summer vacation working his way across his back yard. We don't need to go to Bali or Iguazu for The Amazing: head to the nearest hedgerow be small.

The interface between domestic and wild in Cox's world is his cats. He's written a tuthree whole books about them. One chapter of Yokel tells how one of his cats was savaged by an off-leash dog and needed two operations and days of veterinary care to survive. The [enormous] vet bills were mostly covered through a crowd-funder organised by his fan-base. "wollen sie ewig leben?", it's not for me to judge how folks spend their own money.

21stC Yokel was published by Unbound, a cunning publishing venture which laid off the risk by crowd-funding the books they accepted for publication. It worked extremely well for Cox, who had a) track record b) loyal and extensive fan base. And his next handful of books were published by the same venture. For other authors, not so much. Unbound went into administration in 2025, 14 years after launch, owing royalties to multiple dependent authors. One of the directors John "QI" Mitchinson [whom prev] acquired the assets of the bankruptcy to create Boundless. "Author Tom Cox, whose latest book Everything Will Swallow You was due to come out this Thursday, became suspicious after months of not having received payments he was owed." That's the thing with bankruptcy, incompetent or unlucky entrepreneurs get to cut their losses and walk away to start new ventures. Their suppliers, clients, customers just have to suck up the losses - counting themselves fortunate to get pennies in the pound of what they are owed. 

otoh!! Walter Scott's printing business went tits-up in 1825 owing £130,000. Scott undertook to write himself out of his debts and died doing it. But the creditors' investment was returned and we got Woodstock, The Fair Maid of Perth and Castle Dangerous.

Tom Cox has a Dad, Mick (not Michael) Cox whose antics make an excellent foil for some of the book's humor. His catch-phrase is “WATCH OUT FOR FUCKWITS AND LOONIES!" [WOFFAL] while his aphorisms, and peculiar certainties, are always delivered SHOUTING. Apparently, this ALL CAPS conceit was first used by John "Garp" Irving in A Prayer for Owen Meany [1989], which is the favorite book of Cox Sr. John Irving was making a lot of waves when we was living in New England in the early 1980s but I never got further than The World According to Garp [1978]. Owen Meany sounds like a rec to me and I've reserved a copy at the Library.