Sunday 3 November 2024

Sun son Nov Luv

Whaaa's happenin'?

Friday 1 November 2024

Domestique

I've written about Team Work in science: after my old boss was awarded a Mentor of the Year Gong. With 10 year hindsight that reads partly like a tale of master and proles; where the Gong-winner may or may not acknowledge that their success is founded on the work of others - not to mention O Fortuna [♩ ♬ ♫ ♪] dealing good cards. But it also gives tribs to those who share, and give and share again. As aside: read the comment which adds another side to an earlier Othering

My recent earbook has been Winners by Alastair Campbell which has a niche pre-Brexit, pre-Trump, post-9/11, post-Crash standpoint although Campbell tries hard to tease out eternal verities from the stories of famous politicians, entrepreneurs and sportistas. Campbell was famously ambitious as a journalist, then editor and then Blair's Director of Comms. For his younger self it was all about the winning: putting one over on Losers so he has empathy and understanding for people hewn from the same well 'ard hard stuff. As it happens, and rarely among Britse politicians, he is fluent in German and French and so understands Le Tour de France and its jargon [glossary]. A domestique is one of the riders who puts in the miles solely to ensure that the star of the team gets over the line firstest with the mostest. Don't presume to call such a one "domestique" to their face though: équipier or gregario is more respectful.

In 10 Downing Street in the Blair years there were a number of Effectives, who had risen to the top of their profession about halfway up the Team Blair hierarchy. Offered a promotion, these folks were astute and self-aware enough to refuse: "nope, I know my limits and my comfort zone and I'll leave the stress to you thanks". I know a number of cases of excellent scientists who took the only available path for promotion and finished up as Head of Dept, or even Head of School and perforce left a large part of their scientific chops behind as they took up cudgels in Admin. Science is top-heavy on spectral types: hyperfocus and obsession with detail makes for success. But those attributes often go together with "shy and retiring" and "lack of eye-contact" which makes them kinda useless dealing with boardroom bluster, let alone family crisis or interpersonal tiff from team-members. Promotion? what a waste of talent!

25 years ago I was hired to work in one of the first SFI Science Foundation Ireland multi-million showcase labs to make sense of The Human Genome. I was surprised because I was for sure not the smartest man in the room (nor woman neither!). When SFI hands you money-no-object millions, you can hire the best in the field (who are prepared to migrate to a provincial backwater off the coast of Europe). It transpired that, a few months earlier, I had been talking to my then office-next-door colleague and now boss. I'd given him a candid self-assessment that I was an infrastructural guy whose ambition genes were shot off in the war. At least part of that was true nature but part of it was being brought up as a navy-brat with a strong sense of service. Anyway, my new boss took me at my word and gave me a desk and a laptop and a task to see if human genes were clustered into 'operons': units of related function. I started off robbing code from the Young Turks who were much better programmers than me but then developed a local expertise in displaying data using a particular graphics package. I was happy to have this code robbed by my colleagues when the need arose.

In Campbell's book, there's a neat anecdote about John F "Winner" Kennedy going on a Presidential tour of Cape Canaveral to see how his Giant Step for Mankind project was going. The consummate pol noticed an old black man pushing a broom across an enormous hangar. Although it was kinda obvs, Kennedy asked the elder what he was doing there. "I'm helping to put a man on the moon" was the reply.  Because, dammit, John Glenn and Alan Shepherd and the rest of the NASA team couldn't do their work unless somebody emptied the bins and swept the floor. Quite so!

Wednesday 30 October 2024

The pipes are calling

Pat the Salt, BJB, has departed this Earth for further adventures elsewhere. Born in 1925, he grew up in Cardiff around the middle of thirteen sibs in the Hungry Thirties. He ran away to sea as soon as he left school at 14; and clocked up thousands of sea miles between Liverpool Halifax Fremantle Buenos Aires Oran. His ship was torpedoed in the North Atlantic in August 1942, but he wasn't for drowning. He lost all his kit, though. A few months later, through a rambling series of unexpected encounters, he was given a set of new-to-him bagpipes in Australia. And these became his signature dish ashore and afloat. By the time he returned to Blighty in 1945, his last Cardiff home had been blitzed, both his parents were dead and one of his sisters was full of shrapnel. But he made sure his younger brothers and sisters were fed and presentable if The Social came to the front door looking for orphans.

Evidence from the Irish Press [R] shows that he came to Ireland in 1948 and went on the tramp from Dublin busking at least as far South as Laragh Co Wicklow. He was probably heading for Passage East where he knew his people were buried. No work in Ireland, so he started with Kellogg's in Manchester where the family had washed up. In another life, in other times, that would have been an unexpectedly comfortable billet but he'd seen things you people wouldn't believe. Soon enough he was working for Elder Dempster in colonial Lagos, Nigeria. He survived, thrived and shipped up country to Kano in the Sahel near the French border with Niger.

Meanwhile elsewhere in the city a young woman of startling elegance and exotic beauty was nightly praying to St Patrick to beam her up out of this khaki dusty backwater to somewhere greener. Seeing a personable young chap with pipes she thought "I'll have him" and she did. Pat was then doing well in the groundnut trade, his wife Souad was working for BOAC out at the airport and the two of them scrimped and saved and did without to buy a farm back home in Ireland. And it was so. But trying to wrest a living, in the 1950s, from sixty stony acres near Dunmore East was even harder graft than shipping before the mast in wartime in the 1940s. Opening the first chic Parisian boutique in Waterford City wasn't enough to ensure solvency.  But while the farm spiraled down into murrain, blight and debt, the children were growing up honest, literate and determined. 

It's not about me, except to say that I bumbled on stage in this up and down drama about a year after The Farm was sold and Pat was wearing a white coat behind the counter of his store in Freshford Co Kilkenny.The joke was that, while my lab coat indicated I was a mere student of biology, Pat's showed he was a nuclear physicist master of a cyclotron in the ball-alley behind the shop. {Despite | because of}my very expensive education, I had a lot to learn. Insofar as I have any manners (and I don't mean fish-forks) now, is largely due to my being accepted into the family in 1973. Blimey, that's 50+ years ago. It's been a journey: all of us have put in restless miles a long way from where we were born.

Somewhere along the way, Pat's Australian pipes went missing. So I never heard him play The Minstrel Boy. About ten years ago, Pat and Souad, well into their free travel years, washed up in the centre of Tramore. They picked up with old friends and made new ones. One of the latter was, inter much alia, a piper. Pipers are a community in the same way as Cosa Nostra is a community.  Shortly thereafter, in a way maybe not so very different from the return of The Boy's bicycle, Pat's pipes mysteriously re-appeared. That piper had a daughter, TL, who was to the manner born a piper in her own right. As well as being an accomplished musician, that child had the biggest heart and the most generous hand you could ever hope to meet. They're grown up now, soldiering though college in another part of the country.

But in May this year, just before Pat turned 99, just after his care went full palliative, TL returned home to Tramore to play the pipes for Pat. Everyone agreed that to play the pipes in his bedroom would smither Pat's dentures and have his hearing-aids blow a gasket. So TL stepped out into the garden and gave her old pal The Minstrel Boy at full blast through his open window. Ah bless! is it dusty in here, or is it dusty?


Monday 28 October 2024

AFOL LEGO BURP

How much information about the Tokio Express do you have capacity for? Tracey Williams doesn't think that a book's worth is TMI! On 13 Feb 1997, the container-ship Tokio Express was caught in a brutal storm between Land's End and the Scilly Isles and a freak wave carried away a number of TEUs which were washed overboard. Within a few weeks specific designs of Lego 'bricks' started to appear on Cornish beaches. Lego head-office supplied an inventory of the lost pieces and they are still being found nearly 28 years later. And not only in Cornwall.

pic.credit Caroline South

Ironically, a good proportion of the lost pieces were nautical themed: octopus, life-raft, flippers, sea-grass, life-jacket. The available inventory tells how many pieces of each type were hoiked off on their journey in 1997, so finders can assess how rare their pieces are. Green Dragons are the Holy Grail in the field.

I'm a beachcomber, buoys and rope division. Dau.I is a librarian, Northside Dublin division. She correctly surmised that I would like to read Adrift: the curious tale of Lego lost at sea (2022) by Tracey Williams. When I became one of the earliest unDanish adopters of Lego, aged 7 in 1961, there were only red bricks. The spaceships, dragons, flowers and helmets all came later. I really wouldn't count as an AFOL [adult fan of Lego] although several of my family wear that badge. With my failing eyesight, I don't imagine I'll become an ABOL [adult beachcomber of Lego] because the search image is too small. a BURP is a big ugly rock piece, see also LURP

What else did I discover? The standard Lego plastic is made of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene ABS, which come together in varying proportions depending on the polymerization conditions. ABS is hard, shiny, chemically resistant, stable, ductile (= un-brittle). All these properties contribute to making Lego the brick of choice for the last three generations. But also ensure that pieces can withstand the buffets of waves, sand, salt for decades before landing on a beach and getting a second life as a rather shabby collectible. 

My son the engineer put himself through Open University to get his first degree and is now designing signalling networks for British Rail. Make an error here and people will die. I like the idea that there are life-and-death averse B.Eng.s who are working for Lego tonking a concept brick 100x with a precisely weighted hammer and looking for cracks.

Sunday 27 October 2024

Hallowe'enish 2024

Clocks fall back an hour today! The EU have really dropped the ball on doing away with this nonsense.

Heyhey, a milestone of sorts. The Blob passed 2 million pageviews yesterday:

This ship has been sailing for nearly 12 years and has cluttered 2.5 million words into the internet servers. It's great therapy for me [whoa: oversharing TMI etc.] but I do check to see if it has utility for others. It took 3 years to pass 100,000 pageviews; and another 3 to pass the half million. So The Blob is doing the state some service?? But there is a strong suspicion that PVs are driven as much by B◎ts as human 👁👁. Case in point:

It is frankly incredible that as many, like, people checked in to The Blob last Thursday as in the whole month of September. I've seen these blips before, and then activity, as recorded by Blogspot, settles down to bumbling along at a few hundred PVs a day - much of that scrapers, spiders and bots but some real people [like you-hoo, dear reader] as well. Have a great day wherever you are.



Friday 25 October 2024

Kokoro 心

A tuthree weeks ago, I was blathering on about ancient Greek customs and norms: with a xenia here, a pompḗ there and aretê in the middle. One of the delights of other languages is that words are diced differently there, so it's hard to get an exact synonym (with all appropriate baggage and nuance) for any word in foreign. A lot of mileage is wrung out of how hiraeth and saudades are untranslatable. But pick a word, any word, and you'll be missing some aspect of meaning when translating it to another tongue.

So there I was, two days on the trot, hangin' out at the Lafcadio Hearn Japanese Garden in Tramore. The first day, we were in Tramore with a surprising couple of care-free hours. We polished up our Annual pass [a snip at €70 /yr IF you plan to treat the place as your oasis of calm and live close enough to go a tuthree times with a friend] and headed out into into a brisk sunshiny autumn morning.  The garden hangs on the side of hill, so it is a challenge for those with a wheelchair or COPD. But for the rest of us, it is lovely: curling paths, well-placed benches, dappled shade.

The next day we were back to witness the Japanese ambassador to Ireland Marayama Norio 丸山範雄 laying the foundation stone for the new visitor centre at the Garden. ahem That didn't happen, probably because the new building scheduled had slumped like the ever-building National Children's Hospital. But Ambassador Maruyama [seen L with his bodyguard] did share some waggishly optimistic words about the future utility of the Kokoro Centre. This was complemented by some, mercifully short, speeches by The Minister, The Mayor and The Chair of the Board for the Garden. Two previous Irish Ambassadors to Japan, one rather frail, were also in evidence. The average age of the invited guests was about 65; which is a pity because it is subsequent generations who will be using and supporting the gardens for lifetime of the Kokoro Centre . . . if it ever gets off its foundations.

Everyone, even the monoglots, essayed to translate Kokoro into English. Nobody thought to cut to the chase and quote Lafcadio Hearn The papers composing this volume treat of the inner rather than of the outer life of Japan, for which reason they have been grouped under the title Kokoro. Written with the 心 character, this word signifies also mind, in the emotional sense; spirit; courage; resolve; sentiment, affection; and inner meaning — just as we say in English, “the heart of things.”

After speeches, canapés! Calling Logistics Manager! Someone decided to lay out the sushi and petit fours on a dazzling white cloth on a table on a balcony overlooking the garden. Which is fine in theory. Not so much if access to the balcony is along a narrow dead-end walkway past the jacks. But if that's what it is, then somebody needs to hoosh people (and their frames, sticks, entitlement and deafness) along, past the table, and out again to enjoy the garden. Not clogging up the access to provender . . . and the jacks [toot toot incontinence alert].

My first encounter with my doughty and dependable pal Rissoles [multiprev] was at a Home Ed gathering in Glendalough. It was agreed that a group photo would be A Good Thing but everyone continued to mill ineffectually about, gnawing rice cakes, and not controlling their kids. Rissoles (I believe it was the first time his family had been to such an event) stood up on a chair, called for silence and directed the milling herd to go East, the photographer to go West and let's just get this done!  And it was so. Y'gotta love him.

Wednesday 23 October 2024

Kati

I wrote with nostalgic gusto about Old Measure, which was still in daily use in rural England in the late 1960s. So many etymologically unrelated names related by inconsistent multipliers: 8 furlongs to the mile; 14 pounds to the stone; 20 [UK] or 16 [US] fluid ounces to the pint. But that's very insular and introspective and frankly baffling for pretty much everyone under the age of, say, 50. 

I was processing the last? of the beans at the beginning of the month. There is only so many beanz and man can eat, despite being good for the heart, so I was blanching and freezing for Christmas, when we expect the family to be sharing þe sucking pigge. I needed to convert 7.5oz to grams and, although I knew it was about 210g, I asked my browser. As well as kg, lb, oz and several different tons, I was offered an answer in Tola or Catty. These measures of weight a) were outside my insular education b) had a whiff of spices.

Catty, kati, jin, 斤, is for measuring lumps and is about 600g or 1⅓lb avoirdupois. It was originally a word in Malay, and we derive tea caddy from the same source. About 600g because several cultures retain an old style incommensurate 604[.78]g = 1 catty. In the PRC, they've made international trade simple by redefining 1 jin = 500g or a 'metric pound'. That's how we used to buy cheese in Rotterdam in the late 70s "een pond van belegen kaas a.u.b." or "een half-pond" as the case might be. Dus! I've been misheard many times in Ireland with my Britse accent asking for "half a pound/kilo of sausages" and getting twice that because 👂"[I'll] have a pound of sausages".

Tola contrariwise is for smaller things, having been standardised by the East India Company in the 19thC as 180 grains = 3⁄8 troy ounce or 11.7g. Conveniently, the EIC rupee (which was a widely circulated and trusted coin) [see R] weighed 1 Tola. I know nothing about such matters, but the base unit of hashish is apparently 1 tola or more likely [short measure alert!] 10g. And 10 tola is a convenient and widely used weight for gold bullion. In these uncertain times that will cost you €9,000! although it's a good bit smaller than my pinkie finger. 

And while we're East is East, there's a Picul or tam 擔 which = 120 Catty. In Hong Kong this amount is called a stone. What with HK being British and all for 100+ years, this is a little wild because elsewhere in the Empire 1 Stone = 14lb in standard human body measurement [for those over 50] in these WEA islands. A picul at 72kg was what an 11st = 70kg man could be expected to sustainably carry on a shoulder pole. I like that reference back to the size and capacity of the human body to generate relatable weights and measures. In Nederland carpenters and others still measure in duim 👍 = inch from the width of a man's thumb. For longer measurements there's a furlong [prev] - the length of furrow that could be ploughed before the oxen went all lactic and had to be rested. It is 220 yds = 10 chains =~ 200m and there are 8 of them to the [statute] mile.