Listerham

Could be a mid-sized market town in Norfolk? But no, it is rather a rant from me about the mysterious transformation whereby thinly slicing food quadruples the price paid by consumers. A couple of weeks ago, Dau.II foodie sans pareil had day release from Dublin to help her agéd parents with some domestic task. She has hank when she poured off the train at Plunkett Station and we had to repair instanter to a supermarket for the makings of a hang sangwich. Nope, LIDL ham would not answer, we must go across the way to Supervalu for a packet of Brady's Family Ham . . . a  Stafford's turn-over Ingredients Wheat Flour, Yeast, Water & Salt. I buttoned my lip, because Dau.II, as a child, could get hangry and I had no wish to witness the adult version.

But my inner dialogue was to the effect that LIDL ham was quite likely made in the same factory with pigs from the same farm injected with NaNO₂ from the same vat.

Then on the last day of June, the food-safety authority FSAI issued a Listeria recall directive on

• Brady Family Wood Smoked Real Irish Ham 6 Slices €37.40/kg
• Brady Family Hand Crumbed Real Irish Ham 6 Slices 
• Lidl Deluxe Triple Oak Smoked Carved Irish Ham 5 Slices 
• Lidl Deluxe Honey Roast Carved Irish Ham 5 Slices 
• Tesco Finest Crumbed Shaved Ham 16 Slices €20.75/kg

all with a bbd of 16 July 2026. I rest my Lidly=Brady equivalency case! You do you, listen to the radio adverts, and buy Brady Family Ham at €37 per kilo. In a hangry emergency I might buy the same stuff in a yellow pack from Lidl or Tesco. But really, I'druther can a [half] kilo of uncooked ham for €7/kg, b'ile it up and cut generous tranches for a week's worth of lunches. Can't be piffling about with waffer-thin slices of honey-shaved wood-roast hand-carved over-priced product.

It could be worse for Brady's rep. It's "only" Listeria!? [whc bloboprev] Unless you're pregnant, very young, very old or undergoing chemo, you'll get through the infection with some fluid loss [both ends] and some discomfort. And (this is important) the contaminated batch was detected by routine in-house QC at Brady. Accidents and boo-boos will happen in any institution; if the errors are detected, then nobody dies. I hope the recalled ham gets chopped up for soup; it would be a shame and a waste otherwise.

By coincidence, the day before the recall, Wikipedia featured On this day the 1971 case where Bon Vivant tinned Vichssoise avec Clostridium botulinum killed one, disabled one people. "On July 3, Bon Vivant voluntarily recalled all remaining cans of their vichyssoise, including soup manufactured under 22 different private label brand names". The FDA came down all heavy and Bon Vivant went bankrupt. I hope Brady's weather the storm because they employ a bunch of people in Co Kildare and are tuned in to Food Cloud, the no-food-waste charity. 

Map Man

Barry Dalby [multiprev] the cartographer [EastWest Mapping] lives close enough that, 20+years ago, I helped barrow the concrete for his kitchen extension. That's what neighbours do. In 2013, he published a 1:25,000 scale rambler's map was definitionally (50/25)² = 4x and possibly10x more informative that the equivalent 1:50,000 map put out by the salarymen at  OSI Ordnance Survey Ireland. 

Back then, at the birth of The Blob, that map was the handiest, handsomest, most convenient data-source for "Blackstairs, Mount Leinster & The Barrow Valley". Part of Dalby's job was seeing that his creation was stocked in local shops. I made and framed a publicity poster and screwed it to the side of one of our sheds [still there, as R]; tempting passing hill-walkers to buy their own copy. Periodically, I'd go visit EastWest Centraal and purchase a bunch of Blackstairs maps, knowing I'd be giving them away to visitors (and passing strangers!). Barry generously cut me a wholesale deal. Which, fair enough, I was possibly shifting as many as Bowe's, Kiltealy or O'Shea's, Borris.

Then, as Coronarama ebbed, I gave away my last copy of 'our' map and contacted Barry for more. But the cupboard was bare! It had taken him 10 years to off-load all copies of the first print-run [joy!] . . . but a  second edition was in process [we're notnin America so defered gratification is okay]. And last year, Dalby went sideways and self-published a book "Map Man ~ Irish Maps & Mapping" a snip at €21!. On my way home from a [miserable washed-out] organic open day in Wicklow, I left the motorway and pootled across country to EastWest Mapping with €100 burning a hole in my pocket. There, after catching up on descendants over a cup of tea, I bought a) a spare copy of EastWest Comeraghs for when we're down the Déise b) a copy of Map Man to work out how Barry ticks c) the balance in Blackstairs II maps to share over our gate at home.

Map Man is profusely illustrated [✓] but the pics are only slightly larger than postage-stamps. Years ago I was advised to illustrate The Blob because a wall-of-text is alienating. I bent to the pressure and almost every post since has a pic. But I obsess about bandwidth on behalf of my fans in the third world reading on dial-up. So my pictures are both blurry and pokey to save pixels. Dalby has similar issues although for a print-book there must be another driver than bandwidth. Example [L], the body-text font on the right is 12pt [guessing] so the text in this adjacent illustration might be 2pt and unreadable without a jeweller's loup.

~35 years ago, I published a book . . . with an ISBN and all. We were wildly optimistic about the desirability of this product; printed-and-bound 250 copies; gave way a couple of dozen; sold [eventually] a couple of dozen; dumped 200. I am glad to have had the experience, could afford the loss, but wouldn't repeat. I wrote another book (on the Process of Pilgrimage) in 2004-2005 but was smart enough, burnt enough, not to try printing or publishing it. Dalby is made of sterner, bomb-proof stuff - he is a serial risk-taker: investing time and [loadsa] money in developing product which needs to be stored and distributed for years before the investment is recouped, let alone converted into shoes and sliced pans.

Life ain't fair. When we hefted concrete at Caislean Dalby in the 00s they lived halfway up a hill close to the CW-WW-WX triple point with stunning views to the South and SouthWest. Coillte had acquired and planted land on the other side of the L road. Those trees now form the standard Coillte dark green cliff which completely occludes the outlook towards the Blackstairs and the Plains of Wexford. They can do that because property rights over-ride mental health rights in Ireland. I've never heard Barry complain, though. Perhaps because as a professional cartographer he knows that the other side of his bohereen was forest at least as far back as the first Ordnance Survey in the 1830s. 

What he does complain about is VAT on maps. And being in competition with Ordnance Survey Ireland which The Man regards as essential civil and military infrastructure & allocates a wodge of tax-payers money each and every budget since 1825. Other creatives [novelists, poets, painters, musicians] get tax breaks because The State has decided their contributions raise the cultural tide for all of us and/but they can't sell enough of their product to make a living. Books, including atlases, have been zero-rated for VAT since 1972. But the consumer must pay an impost for maps . . . unless they are produced by The State through the Ordnance Survey.

I believe EastWest Mapping, in the person of Barry Dalby, has done the state some service by recording place-names and other aspects of landscape heritage. The State treats him like a maker and retailer of cuff-links.; nice if you fancy that sort of thing but not, like, essential. But like Luther, he kann nichts anders, and his creations are works of art, engineering and data-science. I urge you to buy one of his minority maps - they are a fire hazard stacked up in the poor fellow's attic. Luther? I didn't realise until the last few pages of Map Man, that Dalby and I [King's County etc.] both come from the Protestant tradition [as R a gem of 19thC church]. As an envoi to his autobiography, he suggests that members of the Church of Ireland have punched above their weight in cherishing, recording and creating the cultural heritage of Ireland . . . because as the outsiders-within they/we do not take it for granted. Go Barry, stick it to An Fear!

 

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