They're giving rain

. . . and I'm giving out [below]
For more than ten years, Wexford Science Café has been running on the 3rd Tuesday of the Month; except when it's not. Third Tuesday is Patrick's Day this March, so the date was shifted forw a week . . . and the guest speakers were announced as MetÉireann veterans Evelyn Cusack and Séamus Walsh. They wrote They Say It Might Rain TSIMR published by Gill last year which is a breezy, profusely illustrated, book about the history of Irish Weather and its prediction. I snagged a copy off the shelf in Tramore library and hoovered through it in  prep for their WxScCaff perf. I particularly like including a number of weather related An Post stamp pictures.

I am a MetÉireann fan, I chekkitout their rainfall every day, sometimes several times a day and I follow incommming storms [so many storms Babet Chandra Darwinday Éowyn Frank] as I touch up my chain-saw to process the damage. This book is defo my jam, and a good bit was new to me. The loss of the Henri IV in the Crimean Storm of 1854. The Royal Charter Storm of 1859. That Éowyn (2025) is running Oíche na Gaoithe Móire (1839) close for being the biggest storm since records began.The [massive, shared] MetÉireann weather computer is located in . . . Iceland. I hope because they have supercheap hydro-power there. I have touched the Finnish equivalent in Espoo; and it is also massive.

The book is grand, and probably fit for parochial purpose: serving the domestic market.  Hopefully inspiring some [Irish] youngsters to embrace meteorology. But I have gripes. In 2017, Gill also published Luke O'Neill's popular science book Humanology; A Scientist's Guide to Our Amazing Existence (2018) which I took apart in 2019.

Like too many Irish books TSIMR runs to chauvinism (unreasonable belief in the superiority or dominance of one's own group or people).  Puffing up any player in the tale who happens to be Irish as if their contributions to science reflect well on the current inhabitants of the island. Cusack, Walsh and Gill claim George "Navier-Stokes Eqn" Stokes (1819-1902) because he was born in Sligo; and "our own" Robert "Boyle's Law" Boyle (1627-1691) because he was born in Waterford. But these prophets were without honour in their own country at the time and upstakes to seek a fortune where their talents were recognised and valued. And "Of course, the weather is all about temperatures and pressure, so Boyle is the dude" is a particularly charmless way of referring to The Great Man and his work. Maybe it is an attempt, using the supposed argot of youth, to make the book, or Boyle, more accessible to teens. The with-no-shame answer for the woeful lack of support for Irish science through the whole of the 19thC & 20thC until Science Foundation Ireland in ~2000AD is to play the MOPE card and blame the Brits.

In 2022, my pal Denis alerted me to a recent pre-print which cast side-eye at the hottest ever in Ireland record temperature 33.3°C observed at Kilkenny Castle on Sun 26 June 1887. That paper. " Given that Ireland is now the only country in Europe to have a national heat record that was set in the 19th century, a reassessment of the verity of this record is both timely and valuable" ie. that 1887 measurement is so extra-ordinary as to require extra-ordinary standards of evidence [Bloboprev Arsenic] but [autoquote] pretty much everyone, including Met Éireann, trots it out with neither sanity-check nor health-warning. Add TSIMR to the list of those whose QC goes squidgy when anything Irish is exceptional. Working hypothesis, one of the KK Castle gardeners popped the thermometer in his tea just before measurement time - for a jape, like.

If I read The Blob, rather than just writing it, I'm sure I'd be annoyed by the tendency to drop clever-clogs I-know-this-thing anecdotes, asides and additions. A good copy editor would ruthlessly hack this crud from the final draft because it impedes the flow and adds nothing but distraction for the reader. My current hypothesis is that Gill copy editors add oxygen-sucking asides to the (?slightly boring, pedantic, but correct?) mss submitted by scientists . . . to make it more accessible. I'll just give one example. p.120 "Similarly the southern lights are aurora australis, from the Graeco-Roman south wind god, Auster. (Terra Australis was the name given in 1570 to the proposed 'southern land' now known as Australia)" It might be more respectful to give some credit/space to the 13 y.o. reader to have their own aha! moment about the etymology.

And sometimes these didactic asides are just .  plain . wrong. p.135 "Iceberg means 'ice mountain' in Danish Dutch Swedish and German". In none of those languages is the statement true: Eisberg DE; isbjerg DK; ijsberg NL; isberg SE; . . . also for completeness ísjaki IS; isfjell NO nynorsk; isberg NO bokmål. Weirdly iceberg means iceberg in FR ES PT IT. Also jäävuori FI cnoc oighir IE. harrumph!

And the WexSciCaf gig?  They announced that the perf would run for 45 mins, leaving 15 minutes for questions. It ran over this wishful thunk by 20 minutes. That stuff really cranks my gears. When they were working to the second presenting the weather for RTE it never happened. Broadcasting abhors a silence, and they were able then, at zero notice, to e x t e n d their slot if the news presenter's toupé fell off OR get what needed saying in less time because The Pope had talked too much immediately prior. Some [far too much] of that time over-run was taken up making a laughing stock of the Infant of Prague. Back in the day, statues of the IoP would be left out in the garden to stay the rain on a wedding day. There were plenty of people in the room whose parents (or who themselves) had been party to this widespread Irish practice. Gratuitously slagging them off is unnecessary and exclusionary. Running over time is also disrespectful. But at least in this case it spared everyone from listening to me get fighty.

Bonus. Because we're all Olds, before kick-off I got chatting to the couple next to me. They turned out to be Frank & Síofra Gallagher, long time stalwarts of Tinahely Courthouse Arts Centre. Which was nice because I got to thank them for the many shows, films and events we attended with or without The Daus back in the day. I mind the night in March 2013 when we drove through fallen branches and floods to see Jiro Dreams of Sushi at Tinahely.  

wet wet wet

Last week I was recalling my adventures on [someone else's] rural laneways and on Monday riffing on potholes. Storm Chandra (26/27 Jan 2026) was just the low-point of high-water for us this really soggy late Winter. For once, peculiarities in the jet-stream and push-back from anti-cyclones meant that Ireland's Ancient East has been much more rain-sodden than The West. On average Galway West gets about twice the rainfall compared to Dublin Central. The MetEireann yellow rainfall warning was for Monday 27Jan, but it was dry on the Saturday, so I trudged uphill to clean out the drains in anticipation. But clearly not enough because, while I sat out Sunday in the warm and dry, steady rain accumulated on the hill [already saturated from a month of every day some ppt] and washed out A Lot of the 100 tonnes of gravel we spread for walkers in 2022. " And nobody NOBODY would listen to me about fixing the drains before dressing the surface!" This time last year I intercepted 200kg of this downhill travelling gravel before it piled up on the county road 300m downhill. That was largely consumed for infrastructure during the installation of our solar array which went live in April 2025.

Same again with Chandra. My uphill gravel catcher filled to brimming and the overspill trundled downhill to block the drain at the county road spilling water and debris across the surface. Prime pothole conditions esp coupled with imbeciles who plough through puddles at 60km/h like it was a fairground splashworld ride. Two never-seen-this-before consequences of the never-ending wet:

1. On Mon 28 Jan the electric RCD [residual current detector] tripped OFF. With some advice from Roy the Plumber I a) unplugged everything then b) tripped off all the circuits and brought them back live one-a-time. That isolated the problem to the "Shed" circuit which was reasonably good news: none of the appliances were tripping, the broadband was working. But, the "Shed" circuit services a) the water pump and b) the freezer. So I scared up a couple of extension cords plugged them into sockets in  the nearest upstairs bedroom and looped them down the yard and in through the shed velux. Bingo and like fiat aqua. 
2. 
   Springs sprung in the lane where they never sprong before [as R] the warning flag is when the yellow clay (a compacted granite and quartz sand / sandstone) starts to blurf up through the road bed. and gravel. If you press these seeps with your boot it feels punky and a little bouncy like a quaking bog. The one shown was new but only 1 sq.m. in extent. Fortunately quickly remediated with a bucket full of fist-sized stones heeled into the soft bits. But not before our postie had driven through the surface failure at speed to start it weeping.
   Further down the lane where it narrows to 2.5m another new spring developed in the drain-side wheel-rut that was 10m long. I could not find that much stone easily and my bucket isn't strong enough.

I called our neighbourly friend John the Digger for a consult. He was optimistic - "the lane will dry out as Winter ebbs" and also cautious about starting work while the problem was still active. "Of course, if you can't drive up to your house, I can come and do something drastic . . . two Saturdays from now". Accordingly we parked the car ½km away in another neighbour's yard and installed a postbox on a stick at the bottom of the lane. I also marked the extent of the long weep with blue tags on the adjacent fence.

And sure enough, the long weep dried out enough for traffic about 2 weeks later. It's exercise to trot 300m down the lane to check the post but even the old need exercise. And it spares the grass verges near the house from being wet-ploughed several times a week by postie in the current version of enormous electric delivery van. It's carbon footprint might be low but its footprint footprint is extensive.

And we found Shane the Sparks through a strong rec by oanother neighbour. He came 4 weeks after the RCD flipped OFF [and two weeks after I'd tried making it go again] it flipped-and-stayed ON. Isn't it always the way? But while he was still within his call-out window, he did some investigation and disconnected the shed-circuit to the shed with the sketchiest roof. Now we know which wire goes to each of three sheds and we have both well-pump and freezer back on the mains. Later, Shane will come back to tidy the outside wiring and give each part its own RCD rather than one RCD-to-rule-them-all at the main fuse board for the steading. As I said to Shane "This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship"

The 4th power

. . . of the axle weight is proportional to damage inflicted on the road surface.

In the early 90s, when I was working in Trinity College Dublin, we took the 3rd year students on a 2 night field trip down the country. Available car-owning adults would pile 3-4 students into cars and we'd roar along country lanes visiting breweries, mushroom factories, plant-breeding centres and stud farms. Anything and anywhere that could spell genetics. Nobody died, although drink was taken when offered. None of the drivers looked at the small print of their insurance to see whether it covered carrying passengers during the course of work. One year the Professor of Human Genetics had a vital funding meeting in The Office and said he'd catch up with us later. We arrived at our final destination after dark and sloped off the pub. The Prof didn't catch up until almost closing time. Travelling at speed in the gloaming he had struck a pot-hole that bent his wheel out of shape and he couldn't manage more than 50km/h all the way back to town at the end of the field trip.

The Grape [bloboprevs] with its fancy alloy wheels, was particularly delicate w.r.t. potholes and the tires cost 3x more than those attached to my 'umble little Yaris. 

Brainstorm episodes pop up on the RTE front page. The headline people came up with Where will the cash come from to fix the latest crop of Irish potholes? for a wide ranging pothole rabbithole by Paul "Strategic Procurement and Supply Management" Davis of DCU. It's not just about the money, although obvs fixing this perennial political football is. It's topical because Storm Chandra [26/27 Jan 26] whacked out A Lot of minor roads across Leinster and €60m is required for ASAP fixing.I like Paul Davis's ironic style ". . . a reminder that drainage, sub‑base saturation and deferred maintenance are not abstract concepts. They are what you feel through the steering wheel at 30 km/h while hoping your tyre survives the morning"

My 4th Power headline riffs on a linked rhetorical 8min piece to mic from April 2025 could we tax 'supersized' cars to fix potholes? We currently road-tax private cars by CO₂ emissions [in g/km]  from €120 - €2,400 a year. €120 for eVs as if they have zero emissions - although we have  carbon belching power-stations contributing to the ESB grid. where almost all of the >100MW stations are burning Kinsale gas. The state also cuts wheeled megaGas guzzlers some slack by making every car over 225g/km pay 'only' €2,400. Buses tractors hearses & trucks pay at a different [much lower rate] rate.

HGVs are a problem wrt potholes which I've Blobbed before as doing [4th power effect] up to 60,000x as much damage as our humble Yaris.You know this: he crappiest road surfaces are often quite local and associated with the farmsteads with biggest sheds [and by implication the biggest tractors]. I have two good pals who, through no fault of their own, were born in continental NW Europe. Every time, I go driving with them, they tsk tsk as we rattle over a road covered in mud and shite and say that where they came from, farmers are obliged to clean their lumpy detritus off the public road. 

Paul Davis gives some interesting insider info about potholes and water. Surface water maximises the power of passing wheels to carry way bit of the road. You know this: potholes blossom on sharp inside corners unless scrupulous attention is paid to prevent puddles where all tires cut the corner. That sort of drainage can often be maintained with a shovel and was before we started railing against the state to make everything better because we pay taxes.

But schlubbstrukture [= water in the sub-base] is more damaging and harder to fix. When the sub-base is saturated, tires striking even a minor deformity at the surface propagate a shock wave through the foundation that can eventually lead to a sinkhole [Waterwolf prev]. It is waaay easier and cheaper to fix roads pro-actively on schedule in the Summer. Taxing by axle-weight is clearly too frightening a nettle to grasp not least because eVs [the current chimaera for making everything better] are designed with an enormous heavy Li-battery aboard. It's not easy to sort out these competing desiderata, but sending a gang of council workers out in scut-truck half filled with tarmac and shovels should not be part of the solution.

Because we love each other very much MeFi had a Pothole thread over the w/e.  

Sweepings, March 2026

I stopped compiling a Sunday Links Miscellany a year+ ago. Most of the links were me filtering the YouTube algorithm to you which was quite unsatisfying for all concerned. Me and YT are having a trial separation since Epiphany this year, so I get to read a) more books b) more text content. I have accumulated a few of these links but can't think of 100 coherent words to say in addition. Might be interesting to you. But lookit [R] beans, pot-planted 19Feb26, are Up

• Bud Cord is dead. For some people Harold and Maude is the same as Withnail & I is for me
• Cats in medieval mss 
• Camelccinos! Milking invasive alien camels instead of shooting them from choppers
• Cartography: nobody made a million making maps
• Dogs continue to kill sheep in modern Ireland  
• 40 days at sea row row row the boat
• Easter Eggs Crayola RGB Apple
• wHo knew tHat an H can be upside down ?
• Living vertically in A'dam 
• Making sense of manuscripts amid the typos 
• Lord Kelvin wrong! Wright bros right 
• Surviving a stroke 

Off piste

Early on The Blob would insert Amazon or Amazon-affiliate links next to books I was recommending. Often sharing the delight that such a book was available for $0.01 . . . + $3.95 postage and packing. Even at 4 bucks delivered to my door, it seemed a good deal. Later, schooled by my family and para-social pals, I made a decided about-face and refused to have any dealings At All with the Amazon BezoSphere. It is all white hat vs black hat with me.

Many will express Schadenfreude when Amazon shits-the-bed, takes a pounding or is made to look stupid. Metafilter was delirah [along with BBC, Guardian, NYT, MSN, Reddit] when a sub-contractor driving an Amazon-liveried van followed their GPS into the sea writing it off when the tide came in. Icing on the cake was the news that the driver, on their third day in the job, phoned their supervisor and was instructed to Obey the GPS which would know better than any mere driver. The Broomway, which had mis-led the GPS, is a medieval trackway across tidal mudflats in Essex. It didn't take long for MetaFilter to veer judgmental:

clearly reveals the supervisor as an idiot, but lacking the gumption to force a GPS reroute and tell the supervisor to go fuck themself makes the driver a worse one.
Which was a little bit triggering for me:

Ouch, That's a bit harsh. When I was ~19, I had a job driving an Amazon-like van around rural Devon delivering books to primary schools, using a 1:200,000 scale map with the targets marked as pink blobs.
One afternoon, I set off down a lane which pointed in the right direction. But the median grass got longer and longer until the lane terminated at a farm gate. My available gumption concluded that it would be easier to turn round in the field than reverse for 3or4 km. After a couple of swings at that, each one further down hill, I left the van and trudged across the valley towards a distant farmstead. Kindly farmer looked back at my attempts to plough pasture and took me back there in his tractor, with which he extracted the van pointing in the right direction. It all seemed normal adulting at the time, my toes are curling now. 

That was the second job in my gap year after leaving school. Head office wrote letters to school principals to expect me during one week to deliver the samples; returning to collect the box a week later. It was The Best fun. They reckoned, in consultation with local sales reps, that 20 drops a day was an achievable target. I found out that 40 drops a day was possible (unless, like, doing the ploughing); which gave me half a week to drive my bus around Dartmoor and the Devon coast on someone else's nickel. I am amazed at the luck and Can Do of my 19 y.o. self: I'm less bouncy, not to say immortal, now.

NotAmazon Independents who deliver the goods:

• kennys.ie for books delivered Free to Ireland; 
• uk.bookshop.org for books to England: 
• lenehans.ie/ for any non-book stuff 

Schrödinger's dogs

Like (almost all) sports, I participate in dog-sled racing from my sofa. As a child, I could be in the fastest three or four over 100yd [91m] sprint or 80yd [73m] over hurdles and could complete a 440yd [400m = 2 furlongs = 20 chains] without dying. But I was so out of puff for the half mile [880yd], that I'd have to walk for a bit halfway through to recover some wind. Last time I used a peak-flow meter, the doc shook it and his own head in disbelief at home low was the declared value. But it's not abut me it's about dogs and The Blob has flagged the Iditarod several times and even crunched some dog data.

Accordingly, when MeFi recommended Winterdance: The Fine Madness of Running the Iditarod [1994] by Gary Paulsen, I made a note-to-self. Just after New Year, I went to Libraries Ireland to discover that there was but one copy among all the public libraries of Ireland [Athlone, Co Westmeath -- 798.8 -- Compactor Available], I put in a reservation and settled down to wait. My patience has limits and some 7 weeks later, I phoned Athlone to see what gives? 

• Hello Athlone Library, how may I help?
• I reserved a book at the beginning of January, and wondered if "Compactor" meant crushed?
• Oh sorry, we were closed for renovations in October and only got back last week; we haven't processed our backlog yet. The Compactor is the moveable archive shelving we have in the basement for storing little used books. What's is the Title? I can go look later.
• Thanks for the explanation; this is not urgent, but I'd like to read the book sometime. 

Less than an hour later

• Hello Bob, this is Athlone Library, I went down to look for your book and it doesn't appear to be on the shelf. It could be anywhere or gone forever. I even asked another Librarian to look.
• Jings, you had to ask another librarian to find you after you got lost in the stacks?
• Oh no [silly] one of my colleagues double checked to see if that book was hidden in plain sight.
• Dang, well thanks anyway and thanks for giving me closure so quickly . . . and maybe amend your records??

Dang indeed. There is a copy in Trinity College Dublin, and as an external / alumnus reader I could have it fetched out of the stacks to read on the premises. And Kennys.ie have copies for €12 but I am still being all virtuous about not buying books. And when I looked at my Library account the following day, Winterdance had, like Trotsky being airbrushed from Stalin's group photos, been expunged from the record as if it had never been there.

And WTF the title? Schrödinger's [Dublin, 1943, prev] cat is a Gedankenexperiment to illustrate uncertainty about the location and existence of sub-atomic particles. We can't be certain that the cat-in-a-box is alive or dead until somebody opens the hatch (goes down to the basement) to check.

Not too late the phalarope

We got back waaaay past my bedtime from the CCEN - Wetlands film night. Having bugged out before the Q&A finished because one of the panel took three whole minutes . to . say . that . was . his .  last . point. As we left, another handful of politer folks fled in our wake. But I was awake and full of porridge the following morning for a 09:30 Teagasc ConnectEd webinar about integrating wetlands into viable Irish agriculture. I did not feel obliged to watch the screen wet to the knees or dripping frogspawn onto the sofa. The guest speaker was Owen Murphy who is senior project manager with Breeding Waders European Innovation Partnership EIP. A €25 million, 5 year nationwide project, monied by the EU through National Parks and Wildlife Service NPWS and the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine DAFM 

Their aim is to "secure existing Breeding Wader populations and support population recovery through landscape management and policy development". Given that the talk was hosted by the Ag advisory service and expecting an audience of farmers, this was the key thread thpugh the slides. Although Murphy's love of birds, especially the birds of the Shannon callows of his youth, lit up his face as he ran through his show-and-tell. I'm guessing he'd get a more receptive audience from Birdwatch Ireland than farmers whose bird-knowledge might not run to species by GISS. 

• Dramatis personnae
• curlew crotach Numenius arqata
• lapwing pilibín Vanellus vanellus
• redshank codeargán Tringa totanus
• sandpiper goba dán Actitis hypoleucos
• oystercatcher roilleach Haematopus ostralegus
• dunlin breacóg Calidris alpina
• golden plover feadóg bhuí Pluvialis apricaria
• ringed plover feadóg chladaigh Charadrius hiaticula 
• snipe naocach Gallinago gallinago
• phalarope falaróp gobchaoi Phalaropus lobatus

But take a holistic view. Making things easier / safer for lapwing ups the quality of life of other co-nesting wader species. Not least because lapwing are fiesty and will see off a magpie. And changing the drainage landscape or the mowing regime for dunlin will benefit grasses other than perennial ryegrass as well as orchids, butterflies, earthworms and the microbiome which underpins the whole teetering tower of diversity

What I liked A Lot About the Breeding Waders Project was its pragmatic acknowledgment of where we are now, 50 years after many Irish bird species started taking a nose dive as a consequence of changed, changed utterly, agricultural practice. Even as late as 1966, most livestock farmers were hoping to win the hay in  late June, weeks after most of the ground-nesting birds had hatched, fed and fledged their young. And although scything a hay-field was a thing of the past, puttering round the field reaping with MF 135 tractor gave lingering adults a fighting chance of escaping the blades. Although the coming of silage and wrapping cut grass in plastic rather than hoping for 3-4 days of sunshine between June and September did not automatically change the timing - but it did open the possibility of cutting earlier and maybe twice. Even if you cut early only some years, the cumulative effect has been catastrophic for birds and hares.

How pragmatic? Saving the corncrake Crex crex in Wexford Leinster -that bus has gone in our current timeline. But this distinctive creature is hanging on by its toenails in Donegal and so money, time and resources directed thither won't be an obvious bust. Same for your favorite species of wader: look at the distribution data through time and space and make evidence-based decisions about who shall be saved. How realistic? One sub-project is training 'nest protection agents': IF each NPA is given 2,000 ha., some night-vision bins and a .22 rifle THEN they have a chance to tilt the balance away from mink Mustela neovison; fox Vulpes vulpes; hoodies Corvus cornix; magpies Pica pica; in favour of ground nesting waders. Allocate 1 NPA to 4,000 ha and you're at nothing.

Another intervention is headstarting. Dunlin Calidris alpina are globally abundant, if declining, but down to 30 breeding pairs in Ireland. In normal times, they live ~5 years and have a typical clutch of ~4 eggs. At steady state, 18 of these 20 possibles are destined to die with 2 surviving to replace the parents. Stochastic blips or one terrible wet Spring could call time on the species on this island. Headstarting is a cunning plan: take a tuthree clutches of eggs from somewhere marginal, whisk them off to Fota Wildlife Park, hatch and fledge them in a mink-free zone then reintroduce the young adults to a super-favorable habitat where they might double the dunlin audience.

But here's the thing: if you incentivize bird-favoring Ag practice at so much per hectare it may become a minimal engagement box-ticking [✓] exercise. Thus to get the wader subsidy you may have to keep stocking density on the designated area to >1 livestock unit / ha. from March through May. But if The Man explains why these are the specs, the committed farmer might graze those fields hard up until March to freshen up and diversify the sward for breeding season: making the environment richer and safer for the chicks. Payback: the birds convert insect protein into 'free' nitrogen-rich guano!

The book Too Late the Phalarope is a tragedy from apartheid South Africa written by Alan Paton. Let us hope it's not Not too late the phalarope on the callows and marshes of Ireland.