- Science Podcast!!: Megan Hanlon quizzes
- Red squirrels Sciurus vulgaris making come-back
- Brian David Gilbert is, apparently, A Thing
- Hurdygurdy, how to get
- Jorts, how to cut
- Feel good movies N=10
- Foodie
- Gin for Finns
- Even more Fin-niche: kiiking
- James O'Brien, the LBC talker, has a new book
- Here Leeds meets London via China
- Cats looking 'uuman
- Doctors, how to say the right thing
- Bucket, how to make one
- Starry Night, how to make marbled
- China's obsession with milk.
- Shanghai Tower, how to fill
- Créole de la Côte d’Ivoire Nouchi, who to speak
- Mullaghmore, how to surf
- An explosion waiting [75 years] to happen
Saturday 31 October 2020
Saturday Miscellany
Friday 30 October 2020
Slide Rule
"Biographical history, as taught in our public schools, is still largely a history of boneheads: ridiculous kings and queens, paranoid political leaders, compulsive voyagers, ignorant generals, the flotsam and jetsam of historical currents. The men who radically altered history, the great creative scientists and mathematicians, are seldom mentioned if at all." - Martin Gardner [prev tribs]
True dat, Mr Gardner. I was down with Pat the Salt this week wearing my caring mask. I heard that libraries were going to be shuttered for the current six-week lockdown, so picked out a couple of books to take away for light bedtime reading. There was plenty of my sort of book choice because that home-library had been accumulated, mostly 2nd hand, by someone of my generation. Since 2016, I've been intending to re-read Nevil Shute's post-apocalyptic On The Beach but that ending was toooo bleak for present-pandemic and so I snagged Marazan [spoiler], his first published novel, and Slide Rule, his autobiographical account of British aviation 1920-1940.
It turns out that writing ripping yarns was just a hobby for Neville Shute Norway, his core business was working on the design of R100, a hydrogen filled airship for Imperial communications, where he was the Chief Quant. R100 was designed and built to government contract by Vickers-Armstrong, the Tyneside armaments firm. In parallel, the UK Air Ministry itself was developing, to the same specs, the R101. For Shute, like Tim Harford, a firm believer in market forces and entrepreneurial derring-do, the government run R101 programme suffered from bureaucratic bloat, group-think complacency, gross inefficiency and insufficient independent oversight. Because the R100 Vickers team were checked by share-holders and accountants, they had to take ownership of their designs and be really creative in finding efficient solutions to a truly massive, cutting edge, engineering problem. Cost over-runs were not a real problem for the lads on Team R101.The >!poof!< of the pudding is that R100 was first off the blocks and made a successful round-trip across the Atlantic to Canada in the Summer of 1930. That put it to the R101-opposition to go on their own first long-distance Imperial Connect, before they were really ready for it. R101 had an Airworthiness Certificate on paper, but hadn't really been properly inspected or had sea-trials. On her maiden voyage that October, R101 broke apart in a storm near Paris, crashed to the earth and went >!whoomph!< in a ball of flame. Remarkably 6 of the 54 people aboard survived. Among the dead was Christopher Thomson, the Air Minister, who had bullied management into over-riding any misgivings of the engineers, so that his trip to India could fit into his political schedule that Autumn. The R101 disaster put the frighteners on the Brits and R100 was scrapped to give a 0.1% return on a £600,000 investment of tax-payers money.
Shute/Norway then went entrepreneurial himself to co-found an Aircraft design and development company called Airspeed. In the early 1930s, you could build your own aeroplane in a shed and plenty of people were having a go at the business. It was a young man's gig, because you have to believe in personal immortality to take-off in something that you'd built yourself from spruce, wire, chutzpah and canvas. The company was seriously under-capitalised but they were really confident in the elegance and functionality of their aircraft. The Airspeed Envoy and it's development the Airspeed Oxford were the most successful of their products. 8.750 Oxfords were built and flown all around the World during WWII and afterwards.Slide Rule gives a really interesting account of how hard it was to get anyone to venture some capital rather than jumping on the band-wagon after all the heartache. Government Enterprise Boards, and banks, is seriously seriously risk averse and so berluddy useless if you have a really innovative project to fly. Shute/Norway's experience was that useful risk-takers are those who have windfall capital at hand and are prepared to lose a small part of that loot on a bit of fun. Often these people would like to give back to the local community in the form of jobs and see their disposable cash as lubricating that public good. Writing Slide Rule in 1954 in austerity Britain, when WWII rationing had just ceased but taxes were high, led Shute/Norway to castigate taxation that sucked up capital and didn't use it efficiently. He would have loved Bill Gates.
Thursday 29 October 2020
2020 La Niña
Fed up with bad news about The 'Rona? What about La Niña? ready for some hardship from The Girl?
Well might the anchoveta Engraulis ringens feature on an issue of Peruvian stamps. A lot of Peruvian citizens depend on its appearance within cruising distance of the coast. When the anchoveta appear they are absurdly abundant: annual landings of just this species are in the millions of tonnes. Typically, the fishing fleet consists of purse-seiners: about 75% of the catch lands in Peru, the rest in Chile.Wednesday 28 October 2020
Επέτειος του Όχι
The Anniversary of No! Remembering the 28 Oct 1940 response of Ιωάννης Μεταξάς, the Greek Prime Minister, to an ultimatum by the Italian ambassador that Greece allow Axis forces to occupy 'strategic locations' within their Kingdom. Explanation. Later the same day Italian military divisions rolled across the frontier from Albania and were stopped and rolled back into Albania by a determined Greek army. Fighting ceased in February 1941 with the Greek occupying "Northern Epirus" aka Southern Albania. Honour satisfied! Metaxas is a controversial figure in Greek political history: he wasn't above banning books and suppressing elections and preferred a monarchy to democracy but then again his Όχι! was the representative voice of the Greek people. Not least because, on 15th August 1940, an Italian submarine had sunk the Κ/Δ Έλλη a Greek cruiser at anchor off the Greek island of Tinos:
The boys dance. The boys march. It means something.Tuesday 27 October 2020
The death of butane
Name | Propane | iso-Butane | n-Butane |
BP°C | -42°C | -11.7°C | -0.5°C |
Vap.pressure | 859kPa | 215kPa | 311kPa |
Sol.water | 47mg/L | 49mg/L | 61mg/L |
Monday 26 October 2020
Chinatown
Tim Harford [prev] writes for the Financial Times and hosts the More or Less podcast through the BBC. I found a copy of his Undercover Economist and arranged for https://www.kennys.ie/ the amazon-free outlet in Galway to ship it to Dau.II in Cork for her bday last month. We are both partial to the More-or-Less podcasts, which often hinge on a listener's query like "I've been told there are more beetles in a mole's stomach than there are islands in the Orkneys; can this be true?" The answer necessarily involes a shrewd amount of defining of terms "before or after breakfast? how big is an island? islandSwitha beach? which species of mole? does the tide mratter? You can spin out pretty much any topic to 15-20 minutes if you ask some experts to free-associate and let them off down a rabbit-hole. After a while you can echo Oscar Wilde with "b'god Harford, I wish I thought like that" and the answer comes back "you do already" but everyone can always devote time to polishing their crap-detector.
Whatevs! Tim Harford reads really easily and economics is surprisingly interesting. This is partly because Economics is surprisingly everything as anyone who has heard Steve Levitt [car-seats, bad] or Steven J Dubner [artificial insemination in turkeys vs chickens] talk; or read their first book Freakonomics will appreciate. Harford is a big believer in market forces: if we leave everything to them, then prices will equilibrate where both the seller and buyer feel that they've gotten a good deal. His position is that, if politicians put their oar in with tariffs or taxes [or regulation? health&safety??] against the flow of the market, then it is inefficient. Which means that somebody ends up paying too much as special interests get preferential treatment. Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) called economics the dismal science but Harford [and Levitt and Dubner] make it rather jolly and edutaining.
The last chapter in Harford's book is about how China was transformed from a centralized, cultist, communist crazy-state into the global economic powerhouse which is now scaring the bejabers out of Western capitalist democracies. It was largely due to Deng Xiaoping [L.R. with US President Jimmy Carter L.L.] who was an early adherent of Communism - he was Mayor of Chongqing [prev] 1949-1953 - but twice purged from the central praesidium and survived The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution [although purged millions didn't] to become Top Gun in the People's Republic in the late 1970s. Through the 1980s he changed the economic policy and incentives of the country without [unduly] alienating the still powerful Communist Party. It's a bit like the current Pope recently making pro-BLT statements; he's got to get any real changes past The Curia.Sunday 25 October 2020
All Change
- Colorado Cobbler
- Glover? Donald!
- Glover? Helen! and Heather Stanning Gold
- Glover? Lord
- Big gloves? it ain't enough! - trying to ban boxing for 25 years
- Rubber gloves
- Borris Lace
- Bobbin Lace
- Tanner = two from
- Weavers
- it works but it risks
- and perlease leave space for cyclists
- Other matter
- spike in lumber prices
- stair design - deadly for servants
- Allie Sherlock [15] & Cuan Durkin [17] bein' righteous
- Perfick - I forgot to put the link in my last Durkin-Sherlock binge
Saturday 24 October 2020
lost + fined
Library overdues is a perennial slow-news-day story on both BBC and RTE:
- Middlesborough 57 years Geoffrey Faber's poetry anthology The Buried Stream
- Suffolk 37 years: To Sea in a Sieve by Peter Bull
- Basingstoke 37 years: Thomas the Tank Engine
- Bristol 42 years: The Cherrys and the Double Arrow by Will Scott
- Cambridge U 60 years: Cultures and Societies of Africa by Simon and Phoebe Ottenberg]
- Lowestoft 57 years: Jim hunter Metaphysical Poets
- Thurles 53 Years: Biography of Father Theobald Mathew by Rev Patrick Rogers
The other talking book I have in my car is Educated by Tara Westover. This is an edgy tale of The Other. When it came out in 2018, the narrative was all about how a girl, home-educated by religious fundamentalists, managed to escape from her family and get herself to college. As we run up to the US Elections, it gives a much clearer picture of the kind of people who are going to vote for another 4 years of ignorance at the top. For me, the most disturbing aspect of the tale is the casual violence within and around the family. It is easy enough to accept the distrust of reg'lar schooling, the self-sufficiency, the pride in place and, although bizarrely expressed, in family. Many instances of psychotic attacks by deranged relatives are really Out There and over any reasonable line normal people might draw. It emphasizes why social services are essential in this world of pain. There is so much in common between the god-bothering certainties of these regular church-goers in Idaho and their mosque-going fundamentalist dopplegangers in Isfahan that it is a wonder they aren't fighting on the same side. Then again, Robert Sapolsky's analysis of the neuroscience (and societal definition) of Other helps explain why we might choose to hate people who are just like us. There were places where I could only continue listening because I knew that she would survive to enroll in Brigham Young University. Read the book before you read the Grauniad review?
Friday 23 October 2020
Backronym MAUD
Today we're having a dive down a cross-lines rabbit-hole about the Birth of the Bomb. Nuclear physics was, in the 1930s, a particularly international field where monster intellects would visit each other's labs and share ideas about the nature of the very small. Otto Frisch, born in Austria and nephew of Lise "Element 109" Meitner, was working with Niels Bohr in Copenhagen. While visiting colleagues in Birmingham UK, WWII broke out and he had to continue his researches there. In March 1940, with Rudolf Peierls, another refugee, he worked out that even 1 kg of Uranium235 would be enough to start an explosive chain-reaction. Bohr continued to write his protégé letters and, as things [political and scientific] hotted up, resorted to telegrams - lots of them, chocka-full of ideas, some sound, some clearly bonkers.
On the day [9th April 1940] the Panzers crossed the border into Denmark, Bohr sent another telegram to Frisch in Birmingham with further suggestions and a cryptic envoi ". . .Tell Cockcroft and Maud Ray Kent". Frisch and his British colleagues knew who John Cockcroft was [evidence from 1946 photo R] and presumably told him but were baffled by Maud Ray Kent. As they all had brains the size of planets they assumed that, coming from St Niels of Copenhagen, it must mean something. Knowing about Kepler, Galileo and other early cosmographers sending each other too-clever-by-'arf cryptograms to establish priority for the discoveries, Cockcroft decided the phrase was as an anagram for radyum taken. The following day, 10th April 1940, a committee was formed to decided what to do about Uranium in the context of WWII. It was officially named after its Chair George Thomson, and included James Chadwick, John Cockcroft, Mark Oliphant and Philip Moon. But Thomson in an excess of modesty seized on the biggest puzzle of the week and they agreed to call themselves the MAUD committee. Half the fun about being a very clever person with a unique position is being able to name things in such a way that only your inner circle will know the back-story. The MAUD reports provided vital evidence for keeping the Manhattan Project on track.Later, lesser, bureaucrats applied the pedestrian "Military Applications of Uranium Disintegration" to MAUD as a backronym. Years later it was revealed that Maud Ray was an English governess to the Bohr family who had returned to her native Kent at the start of the war.
Thursday 22 October 2020
Build your own education
I'm a couple of weeks into retirement and have already acquired a couple of students to shout at. Not my students, I hasten to add; they are somebody else's students. OR, and this is the point of the polemic, these youngsters are their own students and not teacher-chattels unless they choose to be. It's about taking ownership of your own education through assertiveness and the exercise of choice. The interesting students are those who kick over the traces and do something unexpected. Like the two lads who set off from Ireland, with sketchy school-french but plenty bravado, for Dijon in Summer 2019 to find work in different science labs.
My most recent acquisition has that in spades. It is an option for Irish undergraduates to spend one of their 4 years of studenting in America. It's like the wonderful Erasmus scheme, without any of the infrastructural support. It therefore takes an exceptionally determined, and well-connected, kid to make that happen. But this fellow had made in happen and thereby broadened his horizons considerably: geographically, socially and educationally. e's now in his final year and has signed up to do a project which has a significant slant towards molecular evolution and bioinformatics - hence my appearance in his orbit. Depending on how charitable you feel, my toolkit in the field is either 5 10 or 20 years out of date. But my crap-detector is better than any 20-something: it goes with the territory along with the silverback and missing teeth.
Anyway, the suggestion was floated that Wozzayank could benefit from this on-line Coursera in sequence analysis and 20 minutes later maybe that Coursera would be better. With a certain amount of justification W affirmed that he saw value in either of those options but asked which one was the preferred?To which I replied [bear in mind that I'd never met the chap]: "Ah now W, don't put it back on us; have a look at each syllabus and see which one best floats your boat. There are so many dimensions to the subject and you'll feel more comfortable in some. They say "the Y-chromosome carries the 3-D visualisation gene" and you produced some beautifully informative overlays of homologous structures in your prelim report. But you may be more productive looking at rates and constraints of evolution. Then again, you might think that one of the courses will beef up something not in your current tool-kit. Or, finally, look NOW at the second hand of your watch. IF it's an odd number do the First Course IF even do the Other Course."
A couple of days later, I was talking to TGWIH about which of several modules in her OU course she should sign up for this coming academic year. I was therefore primed for that question and I think it is useful to summarise the polylemma in three Fs:
- Fun
- Choose the course which seems most interesting. If you're grown up and/or protestant that might include embracing a challenge, even if daunting. Far too many young people have been duffed up by the system and their crap teachers into believing that they can't do math or foreign languages or cooking or soccer. College is maybe your last chance before retirement when the pressure is off and The Past is behind you and you can re-invent yourself as a building-jumper.
- Foundation
- You may be young but you have skills, talents and aptitudes. It might be sensible to choose the next course because you have nailed some of the pre-requisites in your lived experience. That way you can leverage what you know already rather than starting with a blank slate.
- Future
- look ahead and think where you want to be at the end of the module or, better, at the end of the course. Which of the options will look best on your CV. Which will most likely turn into the dream job or the mighty salary boost that you surely deserve.
- Flip
- Make your own luck. If you have the capacity for happiness you'll thrive in whatever course you take, so you may as well flip a coin.
Wednesday 21 October 2020
Shroom Season
I went for a walk across our fields on Sunday last and got to talking with some 🌞heliophiles🌞. As well as finding a novel petroglyph, they also reported that their lunch had been marginally disturbed by a pair of metal-detectorists who were sweeping the ruined steading on the Wexford edge of our common.
Slightly shifty strangers were therefore in my mind as I wandered home from my excursion . . . and saw three young blokes intently searching the grass of my neighbour's 12 acre field. My eye-sight is no longer 20/20, so I crossed over the grass to see what they were doing. Pure curiosity, but I'm not shy that way, and what's the worst that could happen? As I got closer, I realised that they didn't have metal-detectors. Indeed, they seemed both ill-equipped and under-dressed for October in the hills.
They were not the least bit shy in admitting that they were collecting mushrooms. "What?", I replied, "magic mushrooms, like, Psilocybin?". The very same! They weren't able to say the Latin name Psilocybe semilanceata but knew it as Liberty Cap. It was a bit peculiar because with half an eye and half a brain, I'd noticed some unfarming people coursing across the same patch of field a few days earlier. I'd assumed that those distant bodies were members of my neighbour's extensive family of grown up children. It seems, rather, that the field has a bit of a reputation for accessibility among people in search of nature's bounty."As of 31 January 2006, the Government, in the exercise of powers conferred on them by section 2(2) of the Misuse of Drugs Act, 1977, has ordered that ‘any substance, product or preparation (whether natural or not), including a fungus of any kind or description, which contains psilocin or an ester of psilocin is a controlled drug for the purposes of the Act’.1 The effect of this order is to render the possession or sale of so-called ‘magic’ mushrooms criminal offences under the Act. Heretofore, it was illegal to possess or supply magic mushrooms in a dried or prepared state but lawful to possess and sell them in their natural state".
According to The Lads, any upland sheep-pasture is a likely source of the fruiting bodies of Psilocybe semilanceata at this time of year. Fungi are saprophytic - they get their energy by robbing it from photosynthetic plants. But each species will have a preferred host and a preferred time of year for sending up the obvious part of the organism and shedding a few reproductive spores. Liberty Cap penetrates the root systems of grasses in pasture: the presence of sheep somehow encourages the presence of the fungus. And it seems that sheep will eat the fungus and zone out. Again the lads said that 20-30 fruiting bodies, dried down to 3 grams would be a handy sort of a dose. It is hard enough work down there in the grass to get that much together, so I don't think anyone is making money from the psilocybin trade. Then again, you don't have to look for the fungus in the long grass - we mowed our fields really late this year and they'll still be throwing up their fruiting bodies. The downpour over the last 24-36 hours will have turned the harvest to mush though; or so my informant tells me. And that the vernacular Irish for Psilocybe semilanceata is pookie, although that term might be generic for all basidiomycetes.My cursory reading of the health issues associated with shrooms implies that they are "mostly harmless". And certainly far less damaging to the population's health than alcohol. But there is far too much money and patronage riding on alcohol to suggest that it too should be banned. otoh psilocybin is being trialled in Tallaght for treatment-resistant depression. Looks a lot like the neurotransmitter serotonin. That seems to be a clue as to its function. John Kelly, psychiatrist in Tallaght and TCD, is recruiting guinea-pigs for his next trial: psilocybin@crp.healthcare and apply, especially if you are clinically depressed and anti-depressants don't work.
Tuesday 20 October 2020
Parking possible
I was boasting a couple of weeks ago, about how I executed a neat bit if parallel parking in a tight spot outside Dau.II's gaff on Xxxxxx Xx, in the People's Republic of Cork .
That was then, this is 08:30 today:
Cue Blondie! This is what happens if there is a) dump of rain b) a southerly wind to back up the R Lee outflow c) a Spring(ish) tide. Apparently the Silver Yaris doubles as a boat. It could be, has been 2009, worse! And 2014 and 2016, Send wellies.More Petroglyphery
Sunday started in the clouds - I couldn't see the other side of the valley until about 10 o'clock. Beyond counting the sheep legs [N = 56, which is the expected multiple of 4] and, Wenceslike, gathering some winter fuuuuuelll, I didn't really step out of the house. After a light lunch, I seized a feed-sack and set off towards the river picking kindling because there was a drying wind. I was surprised to see a small group of people at The Ringstone taking stock and taking pictures and clearly paying attention. Turns out I had met them a couple of years ago further up the hill and, apparently, I'd given them far far TMI about me and airily invited them to visit The Ringstone of Knockroe before they went home.
We fell to comparing notes about the various example of petroglyphs in the neighbourhood; and further afield. They'd never heard of the truly amazing Rathgeran Stone, for example. I see that my Rathgeran link to Megalithomania is broke [sic transit gloria interweb], so here's some pictures of that wonderful piece of work. They were delighted to tell me something I didn't know about my ownMonday 19 October 2020
pay peanuts, propagate pandemic
Joinedy up thinking is harder than promulgating a series of arbitrary rules:
- 2m distance;
- 15 minutes of contact;
- outdoors good, indoors bad;
- masks not visors;
- not those masks, these masks;
- corona not coronaries;
- covid not cervical
You will have heard the no-mask argument that "people" [that's me, and you] will take greater risks on distance and parties so long as they are dressed bandito. As if "people" were incapable of dealing with two ideas at once. Ian Mackay's swiss cheese model for comprehensive complementary control measures is graphical and helpful
It's like the sieve of Eratosthenes a series of grids each with a different granularity and starting points which allows only a tiny fraction of the particles to reach the other side. It's not an ideal model because it would be super-helpful to know quantitatively which slices were most effective [had smaller or fewer holes] especially if these were cheapest [in money and social cost] to implement. I suspect that distance trumps masks and probably hand-washing. Me, I would be really leery about touching tap in a public restroom. The chief benefit of I R Retire is that I don't have to use the jacks at work which, at the best of times, were never properly cleaned. and they offered only warm-air aerosol concentrators for hand-drying.
In March, I was paying attention to the nightly reports of covid-cases and covid deaths. I had them all in an excel spread-sheet and was plotting the % change as well as recording our family's coffs and sniffles. Then about the middle of April I stopped: the covid cases count was meaningless unless The Man was testing people pro-actively rather than reactively. Better still would have been to test a large number of randomers off the street to establish a baseline. That was why I was excited when Ioannidis and Battacharaya carried out the Santa Clara County count. That got a lot of adverse scrutiny and I had to retract my imprimatur.
But FFS, IF 80% of infected people are asymptomatic but still infectious THEN we should be testing a hella lot more people to flag the carriers so they can be isolated. Even if the tests are imperfect, we should be making it easy and free/cheap to get tested
- a) if we're feeling crook in the covid-peculiar [I can't smell anything PDF] ways of feeling crook
- b) if we know we've been [< 2m + >15 min] too close to a likely contact.
- c) if we are worried [give everyone Three Free Covid-test Vouchers and a back-up referral to an OCD clinic]
It's like STD clinics; it's a pub[l]ic good service. Heck, the STD clinics could be doing the testing: they are trained to be careful with bodily fluids. When Dau.I was sick in the Summer and work paid for a test, she had to wheeze her bike 5km to the nearest test centre and 5km back home to bed and lem-sip . What's that about? It's like schlepping a vulnerable 95 y.o. to a fomite-blistered clinic for a 'flu jab. Outside the box thinking [rather than suit people with good health, a government job thinking] would deliver these elders their inoculation outside their own front doors.
Tom Cotter: "The reason Taiwan and South Korea were so successful in controlling covid19 was rapid relentless testing and contact tracing. If you were a close contact they even came to your door to test you. No ifs or buts you got tested. This is not the case on Ireland I’m afraid". Just how little of a shit the Irish Government gives about testing & tracing was revealed when Contact Tracers, a skilled job requiring painstaking dedication, were getting offered zero-hours dismiss-at-will contracts. Oh no, that was a clerical error, the HSE claimed, when this shameful fact was public-domained by radical TD Richard Boyd-Barrett.
At the beginning of Coronarama we were hopeful, in a silver lining sort of way, that the crisis would force us to address other shameful treatments of the weakest members of our society: workers and residents in nursing homes and créches, the dark denizens of direct provision centres, shelf-stackers and cashiers in the retail sector. What this force-of-change amounted to, in the end, were a series of cost-nothing, do-nothing sops to the collective conscience like institutionalised rounds of applause for front-line workers.
I R Retire now since 2nd October, but I'm still on the mailing list for The Institute. The President's address on Friday 16th October reflected on the plans for an inevitable change upwards of the Pandemic containment measures from Level 3 to Level 4. NPHET, [National Public Health Emergency Team] has been advising for Level 5 measures for 2 weeks now (and the government have been stalling; the cabinet meets again today). But The President was/is unable to plan effectively for this extremely likely development because "The prospect of a movement to Level 5 restrictions for Adult and Higher Education is less clear because the descriptor for this level currently states, “Recommendations based on situation and evidence at time”. WTF?
If not now, when?
Sunday 18 October 2020
St Luke's Day
- Parkour à la Negev
- Dr Francis talks soundly about Regeneron and evidence
- Singing bit
- Laura Currie does Blondie ukulele
- Stefka Sabotinova - Prituri se planinata
- Trio Mandili from Georgia
- Alison Young, Dream Dream On
- Fud
- Codbuster at Gt Missenden
- Afghani Pulao
- Brittany butter - brilliant!
- Extras with bread dough
- Dal Pakwan
- Burrata Pugliese - white!
- Volvo trucker's sleep-cabin
- Rosslare port and by-passing the land-bridge
- Reprise on energy efficient rock splitting
Saturday 17 October 2020
More ears are needed
I've reached that stage of life where I get to lose stuff, often hidden in plain sight. I haven't yet applied my self-advice to keep things simple and not tote around, or live amid, so much shite. This definitely true for my little red Yaris, which I use . . . for a variety of purposes. Up until recently, I used m'wheels to commute to work several days each week and often, on these voyages into a hostile world, I'd buy something [almost always food, occasionally petrol] from a shop. Those simple transactions seemed to me to require: own shopping basket; shopping bags, glass for recycling, bucket for hand-washing; gloves; mask. Other things accumulated from these transactions: promo-mags from shops; receipts. So the interior of the car is "cluttered"; but then I'm not vain about myself so it would be fatuous to become a suburban Saturday car-valetter. Apart form anything else I live on a farm, so there is a fair bit of real shite about the vehicle let alone the metaphorical shite.
It's not usually a problem!
But earlier in the week, I was i/c Pat the Salt, my venerable father in law, and one of the tasks on my ToDo list was "take Pat to GP clinic for winter 'flu shot". It wasn't a terrible day on the weather front but he's now 90-something and feels the cold more than sprightly me. I bundled him up in a hat and coat. Thermoregulation is not the only deficit of old age: Pat has glasses, hearing aids and going-out teeth, so he can see, hear, and look presentable. When we got to the clinic, following the SOP, I hooked a surgical mask over his already multi-tasking ears and in we went. The nurse was on time, although we were early, and we shuffled into their office. It was utterly beyond their world-view that Mohammed, with fully functioning legs, would come out to serve the ould chap. And The Only Place a 'flu jab may be administered is in the upper arm. I offered his neck . . . but nothing would satisfy the professional but that I unpack the old chap.And a few minutes later we were safely back in El Yaris and I whipped off Pat's mask and <pToinnggg> one of his hearing aids flew into the back of the car. I wasn't expecting this but glimpsed something travelling fast from the far side of Pat's head. Even National Health hearing-aids are pretty small and beige and the missing part didn't stand out in the complex environment back there. At least the search space was finite, and the hunt was successful. I tell ya, that's an exciting day in pensionland!
Friday 16 October 2020
Rebuild your forest
Digging through a pile of 2018 papers looking for an empty folder to start a 2020 project, I unearthed How to rebuild a forest. Much of the tenor of that essay is to "shut up and get out of the way", and rely on natural succession to restore the status quo ante {clear felling - earthquake - flood - fire -pestilence}.
The worst possible thing you can do is futility planting where you and your friends spend time and money on planting trees with insufficient attention to soil, weather, tree species, pest species or shelter and, like, everything dies. I remember hearing James "Gaia" Lovelock express regret at planting 10 hectares of native English tree species in a corner of his Devon farm / research station. Not because it went horribly wrong, but because the trees took and thrived and provided habitat and eventually fuel, tool-handles and milking stools. Lovelock beat himself up [gently - he's over 100 now] for the hubris of deciding what trees should grow on the land that he was borrowing from his children. Better to have let nature take its course; allowing the brambles and gorse to encroach on the field from the margins and provide shelter and grazer deterrence for wind-blown and bird-shat tree seeds to get their chance in the sun. By definition, naturally sown trees are the best fit for that corner of habitat. And they will modify the microclimate to suit as they grow up straight and tall.Thursday 15 October 2020
Ball's Pyramid
It is a while since we were island hopping. Ball's Pyramid is on the far side of the world. It is clear that Lt Henry L Ball RN caught the moment in geological time when this feature was at its sharpest focus, as he cruised past in 1788. He was Captain of the ship transporting a subset of First Fleet convicts from Botany Bay to Norfolk Island when discovered first Lord Howe Island [previous exciting adventure there] and then Ball's Pyramid about 20km distant. The Pyramid is the edge of a long extinct volcanic caldera; formed maybe 7 mya. It will assuredly disappear beneath the waves, but not in your lifetime, or mine.
It took 94 years before any [white? literate?] person [Henry Wilkinson,1882] landed at the base of the razor; and another 83 years [Jack Hill and Jack Pettigrew, 1965] before anyone struggled to the summit 560m above the azure sea. Five years ago a couple of wing-suiters, Jeb Corliss and Luigi Cani grazed past [The red blob L travelling at 100km/h] having jumped from a helicopter. They were picked up from the far side a couple of minutes later by a zodiac from a well-placed catamaran.Needless to say nobody lives on Ball's Pyramid. Corliss and Cani picked one of the rare days each year when the sea isn't throwing shapes at the cliff face. So landings can be a bit random. And visitors are discouraged since it was discovered that the Pyramid is the last refuge of the Howe Island stick insect Dryococelus australis. Lord Howe Island [pop ~380] at 1400 hectares is much bigger; and Norfolk Island [1,600 folks, 3400 ha] is bigger still. But how much bigger? And this is a classic case where, as Matt Parker discussed recently on Numberphile, your definition of area matters. I show the elevation & footprint of the island here roughly on the same scale: it is 1,100m from end to end.
Looks like the elevation is at least 50% bigger than the maps.google.com footprint. But we can make a better fist of the ratio by making 1 hectare squares and superimposing them on the picture. Rules of engagement: if a region of the map is >50% of a hectare it adds a whole square to the count - if <50% then not.Wednesday 14 October 2020
The math of butane
. . . That would be now, 11-18th October 2020. There's a heckuvalot of events round the country, mostly aimed at schools; because if you haven't "got" math by the time you leave school, people will tend to give up on you - and you may even have given up on yourself as a numerate person.
Mathematics is not about numbers, or that is only a tiny part of the circus. Maths is more about patterns and connexions and relationships. I have found it really helpful, teaching remedial math these last 8 years, to recognise that the ancient Greeks did all their maths scratching patterns in the sand of the Agora. Algebra came much later and was able to embrace levels of abstraction / unreality which were beyond geometry. By coincidence, I was browsing through Alex’s Adventures in Numberland by Alex Bellos [prev] and found him citing The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences. I've grazed past this planet before.
Sequences are the epitome of patterns and so feature quite strongly on intelligence tests. "what are the next two numbers in this series: 1 4 9 16 25, _, _ ?" You'd think that a database of counting-number sequences would start simple and get more challenging but not so. Frankly Scarlett, I've no idea what the first 3 even mean
- A000001: Number of groups of order n
- 0, 1, 1, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 5,
- A000002: Kolakoski sequence: a(n) is length of n-th run
- 1, 2, 2, 1, 1, 2, 1, 2, 2
- A000003: the class number of the quadratic order of discriminant D = -4n
- 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 1, 2, 2,
- A000004: The Zero Sequence
- 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0,
- A000005: the number of divisors of n.
- 1, 2, 2, 3, 2, 4, 2, 4, 3, 4, 2
- A000059: Numbers n such that (2n)^4 + 1 is prime
- 1, 2, 3, 8, 10, 12, 14, 17, 23, 24, 27 . . .
- A000602: number of n-carbon alkanes C(n)H(2n+2)
- 1 methane, 1 ethane, 1 propane, 2 butanes, 3 pentanes, 5 hexanes, 9, 18, 35, 75, 159, 355, 802, 1858
Tuesday 13 October 2020
Not the droids
- (over 60 years of age) ✓
- learning disability
- lung condition (such as asthma, COPD, emphysema or bronchitis)
- heart disease (such as heart failure)
- high blood pressure
- diabetes
- chronic kidney disease
- hepatitis
- cancer
- clinically stable cystic fibrosis
- (immunosuppressed
- cerebrovascular disease
- neurological issue (Parkinson's, motor neurone disease, MS, cerebral palsy)
- splenectomy
- infection susceptibility (HIV, lupus, scleroderma)
- on steroids
- obesity
- in nursing home
Garda: What is your business?
Monday 12 October 2020
lost + pound
It's The Beloved's birthday, so it is inevitable that I'll reflect on the prospect of growing old together. Last week I found my car-key [again!] before I'd lost it. I must have been overloaded getting the groceries off the back seat of the car and allowed the lanyard to slip through my arthritic fingers. It showed up a lot better in the grass since I changed the colour. Looking for the other key-loss event showed up a disconcertingly numerous number of recent examples of lost & found. Those marbles must be quietly slip slipping away.
Anyway, it's not only me. The Beloved is principal carer and power of attorney for her redoubtable father Pat the Salt. A few weeks ago was on watch with him and had to nip up town to get something. With the approach of pension day, the pension and credit union bag was on the kitchen table - in full view of any burglar who had climbed over the gate (or indeed 2 m of box-hedge), sneaked past the dog and walked round the back of the house. That would never do, so she put the bag in a safe place. >!poof!< it disappeared. Finding it wasn't helped by having two houses, both alike in dignity and 70km apart, where it might be. I won't reveal where the bag turned up [but it did!] because I know some of you may [inadvertently] share the information with your sketchy cousin who is desperate to service their drug habit.
At least the bag turned up in a time frame nearer to 13 days than the 13 years it took for a carrot to find this Canadian lady's diamond ring. Ring seeking carrots are, apparently A Thing: Sweden. I read a Quora story of a woman who put her pearl necklace in a safe-place and didn't see it for 30 years when she was widowed and downsizing and the necklace appeared hooked on the back of the marital bed's head-board.
Hearing the lost and found story, a good friend of ours said it was better to leave everything valuable in a reasonably accessible place OR in a concrete bunker at the bottom of the garden. Burglars will literally turn your house over, quickly and efficiently, until they find what they assume to be present in your empty/sleeping home. And they don't have time to clear up the mess afterwards. And getting ritualistic about always hanging the car keys on the same hook in the kitchen only works until it doesn't. But, for sure, the more stuff we have the easier it is to having things hidden in plain sight.
Sunday 11 October 2020
Horses for courses
Equus caballus been there before
- The horse whisperer de la Camargue
- Putin as babe-magnet
- Finland hobby horses. "It's a girl thing"
- Horse feathers
- Comanche
- Myles W. Keogh, Comanche's rider, was born in Leighlinbridge.
- Mr Ed - tedious at the time, dreadful in hindsight
- Horse Outside
- Dawn Run
- ♬y Love♩y #orse
- Spirit - a stallion of the Cimarron
- Took 7.y.o Dau.II to this in the cinema: still recall her reaction at 2:40
- Not a horse