Ashley breezes past

The Met Bureaus of Ireland, UK and Nederland have had their corporate arm-wrestle and come up with their shared Storm Names list for the 2024-2025 season. Here they be: Ashley, Bert, Conall, Darragh, Éowyn, Floris, Gerben, Hugo, Izzy, James, Kayleigh, Lewis, Mavis, Naoise, Otje, Poppy, Rafi, Sayuri, Tilly, Vivienne, Wren. The names owned by Met Éireann wearing their green jersey. Vivienne of course named for Vivienne the Pirate Queen of the Nine Cattle Rustlers. We've been here before 2015 - 2018 - 2019 - 2021 - 2022 - 2023; so maybe we're running out of Trad Irish Names that only have a few silent consonants and fadas.  Storm season starts on 1st September each year but some years are slower off the mark than others. Storm Atiyah, for example didn't whistle through until the second Sunday in December 2019 fully 50 days later than Ashley.

Storms worth naming held off until this last weekend when Ashley was taken out of Pandora's Box and started whipping up waves in the Atlantic. Saturday lunchtime, I pinned the location of Ashley's Eye and asked for the Nullschool Wind App to predict its position 16 hrs ahead. 

Ashley's eye was predicted to be travelling at ~75 km/hr (the circulating wind going faster) in a NE direction and brushing her skirts against the West coast of Ireland. Ashley was accorded an orange wind-warning for 4 (later upped to 7) Wild Atlantic Weather counties from Noon Sunday and yellow for the rest of the island. We therefore made our storm preparations: filling some 5lt water containers and putting candles in candle-sticks. We needed to do this anyway because the ESB is giving us our second scheduled outage in a month tomorrow 09:30 - 14:30, Tuesday 22 Oct 24.

Saturday night and Sunday morning the forecast yellow rain came through but by the time I got up to count the sheep [N = 15, all present and correct!] before breakfast, it was barely spitting and the wind hadn't really got up.

By tea-time Sunday we had endured a few gusts but nothing really sustained and the wind-speed didn't seem to be in resonance with any local trees enough to whip off branches. So that was it. The tabloids tried to talk it up with emotive language (wreaks chaos, airport mayhem, horror map) and Rosslare ferries were cancelled, but Ashley herself had less bluster.

French Shore

tric-trac

• The reason St.Pierre-et-Miquelon is a collectivité d'outre-mer français
• Saving Lithuanian or lietuvių kalba as they call it
• Grady on landfill
• Hurr.Helene: Hickory Nut Gorge and ChimneyRock ⬤, NC geomorpology meets weather explainer: stream-capture; orographic lift etc. etc.
  
• Paramotor footage from Mark Huneycutt [whom see also last Sunday] 
• Guardian gives explainer on Ireland's Transition Year ( the only time when any education happens in Ir secondary schools).
• Royal Society opens its peer-review archives 1949-1954
• On the homogenization of McDs, a forgotten graphic artist, paying attention and a neat ending. via MeFi
• Speaking of MeFi, two days ago, I posted there about a 16thC card trick. I am a net sponger on MeFi; but still contribute more than most.
  

Rodents for larfs

I checked into the front page of RTE.ie a week ago and was given a surprisingly rich and varied array of Top Stories: scandal in a homeless charity; €500K anonymously gifted to schools in Cork; and the outfall fall-out of a report from the FSAI, the Food Safety Authority of Ireland. 

Of all the existential threats to global equanimity, hygiene failures in burger joints don't make my A-list. That's partly because the regulatory environment seems to work and a monthly report that fingers 16 perps across 26 counties (Glens Takeaway; Hearty Sunshine; Sizzlers; Grace’s Garden; Koffee and Kale; Café Sol; Osteria 99; Antonio's; Red Robin; Coolmine Shawarma; Polonez; Lord Lucan; Spar) is small enough that it's unlikely to catch me talking to the porcelain telephone. It's not my Polonez in New Ross [excellent fresh tomatoes; reliable fresh yeast], it's one in Walkinstown D12, for example. 

Then again, it might be that FSAI is so underfunded and the inspectors so overworked that they can't cover their patch effectively. But FSAI don't reveal their baseline - how many premises were inspected in September 2024 - so it is impossible to gauge whether 16 is a big number.

In 1998 we had a big knees-up to celebrate 25 years together and invited new neighbours and old friends from three continents. We decided to put together a short-list of nearby accommodation from fancy to hostel and send our guests a list. One of the neighbours did occasional B&B and The Beloved went to see what the available rooms looked like. While discussing costs on the upstairs landing, a mouse appeared behind the host's shoulder sauntering bold-as-you-like across the carpet between two of the recently viewed rooms. Similar unfortunate timing at FSAI: "a live rodent running across the floor of a food storage room" just when the inspector calls. Even though a single running case is an anecdote not data; it nevertheless gets you closed down - quite properly i.m.o.  Graphic images to add to the fun?: a "gnawed chocolate bar" in the food storage room and clear evidence of a rodent attack on a bag of rice. 

But many of the adverse events caught by FSAI are a tedious run of cafés, shops and take-outs being cavalier about basic levels of food safety hygiene: wash hand basins, soap, hot water; basic obvious cleaning; woeful ignorance about food safety culture. These are much more likely to cause the runs in clients than Speedy Gonzales whizzing through the pantry. Then again, if food premises can't get the in-plain-sight issues sorted, it's a strong indicator of failings at the invisible microbe level.

It's more than 10 years since I was channeling FSAI There's a Fly in my Soup and Now Wash Your Hands. It's time for another airing, so.

Two steps of decency

A couple of months ago, I sent A Conversation With … Emily Wilson PhD, Contemporary Interpreter of the Iliad, on Listening, Hearing, and Communicating to a couple of friends-for-fifty-years who were uniquely appropriate for the article: she read Classics and he read medicine in college and they got married.  A few weeks later they were in Ireland for a Class Reunion and we got to meet in Tramore. They gave me a copy of Emily Wilson's 2018 translation of The Odyssey . . . and some rather fancy Canadian tea.

I had a very expensive education with access to a pretty good library: top-heavy with Thackeray, light on thrillers. As a teenager, I read E.V. Rieu's 1946 translation of The Odyssey, which was the 1st volume published as a [eventually black-covered] Penguin Classic.Teenagers are frankly Scarlett about the niceties of translation: so long as the story rips along. I know the story in some detail but have no Greek. At about the same time I also read HDF Kitto's The Greeks in its Pelican edition. The Greeks was a key text for Robert Pirsig [Blobit 2017] in the writing of ZAMM Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. 

Kitto: "Thus the hero of the Odyssey is a great fighter, a wily schemer, a ready speaker, a man of stout heart and broad wisdom who knows that he must endure without too much complaining what the gods send, and he can both build and sail a boat, drive a furrow as straight as anyone, beat a young braggart at throwing the discus, challenge the Phaeacian youth at boxing, wrestling or running; flay, skin, cut up and cook an ox, and be moved to tears by a song. He is in fact an excellent all rounder; he has surpassing aretê.” That should resonate with Heinlein's Specialization is for insects analysis of what a piece of work is a man [Withnail]; and also with O'Grady & Pyke's I could read the sky. We are all, even the dullest of us, complex creatures: so it is invidious to label /summarize anyone as dull or narcissist or scientist. 

Wilson devotes the first 91/583 pages to setting out her stall with as much baggage as she is aware of. It is also helpful to have a classicist's explanatory insight on how Archaic Greek life and certainties differ from those of our own time. "Odysseus is a migrant, but he is also a political and military leader, a strategist, a poet, a loving husband and father, an adulterer, a homeless person, an athlete, a disabled cripple, a soldier with a traumatic past, a pirate, thief and liar, a fugitive, a colonial invader, a home owner, a sailor, a construction worker, a mass-murderer, and a war hero". Some of those descriptors [migrant homeless disabled] have a particular charge for our modern selves in contrast to the inhabitants of EV Rieu's immediate post-WWII world of 80 years ago.

As we see above Kitto is keen to lay out the nuance of aretê ἀρετή = virtue / excellence. Wilson spends as much effort on xenia ξενία = hospitality: the rights and obligations of hosts and guests. Perhaps in these troubled, othering, times we all need to reflect more on xenia than aretê ?? When somebody, anybody, rocked up to the door Greeks were obliged to give the stranger bath, bites, bevvies and bed.  An integral part of the process is pompḗ Πομπη = safe escort to the next destination. After the fall of Troy, Odysseus' son Telemachus goes off to glean some intel from his father's fellow warriors who have, like, actually returned home. Nestor provides the chap with a chariot and his own son Pisistratus as guide for the onward journey to Menelaus and Helen's palace in Mycenae. Hypnopompic same root.

They say that, when B&B's became A Thing in Ireland in the 1950s there was some [presumably bitch behind the back] outrage that people would charge money for accommodating wayfaring strangers [♪Riannon Giddens♪] who needed a bed for the night. In that world Two steps of decency required a host to see their departing guest to the door - to the gate - to the bus-stop . . .

Irvine's foot

Because things come in threes it is fortunate that we can now add Sandy Irvine's foot to Capitaine Legionaire Danjou's [wooden] hand and maybe Galileo's finger. But knock yourself out: Susie Dent has written a whole book on famous body parts Vital Organs . . . also on YT [45m].

Andrew Comyn Irvine was last seen on The Blob in 2021. . . or with George Mallory near the summit of Everest on 8th June 1924. They found Mallory's body in 1999. But Irvine had the camera which might retain the evidence that the intrepid Brits had made it to the highest point of the World a generation before Hillary and Tenzing. Now they've found Irvine's boot with what's left of his foot inside.
Q. How did they know that it was Irvine's boot?
A. Because the sock had his name tag on it!
They'll do a DNA test and compare it to his grand-niece Julie Summers who is also author of his biography Fearless on Everest The Quest for Sandy Irvine (2020, £20) But any reasonable person would consider it case closed. Sandy's sister Evelyn married his school-friend Dick Summers. It is claimed that Irvine had a fling with Marjory Summers the step-mum of Dick Summers; or something - I'm frankly Scarlett about illicit interwar bonking, given the reg'lar old-fashioned forensic evidence in this case.

That evidence [see L] gave me a frisson. Part of my very expensive education required me to leave home for about 3/4 of every year and go boot camp with hundreds of other chaps. Laundry still had to be done in those institutions and we were requested-and-required to supply the commissariat with 12 handkerchiefs [remember them?]; 12 shirts; 18 collars; 12 pantses; and 12 vests. WTF collars? Yup we had to attach the collar to each shirt with a pair of studs; also cuff-links. These had to come back to the correct locker, so each item was labelled with Cash's name tapes. As you see Irvine's [mother?] chose the default colour. In our family, for reasons lost in the mists of fading memory I was B.T.SCIENTIST in black, my brother's name tapes were blue and my sister's green. At about the same time (as Charles Windsor was playing The Pirate |King at Gordonstoun) Cash's won the right to say 'Manufacturers of Woven Name Tapes to Her Majesty the Queen.' 

PS MeFi commentary on foot of the story. Interesting idea: check Mallory and Irvine's pockets for [top souvenir] rocks rather than cameras.

Mid Oct Sun Aye Noe

Dang! Entirely missed the aurora borealis on Th 10/10

• ♩ ♬ ♫ ♪
  
• Mark Knopfler & Ruth Moody - Wherever I Go
  
• Kodo drummers - well fit
  
• Hayde - Wayfaring Stranger
  
• Home Free - Man of Constant Sorrow
•  0.4146825098 prime nerd land
  
• Mark Huneycutt flies again after Helene 
• E-scoots banned on trains - Lithium fire risk
• MegaProject California Delta Conveyance ≋≋
  
• MiniProject Mossy Earth make a wetland in Portugal
• Really, do we need another golf-course?
  
• Career change after mislaid job application
  
• Some centenarians are not 100
  

evidence based

Pundits can be a pain in the fundament. I am a big fan of the BBC podcast Sideways which allows Matthew Syed to talk about people who march to a different drummer; who look at the world that standard media and Jan Modal might consider a bit out there. If we all think alike, it may be cosy and non-confrontational but it might also be bzzzt wrong. The podcast is fun because it explores some peculiarity of the human condition, develops some makes-ya-think ideas,ties everything up with a Message and signs off after 30 mins. Malcolm Gladwell, with his breezy certainties, and tidy stories, is an exemplar of the genre. As some wag had it "My take on Gladwell: his books should have been magazine articles and his magazine articles should have been tweets." 

But now I've read Matthew Syed's second book Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn from Their Mistakes (2015). It's a book in form but it's really journalism in substance. Which is fine - chacun à son goût métier - so long as you don't expect reporting on science to be, like, science. Scientists are generally really crap at explaining their ideas to ordinary folks; so there's defo a niche for Syed and Gladwell and Jared Diamond [whose breezy hypothesis about the end of civilization on Easter Island was just demolished on MeFi]. Diamond also had theories about the end of Viking Greenland [blob].

Syed contrasts the response to mistakes were made in the aero and health industries. But there are many examples from business and politics. Key message is that some corporate cultures make it very difficult to admit error so there is no learning opportunity. Nobody likes to be wrong and we tend to double-down if errors are pointed out. If management mistakes are re-framed as "shit happens" and "nothing to do with me" then the errors repeat. 

When a plane goes down, by contrast, investigators will go to extraordinary lengths to work out why. The black box for Air France 447 Rio-Paris flight was recovered from the mid-Atlantic floor 4,000m below the surface, 2 years after the plane crashed. Despite the headlines, air-travel is famously safe: and this is because pilots and engineers fess up when things go pear-shaped. Reports are filled and submitted and collated and analysed. Most importantly, international warnings, recalls and advisories go out to minimise the chance of something similar happening again [ever]. Here's another near [1.3m = 5ft] miss story analysed in the book]There has been much recent 737-max criticism of Boeing for turning a premier engineering company into a shareholder's company. 

When you tally up the number of avoidable iatrogenic deaths it is, according to Syed quoting a 2012 epidemiologist referring to a 2000 report,  equivalent to two full jumbo-jets falling out of the sky every 24 hours [USA data]. An arresting image, indeed. But more recent analysis on much larger samples specifically looking at the problem of medical error finds that two full jumbo-jets might be 10x - 20x too high.  Nevertheless even if only 5% of deaths in hospital are due to mistakes, it's still too high. And, Syed sez, nobody is comparing notes; let alone sending reports, analysis and conclusions to a central repository. Au contraire, when they killed my father in 2001, his hospital records mysteriously disappeared. We see this all the time: when babies die or are incapacitated in/by hospitals, parents usually have to lawyer up to get to the bottom of it. Mostly, they just want an explanation, an apology and some assurance that no parent will have to suffer like them in future. It's ugly and makes it all about the compo; as if a €million will get their baby back.

Afrique. Later on in the book  Syed re-tweets a story from Tim Harford [multoprevo] about evaluating interventions to better educate young Kenyans. Aid agencies have $50 billion to spend in Africa each year. Harford's useful way of evaluation such large numbers if to divide them by the relevant population. If distributed evenly, that's  a little less than $1 a week each. Anyway, the study in Kenya was effectively a controlled experiment or randomized controlled trial RCT. They found that 

• lurrying textbooks [in English] into schools made no difference
• lo-tech flip-charts with engaging brightly colour pictures ditto brrrp! 
• otoh, dosing all the kids (and the teachers?) with anthelmintics to reduce the parasitic worm burden perked everyone up, ready to learn and less likely to pull a sickie. Result: demonstrable improvement in the LOs Learning Outcomes.
  

Don't believe a word of it until it's been replicated in Cameroon! Nevertheless it's probably better if you read (some of) this book than spending the equivalent amount of time restlessly swiping left-right or slack-jawed watching youtube. As Gladwell said of his own works "The mistake is to think these books are ends in themselves. My books are gateway drugs—they lead you to the hard stuff." Which is characteristically too clever by 'arf.

!! But why waste time with secondary sources when you can get the key ideas from the horse's mouth? I have been recently quite the fanboi for Sean Carroll's Mindscapes podcast. Mindscapes#1 was with Carol Tavris the co-author of  Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) [2007] on Mistakes, Justification, and Cognitive Dissonance. Also on YT.
Five years and 200+ episodes later Carroll returned to the theme in Mindscapes#233 with Hugo Mercier (co-author  of The Enigma of Reason [2017] on Reasoning and Skepticism. Also on no pics YT. In my reality, I absorbed these two hour+ blasts of erudition within a couple of days of each other. So it was a bit like binge-watching House on lupus in an all-night session.

Stick it to the man, dessert edition.

RIYC?? In the early 90s, a couple of friends of my sister left the Woo of Findhorn to settle and make a living in Ireland. They bunked with us for a few weeks. But as soon as they got some gig work, they left our spare room and rented a teeny tiny flat in Dun Laoghaire. One Saturday a few weeks later, we piled into the car for a surprise visit to our new pals K&L. For a jape, we paused at the garden centre at the bottom of our rural Northside lane and bought a massive sack of spuds as a house-gift. They were delighted to see us, gave us tea and we all went on a promenade along the East Pier. That Winter, The Boy got well into D&D and wanted to attend a session in Dun Laoghaire after school on Tuesdays. K&L, well obvs, offered to give him a bed for the night and make sure he brushed his teeth before going back to school in the morning. And it was so.

For a while L was working the night shift as a waitron in the Royal Irish Yacht Club. It was a club, for rich people, so the tips didn't appear as a golden rain and the management paid only minimum wage. But, at the end of the shift, the staff could take home any unsold desserts as a gratuity. "rrrr, thank ye for my wages, marster". K&L, whose ancestors had left in the 20thC and 19thC respectively, worked real hard at re-anchoring their dynasty in Ireland. But it just didn't come together in pre-Tiger Dublin and so they pulled the plug and went on to British Columbia. When we went to help them pack for leaving, they presented us with a neat stack of 6 RCSI dessert bowls. L had never been in a hurry to return the receptacles for her dessert 'bonus'. I guess I was, wearing my épater les bougies bonnet, happy enough to fence her loot.

After they left, K&L borned and raised a chap together who was about the same age as Dau.I and Dau.II. And then, just before Christmas 20 years ago, K had a heart attack and died. We were bereft, it was as if his heart was too big for this world. The only time the three kids met was when L came back to Ireland with her Boy and his father's ashes to scatter at the Home Place in Tulla, County Clare. On that trip L revealed that the sack o' spuds which we'd dumped on them as a joke a decade earlier had been a lifesaver. After the rent was paid that month, they had literally no money left for food. Morto, I was! At the time I was on a crazy tax-free EU-funded gig in TCD and would happily have given them a pound of rashers and a cabbage as well as the spuds! And son-of-K&L? He turned out well.

Vth Column

It's more than 100 years since the foundation of The State = Saorstát Éireann which didn't formally sever the last umbilical to the UK until Easter 1949 when the The Republic of Ireland Act 1948 came into force. The Free State / Saorstát had been minting its own coins since 1922 but they were the same size and denomination as British coins and the latter circulated freely in Ireland, at face value. UK paper money was also accepted in Ireland when I was student in the 1970s; although not vice versa - you'd get very peculiar looks if you proffered £5 Irish in middle England. 

One of the neatest buildings in Trinity College Dublin is the 1937 Reading Room which was commissioned in 1919 to commemorate the 491 students and staff who had perished [in uniform!] in The Great War. The Hall of Honour atrium wasn't finished until 1928. 'NIKH' is inscribed in foot-high letters on the outside portico although 'Victory' rang kinda hollow for the 491 and their grieving families. The functional rest of the building - serving as a Post-Graduate reading room - wasn't finally completed until 1937! 

One of the neatest features of the design is that the massive hardwood doors are studded with bronze pennies [as L]. I've always believed that these pennies all bore the date 1937 because that would be a cool nod to future post-armageddon archaeologists. Similar to the practice of putting coins under the foundation stone of many public buildings when they are a-building. Most recently, in August, I urged Gdau.I and Gdau.II to check out the doors when they went on a city break with their aunties. They were unimpressed! So the next time I had idle minutes in TCD, I went to look at the disappointment myself.

And WTF! There are no Irish pennies, let alone 1937 pennies at all at all. Rather they all sport the profile of GEORGIVS V DEI GRA: BRITT: OMN: REX FID: DEF: IND: IMP: = George V by the Grace of God, King of all the British territories, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India . . . who died in 1936. I was initially outraged that Trinity was acting up as a Fifth Column for Empire long after that ship had sailed from the 26 counties. For a Republic, there's a lot of this historical inertia about: Royal Irish Academy, Royal Dublin Society, Royal College of Surgeons, Royal Irish Yacht Club. But a moment's thought revealed that the doors were probably completed for the 1928 structure and, however bamboozled, those remembered inside died for 'King & Country'. And no, not Brian Ború (941-1014 Clontarf), High King of Ireland.

Lonelio Noleoni

 Grass-widder agane this w/e: just me n the sheep

• Jackie Lennox - Chicken Supper, Mushy Peas and Tanora - Tanora 
• adverse review
  
• is closed forever
• Veg rennet pecorino making
• UnVeg!! Reducing half-a-pig at hometo chops and sausinges
  
• Modular homes ? two bois have a rant
• Not a bike-shed
• TDs behaving badly
  
• Moel Fferna Slate Mine
• Retrogressive permafrost thaw megaslump
• Sean Connery reads Ithaka [prev] to Va♫gelis 
• Lee Marvin [→] b under a Wand'ring Star (1969!)
• HeyHo, a Proustian madeleine for me: ole gravel voice grrrrresonated with the miserable lonely 15 y.o. that was me when it came out. Never seen the whole movie.
• Portishead
  
• Ryanair know where you live how close together are your eyes
  
• Irish Spa Hotels sweep prizes 8/25 incl. #1 = Adare Manor in CondeNast Europe Resorts survey. 6/25 in the list are in Turkey [Asia ahem] so the whole process is suspect
• Not-Streetview: googlecars can't cover the whole planet: entrepreneurs and dogoodniks are filling the gaps.
  

Gavagai!

In't language wonderful? We make these sounds with lingua, lips and larynx [Ug Ug beep beep] and other humans (and some dogs) can understand them to carry a particular meaning. Not all other humans, of course; your {family | roomies | co-workers}will probably get your drift; but someone who has just struggled from a leaking inflatable through the grating roar of pebbles which the waves draw back  and onto Dover Beach - maybe not so much? [and every day, as someone with a tin ear, I thank St Fursey I grew up Anglophonic).

It's not fair, or sensible, to ignore that wet Somali refugee because, even if we SHOUT, he can't understand what we want. Not sensible? Because we are making a sorry hames of running things hereabouts and could really benefit from new ways of l◎◎king at the problems that haemorrhage our social capital and aggravate inequity, unfairness and exclusion.

That's why we need linguists (and signers, translators, grammarians); to see what falls through the cracks of communication when people speak to each other. I returned a rental-car the other day and pointed at the nearside front corner
Bob "those scuff marks were on it when I took delivery"
Avis "these alloys?"
Bob "I've no idea, it's your car"
Avis "No: do . you . mean . the . alloy . wheels?"
I'm glad we cleared that up, because extra charges have been anxious-making in the past.

The best ling thing on the internet since sliced infinitives is Lingthusiasm which I've riffed on before. In the latest of nearly 100 episodes they cite a linguistics 101 story about two lads in countryside who have no language in common. A rabbit exits the hedgerow and runs across the field and one man points and says "Gavagai!". What does the other person make of that single word - it matters because establishing the meaning might be the beginning of a beautiful mutually intelligible friendship. Probably "rabbit"?? But could be "fast" or "big-ears" or "I like a lorra shaggin' too" or "mammal" or "fox incommming". 

The Lingthusiasm discussion transitioned from [parts of] rabbit to a handy resource for inter-language comparison. Morris Swadesh (1909-1967), a student of Edward Sapir [of Sapir and Whorf prev]. . . became the GoTo for lexicostatistics and glottochronology. In 1952 he delivered a 215 word list of language universals, to facilitate the comparison of languages - how many members of the Swadesh List have the same root in, say, Hindi and Irish. IF all languages, and this is the hypothesis behind the lists, have a word for [alphabetically] - bird - come - drink - earth - foot - give - hand - know - leaf - many - neck - push - rain - tree - THEN you can be confident that speakers of two languages are talking about the same thing . . . and you can make your comparisons. You may be able to see the connexion with the Gavagai tale. I guess that populating the Swadesh List for a newly discovered language would involve the same sort of non-leading questions as used to fill a Linguistic Atlas: "What do you call the long, tapering, orange-coloured root vegetable with feathery green leaves?"

Anyway. Swadesh recognised / included only 5 colours [wot? no cerise or teal?] because, for e.g., blue is not universal. Here are those colours in 9 different EU languages. What I've done is sort the five words in each language alphabetically. Your task is to match the colours between each pair of languages. Maybe start with EN and Nederlands?

Maybe not so easy? - even when you exclude the two not IndoEuropean tongues = HU and FI. You may express your admiration for those 19thC scholars who wrangled the Indo-European family of languages to appreciate that they were all descended from PIE - a language spoken by central Asian shepherds maybe 5000 years ago. Swadesh Lists for more languages [Hausa Telugu Tagalog Klingon] than you can shake a stick at on wiktionary.

Answers

	EN	FR	HU	NL	PT	CZ	FI	IS	IE
87	red	rouge	vörös	rood	vermelho	červený	punainen	rauður	dearg
88	green	vert	zöld	groen	verde	zelený	vihreä	grænn	glas
89	yellow	jaune	sárga	geel	amarelo	žlutý	keltainen	gulur	buí
90	white	blanc	fehér	wit	branco	bílý	valkoinen	hvítur	bán
91	black	noir	fekete	zwart	preto	černý	musta	svartur	dubh

In context, you can believe that yellow and geel and gulur have a common [Germanic] origin. As for black, English has gone rogue by adopting blæc an Old English word for ink. But we keep the standard meaning in swarthy. Also ewe.

Other ways of being

I gorra new Podcast: Mindscapes run by Sean Carroll where he "hosts conversations with the world's most interesting thinkers. Science, society, philosophy, culture, arts, and ideas." I should be okay for a while because it's been running since 2018 and 290+ thinkers have given an hour of their time to the project. Sean Carroll was trained a cosmic physicist [PhD Harvard 1993] but has also been one of those Public Intellectuals like Steven Pinker. Cosmology is hard and physicists in search of new challenges were definitely the grit that niggles at the start of the rise and rise of molecular biology in the 1950s. Carrol has read Erwin Schrödinger's What is Life? for example and has ideas about evolution because he's read widely in the field and is interested in Life, The Universe and Everything including the antics of the diverse inhabitants of this our small blue planet.

Mindscapes 269 featured Sahar Heydari Fard on "Complexity, Justice, and Social Dynamics". She has not read Erwin Schrödinger's What is Life? but she is up to speed on, say, punctuated equilibria and other key issues in the evolutionary philosophy. So her convo with Carroll was quite high-falutin' but pretty interesting, not to say gripping. The question addressed was what tools are available to document and support change in society. Like 1950s physicists brought their ways of seeing to DNA, proteins and evolution in the 1960s; so with social dynamics today: maybe we don't need to re-invent the wheel if established complexity theory can be mobilized to make models to get our heads around really hard problems (and unintended consequences) in society. 

One of the biological theories that the philosophical physicist and the philosophical economist cite with approval is Wright's idea of adaptive landscapes. Acknowledging that the Perfick is the enemy of the Good enough. They like the idea of local optimum solutions that may not be The Answer but are pretty good in a particular place and time. But Wright's landscape is barely a theory, let alone a testable hypothesis - it's a metaphor! But Fard riffs off on the idea to imagine an actual landscape of communities all trying to get along with the cards they have been dealt - a maybe sharing some of Things That Work with other similar communities to save them having to re-invent the wheel er blackjack table [Mixed metaphor morass alert!].  But that's okay: matter a damn where the ideas come from; just seize those which seem useful. The podcast set my poor mind off in a number of different directions. 

① One was to reflect on our Kindred Neanderthals who kept on keeping on for 200,000 years - through climate changes the like of which we haven't yet experienced - sharing, propagating and using a very basic set of technological tools: chipped stones, tanned hides, sharp sticks and red fire. The Blob has asked, rhetorically, where do the ideas come from? in science. For reasons unknown, Neanderthals don't seem to have budged much on the implemented ideas front for a hella long time.

② I was talking to my neighbour Local Solar the other day. He asserted that he was, like me, def'ny a morning person. But he recognised that night-owls had their place too. He reckoned the distinction went back to when the common ancestor of Us and Neanderthals had just come down from the trees. It was desirable that someone in the clan should be awake to tend the fire (and keep watch for cave-bears). Groups which segregated for larks and owls [as we do for green eyes and brown], retaining some of each type, survived better while less bioclock diverse parties left the stage. I'd never heard that argument before and I've no idea if it's even testable scientifically. But I love the idea that we are selected to be diverse rather than identical (to a fallen angel?)

③ Carroll and Fard were also asking how stable societies can nevertheless embrace change. For hundreds of years Han Chinese carried out foot-binding on their infant girls. Then in the space of one generation, about 100 years ago, the practice was shoved into the dustbin of history. This collective decision worked where Edicts from Manchu Emperors in the 1600s had been brushed aside. How come? Lots of other cultural norms in that society - some of which seem weird to us - continue as before. When we came back to Ireland in 1990, it was still pretty darned white, pretty darned catholic and pretty darned bacon & cabbage. In 1996, when we moved to the deepest rural midlands, our nearest neighbour confessed that they'd just tried frozen pizza for the first time - induced to do so by their teenage daughter. Now there is a Chinese take-away in Borris (pop ca. 800), not to mention Polskie sklepy, black and amber GAA players and Grand Theft Auto. 

One way to make change in the way we live now is to present lots of options and give some of them a go. Immigrants? Bring 'em on!

Dobré ráno Marek

The Grape is gorn and we're back in the Republic of Yaris. There are about 60,000 different used cars for sale in Ireland today. There are too many variables (marque, model, year, drive-train, clock-Km, colour, price) of uncertain weighting to get The Best car. But, as an evolutionary biologist, I don't want Perfect, I rather want Good enough. One way of reducing the choice to manageable proportions is by brand: Audi Bentley Chevy . . . Renault Škoda Toyota. And the rest is fairly straight-forward, constrained by money and size and what is available at this location today. I am not one to piffle about: so long as it goes and won't leave me or mine stranded, a decision can be made today. 

The day after The Grape was given a terminal diagnosis, which was not wholly unexpected, we went to the nearest Toyota dealer and said "Sell me this pencil us a car; any car, so long as it's black Yaris". They had about 20 on the forecourt. Half of them older stick-shift petrol like my '06 little red Yaris and half newer [petrol+battery] hybrid models. We were conducted round the stock by a charming New Irish fella from the other end of the EU. After a bit of tire-kicking, I was ready to take the '21 Red Hybrid but was prevailed upon to sleep on the decision. Our contact was off on family business the next day.

But early on the day after that, I sent him a txt "Dobré ráno, Marek, we're coming in at 0900hrs to pay for the '21 Red Yaris Hybrid 212KK456". When we reconvened at 9am, that [rather low mileage] car had been sold, and the other '21 had been keyed over the w/e and was being de-scratched, so we could either go newer for more money or vice-versa. While we dithered, Marek went to his supervisor and secured us another €500 on the trade-in: he was really touched that my text had started with G'day in his mother-tongue. We have a multi-cultural society now, I prefer to lean in to it rather than set fire to vacant hotels. We can all play nicely and use DeepL translator to spice up the comms.

It took a tuthree days to get the paperwork sorted. When I returned to take delivery Marek was off-site again. I nevertheless left him a pot of '23 Marmalade with a tag "Děkuji vám, Marek. In Ireland after a large transaction (like a horse), it is traditional for the buyer to return a luck penny to the seller . . . but you  can't eat pennies. Bob & TB". And that's how we acquired a NightSkyBlack Yaris Hybrid with a once-round-the-world mileage. God bless her and all who sail in her. 20 minutes after taking delivery I parked under tree to go shopping. Bird shat of my windscreen! A baptism of sorts.

Hint - automatic: do NOT use left foot ever - ask me how I know.

Bitter lemmings

Lemmings + cliffs = fib. [Prev]

• Victorian cant
• Victorian coopering in Cork 
• Free speech heroes for Margaret Attwood
• Old Man sock test F3 generation is fastest (no surprises) 
• Joshua Idehen - Mum Does The Washing: every -ism explained . . . with red hands
• Parlez Nous à Boire 
  

The apparel oft proclaims the man

Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not expressed in fancy; rich, not gaudy,
For the apparel oft proclaims the man . . . Polonius advises

Half a life-time ago, in advance of a career-changing interview, we went into Next in Newcastle upon Tyne and came out 45 minutes later with a woolmark charcoal gray double-breasted suit. I didn't get the job, but the suit has done me ever since for weddings, funerals, christenings and interviews. Being exactly average in size has made life easier for me to find things that fit. And being frankly Scarlett about the apparel details certainly helps.

One of the useful things I was taught in graduate school in Boston was that wearing a jacket and tie [a charcoal gray suit might be a teensy bit OTT in academia] for an interview shows that you care enough about the job to step over that very low bar! For all other public/formal events, not wearing a suit is making a statement and so making it more about you than the situation probably deserves. Exceptions made if you are, like, The Corpse: then it's your last chance to be the subject of gossip.

People have said that I brush up well. But that's largely about being average size, so my pants legs come to the shoe but no further. And I inherited a wide variety of ties from my Da (HMS Dolphin, Royal Engineers, Old Eton etc. to none of which he was 'entitled') and have picked up more snazzy designs as gifts along the way.

By coincidence, in the run up to my last jacket&tie outing - to #1 Grafton St! - I found myself listening to Sean Carroll, public intellectual, in conversation with Derek Guy, internet personality, about the Theory and Practice of Dressing Well. Guy has been in some twitter-spats about suitings; and blogs about apparel on Die, Workwear. I R old; I R The patriarchy; I had a very expensive education including a very old fashioned uniform - so I don't need advice about neckties and buttons. Most of that is about signalling status to people who care; like wearing a gold ring in your left (gay) or right (pirate) ear. eeee but I do have a lot an hour and a bit of time for an enthusiast.

I liked very much the two-sidedness of Derek Guy's coin. One side knows and cares about the difference between a four-in-hand and a half-windsor. The other is very emphatic that he/we should never judge someone's worth by their clothing. Chances are, you've been wrapping your neck in a four-in-hand since you were in national school without knowing the name, like M. Jourdain and prose. Nevertheless, Derek Guy's advice seems sound: if you dress to fit [your bod and the social surroundings] then you'll possibly feel less awkward and it will be easier for everyone to have a fun and/or productive time.

Deputy State Pathologist

The Blob has been running for nearly 12 years; recently cranked down from daily to MoWeFr[Su]. Now that I R retire, it is no longer an everyday story of Institute folks and I must poke elsewhere for copy. Most days, before breakfast, instead of a cold bath [so Protestant, so Yesterday], I glance at the RTE front-page to check that I haven't missed something important. We've come a long way from the BBC dressing a chap in evening clothes for 9 o'clock to solemnly announce "There is no news tonight". RTE will fill their page with stuff regardless of whether there is any news. But it would take a momentous recent upheaval elsewhere to stop RTE giving headlines to an Irish murder or a multi-victim car-crash. 

For 20 years 1998-2018, the reports on Irish mayhem would mention the presence of Dr Marie Cassidy, the [Deputy] State Pathologist. Before she was appointed DSP in 1998, one man carried the can, now there are seven pathologists on pay-roll (currently all women for what that's worth). Jack Harbison, Cassidy's mentor and predecessor, wasn't camera-shy and State Pathologists have become celebs in Ireland. This is not the norm in other jurisdictions.

When Cassidy retired in 2018, as well as the Dancing with the Stars gig and a part on Cold Case Collins [nodding sagely R], she also sat down to write her memoir Beyond the Tape which was published in 2020. It required big font and 1.5pt line-spacing to get it to fill 300 pages and justify the £16 sticker price. Not knocking it for being short; it does the job. The gruesome is presented but not lingered over and the books spares us the smell and the flies, so we can get a sense of how grim-but-necessary tasks are carried out professionally. One thing that helps front-line workers get through is gallows humour and a good bit of that leaks into the pages of the book. 

One aspect of the professional demeanour of Marie Cassidy is that she tries very hard to be non-judgmental and dispassionate. It's not helping grieving relatives if the forensic pathologist goes all weepy on them but neither is pretending to be a robot. Also (by her own account) while Cassidy works hard and meticulously to bring decades of experience to bear on resolving the cause of death, she is not prone to over-egging the pudding. She will stand up in court to say that the evidence is equivocal or insufficient. And I also detect a degree of compassion for the perps. It's not helpful to anyone if state professionals are judge and jury and St-Peter-At-The-Gate for The Accused. Humility and a l o n g list of wrongful convictions require uncertainty about The Facts.

This is the 4th forensic biography I've reviewed after Mark Spenser's Murder Most Florid, Patricia Wiltshire's Trace, and Unnatural Causes by Richard Shepherd. The last has the greatest overlap with the Cassidy book. Shepherd eventually unravelled. It's probably true that gallow's humor isn't enough to secure the mental health of all workers at the forensic coal-face. I only read Beyond the Tape because The Beloved browsed it off the library shelves especially for me. I won't be reading Marie Cassidy's first essay into fiction with The Body of Truth (2024) but I daresay the whodunnit members of my family - who are legion - will give it a go.

Turn Turn Turn

It's a while since I did a compost-heap work-out. Can it really be three years since I did this? It certainly didn't feel familiar when I set to the task mid-morning on 10th Sep 2024 [heck'n'jiminy, that's two weeks ago]. It also seemed a bit redundant, because I still had two bags of 'friable loam' = sieved compost from when(ever) I last did it. Nevertheless the primary input bin was getting kinda full and something had to be done. It was higher than it might have been because I had been mucking out under the trees where the sheep are wont to rest up; and I'd added a bagful of dung to the compost bin. I sort of wrote off Bin3 of the three-bin process because the second bin (having been festering for an unknown age) felt and looked pretty good after I'd sieved it through a Tesco-crate. Here's what's left [zip zero zonders] in the second bin after an hour of shovel, sieve and bagging:

Note the white floor: two corrugated election posters effectively stop tree roots from robbing the nutritive value of the compost from below. I went back to the task at tea-time and forked the intake-bin into the vacated middle bin:

I left a few scoops of starter in the intake bin, added a basket of grass clippings and another bag of sheep-shit then gave it all a good stir. It's now ready for kitchen waste and rhubarb leaves.

Did I say I sieved the stuff before bagging? I did! This has a number of benefits 

① It breaks up the clods and allows obvious nettle-roots to be discarded
② It develops upper-body strength
③ It turns up a lot of things before they go back to the veg-beds. Things that do not compost include wine corks, avocado stones and teabag bags. 

The white bucket [R above] is mainly full of grey rags which once held 2g of tea and now remind me of nothing so much as the wretched public laundromat in Tramore eeuw!. I've implemented a 2024 regime of ripping open and emptying tea-bags into the compost to scotch this problem at source. I am also being encouraged to use more loose tea in a pot.
w.t.f. are teabags made of?; and do we really want to be consuming a hot-water infusion of the stuff??

Judy and Pete do Turn turn turn

Equinoctal

I caught The Ringstone at pretty much peak oblique sunlight on 11/Sep with a flaming mountain ash caorthann Sorbus aucuparia - crowning the earth-mother as it were.  It's a fairy'nuff image for the start of Fall, no? Pre.view from Jun last year.

Else:

• Ireland’s most beautiful train route [40m DW Docu] Rosslare to Howth. How others see us.
• Working on friendship Trevor Noah ♥ Simon Sinek
  
• Life on Thames River - oral hist edition
• Down with the yoof in Leeds Armoury Museum
• Cup Song / chanson à tasses: Drummondville PQ
• Booting the Irish, bilingual signage edition.
• History of money laundring EIC VOC edition

More Autumn landscape? Perp or perps unknown have been setting the heather blazing again [also April 2020 and April 2022] and I bet you a sacrificial pig that it's not a bunch of neoDruids going all wiccan about the Feast of Mabon. Our hill was downwind of the conflag [below 19:49hrs 20Sep24], and The Man will be happy to dock the damage from our our maintain-the-dry-heath money. Burning is not an effect method for killing Rhododendron ya eejits.

The next morning, Sat21Sep24 bright and early (caught the sunrise), I was up and yomping. It was dewy sog under foot and when I got to the back end of the hill, I could see the fire was out; with only an ugly splot of soot-waste across the valley. The fire defo crossed the county borrrder, but one could believe that all /most of the damage was on the neighbouring commonage. Without a theodolite and chains OR a phone with google sat map, it's hard to be sure to be sure:

Kindred

It's 40 years since we published our definitive catalog and [trivial] statistical analysis of neogene tooth metrics. At that depth of time, I cannot remember if we included any Homo neanderthalensis in the dataset . . . they may have been 'too recent'. Didn't care either way, because Neanderthals have never really floated my boat. Although The Blob has been 'interested' in the idea of palaeolithic denisovan / neanderthal / sapiens pals making nookie . . .

Then I was more or less ordered to get Kindred out of the library. That would be Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art [review] by Rebecca Wragg Sykes. It's pretty good. A Lot of progress has been made in tech and archaeological practice over the last 20-30 years. 

① It is now much easier to record electronically the  x y z co-ordinates of every bone and artifact so that the whole structure can be reconstructed in fully zoomable rotatable 3D back on the lab computer screen.

② Archaeologists have found the patience to reattach stone chips which were sundered by neanderthal blows 50,000 years ago. This can inform about the percussive techniques used in the first place. Scanning microscopes can find differences in the wear grooves on neanderthal teeth and tools. A modern database has been built up to record the what wear results from scraping hides and how that differs from severing tendons or dis-articulating bone. Comparative flint-knapping is almost a profession in  modern archaeological circles.

③ DNA! I was in the lab next door when Dan Bradley was extracting ancient DNA from ancient bones, and parchment pages to make sense of the history of domestication and incest in Ireland and Europe. Neanderthal DNA is perhaps 10x older but, with luck and care and PCR, enough DNA of sufficient quality can be obtained from neanderthal bones to recognise it as distinctive and distinctively different from "us" Homo sapiens. As 23andMe will tell you, there has been detectable inflow of neandergenes into our ancestors . . . but apparently not in the other direction.

There's a lot we don't know, but it is wonderful how much information has been wrung from a few tonnes of bones representing another way of being a bipedal hominid ape. It's like an alternative running of the experiment over 600,000 years.

A peculiar footnote on p113: " . . . Aboriginal knappers paid as much attention to the overall appearance of their scrapers as Westerners do to their pencil-sharpeners" i.o.w. not at all? What colour is your pencil-sharpener? I have no idea!

When oh when will Usians get with the program and learn about centimeters? Obvs, the USA is the largest English-language book-buying market in the World, so no author wishes to gratuitously alienate readers by giving all distances in versts. But really, everybody [who can read a 400 page academic-adjacent  book about Neanderthals] understands metric even if we in Ireland still weigh babies in lbs and know our height in ft&ins. The editors at Bloomsbury have used cm, m, km, m², kg as primary measurement while appending equivalents as in, ft, mi, yd², and lb in (brackets). Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds but I will point out that 0.5m is variously made equivalent to 1½ft, 20in & 2ft. Number-crunchers gotta data, and I went through the first half of the book to clock the range of values given for m/ft ratios (converting mi to ft by * 1760 * 3 and in to ft by /12): count N=50; mean 0.309; st.dev 0.023; min 0.25; max 0.4. That std.dev is pretty tight: the mean is 1-2% above the everybody knows value of 30.5cm. There are officially 3.281 feet to the metre or 0.3047 m to the ft.

I really like the editorial decision to use micro drawings of palaeolithic artifacts at colophons through the text - raptor-claw [L], pierced shell, flake, feather. Feathers? Many neander-sites reveal a disproportionate number of avian wings, often corvids. I propose that black wings made great eyebrow enhancers 70,000 years ago in France.

There's an effective index but no list of references: proper order for a "popular" science book. It's coming up for Christmas: might make a nice gift for a reading teen. We defo need more archaeologists.

and More women in science!

Moral Hazard, Invasive edition

A few years ago, one of 'our' reg’lar hill-walkers paused at the gate for a chat. In among a lot of other information, he mentioned that he’d seen a clump of Rhododendron ponticum up the hill, far from any walkers’ motorway, but close to the fence that separates the commonage from the various single proprietor holdings. I was interested, because I’d shared a house with two long-haired botanists in the 00s and one of them had contract work in Killarney National Park . . . where Rhododendron is an invasive scourge – relentlessly driving native oak Quercus & Scot’s Pinus climax woodland to the brink of extinction. It can be 'treated' [R is for Roundup] but it's hard, hand, work.

I was interested, but I was also still working and it was term-time and I didn't immediately make it up the lane to yomp across the pathless mountain to take pics and write it all up for The Blob. Indeed, with my two-week event horizon, the whole incident slipped from my ‘mind’ temporarily and then Coronarama closed down at lot of practice and patterns and habits . . . including plant identification.

Then, a few days ago, we heard that one of the other Blackstairs commons had scored 0% /100 in their evaluation under Acres: the latest = current agri-environmental scheme. The explanation given telegraphically as “invasive alien species, contact Head Office for remediation”.
I thought “feckit, that Rhodo has come home to roost on our neighbours and I'm sorry they’re getting 0% help from The Man”
then I thought “feckit, if I / we / they had done something about it when it was one scraggly bush five years ago, then it would have been a lot easier to extirpate”
and then I thought “feckit, how long do we have before the offspring of that lone bush sends tentrils up the stairs and strangles us all in our beds?”

By contrast [Smug alert] Our commonage score was 65%, which rounds up to 70% which secures all 20 of us commoners a modest stipend from Bruxelles. It’s more money than a score of 60% (let alone brrrpt 0%) and close enough to 75% (rounds to 80%) giving us something extra to which can aspire. I won’t bore you with the details but we also have problem with invasive plants degrading the quality of our iconic, fragile, endangered Dry Heath [it's a biome / habitat]. IF we can fell out all visible Sitka spruce Picea sitchensis before the next visit of the inspectors in Summer 2025 THEN we can get paid at a higher rate in the future. 

I was articulating my indignation on behalf of our near neighbours who had been hung out to dry because Rhodo appeared on their patch through no fault of their own. Then I found myself asking why? we had a problem with Sitka spruce degrading one of Europe’s precious rare extensive habitats. It’s because, 45 years ago, Coillte (the semi-state forestry quango) acquired 20 hectares of upland cheap and planted it with a mono-culture of Sitka. That forest was clear felled in 2021 but not before it had spread Picea seedlings far and wide across our commonage, which abuts the Coillte forest. We’ve spent chunks of the last 5 years cutting these buggers down. But it’s only under the Acres scheme that we are actively getting penalized for the presence of Sitka.

Coillte made money on acquiring then planting their enormous land-bank – A Lot of money – and locally they’ve doubled down on planting spruce to set another 40 year cycle in train. When big corporations (banks, bloodbank, beef, broadcaster and that's just be Bs) take risks  and make a lot of money for directors and shareholders then they keep the profits. When they take risks and it doesn’t work out, they are too big to fail and the government bails them out. It’s called moral hazard when no adverse consequences attach to poor decisions.  

Coillte, by washing hands and walking away from the eco-mess they have visited upon us, their neighbours, are basking in the privileges of moral hazard. It’s the poor bloody infantry farmers who are left to stamp out the contagion.

Pat the, Pete the, Paul the Post

We have a new Postman! When he retired in 2015, I wrote about the community centred service meted out by Paddy our first postie at Caisleán an Blob. He'd been with us, and for us, for 19 years. Peter replaced him and was with us for 9 years. Postal delivery workers have complete autonomy about how they run their round - from clockwise or anti-clock to the details about whether to do the long dead-end bohereens on the way out, or on the way home. It always includes a break for 'bait', because if they got back to base early, then the An Post time-and-motion manager would soon be consolidating 9 rounds into 8 and letting someone go from the payroll. I think Paddy got a cup of tea in someone's kitchen on the reg'lar but he always stopped on the same verge mid-morning for his union-time break.  It do be captured by the first (and so far only) pass of the Google-car in 2009:

He certainly didn't get buffeted by passing traffic there.  Pete was different (b/c we're all different): we were later on his round, and his union-break was one drop after us. If I really needed to know that he'd nothing for us, I could peer through the trees in the SE corner of our haggard and see him parked up on his spot in the valley below. A couple of times, I trotted down the lane and 500m along the county road to hand Peter an outgoing postcard. I did once, foolishly in retrospect, accept a parcel from one of the courier services at Peter's Stop - lugging a 20kg case of plonk uphill was more than I was expecting, even for my birthday.

Now, because P for Postmen always come in threes, we have a new postie who goes by Paul. He's fine, his van is even bigger than Peter's but I showed him how to turn in our lay-by to save him having to open our gate. Years and years ago, I moved our post-box to the outer wall of one of our sheds, so that regular mail could deliver through the van window rather than getting wet getting out. Rural posties serve a vital role as social cement: must to what we can to make their round easier.

In 2015, I also wrote about the politics of post, my mother's postie, corporate bullying and the power of the articulate middle-class.