Poker Face

Joshua Foer was a well-connected 20-something science journalist who went, almost for a jape, to cover the annual Mr Memory Competition. Being there and talking to the punters, he figured I could be a contender. His book Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything is the tale of his year of learning how memory could be trained sufficiently to win the competition the following year. I'm quite good at rote-learning: it's been key to such academic success as I've had. But I really couldn't be arsed to do memory well: to put in hundreds of hours training to be better the best in class (my ambition genes were shot off in the war).

My pal P sent me a book where Maria Konnikova appeared to go all me-too on "knock off some arcane skill in one year and write a book about the journey". The pic gives a clue as to the challenge documented in The Biggest Bluff her 2020 book about the world of million dollar poker. The subtitle How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win is a masterpiece in the made-for-the-chatterati trips-off-the-tongue triples genre: Eat Pray Love -- Heat Braise Shanks etc.). It is interesting to read because Konnikova is sufficiently self-aware to a) be good at poker b) be skeptical about what she experiences on her journey. But it is not a text-book about how to Win Big at Vegas. Not least because a rather large variety of types have mastered the craft; and you have to play to your strengths, not Konnikova's. Your strengths . . . and a little bit more!

One of her informants seems to have mastered a form [qigong + mindfulness] of non-attachment "If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster / And treat those two impostors just the same" where winning and losing chunks of money on the turn of cards are seen as equal in the eyes of an implacable universe. Less woo-woo winners recognise the value of losing . . . as a learning experience. It's all about recognising that, although bad turns, bad luck, bad cards will do you in the eye sometimes; good players can turn crap cards into a Win because they are paying attention: it's not about card counting in poker; it's not even about 'tells'; it's paying attention to the way your opponents have behaved in the past (couple of hours often) and perking up at anomalous (in)actions.  NB: really top players have the ability and inclination to turn this attention scrutiny on themselves. 

Typical players, au contraire, get fixated about what has worked in the past, in similar circumstances. As current information blizzards down on them across the table and from the cards, only confirmation bias kicks in - making them more certain that what has worked will work. Bzzzt! wrong.

Konnikova didn't make the goal she set herself to achieve in one year from a "what's a full house?" start. But she did get in a lot of travel (Vegas, yes, but also Dublin, Barcelona, Monte Carlo and Macau) and win some $000 pots along the way. Wikipedia says she's a Poker Pro now. Good on her for facing down loadsa wannabe-alpha trash-talking males in the process . . . and cleaning them out. Still 97% of top level poker players are men: there's no physical reason why this should be.

Getting bitter NOT!

The Blob made passing ref to Michael Rosen's hypothyroidism a couple of years ago. In trying to track that link down, I find that The Blob has been quite the throw-knickers-on-stage groupie for the lugubrious English wordsmith [R].

My current earbook is Getting Better by the said same Michael Rosen. [Which may remind you* of Tous les jours, à tous points de vue, je vais de mieux en mieux the mantra of Émile Coué (de La Châtaigneraie) 1857-1926, the doyen de personal development through the power of positive thunk. * if you aren't part of la francophonie try every day in every way I'm getting better and better with or without earworming Frank Spencer]. Getting Better is short and packs a lot of hurt.

His father and mother were intellectual Lefties from East London: their first date turned into The Battle of Cable Street an anti-fasch riot in 1936. Foter was never satisfied with academic progress of his sons in a cliché of ambition-by-proxy my-son-the-doctor. Sod that: so much unhappiness trying to tonk square pegs into round holes.

Young Rosen shrugged into the academic mantel, did well in school and went to Oxford, but in his early 20s his body was sapped by Hashimoto's thyroiditis, a progressive disease where the immune system declares that the thyroid in non-self and starts to destroy it. The thyroid produces thyroxine which is the 'metabolic hormone' and without it, everything slows down: bowels, heart-rate, s p e e c h. Because the effect are system wide, hypothyroid is hard of diagnosis and it wasn't until his mid-30s that Rosen got treatment. Added thyroxine is one of the miraculous cures of the 20thC and treatment made him better. 

It was unfortunate that, as his undiagnosed hypothyroidism was kicking in, Rosen was trying to progress a career (permanent + pension) at the BBC. Despite some creative successes, he was let go by the Corporation and thereafter had to dig his own channel as a free-lance. It is hard to be off the pay-roll, but for some it can be a stimulus. So many mediocrities were kept on the books [bloboprev last para] at the BBC. Years later it was revealed that his career at the BBC had been coshed by MI5 because The Man feared his leftist credentials.

Rosen developed as a children's writer, getting words down on paper at his desk allowed him to be agreeably absurdist and laughing quietly at his own jokes. But when a fan, a teacher at a large primary school, asked him to perform for a hall full of 400 kids, Rosen was a dull dull dull failure. The teacher kindly showed him the way to be better at playing a children's poet. I felt a rush of empathy because, when I worked at The Institute as a hack teacher of science, I consciously put on my happy face when I strode down the corridor to perform in class - learning was bound to be better if I left my mumbling, stumbling, diffident self at my desk.

In 1999, when he was 53, Rosen's son Eddie contracted meningitis [Neisseria meningitidis prev] and died at home in his bed.  He was only 19 but had already delivered a play into the late 20thC canon. So much potential, so sad. That kind of shit really knocks you back. But moping, let alone griping about life's unfairness won't bring the boy back. Rosen Sr. tried to follow a similar playbook to, similarly bereft, Mo Gawdat - stuff all that might-have-been; focus on the actual 20 decades worth of happy days.

In contrast to his chap, Rosen didn't die at home. He didn't die in hospital during the first Summer of Covid either. Tim Robinson (and 000s of other elderly Brits) was not so lucky. Rosen copped a 'Rona, went downhill and was taken to hospital. Between the jigs and reels he spent 40 days and 40 nights intubated in an induced coma and everyone was surprised (because the odds were against that eventuality) that he woke up. Another 50 days of physio and occupational therapy got him back on his feet and eventually he threw the final stick away and went home. He has some sensible, useful things to say about engagement with your own healing. Like my audiologist, OTs recognise that the major part of their job is putting it back on the client. Nobody gets better if the OTs do all the heavy lifting: ya gotta work for your own salvation. But, as with the other adversities visited upon him, Rosen got better from Covid because he didn't give up.

impersonation

Impersonation is a right regular pain in the arse of the internet: so many Nigerian Princes with spare cash and employees from the late-night bank security team. In Ireland it is a crime to impersonate a member of the Gardai.: you may be fined or spend 5 years in the slammer if convicted. In some circumstances pretending to be A.N. Other is harmless fun (Ms Veranda Porch) or positively protective (Ms Attracta Looney). That last link is also about the birth and naming of Gdau.II who, with her nucl.family, has been in Ireland for the month of August. They normally live in England but have been visiting the Crumblies and also travelling about seeing the sights, hanging out with peers and other scions of the family tree. 

It was arranged that The Parents have a two night quality time break together, while The Kids, now 8 and 12 y.o., go to Dublin with their Aunties. For such an adventure noms-de-plume were in order. Irish Rail has been getting better and better over the last 30 years. The provincial rail service is still absurdly light: there are only 7 trains a day between Dublin and Waterford. But you can book tickets on-line and change reservations ad lib until departure. The carriages are all wired up, not only with WiFi, but also little electronic seat IDs to match the booking number. Nobody remembers their booking number, so you may opt to have your name beside your assigned seat. GDPR requires that the naming of seats is opt-in rather than opt-out.

It would never occur to me to use another name in such circumstances but the Gdaus are more imaginative. Accordingly, yesterday Hérr Van De Guard and his diminutive and sassy assistant Murgle Turgle went to town in carriage B. This evening, after seeing the sights with "Auntie Perspirant" and "Auntie Climactic", they will be reunited with their freshly pampered parents. Lest State Security tries to follow the movements of the intrepid adventurers, they are returning as Bubble Tea and Plopper Suitcase . . . you'll never take them alive coppers!

Ness of Brodgar

For a hymn to the (voluptuous) Earth-mother, the matrix of The Ringstone is well 'ard. It is fine-grained igneous granite. Crude as the carving is, it is still clear after 5000 winters of weather. We have no idea whether and when the carved face was covered against the elements but we do know that they were buried in a wall (and so protected) for ~200 years up until 2007. With sedimentary rocks like limestone and sandstone it is fatal to be insouciant about the effects of weathering. Years ago we heard a story about how some neolithic works of such softer stone had been dug up and relocated to the edge of a municipal car-park in Tullamore? the Midlands - so that they were on display. Within a decade, or two at most, the 000 year old detailing had been done to death by acid rain and drunken urinators; all that remained was blobs.

The Ness of Brodgar was in the news this Summer because it is going under . . . again. This extensive (2.5 ha.) site adjacent to Skara Brae on Mainland Orkney was discovered in 2003 after being farmed and fished past for hundreds of years: ignored because it looked like a big oval hillock. In that year, a large notched stone was turned up by the plough and a geophysical survey showed a rich mess of anomalies suggesting the work of human hand. The following year a team of archaeologists turned up with their shovels and toothbrushes and dug some exploratory trenches to confirm the geophyical imaging.  A complex of walls, middens, buildings, 150,000 cattle bones and fabricated artifacts were revealed. No gold torcs, but for archaeologists it's not about treasure; it's about understanding how people lived and worked and had fun in the neolithic.

Silbury Hill [wch prev] a larger man-made hillock 1,000+ km due South in the middle of England is more-or-less the same age as the works at Brodgar. Crude digs over the last 250 years have made a hames of the archaeological strata and context making it much harder for us moderns to interpret the origins and functions of that massive structure. 

With commendable restraint and humility, it has been decided that Summer 2024 is the last excavation season: every winter more lamination of the top layers of stone occurs. It won't take long to reduce the whole precise structure to soft-focus of weathered rock revealing nothing about the past. Accordingly, this fall, the archaeologists intend to cover up their 2 decades of careful digging and write up their interpretive notes. As they affirm "The long-term survival of the archaeology is paramount. Our duty is to protect the site for future generations, who, armed with new techniques and technology, will be able to pick up where we left off".

Gach Treo Augo 2024

Poppy harvest is In. Poppy seeds go a long way and are A Gift to bread. There's a "dead" corner of the polytunnel between the potting bench (mostly filled with a clatter of crusty seed trays and wretched flower-pots) and the wonderful ever-giving rosemary bush. Because the corner is "dead", weeds come in and poppy is the quintessence of weed. Most years we get some poppies in that corner. This year three of the most successful started up out of the dirt adjacent to the block-faced bed. I build a little mud dam and have been carefully supplying these pioneers with water. Friday I topped them off and shook out the seed into a fine white pasta bowl. Very happy, me.

• 83 y.o. aces Leaving Cert Irish.
• Beau Miles deposits A Lot of cans at 10c a pop
• Climbers: how strong are your belay-loops?
• Alain Delon, un monument français, est mort
  
• Tancredi being sexi
• Jef on Le metro
• Jef prefers les Citroën DS
• Which DS?  2709 RR 75
• Directing early AirMail NYC to LA
• Alabama Paradox exposes the sketchy quality of historical data . . . not everything in Wikipedia is correct 
• Aural illusions exposes the fact that I've been wearing my LIDL-special headphones on the wrong ears.
• Irish seaweed = yum && can't be beat
• I'm yours Jason Mraz
  

graaassseeeddd

We make a lot of hay out of having a traditional hay meadow. Which means we get a modest stipend from Brussels to not cut / graze between 15 Apr and 01 Jul in any year. Which means we get very little hay because we are unmanaging our four largest fields to promote species other than Lolium perenne = perennial rye-grass. This un-grazing regime means that by the 1st of July the grass (and all the other trad meadow species) is too long for sheep to eat . . . but long enough to give a painful cut between the hoof-claws. Sooo we contract to have the grass cut and baled . . . and sold. 

Several years ago we foolishly agreed to allow the contractor to store the wrapped bales in the top corner of the Home Field until they were needed during the winter. When these bales were, in due course, loaded onto a trailer and carted off site, the ground was winter-wet and the tractor skidded about leaving troughs and ruts deep enough to hide a sleeping dog. Contractor promised to make good but never did; so that corner was too buckety to mow the following year, and the next year, and the next. Succession happened: nettles and brambles got footing, a hazel bush up-sprouted and the ruts were covered over with thatch to create a trip, ankle-turn and fall hazard.

Finally, we met up with Séan the Mow and he agreed to ① grub up the bushes, ② rotavate the sod and ③ roll it all flat. And I agreed to re-seed the area between ② and ③. Of course, a normal person would go down the creamery and buy certified-to-sprout grass-seed for this purpose. Except that a) the smallest quantity available is 12.5kg b) that cost €70! and c) it is all ryegrass with ~10% clover Trifolium repens as a token of sustainable nitrogen fixing. 

One of the several tasks which Séan carried out was "knocking the thatch" in the haggard, leaving large clots of cut grass-and-weeds to mulch in. In early July it was a bit early for grass-seed, but I found that dumping the drying clots into a wheelbarrow winnowed out a lot of grass-seed and eventually I had a bucket-full of bio-diverse grass-seed [as L] which I broadcast out to reseed the was-bucketty field corner. My seed weighed light because it was contaminated with stalks, husks, awns and other not-seed grass parts. But I finished up with 11 lt = 600g. Over the next several weeks I stripped off almost as much again from clumps of grass around the field edges. This was [probably, my grass chops are pretty weak nowadays] mostly Yorkshire fog Holcus lanatus which Hubbard damns with faint praise: regarded as a weed, but when young it has some value for grazing, especially on poor soils unsuitable for more desirable grasses.

It's nice that the area to treat was small ~600sq.m. which is 6% of a hectare or 15% of an acre. Teagasc advises that meadows should be re-seeded at 12.5kg / acre which must be one reason why that is the standard bag-size at the creamery. Calculation suggests that we need a bit under 2kg of seed for our modest corner. Also note that Teagasc advice also recommends that the field is "burned off" with round-up as part of the re-seeding process: damn the diversity full ryegrass ahead!!

In early August The Beloved and I were in a garden centre: a place I never go on my own.  I thought it would do no harm if I bought a small sack of lawn-seed because, whatever about diversity, at least the stuff was guaranteed to sprout. It was also appealing that at 1.75kg, it weighed exactly what was required according to my calculations. I feel, it's a bit like me adding a bit fresh yeast to my sourdough: not exactly a cheat but not a purists solution either. That was lurried out on top of my mixed bucket-o-seed and 'raked in'.  Raking in turns up stones and these have been picked out to fill the tuthree feed-sacks visible in the picture above.

Is it green? I think it's green. Tell me it's green!
Unsurprisingly, given that we missed out the RoundUp step, the rotavated lumps are now (a month later) sprouting up with fresh grass quite independent of my saved and bought seed. Although it is hard to swear that none of the seed has sprouted. A few nice showers in mid-August for sure helped bring things along. I hope and believe that the strewn seed will tilt the process towards productive grass without becoming a dreary mono-culture. The watch-word is 'good enough' - almost always a better outcome than 'perfect'.

Books about book-people

Que si j’eusse esté parmy ces nations qu’on dit vivre encore
souz la douce liberté des premieres loix de nature, je t’asseure
que je m’y fusse tres−volontiers peint tout entier, Et tout nud.
Ainsi, Lecteur, je suis moy−mesme la matiere de mon livre.
. . . Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne (1533-1592)

If I had lived among those nations, which (they say) yet dwell under the sweet liberty of nature’s primitive laws, I assure thee I would most willingly have painted myself quite fully and quite naked. Thus, reader, I am myself the matter of my blog. Bob the Scientist (1954 - not.yet).

Although The Blob has a tendency to range widely over time and space (including a glance at Michael de Montaigne), it might be said that its point is to record everything I can remember of my own life built up in 600 word blocks. Biography in metaphorical Lego. It is nit-pickingly detailed about the last 11 years (because recorded within a few hours of each event) and sparse indeed for earlier times. My family groan when I trot out one of my well rehearsed anecdotes for company. Jakers, Pa, did nothing else happen in 1971??

Thus, it's all about meee, but two recent ear-books have also been what do we talk about when we talk about readers [phrase tip Lanchester, Carver]. 

① The Secret Lives of Booksellers & Librarians : True stories of the magic of reading, ostensibly by James "Churn 'em out" Patterson and Matt Eversmann but actually a compendium of authentic voices of those who work in the book-trade. Several of these workers at the coal-face of literacy have a version of the Blue Book meme (Customer: "I wonder if you can help me re-find a book I enjoyed at a teenager? . . . it had a blue cover") and many of them have heart-warming tales of getting the dispossessed into the world of books. I'm guessing that the named authors thought up the idea and corralled the several dozen narrators into getting something about their lives down on paper. Probably bashed some of the less coherent tales (you can love books, read a lorra books, but still not be a natural writer) into shape.  And several have benefitted from Patterson's Page Turner scheme to use his million$ to support independent bookstores.

② Shannon Reed's Why We Read: On Bookworms, Libraries, and Just One More Page Before Lights Out.. This is more cohesive and long-form because, like The Blob, it selectively samples the life and times of a single teacher of Lit at Pitt. If you're quick <link-rot, paywall alert> you can snag an excerpt of Reed's musings about Lincoln in the Bardo filtered through the lit-blog of George "Lincoln in the Bardo" Saunders. Which really is as recursively back-scratching louse-riffling as it sounds but nevertheless gives you, dear reader, an appetizer for the style of Why We Read - cw: can be larf out loud funny. As you should expect from a book by Reed about who / how to Read, it reads easy but offers insight into the hard graft involved in proper writing. Not the easy one-time-pass gab of The Blob, but something which has been drafted and copy-editted and redrafted . . . and redrafted [and shared and feed-backed] until the document is living its best life into posterity. One of the nice anecdotes is when students at a creative writing class get to realise that they are not cut out to be a writer but will so be a much better, more critical, less superficial, reader for having taken Reed's course.

I've returned both these books to the Borrowbox available bin; but you'll have to get in line behind Dau.I the Librarian who tag-teamed them after me.

Bangor to Bobbio

I've been circling round Teagasc, the agri-food semi-state institution, since it was An Foras Talúntais. Some of my best academic-adjacent friends have worked or are working there. But despite this leaven, Teagasc is generally conservative, complacent and dull. This long week (18th-25th August) is Heritage Week and Teagasc's Friday agri-zoom call went early with a talk: Discovering Heritage Through Old Routeways - Ireland's Pilgrim Paths by John G O'Dwyer (Chair of Pilgrim Paths Ireland) with promo by Ronan Healy (Project Manager National Heritage Week at the Heritage Council). With a redundancy typical of the feather-bedded Irish semi-states, it requires two Teagasc people to introduce these talks, one of whom is nail-bitingly poor at public speaking; did I say 'dull'?

This year there are 2,200 events comprehending a very broad definition of Heritage: walks, talks, bees, lighthouses, gardening, painting, baskets, céilí, science. Chekkitout? especially for kids?? they've made efforts to be inclusive.

John G has written The Book on Irish (hill) Walks, but more to the point he's written Pilgrim Paths in Ireland - A guide from Slieve Mish to Skellig Michael. He was also one of the main movers to establish St Declan's Way from Cashel to Ardmore which was officially opened in 2021 [Event tomo!]. Dau.II and I clocked the finger posts where the St.Dec crossed the N25 on the couple of pandemic trips we made to&from Cork. Here's a JGO'D mnemonic D.A.R.E.S. to suss pilgrimage:

• D iscovery, self-
• A ppreciation, for grace and favours from the almighty
• R emembering those gone before
• E scape from the press and stress
• S implify, simplify [Thoreauprev]
  

Oddly enough, in the question session on Friday, O'Dwyer professed to know nothing about Turas Columbanus despite the fact that the local-to-me part of that trek has finger posts all over Co Carlow.

 

"All over" because the route zig-zags back and forth across the county after it lurches away from the River Barrow at Borris or at Clashganny heading for Mt Leinster and Myshall before rejoining the River at Bagenalstown. We cross the Turas 3x getting to our nearest Aldi. This turns a lovely flat [kingfishers, dragonflies, swallows, otters, buzzards, fish] 12 km walk along the towpath of the Barrow navigation into 36 km of schlep along country roads shared with litter, boy-racers, tractors roaring past with trailers of livestock shitting themselves on the way to termination. There are no verges on much of this voyage, let along footpaths; so you must be prepared to plunge into nettles and briars or meet your maker plastered on a front bumper like an extra in Herzog's film about driving-while-txtn. Much as I deprecate sanitizing the Camino de Santiago by taking all the hard bits out; I can't approve of paying for and setting out a set of laminated pilgrim story-boards linked by finger-posts without contemplating how pilgrims are going to navigate with reasonable safety. 

Turas Columbanus follows the life story of St Colmán aka Columbanus starting at Bangor, Co Down and jinking hither and yon until it finishes in Bobbio between Milan and Genoa in N Italy. It takes in pretty much everywhere where legend has it that Columbanus laid his head or knelt at a tomb. Fermanagh, Cornwall, St Malo, St Coulomb [no surprises there?] Rouen, Luxeuil-les-Bains, Soissons, [Hildegard von] Bingen,Tours, Nantes, Schengen, Koblenz . . . all over.

When they / we do the Camino de Santiago, most pilgrims acquire their "credential" = passport at the start of their journey, and get it stampe at each refugio and hostel. Although there are many Camino to Santiago, they all finish at the City of God. In Ireland it's more of a free-for-all. Several Saints, several destinations. Presenting your credential at an office in Santiago gets you your Compostelle: a document asserting that you've walked at least 100 km in the right direction.  Ballintubber Abbey in Co. Mayo has taken up this bureaucratic mantel: taking €5 for a passport and €15 for your personalized Teastas Oilithreachta:

Whoa! and, like, Whoo-hoo. There's our own St Fursey hanging out with more famous saints like Patrick, Kevin, Brendan, and Finbarr. Maybe Ballintubber will up-date their docs to include St Declan of the Déise. At least we know where to walk in his footsteps. I cannot get any handle on a Camino Fursana, but hazard a guess that it involves Headford.

Time was that tourists came to Ireland for the fishing - they said in 1990 that every rod-caught salmon added £1,000 to the economy (B&B, pints, car-hire, dinner, céilí, souvenirs). But we sacrificed the salmon on the EU altar and shat in all the rivers, so that was the end of that. Folks like John G O'Dwyer are starry-eyed about the possibility of making up the deficit in the rural economy through pilgrimage. May the road rise to meet them!

Fertility schmertility

This and that

• Kitchen direct: growing veggies on food scraps.  tl;dr: use compost
• Digging? . . . graves by shovel in NZ via MeFi
  
• The diff: white vs black pepper - same species diff treatment
  
• Jpeg-xl vs AVIF:quality vs compression
• 2023? Wettest Ireland on record
• Heritage Week! The fishin' at Waterford Harbour
  
• Salthill prom shelters: swim not sin
• Shelters? Woodpile hide-out  

Beansprout and the possums

Robert "Beansprout" Long left the rat race in 1980 at the age of 25 and occupied an abandoned miners' shack at the mouth of the Gorge River. Gorge River is a two day hike [43km] South of Haast on the underpopulated West coast of the South Island of New Zealand. It's further still to the Milford Track which served as The Boy's intro to his Kiwi Year in 2005.  A few years later Catherine Stewart threw her cap at him and then there were three four humans living there off-grid. With two tots, twice yearly supply treks took five days rather than two and reduced the adults' carrying capacity. Who'd have kids?? A fit young teen or 20-something can yomp along the bouldery beach in 6-7 hours.

I've just finished ear-booking The Boy from Gorge River, which is Christian "Beansproutson" Long's report on growing up as Lordling of the Sandflies Austrosimulium ungulatum. He flew the nest in his teens to get some schooling and see the world and has lived a very adventurous life in locations yet more extremely isolated [mushing huskies in Norway during Coronarama; crewing a yacht through the NW passage from NYC to Nome, AK; communicating with Russians, Americans and penguins Aptenodytes forsteri in Antarctica] than Gorge River. Like our own children, who all left home before they could vote, Beansprout's two kids come home on the regular and they bring back their learned experience of the outside world: forcing their hippie-adjacent vegetarian parents to kill a few deer and get satellite broadband.

[aside: 20 years ago we were w a a a y behind the curve on our internet connexion. The Boy came home from New Zealand and was trying to help the crumblies get with the program. One of his techie pals in Dublin cut him short "Just how remote are your folks? Can they see the sky?" before explaining that satellite-to-home was not substantially different from satellite from Dublin to Bethesda, MD and it wasn't 100x the cost of copper.]

The common brushtail possum Trichosurus vulpecula [R, looking cuddly] was introduced from Australia in the 1850s in a cunning plan to supply bush-meat and fur. It turned out to be an ecological and economic disaster: possums are ① a far more effective vector for bovine TB than was ever the case for Irish badgers Meles meles ② as relentless omnivores they cause a fatal biodiversity reduction on NZ-native bird eggs/chicks and trees.

Young Chris spoke to the helicopter deer-hunters who flew along the coast blazing away at large mammals for meat and money. The idea was planted that the chap could kill possums and pluck their fur, bundle it up and sell it up the coast. Possum hair shafts are hollow, have high insulation value, and are organic. He sold his first few bales of possum fur and bought a rifle which made it easier to knock possums out of the trees they were depredating in the virgin forest. Whole possum skins, being harder to obtain, carry a premium better than fur, and soon mother and son were making possum-skin hats, scarfs, throws, and other chicerie. The possum carcasses are buried in the veg garden and help produce enormous beets and cabbage as they are recycled below ground.

The Boy from Gorge River is okay. The true-life adventure stories romp along. Too many of them are apparently the X-est whatever in my whole life; which gets a bit tiresome from repetition. Believe me, from the vantage of 70, you'll do sketchier, crueller and stupider whatevers in due course.

For others

I was chatting to Dau.I The Book the other day. For a read-all kid, she's done well for herself and was about to move to a new branch of the Dublin Library service. She was in reflective mood, and mentioned that, a while back, she'd brought in a reasonably compendious bicycle repair kit and left it behind the desk. I thought that was a brilliant example of mission-creep: if The Man wants us all to leave the car at home and travel healthy, then it's a good idea to allay people's anxiety about getting a puncture far from home. Why not have Libraries, a public facing, widely distributed, open in the evenings (someplaces, sometimes) the place where cyclists can fix a puncture?

I was running ahead of the intention a little here, because the spanner and tire-patches were primarily for co-workers, 50% of whom arrived most days by bike. Nevertheless I thought that kit was pretty cool as an unexpected contribution to the common good. Others please copy? 

The apple falleth not far from the tree?  Shortly after we returned to Ireland in 1990, I needed a screw-driver at work. There wasn't one to be found. The next Monday I brought in a rackful of different varieties of that handy implement. Being me, I added an ironic label "The Bob Memorial Screwdriver Rack". Over the next several years, all of these tools found irregular use among my co-workers: fixing bikes; putting up shelves; opening paint-tins. I can't remember which end-of-contract clean-out brought the rack home [as L in a dark  corner of the tool-shed], I'd happily have left it.

I did leave my privately collected [beg borrow steal indent-in-triplicate] co-worker-available key rack behind when I wrapped up at The Institute in 2020. Those keys were all 'owned' by particularly needy colleagues and the one-stop-shop for keys to all the labs on the science corridor was thrun in the dustbin of history. It's like the flapjacks I made on the irreg'lar through my eight years at The Institute. They all got ate. Several people said thanks; several asked for the recipe; to the nearest whole number, zero people reciprocated with home-made anything in any month while I worked there.

Didn't ever turn me churlish and huff off about the one-wayness of the cookie traffic, though. If you start thinking about such small-small t'ings as being transactional you'd be tempted to stop. And then where would we be? Flapjackless! . . .and having better teeth, probably.

Caedite Piceas

I said we happy few yomped up our hill for reasons. Those reasons being that The Common was to be scored a second time for its [ecological] quality. Quality here bears only a faint resemblance to the Metaphysics of Quality in a Robert Pirsig / Phaedrus / ZAMM sense. We, The Commoners, have been incentivized over the last 5 years to recognise Value in The Common . . . beyond sending a certified copy of our entry in the Land Registry on to the EU and thereby drawing down whatever subsidy, headage or grant was currently applicable. 

Our hill, you see, is an increasingly rare example of Dry Heath: an intermediate ecological stage where full succession to dark forest is checked by the activities of shepherds and their sheep. Winter on the hill is not a place to fatten sheep: the pickings are slim and the weather can kill even without the drama of a three week blizzard. But during a long Irish Summer, the sheep can chomp through the heather while the in-bye fields are left ungrazed for hay. They also relish tree saplings and so these 'climax' species never get tall enough to shade out the under-storey . . . so Dry Heath.

The score for each Common in the currently favoured scheme for transferring money to farmers has been devised and revised by ecologists employed by The Department of Ag. They have devised an algorithm which identifies Good Things [heather, tormentil, larks] and Bad Things [erosion, bracken, invasive trees]. Things which are useless for sheep-farming, like bogs, might nevertheless score well in the Algorithm. All the features, appropriately weighted, are tallied up into a Score out of 10. Some elements of the scoring can be abstracted from a pass of The Satellite but most of them require boots on the ground. 

Incentives must be seen to have worked (or what's the point?) and that means at least two trips by The Man to each commonage in the country: once for baseline and once after the interventions. Because Ireland is a leaky place, word came down from on high that our Common would be scored on such-a-date and that the score might be improved if a) we cleared trash and b) extirpated any and all Sitka spruce Picea sitchensis which have seeded downwind of the recently felled 40 year old Sitka plantation. That might was carrying a lot of water and only 6 of us heeded the call to do something about it.

The Holy Year Cross (1950) was restored by The Faithful in 2017. For years after, the Cross was surrounded by elements familiar on any building site: a disintegrating bag of builder's sand, several ditto plastic buckets, baulks of timberr and containers for water. When four of us arrived, with trash-bags, at the summit, we found that The Faithful had been, sometime over the last tuthree years, to tidy up the job. We turned away, not too disappointed, intending to cut Sitka on the way downhill to meet the rest of Team Clean as they worked their slash-hooks up and away from the road. 

But 40m from the Cross I stumbled over two fence-posts and a raffle of rebar, electrical-wire and chain-link fence. The only thing for it was to pick it all up and de-Calvary (I was still clearly in ✞ mode) it to the waiting 4x4s. I did not break a leg or sustain significant damage on this potentially dangerous, un-stewarded handicapped cross-county yomp but I didn't pause to cut Sitka either.

The following Saturday, I went back up the hill on me ownio to make a final 🪓Sitka🪓pass. I'd rather hug trees than fell them but there is a place for selective management; like when Kiwi Sean came through our micro-forest in 2022 for some judicious thinning. I delighted to see several [native to Ireland] mountain ash Sorbus aucuparia and even some willow Salix spp getting their heads up through the heather. That's a consequence of running a limited number of sheep on the hill . . . and keeping Bob the Axe on a tight leash.

Post title references: Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius. From the chilling instructions by Papal Legate Arnaud Amaury at the massacre of Béziers 22 July 1209.

Zon tag elf aug

Olympics? Pah! 

• poc fada a venerable if minority GAA outing
• Keeping it local: Ból an bhóthair in Fenor Co WD
• also in  Co Cork (slash-hook [R], metal detector required: the Ból is an 800g cannonball)
  
• Meanwhile in Drenthe: Klootschieten
• Young Ifan takes one for team science (cw: Urtica dioica yarroo)
• Kamala? Cámel or Koāla. Geoff Lindsay helps the English find a way
• Lucki Allen predicted the 1968 Tết Offensive
• Tonight You Belong To Me  Allison Young & Josh Turner
• Tidal power generation, Orkney (too big for grid?)
•  Dr. Glaucomflecken Olympic Infectious Disease Specialist
  

Jinks

My current dead-tree book is Mapmatics: How We Navigate the World Through Numbers by Paulina Rowińska. There's a fada on the ń because the author was born and works in Warsaw, although her PhD is from Imperial College London.  It's a book for those who can reliably spell retroazimuthal projection but can't remember how to make one . . . even in theory. The malevolant sprite in cartography is that the world is a tangerine oblate spheroid . . . but maps are flat - so they can be hung on walls; included in atlases; or folded up a stuffed in a rucksack.

The borders of Colorado were agreed and defined by the US Congress on 28 Feb 1861 [p.172] (with a great sweeping gesture on a desk in DC) as a box between 37° and 41° N and 25° and 32° W [from Washington!]. Surveyors were sent west with theodolites, chains and compasses to put pegs in the ground and much later more geopolitical clutter [see below], like, manifest Colorado's destiny. 

But, as Rowińska points out, those 1861 congressional straight lines are difficult to reconcile with the dirt those surveyor's boots were planted in. So on maps at the finest practicable detail, Colorado is a polygon with 697 sides. Where the Colorado border changes from meeting New Mexico to meeting Oklahoma, for example, the surveyors swooped South 150m over 1,000m to keep to the 37°parallel.

A details-chap like me will inevitably load up GooMaps and track East to see if there are any more CO=OK jinks in the line. One oddity is that there is a clear dark line on the GooMap which is parallel to, but 20m South of the neat artificial dotted line that is marked for/as the borrrder. When you get to 36°59'42.2"N 102°39'35.9"W that dark line steps 2m South and then carries on East [see Top pic]. I'm guessing that is a fence line defining a ranch which in wholly within Oklahoma and needs to be accurate because good fences make good neighbours. Where US-385 leaves Baca Co, CO, the GooMaps state line is definitely not consonant with the change in the quality of the tarmac. 

Rowińska doesn't clarify that the Westings of Colorado are from Washington (nor does Congress specify where in DC is the start point). If we take those measures from the Greenwich meridian, The Colorado rectangle almost exactly comprehends the entire Azorean archipelago 36.5°–40° N & 24.5°–31.5° W. If aliens set their landing coordinates on Greenwich (as intergalactic visitors might) they'd find that "Colorado" was unexpectedly a) flat and b) plooosh!

20 pages further on in Mapmatics, another geopolitical qualification might help. In a chapter on the coastline of the Alaska panhandle and its borrrder with Canada, it is asserted that Alaska and Russia are separated by 55 mi = 89 km of the Bering Sea between The Seward Peninsula and Чуко́тский полуо́стров = the Chukchi Peninsula. Maybe so, but the political border is much much closer (4km) passing through the Diomede Islands.

There's lots more in Mapmatics. I'm not much better informed on the four-color map theorem [bloboprev] by Chapter 5 How to Simplify a Map. But I learned something new about Gerrymandering [bloboprev], not least that the original Gerry started his name with a hard G. And if you're a fan of Numb3rs [we are] Chapter 7 has some interesting background on finding serial killers with math. Recommended; there are not too many graphs and maps, so could be done as an ear-book. Yes it exists in that medium: not in Irish Libraries yet, though.

Rockie Cake

Part of my adoptive US family (4) have moved back to Colorado. They (there are six in my generation) all grew up in Michigan but liked to acknowledge that, in the 19thC, they came from the same Townland as we now reside. I rendered them, particularly their Mère, a trifling kindness 20+ years ago and they've been visiting ever since. It's nice to know that me and mine can find a cup of tea and a sandwich in several widely scattered locations across the contiguous 48 states. Anyway, Coz Tom and his 3 generation family are back in the Rockies and their youngest member had a birthday at the end of July. As is my wont, I facetiously sent them a picture of an extravagantly decorated cake in lieu of an actual card.  Tom replied "Thanks again for thinking of us and wish you were able to bring that cake in person. Looks delicious!"

That tumbled me down the rabbit hole of memory to baking Betty Crocker cakes in Boston 40+ years ago. I did so make from-scratch cakes also but baking cakes straight from a packet - just add water and 1 egg - was/is part of the American Dream. One of the intriguing / evocative aspects of reading the packet was special hoops that people from Denver had to jump through lest their cakes failed to rise and/or experienced a soggy middle. Denver is affectionately known as The Mile High City because it is 1,600m above sea-level.

Because air pressure is lower, cakes tend to be fizzier, boiling temperatures are lower and liquids evaporate faster, and you shouldn't follow the standard recipe. The scientists at Betty Crocker give some hints about what to do above 3,500 ft = a tad over 1,000 m. The atmospheric issues require some of:

• less fat
• more flour
• more water
• more time

But the exact details are probably too much for the average recipe-following cook to work out for themselves - and why re-invent the wheel? 

But here's the thing, I went for a yomp up our hill (1500m horizontal; 300m vertical) for reasons with 3 other people, two of which were struggling [1 sinus; 1 smoking] for wind. I'm good for that but the ould knees are less resilient than they used to be for the downhill. Just getting to that elevation (500m) let alone Ireland's highest mountain Carrauntoohill (1040m) requires exertion. Our effort occurred on Dia do Santiago a date notable for aspects of pilgrimage and at least one member of the party crossed themselves discretely for/at/to the Blessed Virgin: perhaps in gratitude for not pegging out on the way. Meanwhile Coz Tom and his family are cruising to the Mall (and adjusting their cakes) without a bother at 1,500 m.

The (h)ears have it

Last time I wrote about hearing aids, they were called deaf-aids and I was quite cross. The, yet more retro, ear-trumpet [R] is what passes for great gag gift for that old person in your life on Etsy. As I said last time, hearing loss is no great gag: it's not about the loss but how you deal with it. IF you no longer go to the pub (or wedding receptions, or soirées, or birthday parties) because you won't follow the chatter or [you believe] your friends and relations will tire of your wha'? your please repeat and your pardon? THEN that's a hearing problem. Hearing loss is also associated with the 3 Ds: depression, dementia, death.

Until my late 40s, I'd been fine without glasses. It's just that my arms weren't long enough to get the print of the book in focus . . . by which extent the font, though crisp, was too small to see.The Beloved made an appointment with 'her' optician. I tell ya, when the opto slotted +1.0 lenses into the test rig it was >!kaCHING!< like seeing The Lord. I R older now 20+ years on, my glasses are up to +3.0 and stabilizing so it's time to move onto the next sensory modality. I'm a bloke, so of course my hearing is fine: in the same way a little light incontinence is fine, high cholesterol is fine, 2x [but not 10x!!] the safe levels of radon is fine, a little iodine¹³¹ is fizzy fine.

The Beloved, like most women of the caring generation, is less complacent about things that you can remediate. And she may have been getting narked at my failure to acknowledge her dulcet requests from downstairs while I'm in the shower. On Wednesday two weeks ago, we both went by [her] appointment to the audiologist at Hidden Hearing in Carlow. It was interesting and informative and we've both come away with a "within the normal range" base-line audiogram. With the over-sharing that is characteristic of The Blob, here's mine:

The normal range is getting most of your frequencies hearable at less than 20 dB. As we age, it is the high frequencies that degrade earliest and mostest. Kids (some) can hear bats echolocating at >9KHz adults not so much. If all your frequencies are greater than 60 dB then seek professional help! You won't have to go far, anyone who can generate an audiogram like mine, is probably a competent professional in the field. On dit que normal conversation takes place between 40 and 60 dB. The grey shaded area is known [technical term] as the speech banana. One of the points of interest is that sounds which issue from human lips reach the ear at different frequencies. Older people are less likely to hear (high frequency) voiceless fricatives like math, mass, paff. My left ear is kinda crappy in the 3 kHz range where t and k is heard. The graph is generated by my response [or not] to pure sounds at the shown frequencies . . . at different energy = dB levels. We might get a slightly different result if I took the test on a different day or before lunch but this audiogram will act as a baseline . . . "come back in 12 or 18 months or if you sense a change" said the audiologist. 

That was not the UpSell I was half expecting after the family's experience with Lennox nine years ago. "my" audiologist explained that, with hearing aids, it takes two to tango: they supply the tech; the client supplies the engagement. It's all at nothing unless the client buys in, uses the device and sees hears an obvious benefit. The company will suffer reputational damage if they sell their system too early: they sold me these things, I've mislaid them twice, I was fine without them at Marie's wedding, blooming boondoggle if you ask me.

Get your hearing tested, you won't regret it. I said GET YOUR HEARING TESTED!!

Notes to Old Chaps. You will have noticed that your pinnae [the flappy bit on the side of your head] have been sprouting peculiar tufts and stray tentacles of hair. This novelty is a natural consequence of changes in concentration in your endocrine system. It's yer 'ormones, mate. Not just the testosterone, but also the various growth factors which have tirelessly maintained your arms at the same length these last many decades . . . and ensured a characteristic pattern naked ape of fur all over. Some areas are tuftier than others since puberty. Your audiologist will have a peek in your ear . . . they will also (because they can) over-share the view on a screen. Let me tell you, whatever kind of lawn you're maintaining outside, it's a jungle in there!

Sunday Four Corners

Verrry interesting

• Waka Aka 2024 NZ: biathlon - paddle like Uncas, run
• Paul and Fintan baguettes and wine
  
• Maine : catching mehaden = pogie = Brevoortia tyrannus [bloboprev] for bait for the lobster fishery: envoi on quotas, regulation, the gumment. 
• Hannah Fry on map projections 
• on catching serial killers
  
• Mixed forestry Inishowen Co DL: 
• wins prize!
  
• Not just Donegal! White Rose Forest at Snaizeholme, Yorks
  
• Farrrming explained, rural ideologies: collective, socialist, full fasch
• Smells can be evocative - MeFi compendium 
• Senator Lynn Ruane meets Tommy Tiernan
• Japanese trad char coal 
• Isla Rowntree Islabikes
• Submarines: Buffalo china goes under 
• Irish spice bag goes down under
• Goatscaping
  

Hot consumer reports

Two kettles, both alike in efficacy,
In fair Na Déise, where we lay our scene,
Old kettles have sprung leaks and scalded hands,
And so have been replaced for price not mean.

I've had occasion in the past to laugh at the pretensions of stuff shops like Hardly Normal. They are happy to retail products whose utility has been blizzarded by additional bells and whistles which jack up the price and are a breakable hostage to fortune. It's not as if, when it inevitably breaks, anyone can fix the little engine which raises a toasted slice of bread with the stately majesty of Botticelli's Venus rising from the waves . . . instead of s p r o i i n n g the slice up and onto the floor like normal toasters.

The Shagsperian parody above is to say that we recently stopped using our old kettle when it habitually left a puddle on the counter and bought a new Bosch kettle. Not to be outdone, Pat the Salt's gaff subsequently purchased a new RussellHobbs kettle . . . about which I immediately made disparaging remarks. Blackening their pot kettle without looking critically at our own choice. The most obvious who needs this? complication is that Pat's kettle requires the user to punch 3 buttons in a particular order in order to start the device. ffs, a PIN code for your kettle? But what you're doing is 1) readying the system 2) steady: setting the desired final temp 3) GO. As if people have been crying out for a kettle which will switch off at 80°C. 

Now I have for sure used a kettle to warm some water - prior to adding sourdough starter and flour, for example, but I've gauged the temp with my pinkie [the cleanest of my fingers]. In fairness, I have proposed that different hot bevvies infuse best at different temperatures: maté = 80°C, coffee = 90°C and tea > 95°C . But most users most of the time just want water as hot as poss as quick as poss. Our kettle draws a frightening 3kW of power so it raises ½ lt of water from RT°C to 100°C in 90s. Which makes it about 60% efficient.

Both kettles have incorporated a silly window in the side-wall. Did I say our last kettle leaked? This was the point of failure. It is too murky to easily read the water level for those with aged eyes who may wish to minimize the amount of water boiled to save the planet or their pocket. So XX for both brands on that.

Russell Hobbs has a metal spout which heats higher than 100°C so that the water spits because super-heated when poured out so X.  Bosch makes the spout out of plastic whc steps round this problem so ✓ unless I'm told that the plastic is leaching BPA into my tea, in which case X.

Lid is Massive Fail for Bosch.  You can't open it without pressing a spring-loaded bound-to-fail-sometime button in the handle X. You open the Russell Hobbs lid by opening it with one finger (or three) hoiked under the lid-lip, so ✓. Thing is that designers design on the assumption that engineers will conjure up solutions which are robust; whereas the finance department wants engineers to be cheap. And there you have your thumb on scale of the effects / consequences of capitalism.