ill thrift

Farm animals are subject to all sorts of conditions & diseases with exotic names: bloat, braxy, fluke, hoose, scour. These can be congenital or infectious or some sort of trace-element deficiency. It can be difficult of diagnosis: the symptoms of too-much selenium overlap with those of too-little. Once they've got a reliable diagnosis, farrrmers want to knock it on the head in a way that is timely, effective and cheap.

Thyroxine is essential for growth and metabolic health in humans and livestock and also incorporates iodine. Just a little I goes a long way, but if your soil is deficient, iodine won't appear in the fodder and something must be done. Likewise with vitamin B12 and cobalt. Lambs which get along fine, and meet their weight markers while on their mother's milk, sometimes fail to thrive after weaning. This is known as ill-thrift or [cobalt]-pine, and becomes a known thing on some farms because,

 like our selenium deficiency, there isn't enough cobalt in that soil. It then becomes an addition on the long list of ThingsToDo to prepare the product for market. The treatment is known, readily available and the cost-benefit is clear: "Oral cobalt supplementation costs less than 1 penny per 25 kg lamb. Production losses from poor growth and delays to marketing may cost £10-£15 per lamb." But it's a time-eating pain to bring the lambs in every month and given them the cobalt or vitB12 that they need.

Well, it turns out that some varieties of willow Salix spp. are hyper-accumulators of cobalt and lambs have a taste for the stuff. It also grows fast, especially in the wet soils that are suitable for sheep . . . because barley or spuds or mangolds or cattle aren't an option. A trial in NE England sponsored by The Oglesby Charitable Trust, has been investigating the effects of feeding willow to lambs. 

It's interesting that lambs are avid for willow; because our sheep feel the same about ivy Hedera helix. When we had snow followed by 5 days of sub-zero temps two weeks ago, we were a bit caught with our pants down. We had only one 25kg bag of mmmm good sheep muesli but that's like dessert and not enough to sustain 15 sheep indefinitely. We also had a big round bale of hay but about half of each armful gets trampled into the snow and/or shat upon. Accordingly I coursed about the property looking for the biggest, greenest, nearest sources of ivy and dragged them up to the top field where the sheep where sheltering in place. It's not clear if ewes love ivy because if supplies a dietary deficiency or because it is green and available in the winter.

Back when I was still active in science I spent a few years facilitating an enthusiastic young scientist towards his eventual PhD in Lithium Sudies. One of the sub-projects which got published was an investigation of whether different species of plant preferentially extract lithium from the soil. It turns out that they do:

The local garden centre was selling seeds for oilseed rape Brassica napus; cabbage Brassica oleracea; sunflower Helianthus annuus; tomato Solanum lycopersicum and bittercress Cardamine hirsuta. The Effective planted them out, dobbed the soil with lithium and measured the concentration of that element in the leaves and stems. Figure 2, shown above, suggests that some species, like bittercress, suck it up goodo while others, like tomato, won't have anything to do with the stuff. Crap-detector: you shd be suspect of any paper where none of the authors and none of the editors noticed a typo H. annuus and also that the publishers MDPI are flagged as predatory: they will publish any-old-shite so long as someone pays the page-charges. So a pinch of lithium salt here although the observation can be easily replicated. 

And it is known that some species, like the daisy-adjacent Berkheya coddii, can hoover nickel and cobalt out of the soil. This can be an elegant way of remediating old industrial sites or mine tailings.

Credit for everyone in the Union

I R retire. There is little enough to amuse me in the Winter evenings, now that I've given up YouTube; gone half throttle on The Blob; and can only spend so long eating dinner and washing dishes. Then I remembered that January is Credit Union AGM season and checked on the web for the date. It was only there that I discovered the option to not get mailed a 36-page booklet with the accounts & agenda for the last financial year. I filled in the no mail application on line and got a phone call the next day telling me a) I was 5 weeks beyond the deadline b) my AGM bumpf had been sent the day before c) I was no mail registered now & forever d) the AGM was scheduled for 8pm Weds 29 Jan 2025. If they want to get more members saving the cost of a stamp, they could be more proactive on the comms.

I thus more or less obliged myself to leave home in the dark, with 1°C on the car-dash, and drive 20km to bear witness. I dumped our glass-trash in the bottle-bank [✓] on the same trip. There were 12 'officers' on the top table, three employees getting some overtime [I hope! they get paid buttons], and . . . 19 members incl me. The average age of the latter was about 70. It took 90 minutes to cover the 20 item agenda.

Gotta say that much of the information was given redundantly in different reports by auditor, chair, different sub-committees and it's all in the AGM booklet anyway. And without a powerpoint prez, reading a lorra numbers off a sheet is kinda useless, There were three different elections, which were tallied by 'independent' CU-volunteer tellers and all officers up for re-election were re-elected. We weren't told how many people voted "not this person for the love of Mike" which is the only really interesting info. In the past I got snitty about starting the meeting with an invocation aka Make me an instrument of your peace supposedly by St. Francis of Assisi. And also about failures to embrace modern tech [heck, even PPTx is an Ask!] These are related: if you're going to attract a younger, more techie, class of volunteers, let alone muslims and wiccans, ya gotta ditch the "Invocation". Vote for next year: Prayers Out Powerpoint In.

The Blackstairs Film Society BFS [MultiPrev] was killed by Coronarama but also a little by its niche interest. Years ago, an acquaintance from the next county came once to a BFS event [was it Pascale Ferran's Lady Chatterley?] and never again. A while later, I caught up and asked why we didn't see him at BFS more often. hhmmm, he mused, drive 20km in the dark in February as temperatures plummet, to sit in a drafty hall bundled up in a plaid rug watching a sub-titled film about Mongolian tractor drivers? OR stay home and pop another log on the fire?? 

The CU-AGM feels a little like that, because logistics and regulations require a Winter AGM, but the CU has their own incentives. As part of our community's social glue and a public good, in the run up to the AGM, they shake down all the local businesses for contributions to the door prize. Everyone who braves the weather and rocks up is given a single raffle ticket. While the election ballots are processed, the ticket stubs are drawn and winners get to choose from a number of prizes. In the before times, the top prize was a rural appropriate ½ tonne of peat briquettes. Most of the prizes seemed to be sundry vouchers in envelopes. My ticket was 399, and my hopes dashed a little when the first tik drawn was 398 and I was, like, wrong wrong almost right. But I was tangling myself in the gambler's fallacy because the numbers came, in >!data!< order: 398 394 382 392 387 384 388 385 389 399 393 383 390. 382 to 399 more or less matches my [N = 19] members head-count. The top table having, appropriately, recused themselves from the lottery. 13 prizes among 19 people is just about [cw: The Late Late Show is a hateful grabfest] one for everyone in the audience. My 399 was quite a ways down the list but I had the choice of a) two bottles of indifferent plonk b) a €30 voucher for the butcher c) a bottle of Jameson's d) a tin of biscuits the size of a Yaris spare wheel.

See [L with kettles for scale - hot whiskey for the win!] for my choice - the Yaris already has a spare wheel. Afterwards, at 21:30 hrs! tea, sangers and iced-dainties appeared at the back of the hall. That's waaaay too late for tea for me but I couldn't in all conscience just leg it out the door with my loot: I hung around in desultory chat with the other olds. My membership number, from 25 years ago,  is 3894. I met Mary [#324] and her husband [#84]. His dad, long deceased, was one of the CU founders in 1976. 

In Jan 2024 there were 3940 members. In 2024, the CU acquired 92 new members but the total membership increased to only 3960. That suggests that 72 members of the Credit Union died last year. The national death rate in Ireland is 7/1000 but it is 18/1000 in the CU membership - nearly 3x higher but not as high [39/1000] as the death rate for Irish pensioners. Pensioners happily [in the fullness of their years etc.] contribute 84% of all deaths despite making up only 15% of the population. So CU membership skews higher than median age; but CU membership who turn up for the AGM skews higher still.

Ho hum, nothing a few hot whiskey's won't cure.

Recumbent nude

I've mentioned George Dawson, my original professor of Genetics before but only in connexion with his monumental study of ABO blood groups in Ireland which posed a relict fire-hazard. But that presents an unfairly1-dimensional view of his cares. Back in the day, after two years being drilled in the basics, students had to choose the department in which they were going to specialize. I opted for Genetics, partly because they could spell evolution, but mainly for

 the collegiate for all-ranks atmosphere fostered by George. Because of the structures he implemented, I was possibly the first person in Ireland to make chili con carne with a dash of cumin. 

Dawson was also locally famous for his devotion to 20thC art and accumulated an enormous collection of prints, drawings and oils. When my then boss got married in the late 80s, George invited the much younger man up to his rooms in college for a glass of sherry. George pulled out a chunky roll of artworks from under the bed and invited his guest to choose something as a wedding gift. They went through the material and my gaffer said he'd really appreciate this OR this OR this OR this. With an expansive gesture George counter-offered with this AND this AND this AND this. George of the Generous Hand, indeed.

Over 30 years George also blagged his employer TCD into acquiring heavier lumps of crafted metal which were too large to fit under a bed. When I arrived on campus in 1973, extremely green and scruffy, I was not entirely Know-Nothing. I recognised, for example, that the inconnected blobs on a plinth [L] in Front Square Reclining Connected Forms (1969) was the work of Henry Moore.

I knew this because a couple of years before when I was 17, living in rural Essex, and borrowing my mother's Vauxhall Viva to get to parties, I had a crush on a girl from Much Hadham. She was arrestingly pretty despite having been fired through the windscreen of her mother's car as an infant and acquired a a faceful of tiny cicatrixes. She was also the god-dau of . . . HenryMoore, who lived down the way at Perry Green. There was talk of taking me and my louche companion Dom to take tea at Perry Green and see the sculptures. But that never happened, let alone any recumbent nude stuff. The following Fall, I left that part of the world behind to go to college in Dublin.

About three weeks after the start of term, I was hanging out on a sofa [hey, story of my life!] below the left-hand window behind the sculpture in the picture when The Beloved walked into the room and sat on the other end of the same sofa. She was also arrestingly pretty and we've been taking tea ever since.

In 1996, George Dawson made one his last art acquisitions. Seeking to furnish TCD's brand new Smurfit Institute of Genetics he contacted Arnaldo Pomodoro famous for his rotating brass Sfera con Sfera outside TCD's Berkeley [he bin cancelled] Library. Pomodoro, giving back to his early patron, insisted on donating 8 enormous pictures riffing on the dreams of cuttlefish [‽]. I had a quiet word with the Chief Technician at Smurfit and he allowed me to cart off the plywood packing cases in which the Pomodoro artworks had been delivered. All that timber got a second life on our farm as work-tops, partitions and chicken-coops. Thanks Dave! And thanks to George for demonstrating that scientists don't have to be Philistines.

Ewe woo

John Connell [prev] is getting traction as spokesman for the Irish countryside, although the competition Manchán Magan [prev] has landed his own TV series. And don't dismiss Kerri ní Dochartaigh [prev] just because of the missing Y-chromosome. It is certainly possible to speak {to | of | for | from} The Land as a wordsmith [Wordsworth wandering lonely as a cloud; Yeats having nine bean rows]. And shite happens in the countryside that is nothing to do with farm yard manure. But of the three living spokesppl cited above, only Connell has had his hand regularly up a sheep's vagina and we should therefore listen to him on that facet of rural life.

We were up in Dublin recently and Dau.I the Librarian pushed John Connell's 2024 Twelve Sheep life lessons from a lambing season at me because a) I'd read a couple of his earlier books b) I count a similar number of sheep every day c) we'd both trudged to Santiago at some time in the past. The conceit here is that young(ish) John buys 12 hoggets [equivalent to a heifer; a female sheep up until her first lamb delivery] from his farmer father, and tracks them through twelve chapters sort of based on the agricultural year. Or at least on the 5 months of sheep gestation. 

Early on, Connell floats the idea that the has-to-be-twelve chapters could be based on, or informed by: the zodiac [one of which is ♈︎Aries?] or the Labors of Hercules [mucking out the Augean stables?] or the Lives of the Apostles [good shepherds all?]. But (correct me if I've missed a trick) he lacks the discipline to chunk his anecdotes by these constraints. Joyce's Ulysses is a classic because he did follow through: holding the Odyssey up to mirror one inconsequential day in the life of Dublin.  

Whatever the initial aspiration of structure, the book gets flubby soon enough with too many rambling thoughts unrelated to caring for sheep and delivering lambs. The Sheep Game it is not. In current public discourse, there is a lot of Nobel Hubris about and not only among winners of The Prize. N.H. occurs when, because you've got the gong, people will listen to what you have to say about any damn bee you might have a-buzzzing in your bonnet. Connell has an ingrained expertise in scratching a living from The Land - and nobody claims farming is either lucrative or easy. But when it comes to philosophy (how we can live our best lives) he is no wiser or more competent than you or me. Been to Santiago [✓] doesn't count: I know . . . that I don't know.

There could be another story in there: a bildungsroman about the growth and development of the lambs Connell Jnr as he battles mental health and the patriarch[y] to discover his true self but that theme is very much noises off. And may have been resolved in Connell's earlier books.

A lot of the usual suspects get a mention because something they've said has been written in Connell's writer's notebook . . . and that'll do to pad out this book. Because despite 176 dead-tree pages and £12.99 rrp the generous margins, nice colophons [as above L] and 1.5pt spacing, makes Twelve Sheep only 36,000 words long. 

Influencers in Connell's journey include: John Clare; Rachel Carson; Henry Thoreau; Henri Nouwen; John O'Donohue; Hermann Hesse; Heinrich Harrer; Martin Heidegger; Erich Hartmann; the Dahlia Lama; the Buddha; Narcisse Blood; John McGahern; Thomas Merton; Father Sean, Bruce Chatwin; Erling Kagge; Thích Nhất Hạnh; Fran Contreras; Paolo Coelho; Saint Francis;  Fergus Kelly; E.M. Forster; David Malouf; Carlo Rovelli; Michael Kelly; Rover Thomas; Raven; Maria Gonzales; Wendell Berry; Nicholas Shakespeare; John Bergman; Karen Emslie; Robert Hughes; Don Watson; Adrian Stimson; Bruce Pascoe; Chief Joseph; Alex Haley; August Schenck; Padriag Colum; Pauline Matarasso; Yukio Mishima; Sam Shepard. They are all given parity of esteem word-count with an unnamed Longford neighbour who claims to cure strawberry orf [contagious pustular dermatitis; a bit like a viral impetigo] by muttering prayers down the phone. Life lessons for the reader? I don't think so.

Éowyn blasts through

While I spent yesterday doing a little light storm-prep, The Beloved took off for the Déise to visit with her sisters. On the way down, she fulfilled our quarterly trip to the Recycling Centre in New Ross, and on the way back, she dropped into the suoermarket for The Dinner. She reckoned that we could be without the use of an oven for several days, so came out with a couple of dinky pot-pies [yum: b/c designed by a food engineer]. The Waterford Blaa is one of very few regional specialties in Ireland [also rissoles in Wexford] and so she picked some up at the same time. It was the second last blaa six-pack on the shelf in an aisle which had been stripped of every sort of sliced pan and almost all the available bread. This morning RTE Brainstorm has a piece about comfort food and siege mentality panic buying. "Despite warnings that there's no need to go mad for the white sliced pan, the impending arrival of Storm Éowyn means many Irish kitchens have more white sliced pans than they might need." Thar she blows at peak Fizz:

I said I'd report back after Éowyn had barged through the country for a shortcut. At 10:00hrs the Sunny South East, incl us, stepped down from red wind to orange. And, amazingly, we still had power. Indeed I woke at 06:15 this morning and rushed down to make a flick-of-the-kettle hassle-free pot of tea: it was still gusty outside and a branch could fall at any minute somewhere along the 15km looping journey the ESB makes from the main grid to here at Castle Backwater. 700,000 Eircodes were without power at 08:00 this morning and the ESB crews cannot get started until it is safe to do so. Even with the best system of Utilitarian triage, fixing that many breaks is going to take several days. It is much better not to be on the list! It's also been pretty good for Dau.I and Dau.II who were both told to stay home from their public-facing jobs on full pay.

Postpubl Sunday noon 26Jan25: Eircodes w/o power maxed out at 768,000 (that's ⅓ of all 2.3m ESB clients). 109,000 w/o water. 183 km/h max gust speed on land.

Hatches battening

I was up the top of the garden on Weds 22 Jan 25. I gazed across the valley, through the scrubby trees to my neighbour Mattie's house. It was windless, Beaufort 0 = calm, smoke rises vertically. I reflected that, when Mattie was a chap in the 1950s, he'd have had no inkling that a big storm was brewing in the Atlantic. They were as ill informed about future weather as people were for Oíche na Gaoithe Móire The Night of the Big Wind on 6th Jan 1839. Sure, people in Dublin might have had 24 hours notice of gusty incommming, but maybe not enough certainty to contact the news desk at Radio Éireann.

We otoh have had Storm Éowyn flagged five days out, when she was brewing over water slightly warmer than usual far out in the Atlantic. I may be the only one who is fantasizing about Miranda Otto escaping from LOTR and galloping at us poor misunderstood orcs, crying havoc. Met Éireann started with an advisory, then an orange warning wind for the whole country reddening for CK KY CE and LK in the SouthWest, where landfall was expected. But as more, and more recent, data indicated more ooomph, the weather bureau went all in with a red warning wind for the whole island. They are saying that it will be as bad as Storm Ophelia [much blob] in October 2017. Here is what the wind looks like 18 hours before landfall eta 02:00 this morning:

Ophelia left us without electrics for 56 hours. Storm Darragh closed us down for 40 hours. I spent yesterday, between flat-calm Weds and fizzy Fri, doing a bit of hatch battening with doors and roofs. But really, there not a lot of prep that can be done. Here's what Éowyn looked like 12 hours later; 6 hours before the red warning kicks in.

The Blob is loaded for autopilot for a week on the usual Mo We Fr schedule, I'll put up a post-op storm report when t'internet comes back.

Damp damper

Our washing-machine went phut the day after we returned from our house-swap in Dublin. Luckily I was first up and had successfully run a load on the 30' superquick cycle that I always use on stuff that isn't dripping with mud or bolognese. We weren't tempted therefore to blame The Yoof who had the run of the house for the previous 3 days.

The LED console was showing a flashing faucet to indicate "low water pressure". I forthwith cleaned the grit-filter at the well-head and convinced myself that water was flowing goodo up to the back of the machine. It was therefore not Roy the Plumber territory but rather a job for Joe the Wash, who rocked up [asap] two days later. His multimeter said that a transponder [there are two] on the water inlet valve was broken and wash-machine central-command read this as insufficient water incommming. Joe didn't have the spare part in the van [dang!] but did have one at head-office and his Effective came along first thing on Friday to swap out the old and plug in the new.

While the lid was off I noted a couple of engineering essentials. The first is that the business core of the machine is suspended from two enormous bed-springs indicated by [↓] and also a huge lump of concrete - cast and serial-numbered to fit Bosch wash-drums. It must be a damper [prev] to provide some inertia to the system. A load of socks or knickers is not a problem because they are granular and can distribute themselves evenly round the drum for the spin cycle. A great wet floor mat not so much? 

When spinning things are unbalanced they can get into a resonance cycle and rock back and forth until the whole caboodle busts off its spindle. As happened in an ex-place-of-work with a steel ultra-centrifuge bucket going through the casing and a 10cm solid concrete wall beyond. The concrete block in the machine overwhelms any trifling wet-blanket unbalance.

Whatevs, I am delighted that [as with the central-heating oil-burner at Christmas] we don't have to trek into DID electrical to buy a new appliance because this one is beyond economic repair. Inside dope note to self: NEFF are the same as Bosch; assembled from the same parts in the same factory but twice the price. I heard it from a chap who is in the trade.

Oddly enough the two meanings of "damper" come from the same etymological root [M.E. dampen, like German dampf]. The reduce-amplitude concept indirectly through soggy → gloomy → depressed → less volatile. All the gases that displace oxygen in mines are also -damp.

Ash fight back

In the Summer of '76, I spent a few consecutive weeks being a spare wheel in a h u g e field near Arnhem in Nederland Centraal. The Effectives a) planted the field in a randomized pattern of multiple plots each containing 20 genetically identical potato plants b) sprayed the entire field with a uniform fog of late blight Phytophthora infestans spores c) scored each plant {1 to 10}[bloboprev 3rd para] according to how robust was its defense against this not-really-a-fungus scourge . . . after 3, 6 and 10 days. The data, its coding and analysis on a mainframe computer the size of a walk-in closet was an expensive undertaking but it was hoped and expected that the experiment would identify potato cultivars that could be used in subsequent crosses to generate [holy grail] blight-resistant spuds for Europe and the world.

50 years on there is a similar problem with ash die-back where Fraxinus excelsior that wonderful source of hurleys, axe handles, furniture and firewood is on the ropes from being attacked by Hymenoscyphus fraxineus, an ascomycete fungus: characteristic diamond-shaped lesions [R]. Now Dheeraj Rathore of Teagasc has written an RTE Brainstorm describing the fight back by his team at AshForFuture. A key element of that project is to document the variability of response to H. fraxineus among 1,000 genetically variable Irish ash trees. Same principle as my 1976 Potato Summer except that the trial field is in Lithuania where apparently Hymenoscyphus fraxineus spores are on the wind as thick as porridge. Preliminary results indicate that 1% - 3% of the trees are robustly fighting the fungus and remain symptom free. That sort of basic science, data-gathering, infrastructural effort is one boring but necessary requirement for lurching towards an effective solution.

One difference between potato and ash is that the generation time is much much longer in the latter. By the time a trad tree-breeder has done the second back-cross they've been given a clock and sent into retirement. It is timely that, since 1976, science has leapt forward in developing techniques to speed the process of developing designer crops which are vigorous & productive and resistant to a particular disease. Back in 2021, I suggested that anti-microbial peptides AMPs might be the tool to knock ash dieback on the head. That's possibly a case of to a hammer everything looks like a nail having spent 20 years of my research career hunting AMPs in the forests and prairies of genomic sequences.

Our crunching through genomes looking for novel AMPs is another far-from-the-coal-face infrastructural plank to make a functional edifice for fighting disease. Heck we didn't even wear lab-coats while driving our computers. The way forward is clear in theory. All they need to do is sequence the chunks of the ash-genome which are known to carry clusters of plant defensin genes and cross-check the variation against the dieback resistance score. The complete Fraxinus genome has been sequenced multiple times.

By a small-world Irish coincidence, it turns out that me and Dheeraj Rathore are besties co-authors on a paper documenting another genetic tool which can fast-track the delivery of specific genes into specific plants to boost their utility . . .

Years ago, alphaproteobacteria of the genus Agrobacterium were found to be capable of inserting particular genes into a wide variety of plant species. [whoooot GMO alert] Harnessing that ability sure did speed up the process of generating crop plants with enhanced cold-tolerance, disease-resistance and nutritional quality. Teagasc had been developing a different species of alphaproteobacteria called Ensifer adhaerens to carry out gene transfers independent of highly commercialized proprietary Agrobacterium systems. Rathore et al. 2015 was part of young Dheeraj's PhD thesis and my contribution was to supervise an even younger final year undergraduate in a project looking for antibiotic resistance genes in the genome sequence of Ensifer adhaerens.

All the lego bricks are there, still all in a jumble, but GMO ash trees resistant to H. fraxineus are a lot more solid for some science than woolly impractical wishful thinking. What can I do? You can find healthy-looking ash trees in the hedgerows across Ireland and grass them up to the lads at AshForFuture. I know that, come Summer, some of our own many ash will be greener and leafier than others on the same stretch of ditch.

Ingrained

It might be so that happiness is being true to yourself and finding your own level. When I was far too young to know what my true self might be, I entertained a fantasy about being a carpenter and maker of furniture. But I bottled it: not even having the oomph to ask. But that's okay, if I had gone that way, I would now, after 50 years of errors splinters and broken finger-nails, be pretty good at making tables. As it is I was pretty good at making sense of genomes, despite being embarrassingly ploddy at writing code. We only have one life so it's rarely possible to open the door to all the shops which might provide work which we are pretty good at.

Well before Christmas my Boston Correspondent P told me I must read Ingrained: The Making of a Craftsman (2024) by Callum Robinson. I don't buy books any more, but rather play the long game and wait for a shared copy to come available at the library. And I collected Ingrained just before the Twelfth Night cold snap. Perfect reading as I fired logs into the fire against the penetrating drafts.

I get the feeling that young Callum was saved by wood-work despite not being a Natural at visualizing in 3-D and not having an intuitive feel^↓ for the tools of his trade. It was OldBuck-YoungBuck challenging for him that his father was a truly gifted worker-in-wood in a way that seemed without effort. We haven't heard from the father if his feet were paddling gang-busters beneath the surface of his graceful progress. Right at the end of the book father and son had a whisky-fuelled heart-to-heart in which Robinson Père reveals that he stayed working with his hands despite an expensive education and professional quals because he . just . could . not . be a manager which was the only option for him to rise in his profession. Amen, brother.

And l👁👁k [L], The Boy done good! With a little help from the love of his life, from his father, from his hand-picked hand-crafting employees, from his therapeutic dog walks: he makes original, graceful, fit-for-purpose, quirky, quality furniture to die for . . . and get written up in Colour Supplements and commissioned by the great and the good - if they can afford it. Because hand-craft and quality come only from first class material and many hours of labour by people who can work magic with steel on wood.

↓ Intuitive feel is what my friend Elli had at the lab bench . . . and I emphatically did not. I am so glad I got out of lab work before I got good enough to pass muster . One self-inflicted spatter accident was one too many and it didn't seem likely to be my last. The rest of my life has been choosing low stakes outlets so that any of my talent which is death to hide is not lodged with me useless.

Gaudete St Fursday

Dateline Thursday 08:31 16 Jan 2025.
Lá Fhéile Fursa!

Sprang out of bed and yomped up the hill in the twilight to witness Sunrise on St Fursey's Day - which is becoming quite the tradition. Crystal clear the night before with Venus & Saturn coming towards conjunction in the SW; Jupiter near Aldebaran between Orion and the Pleiades; and Mars suspended below Pollux in Gemini. But sunrise? that was, this year, a dull grey sombre event:

Note to self: it really only takes 30 minutes from sofa to altar, and there's no advantage to setting off, like my father, in good time. That just involves hunkering down in the lee of the stone (the only local shelter) waiting for 08:31. There's nowhere to sit without getting a wet seat; although the almost vertical stone on the left does provide a sort of misericord support. Bring a feedsack? I slipped and sat down in the wet heather anyway on the way down.

20 minutes later and 170m lower down, there was a struggle between sun and lowering cloud behind The Thorn [last year]:

And now, 90 minutes too late, it's a bright sunny day in the yard. But can't complain: knees still up for it.

The cardinal done it.

Dau.I and Dau.II are now bunking together in Dublin Centraal. They rent a teeny tiny flat in a Late-Tiger apartment complex. Building regulations allow developers to build and sell apartments where neither the kitchen nor the bathroom have a window. But bedrooms must be at least 7.1 sq.m. with the width at least 2.1m AND have a window (or second door) for emergency exit. The floor area for a 2-bed apartment (assumed to sleep four people) must be 73 sq.m. in size. I haven't measured but their home might be a generous 75 sq.m. which is not absurdly smaller than our 'umble tumble farmhouse [95 sq.m.] but we have a kitchen with a view and natural light in the bathroom. And we can spill out into the yard if the weather is nice enough [predicted to be 3 days in July 2025].

The Daus have been playing 20-D orcs and dragons on the reg'lar last year with a couple of chaps. After one of the sessions in November they all imagined that it might be fun to rent a down-country AirBnB for a long weekend in the New Year - y'know fresh air, change of scene, throwing axes etc. The lads thought it might be nice to visit the Sunny SouthEast. After a few more encounters with grim-faced crusaders in taverns, Dau.II said "that's actually a ridiculous idea, when we could boot out my folks and go and stay there instead". It was presented to us as a neat bit of reciprocity: town-mouse and country-mouse seeing how the other half lives. "you could go out to dinner, share a bottle of plonk . . . and walk home" she said, and "think how many films with subtitles you could clock in three days" and "that Jane Clarke meets the weavers exhibition closes on the 19th Jan".

We woz willing and, well before Christmas, we agreed to do the house-swap from Fri 10th to Mon 13th Jan 2025. But a week beforehand the Sunny SouthEast took a moderate dump of snow followed by 5 days and nights of Baltic weather. But, despite anxiety, it was alright on the night! A thaw set in early on Friday and the roads were mostly snow-free when, in the fore-noon, we headed off to the train station with our free-travel passes. It's a little weird doing a free gaff at your offspring's but the flat is a lot more spacious and less vexillologically challenged than a room in the Hotel Generic.

We did make a flying visit to the Jane Clarke show and met the extended family of one of our neighbours . . . because Ireland is a very small place. But we were on our way to spend 2 hours with Men in Frocks [check out (last para) Colm Tóibín's wonderful skewering essay Among the Flutterers] watching Conclave at the IFI. Don't read any reviews! there will be spoilers. It is gorgeous to behold, there are neither car-chases nor helicopter gunships, and nobody dies . . . except the out-going pontiff - played horizontally with 'aplomb' by Bruno Novelli.  "Certainty is the great enemy of Unity" Good fun. Recommended.

As for house-swapping in Winter; good fun, would do again.

Bouncing the polytunnel

Did I mention that we had a dump of snow last weekend? I did, in passing. It's true that fallen snow is, like ice-cream, mostly air - let's say it has a density of 10% of liquid/solid water. But that can still be a lorra weight it spread out across a large structure. An under-engineered flat roofed sports complex in Tralee collapsed at 06:00hrs during the recent orange snow and ice warning for the South of Ireland [Galway to Dublin downwards, not the 26 counties]. I'm sure the structural specs took data on 100 year snow events, adding 50% for safety, to determine the size of the trusses. It's a roof: you don't want to over-engineer it because you then have to up-spec the walls to carry the additional weight. There will be an enquiry, everyone will lawyer up, nobody will lose their jobs or be sanctioned. Not least because the structure was opened in 1977, so most of those responsible are dead in the 80s or older.

We have a relatable situation in the polytunnel which has a 9m x 17m = 150 sq.m. footprint, with say half of it sort of horizontal. Well. flat enough to hold snow as it falls. On the night 04/05 Jan, we got 9cm of snow. Which is about 10mm of rain equivalent, except that it stayed on the polytunnel roof rather than running away. That's less than a tonne [75sq.m x 10mm = 750kg] of extra weight up there but it l👁👁ked a lot more under the bulging plastic. That 's polythene, which ripped asunder at the height of  the Darwinday Storm of 2014 but is generally good for plastic deformation. We have a convenient length of 50mm ⌀ plastic pipe that can reach all areas on the inside of the plastic, so I put a robust rubber glove on the end of the pipe and, starting at the bottom, bounced some of the snow off the roof. Gotta get the rhythm, bro. Over the next tuthree days, I bounced a little more; until almost all the extra weight was on the ground. No Tralee here . . . this time

You can see the effect in the picture for 2 of the eight bays of the tunnel: a gurt hape of heavy snow on the ground and a clean-ish track on the plastic where the snow has scoured off the algae. You can also see one end of the 2014 Darwinday rip covered with fresh white Fablon® since the 2022 refurb by Rene and Kamil.

We hazarded leaving the sheep [N = 15] in the 0.4 ha field adjacent to the tunnel and they've been getting a breakfast of sheep muesli and some rather tasty-smelling hay which we've had in reserve for the last few years [hey, thanks Syl!]. The sheep seem to be doing okay on such short commons.

Newton's needle

After Irvine's Foot and  Galileo's finger we have . .  Newton's needle

Ireland had its first really cold snap since Storm Emma in March 2018. The logistical difficulties weren't helped by us having a power-cut from 01:30hrs to 17:00hrs on Epiphaneve [05 Jan 25]. That background is probably irrelevant to the fact I managed to give myself thumb-poke in eye while turning in the bed. In any case, I 'saw' a bright light which couldn't be external / electrical. The following night, I woke up [screaming] with a connexion and got out of bed at 01:00 to capture the meander: much easier having had power restored. Newton jiggled a bodkin behind his own eyeball to see what he could see about how changing the shape of the orbit affected his perception.

That Newton was some man for one man - optics, cat-flaps, gravity, Warden of the Royal Mint, astrology. But he wasn't the only scientist up for auto-experimentation. Barry Marshall chugged down a glass of Helicobacter pylori, for one. And JBS Haldane went to absurd lengths in trying to increase the titre of CO₂ in his blood. Actually, those gaseous self-experiments were first visited upon young JBS by his father physiologist J.S. Haldane before Haldane Jr was old enough to vote and def'n'y before informed consent!

There are several other examples of adults doing sketchy things to children in the name of science. Bloboprev: In May 1796 Jenner inoculated 8 y.o. James Phipps, without informed consent, but with cowpox ‘matter’ from the hands of Sarah Nelmes, who had caught cowpox from a cow called Blossom. There really is TMI in that sentence but you get my drift. More recently, in 1990, UK Agriculture Minister John Gummer tried forcing his 4 year old daughter Cordelia to tuck into a beefburger not contaminated with BSE [whc bloboprev].

St Googler of Search reveals that self-experimentation is A Thing . . .

Or at the very least a book  by Lawrence Altman, The New York Times medical columnist: Who Goes First?: The Story of Self-Experimentation in Medicine (1998). Allen Weisse assembled the profit and loss in 2012 Tex Heart Inst J, 39(1):51–54. Self-Experimentation and its Role in Medical Research [free full text]. 465 examples culled from 200 years of medical investigation . . . resulting in 8 deaths and 13 Nobel Prizes. Four of the latter, as well as Marshall, have been Blobbed: Ramsay - Landsteiner - Banting - Metchnikoff.  

Don't try any of this at home kids!

A Pearson Person

All my post-grad life I've been buying up 25c copies of MJ Moroney's book Facts From Figures (1951) and giving them to younger people who have numbers to crunch. Because statistics is a) essential for effective science b) usually taught so poorly across these islands. Moroney strikes an agreeable balance between correct and accessible, but it's dated by being written before calculators, let alone Excel SPSS and R. As a 12 y.o. could calculate the variance of a [small] dataset with the help of a pencil, squared paper and Charlier's Checks. Nobody would consider teaching the skill to Gdau.I at the same age.

I was in Wexford Town Library early before Science Cafe in mid-December and found a copy of David Spiegelhalter's The Art of Statistics, Learning from Data (2020) call out to me from the 519.5 shelving. Spiegelhalter is frequently wheeled on stage for the Tim Harford's More of Less podcast when some egregious numerical bloomer needs to be exposed and explained to Joe Public . . . without being either stodgy, geeky or patronising.

There are some arresting patriarch-involving images. In explaining the prosecutor's fallacy, Spiegelhalter uses the following as a reductio ad absurdem: if you're the pope, then you're a Catholic is not the same as if you're a Catholic then you're the pope. Later, in a discussion of Bayesian statistics, he considers likelihood ratio = (the prob of dealing himself a royal flush, assuming the Archbishop of Canterbury is cheating) ÷ (the prob of royal flush assuming the ABofC is lucky). Which was funnier because absurd when the sentence was written than now with the 2024 Archbishop of Canterbury sheltering abusive paedophiles and resigning only with reluctance.

The self-styled Chevalier de Méré was a 17thC rake who gambled A Lot. He wanted to know which of two dicey games of chance was mostly likely to make him long-term money: a) throw a single dice 4x to get a single ⚅ or b) throw pairs of dice 24x to land ⚅⚅ [wrong wrong almost R]. Neither he, nor anybody else at the time, knew the correct mathematical way to calculate the odds, so he set to and rolled a heckuva lot of dice to [correctly] determine the answer. Hanc marginis exiguitas non caperet This is exactly what I did to determine the likelihood of winning while playing Klondike patience. The Chev wanted the right answer mathematically to save other gamblers from doing a similar multiple trial experiment and presented it to Blaise "God's Wager" Pascal [prev] who in turn shared it with Pierre "Hanc marginis exiguitas non caperet" de Fermat [prev]. Between them they started the modern ride in probability theory. People like me, who started calculating means standard deviations on paper ~60 years ago are now trying to get their heads around Bayesian stats and  prior and posterior probabilities. Spiegelhalter 2020 is helpful in this regard, while Moroney1950  ignored the issue entirely.

Reveal. Pearson Person? Both Karl "correlation" Pearson and son Egon "confidence" Pearson get a shout. But really, at heart, Spiegelhalter is a Bayesian Bloke

Handcrafted

I was a[n over educated] late developer. Didn't get a proper job, commensurate with all that training, until I was 29. Three years later, my contract with the university was renewed for another 3 years. We decided that if we were stopping in Geordieland we might as well buy a house rather than paying rent forever. Ah the privilege of being born in the mid1950s: so much choice. We 'viewed' +30 properties in the Summer of 1986 and eventually plumped for a dilapidated mid terrace in a respectable working class suburb of Newcastle upon Tyne. It cost £21,000 = the £15K mortgage about 1.3x my salary. The Boy was a tween, I'd just got a pay-rise, the mortgage was less than the rent we'd been paying, life was pretty good.

One aspect of feelgood was that The Boy could walk down the street on Mondays after school and buy his copy of 2000AD [for 28p - was that expensive?] a weekly SciFi comic which featured inter alia Judge Dredd an amoral law enforcer on a bike [L]. At about the same time, I started spending most Tuesday evenings in the basement of library learning the fine craft of book-binding. After a tuthree years, I'd put manners on all the oh-so-useful hardbacks bought for 25c at US yard-sales. Coming up for his 12th birthday, I made off with a year's worth of The Boy's 2000AD collection. Over a couple Tuesdays, I sewed them all together, constructed a hard-cover 'case' and bound it in maroon library cloth. With The Boy and '2000AD' in gold lettering on the spine, it made an acceptable gift. Albeit the size of a family bible.

Fast forward 6 years, we'd sold the house on Cheltenham Terrace [for £53,000 as you're curious] and embraced further adventures; starting with moving home to Ireland in 1990. At a free-gaff at the farmhouse where we lived out by the airport in No Dublin, a miserable entitled young bravo pal of The Boy [we never found out which/whom] made off with the 2000AD compilation volume. I'm all for wealth re-distribution so we finish up with a more equal society. But there really is a difference between things bought for money and things crafted with love [see recent].

The Infrastructure Guy

tl;dr: there are plenty enough farmers, rentiers,
publicans and teachers in the Oireachtas. We need
more scientists! A proper gander at the Seanad elections

We can't all be centre-forward. Someone else has to hoof the ball up-field or make the final cross for Messi to walk-it-in. But the culture we endure privileges the one over the other to a quite absurd degree. CEOs award themselves 20x the wages of the janitor; the surgeon is getting 5x more than the scrub nurse. 

25 years ago, I had a candid talk with Ken Wolfe = then just the fellow in the office next door; rather than Fellow of the Royal Society. He was almost always the smartest person in the room [MultiBloboPrev]. Whereas I was a second-rate [but not fifth rate!] kinda guy. I didn't want to win prizes but I was rather good at setting things up so that others could be their Best Selves. I was, I believed, a good post-doc: given a task I'd plug away at it creatively and with diligence until it was done. Six months later - scutter me pink, lads - Wolfe landed one of the first monster grants from Science Foundation Ireland and, taking me at my own estimation, offered me a seat at the table. Some really smart people [from Spain, France, Canada, USA & Ireland] landed posts as they were advertised under that grant.

One of the New Hires was a rocket scientist theoretical physicist called Kevin Byrne [R] who was ear-marked to be SYS$OP, managing the hardware for us all, as well as pushing the frontiers on his own project. The Boss had an arm-waving vision for a graphical tool for comparing complete genomes: both an archive and a tool for studying the evolution of related organisms. Over the next couple of years, from not knowing how to spell DNA, young Kevin implemented that idea, adding bells and whistles and extra features if they seemed to have utility. Or if The Boss had woken up screaming at 0300hrs with another of his brilliant insights. 

That lab was a wonderful experience. A dozen people from widely different backgrounds [hmmm, maybe a bit whiter than the global average; maybe a bit more spectral], with different tool-kits, all working on separate but related projects making sense of the fresh minted human genome [other genomes were available]. Kevin was present - always ready to pause and listen; suggest a solution; share a fragment of code; ready to say I've no idea . . . but also leave it with me, I'll find out. He could no more blag a bullshit answer than he could refuse to offer a helping hand.

The following May, the whole lab decamped for Cork to present our stuff at the 2002 VIBE meeting. That's when everyone in the molecular evolution / computational biology community in Ireland gets together to compare notes, set up collaborations and eat pizza. A block booking was made for the early morning train to Cork. There was a mild commotion when Kevin bailed out at Port Laoise and went back to Dublin. It turned out that he was moon-lighting for Fianna Fáil developing and maintaining one of the first effective political web-sites. The country was three weeks out from the 2002 General Election, the party web-server had blown a gasket and nobody at FF central office was able to make it go again. With their website fixed, Fianna Fáil went on to comprehensively win the election! And Kevin came down to Cork the following day to make his prez for VIBE.

Some time later I was in the pub with Kevin and asked him "Politics can be a worthy [and often thankless] task; but why [for heaven's sake] Fianna Fáil ?". Kevin was quite open: "When I was at school and then college, I really believed in Europe and all the positive, inclusive, diversity-affirming, opportunity-providing aspirations of the EU". Taking the long view, he asked himself which was the most effective political star to which he could hitch his wagon. FF was the answer, and Kevin signed up to make the tea, knock on doors and create the website. I've been teasing him since as the next Taoiseach but three because I knew him to be pragmatic, honest, loyal and clever. We need all those qualities in our leaders.

At last, Kevin Byrne has made his move! After three decades of crunching numbers in academia, and briefly in in dot.com business, and always always in the engine-room of politics [what do people want? what makes them tick? how best to achieve that?] my friend is running for the Seanad to take & hold one of the three seats allocated to The University of Dublin aka Trinity College, our shared Alma Mater. #1 No better man! Vote early and vote often. My ballot and some poll puffs have arrived at Caislean Blob:

Here come the cavalry

Alternate years, The Boy braves St George's Channel to bring his family home for Christmas. There was a big yellow warning storm at sea over the weekend prior with ferry cancellations and delays but they lucked out and arrived on time late on Monday 23rd Dec. We had fired up the oil-fired central heating for the first time this year on the Solstice. The first floor of the house felt like the tropical rain-forest exhibit at the Botanic Gardens as the rads drove the damp out of the granite walls. I was surprised (and relieved) that the boiler actually fired up because we've been eking out a tank of oil that might be our last before moving to a more sustainable way of heating our home.

Then, at lunchtime on Christmas Day, the boiler [R] went phut and we had to subsist on the residual heat in the walls. It was fortunately super mild - and dry - so it wasn't too much effort to revive freezing wet G.daus when they returned from outdoor adventures. And we always have wood and the Waterford 104 stove to burn it; so one room in the house can keep frost-daemons at bay. Shortly after 0900hrs on Stephen's Day, I called the number on the front of the boiler. The ansafone at O'Byrne Services in Kilkenny shared a mobile number for emergencies and breakdowns. I wished Conor O'Byrne a cautious Happy Christmas and explained the symptoms, adding that nobody was going to die if the boiler wasn't fixed. But he took my Eircode and said he'd try to get out later.

. . . and he did.  And like the best trades-folk, he listened a bit, poked a bit and announced "It's the oil pump". Like the best trades-folk, he had a spare pump in the the Aladdin's Cave of his van and he swapped out the tired old broken for a shiny new replacement . . . which worked. It's like science: you have some data, which you match with experience, to float a hypothesis, which you test. Sometimes, the first, most likely explanation, is wrong and you have to dig deeper through the mind-archive for the answer.

After the fix and the payment, which seemed proper reasonable, and my sincere thanks for Being There for strangers we chewed the fat for a bit. Lamenting that Millennials floated through adolescence on the back of the Celtic Tiger, awash with money, so they never had to get their hands dirty fixing tractors or laying bricks. I lamented that The Institute had lost its place in the scheme of things with its pathetic aspirations in rebranding to a second rate university. In the before times, The Institute had been a first rate regional technical college: training up youngsters to be a Good Pair of Hands who could implement the ideas of desk-bound, live-in-m'head, intellectuals like me.

And its not only scientists who are detached from the Real World. We just had a general election which returned a safe centre-right coalition. But all the political parties were talking large about how many houses they were going to build. Mr O'Byrne asked, with dead-pan rhetoric, "build houses with which blocks-layers, sparkies, chippies, plumbers and central heating installers??" Because he sure-as-heck couldn't find enough Effectives to drive a van loaded with spanners and spares and fulfill the demands of Seán Poblacht for new and upgraded central heating kit. Our 28 y.o. cast iron boiler is a) fundamentally inefficient b) approaching its end-of-life.