Hay rattle and roll

We have, mainly through inattention, created a Traditional Hay Meadow. There is grass in there, even some Lolium perenne, perennial rye-grass. If Irish agronomists had their way, a following wind and infinite money, the island's pastures would be 100% rye-grass; because scientific studies have shown it a) responds well to nitrates b) promotes faster weight-gain in livestock than any other forage species.

One of the consequences of our mowing / feeding / selective killing [ragwort bad; kill ragwort] practice is that we have A Lot [see L: >100 plants per sq.m in patches] of hay-rattle, gliográn, Rhinanthus minor. It was part of what got us nominated as Farmers for Nature last year. We were advised then to contact Wild Flower companies to seed-share. In June, at one of the Organic Open Days, we were button-holed by Saorla Kavanagh from Teagasc. She also waxed enthusiastic about us looking at getting cash for hay-rattle.

Hay-rattle [the round yellow or purple blobs L are the seed capsules] is in Family Orobanchaceae aka broomrapes. Most of the species in the family are parasitic on the roots of grasses and/or legumes including clover: they tap into the phloem and suck out the sugars generated by photosynthesis in the host. Hay-rattle is a pretty comprehensive disaster for farmers who want to grow livestock for money. But it is a useful additive in wildflower plantings on roadside verges and roundabouts, and bougie horse-paddocks If grass is suppressed, poppies and forget-me-nots, bedstraws and orchids can get their colourful flower-heads up and seen.

There is another possible viewpoint for maintaining a greater diversity of plant species where cattle and sheep graze. For us, it is quite possible to subsist on a diet of oatmeal porridge and buttermilk but that's an existence rather than a rich and healthy life.  A more diverse diet is going feed up our gut microbiome to better fight off pathogenic infections and release micronutrients and vitamins. I have an open mind on whether cattle self-medicate. My pal P did some work 40 years ago looking at how ovulation in kangaroos Osphranter rufus is driven by plant estrogens which become available after drought-break.

If I was the scientist I was when I was 18 y.o. I would have done a quadrat analysis to assess how many hay-rattle plants we have. That would require throwing a dart (. . . stick, rock, coat-hanger) at random into the field [with a string attached so it don't get lost] and counting the plants in a 1 metre square of which the dart is the SE corner . . . rinse, repeat say 10x. But 100 plants will do for order of magnitude estimate. We have 11 acres of trad.meadow over 4 fields. Round that down to 4 hectares = 40,000sq.m. I 'harvested' 10 hay-rattle plants on Monday evening and shook out [L] 2½g of seed - they are the size of tomato seed rather than poppy. That converts to 25g = 1oz per sq.m. or 1,000kg = 1 tonne in total! Wildflower folk are quoting €10/kg harvested. That's me on the piss tonight! or as soon as they payola.

Goaded by Saorla's call and with her help, we scared up some names and telephone numbers including Sandro Cafolla [bloboprev on ecotypes of Ash], who Wildflowers just over the far edge of our (tiny) county. He's been doing this for at least 30 years [and his website is about the same hand-cranked vintage]. We went on a courtesy call / informational interview there yesterday: mainly to see what machinery we'd have compacting the soil of our meadows. Could be a Hege 140 or a Hege 125  plot combine harvester.These teeny-combines were invented & developed by a German engineer called Hans-Ulrich Hege [1928-2021] to selectively harvest small plots for plant breeding stations, universities and experimental farms. They tread lightly on the earth. Alternatively a brush-harvester hauled behind a quad-bike. I R excite! New venture, bigging up biodiversity.

Keeping secrets from The Man

My Boy, The Engineer, who has worked in transport all his life, has internalised the NATO alphabet [whc prev] to ensure better comms over crackly, lossy, phone-line. That prevlink also hat-tips Clapham & Dwyer's Surrealist Alphabet [1936]: A for 'orses; B for mutton; C for th' Highlanders, D for ential . . .  Also relevant acknowledgment of l33t-speak [prev]

Meanwhile over on MeFi, someone was seeking advice help hints for deliberately obfuscating {The Man | search engines | algorithms}. The long tail of the internet can be a problem for seekers-of-public-office. Even if you deleted your {drunken | catty | racist} tweets, it has probably been snagged and archived elsewhere for {ill-wishers | neighbours | journalists} to pick up and beat you with: 👁Jim Gavin👁.  What we all could do with is a font / script which is readily readable by humans but won't be parsed into meaningful Ambonese Bodo Catalan Dogon English Farsi. My contribution to the MeFi debate: 

5° 👁 ◎♄λ⑂ ωᴙ¡✞ε |~ ᴙəβ∪ſ

 set me thinking about gussying up a complete alphabet where each of the Ascii/unicode representations of the 26 letters of the English alphabet is replaced by another symbol.

α ∀	ſ	λ ∖ £	Θ	▼
Б	Γ	Ш	ᴙ	ω
© ☾ <	♄	~ ♫ И ∩	5 ∫ $	χ ×
δ Δ	¡ 👁 |	0 ◎ ☉ °	✞ ナ ↑	⑂
ə ≡ 3	|<	π	∪	Z

No, you're welcome. Please feel free to use this idea in future. Like the sped arrow, none of your past expletives can be recalled, let alone erased. But we can all be more circumspect from now on.

Note: this is obvs a pain in ye hoop for you, or me, to implement. Cutting and pasting each letter is enough effort to ensure only the most telegraphic comms. DCODE.FR has your back for seamless translation to/from Braille Morse 1337 ogham and dozens of other options. I used it to generate the 6 x 4 block message [above L] as a maritime signal, for example. That site offers a "symbol font" whc is similar in conceit to my idea

Scaling up, organic edition

Karen Blixen had a farm in Aafrika; we have a farrm in the Irish Midlands. Insofar as we are farming, we are organic. We are not Certified Organic because we haven't found the energy to, or seen the benefits of, filling in the 12 page Form App21/15 from the Irish Organic Association or the 1 page Form ORG1/DAFM form from the DeptAg. All the successful Organic-at-scale farmers are chewing their beards at being unable to find and lease Certified-Organic fields. Maybe certification-process tail is wagging the organic dog ? Paperwork infrastructure and bureaucracy is holding up housing and hospitals across the land: maybe Perfect is the enemy of the GoodEnough.

Our organic is fine for us:

• Sow seeds in pots in the Spring
• Transplant to nature after the 1st week in May [last frost]
• Water on the regular 
• Reduce the number of competing weeds
• Pick off slugs and fire them over the hedge
• Remove withered, spotted or furry leaves
• Insert sticks to support beans and tomatoes
• Eat what has been left by the competition 

We don't make a living out of this! But surplus courgettes and tomatoes make almost as good a social glue gift as home-made scones or marmalade.

A couple of years ago, we signed up for Teagasc's Signpost webinars which are broadcast every Friday at 09:30hrs and later get archived for folks who were haying or calving when the live broadcast went out. I've made sour comment about the surplus mouths battened onto these webinars. And also ranted at the screen when presenters read their own slides [and run over time arrrrgh!] and so make the whole live exercise a bit redundant. But in general it's a data-rich way of spending an hour and I've learned a lot.

These Signposts have induced me off-site to attend three [3] Open Days in the last two weeks. Teagasc Centraal at Johnstown Castle near Wexford. A Somers Evening on a big commercial environmentally friendly farm at Oylgate. Scaling up Organic Tillage near Wicklow Town. I confess that I bugged out of two of these events when drifting drizzle turned to decisive rain. It's not just me getting wet, it's anxiety that my delicate, under-powered, low-slung Yaris will bog down in a bucketty mud-field.

But not before I'd been amazed at the tech with which proper commercial organic farmers address the problem of weeds. The next three images are lifted from a recent Signpost Prez.

This a GPS connected, solar-powered Roomba aka FarmDroid FD-20. You deliver it to a field of, say, carrots or onions. It remembers where it sowed seed 15 days ago [straight rows, precisely spaced]. When the sun comes up the beast starts trundling down the first 5m of rows. Anything green growing between rows gets a jolt from a laser, gives up the fight and dies. When the sun goes in, it stops, not least because clouds are associated with rain and you need to keep moving machinery off wet fields b/c soil compaction. But this baby is far lighter on the earth than a 5 or 10 tonne general purpose farm tractor. Yes it's expensive, but so is the kit for spraying herbicides from behind your GP John Deere and consumables are much lighter on the farmer's pocket and the planet.

Same problem, different solution. Thulit MF 1200 [above] Harrowing between rows has been the weed-solution since peasants were wielding a hoe, deftly detaching weeds from crop fields. Doing it mechanically requires a) skill b) tricking about with a spanner adjusting the tine-settings and tractor speed to optimize the weed/crop kill ratio. But in a large known field the soil quality [and weed-holding] will vary. Is it worth rejigging the tines for than awkward corner or is it better to accept some missed weeds or collateral crop loss. Precision tine harrows have each tine hydraulically adjustable from the tractor cab. I don't think that we're there yet, but GPS-encoded data could adjust tine angle and depth automatically to suit the micro-locality.

This kit also required precise row spacing. Instead of static tines, on the Lemken EC-Steer & EC-Weeder little propellers scoop out the weeds, maybe only turning if the associated camera sees a docken Rumex obtusifolius. We saw a similar camera driven solution to docks of the Somers [not organic] farm. They have a 30m-wide boom on the back of a tractor for spraying weeds; there are nozzles every 0.5m; each individually controlled. Herbicide is only released where/when it sees a dock! Big saving on the use/ release/ cost of 'chemicals'. They seemed to imply that a drone can act as the eyes for each nozzle.  Software aGoGo! 

One final demo to share. Flahavan's in Kilmacthomas, CoWD mill and sell organic oats. Current demand far outstrips supply. Weeds are a big problem with organic cereals. One part of the solution [blind weeding] is to clear, harrow, roll the field then sow the oats Avena sativa 55mm deep: at least 2x the usual depth. Wait two weeks then harrow to a depth of 30mm, hiking all the weed seedlings to oblivion. That gives the oat coleoptyles a clear run to get their heads up. The weeds under that regime exist, but they are struggling for light under a dense canopy of oaty leaves. Next door, the trad, shallow-sown, part of the field was spackled with yellow and blue flowers [aka weeds] at the same height as the oat seed-heads. 

On Sunday we drove up to Dublin on another mission. On the M9 just N of Carlow Town there was a field of barley with a great broad streak of scarlet running through it. Whoop whoop poppy Papaver rhoeas alert. I said "must be organic". 3 days later we're traipsing through another barley field at the Oylgate Open Day. Not a poppy to be seen! I mentioned this to an ex-colleague from The Institute as we stood in the drizzle at the next Open Day. Colleague is also a farmer in South Wexford and he pointed out that, whatever about docks, poppies are really not a thing in Wexford. Carlow, Kildare, Kilkenny: plenty of roadside poppies. Wexford: null. Who knew?.

Shifting Shape

We live quite remote, not Yukon remote, but enough that you don't want to run out of milk because driving to the nearest shop for more will double the cost per litre. Amenities like a cash-point, gas-station, or chinese-takeaway are much more remote. When we go visit Pat the Salt's old place in Tramore, it's different. The library, for one example, is so close you could hit it with a tennis-ball thrown from the garden. We were in town [in our bib-overalls and shedding straw] earlier in June and I popped up to the library to see what they had for non-fiction / science. 

Fair enough that most of the books in a small town library are General Fiction, that's what normal people go to browse the collection. It was kinda woeful that there was just over one shelf covering the whole of DeweyDecimal 500, that includes 510 Mathematics 520 Astronomy 530 Physics 540 Chemistry 550 Earth sciences and geology 560 Fossils and prehistoric life 570 Biology 580 Botany 590 Zoology. Compared to 10 linear metres labelled CRIME. What is this obsession among Citizens with over-stepping the bounds of the law?

BUT, I did find another book Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else [2021] by Jordan Ellenberg. to carry on from How Not to be Wrong [bloborecent]. Shape is more recent and also 400+ pages but the font is bigger. 

Another book I've just finished suggests that kids can be quite different in their learning styles and good teachers run through a variety of approaches to new material hoping / expecting that some kids will 'get it' in one way, while another bunch will prefer a different perspective. Really great teachers will stop their gallop and pause to ensure that the lesson is learned. Ellenberg confesses early in this book that he never got geometry, preferring an algebraic approach if that was available and appropriate. Euclid, like all the ancient Greek mathematicians / philosophers were embedded in geometrical models: if you couldn't scratch it in the dust, it wasn't real.

I was 'good at maths' and able to get to grips with arithmetic, geometry, algebra, even calculus as they came up in the curriculum. Even outside of class, I would riffle through puzzle books by Martin Gardner and others. One standard set of problems was "Series": being presented with a list of numbers and asked to guess work out what the next two numbers were:

• 2, 4, 6, 8, . . .; . . . 
• 10, 7, 4, 1, . . .; . . .
• 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, . . . ; . . .

The first two Series are changing by a fixed amount [+2 and -3] to generate the next number. But the 3rd one has gaps of 3 then 5 then 7 . . . between successive numbers. Those differences are changing by a fixed amount; maybe we called it a second order series back in the day?Having been drilled in my times-tables, I recognised that third Series as being of square numbers. But one day as a tween I had an Aha! to twig that they were called Square Numbers because you can draw them in the dirt as squares. And further, that was the reason why adding successive odd numbers to 1 [as in the diagram above R] generated the series of Square Numbers.

Because Ellenberg thinks better in the abstractions of algebra, he has had to struggle to make sense of the world through Shape. That struggle has compelled him to think through each problem clearly and that really helps him to explain the issue and solution cleanly.

Footnote on p311 resonated with moi-le-plongeur. "A disagreeable feature of the Erdös legend: it encourages some mathematicians to see domestic work as somehow beneath our station and beyond our capabilities at once. And yet we eat food and wear clean shirts. Fact: thinking about mathematics while washing dishes is good for both mathematiciansand, if your are prone to reveries as most mathematiciansare, the dishes".

I like his throw-away jokes, not always confined to the [copious] foot-notes. "A sporting event is not just an algorithm; it may also be intended to provide entertainment, generate tax revenue, narcotize a seething populace etc. -- but an algorithm is one of the things that it is". He discusses why a match between two players as best of three games [or 20 overs in cricket , or 5 sets of six games in tennis, or playing a league of other teams both Home and Away in soccer] is more likely to find the better players than the result of a single play. There is also a desperate, depressing chapter about how gerrymandering [whc prev] can be really effective in birthing a totalitarian state.

Lafcadio

The years tick themselves off. Nine years ago, every Monday morning, I accompanied Pat the Salt, then 92y.o., to the Tramore Community Centre and Wheels-on-Wheels hub for sessions of The Heritage Club. The Big Room at the TCC looked out over a steep fall of trees and shrubs between Pond Road and Upper Branch Road. That woodland was making its +10-year transformation into the Lafcadio Hearn Japanese Gardens.

On 8th June this year, we were down among The Great and The Good [aka The Olds] of Waterford to witness the official opening of the Kokoro Centre - an all-weather venue with a sweeping view over the rooftops of Tramore Bay and Brownstown Head.

Underneath the street-level room with terrace [seen above] is another auditorium which may comfortably seat 100 guests. That was where the dignitaries [minister, mayor, local TDs, senior trustee, ambassador] made their speeches.

Then it was outside [L] into the almost drizzle, for more [shorter] speeches and unveiling of plaque. Astutely, the management of the event had realised that The Minister would be late, so allocated the first hour to the distribution of tea & canapés, networking and wandering around the gardens. People who can take a couple of hours out of a Monday afternoon skew Old and you really do not want a flock of hangry pensioners loose on the premises and/or queuing for the t'ilets. The canapés were catered by Daoti Sushi which are in business on Queen Street not 200m from the gardens - that's how cosmopolitan Tramore is in 2026.

We were last on Kokoro business fully 20 months ago when the previous ambassador 'laid the foundation stone'. So building a 2½ room extension in the Gardens has been quicker than finishing the National Children's Hospital. But I must point out that the Empire State Building was opened on 1st May 1931, 18 months after foundations were sunk. 

And Solution begat Problem

Institutions, governments and countries all have structural inertia. I worked for several years teaching science in The Institute. Science has been the driver of the technical changes impacting Life for at least 100 years. I can do things from my sofa you 11.y.o. me wouldn't believe (video call to CapeTown; pay Joe the washing-machine whizz; buy a book from Kennys; order Tesco to deliver bacon, cabbage and spuds asap). Tech which is commonplace now, was unimaginable 5 or 10 years ago. We teachers at The Institute aspired to launch students who were equipped to thrive in the New New. Devising a new course was was easy: ask what needed teaching, and what resources were needed to achieve that. But, getting the new course approved by management was trudging through a paper mangrove swamp: learning outcomes LOs had to be written up in Officialese; deliverables had to conjured in optimistic babble; technical staff had to be schmoozed into, like, working with new kit rather than drifting between tea-breaks. What gets lost in the obsession with curriculum, documentation and LOs is teaching our technical good-pair-of-hands students to think on their feet rather perform by the book.

Although life is 'more convenient' it is also more complex. The number of things Ordinary Folk can/should do themselves diminishes with each passing year. In the house we bought in England, I installed a new electric-socket on the far side of the living room by hauling a cable after me in the crawl-space under the floor-boards. I wouldn't do that now: I've known at least one case where faulty wiring caused a fire between the studs of a kitchen wall. This January, I learned about RCD [residual current detectors] which are now routinely installed in domestic electric circuits to trip before incommming water causes an electrical short, fire and multiple deaths. One thing I learned in January was that you really don't want to lose power to your fridge or freezer while you're away on, say, holiday or a field-trip.

But modern Sparkses are aware of that issue and modern best practice is to put the fridge-freezer on a separate circuit. So that, for example, a leaky kettle doesn't trip off the entire kitchen circuit and ruin your wholesaler stash of frozen pizza. That's a solution to a potential problem, but the devil is in the details of implementation. Pat-the-Salt's old gaff on Costa na Déise has spent the last year undergoing a major refurb and refit. We were down there for a few days at the beginning of May: cleaning and gardening and chopping wood for a new stove. As we were leaving, Dau.II pointed to the wall switch [as L ☉] beside the fridge and asked "Should that be off?". We agreed that the light should be red and the fridge should be left ON. And it was so, and we left, without getting into blame about who had switched the freezer off.

Four weeks later we were back in the house and I opened the fridge to get a dash of milk for the tea. Because I was alone in the kitchen and right in front on the door, I heard a click and noticed the fridge light went off. Aha! If anyone opens the fridge door fully, it makes contact with the separate-circuit rocker switch on the wall and turns the fridge off. The electrician's solution to a vanishingly rare eventuality was to install a switch which is far more susceptible to getting switched off accidentally. Very slow hand clap.

We are now canvassing solutions. I favour gluing half a beach-combed tennis ball to the fridge door (anywhere will do, except right opposite the switch). But a stack of hilarious fridge magnets, or half a wine cork would serve as well. Someone else suggested a frame round the switch - it just needs to be 2cm proud of the wall. 

8 by 9

When I was young [in England, Ireland was ambivalent about WWs, poppies] Armistice Day was still marked on the 11th of November, with a 2 minute silence at 11:00hrs. You were expected to STOP what you were doing, stand up and remember the dead of WWI. But as the survivors of WWI diminished through subsequent attrition, and as Britain was again at it during WWII, this national mark of respect was considered too damaging to the economy and the main ceremonies were shifted to the nearest Sunday, when many workers resting anyway. Most other official religious and secular holidays have shifted to the nearest Monday rather than the day itself. St Patrick's Day is a most welcome bucker of this trend as it cycles through the week rather than being bundled into a Long Weekend.

Likewise birthdays, if you-as-an-adult are going to have A Party to celebrate clocking off another year, chances are you'll shift it to the nearest weekend - to increase the likelihood that your friends & relations can be present to raise a glass and down some cake. Today, according to Daylight Saving Time, is my birthday: my actual birth was just before midnight on 16 June 1954 but all the docs give d.o.b. as the 17th. Dau.I and Dau.II aka Bookie and Cookie invited us up the Dublin last Sunday Lá Fhéile Caomhán . . . for Cake (and a walk). 

They asked what sort of a cake The Patriarch would prefer. I replied with aggravating faux-humility that "Oh, I don't want a whole cake, just a slice of cake would do". Dau.I announced that, whatever I had to say, she was going to have another go at perfecting her lemon and raspberry cheesecake: she is making it her signature bring-a-cake solution when required at work or after work. On Saturday, I noticed we had an egg-glut at home, and decided to make my signature 5-egg, 1.7kg fruit & nut "Christmas" cake. Dau.II, meanwhile, who has been baking novelty cakes since she was about 8 y.o. took my comment literally and constructed A Slice of orange butter-cream chocolate layer cake of Brobdingnagian size [L with teapot for scale]. So it was Cake Wars on Sunday afternoon when we came back from a walk in the Glasnevin Botanic Gardens.

In the past, I have asserted that The icing on the cake of day is for me to spend it alone on the hill, so long as there was tea-and-toast at five o'clock. But scoffing cakes with family makes a prretty good day too. But Today is the Actual Bday when I turn 72 = 2³ x 3² still have my marbles, knees still work, not homeless, life is good.

Lett Us Create

On dit que The definition of stupidity is doing things over and over hoping for a different result. It's defo like that with me and lettuce. I like a BLT; shop-lettuce is a dollar a pop & can be awash with coliform; we have hectares. 
Q, How difficult could it be to GIY?
A. For me, molare-sappingly, uneconomically difficult.
But here we are in 2026 on lettuce-repeat. I bought seed, they cost money. I planted them in tiny pots on 21 April. Five weeks later, half of them were no-show; half were 5-leaves / 8cm big and cluttering my window-sill. I planted them out [R]; they fell over, and despite the referee counting they were disinclined to get up.

In May, I was given a 5-leaf courgette plant among a trayful of misc tomato and squash. It is doing much better [L]. Not to be the ingrate, but I get cognitive dissonance over yellow courgette, so I'll have to eat them blindfold. Likewise bell-peppers, which should be green or maybe red, but they are often sold 🇧🇯 🇲🇱 🇨🇲 🇧🇴 🇨🇬 as if a) we all had a faarm in Africa and b) were ardent patriots. We have grown bell-peppers in the polytunnel . . . two of them, the size of crab-apples. At least they were green.

There has been a bit of a reno down at Pat the Salt's gaff on Costa na Déise. A pair of antient wrought-iron gates turned out to be supported entirely by rust and brambles and were pulled out of the gap in the road-frontage wall. Only mad people have steel gates down on the Costa where the half-life of a wheelbarrow is about 15 months. It's the salt, innit. The Beloved was inclined to screen the gap with a garden trellis and encourage honey-suckle or sweet-peas to fill in the gaps. These trellises are made from lath-and-staples which might stop a jack-russell, but were scarcely capable of having me lean-on-the-gate while chatting to the neighbours. and they only came in 600mm, 1200mm or 1800mm lengths [we needed 2300mm] and they cost €40.

It's not for nothing that I've spent half my life, combing the beaches of the Costa. Fathoms of rope, scores of buoys, a dozen fish-boxes, an anchor have all been saved from Poseidon Manannán mac Lir and given a new life ashore. But I have also been slowly progressing a project to make a sculpture from wave-tossed and sand-scoured tree-branches which in cycles litter the tide-line.  I figured that when I had 206 pieces of the right size (from phalanges to femurs) I could assemble an articulated wooden pal for buoy-boy. Obvs, I knew that I'd need more like 2060 timber-toes to pick-and-choose from. 

A few days later, when I was alone on site, I gathered by driftwood archive together. I made a frame from 5 pieces of timber off-cut about 1m long and made a proof of principle ProtoTypoGato; 

I left the original where The Beloved couldn't help but see it and sent a photo to the next generation. Everyone hated it! But were kind enough to say little. Which was just as well because, once The Shock of the New had its corners knocked off by a couple of sleeps, I had constructive comments about how the basic idea could be improved. Rip some of the Western Red Cedar planks from the 2016 woodshed project to make the horizontal rails, for example.  I feel a mort happier about this than I do about verdomde GIY lettuce.

A Different Kind of Power

In the 1991, the fellows of Trinity College Dublin elected a new Provost, a well regarded Classical scholar who wrote the books on Cicero. So far, so conservative. But Mitchell was the first Catholic in the post for 300 years . . . and <frisson> the first who still had children young enough to be housed in #1 Grafton Street his official residence. The three boys had bedrooms carved out of the cellars and it was the first time a dart-board was installed in the Provost's House. Having close relatives who were actual students in his patrimony gave him an insight into the doings and needs of that often disregarded under-class. Catholic? children? it took another 30 years for Ye Fellowes to elect a Womanas Provost, but here they are now.

Three of the last four Presidents of Ireland have been women. On the far side of the World, they started electing women as Prime Minister in 1999 and since then only about half those heads of government have been men. Good thing too, women hold up half the sky, and we should put them in charge about half the time. They don't have to be better at the job than blokes, just different.  Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result [NotTwain, NotEinstein]. 

I've just finished ear-booking Jacinda "PM, GNZM" Adhern's autobiography A Different Kind of Power [2025] in which she describes reinventing herself as a youngster, leaving her Church [LDS-Mormon] because of its repugnant attitudes of the status of The Gays and women, not to mention BIPOCs. I try to make time for people who have changed their mind on something embedded in family or culture. It may be mere contrariness, but more often [i.m.e.] it has required some deep thought about uncomfortable [cognitive] dissonance. Adhern joined the NZ Labour party before she was old enough to vote because she looked around her at The Dispossessed and a) decided that's not good enough and b) asked what can I do?

She was on a half-year semester abroad at U.Arizona when aeroplanes crashed into buildings on 11Sep01. Most classes were cancelled that day, but one Professor insisted that His class would schedule as normal . . . because, else, the Enemy would win. He invited the class to say how they were feeling, and accepted without comment sentiments which lurched from outrage, patriotism and defiance to frank expressions of Islamophobia. Adhern felt obliged to call out this superficial assessment and demonization of 2 billion people, including 4 million legit resident in the USA. Her "Not all Muslims" speech from the floor fell on deaf ears; but someone needed to speak the words.

It would be a tiresome book if it was chocka with tales of how Adhern was Right, or Compassionate, or AheadOfTheCurve. And indeed, the only times I felt a bit choked up as I listened were when Other people were unexpectedly kind and supportive.

Exec Summ Elec Proc. 30 years ago, NZ ditched the UK-adjacent FPP electoral system in favour of " mixed-member proportional (MMP)". There legislative branch is UniCameral - so no Senate, let alone a House of Lordlings. 60% of the 120 seats are elected in the British way: the winner of the most votes in 72 constituencies gets a seat in parliament for the next three years. In the run up to the election, each registered Pol Party goes into conclave and rank all their candidates in whatever order seems good to that caucus. Each ballot in the election offers two votes: one for a candidate in the locality and one for a party. These latter votes are all tallied up and the remaining 40% of seats in the national parliament are divvied up proportional to the popular vote. 

Putting others first 1) The 2008 election, Grant Robertson, big, gay, bespectacled, rugger-playing insider was nominated for the Labour List. He stood up and declined the honour unless and until Jacinda Adhern was listed for the party. As it happened Robertson held his constituency for the Labour party and Adhern sailed into parliament by being sufficiently high up The List. He didn't have to do that, it wasn't in his interests to do that, it was notably unusual to do that, but he did it. Believing that the country would be better off by gaming Adhern into a seat of power. Less than 10 years later Adhern was Prime Minister and her first cabinet appointment for Grant Robertson as Finance Minister. It was never seen by either of them as pay-back time, because for both of them politics was a vehicle for making the world a better place . . . for Others . . . for Everyone. <snif snif, me>

Putting others first 2)  On 15 Mar 2019 a 20-something gun-nut [conspi]racist from Australia carried out a mass-shooting in Christchurch, NZ: killing 51 people in and around two Sunni mosques.. Adhern, the leader of the country, binned her diary and turned up to bear witness and answer questions [R Christchurch City Council Newsline/Kirk Hargreaves] in Christchurch the next day. She calmed a crowd of distraught, grieving, confused people in a local Community Centre. She had a difficulty task, not least because The State would have to over-ride the Sharia imperative of getting the dead back to their families, washed, shrouded and into the ground asap. Her preferred soundbyte for media became They Are Us: because her New Zealand was, and was happy to be, a multicultural society; where diversity of people generated diversity of solutions to the ongoing enshittification of human existence. [See Caitlin Moran?]. Later she visited the mosque to show she cared, to listen to the pain, to answer questions. Towards the end of the session an 8.y.o. Kashmiri girl raised her hand. Her question was "And how are You?". Because some people, be they 8 or 18 or 80, can read the souls of those who are hurting and can by their tone and demeanour offer solace. A while later, this same girl waded through the departing crowd to the front of the room to hug the Prime Minister, her Prime Minister. <sobbin'>

This time last year The Rest Is Politics Leading interviewed Jacinda Ardern. If you haven't time to listen to an entire book.

math book thud

I've been on a math-for-norms book binge. Singh then Eastaway and now Jordan Ellenberg's How not to be Wrong (2014). Which is the same title as a book by James "LBC" O'Brien. The subtitles distinguish: JE . . . The Power Of Mathematical Thinking [US] OR The Hidden Maths of Everyday Life [UK IE] vs JO'B . . . the Art of Changing Your Mind. Want an insight into the tawdry prejudice that can inhabit the head of a radio presenter [or your own]? Choose O'Brien. Deal with your own math-anxiety and get a better crap-detector? That would be Ellenberg. He doesn't claim that math is easy, but maintains that you will be better off [and less often bamboozled by sharks] if you knuckle down to the work of squeezing sense from numbers. Compared to Singh and Eastaway, Ellenberg's book has more pages and a teeny-tiny font and many even smaller footnotes and an index: it is meant to be taken seriously, hence "thud" in the title. But it is also meant to make math fun and some of Ellenberg's waggish asides 

It's also okay to make your own fun where math meets literature. As when you hunt for ELS [equidistant letter sequences] in The Torah, [or like Meeee in genomes, or GenBank or Magna Carta]. The Torah = the Pentateuch = The first five books of the Old Testament: Gen Exo Lev Num Deu = The Word of God! About 30 years ago, three math-comp-phys whizzes loaded up the Torah and wrote a program to look for hidden messages in a text written 2,500 years ago in Hebrew. In fine, they looked by ELS for, and found, the names and b.days of 32 'modern' rabbis. They also jumbled the order of the holy letters to see whether you could find that good of signal in random Hebrew letters . . . and [compufolk can do that sort of thing in perl or python] then re-jumbled the text a million times to get a measure of just how unlikely were their prophet-finding results! It caused a stir at the time and not just among people who'd done the bar-mitzvah. Push-back came quickly and Ellenberg uses the tale to be skeptical about other crazy 'truths' which seize the public imagination every few years [Dan Brown, we see you].

One of the themes which runs through the book is Utility: how evaluate competing desiderata so as to come up to some optimum solution. He quotes one pundit as saying that "If you never miss a plane, you're not doing it right spending too much time at airports". To get to the airport in Good Time, you've skipped breakfast and left home before airport-shuttle: so you're down the cost of a taxi AND a €9 croissant from Costa Packet. If you fly twice a month those deficits (we'll ignore the sleep deficit and the hazard of using the airport t'ilet) will far exceed the cost of rescheduling the missed flight. And not only travel: Surgeons who never kill patients aren't pushing the envelope of their cutty craft.

Also The Variance! There is a whole chapter on winning the Lotto. For about a decade, Massachusetts ran a lottery where on some occasions, the expected utility of a $2 ticket was ~$5. Something, something roll-down excess jackpot something something match 5 winners. On such draw-days, at least three different consortia bought A Lot of tickets. One group wrote a script to generate 000s of different 6 number combos. Another group just rocked up to convenience stores with $10,000 in cash and did quick-pick; which saved the confederates some RSI from making pen-marks on Lotto forms. The winnings were about the same for each strategy. Across the state, ordinary folk were winning also but with only $2 up-front their odds of winning were slim enough. The consortia, by covering more bases, smoothed out the variance and more or less ensured that they would cash out close to the expected utility.

Because we love each other ver' much, Ellenberg has some overlap with The Blob: Poincaré's bus-step; Cantor's infinities; Abraham's armour; Nate Silver's uncertainty; Shannon's bits; Hamming's bit-errors; Pearson & Son.  I recommend this book: you don't have to read all 120,000 words. And it will help your crap-detector for interpreting Gallup polls, press headlines, and political pundits.

Amen to this: "I think we have to teach math that values precise answers but also intelligent approximation, that demands the ability to deploy existing algorithms fluently but also the horse sense to work things out on the fly, that mixes rigidity with a sense of play". But later he says ""Nobody ever looks in the mirror and says "Let's face it, I'm smarter than Gauss"."" Maybe we should hope that at least one reader may grow up to be that Nobody.

Pots Landing

Sometime in the 1970s Coillte, the semi-state forestry firm, acquired one of the old steadings in the hills above us and planted it all with Sitka spruce Picea sitchensisis. By the time we arrived ~20 years later the forest formed a forbidding dark green cliff to the East of the rough track which served as the main access to Mt Leinster and other local peaks. For reasons, Coillte had excluded the ruined farmhouse and yard from the deer-fence enclosure of the forest. Notwithstanding the cliff, that farmstead was, if not a destination, at least a way-station on a longer trek; perhaps especially for small people. Storyrock was another (off-piste) picnicplatz for Dau.I and her sister..

Sometime in the 00s, a hillwalking family suffered a tragic loss and their friends-and-relations planted a tree to commemorate one whose tiny legs would never again give out and demand rest at the ruin on the edge of the forest. Mountain ash = caorthann = rowan = Sorbus aucuparia was a pretty good choice, not least because in berry-season, it really brightened that corner of the dark forest. The tree grew straight and tall, fighting for light up against the spruce. But when Coillte clear-felled their forest during Covid, the memorial rowan was exposed to the blast of any easterlies and was badly shook. I restaked it [have rope, have hammer, have stakes, have time] at least once and I know the friends-and-relations looked out for it. But this last Winter, the weather laid low the tree well before its time [insert sad emoji].

One section of the hillwalkers used to yomp about the mountain by the light of head-torches: after dark, in Winter often on Thursdays. Last Thursday they called in to "borrow a shovel" as they walked up the lane with a baby rowan, stakes, spike, hammer, sheep-fencing and energy. They were going to have a Go at memorial_tree.02. I left them to their neighbourly task and went to bed. Woke up at 0300 hrs screaming "the water, the water". You're at nothing planting young trees without a solid plan to keep the roots damp - ask me how I know. At first light I dealt with my anxiety and reported:

. . . mountain ash looks well! It takes a village to raise a tree.
I lugged a 4lt flagon of K'roe Spring up there just now and left it for the next waterer because it's not needed now.  You know this, but the nearest running water is 100m SE just across the county line where the runnel gets closest to the ditch:

I could see myself making a wee dam there but not until I'm wearing wellies.
Ar aghaidh!

Although the OS map above is more than 130 years old, it does capture how the land East of the county line is bog marsh wetland. By Sunday morning I had wellies, shovel and bucket because I have form for building recreational dams. It was slight excuse to pretend that I was creating a lake, with added dry-shod landing for the convenience of otters others: utility topping my amusement. It only took about 20 minutes, with Jacinda Adhern chatting in the background describing her orderly departure from a six year term as NZ-PM.

I didn't need wellies as my micro-dam project happened after a long dry May. You can see Lake Blob reflecting the sky behind a minimal intervention obstruction to the water flow. I dug up some mud-and-sphagnum from the bottom of a pool in the rill and dumped it in a downstream heap. It was then just barely deep enough to easily obtain a bucketful of tea-coloured water. For added utility (for waterers in dancing pumps, like) I robbed three extra flat stones to make a landing / standing. 

It's been lashing down these last tuthree days, so the baby rowan is getting well puddled in, and nobody will need to bucket water about for a good while yet. Indeed, there was a Summer down-pour after dinner last night and it's entirely possible that my pathetic two-scoops dam has been carried away. I am also assiduously collecting water for the polytunnel and we are talking about acquiring another 1 tonne IBC against El Niño Madness later in the Summer.

STOP PRESS: Before 07:00 this morning, as the clouds lifted off the hills and blue sky appeared in the East, I walked up the hill. Up beyond the Mountain Gate, the hills are alive to the sound of water, the drains are full and somebobby should really go up and fix the spill-over sites. But the dam at Pots Landing is holding. I'll go up again later this week with a shovel and drop a tuthree cut sods on top.

Wilf Rock

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown; 
Thus unlamented let me die; 
Steal from the world, and not a stone 
Tell where I lie.

When I was in Grad School in the early 1980s, I was trying to get a novel handle on the [Euro]peopling of New England and the Canadian Maritime Provinces. I did A Lot of reading about pre-colonial demographics. I also put in a lot of field-work foot-miles from Cape Breton to Cape Cod in the East to New York and up the Hudson River valley to Montreal and the St Lawrence. Starting in to Year Three of this project my boss advised me to enroll in an evening course at the Harvard Extension School. It was something like "Grave markers and iconography in colonial New England cemeteries". As reg'lar readers may suspect, I have a low threshold for "gosh how interesting, do tell me more". I can't remember any details but if you plot "flying skulls" across time and space it looks like this fashion for memorializing the beloved dead in this way swept like a wave across  New England . . . only to be replaced by "sad angels", Our teacher projected A Lot of 50x50mm slides from a very large collection.

My abiding memory is of gravestones remembering several children from one family dying within days of each other. Also considerable discrepancy in age between husband and wife. And so many dead young mothers. Death omnipresent, a belief in a happy hereafter, but people still wanted [their names and dates] to be recorded forever in this vale of tears.

My Grandfather Wilfred [L, R] was born in in 1879 at The Big House in King's County as the youngest son. There was no future there, let alone a fortune, so he upstakes and joined the Army seeing service in the Second [Colenso, Spion Kop, Mafeking, Ladysmith, that one] Boer War and on the NW Frontier.  One story is that he got rather too deeply in a romantic entanglement in India, so resigned his commission and fled to America in the 00s of the 20thC: maybe winning a section of the Hollywood Hills in a card game; maybe being in San Francisco during or just after the 1906 earthquake; maybe losing all his money to become a panhandling hobo for a while. With more certainty, he volunteered for the RNVR in WWI and lost a lung while serving a balloon-observer in the North Sea. Later he was stationed in Egypt with the RNAS (Air Service) which, in 1918, was merged with the RFC to form the RAF Royal Air Force. I'm sure there were other people who served in all three divisions of the armed forces, but he's the only one who is related to Me. When peace broke out, he became Harbourmaster at Dunmore East, which is where his only son, my father grew up. The photo was apparently snapped in 1952, when Wilfred was about the age I am now. He's got a better hat, but I've got a better sofa!

Wilfred [was] retired in 1947 and lived out his remaining days across the water in Co Wexford. He died in 1957 and was buried [R] in St Mary's, the Church of Ireland First Fruits church where his cousin (and landlady) played the organ. I always found it peculiar that there should be a (Carlow white granite) cross at the grave-head because in practice he was agnostic edging atheist. But then again, your still living rellies have the final say w.r.t. grave-goods.

The Board of First Fruits was a cunning plan which, between 1778 and 1833 funnelled a lot of money into building "established" churches (and glebes to house the rectors) across the island of Ireland. 700 new and refurbished churches over 50 years had a significant impact on the landscape of vernacular architecture. At some level of consciousness we'll have twigged "Oh, another Protestant church on that hill, down than lane" there is no need to read the sign-board, if any, to recognise the Gestalt. St Mary's has the same look-and-feel as the church in Bunmahon which is now the Copper Coast Visitor's Centre. 

Wilfred lay there among the Protestants, quietly weathering topside and composting below. Thirty-something years later, we came back to Ireland in 1990 and I would drop in to say hello if I was passing. I reported to my father that the lettering at the foot of the cross was weathered almost to illegibility. In 1998, we asked the local monumental mason to "make it better". This stone-guy emptied a £15 bag of chippings onto the concrete slab and sent an invoice for £120. Which was a bit disheartening. Shortly after that my father died in his turn and grave-keeping slipped way way down on the list of priorities. That chippings episode turned out to be useful because my letter to the mason recorded the full text of the inscription while it was still, barely, legible.

Forward another ~25 years and there were more deaths in the family. Three of them were buried in Kill, Co Waterford and a rather spectacular, somewhat foreign looking, ✞ was commissioned to mark the spot. This was all the work of Thomas Glendon, a quite-famous mason and letterer, and last year I drove a shovel to facilitate some up date-ing. We all liked the cut of Tom's lettering: very elegant, the ligatures. Tom is even older than me, and with a sense of clock ticking, we asked Tom to re-cut Wilfred's 1957 inscription.  I lied about the inscription in 2o2o. It's not Stephenson's Home is the sailor, home from the sea And the hunter, home from the hill but rather Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas [as L and below] from Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene which has the virtue of being a) shorter than RLS b) penned, possibly in Ireland, by a planter from the Other Island. Our planter family came over about 50 years later . . . and stayed.

As they do, and like Topsy, the project growed. From two lines scrunched at the base of a granite cross to 200kg of recumbent Kilkenny black limestone slightly battered to shed the rain, and filling about 20% of the space between the curbs of the grave. That took forever several months of to-fro, but on a bitter wet and wind-driven day at the end of January, Wilf's Rock was delivered to site [R] as we watched white horses scudding across Bannow Bay.

Book 1. CANTO IV, verse XL
He there does now enjoy eternall reft
And happy eafe, which thou doeft want and craue,
And further from it daily wandereft:
What if fome little payne the paffage haue
That makes fraile flefh to feare the bitter waue?
Is not fhort paine well borne, that bringes long eafe,
And layes the foule to fleepe in quiet graue?
Sleepe after toyle, port after ftormie feas,
Eafe after warre, death after life does greatly pleafe.

Title a rather weak reference to Wolf Rock which caused HMS NormalAccident in 2002. The more familiar, because nearer, Wolf Rock has a lighthouse. Waterwolf is another, floodier, thing altogether. 

More Math Book

I had a troika of math-for-normals books on the go in parallel at the end of May.  One The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets (2013) by Simon Singh was admittedly more for noodles than for normals. Maths On The Back of an Envelope (2019) by Rob Eastaway is in the tradition of John Allen Paulos [whom bloboprevs] and his A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper (1995). Numeracy is important to prevent yourself or your granny being gulled by nonsense which appears in modern media. Eastaway could, with Simon Singh, Simon Clark, Hannah Fry, Tim Harford, James Grime, Adam Rutherford, Matt Parker, Marcus du Sautoy, Alex Bellos [yes all of blobochecked] make up a cricket team of Explainers of Maths resident in the UK: who therefore know the difference among googol, google and googly.

I twigged that Eastaway was more than {one book picked of a library shelf in rural Ireland} when he wrote about being called up for a crap-detecting soundbyte by local radio. And also about canvassing an audience of teenagers for the weight in stones (rather than kilos which have been curriculum official in UK for the last 50 years). No surprises that he has worked with the UK Math Trust where Gdau.I is currently wrestling kangaroos. Ten years ago he won-a-gong from the IMA [Institute of Mathematics and its Applications] and he's written a dozen books

One of the themes in Envelope is getting numbers correct but not too correct. When RTE reports that 48.34% of people support the bacon-and-cabbage for dinner movement, the number is a blur while "half" or "50%" can be taken in. If  the number is absorbed it may trigger a question like "I wonder what the proportion was in 1996?". It was a time of transition, in 1997 my farming neighbour confessed that his family had frozen pizza for dinner the day before: induced to do so by his teenage daughter. Eastaway suggests using Zequals (a new coinage of his) when trying to get into the right ballpark. Zqualling strips all but the first significant digit. So 7 stays as 7, but 83 ⇒ 80;  83.78 ⇒ 80; 8,452 ⇒ 8000. Pre-process your sums to Zequals and you won't need a calculator but still get a good enough answer: 98 ÷ 5.3 ≈ 100 ÷ 5 = 20.

 Since we got our solar panels, my life is ruined by the kW app on my device. I put off baking until the sun is giving enough to get the oven to 200°C "for free". I put on the immersion when the sun is making 5.25kW [the max] resolving to wash A Lot of dishes or one elderly body before the water gets cold. Towards the end of Envelope, Eastaway offers a poser: which of the following uses the most electricity:

• fridge
• TV on standby
• shower 
• kettle 

Depending on how much tea you drink and how many oxters you possess, shower or kettle (~ 2000W) will win. Leaving fridge ~50W and TV-standby ~2W in the ha'penny place. Apparently, back in the day, TVs would get warm even when nothing was showing, and there was a desultory campaign to make folk unplug them when they went to bed. Not so since we did away with cathode ray tubes and went LED pixels. I knew all that, but Eastaway then riffs on to point out that the family Yaris runs at 20kW or 10x the kettle! "A 30 minute car journey uses more energy than all your domestic appliances put together: that's something to think about when doing the school run". Yes indeed. It reminds me of my dear old dad who would periodically get cost conscious and go though the house flipping off switches while muttering "every light blazing" and "harumph". And then he'd drive into town and buy another lawn-gizmo to clutter his shed.

Nothing in excess [as Delphi sed μηδὲν ἄγαν] is all very well but some excesses are way more excessive than others. Cows burping methane is waaaay more than human pooting the stuff after Beanz Meanz Heinz even accounting for there being 6x more people than cattle on the planet. We shd all give up the ould burgers [two too many poo R]: mutton, chicken, pork are all easier on the planet and lentils least of all.  But cars are an even bigger burden. 

Go Republic!

Today in Italy it is Festa della Repubblica because 80 years ago, just after WWII, they held a plebiscite [ballot-paper] to determine whether to continue with a monarchy (but without Mussolini, he dead) or go full-metal Republic. It wasn't a slam-dunk, but a 54% majority voted for Republic. This iconic picture by photo-journalist Federico Patellani came to symbolise the optimism that people felt for a new system of governance. The woman in the picture wasn't named as Anna Iberti, from Milano, until decades later. Patellani blasted off an entire roll of film on that shoot and other images are available on the internet. But everyone likes the ragged hole torn in the newspaper of record: it's a metaphor of the shaky start to the Republic: so many parties, so many elections.

The referendum was not held in some provinces of Italy which were a) still occupied by the allies in 1946 and b) diplomatically incertae sedis: 

• The Julian March = Venezia Giulia consisting of Trieste and Fiume which was eventually split between Italy and Yugoslavia.
• Bolzano =  Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol up in the Alps, fell to Italy, although it took a generation for Austria to finally quieten its aspirations for sovereignty there.
• Zara a Italian enclave city deep in Dalmatia, which administratively included two archipelagos out in the Adriatic: Lagosta and Pelegosa. All these are now part of Croatia

Pelagosa was the site of a battle between two submarines during WWI. On 5th Aug 1915, the Italian sub Nereide was sunk by SM-5 of the Austro-Hungarian navy, with the loss of all hands. The Captain of SM-5? Linienschiffsleutnant Georg Ritter von Trapp . . . as in Sound of Music, Anschluß, Christopher Plummer.  Phew! that's today's rabbit-hole: coming up for air and breakfast.

Moral HazMat

There were elements of moral hazard in The Blob's recent voyages round the world of shipping. Shipping companies are profitable because they employ desperate non-union sailors, register the ships in-foreign and power them with bunker fuel [mmm sulphur, love the smell of phenolics in the morning]. We the people and we the planet tolerate these shenanigans because we like cheap Stuff. Ships are complex machines. Hard as it is to assemble these engineering marvels, deconstruction is also difficult. If MegaCorp had to build safe and clean ship-breaking & disposal into their business plan, shipping goods would be more expensive.

End of life issues are also central to Wasteland The Dirty Truth About What We Throw Away, Where It Goes, And Why It Matters (2024) by Oliver Franklin-Wallis. which I just raced through on Borrowbox. At the turn of the century, Fruit of the Loom [remember them?] stopped making apparel in Donegal when government a) imposed a structure of minimum wages and maximum working week b) stopped supporting foreign direct investors by building them sheds c) [mainly] corporate HQ stretched their debt to breaking point. I can now buy cheap shirts in Penneys or expensive shirts in M&S but they are still made by sweated labour in Asia. I haven't actually bought a new shirt this century. My father died in 2001 and I snagged all his blue corporate shirts. When they had worn to rags, my FiL Pat the Salt kindly died to restock my wardrobe. I have the fashion sense of a brick, so dontgiveadamn how many buttons are on my cuffs.

For others, it matters, and/or their Penney's blouse was in rags after three washes; so new kit must be bought. Guess it keeps the economy rolling. But shame prevents sending last year's shirt to landfill, so some people feel better by donating their cast-offs to Oxfam. Oxfam cherry-picks the designer brands, prices and hangs them. They get bought by bougie students. They rest is sent to Oxfam Centraal where it is scooped into heaps with a fromt-loader and compressed into bales. These are shipped to, say, Accra, Ghana where they are auctioned off to fabric re-cyclers. But here's the thing: if the waste stream is top-sliced by Oxfam and its dogoodnik customers, there is only trash left and Ghanaian rag-pickers can't make a living so the whole shipment goes direct to Kantamanto dump. The unintended consequence of your conscientious re-cycling makes life worse for the dispossessed in West Africa. Oliver F-W's book is full of these counter-intuitive factlets. And so many acronyms PET PFAS POP PCB PAH - and that's just Ps.

I thought I was on top of waste and pollution - I used to teach water chemistry after all. But, blimey, I didn't know the half of it. Wasteland will open your eyes . . . and not in a good way. 

In a strange way, in my 'mind', ruminations on Moral Hazard reminded me of a recent interview of Alvin Roth by philosopher-physicist Sean Carroll. Roth has made a career out of looking a 'questionable' markets; and has written a book Moral Economics. One useful definition of 'questionable' in this context is cases where such-a-thing is illegal in some jurisdictions but accepted in others. You can't sell your blood plasma in Ireland or in much of Western Europe; you may only donate it. There would be a shortage of blood and blood-products in European Clinics and Hospitals except for the fact that billions of units are sold into our health systems from the USA . . . where folk can sell their own blood. Maybe we shd think about incentivizing donors here rather than begging them. The Mindscape podcasts all come with added [searchable] transcript so you don't need to listen to the whole thing. Roth was a driver in establishing Kidney transplant rings [whc bloboprev] to maximize the match among donors and dialysees.

Moral Hazard [bloboprev] occurs when The System is structured so that players can make money by taking risks but know that they can walk away if their cunning plan has unintended consequences. Olde Timey miners in the American West made holes in the landscape; abstracted gold, copper, zinc, silver, lead and then loaded up their burros and trotted off to the next prospect. Mammy Someone else would deal with the toxic desert which had been brought to the surface. In this century, executives at Irish Banks made A Lot of money geeing up the Celtic Tiger with doubtful loans . . . but, considered too big too fail, were bailed out by Mammy the Irish Govt with help from we the tax-payers.

Simpson's Gogglebox

I had an Epiphany on 6th of Jan 2026 and stopped watching YT.  60 days later, I acknowledged that by saying No to the algorithm, I'd freed up a lot more time to sit on the sofa page-turning books. Lack of YouTube doesn't affect my diet of earbooks half so much: my borrowbox coups are mostly consumed when I am out and about. I was in Tramore Library on a recent Monday morning returning a book and thought I'd browse the shelves. On my way to non-fiction (300 Social Sciences 400 Language 500 Science 600 Tech) I was surprised to see a Whole Block of shelves labelled Crime Fiction. There was more shelf-metres in that category that All of 300-699. I find that Quite Peculiar but I recognise I'm in the minority on that one.

During a brief gap in my jury-service days, I nipped down to the County Library and borrowed a couple of books. One of which was The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets (2013) by Simon Singh [rendered R]. I have name-checked Singh for kicking homeopathy; unaware of the unintended consequences [no placebo] of such righteous punching down. But generally Singh is a force for good: edutaining STEM more widely to diversify the lives of math-anxious folks and maybe making them [feel] smarter.

You're wrong if you know that Matt Groening made 800+ episodes of the Simpsons. The show's success required-allowed the hiring of a rotating roomful [nearly a gross!] of comedy writers. A Lot of them were [Harvard] college educated and their demographic leaned nerd science-guy [sex-ratio ~1F:4M. Singh ploughed through the footage and alt.tv.simpsons and interviewed the writers to winkle out the math references. A lot of them Easter Eggs which lit up the day of those who 'got' them. Getting them might require using VHS to step through a sequence frame by frame to find a subliminal nerdnik gag. The Simpsons writers were cracking jokes about Googol and Googolplex when Sergey Brin was still in High School

I was born too early for The Simpsons, by the time it launched in late 1989, we'd given up the ould telly several years earlier. But, during my YT years, I clocked enough hours to know that the cast live in Springfield, US; that Lisa is a genius and has an older brother called Bart. But I rate puzzles and Easter Eggs, [one of Singh's other works is The Code Book] and my lack of Simpsonology doesn't impinge much on my appreciation of Singh's book.

The book has several intercalated 'exams' where you can test yourself on the larfometer 

• What did 0 say to 8?
• Nice belt!
• What are the 10 kings of people in the world
• Those who understand binary and those who don't.
• Prove that a horse has an infinite number of legs
• Horses have an even number of legs: two hind legs at the back and forelegs at the front. That's a total of six legs, which an odd number of legs for a mammal. The only number which is both odd and even is infinity. Therefore horses have an infinite number of legs.
• Why do computer scientists confuse Hallowe'en and Christmas?
• Because Oct.31 = Dec.25 . . . and bin.11111 = Dec.31 

This seems the best chance I'll ever have to do Simpson's Paradox on The Blob. It forms half of the current book's Chapter 12 in which Congressional votes for the 1964 Civil Rights Act are tallied with unexpected results.

Because the Civil War is was still fresh in everyone's memory, having finished only 99 years previously, it is interesting to see how votes compared where Jim Crow hadn't run [North] and where it had [South].

Party	Northern	%	Southern	%	National	%
Democrats	145/154	94%	7/94	7%	152/248	61%
Republican	138/162	85%	0/10	0%	138/172	80%

These data show that, in percentage terms, as expected, Democrats were more in favor of civil rights than Republicans in both North (94% v 85%) and South (7% v 0%) regions BUT when the country as a whole is considered Republicans seem to be more Civil Righty. That's paradoxical, no? It hinges on several numerical diffs which are smoothed out if you consider only % of votes. 

• There are 3x more people and their representatives in the North than in the former Confederate States
• Democrats were the party of power in the South (Lincoln was a Republican)
• There is cross party lack of support for Civil Rights across the South; even the Dems there are luke warm  

One final thing to mention (which is the subject of Singh's Appendix 2) is Euler's Identity

e^πi + 1 = 0