Homo conflagrans

Someone recommended John Vaillant as a book-writing journalist, so I snagged Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World (2023) off the shelf in Wexford Town library. The inspiration of the book and about 2/3rds of its content is the Fort McMurray wildfire which swept out of the surrounding forest and destroyed about 20% of the homes and emptied the city of ~88,000 people in a matter of hours. Nobody died! but damage was estimated at $10billion. In addition ~600,000 hectares of forest and muskeg were swept by a wall of flame - that's 3 medium sized Irish counties [KK + WX + WW] or the state of Delaware or an average département de la France.

Vaillant's thesis is that the McMurray fire and the other uncontainable conflagrations of recent years are a direct consequence of galloping climate change, in particular the way we have been spewing out greenhouse gases like CO₂ and CH₄ without heed or hindrance during my lifetime. Of course, my grandfather was pottering about Co Wexford in his own car for his own convenience in the 1940s so it's not all on me. But I've driven 100x further than my ancestor and I'm not dead yet. 

So here's a thing, known to all foresters and fire-fighters, but not obvious to all thinking people until it's e x p l a i n e d. "Crossover" occurs when the relative humidity in % is less than the temperature in °C; this makes conflagration much more likely - just a spark will do. We got a dehumidifier for the kitchen last November - hilariously named R2D2 R1DH. Our whole house, not just the kitchen has 500mm rubble-in-courses external walls. The windows used to weep and the walls developed a palette of fungal colours. We achieved a lowest ever RH of 52% at tea-time on the Spring Equinox after 3 days of cloudless sunshine. tbf, I opened the window and the front door for a warm draft to get from 55% to the shown [R] 52%. It has never gotten close to 52°C in Ireland. It's going to take another bomb to set our soggy house on fire. A weather station close to the 2018 Redding Fire recorded 44°C and 7% RH!

Here's another rule of thumb: firefighters need a water supply in gallons/min equivalent to the BTUs generated by the fire. A US gallon is about 4 lt and a BTU is about 1,000 Joules. That energy is enough to raise 250ml of water by 10°C. Now before the gas-grill goes on fire check to see how much water you can dribble out of your 12mm garden hose in a minute

Then again, then again, one of the tropes in Vaillant's tale is the Lucretius Effect, a cognitive bias where the biggest [whatever] you can imagine is the biggest example you've heard about . . . and a little bit more. But the temperatures of these MegaFires haven't happened since the end of the Permian 250million years ago. When the wall of flame stormed into residential sub-divisions of FtMcM they vaporized 200sq.m. million-dollar homes in 5 minutes - one big whooomph and there's nothing left but the [reinforced concrete] walls of the basement. Because it's a boom town and everyone was making silly money demand/supply drove up the cost and drove down the standards. Even the best homes in North America are thrun up from 4x2 studs and sheet-rock with vinyl siding and tar-paper shingles on the roof. To a regular fire that-all looks like so much fuel with convenient pockets of oxygen in each room. A garage full of cars and snomobiles with full tanks && propane tanks to service the BBQ grills && several fire-arms with boxes of ammo: that's just a source of pop-off shrapnel. If the owner and their bank pays a million dollars for a big-old shanty, lots of folks along the supply chain are laughing all the way to the same bank.

In Ireland one of the scandals of the Celtic Tiger was that developers and regulators conspired to cut corners with fire-safety - failing to separate each apartment from the next. But at least the structures were /are built of bricks not tar-paper.

Back to the book. The dust jacket says Vaillant writes for Nat.Geog. New |Yorker and The Atlantic. You can tell from "Steve's wife Carrie, who is tall and slender with wavy dark hair . . ."  and the numerous similar journo tics of providing irrelevant details to establish ?empathy? The style is pacy and engaging and reminds me of Mark Kurlansky and books about Salmon and Cod as bell-wethers for dramatic change in species diversity and abundance. I'm sure Vaillant and his editors thought and fought over the structure of Fire Weather: because he wanted to tell a gripping yarn on the streets of FtMcM but also flesh out the history of climate change and (climate change denialism).

But the transition whacked me into a confusion. p224/359 ends with ". . .It was the fire's third day inside Fort McMurray". And the next chapter begins with "The Middle Ages saw an slowly dawning awareness that there was something in the air . . ." followed by Priestley this then Tyndall that and Teller the other. Much as Ireland appreciates naming Tyndall for his atmospherics, we're still on the edge of our seats waiting to see what Day Four brings in NE Alberta.

"The climate system is an angry beast and we are poking it with sticks" Wally Broeker

Maybe read the book and spend sometime adjusting the content of your GoBag to include a reflective fire blanket and some tubes of Savlon. Always remembering Lucretius: the disaster which next requires a GoBag won't be stranger than we imagine but stranger than we can imagine. 

*R1DH aka Our one de-hum. 

Hail Fellows

In Summer 2024, I was delighted to bear witness when my pal Dan Bradley was elevated to FRS. He has been doing sterling work for more than 30 years in the history of domestic animals incl humans. Almost all my science friends are a) younger and b) more 'successful' than me: so many medals, fellowships and chairs. I guess that all my older science friends are, like, dead.

Apart from Metafilter, my only opening to social media is LinkedIn, which delivers 'news' from /about my LinkPals. It's kinda terrible, the original post is fine - usually about Such-a-one completing their PhD or publishing a paper. But it's followed by a long tail of anodyne responses; regularly "Congratulations Such" or a string of emoji. A month ago, an old [younger!] binfo friend, James McInerney, posted onn LinkedIn that he'd been elected Fellow of the European Academy of Microbiology (EAM). I took him at his word [but found no online evidence of his change in status] and updated his WikiPpage to reflect his elevation. 

Then last week, James posted again to report that (EAM) had published the election of their N=95 new 2026 Fellows, "recognising scientific excellence and long-standing contributions to microbiology". 40% of them are tagged bioinformatics and/or -omics. DNA genome sequencing has given Microbiology a shot in the arm, in the same way that 3-D printing boosted Anatomy - another tired old 19thC discipline.

There are four from the People's Republic of Cork on the EAM2026 list (Gerard Clarke - John Cryan - Fergal O'Gara - Paul O'Toole) plus James McInerney of whom we treat. But also Diarmaid Hughes [R - some years ago] who was in my year in college 50 years ago. Hughes diaspora'ed himself to Uppsala in Sweden when there were no futures in Ireland during the 1980s. And never came back, except at Christmas when/where I'd often meet him over wine-and-cheese at alumnevents. We also spend the 80s away: 1979-1983 in Boston + 1983-1990 in Newcastle upon Tyne, but were fortunate to be able to return in 1990. And get a foot-hold here before the Celtic Tiger boomed and then bust and made immigration so very difficult for ordinary folk.

I posted the EAM multi-Fellow news to the Binformatics in Ireland listserv as leaven from its intermittent traffic announcing job opportunities [still usually abroad] which seems an appropriate vehicle to recognise these significant achievements and propagate the news. LinkedIn, not so much? And you may be sure that Ireland of the Partiarchs will claim McInerney and Hughes and get a proxy glow from their success despite having abandoned them for the decades when it mattered.

A glancing stream of photons.

On Thursday last week, I was crossing our lane when I was hailed by one of our many hikers. Terry Platt was doing a wee recce because one of the arrows in his quiver is guiding groups of walkers from their city stews into the wilderness of County Carlow. He was planning, on Saturday, to Summit Knockroe with a dozen or score of folk under his banner. 

"To whom should I apply for access to the neolithic art . . . and, errrm, where is it?"

I recited my script "According to the Land Registry, we own the land (and the lane on which we stand) but everyone owns the heritage. Usual countryside rules apply: don't leave gates open if you meet them closed; don't annoy the sheep; no dogs for pref, but absolutely no unleashed dogs" And with that I took him down the field to show him The Ringstone. It was quite disappointing because the sun was blasting the face of the stone making a blinding blur of the detailing.

Come Saturday, I was up betimes, ready for the third day on the trot with good sunshine forecast.  I checked my notes on the orientation of the Ringstone: 112° = ESE. Then consulted the almanac to ask 
Q. when would nicely oblique sunlight illuminate the runes to perfection?
A. That would be Now! At 08:55 on the Spring Equinox, the sun has a bearing of 118°.
Accordingly, I scrabbled up my devices and trotted through Crowe's field to strike while the photons were hot. The sheep looked up to ask "Wot, 'im again? wasn't 'e 'ere 20 minutes ago muttering to 'imself". Whatevs, I took a few snaps, picked one and emailed it for Terry to share. Because even 90 minutes later would give a much poorer show. And at this time of year, the sun sets before it gets far enough N to shine an oblique ray from the tea-time direction.

Delighted with myself. And I was able to fill in some details [Far too much TMI TMI detail, I'm sure] for Terry's walking group when they hove into view. At least one of them was on the charabanc round the holy wells gig last year. 

Later in the day, I was sitting on the stoep taking off m'boots when Martina & Dec of The Broad Arrow passed the gate and then backed up to chew the fat a bit. It turned out that the sun had been Just Right for them to pick up the Peter & Paul mark which they discovered up the hill a few years ago. Time is the key 4th dimension for getting the best out of petroglyphery

Make like a cone

More tributes to the Irish way of death last week. About four years ago a friend of ours, a bit older than me, started the process of forgetting and had been declining ever since. The trajectory was similar to that of my late lamented FiL Pat the Salt: every time they rallied it was never quite back to status quo ante the last slump. The trend was ever downwards but ziggy zaggy and unpredictable. Friend's family wanted to keep her at home, and this turned out to be possible to the very end but required A Lot of support from carers, friends and relations. In the last month, and then the last week, things took a tumble. Palliative care was triggered by the GP, and the family abroad was advised to return sooner rather than too late.

The Beloved called over on Sunday (taking my most recent batch of marzipan scones) and contributed one bedside vigil while the nuclear family caught up on sleep, messages and essential outdoor work [hens division]. TB returned with a report that their access lane was cratered: Maybe I could come along the next day to estimate how many tonnes of 804 road-stone would see it fit for end-of-life increased traffic. Obvs, we're more alert than normal to road-fails and potholes. But I did caution that, however well intentioned, visiting your own priorities and solutions on other people was not guaranteed to cause joy. The parable of My Father and the Tea-towels might be relevant.

When we arrived the next day Monday, I snapped some pics: 

. . . and, hearing a chain-saw rattling away behind the house, went to talk manly things with that part of the ménage. I airily explained that I was there pretending to be a civil engineer wrt the potholes. I am not totally incapable of reading the room and my gambit was greeted with a touch of bristle. Because, of course, their pot-holes were a known thing, indeed a tonne of 804 had been been delivered. The potholes had been filled before the Christmas, and again before Storm Chandra in Jan, but Project Pothole was at nothing until the weather dried out. Fair enough, but I did lend him my second-best mattock / azada as the optimum tool for road-works. 

Meanwhile, inside the house, end-of-life issues were riding post. The Beloved sat in for another bedside vigil while two family members went to the undertakers. I'm not sure if Team Palliative got to make even their first scoping visit because, a couple of hours after we left, The Principal left the stage. At almost exactly the same time her daughter touched down at Dublin Airport having dropped everything to fly in from England. At 10:30 that night there was a ratAtat at the door to reveal three neighbouring women. They wanted to assure the family that sandwiches (so many sandwiches) would appear the following day, the catering tea-pot would be borrowed from the village hall, extra chairs would manifest themselves . . . indeed all the necessaries which the bereaved might not have head-space or experience to take on board.

When we returned again for the wake on StPs Tuesday, the lane-lake had been drained of water and filled with gravel and the pot-holes filled! The English daughter expressed wonder and gratitude at seeing how many people had rallied to the family, bringing ham [and other] sandwiches from all over the province and/or being up to their elbows sudsing tea-cups and plates for the next round of visitors. I hastened to explain that, although it wasn't transactional, her mother had already paid it forward by her care and attention for the marginalized and the dispossessed.

Wednesday it was into town again for the humanist service of gratitude and remembrance at the pub-undertakers followed by more tea & sandwiches [other beverages available - it's a pub]. I was tasked to stand 🗼in the street to hold, for the immediate family, the two parking spots adjacent to the undertakers. They also serve who only stand and wait.

They're giving rye

Went into town last Friday forenoon to get food in for StPs weekend.  Lidl for fizzy water and block Gruyère, Aldi for toothpaste, Dunnes for fish. I don't rate Dunnes, but our Dunnes is next door to a Polski Sklep. A Polski emporium is the only place to find 100g blocks of fresh yeast and you can always be surprised by really good tomatoes or something made of cherries or cabbage. Not cherries and cabbage - that would be a bridge too weird even for me. 

I am always tempted by the array of continental bread but I am only me and I have to keep my sourdough starter frisky. So I can rarely justify a fresh bread purchase when own-self bread awaits at home.  otoh, pumpernickel is shelf-stable for half a year, so I often buy some. Last week I was presented with Two pumpernickels both alike in dignity packaging which cried out for comsumer reports. Accordingly I bought both chleb żytni pełnoziarnisty and chleb żytni pełnoziarnisty razowy and brought them home for label inspection. The difference is whole grain rye meal, water salt yeast vs whole grain rye meal, water salt barley malt extract yeast you can't really get simpler than that and it's all good.  razowy doesn't translate as 'malt extract' but rather 'one-time' [milling] or coarser grain. I have, for the moment, popped both chleby in the armageddon bunker. But _we_ shd get together sometime soon for a tasting.

I am religious about using rye-flour to nourish my starter: they say the LABs prefer it. A key part of my process is to transfer a blut of starter to the final water dosed with a a handful of whole wheat flour to e a s e their transition into a different alien challenging culture. Only later do I add strong white flour and salt and beat everything into submission. You will dance together, you will be mutually supportive and kind.

Dau.II the Foodie reports [✓✓✓] the existence of a new-to-us Georgian flat-bread the size of a medium pizza which is baked in Dublin and distributed to, at least, the Polonez chain.

Coffee and lungworms

I have an Internet parapal who fell in love with Iceland before it started to be a Sunday-paper colour-supplement destination. Not for the first time, last year, he recommended reading Halldór "Nobel 1955" Laxness. The Nobel Literature committee has put up some quite peculiar choices in the past. Winston "WWII" Churchill in 1953? Bob Dylan 2016? Four from Ireland^✞?? Why not pick a writer from a minority language?

I'm institutionalized;  I can follow recs so I hunted up the national library catalogue for the Laxness magnum opus Independent People Sjálfstætt fólk 1934/35. Well, dear reader, there is but one copy available for unaffiliated people in the whole republic. I put in a request and waited 4 months for my to turn to turn 540pp of one damn thing after the other, set ~100 years ago in deepest rural Iceland. At 225,000 words it is between "Call me Ishmael" and "and yes I said yes I will Yes." 

IP follows trials of independent sheep-farmer Guðbjartur Jónsson alias Bjartur who, in ~1900, scrapes together 20 years of savings to make the first payment on a tiny sod-house, ironically named Sumarhúsum = Summerhouses and a stretch of unforgiving tundra. By owning property [under some definitions of owning] rather than earning a shepherd's wage, he defines [and repeatedly describes] himself as one of The Independent People = equal to anyone on the island and a cut above most of them.

Bjartur and his shepherding neighbours talk as relentlessly about lungworms as Irish farmers look gloomily at the clouds anticipating hay-sopping rain. Lungworms are nematode worms such as Muellerius capillaris and Dictyocaulus filaria which travel from sheep to infected sheep causing hoose, husk, or verminous bronchitis. Nowadays farmers get atop these parasites with anthelmintics like Ivermectin. Back then the only options were prayer, woo or cull but none were notably effective when the animals had been inside, on short rations, recycling nematode eggs, all through the Winter. Ivermectin is also effective vs river-blindness . . . against Covid-19, not so much. The same Laxness shepherds, while counting coup on their number of dead ewes, drink frightening amounts of coffee.

Bjartur is so up himself with his Independence that he is appallingly casually rude to his friends-and-relations. The day after his wedding he accuses his young wife of having liaisons with other men and convinces himself that their first born daughter is not his. Nowadays, he'd get an ASD diagnosis and a script for Risperdal; in the 1900s everyone around him has to suck it up. Annie Proulx [blob] gave Independent People a puff "This funny, clever, sardonic and brilliant book . . .". And others have advised reading it as parody, in the same way as Cold Comfort Farm is a parody of loam-and-lovechild novels. 

Kolumkilli features heavily as a malevolent sprite who predates the Viking settlement of Iceland. This resonates with the historical consensus that, before Ingólfr Arnarson planted his flag, Irish monks and anchorites had scratched a living there for a long old time. Not St Colmcille, to be sure, but near enough to enter Icelandic folklore as a Black Hat.

One interesting new-to-me perspective was that WWI was a boom-time for Iceland. While the great powers were conscripting the agricultural laborers to get slaughtered in trenches, there was still a demand for mutton, wool and cod. Prices for these staples rose nicely for farmers and through them for the whole Icelandic economy. Pretty much everyone lost the run of themselves, and credit was easy. Accordingly, imported {cladding, cement, copper, corrugated-iron}fuelled a glut of McMansions across the landscape. When the boom tanked in 1920/21 lots of folk were mired in negative equity. Obvious parochial resonance with the Celtic Tiger and the Crash. And if the political Message of Independent People gets a little wearing, the narrative regularly reverts to comforting common ground: 

"It was at this point that Hrollaugur of 
Keldur turned the conversation to worms"

But what do I know. There are many other takes on Independent People at the Laxness archive 

✞Parochial Lit footnote [WB Yeats 1923 GB Shaw 1925 SB Beckett 1969 SJ Heaney 1995 only one of whom lived and died for in Ireland cf Boyle and Stokes last Friday]

Running no more

 Ronnie Delany, the fastest miler at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, died last week in the fullness of his years. Funeral mass this morning 11:00hrs in Foxrock. When I was still working in Dublin, my commute bus would go past his birthplace just across the river in Arklow. The local Chamber put up a plaque, because everyone loves a winner.

Knowing this primed me to react appropriately when I shook hands with him at at a bday party in The Institute just before Xmas 2014. Follow links in the bdayreport to see Delany run.Delany was fast, but a sports scholarship to Villanova U when he left school gave him support, training and Time to become his best self as a runner. When I met him +10 years ago, he was trolling for fit youngsters to follow him down to Villanova in their turn.

What do you do after winning Gold as a fit young chap? Deleny went on to be VP Marketing for Irish Ferries. It's a bit like Tony "Fleetfoot" O'Reilly who was A God on the rugger pitch and went on to become a multi-millionaire as CEO of Beanz Meanz Heinz. Not all sporty champs are able to parlay their ambition and success from one field to another. RIP - rest in plimsoles. And he made the front page of Wikipedia:

 

They're giving rain

. . . and I'm giving out [below]
For more than ten years, Wexford Science Café has been running on the 3rd Tuesday of the Month; except when it's not. Third Tuesday is Patrick's Day this March, so the date was shifted forw a week . . . and the guest speakers were announced as MetÉireann veterans Evelyn Cusack and Séamus Walsh. They wrote They Say It Might Rain TSIMR published by Gill last year which is a breezy, profusely illustrated, book about the history of Irish Weather and its prediction. I snagged a copy off the shelf in Tramore library and hoovered through it in  prep for their WxScCaff perf. I particularly like including a number of weather related An Post stamp pictures.

I am a MetÉireann fan, I chekkitout their rainfall every day, sometimes several times a day and I follow incommming storms [so many storms Babet Chandra Darwinday Éowyn Frank] as I touch up my chain-saw to process the damage. This book is defo my jam, and a good bit was new to me. The loss of the Henri IV in the Crimean Storm of 1854. The Royal Charter Storm of 1859. That Éowyn (2025) is running Oíche na Gaoithe Móire (1839) close for being the biggest storm since records began.The [massive, shared] MetÉireann weather computer is located in . . . Iceland. I hope because they have supercheap hydro-power there. I have touched the Finnish equivalent in Espoo; and it is also massive.

The book is grand, and probably fit for parochial purpose: serving the domestic market.  Hopefully inspiring some [Irish] youngsters to embrace meteorology. But I have gripes. In 2017, Gill also published Luke O'Neill's popular science book Humanology; A Scientist's Guide to Our Amazing Existence (2018) which I took apart in 2019.

Like too many Irish books TSIMR runs to chauvinism (unreasonable belief in the superiority or dominance of one's own group or people).  Puffing up any player in the tale who happens to be Irish as if their contributions to science reflect well on the current inhabitants of the island. Cusack, Walsh and Gill claim George "Navier-Stokes Eqn" Stokes (1819-1902) because he was born in Sligo; and "our own" Robert "Boyle's Law" Boyle (1627-1691) because he was born in Waterford. But these prophets were without honour in their own country at the time and upstakes to seek a fortune where their talents were recognised and valued. And "Of course, the weather is all about temperatures and pressure, so Boyle is the dude" is a particularly charmless way of referring to The Great Man and his work. Maybe it is an attempt, using the supposed argot of youth, to make the book, or Boyle, more accessible to teens. The with-no-shame answer for the woeful lack of support for Irish science through the whole of the 19thC & 20thC until Science Foundation Ireland in ~2000AD is to play the MOPE card and blame the Brits.

In 2022, my pal Denis alerted me to a recent pre-print which cast side-eye at the hottest ever in Ireland record temperature 33.3°C observed at Kilkenny Castle on Sun 26 June 1887. That paper. " Given that Ireland is now the only country in Europe to have a national heat record that was set in the 19th century, a reassessment of the verity of this record is both timely and valuable" ie. that 1887 measurement is so extra-ordinary as to require extra-ordinary standards of evidence [Bloboprev Arsenic] but [autoquote] pretty much everyone, including Met Éireann, trots it out with neither sanity-check nor health-warning. Add TSIMR to the list of those whose QC goes squidgy when anything Irish is exceptional. Working hypothesis, one of the KK Castle gardeners popped the thermometer in his tea just before measurement time - for a jape, like.

If I read The Blob, rather than just writing it, I'm sure I'd be annoyed by the tendency to drop clever-clogs I-know-this-thing anecdotes, asides and additions. A good copy editor would ruthlessly hack this crud from the final draft because it impedes the flow and adds nothing but distraction for the reader. My current hypothesis is that Gill copy editors add oxygen-sucking asides to the (?slightly boring, pedantic, but correct?) mss submitted by scientists . . . to make it more accessible. I'll just give one example. p.120 "Similarly the southern lights are aurora australis, from the Graeco-Roman south wind god, Auster. (Terra Australis was the name given in 1570 to the proposed 'southern land' now known as Australia)" It might be more respectful to give some credit/space to the 13 y.o. reader to have their own aha! moment about the etymology.

And sometimes these didactic asides are just .  plain . wrong. p.135 "Iceberg means 'ice mountain' in Danish Dutch Swedish and German". In none of those languages is the statement true: Eisberg DE; isbjerg DK; ijsberg NL; isberg SE; . . . also for completeness ísjaki IS; isfjell NO nynorsk; isberg NO bokmål. Weirdly iceberg means iceberg in FR ES PT IT. Also jäävuori FI cnoc oighir IE. harrumph!

And the WexSciCaf gig?  They announced that the perf would run for 45 mins, leaving 15 minutes for questions. It ran over this wishful thunk by 20 minutes. That stuff really cranks my gears. When they were working to the second presenting the weather for RTE it never happened. Broadcasting abhors a silence, and they were able then, at zero notice, to e x t e n d their slot if the news presenter's toupé fell off OR get what needed saying in less time because The Pope had talked too much immediately prior. Some [far too much] of that time over-run was taken up making a laughing stock of the Infant of Prague. Back in the day, statues of the IoP would be left out in the garden to stay the rain on a wedding day. There were plenty of people in the room whose parents (or who themselves) had been party to this widespread Irish practice. Gratuitously slagging them off is unnecessary and exclusionary. Running over time is also disrespectful. But at least in this case it spared everyone from listening to me get fighty.

Bonus. Because we're all Olds, before kick-off I got chatting to the couple next to me. They turned out to be Frank & Síofra Gallagher, long time stalwarts of Tinahely Courthouse Arts Centre. Which was nice because I got to thank them for the many shows, films and events we attended with or without The Daus back in the day. I mind the night in March 2013 when we drove through fallen branches and floods to see Jiro Dreams of Sushi at Tinahely.  

wet wet wet

Last week I was recalling my adventures on [someone else's] rural laneways and on Monday riffing on potholes. Storm Chandra (26/27 Jan 2026) was just the low-point of high-water for us this really soggy late Winter. For once, peculiarities in the jet-stream and push-back from anti-cyclones meant that Ireland's Ancient East has been much more rain-sodden than The West. On average Galway West gets about twice the rainfall compared to Dublin Central. The MetEireann yellow rainfall warning was for Monday 27Jan, but it was dry on the Saturday, so I trudged uphill to clean out the drains in anticipation. But clearly not enough because, while I sat out Sunday in the warm and dry, steady rain accumulated on the hill [already saturated from a month of every day some ppt] and washed out A Lot of the 100 tonnes of gravel we spread for walkers in 2022. " And nobody NOBODY would listen to me about fixing the drains before dressing the surface!" This time last year I intercepted 200kg of this downhill travelling gravel before it piled up on the county road 300m downhill. That was largely consumed for infrastructure during the installation of our solar array which went live in April 2025.

Same again with Chandra. My uphill gravel catcher filled to brimming and the overspill trundled downhill to block the drain at the county road spilling water and debris across the surface. Prime pothole conditions esp coupled with imbeciles who plough through puddles at 60km/h like it was a fairground splashworld ride. Two never-seen-this-before consequences of the never-ending wet:

1. On Mon 28 Jan the electric RCD [residual current detector] tripped OFF. With some advice from Roy the Plumber I a) unplugged everything then b) tripped off all the circuits and brought them back live one-a-time. That isolated the problem to the "Shed" circuit which was reasonably good news: none of the appliances were tripping, the broadband was working. But, the "Shed" circuit services a) the water pump and b) the freezer. So I scared up a couple of extension cords plugged them into sockets in  the nearest upstairs bedroom and looped them down the yard and in through the shed velux. Bingo and like fiat aqua. 
2. 
   Springs sprung in the lane where they never sprong before [as R] the warning flag is when the yellow clay (a compacted granite and quartz sand / sandstone) starts to blurf up through the road bed. and gravel. If you press these seeps with your boot it feels punky and a little bouncy like a quaking bog. The one shown was new but only 1 sq.m. in extent. Fortunately quickly remediated with a bucket full of fist-sized stones heeled into the soft bits. But not before our postie had driven through the surface failure at speed to start it weeping.
   Further down the lane where it narrows to 2.5m another new spring developed in the drain-side wheel-rut that was 10m long. I could not find that much stone easily and my bucket isn't strong enough.

I called our neighbourly friend John the Digger for a consult. He was optimistic - "the lane will dry out as Winter ebbs" and also cautious about starting work while the problem was still active. "Of course, if you can't drive up to your house, I can come and do something drastic . . . two Saturdays from now". Accordingly we parked the car ½km away in another neighbour's yard and installed a postbox on a stick at the bottom of the lane. I also marked the extent of the long weep with blue tags on the adjacent fence.

And sure enough, the long weep dried out enough for traffic about 2 weeks later. It's exercise to trot 300m down the lane to check the post but even the old need exercise. And it spares the grass verges near the house from being wet-ploughed several times a week by postie in the current version of enormous electric delivery van. It's carbon footprint might be low but its footprint footprint is extensive.

And we found Shane the Sparks through a strong rec by another neighbour. He came 4 weeks after the RCD flipped OFF [and two weeks after I'd tried making it go again] it flipped-and-stayed ON. Isn't it always the way? But while he was still within his call-out window, he did some investigation and disconnected the shed-circuit to the shed with the sketchiest roof. Now we know which wire goes to each of three sheds and we have both well-pump and freezer back on the mains. Later, Shane will come back to tidy the outside wiring and give each part its own RCD rather than one RCD-to-rule-them-all at the main fuse board for the steading. As I said to Shane "This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship"

The 4th power

. . . of the axle weight is proportional to damage inflicted on the road surface.

In the early 90s, when I was working in Trinity College Dublin, we took the 3rd year students on a 2 night field trip down the country. Available car-owning adults would pile 3-4 students into cars and we'd roar along country lanes visiting breweries, mushroom factories, plant-breeding centres and stud farms. Anything and anywhere that could spell genetics. Nobody died, although drink was taken when offered. None of the drivers looked at the small print of their insurance to see whether it covered carrying passengers during the course of work. One year the Professor of Human Genetics had a vital funding meeting in The Office and said he'd catch up with us later. We arrived at our final destination after dark and sloped off the pub. The Prof didn't catch up until almost closing time. Travelling at speed in the gloaming he had struck a pot-hole that bent his wheel out of shape and he couldn't manage more than 50km/h all the way back to town at the end of the field trip.

The Grape [bloboprevs] with its fancy alloy wheels, was particularly delicate w.r.t. potholes and the tires cost 3x more than those attached to my 'umble little Yaris. 

Brainstorm episodes pop up on the RTE front page. The headline people came up with Where will the cash come from to fix the latest crop of Irish potholes? for a wide ranging pothole rabbithole by Paul "Strategic Procurement and Supply Management" Davis of DCU. It's not just about the money, although obvs fixing this perennial political football is. It's topical because Storm Chandra [26/27 Jan 26] whacked out A Lot of minor roads across Leinster and €60m is required for ASAP fixing.I like Paul Davis's ironic style ". . . a reminder that drainage, sub‑base saturation and deferred maintenance are not abstract concepts. They are what you feel through the steering wheel at 30 km/h while hoping your tyre survives the morning"

My 4th Power headline riffs on a linked rhetorical 8min piece to mic from April 2025 could we tax 'supersized' cars to fix potholes? We currently road-tax private cars by CO₂ emissions [in g/km]  from €120 - €2,400 a year. €120 for eVs as if they have zero emissions - although we have  carbon belching power-stations contributing to the ESB grid. where almost all of the >100MW stations are burning Kinsale gas. The state also cuts wheeled megaGas guzzlers some slack by making every car over 225g/km pay 'only' €2,400. Buses tractors hearses & trucks pay at a different [much lower rate] rate.

HGVs are a problem wrt potholes which I've Blobbed before as doing [4th power effect] up to 60,000x as much damage as our humble Yaris.You know this: he crappiest road surfaces are often quite local and associated with the farmsteads with biggest sheds [and by implication the biggest tractors]. I have two good pals who, through no fault of their own, were born in continental NW Europe. Every time, I go driving with them, they tsk tsk as we rattle over a road covered in mud and shite and say that where they came from, farmers are obliged to clean their lumpy detritus off the public road. 

Paul Davis gives some interesting insider info about potholes and water. Surface water maximises the power of passing wheels to carry way bit of the road. You know this: potholes blossom on sharp inside corners unless scrupulous attention is paid to prevent puddles where all tires cut the corner. That sort of drainage can often be maintained with a shovel and was before we started railing against the state to make everything better because we pay taxes.

But schlubbstrukture [= water in the sub-base] is more damaging and harder to fix. When the sub-base is saturated, tires striking even a minor deformity at the surface propagate a shock wave through the foundation that can eventually lead to a sinkhole [Waterwolf prev]. It is waaay easier and cheaper to fix roads pro-actively on schedule in the Summer. Taxing by axle-weight is clearly too frightening a nettle to grasp not least because eVs [the current chimaera for making everything better] are designed with an enormous heavy Li-battery aboard. It's not easy to sort out these competing desiderata, but sending a gang of council workers out in scut-truck half filled with tarmac and shovels should not be part of the solution.

Because we love each other very much MeFi had a Pothole thread over the w/e.  

Sweepings, March 2026

I stopped compiling a Sunday Links Miscellany a year+ ago. Most of the links were me filtering the YouTube algorithm to you which was quite unsatisfying for all concerned. Me and YT are having a trial separation since Epiphany this year, so I get to read a) more books b) more text content. I have accumulated a few of these links but can't think of 100 coherent words to say in addition. Might be interesting to you. But lookit [R] beans, pot-planted 19Feb26, are Up

• Bud Cord is dead. For some people Harold and Maude is the same as Withnail & I is for me
• Cats in medieval mss 
• Camelccinos! Milking invasive alien camels instead of shooting them from choppers
• Cartography: nobody made a million making maps
• Dogs continue to kill sheep in modern Ireland  
• 40 days at sea row row row the boat
• Easter Eggs Crayola RGB Apple
• wHo knew tHat an H can be upside down ?
• Living vertically in A'dam 
• Making sense of manuscripts amid the typos 
• Lord Kelvin wrong! Wright bros right 
• Surviving a stroke 

Off piste

Early on The Blob would insert Amazon or Amazon-affiliate links next to books I was recommending. Often sharing the delight that such a book was available for $0.01 . . . + $3.95 postage and packing. Even at 4 bucks delivered to my door, it seemed a good deal. Later, schooled by my family and para-social pals, I made a decided about-face and refused to have any dealings At All with the Amazon BezoSphere. It is all white hat vs black hat with me.

Many will express Schadenfreude when Amazon shits-the-bed, takes a pounding or is made to look stupid. Metafilter was delirah [along with BBC, Guardian, NYT, MSN, Reddit] when a sub-contractor driving an Amazon-liveried van followed their GPS into the sea writing it off when the tide came in. Icing on the cake was the news that the driver, on their third day in the job, phoned their supervisor and was instructed to Obey the GPS which would know better than any mere driver. The Broomway, which had mis-led the GPS, is a medieval trackway across tidal mudflats in Essex. It didn't take long for MetaFilter to veer judgmental:

clearly reveals the supervisor as an idiot, but lacking the gumption to force a GPS reroute and tell the supervisor to go fuck themself makes the driver a worse one.
Which was a little bit triggering for me:

Ouch, That's a bit harsh. When I was ~19, I had a job driving an Amazon-like van around rural Devon delivering books to primary schools, using a 1:200,000 scale map with the targets marked as pink blobs.
One afternoon, I set off down a lane which pointed in the right direction. But the median grass got longer and longer until the lane terminated at a farm gate. My available gumption concluded that it would be easier to turn round in the field than reverse for 3or4 km. After a couple of swings at that, each one further down hill, I left the van and trudged across the valley towards a distant farmstead. Kindly farmer looked back at my attempts to plough pasture and took me back there in his tractor, with which he extracted the van pointing in the right direction. It all seemed normal adulting at the time, my toes are curling now. 

That was the second job in my gap year after leaving school. Head office wrote letters to school principals to expect me during one week to deliver the samples; returning to collect the box a week later. It was The Best fun. They reckoned, in consultation with local sales reps, that 20 drops a day was an achievable target. I found out that 40 drops a day was possible (unless, like, doing the ploughing); which gave me half a week to drive my bus around Dartmoor and the Devon coast on someone else's nickel. I am amazed at the luck and Can Do of my 19 y.o. self: I'm less bouncy, not to say immortal, now.

NotAmazon Independents who deliver the goods:

• kennys.ie for books delivered Free to Ireland; 
• uk.bookshop.org for books to England: 
• lenehans.ie/ for any non-book stuff 

Schrödinger's dogs

Like (almost all) sports, I participate in dog-sled racing from my sofa. As a child, I could be in the fastest three or four over 100yd [91m] sprint or 80yd [73m] over hurdles and could complete a 440yd [400m = 2 furlongs = 20 chains] without dying. But I was so out of puff for the half mile [880yd], that I'd have to walk for a bit halfway through to recover some wind. Last time I used a peak-flow meter, the doc shook it and his own head in disbelief at home low was the declared value. But it's not abut me it's about dogs and The Blob has flagged the Iditarod several times and even crunched some dog data.

Accordingly, when MeFi recommended Winterdance: The Fine Madness of Running the Iditarod [1994] by Gary Paulsen, I made a note-to-self. Just after New Year, I went to Libraries Ireland to discover that there was but one copy among all the public libraries of Ireland [Athlone, Co Westmeath -- 798.8 -- Compactor Available], I put in a reservation and settled down to wait. My patience has limits and some 7 weeks later, I phoned Athlone to see what gives? 

• Hello Athlone Library, how may I help?
• I reserved a book at the beginning of January, and wondered if "Compactor" meant crushed?
• Oh sorry, we were closed for renovations in October and only got back last week; we haven't processed our backlog yet. The Compactor is the moveable archive shelving we have in the basement for storing little used books. What's is the Title? I can go look later.
• Thanks for the explanation; this is not urgent, but I'd like to read the book sometime. 

Less than an hour later

• Hello Bob, this is Athlone Library, I went down to look for your book and it doesn't appear to be on the shelf. It could be anywhere or gone forever. I even asked another Librarian to look.
• Jings, you had to ask another librarian to find you after you got lost in the stacks?
• Oh no [silly] one of my colleagues double checked to see if that book was hidden in plain sight.
• Dang, well thanks anyway and thanks for giving me closure so quickly . . . and maybe amend your records??

Dang indeed. There is a copy in Trinity College Dublin, and as an external / alumnus reader I could have it fetched out of the stacks to read on the premises. And Kennys.ie have copies for €12 but I am still being all virtuous about not buying books. And when I looked at my Library account the following day, Winterdance had, like Trotsky being airbrushed from Stalin's group photos, been expunged from the record as if it had never been there.

And WTF the title? Schrödinger's [Dublin, 1943, prev] cat is a Gedankenexperiment to illustrate uncertainty about the location and existence of sub-atomic particles. We can't be certain that the cat-in-a-box is alive or dead until somebody opens the hatch (goes down to the basement) to check.

Not too late the phalarope

We got back waaaay past my bedtime from the CCEN - Wetlands film night. Having bugged out before the Q&A finished because one of the panel took three whole minutes . to . say . that . was . his .  last . point. As we left, another handful of politer folks fled in our wake. But I was awake and full of porridge the following morning for a 09:30 Teagasc ConnectEd webinar about integrating wetlands into viable Irish agriculture. I did not feel obliged to watch the screen wet to the knees or dripping frogspawn onto the sofa. The guest speaker was Owen Murphy who is senior project manager with Breeding Waders European Innovation Partnership EIP. A €25 million, 5 year nationwide project, monied by the EU through National Parks and Wildlife Service NPWS and the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine DAFM 

Their aim is to "secure existing Breeding Wader populations and support population recovery through landscape management and policy development". Given that the talk was hosted by the Ag advisory service and expecting an audience of farmers, this was the key thread thpugh the slides. Although Murphy's love of birds, especially the birds of the Shannon callows of his youth, lit up his face as he ran through his show-and-tell. I'm guessing he'd get a more receptive audience from Birdwatch Ireland than farmers whose bird-knowledge might not run to species by GISS. 

• Dramatis personnae
• curlew crotach Numenius arqata
• lapwing pilibín Vanellus vanellus
• redshank codeargán Tringa totanus
• sandpiper goba dán Actitis hypoleucos
• oystercatcher roilleach Haematopus ostralegus
• dunlin breacóg Calidris alpina
• golden plover feadóg bhuí Pluvialis apricaria
• ringed plover feadóg chladaigh Charadrius hiaticula 
• snipe naocach Gallinago gallinago
• phalarope falaróp gobchaoi Phalaropus lobatus

But take a holistic view. Making things easier / safer for lapwing ups the quality of life of other co-nesting wader species. Not least because lapwing are fiesty and will see off a magpie. And changing the drainage landscape or the mowing regime for dunlin will benefit grasses other than perennial ryegrass as well as orchids, butterflies, earthworms and the microbiome which underpins the whole teetering tower of diversity

What I liked A Lot About the Breeding Waders Project was its pragmatic acknowledgment of where we are now, 50 years after many Irish bird species started taking a nose dive as a consequence of changed, changed utterly, agricultural practice. Even as late as 1966, most livestock farmers were hoping to win the hay in  late June, weeks after most of the ground-nesting birds had hatched, fed and fledged their young. And although scything a hay-field was a thing of the past, puttering round the field reaping with MF 135 tractor gave lingering adults a fighting chance of escaping the blades. Although the coming of silage and wrapping cut grass in plastic rather than hoping for 3-4 days of sunshine between June and September did not automatically change the timing - but it did open the possibility of cutting earlier and maybe twice. Even if you cut early only some years, the cumulative effect has been catastrophic for birds and hares.

How pragmatic? Saving the corncrake Crex crex in Wexford Leinster -that bus has gone in our current timeline. But this distinctive creature is hanging on by its toenails in Donegal and so money, time and resources directed thither won't be an obvious bust. Same for your favorite species of wader: look at the distribution data through time and space and make evidence-based decisions about who shall be saved. How realistic? One sub-project is training 'nest protection agents': IF each NPA is given 2,000 ha., some night-vision bins and a .22 rifle THEN they have a chance to tilt the balance away from mink Mustela neovison; fox Vulpes vulpes; hoodies Corvus cornix; magpies Pica pica; in favour of ground nesting waders. Allocate 1 NPA to 4,000 ha and you're at nothing.

Another intervention is headstarting. Dunlin Calidris alpina are globally abundant, if declining, but down to 30 breeding pairs in Ireland. In normal times, they live ~5 years and have a typical clutch of ~4 eggs. At steady state, 18 of these 20 possibles are destined to die with 2 surviving to replace the parents. Stochastic blips or one terrible wet Spring could call time on the species on this island. Headstarting is a cunning plan: take a tuthree clutches of eggs from somewhere marginal, whisk them off to Fota Wildlife Park, hatch and fledge them in a mink-free zone then reintroduce the young adults to a super-favorable habitat where they might double the dunlin audience.

But here's the thing: if you incentivize bird-favoring Ag practice at so much per hectare it may become a minimal engagement box-ticking [✓] exercise. Thus to get the wader subsidy you may have to keep stocking density on the designated area to >1 livestock unit / ha. from March through May. But if The Man explains why these are the specs, the committed farmer might graze those fields hard up until March to freshen up and diversify the sward for breeding season: making the environment richer and safer for the chicks. Payback: the birds convert insect protein into 'free' nitrogen-rich guano!

The book Too Late the Phalarope is a tragedy from apartheid South Africa written by Alan Paton. Let us hope it's not Not too late the phalarope on the callows and marshes of Ireland.