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.  

Car Ha Ha Ha Hire

This Summer, on so many axes, I've been hatching from the cocoon of corona-mediated sofa comfort.  Went flying and speaking French after a gap of five years in June. Rented a car in foreign two weeks ago. I've had rather a lot to say about car hire in the past. The general practice at the rental desk is to require A Lot of explanation about the extent of the customer's liability for damage to the paint-work and alloy wheels and very little about the added features on modern cars. It kind of ruins the holiday worrying that the car will get scrorched by a 20 year-old [in a] Ford Fiesta while you're having dinner at a restaurant.

We rented a car in Ireland for a few days last September to facilitate the transition from the dying Citroën Picasso aka The Grape to a new-to-us Toyota Yaris. The hire-car was a head-ache: the previous renter had set up but not cancelled a relationship with a Road Toll company that land us with charges; concerning 'failure' lights appeared on the dashboard just as The Beloved was embarked on a trip to Dublin. That trip was therefore cancelled. otoh Enterprise Car Hire bent over backwards to comp us for our troubles and sort out the problems.

That's not a very good reason to choose to rent from Enterprise in England two weeks ago but that's what I did. We were two hours delayed by Aer Lingus hassles at DUB airport but not in a tearing hurry when we landed at BRS Bristol. So we suffered through their weird obsession with dunts and scratches and £1,700 liability for such damage [and £1,700 for damage on the other side of the car!]. rather than getting cross. I didn't get really cross when the under-employed Enterprise Chap at the next desk started in about how cool our Ford Puma was. But I did invite him to "SHUT UP", so I could concentrate on the CDW excess.

Despite having an extra hand larking about, nobody from Enterprise troubled to explain how to open the petrol cap on that particular car. I've been caught on that before as well as not finding how to select reverse gear. Youngsters in the car trade know all about the latest bells and whistles and so assume [Curse of Knowledge] that An Old like me will too. Lucky I had two 30-somethings in my party to handle the SatNav, the Bluetooth and the AirCon, eh? 

You have to wonder at the adolescent mind of car designers. 

• Did I say we rented a Puma? I did [and see R]. When the car is activated by the unlock button on the fob, a light from each wing-mirror projects a pouncing puma onto the pavement beside the car. 
• More useful in theory is a bing-bong alert and a light which appeared telling us that The Driver is Sleepy, rest soon. Followed 10 minutes later by The Driver is really Sleepy, rest Now. 
• Ditto for the disconcerting periodic wobble in the steering. That is not the wheels are out of alignment and about to fall off but the lane assist feature which eases the car away from grassy verges. This can be disabled IF you know it's called the Lane Assist feature and have time to read the online onboard manual.

Enterprise customer service called me on the phone the day after we got home to re-assure me that my tab had been closed and the £200 credit card lien had been refunded. That's pretty good service. Less so the barrage of txts and emails the system sends out including "Hi Bob, please confirm your existing details or modify them to add new information for your upcoming rental return." Go away with that! 

20 shades of grape

Did I say that Dau.II was down home and up hill? I did. We went up beyond The Fork the same evening for to see the Sunset - which had been spectacular the night before when she came down from Dublin. The sunset was scheduled for 21:17. But that's when both observer and horizon are at sea-level: we were quite a bit higher than the Castlecomer plateau behind which the sun e v e n t u a l l y dipped until the last bright dot winked out. By which time it was well past 21:20. Had I a nautical chronometer and/or a sextant, I could have calculated the height difference from the time. But I didn't so I couldn't.

Between yomps, Dau.II rolled up her sleeves and leaned into the family freezer which has a tendency to take things in rather than spit them out. A couple of years back, when she was billeted with us, she;d gone with her mother to Malone Fruit Farms and purchased a variety of soft fruit. We also had two years of meagre damson harvest from a sad old leggy Prunus domestica which stands on one of our ditches. And some own self picked bramble blackberries Rubus spp. Four hours of stirring over a hot stove resulted in:

Inventory: 5x blackcurrant curd; 10x black&loganberry; 2x cranberry, clove and anise for Xmas; 8x damson. Well done us. At a cursory glance they all look essentially the same: variations of purple. But every batch is different and every batch is good. Man cannot live by marmalade alone!

Come teatime, I made a batch of scones to act as tasting vehicles: each of the jam options sandwiched between butter and whipped cream à la Devon Cream Tea. [discrete burp] Must do quality control, after all.

Dobré ráno Marek

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

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

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

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

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

The Work of Human Hands

[R.C.] Benedíctus es, Dómine, Deus univérsi, quia de tua largitáte accépimus vinum, quod tibi offérimus, fructum vitis et óperis mánuum hóminum . . . [CofE] Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation: through your goodness we have this wine to set before you, fruit of the vine and work of human hands.

We've been down in Tramore for the week, minding my venerable FiL, Pat The Salt. He'll be 99 - and I don't mean the ice-cream - at the beginning of June; and is getting increasingly frail. At one stage even, the priest came, but the trajectory is still bouncing up and down. Accordingly, a number of his friends, relations, previous carers and neighbours have been in to visit. It's been fine mulling over the past and having inconsequential disagreements about the timeline of distant events. One of his old pals (not that old! = my age) came out from town on the bus. He's quite shook himself [f*&% Parkinson's!] and I gave him a lift home in The Grape. As old buffers do, we fell to chatting about what three-score-and-ten even means. Whatever about us being dots in the immensity of the universe [his trope], I reflected on the immensity of human achievement, exemplified by the construction of ocean liners a million times larger than any of the engineers and rivetters who made them . . . the work of human hands.

The next day, I woke up early to prepare The Blob . . . coursing over the Interweb for copy. Which is my contribution to The Work of Human Hands and was presented with a stunning picture of Castel del Monte an octagonal castle in Apulia. It's a UNESCO World Heritage Site, originally built 800 years ago and carefully restored by the Italian government in the 20thC. The eight octagonal towers at each corner are 3m = 10ft in diameter so, as castles go, this one is kinda cosy. You could imagine building it yourself - so long as you had a clever stonemason, 100 pals and some sort of crane to lift the blocks . . . and 20 years. You may be sure that Federico II, The Money commissioning Holy Roman Emperor didn't get off his horse to help in the construction. Unlike a lot of medieval building projects, Castel de Monte is all of a piece rather than an accretion of cunning plans and clever ideas for improvement. One reason for that is that the castle really didn't get a lot of use being more in the nature of a vanity project to show what emperors can do.

It turns out that the red soil in the neighbourhood was caused by the metabolic presence of Streptomyces peucetius a species of Actinomycetota = Actinobacteria - not to be confused with Ascomycetes one of two major sub-divisions of Fungi. Streptomyces are found everywhere - they are responsible for the smell of damp soil after rain - and each one has to fight its corner in a busy competitive microscopic world. Rather than spears or cruise missiles, microbes tend to use an array of biochemical assault weapons - chemicals that will do a number on the replication of competing species. Anything will do, so long as it unlevels the playing field for rivals. In the 1950s Italian scientists from Farmitalia discovered that Streptomyces peucetius isolated near Fred's Chateau produced an anti-cancer drug which they called Daunorubicin.  We've been at dirt-derived Streptomyces cures before with Eleftheria terrae in Co. Fermanagh.

Farmitalia were actively looking for biologically active compounds and Daunorubicin turned out to be a potent knocker-on-the-head of rapidly growing cancer cells from mice. It's the topo-isomerase innit? In order to grow, cells need to replicate their DNA and that requires unravelling a l o o o o n g helical string. Any beachcomber will tell you that unravelling rope only moves the tangle along. Topo-isomerase allows controlled breaks in the DNA strands to relieve this tangle-tension. Daunorubicin is an inhibitor of topo-isomerase and so replication grind to a halt. No replication in the competition gives Streptomyces peucetius the edge. Farmitalia mobilised this effect and started to market Daunorubicin in the 1960s as a therapeutic against lymphoma and leukaemia. By 1967, however, the side-effects (fatal cardiac toxicity etc.) started to pile up and researchers dug up (literally) a related compound Doxorubicin which did less damage to the heart while still being effective against a wider range of cancers. Big Pharma doesn't do this sort of blue skies soil-grubbing anymore, the ROI [return on investment] doesn't satisfy the shareholders. Odd that the build unit in organic chemistry is so often hexagonal [thanks Kathleen Lonsdale!] while big boy builders prefer things square or, on Sundays, octagonal.

The Work of Human Hands doesn't have to be Big to be impressive /useful. 

Because we love each other very much y coincidence, yesterday Dau.I sent me a Postcard with Stieglitz' The Hand of Man on the picture side. It's another take on this theme.

Scenic Routes

Did I mention being Grand Marshal of the Scullogue Gap last weekend? I did. The night before, I threw together a steward's pack incuding a  HiViz  jacket. Imagine my mortification when I arrived en poste to find I had snagged a  HiViz  bolero [R] from the coat-rack. I'd been dancing at the same cross-roads 5 years previous when I had to make my own signs, this time signage was a lot more professional because of sponsorship by Aptus the broadband people. We all have a tendency to big up our contributions to any common venture but my station was key because it was where the shorter route-options [50km and 80km] turned for home while the 100km and 140km hard-chaws headed for the full circuit of Mt Leinster.

It was a brilliant sunny day with just enough chill on the breeze to prevent overheating - sunscreen defo advisable. I got to see a poor bloody buzzard Buteo buteo being hunted off the premises by a pair of crows Corvus spp. They say that 360 people had registered for the Blackstairs Cycling Challenge and it seems that €17,100 has been raised for the cause. You'd think that everyone would be happy, but I heard two separate tales of angry car-drivers taking the trouble to roll down their windows and curse at the cyclists for getting in my !&*%ing way, can't you proles see I have an Audi? which really helps people who might be a bit wobbly in the saddle. I was contracted to Be There from 10:30 to 12:30 for the anxious [nobody needed my spanners, tire-pump or blister plasters] because the signs were many, large and self-explanatory. But a really enthusiastic volunteer swung by on the dot of 12:30 and scooped all the signs into the back of his van. I was asked to hang on for a bit because there were known stragglers who by definition were less fit and more anxious. It would be a propaganda fail if such people were to miss 'my' crucial turn for home and get lost in the wilds of Wexford.

It was thus 13:30 before I Escape!ed and headed off for Costa na Déise. I was in a bit of a rush because family were >!surprise!< over from England. But less than 5km into my journey South, I got caught behind three [3] elderly but spruced up tractors. I hung loose reckoning they could be over-taken at the Ballinlug Long Straight. But when we finally reached this zoooomportunity, the long straight was old red tractors as far as the eye could see. I did a U-eee and nosed along the Scenic Route through Askinvillar Rathduff Ballygibbon Ballindoney Balligalvert Templeludigan and back to the known path at Ballywilliam. I've never been to or through Templeludigan (St Joachim's church! 1909 National School! ball-alley!) before, so [✓] to that.

Had a wonderful time with the family in Trá Mhór, including some care-and-attention for Pat the Salt as he lurches towards his 99th birthday. We came away at 15:50 on the Monday - I R Retire, so can go home when it suits. I had been apprised by my pal Russ that Belview Port is a designated landing point for 80m wind-turbine blades. In February, he suggested I look out for changes to roundabouts in the area to allow these monsters to traverse a national road network originally designed for the ass-and-cart. I had also noted the flashing signs  Luffany works 22/04 to 26/04 expect delays . How and ever, we found ourselves joining a 3km tail-back on the N25 Waterford Ring-Road. Of all the ways to approach Luffany at the N end of said Ring-Road, this is the worst because there is an unsurmountable median strip and no turn offs to winkly side-roads. We endured the stop-go car park in a fug of diesel for an hour but at least The Grape didn't boil over and it wasn't hosing rain. We're heading South again today . . . via Thomastown, Co Kilkenny, another Scenic Route. But not so Scenic as the back-road from New Ross to Waterford by Glenmore and Slieverue [R with more tractors].

The ties that bind

Nope: not The Boss. After 7½ years of working for/ at/ with/ The Institute (and giving it socks) I took retirement in October 2020. Like all my going-gone colleagues, I was quite mercenary about this. We-all retired on 2nd October, at the most inconvenient time to make staff change-over, because all public servants got a 2% pay-rise on 1st October. It was Full-on Coronarama, so there was no formal goodbye; for which I was thankful. Then last Summer, my/our Department rented a room in town and stood us a dinner, a wee accolade and a weird glass ornament. 

But The Institute wasn't done! And even larger group of retirees was given lunch just before Christmas 2023. To accommodate the logistics of all these people, still-in-harness colleagues were reduced to N = 2 per department and speeches were stop-watched. It was short notice and I think they were grateful when I refused the invite and had a 'umble cheese n pickle sandwich instead. As I suspected a month ago, I could not thus avoid getting a glass vase. It arrived here at home, all parcelled up, the day after Storm Jocelyn blew through. The vase was hand-blown at Jerpoint Glass [L]. Me, I would have preferred a different design; but I'm not gonna use it, so I don't really have skin in the game. otoh, the colour does rather complement The Grape, The Beloved's Citroën Picasso. The design is called Tulip Vase and it's 25 cm = 10" tall. I don't know where I'm going with this: nobody wants a heavy glass object full of flowers (and water) in the car with them if they get side-swiped at an intersection.

If I can think of a way to seal the top, I could fill it with something typical of today and add it to our Centennial Time Capsule. The diggers-up in 2121 may look on such a handy water-proof container as worth its weight in spear-points.

I have baggage about gifts. I just participated in my last family Kris Kringle, for example. Nobody shd be put in a position where they feel obliged to give me something unless they know I want it. Gift giving should never be transactional but Kris Kringle, and indeed Christmas, tends to make it so. The Kwakiutl of the Pacific North-West allowed potlatch = reciprocal gift-giving to get completely out of hand. In order not to lose face, communities would bankrupt themselves and their neighbours as gift value spiralled out of control. With this purple vase it is transactional but not reciprocal. When a powerful entity gives something to someone who is powerless to refuse, that says I still own you. Also, because the vase has no utility, it's a tawdry metaphor that the retiree (who was previously adding value to the enterprise) now has no utility. The Institute doesn't care enough a) to include a named contact on the compliments slip through which I could formally express my thanks b) to ask whether purple matched my curtains.

I could do (a) above: I'm well brought up, I was obliged as a child to write insincere thank-you letters to two rellies who both sent me a Lett's Schoolboy Diary in 1964. Now, though, I really am that man who has everything. The Blob as my diary for starters! Obvs I don't have everything but I don't want no more stuff. Family, pals, previous employers, please note. To paraphrase Dorothy Parker.

yachts make you seasick
devices wear out
events give you covid
you're best off with nowt

 You're kinder than me and can doubtless cast this transaction in a more positive light.

Jocelyn sweeps past

Just about 48 hours after Storm Isha gave Donegal a drubbing and scattered Dublin-bound planes all over NW Europe, Storm Jocelyn followed in her footsteps.

We weathered Isha well enough, parking The Grape almost in the living room to escape any falling deadwood. In the morning, I was up at first light to check that we could reach the county road down our lane. We had places to go, things to do in the forenoon. If I didn't need to cut our way out then I could have breakfast instead.

What you see in the foreground is most of the larger wood-rain; none of which fell dagger-down in The Grape's usual parkplatz. But I'd do the same again.

The most significant Isha damage was the loss of half of a dead Scot's Pinus sylvestris down at the bottom corner of the haggard. 

The branch/trunk broke off 6ft =  1.8m above the ground - presumably after getting into a thrashing resonance with the wind at some time in the night. It's quite safe for the moment but is applying extra weight to the leaning ash Fraxinus excelsior from which Gdau.II's swing-buoy is suspended. With Jocelyn incommmming, some or all of this teeter-totter might fall. Then we'll have to find somewhere else to put the more daddo, higher daddo, hiiiigher kidder into low-earth orbit.

As noted last year Storm Jocelyn is named after Jocelyn "No-Bell" Bell Burnell, discoverer of pulsars, long term supporter of Open University and active promoter of more young women in science.

And I quote Met Éireann meteorologist Aoife Kealy has urged people to be mindful that Storm Jocelyn may exasperate damage to structures that have already been damaged by Storm Isha. Exasperate?? My damage would be quite pissed off as well I can tell you.

We escaped the indignity of electric failure with Isha, although at peak on Monday 22 Jan 24 225,000 ESB customers were in darkness. That count was down to 50,000 by noon the following day; just as Jocelyn started to ramp up the windspeed. But this second storm - perhaps frightened by the weather forecasting Donegal postman - edged Northwards and barely brushed the country. At 0700 hours 24 Jan 24, only 29K homes were without power: 16,000 residual from Isha and an additional 13,000 from storm J. By that metric Jocelyn was but 6% as fighty as Isha. Not complaining, mind! As the Storm's namesake said last September "I am delighted to feature in this distinguished list celebrating science and hope that if a potential “Storm Jocelyn” happens, it may be a useful stirring-up rather than a destructive event!".

One bad outcome of this might be to increase skepticism about MetEireann warnings: leading to people being out and about at the wrong time because them weather people always talk it big. That would be foolish because MetEireann is much better at predicting the weather than all the berry-counting postmen in the country.

Chinese boggle

In the run up to Dau.II's driving test, I was, several times, unceremoniously shoved out of The Grape in various bleak settings in SW Waterford City. My place being taken by Damian the driving instructor or Darren the driving tester. What to do? Driving School Centraal in Woodie's Car Park is a brisk 15 minute walk from, say, the City Library; but the RSA driving test centre is way off on the Ring Road. I had ~45 minutes to kill there, the drizzle was light, so I headed off towards a Stuff Shop called The Range which we'd passed on the way into the industrial estate. So much to tempt the unwary:

• Arthritis Glass Jar Opener Lid Remover - White
• Counter Top Ice Maker Machine - Copper
• Peppa Pig Acoustic Guitar - Blue
• Industrial Iron Bar Chair - Dark Brown
• Cat Cave - Navy

But I got caught in the craft section and bought one "Pack of 100 Art Studio Wooden Alphabet Beads" for what-could-possibly-go-wrong? €1.30. I thought they'd make a novelty stocking filler for Gdau.II [8] at Christmas. Returning home, I spilled the 1cm x 1cm cubes into a shallow bowl, resolved to thread the beads on a bit of string so that it spelled something nice. My nice is not Gdau.II's nice, though . . . I don't believe in unicorns for starters. The letter-bracelet -necklace was just an idea. 

I scrabbled about looking for an S - the 8th most common letter in English and the normal way of making the plural. There was only one S! - and that a mis-shape. If you count this hirpled S, there was at least one bead representing each of our 26 letters, rarities like Q Z and J included. So the composition of the bag-of-100 cannot be random.  The beads are made in - surprise! - the PRC = People's Republic of China. Perhaps the foreman or marketing manager chose them so that patriotic messages could be easily written with this tool. "LOLS" is difficult but Xian, Qi and Zhu are much easier. Bloboprev on letter freq.

Here's the scatterplot of the 26 letter freqs in the OxEngDict compared to PplRepChina as represented in the archives of Art Studio and The Range. The letters appear chosen to be completely unrelated to their frequency in English. So The Range, a British firm headquartered in Plymouth, are not serving anglophone literacy with this particular toy.

Speed limits will be observed

I was wailing on about the final stages of gestation for Dau.II's to become a competent driver. On Monday last . . . just in time for tea, the key L → N fledging happened after a leisurely cruise around the mean streets of SW Waterford City. She had clocked up the mandatory 12 hours of lessons from a licensed instructor while still living in Cork in 2021. That should be enough to cover a) indicator + mirrors + clutch + handbrake b) getting going on a hill without stalling c) L-hand reverse round suburban corner d) 3-point turn e) general line maintenance e) not dawdling f) not lurching, gear-grinding. Thereafter, as much practice as you can get with parents should be able to smooth the experience out; internalize some of the muscle memory; and learn by not doing what other drivers do. 

In different times and an adjacent country, I had 6 lessons in the Summer after I turned 17, + a final lesson from the same instructor immediately before I took the test in December. In that sense mandating 12 lessons is a bit overkill. I got my Massachusetts licence by showing my UK ditto and sitting a 10 question MCQ with a pass-mark of 7/10; it was easy to clock 100% and I was let out on the roads of North America.

Dau.II was insured to drive The Grape in February 2023 and immediately registered to take her test in Waterford asap. It took 40 weeks to get to the head of the line - hence the gestation metaphor. Having been assigned a date 4 weeks out, she contacted a highly recommended Tramore instructor and booked two hours with him to ascertain how far apart were her skill-set and the test's requirements. Not far, it turned out but only in The Grape! It was back to nappies in his car. But several times we managed the logistics of getting herself from Dublin; The Grape from the Home Place; and Damian in from Tramore . . . all to assemble in Woodie's car-park on the Cork Rd in Waterford. This is clearly The Place to change students in Waterford; there are always a handful of driving school vehicles.

We were all relieved (although not really surprised) that she passed. You cd take a fail on the chin if that didn't put you at the end of a 9 month wait-list. [WTF!]. When she came out smiling and waving her pass cert, I was very happy that taking the protocol seriously and not stinting the car-miles had paid off. We agreed that I'd drive home, while she txtd her news to a longish list of frends'n'relashuns. As we left town, she got her face out of the phone to say "You should be in 5th gear, no?" which she followed up with "I'm a peer now, innit?, I can tell you these things."

Gotta say, that when she was starting to drive, I was known to flinch as she skimmed the bushes coming round a country corner; and to wince when the gears crunched. But gotta say gotta say that I never worried about her going too fast: from the beginning she always notes and obeys the posted speed limits. It's restful and saves money. Other drivers please note.

Some old Compostella feet hands have been known to say When the road finishes, the Camino continues. Dau.II, smug in her pass, said something like 

"Once you've passed the test, the life-long learning begins".

Freebie

Does a bear exploit in the woods? 

Years ago, in grad school in Boston, my boss had two teenage daughters at home. They ate a lot of cold cereal. One day, I was passing through their kitchen and remarked on the purple milk in the bowl. The dye was leaching from the Grape 'n' Raspberry Froot Loops. It was a cue for a characteristically irascible rant at General Foods who would make an out-there new variety of product and budget $1million for advertising and still turn a profit by selling 2 million packets of Avocado Chili Cornflakes at $2 the pop. Even if no cereal packet ever got finished and nobody bought a second packet, because bleugh! And next month another wild option would be kited to consumers of America

The market is skewed because the end-consumers are either children who bully their parents into purchasing what the kids see on daytime TV or youngsters living at home who have a grunt job at a car-wash or McDonalds but no mortgage to pay. Adults tend towards, like, real food.

Dau.I was down for the bank.hol weekend and presented me with an apposite card [R]. She had lifted it, with permission, from a grown-assed chap at work who had been snacking on 'healthy' Bear Yoyos. Bear Snacks was founded in 2009 in the UK and you know that adults [except as commissariat and catering supplies] were not the target demographic; they encourage feedback fr'instance through the following media

• Give us a growl bear.uk@bearsnacks.com
• BEAR,  The Big Cave, Deepest Darkest Woods, PO Box 1311, St. Albans, UK
  

I guess you cannot fault them as a chemical factory of additives. There are very few packaged 'foods' which have fewer ingredients than my sourdough bread.

• Apples (65.8%), Pears (32.9%), Strawberries (1%), Black Carrot Extract (0.3%)
• Apples (40%), Pears (40%), Mangos (20%)
• Apples (62.3%), Pears (31.1%), Blackcurrants(6.6%)
• + each packet includes a 'collectible' card featuring something similar to Bob the Blob [see above]
  

Apart from the performative bonhomie equivalent to children's TV from the 1970s, my gripe is the cost. The standard aliquot is 5 Yoyos [one for each school lunch M - F] each weighing 20g for €3.29 . . . that's €32.90/kg! which surely puts them outside the budget of poor families actually feeling food inflation. I guess ordinary struggling folk by-pass the aisle packaged products promoting "health" and buy, like, actual apples at 10x for €1.60. That's about ¼ the price and includes actual apple pips that you can spit across the lunchroom at your pal Jimmy.

Butter called Sal

Years ago, I was a saddo single person living round the corner from a supermarket. After work (I had a job and the money that brought so I could shop), I'd wander up and down the aisles trying to think of something to cook for my saddo single dinner. I made disastrously foolish decisions on multi-pack Kit-Kats and cheap stir-fry. At the tail end of Orthodox Easter, we were down on Costa na Déise for a few days of elder-care . . . round the corner from a supermarket.

After dinner, a cry went up "More dessert is needed" - because who wants an apple? Dau.II and I took one for the team and went round the corner in search of something adjacent to  lemon posset  [whc prev]. The closest strike was Supervalu Sicilian lemon yoghurt but we also came away with 94g of "Munchies Gold Caramel Flavour Sharing Bag". As y' do, when investigating a new-to-me product, the ToC was closely scrutinized:

Sugar, Vegetable Fats (Palm, Mango Kernel, Sal, Shea, Rapeseed, Sunflower), Glucose Syrup, Invert Sugar Syrup, Sweetened Condensed Skimmed Milk (Milk, Sugar), Whey Powder product (Milk), Skimmed Milk Powder, Wheat Flour (contains Calcium, Iron, Thiamin and Niacin), Butterfat (Milk), Cocoa Butter, Dried Whole Milk, Emulsifier (Lecithins), Cocoa Mass, Whey Powder (Milk), Raising Agents (Sodium Bicarbonate, Ammonium Bicarbonate), Barley Malt Extract, Salt, Lactose (Milk), Caramelised Sugar, Natural Flavouring, Maltodextrin, Safflower Concentrate 

It's candy, so you'd expect a lorra sugar but we were intrigued by the gallimaufry of exotic vegetable fats [Palm, Mango Kernel, Sal, Shea, Rapeseed, Sunflower]. Sal?? never 'eard of it! But Sal [ripe seeds L] turns out to quite a big thing in India: a tree known as Shorea robusta; a member of the Dipterocarp [aka two winged seeds] family. Sal trees are sacred and under the protection of Vishnu. The mother of Gautama Buddha is said to have clutched a Sal branch while giving birth to Hissonour. 

Apart from the religious stuff, the seeds are the size of a seedless grape and 14% fat which is extracted to produce a buttery spread, which is solid at room temperature. Those who live in or near to Sal forests use the sal-ghee for cooking but entrepreneurs also convert the goop in soap, varnish, paint and lubricants. I suspect that the food engineers at Nestlé don't care much what sort of vegetable fat goes into the Munchie vats. The fat-ingredient is likely subject to the vagaries of global markets and the marketeers kick the ToC list to safety by including any-and-all species which might be in our 94g.

A final observation: pretty much the only customers in the shop at 8pm on a Monday evening were single silverbacks with more or less empty baskets. I imagine [I may be over-empathizing] that, like saddo me 20+ years ago, these old chaps are wandering around killing time in the aisles because 

• TV is utter bollix; 
• the Men's Shed is on Wednesday;
• Supervalu is warm and dry
  

Striking two grapefruit

In July 1984, Mary Manning was just 21, still living at home, and working the tills at Dunne's Stores [better value, beats them all, every time] on Henry Street in Dublin. She joined the union [IDATU that became Mandate later]  The managers were almost all men, the actual workers were almost all [young] women . . . and the regime was heavy on pettifogging, patronizing regulations bordering on bullying. The bullying centred up when any of the "girls" seemed to be kicking over the traces.

So when IDATU issued a directive that members should sell nothing exported from the Republic of South Africa. The Irish education system, especially for working-class schools was a series of stories with far too much about the Bog of Allen and turf-fired power-stations and nothing at all about Africa except that Irish missionaries were saving souls out there. Mary Manning knew that Outspan grape-fruit came within the ambit of the union directive and explained to a customer that she couldn't run a pair of these forbidden fruit through the register. The customer was understanding but the line-manager, who was hovering there waiting for such a transgression of company diktat, was not. When Manning resisted the bluster, she was suspended and nine other shop-workers walked out in sympathy. It had to be an official strike, because the union had precipitated it with their dogoodnik anti-apartheid policies.

Dramatis personnae: Theresa Mooney, Catherine O'Reilly, Karen Gearon, Veronica Munroe, Alma Russell, Sandra Griffen, Mary Manning and Tommy Davis (not in photo - Dorothy Dooley, Michelle Gavin and Liz Deasy). Note to editors, writers, re-churners. There is a lot of errors / variation in the roll-call out on the interwebs. Sandra is probably Griffin. Catherine might be Cathryn. Veronica is known as Vonnie . . . and is not a Murphy. Alma is a 2-L Russell not Russel and she's defo not Alma Bonnie.

You might think that a brass plaque [R], which will be there after I R dead, would have the correct roll-call. Karen Gearon; Liz Deasy; Michelle Gavin, Mary Manning; Vonnie Munroe; Alma Russell; Tommy Davis; Sandra Griffin; Theresa Mooney; Cathryn O'Reilly; Brendan Barron. It includes Brendan Barron, who joined the strike the following year from the Crumlin branch. Next year? Weren't they hoping it would all be sorted out in a couple of weeks?? Mebbe, but the strike was still on their pickets in April 1987! 33 months after those grapefruit started the ball rolling. 

Last year Mary Manning was interviewed about her book Striking Back. One of the great insights is that she and and her strike-mates used their adverse circumstances to educate themselves about the correct pronunciation of apartheid The Rights of Man, product labelling and who were your real friends. And begod it made a difference. The Irish government eventually banned the import of South African produce: only took three years to get a complacent patriarchy to follow the righteous lead of two handfuls for working class people. Also note that Ben Dunne, the CEO of Dunne's Stores, was paying off the Taoiseach Charles Haughey synchronously with institutionally abusing his employees. So Fuck Him too.

Brendan Archbold their Union mentor came up with a graphic picket-line soundbyte for the politics involved: "you have to imagine South Africa as a pint of Guinness- the vast majority of it is black and a tiny minority is white and like a freshly poured pint, the white sits firmly on top of the black".

There is a Ewan McColl ballad!  And one by Sandra Kerr.

Driven mad

Last time I rented a car, I had all sorts of trouble because I was a technorube: not knowing the difference between pressing a button and press&holding a button and unable to drive the central console on the dash-board. The thing is that modern cars keep upping the inventory of fitted-as-standard features. I don't think that, when the Ford marketing department meets with the engineering development, they think deeply about unintended consequences. How many old buffers are distracted by lights and beeps from the dashboard only to disappear off the road and through a hedge? I haven't done that yet, but I am bemused.

My Yaris is living its best life with someone else now, and our remaining car has been a lemon . . . coloured like a grape. It's most annoying feature was a dash-board light which alerted us to a spongy tire but didn't reset itself when all the tire were pumped full. So we ignored the flat tyre icon which rather defeats its intended purpose. But that car seems to spend more time at the Citroën dealer waiting for parts than actually on the road conveying people and sacks of sheep feed. Supply chain issues are a pain in the neck.

This time it's been three weeks since the clutch went futt and we had to get towed to Waterford. Luckily we have family nearby who can bail us out or at least provide a safe warm place to hang out for a day while the car is being serviced. . . but not for three weeks. The dealer offered us a courtesy car after a further week of delay and we've had a stealth grey Hyundai i30 for more than a week now. The Beloved was totes freaked because, she'd scarcely left the garage before a green light appeared on the dashboard couple with a little buzzy vibration. We assured her that as the light was green it couldn't be tooo bad; and in any case I was scheduled to driving the vehicle home. Well, it was quite aggravating until I'd worked out that this was a lane departure warning light functioning as designed. Which is mighty for motorways but less appropriate on country back-roads in Ireland. We worked out that the alert must work through some front-facing cameras and nifty software. It picks up both the median line and the dashed yellow lines which indicate the road-edge on minor roads in Ireland . . . and seems to be over-ridden if you indicate.

What the buzzy vibration is actually doing is forcing your hands to drive away from the transgressed road line. Because this movement is outside the driver's control it feels like the wheels have gotten caught in a rut or left the paved road or one of the tires is flat - sponge-bob, like.

Turns out that Hyundai have positively festooned the i30 with cameras because if you select reverse gear a post-card sized screen activates on the dashboard . . . to help you reverse. Because I haven't been successfully reversing cars and vans into constricted places for, like, 50 years. I took Dau.I to the railway station after a visit over last weekend. It had been raining stair-rods the night before, so when I reversed into a slot at the station, the console view was uselessly blurred with rural road muck. Find the camera challenge:

No probby, quoth I, I'll just go and clear the lens. Turned out there were two little black buttons on either side of the number plate. Ah ha, quoth I, the engineers have installed stereo distance sensing, very clever. But when I got back in the car the picture was still blurred. Dau.I, patiently [she's a librarian used to dealing daily with the tech-challenged] got out of the car and applied her thumb to a little button under the Hyundai company logo. Noisiv raelC! - instant gratification!  I've no idea what the licence plate bracket buttons so.

Plonkety plonk

 "Il meglio è l'inimico del bene" an old Italian proverb quoted by Voltaire means Perfection is the enemy of the good enough. Which resonates for me, as an evolutionary biologist: successful species are a kludge of attributes that work better than those of competitors despite being a long way from perfect. Think the recurrent pharyngeal nerve, or male nipples, the phalanges of your pinkie toe . . .

The Western World has a contemptible obsession with stardom: there is only one [Zatopek] winner of the 10,000m; only one Harry Potter; very few millionaire golfers, soccer players or film actors. In horse racing it's ever and always "Eclipse first, the rest nowhere". The difference between first and second in many fields is not statistically significant or reproducible. Run the race or exam next week and the order will be different: the consequence should be that everyone over a certain threshold is deemed to be good enough . . . and a lot better than slobby old me sitting on the sofa swigging tinnies.

I'm not a black&white bloke, indeed my last true name means 'grey'. My sister briefly shared a flat in London in the 80s with a woman who went on to become one of the top wine-tasters in The World. So I'm inclined to believe that there are people out there who practice enough, and are sensitive enough, to discern subtle differences among wines. Me, I'll trust someone who makes a living visiting hundreds of co-ops and vineyards for LIDL. If the company is going to order 1000s of cases at €100/case then that product is not going to be drain-cleaner . . . it will be good enough for €5.75. In the range €5.95 to €15.95 it's all going to be a matter of taste. I am told by my brother, who's been there, that €50/bottle wines are something else entirely but I'm on the pension now, so I'm not going there.

I wrote a few years ago [whoop, whoop, numbers alert] that competitive wine-tasting is largely flim-flam, boondoggle and blackguardry. IF the label is soaked off or the wine is decanted THEN most people can't identify a wine to grape-variety, let alone terroir. I was delirah therefore to discover the 2018 Master Sommelier Exam Cheating Scandal. It is a tale of hubris [overweening arrogance inviting disaster] and huckster. Who knew that there was a Court of Master Sommeliers, Americas (CMSA)? Who cared enough to let it be known that there were fewer Master Sommeliers than astronauts? Whose sense of self is so tied up in the business that they actually append "MS" to their business cards?
Answer: people whose interest in wine is conflated with their interest in money.

In 2018, and not for the first time, there were shenanigans and insider dealings in the process of accepting new members into The Inner Circle. The examination is in three parts, each section of which costs €1,000 to take . . . with no guarantee of success. Indeed only 1 candidate in 12 passes through the ordeal. It reads like the "servitor" section of the exam is licenced hazing by the judges AND is regressively snobbish in its 19thC ideals about what a Sommelier is. For reasons beyond comprehension, in 2018 one of the judges send out a txt to candidates hinting at which six wines would be on that year's tasting panel: Subject: Heads up // "PG, CndP". Which being interpreted was pinot gris / grigio & Châteauneuf-du-Pape. 

tl;dr The Court of Master Buffoons decided to cancel the certs of all the successful candidates that year on the assumption that any and all of them could have been given the Heads-Up. Like a typically patriarchal, smug, self-aggrandizing coterie of bluffers they refused to have a proper investigation or an external audit to their arbitrary and capricious decision. The Optics are terrible and the lawyers are rubbing the hands.

Furthest South

We had the best Christmas that could be reasonably expected at the end of a Plague Year: enough food, perfectly cooked; family present; but min presents; drink but no drunks. Beyond having Dau.I and Dau.II home we didn't get hammered and didn't go <cof> <cof> visiting. As a country, we seem to have Xmasocialised rather too closely and rather too widely and the Covid+ numbers have gone vertical. It was an unfortunate time for the Girl Who Invented Herself aka B to exercise her decision, arrived at last Summer, to repatriate herself from foreign. But back in the fall, she booked her flight home for 9th Jan 2021.

Common sense, Covid sense and The Man all advise that self-isolation for 14 days is required of all immigrants . . . we have enough virus circulating in the community without adding any foreign germs to the already frothy [and potentially fatal] mix. The Public [whoever that might be] don't do nuance [although they are grand with me-exceptionalism] so rules, regulations and requirements are necessarily blunt. Any rational risk assessment will conclude that B, inccommming from Covid-free Singapore is much more at risk from us than we are from her - even factoring in a two-leg Etihad flight. 

From commuting my Yaris 80 km every day; since Coronarama in March, its use been down 80km a month. It made sense, therefore, to add B to the insurance and let her drive herself to her quarantine lazar house on the Waterford Coast. Plan: I drive the Yaris & The Beloved drives her Grape to the Airport. B takes the Yaris while TB and I return home in the Grape. It was a plan not without its anxieties because a) the travel restrictions b) the previous night was the coldest since the Beast from the East three years ago. All fine and dandy until Bob the Duh starts the additional driver insurance 24 hours after B's arrival from foreign and only notices his error minutes before departure.

We decide that the best fall-back is for me to do Driving Miss Baisy and for TB to pick me up from outside the Quarantine Station after delivery. It should be okay on the Riskometer Scale if B sits in the back as far from the steering wheel as possible; we both mask up; and drive with the windows open. Did I say it was cold? Not really cold, not Sweden cold but it was -5°C when I crunched the ice to leave home. 

At the airport it was a [comparatively] balmy +1°C. Brilliant sunny day, though which helped. Gradually the temperature crawled up as with headed towards to tropics: +2°C in Kildare, +3°C crossing the Carlow border, +4°C in mid-Kilkenny and touching +5°C as we crested a Furthest South rise and saw the sea. This is how lots of people travelled 100 years ago: one of my elderly female rellies was still going about her rounds in a pony and trap in Wexford in the 1960s.

Near the J3 turn-off for Moone and Timolin [what passes for a metropolis in the M9 Kildare corridor], we noted a motor-cyclist and I said we were better protected, in all senses, than them. B made a quip about Shackleton and Tom Crean [R <not!> photo courtesy George O'Mahony] and how well 'ard we were.  Somewhere along the way she also shared a Coronarama silver lining about how face-masks were just the thing for outdoors in Winter. To which Dau.I would add: especially if cycling. Now here's the thing: when we were making ableist, self-congratulatory, comparisons with real Hard Chaws like Crean and Shackleton we were cruisin' past, and not more than 5km from, Kilkea House, where Shackleton was born and reared . . . on the 112th anniversary of his Furthest South achievement struggling to within 100 nautical miles of the South Pole on 9th Jan 1909. Doing a 2 hour trip with the windows open doesn't really qualify. And to show that the real Tom Crean had a heart of gold, R is a picture of him with an armful of puppies.

Here come the elephants

Nearly 40 years ago, with no lire left to spend on food for The Boy, then an infant, we were escaping from Italy across an Alpine pass at night. Three years ago, I told the romantic tale of how we landed a lucky and sustaining bowl of soup at the last outpost on the Italian side of the border.  It never occurred to us, being too hungry to think, to wonder whether we were mirroring the famous trek of Hannibal and his elephants as he marched to bring war to the Romans in 218 BCE. Πολύβιος Polybius, a historian who died 100 years later (although he interviewed some of the trek's survivors) said that the details of the route even then were lost to the mists of time.

First though, let's clear the elephant jokes out of the way:
Q. What's the difference between an elephant and a grape?
A. One's grey and the other is green.
Q. What did Hannibal say when he saw the elephants coming over the Alps?
A. Here come the grapes [he was colour-blind].
Eeee how we larfed when we were 8.

Molecular archaeology has turned up some new evidence supporting a Hannibal route across the Col de la Traversette.  This is now a rough bridle-path unpassable to motor vehicles about 20km N of where we got our Found Soup. Back  2234 years ago, Hannibal and his army had a cold coming of it, famously having to break through a recent rock-fall laying on top of an earlier rock-fall which was impassable for men and horses. let alone the elephants. They cracked the immovable rocks using fire and vinegar. JMW Turner captured their trials, with a liberal dose of pathetic fallacy, in his 1812 painting [L. Snow Storm: Hannibal And His Army Crossing The Alps]  Back in the 1950s Gavin de Beer, a well regarded embryologist, pointed out how the Col de la Traversette matched the ancient descriptions much better than alternative paths which modern engineers had used for laying down tarmacadam.

This idea was seized on by Bill Mahaney, a polymathic scientist for hire, and he went trekking along the pass until he'd convinced himself that he agreed with de Beer.  It's the rock-falls, stupid; none of the other options match Polybius's, and other early documenter's, descriptions of the terrain.  Most recently, elephant horse shit has made a huge splash towards elucidating the controversy [BBC]. Queen's University Belfast <huzzah!> has also made a contribution to the analysis. In an ancient bog near to the summit of the pass they have found a layer of churned up soil, such as might result if 15,000 horses had bivouacked in the place. In the sediment they have turned up a disproportionate number of Clostridial spores and even some fossilised horse tapeworm eggs. As you know from The Blob, Clostridium is a natural component of the intestinal flora of mammals. Nearby undisturbed soil had no such spike of Clostridium spp. The story has been covered by the unfailingly erudite Philip Ball [prev] in the Grauniad.

Old Red Biddy

O.R.B. was the favorite tipple of all the loungers and wastrels who used to hang out with Ed "Doc" Ricketts in Steinbeck's Cannery Row.  It was what I used to label the 'wine' I produced from tins of grape-juice concentrate, back in the 1980s, when I was in the business of fermenting anything that would stand still.  The bums on Cannery Row would buy a gallon jug of Old Red Biddy whenever they had sufficient funds.  The Boy used to buy Thunderbird when we moved back to Ireland mainly because it was 17.5% alc/vol and the cheapest bottle in the offy.  But I'm not here to talk about rot-gut, it's quality time today.  It's quality because you can't afford the techie solution to better wine that is offered by Fruition unless you have several $,000s to spare for the intervention.

It's all in a really interesting Wired article, about Fruition, the brain child of two French viticulturists Sébastien Payen and Thibaut Scholasch.  The company is about measuring [whoop whoop data alert!] water-stress in Californian vines rather than intuiting it or relying on witchy-poo nonsense that will cost time and money and quite possibly deliver a worse outcome that if you just left your vines alone and went on a Caribbean cruise until your Mexican foreman starts the harvest. Fruition can measure the flow of sap through the stem of a vine by using a pair of thermocouples which gives them a direct reading on the changes in the amount of water that the plant seems to require. This is a directly applicable parameter that is really important for good yields, other factors - the local weather forecast; what you neighbour is doing; whether the leaves look a little crinkley - are all secondary data and so indirect and unreliable.  The consequence of using the wrong measure is almost always chronic over-watering - to be sure, to be sure. This might amount to 50 billion litres of water wasted in Californian vineyards every year. Which is shockin', given the persistent and devastating drought that has been scorching the Southern half of the state for the last two years.

The correct solution is often counter-intuitive.  It is sometimes a good thing to beat up on the vines - they are designed by millions of years of evolution to set fruit to escape from adverse condition.  Which partly explains why the best grapes are grown on really marginal soils from which no normal plant would be able to scratch a living. Making great wines can never be wholly scientific because it is dependent on the weather which can't predict as well as we'd like; although we're really much better at weather prediction than, say, earthquakes.  It is certainly true that wine-tasting is effectively unreproducible, unscientific posturing for almost all who affect to know their chablis from their chateau.

Following the convention of 'balance' the Wired article's author hunts out a nay-sayer, who claims that Fruition is geek-boy nonsense and asserts that he can do better from a life time's experience.  It is just possible that this is true - if he is the very best viticulturist in the County.  But grape-growers, like any other profession, follow a normal distribution: some are exceptional but most are middling-poor. Somewhere out there is a stunningly talented HR manager but s/he isn't going to be working in whatever marginal organisation you work in. Same with the tiers and tiers of managers in the Health Service: they pull down the big bucks and think that they are earning their salt . . . until a crisis looms that requires some actual management. The middle-ground of wine-makers could probably do with some help and, as I've asserted throughout The Blob, scientific help is more likely to deliver than stick-shaking.