Duffers but not drowned.

Dau.II and I spent two days over the weeklend out on Lough Derg, the lake in the middle of Ireland which is one of several that is both fed and drained by the mighty Shannon.  Readers from Ukraine and Russia may now snicker at the epithet ‘mighty’ when applied to the Shannon which is a paltry 360km long and for the last 200km falls only about 20m.  So it is only mighty in the parochial sense that it is Ireland’s largest and longest river. This Lough Derg should not be confused with the other Lough Derg which is a place for catholic for ritual pilgrimage, penance and fasting.

We were learning to sail. Along with rugby, squash, cricket and shot-putting, sailing is something “I have done” but not for more than 40 years. So I was expecting hoping it would be ‘like riding a bicycle’, something once done never forgotten. Dau.II has never engaged in any of those sports, so was by the old definition a Landsman rather than an Ordinary Seaman, let alone an Able Seaman. We arrived in Dromineer the night before, so I again had the pleasure, at 0700hrs, of seeing the lake in its mirror-glass mode.  As far as the eye could see the lake was utterly flat.  When the working day was ready to start there was a ripple or two but the lake-shore trees were without a flutter, which I think makes it Beaufort windscale Force 1, maybe Force 0.5.

On the first day, with zero wind, our instructor taught us how to start the out-board motor, which we might need anyway to get out of or into harbour or out of a fix like being caught on a lee-shore, dismasted or in a terrible hurry to get to the nearest bar for a pint.  It’s tricky enough, but no worse than a chain-saw and less likely to cut your leg off.  Then we motored out onto the lake and practiced coming up to the quay a few times.  In contrast to driving a car, there is no brake on a boat; but if you approach land at an oblique angle at a sufficiently low speed then you can turn the boat at the last moment so that the boat-side kisses the quay-side and you can step lightly ashore. No jumping allowed.
After that we returned to base for a cup of tea and some instruction on the theory of sailing.  I’d never had that formal instruction – when we were nippers we had learned how to sail in the apprentice mode – going out with someone more experienced and learning by doing.

We also learned a few basic knots. Knots are a good example of compromise.  A knot needs to be secure under the action of natural forces and readily untied when you need to release it. You could moor your  boat by whipping out a hammer and whacking a dozen nails through your mooring rope.  Nothing will shift that including yourself when you want to get out on the water again. Some knots work well only with static ropes while others will tolerate a lot of movement and still be secure. These you need: reef-knot, clove-hitch, round-turn-and-two-half-hitches, bowline.

Still not much wind but we headed out aNNyway to find some; preferably not one of those gusts that precedes a squall of rain.  Suddenly in the middle of the lake and in the middle of a windless doldrum we realised that it was lunch-time and we were all Hank Marvin’.  So we hauled down the sails, fired up the outboard and headed into the harbour at Garrykennedy which is 150m from Larkin’s bar which serves as fine a bowl of chowder as you’ll find East of New England.  That was a pretty good day.

The following was good weather for Duffers.  Sunny spells rather than a broiling hot sun; no rain; wind between Force 1 and 4 variable; the whole day to play with. We headed across the county border which runs down the middle of the lake and went to Co. Clare for lunch. Mountshannon is a strange village that has turned its back on the Lake, so that from the marina there is no visible shop or pub. You’d imagine that there were more people willing to make an honest penny from the owners of these €100,000 motor-boats that tool up and down the Shannon all summer.  There’s got to be more to the potential transactions than charging €7.50 for a toasted sandwich and double that for plate of dinner.   Where’s the water-front café selling ice-creams hand-over-fist and cappuccinos to go.  They have one of those in Dromineer and it appears to be doing a land-office business.

After lunch we beat back across the lake a little faster than we'd gone across because there was a little more wind and we were a little more competent. And despite still being duffers, we did not drown. Just a perfect day, I'm glad I spent it with you.

Metropoleaxe

From the report from Pravda about dangers in the Moscow Metro Моско́вский метрополите́н: "About 100 people die in the metro as a result of heart attacks. A cardiac arrest may occur because of the sultry air, pressure difference, rumbling trains and intensive flow of passengers. The situation reaches the critical point during summer." Pravda  Правда as everyone knows means Truth, so they must be correct

Bollix!  I hear you cry?  Is this news?  Is this unexpected?  What is the baseline?  It turns out that cardio-vascular disease is the #1 killer in Russia.  About 1 million people die of this (= heart attack) each year.  There are just over 140 million people in the country, which to me is surprisingly small: less than half of the USA and a much smaller proportion compared to the EU.  So every year 1/140 of Russians die from heat attack which is about half of all deaths from all causes.  The death rate is not untypical of Western countries at 13/1000.  What else do we need to know?  The Moscow Metro is vast and really well used: 7 million people use the system every day which is conveniently close to 5% of the whole country - not a lot of people live in Siberia while Moscow is Russia's largest city with 11 million inhabitants.  So you expect 5% of the million fatal heart attacks in  any one year to occur to Metro users.  That's 50,000 but they only appear as one of the people overcome by "sultry air" if they are actually in the Metro system.  I put it to you that the average time spent in this super-efficient mass transport system with only occasional fatal derailments is 30 minutes or 1/50 of the day.

So you expect 1000 people to suffer a fatal heart attack while using the Metro and they've only clocked 100.  Clearly the "pressure differences [and] rumbling trains" prevent heart attacks and the safest place to hang out is underground. And why wouldn't you?  It looks gorgeous. Train-spotters must live forever!
See similar tetchy argument for the death of Linus Pauling.

Acrylamide in the chips

Pretty much everything that gives us pleasure in eating is due to the Maillard reaction: the browning on chips, roast potatoes, fresh-baked bread crust, steaks, hamburgers, roasted coffee, maple syrup, dried milk, chocolate, malted barley for whiskey and beer.  The rest of the food we eat: porridge, broccolli, boiled spuds is just the stodge and fibre: necessary but not sufficient for a diet that pleases. Maillarding occurs when the amino acid constituents of proteins react at high temperature with 'reducing' sugars like glucose and fructose.  It's not possible to write a chemical equation because, although the inputs are limited the outputs are many and varied: a cocktail of tasty chemicals that are 'mostly harmless'.

One of them is likely to be acrylamide [R] or prop-2-enamide, which was the focus of a report in RTE wireless last night.  I missed the beginning but suppose that some food-safety report must have been published warning us about the dangers of consuming this stuff.  Acrylamide in food has an interesting and quite recent history.  It is used in a variety of industrial-chemical processes and in 2002, some Swedish scientists were called in to assess the toxicity of acrylamide dust in a factory where there was a lot of it about. They cast about for a control population that was unexposed, to establish a base-line and were surprised the find that their controls were also exposed to low doses of the chemical under investigation. The source was tracked down to Swedish crisp-bread but also to the long list of tasty chow mentioned above. At around the same time, it was found that feeding large amounts to lab rats resulted in tumours in every tissue looked at.  But cyclamates and saccharine have also at one time or another been shown to cause cancer in lab rats and accordingly been banned in some countries.  Saccharine used to carry a health warning the US until proper science showed that lab rats were, in this case, a poor model for human metabolism.  Their urine has much higher levels of pH, calcium and protein and these produced crystals that damaged the lining of the bladder to precipitate the onset of cancer.

But acrylamide is not an artificial additive amenable to legislation, it is a natural by-product of baking, roasting and frying and, as a part of the Maillard reaction, may be a desirable addition to cooked food. It turns out that the levels of acrylamide fed to the rats to induce cancer was 900x greater than a reasonable person is likely to get in the diet. A number of epidemiological studies have been carried out to track the impact of a diet high in acrylamide on long-term health.  A few of these studies have shown statistically significant association, while others have not.  This is typical of associations that are so small that they require thousands of cases and thousands of controls to detect any difference. Science has an almost unavoidable publication bias - it's hard to get negative results published while positive results in a field (like diet and human health) that everybody thinks they understand will mobilise your University's publicity department to issue a press release.  This will remove all the equivocation and qualification of your findings and the Daily Mail will reduce the press release to a catchy headline and two paragraphs of excited extrapolation from your results.

The Food Safety Authority of Ireland FSAI will shortly issue a warning advising us to eat soggy chips and discarding the crusts of bread.  If you want to live forever on a diet of cabbage and porridge, you're welcome.

Research: hard work

The universe is infinite and it is the purpose of science to try to discover its truth. Whichever size of infinity you choose, it's still impossible to reveal the-truth-the-whole-truth in one lifetime of science, so each of us scientists carves out a chunk of the playing field and tries to make sense of that patch. Some scientists (some of whom are to be found homaged in The Blob) gallop freely and exuberantly across the plain hunting far and wide to tackle and bring to bay difficult prey; others gallop fast and loose in the wrong direction, bending the truth, fudging their results and misleading the rest of us. The humble foot-soldiers of science, like me, work quietly in a corner putting one tiny experimental brick on top of another to build an edifice that stands up even if it doesn't stand very tall.  It's both hard and easy: easy because with an infinity to avenues to explore you are not constrained; hard because nobody knows what the real answer is.

I put it to you that research in the Arts Block is a bit easier because the whole thing (every word written, every picture painted, every song sung) is finite and it's just a case of hunting out the primary sources and thinking about them.  Easy enough if you choose the plays of Sophocles: there are only 7 extant, the other 116 which he is known to have written having gone up in smoke when Caesar torched the library at Alexandria. Heck, there's more material in The Blob than the entire works of the author of Antigone. Like some Mandelbrot fractal recursion, you can write a whole book on a single phrase like "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants" and presumably a later author can write a whole book on a phrase in that book. Not to mention the fact that the commentaries (Talmud) on the first five books of the bible (Torah) has ballooned out into a dense thicket of points, counterpoints and extrapolations fifty times greater than the word-of-god. Nevertheless, how difficult can it be to get it right?  Too difficult, it seems.

The Beloved, who has been practicing mindfulness for years before it became both chic and debased, has just bought a book Brainstorm: an Inside-out Guide to the Emerging Adolescent Mind by Daniel J. Siegel MD.  The "MD" is from Harvard Medical School and they don't throw those into your car as you drive along Shattuck St. He's now "Clinical Professor Psychiatry, UCLA School of Medicine". Wikipedia says "Siegel is known as a mindfulness expert and for his work developing the field of Interpersonal Neurobiology." Given all the qualifications, you tend believe what he has to say. At the very end of the book he suggests that The Answer to "what a successful adolescence might look like" is a poem by "Bessie Anderson Stanley":  which I'll render as prose because it don't rhyme too good:
"To laugh often and love much; to win the respect of intelligent persons and the affection of children; to earn the approbation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty. To find the best in others; to give one’s self to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to have played and laughed with enthusiasm and sung with exaltation to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived this is to have succeeded.".  That has a sort of Kiplingesque (if you can keep your head when all about you, tee-tum-tee-tum-tee-tum) post-card ring of truth but TB said, "that's wrong, it's written by Ralph Waldo Emerson".  That does not seem to be the case. Actually they are both wrong and, as far as I can deduce from the finite universe which is the part of the interweb which Google thinks I want to see from Ireland, it was probably written by Albert Edward Wiggam in 1951 believing he was quoting Emerson.

There are several versions of this quote and I use one of the tools in the molecular evolution toolbox, which I've used before, to compare two such:

CLUSTAL W (1.83) multiple sequence alignment
Emerson  TOLAUGHOFTENAND----MUCHTOUINTHERESPECTOFINTELLIGENTPEOP-LEAN
Wiggam   TOLAUGHOFTENANDLOVEMUCHTOUINTHERESPECTOFINTELLIGENTPERSONSAN
         ***************    **********************************:.  .**
Emerson  DTHEAFFECTIONOFCHILDRENTOEARNTHEAPPRECIATIONOFHONESTCRITICSA
Wiggam   DTHEAFFECTIONOFCHILDRENTOEARNTHEAPPROB-ATIONOFHONESTCRITICSA
         ************************************:  *********************
Emerson  NDENDURETHEBETRAYALOFFALSEFRIENDSTOAPPRECIATEBEAUTYTOFINDTHE
Wiggam   NDENDURETHEBETRAYALOFFALSEFRIENDSTOAPPRECIATEBEAUTYTOFINDTHE
         ************************************************************
Emerson  BESTINOTHERS--------------TOLEAVETHEWORLDABITBETTERWHETHERBY
Wiggam   BESTINOTHERSTOGIVEONESSELFTOLEAVETHEWORLDABITBETTERWHETHERBY
         ************              **********************************
Emerson  AHEALTHYCHILDAGARDENPATCHORAREDEEMEDSOCIALCONDITION---------
Wiggam   AHEALTHYCHILDAGARDENPATCHORAREDEEMEDSOCIALCONDITIONTOHAVEPLA
         ***************************************************  
Emerson  ------------------------------------------------TOKNOWEVENON
Wiggam   YEDANDLAUGHEDWITHENTHUSIASMANDSUNGWITHEXALTATIONTOKNOWEVENON
                                                         ************
Emerson  ELIFEHASBREATHEDEASIERBECAUSEYOUHAVELIVEDTHISISTOHAVESUCCEED
Wiggam   ELIFEHASBREATHEDEASIERBECAUSEYOUHAVELIVEDTHISISTOHAVESUCCEED
         ************************************************************
Emerson  ED
Wiggam   ED
         **
Dang, it could happen to anyone in the days before word-processing.  You're copying something in a hurry from a printed page to make a deadline and you substitute persons / people and approbation / appreciation and the sky doesn't fall. But having been educated in TCD the home of the Book of Kells, I am aware of cases where medieval scribes made copy errors that mangled the sense of the manuscript because ther latyn was nott uppe to scratch. Here's another mol.evol tool used with effectiveness for Arts Block research.

This is probably what Ms Stanley wrote in 1905 (Wikipedia agrees):
He has achieved success who has lived well laughed often and loved much
who has enjoyed the trust of pure women, 
the respect of intelligent men and the love of little children 
who has filled his niche and accomplished his task 
who has left the world better than he found it 
whether by an improved poppy a perfect poem or a rescued soul
who has never lacked appreciation of Earth's beauty or failed to express it 
who has always looked for the best in others and given them the best he had 
whose life was an inspiration whose memory a benediction.
Sort of the same sentiment as the Emerson/Wiggam but not much better rhyming. It's easier to cite Emerson, of whom everyone has heard, than Stanley, who wrote this one thing for a newspaper competition in 1904 (or was it 1905?).  It shows that you're working at your sources if you cite minority-view Stanley but it shows that you're not working hard enough if you clip the wrong verse.

Matter a damn? Not! Except that you are now advised to take everything else that Siegel writes about mindfulness, interpersonal neurobiology or adolescence with a damned good shake of salt.  It's like if you turn in a thesis full of spelinge errurs and impenetrable grammar or ask for a character reference from someone (like me this Summer) whose name you can't be bothered to spell correctly.  These things don't invalidate what you say but they sure do make it harder to accept your statements on the nod.

Aviamotornaya

Pinch of salt time.  The math-pop writer John Allen Paulos has a great book called "A Mathematician reads the Newspapers" in which he cites examples of headlines that have brought him up all standing: "Duh, that's can't be true".  It is the sequel to Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences which is, IMO, fresher and better but both books are informative and readable.  They help tune into nonsense.

I have two loyal readers in Russia (and two in Ukraine, so you might think that people at the further edge of Europe might stop squabbling about Lenin, Oil and The West and see how much common ground they have in reading The Blob). My interest in events in Russia is accordingly higher than my interest in events in, say, Venezuela where lots of oil is produced by nobody reads El Blob - so forget them.  If you hunt hard you will have heard about a recent derailment in the Moscow Metro which killed a couple of dozen people and is currently under investigation. One tragedy stands on the shoulders of another and many reports refer to the Aviamotornaya (Авиамото́рная) escalator disaster in 1982. In that case, new operating machinery for all escalators was being installed across the metro system including at that station.  You really need something to help mass transport in such places because the platform in 150m below ground and that's a long way to walk. There was sufficient redundancy designed into the system, but the engineer who installed the back-up emergency brake hadn't read the instruction booklet, so it was wired incorrectly. Everything was fine until one of the steps derailed and stripped off the gears of the drive mechanism putting the loop into neutral (= freefall).  The brake didn't kick in automatically and the the hand-brake was also disabled, so 100 passengers were whooshed to the bottom and dumped in a heap.  Eight people near the bottom were killed.  As it was in Soviet times, when everything mechanical must work fine because all the engineers have a red star on their lapels, the event never made the newspapers so the rumor mill clicked into action instead. Dead people on escalators must mean that they were sucked into the mechanism and turned into hamburger - and it was so . . . not!

Not believing Wikipedia, I thought to check other sites for better details and assumed English Pravda would be authoritative but this headline Moscow Metro Kills Over 1,500 Every Year is where my Paulos-trained crap-detector kicked in.  Can't be true, and it's not.  It should read Moscow Metro Injures Over 1,500 Every Year which is less exciting but less fatal. Lost in translation?

Cost benefit beer.

Calculation time!  It's a while since I waved my arms at some order of magnitude numbers.  Recently I was remembering the multiply-fatal Lac Mégantic derailment and left a question hanging about how dangerous is beer. In a famous incident in October 1814, 500 tons of beer Niagraed out of a vat in London and drowned 7 poor people in the local cellars.

The per capita annual beer consumption in Ireland is close to 100 lt. We're way behind the Czechs and about on par with ethnic Germans, Poles and Balts. The total quantity consumed is about 475 million litres, for a population (Republic only) of 4.6 million. Which shows how goofy some of these out-trotted statistics are: for per capita beer consumption we're talking per every head in the country including those that have just emerged from the womb.  ANNyway, every day 1.3 million litres of beer goes down Irish throats.

There were in 2011, a record low number N = 162 of road fatalities. Which is the result of an extraordinary collective effort to reduce this toll of unnecessary death - as recently as 2005 there were 396 deaths on Irish roads. In any year about a quarter of the dead are pedestrians and maybe 3% cyclists. I'd guess that half of them have drink taken so there is a drink-related death on the Irish roads one day in every five.  I've suggested before that, as the Irish government has a commendable policy of reducing road deaths and as RTE, the state broadcaster has a less commendable policy of reporting every road fatality on the national news, it would be a useful standard operating procedure SOP to report the blood alcohol level of every dead car driver.  But I'm not particularly interested in beer-induced road deaths, I trying to get an estimate of beer-induced any deaths.  Irish Water Safety are getting a lot of airtime this weather and they say 1/3 of 150 annual deaths by drowning involve The Drink. Because of their ear for ghoulish quirkiness, the RTE news-editors told us a couple of weeks ago about a young woman, a wedding guest, seriously injured because she had fallen from a hotel's first floor balcony head-first onto the roof of  car parked below. Would you agree that the odds are Lombard Street to a china orange that alcohol was involved? I'd hazard a guess that every two days there is an alcohol related accidental death in Ireland: half of them (0.5 x ~162/365) from cars, 1/6th from drowning, the rest from other situations where machinery and alcohol don't mix: PTOs on farms, chain-saws, lawn-mowers, gas-ovens, ladders and I'd guess a lot of plain young man silliness like the neknomination craze that swept one of our students to death earlier this year. Let's note that 50% of the alcohol consumption is beer, down from 70% 20 years ago - we are. like continental sophisticates, delicately sipping a lot more wine nowadays.

Thus every day in Ireland somebody gets killed because somebody has drunk too much beer (those somebodies are often the same person). Over the same period, 2.6 million litres of good ale, refreshing lager and nutritious stout have been drunk, giving hundreds of thousands of people a chance to cool down a hot curry, restore fluids after some strenuous Summer work outdoors, lubricate an awkward conversation or, indeed, achieve a temporary oblivion from their private hell.

Me, I don't think we should follow out-gone Health Minister James Reilly in banning cigarettes.  I guess the tobacco lobby have won that battle now that Reilly has been reshuffled to a different government position.  Kevin Byrne has opened the debate about imaginative proposals to balance the the cost of beer-driven death vs the clear-and-present benefit of beer in rural Ireland. Neither of us have really considered the general life-shortening aspects (cirrhosis, heart-disease, cancer, dementia) of excessive alcohol consumption: I'll clearly have to come back here wearing a different hat. There is something repellent when government mounts the white horse of moral crusade and legislates to prevent something of which it disapproves. Romeo and Juliet laws spring to mind. In framing legislation you research relevant data and extrapolate imagined scenarios and write the law in best legalese. The Irish Council for Bioethics thought long and debated hard about end-of-life issues but there will be a particular and peculiar set of circumstances that aren't covered by their wording for advanced healthcare directives.  A helluva a lot of road-miles are driven with alcohol on board for each fatality but no sane person believes that we can eliminate road deaths entirely even if we make drink-driving a capital offense.

Archaea

I was bigging up Lynn Margulis last year because I knew her well and her course BI504 Evolution had a huge impact as I sat through it with shining eyes in graduate school. In her course, Margulis marginalised humans, indeed mammals, indeed vertebrates as a slightly boring and rather uniform wart on the edge of life's diversity.  She championed a five kingdom division of the living world: Animals, Plants, Fungi, Bacteria and Protochtista.  In 1980, when I took the course, she was happy with the first four bins but acknowledged that Protochtista was a bit of a grab-bag consisting mostly of unicellular organisms that had a nucleus (so were not bacteria) but didn't comfortably fit in the other three kingdoms: including human parasites like amoeba, trypanosomes, giardia but also various algae and things you find in pond-water. But she was wrong, and the timing shows that it takes some time for even a smart, iconoclastic scientist at the peak of her game to absorb new ideas.

Because at the end of 1977, Carl Woese and his post-doc George Fox, had shook all the toys out on the floor and started putting them into different boxes.  They were able to do this by exploiting a new technique for classifying microscopic organisms that didn't depend on growing them on Petri dishes.  It turns out that many, even most, small-small t'ings cannot be grown on a Petri dish no matter how you trick about with the ingredients in the agar. One of the reasons why everyone knows about Escherichia coli, although few can spell it correctly, is that it can be cultivated in vitro (on a glass Petri dish). E.coli, far from being the gut bacterium, in fact contributes less than 1% to your intestinal flora. Before Woese and Fox, microbiologists did nifty things looking at the size, colour and shape of colonies growing on agar in dishes, measuring the metabolic chemicals that went in and out of those colonies and looking at the size and shape of the microbes under a microscope.  I've spent a very enjoyable year in The Institute doing this C19th science with our Yr3 Food and Fermentation Microbiology students.

It took pretty much everyone a long time to take on board this radical shake-up of how we viewed the living world, but like Barbara McClintock, Woese, knowing he was right,  just kept plugging away gathering more data. Woese had been working for the previous decade and a half on nucleic acids DNA and RNA, trying to suss out the genetic code and, when that was sorted by himself and many others, churning out sequence information particularly of structural RNAs in the ribosome.  The ribosome is the biochemical machine, shaped like a teeny cottage loaf, which translates RNA into protein codon by codon.  It consists of maybe 60 different proteins held together with three strings of RNA.  In 1977, Woese and Fox published a classic paradigm-shifting paper in PNAS which suggested that although two bacteria might look identical (oval blob) down a microscope they were as different as two things can be and still come from from the same planet. In particular they recognised that "things without a nucleus" (i.e. different from us) should definitely not be lumped into the same bin. Executive summary and context by Jon Eisen.

This picture is a recent assessment of the state of our knowledge.  4/5ths of Margulis' kingdoms make up the pale green branch pointing upwards and plants / animals / fungi which are effectively the visible portion of the living world are three twigs on a limb of a branch of the whole tree. So you can see why she might have talked up a storm on W&F 1977, but as far as I remember, she did not. [I've gone back and checked my notes from the course and she did mention that the 16S rRNA from methanogens was very different - but that meant that methanogenesis was 'early'; rather than that bacteria of her fifth kingdom were polyphyletic]. The animal 'kingdom' is so well embedded in our language and understanding of life's divisions that the three major groups identified by Woese and Fox are referred to as Domains. It was intitially thought that the recently identified Archaea were ancient hold-outs from a primitive earth living in extremes of temperature, or in weird chemical stews in geologically active ponds.  It being so difficult to cultivate a given microbe in the lab, it's taken a while to realise that Archaea are found pretty much everywhere and that several species are extremely abundant and impact significantly on cycling of carbon (whoop whoop global warming alert) and nitrogen on the planet. Also note the implication that Archaea are more similar to things-with-nucleus Eukaryotes than they are to the rest of bacteria - although this view is under intense scrutiny now.

The other important consequence of the technique of RNA sequencing is that you can pull up a net full of sea-water or an aliquot from the intestinal flora or a shovelful of contaminated soil and get a good Petri-free idea of the number and types of the invisible organisms that inhabit those environments.  This bears on diagnostics, environmental chemistry and numerous other fields. Woese died a couple of years ago, but today is his birthday 15 July 1928.  Hats off!