Ireland's Shame

As you know, my two girls Dau.I and Dau.II never went to school. They were completely different but both taught themselves to read in the month after their sixth birthday which gave them the competence to learn whatever they thought was important.  Dau.I internalised a dozen plays of Shakespeare and the complete works of Jane Austen in her early teens and became a poet, blogger and journalist.  She also read everything written by Neil Gaiman, Tamora Pierce and eeeuw! J.K.Rowling.  Actually she read everything. Dau.II, OTOH, turned out differently. They both left home a few months before they got the vote and are now productive members of their community, respected by their employers and earning enough to support their modest needs. It's not just them. They are members of an extraordinary cohort of  youngsters, now in their late teens and early twenties who are artists, musicians, journalists, craftsmen and scholars : most in college, some not.  All true to their own individual selves, all articulate, independent of thought and action and all home educated: not a dim bulb among them, although some are painfully quiet.

I've written before about the family of two of this group who are The Future of Ireland. I've also written about my own flabby moral compass and so am heartily glad that the girls grew up before the Feds took them away. Because since 2000, the government of Ireland has taken it upon themselves to licence the right to educate your children at home.  This despite that right being explicitly buttoned into Article 42 of the Irish Constitution by Eamonn de Valera. Actually our girls weren't going to be taken into care by a beneficent and increasingly intrusive state because, after a decade of ignoring the new Education Welfare Act and getting out of the way while they educated themselves, we caved in and registered with the National Education Welfare Board NEWB. It was easy. We have 3000 books in the living room, I have an intimidatingly educated English accent and was then working as a teacher and researcher in Trinity College Dublin, while Herself their mother has better formal quals for teaching and the girls made a brief appearance: open, articulate, interested and knowledgeable. Registration was assured in half and hour.  But that's only part of it.

What right does the state have to intrude in the lives, particularly the family relationships, of their citizens?  These are difficult moral and ethical questions, that can be conveniently shuffled under the carpet because they don't matter to those of us who are middle-class, white, and have a penis. We make the rules, we decide what is normal. For example, we decide what is on the curriculum in schools, so we turn out generations of people who know how to answer questions about a single Shakespeare play (Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear on a three year rotation) but have usually never seen it acted. Maude Delap, a superb Irish naturalist, doesn't feature in the biology curriculum; cripes! evolution barely features there. We are all shifting into an uncertain future. If everyone has the same education then who is going to propose the outside-the-box solutions?  Clearly we want every child in the state to achieve at least "a certain minimum education" as required by Article 42, but compelling the handful of home-educating parents to register with a government appointed quango is maybe not the best way of achieving this laudable aim. It is an ominous fact that the government has spend thousands rebranding the NEWB as the Child and Family Agency of Tusla - optics matter!

My reading of the situation in the case of Monica O'Connor and Eddie O'Neill is that they have mounted a barricade for the rest of us.  The government on the other hand is concerned with the letter of the law: it says you have to register to home-educate, so you will be punished if you don't register. It's easier for everyone if parents register, the optics can then be kept polished.  But the difficult cases, the awkward squad, compels us to think about why law is there and whether the tail is wagging the dog.

Thanks Monica and Eddie for taking one for the team.  I'm sure you'll handle slopping out with the care and competence that you've handled so much else, including raising of a parcel children who stand up straight so that they can see over the hedge.
http://url.ie/txgg is short for this post.
The Blob goes all ethical:
1) blows: smacking - boxing - rugby - ECT - school - chlorine -
2) the dispossessed: Guildford - Mississippi - Viginia - Derry - Berlin - Dublin - Belsen

That Sinking Feeling

Nowadays, when you Google up just about aNNything, the top hit is from Wikipedia, unless it's about notable female Edwardian naturalists who are of no interest at all to Jimmy Wales's wikiboys. In my restless surfing of the interweb to find copy from The Blob I often pass through the en.wikipedia.org home page where there is a snippet-bin called Did you know  . . . which changes daily and is usually good for a ten second glance.  Items are often peripherally associated with some event on the given day. I was curious enough about this question Did you know that the stiff wood in Bronzino's portrait of Genoan admiral Andrea Doria (pictured) may represent an erection? . . . to find out more about the portrait (it's not very exciting in that sense).  From there I was reading about Admiral Andrea Doria the man; which rang a distant bell about Andrea Doria the liner which was sunk in a collision with the Stockholm at the end of July 1956. Events were both similar and different when comnpared with the sinking of the Empress of Ireland in the St Lawrence 40 years earlier. Fog was a factor in both and the ship which was struck in her side sank, while the striker survived afloat despite dramatic damage to her bow.  The differences were that almost everyone survived the sinking in the Andrea Doria because she took 11 hours to die rather than 14 minutes for the Empress.  Most of the dead were from the impact of 12,000 tons of steel-plate appearing in passengers' cabins as they prepared for bed. Fourteen year old Linda Morgan miraculously finished up on the bows of the Stockholm which had just killed her sister and plucked her from their bunk at the point of impact. But that's an anecdote, here are the data:

Ship	Lost	Saved	% saved
Empress of I	1012	465	31%
AndreaDoria	46	1660	97%

Ocean-going liners in 1956 had radar fitted-as-standard which should be a great help in notoriously fog-bound seaways like the St Lawrence or South of Nantucket but sometimes kit lulls you into a sense of complacency and dependence rather than relying directly on your eyes. ears, common sense and the rules of the road at sea.  In at least the Stockholm's case but probably the Doria's as well, there is a strong suspicion that the Bridge didn't really know what the range-setting was and assumed that the blip representing the the other ship was three times further off than she really was.  This was partly a design flaw: the range-setting was virtually invisible in the darkened bridge - one of the subsequent recommendations being to have a binnacle light for the radar as there had long been one for the compass.

Another point is that the Stockholm's officer of the watch, outbound from New York and experienced on this route, was expecting incoming craft to run very close to the Nantucket light which he believed was well to the North of him. Seeing a radar-blip representing a ship very fine on the bows, his brain said "must be on the port bow" and it was hard to shake that conviction when the Andrea Doria burst out of the fog bank.  His reaction was turn right, which was, in addition, the correct Rule-at-Sea where ships pass port-side to port-side and turn right away from each other. But this was turning into the path of the oncoming liner.

The Doria's helmsman seeing disaster approaching instinctively shied away from the source of danger but, if the Nordling diagram above is close to correct, it was too late and his ship was whacked just behind the bow and tin-opened from main-deck to waterline. The damage was thus similar to that sustained by the Empress in 1914 but coming in from the Ocean and in fog the Doria's water-tight doors were all closed according to regulations.  Nevertheless the ship heeled to starboard and started to settle. That meant that half the life-boats were unavailable for normal loading when the Italian captain ordered Abandon Ship. Nevertheless, the first three life-boats which rowed from the stricken ship towards the comparative safety of the Stockholm were heavy with crewmen and very light on passengers, let alone women-and-children. The crew of the Stockholm accordingly took time off from saving their own ship and picking up survivors to duff up their fellow sailors who had abandoned their duty.  That might remind you of the Costa Concordia which ran aground and tipped over in Jan 2012.  It was said at the time that Captain Francesco Schettino was the first off that stricken ship to "go and seek help".  Not the done thing in my father's book. The crew of the Stockholm then went back to saving a final tally of 570.

Perhaps the hero of the hour was Captain the Baron Raoul de Beaudean captain of the Île de France the aged pride of the French merchant marine. Beaudean (seen R with his radio-operator L) (русский) put the needs of his passengers, his company and their shareholders on the back-boiler and turned his ship around to help with the rescue. By forming a lee behind which the Doria found some shelter from the elements and by shuttling his own life-boats back and forth between the wreck and safety, Beaudean plucked 750 people from the unforgiving sea, fed them, re-clothed them (with generous help from his passengers) and brought them on to their destination in New York.  Now that's a chap of whom my old man would have approved.

Sefarad

And the captivity of this host of the children of Israel, that are among the Canaanites, even unto Zarephath, and the captivity of Jerusalem, that is in Sepharad, shall possess the cities of the South. Obadiah 1:20.

This is the only mention of the place Sepharad / Sefarad / Sfard in the Old Testament.  But like early American settlers named their towns after places in the Bible (Lebanon NH, Dothan AL, Salem everywhere), the Iberian Jews referred to their home-place as Sefarad and they themselves accordingly became Sephardim (  סְפָרַדִּי) which distinguishes them from the Ashkenazi Jews of Northern Europe. They landed up here because Islam was particularly tolerant of any monotheists "the people of the book". That's not to say that Muslims are notably anti-anti-semitic, they can't even extend tolerance to different sects (Sunni, Shi'a) of their own religion and nor can Christians (Cathars, Catholics, Protestants, Quakers). Al Andalus ( الأندلس‎,) was a Garden of Eden and pleasure to live in or see, and after the 70 AD expulsion of Jews from Palestine by the Romans in a Stalinist relocation, many of them finished up in the paradise that the Emirate of Cordoba [in about 1000 AD all the green bits L] was making out of the peninsula. The next 500 years was a long drawn out process which gradually whittled the Empire of the Arabs to a tiny enclave in Granada. This reconquista is marked by the many towns and villages across Spain with the suffix de la Frontera. Jerez de la Frontera is where they make Sherry, for example.

Los Reyes Católicos  Fernando II de Aragón e Isabel I de Castilla united the Christians for the final push South and gave the Muslims a good drubbing at the Battle of Granada in late 1491, which led Emir Muhammad XII, whom we know as Boabdil, to surrender the city and the complex of rich agricultural holdings in the surrounding countryside to Ferdinand and Isabella (everyone in this story gets their name mangled).  The treaty of surrender was pragmatically tolerant and allowed the Jews and Muslims to retain their holdings. Pragmatic because the Muslim peasants were the only people with generations of experience managing the irrigation system. But within 3 months the Catholic Kings got a bee in their bonnet about the Jews and on 31st March 1492 signed an edict of expulsion to take effect four months later on 31st July the same year. Which makes them a tiny bit more compassionate than Idi Amin expelling the Ugandan Asians with 90 days notice in 1972.  It took just over 100 years before the patience of the Catholic hierarchy for converting Muslims finally reached the end of its tether and the remaining followers of The Prophet were also expelled in 1609.  Those of both faiths who chose to remain had to convert and became Nuevo Cristianos or Conversos.  If you think that Anne Frank had a hard time hiding away for 4 years in Amsterdam, reflect on these people having to live a double life for generations. The Inquisition would be happy to take denunciations from the neighbours if they were seen to refuse a pork chop or behave a little strangely at Easter / Passover.  Those Sephardim who weren't knifed for the diamonds they were rumoured to have swallowed, took their faith with them and went to seek their fortunes elsewhere, notably in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire (Thessaloniki, Smyrna, and Sarajevo absorbed many). They also took their language Ladino which is based on medieval Spanish the way Yiddish is based on medieval German.

Now here's coincidence that has bothered me for a long time. 1492 is one of the dates that everybode kno, like 1066.  Because

in fourteen hundred and ninety-two

Columbus sailed the ocean blue

which at the time was a small-small thing compared to the momentous events in Al-Andalus but a giant step for mankind. There is a bit of whisper that old Cristoforo. who was born in Genoa but didn't speak Italian and left a weird will, was Jewish and that he sailed on the first tide after the Alhambra Degree became absolute. Now that's not true!  He waited until 3rd August.

So far, so far away. But the Spanish government, for reasons which are beset with fuzzy-thinking, are in the process of passing a law to give Spanish citizenship to the descendants of those expelled more than 500 years ago.  There is an estimate of 225,000 being the Jewish population of Spain in 1492, and there are 45,000 now.  But the Irish diaspora, running the Chicago police department and supplying an occasional POTUS, outnumbers the current inhabitants of the island by at least 10 to 1 and possibly double that.  So the bureaucrats working under Spanish Minister of Justice Alberto Ruiz-Gallardon will have to work out the logistics of his sentimental gesture (see also Turing, and Guildford for further examples of revisonist nonsense|). Someone has published a list of qualifying surnames in Israel and there has been a lot of interest. Apparently the ability to speak Ladino will also allow you an EU passport. As Judaism is a matrilineal religion (because everyone knows who your mother was but your father could have been the milkman), then I can imagine an enterprising company getting a kit to test the mitochondrial genome (which is inherited from the mother because the sperm delivers no mitochondria to the fertilisation process) for "Sephardism".  Testing the Y chromosome is as irrelevant as looking to the surname for establishing Jewishness.

There was a minor scandal in 1990s Ireland when the Prime Minister Charles Haughey organised an Irish passport for a Maltese businessman who had been generous to his Fianna Fáil party.  If my pal Malpica is correct in his assertion that Spain is much better at corruption than the Irish, then there is going to be an unseemly scrum for Ladino classes in South America.

Burkitt

My first job after my PhD was in the Genetics Department in the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. It was the quintessence of a Red Brick University - staffed and studented by ordinary people and integral to the local community.  The campus was on the very edge of the downtown shopping district which meant we could support the economy on our lunch-breaks.  But it cut the other way also, because every Thursday evening in term-time there was a Public Lecture in our biggest theatre.  The lectures could be, and were, about every topic under the sun and I made a point of going to them all - you never knew when it was going to be a blinder. It was all quite formal, with a Chair to introduce the session, and a vote of thanks afterwards.  One night, the speaker discarded the lectern and microphone and came forward to sit on a big mahogany desk at the front of the stage. As he swung his feet and asked for the next slide, he told us the story of his discoveries in East Africa and got starry-eyed and insistent about the importance of dietary fibre in the prevention of colon cancer - complete with pictures of a cross section through a flush-toilet containing "a floater" to indicate how we were to know if we had sufficient fibre in our diet.  It was the funniest, most engaging and most informative talk that year. His name was Denis Burkitt and he came from a family of evangelical christians in Enniskillen.

After WWII service in the RAMC,  his vocation insisted that he stop in Uganda to help the dispossessed.  One day he treated a small black child who had a tumour at the angle of the jaw.  The next day, looking out of the surgery window, he saw another child with a similar growth.  As he'd never seen such a condition in a child back home in the WEA, he was disturbed and intrigued. Not unlike William McBride noticing several limbless infants and eventually fingering thalidomide. As such tumours were untreatable at the time, it might have been more sensible to concentrate on diseases where his training could make a difference.  Burkitt on the contrary went up to head office in Kampala to dig out all the records of childhood cancers in the archives of the medical service of the colony. There were lots, but they weren't everywhere, so Burkitt went along the road to the Surveyors Office and got a map of the colony on which he marked each case with a cross.  A few sleepless nights and gnawing at the data and he twigged that the tumours were much more likely to happen in regions which had year-round hot and wet weather: regions where malaria was endemic. He assumed that he was dealing with a something that was transmitted along with the malarial parasites by the vector mosquitoes that hatched in large numbers where warm puddles were ever-available.  He was wrong, wrong almost right.

In 1961 he went to London on leave and gave a talk about his work at one of the medical schools.  This lit a fire under a young chap called Michael Epstein who came up to talk to him over a cup of tea afterwards.  Epstein was primed because he'd spent some time working with Rous Sacroma Virus which had been shown to cause cancer in chickens.  Epstein conceived the ambition of being the first to show a cancer-inducing virus in humans and arranged that Burkitt would air-freight samples of tumorous tissue from Kampala to London on a regular basis.  Nothing Epstein or his PhD student Yvonne Barr could do enabled them to isolate any sort of virus from these samples . . . until the day Heathrow was fog-bound and the Kampala flight was diverted to Manchester.  It was two days before the sample arrived at its destination and if looked 'off' - cloudy like it had a bacterial infection - and Epstein almost threw it away.  But a look down the microscope showed that the cloudiness was free-floating cancer cells and that was the first step in being able to see virus particles in the cells when viewed with a powerful electron microscope.  It's a type of herpes virus and now named EBV - Epstein-Barr Virus. Burkitt was wrong to believe that EBV is transmitted by mosquitoes because it turns out that we all (90-95% of adults) have EBV about our persons, but he was right about the malaria connexion. When the child's immune system is under siege from malaria, the EBV can multiply sufficiently to do its damage. It's like MRSA which at least 30% of us have ready to sneeze. That wasn't the end of the story, you can fill in the spaces here, en ook hier.  EBV is the cause of infectious mononucleosis (aka mono or glandular fever) in teenagers - if you haven't had it, you know lots of people who have.  It is also associated with a variety of auto-immune diseases including lupus.

Epstein didn't get a Nobel Prize (although it was a possibility) but he did become Sir Anthony Epstein CBE FRS (giving him parity of esteem with Jocelyn Bell Burnell) and nor did Denis Burkitt who is dead these least 20 years, so out of the running. Yvonne Barr seems, like Beatrix Potter, to have left science shortly after her one great contribution and married a bloke from Melbourne.

This is what makes science so fascinating.  It's never as simple as it seems at first sight.  Nature yields her secrets best to those who are observant, creative, all-the-hours hard-working, communicative, generous . . . and lucky.

Hill Top Farm

Hill Top Farm in the English Lakes is the enduring legacy of now world-famous writer and illustrator Helen Beatrix Potter.  She is famous for her ditsy children's books, starting with Peter Rabbit [L].  Luckily her family "had money" because when she hawked her biologically accurate anthropomorphic cutesies round the publishing houses of late Victorian London nobody was interested.  For £11 she published a limited edition which was very well received by family and friends. Publisher Frederick Warne accordingly "took a risk" and have been coining it ever since.  £11 sounds like buttons, but an agricultural laborer in 1900 was bringing home less than £1 a week, so it helped to "have  money".

You could do worse than hunt out the film Miss Potter starring Renée Zellweger and Ewan McGregor (full film in ten etiolated fragments with eSpanish subtitles): it's got a lovely sound-track, no car-chases and an upbeat ending: my sort of film but fluffy. The up-beat ending hinges on the fact that with the proceeds of her books she accumulated a huge land-bank in the English Lakes starting with Hill Top Farm which is now the centre for coach-loads of groupie-tourists.  She was rich, she was astute and she didn't alienate too many of her neighbours. She bought the abutting farm and then other parcels of fells and valleys to something in the region 1700 hectares. She sank further money into developing these, occasionally moribund, holdings into productive farms mostly given over to sheep but supporting a sustainable mixed economy of other livestock, quarries and timber.  When she died in the middle of WWII she made over this incalculably valuable resource to the National Trust and when her husband died 18 month later, the rest of the estate came to the NT as well. The picture shows them the day before they got married. It is likely that, but for this vision and generosity, there would be nothing for the tour-buses to bother with in the English Lake District.  Her reputation for sheep-breeding and -husbandry was legend in the region and she was often asked to judge competitions at agricultural fairs.

It might have been different, she might have been a scientist. Indeed, some people claim that she was a scientist who made significant contributions to the study and identification of fungi, especially in their associations with algae to form lichens. In those unthinkingly sexist times, women were widely believed to lack the intellectual capacity to follow a logical argument, gather reliable data, or form and test hypotheses. Miss Potter was born the same year as Maude Delap over in the West of Ireland who made waves in the world of the development and reproduction of Cnidaria including jellyfish. Because Miss Potter was very well-connected in Victorian London she was able to get alongside competent mycologists and other naturalists with whom she bounced her ideas around. What she learned from these learned men about physiology, development and evolution undoubtedly improved the accuracy of her drawings. That's an interesting comment on the psychology of perception: you can't draw what you can't see and you can't see what you don't understand. One of these insiders read her single scientific paper "On the Germination of the Spores of Agaricineae" to the Linnean Society in 1897. She was not eligible to do this for herself because she lacked a penis. Some comments were made on the paper and, as was normal practice, it was returned to the author for revision.  She withdrew the paper from the publication process and it seems to have disappeared, so nobody is quite sure how much of a contribution to the study of fungal development it was. She continued to draw fungi and lichens with meticulous care and attention to detail but didn't always know what she was recording. Her career in science was thus not meteoric, but it was handiXXapped from the beginning.

The other intriguing thing about the young Miss Potter is that for about 15 years from the age of 14, she kept a secret journal in a code of her own invention.  That's pretty determined: to write 300,000 words (about equal to the contents of The Blob) in an idiosyncratic code so that her parents wouldn't be able to intrude on her mind, the way they assumed the right to intrude on her external life. This diary stops abruptly 4 months before the Linnean Society escapade. I think she found her métier in recording the natural world that she loved and indeed just being in the natural world that she loved. It is unlikely that she would, given the prevailing inertia and prejudice, have had a more fulfilling life climbing mount impossible in Edwardian science.  And I for one am grateful to her for the many happy days I spent on top of the world in the English Lake District.

The Edge: not an abyss but a place to fly

You wouldn't think to look at his appreciative and confident smile (he's just taken a huge ovation at TEDxHollywood in June) that this is a man with problems. In his talk, however, he itemises a list of handicaps any one of which would be devastating for people like me: he's blind, he's paralyzed, he's bald and he's from Nor'n Ireland. But in the same way as Stephen Sutton was not defined by his cancer, Mark Pollock is not defined by his problems. He's not even defined by his solutions, he's just himself: kind, funny, and courageous. He's also outrageously sporty (me = not): winning rowing medals at the Commonwealth Games 2002 ; six marathons over a week in the Gobi desert 2003; running to the South Pole 2004. A bit of an all-rounder like Zatopek? You might think that pitching out of a second floor window and breaking his back in 2010 would put a stop to his gallop, but not so. He's bored in his wheelchair (not to mention the pressure sores) and has spent the last many months in California being a guinea-pig for a pair of robotic legs. Supporting this endeavour has gotten thousands of people across the world off their sofas to Run in the Dark.  It's about getting his mobility back, yes, but it's also about developing a technological solution to paralysis and other forms of leglessless.  I'll recommend another TED talk by neuroscientist Stuart Firestein on the Joys of Ignorance and telling science like it is ("farting around in the dark"), not the way Scientific Method textbooks say it should be. He says something interesting and Pollock-relevant about how techies have taken the last 30 years to reproduce in machines many of the attributes that evolution has taken 2 million years to make functional: face-recognition, auto-focus cameras, how things smell.  But he admits that getting robots that walk without tripping over their own wires has been a very great challenge; but galloping (yee-har) they can do.

And you might wish that, rather than talking at a TEDx event to relatively ordinary citizens (although ticket prices were a humpin' $250) from LA, he was pitching to a TED proper meeting where only the seriously rich can afford the $6K annual membership. Chris Anderson, please note.

What does it take to make a contribution to that sort of science? It takes Mark, so far, 300,000 steps. The same year Mark was running to the South Pole, I was walking along the Camino de Santiago. That trudge of 800,000 steps did me some service although one of his steps was equivalent to 500 of mine, blisters and all. There's also this comparison:  almost every day in Spain I met people on the Camino who had to dig deep into their reserves of courage to carry on with their personal pilgrimage: not only those on crutches and wheelchairs or terminal with cancer but also those surrounded by a black cloud of sadness and despair. Mark's trials (both in the sense of experiment and tribulation) in California are going to make a difference in Kampuchea without him ever going there. But more importantly Mark makes a difference because, like Open University, the RNLI and the Jack&Jill Foundation he shows us the best of what we have within ourselves.

“What counts in life is not the mere fact that we have lived. It is what difference we have made to the lives of others that will determine the significance of the life we lead.”  Nelson Mandela

Legless in Kampuchea

Nearly 3 million people have tuned into TED to watch VS Ramachandran talk about the weirdness of how our brain makes sense of the world. A couple of them are me because I had occasion recently to cite the great neurologist for his thoughts on the intrinsic meaning of the sounds of language.  In the same talk (from about 9:30 minues), he refers to his extraordinary work on phantom limbs.  This is firm belief of amputees that the limb is still there.  They can feel it so clearly that all kinds of aspects of their lives are forced to accommodate something that isn't there.  That's what we do all the time, we try to make sense of the world and come up with rational narratives to explain random events that have happened to us.  It is too much to allow that shit happens - there must be a reason.  If you seed the idea that entirely ficticious events have happened to people - they went on a trip in a hot-air balloon as a child - they will not only come to firmly believe that it happened but invent all sorts of reasons why it happened - Uncle Jim was in town and took the kids for a treat etc.

That would be curious or mildly amusing except that a large proportion of amputees experience their limb as twisted in agony to such an extent that their quality of life falls through the basement into a hell which you and I can barely imagine.  Well, of course, everyone said, that's because you've sawed off the leg and the nerve endings including pain receptors are still raw and still transmitting.  So for years the standard treatment was pain-killing meds.  But Ramachandran and others have shown through a series of damn-clever experiments that the pain is not peripheral but generated in the brain as it tries to make sense of the fact that part of its familiar body is missing.  Motor signals sent to the missing part have no visible effect and the cognitive dissonance is interpreted as pain.  It is similar to the effect when our eyes tells us that the floor on the ferry is horizontal while our semi-circular canals are telling us that it is heaving about in a storm.  The result is queasiness or even what Australians call a technicolor yawn.

Clever experiments are all very well but the neurologists tried a creative therapy based on a low low tech appropriate technology.  They hid the stump behind a mirror in such a way that it looked to the patient like there were two mirror-symmetrical limbs available (situation normal, therefore).  A short course in training - telling the patient to move both limbs in synchrony creates a feeling of oh look my phantom limb is moving under my command. After a while - a matter of weeks - in some people the now under-central-command limb no longer feels painful. I guess the unfortunates who have lost both legs are beyond this therapy.

Ramachandran mentions the Iraq war as a source of missing limbs but you can finish the TED talk and reckon that this is just a quirky anomaly that affects a small part of the case load of this adventurous neurologist in California. California is a long way from Cambodia. But hey, if you want people without legs, then Cambodia is the place to be.  Three decades of war strewed the countryside with twice as many land-mines as people to step on them.  It was one of the places that exercised Princess Di before she died and also helped put in place the Ottawa Treaty which repudiated the manufacture, use or stock-piling of anti-personnel mines. It has been signed off by 150+ countries, so it should now just be a case of cleaning up the residual mines with a minimum of lost limbs and lost lives. There is a shorter list of countries that have a different way of dealing with land-mines - making money from them: why not check to see which side of the fence your own nation stands?  From a science and engineering viewpoint, landmines have been ingeniously improved over the last 60 years. Some clever engineer, for example, designed a feature that makes the explosive charge spring out of the earth to eye-level before filling the air with ball-bearings.

Anyway, that's our shame.  But I can strongly recommend that you take ten minutes out of your life to read the story of  Canadian wanderer Stephen Sumner. He lost his leg in a bicycle-car accident, screamed through several years of phantom pain, then cured himself in the parking lot of the store where he bought a mirror.  With his eyes shining with fervour rather welling up with tears he went off to Cambodia, designed a light-weight unbreakable therapeutic mirror, loaded his bike with samples and went off into the countryside. Whenever he saw someone missing a leg, he'd dumb-show his way through the way to put the pain behind. "I can’t believe no one else is doing this. It’s super-effective. I’d have thought there would be thousands of people riding around with mirrors, but there are not… What is wrong with people?”

Now what was I quoting?  "to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived this is to have succeeded."  Hats off to Mr Sumner.  Or wave your prosthetic legs in the air: that will do as well.