21 seconds to empty

. . . the bladder.  The Ig Nobel awards have been running for 25 years now.  They were set up by the team from the Annals of Improbable Research [not to be confused with The Journal of Irreproducible Results]to give tribs to scientific papers that "Make you laugh . . . and then make you think".  We've had Benoit Mandelbrot giving a talk at the award ceremony previously.  When you consider that serious science is full of sleepers that are never heard from again (45% of scientific papers are never cited), then the hit rate is far higher at the quirky end of the spectrum.  If your reaction is WTF would anyone want to spend time over such a problem, or even harrrumph!: waste of tax-payers money. then you're quite possibly wrong.  We know not where the next inspiration and the next great leap forward will come from.  It is almost certainly not going to come from science funded by government agencies that are trying too hard to get short-term results.

One of the 2015 awards that caused a brief flurry in the press several weeks ago was the finding that all mammals that are bigger than a breadbox [3kg to 3000kg aNNyway] take the same time to empty their bladders.  Much of the coverage was a perfectly dreadful soup of coyness, archness and cheap jokes. Livescience was one of the better takes on the reportage. It seems that David Hu of Georgia Tech was changing a particularly brimful diaper and wondered about the bladder-capacity of an elephant. Whatever the reasons for starting the investigations, the results are definitely counter-intuitive.  Lots of things scale up as dimensions increase and not always in a linear fashion.  For example, a newborn baby weighs about 3kg and is about 0.5m long. Over the next 18 years, the length will increase by 4x but the weight by 20x (or more if obesity is at issue).  But the size of the cells doesn't change: a red blood cell is 8µm across from cradle to grave.  Indeed r.b.cs are the same size across the whole range of mammals.  It's because the physical chemistry of gaseous exchange between the rbc and the walls of capillaries [which are also 8µm across) is so clever, intricate and complex that it hasn't been invented twice; it's just been increased in network size.  Same for cells-in-general, they are an average of 30µm across, so mice have fewer cells than we do rather than the same number of smaller cells.

It's a different constraint in the neck.  All mammals have seven (7) cervical vertebrae: all of us from pygmy shrews Sorex minutus to hump-back whales Megaptera novaeangliae have the same neck-bone count. It is these cross-species similarities and scalings that allowed Georges Cuvier, the father of comparative anatomy to say that he could reconstruct the whole animal from a single bone.  The humerus of an elephant is built like a tree trunk because they both have to support enormous weights; a bat's humerus not so much.

Most of us would think that an elephant's bladder, at full 18 lt capacity, would take a considerable time to void and a cat's rather less. That's working on the assumption that the urethra [the tube between bladder and out; not to be confused with the ureter the tube between kidney and bladder] would be, like a capillary, be about the same size in all species. But Professor's Hu's team has shown that this is not so: urethras are all in a length to width ratio of 18:1 regardless of absolute size. They are vessel-emptying devices.  For mammals smaller than a bread-box, the rule doesn't hold: at small sizes the physics of water, including surface tension, comes to the fore and, although rats and mice have bladders, they tended to be dribbly.

Last month at Wexford Science Café we discussed a cunning plan by the Irish Times to carry out a massive crowd-sourcing project like their scheme earlier in the year to gather genetic data about domestic cats.  That persuaded more than 10,000 people to share these data about their cats, without any of them paw-signing an informed consent form. If you're in the science zone, it shouldn't be hard to think of a question that can be addressed scientifically without needing any expensive kit or hours of time. The sample size being beefed up, and the scientific value thereby enhanced, by multiple participants. With 21-seconds-to-pee somewhere near the fore-front of my mind, I'd spent the previous several days counting "1 battleship, 2 battleship, 3 battleship ..." - but not necessarily aloud - every time I took a leak and was accumulating data. The headlines about the Georgia Tech study have all been about the average length of time it takes to empty bladders of all sizes. But biology is at least as much about variability as it is about the mean and the central tendency. Indeed it is the variability that makes life so interesting. This will strike those who know me as far far too much information TMI but I'm quicker than most - about 16 seconds.  In a week you could get a sample of 20 emptyings each with a time-of-day.  10,000 people, male and female, young and old, diabetic and post-partum could generate a dataset worthy of analysis.  Who's with me?

It would be a poor show if we allowed the talk of passing water to pass without recording a hilarious example of Dublin street wit. In 1966, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising, Dublin City commissioned a statute of patriot Thomas Davis [R] incorporating a fountain representing the heralds of the Four Provinces showering the country with the good news of national identity. The installation was instantly christened Urination Once Again.  On a more serious note, if you're a young chap you will not need instructions about how to empty your bladder but this link will explain that not everyone can take this essential life-skill for granted.

Sunday sofa 011115

• Yesterday was Ali Farka Touré's birthday, or it would be if he hadn't died in 2006 [bummer]. You might try this or this or with Ry Cooder for a little background music from Mali.  You'll be happier all day.
• Here's a nice little film about ultra-running - Ultra-trail du Mont Blanc, through 3 countries.  You have 46 hours to finish.
• The importance of jumping in rivers by Alastair Humphreys who has done longer journeys and recommends cold-showers if rivers are not conveniently available.
• The least dreadful clip I could find about the Milford Track; some of the others would make you want to walk somewhere else . . . anywhere else. The blue duck Hymenolaimus malacorhynchos is said to go down nicely poached in red wine.

First Counties in Aotearoa

I have friends&relations on the other side of the World, so have an interest in their demographics and politics flags. When New Zealand / Aotearoa was first colonised, the Islands were divided into 9 administrative provinces. On 1st November <today!> in 1876 these provinces were replaced by 63 counties and 7 boroughs.  My source can only identify 62 of the counties.
Counties and Boroughs in New Zealand 1876 with population:

Mongonui	1204	Wanganui & boro.	6308	Geraldine	13164
Bay of Islands	1489	Rangitikei	3690	Waimate	4269
Hokianga	419	Manawatu & boro.	5730	Waitaki	11595
Hopson	2171	Hult & boro.	25960	Waikouati	10826
Whangarei	2906	Wairarapa West	7163	Peninsula	2195
Rodney	3122	Wairarapa East	1100	Taieri	41318
Waitemata	3424	Waipawa	4721	Bruce	6814
Eden & boro.	32491	Hawke's Bay	9559	Clutha	3731
Manukai	9152	Sounds	570	Tuapeka	7109
Coromandel	2053	Marlborough	6117	Maniototo	2801
Thames & boro	10375	Kaikoura	782	Vincent	3937
Piako	34	Waimea	13641	Lake	3533
Tauranga	1550	Collingwood	1477	Southland	16315
Whakatane	783	Buller	3557	Wallace	3261
Cook & boro.	2745	Mangahua	2970	Fiord	13
Wairoa	809	Gray	7767	Stewart Island	245
East Taupo	95	Westland	11606	Auckland	13758
Waipa & boro.	3259	Amuri	458	Wellington	18953
Waikato & boro.	2460	Cheviot	117	Nelson	6604
Raglan	797	Ashley	12842	Christchurch	13425
Kawhia	69	Akaroa	4364	Sydenham	6510
Taranakai & boro.	7369	Selwyn	50720	Dunedin	22525
Patea	2988	Ashburton	6123	Invercargill	3761

In the 1878 census, two years later, the authorities chose to enumerate all the Chinese [N=4382] and half-castes [1932] but not the Maoris, who in this register are invisible, except in the naming of counties, more than half of which have Maori names. All the 'cities' have names from back home. The population is now [4.6m, the same as Ireland] about 10x what it was 140 years ago. You'll be struck by how small the population of some of the counties is.  Fiord County is now called Fiordland and still has a tiny resident population [N=20, in 2001] and a lot of fiords <surprise!>. The first thing The Boy did on his 2005 arrival in New Zealand for his working year for young people was slog along the Milford Track in Fiordland: a +50km limited access trek in one of the beautiful areas on the planet - I've seen the pictures.

What is a man?

People in Ireland with medium-term memories will recall the name Michael Cheika as the rugby coach who brought Leinster, the rugby team, to victory in the Heineken Cup in 2009. The trophy is now the European Rugby Champions Cup which explains more accurately that it is an elite championship for local clubs in the Six Nations. Weirdly IMO, the Irish field province-wide teams Leinster, Ulster, Connaught, Munster while other countries put out city teams like Newport Dragons or Glasgow Warriors. Is it that there isn't enough ooomph in Irish club teams like Blackrock or Old Wesley? The father of the nation Éamon de Valera was a lifelong rugger fan having played it in Blackrock College [but note that the real Blackrock College claims him] when he was young and fit - it caused some inconvenience with the Gaelic Athletics Association GAA who were and are a political, as well a keep-fit, movement.

Dove, a wholly owned subsidiary of Unilever, is trying to move out of the soap-is-for-girls niche and sell more of their product to the other 50% of humanity. They've started to interview Real Men and so get their logo out in association with blokes. That's an interesting marketing ploy and is probably working, not least because some of their interviews are gaining traction on youtube. Here, for example, is an interview with rugger coach Michael Cheika which is worth 40 minutes of your time if a) if you are a bloke with kids b) you have never used soap c) you like rugger but not the image d) you've bought the whole package: hard-chaw, pints of beer and fry-ups for breakfast every day. Cheika talks about

• building a team with different shaped bricks
• being okay about losing
• in contrast to divorce, world peace and Ebola; it's just a game
• but one which brings 50,000 people together in one place with a common purpose that isn't war
• real men being Who They Are not what someone else wants them to be
• there are many ways of being a brick
• the importance of kindness
• running up a hill with a smile on your face . . . or else

Warning, it's 45 minutes long so a schlep for the sound-byte generation but watching Cheika talk about training is waaay easier than running up a hill with a smile on your face.

A petunia in the onion patch

Derby Day, Flemington Racecourse, Melbourne, Australia
Dateline: 30 October 1965
Shock sensation outrage as Jean Shrimpton turns up for the first day of the races without gloves . . . without a hat . . . and showing rather more thigh than Melbourne matrons were used to seeing in a grown woman [youtube hindsight]. When she arrived, assuming that nobody would notice, everyone stopped talking and stared in a show of ill-manners that exposed the conventions of the time as frumpy, intolerant, and all together too floral, my dear. The Ozzie press had a field day, shifting the Derby winner, owner, trainer and jockey off the front-page and showing the best picture of the girl and the event that they could scrabble up. The English press, scarcely less hidebound and conventional than their Australian counterparts, rushed to defend their girl; one of them coining contemptuous superiority to those Colonials with the phrase "petunia in the onion patch". There's no doubt but that Shrimpton, like Hedy Lamarr, was symmetrical.  Me, I'm glad that she and we-all have left the clipped strangled English accent that today's middle-class-southern evolved from.  She was the first super-model: paid £2000 by the textile company Dupont de Nemours to make an appearance at Melbourne races. That was more than the annual take for an average salaryman. Two years later, my father, retiring at fifty after a lifetime in the navy, pulled down a salary of £3000 to work as sales manager in electrical engineering. Dupont was the same multinational that employed Stephanie Kwolek, for far less money, to make Kevlar. I think that comparison exposes the whole silliness with which Western society divvies up the money.

Lost in translation

I was coming out from my human physiology class at the beginning of the week chatting to the last tuthree students. It's a multi-cultural group and one of them was complaining that it was hard learning all the sciencey terms in English when she hadn't quite mastered the basic anatomy in English-as-a-foreign-language. I turned to the Anglophones and said that they should stop complaining about the long words, at least they knew the word "stomach" even if they had a only a hazy notion of where it was.  Then I added that the long words were surely the same, more-or-less, between English and Polish. I picked out Polish partly because the adrift student was Polish, but also because now, in terms of fluent everyday speakers, Polish is Ireland's second language after English and before Irish and French.  I then sat down with Google-translate to compile a list that would prove my point. It started off well:

• homeostasis; homeostaza
• cytoplasm; cytoplazma
• aorta; aorta

But then my theory rapidly lost support with rather complex, technical words having an unrelated term in Polish:

• carotid artery; tętnicy szyjnej
• kidney; nerka
• liver; wątroba
• pancreas; trzustka

I presume nerka and wątroba are butcher's terms: we use normal English for those things but revert to Latin roots for the adjectives renal and hepatic. The thalamus is a section of the brain right in the centre, behind the eyes, it is straight Greek: θάλαμο meaning a chamber.  The Polish term for thalamus is wzgórze which means 'hill' rather than 'chamber', but hypothalamus follows the same construction as for English: podwzgórze is underhill.  So I had all these in a list for the next class

• thalamus; wzgórze
• hypothalamus; podwzgórze
• adrenal; nadnercze "stuck on the kidney"
• pancreas; trzustka
• colon; dwukropek

I put the list up  on the screen, partly to show the Irisher kids that life would be a lot harder for them if they were enrolled in the Kraków Instytut learning human physiology fizjologia człowieka. My handful of Polish students were only a little helpful: they knew wzgórze meant hillock but had never delved enough into anatomy to know that they had one in their head. We had a small discussion about that and then one of them, very tentative and polite, suggested that I might have the wrong word for colon "because, you know, dwukropek is the thing with two dots". Much hilarity!  With hindsight, I should have known that: dwu . . . kropek.  Curse you Google-translate, you have collapsed my street-cred again.

Philip French - gone

Philip French, the long time film critique at The Observer died from a heart attach yesterday after a long illness.  He suffered [the right word here] from Still's Disease, a rare form of arthritis which can exhibit cyclically recurring symptoms [sore throat, joint pain, pink rash, fever] that make you think "pathogen" although none has been isolated yet. In this sense, it is in the same bin as the other [rheumatoid] arthritis RA and the other all too common autoimmune disease multiple sclerosis MS. Our immune system is a system which can pull out all the stops when it comes to fighting infection: hunting out the perps in dark corners and hitting them with a number of sticks. When the immune system is all tanked up and has nowhere to vent its spleen {*} its "effectives" may start biffing our own cells: the lining of the joint-capsule in RA and the myelin sheath of neurons in MS. We don't yet know the target cells or the rigger in the case of Still's, partly and thankfully because it is quite uncommon.
{* the right metaphor here: the spleen is a potent generator of white blood cells}

French's stamina and knowledge about film were legendary. Every week for more than 30 years he a) watched up to a dozen films and then b) wrote 1000ish words of solid and insightful copy about a handful of them.  Because he worked for a great liberal newspaper, he was able to write whatever he wanted and he found a wide readership among people who may not have 'known' film but they knew what they liked and were persuadable to try something outside their comfort zone. Choosing a theme suggested by one or more of that week's films, he'd flesh out the ideas and put them into a cultural context. Not a lot different from writing a regular blog except that he was good enough and early enough to parlay his experience and creativity into a living wage. By empowering and widening the world-view of thousands of middle-Englanders he did an enormous amount for increasing the concentration of compassion, tolerance and appreciation of The Other. A recent interview with Philip French.

His favorite movie of all time was a dark timeless morality play called Bad Day at Black Rock (1955 dir John Sturges, stellar cast) in which one-armed war-veteran Spencer Tracey, in his last film, turns up at Nowheresville, Boondock County looking for the family of a dead fellow-combatant. He's not to be bullied.  You can scoot through a long list of reviews written by French: Stalag 17 - The Manchurian Candidate - The Ladykillers - Au Revoir Les Enfants [a take from Siskel & Ebert] - My Dinner with André [previously on The Blob].  The last two films in the list were directed by Louis Malle.  His autobiography Malle on Malle [available for $0.01] is based on a series of interviews of le grand fromage by Philip French.  Like this: My Dinner with Louis ??

Roger Ebert, the late, great American film critic, passed on in 2013, now Philip French.  Whoever is writing film reviews in English now is standing on the shoulders of giants.