Inner Circle only

One of the graduate students at The Institute, to whom I've often given a lift to some off-campus science event, now feels he is old enough and ugly enough to book a room and invite a visiting speaker. The speaker is a friend who is going to give a short communication on a Bio-safety Index used for plant growth promoting bacteria (PGPB) which he developed as part of his thesis research. I teased the organiser by asking if there would be biscuits to sweeten the deal.  He replied that of course there would be tea and biscuits but he didn't want to announce the fact in case the room was flooded with gannets only interested in free food.  I liked that approach very much and replied in my sententious fashion I'll do my best to be there.  It sounds really boring, but my experience is that you get hidden gems in unlikely places and I never miss an opportunity to get some education - the biscuits are a bonus.  I can buy biscuits but nobody can buy somebody else's accumulated knowledge expertise and insight. If I didn't turn up regularly, I would never have heard Aled Edwards' stunning talk about Funding Fondling.

There's a story of the Nobellist Richard Feynman [multi-prevs] about how a student Physics Society up-state sent him a nice letter asking him to give them a talk.  It was just after he got his Nobel, so they agreed to announce the talk as something obviously Physics-Nerd: Professor Henry Warren from the University of Washington is going to talk about the structure of the proton on May 17th at 3:00 in Room D102. That went off, one of them met him at the airport, he gave his talk, they all had a fabulously nerdy discussion and he went home.  When the news filtered out, the Faculty and Admin were FURIOUS because they'd missed a change to schmooz with a Nobel Prize winner.  Feynman felt he had to send a letter of apology to the Faculty Advisor for Physics. That letter is probably framed on the dude's office wall, like the folks who received a $2.56 cheque from Don Knuth - which shows again that celebrity all too often trumps merit.

Spice Burger

Sunday-eight-days, I was down with Pat the Salt on my reg'lar night cooking a scratch meal with the old man and not insisting that he eat his greens. I try to do my bit to clean up/out the fridge which is always a gallimaufry of pots and tubs filled with a variety of left-overs and over-catering. "Rotate your stock", I mutter as I create something edible&safe with the last sad slice of ham that is approaching its sell-by date.  I am not as ruthless for the bin as some of his other carers and do try to convert things into tasty calories rather than becoming a problem at the landfill.  The previous w/e The Boy had been over from England with his family.  He had been shopping and got unaccountably nostalgic for Spice-Burgers which is, and I quote, one of the most popular foods in the country. That is pushing it on two levels a) it's not food; it's a food product b) it's mainly popular among undiscriminating children and bone-poor students.  If it's so popular, how come Walsh's, the family firm that makes the things, went bankrupt in 2009?  The rump of the company was bought up/out by a Combine and Spice-Burgers are back on the menu across Ireland.  I can't imagine a French family having a few for dinner.

The Walsh family from Dublin have been making these things since 1950; and they are not dissimilar to Wexford rissoles, which at least have the virtue of being made fresh . . . from nameless ingredients found around and behind the fryers in chip-shops.  Spice Burgers OTOH, come in lurid plastic packaging [above R] with a sell-by date a couple of weeks after manufacture. Their contents are also nameless because it is a secret family recipe, which was the subject of a bitter row in 2009 between the company and the son of the founder. ANNyway, The Boy had bought a brace of these food-products and then bottled out of cooking and eating them - possibly because he's no longer a starving teenager and possibly because Real Food was on offer for the whole of his visit home.  So a week later, on the very cusp of the sell-by, I brought the Spice Burgers away home, and shared them, one each, with Bolivar who is visiting from Venezuela.  Viewing the little bread-crumbed patty on his plate, Bolivar asked "¿Que es?" and we were neither of us able to answer.  Although The Beloved boldly stated that they were meat,

That's only partially true because 'meat' is a long way down the table of contents:
Water, rusk (gluten), onion, beef (9%), beef fat, crumbs (gluten), soya protein, wheat flour, beef connective tissue, rapeseed oil, seasoning (salt, herbs, spice, more rusk (gluten), yeast extract, sodium sulphite, flavouring), potato starch, cornflour, modified starch, more salt.
Jaysus! another food product which has more water in it than anything else. How much more?  The maths says that, as beef is 9% and we will suppose that the fat, connective tissue, binder and flavourings total 8% then 83% is left.  Of that at least 10% must be onion and 11% must be rusk (gluten) so water in SBs cannot be more than 60% and might, with more rusk-and-onion be as little as 30% but cannot be less.  They are one of the most popular foods in the country because they were created by a butcher from Finglas who knew that if you lurry in salt, fat, flavourings; package it in a crispy crunchy coating and cook it so it's ready to eat then people will want to eat them.  Especially if you can adulterate stretch out the 'meat' with a lot of cheap filler so the price comes way down.  That man, Maurice Walsh, he was a true food engineer long before that became a job description.

This food ingredients critic felt a little "uneasy in the tum" about half an hour after consumption; which might have been hysteria and soon passed off.  Like Mr Eastcoastman's ice-cream, you have to wonder whether any of the mix get converted to useful protein or calories.

Sunday Shambles 170416

Shambles "From ME shambil, place where meat is butchered and sold, from OE sceamol, table, counter  ultimately from Latin scamillum, diminutive of scamnum, bench, stool", now defunct except in several English towns and cities as a place name, similar to 221b Baker Street or Pudding Lane where the 1666 Greta Fire of London started.

• Rust so superficial on a steel knife, it can be restored / sharpened.
• When it's real sharp, then a butcher can use it to dismember a cow.
• Too big? Accents too Scots? Try a lamb butchery lesson.
• No red meat? Try filleting a salmon?
• Vegans need to chop onions without tears. Jamie Oliver
• This onion is RAW.  Gordon Ramsey less SHOUTY than usual.

Unique solution

When the family left after the Easter holiday, I found a book near the surface of one of the heaps in the living-room. Someone must have found it on a shelf and started reading it. My Best Mathematical and Logic Puzzles by Martin Gardner.  Gardner had an endless fund of cleverness, turning out a column called Mathematical Games every month without fail for 25 years!  Two of my favourite books growing up, each read ragged, were his Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions and More MP&D.  All three books cited here were full of stuff first launched in the SciAm column. After the death of his wife, he returned home to Norman OK and died there, alert to the last, in May 2010 at the age of 95. He's probably done more to inspire smart young people and encourage them to think a little bit more than any other writer in the 20thC.  The nice thing about his books and his puzzles is that they engage at a variety of levels: some fiendishly difficult; some requiring a lot of grunt work; but many yielding to insight and/or a clear marshalling of data. When you can't work it out yourself, the answer rarely makes you think either that was dumbass or I'm a dumbass but rather that was clever, I could be that clever, I'll try harder next time . . . and another critical thinker is launched.

On a something for the weekend basis, here's one of the puzzles. I read, gave up on, wrote a Blob, slept, did a day's work, slept and looked at again. If you don't give up, you too can crack it.

Three schools -- Democritus, Pythagoras & Anaxagoras  -- competed in an athletics meet. Each school entered one man, and one only, in each event. Susan, a student at Pythagoras High, went to cheer her boy friend, the school's shot-put champion. When Susan returned home later in the day, her father asked how her school had done.
"We won the shot-put all right," she said, "but Anaxagoras High won the track meet. They had a final score of 22. We finished with 9. So did Democritus High."

"How were the events scored?" her father asked. "I don't remember exactly ," Susan replied, "but there was a certain number of points for the winner of each event, a smaller number for second place and a still smaller number for third place. The numbers were the same for all events." (By "number" Susan of course meant a positive integer.)

"How many events were there altogether?" "Gosh, I don't know, Dad. All I watched was the shot-put."
"Was there a high jump?" asked Susan's brother. Susan nodded.
"Who won it?"  Susan didn't know.

Incredible as it may seem, this last question can be answered with only the information given. Which school won the high jump?

Better still put this to your favourite numerate 13 year old. Answer. No peeking until you've given it some time!  Anaxagoras Who? Pythagoras on The Blob. Democritus.

Meander

Were we talking about the power of running water? We were. But that was Ice-cold in Greenland, [chekkitout the more famous Ice Cold in Alex with added product placement] although not actual ice. I just picked up from metafilter a two year old link to Landsat imaging for course of the Ucayali River in Peru by Zoltan Sylvester. Landsat has been taking serial photos of the Earth from space since 1972 and these data have been immensely rich and useful documenting the changing face of the planet: most dramatically shown in Zoltan's clip of the developing ox-bows and bends in the Ucayali.  Don't think of Peru as all towering cliffs and Andean mountains like Machu Picchu or Cuzco; the Eastern side of the country forms a major catchment for the Amazon basin and it is as flat as Holland - hence the meandering flow.  Meander is named for the river in SW Turkey which the Greeks named Μαίανδρος; Maíandros; and the Turks borrowed as Büyük Menderes while English generalised the name for any river that writhes across the landscape. Super gallery of [static] images of ox-bows and loops on MyCarta.

Sell car buy boat

Not me, I won't need a boat: my home is 230m above sea-level.  You flatlanders and coast-dwellers you need a boat or at least some attractive wellington boots. It's not really flatlanders that are going to feel the wet it's only those who live less than, say, 10m above sea level.

What am I talking about?  Data! From the Danish Meteorological Institute DMI which announced that a warm front pushing in against the Western glaciers of Greenland [red on right] has caused an anomalously early spike in melting ice.  The ice on Greenland accumulates during the Winter when it is dark and cold and snows a lot and then melts in the Summer when the sun raises itself above the horizon. For centuries there has been net gain, so the Northern Dome has ice up to 3km thick!  'Melts' is defined as being covered by more than 1mm of liquid water, so it might be dismissed as a mere surface phenomenon.  Nevertheless 12% of the ice was so covered on 11th April 2016, a full month earlier than this sort of melt-level has been achieved over the previous 25 years. Liquid water tends to run away downhill exposing the ice below to the sun's rays thus allowing a run-away melting. However much we might worry about melting Arctic ice-caps, most of that ice is already submerged, so melting won't result in a much sea-level rise.  Greenland OTOH is a massive island (although not so massive as the Mercator Projection distorts it), so all its ice is above the tide-line.  If it all melts it will raise the mean sea level by 6m and the additional water is going to accelerate coastal erosion in those places which are susceptible. Even if you now live 20m up, the sea may be at your front door before you sign on for the pension.  Everyone in Bangladesh should now start applying for visas to live elsewhere.

If the melt-water would just slip off the surface and start diluting the sea locally and/or covering it with a layer of fresher less dense water, then we'd only have a diverted North Atlantic Drift, brutal cold Winters in Ireland as I erroneously predicted last September for this last Winter. But what the water tends to do is run towards a local minimum and then plunge down a moulin to the base of the glacier where it acts as a lubricant to detach the glacier from the underlying bedrock - making the groaning grinding journey to the sea go incrementally faster. Be afraid, be very afraid - buy boat, buy big enough boat.  But what do I know?  My data-driven predictions of last September, about the end of the world as we know it a cold Irish Winter, were completely wrong. At least buy some wellington boots, though.

Centred

During the two cold Winters of 2009, we were snowed in on our "mountain".  At 230m above sea-level, this is a mountain in the Netherlandish rather the Andean sense.  Nevertheless there were 10cm of snow between the farm and the railhead in Enniscorthy 15km away. For Irieland, 10cm is a LOT for snow. There are only 5 snow-ploughs in the country and three of them are within the perimeter fence of Dublin Airport [I exaggerate only slightly]. I had been working in Dublin as the snow fell but was expecting to get picked up from the station by The Beloved when I was heading home.  It wasn't going to happen as our antient car had bald tyres without snow-studs. We arranged for a near neighbour who works in Enniscorthy to pause at a convenience store on the edge of town to pick me up and whisk me home.  Well Irish Rail wasn't able to deal with snow and my train ground to halt in Bray and arrived 3 hours late in full dark at Enniscorthy, so I missed my lift. I set off through town prepared to walk home [I'm well 'ard me] if that's what it took.  At the last roundabout, I put out my thumb under the last streetlight and said I'd hitch until 100 cars had passed.

I've written before that, since the epidemic of axe-murderers [both driver AMs and passenger AMs], hitch-hiking has ceased to be part of Irish culture; so I wasn't hopeful.  Nevertheless, at about car 75 a friend and neighbour half-recognised me out of context, picked me up and delivered me to the bottom of our lane.  He had been doing some engineering work in one of the small factories and was heading home a little later than planned, so it was providential.  As we drove out chatting, I imagined how handy it would be to know who in your mobile-phone-book was in town at the same time you were. He glanced at me with an incredulous are you having a game with me? look and said "Haven't you heard about Foursquare?" which had launched earlier that year.  Foursquare is dead handy for the apped-up because it means they can meet any of their pals for coffee if they're both in TriBeCa, NY, NY at the same time: social media indeed. The interweb elf in one phone must be talking to the elf in the other or they are both sending petal-messages to the fairy-cloud.

If you're in the business of persuading people to buy things that they don't need - possibly because those folks didn't know such things existed - it's handy to know where people live. If I want to know what's on at the cinema, I don't care much ado about theatres in Dublin, New Hampshire.  Same with hearing aids; vendors might be happy to drive 250km from Cork to Dublin to secure a €2500 sale but don't want to be directed to a potential customer the other side of the pond. If the advertisers know where the IP address of my computer is, they can save me hassle and save themselves money. If they're smart, the way some sections of the interweb are smart, they'll also want to know whether I'm pregnant, or a pensioner or deeply into paragliding.  They can infer this information from what my IP address has been interested in: it's the paracord or the incontinence-pads, stupid.  That's how I had a month of being badgered to buy a toaster that cost more than my car.

Here is an interesting story [via Metafilter] about the downside of these linkings of people and computers; especially when you set a robot to create your database. MaxMind is a number-crunching company in Massachusetts, they were set up to do the math-grunt for Advertisers matching physical location with IP numbers.  Each computer has a unique IP, so the USA must have a well over 1 billion to allocate a GPS location.  Sometimes, MaxMind just had to throw up their hands: they knew the computer was in the USA but couldn't zero nearer than that . . . so they assigned it to a latitude and longitude more or less in the middle of Kansas which is in the middle of the USA. Formally, this is the centre of the contiguous 48 states.  When you throw in enormous Alaska and diminutive Hawaii, the centre shifts nearly 1000km NNW to the edge of S.Dakota. I've looked at the difficulty of deciding which centre is The Centre for the UK. It turns out that 38^oN, 97^oW is in the middle of somebody's farm. MaxMind didn't care, they just assigned more and more IPs [eventually 600 million of them!] to this as-close-as-we-can-be-bothered-to-get-it field outside of Wichita.

Their easy solution created a huge headache for the family who lived at Centroid, USA because lots of people used the MaxMind data in ways [often foolish and unconsidered] that hadn't been anticipated. The law of unintended consequences played out as police agencies came looking for the computer which had sent a drug cartel's assassination order or the computer which had sent a suicides cry for help. MaxMind were wholly unaware of the effect of their cavalier decision; just as the Kansas farmers were unable to explain why they were being criminalised. MaxMind are changing their name to RedFace reassigning all these (there are other similar problems) generic addresses to the nearest substantive body of water. That way, agencies who act before they think can demand back-up from the US Coastguard. The discussion/ comments at the Metafilter link are worth reading. The story provides an interesting insight in how our universe is tunnel-visioned by the extent to which we can imagine it.