- Amazing Grace Ping - Runner
- Ruah B-P - Hard to Tell
- Dolores Keane - You'll never be the Sun
- Doris Day belting out Que Sera Sera
- Lindsay Stirling - The Arena
Sunday, 20 November 2016
Song&dance 201116
Women who can run, sing and sing&dance:
Saturday, 19 November 2016
Microwave
I'm more than halfway through Michael Pollan's book Cooked. I've thanked him for his analysis of the virtues of slow cooking and agree that the tastiest meals are those that have been a long time a-coming. In past times, when he anticipated the arrival of a passel of people, we have been known to order a whole shoulder of pork, which might weigh 8 or 9 kilos of meat. We used to ignore the injunction never eat anything bigger than your head and sear this potlatch lump of meat to start a Maillard reaction then pop it in a slow oven for 18 or 20 hours: more or less cooking it over the pilot light. Dang! but it was good.
Pollan, in the interest of journalistic culinary research, gets himself mentored by an Iranian student of his and they spend several hours of a weekend cooking slowly and discovering new frontiers of tastiness by mixing and matching some quite unlikely ingredients. It is a wrench, and an education, for cash-rich but time poor Mr Pollan to spend so much time chopping onions and peeling spuds when he could be tricking about with his smart-phone or sacked out watching the match on TV. Eventually he come close[r] to that state of grace "When chopping onions, just chop onions". Only wimps cry when chopping onions, if you ask me. He comes to realise that preparing food, especially if done together, has its own rewards. It is not just a means to a meal. His family have to suffer through this intense devotion to The Art of the Stock-Pot . . . that, or roll up their sleeves and help cut stuff up. Another point is that, by investing some time in the kitchen over the weekend, you can get ahead of yourself later in the week - everyone knows that a stew or a curry tastes better second or third time round. Like in the days of our [great-]grannies, when the Sunday chicken would be cold on Monday, pie on Tuesday, rissoles on Wednesday and soup on Thursday; the Pollans can get four family meals from the weekend's 'work'.
At one point, after weeks of tagines and marmites and lamb-shanks à la greque and duck thighs in hoisin sauce, the Pollan family commendably carry out what we scientists would call a negative control.
Q. If this all this home cooking is so damned good what are we comparing it to?
A. Convenience food, is what.
They agree that one day in the coming week will be Microwave Night and Pollan and his chap will go to the supermarket and get their food ready-prepared. It will be a change, it will be normal, and how bad can it be? Food engineers get paid the big bucks because they can persuade folks to come back for more of that.
On Der Tag der Mikrowelle after school, the two boys [Mum refuses to participate but orders lasagna] push a trolley into the microwave-dinners aisle at the local Safeway. Well, they are overwhelmed; like when we first went to Boston in 1979 and found a whole aisle devoted solely to pet-food. Salivating there it took them 20 minutes just to decide what amazing constructions to try. Indeed the chap dithered so long that his father said they'd buy both desirable options, which helped the bill up to $27 (!) My first pay-packet was £6.50, so those sort of prices for a single meal make me feel a bit weak at the knees - but that's my baggage, it doesn't have to be yours. So, by my analysis they are already deeply in the hole before they're even home.
But they still have two shovelfuls to excavate into the pit of dystopia.
Pollan, in the interest of journalistic culinary research, gets himself mentored by an Iranian student of his and they spend several hours of a weekend cooking slowly and discovering new frontiers of tastiness by mixing and matching some quite unlikely ingredients. It is a wrench, and an education, for cash-rich but time poor Mr Pollan to spend so much time chopping onions and peeling spuds when he could be tricking about with his smart-phone or sacked out watching the match on TV. Eventually he come close[r] to that state of grace "When chopping onions, just chop onions". Only wimps cry when chopping onions, if you ask me. He comes to realise that preparing food, especially if done together, has its own rewards. It is not just a means to a meal. His family have to suffer through this intense devotion to The Art of the Stock-Pot . . . that, or roll up their sleeves and help cut stuff up. Another point is that, by investing some time in the kitchen over the weekend, you can get ahead of yourself later in the week - everyone knows that a stew or a curry tastes better second or third time round. Like in the days of our [great-]grannies, when the Sunday chicken would be cold on Monday, pie on Tuesday, rissoles on Wednesday and soup on Thursday; the Pollans can get four family meals from the weekend's 'work'.
At one point, after weeks of tagines and marmites and lamb-shanks à la greque and duck thighs in hoisin sauce, the Pollan family commendably carry out what we scientists would call a negative control.
Q. If this all this home cooking is so damned good what are we comparing it to?
A. Convenience food, is what.
They agree that one day in the coming week will be Microwave Night and Pollan and his chap will go to the supermarket and get their food ready-prepared. It will be a change, it will be normal, and how bad can it be? Food engineers get paid the big bucks because they can persuade folks to come back for more of that.
On Der Tag der Mikrowelle after school, the two boys [Mum refuses to participate but orders lasagna] push a trolley into the microwave-dinners aisle at the local Safeway. Well, they are overwhelmed; like when we first went to Boston in 1979 and found a whole aisle devoted solely to pet-food. Salivating there it took them 20 minutes just to decide what amazing constructions to try. Indeed the chap dithered so long that his father said they'd buy both desirable options, which helped the bill up to $27 (!) My first pay-packet was £6.50, so those sort of prices for a single meal make me feel a bit weak at the knees - but that's my baggage, it doesn't have to be yours. So, by my analysis they are already deeply in the hole before they're even home.
But they still have two shovelfuls to excavate into the pit of dystopia.
- Everything tastes [that's a Good Thing and a tribute to the food engineers], but tastes vaguely the same [not so good] which Pollan puts down to hydrolyzed vegetable protein HVP appearing in every table-of-contents. That is engineer's code for MSG and is quite possibly achieved by filling a vat full of roots and stalks and boiling it up with 1M NaOH to break all the bonds between the amino acids of any residual protein as quickly and efficiently as possible. What's left after the abstraction of HVP can be fed to pigs or used loft-insulation.The alkaline protein slurry can be neutralised with 1M HCl which contributes the added side-product of NaCl and water. NaOH + HCl --> NaCL + HOH Wait, that's no by-product: that's an asset because salty food tastes so good . . . and is so bad for blood-pressure.
- This sack full of convenience food takes 37 minutes of juggling stuff in and out of an over-worked microwave; and family are so busy jumping up and down to service the instrument that they can't all sit down at table together. One of their choices, french onion soup, can be prepared in the microwave but the engineers suggest that better results come from 40 minutes in a hot [regular] oven. As Pollan cries "I could make french onion soup from scratch in that amount of time".
- And I won't address, because it is invisible to Pollan as the omnipresent background to American life, the bag full of packaging that is left at the end of the night.
We don't have a microwave anymore: it was second hand when we got it, lasted for 20 years and then died. In Ireland, it is impossible to get such household kit fixed for less than the cost of a new one. Microwaves are really handy for two things: 1) Heating 200 ml of milk in a cup for, say, hot chocolate 2) making scrambled eggs. Both of these, particularly the latter, make a devilish cleaning chore when made on the stove-top with a saucepan. <whoop whoop safety alert> I was supervising [acting as the adult in the room] the 4th year research projects yesterday and was chatting to one of that cohort, who works in the catering trade to support his science habit. He demurred about cooking scrambled eggs in the industrial microwave in his works-kitchen. "Have you ever seen a scrambled eggs burn? It's not a pretty sight", he said. Apparently the mess of scramblers can sometimes include a super-heated vapour bubble that blows up in your face.
Friday, 18 November 2016
Tally the bone yard
It's that time of year when the 1st Year Sporty People try to work out how many bones they have about their person. I've done this before in 2014 and 2015 and it's an exercise that keeps on giving. One of the pervasive anti-science elements of teaching practice is to say or imply that there is a correct answer. If we know the answer already then we're not doing science. I've heard all the arguments about giving students tasks to do which improve their dexterity and practice at the bench so that they become, eventually, a good pair of hands. For example, talking to my Yr 3 Microbiologists on Thursday, I told them that the 60 hours of lab time we have together is An Opportunity . . . to learn their craft through repeated practice. It wasn't about the results, which are quite unlikely to be either new or unexpected. It was about doing Gram stains until you no longer have to follow the protocol from a book but have internalised it. It was about pouring Petri dishes in a zen like state so that each is the same thickness and in a neat stack. It's about using the autoclave so often that you never forget to label the media bottles; you know the task list so well you dream about it; you know the tricks for expediting the process to win a tea-break in the middle of the afternoon.
Mais, revenons nous a nos squelettes! This year, each group of 2 or 3 people was tasked to inventory a typical skeleton so that it came to N=206. We all agreed that 206 was the Correct Answer. But it transpired that nobody had the same idea about where these 206 bones were located. I put a blank table up on the board and invited the 6 different teams to enter their numbers. This was a little more constraining than perhaps fair because the rules of engagement didn't, for example, require that the foot and leg should be treated separately. The headings also didn't clarify where the pelvis, clavicle and scapular should be binned.
What's striking, and depressing, about these data is that half the class got the correct answer but achieved this is different ways. Group six didn't even both to make sure that tally in each of the 7 category bins [=207] summed to the 206 Total! I think, formally, they'd be guilt of plagiarism because the numbers - of bones in the skull for starters - are suspiciously close to correct. But there are 7 extra bones rattling around inside the skull but not attached to it: 2 each of incus malleus and stapes in the ears and one hyoid in the neck. 206land counts two bones in the pelvis L & R innominate rather than 6: two each of ileum, ischium & pubis.
So here is the list, it's normal /definitive, and 206 is just plain wrong:
Axial = 87 (8+14+7+33+25)
Mais, revenons nous a nos squelettes! This year, each group of 2 or 3 people was tasked to inventory a typical skeleton so that it came to N=206. We all agreed that 206 was the Correct Answer. But it transpired that nobody had the same idea about where these 206 bones were located. I put a blank table up on the board and invited the 6 different teams to enter their numbers. This was a little more constraining than perhaps fair because the rules of engagement didn't, for example, require that the foot and leg should be treated separately. The headings also didn't clarify where the pelvis, clavicle and scapular should be binned.
| Group |
1
|
2
|
3
|
4
|
5
|
6
|
| Skull |
14
|
11
|
14
|
24
|
31
|
22
|
| Vertebrae |
33
|
33
|
33
|
25
|
33
|
33
|
| Ribs |
25
|
25
|
25
|
25
|
27
|
25
|
| Legs |
16
|
15
|
18
|
10
|
16
|
10
|
| Arms |
12
|
10
|
10
|
10
|
10
|
10
|
| Hands |
54
|
54
|
54
|
54
|
54
|
54
|
| Feet |
52
|
56
|
52
|
48
|
42
|
53
|
| Total |
206
|
204
|
206
|
196
|
212
|
206
|
So here is the list, it's normal /definitive, and 206 is just plain wrong:
Axial = 87 (8+14+7+33+25)
- Cranium N=8: occipital bone, 2 temporal bones, 2 parietal bones, sphenoid bone, ethmoid bone, frontal bone
- Face N=14: vomer, 2 conchae, 2 nasal bones, 2 maxilla, mandible, 2 palatine bones, 2 zygomatic bones, 2 lacrimal bones
- Extras N=7: hyoid, ears: 2 stapes, 2 malleus, 2 incus
- Vertebrae N=33, 7 cervical,12 thoracic, 5 lumbar, 5 sacral, 4 coccyx
- Ribs+sternum N=25
- Shoulder and arms N=10: 2 each scapula, clavicle, humerus, ulna, radius
- Pelvis and legs N=10: 2 each innominate, femur, patella, femur, tibia
- Hands N=54: 16 carpals, 38 metacarpals and phalanges (thumb only 2 phalanges)
- Feet N=52: 14 tarsals, 38 metacarpals and phalanges (great toe ditto)
Thursday, 17 November 2016
Not even close
Last year, I showed how the level of math-anxiety is so great in certain sections of The Institute that students will put down crazy answers in tests, quizzes and exams just to get it over with. In that case the majority of my students stoutly asserted that 44 concrete blocks occupied half a billion cubic metres. Now it's another year, another batch of students sitting a midterm in Quantitative Methods = remedial maths. I wasn't about to ask the concrete block question again but I wasn't going to shy away from casting the "math" questions in contexts approximating real life.
Q13. The volume of a sphere is given by the formula 4/3πr3. If a soccer ball is 22cm in diameter, what is its volume in litres? Everyone in the room has handled a 1 lt carton of milk or orange juice and a soccer ball or seen one on TV.
A. It is just bonkers to assert that the volume is 44,000lt. That's about the size of the largest road tanker we have on the roads in Ireland. Nevertheless 2 students offered this as an answer. Actually they offered 44,602.2 lt. Which showed that they didn't know the difference between a diameter and a radius and that one had probably copied the other's answer.
Q16. Given that the period (tick . . tock) T of a pendulum is given by T = 2π*√(L/g), that g the acceleration due to gravity is 9.8ms-2 and the length L of the pendulum is 50cm, how long does it take for the pendulum to swing one complete cycle?
A. I can't claim that everyone will have seen a pendulum up close: only a minority of a homes have a grandfather clock. But we have all been in a children's play ground with swings. The almost universal answer to this question was 14 seconds; because they treated the length as 50 rather than 0.5m. You can run 100m in 14 seconds; how could a pendulum half a metre long take that long to swing forward and then back?? In the post-mortem I whipped out my car-keys and swung them from their lanyard - which is about 50cm long - to show that it takes a tad under 1.5 seconds.
Somehow, I/we have to get kids to realise that the units count! Merely plugging numbers into a formula is the easy part, evaluating the answer for sense is another level of competence altogether. We should have a class in guesstimation, like in Mathsemantics Home Ed class. It might include numbers like counting the spaces for receptor proteins in a typical mammalian cell. More:
Q13. The volume of a sphere is given by the formula 4/3πr3. If a soccer ball is 22cm in diameter, what is its volume in litres? Everyone in the room has handled a 1 lt carton of milk or orange juice and a soccer ball or seen one on TV.
A. It is just bonkers to assert that the volume is 44,000lt. That's about the size of the largest road tanker we have on the roads in Ireland. Nevertheless 2 students offered this as an answer. Actually they offered 44,602.2 lt. Which showed that they didn't know the difference between a diameter and a radius and that one had probably copied the other's answer.
Q16. Given that the period (tick . . tock) T of a pendulum is given by T = 2π*√(L/g), that g the acceleration due to gravity is 9.8ms-2 and the length L of the pendulum is 50cm, how long does it take for the pendulum to swing one complete cycle?
A. I can't claim that everyone will have seen a pendulum up close: only a minority of a homes have a grandfather clock. But we have all been in a children's play ground with swings. The almost universal answer to this question was 14 seconds; because they treated the length as 50 rather than 0.5m. You can run 100m in 14 seconds; how could a pendulum half a metre long take that long to swing forward and then back?? In the post-mortem I whipped out my car-keys and swung them from their lanyard - which is about 50cm long - to show that it takes a tad under 1.5 seconds.
Somehow, I/we have to get kids to realise that the units count! Merely plugging numbers into a formula is the easy part, evaluating the answer for sense is another level of competence altogether. We should have a class in guesstimation, like in Mathsemantics Home Ed class. It might include numbers like counting the spaces for receptor proteins in a typical mammalian cell. More:
- The full moon was super big on Monday, how far from your eye do you have to hold a dime to eclipse it?
- Is it possible for all 7.5 billion people to stand comfortably in Co Carlow = 900 sq.km?
- in the Republic of Ireland 70,000 sq.km?
- many of them all small
- If a cell is mostly water and so are you, how many cells are there in a bloke weighing 70kg is the average diameter is 30μm?
- How thick is a sheet of 80gsm A4 xerox paper if a 500 sheet ream weighs 2.5kg?
- How many blades of grass did Louis Agassiz inspect during his Summer beetle collecting?
Wednesday, 16 November 2016
Maria Island
I was chatting to Dau.I the other day about the 'fact' that she, and I, and the rest of the family are descended from James I & VI [previously ranting about smoking]. It depends on who was the father of Mary Croft, the daughter of Lucy Walter, one of Charles II's many paramours. Charles Stuart is not the most likely paternity candidate. ANNyway. Dau.I mentioned that one of her pals is definitely a descendant of William Smith O'Brien a patriot of the 1848 Young Irelander's Rebellion. Because WSO'B was born 170 years later than Charles.II, that family can be a lot more certain about who was who's gt gt gt grandfather . . . always discounting the likelihood of bastardy. Non-paternity numbers explained.
The abortive 1848 rebellion in Ireland is seen as being caused by the potato famine on 1845-1849 which in turn was caused by the late-blight fungus Phytophthora infestans. But that's a very parochial view of the Springtime of the Peoples which saw political upheaval across Europe:
William Smith O'Brien was, like so many of the Irish revolutionaries (Parnell, Erskine Childers, Wolfe Tone, Edward Fitzgerald), a protestant which might [but won't] make some present day but historical ignorant patriots adopt a less monochrome view of who is Irish. He was sentenced to death but, possibly because His People played cards with The Man's People, his sentence was commuted to transportation to van Diemen's Land. When he arrived there, refused to sign a parole undertaking not to escape so he spent a couple of years on Maria Island [R]. He went on to other things but we're going to bide awhile on Maria Island.
Maria Island is interesting for a couple of reasons. Bernacchi House tribs the 19thC Italian entrepreneur who set up a silk farm, a vineyard and a cement factory (despoiling the fossiliferous limetsone cliffs) which grew to employ some hundreds of people until the whole house of cards was swept away by the Great Depression. The town of Darlington was briefly named San Diego and rebuilt to house the workers, their families and a steady stream of wondering visitors. All in all, it's charming story but Bernacchi exemplifies the advice that easiest way to finish up with a million dollars is start with two million dollars. Darlington reverted to its original name but is now a ghost-town because there is no work to be had. It's a bit like the sleepy village of Bunmahon on the Waterford Coast back home. In the 19thC, the copper mines there employed 1200 people directly; and numerous other grocers, publicans and pastors live on their backs until the price of copper bottomed out and mines were all closed down.
Locally famous is/was the Robey house on the South part of the Island. Robey was a farmer, originally from South Africa, who scrabbled a living for many years until he too left. His house still stands; for many years it was left as a time-warp filled with furniture and fittings. Friendface link with LOADSA maps and pictures.
In 1971, Maria Island was declared a Wildlife Sanctuary and is currently under the care of Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife Department. Of particular interest, because they have featured on The Blob, is the introduction of Sarcophilus harrisii, the Tasmanian devil. As I indicated in January, Sarcophilus is being ravaged by a horrendous cancer-inducing and disfiguring virus. The individuals brought to Maria Island are a) believed to be clear b) serving as a germ-free reservoir for the species. Despite the name, S. harrisii looks kind of cute and so is conservation-bait for tree-huggers. There is some evidence that the introduced devils are doing a number on the native bird-life.
The abortive 1848 rebellion in Ireland is seen as being caused by the potato famine on 1845-1849 which in turn was caused by the late-blight fungus Phytophthora infestans. But that's a very parochial view of the Springtime of the Peoples which saw political upheaval across Europe:
- Cinque giornate di Milano turned the Austrians out of the city.
- The overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of the 2nd French Republic
- The defeat of the Sonderbund established Switzerland as a federal state
- Karl Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto and was expelled from Brussels
- There was a huge Chartist rally on Kennington Common in South London.
- The Marsoroligheterna riots made March noisy in Stockholm
- The core of Ukraine was wrenched from direct control by Vienna
- There was an armed insurrection against Prussia in the Polish city of Poznan.
- Serfs were liberated in Hungary
- Denmark became a constitutional monarchy
Maria Island is interesting for a couple of reasons. Bernacchi House tribs the 19thC Italian entrepreneur who set up a silk farm, a vineyard and a cement factory (despoiling the fossiliferous limetsone cliffs) which grew to employ some hundreds of people until the whole house of cards was swept away by the Great Depression. The town of Darlington was briefly named San Diego and rebuilt to house the workers, their families and a steady stream of wondering visitors. All in all, it's charming story but Bernacchi exemplifies the advice that easiest way to finish up with a million dollars is start with two million dollars. Darlington reverted to its original name but is now a ghost-town because there is no work to be had. It's a bit like the sleepy village of Bunmahon on the Waterford Coast back home. In the 19thC, the copper mines there employed 1200 people directly; and numerous other grocers, publicans and pastors live on their backs until the price of copper bottomed out and mines were all closed down.
Locally famous is/was the Robey house on the South part of the Island. Robey was a farmer, originally from South Africa, who scrabbled a living for many years until he too left. His house still stands; for many years it was left as a time-warp filled with furniture and fittings. Friendface link with LOADSA maps and pictures.
In 1971, Maria Island was declared a Wildlife Sanctuary and is currently under the care of Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife Department. Of particular interest, because they have featured on The Blob, is the introduction of Sarcophilus harrisii, the Tasmanian devil. As I indicated in January, Sarcophilus is being ravaged by a horrendous cancer-inducing and disfiguring virus. The individuals brought to Maria Island are a) believed to be clear b) serving as a germ-free reservoir for the species. Despite the name, S. harrisii looks kind of cute and so is conservation-bait for tree-huggers. There is some evidence that the introduced devils are doing a number on the native bird-life.
More Islands? We have a list.
Tuesday, 15 November 2016
Food Ferm 2017
The Friday before last we gave out a couple of hundred certs, diplomas and degrees. Some of us even dressed up in medieval costumes with floppy hats and pointy shoes. In her address to The Faithful (parents, students and teaching staff who must believe that a fine "parchment" and a quality education has been exchanged for several thousand €€€s), the President alluded to the fact that we have students from 90 different countries. But we don't seem to make a dent in the education of the plain young people of counties Limerick, Dublin, Clare or Louth. It's like we know more about the far side of the moon than we know about the biological make up of the ocean or our own guts.
There are 12 Institutes of Technology ITs in the country and they all aspire to have a global or at least National reach. But that is hardly true if every one of them is offering generic and indistinguishable courses in accounting, biology, and chemistry. Why would you go to the other end of the country when you can get the same deal and live at home? After the success of CSI on the telly, a number of ITs cynically inserted "Forensic" into the title of their degree courses without troubling the staff to change their delivery to include Blood-splatter 101, Introductory Remains in a Bin-bag, or Semen Stains in the Merchant Marine. Most years I have a straw pool among our students as to how many a) admit to washing up in The Institute because of the "F" word and b) regret their decision. The answers are a) a lot b) none. We have many virtues at The Institute, it seems, despite the hypocrisy of The Management.
At the beginning of the Summer, The Institute launched its new BSc in Brewing & Distilling. It is an idea whose time has come, we are the first out of the traps, and it may be the saving of the college in the internecine InstTech wars. As this band-waggon started to lumber forward, I leaped aboard crying "Avanti Food Fermentation" and spent a couple of days designing a module on that topic with Learning Outcomes; Deliverables; Assessment Methods; Recommended Text-books and all the other nonsense that bean-counters and brochure-writers require of us. But the substantive content will be:
Last year, I was in my authentico white lab coat manning the science stand handing out brochures and enthusiasm when a girl and her Dad came by wondering whether to sign up to The Institute or Another Institute. Basically I was given an opening for an elevator pitch. With Food Ferm on my mind, I said that signing with us would open the girl's mind to a world of food that was different from anything she'd experienced. I fantasised that she'd do a research project on making soy sauce and become so intrigued with the process that she'd continue doing it after college. With luck, a garage and some venture capital she'd start Killeshin Soy at a secret location in the Irish Midlands with quirky proprietal Irish! strains of Aspergillus oryzae. Five years later she'd be selling soy sauce to the Japanese. 15 years after that she'd be retired on her money. Irish soy sauce becoming as hip and sexy as Manga is to us. It's the 2016 Open Day this week, I'll see what fantasy I can lay on the unsuspecting teen-public this year.
There are 12 Institutes of Technology ITs in the country and they all aspire to have a global or at least National reach. But that is hardly true if every one of them is offering generic and indistinguishable courses in accounting, biology, and chemistry. Why would you go to the other end of the country when you can get the same deal and live at home? After the success of CSI on the telly, a number of ITs cynically inserted "Forensic" into the title of their degree courses without troubling the staff to change their delivery to include Blood-splatter 101, Introductory Remains in a Bin-bag, or Semen Stains in the Merchant Marine. Most years I have a straw pool among our students as to how many a) admit to washing up in The Institute because of the "F" word and b) regret their decision. The answers are a) a lot b) none. We have many virtues at The Institute, it seems, despite the hypocrisy of The Management.
At the beginning of the Summer, The Institute launched its new BSc in Brewing & Distilling. It is an idea whose time has come, we are the first out of the traps, and it may be the saving of the college in the internecine InstTech wars. As this band-waggon started to lumber forward, I leaped aboard crying "Avanti Food Fermentation" and spent a couple of days designing a module on that topic with Learning Outcomes; Deliverables; Assessment Methods; Recommended Text-books and all the other nonsense that bean-counters and brochure-writers require of us. But the substantive content will be:
- Role of chemical preservation in the food industry: cheap soy sauce, pickled onions, Chorleywood process.
- Carcinogens as possible downside of food transformation.
- Lactic Acid Bacteria LABs and fungi used to transform grains and milk into digestible food such as sourdough. yoghurt, quark, koumiss, kefir, cheese.
- Foreign:
- fermented vegetable products (sauerkraut and kimchi)
- dry fermented meat products (chorizo, pepperoni)
- filamentous fungi fermented beans (tofu, tempeh, soy sauce, miso).
- I didn't then know about Faeroese ferments like skerpikjøt or turrur fiskur
- marketing these exotica in Ireland
- Production of acetic acid, ethanol, citrate, lactate and glutamate as industrial fermented food products.
- Create a delicious fermented food product and eat it.
Last year, I was in my authentico white lab coat manning the science stand handing out brochures and enthusiasm when a girl and her Dad came by wondering whether to sign up to The Institute or Another Institute. Basically I was given an opening for an elevator pitch. With Food Ferm on my mind, I said that signing with us would open the girl's mind to a world of food that was different from anything she'd experienced. I fantasised that she'd do a research project on making soy sauce and become so intrigued with the process that she'd continue doing it after college. With luck, a garage and some venture capital she'd start Killeshin Soy at a secret location in the Irish Midlands with quirky proprietal Irish! strains of Aspergillus oryzae. Five years later she'd be selling soy sauce to the Japanese. 15 years after that she'd be retired on her money. Irish soy sauce becoming as hip and sexy as Manga is to us. It's the 2016 Open Day this week, I'll see what fantasy I can lay on the unsuspecting teen-public this year.
Monday, 14 November 2016
She was my teacher
Ruby Bridges and Barbara Henry; what do those names tell us? Not much except that that they are both women. In these transgender times, I would qualify that as 'probably' women. If I tell you that they met on 14th November 1960, you'll know they were definitely female. But apart from that fact, the only thing they had in common was that they both lived in New Orleans. Ruby had always lived there: for all of her six years walking this blue planet. Barbara was an outsider, born in Boston in 1932, who went to the Girl's Latin School in Roxbury / Dorchester a short walk from the Franklin Park Zoo. In school and in the street she rubbed shoulders with other girls some of whom weren't white and all of whom were treated with respect if they could cut the academic mustard. It's not fair to paint too rosy a picture of integration in the Boston of the 1930s and 1940s because I've read Death at an Early Age, Jonathan Kozol's scorching account of teaching grossly disenfranchised black and white kids in Roxbury in the 1960s.
Harvard educated [and let's not forget Rhodes Scholar at Oxford] Kozol spent some time in Paris learning his craft as a writer but came back to his native land to work with children who hadn't had his opportunities. If you're in the education biz - and that's all of us in the University of Life - you could, with advantage, read his book: only $0.01 on Amazon. Kozol was sacked for exposinghimself his kids to the works of Langston Hughes a black poet and activist. The "himself " in the previous sentence is by no means a cheap shot: nowadays teachers exposing themselves to small children is one of the seepier leitmotifs of our times and would even in the 1960s have gotten a teacher fired. But I also mean to imply that by reading that poem aloud in class, Kozol was exposing his very soul . . . and that was part of the undertow that sucked him into deep water. Teachers are meant to keep a certain distance from their pupils; to compartmentalise the working day from their other passions. Nobody has explained why this is a good idea. Here is one stanza from Hughes's The Ballad of the Landlord:
56 years! What's changed? Well, the following year William Frantz ES was open and fully peopled including a handful of other black kids. But before you get all complacent and dismiss the events of November 1960 as so last century m'dear, you may care to remember Holy Cross School in the Ardoyne area of Belfast and the mob which tried to prevent Catholic children going to a Catholic School in 2001[no integration here].
Now here's where there really has been a big change. Check out the footage from 1960s Louisiana and try to spot the fat people . . . there aren't any.
Harvard educated [and let's not forget Rhodes Scholar at Oxford] Kozol spent some time in Paris learning his craft as a writer but came back to his native land to work with children who hadn't had his opportunities. If you're in the education biz - and that's all of us in the University of Life - you could, with advantage, read his book: only $0.01 on Amazon. Kozol was sacked for exposing
Ten Bucks you say I owe you?
Ten Bucks you say is due?
Well, that's Ten Bucks more'n I'l pay you
Till you fix this house up new.
Which will resonate with anyone who is living in a shit-hole in Cork, Kilkenny or Dublin and dare not complain to the landlord in case s/he remembers to put up the rent. The rest of the poem here.
Barbara Henry also did a stint in Paris because her education had created a ferment in her mind and she wanted to see the world. Accordingly she signed up to teach Air Force Brats [I was a Navy Brat] at a USAF base in France where she met and married a dashing young Lieutenant from Louisiana and returned home with him to New Orleans. She got a job teaching in William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans which was chosen by the Feds to be one of the first to be desegregated in The South. When little Ruby Bridges rocked up with her ruler pencil and lunchbox she was accompanied by four Federal Marshalls and greeted by a hootin' and hollerin' mill of white folks who were trying to dam the tide of history by keeping small black girls from being in the same classrooms as small white girls. Here she is, captured by Norman Rockwell:
You can see that girl has back-bone. It might help to deconstruct the picture [spot the golden rectangles!] as a picture. It might also help to deconstruct the situation by noting that, when little Ruby turned up all but two of the white teachers stood down and almost all of the white kids were withdrawn from school. Ms Henry was the only person in the city who was prepared to actually teach the girl. That's nothing, or very little, to do with the Girl's Latin School or Paris. It is rather to do with the moral and physical courage that gave Barbara Henry the back-bone to defy the mob and get on with the job. Oh yes, and she loves the poetry of Langston Hughes as well:
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly
You can read Barbara Henry's recollections of the time and place in the Boston Globe from two years ago. As Ruby Bridges acknowledges, you learn more from your teachers than ABC and where Paris is; you learn how to carry yourself. This is her story about knowing one white woman who cared for and pushed her: thereafter she was going to judge people not by the colour of their skin but the content of their character [Martin Luther King, he said that]. But that clip also reveals that her father lost his job and her grandparents lost their share-cropping holding in Mississippi . In 1996, these two game-changers, were re-united [R looking right happy to be in each other's company again].56 years! What's changed? Well, the following year William Frantz ES was open and fully peopled including a handful of other black kids. But before you get all complacent and dismiss the events of November 1960 as so last century m'dear, you may care to remember Holy Cross School in the Ardoyne area of Belfast and the mob which tried to prevent Catholic children going to a Catholic School in 2001[no integration here].
Now here's where there really has been a big change. Check out the footage from 1960s Louisiana and try to spot the fat people . . . there aren't any.
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