Urban development

It seems you can never have enough houses. But that seems to be partly because houses are more than shelter nowadays, they are assets. Indeed families in the st will elect to be in debt for their whole working lives in order to acquire their 'own' home.  This can be seen most clearly by selecting Ps from the Pocket World in Figures 2015: Average number of people per household: Portugal 2.5; Poland 2.6; Peru 3.9: Philippines 4.6; Pakistan 6.8. For comparison Ireland and France have 2.3 people in each home. Everyone shouts that there is no future in small family farms and each generation the potential farmers flee to the bright lights of the city where, for most of them the conditions are a mixed blessing. Pat the Salt was born on Longcross St, Cardiff in 1925 . . . in a home on Longcross Street, silly. Shortly thereafter, his mother, restlessly trying to do better for her family, shifted the menage over the back-garden wall to System St. That short journey can be found on Google Maps complete with street-view pictures of both homes:

I've known Pat for more than 40 years and for many of those, I misheard that he had lived on Cistern Street which I thought was a rather brutally appropriate name for an urban stew. "Now then, bailiff, flush those Irish chappies out, we want the houses for the Barbadians". System Street is a peculiar enough name, I guess, until you see the context. The surrounding area includes Comet, Constellation, Eclipse, Orbit, Planet, Star, and Sun Streets. Further East we have a block of Copper, Gold, Iron, Lead, Silver, Tin and Zinc Streets and then Diamond, Emerald, Pearl, Ruby, Sapphire, and Topaz Streets. These streets were laid out in the 1860-1880s from the Bute estate and other developers. I think the names show a nice, and rather unpretentious, sense of imagination.  All these streets and more are in the suburb of Adamsdown which 200 years ago was farming country [like N Dublin was 20 years ago], albeit a short walk East beyond the walls of Cardiff City and Castle. Cardiff Castle and many of those farms were the property of the 2nd Marquess of Bute, a mighty Victorian landholder with estates all over South Wales and Scotland.

I can look that sort of stuff up because I paid €9.99 for Kevin Cahill's Who Owns Britain [available on Amazon upwards from £35] which investigates a window in 1872 when all the estates in the United Kingdom were enumerated in The Return of Owners of Land in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales a four volume, 2000 page Domesday Book. For ordinary folk living on , say, System Street, the Land Registry holds, since 1925, records of who owns the property next door. But the Land Registry only records transactions and  many of the Great Estates are now wrapped up in Trusts with life-time beneficiaries, so the ownership of much of the country is not a matter of public record. In 1872, the 3rd Marquess owned 117.000 acres but because of Cardiff and its docks and the South Wales coal-fields he was the 8th richest landowner in the country but only 33rd in terms of area.

The 3rd Marquess had to thank his dad the 2nd Marquess for not resting on his huntin' and shootin' estates but hunting around for ways to improve the value of his property: notably, as I mention above, improving Cardiff Docks to facilitate the export of iron and notably Welsh steam coal and high quality anthracite from the Rhondda Valley.  The iron industry developed in South Wales because of the ready availability of coal locally but both developed through the vision of The 2nd Marquess. It was a close run thing because those massive development projects required enormous amounts of capital and the Marquess borrowed heavily to see his projects through and that took many years. The homes of Adamsdown were developed to house the workers, a great many of them Irish, who were hired to build and work the docks and other infrastructural works. The Welsh had the mining itself sewn up.

2nd-Bute was a stoic of the old school and much admired by Neil Todd my boss from graduate school who was also well 'ard a stoic of the old school. He spent many hours at home and in the field researching Welsh tavern tokens locate the place of origin of these coin-like entities. In 1985, we spent a wonderful short week wandering up and down the Rhondda Fawr [you can sing it] - Treherbert (the rail head) - Treorchy (the choir) - Ystrad - Tonypandy - Treslaw - looking for pubs [R Brains is the local brew] and cats. It was our last field-trip together. According to Neil (I can find no trace of this on Google) the 2nd Marquess lived by the following motto:

I have no god

I feel not Winter

I heed not Summer

I fear not death

You wouldn't call that a very sunny view of life, but it is one I can live by too.

London streets hold their value

I'm a bit of a Wikipedia groupie - not a total slave - but I get triggered for a certain amount of blob-copy by reading Did you know . . . and On this day . . . at 0600hrs in case I miss the birthday of some famous female scientist. Intriguingly List of London Monopoly locations includes thumbnails of each location and the current price of property there, taken from an article in The Independent. In 1936 the locations were chosen by Victor Watson, managing director of Waddington's, and his secretary Marjorie Phillips, on a day trip to The Smoke from head office in Leeds. Apparently they had lunch at a Lyons Corner House, that used to be a famous local pub, in Islington which event was commemorated in one of the cheaper properties on the board The Angel Islington. The conceit of the Independent article is to compare the pre-WWII prices with the astronomical amounts that are required to buy (or rent) your own gaff in the British capital. Notwithstanding the difficulties I have to get to a cultural event or a really good riot in London, I think our humble farm is better value. I've no idea what our 7 ha. and ruined sheds are worth but let us conservatively put it at half the cost of a 2 bedroom semi in the ropiest part of monopoly land Whitechapel Road where the average house price is £590,000. With the £300,000 I 'save' by living remote I could fly to Dublin - London day-trip [11 August 2017 = £60] every day for the next ten years.

But of course with a great string of data, I had to plot current prices (which vary from £590,000 to more than £3 million) to those unreal 1936 values (£60 - £400):

I'm assuming that they were unreal only in the sense that the absolute value. In 1926, the price of a new home was (UK average) ~£600, in 2016 it was ~£300,000 up 500-fold [source]. That's a pretty crap source because they claim "In comparison, a pint of milk cost the equivalent of 1.3p in 1926 and is only 42p today. If it had risen in line with property prices it would cost £612.57." Which is plainly bonkers [1.3p * 500 = £6] because they don't know the difference between pounds and pennies. The BBC claims a 1930s 3-bed house as £350.  aNNyway, it looks like the price of housing in London has been a rising tide that floats all boats rather than some sort of exponential function in which Mayfair got disproportionately more exclusive than the Old Kent Road. And I've high-lighted the outliers above and below the trend-line: Bond Street is going down in the world while Marlborough Street is on the up-and-up. And of course parts of Kensington recently went up in smoke. Here's Jonathan Pie [warning may make you cross all over again] deconstructing the politics of discrepant wealth. Here's a wordier but no less angry deconstruction of London housing policy which contrasts empty investments of /for mega-rich foreigners with dispossessed, but still British, citizens living in hostels at the foot of these condominiums. Whose bright idea was that and. more importantly, cui bono??

Science Book Swap

Science Book Swap SBS is an original idea whose time has clearly not come . . . yet. Every month for the last two and a half years on the third Tuesday, Science Café goes down in a pub The Sky and The Ground, South Main Street, Wexford. Born from a gap in 'the market', Science Café is a bit like a book club, or a quilting bee, where people who have something in common embrace a structure to meet more often. The people who rock up to Sci Caf Wex SCW each month are all interested in science and live near Wexford and feel they don't talk science often enough . . . or didn't until Science Café came along. We have N=~30 students, technologists, teachers, foresters, entrepreneurs, farmers, brewers and a pharmacist on the books but the average turn out is a handful. What we do is pick a topic and a presenter and use that as a launch-pad for a couple of hours of networking [at least one of us has gotten a job out of it] and talking in-and-around science.  It's mighty, good for my morale, and I always learn something new.  But it's often difficult to find a volunteer, fired up about some tech-topic, to be ringleader for the evening. For my sins, I am the list-manager and secretary and probably, by default and bystander effect, find myself gabbing about My Baggage more than I should. With The Blob and all, it's prolly easier for me to dredge up some copy than the other members of the Café.

July is the midst of the Silly Season, when folk are on vacation, or mowing the lawn, or taking the kids to soccer, at 8pm on a Tuesday. But I had a Brilliant Idea for a Sci Caff Concept.  It was born from an unconscious memory of Ignite Talks which were all the rage a few years ago in venues like Dublin's Science Gallery [prev]. The conceit there is "a whole conference in an evening" where speakers are strictly limited to 5 minutes and 20 slides to present their ideas. Here's one on Lafcadio Hearn Irish / Greek / American / Japanese story-teller. They're great: you can get a taster-teaser quicker than it takes you to look something up in Wikipedia. Here's another on The Future of Food by Nora Khaldi . . . so you see: super-diverse.  You could get sniffy about Ignite being a product of the attention-deficit sound-byte generation but that's where we live now and it's better than watching commercials on the TV. You'll see commonality with the Pint of Science concept.

I was casting about for something to do for July's Science Café [no volunteers having beaten down the secretary's door to present their stuff] and my eye fell on my most recently read book RRB Chasing Venus by Andrea Wulf, from which I filleted a blob about Mason and Dixon. I picked that book up while shopping with my book-buying daughter [peer pressure] last month. Because it was recently acquired I have no particular attachment to the book and am actively de-cluttering my life so SBS was born. Everyone was requested-and-required to turn up to SCW with a science book, which they would talk up for three (3!) minutes to promote its many virtues and then swap it for a different, but similarly promoted, science book and everyone would go home happy. I cast it as a cross between Ignite, book-crossing and speed-dating. I was well excited and hoped to off-load Venus and acquire [temporarily! I'm not building a library again] some new Summer reading.

Well, among Wexford Cafistas, I'm the only person who seems to be stoked by this idea because when I bounced into The Sky and the Ground yesterday evening I found I doubled the audience and Mike had to leave early to wear his thespian hat. Furthermore Mike hadn't read the announcement and so he had no book to swap.  And so, my friends, I offer up the SBS concept and hope it may fall on more fertile ground in Nantes or Montpellier.

Throw it away - it's old

My late lamented mother-in-law grew up on the edge of the Sahara without a fridge or sell-by dates . . . and survived. One of her more inspiring traits was to take responsibility for the food that came into and went out of her kitchen. She used her nose and eyes to decide what was and was not fit for food and safe to eat. She'd use cream, for example, that was days over its sell-by (especially if it had been unopened in the fridge) because she had a life-time of experience under the regulations of the catering trade and cooking under very adverse circumstances. Parsimonious me has tried to follow her in using food up: what can't be served raw will go down well cooked. That's why, after all, spices were imported from The East - keep calm, curry it up and carry on.  The problem for the younger generation, who have been babied by safe-food regulations all their lives, is that the treat sell-by dates as proscriptive rather than advisory.  In May, I made some perfectly safe cattle cake from ingredients that had expired 2 years previously.   You can, of course, see where the Food Safety FSAI [prev] is coming from, especially w.r.t. food for sale, but it galls me to see people condemning nutritious food in a world where so many children are starving.  And yes, there are issues with over-production in the EU and over-buying among EU families. If folk had less money they might be less wasteful; in the same way that we, you and me both, would drink from the toilet-bowl rather than die of thirst.

It's not only food. The Market also over-produces printed matter and writings become obsolete. My eclectic collection of 3,000 books have almost all been acquired second-hand or remaindered.  The core of the collection was acquired by haunting yard-sales in suburban Boston the early 1980s so my library is a little off-balance or quirky: the 1930s being better covered than the 1990s. A Romanian dictionary is not going to 'go off' any more than a collection of stories by W.W. Jacobs. None of us will have the time to read all the books published this year in English, ou même en français, to decide which suit our temperament - so we might just as well read randomly and be occasionally surprised and delighted by unexpected books.

Now I make no bones about the fact that I love maps and I'll admit that a few too many of the books I bought for 25c in Boston were atlases. One World Atlas from 1939 is interesting to give a view on Europe before the Iron Curtain but I shouldn't have bought three at various times. After a while, maps and atlases have diminished utility. My street map of Dublin 2000 AD shows an agricultural void where Dau.I's current digs are surrounded by 300 homes and a shopping precinct. The Celtic Tiger promoted the building of a motorway network that, in some cases, makes the old National Routes obsolete by-ways. aNNyway, I was passing through New Ross last weekend to do some research in SW Co Wexford and decided I needed to purchase sheet 76 of the Ordnance Survey 1:50,000 Discovery Series.

In the 3rd shop I tried the lady had to get a stool and rummage on a high shelf to find a bundle of the distinctive blue maps. I'll spare you a picture of New Ross and go further up river to St Mullins [R aerial pic and OSI map]. She shuffled through the stack looking for Sheet 76 - which might well have been sold out because New Ross is centred thereon. But with a harmonious "Aha!" we found two copies halfway down the pile. Win! because I'd got what I was looking for but also because I'd rather support a small local shop than buy the map from a megacorp garage on the road out of town. I gamely but facetiously suggested that she might cut me a discount because the map was 'old' but she trumped that to say I could have it for free because, as far as the shop was concerned, it was just clutter because a) they felt unable to sell an obsolete map b) the wholesaler would not take unsold maps back and c) nobody uses maps anymore because they all have GPS in the cars.  Even after I asked, with rhetorical flourish, if The Hook peninsula was still there? and pointed out that no new motorways had appeared on the map, the shop-keeper was determined that the maps were beyond sell-by.
If they were really clutter, I asked, could I have some of the other maps? 
Take them all,  she replied.
I can't do that, I said, but I'll take one copy of each different sheet you have.
And it was, so! I came away with sheets 67, 68, 69, 75, 76, 77, 82, which more or less covers the whole Sunny South East of the country . . . and bizarrely sheet 83 which covers Killarney and MacGillicuddies Reeks in the far West . . . and an irresistable second copy of sheet 68 because our home is in its very centre. Even after slapping an unasked-for €20 on the counter I came away super-delighted. Not since 2002 when I rescued, from the curbside trash, 10 sheets of the old orange 1/2 inch to the mile 1:126,720 series have I made such a cartographic coup. A bargain is when both parties come out of an exchange feeling satisfied. A bargain was struck in New Ross last Saturday.

Copper bottomed

Peak oil? Are we there yet? That seems to be an ever receding gateway the other side of which is hard to contemplate: so much of our lifestyle is predicated on cheap oil. But we've also been rapacious in our looting the planet for minerals that can be smelted to metal to make gizmos to throw in landfill. Gold is the obvious one and I've written about recycling phones to recover that element. But today let's have some passive entertainment about recycling copper Cu because you can make money and save the planet by concentrating metallic copper in ingots which are worth $5.75/kg. Why copper? Because the Copper Coast is a key element in restoring the ragged fortunes of Co. Waterford where I do most of my beach-combing. [

Warning and disclaimer from a comment below a youtubeos I haven't cited here "I can't believe I just wasted 5 minutes of my life to listen to all this babble that ended up being a tutorial on how to hold a utility knife."

• Trinket Gobblin finds a large differential in the price he can get from raw electrical wire. All those Hannukah/Christmas lights thrun in the trash at Epiphany tsk! the waste.
• eWaste Ben advises tooling round the neighbourhood taking copper out of CRT TVs - lingo note: No.2 copper is lacquered.
• Chris from Westsound Recycling explains diff between #1 and #2.  The latter in contaminated with lacquer, solder, aluminium coating, oxidation = patina and is therefore less valuable
• Bracken Recycling does the maths of whether to strip wire. More lingo: 75% wire is still covered in plastic; BB bare-bright is pure copper. A spool of 75% is worth $12.51. You get a higher price $15.80 for BB by losing some weight. Is it worth $3.29 of your time to process the stuff? Convincing theatre suggests it is NOT worth the hassle. 9 lb of wire is loooooong and each meter of it has to be stripped.
• Jeff Reisitter says strip to increase price from $2 to $70 /kg but doesn't say how that might be achieved
• Jeff James strips off the plastic to raise the price from $1/lb dirty to $3/lb stripped.  But that's 2013 when copper spiked at a little over $4/lb wholesale. I do like the idea of a large white american doing the sort of hands-on grunt work that we associate with benighted Bangladeshi ship-breakers.
• Paul and Deano in England have geared up their system to strip 1kg of wire in 3 minutes. Far too long for the enclosed info, but I like the appropriate technology = broom-handle mechanism. You will be able to think or a more efficient way of doing this running the stripped wire onto another reel rather than a heap on the floor.
• Robbie TwoScraps does a time&motion study to suggest that if your time is worth less than  $7/hr it's worth stripping longish (=efficient) lengths of wire.  Chrismas lights? Forgettit!
• Nederlands is almost the same as Engels: koper draad strippen met een houten blok en een stanlymes
• Moose-scrapper seems to have a paleolithuc bang-two-rocks-together approach to recovering a copper coil from a transformer. Commenter suggets getting a bigger hammer.
• eWaste Ben makes handy little 10oz ingots of copper melted from wire from coils in TVs. I gather that he is stock-piling these against Armageddon.

Sorry, readers, today has given you rather more work and less digest but the old tongue-twister is harder still:
"Are you copper-bottoming 'em my man?"
"No, I'm aluminiuming 'em Mum"

Other metal stories on the blob:

Al - Au - Cr - Li - Mg - Sn - Pb -

by implication there's 100 more in pipeline

Sunday Miscellany 160717

Sunday very miscellaneous

• Glorious - I mentioned this at the beginning of the week at the end of a tl;dr piece about crumblies so you may have missed it so this is a repeat.
• Walking on water: The Dock a floating surf-board launch-pad: why has nobody thought of this before?
• So sorry Scotland - after the larger partner to the Union voted to leave the EU
• Part 1/26 county songs: Kieran McGilligan sings My Own Leitrim Home. Did he write this, as well as sit the in rocking chair to sing it? Or is the Leitrim Anthem 1b/26 Bonnie "pant-suit" Stewart singing Lovely Leitrim Shore. No better evidence that Leitrim was left behind in the 1970s.
• Treorchy Male Voice Choir sing
• Bring Him Home
• Nearer my god to thee
• Gwahoddiad
• Back in June, I flagged Michael 'Moneyball' Lewis's advice to young privileged people to acknowledge their luck and not get too smug about how it was all working out so well for them. I was therefore primed for another commencement address on 3quarksdaily, in which John Roberts the US Chief Justice spoke to golden-spooned 14 year old white-headed boys on leaving Cardigan Mountain School. He counter-intuitively wished them bad luck, betrayal and unfair treatment so that they could reflect more directly on their fortune [see the whole thang here]. That's fine and the whole performance has gone viral.  He finishes he peroration with a quip about being unable to offer the lads any advice about how to cope with women. Elise Hempel checks the Old Boy on this cop out: He could have told that group of soon-to-be men, "You've been at a school with just boys. Most of you will be going to a school with girls. Listen to them. Respect them. Treat them as the equals that they are."  Wot she said!
• Taking Elise's harrumph on board we'll park Boy's Own and try a Mixed Welsh Choir is truly weird costumes singing Calon Lân 
• Eeee, I do love a bit of rope especially found >!free!< on the beach
• How modern nylon rope is made
• How it's made from soda-pop bottle plastic
• How hemp&cotton rope was made
• Inca grass rope bridges
• Make a monkey's fist with one rope/cord - makes key-fob
• Years and years ago, I made a Bodice-ripper calendar for one of The Beloved's sisters. Each month had a 'quote' from that genre of books. One went something like "As newly-wed Morag slipped between the linen sheets, Alastair's braw tartan torso filled the door-frame . . . slowly he unfastened his kilt."  Dau.II sent me graphic satire on such writings. by Cris Shapan

Kids go the orifice

Short stack to fit the title; need to start kids working earlier because Arbeit macht aufrecht:

• 8 y.o. Kansas boy noodles his first catfish
• 3 y.o. English girl delivers lamb
• Cambodian boys dig for their dinner
• Boys take rabbits with ferrets
• Kids go spelunking in Wales
• Did someone mention Holes the Walt Disney movie? I read the book, it's okay.

And no I'm not recommending sweated labour in the third world. Any more than I've been pro Victorian chimney-sweeps. Doing things with your Dad should be part of growing up or you finish up with college students who've never cracked an egg,