sew on a button

It's a Bank Holiday weekend in Ireland and there are events all over. It's rather hot on the community history in Dunmore East the weekend and on Friday I showed up by invitation for two commemorative events.  Last year, along the coast in Tramore, they had the bunting out for the bicentennial of the wreck of the Sea Horse. In Dunmore this weekend is the centennial of the loss of the u-boat UC-44 and the miraculous rescue of  Kapitan Kurt Tebbenjohanns [looking self-consciously casual for his folks R]. UC-44 was a mine-laying submarine which had the misfortune to contact one of its own deadly spawn in the middle of the night of 4th August 1917 and sink to the bottom with almost all hands. Kapitan Tebbenjohanns was in the conning tower and bobbed to the surface alive but 2 miles from shore. There was a big bang and three young Dunmore men, Jack McGrath and brothers Tom & Patsy Power, decided to row out on the dark mine-bobbing waves to see what they could find . . . and pulled the Kapitan from the drink. I'm sure he was as surprised and delighted to be rescued as my father-in-law Pat the Salt who was torpedoed off Halifax almost exactly 25 years later. I have my own, extremely modest, experience of delivering flotsam to Dunmore.  From rubbing shoulders with local historians all Friday evening, I gather that the celebrations over the 1917 rescue were also rather muted - because the British Admiralty soon salvaged the wreck and its code-books and didn't want the Kriegsmarine to know that their ciphers were compromised. There an informative essay on mines and minesweeping on the Russianside blog this week. Where I was guest-blogging last week, and here's another essay on WWI u-boats

Organising local commemorative events is enormously time- and energy-consuming. It's not too difficult to get the German [UC-44] or British [Seahorse] ambassador down, or have the Mayor of Waterford appear with his chain of office: that's what they do.The local difficulties and sensibilities are what usually consume the most emotional energy. You can't invite everyone to lunch with the Ambassador and the organising committee has to listen to old Bob Bitterroot telling them how to run the event while relentless dissing their efforts in the pub. I was invited to the opening of the [excellent, informative and interesting - it will be on-line soon] commemorative exhibition ex-officio being grandson of the harbourmaster at the time of sinking / rescue. They couldn't un-invite me when I confessed that the The Major started his long incumbency five years after the events of 1917. Albeit under a false flag, I was delighted to chat to the great and the good of the maritime world of Waterford Harbour.

I had an interesting conversation with Tony Bab RN retd, who was invited to Dunmore to talk about the salvage of the UC-44. Roy Stokes the author of U-boat Alley: The U-boat War in the Irish Channel During World War 1 was also there and getting such an on-message author was a bit of a coup by the Dunmore committee. Bab rose to be Chief Petty Officer, a rank which is the absolute back-bone of the navy. Naval officers, like my father and grandfather, come and go but the CPOs provide the organisational continuity and actually implement the orders that percolate down from the bridge. Bab started life as a naval artificer. I've written with breathless admiration about Tiffies before. In the 1930s, my father acquired a great education - history, geography and geopolitics, languages and knots, navigation, sailing - in the Britannia Royal Naval College at Dartmouth. He was really good at pub-quizzes. In the 1960s, Bab was getting his training as a good pair of hands: electrical and mechanical engineering, damage control, plumbing, communications, radar, ventilation. There is nothing that tiffies cannot do. 

Another event last week was IGGNITE an international jamboree for Girl Guides. A number of teenage girls were interviewed to talk up a storm about the Guides.

Q. Why did you join the Guides and what's so good about it?

A. My pal was in so I said I'd give it a go; you learn to sew, like, and stuff like cooking.

But, duh, well before I was old enough to join the Guides in my cross-dressing phase, my Mum taught me to sew on a button and hem up a trouser leg because she wasn't going to be always available to do it for me. She also taught me how to make flapjacks and fry an egg. CPO Babb and my father both had a housewife and were also taught how to sew on a button or fix a torn shirt . . . and splice a rope or trice up some shear-legs to lift a load. You shouldn't need to join the Guides to get these basic life-skills.

In science, you can do a higher degree PhD or MSc to build on the fundamental information that you acquired in college. What you get from that is a deep knowledge about something often relatively obscure. For a few weeks at graduation, you know more about your field than anyone walking on the planet. But that deep knowledge won't get you a job. You become an asset in the outside world because you've been trained in resilience; resourcefulness, critical thinking; inter-personal relationships; obeying instructions and making your own decisions; organising your data, your ideas and analyses; presenting your findings to the boss, to other scientists and Joe Public. 

The exhibition in Dunmore was formally opened by Richard McCormick, President of the National Maritime Museum of Ireland, who gave a long and passionate speech about how such commemorative events, although attended disproportionately by old buffers, should really be for the youth-of-today. He learned his trade as a fisherman, than which there is no harder or more dangerous way of making a living. His point was that the training he got at sea; which today's youth would get if there were any maritime jobs out there on the great rolling ocean; was an education of much more general applicability: resilience, resourcefulness, critical thinking; inter-personal relationships; obeying instructions and making your own decisions. The difference between me doing a PhD on human genetics and migration patterns in New England and the Canadian Maritimes and Pat the Salt running away to sea at the age of 14 for his education in the University of Life is that, at no time was I in danger of bobbing about in the Atlantic with only a floating spar between me and Davy Jones.

Sunday with shanties 060817

I really should lay off the youtube: all that band-width, so little benefit.  But it's gotten to be a habit with me [truly weird dancing with polyandry]

• Well some shanty-like things:
• Turning to the Morning Gordon Bok
• Mingulay Boat Song:
• And some nautical links
• Northwest passage is officially open.
• But let's do foodie:
• Steely Bob on Croissants:
• Catalan croissants; Hand-made with hairy arms:
• Kimchi at home [Great Big Story]
• 5 Japanese foodie tales: fugu; plastic food; pot-noodles; sake; mocha
• Pizza tossing as a sport
• Polish is Ireland’s second language: in the pierogie factory
• Food and drink from Orkney
• And some crafty links:
• Sekishu-Banshi: papermaking in the Iwami region of Shimane Prefecture [Note Kozo is Broussonetia papyrifera
• Paper making in 70s England [same principle]
• Operation ouch! [on sleeep and melatonin].which the Gdaus watch most days for 10 minutes, is a super accessible but sensible series about doctors, medicine and how we tick.
• The tyranny and privilege of car parking. [Vox]

End of Hebrides

Life's a beach, and then you die. Too many of us treat the process as a race: to get furthest with the mostest. But we all finish up six feet down in a six-foot box - unless we choose to quick-release our carbon foot-print with cremation.We may as well try to pay attention to the landscape along The Way rather than hurtling heedless towards this dank and wormy finish. I consciously gave up the bike and started walking to work in 1985 in an attempt to be more mindful of the process rather than treating as dead time. In 1989 I walked 700km alone along the coast of Portugal; 15 years later I continued the journey from Tui on the Portuguese-Galician border to France. Those 900km were less lonely, indeed it was a bit of a mill going upstream along the Camino de Santiago.  I was talking large last Winter [12 years later] about Part III of the Process of Pilgrimage and my researches turned up the Hebridean Way which runs 250km from Vatersay [V on Map R] in the South to the Butt of Lewis [BoL on map].  It requires only 2 ferry trips - Barry to Eriskay and North Uist to Harris - because several of the islands have been joined together by permanent dry-shod causeways. The cycle-way is 18% longer and has been completed in 12 hours, but I bet Mark "The Whizz" Beaumont didn't hear a corncrake Crex crex or stop to see larks Alauda arvensis ascending.

But, lookit, if you consider that map of the Outer Hebrides carefully you'll notice a spray of blue dots further South than Vatersay, which is the most Southerly inhabited island in the archipelago and is conveniently connected to Barra. Therefore infrastructual deficits [lack of beds, boozers, ice-creams, and plasters for blisters] exclude the other small blue dots from the Hebridean Way. But that's not a sufficient excuse to leave them off the ever lengthening island inventory on The Blob. So let's hear it for Pabbay, Mingulay and Berneray.  All those *ays: from the Old Norse for Island so Eriskay Island is a solecism.

It is annoying for everyone that there are two Bernerays in the Outer Hebrides. Damn silly and confusing. There are, indeed, two townlands [the smallest civil division in Ireland] in County Carlow; we live in the real one and lose post to the other one occasionally.  U.S. Board on Geographic Names is briefed to have unambiguous place-names, but their writ runs not to Scotland or Ireland. Nevertheless the two Bernerays [Orig. Bjorn's Island] are differentiated in Scots Gaelic: Beàrnaraigh na Hearadh (Berneray of Harris) in the north and Beàrnaraigh Cheann Bharraigh (Berneray of the Head of Barra) at  the very South. Perhaps because nobody lives there anymore Beàrnaraigh Cheann Bharraigh is now widely, if loosely, called Barra Head which is a synecdoche [bloboprevs].

Turns out that there are two Pabbays [Old Norse Papey island of the fathers/monks] as well: effectively paired off location-wise with the Bernerays one pair looking across the Sound at Harris and the other associated with Barra. Pabbay of Harris was cleared of its human inhabitants in 1846 to make way for sheep. That was a tragedy but not unexpected as the Highland Clearances spread across Scotland in the 19thC. The depopulation of Pabbay of Barra occurred with more shocking abruptness when all the adult males were drowned in a storm in May 1897 and their relicts packed up within a few years to find an easier life elsewhere. The crags and cliffs of Pabbay attract climbers: checkitout if you have a head for heights.

Next down the sea-lanes, Mingulay is apparently from Norse Mikilay Big Island: although technically it is smaller than Vatersay its cliffs make it rather more imposing. The human inhabitants hung on until 1912, when they decided that the hardship and isolation wasn't worth the candle. I guess they didn't want to hold their tenancies until a tragedy similar to Pabbay's overtook them. The 19thC was, for most inhabitants of the West European Archipelago WEA, the Age of Stuff. Candles, forks, cotton cloth, tea-pots, tea . . . if you worked hard enough you could aspire to such extras and in Birmingham or Roscommon it was easy enough to get things delivered. The level of literacy in the Highlands and Islands was probably higher than other bone-poor regions of the country and reading newspapers fueled a sense of "we'll hae some o' thae gibbles". Mingulay's access to the outside world was from the open strand. Getting yourself and your groceries ashore from a boat-tender was hard enough, but a piano posed huge problems. The Leaving started in 1906 when 3 families decamped to the flatter machair Vatersay as squatters, and over the next 6 years the rest of the people drifted away to better, or at least easier, places. Mingulay was acquired by the National Trust of Scotland in 2000. You can get Derek Cooper's nostalgic Hebridean Road-to-Mingulay Trip for £0.01 on Amazon, I'll probably bite too!

Berneray of Barra shut up shop in 1910 after being continuously inhabited - the folk made a living from fishing, fowling [guga / gannet same thing blooargh!] and a few rows of spuds or oats - for at least 2,000 years.  There were hardy people living there to tend the lighthouse [L looking romantic] up until the 1980s, when the lighthouse was automated.  It looks a bit of a peculiar location until you twig that this view is looking South and that the lighthouse is hanging over a mighty cliff to illuminate the hazard of the Hebrides to shipping travelling North. You have to also appreciate that the lighthouse isn't there for when the weather is fair enough to see it clearly. It's there for when Atlantic storms roll in with 3000km of fetch to build up some ship-crushing waves.
All this depopulation spells a contraction of the appendages towards a more centralised, convenient, homogeneous way of life. But diversity is our hedge against an uncertain future. As alternative lifestyles are deemed to be impossible /unsafe / too costly to maintain, we lose the perspective to look from the outside and evaluate critically the assumptions we've made in embracing the currently dominant political and economic certainties. otoh, we don't want to embrace every red-blooded boy's romantic fantasy about the islands [R] and the red-headed Hebridean girls who live there. Contraction from the wild places is a bad move if the underlying assumptions are faulty because "if a wolf did come out of the forest then what would you do?" Cue Peter and the Wolf. Which brings me to the music of this part of the Hebrides.

• Mingulay Boat Song. Written a generation after the great leaving by Hugh Robinson which consciously imitates the rhythms of an island waulking songs and/or sea shanties.
• Eriskay love lilt by Judith Durham 1964.
• Arragh sure, we may well throw in the Skye boat song, although strictly that's to Skye from Uist. Warning: Outlander: more fantasy alert!
• Now we've heard waulking songs on The Blob before but the sanitised [not a wen, nor a goitre, nor a rheumy eye to be seen] Outlander version is not without its attractions.
• Ah go on then we'll have another 

less than dead

I'm a sloppily pedantic person. I like things to be 'correct' and 'just so' but almost every time I look back over a previous post I find egregious errors.  Cue confiteor: I've neglected to include the Latin name for some organism, I've used its when it's is correct and the other way round. I've omitted the accents from Irish and french words.  This is particularly wearing because blogspot / blogger's recognises é as a completely different character to e and so if I want to see if I've written something about Aimé Bonpland I have to search both Aimé and Aime in case I missed the accent aigu. With magisterial inconsistency blogspot-search treats Aime and aime as equivalent.  Thanks be that I'm not an apostophe nazi because Unicode 'right single quote' [in HTML you write that as ’] is actually the preferred option over 'apostrophe' [']. If you're writing code you can't allow slack-arsed errors to creep in by cut&pasting “ when you mean "  Here's a list of  unicode possible quotie symbols [in hexadecimal!]
U+0022 = " quotes
U+0027 = ' apostrophe
U+0060 = ` grave
U+00B4 = ´ acute
U+2018 = ‘ left single
U+2019 = ’ right single
U+201C = “ left double
U+201D = ” right double
and because 80% of  my readers are french
U+00AB = «  guillemets en chevrons gauches
U+00BB = » guillemets droits
I'm glad I have that on record for myself. But nobody died because I popped an apostrophe in the wrong place unless Hauptsturmbannführer Apostroph has an apoplectic fit while reading The Blob from his fastness in Paraguay.  Things are different in Apple-land and sometimes you see characters like � [U+FFFD] in HTML docs on the web where your browser can't read the writer's symbols - almost always because of a problem with accents or special characters like > < / \ | & which are often 'reserved characters' in coding languages. HTML tags use <bold>to make thing bold</bold> for example. Technical details.

It's more difficult, because errors matter, if you're programming for the Health Service Executive HSE: you can't afford to write sloppy code there because some unfortunate's life might depend on it. About six years ago, the HSE moved into the 21stC by digitising all their X-rays, CAT scans, ultrasounds, MRIs etc. rather than depending on developing large sheets of photographic paper and holding them up to the light. This has obvious advantages: you can make a back-up copy; a houseman in Donegal can look at the same digital image at the same time as the consultant in Dublin; you don't need a courier to take the X-ray to the receiving hospital. The system has an acronym [must be important] National Integrated Medical Imaging System (NIMIS) and seems to operate on two levels:

• the radiology information system RIS which is the original definitive copy usually pored over by the clinical team before treatment is meted out
• the export copy which goes to the picture archive and may be retrieved later and by a wider subset of interested parties

A picture on its own is worth bugger all, it must have context and interpretation, so each picture acquires 1000 words of relevant commentary. Seems they have embraced speech-recognition technology, so the busy consultant can dictate his comments and these are captured digitally and attached to the image. That's all modern and cool. The problem was that the speech-cog software captured ". . . the aorta is less than 50% occluded" as ". . . the aorta is < 50% occluded" which is entirely acceptable in the context: nobody is going think <50% is the beginning of an HTML tag. The problem arose when the original notes became an export copy. At that stage, because the coders were asleep at the switch, the < disappeared like the cheshire cat and the message became ". . . the aorta is 50% occluded".  Whoops.

Why that is most likely significant is because of threshold values. The medical commentator will have in mind the critical values - those that require intervention. < 50% means everything is okay because 50% is the alert threshold; bald 50% is nay-kay and may precipitate intervention - a stent; more X-rays to give you cancer; another €1500 of tax-money for a confirmatory CAT scan.

There are several worrying things about this:

• that is should happen at all in the export copy transfer
• that the coding company's QC didn't pick it up
• that the system has been running for 6 years and nobody on the ground noticed the anomaly
• that there are now likely to be other errors (less overt and so harder to find and that much more insidious). Up to this week we were totally confident that the coders were worthy of their hire. Part of the confidence lies in the fact that the HSE paid them a shed-load of money. Could we have that money back please and could a few heads roll?

Richard Corbridge the HSE's Chief Information Officer has resigned "Corbridge’s decision to leave has nothing to do with the news that thousands of patients may need medical tests re-done because of a computer error."

I was a crap coder. I never mastered hashes aka associative arrays: they just wrecked my head so my iterative loops ran slower; I used <horror>GOTO</horror> statements; I was always forgetting the line-end ";". But I was a careful coder, I never believed that what I had written was delivering the correct output: I checked chunks of code with a calculator; I stress-tested it with non-numeric inputs; I asked if the outputs were reasonable. I have also hacked at other people's code when it mattered and found that it wasn't delivering the correct answer. I am proud to be on a select list of 385 people who found a glitch in PHYLIP.

Good news for the potentially 25,000 affected patients. After all which would you rather be?
less than dead
or
dead

Zeppo clamps

How many of us find our true selves or our métier before we die? We are born into a family of dentists and become . . . a dentist, or, kicking over the traces, a doctor. If your folks went to college, it takes a particular determination, or a Richard Branson dyslexia, not to go to college yourself. Almost all people born Catholic, die Catholic and it just stretches credibility that some of them wouldn't have been happy Lutherans - who, after all, make the best pork sausage. A while ago, I wrote about one of my most outstanding students who left science immediately after obtaining her summa cum laude to run a climbing shop in the English Lakes.  It's a problem for the multi-talented to figure out which one is going to earn them their living - unless you're a pianist in which case your day job will, with 99.9% certainty, give you more money. As John Spillane quipped the other day "What's the difference between a pizza and a musician? A pizza can feed a family of four". The aching dilemma is very well expressed in Somerset Maugham's story The Alien Corn, which ends in tragedy.

Even people who were born after the last one died can probably name the Marx Brothers: Chico, Harpo, Groucho and the Other One. That would be Zeppo, the youngest. There was also Gummo, who was never in the films, but was a successful theatrical agent; you'll be in good company if you've never heard of him. You'll also be in good company if you didn't know that Zeppo, the slightly boring straight-man and young romantic cipher of the quartet, was an inventor who made $million$ through his engineering company Marman / Aeroquip. He came to his engineering talent early, keeping the family car in working order.

When he stopped acting, he partnered his brother Gummo in the agency but also started his company which is most notable for developing and marketing the Marman Clamp [R from NASA engineering specs]. These clamps consisted of a ring with an internal V-shaped notch that seized together the ends flanges on the end of two connecting tubes, As you tighten the strap with a turn-buckle the V-notch forces the two pipe-ends together in an elegant appropriate technology non-leaking joint. Here's 21stC engineer show-and-telling why Marman flange clamps knock the alternatives into a cocked hat. The company got a boost in engineering circles when it became known that Marman clamps were used to secure and transport the second Nagasaki atomic bomb code-named Fat-Boy. Doubtless, Marman clamps were used to connect the exhaust pipe of the company's 1948 motor-cycle the Marman Twin. The design of the flange clamp was so solid and so simply effective that you can still buy them today.

Zeppo was also waaay ahead of the curve in thinking about and developing on-body health monitors. In particular he secured two patents for wrist-watches that could detect irregular pulse-rate and warn the wearer before a defibrillator was needed . . . or indeed widely available. Damned clever, altogether. It could have turned out that Zeppo stayed in films because that was available; the world is a better place for him finding another talent in his toolkit. There's an iconic story about finding your true level by Somerset Maugham [prev] called The Verger: you can read the whole thing in about 8 minutes. This should remind you of another actor who shone in STEM: Hedy Lamarr,

Ovis algaphagia

Fair Isle, of which we wrote recently, is absurdly small and remote. The next island South is the slightly smaller (690 ha. vs 780 ha.) North Ronaldsay about 40km SW. Fair Isle is famous for its knitting and the rich diversity of its bird-life. North Ronaldsay is famous for nothing-at-all but in the news last week because the school closed . . . as all Scottish primary schools do at this time of year. The difference here being that a) there was only one pupil in the last academic year and she is going on to secondary school in Kirkwall this September. Accordingly the North Ronaldsay school won't be opening after the Summer break. It's like the joke about the notice which appeared outside a village library "Library closed, somebody borrowed the book."

That's kind of sad, in an end-of-an-era sort of way. As recently as 1977 there were 17 primary school pupils in the school. The departure of Teigan Scott is part of the general trend of rural depopulation in the Highlands and Islands because EU food economics have tilted the playing field in favour of French mega-farms growing golden delicious apples and oats being grown 'only' in Poland and Finland. It is, accordingly, difficult to make a living off the poor thin soils of North Ronaldsay and the surrounding, over-fished, seas around the island. So the young go off to become electrical engineers and quantity surveyors and never come back. at its peak in 1881 there were 550 people living on the island a count which steadily declined to about a tenth of that today.

It would have to be a very slow news day for such a local event to make the news in France, Indeed it only makes the national newspapers and the BBC because the story is cutely nostalgic. It helps that young Teigan is symmetrical too, of course. I wrote about a similar story two years ago where the two pupils and their teacher travel to Sherkin Island for school each day. The teacher is paid to do this by me-the-tax-payer because educational politics sees this sort of micro-school as desirable. Finding another resource teacher in a ghetto deis school in Dublin or Limerick is, contrariwise, just regrettably beyond the budget of the Department of Education.

Actually, I was woeful ignorant in saying nothing of interest happened on NR. It seems that the local breed of sheep [R getting a mouthful of traffic-cone kelp Laminaria from the foreshore although they prefer dulse Palmaria palmatta] developed a taste for seaweed along the foreshore and by dint of eating this iodine rich food source acquire a distinct ' gamey' flavour which, like other Northern dainties like lutefisk and guga, is an acquired taste. It is the only vertebrate than obtains sustenance from algae. As the sheep adapted to the diet they became less efficient at digesting grasses. If they don't go extinct, we probably have the makings of a reproductively isolated species there. The sheep are kept on this algal diet by a huge dry-stone wall circumscribing the island, which needs constant maintenance to ensure genetic purity of the  wild and wonderful combination of genes, digestive enzymes and gut microbes which allows the continued exploitation of this niche dietary resource. You can contribute. Nice films: diet - shaping the island.

Insulography More islands

Been wrong for 75 years

While visiting with the grandchilder, I dropped down the country to have lunch with my aged [97 and rising] mother, whom we last met having eye-drops following a cataract scraping. They didn't adequately inform her that a disagreeable side effect of cataract treatment is painful sensitivity to bright sunlight and she is currently determined not have the second eye done. As we chatted over lunch, she said that she'd stopped taking one of her pharmacopoeia of daily drugs because it made her feel depressed, started it again after a week to see if the symptoms returned (a scientist, my Mum) and then 'fessed up to her Doctor. The Doc's response was a shrugged "Whatever", almost as if she was prescribing random scripts without much interest in whether they were going to work.

I've previously mentioned my own experience with medical volte-face about cholesterol and proctological prostate palpitation PPP. The most striking aspect of these interactions is the bare-faced certainty with which the medicos held their contradictory positions.  Okay okay, they aren't flip-flopping day to day but nevertheless they pushed out a clear message that would be brooked only at great risk to the patient and later said exactly the opposite with equal confidence.

Now let's go back 75 years to Spring of 1941. Florey, Chain and Heatley [prev] were doing some methodical mouse studies on the efficacy of penicillin in killing pathogens when Albert Alexander presented in the Radcliffe Infirmary with a horrific septic head which ultimately derived from scratching his face with a rose-thorn. Florey and co. were persuaded to treat the unfortunate man; but scaling up the dose appropriate for a 20g mouse to an 80,000g police constable used up their entire stock of penicillin. Despite recovering the active principle for PC Alexander's urine, and despite a remarkable ebb in his adverse symptoms, a four day course was all that could be offered and the gallant policeman died [horribly] five weeks after first treatment. Florey's team undertook to increase their production of the potential wonder-drug but also decided to treat only critically ill children in their clinical trials because they were less massive.

The devastation felt by the clinical team from the relapse after the almost miraculous recovery developed into the medical practice of completing the course of any antibiotic therapy. Failing to complete the prescribed course not only put the treated patient at risk; it also put the whole population and succeeding generations at risk because stopping early promoted antibiotic resistance about which I have sobbed and warned and  railed. Well a new analysis in the BMJ has looked with extreme skepticism at this medical shibboleth. They find that there is no evidence that completing the course always leads to better outcomes than stopping when you-the-patient feel better.  Me-the-patient may well require a different time-course to you because I am genetically different and my strain of pathogen is definitely different to yours; unless we have eaten from the same bag of dodgy chicken goujons. The usual suspects are, and I quote "The clinical threat comes mainly from species such as Escherichia coli and the so called ESKAPE organisms (Enterococcus faecium, Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Acinetobacter spp, Pseudomonas spp, Enterobacter spp), which are all found harmlessly in us, on us, or in our environment".

The WHO is updating their advice about antibiotic use and I guess we'll have a different message when Antibiotic Awareness Day 2017 comes round again in November. All the British broadsheets are tooting the failure of medical science to live up to its key evidence-based precepts: Independent - Telegraph - Guardian. There has been some push-back from the medical profession including the UK's Chief Medical Officer Sally Davies [previes]: "The message to the public remains the same: people should always follow the advice of healthcare professionals. To update policies, we need further research to inform them." Commentator George Dvorsky at Gizmodo/io9 got all hot and bothered at the notion of change, asserting fair-enoughly that changing current practice isn't really evidence-based either until more research is carried out. Shockingly, there has been no research on the most effective time-course for treatment for most conditions treated by antibiotics: the profession has been too busy chipping 7 days or 14 days into stone tablets to hand out with the colourful tablets that you pick up at the pharmacy.