Anonymous shopping

In the world of teaching biology, I can be a gun-for-hire. When I started at The Institute, my boss waved an absurd list of courses that I would be required to teach [human physiology; remedial maths; 2nd Yr physics; 1st year biology and chemistry; environmental chemistry of water; food microbiology].
Yore 'avin' a game, guv'nor, I said.
No I'm not he replied this is what we need you to do, so I did.
In the 1990s, I was contracted to tool all over Ireland, with occasional forays across Europe, to teach short courses in bioinformatics and molecular evolution. It was tremendous fun. Along the way I developed a module for becoming a power-user of PubMed, the database of bio-science literature. I dreamed up a list of bizarre things to hunt for on PubMed, at least partly to show the wonderful breadth of human research curiosity.

• Vending machine injury
• Vacuum cleaner injury
• Vasectomy and prostate cancer
• Vesalius
•   . . . and vat's jvst ve Vs

I was reminded of that because a comment on the blogosphere pointed to a an article tallying up the count of peculiar deaths occuring each year in the USA. That was interesting in itself because if you were required to put these potential killers in order of body-count, I bet you couldn't:

• Vending machines
• Dogs
• Txtn while drivn [prev]
• Autoerotic asphyxia
• Roller-coasters
• Falling from the bed
• Terrists

The comment appeared under a flag on Metafilter pointing at a FastCo piece on the latest convenience startup. A couple of ex-Googlistas, Paul McDonald and Ashwath Rajan, are trying to launch a series of teched-up retail boxes called Bodega which will spring up at a location near you. Bodega will sell a short range of essentials and undercut the Mom-and-Pop store on the corner. Real convenience stores have a longer inventory and overheads like people-who-say-hello and will hold a UPS parcel for you. Bodega intends to cherry-pick the fly-off-the-shelves items and leave the competition high and dry. Retail is a dog-eat-dog world where the whole enterprise is predicated on a race to the bottom on cost. When I first knew them, Pat the Salt and his late and much lamented wife, my in-laws, ran a grocery in a village in the middle of County Kilkenny. Not a hamlet but a long way from a town also. That distance, demographic and geographic, meant that 700 inhabitants, with maybe 700 farming families for a hinterland, were supported by a national school,  two churches [RC and CoI], a creamery, an expensive petrol-station, 7 pubs and 7 shops.

It was pretty harsh.  In order to differentiate themselves from the competition, they started baking a big ham each weekend and selling it in slices through the week. It was an instant success, everyone came to try it out and and all resolved never to turn vegetarian. But it didn't do enough for the bottom line because the clients would buy their few slices of ham and then duck round the corner to get their tea, sugar, butter, milk, bread and baked beans from Mrs Doohickey who know their mother really well and had run her shop forever. After several years on the downward slope they sold up and tried something else. The Garda Sergeant's wife, who had an account, owed them a huge amount of money which she had no intention of ever paying . .. the trollop. Google maps suggests the premises are now a chipper: sic transit gloria hami.

To honour of the rapacious enterprise of McDonald and Rajan, I note that today is Talk Like A Pirate Day. All aboard the SS Amazon, me hearties.

The Filth

Charles Darwin spent his post-Beagle years largely recumbent, initially fathering an extensive squad of children [N=10 over 16 years] and then on the sofa downstairs reading through an extensive correspondence [average 2+/day in, say, 1872] and firing off suggestions about what to do next. He also read loadsa books of course and had the habit of dismembering big volumes so he could read them section by section. I think there are probably as many books published in Britain every day as the entire output of 1872.  In my restless search for copy, I have to rely on my own efforts, searching the blogosphere and my own, particularly unexciting, life at The Institute. I have, nevertheless, two 'correspondents' who send me links on a regular basis and I appreciate both link and sender. Not too many, mind, G - I don't want to direct all your mail to the spam-box.

All that preamble is by way of acknowledging a Guardian report on micro-plastics in the drinking water which was sent me by G a tuthree days ago. Microplastics are the new environmental bugaboo, not because they are unsightly but because they are invisible and we have no idea a) about how we are going to clean them up or b) about how harmful they are. Microplastics are defined as particles smaller than 5mm and larger that 1 micrometer µm = 1 micron = 1/millionth of a metre = 1/thousandth of a mm. Smaller than that we are talking about nanoparticles. E. coli is about 1µm across and 2µm long and a human cell is on average 30µm in diameter.

On microplastics on the beach, here's a nice imgur photo-story [and R for a sample] about beachcombing  on Tregantle Beach near Plymouth, UK, for the cohort between microplastics and my bailiwick of ropes, buoys and fishboxes.  It takes a particular and peculiar dedication to sift through 35 bagsful of beach detritus to find all the Smarties-tops, or Lego flower-parts.

The question is, Guardian readers, whether you should be really worried by the fact that 72% of your UK drinking water is contaminated with microplastics? First off, note that 28% of such sources had NO microplastics.  Of the rest, the contaminated, the average discovery was 4 particles per 500ml. Now there may be a long tail here, with some taps spouting 100s of microplastic chunks but I don't think 4 is enough to concern you/us. You could, for example, decide to go out and purchase a 1 micron mesh water-filter and sustain a disfiguring facial injury from a car crash on the way to the store.  That's not likely but it's a terrible outcome and Risk Assessment requires balancing that against a more common event (assault by microparticle) which has no known effect. No known effect is not the same as no effect! But the risk assessment helps put your worries into perspective and that should help formulate a rational course of action.

On the stuff-I-put-in-my-mouth front you should know that the FDA in the USA has allowable levels of contamination in the various food-products that pass through its labs and our guts. The plain people of Ireland thanks the US government for carrying out these time-consuming studies for the free[-loading] world, because, according to my calculations, our Food Safety Authority spends more of its time drinking tea than analysing it. The FDA's Department of Sanitation and Transport publishes a long, and fascinating, list of the levels of allowable 'filth' in food products.  Here we go with an excerpt:

• Ground Paprika : hazard and action level
• Mold Average mold count is more than 20%
• Insect filth Average of more than 75 insect fragments per 25 grams
• Rodent filth Average of more than 11 rodent hairs per 25 grams

The FDA recognise that it is impossible to keep insects and mice out of food-stores while noting that we don't want to pick earwigs and weevils out of the rice before we cook it. 50 insect wing fragments in your paprika? Meh! You want to look at your bacteria-laden tea-towels and pot-scrubber before your start to worry about evidence that your food is edible to both humans and rodents. 1000 insect frags, and you may take notice - it is evidence that hygiene standards in that food-processing process are dodgy and should be investigated and, probably, changed.

Sporting life

For several years in the 90s I taught courses in Finland. It is about the only time I went to a sauna; as a sort of hats off (and kit off, of course) to the host country. Far too hot to be comfortable, really. I found the Finns had a very sharp laconic sense of humor, often quite dark. One chap referred to another as "about as useful as wet toilet-paper": with the accent and delivery it took me a while to twig this phrase as a synonym for utterly useless. Here's a pretty and peculiar [both] aspect of Finnish culture - keppihevonen - in which girls gallop over jumps astride a hobbyhorse and perform a fair imitation of dressage.

• I've mentioned wife-carrying, another Finnish sport, before.
• But maybe not [English] shin-kicking.
• Worm-charming is another English all-the-family sport
• Quintessentially British at this time of year: conkers.
• Mountain unicycling, anyone? You've got to have a cotter-pin loose for that sort of thing
• Paragliding.  It boggles my mind that I was in 2002 able to master the task of getting my canopy airborne above me and then launch into space.
• Previous coverage for out-there passtimes.

Here's a another form of fun: playing a power-hose on a 130 tonne fatberg [2013 prev] under ground in East London. Metafilter used a come-on-and-click title Congestion backs up London Tube for a quarter of a kilometer to a predictably witty rich seam of comments.

The Ginger Man

I pretty green in 1973; but at least I had the gumption to leave home and country to go to college. Travel broadens the mind and I really needed to be exposed to different vistas after more than ten years being institutionalised by my very expensive education in England. On the ferry from Liverpool, I had brought a 20 lt volume box of volumes mostly Penguin paperbacks which I considered essential to civilised life. It turned out the at least two of these not particularly racy [for 1970s England] books were on the Index Librorum Probitorum and banned in Ireland. I had, for example a copy of La porte étroite by Andre Gide. I've written before about how another of these banned books, The Ginger Man by JP Donleavy, or rather my laughing at one of these, brought me and The Beloved together. It is accordingly with a certain sadness that I note the passing of Donleavy [L last year at his 90th bday with Glen "Once" Hansard] at the beginning of the week. There was a time when I read The Ginger Man ragged; riffling through it to find favorite passages and slapping the open book's face down on the kitchen table to acquire some accidental butter stains. I read a lot of his other books but they seemed a bit tired and derivative after Donleavy's first and most immediate book.  I will acknowledge that I cannot remember reading his Fairy Tale of New York but do rate The Pogues song of the same title.  The Ginger Man itself inspired Brian Cadd's song of that name.

I wrote him a letter in about 1974, offering to come out to his country mansion and interview him for the TCD student newspaper (with which I had absolutely no connexion or affiliation). Donleavy, quite sensibly, didn't reply to my letter.

Donleavy must have been an engaging chap, he was certainly a great boozer and intimate of Brendan Behan. You get a flavor of this listening to him on Desert Island's Discs DID in 2007. I've had occasion to mention DID as the ultimate tribute of respect from the British Establishment (=BBC): better than a medal, better than an honorary degree. I must ask The Brother, who has landed all three fish. Somewhere in his interview-with-music JPD offered the suggestion that some of the 45 million copies of the book have been so good for the morale of the sick that they have recovered "You don't die in bed if you have read The Ginger Man". That is likely to be confirmation bias, selective attention or cherry-picking. So many copies out there and everyone dies, most of us in hospital beds (or on mere trolleys in Ireland, there being insufficient beds). If every sick person receives ex officio a copy of The Ginger Man, some of them will recover and that connexion will wing its way back to head office at the publisher; the unmiraculous copies of the book won't be noticed under the hospital bed, let alone tallied up.

Nevertheless, I will share a nice story that was going the rounds when I started working in St Vincent's Hospital in 2001. In 1990, Ireland did surprisingly well in Italia 90, that year's World Cup soccer tournament. An elderly lady was occupying a hospital bed for her last journey surrounded by her anxious family. As the time for a crucial Ireland match approached, she told her sons and daughters to go off and watch the match in the common room "sure don't be worrying about me". After the game, her rellies trooped back somewhat sheepishly having had their priorities exposed. "How did we do?" murmured the old lady
"We won on penalties" they chorused
"I'm feeling much better, so; is there a cup of tea to be had?"
The restorative power of tea (and soccer) worked its magic, she was soon discharged and lived on for several more years.

It is strange and peculiar how sporting events can be so inspiring for people; even those whose nearest approach to a football is sitting on a sofa all Saturday afternoon working through a slab of tinnies and shouting at the ref. The case has been made many times that Ireland's somewhat limping progress through Italia 90 was the catalyst for the rise and roar of the Celtic Tiger.  On 3rd September this year Waterford and Galway met in the All Ireland Senior Hurling Final. Waterford, of all Ireland's cities, has had the roughest time through the recession and could do with a boost. Galway with a critical mass of IT companies is doing much better.  It was mental in Waterford in the run up to the key weekend: every house was dressed out in blue&white  Pat the Salt was compelled by his carers to buy a large flag although he has no time at all for GAA having grown up in Wales where Rugby is king. When Waterford went down GALWAY 0-26 WATERFORD 2-17, I wrote to my pal Paul who used to hurl all over Galway in his youth "Thanks a bunch Paul, you and yours have screwed over any chance of economic recovery in Waterford this decade"

Dry hands right now

At the beginning of the Summer, I was out with the family and none of us was able to dry our hands effectively after using "the bathroom" in a new Cork restaurant.  Ellen DeGeneres doe sit much funnier as she riffs on the evolving technology of hand-driers. We're back in The Institute now and I'm having to pee on company time. Some of the hand-driers are antiquer than others and I was tickled to notice that the pair nearest my office are called "Worldwide Driers Tempest". This is more aspirational than appropriately metaphorical - unless it's a reference to the length of time taken to dry the hands being the same as a reading of Shakespeare's play.  New parts of the campus, nearer the President's penthouse office, are equipped with Dyson Blade driers which has a decibel rating 85dB a little less than that of a lawnmower 90db. You should wear ear-defenders for anything more 85db. And it also makes a difference that the hand-drier is by definition at arm's length while the lawnmower is that plus the lawnmower's arm away.

I note that UC Santa Cruz, aghast at the statistic that 1 third of to-landfill traffic was paper towels from bathrooms in halls of residence, is now recommending that students bring a few hand-towels to campus along with lots of t-shirts and devices. Here are some earnest UCSC students embracing the plan to save the planet. "instituting this change campus-wide would save as many as 1,400 trees, that's, like, a forest" True dat, if a forest is one hectare in extent.

ANNyway, I have now taken my own advice and take a small towel 30x30cm to work to dry my hands after rinse. It may not be super-sterile, but at least it's my germs being transferred from hand to towel to hand. I am now adding hearing-loss the the ever increasing list of accumulated deficits as I age. Using my hand-towel is saving the old lugs further insult. I don't want to spend my declining years asking mumbly students to repeat everything repeat everything repeat everything they say.

Towel? You should try it; should dry it them!

Big number wrecks head

A few days ago, I was writing about a lesson plan to get the students at The Institute to think about numbers and guesstimate a few statistics. On the day we registered the incoming first year students, they were given an orientation session for each of the courses they have signed up for: physics, chemistry, biology, lab science and quantitative methods QM. I had each of the four student groups for half an hour of QM. I'd overheard  my colleagues using the opportunity to transmit information "you must wear PPE = white-coat, closed shoes, safety-glasses . . . here is the fire extinguisher . . . there is the eye-wash . . .". There's only so much of this you can take in one sitting before you have to shovel out previous information in order to accommodate new stuff.

Instead of that, I gave each tuthree people a sheet with four questions which required an answer although nobody in the world knows accurately what the true answer is. Here we go:

• Q1a How many trees are there in Ireland?
• Q1b If we had a country wide Electric Picnic, could we invite and accommodate everyone on the planet?
• Q2 How many red blood cells do you have?
• Q3 If this 120-seat classroom was in downtown Houston and filled to the brim, how many tonnes water would it contain?

You should give [some of] those puzzles a go, yourself. The answer is far less important than the process of thinking it through. My students were almost all initially reluctant to test their mathy mettle. "I have no idea" being the commonest response to the question direct. With some, when I said that they didn't have, couldn't have, "No Idea", they picked up the baton and started to move off the blocks. This sort of Socratic method was often used on my poor daughters  "You have No Idea how many trees? . . . Is it more than the 20 trees that we can see out of the window? . . . Is it less than the Eddington Number?". If you can see 20 trees in this part of campus, are there more than 2,000 trees in Ireland? etc,  It turns out that Ireland has the lowest rate of tree-cover in Europe.  It is now a piffling 11% against a European average of 40%. But that is up from a frighteningly denuded 1% two generations ago. This and other uncertainties make the answer to that question the least certain of the four posed above. Sitka spruce Picea sitchensis plantations, which is the main source of the increase from 1% to 11%,  start off on 2m spacing, so that's 2500/hectare, but how many hectares are forested and how many 'rogue' trees are there in hedges and gardens. The picture [R source] shows the Fairy Tree Crataegus monogyna on the Magic Road near Mahon Falls Co. Waterford.  It is covered with votary rags and holy medals to show that paganism flourishes in Ireland.  In antient tymes, Ireland's tree-cover was as much as 80% “a squirrel could go from Skibbereen to Mizen Head on trees without touching the ground"

Several students came up with an answer of 709 million trees in Ireland.  All that indicated was that they had given up the ould thinking and googled an answer from RTE. That is a bad estimate for two reasons a) it is plagiarism on which we are not big at The Institute b) it is spuriously accurate: writing 709 means you are confident that it is not 707 million or 715 millon, 700, though vaguer, is better because it doesn't imply an unevidenced confidence.  Now I have a mission: never allow students to accept facts-from-the-web without at least doing an order-of-magnitude analysis [see voluminous nonsense prev] to see it is on target rather that off the wall. It will be a task: at the moment many struggle with the fact that there are a million sq.m. in one sq.km.

They were at all sea on the Houston problem above. First many were confused by the reference to the recent flooding of USA's fourth largest city; the event didn't seem to have bobbed across their section of the Snapchatverse. But on to the problem itself. The room in which we were working is 7m x 11m x 3m. There is space accordingly for 231 cu.m. of water. That's a silly answer unless we had used a tape-measure to generate the fundamental LxWxH dimensions, so we could  call it 200-250 tonnes. Or 100-500 tonnes if you're hazy about the size of a metre. I got 20 answers, ranging from 8 tonnes to 378,000 tonnes; only 7 of which were within the 'possible' range. hmmmm.

Mammoth mermaid

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player 

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage 

And then is heard no more: it is a tale 

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, 

Signifying nothing.  [Shagsper's Macbeth Act V]

In 1741, Steller's Sea Cow Hydrodamalis gigas bobbed briefly above the kelp beds off о́стров Бе́ринга Bering Island, was described by naturalist Georg Steller, and then was sent off-stage to the oblivion of extinction before we knew anything much about the species. Bering Island, where dat?  It is the last gasp of the Aleutian Islands [prev] which form a violently volcanic Southern demarcation of the Bering Sea:
The Northern limit to the Bering Sea is the Bering Strait, which we've explored as far as Diomede, where Mother Russia meets Uncle Sam. So all the geographical features here are named after Vitus Bering. Here's the most engaging map, by Sergey Pasenuk, [woefully slow connexion: maybe a wood-fire Siberian server?] you're likely to find of Bering Island:

You can see  о́стров Ме́дный Medny Island, the other substantive member of  Командо́рские острова́ Commander Islands in the background.  And who is the commander after whom the archipelago is named? Vitus Bering: no surprises here. Poor Bering is buried on Bering Island, having died, probably of heart failure aged 60, on his way back from Alaska on the Great Northern Expedition. His ship was wrecked on the island but the crew struggled ashore and survived on berries, algae and whatever vertebrates they could capture and slaughter. One sea-cow was a lot of dinners because, according to Steller's notes, an adult was 9m long and weighted almost 10 tonnes. The high salt content of the sea-cow diet [kelp, kelp, kelp, kelpeddy kelp] meanst that the sea-cow meat sort of auto-preserved itself. 10cm of blubber provided a convenient fuel for cooking the slabs of meat. Nevertheless 28 members of the crew died, probably of scurvy, possibly because the were unwilling to follow Steller's strictures about eating more berries and sea-weed and less prime rib.

Eventually, the survivors, salvaged material from their wrecked ship and constructed a small vessel from the timbers, in which they sailed back to civilisation in Петропа́вловск-Камча́тский Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. 'Civilisation' is relative because the settlement had only been established the year before by Bering before he departed on his final, fateful, fatal voyage. One of the items of cargo the mariners brought away were a number of sea-otter Enhydra lutris skins, which along with reports of Steller's sealion Eumetopias jubatus seals (Callorhinus ursinus, Phoca vitulina, Phoca largha) and sea-cows showed that Bering Island was rich with exploitable resources. The last sea-cow was sighted and slaughtered in 1768 just 27 years after its discovery to science.

Mermaids? Sea-cows, along with manatees and dugongs are members of Order Sirenia named for the mermaids who attempted to seduce Ulysses to a fatal shag. The word manatee is cognate with the word for breast in Taino, and dugong means lady-of-the-sea in Tagalog. It is true that sirenians have a pair of pectoral mammary glands, so maybe after many months at sea, the imagination of sailors may have become a little elastic.  I go down this road because the incomparable Bill Bryson went a similar route before on his Lost Continent [prev] road trip: " I drove on to Grand Teton National Park. And there's another arresting name for you. Tetons means tits in French. … The first French explorers who passed through northwestern Wyoming took one look at the mountains and said, "Zut alors! Hey, Jacques, clock those mountains. They look just like my wife's tetons." Isn't it typical of the French to reduce everything to a level of sexual vulgarity? Thank goodness, they didn't discover the Grand Canyon, that's all I can say. And the remarkable thing is that the Tetons look about as much like tits as … well, as a frying pan or a pair of hiking boots. In a word, they don't look like tits at all, except perhaps to desperately lonely men who have been away from home for a very long time. They looked a little bit like tits to me."

More islands