- my biological sex?
- what I had for breakfast?
- if I have a pet?
- with whom I live?
- where I work?
- if I get migraines
- if I was at a crime scene?
Thursday, 11 January 2018
Microbial fingerprints
Over Christmas, I was given the spare half of a 2for1 sub to the New York Times, this is grrrreat because in my part of the blogosphere, the source is often either the NYT or WaPo the Washington Post. WaPo has closed it's free-access doors recently, so I need one USA source for following things up. Or indeed getting at some original stories that aren't yet being rechurned on the blogosphere. For the last 10 years, I've been really interested in the microbiome - the community of microbes which we tote around with us all the time and largely take for granted. Then I came across a NYT quiz to see what microbiologists can/could tell about me if they swabbed some of my orifices and characterised the bacteria found there. Can they tell:
Wednesday, 10 January 2018
Small bite, big threat
This all came back to me because, at Christmas, The Boy brought me a tiny device that was brimful of podcasts, a lot of them from the BBC. There is probably 500 hours of listening material there and that doesn't take account of the stuff that is in the same part of the BBC archives that didn't finish up on the device. One of the seams which The Boy mined was a series called TLS The Life Scientific in which an amazing diversity of scientists are interviewed with care and attention to details by nuclear physicist Jim Al-Kalili. There are more than 150 of them waiting to be heard, indeed I've already noted the interview with Niamh nic Daéid. I like this medium very much: Al-Kalili does his research, or the programme's researchers do, so the questions are not vapid and because he is a scientist himself, there is always some common ground of understanding. You might check out A Passion for Science an earlier riff on the same idea where Lewis Wolpert [bloboprev] interviewed the scientists.
More or less at random, I thought I would hear what Janet Hemingway had to say, on the basis that I'd never heard [of] her, which is much more a comment on my memory or my insularity than on her reputation or her importance. It turns out that she is the youngest woman to have made Professor grade in UK science and was elected FRS in 2011. Which is not bad for a girl whose folks ran a corner shop in Yorkshire. She went through the same "girls don't do science" nonsense at school as Jocelyn Bell, but secured a 1st class degree in Genetics from U Sheffield aNNyway. That was at least partly because she designed her own final year research project - on mosquitoes - because she had decided that mosquitoes were important and interesting and blagged a couple of the faculty into 'supervising' her. That contribution and some active networking in the mosquito world secured her a PhD place at the London School of Tropical Medicine and her career was launched. She is a vectorologist looking, not to cure malaria, but to stop mosquitoes transmitting the malarial parasites. If you can achieve that then you've cured the disease; which has to pass alternate generations in an insect host. I've been down this vectorcentric track before.
That has also been one of Hemingway's significant contributions: the recognition that the reproductive rate of mosquitoes are so great that they effectively behave like bacteria in evolving resistance to poisons quickly if the selection pressure is sufficient. Not only that, but she was early to show that the mosquitoes can develop mutations more or less simultaneously in several different genes / pathways so by the time chemists have developed a new therapy, some mosquito somewhere has already developed a biochemical work-around. But that's not her real contribution, which has been more to have a magisterial holistic overview of The Problem and to bring the players round the table to talk with each other: chemists, ecologists, vectorologists, policy-wonks, biochemists, doctors, geneticists, nurses, entomologists, health-visitors. Those are two very different skill-sets: seeing the big picture but also enticing people out of their bunkers to come along for the ride.
Her excellent network skills have seen her grow the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine LSTM, where she has been Director since 2001, to a major player in World Health: 3x the personnel and at least £50 million capital investment for buildings to house those Effectives.. And she has obtained huge grants from the Gates Foundation to support her brain-child, the Innovative Vector Control Consortium (IVCC). In her words, Gates money has allowed pharma companies to 'de-risk' research in novel therapies. She is in the process of retiring as Director of LSTM, so that she can devote more time to research. The woman is a whirlwind.
Tuesday, 9 January 2018
The shiny stuff
For the last 20 years, aluminium has been selling at about $2,000/tonne. That's $2 a kilo: more expensive than potatoes but less than cheese. Of course it is silly to compare retail and wholesale. The price of wheat is about $180/tonne at the farmer's co-op or, more accurately, FOB at the Gulf of Mexico; but I'm paying €1.25 / kg for Strong White Flour in Tesco: a markup / processing cost of about 4x. It's more sensible to compare it to the other widely traded 'base metals':
- Spot price US$ per tonne
- Al 2244
- Cu 7194
- Pb 2508
- Ni 12078
- Sn 19734
- Zn 3278
Aluminium is made from dirt and is dirt common - 8% of the earth's crust. Only certain types of bauxite will do but it's essentially dirt nonetheless. I gave an executive summary of the process in 2014. The difference in price between dirt and $2000+ per tonne is the Hall-Héroult process which uses 15,000 kWh per tonne. We pay about 20c / kWh but you can imagine aluminum smelters can negotiate a better deal from their suppliers. Once it's been reduced to bare metal, aluminium can be melted and pressed and hammered and re-purposed more or less indefinitely. As I said on New Year's Day it seems just bonkers to throw it back into landfill for our grandchildren to mine out of the feh of their own fossilised diapers.
As it happens, aluminium was one of the very first items which were conscientiously recycled. Guide Dogs for the Blind is a charity that breeds and trains seeing-eye dogs to enhance the mobility of the visually impaired. The training is nifty: a dog can easily walk under a dangling shop-awning but her owner can't, so the dog must be instructed to be aware of another's troubles - to develop a sense of empathy. In these islands, Guide Dogs have been A Thing since the 1930s but really took off after WWII. Someone had a cunning plan to get kids to gather the aluminium caps from milk-bottles which were delivered in glass bottles to every home back in those days. The bottles were re-used! Rinsed, collected, washed properly, steam sterilised and refilled with the white stuff. If aluminium is made from dirt, glass is more or less made from sand and the cost is in the melting, blowing and marking. This is why reducing glass bottles to cullet then remelting and reforming them is a fabulous waste of energy. Eventually, milk companies realised that they could skip the costly re-use cycle by off-setting the cost of container disposal on the tax-payer. Tetrapak cost no more [except to the planet] than a multiple use glass bottle and the dairy's washing plant could be sold off for some other purpose.
In 1964, the whole Guide Dog thing took off when the project was flag-shipped by Blue Peter [presenter John Noakes R] the after-school children's TV programme. There were only 2 TV channels then, so it was watch Blue Peter or do your home-work. Kids were told to collect their milk tops and take them to school. Schools warehoused the tops until they had enough to be collected. I can't remember what the figures were but the concerted efforts of 8 million 6-16 y.o. children yielded . . . two guide dogs (Honey and Cindy). The mountains labored and brought forth a mouse indeed. I know we had a slowly increasing ball of aluminium in the kitchen at home - aluminium kitchen foil was acceptable as well. There were no aluminium drinks cans in 1964 and take-way chicken vindaloo hadn't been invented yet. I've written with nostalgia about the Corona lorry which visited our estate every Summer week in 1963; exchanging an empty [rinsed please] bottle for a full one in a tooth-dissolving variety of colours and flavours.
As it happens, aluminium was one of the very first items which were conscientiously recycled. Guide Dogs for the Blind is a charity that breeds and trains seeing-eye dogs to enhance the mobility of the visually impaired. The training is nifty: a dog can easily walk under a dangling shop-awning but her owner can't, so the dog must be instructed to be aware of another's troubles - to develop a sense of empathy. In these islands, Guide Dogs have been A Thing since the 1930s but really took off after WWII. Someone had a cunning plan to get kids to gather the aluminium caps from milk-bottles which were delivered in glass bottles to every home back in those days. The bottles were re-used! Rinsed, collected, washed properly, steam sterilised and refilled with the white stuff. If aluminium is made from dirt, glass is more or less made from sand and the cost is in the melting, blowing and marking. This is why reducing glass bottles to cullet then remelting and reforming them is a fabulous waste of energy. Eventually, milk companies realised that they could skip the costly re-use cycle by off-setting the cost of container disposal on the tax-payer. Tetrapak cost no more [except to the planet] than a multiple use glass bottle and the dairy's washing plant could be sold off for some other purpose.
In 1964, the whole Guide Dog thing took off when the project was flag-shipped by Blue Peter [presenter John Noakes R] the after-school children's TV programme. There were only 2 TV channels then, so it was watch Blue Peter or do your home-work. Kids were told to collect their milk tops and take them to school. Schools warehoused the tops until they had enough to be collected. I can't remember what the figures were but the concerted efforts of 8 million 6-16 y.o. children yielded . . . two guide dogs (Honey and Cindy). The mountains labored and brought forth a mouse indeed. I know we had a slowly increasing ball of aluminium in the kitchen at home - aluminium kitchen foil was acceptable as well. There were no aluminium drinks cans in 1964 and take-way chicken vindaloo hadn't been invented yet. I've written with nostalgia about the Corona lorry which visited our estate every Summer week in 1963; exchanging an empty [rinsed please] bottle for a full one in a tooth-dissolving variety of colours and flavours.
Monday, 8 January 2018
“Wow, I really need a civil engineer!”
Wow, we really need more WITS. Rachel Skinner is now the VP of ICE (the Institution of Civil Engineers) in the UK but she started off in Geography, which is often bizarrely plonked in the Faculty of Arts. She secured a 1st Class Hons degree from Durham, where Geog is shoe-horned into the Faculty of Social Science. At about the same time The Boy might also have studied Geography in UCD if he'd ticked the [exempt from Irish] box on his application form. But he didn't, so he came to engineering through the School of Hard-Knocks and the University of Life, and a winnowing 9 years at Open University. At the time of his UCD application I thought Geography was a great choice of subject because it could go any direction: water-sheds in the Andes; plastic gyres in the Pacific; plastic buckets in Nairobi; arsenic in Bangladesh . . . and that's just the watery bits. His Headmaster, a rather unimaginative fellow, said "Oh, I think he can do better than that" meaning that The boy's grades at Leaving Certificate might qualify him for a course with "higher points", maybe not Medicine, but 'better' than Geography. This annoyed me for the reasons I've tried to articulate above.
What do you do with a Social Science 1st from Durham? You take a job to make a bit of money before you go travelling. That's what Rachel Skinner [L ooking happy] did aNNyway, being given a desk in a transport planning office. That could be seen as a soft option but Skinner is a bit of a quant and naturally started to crunch numbers rather than form committees to investigate the tangle of paths in the yellow wood of transport futures. She claims that she "fell into engineering completely by chance" but that's a) a bit self-deprecating and b) probably nonsense because we make our own luck. Like The Boy, her company must have allowed her day release to secure a MSc in Transport Planning & Engineering (with distinction, Leeds U) in 2001 (aged 25). From there it's natural to qual up as a Chartered Engineer (2002, aged 26). CEng is not a shoo-in, they "are characterised by their ability to develop appropriate solutions to engineering problems, using new or existing technologies, through innovation, creativity and change." and are grilled into the club by a board who have no intention of debasing the currency.
Like geographers, engineers are a broad church. Nothing human, mechanical, civil or electrical is beyond their reach. Collectively! I'm not claiming that expertise is present in any single pair of hands, but with a degree in Engineering you can go aNNywhere . . . and be useful. The post-title is a quote one of Skinner's pieces-to-camera; she points out that engineers and their works often fade into invisibility against the unconsidered background of daily life. We take the bus to work, squinting at our smart-phones, along roads and across bridges without stopping to think that these were all created by engineers. The lift to the office works, the stairs don't collapse if we run up them, our hip-replacement doesn't creak, the pencil-sharpener is fit for purpose . . . because of engineers.
Transport Planning - traffic flows, margins of error, safety - are complex with elements of chaos (sensitivity to initial conditions). You can't do that with a sharp pencil and an envelope; you need to write some code or plug numbers into someone else's program and see what comes out of the box. BUT you have to apply your quant crap-detector to those figures: "there’s a need for common sense checking and understanding about the sort of answer you’re looking for, from first principles". IF the numbers are an order of magnitude different from what the pencil-&-envelope and/or your life-time's experience tell you THEN you need to double check the inputs. My students will happily report that a bale of 44 concrete blocks is half a billion cu.m., because they close their eyes and think of Ireland when required to do sums.
And what about girls? You don't need to be built like a rugger prop forward and wear 20kg rigger boots to contribute to an engineering project. Steel-caps and hard-hats come in all sizes now and computers will do a lot of the bump-and-grind number crunching. Engineering doesn't have to involve differential calculus, and you can get by will basic maths, so long as you have a feel for materials and systems. Even without those intuitions, a lot of your real training isn't book l'arning at school and college - it's being mentored at the drawing board and out on site until you grow your own ways of doing. If you're an engineer then you know other engineers: some bad, some stellar; some lazy, some strivers; so you know what the sector requires. If you care about the future of engineering you need to find your successors and they are now in school wearing plaid skirts and a late 19thC blazer. All it takes is for someone, preferably unrelated, to say "You've just said/done something interesting; that's how engineers think; it can be a lot of fun, the money is okay; the work will be testing but you'd ace it. . . What? you want to read Geography at Durham? You can do better than that". Film time:
Like geographers, engineers are a broad church. Nothing human, mechanical, civil or electrical is beyond their reach. Collectively! I'm not claiming that expertise is present in any single pair of hands, but with a degree in Engineering you can go aNNywhere . . . and be useful. The post-title is a quote one of Skinner's pieces-to-camera; she points out that engineers and their works often fade into invisibility against the unconsidered background of daily life. We take the bus to work, squinting at our smart-phones, along roads and across bridges without stopping to think that these were all created by engineers. The lift to the office works, the stairs don't collapse if we run up them, our hip-replacement doesn't creak, the pencil-sharpener is fit for purpose . . . because of engineers.
Transport Planning - traffic flows, margins of error, safety - are complex with elements of chaos (sensitivity to initial conditions). You can't do that with a sharp pencil and an envelope; you need to write some code or plug numbers into someone else's program and see what comes out of the box. BUT you have to apply your quant crap-detector to those figures: "there’s a need for common sense checking and understanding about the sort of answer you’re looking for, from first principles". IF the numbers are an order of magnitude different from what the pencil-&-envelope and/or your life-time's experience tell you THEN you need to double check the inputs. My students will happily report that a bale of 44 concrete blocks is half a billion cu.m., because they close their eyes and think of Ireland when required to do sums.
And what about girls? You don't need to be built like a rugger prop forward and wear 20kg rigger boots to contribute to an engineering project. Steel-caps and hard-hats come in all sizes now and computers will do a lot of the bump-and-grind number crunching. Engineering doesn't have to involve differential calculus, and you can get by will basic maths, so long as you have a feel for materials and systems. Even without those intuitions, a lot of your real training isn't book l'arning at school and college - it's being mentored at the drawing board and out on site until you grow your own ways of doing. If you're an engineer then you know other engineers: some bad, some stellar; some lazy, some strivers; so you know what the sector requires. If you care about the future of engineering you need to find your successors and they are now in school wearing plaid skirts and a late 19thC blazer. All it takes is for someone, preferably unrelated, to say "You've just said/done something interesting; that's how engineers think; it can be a lot of fun, the money is okay; the work will be testing but you'd ace it. . . What? you want to read Geography at Durham? You can do better than that". Film time:
- Gender balance propaganda from ICE [6 mins]
- Rather peculiar ICE film showing that engineers can sing and dance [7 mins]
Sunday, 7 January 2018
Sunday Mixie 070118
Heck n jiminy it's 2018 already. I'm back at work tomorrow, so I'll be busy enough for the next 15 weeks. We have some interesting stuff lined up for R&R today:
- Manly stuff: filleting salmon for drying as winter-trail dog-food.
- We've met Stan Zuray before with his fish-wheel for hoiking salmon out of the Yukon River . . . and yesterday at length.
- Explanation of licencing, quotas, economics
- To Russia fishing through holes in the ice.
- Whoa. It seems from surveys at Scientific American that tree-hugging is seen as a 'women's thing' and blokes feel that using a canvas bag at the supermarket [cue Tim Minchin] labels them as a Total Girl. What are these dudes even shopping for; don't they have a mother to do that for them? Bring on the bag-shaming, I say.
- Nerd-papa. Steve Mould [prev] graphs his wife's contractions on Excel
- Why [private] medicine is mad expensive in the US (same arguments prolly apply in Ireland)
- Living in a converted grain silo in Berlin - footprint = 2x2m but high ceilings
- Remember the floods in Houston last Summer? Some citizens just got on with being right neighbourly.
- Sam Houston State U is all for free-speech until someone cusses out the president. No not That President nor indeed his Dad, the last one. Not current = 2012
- Nearer home Fundamentalist Christians being silenced in UCG . There is no point in having free speech if you close down everything you feel uncomfortable about.
- The Oxford Union invites everyone and his dog to talk to them and answer questions. Here's Anthony Scaramucci who was briefly the Communications Director for the Trump administration. In Oxford, he is whip-sharp, articulate and confusing - because he is a Money-wins-all Republican <boooo> who also supports marriage equality <raaaay>. See if you are good enough on free-speech to watch to the end. If you hunt through youtube, you can find the same forum just lovin' Bernie Sanders.
- Move over C3PO; Doordash Robot local delivery
And the planes!
Eeee, we do love a bit of death in our news. We have a certain cause to feel collectively smug for 2017 to clock the lowest number of Irish road-deaths since records began. But the well known statistical concept of regression to the mean dictates that the road-death toll for 2018 is likely to be higher . . . but not 3x higher! If you listen to the news at all, you will have heard that the number of commercial airplane fatalities worldwide in 2018 was zero. If only because of the derision attached to President Trump's claim of responsibility for the success, albeit on twitter which trivialises and simplifies discourse: 'Unlike Obama, Trump won't let any planes crash' which he later clarified / qualified with “I have been very strict on Commercial Aviation,”
You may have heard that news, but it's just not true! as a thoughtful, data-driven piece in Forbes clarifies. For starters my statement above misses out a key adjective: jet and excludes jet freighters. If. If you include (smaller) turbo-prop data and the ACT Airlines 747 freighter that came down in a village in Kyrgyzstan in January, the the death toll rises to 64. Even so, that's better than the score for previous years 2014= 864; 2015 = 471; 2016 = 271 which is looking shockin' close to a straight line pointing at 2017 = 0.
The implication, as for the Irish road-deaths data yesterday is that death-count is a good surrogate for 'the state of the nation' or here the state of aviation. In fact there were several near-misses, crap landings and in-air disasters which could have had a "no survivors among passengers or crew" outcome but for good luck, good air-traffic control, and good pilots. For luck compare Air France AF66, CDG to LAX which suffered an "uncontained engine failure" while flying over the edge of Greenland and had to divert to Goose Bay in Canada. Uncontained engine failure is where the whizzy bits inside the cowl come through the casing at speed. A similar event occurred in 1989 to UA 232 when the flying debris severed the hydraulic control-lines. The shards from the AF66 engine didn't hit the fuselage, so the damage was ring-fenced. Incidentally the nacelles [engine casings] of jet-planes are designed to shear off from the wing under certain adverse conditions: discarding the damaged parts.
If you believe the trendline in my graph, or indeed Mr Trump, you'll have to conclude that 2018 will bring negative deaths in commercial jet-liners. I guess that means homeward-bound coffins opening up in the baggage hold and the incumbents demanding dry roasted peanuts and a complimentary drink.
The implication, as for the Irish road-deaths data yesterday is that death-count is a good surrogate for 'the state of the nation' or here the state of aviation. In fact there were several near-misses, crap landings and in-air disasters which could have had a "no survivors among passengers or crew" outcome but for good luck, good air-traffic control, and good pilots. For luck compare Air France AF66, CDG to LAX which suffered an "uncontained engine failure" while flying over the edge of Greenland and had to divert to Goose Bay in Canada. Uncontained engine failure is where the whizzy bits inside the cowl come through the casing at speed. A similar event occurred in 1989 to UA 232 when the flying debris severed the hydraulic control-lines. The shards from the AF66 engine didn't hit the fuselage, so the damage was ring-fenced. Incidentally the nacelles [engine casings] of jet-planes are designed to shear off from the wing under certain adverse conditions: discarding the damaged parts.
If you believe the trendline in my graph, or indeed Mr Trump, you'll have to conclude that 2018 will bring negative deaths in commercial jet-liners. I guess that means homeward-bound coffins opening up in the baggage hold and the incumbents demanding dry roasted peanuts and a complimentary drink.
Saturday, 6 January 2018
Alone not lonely
In 1989, I walked up the Atlatic Coast of Portugal from Sagres to Caminha just across the river from Galicia. It look me about 6 weeks and for half of the walking days, I spoke to no-one. One day, indeed, I saw more dolphins, pacing Northwards parallel to the coast, than people. I didn't find being clear of chatter the least bit of a bother, but I don't know if I'd be up for some of these stories:
- If you see nothing else this weekend and have 100 minutes to spare watch Stan Zuray remembering setting up in Alaska, getting burned out, eating fish, eating dog-food, eating dog, eating raven, surviving. 40 years later, he's still there. No car-chases, no snogging, crap camera-work, but rivetting.
- The challenge of true solitude. Being the long Winter caretaker and sole inhabitant of Star Island, NH: 43 acres and a massive hotel /retreat centre.
- The Lookout. Being a fire watcher in Flathead National Forest, MT
- Lighthouse keeper.
- Tristan da Cunha is looking for an agronomist.
- billy barr records the snow in Gothic, CO and has been doing it alone for 40 winters. Worrying climate change data.
- The Lost Gecko - C-saw. The desperate loneliness of depression.
- Same people: Talvisota in memory of the 400,000 Finns displaced of Soviet invasion of The Winter War of 1939-1940
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