Bloody Sugar

No, this is not another rant about the Food Police. Well not directly anyway. It is rather another part in my series of Graphics for HumPhys [prev Calcium balance; blood pressure; mitochondria; temperature]. You may think you can drift off, because this is going to be boring, over-my-head, academic and irrelevant. It may have the other three attributes but it is not irrelevant because, like me, you have a body. Having a, now beginning to fall apart, body is what has sustained my interest in teaching Human Physiology these last 6 years. If you don't make some effort to understanding the vital functions you'll be wrong footed in managing your health. If you're approaching, or over, 50 you'll no longer be able to take continued health for granted.

There is a difference between knowing a thing and knowing the name of a thing; as Dick Feynman's Dad famously instilled into his young son. But in the artificial learning system which is school and college, you have to be up for the Naming of Parts [evocative, deliberately retro, 1971 film of same by Robert Bloomberg] so that the Learning Outcomes [boo hiss] can be assessed. I've told my students that naming of parts in the micro-management of the concentration of glucose will likely come up on exams and so they might concentrate some attention on their notes on the subject. Their notes are few and far between, because my students have mostly not been trained to write things down as an aid to memory. Some of them will concentrate some attention on my [powerpoint] notes on the subject and for some of them staring at the PPTs the night before the exam will work. But there are pages of notes and if they just internalise, as an Executive Summary, the picture at the top of the post.

What does it mean? That two households hormones both alike in dignity, in fair Verona Pancrea, where we lay our scene, act out a delicate pas de deux of homeostatic regulation. Insulin and Glucagon are both made in the pancreas, an organ the size and shape of a flubby parsnip that sits just under your stomach and above the bowel. The pancreas has two main functions a) producing and leaking digestive enzymes into the top of the small intestine b) making a passel o' hormones and leaking them directly into invasive capillaries and thence into the circulatory system. Insulin is made in little clusters of beta beetroot cells while glucagon is manufactured in alpha [male] cells. In the lecture, I may make a quip about me being the alpha male because I am a silverback and almost the only bloke in the room [the sex-ratio in Pharmacy Technicians is 95% female].

In a well regulated bod, insulin and glucagon circulates at just the right complementary concentration, so that every cell [100 trillion of them all demanding service] gets enough insulin to dock with its insulin receptors and allow the uptake of glucose. Without glucose inside the cell, there would be no metabolic activity, without insulin the glucose just stays in the blood where it encourages the growth of pathogenic bacteria, septicaemia, gangrene and an early death. Therefore, it's insulIN to the cell with the glucose. Insulin is a small protein with a half-life of about 4 minutes! The beta cells crank up production of insulin after you eat something because the cells detect the upspike in circulating glucose. Four minutes later half the insulin has gone and within an hour it is all degraded and the cells have scarfed up all the available glucose.

What then? what if you have to run for a bus or sit an exam more than an hour after you ate your porridge? Well we have a word for that and its glucagon. Certain cells, especially in the liver and in muscles, are rather greedy for glucose when it is available. They clag a lot of glucose molecules together in a complex poly-saccharide called glycogen. Glycogen is, like starch its plant equivalent, relatively inert - it just sits there waiting for the call. Demand for glucose is that call: when blood glucose sinks below a threshold, the alpha cells of the pancreas detect the fall and release glucagon. Glucagon triggers the liver cells to give up the ould glycogen and break it down into usable glucose. Therefore glucose is glucaGONE from the cell.  In the picture I show a yellowed crumbly liver on its last legs from cirrhosis because that is going to be more memorable. In your Memory Palace, it's more effective to employ images which are ludicrous, naughty, revolting or unsettling because they are more sticky <eeuuuuuuw>.

Bomb calorimeter

Last week, the wireless was discussing a dopey "sounds good but probably silly" proposal to follow Taco Bell [R] and compel restaurants to add a calorific content to each item on the menu beside the price.
Why does it sound good? 
Because you don't have to listen to Donal "Bariatric Band" O'Shea the HSE spokes-person on obesity to appreciate that people eat too much, maybe especially in restaurants when they don't have to wash the pans and dishes afterwards. When I'm Home Alone, which often nowadays, I often eat direct from the saucepan like a hobo because a) I have low self-esteem b) no standards and c) I ask why dirty a plate? when you can eat straight from the saucepan with a wooden spoon. I don't actually eat off the floor, though. We haven't had those sort of antics since Dau.II stopped behaving like a dog in her campaign to secure a puppy. Her 5 year old weasling reasoning was that, someone in the family had to eat from a bowl on the floor and without a dog, that task would fall to her. She was indeed correct because Rashers-the-dog appeared within a very few weeks.

Why are calorie menus silly?
Because it's difficult for a real restaurant to carry out the task with any sort of accuracy and even a half-arsed job is a huge administrative burden.  It's different for McD's and BoogerK and KFC: they serve a billion meals a day all to rigorous portion control standards. And I notice from googling "calories + menu + images" that many such give a range of calories rather than getting stupidly specific.  A Talking Chef on the wireless was worried that a Calorie Law would cramp his style: If they had a lot of cream on the cusp of 'off' they might lurry more into the potatoes dauphinois which would Up the fat&energy concentration and have them caught with their calorie-pants down in a razzia by the Food Police.

That set me to thinking how the Lebensmittelpolizei might actually carry out an audit . . . and 'bomb calorimeter' floated up from the abyss of memory. The cross-sectional diagram [R] looks complicated but the principle is simple. Add a measured quantity of the potatoes dauphinoise (or a portion of Nigella Lawson if you prefer) to the crucible in a sealed container containing enough oxygen to fully combust the spuds. Ignite! The steel container is called a 'bomb' maybe ironically because it is designed not to explode when the potatoes start to burn up. All the energy given off when the oxygen combines with the carbohydrate is captured as heat . . . which raises the temperature of the water surrounding the bomb. Precise measurement of that increase in temp [note the magnifying eye-piece] will allow you to calculate the energy in, say, 5 g of creamed spuds. That is multiplied up by the portion size to get a calorie count for that item on the menu. Repeat for the poisson du jour en croûte de chorizo, the haricot rouge et petits légumes en ragoût, and the Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte.

You could do this, but the chef would be really reluctant to change the menu, or start adding more butter; and the restaurant would become known as the most boring place in town.  I guess it would be too much to ask the Plain People of Ireland to look up what is the calorific value of meat, potatoes and cabbage and then use that as a guide to choosing their meal. People like me and Pat the Salt, who were trained from an early age to polish our plates and leave nothing for the chickens, could benefit from  smaller portions. No government is about to intrude in the market to the extent on enforcing portion control; but they are quite happy to create a further layer of bureaucratic regulation. Maybe we should give up the ould pharmaceuticals and go back to training food technologists at The Institute: there will be jobs-for-the-boys-and-girls.

You can do this at home, kids . . . or certainly in a school science laboratory following a Nuffield Science protocol.

Tree down!

It's sad when an old friend is suddenly brought low and you know s/he will be tidied away and replaced by a younger model.

On Saturday 2nd June, the picture above was going the rounds on Twitter, Newstalk and other media outlets because an iconic maple Acer macrophylum in the Front Square of Trinity College Dublin had coming crashing to the earth at 0400hrs. When I caught up with the news at tea-time, I cried out "My tree is dead" and The Beloved came in to commiserate. We went on a hunt for the picture that evidenced the connexion between me and the mighty tree.

Back in 1973, like The Ginger Man 25 years earlier, I came from foreign parts to be a student in Trinity College. I left my natal home and country with what I considered essential gear for studenting. This included:

• a moustache, which would have had the gays all over me if I'd been enrolled in UCSF rather than TCD.
• a ratty musk-rat Ondatra zibethicus fur coat
• a box of books, some banned in Ireland
• long ratty rarely washed hair (eeeeeuw it was the 70s)
• a slide rule
• a pair of sea-boots (yachtie's wellingtons really)
• a pair of loons [as R, £1,80?? my first wage packet in 1970 was £6.50]

I met The Beloved about three weeks later and the following Spring, she lent me a white galabeya [as L: not me!] which I think she looted from her father Pat the Salt, an old Africa Hand. Come Rag Week or ?Trinity Week? in 1974, I decided that wearing the galabeya and a white cotton headband would be the height of fashion for a young buckeroo about College; check out the love-beads as well. And it was so. To gild the Wildean lily, I climbed into the maple tree and struck a leafy pose about 3 m off the ground. A photographer from the Irish Times snapped this epitome of youthful dinkitude and my photo appeared in the paper the following day. All I have is a crap xerox of a xerox of the original pixellated picture. I don't know what I was thinking at the time  climbing a tree in a long skirt but it probably wasn't notably profound. It was of course against all ideas of Health & Safety in the Workplace even back in those free-wheeling times.

Ghost Net

I just bought myself another set of garden secateurs €3 from ALDIDL. I think we have about a dozen knocking about the farrrrm in various states of usefulness. They take a hammering, not from pruning the roses but from filleting the tangles of ropes & buoys & nets & floats & hooks & pots which I find along the Waterford Coast. I don't need secateurs for boots, footballs, baby Crocs or driftwood: just a bag to carry them to the car-park., Indeed, The Beloved won't let me touch her secateurs because the fulcrum gets torqued out of true and they by-pass the rose-stems. Imagine having a job [above] detangling oceanic detritus and making an inventory of ghost nets in the Pacific Ocean. Ghost net is the technical term for hanks of orphan fishing gear lost at sea.

Boyan Slat is talking hot and hard about ghost nets, because microplastic [L in a sorting swirl in the Ocean Clean-up lab] is sooo yesterday. But more importantly, it's in recognition that it's easier to find and dispose of BIG chunks than the confetti that's left after the sun does it's photo-degradative work. "The French government offered a reward for ghost nets handed in to local coastguards along sections of the Normandy coast between 1980 and 1981. The project was abandoned when people vandalized nets to claim rewards, without retrieving anything at all from the shoreline or ocean [source]". Bounty incentives don't work for foxes or Tasmanian devils but have some success with lionfish. Boyan's key contribution is not to be disheartened by the vastness of the ocean and the low density of the the problem plastic. If you start somewhere with the biggest sweeper you can afford you're doing better than sitting on your sofa getting depressed about it and eating more crisps . . . out of  plastic. He has been pushing his boom broom [prev] solution but note that other people have different toolkits including microbial degradation of PET. His team has scaled to a 600m long sweep-net called Boomy McBoomface [woot! prev] made from HDPE = polythene. Here is that mother-if-all-booms being assembled in California.

They were concerned that their sampling methods were biasing the data to small bits. If you use only a children's dip-net, you'll never catch a salmon worth eating. So he went round the marinas or Hawaii and California and recruited 30 yachties to participate in a coordinated sweep across the North Pacific Gyre in the hope of seeing some trees in the woods. There are lots of Silicon Valley millionaires who have retired on their money and can do what they want with their time and their yacht.That was partly successful and they fished out several clots of ghost-net. But Boyish and enthusiastic Boyan is a classic example of TED-fodder and a money magnet. So they next leased a Lockheed C130 Hercules transport plane loaded it with short-wave IR sensors and LIDAR [prev on land from the air] and cameras and did a two sweep aerial reconnaissance of the Gyre. Integrating the two sorts of data, they now estimate that 50% of the 80,000 tonne mass of plastic [and below]could be ghost-nets . . . and so 'easily' recoverable. Well, easier than sieving out 2 trillion barely visible microplastic shards, while leaving the same-sized living plankton in place.

The Ocean Cleanup has a beautifully produced, informative and data-rich site.
The bold Boyan Slat is not the only one who is interested in sampling the oceans to assess the damage: data must precede solution! U Exeter have crowd-funded [they've exceeded their £20K target] an expedition to the Barents Sea in a romantic sailing ship. Barents Sea (not to be confused with Bering Sea on the other side of the Arctic) is the wet stuff between Svalbard [NO] and Novaya Zemlya Но́вая Земля́ [RU] not to be confused with Nova Zembla an island in the Canadian Arctic. Sails Against Plastic is not to be confused with Plastic Change a Danish sailing expedition to the Pacific. Confused? Me too!

I really hope that these parallel projects are talking to each other. I don't think I want them to merge to pool their resources yet. There is, of course, some duplication of effort but the positive aspect is that you have more creative heads working independently and banging those ideas up against each other to see which is best. Best for the Arctic may not be best for the Pacific, for starters.

Sunday Sort 03 Jun18

Dau.I walking into the Sunset having righted (a small corner of) the World.

• Clare Daly TD giving credit and taking none ". . . it's a nonsense, lads . . ." for the Referendum
• The 2018 Gloucester Cheese Rolling at Cooper's Hill as ballet. [prev 2015]
• Nice BBC photo-essay with maps of the Faroe Islands [prev]
• Same locale: Islands in the Sky. 
• New Film: The Worlds of Ursula le Guin to be launched next weekend: trailer.
• Feeding the 10,000 at a Sikh temple in Delhi
• The last programming language I a) learned and b) used was Perl (2001-2007). All my friends dumped that as soooo yesterday and embraced Python. I'm glad I didn't learn Python because now Ruby is the language of now.
• Done with the Golden Ratio [prev]? Soooo yesterday. Now it's the Silver Ratio.
• I was on about changing your mind which is A Good Thing. Here's CGP Grey's riff on changing opinion.
• And Thursday's word-a-day Enantiodromia: The tendency of things, beliefs, etc., to change into their opposites . . . see poster at top of post!
• The most peculiar entertainment you'll see this weekend - solid potato salad.
• An explanation of the Celtic Tiger - incl. some errors of fact.
• Push-back on Sanofi being smug about Ambien and its peculiar adverse effects; while equally not condoning Roseanne Barr's racist trash talk.

It pays to increase your word-power

After Metanoia, more obscure words. There used to be a column in Reader's Digest called It pays to increase your word-power. Maybe there still is, but it's 40+ years since I was desperate enough to open a Reader's Digest. A few days ago I was desperate enough to open my copy of Dictionary of Foreign Terms by Mario Pei and Salvatore Ramondino . . . delicately because it was published in the USA on acid-rich paper so the pages are yellowed and brittle. They were yellowed and brittle when I bought it for 25c in a yardsale in suburban Boston in the early 1980s.
Mario Pei (1901-1978) emigrated from his native Italy to the USA aged 8 and developed into a remarkable polyglot; fluent in Italian, English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian with functionality in 30 other tongues. He was positive about Esperanto [which prev]. If you see one of his many his books going cheap, pick it up: they are readable and accessible. If you see one going cheep-cheep ignore it: it's for the birds.

Because I can be a bit OCD, I'll give you a taster: first word on  every 10th page between 28 and 358:
aire libre [Sp] open air
Arbeiter [Ger] worker, workers
baklava [Turk] a rich many layered pastry made with butter, nuts and honey
blad [Swed, Norw, Dan, Du] leaf, sheet, folio, newspaper
cabaletta [It] a catchy refrain at the end of an aria or duet
catalogue raisonné [Fr] annotated catalogue footnoting and explaining works of art
chukker [Anglo-Ind from Hindi chakkar, wheel] a track for exercising horses; a time period in polo game
cornu copiae [Lat] horn of plenty
Dasein [Ger] existence, presence
Dolce [It] sweet, sweetly  - far niente sweet idleness, it's nice to do nothing - stil nuovo Italian literary14th Century style based on courtly love. - vita the sweet life, the beautiful life, hedonistic style of living
en gros [Fr] in all, in total, wholesale
fabada [Sp] bean stew - asturiana ; in the Asturian style with bacon, ham and/or sausage added
fluvius [Lat] river, flood; of or pertaining to a river
get [Yid from Aramaic] divorce
Hadji [Ar] a muslim who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca; a mark of respect
Ich [Ger] I
ita est [Lat] it is so [i.e.]
katharsis [Gk] purging, purification esp. of the emotions or conscience
landzman [Yid] a countryman, compatriot
lo dicho [Sp] what is said
maraca [Port from Tupi] a gourd loosely filled with seeds, used as a musical instrument
ming [Chin] type of art done during the Ming dynasty in China (1369-1644), esp. in porcelain and painting
Nazi [Ger abbr Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei] a member of the National Socialist Workers' Party; the Nazi party
omnium gatherum [pseudo-Latin from omnium of all + Eng gather+um Lat suffix] miscellaneous collection, hodgepodge.
passe-partout [Fr] (lit. pass everywhere) master key; pass key; ornamental mat for a picture
Pochismo [MexSp from pocho discoloured] name of a Spanish-English pidgin along the Mexican-US border
quand même [Fr] nevertheless; just the same; all the same
rez-de-chaussée [Fr] ground floor
sbirro [It var. of birro from LL birrus red (from the colour of some uniforms)] policeman; cop
si [Fr. from Lat sic thus, so] if, whether, so, so much, yes (in answering a negative question); [Sp] if whether.
sucrier [Fr] sugar-bowl
toile [Fr, linen, canvas from Lat tela web] sailcloth, canvas, backing material
Ursprung [Ger] source; origin
vouloir, c'est pouvoir [Fr] where there's a will, there's a way
I'll be using some of these this Summer: "Oh, I say Pat, pass the sucrier, old chap"

Pay attention; write it down

Of all the fun I have teaching at The Institute, a special place is kept for my Human Physiology course for 1st Year Pharmacy Technicians. It started at 10 'credits' and 75 contact hour but two years ago this was trimmed to 5 creds and 60 contact hours. The earlier version 'fat' version was more leisurely had more time for reflective learning. The 60 hour version covers the same material in 20% less time, so can be a bit of a gallop. But I'm not about to trim my slightly off-topic, intended to be inspirational, introduction called Alert in the Pharmacy. Here I tell war stories about {Thalidomide, McBride, Lenz, Kelsey} and also about {smallpox, Jesty, Jenner, Chetnole and Blossom the Cow} and wrap it up by exhorting them to pay attention at the counter because they might be the first to see the signs of a community health problem. If I'm on a high, I'll probably throw in a mention of  John Sassall the protagonist of  A Fortunate Man, John Berger's compelling investigation of a rural GP's life.

I am annoyed at a failure of my education that I only last week came across another famous-in-his-day GP who paid attention. Will Pickles was a doctor in Aysgarth from 1912 to 1965. Where? Aysgarth! An obviously Norse name, [meaning any of: the garden of the gods, water of rocks or the enclosure of oaks] it is a village about midway up the valley of Wensleydale in Yorkshire. The mappe with antient fonts delimits the extent of Dr Pickles' practice:

Pickles travelled all over the area for more than 50 years until the amputation of his right leg put a stop to his gallop. At one time standing on a hill overlooking the valley, he realised that he knew the names and patrimony of all the people in every home that he could see. He also knew or could deduce a lot about who among his patients were grinding up against each other in the social mill because they were presenting the with same diseases. "Thus to my knowledge, thirteen instances of this disease resulted from the determination of one girl, jaundice or no jaundice, not to be deprived of what she considered to be her legitimate amusement" [source]. Even with his capacious memory this was only really possible because, with the help of his diligent wife, he captured the names, dates and locations of everyone who fell sick.

Even this snapshot of the data tells you a lot. In 1932, people lived local and only shared sputum with the closest neighbours. How else could the January February measles epidemic have been confined to West Witton and not spread to West Burton and Aysgarth a mere 5km down the A648?  The dysentry, however, appears to have started at Askrigg and then moved East to Aysgarth. If you pay attention you can calculated the incubation period for each disease. The spikes of new cases of measles in West Witton occur every 10 days while the blips of influenza in West Burton are separated by about 2 days. With similar data analysis, Pickles was able to reveal the incubation period for catarrhal jaundice [aka infectious hepatitis] was 25-35 days; nobody knew that before.

The data from measles in W.Witton is particularly instructive w.r.t. herd immunity. You get one case at the beginning of January 1932; 6 more cases 10 days later; 14 cases 10 days after that; and 7 cases 10 days afterwards. At that point everyone in the village who is infectable has been infected and the measles virus has no place to hide / reproduce. End of measles epidemic. With vaccination, you'd drastically reduce the number of susceptible people and the epidemic would peter out earlier . . . before Betsy Snitterthwaite comes visiting from Carperby and carries the virus to fresh fields up the valley.