Dr Lithium

Just after I started working at The Institute, I was driving [again] into work and I had one of the three big ideas I've conjured up from a lifetime in science.  I had spent the previous 10 years analysing genomes: studying the pattern and process of evolution and discovering novel genes which had bearing on the immune systems of various vertebrates. Accordingly my HoD required me to teach human physiology, remedial maths, 1st year chemistry, 2nd year physics, and 3rd year molecular biology and 3rd year environmental chemistry; in none of which had I any expertise. Scouting around for practicals to go with a series of lectures about the chemistry of water, my >!aha!< was to have the students analyse the concentration of lithium [and sodium and potassium while they were at it] in the river [see below] that runs along the edge of our mountain farm. I was thinking along these lines because of an essay Lithium Dreams I read about the importance of lithium for batteries in a world without fossil fuels.
After those practicals, one of the students - whom we'll call Lar, because that's his name - told me that I would be supervising his final year research project; in which he would develop the protocol and measure lithium [and sodium and potassium while he was at it] across a wider swathe of the county. And it was so. I got some more samples, he got some more samples and he ran them all through the FES Flame Emission Spectrophotometer. He ran the results through some statistical analyses and wrote up the results in a neat and thoughtful report. Job done. I met his parents, his partner and his two kids at the next Conferring ceremony and I thought I had a Wrap. Wrong.

Lar informed me that I would next be applying to The Institute's postgraduate research fund for two years of money so that we he could extend the study to cover the whole county and test a hypothesis: did the ground-water and surface water track the underlying rock w.r.t. lithium concentration. The research fund had a peculiar bee in its bonnet about refusing to fund 'field-work': which was clearly essential to the success of this project. Accordingly, I traded my time teaching a module on a Master's programme in Dublin: I knew what I was talking about in that field. Rather than taking payment in cash, I had them transfer the value to an account at The Institute which could be used for field work. That lubricated the process nicely: 4 days teaching neatly covering four sampling forays in 2015.

After one year on The Institute's nickel, we he applied for external funding a) because the stipend was much more generous b) field work was positively encouraged. He didn't get that grant largely because ". . . the supervisor lacks any track-record or credibility in the field of water chemistry . . .". True dat! Around that time a new lecturer started at The Institute who was a genuine water chemist.  I was delighted: I could shuffle off the responsibility for teaching water chemistry and do more hours supervising molecular evolution research projects. We he and Lar applied the following year to the same external funding source. Not only was the application successful but it was designated for that year's EPA special post-graduate award!

After that year on the EPA gravy train, he had a final year eking things along back on Institute money because he'd embraced another departure from the original idea for his thesis.

The thing about Lar was/is that he does not shirk work. Having got several hundred vials of water from across the county in 2015, it seemed a waste to 'only' measure lithium [and sodium and potassium while he was at it] with the FES; so he measured cadmium, iron, lead, copper, zinc, and arsenic as well using a different instrument and a different protocol. He also measured all those chemicals in ivy Hedera hibernica and ash Fraxinus excelsior to see if they preferentially absorbed any of the metallic elements. That set him after a hare of hyper-accumulating plants and phytomining which involved a huge greenhouse trial starting with seeds from 30 different plant species. Answer: cabbage really sucks up lithium. Finally this Summer, his real supervisor and I were able to slow his one-man laboratory analysis factory down sufficiently and get it all written up in a thesis. That was easier than for some students, because he'd already written and submitted four papers for publication, two of which had been accepted. In this sense he is a far better scientist than me because he has Finish: he's not daunted by the [often outrageous] demands thrown out by the referee at a journal. He just knuckles down and does a re-write: "criticism is good, it makes the the report better". He also has a great graphic sense: the picture [L] shows him winning another prize for one of his many colorful and informative conference posters.

Yesterday all that hard work, all those samples, all the nitric acid, all those runs through the FES, all those maps and graphs and statistics finally paid off. Lar successfully defended his PhD thesis and can call himself Doctor Lithium because right now, for a brief time, he knows more about the white gold than anybody on the island of Ireland. Hats off.

crogging

Years ago when The Blob was still in diapers, I wrote about a friend who indignantly refused to act as a community trash-collector on a beach North of Boston. Insofar as we choose to take some exercise away from home, we generally choose not to plod across a land-fill; or something that looks like one. If a beach is really heaving with plastic we're likely to be strolling on our own: normal people are on a beach where the trash isn't disgustingly obvious. In 2013, I was of the opinion that no one person could make inroads into the 38 billion plastic bottles which are discarded every year in the USA alone.

But my math was wrong because that's only a couple of bottles every week [for each and every man woman trans and child]. Steven Moody is an Irish runner who set himself the goal of picking up a few items of street trash every time he went out jogging. Not enough to require a bin bag - if he saw a bottle in the gutter he'd pause long enough to pick it up and carry it to the next trash bin he passed. He considered that he could, in this way, make a visible difference along his regular route and make himself happier. I think he also subscribed to the broken window theory: that a clean street was harder to first-trash than one which was already awash. He was also delighted to have had an original idea. Turned out that plogging [jogging with plastic] had been a thing [plocka upp = pick up] for several years in Sweden; so his idea was a First For Ireland <huzzah!>. I heard Steven on the wireless a while back pushing a plogathon on Sandymount strand last Wednesday 22 Aug 2018. Many of the beaches round Ireland have now been owned by Tidy-Towns type people who go out regularly with a bin bag. The great thing about plastrash is that it packs light: you can carry a huge volume away with you if you bring a bag.

Okay, that's plogging! What the heck and tarnation is crogging as in the post-title. That's where you train crows to pick crap up in exchange for peanuts or Purina Cat Chow pellets. via Neatorama. Last year they trained crows to clear cigarette-butts. Now they are suggesting corvids as electrical component sorters, search and rescue, car-key finders. Instructions for making the exchange box for crows.

Finding things? We met up with Young Bolivar [multiprev] when we were down in Cork last month and he has just lashed out to buy himself a drone. He showed us some distant selfies taken with his new toy. Just the thing for finding our sheep which have gone awol on the mountainside. Would such drone-hunting be drogging? Ooops no, drogging is something else entirely.

UninTented consequences

There is a famous study of social engineering which went all pear-shaped. Once upon a time in Israel there was a creche. Professional parents would deliver their children in the morning and go to a high powered job elsewhere. The kids would be fed, cleaned and edutained by a team of young people working on the minimum wage. At the end of a long and tiring working day, The Help just wanted to go home but some of the busy-busy parents would be late picking up their offspring. The creche implemented a new policy whereby parents would be charged extra if they failed to collect on time. In response, the frequency with which parents were late went Up - indeed it effectively doubled under the new price structure. Why? Because the now parents felt that they were entitled to be late because they had paid for the privilege. Under the no-pay model, the parents felt a sliver of guilt about wasting the time of the creche-workers and so tried harder to get there before the doors closed. It is the most frequently cited example of the Law of Unintended Consequences.
Electric Picnic #15 [above: looking like the technicolor part of The Wizard of Oz] just wrapped up in Stradbally Co Laois. Ireland's Answer to Glastonbury has been running since 2004. Because Stradbally is located in the middle of nowhere, most of the punters rock up and camp out. Tickets cost an eye-watering €200, so it's not really for people suffering from food-poverty. Then again, I guess if you saved €5 a week for a year by refusing booze, you'd have the ticket price. With that much as the ante-up, the hardy festival-goers often invest almost as much in kit: tent, sleeping bag, inflatable mattress for softies, slab of tinnies on a trolley, gaudy wellington boots, condoms, fly-swatter, sun-screen, poncho. At the end of 3 days on the batter, the dear departing only want to get home and have a hot bath and some comfort food. Accordingly it has been the habit of many punters to abandon the tent, the sleeping bag, the wellie that served as a bed-pan, the now empty trolley . . . and head home to nurse the head.

Last year everyone had fun. This year ditto. But afterwards, the organisers, with the help of troops of boy-scouts, carted away an estimated 500 tonnes of garbage from the festival site - that's an average of 10kg! for every person who bought a ticket. Bulldozers were brought in after the boy-scouts ran out of steam.  Like at the Israeli creche, IF you say that abandoned tents and sleeping bags will be recycled for the homeless THEN you allow people to justify that fact that they cannot be arsed to clean up after themselves. 

But 'tric picnic was not all a complete bust. At 1600hrs on Saturday 1st September, the amazingly talented Waiting For Smith, whom I've tribbed before, was up and at 'em. Resistance is useless, you'll have to hear him again now:

• Don't let me down.
• Roma.
• Monkeys in my head.

Office Space

Over the Summer, The Institute has been dolling up the central block where everyone hangs out to eat, drink and role-play. It smells of 'new' but looks like a 1960s architect's vision of the rec-room in a space station. In the process my office, which look out over the atrium / concourse, has acquired new windows which, according to a colleague are the same size as those on the gorilla enclosure in Dublin Zoo. Ripping out the old windows was a month+ of dust and disruption but it's over now: the old privacy blinds are gone which lets in more light, but the lower half of the windows have been frosted so we can't see out at all at all. I am confident that we'll still know it is Friday when the smell of fish comes roiling in from the canteen outside the windows.

But the biggest change is that the HoD has announced that we have to make room for a new colleague who has secured a one-day-a-week maternity cover contract. I don't mind much, unless he's going to whistle Campdown Races through his teeth when stressed. We were given the chance [paper-dumpster provided] to de-clutter before the summer break rather than pack stuff in boxes 'for storage' which we are really never going to use again. We've also been advised, because of GDPR [prev],  not to store out-dated personal-sensitive information, like marks, unless there is a compelling reason to do so.  That clear-out meant that Bob-of-the-generous-hand could offer the newbie two drawers from "my" filing cabinet.

For the last several years, I've been posing a real-math question in my remedial math classes: If my office measures 7.3m x 2.2m [which it does] andif I share it with two others, andif the EU requires each workstation to have 4 sq.m. of space, are we EU-overcrowded? I think one of The Institute's suits must have made the same calculation because 7.3 x 2.2 is 16.06 sq.m. therefore there is room for 4 salarymen, two of which are s-women. We're so close to the limit, that I'm going to bet we are now the crowdedest drones in Europe. I went to the office next door where K and D hang out between lectures and it looked like they had a lot more room. K defended his territory robustly saying it wasn't his fault if we held on to piles of ould shite which filled all available corners in our offiice. And the tape-measure, which I brought into work, agreed. The office next door is only 5.4m long and 2.2m wide: that's 11.9 sq.m. so the lads there cannot take in another body and still be EU-compliant. Dang!

This is the sort of problem that electoral boundary commissioners have to contend with. How do you allocate a finite number of representatives fairly across the country without gerrymandering. With the extra body office allocation problem fairly dealt with, our neighbours finish up with 50% [11.9 / 2 = 6 sq.m.] more stretch space than us; which I think is the most extreme discrepancy possible.

Actually, I don't know where I got that 4 sq.m. rule from. I can't easily track it down today but I did find a relevant paragraph from the Irish HSA Health and Safety Authority. p24 says " In offices, 4.65 square metres should be the minimum amount of floor space allowed for every person employed in any room, including the area occupied by the office desk and chair but excluding filing cabinets and other office furniture." Next week I'll bring in my shop-steward and my personal trainer to restore the status quo ante.

Office Space clips - a typical day with The Bobs - Whaaat's happenin' - End of copier

Gold in them thar lobsters

Back in November 2015, we were getting sentimental about Isle-au-Haut off the coast of Maine. I wrote that piece partly because I love islands but partly because I like the down-east folk songs of Gordon Bok. Despite its French name, Isle-au-Haut is indisputably part of the USA. Noting that 5% of the people in Maine still speak French at home, a few French names are to be expected.

130km NE Isle-au-Haut is another speck of land that humps out of the inclement fog-bound sea at the mouth of the Bay of Fundy: Machias Seal Island. At 8 hectares MSI is half a field bigger than our farmlet in the middle of nowhere in SE Ireland so it's not worth going to war over. But you can't underestimate the capacity of human beings for destructive greed and myopic folly. Because of this MSI and a broad stretch of the surrounding ocean is in dispute between Canada and the USA and has been for about 200 years. The last time those two countries almost went to war was over a potato-eating hog in the San Juan Islands [whc prev]. Nobody is growing potatoes on MSI and it would be a disaster to let loose a pig there because it is a famous and diverse sea-bird sanctuary. The most likely casus belli here is not on the island but lummocking about the sea-bed of the surrounding sea - LOBSTERS. Because territorial waters surround political land-masses, sovereignty of the island invests control of the lobsters.
 The Canadian case is inherited from the British who, in 1621, granted Sir William Alexander all islands within 6 leagues of the coast of "Nova Scotia" to be part of his patrimony. New Brunswick was later hived off from Nova Scotia to become its own province. They can also claim squatters' rights because in 1832 they built a  lighthouse and cluster of service buildings that show up as red and white dots on the satellite view [L]. The island is right in the middle of the seaway to St. John NB and the other ports and harbours up the Bay of Fundy, so a lighthouse had clear utility. The lighthouse has been rebuilt and refurbished since 1832 but more or less continuously occupied by Canucks ever since: de facto they own it.

The American case stems from Article 2 of the Treaty of Paris which wrapped up the war of 1812 between UK and USA. That says that any island less that 20 leagues off-shore and South of the St. Croix river is part of the United States of America. The St Croix runs between Calais, Maine and St. Stephen, New Brunswick and I crossed it there in 1981 towards the end of a big road-trip getting data for my PhD. Machias Seal Island is clearly South of the mouth of the river and definitely within 20 leagues of the coast of Maine, so I think de jure the Yankees have it.

At the moment, despite some shape throwing by Prime Minister Trudeau and President Trump. Canada and the USA are at peace with a helluva lot of traffic - both goods and people - across the border every day. Nobody cares enough about the lobsters [which are getting scythed by fishermen from both sides of the border] to start a war and both sides have refused arbitration by the International Court of Justice in The Hague. But if oil is discovered under the sea in what they call the Grey Zone surrounding Machias Seal Island, then we can expect a bit of gun-boat diplomacy. The Atlantic has put together a NatGeog-like documentary about the affair. And/or  A life in the day of a lighthouse keeper.

A whole archipelago of other Blobby islands.

End of Sumer 020918

Not a typo: Sumerians lived in Mespot. The fact that you know buggerall about them is because you haven't been told <conspiracy warning>. Anyway, It's Labor Day weekend in the USA, which is when folks have their last family barbecue. You might reflect on how high the flames were when the Elamites sacked Ur of the Chaldees in 1940 BCE.

So what else has been happen'?

• End of the world bin happen'
• Graphic illustration of worldwide temperature anomalies it's gotten hot since 2000AD
• Food bin happenin'
• Barack Obama has dinner with four ordinary Americans.
• Coconut oil? Pure p'ison
• When woo-wha is not wellness
• Chicken curry with a LOT of butter . . . and love
• Miscegenation bin happenin'
• Californian woman (white) and her black partner agree to sustain a surrogate pregnancy for a Chinese couple. Early scan reveals 'identical' twins. After birth, scrutiny [and later DNA] cries: not identical. This looks like a genuine case of superfetation a word much bandied about during the Kerry Babies case. Everyone finished up with their genetic parents and the lawyers have had their pound of flesh too. via MeFi where everyone and his dog feels able to sit in judgement in a nature vs nurture debate.
• Inventin' 
• of the iPhone
• airbag impact explosive bike helmet
• Bodgin': Make A Chair From A Tree In A Day
• Playin' Pingpong in Bryant Park NYC.
• Hilarity: Do not, like me, attempt to read this story aloud to your partner <drain alert>
• Returning lost property found by snorkel
• This guy is a magnet for sunglasses, car-keys and smart-phones. Is it all for real? Seems to have a bottomless source of lost property.
• Singin'
• Annual Camáron Parade Collins Bks Dublin 2016. Irish FFL know the words.
• Jim McCann: sings about Grace [Gifford]
• Adiemus Goenlo, NL
• Long Road Mark Knopfler - white horses, waterfalls etc etc
• For anti-vaxxers: herd-immunity explained
• Candid camera wasted water
• Lego 
• Tuned mass dampers [prev] explained with Lego rockets
• Built a whole car out of bricks

Poverty-poverty

I've been a little skeptical about specific sorts of poverty: Fuel-Poverty for one example; Food-Poverty for another. I'm having to rein my certainty about this in a bit from recent evidence.

Food Poverty
The holy father Pope Francis was in Dublin recently. Of all the calls on his time, he chose to visit a soup-kitchen called the Capuchin Day Centre for Homeless People; possibly because the place is inspired by St Francis of Assisi. Between 0730 and 1100hrs the Centre serves 300 breakfasts to anyone who rocks up. Later in the day they put 500 dinners on the table; all served by volunteers. Wednesday is Food Parcel day when they distribute 1400 take-away parcels. In addition they run medical, chiropody, haircut, optical, and welfare-advice clinics. They'll do their best to help with socks, hygiene-products, sleeping-bags too. It's still run by Br Kevin Crowley, who founded the service in the Friary garden in 1969.  Here is the good man telling it like it is. The wage bill is effectively nil [ethics of the voluntariat] but it still costs €2.3 million /yr in 'consumables' of which about 1/6 comes directly from the government. [donate?]
Br Kevin learned early on not to judge, in fact not to ask questions about his clients. He chid a woman for coming to the Centre in a car: if she could afford a car she surely didn't need free food, he suggested. It turned out that she had driven up in her home which she shared with 2 small children. Money is money but poverty is not always fungible. Circumstances had indeed left that woman with a car but she had lost her home, had no work and still had to feed the kids. There are people in Dublin who are holding down a full time job that requires a suit-and-tie who nevertheless are homeless. As I explained last year, all kinds of take-for-granted things are impossible if you are living in a hostel. One of those missing things is knowing that somebody cares if you live or die. Br Kevin lets everyone know that he cares: even if he sends a single mum and her kids back to a single B&B room after dinner: he knows that she knows that he will worry if she's not back the following week.

Water-poverty
I learn a lot of this How To Be a Mensch and Do The Right Thing stuff from my daughters. We were down in Cork last week visiting with Dau.II. Every morning she goes to work across a foot-bridge over the River Lee. Every morning she pauses to greet the homeless man who has made that bleak place his pitch. Sometimes she'll slip him him some cash but she reckons eye-contact and acknowledgement is worth more than €2.  Last visit we were walking through town and she said "Y'know there are no public water-fountains in Cork City?" It's been the longest, hottest, driest, summer since 1976 and a single 500ml bottle of water costs €1. How many of those would you need if you were on the street all the long day? The back of an envelope might indicate that 20% of your dole-money might go on water. If you have a home and a work-place  [HSA regs p27] you have access to a tap: you may, like many of my students, choose to suck on a water-bottle like it's yer mammy's teat but you don't have to.

Louse-poverty
I had occasion to visit a chemist a while back for some gamma-hexachlorocyclohexane / Lindane / Gammaxene against the head-lice Pediculus humanus capitis - purely as a precautionary / prophylactic measure after coming into contact with school-going children. For the last six years, I've taught Human Physiology for The Institute's Diploma in Pharmacy Technician Studies, that's about 200 ex-students floating about the county, so they collectively know more about me than they need [or desire to know]. When my thumbs went weird, I bought a wrist-support from Amy F in McCauley's. When I bought hot-water bottles for everyone's Xmas present last year, it was Noelle C who served me. We're told there is no shame in head-lice, but I was glad I didn't know the lady behind the counter in Nolan's of Bagnelstown when I asked about m'cooties. I choked and spluttered a bit when she asked €16.84 for 200ml of de-louser: "It's okay for me, I've got a job, but what about some unfortunate single parent on welfare, where is she going to find €17??". Counter-lady agreed that it was an issue, and that maybe that's why poor people choose lice rather than treatment. And that might be the reason we haven't eliminated this irritation years ago.

Period-Poverty
News last month was that Scotland had voted to make feminine hygiene products freely available across the country. The project is led by Community Food Initiatives North East (CFINE) in Aberdeen. They claim that between menarch and menopause a woman will need £5,000 to manage menstruation; that's 30 years x 12 months = about £15 per cycle. That sounds right from what I hear from my female rellies. All my female rellies are working, and can afford what it takes. Seems that some poor girls are not going to school for several days a month because they can't pay for reliable protection. Me, I don't think its fair to force women to make a choice between pasta or period.