They were expendable

NASA ran out of astronauts as the programme got more ambitious, [and cut a few corners].
[M7] First were the original Mercury Seven appointed during the Eisenhower administration in April 1959. They look suitably Star Trekky in their helmets and lace-up boots:
Back: Alan B. Shepard, Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom, and L. Gordon Cooper.
Front: Walter H. Schirra, Donald K. "Deke" Slayton, John H. Glenn, and Scott Carpenter;
Only 6/7 = 86% actually made to Space; Deke Slayton's heart problems had him nixxed as a health risk Up There; but he became a NASA magnate on Earth.
They're all dead now, the last to go being John Glenn, a 1984 US presidential hopeful. And don't forget Ham, the first primate in space, who went up before Alan Shepard, came down 15 minutes later and lived another 24 years in US zoos. And also remember Enos, the second chimpanzee and first malfunction casualty in the NASA hall of shame cock-ups: Enos didn't die from multiple electric shocks, he died a year after that ordeal from the bloody flux which proved to be untreatable with then current antibiotics.

[NN] The Next Nine group of recruits were [alphabetical]: Neil Armstrong, Frank Borman, Pete Conrad, Jim Lovell, James McDivitt, Elliot See, Tom Stafford, Ed White and John Young - were appointed in September 1962. Only 7/9 = 78% of them left the Earth.

[TF] The following year 1963 there was another recruitment drive, and 13 white, male Right Stuff pilots made the selection cut. Because 13 was an unlucky number (Go Science!), they added Walter Cunningham to the list to form group 3 The Fourteen: Edwin (Buzz) Aldrin, William Anders, Charles Bassett, Alan Bean, Gene Cernan, Michael Collins, Roger Chaffee, Walter Cunningham, Donn Eisele, Theodore Freeman, Richard Gordon, Russell (Rusty) Schweickart, David Scott, Clifton (C.C.) Williams. There were another 4 pre-flight fatalities = 71% in this group. Do you see a pattern here? the number of astronauts who actually went astro fell 86%, 78%, 71% with each intake!

Ted Freeman [TF] hit a flying goose coming into land a plane at Houston. Elliot See [NN] crashed his plane trying to land in poor weather at St Louis, taking co-pilot Charles Bassett [TF] into the ground with him.  CC Williams [TF] was also killed in a plane accident - aileron failure. Although all four planes were Supersonic T-38 jets, there is no suggestion that T-38s were inherently unsafe. Gus Grissom [MS], Ed White [NN] and Roger Chaffee [TF] went up in flames (loadsa velcro on the cabin walls, nylon space suits, design failures) on the launchpad in a practice from Apollo 1.

They Were Expendable was a book and a John Ford film about PT boats in WWII Philippines. It's a Boy Film. Nit a million miles from what my father was doing in the English Channel at about the same time.

On Silbury Hill

Stop Press: Whaley Bridge dam crisis update (holding in there!) late Sunday 4th August 2019. Run Press

While we were minding the grandchildren dossing in Bath last week, their mother lent me a book On Silbury Hill by Adam Thorpe. Thorpe is a couple of years younger than me and achieved a burst of media recognition when he published Ulverton in 1992. I never read it; the timing was wrong. In 1992, I was mad busy reinventing myself as a functioning research scientist having spent the late 1980s marking time, shuffling papers and doing some desultory teaching to put bread on the table and shoe on The Boy - no time for reading novels when I was on fire. I knocked off On Silbury Hill in a couple of days while letting the children fight in a corner - they are old enough (7 and nearly 4) to be able to look after each other. I just needed to keep them away from the kitchen knives.

I wrote my own take on Silbury when The Boy moved to Solsbury "no relation" Hill in 2013. Adam Thorpe and I have some things in common including a very expensive education. I was a navy brat, and our family moved home every 18 months through all my minor years. My parents figured that boarding school would provide some continuity in a fractured life. The experiment delivered continuity, yes; and a lot of facts, which has been really useful in pub quizzes; but left me an institutionalised emotional cripple. Thorpe's father worked for PanAm and the family lived in France, Cameroon and India. At the appropriate age, the young feller went to Marlborough one of the less famous English boarding schools. One of the ways that he was able to stay sane in the bullying, sport-obsessed, homogenising atmosphere at school was to get on his bike and cycle off into the countryside. I did that too. It is incredible to me now but, at the age of 15 or 16, I occasionally ran off into the countryside, usually with a book stuck in the waistband of my shorts. I'd sit in the lee of a hedge reading to escape the hubbub and oppressive regularities of school life.

If you have a streak of poet, an interest in the deep past and a bicycle, then Marlborough is a good place to sleep. Averbury with its menhirs, avenues, stone circles and the whiff of druid is a mere 10km west: not more than half an hour on a bike. Silbury Hill dominates the journey from the South. At 250,000 cu.m. volume and 40m high, Silbury Hill is the largest man-made solid structure in Europe, although it is only 10% of the size of the Great Cheops Pyramid in Gizeh. The hill doesn't dominate Thorpe's book in anything like the same way, but makes occasional >!shazzam!<  appearances in his rambling memoir. I call it rambling because that has been a feature of Thorpe's life-story. Most of his surviving schoolmates, after sowing some wild oats at school  and University will have settled comfortably into the British Establishment: bishops, bankers, brigadiers. Thorpe, not so much: after leaving Oxford U he formed a troupe of jonglers and toured round the English countryside entertaining rural folk with mime and mummery in village halls. A few books of his poetry found publishers, if not profits. And each of his books have found a niche market; it's own niche because they say each one is quite different from the last. That shows considerable integrity as well as a certain restlessness. 'Successful' authors discover a formula that works and deliver more of the same on a regular schedule to a grateful public that doesn't like being challenged.

The book annoyed a fan who reviewed it in the Grauniad when it came out: too rambly for Rachel Cooke. Because Thorpe is now part of the literary establishment (his first novel was rapturously reviewed by John "Magus" Fowles), you'll find lots of other reviews out there if you're tempted to give this book a go. Being part of the literary establishment doesn't mean making loadsa money from writing: income / expenditure of time will be far less than the minimum wage.

I look forward to getting his latest book Notes from the Cévennes: half a lifetime in provincial France out of the library. Even though it was published last May, I don't think there will be a long line of people wanting to do the same thing.

Oroville-le-small

I've had an interest in dams since I was a nipper with a bucket and spade in Duncannon in the 1960s. In January 2017, I got over-excited about Oroville Dam, a massive earth-filled flood-abatement project across the Feather River in N. California. Nobody likes a flood, especially if the water comes through your front door and covers your chintz sofa in diluted sewage. In Ireland, it would just grand if the annual average rainfall of about 1,000mm was delivered with modest regularity: say 10mm every third day between 0100 and 0500 hrs. That would be enough for the crops, enough to top up the reservoirs for drinking water, with a modest excess to generate a bit of hydro-electric. Ain't gonna happen!, though. What actually happens is that rain falls with unpredictable irregularity giving us weeks of drought, as last Summer, or damaging torrents which flood Clonmel, or Enniscorthy or Grainaguemanagh with predictable irregularity. At least in the first two cases, the floods are made worse because of cunning plans for flood abatement which defers a minor problem [elsewhere] to a catastrophe if the weather doesn't play ball with the hubris of engineers and planners.

Farmers and citizens in the Sacramento Valley in California were fed up with Spring floods, when the snow melted in the High Sierras with a bit of warm February drizzle and the riverbed was unable to contain the excess water. Soooo, they built USA's largest earth-filled dam to contain the floods and eke out the water through the growing season of the apricots, almonds and apples of California's Garden of Eden. With great cunning they incorporated a hydro-electric power plant in the dam structure . . . and a trout farm in the warm water of the rail-race. The water of the Feather River was turned from a threat to an opportunity. Until . . . the weather stopped playing ball and delivered a huge amount of water (after years of none-at-all) and the reservoir topped out to beyond the manageable expectable predicable quantities for which the dam designers had allowed. In 2017, the concrete surface of the aged spillway developed a small hole as the torrents of water came down. Torrents of water will rapidly turn a small hole into a large one and soon enough the voracious maelstrom was sucking at bedrock and sweeping it all downhill in a heap. As the erosion worked back towards the footings of the emergency spillway, it looked like that might fail to loose a Wall of water 10m high into the valley below where 100,000 people had homes. The worst flood imaginable - a 10,000 year flood - from the natural pre-Columbian pre-concrete times would have been a trickle compared to that. Over the succeeding months, I followed the management of the disaster and the successful restoration, and augmentation, of the flood safety net. One of the positives was the rise and rise of Juan Browne a pilot from N California, who took it upon himself to comment on the unfolding saga on his wife's Blancolirio youtube channel.

You may believe that we are living through The End of Days as climate change extends the range of natural weather beyond what we have so far taken as normal. The hottest July ever in Central continental Europe, record rainfall in UK, last year's parching drought. The Derbyshire town of Whaley Bridge has been in the news since last week when a big spill of rain filled the reservoir above the town and . . . the spillway failed just like Oroville. The reservoir has been hanging over the town since Whaley Bridge was joined to the English navigable in the 1830s. It is behind an earthen berm across a small stream and the front face of the spillway was faced with concrete:
This year the rushing water winkled destructive fingers through small-small irregularities in the concrete surface, eroded the supporting clay beneath and collapsed some of the concrete panels. The management had to stop using the spillway and try to fill the cavity.
They called in an RAF Chinook to deliver hundreds of 1 tonne bags of fill, four-at-a-time, to help stop or slow down the erosion of the raw earth beneath the once-upon-a-spillway. And they sourced and leased the biggest pumps available in Northern England to lower the level of water in the reservoir so that nothing will travel over the damaged spillway
They've lowered the level of the water by 1.5m but a storm is forecast to dump another 100mm of rain across Derbyshire this afternoon. Whaley Bridge is not out of danger yet. Best commentary on Whaley Bridge from Juan Browne. To put it in perspective, the Whaley Bridge reservoir is 1.5 million tonnes of water, Oroville was a problem about 4,000x bigger.

Tour des hommes durs

It's hard chaws and can-do blokes today.

• Two today lads, James & Mark  try a single 467km!! stage of the original 1903 Tour de France; on original era bicycles. It's a bit like Scott et al. setting off for the South Pole without GPS, Gortex, fibreglass, fleece, aluminium or rip-stop nylon. There's well 'ard and old style hard.
• Real men? Juan Browne tells ya how to cope with prostate cancer. tl;dr with courage and data.
• Naive men. Remember the Northwick Park drug trial which went horribly wrong?
• Piece to camera about survivor of the near death experience
• Rutger Hauer dead. We watched Ladyhawke a lot when the girls were small.
• Leonard Cohen is dead too. But he was grateful to a young Spaniard for starting him off.
• Making up one for the team? Liam 'Deaf' McMulkin, a student at Dundee U, couldn't wait for his designated signer to spell out phosphoglucomutase in his biochem lectures. So he invented a load of STEM terms in BSL.
• I was on about scigns (absence of sufficient) in May.
• Voluntary hardship? Why not buy the decommissioned South Goodwin Lightship  [42m x 8m] and make an office in tthe hull? First remove 180cu.m. of foam inserted by Trinity House to improve buoyancy after the vessel was de-manned. 
• Or you could build a boat out of cardboard and lots of PVA.
• You could rather buy a model lightship and finish the project quicker and cheaper.
• Ships? Honking night and day in the Port of Duluth [more via]
• Lock picking lawyer: always ready to tell you the padlock you just bought is utter crap.
• Ozzy Man is much louder and profaner than the LPL <trig warn> F***, C***, W***

Chaga

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself 

I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, 

and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble 

or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth 

lay all undiscovered before me.

Isaac Newton
Suggested background music.

Sing it, Isaac! All those years of expensive education left me knowing a lot . . . which has been useful in winning table quizzes. But like Newton, I realise that for every fact I know, there are a thousand that are known to other people; and a million that are unknown unknowns. The Blob has been good to me because, in the twilight of a career in science, I have an excuse for learning new / more / other. Actually, looking with bemusement and interest at things I wrote about in 2014, I suspect my mind is at a steady state: every new fact displaces an existing one. Right now, for example, I know quite a lot about Inonotus obliquus but can't for the life of me remember where I put the box of 'best' cutlery.

Inonotus obliquus? That would be чага = chaga. Which you will have certainly seen of you've spent any time at all being observant in a birch Betula spp. forest in Poland [włóknouszek ukośny] Norway [kreftkjuke], Russia [чага], Finland [pakurikääpä], Sweden [sprängticka] or Netherlands [berkenweerschijnzwam]. All those common names suggest that local people have been paying attention to this fungus; indeed many of them have been infusing and consuming it for hundreds of years. The black mass which you can see [R] blurfing out of the bark of a silver beech Betula pendula is a sterile mycelial mass. Aficionados dig out this clinker, chop it up, soak it, then add warm 50°C water and let it steep for two days in a cool place. Too warm and you'll get a kombucha-like ferment. Instant gratification people will chop it up and pour boiling water on it.  They can't both be right. As I explained patiently five years ago tea, coffee and maté require different infusion temperatures to release their active principles. It is clearly best if you canoe to a remote spot in Sweden, start a fire by striking a flint with your bowie knife, and climb a mountain before coming back to your chaga tea.

Paul Stamets points out that the reproductive future of this fungus depends on its mycelia penetrating the heart of the tree until they kill it or it gets blown over in a storm. It is only from the dead horizontal tree that the fungus is induced to send up its fruiting body and release spores to continue another generation of  Inonotus obliquus. He is keen that people will leave the conks alone because it has gotten to be A Thing among New Age Alternative types for the supposed health benefits of the infusion. There are parts of Alaska - esp. near cities and towns - where the species is locally threatened because of the rapacious greed of woo-wah harvesters.

You need to hold back a little in your consumption of chaga tea because it is a really rich source of oxalic acid. Oxalic acid is toxic because it is avid for calcium. Calcium oxalate precipitates out of the plasma and accumulates in the kidneys eventually blocking up the plumbing. Dau.I was really avid for wood sorrel Oxalis acetosella as a child. We used to caution her about eating too much - the name is no coincidence: oxalic acid was first isolated from Oxalis . I used to believe that rhubarb leaves were super toxic because they had a much higher concentration of oxalic acid than the stalks. Wrong! spinach, swiss chard, parsley, chives and chaga are all far richer sources of oxalic acid.

Branchage

New word! I heard it pronounced bronquage which sounds exotic and medieval but the correct spelling branchage is what-it-says-on-the-tin: dealing with [over-hanging] branches. Branchage is a bureaucratic community chore required twice a year of all owners and occupiers who have road-frontage on the island of Jersey.  It seems to work on the principle of little and often is quite enough. The land-owners have to cut back vegetation, preferably with hand tools, so that the highways and by-ways of the island do not inexorably revert to jungle. On roads the edge must be cut back to a height of 12 ft = 3.6m; on footpaths only 8ft = 2.4m. The greenery on the "banque" must be cut to not less than 10cm, so that the plants are not ripped from the soil and thus have no chance to regenerate.  Attention must be paid to indigenous animals and rare plants, which is effectively impossible if you are using a mechanical flails from the back of a tractor. The clippings must be carried away. You can get the complete set of instructions - also available in Portuguese and Polish for the two largest outsider communities in Jersey. Branchage all sounds impossibly neat, tidy and, well, Protestant . . . wouldn't / doesn't work like that in Ireland.

I heard about this neat piece of community pressure from a friend who worked really hard and was able to retire on his money as he turned 50.  The Jersey tax-regime is kinder than Ireland's to well-heeled people but unless you play golf (or the fool) you're likely to get bored. I guess the weekend before the branchage inspection is something to look forward to: for the exercise and the sense of civic pride. Last year when we had a neighbour's help to round up our sheep and bring them off the mountain, he and I were walking down the green lane together behind the sheep. He pointed out that the lane used to be 4-5m wide but now can be a tight squeeze for a regular car, let alone a tractor. The margins between the dry-stone walls and the narrowing roadway have been allowed to fill up with gorse, brambles and over-hanging hawthorns. Have been allowed is passive tense because the community has had a generation of bystander effect - passively expecting someone else to clean back the bushes.

Nowadays, whenever I go up the hill - after sheep or after artefacts - I take a pair of gloves and ditto secateurs and snippety-snip at the brambles. It makes it less scratchy for walkers who, in summer, might be tempted to walk in shorts.  A few years ago, my pal Russ - A1 at Cheekpoint - undertook to clear an old green lane between his village and Passage East. It used to be a thoroughfare when people were up for walking 5 km to visit a friend or a different village shop. But the Celtic Tiger somehow stopped the use of Shank's Mare in favour of cars and the lane was getting jungly. Shortly after he set to with a  slashhook, one of the neighbours happened by, talked briefly and came back with shears and a rake. It got to be A Thing with some of the community; many hands make light work; the banter was savage; it was more entertaining than daytime TV; there was a visible change after each day's work. After that blitz, it should be easy to keep it under control with a rather light hand - maybe twice a year like the Branchageurs in Jersey.

The Branchage website records the times for this year's inspections:

	Days after 01 Jun	Days after 01 Sep
St Brelade	25	3
St Clement	35	20
Grouville	28	13
St Helier	35	13
St John	27	5
St Lawrence	40	4
St Martin	41	17
St Mary	34	5
St Ouën	41	5
St Peter	27	5
St Saviour	26	9
Trinity	28	6
Correlation:	0.29

Of course, me being me, I had to know if there was any pattern to these rather random dates. Perhaps parishes in the Atlantic-exposed parishes start pruning later because the weather made for a later Spring? But it turns out that there isn't even a first in - first out pattern between Spring and Fall clip-times:

so for the moment I'll suspect that the dates are arbitrary and capricious. Although I have no evidence that the officials responsible (Connétable, Vingteniers, Centeniers and members of the Roads Committee) are anything other than reasonable.

Notes to Self

For the last 20+ years I have had a file on all my successive work computers called Notes to Self. It contains everything which I've learned how to do, in case I need that fix again. I guess, before about 1998, I could rely on my "mind" to retain these useful skills-and-facts. Not any more, lads. Because these files exist, I can trawl back through them and marvel at what I could do back then. Tall buildings to leap? No problem in 2002. But then again, I don't think I'm ever again going to make graphic displays of gene expression across sections of  the human genome. It would be mildly embarrassing to show my NotesToSelf to the younger, fitter, smarter, people with whom I worked at the time: they would be aghast at my ignorance.

Laying yourself bare warts-and-all is the commonality between my dry academic aide-memoire and the blistering raw exposure in Emilie Pine's Notes To Self [2018 €9.99] [reviewed] a book of essays which documents where she came from and how far she clawed herself up the precipices of life to "Success" as a lecturer in UCD. You can read a segment about the anorexic horrors she inflicted on her teenage self. If that is too much for your lily-livered soul, then don't read the rest of the book - you'll have nightmares for the rest of the year. Calling eating disorders 'self-inflicted' is not to suggest that it is easy, or even possible, for the perp to pull herself [herself? - there is a slight excess of the disorder in F vs M] up from the puke bucket and start eating chicken-wings like the rest of us. We all live in a compromise world buffeted by competing needs, desires and constraints and anorexia becomes a solution to this booming buzzing confusion for some people at some times in their lives.

More or less at the same teenage time, Ms Pine was living in London under the "care" of her single-parenting mother. They had been abandonned by Richard Pine (author, lecturer, media apparatchik and alcoholic) shortly after the birth of his second daughter. Emilie ran wild in London, pretending she was a loose woman in the drugs, booze and rock scene when she was actually a girl who should have been either doing her school homework or getting some sleep. A key problem seems to have been where to stash her school uniform, so she could look outwardly normal for English classes in daylight. A lot of her pals died but she managed to teeter through the hazards of men, alcoholic benders (doubtless occasionally at exactly the same time as her father was blotto in Dublin), and self-esteem. At some time, not quite too late, she realised that she was smarter than all that and relished the escape-from-grot and flying-to-heaven of reading and writing. She is now a lecturer in film and drama in UCD. I'm sure she brings something interesting to the table with her students, having lived a far wilder peri-adult life than them. Having experienced so much crap as a young woman, she has a well-honed crap-detector and I don't imagine that she lets the students off with second best.

To her shame, but because she is in the normal range among adult women, she lets men off with a lot. When fellow male academics let slip a gross or slight or implicit sexist comment, she doesn't always call them up on it. Because she isn't cruel enough to humiliate grown men in public; because life is too short to deal with that shit every time it happens; because oftentimes she only twigs that she has been disrespected as an esprit d'escalier after she and he have left the room. That's the problem with the patriarchy, they infect everyone about them with their sense of entitlement. The ideas people have in their heads are not crafted entirely inside there between the ears, they are frequently bounced in from outside and modified so they make some sort of sense and have some sort on internal consistency. Because men bray louder and oftener, they and their ideas become the background certainty of common discourse. It takes a strong woman to cut through this to think and do the right thing by/for all people.

There's one telling current culture reference about the all-areas reach of the Patriarchy. She goes to a feminist theatre performance where all the dancers on stage are completely naked. As well at the lively movement and the femessage, Dr Pine notes that none of the women have left their pubic hair as evolution intended it to be. All of them have tweaked or tidied or shaved the whole area bare. Allowing them the benefit of the doubt - I do it for me - is countered with a rather tetchy yeah right. I don't have a wide experience of pubic hair these days but I gather that this depilation is A Thing and indeed an industry nowadays - even for blokes! What's all that about? Is it not a little peculiar to have a culture that is really exercised about paedophilia [Bad] which at the same time mandates to removal of a key attribute of sexual adulthood? Just a thought.

As an academic Dr Pine has worked twice as hard to get half as far as her male contemporaries; but that's normal for women in college or industry or any institution. She certainly seems to have played the game to the rules written by the university administration: if they expect external funding, Dr Pine secures grants; if they require presentations abroad, Dr Pine eats jet-lag for breakfast. She was well into her 30s before biological imperatives plooshed above the surface of her frenetic academic and ambitious life. She went through several harrowing years trying to fall pregnant when she was on the edge of menopause. I don't imagine that she was easy to love or live with during that journey. But motherhood didn't happen and the chapter where this is all laid out on the gynaecological couch is resolved in a realisation that life is not about just one thing or even one thing at a time. About half of the women I really care about have been on a similar journey.

Another resonant chapter deals with her father's near death experience, in a third world hospital in Corfu. It's Emilie's experience too because she and her younger sister fly out to Greece to deal with the crisis - basically liver failure from four decades of alcoholic excess - which includes mopping up all the bodily fluids that spew from the paternal orifices. Note to self: bring surgical gloves. Eventually the women, with grudging help from an insanely over-stretched hospital staff, get the old man stabilised and flown back to Ireland. That was in 2013, and he's off the booze now and functioning better. At no time did he consider apologising to his daughters for following a Me life for all the years when the girls could have used his support - financial, emotional and social. Then again, what kills not fattens, and Emilie Pine might be a less interesting and useful person of she's followed the comfortable middle-class Dublin Arts life that might have been.