Just fishin'

Our house is awash with books and one just surfaced which a) I haven't read b) I didn't know we owned. It's only really since I R retire that I've found time to read, like, books, like I did in my 20s. A full time job and a full time Blob sure fills the time. Andrew Grieg is a poet, novelist, climber and rambler from Scotland. As a 17 year old from Anstruther, Fife he sent a sheaf of his poems to Norman MacCaig, a poet whose work he admired. As a 17 year old from rural Essex, I sent a sheaf of my poems to R.S Thomas, a poet whose work I admired. Grieg got a much more positive response; possibly because he's a poet rather than a self-pitying, hormonal mess with long hair and spots. Indeed he received a post-card asking him to drop in when he was next in Edinburgh. MacCaig [L, as ever with whisky and fag] was about 40 years older than the restless young Grieg but treated him with respect and sensitivity and it began a friendship which last for nearly 3 decades until MacCaig died, in the fullness of his years, in 1996. Young Grieg thus got to hang out with the best Scots poets of the previous generation and such peripheral luminaries as, own own, Seamus Heaney.

Sometime, in the mid-90s, Grieg and MacCaig were getting drunk together again and, in his cups, the young fella asked The Master what was his favourite place in all the world. MacCaig replied "Assynt".
"I know it's Assynt, but where in Assynt? what's your favourite place?"
"I think that would have to be the Loch of the Green Corrie. Only it's not called that . . ."

Game on!

The next time they were in the same room, MacCaig was in his coffin, and the book At the Loch of the Green Corrie is the story of Grieg's pilgrimage to catch a fish from that loch [spoiler location R] in honour of the great man, his mentor and friend. He chooses to go camping & fishing with the Dorward brothers whom he'd known since school days and one of the threads in the book is men being comfortable in each other's silence. There is whisky, of course, and lazy evenings of talk after a hard day of thrashing the goddamn loch for fish which are utterly indifferent to their efforts. On the third day of this quixotic quest, Peter Dorward, the luckiest, most skilled and persistent of them, catches and lands a fish. Honour is satisfied and the three middle-aged men return to their day jobs in three different continents.

The book is 300 pages longer than that and those pages are not blank. They are full of poetry and appreciation of the good things in life, with some regrets, some near-death-experience to stop it seeming saccharine. The good things are not Volvos or iPads or even whisky. It is rather the moments of earthy heaven, so right, so brief, so real.

"It is what Norman and [his bestie] AK Macleod, looking down from the place they do not believe in, would give anything for - one more day of catching or not catching fish at any lochan. Fish supper warm in the hand on a cold wet night, heading home hungry - nothing beats this, nothing. This is what the dead envy us, the sweetness at the heart of physical existence".

All day we fished

the loch clasped in the throat

of Canisp, that scrawny mountain,

and caught trout and

invisible treasures.

We walked home, ragged millionaires,

our minds jingling, our fingers

rustling the air

Norman MacCaig (1910-1996)

Messier tidies up.

We had a meeting, possibly the last, of the Wexford Science Café on St Patrick's Eve. I had steered that Ship of Science away from more picking at the scab that is Covid: there is more to life and plenty other ways of dying. We were treated instead to a show and tell by Kevin Breen, Wexford's premier astrophotographer. It's amazing what you can do with a few hundred €€s worth of equipment and hundreds of hours of patient optimism. It's like fishing: if you can't peer through the clouds and temperature shimmers and see nothing the whole night - and still be having the most tremendous fun - then you're not a real astronomer. 

One name that Kevin brought up in passing was Charles Messier (1730 - 1817) a French comet-hunter who got hooked as a teenager by the amazing Great Six-tailed Comet of 1744 aka Comet Klinkenberg-Chéseaux, C/1743 X1.  After leaving school, he started working for/with the official French naval astronomer and cartographer Joseph Nicolas Delisle, so his day job became his impassioned hobby and vice versa. Astronomy was glove to the hand of cartography, especially in maritime circles, because . . . longitude: the vital necessity for knowing where you were on the featureless ocean.

Competitive comet hunting - getting there first, with naming rights, and immortal fame - requires quartering the sky at night looking for something that wasn't there last week knowing that others are about the same task with younger eyes and better telescopes. It was wrecking Messier's head, and his autonomic nervous system, getting a heart accelerating jolt of adrenalin upon seeing a fuzzy smudge in his ocular lens . . . only to realise that he had indeed seen it before.

Soooo, he started, with help from his assistant Pierre Méchain, to catalogue these false positives together with their celestial coordinates. When he/they had enough to make the information formal, a numbered list was published as the Catalogue des Nébuleuses et des Amas d'Étoiles (1774). Subsequent editions bumped up the number of these distant objects to 110. Many of them are well known enough to have 'common names' as well as Messier numbers

• M1 Crab Nebula [see R] is prolly the remnants of the Great Supernova of 1054 CE.
• M31 Andromeda Galaxy, far far away
• M47 the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters [Bloboprev]

The Catalogue doesn't include, say, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, because they are not visible from Paris, being in the Southern Celestial Hemisphere. 110 is a nice doable number, like bagging the 282 Munro peaks in Scotland higher than 3,000 ft. Michael A Philips is one amateur astronomer who has bagged them all and tiled the images into a single spectacular panorama:

Absolutely nothing to do with Mersenne, Marin

Sun day Bee Day

Equinox!

• Women at work - Shepherd school
• The inexplicable longevity of LinkedIn
• Erica Thomson [R] Queen of Bees 
• via Kottke whereat more links /tribs.
• Eddie "covered in beeees" Izzard
• Aisling Bea plays it for laffs.
• ♬u♪♩c 
• Solsbury Hill by Reina del Cid
• Lines of Love - Waiting for Smiff
• Something is rotten in the State of Music. Kenneth Woods dishes the dirt on James "now dead" Levine [cw: abuse of power, abuse of minors, enabling]
• Enginee⚙️
• Bailey Bridge
• Stone Story Wall with batter and feature elements
• Restoring 1955 liner when cruisin' had class
• Solar powered e-bike!
• PodRide e-Pedal car with screen-wiper fitted as standard
• Shave with an axe like a Viking
• Fud
• Strawberry pink cakes - 🎂🎂🎂🎂
• Chocolatine ou Pain au choc?? Le même chose you silly frensh people
• Alex has a go
• Who doesn't love a paratha
• Portuguese sardines
• Science
• Julia Galef On Bayesian reasoning -
• Her favourite [Darwin] letter
• Nightingale / Coxcombe plots . . . [bloboprev]
• Pauly and Dan prospecting for agates

Slack-Bob

Question on Metafilter last week about jobs where the actual work to pay ratio was most favourable.

Watchman type positions. In the 00s, The Boy went to work for British Airways freight in Heathrow. It was pretty exciting: he'd occasionally trot out on the apron to deliver a last package to the plane as it backed out for take-off [long stick to the flight-deck window chekkitout - you can also [R] evacuate the cockpit through the flight-deck window]. But BA was automating all their logistics into bar-coded air-freight containers and miles of switching track hanging from gantries. He kept his pay and title but thereafter he was watching a bank of monitors. About 5% of his time was dealing with snarl-ups, 95% reading / goofing / studenting for Open University [My Son the Engineer]. 

Movie projectionist Last time we were in the, late and little lamented, Enniscorthy Plaza Quadriplex, possibly in the 00s, the film went wonk and we all shouted "focus! Focus!" for a fix. Eventually one of the customers, possibly me, went out in the foyer and dragged the spotty youth responsible away from chatting up the pop-corn vendors.

Head of School. 

Postie. My second job was portering in the local hospital. My primary task was to collect and deliver post three times a day to-from the various wards and departments. Between my rounds I was instructed to keep out of sight in the tea-room. I spent more time resting each week than walking.

I see I've consolidated a couple of relevant anecdotes into an earlier Blob.

Frog 'e would a-wooing go

It's been a mild Winter / Spring so far. In February it was bucketting down rain, then we had 10 days without a drop, and then we had a couple of storms - situation normal for Ireland. In early Feb I was up the hill on my own and stepped over the fence into the Sitka forest owned by Coillte. It's at least 40 year since it was planted through the steading known as Dreelan's and across the county border into Wexford. It was thinned about 15 years ago and it has been ready for clear felling for the last couple of years. It's dark in the forest and dank and mysterious and in the right season rich in fungi. When the forwarder was in there thinning, several roads where driven through the trees to access all areas. The forest floor was well torn up by the monster machines which cut the trees and extracted them in 8ft and 16ft lengths.

Wherever these tracks levelled out the ruts filled with water and there was a local flush of bright green sphagnum and other mosses. When I visited that February day, the surface of the pools was half-and-half frog-spawn and water and the eggs were piled high and deep in a vivid statement of fecund abundance. As I approached invisible frogs disappeared beneath the surface with a noticeable plop.

古池

蛙飛び込む

水の音

[Basho prev] eee but, like Basho, I do love a frog! They represent the transition our ancestors made from the sea to dry land. But like other amphibians they are compelled by evolutionary inertia and physiological imperative to return to water to spawn. It wasn't until reptiles evolved an amnion to keep the embryo artificially wet that we [reptiles, birds and mammals] finally cut loose from the sea. No more than Met Eireann, frogs cannot see the future, they can only feel the wet but they need the pond to stay wet for several weeks: three to hatch into pollywogs / tadpoles and many more until the thrashing propulsive tail is resorbed and four legs develop for earth-walking.  In Ireland there is only one species of frog Rana temporaria, so it's much easier to know what you're dealing with than, say, fungi or small brown birds.

It's a sin and you shouldn't do it at home or otherwise but a tuthree days later, I returned to the forest and scooped a couple of generous handfuls of frog-spawn into a bucket and some mossy clods from the same puddle into a feed-sack and brought them down to our garden. I think these domesticated frogs have at least as good a chance of surviving under my watchful eye as they would have left to nature red in tooth and claw.  On St David's Day, the spawn had effectively disappeared and been replaced by dozens and dozens of wrigglers about 12mm long. I sent the family a really terrible photo of some of this progeny with a 30cm rule for scale. Two weeks later, just before St Patrick's Day, immersed a drinking glass in the frog crate and brought out 30 - 40 tadpoles for a more formal shot [see L]. They have definitely put on weight! At the moment they are eating mostly veg but I have promised them a delicious menu of flies, worms and molluscs for when they turn carnivorous with adulthood. 

It's hard to be perfect

In my friendfacefree corner of social media, a participant solicited opinion on whether to unpal a friend who had skipped the local prioritisations and secured a covidaxx. The consensus was that such queue-jumpers should be shunned; for several because they had lied about co-morbidities. I've written before about my tetchy rejection of such Kantian certainty. YMMV but, for me, transgressions - queue-jumping, lying, assault&battery, plagiarism, murder, speeding - are sliding-scale rather than black and  white . A couple of contrarian responders to the vaxx-jumper dilemma suggested that the now-vaxxed friend would be better off entirely without the friendship of a judgmental mill-stone whose life had been clearly immaculate. Most folks are strongly against murder but murder books, even salaciously graphic murder books, sell millions of copies each year. There is a big fat intersection on the Venn Diagram between those who hold murder to be wrong and those who eat meat from animals that have been raised under unconscionable conditions and slaughtered in a clanking hell-scape of blood and guts. "I'm somewhat shy about the brutal facts of being a carnivore. I don't like meat to look like animals. I prefer it in the form of sausages, hamburger and meat loaf, far removed from the living thing." John Updike

Did someone mention Venn diagrams? That would be me noting the rather wonderful tribute to the eponymous John Venn in the form of a stained glass window in Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. If you check out the link (nobody ever does) you'll note another stained glass trib below Venn's. This represents a Latin square to honor Ronald A Fisher, Sir, FRS - "the greatest biologist since Darwin". Indeed, I wrote about Fisher, in his own right, without mentioning the window because Fisher's serious contributions to biology, maths and statistics could fill a book let alone a 700 word Blob. If you've ever used a null hypothesis, or a t-test, or an Anova, or preferred Fisher's exact test to a ChiSq you shd thanks Fisher for providing the tools. The F-test for significance in that Anova is named F for Fisher. The New Synthesis reconciling Darwin and Mendel into an internally consistent view of evolutionary biology is due to the theorising and hard mathematizing of the numerate triumvirate of Fisher, Sewall Wright and JBS Haldane.

Well that window is now history! Removed last year because Fisher believed that the human race could be improved. The condemnation is two-fold: Fisher was a Eugenicist and Fisher was a Racist. Have you ever been on a march? Have you ever been gee'd up by the stewards to chant a slogan? Did you feel better for that? A sense of solidarity? Would you have been offended by the Orwellian epithet groupthink? Have you ever kept sitting when the rest of the audience rises for a standing ovation? Is August Landmesser dead?

Caius have not left it at the tokenism of removing the window, they have moved their diversity & inclusion policy to front and centre.
[✓]All Tutors and Admissions Tutors have completed implicit-bias training 

[✓]All Fellows have been invited to a diversity awareness session to provide education about race issues

[✓]Appointed a Research Fellow for . . . advancing the goals of anti-racism

[✓]Well that's sorted, then!

For a Cambridge College brimful of clever people, the narrative and the response has been quite woolly in its logic. Conflating eugenics with racism [and death camps] for starters. Some of this has been unpicked by AWF Edwards, an indignant fellow of Gonville & Caius, in an essay in The Critic. Edwards claims that the management at his alma mater had been steam-rollered into doing something because the spirit of the times was severely unsympathetic to The Man in all His patriarchal elitist sexist racist certainties. Me, I don't think that Fisher was racist, or at least rather less racist that many of his colleagues and contemporaries. But it's really hard to win that argument with people who are convinced that a) they are not racist b) most other folks are. I have Irish friends, none of whom are racist in the classic sense. Of course, they couldn't be my friends if they were anti-vaxxers racist. But let them check out their galvanic skin test response <frisson> to the word Traveller, let alone their innermost feelings if two lads with a flat-bed truck full of gates pulls into the yard. I fail that test and I've bought a lot of gates. Walter Bodmer, professor in his turn and Fisher's last student, has set out the case for Fisher's feet of clay in the Before Window times. 

Fisher was usually the smartest man in the room but he was not always the nicest. He could bear a grudge. He was dismissive of people of contradicted him; especially those whose math wasn't up to understanding what he'd discovered and set out on paper. He smoked a pipe and was for years a lung-cancer denialist. He thought it would be a good idea to sterilise people whose progeny would not be an improvement to the human race. He associated with people who had probably been associated with the Final Solution in Nazi Germany. 

It's classic blinkered patriarch stuff: his ideal of the best sort of person, who should be encouraged to have more children, bore an uncanny resemblance to chaps like him whom he met in the Senior Common Rooms of Cambridge. His cliché for who should be offered sterilisation was someone with mental problems. He wrote an academic letter of support for Otmar von Vershuer, Josef Mengele's mentor, unfortunately including a sentence praising vonV's "wish to improve the German racial stock". 

As well as being willfully wrong about the association between smoking and lung-cancer, Fisher was wrong about the efficacy of sterilisation [or death camps, indeed] in improving any racial stock. His colleague and rival JBS Haldane wrote a classic paper showing a) that most genetic defects are recessive b) by definition they are rare c) Hardy-Weinberg showed that in such cases almost all the defective genes reside in 'carriers' where a 'good' gene masks, or compensates for, its defective partner. Haldane went on to show that eliminating all the double-defective gene cases would have negligible effect on the prevalence of the gene in the population and it would take hundreds of generations to appreciably reduce the frequency. We are less that 100 generations from Caesar Augustus and Pontius Pilate.

But the window?? I was trying to explain my unease and The Beloved offered a story "Suppose you're a small child enrolling in primary school, the head teacher is real nice, welcoming and inclusive but behind her on the wall is a picture of the founding head teacher of that school; stern of mien, with mutton-chop whiskers, a high starched collar, a bible in one hand and a cane in the other. What sort of message does that convey to the child?" And my response is something like yes yes of course and point taken but the youngest person who is going to have the window in their face is old enough to vote; going to college is about making up your own mind and it really helps to do that if your current way of thinking is challenged by the awkwardness of the real world. One of the press releases from G&C suggested that Fisher's interest / obsession with eugenics was the very well-spring of all his powerful ideas, techniques and theories in biological statistics. We cannot therefore brush his eugenics shite under the carpet as an aberration. One irony is that by providing the statistical tools for effective plant-breeding, Fisher was partly responsible for the Green Revolution [Norman Borlaug, I'm looking at you] which put an extra 1 billion people on the groaning planet; none of whom ever smoked a pipe or wore a tweed jacket or had a glass of port after dinner at high table.

Removing the window from public view and storing it in the basement s👁rts 👁ut the optics but really doesn't solve the problem of endemic racism in society . . . no more does a diversity awareness session. And while we're casting stones in Cambridge, maybe Churchill-was-racist College, 2km NW of Gonville and Caius, is due for a name-change?

How would you know if you're right?

 I've been lurking at TYWKIWDBI since before I started bloggin' myself. I keep going back because the content is nicely random / unexpected but also overlaps with my interest in biology, the out-doors and human folly. Minnesotastan, the author, is rather endearingly cleaning his closets cabinets to make life easier for his heirs; and sharing some of the finds before they go off to Goodwill or the bonfire of the vanities. It's endearing because, like me, I suspect he's come to the conclusion that nobody is going to write his biography; so all that hoarded ephemera [concert fliers, restaurant bills, bday cards, ] is just clutter. Anyway, there is life in the old dog yet and he's still posting about peculiarities that come over his horizon . . .

Apparently, Christiaan Huygens [L b.1629-d.1695], the Netherlandish scientific polymath was in the habit of circulating anagrams to the astronomical community so show a) he was fluent in Latin b) he'd discovered something c) before them.  In 1655 (aged 26), Huygens devised and built a telescope with sufficient resolution to pick out a moon orbiting Saturn, the then furthest known planet. To establish the fact that these two specks of light were associated, Huygens had to record their position over several nights in less than optimum weather: it's cloudy at night in Den Haag almost as much as it is in Dublin. At the same time, he observed the facts a) that Saturn had rings and b) that they presented at different angles according to the season.  The Royal Society, founded in 1660, elected Huygens a member in 1662.

He recorded his mooning thus:
“ADMOUERE OCULIS DISTANTIA SIDERA NOSTRIS UUUUUUU CCCRRHNBQX"
which kindly gives a clue as to where in the universe he'd made his latest discovery "Shift your eye to our most distant star . . .UUU"
The answer is "“Saturno luna sua circunducitur diebus sexdecim horis quatuor": The moon of Saturn orbits in 16 days and 4 hours. Which is pretty darn cool, not only discovering the moon but calculating its orbit at the same time - not leaving many crumbs for his contemporaries. If you teach you might check out the NASA source [PDF] for this story: there's more anagram fun and a celestial crossword.

Brilliant though he be, Huygens acknowledged that he was standing on the shoulders of giants when it came to telescopes, star-gazing . . . and peeing on the lamp-post with anagrams. Notably Galileo Galilei [1564-1642] and Johannes Kepler [1571-1630]. Galileo was much less inclined to give a hat-tip to those who went before, preferring not to share his rather exclusive place in the sun. I know all this from Arthur Koestler's  The Sleepwalkers , [prev] his brilliant biographical history of the early astronomical discoveries. In 1610, Galileo [and simultaneously Simon Mayr in Bavaria] had recorded the four [brightest] moons of Jupiter. That's a bit of an easier problem because Saturn is at least 2x further away from any telescopes than Jupiter. But it's an outstanding achievement.

Galileo had a punt at making another coup about Saturn's satellites but tbh the quality of his telescopes weren't up for the challenge. Nevertheless he sent the astro-community one of his boasty anagrams:
"SMAISMRMILMEPOETALEUMIBUNENUGTTAURIAS"
everyone pretty much let him at it with his tedious isn't GG clever tricks but Kepler agonised about the puzzle far more than it was worth trying to get a handle on the inside of Galileo's Big head - and taking time off from his day-job, as well as from productive scanning the heavens rather than anagrams which could mean anything at all - or nothing.
Kepler's best guess: Salve umbistineum geminatum Martia proles 
"Hail, burning twin, offspring of Mars." Whatever that means! Me, I'd lock into the obvious VENUS in the puzzle and pointed my optics at the morning star.

Of Course and, like, duh, the answer was "Altissimum planetam tergeminum observavi" or "I have observed the highest planet [Saturn] as triplets". Squinting and screwing up his observing eye he convinced himself that he could see three bollupes to the planet whereas he was really seeing the opposite shoulders of Saturn's ring system bracketting the planet itself. Galileo was, accordingly, wrong but not as wrong as Kepler in this instance. But as I say above, these puzzles are not meant to solved except retro-actively and only by the author. The anagrams were intended to establish priority.

The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe was published in 1959, so it's probably out of print, and out of library, so maybe kindle is the way here. You can get the relevant part of the book including a couple more clever-clogs anagrams to play with.