Wampum

My pal P from Boston sent me some wonderful upbeat news about the rise and rise [it's the thermals silly] of bald eagles Haliaeetus leucocephalus in the contiguous 48 states. Seems that there are now more than 300,000 of these distinctive birds; up 4x from 75,000 just ten years ago.  They put it down to gradual draining of DDT from the environment - these apex predators accumulated those organochlorine pesticides and it rotted out the shells of their eggs. Remembering Rachel Carson's Silent Spring! It brought back the 1980 memory of driving from Boston to see The bald eagle at Quabbin Reservoir a 100 sq.km straggle of flooded river valley dammed in the 1940s to supply water to Boston and other communities in Massachusetts.  The appearance of that erratic must have been a big deal because it wasn't until 1989 that bald eagles successfully fledged young near Quabbin. Today there are at least 50 eagles making a living on and about Quabbin.

Needless to say, we didn't see the damned eagle, although we did get cold. Nowadays such ventures would be covered by twitter minute information updates and we could have driven to the best spot for sightings. I seem to remember we went into Amherst, one of the homes of U.Mass, for something to eat and warm up. We may have driven past Emily Dickinson's house at 280 Main Street.

I couldn't remember much of this after 40 years and wasn't even sure if Amherst was further West than Springfield MA. The answer is no: they are both in the Connecticut River Valley which runs more or less due South from Canada to Long Island Sound.

>Googling "Amherst" got me to the story of its purchase and settlement by Europeans from 1703, two generations after the littoral from Boston to New York and beyond had elbowed the First People aside to build pubs and churches. "John Pynchon of Springfield, down-river a piece, negotiated with three local blokes Umpanchla, Quonquont, and Chickwalopp from Nolwotogg (Norwottuck) upon ye River of Quinecticott (Connecticut)" and bought the Amherst area for "two Hundred fatham of Wampam & Twenty fatham, and one large Coate at Eight fatham wch Chickwollop set of, of trusts, besides severall small giftes".  Wampum consists of beads hand-crafted from the polished white centres of the shells of whelk Busycotypus canaliculatus or B. carica, and black / purple shell beads made from quahog Mercenaria mercenaria clamshells. The beads are small [~8mm x 4mm] and strung on threads for convenience. A fatham is 6ft = 1800mm long. Wampum was originally used to make decorative belts which acted as a certificate of authority. In time, the raw material for constructing these belts /sashes came to be used as currency.

Although these sea-shells were only available on the shores of Long Island sound, they travelled widely through NE North America as a wider circle of people speaking many different languages agreed to accept wampum in exchange for other goods - arrow-heads, beaver skins, one large coate, delft . . . like the basalt axes that travelled far and wide across the Pacific. The burghers of Nieuw Nederland [NY, NY] set the value as so many beads to the stuiver with black worth two white. Like Bitcoiners in the present times, the steel and water-power mentality of Dutch entrepreneurs turned a handicraft industry, largely in the hands of women, into mass-production pipelines which soon enough debased the value in a spiral of inflation. 

Like Chinese characters, wampum could be used to write messages, and record treaties, in a code / convention that transcended the spoken language. 

Crow[n]ing glory

 As a tree-hugger, one of my besties is the mighty ash Fraxinus excelsior at the bottom of our yard. This tree is directly downslope from our front door and has been occluding the sky and shading the yard, in Summer, since we moved here 25 years ago. It was obviously smaller back then, but it was still a tree [self-seeded and growing from the top of a stone bank] rather than a sapling. But squinting through one eye and marking lines on the kitchen window, I calculate that the tree is 8½ times taller than the shed beside it or about 28m high. I am very glad that ash has but little tendency to uproot itself because 28m is 4m more than the distance from the tree base to the front door.

This Spring, the ash has finally been adorned with a crown of twigs, courtesy of a crows' nest [L with Le Patron pointed out for scale] started by a pair of rooks Corvus frugilegus. The Beloved's theory is that until now the tree hasn't been tall enough for the rooks to feel safe enough to build a nest - it is at least 25m above the ground. I hope it works out for them . . . then again, maybe I don't: crows are big and noisy and they bully the smaller, prettier, quieter birds away from the tray of bread-crumbs which I put out most mornings after breakfast. The Beloved has had to park her car in a different place to stop it getting spackled with bird-shit. But on the silver-lining front, she was able to pick up a large basket of kindling from the ground immediately under the nest. Very rough estimate suggests that only a quarter or a third of the twigs brought to the nest-site actually get incorporated into the structure - and we've really not had any gales since the nest project started.

Yarborough

 In the mid-90s of the last century Anu Garg was a MSc computer science student in Ohio. While still student, because he had the technical capacity and the interest, he started wordsmith.org to deliver A Word A Day AWAD to interested subscribers. As an early adopter of the WWW and e-mail for communication outside of academia he got there firstest with the mostest and now runs Wordsmith and AWAD full time. There are ~ half a million subscribers to AWAD, including me, and this addition to my inbox has generated a few Blobs. That's a lot of outgoing e-mail traffic and there's a lot of incommming as well: some quite shirty and cross. On dit que Mr Garg is a OneMillionaire and his venture employs 4 people. I wish him well even when he is occasionally wrong . . .

Take AWAD 7th April 2021. Yarborough n.  In a card game, a weak hand, especially one in which no card is above a nine . . . the occurrence of such a hand [see R]. The actual odds are 1827 to 1. But those odds, that probability, is only true if a card game is Contract Bridge or Whist where a hand is 13 cards. Which was an opening for Clever Clogs to reply It's clear nobody Chez Garg plays cards [and more power to them all!]. The odds mentioned apply to a 13 card Bridge hand. A Yarborough Poker hand [8%; 12 to 1]  is a regular occurrence ; and a Yarborough Blackjack hand [37%; 2 to 1] happens pretty much every deal. It's unlikely Yarborough played Contract Bridge which didn't become trendy until after his death; more of a whist man.

Someone was clearly burning the midnight oil at AWAD head office in Seattle because ek dum I got back: "For the rest of us, you'll have to include what those percentages mean, what "12 to 1" and "2 to 1" mean, and how many cards each hand has in poker, bridge, etc. Thank you."

So I had to beef and butter up my reply for 500,000 Arts Block logophiles: The odds mentioned apply to a 13 card Bridge hand. In the standard 52 card deck, there are 32 cards with values 2 thru 9. The chance of getting 13 such cards is 32/52 x 31/51 . . . 21/41 x 20/40 = 0.00055 = 5.5 chances in 10,000 or, to use a convention commoner at race-courses and AWAD "1827 to 1".  A Yarborough Poker hand [5 cards; is considerably more likely: 32/52 x 31/51 . . . 29/49 x 28 x48 = 0.077 = 8% or 12 to 1] is a regular occurrence ; and a Yarborough Blackjack hand [2 cards; 32/52 x 31/51 = 0.374 = 37%or  2 to 1] happens pretty much every deal if there are a handful of players. 

This task was considerably lightened with Excel [L, show your working]. It was the first occasion I've had to use the function 

=product(C1:C5) 

as a shorthand for

= C1 * C2 *C3 * C4 * C5

so I've learned something from the exercise.

But really, without getting judgmental, are there a lot of people who don't know how many cards in a poker hand? Maybe my expensive education, normalised card-playing in an unhealthy way - although I've never played cards for real money.

Afterword: when the AWAD 980 weekly round-up came in late on Sunday, another comment of mine was published about "Apgar", based on my Women-in-Science Blob. 

Fundraiser: Anu Garg has offered a Covid-troubles moratorium for these coughing up actual money for a sub to AWAD. Only a subset of people are making money during the pandemic while many, many, more are struggling. He'd love for you to spread the word <hoho, see what I did there?> to all your friends'n'relations thus.

Sounday round-up

Bits 

• Manchán "32 Words" Magan talking about Ireland
• Giving Dara O'Briain back his fada.
• Rohin Francis gives the dope on Statins
• Celui qui tombe; theatre in the round
• RedBull Hardline downhill mountain biking
• planning
• actual
• Well fit? 83 y.o. climbs a 30m pole
• Julia Galef remembers her father
• you may choose to remember BeanDad
• The enigma of Elgar's Enigma Vars
• Seafarer abandonment; it's a thing.
• Shipbuilder inclusion it's a Tally Ho: The Whiskey Plank:

Nasreddin

Nasir ud din aka Nasreddin aka Nasruddín Hoja was born, a Sunni Muslim, in 1208 [ten years after the Frankish 4th Crusaders sacked Constantinople] somewhere in the Seljuk Empire and died in the fullness of his years in 1285 [just before the Crusader kingdoms in Asia were finally extinguished] more certainly in Akşehir in central Turkey. His life is remembered as a series of quippy anecdotes in which his persona shoulders a number of roles: joker and jokee. teacher and student, wise and foolish; respected and contemptuously dismissed. Many of these tales involve <pfffffft> collapse of stout party as pomposity & pretension are pricked; and injustice is exposed by irony. Nasreddin tales are known across the Arab and Arab-adjacent world. I suspect the parables are popular because they give power to the dispossessed and make subversive fun of The Man. Folklorists reckon that Nasreddin has accreted a number of different prototypical heroes under a single name; which explains some of the inconsistencies in his character.

This week is midterm break for Gdau.I and Gdau.II over in England and their doting Gparents have been chatting to them over Skype while the actual parents are slaving in the kitchen making dinner after work. Nasreddin had recently popped up over my horizon (with an impish smile and arched eyebrow) in a different context, so I shared a couple of food-adjacent Nasreddin tales.

Nasreddin and the banquet.
Nasreddin had to work for a living. Being a Mullah/Hodja didn't put bread on the table. One day after work, he knew that his wife was away, so decided to treat himself to dinner at an inn on his way home. The inn-keeper refused to serve such a scruffy, dusty, poor-looking customer. The Hodja went home, washed, changed into his best mullah-gown, his biggest mullah-turban and his glitteriest sandals and returned to the inn. Much bowing & scraping brings the Hodja to the top table where the knobs are eating. The soup arrives and the Hodja dunks his sleeves in he bowl making sure that the soup runs up his arm to the elbow. When the fish is served, the Hodja pops the best bits into the same capacious sleeves and tucks the lettuce into his hat. The meat course is disposed into his cummerbund. The Turkish Delight ends up in his purse. The inn keeper, the waiters and the other guests are confused and ask him to explain his peculiar behaviour. "Well", said the Hodja, "you refused to serve me when I came straight from work; but were delighted to serve my fancy clothes. It only seems proper therefore that the clothes should eat the food rather than me"

The Beggar and the Soup
A poor man had to beg for his dinner every day. One evening all he had garnered was a dry crust of bread. He went to the inn and asked for a small amount of soup to wet the bread, but the inn-keeper turned him out in the street. The poor man went round the back of the inn and held his crust in the steam of the soup tureen which was boiling near the kitchen's open window. The inn-keeper catches him and charges the poor man 2 piasters for the vapours. The poor man cannot pay, so the rapacious inn-keeper seeks justice from Nasreddin Hodja. Nasreddin takes two coins out of his pocket and asks the inn-keeper to approach. The Hodja rubs the two coins together next to the inn-keeper's ear and says
"There is your payment"
"That's ridiculous, that's just the sound of coins"
"Indeed: an entirely appropriate payment for the smell of soup"

The Wonders of Nature
Nasreddin is enjoying another siesta dozing under a Juglans regia walnut tree. He falls to thinking that Allah has arranged things in a rather foolish way: Such a big tree for such a small nut. If I was running things, I'd get better use out of the infrastructure  and give these tree pumpkin-sized fruit. As he muses, a walnut falls and strikes him painfully in the face. hmmm, the Hodja thinks, in Nasreddin's world I would be dead: perhaps nature knows more about how things should work than any mere mortal.

I bet you're sorry you weren't a fly on the Gdau skype-wall last Monday evening. Other people give Nasreddin their best shot: I -- II 

Prebiotic

Probiotics? Sooo yesterday! Sometime last year I sourced a 100g block of fresh yeast selling for €0.45 in our nearest Polish deli. That's a bargain: it's good for about 2 weeks of baked goods Chez Bob. It's also a pathetic sale for the hard-work Poles who run the shop, so I always buy something else: rye flour, cherries and kefir are often in the basket when I check out. None of these are normally on shopping list but they get chugged down in some form or another. During the brief time last year when travel was permitted, Dau.II and The Pep, her S.O., came to visit and we picked up yeast and kefir on the way home. Turns out that Pep is partial to a glass of kefir if it's put in front of him, so there was no difficulty in finishing the bottle.

Last week I was talking shite groceries with Dau.II and I reminded her that any  Cork Polski Sklep  would have yeast and kefir. And she made some comment about the kefir having probiotic benefit for her bloke. I demurred: the microbes in kefir [or yoghurt, creme fraiche, koumiss] would be a monoculture which probably wouldn't survive the acid gauntlet of Pep's tum and wouldn't cause a blip on the make-up of his intestinal flora. What we all need, I asserted, was prebiotics: the foods [mostly plants, not too much] which encourage the growth of a diverse, robust and mutually supportive community down there.

It's ridiculous how limited our diet is w.r.t. to incorporated species; people, or at least country people, 100 years ago ate a much more varied diet: I mentioned medlars Mespilus germanica recently as a fruit nobody eats anymore. Service trees Sorbus torminalis, rowan Sorbus aucuparia provide other minority interest fruits which benefit from bletting. If you live near the coast sea beet Beta vulgaris, samphire Salicornia europea [bowlful L] and sea kale Crambe maritima will all help vary the diet. And that's before you even get your feet wet going for dulse Palmaria palmata and other algae. And all that chick-weed Stellaria media, fat-hen Chenopodium album and good king henry Chenopodium bonus-henricus going to waste on a field-margin near you. Go easy on the chick-weed, though: saponin alert.

There are two scientific angles on this.
1) Each species will have its own characteristic, unique community of microbes, some of which will arrive viable in the digestive tract. You want to provide the biggest choice of candidates for a new dimension of microbial biochemical capability to get established inside. Because your flora is different from mine and that of your roomies / bed-fellows; although your floar will be shared with your 'family'. This could be why herbal remedies appear to work for some people some of the time: that plant provides a key to this locked gut.

2) Each plant species has wildly different ability to absorb and concentrate particular minerals: not only lithium, but potassium, calcium, selenium, lead, cadmium. Minerals need to be available in just-so concentrations and dietary intake is one way to keep particular elements above baseline and usable by the complex system of interactions which is human physiology. 

Look after the food and the pro-biotics will look after themselves. And let's not forget the viruses.

Make the most of studenting

Dau.I is on vacation! She's been one of the few people actually working in her library service; because all the libraries are closed and the library staff are kicking their heels working from home. I suggested that The Parable of the Talents might be an appropriate metaphor. In this tale, some "servants" are given an opportunity to make the most of things without supervision. Then "The Lord" returns and calls everyone into account [it's The Bible, you may think Pearly Gates if that's your thing]. 

Everyone is getting a "Well done, good and faithful servant" until the last servant confesses "I went and hid thy talent in the earth: lo, there thou hast that is thine".  His lord answered and said unto him, "Thou wicked and slothful servant, thou knewest that I reap where I sowed not, and gather where I have not strawed . . . Thou oughtest therefore to have put my money  yada yada". Eeee, quite cross, The Lord was. If we're told that we can stay at home on full pay, most of us will say whoopee, lie in, get up for brunch, spend the afternoon watching Netflix, or pottering in the garden if it's fine . . . until a snifter before dinner and more TV until bedtime time. For about two weeks; it gets boring after that. Effectives will then start using the time productively doing some form CPD (continuing personal development) or, in Dau.I's case, thinking about re-purposing libraries in a digital age.

When The Lord of Libraries gets vaccinated and calls her into the headmaster's study, Dau.I will be able to say "Studenting, Lord, I've been working really hard on my degree course and learning a helluva lot; only some of which was on the curriculum". Because that's what college is about; only about 20% is about the Learning Outcomes and the specifics of the syllabus; the rest is 

• learning to hold your drink; 
• holding your pal's drink while they do something that requires two hands; 
• learning which deadlines are soft; 
• meeting the love of your life; 
• polishing your crap-detector
• finding out whether you are an owl or a lark
• and still getting enough sleep
• discovering that dishes are easier to wash when fresh
• learning whom to trust

And that 20%? most of it you will definitely and forever forget within a week of the relevant exam. And most of it is padding out the course so it looks like it is worth 5 or 10 Bologna credits. Like when my colleague Tony was allowed to teach viral genetics to 1st Year students because that's all he knew about and they may as well have that as anything else. Dau.I and her peers got into a bit of a barney with one of their on-line tutors who had chid them for obsessing about the marks. One of the students called this hypocrisy out with a rhetorical flourish: "if you predicate the entire course, and success in it, on the goddamn marks, then what else do you expect our attitude to be?"  Only the best students weather this demoralizing, dis-enfranchising and frankly boring process to come out the other end a powerful force for good and capable of thinking for themselves. But it's okay: the rest of us have learned from the extra-curricular stuff which is available in college: how to row; how to argue; how to love . . . how to live.