I've had a pretty good pandemic:
From which we derive the words for character traits like Melancholy, Phlegmatic and Sanguine. Nobody now believes that depression is due to the spleen making an excess of black bile but the principle did put doctors onto the idea of checking bodily out-puts. If you have experienced a lot of snotty kids in surgery, you can tell from the colour and smell when an excess of rhinovirus has been superseded by a more threatening bacterial infection. In the Netherlands toilets are designed so that user can easily scrutinize the stool before flushing - which is handy for getting on top of another pinworm infestation. It is a rare visit to your medico that doesn't involve a urine sample.
In the old days, the doctor was likely to dip the tip his [sic in the old days] pinkie in the sample bottle and taste it. We have a mighty set of over-lapping, complementary physiological mechanisms for controlling the amount of circulating glucose. Waste not, want not: glucose is the primary currency for energy in the body and without a source of energy cells are quickly dead. The normal interplay between insulin and glucagon scoops up excess glucose before the kidney gets a chance to dump any. You're likely in trouble with sweet pee [Lathyrus odoratus - not].
You may have noticed that your doctor doesn't do the finger thing! They rather shake one out from their vial of 100x Multistix and dip that instead. That gives a more or less instant read out of Blood, Leucocytes, Nitrite, Specific Gravity, Glucose, Protein, Ketones, Ph , Urobilinogen and Bilirubin. At 43c it really is extraordinary good diagnostic value. Novice clinicians may need to read the manual [above R] - not to be confused with a Pantone colour swatch for matching the curtains with your new dinner-service - but old hands know what key colour change they are looking for. We have Helen Murray Free, and her husband Al, to thank for this now taken-for-granted appropriate technology.
Helen Murray was born in Pittsburg in 1923 and was all set for an Arts major at college reading English and Latin when Pearl Harbor was bombed and vacancies opened up in blokey science disciplines. Murray switched to Chemistry - if you're smart you can do that - and graduated in 1944 and got a job with Miles Labs in their QC and diagnostics division. But she transferred sideways into the research division run by Al Free and the two of them quickly became a complementary and very effective team. They were tasked to develop new diagnostics for urinary glucose. This was important because there were treatments for diabetes [thank you Banting and Best!], so patients could go forward with hope from a reliable test.Like a lot of chemical tests, they were looking for a colour change which would light up for glucose and nothing else. Their first products involved soluble pills that could be popped into a urine sample. Clinitest used cupric sulfate, citric acid, sodium hydroxide and carbonate for the fizz. Miles Labs' cornerstone product was Alka-Seltzer so <fizz> was almost required. But that was wasteful because it needed an extra bottle - the rest of the sample could be used for other diagnostics, sent to a specialist urology lab. Creating another diagnostic test - for Hepatitis A - set the Free lab on a trajectory to make a single product that would do multiple tests at once. Another key conceptual break-through was dry-testing where the active ingredients were migrated to a plastic strip which could be dunked. That saved on the extra bottles and effectively replaced Galen's medieval finger-tip. And the idea could be scaled up to make multiple tests from one product. All sorts of teething problems had to be confronted and solved: separating the various chemical cocktails so they didn't bleed into each other; ensuring stable shelf life. Of all the one-time use plastic products which are available, pee-sticks have arguably the best utility:carbon-footprint ratio.
Helen Murray Free [interview] continued working through six children; co- wrote The Book Urinalysis in Laboratory Practice with Al and retired in 1982 before she turned 60. She then devoted the next few decades to making chemistry understandable and accessible to girls and other groups normally excluded from the Joy of Science. She won the National Medal of Technology & Innovation in 2009. She died in the fullness of her years last Saturday having made a difference.How do you identify? I have recently embraced being An Old, but I don't tbh click heels with delight at being a grandparent, although many do, who can. For all my adult years I've considered myself to be EUropean even when [1973-1993] I was strictly EECropean. That was from an ambivalent attitude to the count[r]y where I was born and which I left at the age of 19. My current book has given me a new sense of identity - as well as being An Old, I am Old Internet; note to self - get a badge made.
Dau.II put me on to Gretchen McCulloch [R], Lauren Gawne and Lingthusiasm, their chatty, fun informative podcast getting enthusiastic about linguistics. Working through four years of back-catalogue, there have been references to Because Internet, Gretchen McCulloch's book on "Understanding the New Rules of Language". I was surprise and delight when I saw that the book was available on the Borrowbox's patchy and eccentric catalogue of audiobooks. Old Internet People [meeeee!] were there before pretty much everyone else. I was using the internet reg'lar for ten years before Tim Berners-Lee invented the WWW. I created an WWW-server and wrote an early Irish website using hand-cranked HTML. I spent rather tooo long, on company time, making 8px x 8px .jpg icons for the ToC for embnet.news, the newsletter of the EUQuango of which INCBI was the Irish node. McCulloch identifies another cohort of Pre-Internet People; these are people of my age who ignored the internet for the longest possible time. These old buffers are really likely to identify as grandparents because they came aboard only/mainly to see photos of distant grandchilder and <ooo frisson> occasionally Skype them.Another key question for binning the demographics is "did you embrace the internet before or after your parents". Teens keep shifting the territory on which they communicate - Bebo, Facebook, Insta, Tiktok at least partly to be in another room than their parents. Comparing, flirting, checking, nattering are just about impossible if Mum can overhear. Why, it's almost as mortifyin' as knowing your parents have sex. McCulloch is a scholar and a linguist. She's interested in how language is used; like many linguists she's a descriptivist rather than a judgmental proscriptivist. And the internet provides a huge, already transcribed archive of how actual real people talk with each other. This is different from the language used when a linguist is among them taking notes, or when they are writing an essay for school.
When Pat the Salt retired 30 years ago he had a kitchen table with a distant view of the sea and a manual typewriter about the same age as himself. He set about writing stories about his life and times in Africa. Wanari the Salt-trader is wonderfully evocative of a different place and time. Like The Blob, Pat's typings became a daily stream of consciousness tale of events real and imagined concerning people he'd known back in the day. Salty tales of Mountbatten of Burma, whom Pat met in Nigeria in 1965, and his champagne lunches with an androgynous tennis-coach. The magnum opus filled many many xerox boxes of recycled paper. Slightly more than strictly necessary because Pat would . . . use . . . ellipsis . . . to space . . . his thoughts. This form of punctuation is, according to Gretchen McCulloch, widespread in some arenas of the internet. It indicates a chummy informality, partly because it is transgressive of the punctuation rules learned in school. McCulloch traces the habit back to another era and another medium - PostCards - and has analysed a database of hundreds of PCs sent to Ringo Starr in the 1950s and 1960s.
Informal comms tell us far more about who we are, what we care about, who we care about, than any of the newspapers of record, formal biographies and stately histories with which librarians like to fill their shelves.
My audiobook of Because Internet is read by the author which is good. As a media commentator with a good ear, she is acutely aware of the medium and has explicitly acknowledged that the spoken word has additional facility for conveying meaning [tone, timbre, emPHASis] which aren't possible in print. BUT it is less easy to catch some important nuances of internet comms: Capitalisation is one example; lol is not the same as LOL. Using the uc/lc conventions of your peers is an important gauge for whether your interlocutor is one of us. McCulloch makes several concessions to make the audio-book a separate product to the dead-tree version. My audio"reader" has a speed button where you can make the voice go 1.25x or even 3.0x faster than it was dictated. That's great if your return deadline looms and you want to finish the book. I might recommend listening to Because Internet at 0.75x speed because nobody would accuse McCulloch of speaking a languid Southern drawl. However, in whatever medium, at whatever speed, read this book, it explains so much about current discourse.
I have an old friend who was a commercial lawyer in London who was the World's best negotiator when it came to buying and selling airports and powers-stations. Heck, somebody has to do it and you might as well give the business your best effort. Years ago we were comparing notes over a bottle of red and he told me of a recent coup when, after 3 days of hot and heavy negotiations, at 0230hrs on the last possible day to strike a deal, his team added [or subtracted, I forget] a clause in the contract which was worth $1,000,000 [or ¥1,000,000, it doesn't matter] to his company's bottom line. The amount doesn't matter so much as the sense of putting one over on the opposition. I guess it was framed as "Okay okay, we're all tired, we'll give you THIS, if you concede that", and sleep deficit, the need for shower and a glass of orange juice clouded their judgment.
But it may be that professional ethicists were top of the class at college in the Arts Block; and they had for sure been top of the class in high-school. They have accordingly been groomed and coddled by parents teachers and peers as being a cut above the rest of us . . . so the rules don't apply to them. That argument probably held true for doctors who continued to smoke for decades after the data came in that smoking upped the odds for cancer, COPD, emphysema, coronaries. And it wasn't just numbers in the BMJ: those same GPs were referring their coughing patients up the medical food chain for drugs, surgery, chemo and an early death.
My lifetime experience of working in science is that it is for sure not the selfless pursuit of objective truth. It is to be expected that successful scientists /anyones are ambitious, hard-working and competitive. What's a bit more disturbing is how invested they are in their own theories / research agendas. We should be resolutely testing our hypotheses; rather than consciously or unc. looking for evidence that will bolster our pre-conceptions. The pressure on researchers to deliver, and deliver on a [funding] timescale, has led too many to finagle their results to get a paper out. PIs, who are ultimately responsible for what the lab turns out, too often get caught in the cycle of enthusiasm for the 'right' result. You may bet your sweet bippy that more fibs work their way into the literature than are caught by RetractionWatch.
If you missed the shoe-making connexion implied by the title, the full proverb is "the cobbler's children have no shoes" . . . because daddy works all day to put food on the table and is too tired when he comes home to count toes under the table. Every person, very organization has to do some self-care or there won't be nothing to give.
The conceit was that she'd sample croissants across the land for buttery, crispy, puffy, deliciousness and give each one a mark out of /10. There were some dire 3/10s on the journey and only two 9.5s. But neither man nor woman can live on croissant alone and Cloake draws on her extensive network of francophone gourmands to secure reservations at a series of fancy restaurants to pitch for The Best examples of the classics of French cuisine: boeuf bourguignon; tarte tatin; tartiflette; poule au pot. So much reduced stock, so much double cream, so half bottles of rouge; so much butter. Working up an appetite converting your flabby London calves into knotted whip-cord is the perfect antidote to this coronary-inducing rich fare. One of the joys of France is that plonk is so cheap you don't have to think twice about adding a generous glug to the cooking.
I don't think recipes do as well in audio as on a page but, like Elizabeth David, the recipes are embedded in the terroir full of options so sound adventurous and empowering rather than depressingly proscriptive. My experience in the kitchen is that you have quite wide leeway in quantities and ingredients before you construct something that is inedible. Recipes that convert 1oz to 28.5 g rather 30g are probably not written by a cook.
There's a lovely moment right at the end of the book, when Cloake and Eddie Merckx, her sturdy wheels, arrange to meet a pal with chanpagne under L'Arc de Triomphe in the middle of Paris. Having been told off for a) having a bicycle b) swigging bubbly under a war memorial, she is approached by two gendarmes. But rather than giving her a further wigging, the two lads are just interested in the bike and the journey. Full of admiration, the younger cop steps back and raises his cap: "Chapeau, Madame!" Formidable and, like, Ouf!
