Spectral optics

Isaac Newton was a relentlessly curious experimenter. In one investigation he inserted a bodkin in behind his eyeball to see how distorting the sphere affected his perception. Apart from gravity, we associate him with the "visible spectrum"; spectrum has become a metaphor for other "within the normal" ranges. Actually, neurotypical folk [which might include me and you - I'm still awaiting a diagnosis] tend to Other people on the autistic spectrum. Othering, especially among school-children, can involve brutal, persistent mental-and-physical hazing, teasing and bullying. It makes life harder than it needs to be for the recipients of this attention.

Diary entry Friday 12 Oct 2018. "There’s a girl on Twitter called Greta Thunberg (we’ve been following each other for a while now) . . ." In hindsight it is hard to credit that, less than 3 years ago, St Greta of Climate was a distant marginalised voice just a girl on Twitter. That entry is from Dara McAnulty's Diary of a Young Naturalist a record shit-happens, mainly in Co Fermanagh and Co Down, from Spring Equinox 2018 to Spring Equinox 2019. In the middle of the book the McAnulty family moves from one side of Ulster to the other which causes a good bit of change-anxiety for young Dara and his younger sibs Lorcan and Bláthnaid who are all somewhere on the spectrum. But here's the thing, first day at the new school Dara is met by a young chap in his class who is his designated buddy; who also shares his interest in the natural world and also the unnatural world of Xbox gaming. There are poignant entries in the diary been here a week and no bullying . . . been here a month and no bullying. Now here's the thing: how is it that one school has systemic bullying and the other doesn't? and what are a) the Head Teacher b) the rest of the staff c) the parents and d) the Department of Education doing about it before the next academic year and the start of another round of institutional inhumanity. Note Greta Thunberg was also bullied in school.

I tease The Beloved about her guru Thich Nhat Hahn being Dalai Lama Light, but that's crass and buys into the Harry Potter Winner-takes-all-ism which is the bane of fame and reputation in our current world system. TNH has a different message, different tech, different presentation, it is othering to bang all elderly meditation blokes in robes into the same ashram as interchangeable cogs in the mindfulness industry. Likewise, it is easy to dismiss Dara McAnulty as Greta-lite on the ecowarrior charts. Obvs Dara is going to get some traction in Ireland because he is Our Ecowarrior but he's got something to say for all of us who are left of the planet. He says, for example, a benison over the 70% of British house sparrows Passer domesticus which didn't leave descendants from 1970.  That's not on the red-list by any means but I remember saying ~50 years ago that soon enough there'll be nothing left but rats, cockroaches, sparrows and starlings after all life's wonderful diversity had been swept clean by whatever Miscreant Humanity had been up to in 1970.

The McAnulty book is pretty impressive for a 17 y.o. but some of the extravagant praise by such Econames as Chris Packham and Robert Macfarlane seems a bit dodgy in its sub-text. It's a little like Samuel "Curmudgeon" Johnson's [prev] — 'Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.'  Where you substitute An autist's writing is . . .".  One thing that I really did get from the book is an insight into one autistic mind. Dara is at pains to note that his brother Lorcan, with whom he's been sharing genes and breakfast cereal for 15 years, has a quite different autistic mind and a different external presentation also.

Buuut, in the Acknowledgements, McAnulty tips a hat to Adrian, at Little Toller, for not trying to 'adult' my voice in the editing process. Which is nice, but a sensitive editor could have done all that and yet suggested some word changes so that this blobby reader was not brought up all standing at the choice of some not-quite-right adjectives. At 17 nobody has had enough time to read enough books or listen to enough podcasts to nail the current nuanced meaning of words in English. Getting this time / experience under your belt is one definition of wisdom insofar as that is different from intelligence [hint - it is]. FWIW, Greta Thunberg's book "No One is too Small to Make a Difference" is even slighter, both in page count and content, than Dara's Diary.

I look forward to seeing this chap develop. I may even get to meet him on a raptor watch if 'my' buzzards and 'his' red kites Milvus milvus finish up on the same mountain shoulder.

Humble hubris

I spent the 90s pushing the frontiers of science in computational biology. That's a whopping big amorphous field but my boss had peed on a lamp-post that marked a small section of the frontier of science. I was put to work with the pick of power and the axe of analysis reducing the forest of entropy to something we could understand. I wrote - and published - some software to make our sort of analysis more efficient. But I also used existing software because research was hard enough without having to re-invent the wheel for each analysis. In the course of stress-testing PHYLIP, a software suite written by Joe Felsenstein in Seattle, I revealed a bug in one of the programs. Joe duly added my name to a list of people who'd found one for the team. Felsenstein had/has a beard worthy of other computer gods like Denis Ritchie and Ken Thompson.

I was following a peculiar self promotion story on Metafilter which reminded me that I'd had a [mortifyin' in hindsight] transaction with Felsenstein about ten years prior to my public-service debugging venture. In 1982, I had to print half a dozen copies of my PhD thesis as well as the official copies for the university / department archives. 5 of those spare copies came back to me, because my thesis committee didn't need a permanent record of the labour. In my intense echo chamber, I thought my stuff was important and interesting and sent each volume out to people whom I admired in the field of computational biology. The only person who replied [it was before WTF? was a thing] was Joe Felsenstein at U.Washington, Seattle, who said . . . he'd passed it on to a Canadian graduate student because "Canadian Maritimes" appeared in the title. 

I tell ya, science is largely one enormous futility closet. You work away for a year, or three, or four, stumbling around until to find your feet and a compass and, after much effort you write the results up in a single manuscript. This document has to be written to a rigid format in peculiarly stilted language. Most scientific papers, despite the imprimatur of an editor and two independent peer reviewers, sink almost without a ripple.

Moranipause

My daughters are big fans of Caitlin Moran; who done good as a journalist and public intellectual without going to secondary school. When they've read the latest Moranifesto they pass it along to me; so I've become a bit of a groupie. Her latest More than a Woman (2020) brings us to date to share some perspective from the shoulders of a 45 y.o. holding up the world. It's a journey. How to Build a Girl was followed How to Be a Woman.  The position for the latest book is the caring professionals and amateurs are disproportionately women with more and more people in need of care. Often a woman will be responsible both as primary childcare and managing the disintegration of both her parents and her in-laws . . . as well holding down a regular job to pay half the gargantuan mortgage.

My residual desire for Social Media is currently met by Metafilter where people discuss things they come across in the media and blogosphere. Metafilter leans left, USA, BLT. All the Republicans have been driven out; and those who are hesitant about vaccines don't brag about it. One of the rules of Metadiscourse is that you must rein in the desire to contribute if you don't have skin in the game. Someone will perk up with Oh no, not #notallmen again if a patriarch like me bridles at being thrown out of the bus with the latest misogynistic monster of media. There is no pain that cis-het ♂ silverbacks can experience which comes close to every day life for black folks. It must be hard to live in a world where you are ex blokio officio responsible for all the wrongs in the world.

Moran addresses with this in a What About the Men? chapter triggered by having her youngest 19 y.o. brother coming to bunk in their married couple two kids London home. This young feller's position is that it's harder for him to navigate the 21stC than it is for women of the same age and demographic. Which comes across as whiny, snow-flaky and bring back National Servicey. Perhaps because she loves her brother, Moran is able to cut him and his peer-group some slack: partly because shouting at him/them is only going to polarize the dialogue even further. And send men in droves off to their cliché pubs, clubs, soccer and Men's Sheds. Still better to be complaining about the ref while watching Match of the Day, than failing to decide between pills or hanging and taking the car out for one last reckless spin. Nobody ever buys men flowers. Men are still dressed like, and behave like, it was 1921. Their roles and their emotional life haven't evolved in 100 years except that in addition to Breadwinner they've also added plongeur, chauffeur, aupair and boulanger to their To Do list. Indeed they can't play the Breadwinner card either because Herself is out to work as well. No wonder they are bewildered.

Another group who are all sheets to the wind in a sea of troubles are teenage girls. Eating disorders and self-harm are no respecters of money or social class and there is a lot of it about. Moran's take is that teenagers have had to shoulder a burden of responsibility about the state of the world which, because young, they are ill-equipped to deal with. This is made worse by St Greta of Thunberg being out there appearing to deal with the world's existential crises and setting an impossibly high bar on other teenagers to be similarly brilliant and effective. Their parents talk about how adults have fucked over the world but that the brilliant youth of today will sort it out for us all. Whaaaaa'? why are we laying the solution on the kids?  It's really hard to work out a script for parents of a troubled teen. One thing for certain, making them responsible for the emotional distress of the parents is no help at all. Moran didn't get her head and her role sorted until her daughter was beginning to see a chink of light in a cycle of anorexia and razors. There are loads of heads out there sounding off about the causes and cures of the epidemic but talk is cheap and mis-steps are legion. But not all of them have been there - as a parent or troubled teen. 

Moran has skin in the game, so is worth listening to. She deals with weighty topics with a light touch; sometimes laugh-aloud funny.  A dash of humility and hefty shake of compassion leaven the mix. The last chapter reflect on how her role is shifting from middle-aged woman to Hag. It won't lessen her responsibilities much just smooze them out a bit so they seem like a helping hand rather than an obligatory part of the daily routine. I suspect she's roughing out the chapter headings for How to Bewilder the Cailleach.

Saint Pambo's Day

Pambo, one of the early Desert Fathers of the Coptic church, is a little bit like Nasreddin in having mildly amusing tales attached to his fame-name. He was said to be a bit moany-moany po-face much of the time and some fellaheen decide to see could they make the saint crack a smile. They put a feather on a baulk of timber and made a great show "two-six heave" of effort to carry it into the saint's presence. He laughed at their extravagant antics and they hooted back "made you larf made you larf har har har". Saint Pambo the Serious replied "I'd did not laugh with joy at your antics, rather with ironic contempt at your foolishness". He was also known as Saint Dick.

• Cake 🎂 disasters are fixable.
  
• Katie "math" Steckles on Archimedean Solids
• Efficiency: Maersk is king
• Efficiency: tandem vs bike
• Efficiency: old gravity rope-way
• Craft: old style tiles
• Beer: old yeast is the best yeast a challenge
• Old shanty is the best shanty
• Containers backed up globally
• Les Marins D'Iroise – Santiano
• Proprioception in hawks: head still body moves
• Michael "Well 'ard" Caine in Korea.

wot are we like?

Dau.II and her feller came across country to visit for a few days last week. When you double number of mouths, it opens up the menu a bit. It's not really worth making, from scratch, a chicken pie for one; with company there can be economies of scale . . . and >!lamb vindaloo!<. [aside: vindaloo is borrowed from Portuguese de vinha d'alhos - the wine and garlic marinade which starts the process off]. The vindaloo was all hopped up with spices because we are all well 'ard on the scoville scale. One of the consequences was that Bob le Plongeur had to wash-up 3 spice jars.

There was a time when we'd bags of "Indian" spices and decant them into little jars on the spice rack. But if the family have left home and you're not inviting the neighborhood to eat regularly, then many of the volatiles have evaporated or gorn orf before the big bag is empty. So now I buy red white black pepper; cumin, turmeric, coriander, from ALDIDL in robust glass jars with solid plastic snap-lids incorporating a shaker [examples L]. It is a terrible wrench to throw these handy, cleanable, functional and re-usable objects away. We have a box in the shed that has enough of these glass mini-bottles to make a complete chess-set - black and white pieces both.

In these The End of Days I'm doing my best to insulate my future self from regret about the food and materials that I heedlessly sent to land-fill before I knew any better.  It will be embarrassing, noisome, and dangerous to be making trips to a post-Apocalypse Powerstown dump excavating a cliff of trash 20m tall looking for glass jars, steel cans and shirts-missing-a-button.

Seməcolon

 It's that damn schwə again. I think that Borrowbox has my number and probably more on the button than, say, youtube which has generated a very tiresome cardboard cutout of what I actually desire from that channel. There I was coming to the end of David Crystal's nifty Story of English in 100 Words and started casting about for the next best thing in audible erudition. Before I got bored browsing, up popped Cecelia Watson's Semicolon: the past present and future of a misunderstood mark. I'll have that, quotha! It's read by Pam Ward, who gives the book a racy, clearly articulated, voice that makes it sound like Dorothy Parker carrying the day over lunch at the Algonquin Hotel. Me, I pronounce the i in semi /sɛmi/-final because I'm not American with their /sɛmaɪ/-trailers. Ward almost disappears the vowel; hence the ə in the title. Maybe that's how all educated Americans pronounce semicolon: I can't recall ever having had a punctuation chat during my Boston years, where I could have found out.

A whole book is more than most people can imagine could be written about a minority interest punctuation mark. But in a way that's an excellent reason to write one. This blue dot on which we all jostle for attention is a too often experienced as a schmeer of unbumpy trivial discourse. All those phatic G'days and What a miserable summers. Such a deadening view; we yearn for something, almost anything, to perk up our horizons. I do eclectic: islands, ichneumons, Yvonne, ice. I can usually find time for something different, especially if it's been worked up into something more substantive than a hilarious tik-tok or a laconic tweet. It's a bit like Moby Dick, a book whose semicolon use is cited with approval by Watson. Once you start following your nose down any rabbit hole you're bound to turn up something worthy of attention. Maybe not, though? I guess positive publication bias plays a part: if you dive deep down a couple of side channels and come up empty, then you move on to something which engages the attention.

For me, one of the factors about the book that commands respect is that Cecelia Watson has changed her mind on the subject of punctuation. When she was young and institutionalised she was a bit of an apostrophe Nazi. But after securing a gig teaching creative writing, she changed the direction of her red pen. Students have a hard enough furrow to plough in creating something that is true, rings true, and is original. For many of them, grammar rules, punctuation rules get in the way: sucking all the spit out of the creative juices. If you're afraid of being wrong all the time, you ain't doing science; and you're probably not doing much of anything that's worth your committed effort.

You might be surprised that semicolons and their use have a political impact but Watson makes this claim in a chapter featuring Martin Luther Knig and David Foster Whiteass. Famously in April 1963 MLK wrote an open Letter from Birmingham City Jail : "My Dear Fellow Clergymen: . . ." which contains 37 ;;;s and is consciously written in SWE Standard White Written English as a rhetorical gambit to establish empathy among one highly educated person and others similar but not incarcerated. That is, for Watson, OK MLK. A generation later, David Foster Wallace, author, teacher and public intellectual insisted that his black students must/should also write in SWE because if they wrote as they spoke [in AAVE African American Vernacular English] their words would be dismissed by the establishment and their ideas would never get any traction in public discourse. Whoa! cries Watson who makes these goddam rules about how people should communicate? The Patriarchy, exemplified in this instance by David Foster Wallace, is who. And maybe, towards the end of her book, Watson suggests that it is past time that The Patriarchy is using SWE as a bastion to keep the proles out there grubbing roots, gerunds and, indeed semicolons, from the dirt. Rather than plucking juicy grammatical, properly punctuated, fruit from the Hanging Gardens of The Ivory Tower.

Another author cited with approva; is essayist and public thinker Rebecca Solnit. One of the points made in that chapter is how hard good writers work for each sentence. How each subsidiary clause; each separate contingent idea; might involve hours or days of research and fact-checking. Semicolon the book is, must be, like that. There's something about the permanent record about a book: the idea that it will outlive the author that makes it worth a bit of effort not to be obviously wrong. Watson has written the cocktail party chatter essay Nine Things You Didn’t Know About the Semicolon if you don't have the money [$15.99] or the time [3hr:24m] for the Big Girl version. 

Good stuff; good fun; recommended.

The Lives of the Cell

Oldies but Goodies Department: You really should read The Lives of the Cell: notes of a biology watcher by Lewis Thomas [prev].

Yonkies but Goodies Department: everything a  needs to know about the contents of a plant cell . . . drawn by Gdau.I [9½], which arrived for my birthday. I hope it was some recycled school work rather than created specially for me. In any case it's well above the median for what I grew to expect when this drawing was turned in by 1st Year Biology students [19½] at The Institute. 

The annoying thing with the voting age students is that pictures like this were routinely turned in as part of a report about microscopy. With a standard optical microscope, even if the material is stained as well as could be expect, you just can't see that much detail. Mitochondria are about the size of a bacterium like Escherichia coli - 1.5μm - that is just resolvable with the 100x objective lens. But only if you use a drop of oil which exactly the same refractive index as glass to connect the lens with the slide. Without this "immersion oil", the distortion as the light bends at the glass-air-glass transitions fuzzes everything up. It's the same as when a bamboo appears to bend when you put it into water. It's something that spear-fishers have to compensate for if they are going to bring home the bacon.

Ribosomes [the gizmos ⌀20nm which convert mRNA into protein] are about 50x smaller than mitochondria so they are absolutely invisible with bench-top optical equipment. And a lot of the other functional structures - golgi apparatus, vacuoles, endoplasmic reticulum, amyloplasts etc. - are, optically just water; in other words the exact same material at the soup [cytoplasm] in which they all sit. Contrary to what most folks believe, the microscope is of limited use for scoping sub-cellular function. Christian de Duve [R] needed a blender and a bunch of test-tubes [and a brain the size of a planet, of course] to discover lysosomes.