Fall of Icarus

 I've been paragliding, I even caught a thermal and almost lost my lunch. Then I had a bad take-off, landed hard and [it subsequently transpired], broke two ribs. It's 20 years ago, and I have no intention of having another go to get airborne.

Toby Ferris has been paragliding too. His Short Life in a Strange World Birth to Death in 42 Panels is my current audiobook. The conceit is that,
because he is 42;
because his father was recently dead at 84 [2 x 42];
because Pieter Bruegel the Elder's entire oeuvre is 42 attributed works
because Toby has two young sons himself
. . . he feels compelled to open the doors of perception, stand in front of each publicly accessible Elder Bruegel and reflect on life, death, the Universe and everything. No postcard, or arty book need apply - it must be a several years road-trip to be there. More Bruegel-inspired writing.

The first picture for such intense contemplation is Landscape with the Fall of Icarus painted in ?1558? and currently viewable at Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, aka Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België. Icarus himself occupies only a fragment of a Narnia like landscape and in deed only his legs and a drift of feathers appears above the wave - Bruegel has made him a shocking but incidental, distant, event in the broad sweep of late-medieval normality.  The painting whooshes Ferris back to his paragliding days when a more experienced, divil-may-care member of his group foolishly larks about while aloft swinging wildly beneath his canopy . . . until he spills all the air from his vital support and plummets to earth; landing with a reverberating thump, on his back, in the gorse. Fantastically he is not dead or even seriously injured. although he spends many weeks in hospital recovering from the results of his folly.

Actually, The Fall is not nowadays believed to be the work of Bruegel de Oude, but rather a copy of a Bruegel original; indeed maybe not even that. But details or attribution should never stand in the way of a great story of real life imitating art. Indeed, the existence of many copies of many certain-sure Bruegel have been valuable in abstracting meaning and de-layering the palimpsest of a work of art. There are, for example, no innocents in the original of the Massacre of the Innocents, all the slaughtered children have been over-painted as sheep, or parcels, or geese. But the full monstrosity of the tale is in your face [and heart] in many of the numerous extant copies. Many of these copies were generated by the atelier of Pieter Breughel the Younger, a man with more acumen at cashing in on his father's legacy than actually applying paint to panel.

Short Life in a Strange World [excerpt] is a find, in that I chose it, because available within a month, after scrolling scrolling scrolling through the finite catalogue of audiobooks available on Borrowbox. It works fine in the ear: I've had it along for the ride walking the hill, washing the dishes, doing the messages and is not too much of a loss that I can't see the the picture described in such obsessive insightful detail. You may get a little TMI about the issues & peculiarities of the Ferris family but maybe that will encourage you to look at the dysfunctions of your own tribe. For a man born just about 500 years ago, Bruegel's reflections on hatching, matching and dispatching haven't become a whit less relevant.

Sun Moon Stars Bright Shining

. . . quagmire

• Forensic typography
• Cost nursing home care RTE
• Walkable bikable cities - way to go!
  
• Da[R]a Ó Briain spills the beanz at Oxford
• He was adopted - didn't know that, me.
  
• Depopulation in Spain
• Kansas tornado as it happens 
  
• Run Henry run. 100m in 12s, with rugger ball.
  
• Fud
• Extra Virgin Oil
• Annato Leicester cheese
• Cornish pasty crimping
• Cornish clotted cream
  
• Science of fat in bread
  

Minié killié

I've mentioned evidence to suggest that conscripts are reluctant point a gun at The Other side and pull the trigger. It is based on analysis by Dave Grossman of unfired, loaded rifles picked up after the slaughter at Gettsburg. It gives a certain hope for the world that individuals will have agency for good deeds even when The Man is trying to dehumanize both parties - killer and killee: “a bayonet is a weapon with a worker at both ends” as John MacLean has it.

I am currently on a spellbound [L: list words >4 letters including the middle letter] jag. It takes longer than worldle. I think the original idea for spellbound was launched as Spelling Bee by the NYT but I heard about it as a MetaFilter project. It is a teeny bit frustrating that perfectly good words - achene, tarn, filo - are rejected by the game editors but I'm not going to threaten to eat their first-born about undaunted. The other day I had a spellbound punt with MINIE having a vague idea that it was some sort rifle. tbh, I can't remember whether this was allowable to the wordlist editor or not, but it hooshed me off down a rabbit-hole . . .

Claude-Etienne Minié (13 Feb 1804 – 14 Dec 1879) was a french army officer who solved an intractable battlefield problem: how to fire bullets quickly and accurately at the enemy. It had been discovered earlier in the 19thC that accuracy could be enhanced by imparting a spin to the ball as it left the barrel; and that this could be achieved by 'rifling' the inside of the barrel with helical grooves. Furthermore, it was cclear that a tight fit between ball and barrel would impart more whoomph to the bullet. Breech-loading was in the future, so gunpowder charge and bullet had to be forced down the cylindrical orifice with an, appropriately named ram-rod.  The ram rod became another piece of kit which could be lost, bent out of shape or inadvertently fired at the enemy in a fog of terror.

Minié's insight was to replace a roughly spherical ball with a slightly smaller cylinder which could be dropped, rather than tamped, down the barrel. The front-end of the Minié ball was streamlined but the back-end was hollow. When the powder ignited, the ridged skirt of this pocket splayed out to engage with the rifling and capture the full impelling force. The Minié ball combined more shots an hour with accuracy and a devastating 1oz = 30g crump when it made contact with the target.

Hundreds of thousands of soldiers were killed by Minié balls, first in the Crimean War where Minié rifles were available to the British/French allies but not to their Russian opponents. The damage was considerably greater in the American Civil War where the Springfield Armory in Massachusetts turned out more than 1 million Springfield 1861 Minié rifles. The Confederates relied on then British for Enfield Pattern 1853 rifle-musket.

A particular world view

I contribute, like mon€y, and a very occasional edit, to the Wikipedia project. I can't remember how long I've been doing this, but  it seemed only fair when I used to check the Main Page daily as a source of more or less random leads for The Blob. When I worked at The Institute we ranted at the students for citing Wikipedia in their essays , urging them to go to the primary source and cite that. But really that's rarely necessary because Wikipedia gives a quick, reliable and good enough answer most of the time. Nevertheless, it has it peculiarities and bias because the core group of active editors is by no means a random selection of humanity: lots of railways and far too much team sports imo. 

I can do no better to illustrate this than by looking at Wikipedia:Vital Articles which defines importance at five Levels each of which is 10x larger than the higher Level. Level 3 aims to include 1,000 articles which is about the number of people you can readily put a name and face to. When my nautical Da, at the end of his career, was captain of a ship with a crew of 600, he knew all their face-names. I never achieved that level of recognition in my 600 strong secondary school. Vital Articles:Level 3 contains 113 biographies and I invite you have have a WTF!? critique of the choices after having [no peeking!] your own plunge at the task:

•     2.1.1 Leaders and politicians (27)
•     2.1.2 Religious figures (8)
•     2.1.3 Explorers (7)
•     2.1.4 Philosophers and social scientists (18)
•     2.1.5 Writers (11)
•     2.1.6 Artists (6)
•     2.1.7 Musicians and composers (6)
•     2.1.8 Scientists and inventors (19)
•     2.1.9 Mathematicians (8)
•     2.1.10 Filmmakers (2)
•     2.1.11 Businesspeople (1)

You'll be relieved to hear that neither Zuckerberg, Gates, Musk, Branson nor Smurfit is the 2.1.11 paragon of businesspeople. Just as an example of why them? let's look at the six most Vital Artists in all the World. They are Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Hokusai, Pablo Picasso, Frida Kahlo. That list reads like a pathetic attempt by a trainspotter from Peoria, Illinois to be "inclusive". Gotta have a non-Western token - so 葛飾 北斎 - and it looks depressingly dead white men so let's include a woman, any woman, so long as she's held a paint-brush. There are two women among the Scientists and you get null points for guess that one of them is <yaaaawn> Marie Curie.

Vital Articles:Level 4 [N = 10,000 Wikipedia articles] is currently getting a lot of who knew? attention because it is the hunting ground for a Wordle-like guess the blankdle quiz called Redactle. Try it? 

A ████████ is a ██████ ████ ███████████ █████████ ███████ █████████ with ███████████ ██████ ███████ and █████████ ██████████ █████ and ███████ █████████. The ████-█████ ████ of ████████ is the ███████ ████████, █████ █████████ ███ an █████████ ██████████ to █████ ██████ ██████ ████████ ███████ from ████ and ████████ ███████ to a ██████ ███████. A ████████ ████████ █████████ is the █████ ██████ ████ ████████ in ███ ██████, with ████ ████ for █████████ ████ and ██████████ ████ for ████████ ███ ████ ████-████ ████. ███████████ █████████ ███████ ██████ ███████, ██████████████ █████████, ██████████ █████████, ████████ (█████████) █████████, and █████████ for ███████ with ████████ ███████ █████ ████ as ███████████ █████████ (███ ███████████ ████████) and ███████ ███████ ██████████. ███████████ █████████ ███ ████ ██████ ██████ ████ █████ ████████ to ███████ █████████. █████████ ███ ██████████ as ███████, █████████, or ██████████ █████████ on the ███████ of ██████ ████████.

I've had moderate success on this, usually getting a score that is a good bit better than the Global Median. But I have to admit that on two recent puzzles Dau.II was twice as good as her Da at things scientific - so being an expert is not necessarily the best prediction of success. My best score ever came after seeing Out of ██████ (████) in the second paragraph and landing Meryl Streep in 3 guesses. 

My worst, and below Median, score was 128 guesses not identifying Screw. I was really flailing around here, pursuing lexicographic chimaera: just about half my scattergun guesses yielded nil hits: 20th, agree, agreement, argument, arts, asia, attempt, author, background, band, beginning, believed, biography, brief, certainty, considered, conversation, cookery, created, culture, current, customs, dance, dentistry, depend, determine, discrete, elsewhere, equivalent, ethics, exact, exo, experts, explain, expose, felt, guess , humours, information, integrate, interaction, land, lay, logic, man, mathematics, measure, moment, musical, opt, painting, paragraph, physics, potted, puppet, reconcile, ring, sea, think, truth, way, wheels, write. I rather like the idea that you might also take more than 100 plunges to get to the truth but without doubt your null hits will be different from mine . . . even if we were identical twins separated at birth. 

I gathered all my guesses for Redactles #21 - #29 into a spreadsheet. Discarded all the score 0 words as above [because that's just my "mind" cavorting about]. Then sorted the remaining ~350 words alphabetically. 50 of those have been successful in two or more different Redactles. That's the list to start the process when I start with No Clues. Those words are the interface between my mind and that of Dr Redactle; and include development, evolution, science and species. If the choice of the daily Redactle was random, this approach probably wouldn't work because there would be more Arts than Tech. The nerd-adjacent WEIRD hive-mind of Wikipedia will also lean that way when populating the list of 10,000 Level 4 Vital Articles.  

But I'm retiring for a bit now: overwhelmed by feeling my brain throbbing into action. Here's my full fair-punt list: all, are, area, been, century, current, development, different, each, east, effect, end, Europe, evidence, evolution, example, examples, function, given, good, growth, has, history, life, made, many, material, middle, more, most, name, natural, non, normal, not, one, other, purpose, same, science, shown, similar, species, that, their, there, they, this, thus, war, west, world.

Power fosters political inertia

Five years ago, I cited a couple of short pieces by/ about/ with Michael "Exposé" Lewis. Check this one about the transition from Obama to the Trump administration. What strikes me, in the reprise, is the superficial quality of the discourse. There are three fat-salaried people on the other side of the CBS News-desk and they want a wrap on a key element of political and government dysfunction in three minutes.

A couple of months back, my old grad school pal P ordered me to read The Premonition: A Pandemic Story [NPR] by Michael Lewis. I'm an institutionalised bloke; can obey orders, so I put in train its translation from a shelf in Dalkey, South Dublin to a bin in Tramore Co Waterford awaiting my collection. Viva the national electronic library service! Lewis is an accomplished and successful non-fiction author, with an agent, a publisher, editors and friends-who-read. It is no surprise therefore that The Premonition reads easy: weaving several parallel, same-time, threads into a coherent warm blanket of understanding. Part of the skill is deciding which of the stories is the hook and which can be left to later chapters. Indeed, I'm sure that leaving researched and written characters on the cutting room floor is another part of the process. Must be a little galling to be interviewed at length and not get name-checked in the published book.

Because it is A pandemic story rather than the Official History of SARS-CoV2, Lewis has chosen to centre the tale on the Three Covideers shown above 

• Joe DeRisi, a super-smart, tech-savvy, open-handed, molecular biologist, epidemiologist and genome sequencer from UCSF
  
• Charity Dean, a no-nonsense, buck-stops-here California Public Health physician
  
• Carter Mecher, a smartest-bloke-in-the-room medical data-slinger and medical historian from the Veterans Administration
  

These are the people who were right, knew they were right early on and tried to overcome the inertia, terror and vested interests of people, institutions and corporations who were doing just nicely in a warm bath of status quo. In the interests of balance, Lewis finds people on the Other Side - whose actions, or more generally inaction, hyped up the impact of the pandemic. First among these Bad Hats is the CDC, which Lewis characterizes as a political tool, utterly risk-averse and mired in red-tape. Thus, even if it was clear what policy would save most lives or alleviate the pinch-points in response protocols, it was institutionally impossible to find a CDC Effective with sufficient authority to implement a change that was a clear public good. Close reading of the history of the pandemic may conclude that it was impossible for the CDC to implement any change, like ever. Lewis says. "And it's removed the brave ones. The brave ones have all got their heads chopped off. So it's sort of institutionalized a cowardice that we're going to need to face up to so that this business of punishing people who are doing their damnedest to try to save us from ourselves has got to stop."

As well as a poke at John Ioannidis, the fallen angel of epidemiology, Lewis also singles out Sonia Angell, Charity Dean's boss at California Public Health as the main impediment preventing Dr Dean from being brave . . . and stomping SARS-CoV2 into oblivion with, like, public health measures. PHMs are actions which inhibit individual freedom so as to protect "society" or its more vulnerable members. This idea puts its finger on the pulse of politics over the last 40 years: since Margaret Thatcher announced "There is no such thing as Society". In this worldview you and I have no obligation to the dispossessed, the future or the planet. Dean, DeRisi and Mecher and their team were sure that only by early intervention and draconian curtailment of individual rights could the virus be brought to heel. Angell, along with the POTUS, many senior political appointees and public representatives, didn't see a virus with a death-rate of 1.5% as something to get the economy [and, yes, Society too] all bent out of shape about. I don't doubt that your mind is made up on these matters - as well as, half-alphabetically, antigen tests, boosters, China, D-vitamin, entry requirements, hydroxychloroquine, Ivermectin, Johns Hopkins, kids-as-carriers, long-covid, masks . . .

If you are a covid-interventionist, then you'll probably enjoy The Premonition.

New Post

May runs apace

• Engineering:
  
• New Post? compressive load calcs for 4 x 4 pillar.
• How roman aqueducts work[ed]. 
• Radical radial public transport NYC
• 60,000 corporation houses built 1948-1962 = 4,000 /year. Land at £2,000/acre.
• New Merch [yetch.store] from Simone Giertz [R and prev]
• Trevor Noah - global treasure.
  
• Promo: all of Discworld as Audiobooks.
• Getting wet:
  
• Transfer to pilot cutter in big seas.
• Cliff-hanger fishes from deserted island speck
• Make it easy on yourself with Yukon fish-wheel

Directory Enquiries

Years ago, in my population genetics days, we discovered a lot of Manx cats in  parts of Maine and New Brunswick. By "a lot", I mean countable examples because, on the streets of New England and the Canadian Maritimes, Manx cats are really rare; so even a handful needs some kind of explanation. One of the hypotheses to be tested was that there had been particular and peculiar traffic between these maritime towns and the Isle of Man - where Manx cats are indeed reasonable common. In those pre-WWW days you had to scrabble about for data to analyse and I spent some time in the library looking at the Shipping News columns of local-to-Maine 19thC newspapers. That came up empty. So I turned to telephone directories to see whether there were more-than-expected typically Manx surnames [Clague, Corlett, Kelly, Moore, Quayle, Quirk] in Augusta, Me and St Stephen, N.B. That yielded enough data to analyse . . . and show that settlement from the IoM was not a good explanation for the excess of tailless cats.

Dau.I the Librarian was visiting "home" for two weeks in April: a) Easter & chocolates with her niblings b) "study time" from work to knock off some end-of-year assignments to mark the half-way point of her two-year MLIS degree [Masters in Library & Information Science. When she returned to work  the next week she had to go downstairs to the dungeons archives and: cull some of the staff records, consolidate others, integrate two sources of data and file the whole caboodle alphabetically by surname. Most of the files now exist in 7# stuffed 4-drawer filing cabinets in a basement. Future-proofing and elbow room has allowed her to order 2 more cabinets for a total of 36 drawers.

Channelling Pat the Salt in his aphorism never move anything twice, it seemed to us sensible to add an empty cabinet at each end of the existing row of seven and start distributing the A's into one set of empty drawers until bored and then start similarly disbursing the X Y Zs to the the other empty cabinet. That way she'll be able to leave the Mc's and O's in the centre of the Irish alphabetical world. So there is an implicit hypothesis: that these patronymic surnames are indeed more common in Ireland. 

How to test that? Find a telephone directory [remember them?] and count how many pages were devoted to each initial letter. For reasons inertia, we have retained a copy of the 05 Sunny South East telephone directory from 2010. And here is the data:

	Page #	Pages	Percent	Drawers	CumTot	Cabinet
A	15	3	0.9	0.33	0.33	A B
B	18	28	8.6	3.10	3.43
C	46	32	9.8	3.54	6.98	C
D	78	27	8.3	2.99	9.97	D E F
E	105	3	0.9	0.33	10.30
F	108	18	5.5	1.99	12.30
G	126	11	3.4	1.22	13.51	G H I
H	137	20	6.2	2.22	15.73
I	157	1	0.3	0.11	15.84
J	158	3	0.9	0.33	16.17	J K L
K	161	22	6.8	2.44	18.61
L	183	12	3.7	1.33	19.94
M	195	42	12.9	4.65	24.59	M
N	237	6	1.8	0.66	25.26	N O
O	243	27	8.3	2.99	28.25
P	270	11	3.4	1.22	29.46	P Q R
Q	281	2	0.6	0.22	29.69
R	283	16	4.9	1.77	31.46
S	299	15	4.6	1.66	33.12	S-Z
T	314	7	2.2	0.78	33.90
U	321	0	0.0	0.00	33.90
V	321	1	0.3	0.11	34.01
W	322	16	4.9	1.77	35.78
X	338	0	0.0	0.00	35.78
Y	338	1	0.3	0.11	35.89
Z	339	0	0.0	0.00	35.89
Total	325		100	36

First thing to note is that frequency of Initial letters [M C B D O K H F R W S L G P T N A E J Q I V Y U X Z] is very different from general letter freq for English etaoinshrdlu. Murphy and Mc/MacNames do indeed fill the middle ground of Irish name space, O' not so much: shoved down the list by Connollys Byrnes Dohertys. You might think, and we did consider, that it would be better to audit the actual data in the existing file-cabinets. But that is not really future proofing the system: At the present moment, for example, there is nobody in the City Library Service whose name begins with A. But there may be in the future, especially if the Library succeeds in diversifying its employee base - think Akinrunde, Battacharaya . . . Yong, Zieliński