The Googlewhacker

 At the Birth of the Blob, I was much taken with googlewhacks and adjacent markers of unique contributions [goldiloxian, I'm l👁👁king at you]. Googlewhack was coined / devised by Gary Stock 20 years ago when the googleverse was much smaller. But the concept really took off under the ministrations of Britse comic Dave Gorman. He wrote a book about his journey: Dave Gorman's Googlewhack Adventure [2005].  The stand-up show is 100 mins on YT. Ever since, I've had Gorman pegged as a geeky but insightful commenter on the late stage capitalist human condition internet: and my sort of funny. Not that I've sent him me undies, or really paid him much attention these last 15 years. 

But a month ago, Gorman bubbled to the surface of life's porridge as two quite separate bollupes. First on Taskmaster Season Six with Al Murray, Sarah Pascoe, Paul Chowdhry and Rob Beckett. We've been binge-watching Taskermaster episodes almost daily for a month+ in an attempt to behave like a normal family doing dinner in front of the TV. Taskmaster is reasonably amusing not least because nobody takes themselves too seriously [lest unmerciful slaggin' result, I guess].

Then a month ago I was 10 minutes early for Wexford Science Café and went down the stacks to browse a book and came away with two: 1) The Ash and the Beech [2007] by Richard Mabey and 2) Too Much Information or: Can Everyone Just Shut Up for a Moment, Some of Us Are Trying to Think [2014] by Dave Gorman . . . of which we treat. The age we live in is peculiar in similar ways that the Roman Empire in, say, 675CE was peculiar - decadent, self-indulgent, heedless of tomorrow for us 1%ers. Filtered through the internet: the insanity and disconnect cranks up a level into truly bizarre.

Gorman's book is not tightly editted because his publisher reckons that Gorman's stream-of-conscious laying out of his niggles and quirks will sell a lorra books as punters leave the venue of another packed stand-up show. 2014 was seeing chinks of light round the dark clouds of post-crash austerity and a little more disposable income sloshing through the economy. That being said, the book is built to look chunkier than it may deserve: big print, 1.5 line-spacing, generous margins. 

In 2002, after the dot-com bust had cleared the internet air of some of the crazies, we were settling down to a quietly commercialized, still largely academic on-line world. Facebook, Twitter, Youtube were not even a malevolent gleam in a fell imp's eye. Amazon was still selling books on-line. Googlewhacks were . . . nice - wholesome, fun, quirky.

2022, the imp has slipped its nice mask and revealed a world of lazy-arsed journalism; cynical exploitation of people's generous nature; lies; political polarization and disrespect; overturning every sense of "value" except the monetary. 

• 15 who-cares-tuppence?s about Richard Branson
• 5 contradictory headlines from the Daily Express
• 150,000 people paying pence to vote in X-factor
• 7 celebs the back of whose head you've seen at a concert
  

Gorman is sharp enough to skewer some of the pretensions of influenzers and others who are cashing in on the internet. Don't buy this book, but ask if you can borrow it from the local library? I returned the copy I borrowed last Tuesday.

The age of woo

One of the most interesting Big Science projects to come out of Trinity College while I was working there in the 00s was The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA) fronted by Rose Anne Kenny FTCD, FRCP, RIA. TILDA recruited 8000+ representative  people over the age of 50 with the intention of monitoring their inevitable decline over the next many years. Such keys to a happy old age as gait, cognition, cardio and macular degeneration were measured on first visit to TILDA Centraal, together with various health and well-being questionnaires. I was touched when at about the same time the aged father of a palomino started to quote "My geriatrician says . . .". It showed an engagement with and active interest in the process of things fall apart as the various and sundry systems of homeostatic equilibrium prove unable to keep the corporeal ship of state steady as she goes.

Prof Kenny is clearly a geriatrician of note; who has put in the hours and should be worth listening to. And I've spent the last several days listening to her reading Age Proof, her distillation of an active life trying to make sense of decrepitude. This is one case where, I feel, the author shouldn't read their own stuff; because on her reading, the text is liberally scattered with , random , pauses at places , which make it difficult to follow her sentence structure. The problem with getting professional readers [apart from the Australian accents: looking at you Bolinda] to read sciency books is that they either mangle the long words or have big loin-girding pause before , say , Taeniopygia guttata. But I have to call out the hard G "lon[Gh]evity" and "[Gh]eriatrics", which, as you may expect from a book about aging, are used frequently.  I checked numerous on-line sources in case it was me being a self-righteous soft-G before I and E pedant. What next: Ghenetics? The Gheneration Game?

More to the point, I learned Chronotype is A Thing . . . the word was coined maybe 30 years ago but was popularized by Dr Michael Breus in his book The Power of When. Breus calls himself The Sleep Doctor which smacks of hubris. Move over owls vs larks on the Breus watch - sooo yesterday. Take the chronotype determinant quiz? But always know that you are welcome to join me in chronotype aardvark: characterized for falling into a drooling sleep while attending lunchtime seminars.  I can't convey strongly enough how this kind of plausibly possible simplification jangles my chain. I've had a contemptuous poke at zodiacal Sun signs but Dolphin - Lion - Bear - Wolf chronotypes are closer to Hans Eysenck's Personality Inventory (EPI) which measures-by-quiz two pervasive, independent dimensions of personality: Extraversion-Introversion vs Neuroticism-Stability and bins everyone into one of four bins. Eysenck was immersed in his own certainties about how the world should be was and, 20 years after he died, 26 of his peer-reviewed papers on race intelligence and personality have been withdrawn by his quondam employer as "unsafe". And check out this take-down by Alexei Guzey of St Matthew of Walker the other Sleep Guru [multibloboprevs]

Yer, like whatevs, this is the level of scienciness in Chronotypes:

• Dolphins are wired and tired light sleepers; also highly intelligent, cautious, perfectionist and often anxious.
• Wolves used to be owls: at their best in the evening and creative, impulsive, and emotionally intense.
• Bears are median: deep sleepers while easygoing and social, fun-loving team players during the day.
• Lions are early risers after a good night's sleep and are conscientious, stable, practical and optimistic with a tendency to over-achieve.
  

Prof Kenny devotes a chapter of her book uncritically promoting this saddo simplification of human diversity. Elsewhere in the book Kenny gives some gratutitous product placement to Calico the age-research spin-off of Google/Alphabet. It is unfortunate because Calico and Chronotypes are hostages to crap-detecting: citing them casts doubt on all the other research reported in the book. Likewise cold-water swimming and having a personal fitness coach. Great if that's your thang; but that's not the same as suggesting that it is appropriate for everyone.

tl;dr: But the take home is the same: good sleep, good diet, more exercise, all adopted early, is likely to yield a happier and healthier old age. It also means missing some hella fun parties when you're still young enough to get off on such things.

Misc Snow

C❄ld white wet

• Kyle Best gets snowed all over.
• Cargo Tram Zürich Schneepflug
• Schneeräumung Alps
  
• Last weekend - Lake Effect in Buffalo.
• Belfast snowball fight in W5
• 100 km/h downhill Cortina [Sofia Goggia R]
  
• 1963
• Wicklow
• Nagano with Macaca fuscata
• Clearing the roof
  

The farmer's friend

Like all farmers, Peter Whatling of Hoxne, Suffolk was possessed or a gurt big lump-hammer . . . until he wasn't. Lump-hammers are the Great Persuader of rural life: if the tines of your bale-lift get bent out of shape; or a bolt just won't fit in the hole then a tuthree mighty tonks with a lump-hammer will sort it out. In November 1992, Whatling had been using his hammer [R on show in the British Museum] down the field and when he got home his hammer was missing. After a while of fruitless searching, he called on his neighbour Eric Lawes to make a few passes with his metal-detector. They did eventually find the hammer, but on the way Eric turned up the largest treasure trove of Roman gold and silver ever discovered in Britain. You can listen to Eric Lawes trying to remember the sequence of events. And here's his famous for 15 days obit. The story has been recorded when Roger Bland of the BM came down to talk to the Hoxne Heritage Group.

They grassed themselves up to Suffolk County Council, who sent their archaeological swat team the following day to painstakingly excavate the hoard maintaining as much archaeological context as possible; including lifting large blocks of frozen soil [did I say it was mid-November?]. Peter kindly created a wall of straw-bales to protect the archaeologists and their police escort against the whipping wind. The 1993 coroner's inquest in Lowestoft determined that the hoard was treasure trove and therefore the property of the state. But, by long-standing convention, the value of the artifacts was paid over to Eric Lawes as the sole finder. The boodle was valued at £1.75million, and Eric shared it with the tenant farmer Peter Whatling. In this case the owner of the freehold Suffolk County Council didn't get nuffink; and was put to some expense saving and cataloguing all the pieces.

They thought they'd revealed all the Roman material in the immediate vicinity but subsequent passes in 1993 and 1994 turned up even more, if less spectacular, historical artefacts. Analysis of the 569 gold coins (solidi):14,272 silver coins (mostly siliquae) was able to date the horde as the very end of Roman Britain because it includes coins minted for Emperor Honorius (393-423). Other details and and cross-referencing suggests a terminus ad quem [earliest possible date] of 408 CE.

In 409, Constantine III stripped all the legions from  Britain to deal with barbarian hordes closer to the Roman heartlands and in 410, 411 Emperor Honorius sent his Rescript to the plain people of Britain inviting them to look to their own defenses. The first Saxon raids occurred at about the same time and it is probable that a wealthy family, probably including one Aurelius Ursicinus, packed their portable property into an oaken chest and buried it somewhere safe. Clearly they never returned - unless you prefer to imagine a bloke in a toga fruitlessly casting about in the area after the above-ground ID had been disturbed.

It's also interesting that the gold coins had identifiable mint-marks from all over the Roman Empire from Trier in Gaul to Antioch in Syria. 85% of the silver coins have been clipped to retain the value of the coin while also salvaging some silver bullion; this defacement has removed most of the mint-mark information. The value of coins to us moderns is definitely more in the provenance and archaeological context rather than the silver. Hoxne bling!

When we joined the Euro-zone in January 2002, each country was invited to strike its own coins to its own design. Ireland struck 135 million €1s in 2002, compared to 300m in France and 2,000 from Vatican City. I thought it would be interesting to get 200 €1 coins from the bank every quarter and tally up the provenance. Presumably on day 0 all the coins from Allied Irish Bank would have a harp on the obverse. But as German, Greek and French tourists piled in to buy pints of Guinness with their small change, the All-Irish flavour of the coinage would get diluted. Something could be learned from the circulation of Euro-people from taking snapshots of Euro-coins. I was super busy in 2002 pushing the frontiers of human genome analysis with Ken Wolfe - and creating the persona of BobTheScientist - so that project never flew.

Footnote. The Hoxne Hoard, and subsequent rogue metal-detecting in the area, precipitated a new law "An Act to abolish treasure trove and to make fresh provision in relation to treasure (1996)". Treasure trove was the term used in British Common Law (dating back to Edward the Confessor 1,000 years ago) to cover valuables which had been hidden, buried or secreted, with the intention of recovery, for which no owner or heirs could be identified. Famously Sutton Hoo was deemed by the coroner to be finders-keepers because nobody intended to come back for the Great Man's helmet [L]! The 1996 act defined what exactly constitutes treasure.

Violent Gibson

In the spirit of the sticker on Woody Guthrie's guitar "This machine kills Fascists" we're going to doff a bonnet to Violet Gibson, of Merrion Sq, Dublin who attempted to assassinate Benito Mussolini in 1926. Il Duce turned his imperious head as Gibson aimed her pistol and fired. The bullet snipped the bridge of his nose and Gibson was bundled to the ground and off the stage of history. 

Although born with every advantage as the daughter of The Patriarchy The Lord Chancellor of Ireland, the most senior person in the Law, Violet was "troubled" and had suffered a "nervous breakdown" at least once before an angel steadied her arm to point it at the Italian head of state. Like Gavrilo Princip = Гаврило Принцип, who successfully offed Archduke Franz-Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, she died in custody rather judicially. Princip died of TB in jail in 1918. Gibson wasn't charged in Italy but deported "home" to England where she was committed to a psychiatric hospital, St Andrew's in Northampton, and existed there for another 30 years. She died as she approached her 80th birthday in 1956.

This story has been one of many obsessions of actor, politician and self-publicist, Dublin Cllr Mannix Flynn. Last month his machinations succeeded in installing a plaque on Gibson's childhood home. Flynn has a reputation for punching down on cyclists and NIMBYing the homeless, so it seems of-a-piece [ie slightly unhinged and resolutely against the flow] to be rehabilitating a supposed anti-fascist who died before he was born. Cue Woody: a genuine card-carrying undeluded anti-fascist.

All at sea

The Youtube Algorithm delivered a rather Dude Bro video about hitch-hiking a ride on a DFDS container ship. It may have been because I went through a spell of binge-watching Chief Makoi a Pilipino Engineer vlogging his best life at sea. It all set me to thinking of the week I spent in  the Thames Estuary as a useless mouth an 18 y.o intern aboard a Trinity House service vessel operating out of Harwich. I'd left school the previous Summer and was still unconvinced that I should go to college so . . . gap year - before youngsters started to employ gap-year coaches to make their CV shine. I threw out an off-hand remark about running away to sea and bish-bosh-bash I was sent off to St Margaret's Bay in Kent to spend a night with Philip Walker, an old beau of my mother. In hindsight, this chap was vetting me to see if he'd totally lose face if he recommended me to his ex-colleagues at Trinity House(*) the corporation responsible for all the lighthouses, lightships, buoys, beacons and other navigational aids round England and Wales. I learnt how to make a vinaigrette that night, so the venture wasn't a total bust.

I must have passed mustard because shortly thereafter I was requested and required to report to THV Siren at 0800hrs on a Monday morning. Nobody knew what to do with me. I was only going to be there a wet week so it wasn't worth training me to a job of work. I'd be a liability sent down to the working deck to haul ropes and and diesel pipes. I spend two solid days in the chartroom behind the bridge cutting out updates to the chart catalogs and pasting over the old data. This was a boring chore for the three navigating officers; so there was an infinite backlog of fiches to be cut out and stuck into the correct place. If we approached a buoy to service it, I'd hear the commotion drift forward to look out over the foredeck at the activity and try to keep out of the way of actual crew who might be supervising the work. If I wasn't looking out at the horizon I was feeling decidedly queasy and so felt miserable pretty much the whole time.

In the week, we only spent one night at sea. The lads would try to get the ship back alongside shortly after 17:00hrs so that almost everyone could go home and sleep in their own beds ashore. It was pointed out that the officers mess had a larder with bread, cheese, pickles, UHT milk and fixing for mugs of tea or cocoa. And that's what I dined and breakfasted on in the nearly empty ship. We had the one night at sea because the crew had been servicing buoys and lightships at the far end of the territory and it wasn't worth the fuel and time to get back to port late and leave early the next morning. I retired to my bunk and fell into a nightmarish fitful sleep as we bucketed about hove-to in the North Sea.

When I got up for 'work' the next morning all the sailor civil servants on the bridge were looking unaccountably energized having been the first on scene after a collision between two freighters in the fairway. My first thought was "ye baastids; the most exciting thing that's happened to the ship in a decade and you let me sleep through it?" but this was sharpish replaced with "fair enough, I wouldn't have been any help". I have a vague memory of the superstructure of one of the ships poking out above the waves but that might have been wholly made up in my head. If anybody had died, I reckon I would have noted it; but then again with my blunted affect, maybe not.

I do remember the skipper postponing the morning's plan-of-work and going on a jaunt up river to return a lifeboat to one of the ships involved in the rescue. The lifeboat had been abandoned in the darkness after the rescued crew had been taken off it. There was some jolly talk on the Siren's bridge about salvage rights and the value of one lifeboat, hardly used. But the skipper didn't hang about in Docklands: we unloaded the lifeboat with the forward derrick and turned round to carry on working the buoys out at sea.  A couple of days later, I left my life on the ocean wave and went to work as a hospital porter.

By coincidence, that year saw the publication of the Convention on the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea, 1972 (COLREGs). This superseded the 1960 regulations and was notable for implementing mandatory traffic separation schemes in busy maritime regions including the Thames Estuary and the Straights of Dover. Colregs does stop all the near misses that continue to happen because of the interface between navigational tech, navigators and normal accidents.

* Formally: The Master, Wardens and Assistants of the Guild Fraternity or Brotherhood of the most glorious and undivided Trinity and of St Clement in the Parish of Deptford Strond in the County of Kent!
Within a year I was enrolled at The Provost, Fellows, Foundation Scholars and the other members of Board, of the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity of Queen Elizabeth near Dublin aka TCD.

Fud

An epicure's feast

• KAAS
  
• O melhor queijo do mundo: São Jorge prev
• Making Jarlsberg.au
• Cheese toastie? Perfick!  
•  PESCI
• Gordon, Hans and Magnus try Rakfisk
• Catch yer own mackerel at sea
• Catching galego off Havana on an inner-tube
  
• CARNE
  
• Filming the perfect burger [R] - cost of artifice
• A surfeit of beef - via MeFi
• Cornishers? Furrgeddit: Welsh Pasties 
• Keep your food of kings - give me Mejadra any day
  
• Shipping food-aid wheat to Djibouti 
• CATER
  
• Feeding Canadians at (heartwarming) home
• You might think 30 mins was too long to spend watching udon being cooked - but you'd be wrong
• How it's done in the army