So many hungry monkeys

I think one of the most important teachable skills in sciences is counting in orders or magnitude. That, coupled with knowing the appropriate level of accuracy and rounding an answer appropriately. Statements like this "The current population of Ireland is 5,073,347 as of Monday, December 19, 2022" is bollix, despite being top of the google heap in a search. For most purposes 5.1 million is plenty accurate coupled with 4.9 million in mid-2020 from the same source. Guesstimating the size of things can be a) fun and b) useful; as when Fermi famously estimated the power of the Trinity Test in 1945 with a handful of torn paper. Indeed, such solvable conundrums are commonly called Fermi Problems to this day. I have had occasion to despair when science students switch this skill off . . . if they were ever taught it.

In the hub-bub of a family zoom before Xmas, Gdau.I [just turned 11] asked me if I thought there were enough bananas to feed all the monkeys in the world. Yo! the apple falleth not far from the tree: Dau.II, her auntie, asked a similar question at a similar age: "How many people make a proposal of marriage in/on the Eiffel Tower every day?" and we cranked out an answer to that one. The current problem is in two parts: how many 🐒🐒🐒s? and how many 🍌🍌🍌s? It would be just bonzer if there were enough to go round.

Bananas

It is easier to obtain a dollar value for the trade in bananas than a tonnage. This appears to be $13,000,000,000. Neatly, the price per kilo imported to USA is  $1.5; giving 10 billion kg of bananas shipped from one place to another each year.  Cavendish bananas, as well as being an endangered species, account for the vast majority of this trade and weigh in at 5 to the kilo. Y?MV but I'd hazard that trade bananas account for between 10% and 50% of total ripe bananas.  Farmers in Honduras must eat some of their crop; and send some to their grown-up children slaving away in the city.

100 billion - 500 billion bananas

Monkeys

There are ~500 species of primate in total. Nobody knows; although lumpers vs splitters quite fiercely know different answers to the species count. Primates are the third most abundant Order of Mammals, after Rodents and Bats.
Apart from humans the most abundant primate is the gelada baboon Theropithecus gelada of which there are about 200,000 alive today. Nobody is claiming a spuriously accurate 211,394 count. If all primates were equally abundant, there would be 100 million non-human primates on the planet.

About half the primate species are Old [Cercopithecidae] and New [Platyrrhini] World "monkeys", so double the number of available bananas if you only care about monkeys.

Geladas are "bigger than a breadbox" at 10-16kg. Primates range is size from a mouse lemur (Microcebus berthae) [R with human hand for scale] weight 1oz = 30g to adult gorillas at 100kg [big sexual dimorphism in that species: males = 150kg, females 50kg].

The actual species abundance of primates is much less rosy than 100 million: numbers range from 200,000 to the several species which are teetering on the edge of extinction: effective abundance = zero!  Nobody has the skills, resources or patience to census all 500 species of Primate. But here's a table of 65 different species where those stats are available. The median value for head-count among those primate species is 1,000-2,000. So maybe 

2 million (and falling) non-human primates
(half of which are monkeys)

So there are plenty enough bananas to go round: at least a banana a day. That's just an appetizer for a gorilla but a daunting prospect  - 6x its body weight - to a mouse lemur.

Second Fiddle

 Seems like yesterday, but it's 200 years since Alfred Russel Wallace was born 8th Jan 1823. He was thus just 14 years younger than Charles Darwin, about whose bday we I have been making a great fuss - donuts etc. - for the last 40 years. It seems appropriate to at least flag the great man's birthday with a cake [go Laura]:

Wallace always deferred to Darwin and considered his contribution incidental to the process of getting the Origin of Species into print. Shout out to John "finch-sorter" Gould who gets even less press for guiding Darwin to the path of righteousness. Wallace had his insight into the power of natural selection to drive evolution while tossing in a malarial puddle of sweat at Ternate in the Dutch East Indies. Darwin had priority on this idea but had been in a decades long turmoil, lest publishing his arguments for species mutability would topple his seat at the table of British scientific patriarchy. Wallace's scooping letter from Ternate forced Darwin's hand and his pals arranged for a reading of the Darwin Wallace joint papers to the London Linnean Society in 1858. That event created almost no stir at the time. It was Darwin's [sole author] book published the following year that set the cat among the patriarchal pigeons.

Mainstream science tends to double-down on this attempt to fade Wallace from the story and big up the vaccillating Darwin. The Man gleefully cites Wallace's skepticism about [smallpox] vaccination and unskep about spiritualism and call him cranky. But I reckon we need more Wallaces about the place who bring a sharp mind to discomfit the cosy certainties of the establishment and force us to think and sift evidence rather than parroting what we read that morning in the Guardian [insert your favorite organ of the echo-chamber here]. Happy Birthday Alf!

If you want more information, and you should, check out the Wallace Memorial Fund WMF, patron Bill Bailey.

Not New Yrs Day '23

Golly me, it's twenty three! Every so often, Christmas and New Year's Day fall on a Sunday; and I still find it a bit unsettling. It seems that such times need the day to be something more than a reg'lar Sunday. But here we go with a reg'lar Sunday Miscellany.

• The lost art of stabbing the other knecht [cw: hacks, blood]
• Life advice for today: Always go to the funeral. 
• obvs, nobody in Ireland needs to be told this
• Decommissioning Sellafield/ Windascle - the price
  
• On the Canadian Borrrder with Tom Scott
• Farmers are well 'ard right?
  
• CA Canada? Gander answers the call
  
• UK University Challenge: Paxo savages The Youth
  
• NO Watch the ticker: The Norwegian Sovereign Wealth fund value 
• PT The Carnation Revolution 1974
• NO FI RU triple point "Treriksrøysa" on the edge of the Øvre Pasvik National Park
  
• ♬ ♫ ♩ ♪ in F#
  
• Fanfare for The Common Man
• Fauré's Requiem
• Fandango Boccherini 
• Fado  Canção do Mar
  
• Fat Boy Slim Weapon of Choice
• Fagunero Mohonay
• Four Strong Winds Ian Tyson died a couple of days ago.
  

Mechanical cake

Last year [= last week] I was writing about baking powder. Even as I wrote ". . .there are two ways of getting loft into cakes - biological and chemical . . ." I knew I was ignoring part of the cakiverse. So here I am making up for slighting the physical / mechanical ways of creating foamy deliciousness. During my expensive education, I tried a few things once and then moved on. 

• I was in a play that had a morris dancing scene; 
• but not the other Beecham thing(*); 
• I made a cheese soufflé; 
• I rode a donkey . . . for 15 seconds
  
• I went pillion on a motorcycle . . . for 15 minutes
  

You can tell I've lived a very exciting life; but the only event relevant to this post is the soufflé, which derives its light airiness from beating egg whites to a foam and folding that gloop gently into the other ingredients just before baking - pre-heat oven, or the confection will collapse.

A similar procedure is key to making meringues. The egg whites are separated from the yolk and whisked up into a foam. The bubbles of the foam are stabilized by the presence of protein - albumins and others - dissolved in the water. It is possible to over-beat the foam so that the matrix collapses, sometimes even before cooking starts. The whipping can increase the volume by as much as 8x and cooks like to achieve this maximum, even if they're not in the commercial business of selling air to punters. Various 'fixes' have been identified as either increasing the volume or, more relevantly, stabilizing the foam until the proteins are set by cooking. I am channeling On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee here [and prev].

• Don't use a plastic bowl: it is hard-to-impossible to clean oils from plastic. Oils and fats prevent the egg-white proteins making the crucial interface between air and water.
• rigorously exclude egg-yolk: lecithins are complex fatty molecules which are even more effective than sunflower oil or residual butter at elbowing into the molecular edge of the bubbles and causing collapse.
  
• salt is ionic and will change the shape of albumin and lower its foam making capabilities - if you must add salt to taste, do so at the last moment
• also add sugar [folding in] after the egg whites are proper peaky.
  
• a pinch of cream of tartar [tartaric acid as in baking powder prev] will lower the pH from 9 to ~8 and this seems to enhance the foaminess and stability
• it has long been asserted that a copper pan is a miracle-worker for meringues and there is some scientific evidence that copper ions help prevent over-beating collapse by stabilizing the foam
  
• before your eyes evidence for bowl effects
  

So there is a little chemistry in making great meringues, but it's mainly elbow work [or Kenwood Chef for wimps].

Victoria sponges are related. Cream butter and sugar till it turns white [ie gorra lorra air in], in a separate bowl whisk the eggs so that they also have a lot of incorporated air. Throw them together then g e n t l y fold in sufficient flour; taking care not to work all the air out by over stirring. Very similar in principle to a soufflé, as both rely on beating to create bubbles in a foam and ultimately in the finished product. You'd be surprised by strawberry jam and clotted cream in a soufflé, though.

footnotes
*Sir Thomas Beecham once said "In this life try everything once, except morris-dancing and incest".

Wire-stripper

New Year's Day, I was being weather-wise positive about Xmas 2022 compared to Xmas 2021. Which is kinda nuts because, while being spared Floods, in 2022 we were subjected to three separate storm-related power-cuts and a mighty lightning strike:  seemingly inside the house . . . there was the CRASH but also a smell of burning in the bedroom nearest the fuse-box . What is remarkable in hindsight is our capacity to make sense of sensory data in the context of prior experience.  I was so focused on dealing with the loss of electricity that all the symptoms were shoes-horned into the "electric system" shoe box. The "telephone system" because less urgent, was relegated to an after-thought paragraph.

In due course, the phone company contacted us to say that they had fixed the phone problem on the 5th day of their five working day window of acceptable repair time. Not so, because neither their the direct-connect landline, nor the wire-free base-station walkie-phone were working. But, triggered by the contact, one of us went up to the middle bedroom to bring down the base-station. Which revealed a much more credible theory to integrate all the data [bang . . . inside house . . . smell of burning in bedroom] - as well as what ever took out the electricity; the copper phone line had internalized "300 million Volts and about 30,000 Amps". All that power had to go somewhere and it blew out 20cm of sheathing [R] round the phone line to the base-station, vaporizing some of the copper and some of the plastic in a big sooty mess. My high-school physics tells me that V.A = W.

electrical potential V x current A = power W

A lightning strike, briefly, conveys ~10 TW [= 10 x 10^12] of power which is about 1,000x the power requirement for the island of Ireland whc ~= 10 GW. That's a hella lot of too hot to touch electric kettles to go down a wee wire  < 1mm ⌀. No wonder there was a BNAG!

Detail:

Note to self: only an amadán would contrive to take a photo of a sooty wire disaster on a white sofa cushion because it was the most convenient white background!

Collateral damage to table and wall:

 

Riparian rehab

Christmas 2021 we had rather too much water. The drain topped out and would have washed out the lane, were it not for three pairs of fit and timely hands to unblock the drain and keep the water out of the roadway. Meanwhile at the other end of the property the wee river Aughnabriskey got above itself and under-cut the bank, tipping several trees into the torrent. We spent a few days salvaging what firewood we could. I also planted out a few dozen rooted willow [Salix spp.] whips: hoping that their developing root system would stablise the bank whence their much larger predecessors' root ball had been untimely ripped.

Christmas 2022 was positively balmy by comparison. The cold snap of early December passed through without dumping any snow and we returned to normal benign wet Westerlies whooshing in from the Gulf Stream. I've been trying to pace myself, on the outdoor front, since copping a 'Rona eight weeks ago.  If work needs doing, it's little & often. Went to bed at my normal time on New Year's Eve and sprang from bed at 0600 hrs, as usual. A while later Dau.I wandered in, wondering about nautical and astronomical twilight [prev] and how they might relate to, actual, sunrise. Turns out, at this time of year, the grey time between  Night  and 🌄 is more than 2 hours! - waiting for the sunrise is therefore akin to watching paint dry. But we could see stars in the heavens, so that boded well for visibility of sun-peep. 

Even as we girded our lions <roooARRR> to set off up hill to see the dawn's early light there was a slash of rain on the windows; and we paused in mid-gumboot. But 10 minutes later, we left home regardless. eeee, it were lovely: watching the day break around us, as we nattered about databases, great bosses, the virtues of swimming, Excel, incompetent management, whether scones should have currants, and how crocked up we were by the covid. There was running water in the drain but none coming down from the sky  and by the time we'd reached the top of The Stumping Ground (previously The Sitka Forest before it was clear-felled) it was quite bright and we could see the remains of the earlier shower moving out across Wexford to the Irish Sea. If it looks a bit aura-like behind me [L], it must be the way I'm striking a pose. It's more than halfway to St Fursey's Altar, and I have a note-to-self on the kitchen calendar for St Fursey's Day in a fortnight. After a respectful pause, and a 'miner's view' to get some wind back we headed downhill, where Dau.I captured the year's first sunrise:

0845hrs: more or less in time for breakfast. 

The weather stayed fine all morning. After lunch I looked at the Things To Do TTD list and carried ~30 willow [Salix spp.] trimmings, which had been soaking in a bucket for several months, down to the river.  I covered the roots in a feed-sack against cold shock, seized my Phineas Gage Memorial  iron spike, and strode off down-valley. Two minutes later, I came back to the house and told Team Baldur's Gate on the sofa that I was off on a real world quest and to come looking if I was not back by dark.
What could possibly go wrong?
Nothing!
But I did come within an ace of plunging full length in the river, when one foot disappeared down a ferny grike and the rest of me fell full-length on the very edge of dry land.  

TTD: [Plant out willows: ✓]

I'm glad that's done. The willow was at nothing sitting in a bucket in the garden. The whips I planted along the same riparian reach a year ago haven't grown in any obvious manner. But that's the way of small trees; it takes 3-4 years to get the infrastructure sorted [roots, water, nutrients, minerals] then whoomph: up they go. In this case, I'm indifferent to height; what's required is a tangled root system to act as a bulwark against the next 20-year flood. Of course, because climate change, the next 20-year flood is due next Wednesday!

New Years Day 2023

1st Jan 2023

And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year:
“Give me a light, that I may tread safely into the unknown!”
And he replied:
“Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God.
That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.”

Minnie Haskins 1908

I've joined George VI Windsor in quoting this before in the context of pilgrimage and the nanny state. Today we leave 2022 behind; which year has been quite exciting in a Red Top headline sort of way. The death of George's daughter, for example; or the Eastern European War. And, no, I didn't tune into the September funeral games in the country next door - don't 'ave a telly, mate. And actually, I've made a conscious decision not to doom-scroll over Ukraine; not least because don't 'ave a telly, mate easily accessible news sources are partial in both sense of that word. Whatevs!

What I came to say, holding hands with the Year-Gate feller, is best wishes and bon courage for 2023. Stuff will happen, don't lose heart, take it one day at a time.

Credits: Christmas Chapel in gingerbread by Dau.II and Dau.I