Murder Most Florid

Let's hear it for diatoms! They are microscopic, unicellular algae fantastically abundant in wet places across the world. Not a patch on Prochlorococcus abundant, mind, but that's a prokaryote. One interesting thing about diatoms is that they have silica, rather than calcium carbonate, shells. This material is rather more resistant to degradation; perhaps because everyone else is avid for calcium. The other diatom 'fact' is their remarkable diversity of form - as sampled above from the Nat Hist Museum in London.

With their diversity, you can imagine that diatoms might be useful in forensics but TIL that they are particularly useful in cases of drowning. The smaller members of the tribe can be forced across the alveolar membrane when water under pressure floods the lungs and finish up embedded in various tissues including the liver. One standard forensic technique is to "ash" a necropsy sample from such tissues and then wash out the impervious-to-fire silica skeletons to determine if the drowning occurred at sea or in a lake or in a bathtub. Each of those habitats hosting different varieties of diatoms.

This is not all I learned from reading Murder Most Florid: Inside the Mind of a Forensic Botanist (2019) by Dr Mark Spencer. I won't link to the publisher because, a) the book is basically out of print because Quadrille under-estimated the take-up b) the book has been published with two missing pages. Check your library, though, because it's worth a leaf through (see wot I did there?). Spencer's work is adjacent to that of Patricia Wiltshire, who works in the same arena as a forensic palynologist (pollen-boffin). They have both been free-lancing = scrabbling for work on zero hours non contracts from police-services across the UK. Between 1991 and 2012, there was a UK state-owned FSS Forensic Science Service. It was available as a service to the several police forces . . . but also coroners, the Revenue, prosecutors. Then it was shuttered because it was costing money and half the staff went free-lance. I'm sure that the created competition is great for Das Kapital.

Most crime (Forensics:the application of scientific methods and techniques to the investigation of crime) happens in houses, or on the mean streets. Forensics in this world is about glass fragments, gunshot residues, blood-spatter, exit wounds. Most coppers never get out in the countryside and are a bit at a loss when scene-of-crime hinges on bending of grass-stems, the length of bramble arches, leaf-frags in trouser-cuffs. They are more inclined to call up a boys-toys back-hoe, than a fastidious botanist in wellies. A back-hoe will dig up the body if it's there, Yes,  but with a lot of extra metal-on-bone marks to bamboozle the forensic pathologist like Richard Shepherd. Cripes, I've been reading too much about dead-body science.

Who knew that a really experienced botanist can name a plant species from a 1cm² fragment of leaf stuck to a muddy boot-heel? For most of us, beyond ash Fraxinus excelsior and daisies Bellis perennis, we'd be hard-put to dredge up common name, let alone a Linnaean binomer, for a whole in situ random plant from the neighbourhood - even if it was in flower. Quiz-time [L]: under what species of tree was the bludgeoned Together For Yes activist having a picnic? A: at page bottom.

It's true that police services have long ago given up on the ideal of solving all crime. They probably won't bother to call by if you phone-in a burglary: "Just call your insurance, Sir". They have a budget and a set of priorities and nailing a perp to a particular place through botanical trace-work is a) alien e) expensive, so it's not done. Drs Spencer, Shepherd and Wiltshire think that justice is a missing a trick there; but perhaps everything looks like a nail to a hammer and they would say that wouldn't they? If you read either of the forensic botanist memoirs, you'll be in a better position to judge whether "we" need that expertise. Nobody has made a convincing case that "we" need synonymous codon usage analysis, however much fun I had working in that field for a decade.

Mark Spencer addresses the Linnaean Society on his book and work.
A: Acer pseudoplatanus, sycamore Seicmar

The Triv of Hist

Q. After all, who wouldn't want Napoleon's penis in a display cabinet?

I had a life-time working in science; amazingly, getting paid (to have fun) for most of it. I was a second-rate player - but not as low as third-rate . . . fair with failings. Principal of those failings being lack of finish: the ideas came readily enough; I enjoyed gathering data and processing them; but copper-bottoming the ship for launching was too much like hard work and my desk-drawer was full of unpublished manuscripts. What I could do was write a book-review! 700 words giving the gist of a book, a mild crit of how well it was put together and a sentence or two of original content to add something to the intellectual history of humanity. The Blob is an extension of this business model: not limited to books but still 700 rambling words about something specific that has floated up over my horizon. There are still rather more typos and clunky phrasing than I'd like. But if there's a copy deadline, the type must be set and printed and done.

Suzie Edge surfaced on Metafilter because of her line in medical-historical tales. That's my jam and so I ordered her book from the library: Vital Organs: A History of The World's Most Famous Body Parts.  Edge started life as a molecular biologist; shifted to medicine (infection, haematology, surgery); then took an MLitt in Modern History; more recently has gone mad on TikTok. It's a bit like The Blob, I guess: getting inspiration from whatever floats past in the media stream.  Someone suggested that the subset of stories about [named] human body parts could be clagged together into a book-length manuscript and waft this past some publishers.

The Q. at the top of this piece refers to one such member.
A. No thanks. It's quite enough to handle my own penis, don't need another.
Seemingly, someone nicked Napoleon's penis before the Emperor was buried and after some peculiar travelling it is now at rest in New Jersey. Most of Albert Einstein's brain is likewise now lodged in a jar in Hamilton Ontario. In neither case was the macabre shipment across multiple state lines authorized by informed consent! We've both 'done' Alexis St. Martin's visible digestive system. Galileo's middle finger is on display [R] in Firenze. If there is going to be a second volume of Vital Organs (and there must be a "second eleven" out there), I've already written Captain Danjou's hand.

Suzie Edge has retailed the [standard story] of Douglas Bader’s legs. These prostheses were defo part of my cultural background when I was a schoolboy in short pants, pretending to be a Hawker Hurricane [neeowwww, budda budda budda] in 1960s England. Bader was a POW in WWII and vowed to be “a plain, bloody nuisance to the Germans”. One example was refusing to attend appel /roll-call in the snow because his feet would get cold. Hilarious stick-it-to-the-man anecdote. Except that, several years after tween me hoovering up Reach For The Sky, his biography by Paul Brickhill, I heard about the POV of his fellow POWs who had been required to parade in the snow until all prisoners were present and accounted for.

This is a peculiar book. Comprehensive history it ain't. It's basically a series of reasonably well-informed cocktail-party anecdotes; not a haiku, but not a critical reading of the several sources, either. I hope it does well because we all need to be less squeamish about dead bodies.  It is written in a jaunty, not to say racy, style with a liberal smattering of dark doctory insider jokes. Rather too many, in my prudish all-grown-up opinion. A lot of water under my bridge since I was sharing Lockerbie jokes with the lads.

I'm boilin' so I am

My grandfather is buried in Co Wexford. His grandmother owned 13,330 acres of the county (that's +2% of the dry-land area - the mean holding per head being 5 acres!) in the 1870s shortly before The Ganfer was born. For that or some other reason, I'm signed up to an e-mail feed from Wexford CoCo Arts Department. Round about Epiphany they sent out a call to arms:

OPEN CALL NEW VOICES SHORT FILMS FUND 2024

Funding will be available through the scheme to support a number of short films. We are seeking entries from narrative film, documentary and animation.
A fund of €10,000 will be shared between a selection of a maximum of 3 successful applicants. This will cover genres of drama,documentary and animation.
The award also consists of mentorship from leading industry professionals, as well as some in kind support of  lighting equipment hire  and film equipment hire.

At the beginning of December, I coughed up some folding money to GoFundMe a film being built by a young team of my acquaintance, based in Dublin, and invited y'all to do the same. Their fund-raiser has ground to a halt [last donation 7 days ago] at €2,305 of a €3,000 goal. I deduce that offering €10K to support max 3x short films is within the normal range of expectations. Who knew? €3,000 is a lot to spend on Mars Bars; but reasonable for a reliable car? 

What had me chewing my beard in vicarious frustration is that the award appears to be limited to a) consultancy fees b) equipment hire. The also in the third sentence of the announcement is porting a lot of water if there is another interpretation. The CoCo Arts Department seem to think it is okay for the creatives in their care to be part of the voluntariat and/or independently wealthy like my Grampa's Grannie. Thus:

• It is okay to funnel money to established "mentors" who have presumably made it financially. 
• It is okay for HireAll companies to generate some turn-over. 
• But it is not okay for the actual creatives to buy food or clothing or pay the rent with the money

That all is not okay. Many of my oldest friends have been making Art for their entire adult lives. This funding model is absolutely standard practice in the Arts world. What happens is that, as established authors big each other up in blurb-rings of mutual back-scratching, so artists ladle the money into each other's bowls: My contract allows me to employ someone else to film my dance; your contract allows you to give a per diem to extras; their contract allows them to buy paint from her supply shop; her contract allows her to have a dancer launch a new product-line by Rowney. None of them can use the money, which they win in competitions, to stave off the wolf or put shoes on their kids' feet.

+30 years ago, before the launch of Science Foundation Ireland SFI at the turn of the century, science funding could be a bit like that. In the early 90s I knew a couple of chemists who were completing PhDs, generating copy and kudos for their supervisors, while working as a barkeep to live: they got no salary. My first three research grants (from the Donegal Historical Society; BU Sigma Xi and the Nuffield Foundation) assumed I had a regular income and provided the money for travel and reagents. That assumption was only true the third time round.

IF the Arts Council and parallel Arts funding bodies really want to get more artistic creation out there, THEN they need to crank up the funding and pay salary to successful applicants. For science funding I've long asserted that piffling the money out too thin does not serve Science well. It means underfunded small sample sizes, inadequate to answer any of the research questions posed. The €10,000 films fund should be a €10,000 FILM fund: €4K to make the film; €5K for rent; €1K for groceries including a bottle of old red biddy for Saturday night after a hard week chasing the Key Grip and Best Boy round the camera dolly.

Piper greets the year

Rich and famous

• Peregrin Paddi, Grace and James - new album A Curious Dance [cover R]
  
• Uilleann pipe arcana 
• A Basque set James Patrick Gavin 
• The Piper at the Gates of Dawn full text
  
• 403 / 100K Brits want to go full Imperial 
• 303 of them are surnamed Colonel, Blimp or Rees-Mogg
• Setting out the Imperial stall in 2022: Imph, human height, neonate weight
  
• Informative essay about Shipping Forecast areas. The Wireless BBC Shipping forecast is 100 years old in 2024.
• Emily Graslie left the Field Museum two years ago.
• Then came back a month ago, as a self-employed person.
• Fanboy Blob from 10 years !! ago
• After 10 years every Monday, Tom Scott is turning down the thermostat
• Which Tom Scott, though?
  
• Documentary about British Trad parades / festivals (sunrise solstice stonehenge 2019 below). via MeFi
  
• How it's done in Saõ Miguel, Açores

 

Form un function

Private Eye summarized the recent UK Coronation: Man in Hat Sits on Chair. I was lamenting how samey and genre'd so much nature writing is: Person (usually bloke) shrugs self into rain-gear and walks somewhere, talks inconsequentially to random people along the way, takes notes, sees birbs, takes bus occasionally because is weak not purist, flies home, writes up, job done. 

There are some exceptions: go deep with Louis Agassiz: talk to nobody but beetles and worms and work your way slowly over your back yard over the summer. Or you can take a small mountain range as your back garden like Nan Shepherd: talk to nobody and keep going back and be quiet in place until the birbs come and talk to you. But having an agenda / trope / theme, even if added post-hoc: that doesn't count as being true to your own-self voice. It is rather a construct: Round Ireland with a fridge; Dervlaing thru Ethiopia on a mule; In the Footsteps of Stevenson: A Journey Through the Cevennes; or 11 Wild Atlantic Way Women . . . those are marketing gimmicks. y'have to quiet the monkey mind if you want to hear the truth.

I was stalking one of the more thoughtful MeFi Regulars who is an Icelandic poet living in Finland: immersed in minority languages but fluent in Englanninkielinen. His interconnect with nature falls far outside my peevish complaining. Watchunder, I sample the title and a single stanza, but please please take the full immersion plunge of "Entropic Nature": it's an experience. On the left the original by Karí Tulinius  the right translated by Larissa Kyzer. Be sure to open the "translator's note" window where Larissa sets out the task.

MARG URÞÚ SEMS YRGR      ALLO FYOU WHOM OURN
loft loft fugl loft      blue blue bird blue
sjór sjór sjór svif      wave wave wave fish
botn þang botn botn      seab edse awee dsea
eðja eðja flak eðja      silt silt hull silt

You don't have to know Icelandic to see that the translation is not a dogged word for word by Google Translate but work by a poet who is determined to be true to the constraints of English while respecting the different constraints of Icelandic and catch the poet's peculiar particular voice.

There was a little tinkle of resonance with that four word only poem. In my I'm so a poet days as a teenager, I developed a neat fast cursive hand but I also had my mother's old Olivetti portable typewriter. Remember them? The font many not have been Courier but it was defo fixed-width. It didn't take me long to see that I could make blocks of text of a defined shape - better with CAPS ONLY - which provided a constraint on the verse. Similar to obeying the rhythm and rhyme scheme of a Petrachan sonnet: ABBAABBA+CDCCDC although I did them too. I figured IF Sir Philip Sidney could knock off a verse or two while dying from his wounds in Gelderland in 1586, THEN I could try hammer one out in my garrett the caravan at the bottom of our garden. All that pretentious tosh went up in flames after I sent them to RS "Real Poet" Thomas: and he found them wanting. 

On the subject of pleasing but unnecessary constraints, for the last several years, every Blob gets at least a thumbnail to leaven the relentless text. It would be yer havin' a larf disrespect to attempt to illustrate Karí's blocky voice so I'll go full-metal non sequitur. Over the last tuthree years, I've taken to doing Guardian Sudoku with my custom-made spreadsheet grid; in colour trying to ensure that neither adjacent cells nor their neighbours are the same hue. Monochrome? Sonnet? sooo boring.

Poet prev: Antonio Machado -- Jan Celliers -- Dickinson -- e.e. cummings -- Ferlinghetti

Wild Atlantic Women

Writing is easy, getting published is hard. In the old days, the actual mechanics of getting words down on the page were onerous. It wasn't so much pushing the pen or banging away on your Olivetti typewriter (altho both will give you a case of R.S.I.); it was the drafts, the revisions, the fair-copy, the final final manuscript. With MS-Word or similar, all that rewriting, correcting, re-ordering is taken care of with ctlr-C ctrl-V. As the mechanics have gotten easier, more and more people have notions of authoring. The poor bloody commissioning editors are deluged with unsolicited mss. Which means less time available for finding a truly original, different, engaging, voice.

The Blob is now more than 2 million words in extent: I can and do write. But I refuse to go to a writing workshop fearing that will knock the corners of my authentic voice and reduce it to something samey. My experience with professional copy editors was informative and interesting. Re-ordering my narrative from time-sequential to bring a Hook up to the first paragraph undoubtedly made it a better product in keep-eyes-on-page terms. But every damned article in that, and every, issue of Natural History used the first para is hook trope as taught in journalism school.

I'm after reading Wild Atlantic Women - walking Ireland's West coast by Gráinne Lyons. It has a chapter on Maude Delap, and has a good bit of walking, so it's basically my jam. Old Maude has gotten a much bigger profile since I wrote about her ten years ago. The publisher's blurb tropes the book up a bit: "At a crossroads in her life, Gráinne Lyons set out to travel Ireland’s west coast on foot. She set a simple intention: to walk in the footsteps of eleven pioneering Irish women deeply rooted in this coastal landscape and explore their lives and work along the way. As a Londoner born to Irish parents, she also sought answers in her own identity". Which is fair enough, except for the hook At a crossroads in her life,  which is lazy and rather first world problemy. The walks in the drizzle which wash through the book were carried out over several years as Lyons bounced between making money in London [in television] and passing it to Ryanair and many B&Bs between Cork and Donegal. The genesis of the book as A cross-roads, is true only in the sense that every set of traffic-lights is a crossroads.

My hot-take is that the blurb quoted above is a post-hoc rationalization by publisher, editor, author and sounding-board pals to hammer the text into marketable shape. Adjacent to this is PB Medawar's essay about the scientific paper which, in all its magisterial data gathering and relentless logic, is a big fib. The process which a paper describes often starts with an Aha! result; and then goes back and makes it seem like the paper's suprising-coz-novel finding was part of a cunning plan which started forming way-back-when in the PI's rational mind.

Lyons works with words and images. She went to visit Cape Clear because an ancestor made lace there, [an ancestor was rector there etc etc] and, as a writer, she wondered how the essence of that windy wet visit could be captured and presented to an audience. There's not enough stand-alone meat in the story of Ellen Cotter, Lyons great-grandmother . . . but it could make a convincing chapter in a longer book. That required some legwork, on paths and in archives so that more tales of horizontal rain in the present moment could be chopped fine and inter-saladed with personal back-story and something about each chapter's star. It's a bit of a scrabble to find enough interesting women more-or-less associated with the West Coast to fill 200+ pages that can be printed, bound, distributed, marketed and sold. Not even a round dozen - eleven (11) will have to do. But that's all sour-puss carping: my book Barrowomen of Science so far only has one chapter - about Yvonne [Epstein] Barr [Virus].

But those 11 women are, indeed, all interesting in their own way. Some already famous to be point of being cliché - like Peig Sayers and Pirate Queen Gráinne Ní Mháille. But the list includes others who really deserve to be drug up and recognised by us moderns - like scientist Maude Delap and philanthropist of the dispossessed Charlotte Grace O'Brien. There are two more mná Uí Bhriain: Edna "Tuamgraney Co Clare" O'Brien and Kate "Roundstone, Co Galway" O'Brien. The latter's two cats - Kelly and La Grise -  feature above L with the village in the background.

Wild Atlantic Women is a professional piece of work in a particular genre [walking with meditation and a hook] and it reads easy. We await the telly-series‽ It took me months to start-and-finish it, but that's because I owned a copy (tnx Dau.I), while library books need to be returned, so they got more of my eyes and attention. I don't need to keep this book, though; and I'll happily pass it free-to-good-home on.

Niche experts

30 and more years ago, in a fit of indignant lamp-post pissing, certain alpha-males in the man-and-boy department of my Alma Mater created a new Experimental Officer position with a special expertise in Clinical Genetics. As the One and Only Genetics Department in the country, they felt entitled to own that patronage. For many years previous to this adventure, Clinical Genetics testing had been carried out with quiet competence by Prof James Houghton at University College Galway UCG . . . on the other side of the country. It's a nice little earner: even before DNA sequencing started to deliver A Lot of tests for the differing clinical conditions. ~1 in 500 births in Ireland have The Down's = trisomy 21, for example. Take Tay-Sachs, for example, it's a journey which families tend not to want to repeat and Jewish communities where the condition is prevalent have implemented a scheme to minimize the likelihood. For any heritable condition, it's better to get an accurate diagnosis if available - to target therapy if available.

Anyway Alma Mater duly appointed the new E.O. who came qualified in cytogenetics, so he could, at a minimum, count human chromosomes in human cells and determine whether there was an extra Chr21 in the mix. If you think that's as easy as falling off a log, remember that up until Tjio and Levan (1956) Everybody Knew, erroneously that, like gorilla and chimpanzee, humans had 48 chromosomes! The new E.O. had no particular aptitude for business, so the Clinical Genetics Testing Unit (which was supposed to tap a market several multiples of an E.O. salary) was still-born. The E.O. was a permanent position, and the incumbent contributed a good deal to the intellectual life of the college - notably in poetry and a rigorously defended Catholicism. The alpha-males just had to chew their beards in frustration at the ruins of their imperial ambitions.

A few years later in the mid-1990s, that E.O. salary was dangled in front of me when I was aspiring to provide another sort of niche infra-structural service aka INCBI for the country. The salary was also dangled in front of at least two, smart but salary-challenged, friends of mine who are now full-professors rather than E.Os. My business sense, not to mention my killer instinct and alpha-maleness was equally deficient. As dierector and sole-employee of INCBI, I was presented with a challenge "IF, as you claim, your infra-structural expertise is so valuable to Irish science, THEN you should be able to persuade your salary from the numerous beneficial clients". That never happened, and the alphas were unable to Lady Macbeth me into, like, murdering my colleague for his job. Accordingly I slipped sideways into a, not particularly effective, research role until the money ran out after the crash in 2012 and then I started Bloggin' for The Institute.  The E.O. trundled on until, eventually, in due course, in the fullness of his years, he retired. I'm delighted that, as well as an E.O. there is now a Senior E.O.in the department who is doing more or less exactly what I should have been doing 25 years ago . . . and doing it was a lot more drive, talent and engagement than I could ever manage.

I guess my point is that, whatever your talents [borned] and toolkit [learned], you need a bit of luck and timing to make it. 'make it' should therefore be own-self defined broadly or most of us gonna fail.