Nice work if you can get it

I've spent a lot of time in Teagasc but I don't have a lot of time for Teagasc. They are conservative, complacent and dull. The only light thing about the organization is the scones which are produced and consumed in prodigious quantities twice a day at Teagasc canteens across the land. 30 years ago, when I was working in TCD, we had a visiting speaker from California. At dinner that night he lamented the fact that his shamrock, given him one Patrick's Day several years previous, had died. I assured him that I could sort his problem. Accordingly, I left home late the following morning and called into Teagasc Kinsealy which was about 1 km along my 12 km commute. I had made an appointment with the Clover Liaison Officer C.L.O. who was available from 10 am. 

We had a very informative chat. He had spent the previous 20 years researching the question of wot am dis shamrock anyway? St Patrick used it as a prop for teaching about the three-fold nature of God 1,600 years ago. StP was 1,300 years before Linnaeus, who put predictable order on the naming of flowers. "Research" included driving round the country [on a mileage allowance that covered both petrol and depreciation of the ve-hicle, and a per diem to cover meals and accommodation] talking to the plain people of Ireland, and mountainty types at the end of grass-median bohereens. At each stop he invited informants to show me your shamrock. As a trained botanist, Dr Shamrock was able to tally up custom and usage for each county; and construct an overall bar chart for the island. Pretty much any fairly common three-leaved forb was identified somewhere: the also rans were black medic Medicago lupulina, white clover Trifolium pratense, wood sorrel Oxalis acetosella and red clover Trifolium repens.

But the front runner was Trifolium dubium (lesser/yellow clover, Irish: seamair bhuí) [as L]. And that became the government Shamrock if you wanted, for example, an export licence. The late lamented Mary Mulvihill has the definitive story of the promotion of Trifolium dubium. Glad to have sorted this out at the end of my visit, Dr Shamrock took a seed pack from his desk, labelled it, filled it with official T. dubium seed and handed it to me. It was close enough to 11:00 am, so we went up to the canteen for tea and a liberally buttered scone.

You can sort of see why Ireland might need a C.L.O. But it's hard to justify keeping one on the books for 20 years after the active part of their career was over. Ireland Inc is really reluctant to re-deploy, let alone sack, employees, so they drift on, eating scones when required and not shouting at anyone until they get to retire on a comfortable pension. Like 'Declan' who was sufficiently under-employed at Dept Social Welfare as to change my nationality before tea-time. Like the HSE employee who redundantly conducts patients from one room to the room next door. The knowledge of this cosy reluctance to downsize the work-force makes The Man super-reluctant to employ extra people to clear invidious backlogs in government services. That's why Dau.II had to wait 10 months for a shot at taking her driving test.

Stats laid bare

In April 2015, I was invited to An Event in Trinity College Dublin and had an interesting chat with one of the last-man-standing Professors of Anatomy. We compared notes on the several deficits in university education - driven off the curriculum by The New Sexy. The New Sexy is often fabulously expensive to develop and pricy to roll-out, so pennies need to be pinched elsewhere in the budget. Trad knowledge, like Anatomy, are undervalued and when the AnatProf retires he (almost always He) ain't replaced. So that class of chap is becoming an endangered species.

Same thing happened at the July 2024 Wexford Science Café which was a conversazione with Dr Sheila Willis, late Director of Forensic Science Ireland. When she started in Forensics in the 1980s the people there could do old style: 

• microscopic paint chips could be found in a child's jumper and matched to the car of a boy racer
• it was definitely Monaghan mud on the boot-heel and the pollen is oak
  
• the blood spatter on the ceiling was [not] arterial
• the hair was from the cat, definitely not the neighbour's aardvark
  

But the great god DNA has nudged a lot of this accumulated expertise into the dustbin of history and thrun the deer-stalker hat in after it. New hires tend to be from genetics and biochemistry rather than geology and ag. It's probably a sound judgment economically: paint-chip breakthroughs are rare but every perp is full of DNA; but having the framing always DNA is not good for expansive hypotheses. Dr Willis was innerviewed on The Life Scientific recently and the revelation that she'd been to school in Wexford Town secured her invite to the WxScCafé. The Blob has quite a lot to say of forensics.

We were invited to lunch recently (they only allow me out with my bib every ten years) and I rubbed shoulders with a different (and still in post) Prof of Anatomy. We agreed that a) scientific training was far too specialised and this was probably affecting a) creativity b) critical evaluation of data through lack of context. We also agreed that everyone, but especially scientists, cd/shd be much better trained in probability and statistics.

Was I a bit shiny-eyed & ranty about that? If so, it might have been my then current earbook: Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data by Charles Wheelan. Wheelan has a faculty position, currently at Dartmouth and before that at U.Chicago. But he has been active in explaining math, data and money, not only to his students, but also on the radio, and in several newspapers of record. And there's more of that in Naked Statistics which uses jaunty, not to say facetious, examples to illustrate such arcana as the central limit theorem and the standard error of the mean. I thought these were pretty good explanations, and some of them were funny. ymmv, I guess. Everyone in the room I am in as I write (N = 3) knew that LeBron James is a tall American basketball player. But similar assumptions are made about the length of an inch, the weight of a pound, the significance of a "hole-in-one" and the function of a "pitcher". Maybe the author and publisher don't give-a-damn about bamboozling non USians. Maybe I am being patronizing about what my neighbours know and ignoring the ubiquitous penetration of American language and culture.

As with all vaguely technological non-fiction earbooks, aural processing is at a significant deficit if the words are either full of numbers or supported by pictures. Don't bother me none in this case: I've seen enough right-skewed distributions in 40 years of data processing to visualise what one looks like; I don't need to see the actual numbers to be believe that two confidence intervals do not overlap. But it is a bit tiresome, yet again, that publishers will take money by selling audio-books without providing these aids to understanding. For one thing it is effectively exclusionary of, say, dyslexics for whom audio is a much more efficient medium for knowledge acquisition.

But here's the thing: Wheelan gathers all the basics covered in the earlier chapters into a big puff for the value of multiple regression with dummy variables. He makes a convincing case that using this technique (readily available in your favorite stats package - yea even Excel) can yield interesting and unexpected insights into your data. One of the first, most challenging, and most rewarding courses I took in graduate school in Boston was Multivariate Statistics: sitting at the feet of Ralph D'Agostino. D'Agostino was also mad for multiple regression with dummy variables and explained that it was mathematically equivalent but much more obvious in its assumptions than ANOVA which is very widely used as a blackbox by people who know no better. D'Agostino died, in the fullness of his years, in September 2023. The obit reveals that he was, for 30 years, one of the Principal Quants in the famous Framingham Heart Study - a longitudinal [1948 - now] investigation into the effects of lifestyle, income, exercise, diet on the likelihood of cardiovascular events. The stats used there to effectively crunch through the data have changed our understanding of cause and effect; and implemented all sorts of policy changes, product labelling and drug development.

One Sep Sun Bit Wol

Bubo bubo [R]

• What wouldn't you do for your [Angelman] son?
• Aphantasia explained by Ian "TCD" Robertson [bloboprev]
  
• Gott Betrunken im Himmel - Ryanair deplores drunken passengers
• What is a unit of alcohol? ♀♂ edition
  
• Parting glass - Onóir 
• Matthew & The Atlas ~ I Will Remain
•  ≋≋≋≋
• Fenit tombolo 
  
• The Death of Lough Neagh
• Mackerel? Only Irish & Asians need apply their forks
• Long lining Halibut Greenland
• Martin's Boat - Colorado R dory [been here before]
• Boats? curving the strakes in the forest
  
• Skara brae . . . neighboring Brogdar prev
• Hot-lime pointing a tumble-down Irish cottage
• Peter McVerry [multibloboprev] Trust goes $henanigan$ tsk!
  

Poker Face

Joshua Foer was a well-connected 20-something science journalist who went, almost for a jape, to cover the annual Mr Memory Competition. Being there and talking to the punters, he figured I could be a contender. His book Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything is the tale of his year of learning how memory could be trained sufficiently to win the competition the following year. I'm quite good at rote-learning: it's been key to such academic success as I've had. But I really couldn't be arsed to do memory well: to put in hundreds of hours training to be better the best in class (my ambition genes were shot off in the war).

My pal P sent me a book where Maria Konnikova appeared to go all me-too on "knock off some arcane skill in one year and write a book about the journey". The pic gives a clue as to the challenge documented in The Biggest Bluff her 2020 book about the world of million dollar poker. The subtitle How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win is a masterpiece in the made-for-the-chatterati trips-off-the-tongue triples genre: Eat Pray Love -- Heat Braise Shanks etc.). It is interesting to read because Konnikova is sufficiently self-aware to a) be good at poker b) be skeptical about what she experiences on her journey. But it is not a text-book about how to Win Big at Vegas. Not least because a rather large variety of types have mastered the craft; and you have to play to your strengths, not Konnikova's. Your strengths . . . and a little bit more!

One of her informants seems to have mastered a form [qigong + mindfulness] of non-attachment "If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster / And treat those two impostors just the same" where winning and losing chunks of money on the turn of cards are seen as equal in the eyes of an implacable universe. Less woo-woo winners recognise the value of losing . . . as a learning experience. It's all about recognising that, although bad turns, bad luck, bad cards will do you in the eye sometimes; good players can turn crap cards into a Win because they are paying attention: it's not about card counting in poker; it's not even about 'tells'; it's paying attention to the way your opponents have behaved in the past (couple of hours often) and perking up at anomalous (in)actions.  NB: really top players have the ability and inclination to turn this attention scrutiny on themselves. 

Typical players, au contraire, get fixated about what has worked in the past, in similar circumstances. As current information blizzards down on them across the table and from the cards, only confirmation bias kicks in - making them more certain that what has worked will work. Bzzzt! wrong.

Konnikova didn't make the goal she set herself to achieve in one year from a "what's a full house?" start. But she did get in a lot of travel (Vegas, yes, but also Dublin, Barcelona, Monte Carlo and Macau) and win some $000 pots along the way. Wikipedia says she's a Poker Pro now. Good on her for facing down loadsa wannabe-alpha trash-talking males in the process . . . and cleaning them out. Still 97% of top level poker players are men: there's no physical reason why this should be.

Getting bitter NOT!

The Blob made passing ref to Michael Rosen's hypothyroidism a couple of years ago. In trying to track that link down, I find that The Blob has been quite the throw-knickers-on-stage groupie for the lugubrious English wordsmith [R].

My current earbook is Getting Better by the said same Michael Rosen. [Which may remind you* of Tous les jours, à tous points de vue, je vais de mieux en mieux the mantra of Émile Coué (de La Châtaigneraie) 1857-1926, the doyen de personal development through the power of positive thunk. * if you aren't part of la francophonie try every day in every way I'm getting better and better with or without earworming Frank Spencer]. Getting Better is short and packs a lot of hurt.

His father and mother were intellectual Lefties from East London: their first date turned into The Battle of Cable Street an anti-fasch riot in 1936. Foter was never satisfied with academic progress of his sons in a cliché of ambition-by-proxy my-son-the-doctor. Sod that: so much unhappiness trying to tonk square pegs into round holes.

Young Rosen shrugged into the academic mantel, did well in school and went to Oxford, but in his early 20s his body was sapped by Hashimoto's thyroiditis, a progressive disease where the immune system declares that the thyroid in non-self and starts to destroy it. The thyroid produces thyroxine which is the 'metabolic hormone' and without it, everything slows down: bowels, heart-rate, s p e e c h. Because the effect are system wide, hypothyroid is hard of diagnosis and it wasn't until his mid-30s that Rosen got treatment. Added thyroxine is one of the miraculous cures of the 20thC and treatment made him better. 

It was unfortunate that, as his undiagnosed hypothyroidism was kicking in, Rosen was trying to progress a career (permanent + pension) at the BBC. Despite some creative successes, he was let go by the Corporation and thereafter had to dig his own channel as a free-lance. It is hard to be off the pay-roll, but for some it can be a stimulus. So many mediocrities were kept on the books [bloboprev last para] at the BBC. Years later it was revealed that his career at the BBC had been coshed by MI5 because The Man feared his leftist credentials.

Rosen developed as a children's writer, getting words down on paper at his desk allowed him to be agreeably absurdist and laughing quietly at his own jokes. But when a fan, a teacher at a large primary school, asked him to perform for a hall full of 400 kids, Rosen was a dull dull dull failure. The teacher kindly showed him the way to be better at playing a children's poet. I felt a rush of empathy because, when I worked at The Institute as a hack teacher of science, I consciously put on my happy face when I strode down the corridor to perform in class - learning was bound to be better if I left my mumbling, stumbling, diffident self at my desk.

In 1999, when he was 53, Rosen's son Eddie contracted meningitis [Neisseria meningitidis prev] and died at home in his bed.  He was only 19 but had already delivered a play into the late 20thC canon. So much potential, so sad. That kind of shit really knocks you back. But moping, let alone griping about life's unfairness won't bring the boy back. Rosen Sr. tried to follow a similar playbook to, similarly bereft, Mo Gawdat - stuff all that might-have-been; focus on the actual 20 decades worth of happy days.

In contrast to his chap, Rosen didn't die at home. He didn't die in hospital during the first Summer of Covid either. Tim Robinson (and 000s of other elderly Brits) was not so lucky. Rosen copped a 'Rona, went downhill and was taken to hospital. Between the jigs and reels he spent 40 days and 40 nights intubated in an induced coma and everyone was surprised (because the odds were against that eventuality) that he woke up. Another 50 days of physio and occupational therapy got him back on his feet and eventually he threw the final stick away and went home. He has some sensible, useful things to say about engagement with your own healing. Like my audiologist, OTs recognise that the major part of their job is putting it back on the client. Nobody gets better if the OTs do all the heavy lifting: ya gotta work for your own salvation. But, as with the other adversities visited upon him, Rosen got better from Covid because he didn't give up.

impersonation

Impersonation is a right regular pain in the arse of the internet: so many Nigerian Princes with spare cash and employees from the late-night bank security team. In Ireland it is a crime to impersonate a member of the Gardai.: you may be fined or spend 5 years in the slammer if convicted. In some circumstances pretending to be A.N. Other is harmless fun (Ms Veranda Porch) or positively protective (Ms Attracta Looney). That last link is also about the birth and naming of Gdau.II who, with her nucl.family, has been in Ireland for the month of August. They normally live in England but have been visiting the Crumblies and also travelling about seeing the sights, hanging out with peers and other scions of the family tree. 

It was arranged that The Parents have a two night quality time break together, while The Kids, now 8 and 12 y.o., go to Dublin with their Aunties. For such an adventure noms-de-plume were in order. Irish Rail has been getting better and better over the last 30 years. The provincial rail service is still absurdly light: there are only 7 trains a day between Dublin and Waterford. But you can book tickets on-line and change reservations ad lib until departure. The carriages are all wired up, not only with WiFi, but also little electronic seat IDs to match the booking number. Nobody remembers their booking number, so you may opt to have your name beside your assigned seat. GDPR requires that the naming of seats is opt-in rather than opt-out.

It would never occur to me to use another name in such circumstances but the Gdaus are more imaginative. Accordingly, yesterday Hérr Van De Guard and his diminutive and sassy assistant Murgle Turgle went to town in carriage B. This evening, after seeing the sights with "Auntie Perspirant" and "Auntie Climactic", they will be reunited with their freshly pampered parents. Lest State Security tries to follow the movements of the intrepid adventurers, they are returning as Bubble Tea and Plopper Suitcase . . . you'll never take them alive coppers!

Ness of Brodgar

For a hymn to the (voluptuous) Earth-mother, the matrix of The Ringstone is well 'ard. It is fine-grained igneous granite. Crude as the carving is, it is still clear after 5000 winters of weather. We have no idea whether and when the carved face was covered against the elements but we do know that they were buried in a wall (and so protected) for ~200 years up until 2007. With sedimentary rocks like limestone and sandstone it is fatal to be insouciant about the effects of weathering. Years ago we heard a story about how some neolithic works of such softer stone had been dug up and relocated to the edge of a municipal car-park in Tullamore? the Midlands - so that they were on display. Within a decade, or two at most, the 000 year old detailing had been done to death by acid rain and drunken urinators; all that remained was blobs.

The Ness of Brodgar was in the news this Summer because it is going under . . . again. This extensive (2.5 ha.) site adjacent to Skara Brae on Mainland Orkney was discovered in 2003 after being farmed and fished past for hundreds of years: ignored because it looked like a big oval hillock. In that year, a large notched stone was turned up by the plough and a geophysical survey showed a rich mess of anomalies suggesting the work of human hand. The following year a team of archaeologists turned up with their shovels and toothbrushes and dug some exploratory trenches to confirm the geophyical imaging.  A complex of walls, middens, buildings, 150,000 cattle bones and fabricated artifacts were revealed. No gold torcs, but for archaeologists it's not about treasure; it's about understanding how people lived and worked and had fun in the neolithic.

Silbury Hill [wch prev] a larger man-made hillock 1,000+ km due South in the middle of England is more-or-less the same age as the works at Brodgar. Crude digs over the last 250 years have made a hames of the archaeological strata and context making it much harder for us moderns to interpret the origins and functions of that massive structure. 

With commendable restraint and humility, it has been decided that Summer 2024 is the last excavation season: every winter more lamination of the top layers of stone occurs. It won't take long to reduce the whole precise structure to soft-focus of weathered rock revealing nothing about the past. Accordingly, this fall, the archaeologists intend to cover up their 2 decades of careful digging and write up their interpretive notes. As they affirm "The long-term survival of the archaeology is paramount. Our duty is to protect the site for future generations, who, armed with new techniques and technology, will be able to pick up where we left off".