Pickin' trash

Shockin' ain't it?  Here left is a picture from Somewhere-in-the-Third-World of desperately poor people picking through the refuse of people slightly less poor to get some residual use from things discarded and make a poor enough living.  You note that the slightly-less-poor people of Oppressia have agreed to dispose of their stuff in particular places which has unconsidered benefits for efficiency of processing by the really poor folk.  Ireland joined the First World several decades ago and was for a brief while in the noughties boom deemed  to have the second richest per capita income in the OECD.  So we don't deal with our trash in such a shameful and reprehensible manner.  Oh no. We just fire it out of the windows as we drive through the countryside in our cars.

Self and DauII and her pal have just spent a chunk of the afternoon picking rubbish out of the ditches and drains along the county road between the end of our bohereen and The Cross.  This scheme was started several years ago by the local branch of An Taisce. They name a day in the Spring and hand out bin-bags - latterly cans/plastic/general bags -  and the Usual Suspects come out to clean up after their neighbours.  On a glorious day like today, it's a chance for a walk, a chance for a chat; and a few little competitions (largest object, oldest bottle, freshest diaper) make it more interesting.  Tea in the village hall afterwards, with the promise of iced dainties, makes a day to remember.

Oldest bottle found by Palia with a sell-by date in 1998; largest object found by Self with broken-rimmed 20 lt feed-bucket; no entry for the diaper section - t'ank de lawd.

In the money!

I received a cheque in the post this week - £25!  This is 'found money' because I wasn't expecting it and hadn't budgetted for the windfall.  As I said a couple of days ago, I'm bound for England to see the extended family, so I've said 'the drinks are on me'  I hope there aren't too many in the pub next week or I'll regret not saying 'the Milky Bars are on me' instead.  I've used that phrase in its literal sense several times in my long and varied teaching career, when I've asked the students to teach each other, by researching and preparing presentations, and give me a bit of a breather.

ANNyway, the cheque: it came from Blackpool as a pay-out from the £50 in premium bonds that was given to me by a rich(ish) aunt for my 8th birthday in 1962.  It's my second 'win'.  When PAYOLA last rang in about 1976, I calculated that the return on investment was almost exactly what I would have gotten if I'd invested the £50 at interest.

So I thought I'd do that again.  The most excellent and informative Guardian Datablog had a report on interest rates since 1694 from which I was able to calculate (with my since-January acquired ExCel skills) the MAX (17%), MIN (0.5%) and AVERAGE (7.52%) interest rates since Jun 1962.  So I estimate that £50 invested at appropriate interest rates compounded over half a century is ... [paste 50*1.0752^50 into WolframAlpha] ... £1877!
which I've written in a large font because it's rather bigger than the £50 that I've actually had returned by the British Gumment.

The hills are alive with

. . . the sound of students.

I've written before about the ringstone which we discovered in a gateway between two of our fields in 2007. Shortly after I started working at The Institute, a blanket e-mail appeared in my inbox announcing the January event for the Institute's Hill Walking Club.  I wrote back to the point person saying I was far too busy prepping my gallimaufry of classes to spend Saturday in the Comeraghs but that the club might like to visit the Ringstone next time they went walking in the Blackstairs.  Well that happened today, and I was delighted to see 20 people turn up in our yard for The Ringstone Tour.  The turnstile was so busy it needed to be cooled down with a bucket of water!  It couldn't have been a better day.  Sunny and breezy - although that might be a deafening brisk wind further up the hill - and not too hot: perfick. The club hires a mini-bus and everyone meets at the Institute for transport.  What a great idea; students meet people from different programmes and courses, the staff meet the students outside of class, everyone gets some fresh air and exercise. Almost all the students are from foreign.  I was alone and a long way from family when I started graduate school in America but it wasn't my first time away from home and I was a good bit older.  But what I felt then assures me that the club is really important for those who take part.

The Petitcodiac Bore

Next weekend, the last in April, DauII and I are off to Merrie Engalond for a family knees-up.  My beloved and colorful brother-in-law is turning 60 and his friends-and-relations have organised a party on the banks of the Severn.  I'm assuming that they have arranged the time so that we can view the Severn Bore. I hasten to explain that this is not the B-in-L's nick-name.  When we scrabbled enough money to go partners with the bank on buying a house for the first time I announced the event with a picture of a swinging pub-sign featuring a pig's head and the motto "Ad signum verris oppressus" which Google refuses to translate as at the sign of the crushing boar.  But not everyone will suffer, let alone celebrate being named for a form of Piggie: too much frightening baggage from reading Lord of the Flies as a child.

Au contraire, the Severn Bore is a spectacular tidal phenomenon, similar in its cause to a tsunami.  After the recent events in Fukushima, we all know the word tsunami and deprecate calling it a tidal wave.  But perhaps a word of explanation of how it happens might be in order.  In an earthquake a huge amount of rock is shifted a comparatively small distance.  If the rock is near or under the sea, that small movement is transmitted to a huge amount of water locally setting up a small wave which travels outwards.  It might be only a few centimeters high but as it approaches land and the sea gets shallower, those few centimeters, spread over a large area, build up into several meters spread over a small area and still travelling.  The collision with the shallowing seas also slows the wave down from a zippy 800km/hr to the relentless and inexorable thing that we saw on the news from Japan two years ago.  A tidal bore, such as the Severn's, happens because the tide, a volume of moving water that puts the largest tsunami in the ha'penny place, gets increasingly constrained by certain estuaries as it moves upstream against the current.  You can surf the Severn Bore.

I have seen the Petitcodiac Bore!!!  I beg to suggest, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that there are not more than a handful of people in Ireland this morning who can make such an extravagant claim.  Quite possibly, I am the only one.

The Petitcodiac is a short river in New Brunswick Canada that debouches into the head of the Bay of Fundy, which has among the most extreme tides on the planet.  The Bay opens to the West and is funnel-shaped, just like the Severn, only much bigger.  So it scoops up and constrains a lot of water as the earth turns.  At the head of the bay lies Moncton NB, astride the Petitcodiac.  Sometime in the early 1980s, as part of my PhD research at Boston University, me and my mentor were in Moncton for a tuthree days.  One afternoon we decided to walk across the 1km of tidal slobs to the Southside suburbs.  You couldn't even see the river from downtown Moncton, just acres of mud with some reeds and spartina near the dry land.  ANNyway, as we trudged across the bridge, the river itself became visible at the bottom of its canyon of gloop and as it became visible, a wave came round the corner travelling upstream.  It looked like the wash of a steamer but there was no boat.  The whole show lasted about 2 minutes.  Because we were both scientists, we were able to work out what we had seen before we got to the Southern shore.  Like most people who aren't completely indigent we whisked back to Moncton in a taxi when we'd exhausted the data and delights of Riverview NB.

So what are the odds?  What do you have to have 'achieved' to become a member of the Irish chapter of the Petitcodiac Bores? - we meet for luncheon in the Railway Hotel, Carlow on the 3rd Friday of the month? 
You have to have been to Moncton.
You have had to have a reason to go to the much smaller Riverview suburbs.
You have to have made the trek on foot...
...during the 2-3 minutes twice a day (during one of which it's probably dark) when the bore is visible.
You have to look down.

Come on, it's lonely eating on my own.

Lest we forget

I completed my PhD in Boston University in the early 1980s.  I was educated, cared for, fed and watered, and entertained by the people of greater Boston.  The friends I made there and then have become family.  Almost every Patriot's Day back then, we'd go and watch the Marathon over some small stretch of its route (only true heroes can watch it over the full 26 miles).  So it was like being struck in the chest to hear the news of the 15th of April.  I guess my sense of empathy went particularly to Lu Jingzi, who came from foreign to be a graduate student at BU just like me, who made new friends and was a long way from home  just like me, who went down to see the show just like me and who died in a bloody mess on the sidewalk.

There's more.

This is hinted by the News section on the Main Page of Wikepedia still three days later:
* A wave of bombings across Iraq kills more than 50 people and injures approximately 300 others.
* Two explosions near the finish line of the Boston Marathon kill 3 people and injure more than 180 others.

But the full (and grossly under-reported) story is that 1950 people have been killed and 4320 injured in coordinated acts of violence (I won't use the T word) since January 1st. Families in Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Kenya, Algeria, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Mali, Turkey, India, Thailand, and the United States are still wondering why.

Schmallenberg

About 6 years ago, when I was working in Dublin, a new guy appeared on the floor to work as a post-doctoral fellow.
I asked him where he came from. 
"China" he replied.
I knew enough not to ask him the politically charged follow-on "PRC or the other one?), so tried "Oh, interesting, whereabouts?"
He named some place and I asked him to repeat it and it still didn't register, so he said patiently "It's the fourth biggest city in China: 12 million people live there".
Tianjin! And I'd never heard of it. 
That's pathetic, now isn't it?  Verging on the shamefully parochial. It's bigger than London!

I'm pretty good about "General Knowledge"; I had an expensive education and am regularly on the winning team in Pub Quizzes, if there aren't too many celebrity picture rounds.  But a Tianjin episode has happened before. In the 1980s we lived in Newcastle upon Tyne in the North-east of England.  Shortly after we moved there, the municipality decided to invite ordinary folks from the German city with which NuponT was twinned and was looking for Geordie host families.  So we signed up for that and went along to the meeting despite that fact that neither of us had heard of the place. Gelsenkirchen!  A chunky industrial city on the Ruhr and it had never figured in either of our educations.  Industrial geography for Europe was limited to chanting "Bari, Brindisi, Taranto, the industrial triangle of Southern Italy".
I hope you did better than me on geography in 'foreign', but I suspect you didn't.

About 120km SE of Gelsenkirchen is another much smaller town called Schmallenberg, and I'd not heard of that either . . . until last month.  As the lambing season pushed on, "Schmallenberg" or some mangled version of the word was on everybody's lips because it's been a disastrous season for sheep farmers in the Sunny South East.  The economics of sheep-farming are delicately balanced, even with the subsidies; the vagaries of the market, the cost of feed, the really cold dry March and April which has delayed the first flush of new grass would make it doomy and gloomy enough.  But many of our neighbours have lost 10% of their expected lambs and some have fared much worse.  There have been abortions, and still-births, physical deformities and neurological issues.  These latter can manifest like the peripheral neuropathy swayback which can be caused by copper deficiency, so it's hard to recognize the plague of 2013 as something new.

They say it's due to Schmallenberg Virus (SBV) which is a member of the family of single stranded RNA viruses called orthobunyaviruses.  These viruses are quite interesting as they're usually transmitted by biting flies of the genus Culicoides which some of my neighbours called midgets.  But a raft of different viruses use Culicoides as a transport system: Douglas virus, Shamonda, Sathuperi, Akabane - all named for the locality they were first identified or after the feller who did the identification. And indeed SBV is named for the small town in Germany.

The virus seems to be relatively benign in adults: a bit of fever, a bit of the runs, a bit off colour as the immune system knocks t'buggers on the head, but if the ewe gets bitten at the wrong time while preg the virus can cross the placenta and start growing in the tiny delicate developing nervous system of the fetus and that has potentially disastrous consequences, as hinted by the enumerated symptoms above.

Why 2011? Why Germany/Belgium?  Why sheep and cattle and goats and probably llamas and possibly camels?  Are our kids susceptible?  That seems unlikely given the evolutionary distance between artiodactyls and us.  There is a suggestion that the weather in 2011, particularly rainfall, was important for the distribution of the Culicoides midges.

Anyway, I hope we aren't about to live in interesting times in the four horsemen sense.  It won't have turned out well if everyone knows where Schmallenberg, Hochsauerland, Westphalia, Deutschland is.

Chicago Cullentragh Coonogue Cnocrua

As discussed before we live in a remote part of the country - I assert that you can't get further from a bus-stop (20km) and still be in Leinster, the most populous of the four provinces of Ireland. Nowadays, Chicago is the only one of the four places named in the title which has any shops and we don't need WolframAlpha to check to see which has most people.  The others are the three townlands of which the Scullogh Gap is comprised, one in Co Wexford (Cullentragh) and two in Co Carlow (Knockroe and Coonogue). The Gap is a low valley in the Blackstairs "Mountains" that is the only way you can travel by ass-and-cart or car between CW and WX without making a detour of at least 20km either north to the Bunclody-Carrickduff border crossing or south via Ballywilliam-Drummin.  Knockroe forms the the northern, South-facing, salubrious, high land-value side of the valley and Cullentragh and Coonogue form the southern side.

In 1835, it was a rather different story.
When Chicago was incorporated in 1833 it had a population of just 350 souls.  It grew rapidly, however, and according to the US Census was home to 4470 people in 1840.  We're a little data-constrained on the Irish side of the pond because the first census wasn't gathered until 1841.  Then we had The Famine in 1845/6/7 and another census in 1851, so we'll have to extrapolate and guesstimate a bit to reveal the population of the valley in, say, 1835.  The population of the Co. Carlow parish of Kiltennell, which included Knockroe, Coonogue and 17 other townlands lost a third of its people (3,544 to 2,454) during the sear and sorry 1840s.  You can still see the ridges of the lazy-bed potato fields 1000ft up above the valley.

Location	1835	1841	1851
Knockroe	350?	356	241
Coonogue	120	118	121
Cullentragh	140	140	130

From the data in the table above, we can show that in 1833 and possibly as late as 1836, there were more people living in and off the Scullogh Gap than in the city of Chicago.

Not a lot of people know that.