One of the benefits of living in the boondocks is the minimisation of artificial light, so we're well placed for star-gazing. The pretensions of the Celtic Tiger still linger in the desire to floodlight your dwelling to show how big it is and our neighbour across the valley has unfortunately signed up to this sect. Nevertheless it's waaaay better than Dublin, let alone Los Angeles or London. So last night I went up behind the house about 11 o'clock and lay out on the grass to watch the Perseids meteor shower. It's not as exciting as Grand Theft Auto but it's worth doing because it's a natural wonder and rather wonderful for that.
So I was trying not to fall asleep - it was way past my bedtime and 'events' were only coming in every 2-3 minutes - when I saw a very bright light flickering through the trees as it lumbered in from the West. There's a LOT of crap endlessly circling our Earth and if you look up for longer than the time it takes to tweet about it you'll see that the night sky is busy. But the International Space Station is by far the biggest and brightest, and a check later with the Astronomy Ireland website said that the ISS had passed across Ireland at 2303hrs. It was almost as exciting as 8-year-old me seeing Telstar bippling across the sky in the freezing winter of 1962/3 when there were so few artificial satellites that their appearance was listed in the newspaper under the weather report. Cue The Tornadoes.
Puzzle time:
IF
the Earth is 8000km in diameter
ANDIF
the ISS orbits 400km above the surface
ANDIF
you have an unobstructed horizon and no clouds
ANDIF
the cosmonauts are clipping along at 7.7km/s (that's just under 30,000km/h)
How long will the ISS be visible as it passes overhead?
Answers on a postcard! Answers added 20/Aug/13 below the fold:
Tuesday, 13 August 2013
The Lady of the Coxcomb
Florence Nightingale, The Lady of the Lamp, lived a helluva long time. She was born in 1820 almost exactly a year after Queen Victoria and outlived the aged monarch by nearly a decade, dying in her sleep at home aged 90 on 13th August 1910. Nightingale has long been the poster girl role model for young women, although most of the reasons given don't really bear up to close scrutiny. "The Lady of the Lamp" was first used by a romantic journalist back home in London rather than an eye-witness from the pestilential hospital at Scutari. She never claimed that her ministrations reduced mortality and nobody at the time knew how disease was transmitted during the Crimean War. Pasteur's germ theory of disease wasn't developed until several years after the Treaty of Paris ended the fighting. And Koch's Postulates, linking particular microbes to specific diseases, were the product of the next generation. Actually, a lot of people knew that disease was spread by contagion (physical contact between patients) but they were wrong, weren't they and FN said so having assessed the data. A case can be made for her being an early feminist and she slated her mother and sister for basking in the privilege of inherited wealth and living from tea-party to concert to a little light letter writing. Florence, by contrast, believed she was called by god to roll up her sleeves and do something useful. "The time is come when women must do something more than the "domestic
hearth," which means nursing the infants, keeping a pretty house,
having a good dinner and an entertaining party."
Revisionists have drawn attention to the fact that she made real contributions to the early development of statistics, in particular the graphical representation of data in order to make more compelling a particular argument. Here's an example of what she called a "coxcomb" plot, to show a year's worth of mortality data among British soldiers.
It's quite clever because the area of each block is proportional to the number of dead. But as a graphical concept it really needs more work, because the small print says that all areas are calculated from the centre. In other words the blue "battle" deaths are superimposed upon the red "non-battle" deaths, so the latter are really red+blue. Nevertheless, it illustrates powerfully that far more of the army's effectives were dying from cholera, dysentery or infectious typhus than from bullet or bayonet. And that (economic?) argument eventually drove changes in practice. It didn't really help the soldiers in the Crimea, but those who served afterwards in India survived better because of her political and statistical arguments, which among other things compelled the government to set up a Royal Commission. She was the first woman elected to the Royal Statistical Society. Bonnets off!
The Blob's women in science: Florence Nightingale - Barbara McClintock - Maude Delap - Cliona O'Farrelly - Lynn Margulis - Rosalind Franklin - Jocelyn Bell Burnell
Revisionists have drawn attention to the fact that she made real contributions to the early development of statistics, in particular the graphical representation of data in order to make more compelling a particular argument. Here's an example of what she called a "coxcomb" plot, to show a year's worth of mortality data among British soldiers.
The Blob's women in science: Florence Nightingale - Barbara McClintock - Maude Delap - Cliona O'Farrelly - Lynn Margulis - Rosalind Franklin - Jocelyn Bell Burnell
Monday, 12 August 2013
txtn urself 2 death
When we returned to Ireland after 14 years on the road, we knew we were going to live in an old farmhouse out near the airport. The Boy was committed to an 8km cycle across country to school and I was a long way from work. Accordingly we bought shiny new roadbikes in England. Mine was sleek shocking pink with six gears - enough but not fashion-accessory excessive. For the next six and a bit years I did a round trip of 25km every working day which amounted to more or less a single circumference of the world. I built up a lot of experience cycling in traffic - I never cycled on the sidewalk - and I treated myself as just another vehicle. You have to keep up with the traffic: if you drive too defensively you go slow, if you go slow you wobble; if you wobble you're unstable; if you're unstable you're under the bus.
Having the bike in town was handy because I could use it to go shopping or to the post-office (we used to send letters in those days). One morning I'd been on such an errand and was waiting to turn right across the traffic opposite my office on Westland Row. As I waited, I saw a car come round the corner by the pub about 100m away. So I waited some more, until I realised that the driver was no longer looking at me or the road but down into the passenger footwell; she was also drifting inexorably towards the white-line. At some time during the 7 seconds (50km/h is about 14m/s) since I first saw her, I decided to get out of the way. A hot-pink road-bike doing 40km/h is a beautifully responsive machine; but stationary it is just an obstacle, and as I tried to get my right leg over the saddle and out of the way the close encounter occurred. Her wing chipped a bit out of my too-slow right shin, but I recovered by driving my handle-bar and fist through her windscreen, she retaliated by turning my front wheel into a pretzel and I finally span out of the way with the grace of a toreador on my remaining foot. We'd both taken a pounding but I think she won on points. She didn't seem as happy about it as Katie Taylor, though.
After dragging the wreck of my beautiful bike off the roadway, I went back to her car where I found her, with the door open and half out of the driver's seat, shaking. Ever the gent, I handed her out of the car and across the road where we sat on the stoop of one of the houses opposite. Then I saw a bus coming round the same corner and hobbled back across the road to shift her car onto the sidewalk. It was less than a minute since the crash. As our heart-rates recovered, she said that she was running late to make a train from Amiens St and, when her mobile phone rang, she thought she had to answer it. Poor girl, she was desperate shook . . . and she missed her train.
Werner Herzog has just made a 30min documentary "From one second to the next" or "It can wait" - he doesn't seem to know what to call it - which you can catch on youtube. It's about people who kill and maim other people because they txt while driving. WTF? I can barely txt when I'm sitting in a chair with really good lighting and a nice cup of tea.
I was just recently ranting about the statistics of drunk driving and how best to reduce accidental road deaths. I thought then that the facts should speak for themselves and that being hectored about them by Gaye Byrne was rather going to promote road rage. The Irish Road Safety Authority did sponsor some very graphic advertisements for the telly a few years ago: "in 40 seconds young Sean is going to kill his girl-friend" says the voice over a happy video of four friends driving along in the sunshine. Shocking, yes, but I'm not sure how effective they were.
Roger "Sneak Previews" Ebert, the late great film critic who died this April, said Herzog "has never created a single film that is compromised, shameful, made for pragmatic reasons or uninteresting." Take it from Roger that Herzog makes compelling films. If you've seen the sequel to pretty much aNNy film in preference to watching Aguirre Wrath of God for the first time you have wasted two hours of your life. So It Can Wait should not be put on the long finger. Especially if you multi-task while driving.
Having the bike in town was handy because I could use it to go shopping or to the post-office (we used to send letters in those days). One morning I'd been on such an errand and was waiting to turn right across the traffic opposite my office on Westland Row. As I waited, I saw a car come round the corner by the pub about 100m away. So I waited some more, until I realised that the driver was no longer looking at me or the road but down into the passenger footwell; she was also drifting inexorably towards the white-line. At some time during the 7 seconds (50km/h is about 14m/s) since I first saw her, I decided to get out of the way. A hot-pink road-bike doing 40km/h is a beautifully responsive machine; but stationary it is just an obstacle, and as I tried to get my right leg over the saddle and out of the way the close encounter occurred. Her wing chipped a bit out of my too-slow right shin, but I recovered by driving my handle-bar and fist through her windscreen, she retaliated by turning my front wheel into a pretzel and I finally span out of the way with the grace of a toreador on my remaining foot. We'd both taken a pounding but I think she won on points. She didn't seem as happy about it as Katie Taylor, though.
After dragging the wreck of my beautiful bike off the roadway, I went back to her car where I found her, with the door open and half out of the driver's seat, shaking. Ever the gent, I handed her out of the car and across the road where we sat on the stoop of one of the houses opposite. Then I saw a bus coming round the same corner and hobbled back across the road to shift her car onto the sidewalk. It was less than a minute since the crash. As our heart-rates recovered, she said that she was running late to make a train from Amiens St and, when her mobile phone rang, she thought she had to answer it. Poor girl, she was desperate shook . . . and she missed her train.
Werner Herzog has just made a 30min documentary "From one second to the next" or "It can wait" - he doesn't seem to know what to call it - which you can catch on youtube. It's about people who kill and maim other people because they txt while driving. WTF? I can barely txt when I'm sitting in a chair with really good lighting and a nice cup of tea.
I was just recently ranting about the statistics of drunk driving and how best to reduce accidental road deaths. I thought then that the facts should speak for themselves and that being hectored about them by Gaye Byrne was rather going to promote road rage. The Irish Road Safety Authority did sponsor some very graphic advertisements for the telly a few years ago: "in 40 seconds young Sean is going to kill his girl-friend" says the voice over a happy video of four friends driving along in the sunshine. Shocking, yes, but I'm not sure how effective they were.
Roger "Sneak Previews" Ebert, the late great film critic who died this April, said Herzog "has never created a single film that is compromised, shameful, made for pragmatic reasons or uninteresting." Take it from Roger that Herzog makes compelling films. If you've seen the sequel to pretty much aNNy film in preference to watching Aguirre Wrath of God for the first time you have wasted two hours of your life. So It Can Wait should not be put on the long finger. Especially if you multi-task while driving.
Sunday, 11 August 2013
Hold a glass of pure water
. . . the the eye of the sun. Today, you can hear Hugh MacDiarmid read his poem, which starts with these words. Or get to read the words as a google-rip http://tinyurl.com/mjmt4og. I'll just abstract the core, although the whole poem bears a close listen because it talks about iniquity and inequality with such contained, sustained fury that you should hear it behind safety glass
Why today? Because Christopher Murray Grieve - Hugh MacDiarmid was his pen-name - was born in Langholm, Scotland (just North of Gretna Green) on 11th August 1892. He was paradoxically a Scottish Nationalist and a Communist, so I don't know how he coped with the Internationale - probably conflictedly. He was also, literally and literately, a champion of Lallans (lowlands scots) as a separate and evolving language rather than a mere dialect of English. Which compels me to cue the Bard of Ayrshire Rabbie Burns, an earlier Scots socialist and pricker of pretension. Sing it out:
I dreamt last night that I saw one of his angels
Making his centennial report to the Recording Angel
On the condition of human life.
Look at the ridge of skin between your thumb and forefinger
Look at the delicate lines on it and how they change
- How many different things they can express –
As you move out or close in your forefinger and thumb
And look at the changing shapes – the countless
Little gestures, like miracles of line –
Of your forefinger and thumb as you move them.
And remember how much a hand can express,
How a single slight movement of it can say more
Than millions of words – dropped hand, clenched fist,
Snapping fingers, thump up, thumb down,
Raised in blessing, clutched in passion, begging,
Welcome, dismissal, prayer, applause,
And a million other signs, too slight, too subtle,
Too packed with meaning for words to describe,
A universal language understood by all.
And the angel’s report on human life
Was the subtlest movement – just like that – and no more.
A hundred years of life on the Earth
Summed up, not a detail missed or wrongly assessed.
In that little inconceivably intricate movement.
Which I've liked ever since I saw Hugh MacDiarmid recite it (with added real-time gestures, of course) in UCD shortly before his death in 1978. I've just realised that this clip resonates strongly with what I wrote earlier about how an artist can/must strive for years to tease out the essential truth of, for example, a hand gesture. Science is a way of knowing.Making his centennial report to the Recording Angel
On the condition of human life.
Look at the ridge of skin between your thumb and forefinger
Look at the delicate lines on it and how they change
- How many different things they can express –
As you move out or close in your forefinger and thumb
And look at the changing shapes – the countless
Little gestures, like miracles of line –
Of your forefinger and thumb as you move them.
And remember how much a hand can express,
How a single slight movement of it can say more
Than millions of words – dropped hand, clenched fist,
Snapping fingers, thump up, thumb down,
Raised in blessing, clutched in passion, begging,
Welcome, dismissal, prayer, applause,
And a million other signs, too slight, too subtle,
Too packed with meaning for words to describe,
A universal language understood by all.
And the angel’s report on human life
Was the subtlest movement – just like that – and no more.
A hundred years of life on the Earth
Summed up, not a detail missed or wrongly assessed.
In that little inconceivably intricate movement.
Why today? Because Christopher Murray Grieve - Hugh MacDiarmid was his pen-name - was born in Langholm, Scotland (just North of Gretna Green) on 11th August 1892. He was paradoxically a Scottish Nationalist and a Communist, so I don't know how he coped with the Internationale - probably conflictedly. He was also, literally and literately, a champion of Lallans (lowlands scots) as a separate and evolving language rather than a mere dialect of English. Which compels me to cue the Bard of Ayrshire Rabbie Burns, an earlier Scots socialist and pricker of pretension. Sing it out:
What though on hamely fare we dine,
Wear hoddin grey, an' a that;
Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine;
A Man's a Man for a' that:
For a' that, and a' that,
Their tinsel show, an' a' that;
The honest man, tho' e'er sae poor,
Is king o' men for a' that.
You can find the whole song here. If you still think that Lallans is essentially the same as English check out Matthew Ch.1 v.18 in Scots.
Saturday, 10 August 2013
Rissoles
I was driving back from the south coast late last Tuesday and found
myself listening to a programme on the wireless about Wexford Rissoles
(!). We live 40 minutes from Wexford town, and used to go there every
week for the girls' drama classes with the Red Moon Theatre
group but I'd never heard of this dish. Seemingly, it originated when
the chipper had cooked too many chips, s/he would squidge them all up
together with herbs&spices, sqeeeze them into lumps the size of a
child's fist. and re-fry them for sale the next day either breaded or
battered. You can hear the whole 12 minutes here as an RTE podcast http://url.ie/igdn
(starts at 4.45 minutes), but get there quick, because they don't leave their
audio available forever. I'm still not % sure that it's not a hoax or a
spoof.
I guess what surprised me was that, given so few regional/local food in Ireland and the generally impoverished nature of Irish cooking, this interesting quirk should exist right under my nose and I would have been unaware of it. We are after all a very long way from General de Gaulle's quip about France "How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?". From 1922-1992 there were precisely two sorts of cheese that were generally available in Ireland: red and white. When pushed to it the only other example of local food that springs to mind is the Waterford blaa - a fluffy bread roll that can only be found in Waterford.
Some people will make a claim for the Ulster Fry, but that is essentially the same as the great British breakfast except that a) everything is cooked in lard b) potato farls should be present which you're unlikely to find on the plate in a B&B in Waterford or Wolverhampton. Others will maintain that a) drisheen is different from black-pudding and b) it is particularly associated with Cork - but both parts of that claim are questionable.
Which is really only to give me an excuse to re-tell the most improper joke that my father shared with my twin sister and me over lunch when we were about 13. For reasons lost in the mists of time, the three of us were in an Italian restaurant in Whitstable. The Da must have had a couple of glasses of chianti to let his sense of propriety crumble to such an extent:
War-time, Rationing, Blackout.
After much drink while on leave in London, two Naval Officers needing some solid sustenance find themselves in a cheap restaurant. One of them winks at his pal, points to the ill-typed menu and says to the waitress:
“I don’t know about my friend here, but I’ll have an order of these Pissoles”.
His companion interjects: “No, No, Rodney, I think you’ll find that’s an ‘R’.”
“In that case, I’ll have an order of Arsoles, miss”
It was a strange and memorable experience to be laughing like a drain while simultaneously picking my jaw off the pink table-cloth. The Da spent the next thirty years denying that anything remotely like that had ever happened. Could well have been more than two glasses of chianti then; although I remember him finding the car and driving us away somewhere else after lunch - but you could do that in those distant days.
I guess what surprised me was that, given so few regional/local food in Ireland and the generally impoverished nature of Irish cooking, this interesting quirk should exist right under my nose and I would have been unaware of it. We are after all a very long way from General de Gaulle's quip about France "How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?". From 1922-1992 there were precisely two sorts of cheese that were generally available in Ireland: red and white. When pushed to it the only other example of local food that springs to mind is the Waterford blaa - a fluffy bread roll that can only be found in Waterford.
Some people will make a claim for the Ulster Fry, but that is essentially the same as the great British breakfast except that a) everything is cooked in lard b) potato farls should be present which you're unlikely to find on the plate in a B&B in Waterford or Wolverhampton. Others will maintain that a) drisheen is different from black-pudding and b) it is particularly associated with Cork - but both parts of that claim are questionable.
Which is really only to give me an excuse to re-tell the most improper joke that my father shared with my twin sister and me over lunch when we were about 13. For reasons lost in the mists of time, the three of us were in an Italian restaurant in Whitstable. The Da must have had a couple of glasses of chianti to let his sense of propriety crumble to such an extent:
War-time, Rationing, Blackout.
After much drink while on leave in London, two Naval Officers needing some solid sustenance find themselves in a cheap restaurant. One of them winks at his pal, points to the ill-typed menu and says to the waitress:
“I don’t know about my friend here, but I’ll have an order of these Pissoles”.
His companion interjects: “No, No, Rodney, I think you’ll find that’s an ‘R’.”
“In that case, I’ll have an order of Arsoles, miss”
It was a strange and memorable experience to be laughing like a drain while simultaneously picking my jaw off the pink table-cloth. The Da spent the next thirty years denying that anything remotely like that had ever happened. Could well have been more than two glasses of chianti then; although I remember him finding the car and driving us away somewhere else after lunch - but you could do that in those distant days.
Friday, 9 August 2013
The W!ld Corkonial Boys
If you've been reading The Blob since the beginning, you know that I recognise 100 as a sort of watershed. If you can put together 100 whoosits then you deserve a drink. So when I wrote my 100th post or my 100.000th word or Neil MacGregor podcast his 100th objet d'art, each event seemed worth a posting here (and a pint o' heavy elsewhere, of course).
W!ld is a talented pair of singer-songwriting brothers from Cork, whom I've know for the last 15 years since a two year old Dau.II got nearly naked up an apple tree with 5 y.o Perry Wild one broiling summer day down by the River Barrow in 1998. Perry and his brother Louis with a bit of help from their friends have assembled (created out of whole cloth by stitching their souls to the edge of the world we find familiar) 100 original songs, and put them together on a website which was launched today:
W!ld are inviting you, me, mad Auntie May in the attic with the cedar chest, heroic Uncle Jack with the wooden leg and anyone with a couple of spare shillings to contribute to their crowdfunding project to put together an album of their best material produced with the sound quality that truly original creations deserve. W!ld write and sing because, like Martin Luther (the reference to the messianic, slightly crazy-eyed game-changer is not entirely random) they can do no other.
They certainly don't aspire to be the next One Direction - wanting to spend any time at all with Simon Cowell must be an acquired taste and W!ld's hair is, well, W!ld - but without you and your entire address book they are not going to go viral. I don't think they deserve the fate of The Blob (like W!ld and Luther I can do no other): hirpling along with a handful of regular readers half of whom appear to be Russian. Это все еще солнечно в Свердловске, друзей ?
Go listen - you may like. Contribute if you can - you could do worse things with your money.
W!ld is a talented pair of singer-songwriting brothers from Cork, whom I've know for the last 15 years since a two year old Dau.II got nearly naked up an apple tree with 5 y.o Perry Wild one broiling summer day down by the River Barrow in 1998. Perry and his brother Louis with a bit of help from their friends have assembled (created out of whole cloth by stitching their souls to the edge of the world we find familiar) 100 original songs, and put them together on a website which was launched today:
W!ld are inviting you, me, mad Auntie May in the attic with the cedar chest, heroic Uncle Jack with the wooden leg and anyone with a couple of spare shillings to contribute to their crowdfunding project to put together an album of their best material produced with the sound quality that truly original creations deserve. W!ld write and sing because, like Martin Luther (the reference to the messianic, slightly crazy-eyed game-changer is not entirely random) they can do no other.
Go listen - you may like. Contribute if you can - you could do worse things with your money.
Tove Jansson
Tove Jansson was born into the finlandssvenskar or suomenruotsalaiset on 9th August 1914 in Helsinki as the continent was rumbling into war. The Swedish speaking minority in Finland now constitute about 5% of the population - a little less than the total population of Iceland - and has been steadily diminishing in the way that Protestants are in our own Republic. I make this comparison because historically the "ruling class" was enriched with the finlandssvenskar.
She's most famous for her spare cartoons and children's stories of the Moomins. But today I'll cite her magical Sommarboken The Summer Book, which can be seen as a manual for respecting (the other-world of) children.
It is structured as a series of interlinked vignettes about a granny and her 6 year old grand-daughter Sophia who spend summers together on an island off the coast of Finland. The child’s mother is dead and her father is part of the background: silent, writing, fishing or asleep. Granny and Sophia have a series of inconsequential adventures, which will become evocative memories because they are filtered through the exaggerated sensibilities of the child’s imagination. If we could only live in the immediate as children do, the ordinary would stagger us. They take care of and love each other but Granny doesn’t always feel very well and can be tetchy and tired and snappy. She is also “artistic”, daft as a brush and not worried about getting muddy knees crawling through the undergrowth to reach a hidden kingdom. Sophia is self-absorbed and demanding, gracious and kind and fanciful. But she gets the respect that should be owing to any person regardless of size. On the other hand, she is coming to terms with the fact that the world doesn’t turn around her alone and that Granny deserves a certain amount of respect (and extra time to get anywhere and space to herself) too. Sophia is also let out on her own to take risks even when this makes Granny sick with apprehension. The island, while physically tiny, is a world in itself and is, with the surrounding sea and the essential boat, a playground for the imagination. Any education is just there: in the talk; in the attitudes; in the projects that start and peter out and get forgotten; in the daily life and chores that are not chores because they are daily life; in the world outside and the interior world.
In Scandinavia school doesn’t start until the age of seven. In Ireland, most children of Sophia’s age spend several hours of most days inside not doing any of those things that allowed Sophia to grow so that she can stand up straight.
She's most famous for her spare cartoons and children's stories of the Moomins. But today I'll cite her magical Sommarboken The Summer Book, which can be seen as a manual for respecting (the other-world of) children.
It is structured as a series of interlinked vignettes about a granny and her 6 year old grand-daughter Sophia who spend summers together on an island off the coast of Finland. The child’s mother is dead and her father is part of the background: silent, writing, fishing or asleep. Granny and Sophia have a series of inconsequential adventures, which will become evocative memories because they are filtered through the exaggerated sensibilities of the child’s imagination. If we could only live in the immediate as children do, the ordinary would stagger us. They take care of and love each other but Granny doesn’t always feel very well and can be tetchy and tired and snappy. She is also “artistic”, daft as a brush and not worried about getting muddy knees crawling through the undergrowth to reach a hidden kingdom. Sophia is self-absorbed and demanding, gracious and kind and fanciful. But she gets the respect that should be owing to any person regardless of size. On the other hand, she is coming to terms with the fact that the world doesn’t turn around her alone and that Granny deserves a certain amount of respect (and extra time to get anywhere and space to herself) too. Sophia is also let out on her own to take risks even when this makes Granny sick with apprehension. The island, while physically tiny, is a world in itself and is, with the surrounding sea and the essential boat, a playground for the imagination. Any education is just there: in the talk; in the attitudes; in the projects that start and peter out and get forgotten; in the daily life and chores that are not chores because they are daily life; in the world outside and the interior world.
In Scandinavia school doesn’t start until the age of seven. In Ireland, most children of Sophia’s age spend several hours of most days inside not doing any of those things that allowed Sophia to grow so that she can stand up straight.
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