Striking findings

 Some things have changed, changed utterly, for the better in my lifetime. We don't normally hit children with sticks anymore for example. More than a year ago, I wrote about a sorry tale of racism that would never have stood up in court because "nobody died" or saw a flaming cross or became strange fruit.  Because the 'beneficiary' of this casual racism was a colleague and friend of mine, I felt the pain a tiny bit more than if it had happened to a stranger, but I was not under any illusion that I was close to experiencing the morale-sapping, never-ending, stupidity that he experienced on a daily basis. Partly this was because, as one of the last taboos in civilised middle-class society, we never talked about it.  He had a far better tan than me , but I hope I treated him like that didn't matter.  This taboo obstreperates into our life and language. In our rather small community of graduate students at The Institute we have two Jims. To avoid confusion we have to give them some sort of differentiating label.  I can refer to Tall Jim, New Jim, Jim the Worm, Numerate Jim, even at a pinch Blonde Jim, but of course nobody says Black Jim or Pink Gin Jim although that is their most striking difference. One of them is going to have to change his name! 

There is a  current rising tide here in Ireland to equalise the rights of homosexuals to such things as marriage with all the tax-breaks that entails.  On a television talk show a couple of weeks ago a chap called Rory O'Neill, a gay-rights activist and drag-queen who goes by the name Panti made an outrageous suggestion.  He said that people, and he named a few, who opposed this change in attitude, were homophobic.  Huge flap!!  You can no more call somebody homophobic than you can call them racist or a Nazi.  Why, it's worse than calling them misogynist. A right-wing think-tank called the Iona Institute weighed in and offered to sue RTE, the state broadcaster, for defamation.  RTE has made a few mistakes in recent years which have been expensive to rectify, so at the first whiff of righteous indignation, their lawyers and accountants caved in and shelled out €85,000 in compo to the aggrieved homophobesphiles.  Spineless but probably cheaper in the long run and we don't have much money nowadays. In science you're not pushing the envelope unless you're wrong occasionally. We rely on journalists and investigators at RTE, the broadcaster with by far the biggest clout in the country, to lift the rocks of our society . . . and we need the management of RTE to support them in their necessary task.

So far so boring and predictable but the storm gave us one of the great polemics of our times from the stage after a performance at the Abbey Theatre.  You can hear the whole grand sweep of it here embedded in an article by one who has more reason than me to empathise. One who also has a future in great headlines!  In one section of this peroration, the absurdly, grandly, statuesque Panti resents being told, by the bien pensant goodniks who think he needs to hear their opinion, just what he should be feeling and when the boundary has been crossed into unacceptability. It is as raw an expression of shame and anger and humanity as you'll hear this year.  If you've ever felt a frisson of revulsion at the thought of two blokes kissing (you never see such a thing in this country unless Brokeback Mountain is showing at the Plaza), and you think you are open-minded and tolerant and basically nice, then you should listen to how the other 10% feels.  Fintan O'Toole who isn't a drag-queen and writes for the Irish Times was more measured in his assessment.  His point was that Breda O'Brien, and John Waters and The Iona Institute were swimming against the tide of history to continue to hold values that are just wrong for any future that the rest of us want to live in. The timeless plays of Euripides and Sophocles, the philosophy of Socrates and Plato, the heroism of Xenophon were all built on Athenian silver mines where slaves bent-double hacked at the rock by the light of sputtering oil-lamps until they died of arsenic poisoning.  Civilised people don't do that anymore, civilised people are ashamed that anybody could be treated like an untermensch, that they could be deprived of the rights that the rest of us enjoy in the full light of day.

It was interesting yesterday morning to hear another pundit on the wireless telling us that children liked to have discipline (no hitting implied!) imposed on them - it made them feel safe.  He was billed as an expert with 30 years experience in child welfare but his opinions are just opinions and his Platonic ideal of "children" who (all) want the discipline that makes them feel safe had my skeptical antennae revolving so fast they whistled.  I was a child once, my needs and desires were peculiar to me and different from those of my twin sister let alone a generic other child in a different family/country/social class.  If I was a child listening to this unsupported assertion, I would feel a sense of indignation at the presumption that this adult, nearer to his second childhood than to his first, should presume to know what I felt and needed.

Why was he being given a platform?  Because the NSPCC was publishing the findings of a survey about attitudes to hitting children. Seems that 62% of people in Ireland think that striking children is already illegal.  It's not. Three-quarters of us recognise that this sort of thing is not only cruel and asymmetrical but it is ineffective.  But these are easy. We can see that slavery is wrong; we've agreed that women aren't chattels; that hitting children does nobody any good; that it's stupid if you don't hire people simply because they are dark or fat.  The difficulty is recognising and discarding those unconsidered certainties and 'necessities' that we just can't see.  Eating meat? Sectarian parades in Ballymena? Free clean water from your tap? Bedrooms? The right to life?  Microwave ovens? Underpants? Foreign holidays?

Anyway - good news - even if the law doesn't change, publicity surrounding the NSPCC survey will mean that fewer small children will be punched, slapped, smacked and poked this weekend.

Ascertainment Bias

I mentioned AB a couple of days ago as an explanation of why people persist in believing that St Blaise will cure esophageal cancer with prayers and a couple of candles.  They believe because for the multiple-multiple times the cure fails nobody notices but if someone goes into remission on the 3rd of Feb then it makes the tabloids and the ticker on Fox-news and shares in міжнародні свічки вкл  go UP on the Kiev stock exchange.  Because I needed to make sure of the definition, I came across a great classroom exercise from Steven Carr at Memorial U. in Newfoundland to show the effect of AB.  This is what you do:

Ask a sample of women to record the sexes of everyone in their sib-group (brothers and sisters) including themselves and then total the number of brothers and the number of sisters recorded by all participants.  You should finish up with a biased sex-ratio - there should be more women.  If you ask the reciprocal question of a group of men, there should be an excess of blokes.  You may now dispute that premise - you may claim that there is no such effect.  You may also try to figure out why there should be an effect such as I've described.  But I should first ask you: what is the sex-ratio in normal human populations?  RA Fisher did the math 80 years ago to show that in any population under the action of natural selection (that's ALL populations, Middle America, even Southern Baptists) the sex-ratio must be close to 1:1.  The fact that the sex-ratio is 1:1 is not, from many surveys of students over the years, obvious to all thinking people, whatever about any explanation.

With me, the thought of a "good classroom exercise" is the deed. I've explained the concept to my Mon and Tue Yr1 Biology classes this week and got them to write up the data from their families onto the lab white-board: red for girls and blue for boys of course.  The alternative was to make drawings of a number of preserved specimens of insects, so there was a queue for the pens and I got my data.

Women's Family

Men's family

	M	F	M	F
Mon	6	11	16	4
Tue	4	12	12	10
Total	10	23	28	14

This departure from equal ratios is very much statistically significant (ChiSq = 9.7, p < 0.001). I didn't think that the effect would be so visible in such tiny samples.  There are only 10 students in the Tuesday class and 15 on Monday.  But for the total, there is a 2:1 ratio in the expected direction for women's families and for men's.  One of the students pointed out (before we gathered the data) that if you don't bin your respondents by sex, you should get the expected 1:1 ratio and (data incoming):
(10+28) = (23+14)
it is embarrassingly close.

So why does it work?  It works much better now than 100 years ago in Ireland when families were a lot bigger.  It worked perfectly black and white until very recently in China where couples were limited to one child.  If you ask women in such a society to record the sex of all the children of their parents you'll get a sex ratio of  0:1; and if you ask men it will be 1:0.  It works for larger families too but less grossly.
Q. What possibilities are there for sex-distribution in families of two?
A. Three: all boys, all girls and one-of-each.
If you ask women about their families they'll never reply that their family is all boys.  If you ask enough of them, you get a sex-ratio of 2F:1M - because the three possibilities for families which include at least one woman are FF, FM and MF.  one-of-each is twice as common as either all girls or all boys, because  girl then boy and boy then girl are equally likely events.  This last fact is also not obvious to all thinking people.

That is indeed a pretty cool classroom exercise, a bit counter-intuitive, a bit of real data and a bit of hypothesis to test - science in fact!

Bernadotte

Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte was the son of a French lawyer, born in 1763 in the Gascon town of Pau in the foothills of the Pyrenees. He joined the army at the bottom as a humble poilu at the age of 17 and was a full sergeant in the peacetime army by the age of 25.  Competent soldiers untainted by blue blood were a desirable commodity in the French revolutionary wars and four years later he was a Colonel, and two years after that became General Bernadotte. His career in those turbulent times was full of adventures and by no means uniformly successful.  But he was close to Napoleon (he married the Emperor's Ex Désirée Clary about whom the film was made) but not his 'creature'.  Bernadotte had a job to do, he did it as well as he could and by all accounts he was more efficient than some of his contemporaries.  Perhaps most notably he was kind.

During the campaign in Northern Germany, he treated a group of Swedish POWs with kindness while he was Governor of Hannover in 1805.  He fought at the huge battles of Austerlitz (1805) but not at Jena and Auerstädt (1807) despite being close enough to weigh in.  Napoleon chid him to his face and behind his back for failing to be there at the Battle of J&A.  He was dramatically stripped of his command on the battlefield at Wagram (1809) for some perceived failure but as soon as he returned to Paris he was sent to oppose the British at their disastrous invasion of the Low Countries at Walcheren.

Then out of the blue he was offered a very nice position in the North.  Largely because of his considerate treatment of those Swedish prisoners five year before, he was offered and accepted the post of Crown Prince and heir-presumptive to the throne of Sweden. It is also true that the powers-that-be in Sweden also wanted a competent soldier to take them through the turbulent years of war which seemed set to last forever.  The old king died and Bernadotte ascended the throne on this day 5th Feb in 1818 as Carl XIV Johan.  Not bad for un soldat de la France in the Régiment de Royal-Marine!  One of his descendants was Folke Bernadotte whom I have mentioned before.

Tweetin' the Marmalade

As I've been writing The Blob for more than a year, there are more than 400 posts to read.  Some of them deathless prose, others a bit slap-dash and shamefully rich in typos.  I must say I am bemused at those which attract over-the-average attention. The current top hitter (25% more interest that any other post) is a perfectly quotidian, not to say boring, reflection on making marmalade.  Someone must have tweeted it, but I can't discover who.  At least that appears to be quite genuine interest; the second "most interesting" post was written a year ago about Milk of Magnesia.  That's a lot more interesting than the marmalade piece but the page-views went through the roof because some imbecile set a robot to advertise in the comments.  It was a while before I worked out how to knock this intrusive nonsense out of the ball-park. Here's another lament about the practice from the often wonderful Tywkiwdbi.

I'll pretend that there is a widespread demand for more marmaladocentric copy.  I made my fourth and final batch of marmalade over this last weekend.  The other batches worked out rather well: all different but all edible.  Marmalade as any fule kno usually has what we, as kids, used to call "fishes" - the little pieces of cooked orange peel.  In the old days you'd make these by slicing the reamed-out orange peel into slivers with a very sharp knife.  I have done this but it takes a long time, so nowadays I put them through the coarsest grind of my old Spong mincer and get klontjes of peel rather than thin slices.  My Mum used to have a Spong mincer and we kids used to fight for the privilege of cutting the remains of the Sunday meat-slab into Spong-sized chunks and mincing it all up for the Tuesday shepherd's pie.

One of the joys of living isolated in the country is that you can fire foodie things out of the door and expect them to be biodegraded. Yard = midden here!  I'm a little precious about our septic system because the settlement tank is about 40m from the house and goes through two right angled turns.  I really don't want to have to rod out a blockage, so I'm really careful about what goes down the kitchen sink lest we get a fatberg.  After marmalade batch three I scrubbed up all the utensils and then got frightie about the orange fibres.  So I seized the washing-up bowl (of course we don't have a dish-washing machine) and fired it out of the door into the yard.  The next morning, I missed the little wing-nut of the Spong which you can see on the left of the picture.  After a good hunt through the kitchen, I realised that it must have been unnoticed at the bottom of the jettisoned washing-up from the night before.  It was also Monday morning and I wasn't going to be on-site in daylight until Saturday at the earliest.  Luckily I had a spare nut, but I don't like to lose things.  Accordingly, the following Sunday I went out scanning the grass within a 5m half-circle centred on the front door for a piece of metal 2cm in diameter.  Lucky I still have my eyes because random pokes would have a 1:100,000 chance of successfully hitting such target in such a field.  It only took about ten minutes but I was immensely pleased with myself - probably happier than if I'd never lost the danged thing. 

The last batch of marmalade was rather a disappointment, both lumpy and rather difficult to set.  I had to resort to spooning the glop into the hot jam-jars because pouring from the jam-pan put as much down the sides of the jars as inside.  I'll have to use it in a helluva lot of marmalade puddings over the next couple of years.  Note added in press: I've just noticed 2kg of sugar on the shelf in the kitchen where there were four, earmarked for marmalade. Duh! So now I have an explanation of why the marmalade was wonk and a lesson in what matters in the process of jam-making.

St Blaise

Yesterday was Candlemas, a name which I particularly like.  The other names for the day include The Presentation of Christ at the Temple (forty days after his birth on Chrimbo).  That is strongly associated with the now defunct practice of 'churching' women after childbirth.  This is put out as giving thanks for the safe passage of the mother through this difficult and potentially dangerous time but is tied up with the necessity to 'purify' women so that they can be approached by their blokes for further insemination. The Patriarch doesn't want to get dirty, after all. It's all in the 12th Chapter of Leviticus: "If a woman be delivered, and bear a man-child, then she shall be unclean seven days; as in the days of the impurity of her sickness shall she be unclean. And she shall continue in the blood of purification three and thirty days; she shall touch no hallowed thing, nor come into the sanctuary, until the days of her purification be fulfilled.  But if she bear a maid-child, then she shall be unclean two weeks, as in her impurity; and she shall continue in the blood of purification threescore and six days."  To explain the lurid 400 year old English, the "impurity of her sickness" is a normal bodily function experienced by women every month. Apologists for religious practice make a case for eschewing pork, rather than merely chewing it, as a rational response to a Trichinosis world.  But the same people who told their followers to pass on pork and lobster also say that girl-children are twice as polluting as their male brothers.  Now that's just silly and annoying.

Having picked up your Candles the day before, you're ready for St Blaise's Day today.  Blaise's iconography involves a pair of crossed candles and if these are held to the throat they are efficacious against such throaty problems as diphtheria (see yesterday! I am so synchronic) and errant fish-bones.  I figured that if you contract diphtheria at the end of February rather than the beginning you'd be done for, but The Beloved's sister was prone to laryngitis and losing her voice in her youth and she claims that suitable rituals on St Blaise's Day  "Per intercessionem S. Blasii liberet te Deus a malo gutteris et a quovis alio malo" etc. are good for the whole year. Just as well because diphtheria is no respecter of seasons and fish-bones happen every Friday.  It is easy to get snitty and superior about such things.  But harrumphing about superstitious nonsense doesn't answer why such beliefs might be efficacious.  In my course on human physiology the same compounds crop up as neurotransmitters and as hormones, and there is an increasingly respectable branch of science called PNI - psycho-neuro-immunology - which suggests that, in the grossest terms, we may be able to think ourselves well.  I find this much more interesting to cogitate upon than the dismissive idea that belief in healing powers is merely a poorly analysed combination of anecdote and ascertainment bias.

Anyway, I hope everyone has a soggy but tremulously Blaisy day  . . . and don't forget the candles (N = 2).

Diphtheria

Back in December I was writing about The Clap and relayed the brilliant tag: "Gonorrhoea: hard to spell, easy to catch".  The cause of the disease Neisseria gonorrhoeae is clearly related to Neisseria meningitidis which is one of several causes of meningitis - an inflammation of the layers protecting the brain.  I mentioned this connexion in my Human Physiology class last week because we were wrapping up January's discussions on the Nervous System by talking briefly about the brain.  I like, if possible, to relate the theory of neurotransmitters and "efferent motor nerves passing through the ventral root" to something that the students might have heard about if not seen or experienced.

Diphtheria also features regularly on Spelling Bees, but it features now only exceedingly rarely in schools and other places where children gather in the Western World.  It is caused by Corynebacterium diphtheriae, but only if the bacterium (that's a Gram +ve, facultative anaerobe to my current microbiology class) is itself infected by a virus that carries the gene for diphtheria toxin.  Diphtheria is a terrible way to go because it affects the upper respiratory tract which develops a greyish partly detachable second membrane.  The inability to breathe, rapidly fatal as any fule kno, can be relieved with intubation or a tracheotomy.  Let me advise you, in case Angus Wallace isn't available to do the emergency surgery, that you can hold open the hole you push through someone's trachea below the obstruction with the outer case of a ball-point pen.

100 years ago diphtheria was a ravening killer, particularly of young children who had not been exposed to the toxin before.  As late as the 1920s, 100,000+ people were infected each year in the USA resulting in 15,000 deaths p.a.  That's when there were only 125 million US citizens.  But in the 1920s they began to get on top of the disease by developing an anti-toxin by immunizing horses.  This anti-toxin could effectively mop up circulating diphtheria toxin before it started work.  Essentially this therapy could carry out a holding action until the patient's own immune-system started to produce anti-bodies.  Accordingly, you wanted to administer the anti-toxin early, but you didn't want to lay it out willy-nilly on any sore-throat or tonsillitis.  But be warned, Diphtheria is waiting in the wings even now.  There were 1 million cases in Central Europe in the aftermath of WWII,  And in the break-up of the former USSR/СССР, critical medical infrastructure (like the availability of vaccination) slumped and there were 200,000 cases and 5,000 deaths in the CIS/СНГ.

Nome, Alaska is just South of the Arctic circle, so it doesn't have total Darkness at Noon in winter but the day is absurdly short and the temperature is briskly chilly at the best of times. 1925 was on the cusp of being recognisable as the same as today.  There were telephones and aeroplanes, cars and domestic electricity.  But there were also horse-drawn buggies, gas-lamps, dirt-roads and disease.  In January 1925, the local Nome doctor Curtis Welch was forced to recognise that the case of tonsillitis that he'd diagnosed the day before was actually the beginning of an epidemic of diphtheria.  The reserves of anti-toxin were beyond their sell-by date and he called for more to be delivered if possible before hundreds of people under his remote and isolated care succumbed to the disease and dozens died.

Canvassing the West Coast of the contiguous 48 states located 1,000,000 units of the anti-toxin that could be shipped to Seward on the South Coast of Alaska.  From there it could be sent to Nenana by train on the Seward to Fairbanks line.  It was proposed that the cylinder of toxin would be sent by US Postal dog-sled from Nenana to Nulato where it would be met by another team who would take it on to Nome. It is not true that all Alaskan place names begin with N: there's Nairbanks, Nuneau, Nitka, Nchorage

The local newspaper magnate, a man looking to the future, thought this plan was both absurd and retrograde when there were aeroplanes available which could do the delivery in a few hours.  But the available planes weren't up to the job, any more than petrol-driven tractors were for Captain Scott when he brought them to the Antarctic in 1912 as part of his bid for the South Pole.

The distance was more than 1000km and the weather was brutal - normal for the Alaskan Winter -, the accounts record at one point "the temperature had now risen to -50^oC".  The first musher "Wild Bill" Shannon set off from the train-station at 2300hrs on 27th January 1925 - why not? it's no darker then than at 0700hrs the next morning.  He covered more than 80km (double a regular day's journey) but killed three of his dogs from frozen lungs (a minimum of -60^oC was recorded) and turned his own face black from frostbite.  He handed over to another team and so it went on through adventures that would not have been believed if written as fiction by Jack "White Fang" London. One chap had to feel about with his bare hands in a snowdrift when the precious cylinder was fired off the sled in an upset - he too got frost-bitten.  Another forgot, in the rush, to cover his dogs' genitals with rabbit-skin overcoats and they got frostbite. My grandfather froze a lung in the First War as a naval gun spotter.  He was left up in a balloon for several hours during a sudden Winter storm when it was deemed unsafe to winch him back to the surface.  He survived and lived for another 40 years.

Eventually, after 18 intervening teams had relayed the anti-toxin stage by stage onwards, Gunnar Kaasen galloped into Nome at 0530hrs on 2nd February 1925.  The mail had got through!  The medicine was distributed effectively and the anticipated epidemic was nipped in the bud.  Hurrah!  Kaasen's lead dog Balto was made into a media hero, briefly surpassing the movie star Rin Tin Tin in headlines and attention.  In our winner-takes-all Harry Potter world, it is ever thus: the man who made by far the longest stage, Leonhard Seppala, was severely miffed that his lead dog Togo didn't get much of a look-in.  Both dogs were stuffed and mounted after their deaths, Togo in Alaska and Balto in Cleveland OH, where their husks can be viewed today.

imbolc

Today - Imbolc! It is one of the four Celtic Quarter Days (along with Beltane - May Day, Lughnasadh - Aug01 and Samhain - Hallowe'en) which are fixed in between Solstice and Equinox.  The word looks alien to anglophone eyes and there are two strangely related etymologies.: i mbolg "in the belly" refers to the should-be-now-swelling bellies of the the sheep whose lambs are expected shortly OR oimelc "ewe's milk" which was the gloss put on it by one medieval scribe.  Scholars of PIE (proto-indo-european) call down the common word used for sheep as part of their evidence that Indo-Europeans started their explosive trek from a heartland in Central West Asia.  Common word for sheep?!?  Sheep doesn't have much in common with the Irish caora or the French mouton does it?  Indeed it doesn't, but we have ewe, which shares the putative PIE root with Latin Ovis, Spanish Oveja, Portuguese Ovelha Russian овца and even Ukrainian вівця at a pinch; and if you dig you can find minority sheep-words in most other PIE languages.

Bolg, the Irish for belly appears in the name of the famous Wexford theatre group Bui Bolg - the yellow-bellies - a common nickname for the plain rissole-eatin' people of Wexford. That epithet is said to stem an exhibition match of hurling 200 hundred years ago when one of the Colcloughs of Tintern took a team to London to play the locals.  They identified themselves from their opponents in the mill on the pitch by wearing yellow sashes as cummerbunds.  My great-grandmother was a Colclough from the same family.  She married my great-grandfather John the Bastard from King's County in about 1860. He was the offspring of the local laird and the red-headed cook, and got to inherit the estate near Birr, while his brothers shipped off to New Zealand where their descendants thrive.


Imbolc is celebrated as Lá Fhéile Bríde (St Brigid of Kildare's Day) in large swathes of the Celtic World as the beginning of Spring . . . if the Cailleach (Holy Hag, to you Batman) sees that the weather is crap.  If the weather is fine on the 1st of February, on the other hand, the Cailleach will be gathering sticks to heat her home because winter will last for several weeks more.  This will remind Americans of Groundhog Day which is traditionally celebrated tomorrow on Candlemas.  Seems a bit unfair on the humble woodchuck Marmota monax to be playing the part of a hag.  Using the contrary to predict future weather will remind English people over the age of fifty of St Swithun's day (15 July): if it rains on St Swithun's it will be fine for the next forty days and vice versa.  St Swithun's Day is celebrated by Billy Bragg, of whose work we should all hear more.

Brigid goes back so far that nobody agrees how to spell her name: Brigid, Bridget, Brighid, Bridgit, Bríd (usu. pron. breej), and Bride all having a punt somewhere in the literature or as part of a placename (Bridewell became a generic name for prison because of one such in London). She is usually cast as an early nun, but her association with fertility, lactation and such Ob&Gyn matters suggest strongly that she was a much earlier deity kidnapped by the Christians, cleaned up and no longer smelling of cheese.  It would be an excellent idea if we all, especially young women, wove us a St Brigid's Cross today.  So lost from your traditions that you don't know how?  Una Casey will show you.  This last Thursday at the Institute the Chaplaincy was weaving crosses with the students.  Inevitably, the Irish kids were above all that, but the Chinese visitors were fully into an opportunity to get the full out of their time in Ireland.

It's a brutal stormy day out there in the dark this morning - bodes well for a grand summer.