Drafting the Professor

Youtube has many tributes to Sugru from a surprising variety of geeks and techies. And I've shown how this stuff has consolidated my inherent thrift. Here's an Arts Block story tribbing the iontach-ábhar.
Once there was a young block-head from the forest called Sceach Bunoscionn whose legs got crushed by a falling tree.  But with the help of a crutch and a walking stick he was able to hirple about without a bother, although he did get teased for the way he walked. He was as clever as wooden-top can be and when he grew up he went to technical college. There he did exceptionally well, taking courses from Forestry 101, through Arboriculture, Introductory Tree-surgery, Tree pathology, pests and parasites (TPPP), Propagation & Grafting, Vernalisation for Seeds, and on to Apiary and Pollination.  He wrote his thesis on Deforestation in Indonesia which won him accolades, not only in his own college but in the University in the capital. After several years of successful field work in Sumatra and Sulawesi, he returned to take up the Chair of Tropical Forestry at the University.  Nobody could pronounce his Irish name so he changed it to Thorn Hirple

The Professor acquired a reputation for wild eccentricity, and not only in his hair. Theatre was integral to most lectures and juggling hatchets to at least one. One day while visiting a neighbour's farm, some fiesty lambs came at him in a bunch - thinking he had milk - knocked him over and broke his arm. This allowed him to shock the students by coming to class with his fractured limb on his head. But the Provost declared that this was bringing the University into disrepute and Professor Hirple should shape up or ship out (the Provost had done time in the US Military). Hirple was mortified and went off and got legless in the tradition of Ben Battle:

Ben Battle was a soldier bold,

And used to war's alarms;

But a cannon-ball took off his legs,

So he laid down his arms!

When he woke up from his three-day blinder in Strasbourg, he had no memory of how he'd crossed several national frontiers and found that he'd changed his name to Hagedorn Humpeln and signed up for a five-year contract with La Légion étrangère. The Legion's surgeons were able to fix his broken arm with a spot of black Sugru under the oxter. He survived basic training, grew to enjoy La Boudin [blood-pudding], marching v e r y  s l o w l y and proudly wearing his white képi. His academic qualifications were not much use, except in the Legion's table quizzes, but Sceach was not a one-trick pony and in the military his many other skills and abilities came to the fore. In the last year of his contract he was promoted to Sergeant, with white Sugru chevrons for being conspicuously plus dur que les autres mecs durs de la légion.  The Future Needs Fixing but with its extra white bracing Sgt Humpeln's left arm definitely doesn't.

Mon dieu, c'est Le Quatorze Juillet, it faut que nous chantons La Marseillaise.  If you prefer a more pillowy tribute to La Belle France, go back a year on The Blob.

Sugru: it works

I wrote awhile back about the wonders of Sugru, the stuff that can fix anything.  That post was purely aspirational.  Now I can share some of the the results.

1. My 5 y.o. walking boots had developed a flexure-crack in the fabric where the toes bend to the foot.  Now, while you can see the join, I can't feel the cold breeze on my sock and the boots are back to being as waterproof as Gortex can ever be.  What you see in the upper red circle is about half a pack and I used up the rest elsewhere on the sole and upper of the same boot partly for prophylaxis and partly because it was needed. 
2. The Beloved dropped the second-best kitchen scissors on the floor and they would have been sent to landfill but for a touch of Sugru to secure the handle to the blade better than it was before. 
3. Thanks be that, while my eyesight has been deteriorating for the last ten+ years, it has been doing so symmetrically.  So when I lose or break a pair of specs I can go to a pound-shop or Alidli and get another pair for €2.99.  But sometimes the damage is not fatal, merely inconvenient or uncomfortable.  Here I show you a Sugru replacement nose-support in the lower red circle.
4. The white plastic specs are really from a pound-shop in England and cost 99p but the frame cracked on me so that the lens was always in danger of dropping down a drain.  A mere whisper of Sugru bridged the gap and now it's a firm as ever - firmer indeed because for 99p you don't get the best of Hackney engineering-quality plastic.

So how cool is that.  I've spent about €5 on Sugru and saved a bunch of stuff from the dump.  Sure I could buy more of these cheap-n-cheerful tools and boost the global economy but fixing them is better for the planet and better for my pawky parsimonious soul.

Guldensporenslag

It's a jittery time this weekend in the Northern quarter of the island of Ireland.  Yesterday 11th of July was the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne. We'll have to see if the Orange Order can continue their tradition of celebrating 'their' victory by sashing up and marching through the neighbourhoods of people who would rather not hear drums and fifes, without anyone getting hurt.  Ooops The Blob's got it wrong because we all know that the BoB was fought on the 12th; but, on these islands, at the date it was fought was 1st July 1690.  In 1752 when the British government finally admitted that the French were right and adopted the Gregorian calendar they also 'lost' 11 days off the calendar (14th September was declared to be 25th September) which caused both confusion and annoyance.  BUT, before 1700 the accumulated discrepancy between the Julian and Gregorian calendars was only 10 days, so 11th July is the best estimate for when the Boyne should be triumphed.  Ever wondered what the losing King did after the battle?  He left Ireland with a waggish quip and sailed to France.  Interesting post on the political language of dates.

Coincidentally, there was an opportunity for sectarian nonsense in another country also yesterday.  The Battle of the Golden Spurs / Guldensporenslag / Bataille des éperons d'or was fought just outside Kortrijk/Courtrai on 11th July 1302: so long ago that nobody had tricked about with the Julian calendar so there is no doubt about the date. There is also no doubt that The French, who believed they were i/c the County of Flanders, occupied the city of Bruges / Brugge in 1302 to assert their rights over the rich spoils of the proto-industrial towns of Flanders. On the 18th May in that year, the burghers murdered all the French people on whom they could lay hands on, an event which has been named with ghoulish irony the Bruges Matins / Brugse Mettin.  It was a conscious echo of the Sicilian Vespers when thousands of French-speakers at the other end of their Empire were murdered in and about Palermo on 30th March 1282.  How do you decide if your neighbour or random people in the streets of your town are French?  You ask them to cry "schild en vriend" [shield and friend] with you or after the whole shameful episode had degenerated into Chinese whispers "gilden vriend" [vriend of the guilds]. The French tended to talk without an endemic clearing the the throat and were readily identified as Southerners by the sch and g.  I guess some English or Hanseatic merchants lost their heads in the mill also. Whoop-whoop nonsense alert.

Needless to say, that pissed off the French king Philip IV and he sent an army to exact retribution.  I reckon he thought the Flemish townies would be a walk-over.  But Brugge mustered a trained militia of 5,500 men, Gent/Gand/Ghent sent 2,500 and Ieper/Ypres/Wipers another 1,000. Using rigid discipline and a variety of lethal weapons (pike, goedendag, morning-star) which reads like a script from dungeons and dragons role-play, the militia stopped the charging French cavalry in a maze of drainage ditches and killed everyone who would stay still long enough to be caught. The French general Robert of Artois was surrounded by pikemen and sued for his life but someone jeered "We spreken niet Frans" and he was bludgeoned to death and stripped of his fancy gear. This debacle for the French is known as the Guldensporenslag, the Field of the Golden Spurs because of the quality of the spoils.  The anniversary is an official holiday for the Flemish parts of Belgium which seems plain bad manners and potentially offensive to the Francophones who occupy most of the rest of the country.

Apparently the Dutch were still exploiting the difficulties of foreigners to speak the language like a native as recently as WWII.  Conversations with suspected German spies were brought round to Scheveningen the name of a seaside resort which could be hawked up no problem by any loyal Nederlander but immediately betrayed anyone from East of Arnhem.

First catch your Taniwha

The girl who invented herself lived for awhile with a lad from Denmark.  Although they were both living in the heart of the Kingdom of Anglophonia, she elected to learn a bit of Danish to give parity of esteem to their two native tongues.  From the outside looking in, it didn't go well. One day, when we were passing through when she tried a sentence like "Er det frokosttid nu?" and he came back with a very brusque (had he been there before?) "No no, it's noo not noo".  I couldn't tell the difference, but then I have a tin ear. She clearly couldn't tell the difference either, maybe she couldn't be bothered to learn a language where you are encouraged to purchase books in a boghandel.  They broke up shortly after. You've doubtless heard of the trouble speaking Chinese where two words are identical except for their tones:
誓言，就是失言
Shìyán, jiùshì shīyán.
A promise is a slip of the tongue.

Obviously from all this, how words sound is important for their meaning to be interpreted. But it has long been an article of faith among linguists that the sounds we use to denote objects, actions and ideas are arbitrary.  This was first formally articulated by Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) as l'arbitraire du signe.  Saussure helped find enough commonality in Indo-European languages to make headway in the deciphering of a long dead member of the PIE family of tongues called Hittite. I've written about how the connexions can be pretty convoluted with, say, sheep = ewe = ovis. Saussure acknowledged that his l'arbitraire du signe only had exceptions in onomatopoeia; like when you call your dog Wooffer. But there is a growing agreement that this isn't the only place where Saussure's dogma has to be put aside.  Here's a test.  Look at this painting by Wolfgang Köhler and ask which of the two objects is called Bouba and which Kiki:

If you think the blue blobby thing should be Bouba and the jangly yellow star is Kiki, then you are in good company.  At least 95% of US college students and Tamil speakers from India agree with you. Vilayanur S. Ramachandran has been dining out on this and other clever bits of experimental psychology for the last 20 years, doing the prestigious BBC Reith Lectures in 2003 but you can track down a TED talk for an executive summary.  Worth checking out.

So maybe the whole field is ready for opening up, deconstructing and re-evaluating?  That's the belief of Trevor Lloyd in his book "How to Find a Taniwha: a deep connection between English and Maori words". Buy now! It will come as no surprise (Maori) to you that Lloyd comes from New Zealand. He is working in a long tradition of hewers at the coal-face of meaning in linguistics and they come from all over the world. The best of them have been famously smart: de Saussure for starters, Champollion and Young who deciphered the Rosetta stone; Michael Ventris who knocked off Linear B for follow-up.  Ventris was an architect by trade, Linear B was just a hobby for him. Lloyd is a retired dairy-farmer who, because of his lack of academic qualifications - his brothers garnered all the PhDs in the family - has been ignored if not positively shunned by the Inner Circle of University Linguists. I find that delightfully empowering - you don't need a PhD to have ideas but having an academic job wins you some time to pursue them - it's your day job. Wondering and wandering in the Groves of Academe after a hard day's work deserves enormous respect, whether it's in Open University or next to some sheep-paddocks.

What Lloyd has done is notice a far wider application of the Bouba/Kiki effect particularly in the initial syllable of words in English and, because there was a Maori dictionary about the place, he tested his hypothesis in a language which is as far as you can get from Indo-European and yet not be Klingon. The reason I led with the story about the aggravated Dane, is that I may have committed some gross misunderstanding of Lloyd's extensive research and theory by comparing it to what might seem to outsiders as an interesting party-trick.

In Taniwha, minor difficulties like the fact that the available phonemes in English do not map exactly on to those in Maori are handled sensibly:  treating P & B and H & G as equivalent is fully in agreement Grimm's Law of consonant shifts in Indo-European languages.  You'll have to read the book to get the Full Monty but I'll try to give you a flavour. Earlier related essays on the interweb may help. It will also help to get a copy of Roget's Thesaurus in it's original C19th structure where he attempts to break down all articulated human knowledge into a hierarchy of classes starting with 1. Existence 2. Inexistence . . . 7. State 8. Circumstance . . . 176. Tendency 177. Liability . . . all the way through to . . . 998. Rite 999. Canonicals 1000. Temple.

Lloyd calls the categories Descriptive Features and takes some of the 1000 key concepts which Roget sought to order our thoughts and hooks them onto certain initial letters:
M: (materiality/substance/magnitude/extensiveness): machine, magic, main, make, man, many, material, master, meal, mean (v), meaning, measure, meat, medicine, melt, mend, merge, metal, meter, middle, milk, mind, mineral, mix, money, mood, month, more, most, mountain, mouth, move, much, muck, mud, music, myth. PLUS a similarly long list of Maori materiality words that begin with M.
P: (specificity, particularity)
Wh/F: (flatness, surfaces, physical, social family, personal intimacy)
N: (contraction, compression, reduction)
etc.
I think it's really difficult, working on your own, not to be prey to ascertainment bias. Every time you see an example which agrees with your your hypothesis you tick the box, while the many intervening contrary instances [mandala, meagre, military, moss, mutilate] are not counted in any box. Without the counter-examples it is not possible to do a statistical test to show that/if the M part of the dictionary is significantly top-heavy with material material.  I've culled some numbers from Lloyd's M list, my P = materiality list (below) and an English e-wordlist (N=152,685) I looted from the interweb a decade ago.

ChiSq	M	~M	RowTot
Material	37	>12
~Material	7984	large #
ColTot	8021	144664	152685

For starters you have to control for the fact that the T section of the dictionary is much fatter than the Ms:
English letters ordered by frequency e t a o i n s h r d l c u m w f g y p b v k j x q z
Initial letters ordered by frequency    t a s h w i o b m f c l d p n e g r y u v j k q z x
You can get round some of the bias by engaging a confederate to go independently through a chunk of the dictionary determining what s/he thinks fits each category.  And going through another section looking for cases that fit a Descriptive Feature but appear under the "wrong" letter:
Materiality/substance/magnitude/extensiveness starting with P: package, paddock, palace, pallet, pallisade, palpable, panel, parade, park, particle, passage, pasture etc.
And you'd want to test your hypothesis by picking a third language unrelated to English and Maori (Magyar?) to see if it follows the same rule.

But I'll stop there because I suspect that, as with Alfred Korzybski's talking about the Map not being the Territory it's too profound for me.  Heck, I can't even differentiate two similar Danish phonemes, what can I bring to the table of a deep and comprehensive investigation of the very meaning of language?

Competing interest declaration: Trevor Lloyd is my third cousin: we have 1/128th of our genes identical-by-descent, which is about the genes-in-common level I share with either of my readers in Ukraine.

Don't worry, be silent

On 10th July 1925, the Zoroastrian guru Meher Baba shut up and didn't speak again until he died in 1969.  He travelled widely and talked to Mahatma Gandhi, Maurice "Zank 'eaven for liddle girls" Chevalier, Timothy "LSD" Leary and Pete "The Who" Townshend. He communicated by signs and repeatedly promised his devotees and the press that he would speak at such a time and place but always felt that the time wasn't right as the moment approached.  This was a pity because if he had spoken The Word, everything would have been clear for the next 700 years. Dang!

For a guy who didn't speak, he has accrued a long list of quotes, the most widely re-tweeted of which is "Don't worry, be happy", which inspired Bobby McFerrin. Many of his followers celebrate today by following his example and not speaking. Good idea, we're well into Ramadan at the moment where muslims are giving up more.

Have a Triffid day?

I has tuned into Newstalk FM on the wireless a couple of days ago and they were interviewing Caitlin Moran - because she has just written a fictionalised sequel to How to be a Woman called How to Build a Girl.  That's almost exactly a month since her last airing, when she talked cogently about the downside to a grossly unequal society. She is always good copy, talks a streak and can think on her feet.  Makes a change from the inarticulate drones whom we like to elect when we have an attack of democracy; these lads often stumble on their prepared script and ah er can't get a hm sentence out without ahem a buzzing hm-er confusion of gah verbal tics.  The bold Caitlin was talking about being poor: not can't afford another latte poor but behind on the rent and no food in the house poor.  And all your friends-and-relations are in a similar state so you can't borrow a quid till Tuesday.  I've never been that poor and neither have the politicians who decide how taxes should lubricate our society.

A few years ago, I was dragging myself through another existential crisis and found myself sitting on the end of a wooden pier dangling my feet in the cooling waters of Lough Derg plunk in the middle of Ireland.  I'd gone for a walk along the lake-shore with a friend and I'd been moaning on about me and what my future entailed. When our feet were good and cold and I'd cooled down a bit he asked "Well, what would you do if I gave you a million dollars?" he'd worked in HR for a merchant bank before cashing it all in for the Good Life in rural Ireland and this was the sort of question HR chaps use to cut through the anxieties and constraints that normal people shackle themselves with. "I'd give it straight back" I answered before I could think of anything clever to say. As a knee-jerk response it was close to being true because, although I've not made much progress in de-cluttering my life, I am fully aware that more stuff is not any sort of solution and I can't think of what else to do with $million$.  Stuff-free uses like going to see Macchu Picchu have no attraction for an Agassist like me.

When I was young, about the time I was reading Heinlein, or a bit before, I ate my way through the works of John Wyndham, a very English author of social science-fiction as opposed to space-cruiser and hyper-drive science fiction.  John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris was born on 10th July 1903 and you can see why he might have dumped 2/3rds of his name for his nom de plume - not enough room on the spine of his books for the whole clan. Writing in the 1950s, when Armageddon seemed to be scheduled for next Tuesday, a lot of his fiction took a look at various post-apocalyptic worlds. The best of them for a 12 year old born in the middle of that decade was The Day of the Triffids. Here's the plot:

• triffids are three-legged walking plants, probably genetically-engineered by the Russkies, which are cultivated as a source of oil; they have a lethal sting, so need to be kept on ranches
• bloke gets a splat of triffid venom in his eye and needs to be hospitalised
• the night after his sight-saving operation a star-wars scenario goes wrong and everyone who has looked up at the night sky wakes up blind
• bloke wakes up un-blind, hooks up with a bunch of other (good) sighted people and avoids other groups of (bad) sighted people
• most of the white-hats avoid getting killed by triffids, almost everyone else dies as society collapses and escaped triffids stalk (!) the land

It works as a gracious manual for beans-and-ammo self-sufficiency homesteaders. For a 12 y.o. the best part is when they find a three-ton truck, drive up to the loading dock of a big department store and have to decide what to take.  None of them has a million dollars but the HR question is relevant - what do you actually need and what are the useless fripperies that we've been spending money on up until yesterday.  I think we could ask ourselves this question more often and more self-critically.  Wyndham is smart enough to imagine three futures: 1) Survive now by cherry-picking from the boundless stuff that we have available (if we aren't bone-poor CaitlinMoranists) in the Western world. 2) Seize or reinvent the means of production and repair, so that we don't throw away that three-tonner when the gas-tank runs dry. 3) Settle down in a simpler world where we don't need three-tonners any more.  In none of these futures is there any use for an electric tin-opener.

Having spent the last nearly 40 years in training, I'm almost ready for Future 3.  Bring it on.

the last shall be first

The title is from the bible: Matthew 20:16 but more it's a triumphant vindication of Caitlin Moran's position that if you dispossess, marginalise and ignore the contributions of  the black, female, gay, or wheel-chaired section of your population, then you end up with a stupider country.  Legislators and large rich white men please pay attention: you/we have problems that need creative solutions, you don't have adequate answers. Intermediate School IS 318 has been in the news because they've won another chess championship. You don't expect this because a high proportion of the enrollment comes from black, latino and the 'wrong sort of Asian' backgrounds. 60% of the families are below the Federal poverty line.  Although this is changing as middle class kids are getting shipped into IS 318 because their parents want Jimmy Jr to win championships.

It will be easier to maintain the status quo if you believe that it's all due to Elizabeth Spiegel their full time chess-coach, who is a pretty hot chess player herself, but she graduated to a full-time position from a part-time post because the kids were hungry for more chess. And she got her foot in the door because she was sent there by a non-profit called Chess-in-the-Schools. There must have been some interest in the benefits of chess from somebody in the IS-318 hierarchy or they'd never have contacted the non-profit. Spiegel appears from her blog to be on maternity leave at the moment and had some things to say about being pregnant.   There's a film called Brooklyn Castle which may have the answer to the back-story.

Or you might prefer to put it down to a 1-in-a-million quirk like Rochelle Ballantyne who at age 13 gave Garry Kasparov Га́рри Ки́мович Каспа́ров a run for his money in 2008 and went on to get a scholarship to U Texas Dallas and then Stanford.  Except she wasn't the best player in IS-318, she just made the best hook for the film

Me, I prefer to believe that you can lick it up from the stones: there are smart kids lurking unnoticed in the dark corners of our society - and yours Ukraine. There is a lot to be said for chess - the game has enough complexity to be a challenge; it is embedded in indo-european culture but has now become universally available; it is language-independent; it requires no kit (zeks play it in the gulag with bits of paper for pieces); each game is of finite length; you can play again and learn from your errors; you can improve with practice; it is amenable to being taught; success in the game empowers other aspects of life; its relentless and unforgiving logic requires concentration and application; there is scope for innovation, experimentation and daring; losing is not the end of the world (nobody loses an eye).

But I want to be clear that I am not beating a drum for chess. I can play chess but I lacked the application to get to be any good at it.  For me the take-home from IS-318 is that not everyone in the school plays chess and if you gave them the chance to learn to code, like in CoderDojo, you'd find a similar number of kids who'd be up for that.  There would be some overlap between the groups but it wouldn't be complete. If you gave a random selection the chance to cut chunks off a block of cheese that weighed 500g +/-5g, then you'd find plenty who could grow into that skill and make a living wasting very little. Or what about a fixit school that would repair vacuum-cleaners, microwaves, bicycles and radios for the community. They could move on to cars just as soon as they get legal to drive. If you think about the life-skills on such a list you'll recognise yourself or some other kid on the block, who could do such-a-thing like a natural but got better with practice.  You want to be careful not to label yourself or that other kid as I/s/he can't do X, like I stoutly maintain that I should not be allowed out in a lab.  Because you'd be surprised what you can do when/if you shake off the steamer-trunk of baggage and give it a go.

And I want to be doubly clear that getting to Stanford, or becoming fairy-tale successful like a princess, doctor, lawyer, fashion model, millionaire soccer player or member of U2 is not the only route to a happy and fulfilling life and sometimes it's not even that. They also serve who can make the perfect latte like my Dau.I.  I've spent the last 10 weeks weighing out 200g of powered milk to make bottles for my orphan lambs - I'm a zen-master of lamlac now and don't need the scales.  And we might change the title:

The last won't be last they'll just be