Seaweed for all

Minnesota is about as far from the ocean as you can get in North America - the nearest saltwater is 1500km NE in Hudson's Bay. In a Soviet style centrally managed economy the U of Minn wouldn't be seen as a sensible place to devote a scientific life to the study of sea-weed. But the principle of academic freedom allows for all sorts of logistically daft research.  Egyptologists work from the British Museum in London (3500km SE); while fossil-fish expert Neil Shubin lives in Chicago but carries out field-work in the Canadian Arctic (4000km N).

Josephine Tilden was born in in 1869 in the corn-belt of Iowa but her folks moved to Minneapolis when she was a child and that's where she went to school.  She got her BSc from U. Minnesota in 1895 and stayed around to obtain a Master's degree whose results were published in her first paper On Some Algal Stalactites in Yellowstone Park. In 1897, her Alma Mater took her on as an instructor to teach the students about Algae to round out their botanical education. She was the first woman on the academic pay-roll of the University.  The following year she was off to the clatter of islands that fill the Strait of San Juan de Fuca between the USA and Canada and between the massive Vancouver Island and the mainland.  We've been there before at Tommy Thompson's marine station on McConnell Island. Tilden had worked out that a very low tide was due in the area in early August and was determined to sample algae which are not normally accessible. It was all very derring-do in a classic late Victorian way. Tilden was paddled to her proposed field-site in an open canoe accompanied by her redoubtable mother as chaperon. The rare-in-Minnesota seaweed which she pulled if the ocean floor and pressed into her collecting books formed the start of a massive collection of algae from all all over the wet world.

Thomas Baird, the chap who paddled the canoe, was also the owner of the foreshore on that remote stretch of Vancouver Island. He was so impressed by the doughty dedication of his companions that he offered to sell Tilden enough property for a cabin to serve as a research station to shelter her and her students when she came back in subsequent Summers to carry of further research. As we saw on Sherkin, longitudinal studies of the fore-shore are really important to establish the base-lines of natural variation in abundance and diversity. A single sample is barely scientific.  From 1901-1906, faculty from U.Minn brought students to this remote spot: presumably by train, ferry and open boat.  And not only to collect sea-weed: the geology, botany and zoology of the area were also ripe for research. The Minnesota Seaside Station [R from], run by Tilden and her boss Conway MacMillan, Professor of Botany, served to educate a couple of dozen students in each of those years. The area is now called Botanical Beach and is famous for its tidal rock-pools and foreshore, it looks busy.

MacMillan and Tilden were so caught up in the value of the place for scientific research and teaching that they petitioned the University to take the Station under its financial and official wing . . . and were refused.  The University only saw an administrative nightmare: how to audit and maintain a property that was 2000km distant and in a foreign country. MacMillan was angry enough to resign in protest. Tilden was not so easily put off and stayed on in the University, undertaking some enormous trips across the Pacific and round the world collecting Algae to get a more complete and comprehensive picture of the distribution of the several species. She was a bit obsessed by algae but was also able to see them as part of the web of life and was vocal, and far ahead of her time, in her concerns about the effects of over-fishing and oil-spills on the whole marine ecosystem.  In 1924, she took a party of 15 to a conference on pan-Pacific conservation in Hawaii, and then expected the University to pay their travel expenses. It was only $15,000, she said, a snip compared to the $750,000 raised for the college football stadium.  She must have been a royal [as in Princess] pain for the poor people working in the finance department.  A few years later she set off on a round the world collecting trip with a group of loyal students, who are asked to chip in $1000 each towards expenses. It was successful if 50+ steamer-trunks full of specimens shipped home to Minneapolis is success.  Her new Head of Department had to deal with a flurry of bills for shipping and incidental expenses as his maverick instructor romped round the world with her train of students all getting wet to the knees twice a day as they looted the fore-shore for material. In 1937 she was asked to retire and there was a war over who owned, and should have access to, 'her' specimens which had been paid for by the University.  It's a classic early IP tussle.

She retired to Florida and lived in straitened circumstances for another 20 years before bequeathing 'her' collection to a friend and fellow oceanobsessor from San Francisco. The specimens eventually returned to UMinn where they sit gathering dust today.  It's all in the essay The Algae of Acrimony, which is such a neat title you have to read it.  Science needs people who are so certain they are right that they forge ahead beyond the current frontiers; but equally science needs people to rein these pioneers in, lest they disappear off the rails into whoowhar-land. Someone - that's most of us in science, indeed - has to plod along carefully picking up the pieces and filling in the gaps and someone has to pay for it all.

Now N=45 Women in Science on The Blob.

Gouldfinch

No, not a typo!  I'm not going to talk about the second most striking bird that you find in parks-and-gardens in these WEA islands. That's the Goldfinch Carduelis carduelis [male R] which comes to visit our front yard (when I'm paying attention, which is rare enough when it comes to checking off the bird-life on the farm) most years. So many of the common Irish birds are LBJs [little brown jobs] that are only namable by experienced twitchers, that it's nice to have something so distinctive as C. carduelis. The most striking bird you're likely to encounter hereabouts is Alcedo atthis, the kingfisher, but that is sufficiently rare that it inspires poets.  But that's here and now.  Today we are going back nearly 200 years and to the other side of the world.

On 2nd October 1836 Charles Darwin returned home from his circumnavigation in HMS Beagle with steamer trunks of specimens to unload and sort. He had been collecting wherever and whenever the Beagle touched land and he could secure Cap'n Fitzroy's permission to go off with shot-gun, nets and killing-jars. In January 1837, he offloaded his Galapagos bird specimens on the Zoological Society of London, confident that they would be able to identify and classify the skins. The Society was, in this case, represented a self-taught taxidermist and naturalist called John Gould who had started his working life at 14 as a gardener and son-of-a-gardener. Gould was probably too polite and deferential to say that Darwin had made a bags of collecting these birds. Famously, for example, he had failed to record the island on which each bird had been killed.  On a global scale, the microcosm of a small archipelago was 'essentially the same', so the that's all the leg-tag for each bird recorded.

Darwin told Gould that they were blackbirds but Gould identified them as finches [L print from a drawing by Gould of the cactus finch Geospiza scandens] a different family altogether. He also realised that they were a) different from anything he'd previously seen or read about but b) they were also strikingly diverse among themselves.  Frustrated by the lack of geographical information supplied by Darwin, Gould applied to Captain Fitzroy and other members of the crew to see if they had better provenance data for their specimens of the same species.  Eventually Gould was able to sort the finches into 12 separate species and show that each one appeared to be endemic to a single island.  That biogeographical information is given in the text-books as a key insight which drove Darwin down the path towards his 1859 book The Origin of Species. The fact that distinctive species could evolve . . . but only if isolated from other potentially interbreeding individuals, was a corner stone of the theory of evolution by natural selection. We can thank John Gould for organising and codifying the key information: if it had been left to Darwin, the theory would have been a lot longer a-coming.

They are called "Darwin's" finches in one of the many unfairnesses of scientific naming. It's not always the firstest who gets tribbed, it's often the one who has mostest influence. The finches are re-churned as the example of evolution in action because there are conveniently finite in number of species and each obviously different in the size and shape of beak. It is thus easy to tell a neat story about how the diet drives specialisation and isolation drives speciation. David Lack and dozens of graduate students have filled in the details about how population density fluctuates in each species year by year in tune with extremes of weather and interactions with other species in the same ecosystem. Evolution is thus comprehensible as dynamic and exquisitely sensitive to local conditions. In fact, it was the status of the Galapagos mockingbirds Mimus spp. which blew Darwin's mind open to the possibility of evolution.  Here, according to Gould, were four distinct species: Mimus parvulus [all over the islands but forming distinctive sub-species on each]; and three other sister taxa Mimus macdonald [Española/Hood], Mimus trifasciatus [Darwin/Culpepper], Mimus melanotis [Chatham/San Cristóbal] which were limited to a single island and had evolved into separate species there. Equally important, for the mockingbirds but not for the finches [p.22], clearly and closely related species could be identified on the South American mainland 1000km to the East.

The only rational explanation for this diversity was that species were not immutable. Which is a truth universally acknowledged today [except in the bible-belt] but in Darwin's day was both novel and shocking; so I'll write it again: "species are not immutable!!!".  John Gould was a name in his day, famous for publishing a set of gorgeous illustrated bird books, and for setting the taxonomic biology of Australian wildlife off onto a scientific footing. [L. 1976 commemorative stamp].
But he is largely forgotten now . . . except on The Blob.  John Gould was born >!today!< 14th September 1804 in Lyme Regis, so he must have been known to Mary Anning but may not have registered her because his family left the county to gardens elsewhere soon afterwards. He died, shortly after a visit from painter John Everett Millais inspired the painting The Ruling Passion, in London on 3rd February 1881.  So he was an almost exact contemporary of Darwin (1809-1882) his collaborator and colleague.

10 minutes of your w/e

Here a neat set of little videos from RadioLab at WNYC:

• Words - if you can't count nine words peek the comments at TYWKIWDBI
• Symmetry
• Moments

That is all.

Day of the Programmer

<nerd>Whoop whoop, nerd alert.
As I told you before, every year I try to remember Tin [50th element] Day on the 19th February, the 50th day of the year.  But, I'm usually still recovering from a massive Darwinday [12th Feb, hissonours birthday] bender the week before. OTOH I don't pay any attention to Pi Day on 14th March because the clever-clogness only works if you're a yankee-dog: 3/14 is sort of like π=3.14 especially if you do something special just before 2pm - 3/14:1:59.  For Europeans there is π-approximation day 22/7 on 22nd July.  In the realm of fiction, h2g2 fans are quietly respectful on Towel Day 25th May. Other SciFi buffs have a Star Wars knees-up on May the 4th . . . be with you. For similar reasons, I refer to 2:30 as Chinese dentist time [say it].

Today is the 100th day of the year in hexadecimal 16^2 = 256 = 2^8. 256 hold special place for computer historians because the original computers had an 8-bit byte which meant that only 256 different characters could be represented by a single byte.  Which was fine for English+math but the divil-a-bit of use for folks who had accents or wrote in Cyrillic or katakana. This 256 fact was noted by Valentin Balt and Michael Cherviakov [definitely not for the first time, you may be sure] a couple of Russian programmers. They started up a petition to have the day formally recognised by the Russian Govt.

Now, I'm a programmer. I've made computers do my bidding through, at least, Fortran, Basic, PL/1, Pascal, C and Perl. I don't think this talent deserves particular respect, except that you might say "Happy Programmer's Day" if you meet me today. And the same greeting will be appreciated by any other chaps whom you know to be able to string three lines of code together. "Счастливый День программиста" might work in Moscow.</nerd>

Cabo Verde sings

12th September is a national holiday in Cabo Verde, the most civilised and healthiest republic in (or at least off) Africa. Like other civilised places including Ireland, their National day is not Independence Day. Which is 5th July in Cabo Verde and not yet in Ireland - we're waiting for the boys to stop squabbling in The North.  I thought, on behalf of Turismo Cabo Verde, that I'd point you at some parts of the culture of this hot and reasonably happy place.

• Ilha de Santiago sung by Marya Andrade
• Mas amor by Marya Andrade and the boys
• Nos bandera saluting the flag in song
• Funaná Cabo Verdean girls shake their booty
• Brincadera de Aos by Tabanka Djazz
• Bom Txon di Mangui by Bana 
• Tarrafal by Pó di Terra  added 13/Sep/15

The flag, tribbed in song above, is not the same as was flying from government buildings [L above] when I was there in 1984. That flag in the red-gold-green of revolutionary Africa was replaced (without the agonising and $$$$ that NZ and Oz have gone through without making a change) in 1992 with the stars and bars [L above].  The stars represent the 10 main islands of the archipelago, the blue is the sea which surrounds them and the red and white is the "road of progress through struggle" or some such woofle-speak nonsense.  Never mind that: listen to the music of the islands and if your hips start to twitch, why, that's normal.

Surf's Up!

Something for the weekend.

When I was teenager, I went a tuthree times on skiing holidays in the Alps. I was pretty good; I didn't fall over much and I didn't break things when I did; I knew I was going to live for ever so I wasn't frightened; I went downhill fast and was able to cut a few dramatic turns. [The evidence: self R, R looking serious with The Brother R, L looking hatless ca. 1967] The  weather in the Alps is continental, so even in January or February it can be cloudlessly sunny for days on end, so you need sunscreen if you're skiing in shirtsleeves. All good fun: I should have done more while I was still fit for it.  Then again, The Boy took a tumble snow-boarding a couple of years ago, when he was still well fit for it, and lost the use of his arm for several anxious days and spent months in physio to get back to normal. He put out his arm to break the fall and tore the ligaments and strreettcched the nerves in his shoulder. Then again then again, his cousin, my neffie, who could ski like a pro, fractured a few vertebrae in a ski accident a year ago and is lucky to be still walking [gingerly].

OTOH, I couldn't see the attraction of surfing.  With skiing you wait for a go on the slopes in a sunny mountain-top cafe drinking cappucino and eating a delicate Austrian pastry. With surfing you wait for a go bobbing up and down getting cold and your croissant gets all soggy.  But The Boy likes doing both - although actually he's a snowboarder rather than a skier. The first date he had with His Beloved he dragged her off to North Devon in a borrowed car. As the surfboard occupied the whole nearside of the car, she had to converse with the back of his head. I guess the attraction is not simply physical. When he was over in Ireland in August he put the 3 y.o G.Dau on a board to catch a small wave or two! An occupational hazard with surfing is that you can drive for miles to a surfable coast and find that the wind is up but the surf is down and you bob about getting cold for the whole weekend without ever catching a wave.

Can't have that! There is a long history of generating reliable man-made waves in a situation that is really close to coffee and buns.  The most recent venture to open in these islands is Surf Snowdonia in Dolgarrog on a former aluminium plant. It's ironically on the site of a devastating wave that destroyed a large part of the village and killed 16 people in 1907.  Industrial plants accumulate all sorts of chemicals, from diesel spills to heavy metals and 400 tons of toxic material was scraped off the site and had to be trucked away. 40,000 tons of hardcore from the demolished buildings was kept for foundations.

The diagram (from the BBC) shows the fundamentals of the technology.  The pool is 300m long with a central trackway running for 150m. The track drags a snow-plough back and forth and up and down all day shoving water in front of itself.  The bottom of the pool is contoured to generate left- and right-breaking waves of different heights which endure for about 15 seconds.  That's pretty good compared to the length of ride you'll get under optimum conditions out at sea. And the wave is quite precise, reducing the variables means that you can perfect your technique, so that you are ready for real surfing in the wild. Costs between £19-£25/hr, which is a lot steeper than the cinema, so you'd better get something out of it. Propaganda video. Looks bloody dangerous to me, the wave is travelling at 36 km/hr about 5m from a row of steel pillars. I don't see anyone wearing a hard hat: concussion in 3m of water is likely to be fatal. I hope they serve bara brith and/or welsh-cakes in the cafe; that would make it all worthwhile.

Teeny tiny scalpels

Nearly 1 million children die each year from malaria, one horse of the troika of infant death along with tuberculosis and infectious diarrhoea.  Only TB is caused by a single agent Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Fatal infectious runs is most likely caused by rotavirus but a number of bacterial species (Vibrio cholerae for starters) will flush you to death. Likewise fatal malaria is most likely to to be Plasmodium falciparum but several other Plasmodium species will give kids malaria bad enough to worry their parents witless. Like with car-crashes, it's not sensible to count only the dead: 200 million people contract malaria every year and that's a lot of sick children and anxious parents (and lost work days in shoe- and shirt-factories). If we could find a cure for any of these malarias we'd be increasing the net happiness of poor people in the third world.

Steve Hoffman has been wrestling with malaria for nearly 30 years, starting with a stint as a [US Navy!] doctor in Jakarta in Indonesia, like Christiaan Eijkman before him. Like Barry Marshall with Helicobacter "stomach ulcers" pylori, and JBS Haldane with CO₂ poisoning, the bold Hoffman wasn't above experimenting on himself: in his case by getting himself punctured by thousands of malaria-enriched mosquitoes. The trick was to irradiate the mosquitoes to nobble the Plasmodium within, so that they would be recognised early by the human immune system but be incapable to propagating within the red blood cells of the unwilling host.  Now it might be possible in a lab setting to hold a box containing 1000 angry mosquitoes up to your arm but it won't scale up to propagating the cure out along the bicycle tracks of the Third World.

Hoffman accordingly started thinking of other ways of getting billions of irradiated Plasmodium out of millions of irradiated mozzies and into a chilled vial whose contents could be injected intravenously. He and his wife Kim Lee Sim came up with a seemingly backwards reculer pour mieux sauter idea to micro-dissect out the salivary glands of the Anopheles mosquitoes and throw them into a bucket for processing, like a mini-abattoir. Hey, I know about this: dissecting out [Drosophila] salivary glands under adverse circumstances was one of the the high points of my undergraduate career. It's a technique, it's possible, you get better at it with practice, but it is desperately inefficient and time-consuming. Could it be done with nano-robots?  Last Summer, accordingly, Hoffman and Sim's kitchen-table company Sanaria, launched a crowd-funding Indiegogo appeal to raise $250,000 to develop the Sporobot.  Propaganda video.

Sporobot is a machine that will hunt down living mosquitoes, restrain them, turn them round and pull off their little heads to reveal the salivary glands.  How difficult could that be, right? [R] Neat, eh!? but that idea didn't appeal to many more than 500 crowd-people who in total contributed $45,000. They probably should have included a picture of a dead baby, that worked recently for mobilising Europe to do something about the Syrian refugee crisis.  There are a million to choose from every year not just when the Islamic world is in melt-down.  Is it that most of the malaria-dead babies are black?