Lampedusa

In the migratory crisis, which has been in the news, and The Blob, since the Spring, we hear about Malta and Sicily because that's where our boys in blue in L.É. Eithne and L.É. Niamh have been landing the dusky people they pluck from the wine-dark sea.  We've also had an earful about Kos Κως because it is so close to Asia. I guess the press in Italy are delivering a slightly different story with other Italian islands taking a more central role.  Among those must be Lampedusa, the largest of the Pelagie archipelago which is currently flying an Italian flag. The Telegraph had a photoshoot down there recently. Here's a boat-full of undocumented migrants arriving at Lampedusa: it looks like a sex-ratio of 99M:?1?F and an average age of 25. If I was ISIS head-office, I'd endeavour to have some of my best people aboard such a boat. Lampedusa is nearer to Africa than Malta although much smaller [20sq.km v 300sq.km] and less well serviced. Any [EU] port in a storm, I guess. Lampedusa has a rich history in the sweeps of Mediterranean migration having been settled and raided by Berbers, Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Spaniards and Italians in succession.  That's all I have to say about migratory matters today - I've already said too much.  Between Thanksgiving & Christmas we might use Lampedusa as an excuse for a gulp of gluttony.

In Roman times, Lampedusa  served as the site for a famous garum factory, the main ingredient of which is fish and a tiny island surrounded by water is convenient for such an enterprise. Garum didn't use the fillets of fish but rather the wobbly-bits inside which were gathered up and dumped into vats. Generous salting and exposure to the sun promoted the growth of salt-tolerant lactic acid bacteria which grew and multiplied to out-compete other common environmental bacteria like coliforms and Pseudomonas spp. But it's also likely that digestive enzymes from the fish itself (or indeed its intestinal flora) played a part in the process. It's not a million miles from the manufacture of soy sauce, or indeed my sourdough bread.  Both of those products require particular fungi in the mix but neither is a monoculture. Soy sauce has rather strong flavours and is not everyone's cup of tea, and the acid after-bite of my sourdough tastes 'off' to people brought up on industrial sliced white bread. A brew of fermented fish-giblets must also have been an acquired taste. Every so often a fine-woven basket was pushed into the vat to strain off the seething fish-bits and the liquid was drawn off and bottled.  The smell about the factory must have been 'distinctive'. Because the microbial community was complex, the flavour was complex and you may be sure that each manufactory had its fans both locally and in Rome itself. Amphorae full of the stuff have been found in Pompeii and in numerous ancient ship-wrecks in the Mediterranean. 

I think we're on solider ground for finding approval for another Lampedusa linked dish. Il Gattopardo The Leopard by Guiseppe di Lampedusa is rolling roiling historical novel set in Sicily during the Risorgimento of the mid-to-late 19thC. Visconti's film of the book starred Burt Lancaster. The writer was a full-blood prince whose family took its name from the little island but held estates on the mainland and lived in a palace in Palermo. In one memorable scene he describes a dish which reads like poetry in Italian: 
"L'oro brunito dell'involucro, la fraganza di zucchero e di cannella che ne emanava, non era che il preludio della sensazione di delizia che si sprigionava dall'interno quando il coltello squarciava la crosta: ne erompeva dapprima un fumo carico di aromi e si scorgevano poi i fegatini di pollo, le ovette dure, le sfilettature di prosciutto, di pollo e di tartufi nella massa untuosa, caldissima dei maccheroni corti, cui l'estratto di carne conferiva un prezioso color camoscio." Everything in Italian sounds sexy and appealing but the dish is scarcely less mouth-watering in prosy old English:
The burnished gold of the crusts, the fragrance of sugar and cinnamon they exuded, were but preludes to the delights released from the interior when the knife broke the crust; first came a mist laden with aromas, then chicken livers, hard-boiled eggs, sliced ham, chicken, and truffles in masses of piping hot, glistening macaroni, to which the meat juice gave an exquisite hue of suède.

Yes, yes, very nice I'm sure, but have you a bottle of fish-sauce handy . . . to spice it up a bit, like.

more islands

The Measles

In 1977, when The Boy was 18 months old we set off in a Citroen Dyane from Dublin for Siracusa in Sicily. On the return journey we exchanged petrol vouchers for soup. There was no spare money, so we drove to Larne in The North to catch a ferry to Scotland en route for Dover. Clearly a 300km detour North was not the most efficient use of our time, but we were strapped for cash and that was the cheapest costing.  On the ferry to Stranraer the poor wee mite went all spotty before our very eyes: it was the rubeola!
Here's a brilliant data-rich graphic that won an award at the information-is-beautiful awards this year. I've clipped the more recent data columns to make it fit on my page:

If you think that measles is something that you should be frightened of, then this shows that vaccination works: within a few years of being introduced, the incidence of measles fell off a cliff from 1-4% of children infected every year to being an endangered species.  If you check out the original sources, you can see that for the last 6 or 7 years, across the whole country there has been a bit of a pickup in measles. I'm not sure if this is an artifact of the data. In a well-fed nation like the US, the rate of death among those who contract the virus is 1 or 2 per 1000 cases.  Manageable, says you, but still bad enough for those two parents in every small town who have to bury a small white coffin.  And a little more serious when, back in the 1950s 90% of US children were infected with measles with a jumbo-jet full dying each year.  In less well fed places, the mortality rate goes up 50x to 10%.  Other sub-lethal problems include scarring of the cornea, pneumonia, encephalitis and ear damage.  And don't take your measles-infected child to visit Uncle Jack with AIDS - it could be a fatal encounter for Jack.

Because measles is so infectious it romps through communities in epidemics and then romps back again when a new cohort of susceptible infants is born.  If you can reduce the infectible population size sufficiently, the measles romps through and then dies out for lack of places to propagate. It's much more serious if you catch the disease as an adult and this is a problem for island populations that have eliminated the virus when measles is reintroduced after many years absent. This is the reduce-the-effective-population-size argument for immunization. The rate of vaccination to achieve 'herd immunity' in measles is about 95% - this key epidemiological figure is different for different viruses which may be less, or more, infectious. Measles appeared in human populations in medieval times, probably as a mutating rinderpest virus from cattle. Like ebola in the old days of static isolated populations, that first rinderpest-like invasion would have died out in earlier times. But the beginnings of urbanisation and increased travel brought the effective population size up above 1/2 million people.  This was enough victims to sustain measles in cyclical sweeps through the human youth.

Any community can carry a few people who choose not to vaccinate because of religious scruples or a belief that vaccination is in itself harmful - causing autism, hammer-toes and hallucinations. There is no real political will to try to eradicate measles virus as we have done with smallpox partly because the fatality and morbidity rate is comparatively low. I mentioned Ali Maow Maalin a year ago as the last person to contract smallpox in the wild in 1977.  WHO declared the virus extinct on 9th December 1979.  I'll have to write something about polio one of these days, which really put the fat in the fire in America in the 1950s.

Positive effect

Those who have their own shrink will think smugly that the title is a solecism [impropriety, mistake, or incongruity] for positive affect [the extent to which an individual subjectively experiences positive moods such as joy, interest, and alertness].  People with therapists can use a word like solecism; but they'd be wrong to use it here because I mean what I say. I was talking to Dau.II recently and she remarked that one of her pals had conniptions or even kniptions when she said that her cake was rather fine. "You can't say your own stuff is good", he spluttered. "Oh yes I can" she thought and spent the rest of the weekend commending herself and other for doing things in a particularly fine way. "This toast is cooked to perfection" . . . "You are holding that newspaper very well" . . . "Your unmatched socks are quite interesting". And why not?  We don't say nice things to each other half enough.

She went on to observe that, while her girl friends would routinely compliment each other for their new haircuts, shoes and mad nail-varnish, this behaviour was completely alien among the blokes that she knows.  Not all chaps are oblivious to the way they look: we all know men who are always glancing at themselves in shop-windows and brush their hair in front of a mirror. It's about 40 years since I brushed my hair at all, let alone looked at myself doing so, and it wasn't always blade-4 short like it is now.  

I heard great story recently from a palomine who, when he was young and single, went off to buy a new duvet cover.  He asked the shop-girl where they were and picked one off the pile.  As she was still standing there he asked:
"Will this do?" 
To which she replied "What colour are the curtains?"
"I don't know"
"What colour are the carpets?
"No idea!"
I'm the same, I'm not colour blind but I throw on the nearest shirt each morning, neatly ironed by The Beloved because she doesn't want me to bring shame upon her.  It may or may not clash with my sweater or trousers.  I've noticed that, now I am genetically dead, female colleagues at work will occasionally remark on the fact that I've acquired new shoes [I bought a third functional pair this Summer] or cut my own hair. I've been clipping my own hair for about 20 years now: it's saved me about €1000 and minimised the requirement for me to talk about either last Saturday's match and United's prospects or where I've going for my holidays.

Other men definitely don't complement each other on their kit.  I'm with Dau.II on this, that failing to say nice things to or about people makes life unnecessarily hard, unforgiving and unhappy. Especially if we are prone to beefing and whingeing when things are not done to our exacting standards.

As an example of the positive effect of being complementary to people, you must check out this short film by Shea Glover. She went out in her community with her camera "to take pictures of things she found beautiful".  When she turned the camera on people, with the same principle in mind, the results [R] are transformative and, well, beautiful.

Flood

I was down at the outlaws last night to visit with them and fix us all a square meal . . . and get my irregular fix of television.  SkyTV was running through the news on its 20 minute cycle showing people from Northern England loading sodden rubbish in dumpsters after Storm Desmond delivered the region a month's worth of rain in 24 hours. The pictures looked like Lymouth and Llyn Eigiau The North and West of Ireland experienced a similar deluge of spent tropical storm at the end of last week. That's probably 100mm; which is nothing like monsoon, but enough to overwhelm the existing infrastructure in numerous towns and villages build either side of rivers: which is most towns and villages. It took me back to 11th June 1993, when a similar amount of rain fell in Dublin. We lived then in an old farm house about 12km North of the city centre and I used to cycle in and out of work most days as the quickest, cheapest and fittest way of commuting to work.  For some reason, possibly because it was raining stair-rods, that day I took the car into work - you could do that in those days: if you left home before 0745 you could get to town in 15-20 minutes.  If you left at 0755, it would take 80 minutes and there would be nowhere to park.

At about 2pm, The Beloved phoned to say, that . . . if I wasn't too busy at the frontiers of science . . . there was a lot of water in the garden; and no sandbags. I jumped in the car and set off Northwards.  I was possibly the last car to go out on the Malahide Road that afternoon that wasn't a jeep.  At an intersection in Artane (4km out) a manhole cover had popped off a storm drain and a fountain 60cm h x 60cm diameter was bloofing up in the middle of the road. Where the road dips at Balgriffin cemetery (9km out), I had to drive on the sidewalk to avoid the road-wide knee-deep pool of water.  By the time I got home, water was coming under the front door and we shifted ourselves to move dozens of books off the bottom shelf in the hallway. The water kept rising and we were about to start on the second shelf up, when I thought to open the kitchen door.  The tide drained away with a whoosh and gurgle and for the next several hours we existed in a steady state: as much water was coming in as going out and we had wellington boots. So we slodged about for the rest of the evening, making dinner by candle-light and doing a little ineffectual shovelling outside.

As dark was falling, there was a knock at the door.  A benighted motorist was looking to use our telephone.  D'you remember when nobody had cell-phones?  He was slack-jawed with apologies when he saw what we were dealing with, but he had his own interesting tragedy to relate. His daughter and her pal had booked a charter-flight holiday in the sun out of Dublin Airport and he and his wife had elected to drive them down from Belfast to say au revoir.  Distracted by the chatter or the rain, he'd missed the turning for the airport and been forced to drive miles into town unable to turn around. The traffic was mayhem and he'd been trying for 2 hours to find an alternative route back to their destination. I knew he couldn't go further along out road because it was a metre deep about 500m West; he got indeterminate information from the airport about whether their flight was going to be on time and after 10 minutes he slipped out of our lives forever.  I'm guessing the girls missed their connexion; I hope they had insurance; and I hope they didn't beat up on the poor old Dad.  For us it was a bit of an adventure, we only lost a handful of books and the water wasn't contaminated with sewage. Could have been worse. A child got swept into a culvert that day and drowned about 5km away from our place. That raised questions in parliament. That was a tragedy.

Several years later, I turned up to my evening djembe circle and our teacher, Sinead "drum dance and body-percussion" O'Brien, seemed a little piano rather than her usual ebullient forte. Turned out that she had been flooded at the home she rented out in the wilds of County Wicklow. Her landlord, a farmer, had contrived to block one of the field drains on the face of the hill above her home and she had been inundated in her absence.  She was in the middle of cataloging the results of a field trip to West Africa recording percussive material and songs on DAT tapes.  Her filing system was the living room floor and her entire collection was ruined. She shrugged and said "It's a lesson in non-attachment . . . are we going to mope or are we going to drum?".  I thought that was just wonderful: she was my Sensei.

MSDS quiz

This may save your eyes.
MSDS (material safety data sheet) forms are produced by each supplying company to a fairly uniform template. The order is the same: 1. Company contacts; 2. Hazards; 3. Composition etc. but the look&feel is different for different companies.  In an emergency, there is too much [6-8 pages] information.  You need to be familiar with the chemicals you use, but also with the chemicals that your lab-mates use – you may have to deal with the crisis on the next bench. This quiz is designed to force you to read several different MSDS forms to abstract particular information; that way you’ll be quicker off the mark if there is trouble.

Instructions:
1. Answer the questions below, as far as you are able, under exam conditions using your prior training and common sense: it shouldn't take more than 10 minutes - tops.
2. Get access to the internet, set the clock and find the correct answers to the questions from the Source links.
3. Make particular note of cases where common sense is at variance with correct practice.

MSDS Comprehension Quiz
Q1. Is there any evidence that Carmine aka cochineal is mutagenic?
Source: http://url.ie/z6d2

Q2. Acrylamide aka prop-2-enamide [Structure see R].  What is the oral LD50?
Source: http://url.ie/z6d9
Q3. Ethanol. C₂H₅OH What is the flash-point for Ethyl alcohol? How should you extinguish an ethanol fire?
Source: https://fscimage.fishersci.com/msds/89308.htm

Q4. 3,5-Dinitrosalicylic Acid. [structure R] Is the oral LD50 less or more for this compound compared to Acrylamide?
Source: https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/IE/en/sds/aldrich/128848
Q5. Sodium hypochlorite. What is distinctive about the look and smell of bleach? What are the characteristic symptoms if ingested?
Source: tinyurl.com/2p9y6z25

Q6. Thorin. 1-(o-arsenophenylazo)-2-naphthol-3, 6-disulphonic acid, sodium salt].  What should you do if Thorin comes into contact with your skin?  What element[s] of its structure [R] suggests toxicity?
Source: tinyurl.com/bdz7rjxx
Q7.  Name two common materials that are incompatible with safe handling of iodine?  What are the recommended conditions for safe storage?
Source: http://www.labchem.com/tools/msds/msds/LC15590.pdf
Q8. What is the most likely effect of oral ingestion of mineral oil?  What is its relative density at 25^oC?
Source: http://url.ie/z6de
Q9. Mercapto-ethanol aka 2-Hydroxy-1-ethanethiol [structure  HOC₂H₄SH].  What is the characteristic colour and odour of this material? How should you extinguish a mercaptoethanol fire?
Source: https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/IE/pt/sds/sigma/m3148
Q10. Cephalosporin aka Ceftriaxone sodium is one of the three antibiotics added to Pseudomonas selective agar base.  Is there any evidence that it is carcinogenic?
Sources: http://url.ie/z6dd
Q11. NaOH. Sodium hydroxide. Lye. Caustic soda. What substances are incompatible with NaOH?
Source: https://www.labchem.com/tools/msds/msds/LC23900.pdf
Q12. In which section of any MSDS form do you find First Aid Measures?

Du côté de chez Schwann

For my father, who had a practical education fitting for a future naval officer, literary intellectualism was summed up, and more or less dismissed, by "Proust and Kafka". It wasn't that he thought the works of those two European authors was rubbish, he just knew it wasn't to his taste; which leaned towards tum de tum de tum poetry, history and biography. Knowing who fought whom at Austerlitz, Blenheim or Camperdown and what the Defenestration of Prague or the Council of Trent was about would have made him rather handy in certain sections of a Pub Quiz if they'd been invented in time. I've mentioned Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu a few times on The Blob but only in its central anecdote about a fragment of madeleine transporting the great man back in time. I know nothing more about it except that, at 1,250,000 words, it is longer than The Blob and even longer than the complete Harry Potter.  I have read Kafka, on the other hand, which was weird but did get built into my expensive education [I can remember some of it]. Strangely, Proust's magnum opus and J.K. Rowling's are both in seven [7] volumes. Proust and Potter haven't been associated only in my mind: at least one other person has mentioned them in the same paragraph.  All this is a long journey round a scrap of madeleine to note that the first book of Proust's "most respected novel of the twentieth century" is called Du côté de chez Swann. And that is just an excuse to make a dreadful pun in the title.

The Schwann, whom I want to cosy up du côté de chez to, is emphatically not Proust's hero but a great scientist who did things in the great wide world rather than living entirely in his own head like me. Ken Robinson TED Talker and charismatic educator says that an intellectual's body is a grossly undervalued vehicle for getting the head to its various meetings TEDtalk [38m views 19mins] - Transcript. Get out and dance, professors! Theodor Schwann was born on this day 7th December 1810 - more than 200 years ago. People knew so little back then about how the world ticked that we might be tempted to wonder how they survived at all.  But that just silly scientism; because ordinary people can get born, eat food without poisoning themselves, fight off infection, have sex with each other and bring their own children into the world without owning a microscope or having the least idea that yeast, Salmonella and Neisseria gonorrhoeae are living things.

 Theodor Schwann was brought up in Neuß Neuss right across the river from Düsseldorf in Western Germany. He was born a French citizen because Napoleon had incorporated that part of Germany into his Empire but the territory was assigned to Prussia at the Congress of Vienna in 1815.  This turned out to be good for young Theodor's education, because he went to Universität zu Berlin (which became Humboldt University in 1949) to get his degree and there fell in with anatomist & physiologist Johannes Peter Müller just as the great man was putting the finishing touches to his magisterial Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen.  Müller appointed Schwann as his assistant. I could have included Müller in my list of great names about the human body for the Müllerian ducts, microscopic embryonic features that grow and develop to become the uterus in female mammals.  I could have included Schwann as well for Schwann Cells which he discovered while working for Müller between 1834 and 1838. Schwann cells are filled with lipids and are coterminous with the myelin sheath à côté de / that wraps around neurons providing a certain amount of insulation and so upping the speed with which electrical signals are propagated. Schwann was the first person to tease apart nerve tissue and recognise how it was engineered.

Don't think that Schwann was a one trick pony.  While in Berlin, he also discerned that yeast was a) living and b) its metabolism was responsible for the production of a) alcohol [beer] and b) carbon dioxide [bread]. And while he was about it he invented the term 'metabolism'! He was really the first person to put this, then wildly controversial, idea (that fermentation is carried out by living microbes) into the public domain and he is thus the giant on whose shoulders Louis "Institut" Pasteur and Joseph "antiseptic" Lister stood. He then turned his attention to the process of digestion; isolating and describing the digestive enzyme pepsin.  It was the nature of the times that the plains of ignorance were wide open and ready for investigation by people who could put in the hours of focused attention necessary to run down some reliable facts about the world.

In 1838, at the age of 28, Schwann was head-hunted by the Catholic University of Leuven in the brand new Kingdom of Belgium. It was one of the region's great universities before it was split along language lines in 1968 into Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and Université catholique de Louvain. The following year he brought out his own mammoth tome Mikroskopische Untersuchungen über die Uebereinstimmung in der Struktur und dem Wachsthum der Thiere und Pflanzen which was his last huzzah.  Nine years later he transferred South to take up a Chair in the University of Liège. Without Müller breathing down his neck inspiring him to new discoveries, Schwann took his foot of the research pedal and mollocked about for the next 30 years giving rather good lectures and being amiably collegial about the campus.  As he got older he turned increasingly to religion and theology. And why not? he'd done more than his share for science.

Sunday Pubquiz training 061215

I've been successful in Table Quizzes but you can never get enough opportunities for training.

• So you think you're a good European?
• Know your country. I was woeful.
• Know your States, yankee-dogs.
• Name all 50 states in 4 minutes. I took 3:46

 Back in January, I wrote about Marie Tharp and the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.  Nearly a year later Neatorama is catching up with their own tribs. Including a 5 minute BBC explanation about Tharp and echo-sounding depth recorders. Bonnets Off!

Two years ago, I was on a narcolepsy jag, with 3 posts about this peculiar and not uncommon condition where people fall asleep (narcolepsy) or go all weak (cataplexy) at awkward moments. Here's a reminder of what it might be like to be affected.

Sorry, we're a bit late at The Blob today. I was out at first light shovelling out the drains after Storm Desmond dumped a lot of rain on Ireland.