Unmeltable!

Were we talking about the filum Unbreakable back in 2014? We were! Did we have a tribute to the unbustable woman behind the unbreakable man? We did!  Are we going to have a mind-crumpling non-sequitur? We are!

You know that I've been bigging myself up as a food-engineer, although this doesn't usually mean more than reading, and making ironic comments about, the table of contents of such food-products [not the same thing as food] as cake - pizza - irish salmon - sausage - potato chips - sheep mix [mmmm so good].  I'm not the only one in the business of looking at what goes into food and failing to wax lyrical about it.  You get the drift from the title of this youtube clip "YOU WILL NEVER EAT THIS ICE CREAM AGAIN, SICKENING RESULTS!" The commentary is quite as SHOUTY as the title implies. and it is far too long for the actual information it contains; but the fundamental elements of the investigation is a scientific experiment looking at the different physical properties of different brands of ice-cream. You might think that the main difference would be whether the product is mostly "milk and cream" N=2 or "modified milk ingredients" N=2, but you'd be wrong. The key thing is that the cheapo brand doesn't melt even after 12 hours on a counter-top in a US kitchen [that would be 20^oC [phew what a scorcher].  That's pretty ominous,:what is your poor duodenum going to do with such a robust material?

My assessment of the investigation diverges when the 4 bowls are left out on the counter for 10 days. Mr Eastcoastman heaps further scorn on the unmeltable ice-cream because it has now acquired a rich coating of fungus. But I'm much more concerned about the 'quality' products which after ten days at 20^oC don't seem capable of supporting life. Can't be doing me much good either, huh?  Despite being a champion eater of the stuff in graduate school, I gave up on ice-cream about a year ago not because I read the label, but because it made me slightly uncomfortable in the hours afterwards. Doctor, doctor, am I lactose intolerant? Should I put almond milk in my porridge? Can I afford it?

Here's Mr Eastcoastman having a puck at Kraft Singles, a "cheese based" product. He compares the bright orange wubbly squares with real cheese on the basis of whether he can set fire to it with a lighter.  If it doesn't burn, it must be poison, the argument seems to go.  Well Mr E, have you tried burning an apple recently? or spinach?  As a positive control, let's think of things that readily burn but are not usually considered food: newspaper, twigs, my cotton underpants, camel dung . . .

deaf aid

Since the turn of the year, I've been spending Sunday night to Monday morning with Pat the Salt I - II, my esteemed and antient father-in-law. One of the rituals we go through each night is the Changing of the Ear-furniture (not so many red-coats for us) where he removes his hearing-aids and I flip the batteries to 'disengage' before putting each into its little box. Each morning the process is reversed.  What's peculiar is that, after removal of the hearing aids we often sit together complaining about the TV . . . and never complaining about how he can't hear. Here's 90, he's doing waaaay better than Helen Keller.  The batteries have to be small (you can't have a 12v car-battery on each shoulder if you're old and frail) and on for 12+ hours a day so they need to be replaced every 4-5 days.  A six-pack costs an indicative €4.95 at Boots-the-Chemist. The maths suggests [365/4 = 90 / (six-pack/2ears) * €5] the batteries will cost €150/year. There's a markup: Boots will sell you a second pack half-price and still turn a profit.  Because we live in a socialist paradise [for which Padraig Pearse died on the cross in 1916] society that privileges old people over { the mentally ill | single parents | the homeless | refugees | women | blacks | Uncle Tom Cobbley | take your pick} the cost of Pat's hearing aids and the batteries is taken up by the state.  And proper order too: hearing loss is associated with social exclusion, depression, dementia, death.  We-the-tax payer already support Pat to the tune of €230/week plus free-travel, so an additional €3/week for the batteries doesn't seem excessive. The argument is made, especially by those in the market for selling hearing aids, that these devices prevent further deterioration of the ear-works but, according to Johns Hopkins Medical School, this is just not true.  But I can see I'll have to do some more critical thinking research on that one.

The Go To source for solid medical research is the wonderful Cochrane Index.  They give you the parameters of slight hearing loss in decibels but also in normal speak: can catch all the words when spoken in a normal voice from 1 m distance; moderate hearing loss is when you can only hear a raised voice at that distance.  I guess normal hearing is when you can hear your wife muttering to herself "Jaysus, can't he even wash his own tea-cup . . ." in the kitchen; so there may be social benefits in slight hearing loss? Appointments were made for the audiologist after Pat and Souad started to annoy their children with too many "Wha'?" responses to simple questions. Pat was easily pleased: satisfied with a set of beige-coloured hook-over-the-ear external 'National Health' hearing aids.  The beige blended into his ear-line so you could hardly see the join. Back in the days around when I was born in England, the UK National Health Service NHS was ensuring the wellness and dealing with the sickness of 54 million people in a cheap-and-cheerful functional way. Pretty much anyone could go a get an eye-test and if a deficit was revealed, you could get a set of tortoiseshell plastic frames that would enable you to read or drive or maximise your social inclusion. As anyone / everyone could get these spectacles they became associated with poverty, austerity and council housing . . . and the concept of spectacles as fashion accessory was born. I've ranted about the cost of reading-glasses before. This week in ALIDL there is a regular special on reading glasses for €2.95, but you can spend €295.00 on glasses to the same spec with a minute Nike go-faster swoop on the legs..

Souad, ever elegant and well turned out, dignified and proud in the nicest possible way, was never going to wear beige hearing aids to the shops when she could "hear perfectly well, thank you", so alternatives were investigated. They didn't have far to look: Specsavers, feeling the market in glasses slowing down, have moved into hearing aids as well and the first 4-5 hits on Google enquiries about hearing loss is advertisements. A short-list of suppliers was made and eventually, she surrendered to the blandishments of the nice man from Lennox who offered to drive 125km from Cork to interview and test her in the privacy of her own home . . . and fit her with a microscopic internal hearing-aid. Not only could you not see the join, you often couldn't see the the device: they got swept into a tissue once and disappeared for a couple of days - could so easily have finished up in the trash. Whatever about elegance, giving teeny tiny devices to very old people with, say, slight vision impairment and a bit of arthritis is prima facie a dumbass solution to a problem. The engineers and designers had better be working on a solution that is fit for purpose rather than fit for winning prizes at tech fairs.

This personalised service from Lennox naturally came at a cost . . . in excess of €2,000!  That pill was sweetened a little by the assurance that it included a lifetime's supply of batteries and tuning / servicing.  It was also supported by the implication that the technology was better, that the engineering quality was German and her life would be immeasurably improved. And it was so . . . but so was Pat's with his yellow-pack beige functionals.

Souad died before Christmas last year, which was very sad, before she'd gotten a full year out of her new equipment. It was also sad because the loan from the Credit Union, taken out for the hearing aids, still needs too be paid off. Dang!

You'd think that there might be some residual value in such high-tech devices, but there isn't.  The Beloved is still picking up the pieces from the death of her mother and last week got round to contacting Lennox to see if the plugs could be returned for re-conditioning. But the nice man from Lennox was abrupt enough in declaring that they were no good to him or the company "Medical devices can't be re-used without invalidating the warranty etc." In our mad consumerist world that is true even for walking sticks and zimmer-frames. You can imagine what high impact accidents, "compromising the structural integrity", might have led to a zimmer-frame being no long required. Somehow, the injury was insulted by The Man adding that Lennox would be prepared to ship the aids off to the Third World. There's something repellent in the idea that something that is not good enough for white folks can be sold on to a chap in Africa.  As I pointed out at the time, I'd be happy to drive from Cork to Waterford if I was going to secure a sale worth €2000. The batteries and servicing is like a Victorian annuity.  The company undertakes to pay a fixed amount each year from an initial investment.  They have an actuary employed to work out the average life-span of deaf old people and sometimes they make out like bandits when the punter pegs out early.

I'm saying "Wha'?'" to my students a lot nowadays but I'm not going to buy into teeny-tiny hearing-aids. I spend enough time each day trying to locate my glasses! All too often discovered on top of my head.

Here come the elephants

Nearly 40 years ago, with no lire left to spend on food for The Boy, then an infant, we were escaping from Italy across an Alpine pass at night. Three years ago, I told the romantic tale of how we landed a lucky and sustaining bowl of soup at the last outpost on the Italian side of the border.  It never occurred to us, being too hungry to think, to wonder whether we were mirroring the famous trek of Hannibal and his elephants as he marched to bring war to the Romans in 218 BCE. Πολύβιος Polybius, a historian who died 100 years later (although he interviewed some of the trek's survivors) said that the details of the route even then were lost to the mists of time.

First though, let's clear the elephant jokes out of the way:
Q. What's the difference between an elephant and a grape?
A. One's grey and the other is green.
Q. What did Hannibal say when he saw the elephants coming over the Alps?
A. Here come the grapes [he was colour-blind].
Eeee how we larfed when we were 8.

Molecular archaeology has turned up some new evidence supporting a Hannibal route across the Col de la Traversette.  This is now a rough bridle-path unpassable to motor vehicles about 20km N of where we got our Found Soup. Back  2234 years ago, Hannibal and his army had a cold coming of it, famously having to break through a recent rock-fall laying on top of an earlier rock-fall which was impassable for men and horses. let alone the elephants. They cracked the immovable rocks using fire and vinegar. JMW Turner captured their trials, with a liberal dose of pathetic fallacy, in his 1812 painting [L. Snow Storm: Hannibal And His Army Crossing The Alps]  Back in the 1950s Gavin de Beer, a well regarded embryologist, pointed out how the Col de la Traversette matched the ancient descriptions much better than alternative paths which modern engineers had used for laying down tarmacadam.

This idea was seized on by Bill Mahaney, a polymathic scientist for hire, and he went trekking along the pass until he'd convinced himself that he agreed with de Beer.  It's the rock-falls, stupid; none of the other options match Polybius's, and other early documenter's, descriptions of the terrain.  Most recently, elephant horse shit has made a huge splash towards elucidating the controversy [BBC]. Queen's University Belfast <huzzah!> has also made a contribution to the analysis. In an ancient bog near to the summit of the pass they have found a layer of churned up soil, such as might result if 15,000 horses had bivouacked in the place. In the sediment they have turned up a disproportionate number of Clostridial spores and even some fossilised horse tapeworm eggs. As you know from The Blob, Clostridium is a natural component of the intestinal flora of mammals. Nearby undisturbed soil had no such spike of Clostridium spp. The story has been covered by the unfailingly erudite Philip Ball [prev] in the Grauniad.

Monsanto goes elegant

Tree huggers love to hate Monsanto because they have made a shed-load of money out of clever solutions to agribiological problems.  First they commercialised, as Roundup, glyphosate, a simple chemical which interfered with the activity of the plant enzyme 5-enolpyruvylshikimate-3-phosphate synthase [don't try to pronounce  that while drunk]. The upshot of the interference was that the plant couldn't make tyrosine, phenylalanine or tryptophan three of the 20 amino acids that all living things use to make proteins. So they stopped growing. It was very effective against weeds which are normally super-good at growing rapidly. The other asset was that glyphosate was rapidly and efficiently broken down by the soil bacteria - typically with a half-life of about 50 days. Applied to a field in February, it killed all other plants to make it ready for planting soya or corn in April or May. Roundup was immensely successful and made billions in sales for Monsanto.  It is still selling well despite being 20 years off patent and competing with cheaper knock-offs.

That was handy but they took the idea a step further by genetically modifying crop plants so that they were Roundup-ready.  These Monsanto proprietary varieties had been enhanced by incorporating, from bacteria, the enzymes that broke down glyphosate, so they could be planted at the same time as the Roundup was applied and survived the killing because they were effectively immune. Tree-huggers had a fit because these plants were now genetically modified GM and so the spawn od Satan. Something like 135,000 tonnes of the stuff were sold in the USA alone in 2012. 5% of the total surface area of California, including urban sprawl and vertical sierras is thoroughly impregnated with Roundup and growing Clifornia's GM bounty: almonds, peaches, melons, cherries and sweetcorn. There have been suggestions that it is a human carcinogen, but the evidence is sufficiently iffy that you may take it with a pinch of salt.  The real downside of Monsanto is not its medical effects but the rapacity of Monsanto's marketing and legal department. It becomes very difficult to grow corn or soya of any variety but roundup-ready and this is relentlessly reducing the genetic diversity of key crop plants; not only in the US but in the Third World as well.

Now they've moved on to monetize the microbiological world of the soil so that farmers won't have to lurry fertiliser and pesticides onto their fields to grow enough food to pay off the loans on their massive tractors.  Monsanto have deep pockets and can, like multinational medical drug companies, invest millions to make billions. Over the last 5 years, in consortium with another company Novozymes, Monsanto have carried out the most humongous field trial of plant-growth promoting microbes. 2000 different species of bacteria and fungi have been grown in the lab and pasted onto the seeds of corn and soya. The seeds were then planted out on a total of 500,000 different plots in dozens of states. across a huge swathe of the US Midwest.  Each experimental plot was paired with a control plot sown with unimpregnated seed.  As with a thousand false leads being rejected to bring a new drug to market, most of the tested microbes had no significant effect on the yield of the crops. But in 5/2000 cases, there seems to be significantly more return.  Those 5 are being taken forward for further trials.  Monsanto hopes to bring this super-seed to market in 2017. The idea is not new. Nitrogen fixing rhizobium bacteria were identified in the root nodules of pea and bean plants as long ago as 1888.  But since Fritz Haber [boo hiss, he's behind you!!] made ammonia so cheap, the business model for agriculture has been to put out tonnes of white pellets and hope that the additional nutrients will generate more crops. The excess nitrogen has washed off into watercourses with disastrous environmental consequences.  But recently it has become increasingly apparent that the additional nitrates alter the balance in the microbial flora  of the soil adversely affecting natural productivity and locking farmers in to the purchased ammonium nitrate model.

Because of the business model of developing a marketable microbial additive, this brute-force approach is limited by only including things that grow on petri dishes.  An even more elegant solution to discovering microbes-of-usefulness, without that constraint, was the discovery and isolation of Eleftheria terrae, which was blobbed last year.

It is not without irony that among the quickest people to appreciate this natural fertility has been Monsanto who have a cunning plan to turn 'green' into 'greenback'.  Curse as you want to, but you have to admire their dedication to their shareholders.

Sunday Miscellany 100416

NO extra links last Sunday, did you miss 'em?  I've clagged together a few today: enjoay!

• Alaska with salmon, soundtrack and no blackflies - bliss. rechurned via Kottke, metfilter
• New film with Jeremy Irons as Hardy taking a taxi to visit Ramanujan.
• White knuckle excitement in a kids' marble run. via Tywkiwdbi
• Too restful? - try some experiments shooting bullets at a thixotropic liquid [Bloboprev]. Viewing 'scientists'  using a chain-saw while wearing shorts-and-sandals might remind you of other foolish activities in the USA [Bloborcently]
• That's still very passive - try to limber up your brain with BBC codes. [via Mark] I was only able to knock off the first, easiest, five puzzles.

Collyweston

Keeping dry while sleeping is one of the essentials for a comfortable life. Not for nothing is the idea of the earliest people cast up by the word caveman.  I guess that the accumulated carbon and carcinogens from poorly ventilated cooking fires helped to ensure an expectation of life at birth was less than 30. Plenty of thirdworlders don't reach 30 today because of this. But those early cave-dwellers got in plenty of nookie in the long winters, without devices to play with, and soon there were not enough caves to go round. Thereafter, the key thing was making roofs. Archaeologists talk a lot about stone axes and scrapers and picks made of antlers because these are the items that have survived.  They also mention postholes, often in circles, which delineate the size of their dwellings. But I've read very little about the antient archaeology of roofs. The larger the house the greater the engineering problems: even thatch is heavy and you need chunky timbers under the skin to support the weather-proofing.

Let's look at the top-layer.  I've mentioned how a small Scottish island was eaten away from the inside to satisfy an insatiable appetite for slates. Slate is a metamorphic rock that still retains the layers from its sedimentary origin. A skilled operator can split slates of any thickness and of substantial size. Thinner is better  than thicker because lighter so long as they are thick enough. If you look at a geological map on England, you will see an outcrop of Jurassic limestone comes close to the surface near the town of Stamford.  It is named for the village of Collyweston just outside of town.

This sedimentary rock was found to split nicely into layers that were a good size for roofing. After hard winters the local builders found that the frost [water expands as it freezes; this is why icebergs float] did the work of splitting very nicely, thanks. With impatience and global warming, there are plans to create artificial freeze-thaw cycles.  As the surface outcrops were exhausted, they dug pits in the earth down below the collyweston strata and excavated the underlying sand until a 'log' of limestone fell down from the roof of the shaft [helpful diagram].  In temperate England the underground layers were never exposed to frost, so each log had to be brought to the surface during winter.  You might think it was a fool's task to hack away at the sand supporting tonnes of rock above your head, but the quarrymen would listen to the rock and shuffle back out as the shearing forces gave their characteristic cry before the fall. In the tale of Ye Ringstone of Knockroe, I told how those stone workers also relied on their ears. The collyweston protocols would cause any Health&Safety officer to have kittens and this elegant appropriate-technology method is rarely carried out now. Now, rather, they bring heavy machinery in to strip off the 'over-burden' to expose the Jurassic measures. With such an organic breakable material, it would be impossibly wasteful to only accept/use slates of a particular dimension, and so the tradition arose to employ a variety of sizes when laying out a roof.

The largest slates were employed at the bottom on the roof where they had to hang free over the eaves to shed water from the wall.  The slates got smaller course-by-course until the fragments  and awkward splittings could be used up right at the roof tree. This being vernacular architecture, the different sizes of slate acquired distinctive names like mope, mumfat and wibbet.  Don't think for a moment, as 'obvious', that the twelve is twelve inches long or that an eighteen is 50% bigger; that would be far too simple. In the late 19thC, for example, roofing slates were sold by the 'heap' or Thousand - enough to cover 200 sq.ft. - consisting of  7 'hundreds' each of 40 cases [=3 slates] plus 13 'big ones'  for the eaves. Thus a thousand = 840+13 and a hundred = 120. No wonder civilised nations moved on to the metric system and SI units.

Island of whistling winds

Kerguelen Island is a part of France, albeit situated 49^oS, 70^oE, as remote as you could wish in the Southern Ocean.  It's more or less directly opposite Saguenay, P.Quebec. Somehow, brutal as the Winter climate can be North of the St Lawrence Seaway, Kerguelen and the other islands of the Southern Ocean feel bone-chillingly exposed. It may be remote but Kerguelen is not small at 7,200sq.km it is almost the size of Co. Cork or Puerto Rico.  93% of the territory is the appropriately named Grande Terre, set in a halo of 300 smaller islands.

Darwin's pal Joseph Hooker stopped by here on his 1840 Ascension Island trip and, as an accomplished botanist, he described and named more than 100 different plants. He was particularly taken with the Kerguelen cabbage Pringlea antiscorbutica was first recorded by William Anderson Captain Cook's surgeon/naturalist in 1776.  As it says in the tin, it is rich in Vitamin C (and potassium) and so prevents the symptoms of scurvy among sailors who have been months at sea eating nothing but salt-horse and ship's biscuit (and weevils, if course). It is one of only a few brassicas that is self-fertile, an adaptation possibly driven by the whistling winds preventing pollination. As Leon van Eck noted, the food-faddist's kale Brassica oleracea is sooo yesterday, we'll soon see pretentious menus all over the world offering Kerguelen cabbage as the new digestive challenge.

Another species endemic to the islands of the Southern Ocean is the greater burnet Acaena magellanica which benefitted from selective predation by the European rabbit Oryctolagus cuniculus after they were introduced to Kerguelen in 1874 by sailors who hadn't a clue about ecology.  Even after the rabbits had been eliminated from some of the smaller islands, the predated plants failed to recover because the balance of power among the windswept low vegetation had been irrecoverably changed, notably by swathes of European dandelion Taraxacum officinale.

The cats of Kerguelen are a scourge to the native birdlife, but don't seem to be able to make much of a dent in the rabbit population which breed, well, like rabbits. The French government thinks the cats are distinctive enough or cute enough to feature in several postage stamps [example L]. The cats were deliberately introduced in 1950 as an antidote to the mice and rats which had been earlier introduced by accident.  You'd think people would have known better that late in the day.