syzygy

Heads up and head out. 14th November 2016 is a full moon. So what, we get one of those every month? But the full moon this month is much bigger than usual because the line up of sun earth and moon - that's a syzygy (from σύζυγος a yoke-together) to those who have a classical education - also coincides with the moon's perigee: its closest approach to the earth. This phenomenon is called a Super Moon and the closer the precise alignment is to perigee, the bigger the moon appears to us. The November full moon is a supersuper once-in-a-lifetime moon because it hasn't been this close since 1948 and won't be this close again until 2034. Explained by NASA. All those objects dancing to the Music of the Spheres! The gravitational influences of the three bodies makes extremely difficult any accurate prediction of where any of them will be in the future. This conundrum - The Three Body Problem - has exercised the best minds on the planet including Galileo, Newton and Henri Poincaré. I'm not ashamed to admit that in melts my feeble mind. We are not even agreed as to what a month is - I've tried to explain that much. The moon is about 30 Earth diameters from us - but its orbit is eccentric and varies between 350,000 and 400,000 km.

ANNyway, let's hope for clear skies on Monday 14th, the moon will be 14% bigger and 30% brighter so you want to get out and look East as soon as it gets dark. There is an optical illusion that the moon seems bigger when it is near the horizon than when it is Up There. If you're planning a block-party to celebrate the event, and you're Chinese, you'll probably rustle up some moon cakes. Not me, I don't like them, I'll be having a plate of pierogi [pierogi - perigee, geddit?] and inviting my Polish neighbours over.

On the way out

I balanced all, brought all to mind,

The years to come seemed waste of breath,

A waste of breath the years behind

In balance with this life, this death.

William Blobster Yeats.

An Irish Airman foresees his death

I've put rather a lot of words down in The Blob about end of life issues. But in balance with this death, I've also written a million words on life, the universe and everything, so don't accuse me of being morbid. I think we have a richer engagement with death in Ireland than across the water in England where the process seems to take forever and where my father was 10 days in limbo between dying and going up the chimney. Thanks be that the modern British funeral director has cold-storage! In Ireland we have an almost Islamic time-scale where it is normal to die of Monday, waked on Tuesday and buried of Wednesday and a jolly good time is had by all . . . especially if you like ham sandwiches and tea.

But post-mortem is not the problem; it's pre-mortem that too often is not handled well.  Here's a 6000+ word essay on How to have a good death by Maggie Fergusson. Among the key issue she addresses is the one epitomised by "“I am mourning my mother, though she is still alive”.  Because we are all living longer, more of the late-onset diseases stalk across our ken, and indeed, kin. My mother, now 96, has seen many couples among her friends separated by dementia. The lucid survivor is required to live with the shell of a spouse who/which is no longer responsive to anything much at all. The lines of Arthur Clough are often cited, because they trip off the tongue, when issues of continued palliative care are broached "Thou shalt not kill / But need’st not strive / Officiously, to keep alive.".

Many doctors find it in their hearts to finish off their patients if they are in distress and /or pain and there is no hope of recovery. They justify their actions to themselves, and if necessary to the relevant medical council if pulled up on it, by invoking the Principle of Double Effect: I administered an awful lot of pain-killers because my patient was so distressed and the consequence was that my patient died . . . but that was not the intention, that was a by-product of the analgesia. You'll need to be a philosopher to drill down into the nuances of this almost on a case by case basis. This is why it is so difficult to legislate for assisted suicide or euthanasia.  No matter what scenarios you may imagine or have encountered to help you write the clauses of when and when-not termination of life is allowed, there will be a case beyond experience or imagination that will not fit the criteria. And it really really doesn't help to trot out anecdotes about the chap who was in a persistent vegetative state for months or years and then came back to earth. For each one of those there are a thousand people who are kept breathing under circumstances that their healthy self would not have countenanced.

This essay sets out most of the end-of-life issues, with a helpful smattering of UK case law and enough detail to make the reader familiar with the language and key findings of those who have been through the mill of a dying relative before. There is nothing really new here, we have been dying for much longer than there have been people to write down their thoughts on the process. If you read the links (above and below) now, you'll thank yourself later when you get there yourself. Nobody, that's nobody, lived for a day longer by not thinking about The End.

Links: Exit (Australia and wider) - The Hemlock Society (US) no longer exists under that name. Assisted suicide and euthanasia are illegal in Britain but the NHS sets out the issues here. In Ireland your Advanced Healthcare Directive has no legal standing whatsoever: Doctor knows best what you need.

Sunday Funday 131116

Surfeit of surfing, me, this last week. So I had to unload some yesterday. But here's The Blob's fix of outside input for this Sunday:

• The academy of food decoration.  How far parents will go to encourage Junior to eat his greens.
• Can't ignore the US Election. Cross post mortem by Jonathan Pie. Of all the liberal left talking-heads, he got the outcome correct.
• Empty Hands Pilgrimage with Nimo Patel
• Being Kind is very important.
• What a wonderful world with just the right number of coloured tee-shirts.
• Leonard Cohen gone. You want it darker?
• Super hypnotic: making wooden barrels for the booze trade.

Comino

It's an island. Plonked mid-way between Malta and Gozo [L, I've drawn a crude blue arrow to identify the Blue Grotto between Comino and Cominotto its tiny sister island.  It is named for cumin / jeera Cuminum cyminum, the herb which is pervasive through the whole archipelago. We lived and went to school in Malta for a year when my sister and I were six. My father was i/c the amphibious warfare squadron which was stationed in Malta in the dying days of the British Empire. It was a magical time and place for a small white child. When we weren't in school we were on the beach or taking long walks into the Maltese countryside. The British Navy was a major employer in and around the spectacular natural harbours of Valetta: the Grand Harbour and Marsamxett. The island was soaked in romantic history from The Knights of Malta who acquired the islands from the Holy Roman Emperor in 1530, for a rent of one Maltese falcon Falco peregrinus a year. The Knights withstood a long siege by the Ottoman Empire in 1565 and dug in and built up against any further invasions particularly around the new city of Valetta. The fortifications included eventually [1618] St Mary's Tower it-Torri ta' Santa Marija, an enormous square castle which dominates the skyline of Comino. Malta endured another long and destructive siege during WWII and survived that too.

Malta is the most densely populated country in the EU with nearly 450,000 people squeezed into an area less than half the size of the smallest Irish counties. On top of that, piled into sea-front tower blocks, are 1.2 million tourists each year who come to cultivate their melanoma. That's a helluva lot of flush toilets for an island with 500mm of rainfall each year and neither rivers nor lakes [none of the above]. Water comes from caught rainfall and artesian wells which perforate the limestone bedrock like a sieve to abstract groundwater. Recently reverse osmosis desalination plants have been installed to create enough drinkable water to flush those toilets. As water is abstracted for drinking irrigation and flushing, the fresh-water lens on which the island sits is invaded by salt water from the surrounding sea. It is unsustainable and a geo-political nightmare.

Mais revenons nous à notre 1960 Comino. One of the perks of being in charge was that the The Old Man could occasionally borrow the company car for the weekend. For 'car' read landing craft.  Essentially the same vessel as featured in Saving Private Ryan. I show a Tonka Toy model [R] to emphasise that these things were real tough toys for real tough boys.  One Sunday, the Captain loaded one of his LCs with the families of his staff [and a crew to steer the thing and make it go] and picnic hampers and we all tooled off to The Blue Grotto a spectacular cave and strait between Comino and Cominotto. When we arrived, the anchor was dropped, the front gate was lowered and we spent the afternoon swimming off the boat. Comino is essentially uninhabited by people and it was long before yachties infested every cove and harbour of the Mediterranean so it was a private off-beach party. Ah, the benefits of privilege.

After lunch in those days, children were forbidden to swim lest they get a cramp and drown. We started pegging small pieces of the remains of lunch into the water to see if they would sink or float. Some [sausage] sank and some [bread-crust] floated and some [apples] were surprising. Soon enough we were 'forming a hypothesis' [arguing about what such a thing would do] and then 'testing it' [throwing that thing over the side and noting the result]. Fifty years later that sounds remarkably like science and you've got to think that small children if left to pursue their curiosity are natural scientists.  I have a degree in Natural Science but between the ages of 6 and 16 almost nothing was done to foster this, probably universal, sense of organised enquiry. Harrrumph!

Music on the travel 121116

Leonard Cohen - Traveling Light
Panama Limited by Tom Rush
Steam Train Blues by Chris Rea
This train is bound for glory by Mumford & sons
Nimo with A Universal love song on the NYC subway . . . and in a fountain
Much ado about the world must be peopled by a fountain.
All wet now? The Leaving of Liverpool by/with the Dubliners.
Soaked in urine waulking the tweed is necessary to make it water-proof

Notapoppy

Ninety-eight years ago today at 11am GMT the guns fell silent and an Armistice was declared which effectively ended WWI.  It was exactly a week too late to save Wilfred Owen, the most anguished and anguishing poet of his generation, who was killed crossing a muddy stream on 4th November 1918. I was born less than ten years after the end of WWII and my parents must have still been raw from their experience in uniform during that conflict. All the veterans of WWI are all safely dead and no longer hirpling around the streets without legs or coughing up their lungs in bed in the spare room. Called the spare room to spare the rest of the family having to listen to Pa trying to accommodate to the effects of phosgene. We tend, therefore, to romanticise WWI on the one hand and 'like' the poems of Wilfred Owen; and on the other hand agree that it was a monstrous thing to unleash upon the planet. I was brought up on a revisionist history of that global conflict which took the 'lions led by donkeys' approach that it was all a horrible mistake, driven by a false sense of national interest and a willingness to over-react to perceived diplomatic slights.  Really, who gives a damn now about the Agadir Crisis? Was that a sufficient cause to lay down the keels of another half dozen battleships? My Grandfather lost a lung in WWI, frozen to necrosis above the North Sea, which seems a lot cleaner than chlorine and phosgene poisoning, but a rather brutal handicap nevertheless.

When I was growing up in England, everyone wore a poppy on Armistice Day and most people stopped what they were doing for 2 minutes on the knell of 1100hrs.  Arriving in Dublin in October 1973, the absence of poppies was conspicuous the following month. The Irish just didn't Do Remembrance Sunday. Poppy denial was part of the forging of a post-imperialist national identity.  I didn't miss the poppies. I was coming round to the idea that war was a mortal sin and wouldn't have worn one if I'd been back in England. The Vietnam War was in the news and being anti-war was a legitimate stance. From a distance, I get the idea that universal UK poppies are having a resurgence in the UK, which is a little worrying if true.

Today there are a couple of soccer matches going down Across the Water as part of the run up to the World Cup and the Scottish and English FAs have decided that their national teams will wear poppy arm-bands during their match this afternoon. FIFA doesn't think much of this because its rules forbid political or religious symbols on footballers' kit. Commercial symbols - Nike, Adidas etc. - are quite acceptable. The rhetoric of indignation about whether the English team should or may wear poppies sounds suspiciously like the shit-stirring bombast in the run-up to 1914.  Affront is only two short steps from a [Western] Front.

One footballer in the British FA leagues doesn't do poppies. James McClean hails from Derry and for him the poppy has strong associations with the British Army and the Army has strong associations with Bloody Sunday, a massacre in his community perpetrated by 1 Para, the 1st Battalion, Parachute Regiment, in January 1972. His 2013 Open Letter to Dave Whelan his boss at Wigan Athletic explained why he wouldn't, couldn't, wear a poppy along with his team mates. Predictably, this stand is met with outrage and indignation. I don't think those reasons are particularly coherent - bloody Sunday went down 20 years before McClean was born -  but I'm all for him expressing them. His position gives us all a chance to reconsider our certainties about the matter of war and remembrance.

Whatever about poppies, in my head arm bands will forever be associated with brown shirts although I've never been to Nuremberg and was born 20 years after the Reichsparteitag der Einheit und Stärke rally at which Leni Riefenstahl shot her masterpiece of propaganda Triumph des Willens.

There, I don't feel clean any more. So let's read Rudyard Kipling's story of reconciliation The Gardener.  It will take ten minutes - dis al.

Flippin' the bottle

I am so not down with the hood: 'down with the hood' isn't even down with the hood anymore. And living in the depths of rural Ireland doesn't help with getting current and trendy. We're about 2 weeks / months behind the UK and they are 2 weeks / months behind San Francisco and NYC.  Even in the age of the interweb, it takes memes time to cross the Atlantic and travel up the River Barrow.  In April I reported on one of these gorn viral ideas: "Bro, do you even lift?". I didn't get up the energy to deal with the ice-bucket challenge.  But I did make a nod towards neknomination, the peer-pressure drinking game; partly because the craze swept one of our students to his death in the River Barrow. A beer with friends is mostly harmless, but lots of beers; or beers consumed on the parapet of a bridge; or beers and driving or operating a band-saw? . . . those are maybe not so good.

A couple of days ago, I came across the bottle flippin' meme which hit the streets in May this year. A school kid is shown fooling about taking the piss of the 'intense concentration' and 'psyching self up' that we had a surfeit of a couple months later in the Rio Olympics. All the prep results in him making a half-empty bottle of water make one complete revolution and . . . land on its base and stay upright. It was eventually [02 Nov 16] reported in Wikipedia which pointed out that the trick was driving schools and families insane and was being banned wholesale. But that article also suggested that there was a lot of science in mastering the trick; including the concepts of fluid dynamics, angular momentum, centripetal force, and gravity. The physics was quickly explained in an article on Vox. Now I failed my physics "O" Level, so these words make me feel a) inadequate b) weak at the knees. But I know how science works and I dashed off an e-mail to my colleague who is down with the Physics, suggesting some science experiments our guys could do.

• What is the best shape bottle to achieve success?
• What proportion of air vs water is optimum?
• Is bigger better than smaller?
• Will a denser liquid of the same volume work better? 
• Different percentages of dissolved glucose?
• Mercury?

Here's the backyardscientist, a man after my own heart, pointing some science at the problem.  What appeals to me in this analysis, apart from dropping a plastic bottle full of Mercury in his garden, is an investigation of what constitutes success.  If you load up a particular bottle with a measured amount of water and then flip the thing so it lands properly, does that mean that the bottle or the amount /density of the liquid is optimum? Clearly not, because a single instance is an anecdote. You need data, which means that you have to think out an experimental design:

• how many replicates do you have patience for? 
• how many will allow you to say with confidence that 56 grams of water is better than 112 g?
• I give ounces = 28g here in deference to American readers
• should you retain the same flipper through all the trials?
• are some people better at this task than others?
• should you worry that your 56g trials preceded your 112g (training etc.)?

On Tuesday, I have a Research Methods [= Excel and stats] class with my 2nd Year Sporty people.
I asked them if they were aware of bottle flippin'
"Duh, Yes".
I then asked them if they did it themselves
"Not so much"
One of the students said she hadn't heard about it and there was a half empty water bottle on the bench and I showed her what to do. The berluddy thang almost stayed upright: my street cred was up only half a point [for trying]. That night I visiting a family with a 17 y.o. girl and she said it was a boy thing. Nobody in her all-girls school could be bothered. No bottle, those girls! It may seem daft to spend your time doing something so clearly without value, but to take anything on-board in a committed and sustained way is, I suggest, a Good Thing.  It's good for morale. If every day and in every way I am getting better at [bottle-flipping; nintendo; lacrosse; scything; drumming; paper airplanes] then that will bleed into my Maths, my Irish Grammar, my Physics.

And all over the world people are pushing the flippin' envelope: citior, altior, fortior - bottle flipping is, on the face of it, no sillier than triple jump or dressage.