Frayed Atlantic Edge

Blessings on the family librarian! A couple of years ago, she issued me with a Dublin City library card with a memorable PIN and advised me to go mad with reading material . . , including listening material to fill the 90 minutes a working day I would spend to-and-fro to work. Indeed she was more proactive than me and I'd often be surprised emails saying that such-a-book, which I had ordered was available for collection in Waterford.  I came to borrowbox too late in my commuting life [I R Retire] to really benefit from its resources of downloadable e-books. But I really enjoyed listening to EO Wilson's biographic advice in his own distinctive Alabama voice.

My latest hit from borrowbox is The Frayed Atlantic Edge [colour supplement] by David Gange. His day job is Senior Lecturer in Modern History at U.Birmingham, UK, and by his account that's quite fulfilling. But some elemental part of his soul is nourished by The Wild. He's happy out sleeping on a mountain-top in midwinter; I suspect that, like John Burns, The Last Hillwalker, he'd consider cooking dinner over a smoking gorse-twig fire in a windowless bothy a bit soft; because roof. Along the way he's acquired competence in a kayak. A few years ago he was inspired to carry out a practical salt-in-yer-hair research project, very much in the same tradition as The Holistic Landscape. 

His plan was to jiggle his teaching and admin commitments in U.Brum to win himself two clear weeks every month for a year . . . and paddle his own canoe from Muckle Flugga, Shetland 62°N to Lands End, Kernow 50°N. In my most judgmental pilgrim's hat, I'd disapprove because a good part of the process of any journey is getting in the zone through unremitting deliberate practice. If you return home every fortnight for clean clothes, a dry bed, classes, cinema and mowing the lawn, then it is work to get enough of your sensibility back to talk to the seals.

This is a wonderful book, as a pilgrim and a traveller, Gange is welcomed all along The Edge. The locals extend a generous hand because strangers are guests but also because strangers bring news. He is accorded time and attention because he appears from along the whale-road which requires skill and effort that resonates empathy with communities who have lived and died by the wave. It is not the same if you rock up in your fully provisioned camper-van. Gange is a man with a mission: to refocus the lens of history to bring the sea-ways, cliffs and anchorages front and centre as they were in The Before Times. An abundance of legend and story (essential for survival on the unforgiving Atlantic Edge) preserve songlines of the seaways. A band of towering cliffs on the Ordnance Survey map is represented by an inconsequentially thin line and the sea itself is blank. From a kayak, the cliffs are a looming vertical landscape, a storm of gannets, a calliphony of cries, odd bushes, cascades of guano. From a kayak you can eyeball those seals and daydream of selkies.

Did someone mention maps? Gange pulls ashore in Roundstone by appointment with Tim "The Map" and Mairéad Robinson [covid obit April 2o2o] expecting a cup of tea and an interview about the boundary between land and sea. They suck him in, settle him down for an exchange of stories, place-names, lore and song and it's 11 hours before he looks at his marine chronometer and escapes from Tim na nÓg to continue his journey South. Much of his journey repeats that trope: arriving cold and locating the oldest extant salt in the village to share tales of Life on The Edge. He has an ear for bird cries but also an ear for poetry and cites a number of local poets including Christine Evans of Bardsey / Ynys Enlli; WS Graham of Kernow; our [obit] own Seamus Heaney. 

But our intrepid voyageur goes incandescent in Mayo when he pulls out at Erris and hears the tearing cries of the Shell to Sea campaigners. The proposal to bleed profit from the offshore Corrib Oil field seems to epitomize the unholy stitch-up between big business and central government and the collateral damage that accrues to local people, local livelihoods, local culture and local ecology. The Satanic bargain may work in financial terms [or may not if naive politicians and bureaucrats are seduced, suborned or bamboozled by the consummately brutal apparatchiks of St Mammon] but only because it is "impossible" to put a dollar-value on culture and continuity: allowing these assets drop off the balance-sheet and blow away on the wind. In 2018, between Gange's visit to Rossport and the publication of his book, Shell threw in the towel and walked away from too much trouble. Win! It could have been far worse! if the people of Erris had been black and living on a different coast in the Niger River Delta. The Rossport Five would have been the Ogoni Nine hanged after a stitch-up military tribunal. The Irish Constitution is really strong on property rights but the law favours those with the deepest pockets and a centralized government can be more easily bought because there are fewer people to pay off.

An evocative revisionist tapestry of a book weaving natural history, poetry, storms and lonely sunrises into a magic carpet that carries you from the dawn of human history to the day before yesterday.

Check out The Blob's Island Index

some of which feature in Frayed.

Note: approach the talking book with caution: the pronunciation of some of the proper names will make you gasp and there are A Lot of proper names here in Scots Gaelic, Welsh, Irish and English. And the Scots and Irish accents are laughable unnecessary generic.

More gliders heard from

Extinction is forever!

Last week I was ruminating on the finding that a single species of primate in SE Asia was more accurately described as three separate species based on their genetic differences. In my post-graduate days I went to college across the river from Ernst Mayr who in 1942 had written The Book Systematics and the Origin of Species. That was one of the bibles of the Modern Synthesis: the reconciliation of genetics with evolution into a mutual admiration society rather than two separate rather fighty camps wedded to Mendel or Biometrics. Mayr's long-lasting contribution was defining the BSC - the biological species concept: "a species is a group of organisms fertile amongst themselves but reproductively isolated from other such groups".  

Wait up there; how do you determine if the members of two populations are inter-fertile? You can't really hang around waiting to catch sight of a shag, follow the female for weeks or months: to preclude any other congress and to be sure to be sure that it's the same female who gives birth. Then wait weeks or months to ensure that the offspring themselves are fertile. Horses and donkeys jump around jump around but mules are an evolutionary dead-end. And it really doesn't answer to lock the prospective parents up in a cage because in captivity some animals will shag anything out of boredom or delinquency. One way to achieve reproductive isolation between "incipient species" is behavioural: if you prospective mate is making the wrong moves, that can be a massive turn-off. Generally, if the chromosome count/arrangement is a mismatch then that's also a probable no-no.

But we know of many many cases of well-studied species which look similar and are plainly not interested in each other. And other cases where there's an obvious difference but the two morphs can get it on just fine: what's a white wing between pals? With enough of these cases, we can compare the % divergence of their DNA and get a rough fix. In this group of animals, > 15% difference in DNA indicates a pair of "good" species while less than 10% is allowable variation within a single species.

Which brings me to marsupial gliders in the Eastern part of Australia. A neat morphology and sequence analysis study (Genetic evidence supports three previously described species of greater glider, Petauroides volans, P. minor, and P. armillatus). out of Australian National University, led by Kara Youngentob [L with attentive student] has sided with the splitters rather than lumpers w.r.t. Petauroides volans the greater glider, which, when all fluffed up, is about as big as a breadbox and weighs about the same as a human brain [1000-1700 g]. These gliders, like koalas Phascolarctos cinereus, feed exclusively on eucalyptus leaves; and they nest in hollows on eucalyptus trees. Unlike koalas and their closer relatives ring-tailed possums, [Pseudocheiridae] gliders glide . . . for as much as 100m! They have an extensible fold of skin between elbow and ankle and a long tail for a rudder: like a base-jumping wing-suit with the added ability to swing right-angled turns like Grand Theft Auto neeeeeeowwww! They are a bit ungainly, and prone to predation, on solid ground, so being able to leap from tree to tree without setting foot on the earth is adaptive.

What the biologists from ANU have done is sample a few individuals from within the extensive range of Petauroides spp. get out the calipers and do the standard mammalogy length x width measurements of the sticky out bits: head, tail, body, ears, legs and lash that matrix of lengths into a multivariate statistical analysis:

As you see a) almost all the variability in the dataset is captured by two axes of discrimination; b) the morphological variants match rather well with the location from which each specimen was sampled. I've <spoiler alert> included the conclusions of the paper by editing in [IrfanView!] the proposed specific names suggested in the title of their paper. Next step is to treat the genetic variability with another multivariate statistical tool to reveal similar clusters:

These data are bit more noisy than the limb n ear measurements: with 20% [1 - [59.5 + 20.8)] of the data variability unaccounted for by the first two discriminatory axes. The two lads edging right from the Northern cluster are proposed to be hybrids between P. minor and P. armillatus. If so, these are not species in the Mayr (1942) BSC sense. But taxonomy has moved on in the last 80 years and there are less rigid definitions of what it means to be a species.

The conclusion is that after 200 years of study and classification by a succession of worthy experts into a single or multiple species, the splitters have it . . . for now. That will hopefully inform CSIRO and the Australian government about where to direct their efforts in restoring habitat after the disastrous bush-fires of Summer 2019-2020. A nice side-note is this study is that is was largely accidental. The 1st author, PhD student Denise McGregor, thought she was going to investigate the relationships among physiology, climate and latitude and this morphological data got in the way; and had to be dealt with. Having knocked off this pub she's presumably back on track measuring heart-rate, acidosis and VO₂max; hard enough as it might be to get a glider on a treadmill. Cool beans for a post-grad.

Follow me down

Poppet

•  . . . to Havering [prev]. neat archaeological report on the site of the hoard.
• . . . to Mumbai for street food
• . . . to Crete for filo pastry
• . . . to the dish - drone footage of the Arecibo collapse [prev]
• New font! say it with trees [Obscure Communication Department]
• Bloboprev on Ogham with link to Ogham-writer
• crafted by Katie Holten
• Supervocalic words, like supervocalic are those which contain all 5 vowels. 
• Logomaniacs obsess about the ordering, and compile a list. There are no English words of the form i_a_o_e_u but most of the other 120 permutation slots are filled; sometimes at a stretch.
• more on Barringtons dead birds - museum.ie and inspired art
• Leave the standing stones lie
• Glottophobie est interdit - can't slag them Gascons no more
• La Dame de Pic -foodie movie
• Marble-run
• Mus♩c, so♫gs
• Free and easy with UCDeasy
• This is the day with Christy Moore
• Craft: covid R number explained with >!oooff!< this huge tangle of crochet
• 1,900 shipping containers lost in Pacific

Flahavoatly nopely

Sinterklaas[avond] today - I am baking a mighty B for Boterletter to practice calorie intake for "The Holidays"

Oatly is a milk-like concoction developed by Swedish food engineers in U Lund in the 1990s. It has gone viral global since then, at least partly carried forward as a fashion accessory by neurotic people who believe they are lactose intolerant. It's hard to stand on even a pimple of the moral high ground over global dairy. Cows are a disaster for the planet, far less efficient in food conversion than, say, chicken and they burp prodigious quantities of methane, the greenhouse gas. I love dairy products; raw milk not so much but cheese, crème fraiche, buttermilk, and recently kefir are a significant fraction of my diet. But it's hard to justify filling the fridge with them. But I'm not going to replace milk-milk with {Oat Base (Water, Oats 10%), Rapeseed Oil, Acidity Regulator (Dipotassium Phosphate), Calcium Carbonate, Calcium Phosphates, Iodised Salt, Vitamins (D2, Riboflavin and B12)}; I'd rather go continental and take my tea zonders - without milk.

I wrote a conflicted piece about Oatly in 2016 because it started to appear in the weekly shop Chez Blob. Since then, I've been assured, by one who sinks a lot of lattés, that "Barista" Oatly makes much the best cappuccino. Like, whatevs, I only have cappuccino on Saturdays which could be pretty much any day since I R Retire. I'll tell ya something though. in 2016 1 lt of Oatly was €1.60 or 2x the price of milk. It is now €2.49 a +50% increase in cost in 4 years. I presume the product is now so well established in the shopping-basket of its supporters that it has become price-inelastic: they'll have it at any price. There is a hearts-and-minds war in Sweden between Big Dairy and Big Oatly.

Now there's a new kid on the block [Déise Oatly L]. The Beloved, a Waterford gal, snagged some of this as soon as she saw it. Of course we all want to shop local and reduce the transport miles on our food. What's not to love about something "made with IRISH OATS made with"?  And the price €2.49 is pitched toe-to-toe with Oatly's imported kvasi-mjölk. I'm sorry to report that Flahavoatly, despite being "tasty & foamable" ain't cuttin' the rug in the dance of white beverages. It's too minimal:  {water, oats (11%), Sunflower Oil (1.5%), sea salt}. Mouth feel, and coffee-lightening potential aren't as good as Oatly, sorry. It is also a concern among the osteoporotic that calcium supplements are missing; and in this Plague Year that vitamin-D is also absent. Of course there are other sources of Ca and vit-D (and riboflavin B2 and cobalamin B12) but it's an extra faff and cost to source them in sufficient quantity. There are excellent nanny-state public health reasons, dating back to Elsie Widdowson and WWII, for adding Calcium and B12 to milk. 

Another reason to support Flahavan's is that Oatly blotted their right-thinking copy-book by selling a 7% stake in the company (for $200 million in liquidity) to black-hearted Blackstone [triggers: Trump, rain-forest]. 

Sproinnng

The Arecibo radio telescope, completed in 1963, had been a-round for almost as long as I have.  1963 was peak tech cold war and the US military industrial complex was concerned about Soviet ICBMs Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles raining down on them from space. Creative counter-measures were required and one thread of that research was using intense radio-waves to destroy the incommming before it reached Chicago or St. Louis. ICBMs with war-heads are expensive and it was assumed that decoys would rain down as well in an attempt to dilute the defensive response. Subtle instrumentation was required to differentiate real from charlatan and the Feds needed a lot more basic information about the ionosphere and its radio-signals. There would never have been the money for such basic research, but cast in a "defense" framing, science could ask for a lot.  

Q. Why Puerto Rico? why Arecibo?
A. Because geology.
The hills there are karst country, like the Burren in Co Clare and there are numerous roughly circular sink-holes of whatever size required. If you want to have a large parabolic reflector it helps if the rim is already in place: saves on construction costs. Telescopes are designed to focus a large area of parallel electro-magnetic waves (light or radio, both) onto a spot where where this concentrated signal may be analyzed. This receiving gizmo is suspended by wires from three pylons outside the rim of the reflecting dish and these pylons are themselves held upright by supporting stays. Like the masts of an old clipper ship the cables have to support tensive forces from all directions: not only to support the 900 tonne mass of the receiving structure but also to deal with the hurricanes which regularly rip through Puerto Rico for a shortcut. 

When one of the receiver support-cables went sproinng on the 10th August, it caused a stir in the astronomical community [10 mins]. Whatever damage caused by the fall of a 10cm thick steel cable, the loss of one part of the mutually supportive web of steel is going to have knock-on consequences. It's like me and my bike wheel. After 20,000km of hard-riding along Dublin's poorly maintained roads, my much cherished commuting road-bike broke a spoke. Take a look at your bicycle wheel: it is true because the spokes carry tension alternately to the left and right side of the hub. That's a lot of tension: 75kg of me travelling at 15km/h meeting the edge of an immovable pot-hole is a lot of joules or watts or whatevs. I was in the frame back then to fix what I could, so I bought a new spoke, threaded it in place, trued the wheel and was back in business . . . but within a week another spoke had gone badong. My pal Pepe, smarter than me a bag a ferrets, said "buy a new wheel, my friend"; so I did, and I got another 20,000km out of my road-bike before it was turned into a pretzel in a RTA, I was 'arder, the impact only broke three (small! it's only a scratch) bones.

Sho' 'nuff, a second cable failed on 7th November and that threw the whole complex into a terminal asymmetry. The web of cables supporting the pylons were obverved to be parting at the rate of one or two each day while the telescopes owners developed a safe deconstruction plan and on 1st December the top of one pylon sheared off and the whole receiver crashed in to the dish below. RIP Arecibo.

As we're in Puerto Rico, let's look at the Arecibo Message which has, since 1974, been winging through interstellar space towards M13 - the Great Globular Cluster in Hercules - a clatter of nearly 1 million stars some of which will have planets [for sure] and some of which might support life as we know it [unlikely]. Check out the Drake equation. It's not likely that any of these planets will be among the ~36 [range 4-200] Out There which are guessed to have intelligent radio-aware life ./ . . when the signal arrives in 25,000 years time, The message is a string of 1679 bits [1/0] clearly chosen because that number is the product of 2 primes 23 x 73. The hope is that the radio-aware inhabitants of planet M13-102866c will twig that they must slice the incommming stream into 73 23 bit lines and get the picture shown L. Have a look: you are radio-aware what do you make of the message? It has been false coloured for you to highlight the different sorts of information. Answer.

Shitter splitters

 In Taxonomy, the naming of parts in biology, there are lumpers and splitters. Lumpers prefer to keep things together in broad categories, splitters tend to elevate small differences to a taxonomically distinctive name; which gives those scientists naming rights. The field has its regulations and conventions. And it can get politically charged. Generally it is bad form to name your discoveries after yourself, but patrons love it and return the coin in further patronage. Or you can give rivals a slap, or your hero a trib.

It guess you'd call my pal Des Higgins a big lumper altogether for pointing out that whales are really artiodactyls like sheep, pigs, camels and . . . hippos. We've been on Planet Nomenclature with bears, giraffes, elephants, penguins and gnus too. In almost all cases, the revisions have been driven by the careful analysis of DNA and protein sequences obtained from individuals in the questionable species. In the old days nature-lovers like Darwin and Wallace would go into the field with a shotgun and blast away gathering specimens for their studies. Usually, they'd only keep the skin and discard the rest of the body for recycling in situ. Natural history museums are holocausts of specimens often containing dozens snd dozens of examples of the same species to document the extent of variability. 

You can't do that any more, so field biologists are only licenced to get DNA non-destructively. In my days as a vole groupie, I'd often go into the field to hold the coats of the real biologists as they measured the size and abundance of Microtus pennsylvanicus. They'd obtain blood from the infra-orbital sinus by stabbing a glass capillary tube in under the eye-ball of the (securely held) rodent. That's rather invasive and I doubt if they'd get ethical approval now. But that's okay, novel techniques like PCR, means that you only need a single hair follicle to map the who genome of your specimen. With Havahart live-traps or even sticky paper in baited tubes you can get hair samples from small scurriers-about-the-forest-floor. Zebras not so much. For larger wild animals, scientists need binoculars, a shovel and a plastic bag to gather fecal samples which they have seen exiting from an identified individual. Shit-sifting can also give us a handle on what species of plant are eaten by large herbivores.

An intrepid group from the Deutsches Primatenzentrum DZP Göttingen have been out and about in the jungles of Myanmar watching for falling monkey-poop and gathering it up for analysis backing the lab. The baggies are half-full of 80% ethanol to best preserve the DNA. In DZP Göttingen they are, through the wonders of PCR, focussing in on the cells of the intestinal epithelium. But the same samples could gbe used to get a handle on the langur diet through DNA analysis of the plant fibre; or indeed on the intestinal microbiome. Loadsa PhDs over the next few years They were interested in Trachypithecus, the langurs, a Primate genus of which there are 20 recognised species, especially T. phayrei which is spread across Bangladesh, India and especially Myanmar. It has long been recognised that there are two subspecies: T. phayrei phayrei in the West and  T. phayrei shanicus in the East of the range.

Their big finding was that there was a third group of genetically distinct langurs clinging for dear life to the slopes of Mount Popa [marked "6" on the map. The clinging is not due to rising flood-waters but the usual human-mediated insults of hunting, de-forestation, pollution, and habitat loss. It doesn't help their case that on the peak of Mount Popa is a spectacular monastery which is on too many trekkers' bucket lists. In fact all the Trachypithecus phayrei populations are endangered on the IUCN Red List. It seems best to raise the Popa Langur to its own species which more or less requires parity of esteem with its neighbours and cousins. 2020 sees two extra species of langur T. phayrei, T shanicus and now T. popa. Without those designations the people responsible for triage in the holocaust will have a better excuse to say "well, we've got Phayre's Langur covered" if any members of the clade survive. And who is responsible for these brutal decisions? Nobody! In Ireland we can't even manage a coherent cross-border public-health response to Coronarama. Imagine trying to get Myanmar and India round a table to discuss the fate of monkeys? Heck-n-jiminy that's where the Rohingya live. 

Conservation? - it's a shit-show. 

On letting die

 Science is A way of knowing. We owe it for successful contraceptives; clean water; a myriad of health-care interventions: titanium hips, dialysis machines, MRI, corona vaccines; long bridges, tall buildings, railway signals; superglue, toasters, ballpoint pens. But in general science doesn't have much to say about living your best life. For that you may need help from religion or philosophy. I had a great deal of religion when I were a nipper - heck I won the Junior Scripture Prize - but gave it all up as soon as I started thinking for myself. I've had a pretty good life [so far!, I'm not feeling terminal, here], I don't have much bad on my conscience and, like Othello and Charles J. Haughey have done the state some service.  So I don't need help to live better.

Or don't I? Maybe if I read more philosophy, I'd realise that I've been deluding myself as a naive utilitarian and that I could do better - as all my teachers wrote on all my reports through school! I won't read Kant, however, his smug certainties have no place in my shades-of-grey ethics. Judith Jarvis Thomson [L] died last week in the fullness of her years. Never 'eard of 'er! probably because I've read a lot more green penguins than books by philosophers; and certainly because my prejudice is that philosophy is windy and impractical. Even when it espouses matters of life and death, it still seems to make the issues more complex than they need to be. I've ruminated for years on trolleyology, (the ethics of killing one to save five) and find that philosophers over-egg the pudding by dragging rights into the frame. Even a cursory study of anthropology will call question on pretty much all the rights of which the American founding fathers said We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights . . . whoa, not so fast Jefferson, not self-evident to the rest of humanity, let alone the rest of the living world.

Turns out that Thomson had a long riff on The Trolley Problem 1985 which was invented by Phillipa Foot, although she didn't have the last word. Thomson was famous in philosophy circles for the precision of her language. Still takes her 20 pages and I couldn't work out what the/her bottom line is.

Thomson is even more renowned for A Defense of Abortion 1971 in which she created the Metaphor of the Violinist to tease out the competing rights to life and bodily autonomy; and also the difference between killing and allowing to die. As well as the insensate but wonderfully talented Violinist who needs your kidneys, Thomson invokes 

• Society of Music Lovers, who are shadowy agents for The Violinist
• the cooling hand of Henry Fonda;
• two brothers and one box of chocolates; 
• Kitty Genovese;
• "seed-people" who are liable to blow in the window and hatch in your soft-furnishings [it's a room for womb metaphor]
• Three Samaritans: Good, Splendid and Minimally Decent

These people aren't all on stage at the same time, but Thomson uses them to bring to our attention the Edge Cases that should cause reasonable people to question their certainties and think with a tad more compassion and empathy. She allows that you can feel squeamish about something without forbidding other people to deal with it. She is also comfortingly grey and pragmatic about rights and decency. It's not, in her Fonda-fantasy, reasonable to expect the actor to fly in from California to help you out but it's churlish if he won't cross the room to lay on his hands. "It's rather a shocking idea that anyone's rights should fade away and disappear as it gets harder and harder to accord them to him." A boy may be boorish, greedy and disagreeable if he refuses to share chocolates with his kid brother but that doesn't necessarily make his selfishness unjust. Thomson's arguments will fall on deaf right-to-life ears, but helped me marshal my arguments into a more coherent order that I can live with. We've Repealed the Eighth but the Oireachtas still has to legislate on the practicalities: if more people read Thomson, we'll get better law.

via MeFi