The End

Nothing lasts forever.

Cory Doctorow has been bloggin' for a lot longer than me - 20 years: "There’s another way that blogging makes my writing better: writing every day makes it easier to write every day". Nevertheless, I have been posting every day for the last eight years. And I absolutely echo Doctorow's sentiments. The last time I missed a day was 22 May 2013. The Blob's original purpose was to document the process of transition to a full-time, full-on job teaching science in the Irish Midlands. I more or less stopped teaching science at the start of Coronarama in March 2o2o. There were a few loose ends final year research project students to tie up <nnnggg nnGGG> but that adventure was done more than a year ago, and I formally retired 02 Oct 20

As the years rolled by, The Blob grew, like Topsy, to catch & incorporate whatever was drifting past my "mind". Although there was a braided thread of funny thing happened in class today posts; but without classes that theme dried up and blew away. My, N = 97, almost invisible,  women-in-science archive is worth a look. There have recently been a lot more book reviews because reading and audioing books is filling the space previously occupied by antics in classrooms and laboratories. In one sense, the tail is now wagging the dog: I feel pressure to deliver daily - all those years of deliberate practice putting one word after the other have Lutherised me into Ich kann nichts anders. otoh I am close to having recorded everything I can remember having ever done. So now I'm easy . . .

22 May? Why that's today!

The End

Informed consent

 I had a swipe at the New England Aquarium & Sy Montgomery for keeping an octopus in solitary confinement, which might seem a peculiar position to normal folk who see octopus as, say, food. I've written quite a lot about ethics over the last eight years; concluding that ethics is hard.  If you are complacent about your ethics it's because you haven't thought about it enough. There are few, in the Western world, who condone slavery but plenty who think that professional boxing (licenced and regulated battery for profit) is an acceptable sport. It's not: just count the concussions and contact sport encephalopathy.

I don't know about you, but IF we agree that all people have human rights - regardless of colour, age, gender, sexuality or wealth - THEN it's difficult to draw the line at the edge of Homo sapiens and say that chimps don't have rights. I'm not, here, talking about prevention of cruelty to animals which was promoted and sponsored by some Victorian eccentrics, like "Humanity Dick" Martin, because it was bad for the immortal soul . . . of the perpetrator. Like Jeremy "Utilitarian" Bentham: "The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?"  Let's rather think about the Right to be Let Alone for chimpanzees.

Actually, forget about chimpanzees, they are largely beyond our control in forests or zoos. Let's think about dogs [and cats]. What are their rights? Actually what are our rights to own a dog? If Genesis 1:26 "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth" is sufficient then you really haven't thought about it enough. 

In Ireland you're meant to licence your dogs [at €20/yr!] but apart from that anyone can own a dog - no requirement to be tested or examined as to competence. Virtuous people truck off to the local animal rescue to recycle a dog that has been abandoned and/or abused by the previous owners. The better class of rescue & re-homing centres have standards equivalent to human child adoption agencies. But [unfixed] bitches gonna pup and if you want a dog you can get a dog - and I have never been asked to show a dog licence over hundreds of hours of walking dogs. So many dogs, so little oversight.

The better class of owners will do their best to train their dog, and good for them. But my feelings about dog training has been coloured by Sy Montgomery's tales of training her dogs to stop, go, come and catch frisbees. I did a year of psychology in college and I know that using operant conditioning you can make animals do all sorts of mad antics: catch frisbees, jump through [flaming?] hoops, walk on two legs and come when called. But the dog? In what sense does it consent to this contract? With chimpanzees, the sense of the meeting in modern ethics is that we should treat them as well as, and with the respect due to, people. When, in 2005, we wanted to extend an evolutionary study of the human immune system to look for/at the equivalent genes in chimpanzees we were (quite properly) told to bugger off with any ideas about a blood sample. Because the chimpanzees in the local zoo were illiterate and therefore couldn't read and sign the consent form. 

It's interesting that the word "grooming" has been borrowed from domestic animal care to apply to the mechanics of achieving gratification in another, seepy, repellent, world where the balance of power is really unequal. Consider whether dogs are being groomed to accept their enslaved state by treats, attention and walkies. Or la la la can't hear you - that will work also.

Me, I don't think it's cool of Captain von Trapp to dress his kids in sailor suits and come to a whistle. Ditto dogs. It's not so long ago, that powerful people in the USA could own slaves. The right of married Irish women to refuse sex with their husband was not vindicated in Ireland until 2002. I think the tide of history is running with me on this one. We've freed the gays; now to free the hounds.

Deaf as a post

 Borrowbox continues to deliver. Their search engine is kind of crap: "anne lamott" sourced me in order Ann Napolitano Ann Cleves Ann Patchett Ann Weisgarber whom I presume are "acclaimed" "bestsellers" or whatever Borrowbox thinks will please their imagined demographic. Not me and not even close to what I was looking for: google knows me better. If you can't find specific requests you may as well just browse through what they have.

My latest coup, is Wildwoods by Richard Nairn [L he gorra woodshed!] a ramble, actual and metaphorical, through Ned's Wood a relict 3 acre = one-and-a-bit hectares attached to a micro-farm "somewhere in Wicklow". Ned being a 19thC tenant farmer who finally secured the title to this plot of paradise-with-hardship, through the Land Reform Acts of 1881 and 1885. Nairn passed through Natural History at TCD a tuthree years before me and became a Name in Irish conservation biology working for Birdwatch Ireland; NI Natural Trust; Royal Irish Academy. But for the last 30 years, he's been the founder and director for Natura Environmental Consultants. Wearing that hat, he helped broker a deal between eco-warriors and The Man when the latter want to widen an arterial commuter route through Gleann dá Ghrua = the Glen of the Downs. The commuters got their road, a handful of mature trees were felled; the ecowarriors learned how to sleep in the trees; and the lawyers got their yachts and/or second homes somewhere nice.

Wildwoods is a sympathetic read: I think we're on the same page w.r.t. badgers; coppicing; ivy [good]; native vs imports; Sitka spruce; pine-martens and red squirrels. Planting trees is good: we've planted a couple of thousand of them and never in anything that could be accused of being a monoculture. And neither Nairn nor I are in it for the money. Although he cites a couple of inspiring cases where trad farmers have converted some of their unproductive rough pasture into stands of trees which after a couple of decades are beginning to wash their face in the economy of the farm: pea-sticks and hazel stakes to begin with hardwoods for joinery later.  You don't plant oaks expecting to see them become the keel and knees of a sailing ship in your life-time.

Guardian report on interplanting broadleaves in pasture.

Are we grateful that there is an audiobook of Wildwoods?
Yes we are.
Whom should we thank?
Bolinda.com who are perhaps the best creator of talky content in English. They also seem to have created Borrowbox.
So what's your problem?
The slap dash production standards for this niche in the publishing world.

My experience is that the best readers are authors unless they have a King's Speech impediment or a really impenetrable accent. Yay! Gretchen McCulloch. What seems to happen is that Bolinda put out a call and the agents of resting actors [short of the readies] and jobbing radio journalists [good speaking voice] put their people forward if their client is desperate the price is right. For Wildwoods the winner of the voice-over contract was Ruairi Conaghan who [at least] has an Irish accent. Except that he was raised in the heartland of Ulster and never had Irish in school. Having a Nordie accent shouldn't be a reason for excluding a candidate but it does render a certain amount of cognitive dissonance given that the author himself has an unexceptionable Educated South Dublin ESD accent [listen?] - he's too old to speak DORT - and the wood in question is in Wicklow.  The problem is that
a) has a tin ear for Irish words: Coillte is not really Quilter; Meitheal is not Meethaul - that's our leader St Micheál of Martin
b) he's Arts Block educated so mangles some science words. There are two sorts of oak in Ireland: Quercus petraea the sessile oak and Quercus robur the pedunculate oak. The former has flowers and acorns which sit directly on the twig; in the latter the flower develops at the end of a peduncle - which in turn is a fancy Latinate name for 'stalk'. Conaghan sometimes uses pendunculate and sometimes pedunculate. Aaaargh you may quote me your Emerson "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" but it sounds like yer man doesn't know or care what he's saying. Taster on Soundcloud.

Actually, I fear that this is all driven by economics. How much does Bolinda pay for 6 or 10 hours of read script? Not enough to make it worth Conaghan's while to listen back to his offering and re-record the bits he fluffed; let alone employ a copy-editor with a sound ear who can mark up the text that needs more than one take. Stephen J. Gould, who produced a column for Natural History every month for 25 years, found that they only way he could justify the time in a busy Harvard Faculty year was to sit down and write the whole essay in one sitting and then <done!> send it off to the magazine.

Women against the scourge

 Where were you when JFK was shot? People of my age will know the answer to that [8 y.o. me: in my pyjamas but maybe not asleep in Titchfield, England]. Younger people will have a similar awareness about 9/11. Irish people of my grandfather's generation will have been somewhere during Easter Week 1916. The urban legend is that more people claimed a pension for having been in the GPO with Connolly and Pearse than could have physically fit. Schoolboy Nevil Shute became a stretcher-bearer - not in the GPO, though - because his father was a government official. Dorothy Stopford, a twenty-something member of the Protestant Ascendancy, happened to be visiting with Sir Matthew Nathan, the Under-Secretary for Ireland or most senior civil servant in town that week. She kept a, now digitized and searchable, diary of the events from that perspective.

Although Easter Week and the cross-patch response of the British administration [they were after all getting their ducks in a row for the disastrous Battle of the Somme] were defining events in the political development of Ireland, they were just an interesting but passing blip in the life Dorothy Stopford [L,L with Kathleen Lynn L,R another Irish medical pioneer]. She had just started a medical degree in TCD and qualified as a doctor in 1921. In parallel to her journey through anatomy classes, ward rounds and delivery suites, young Dorothy was radicalised into joining Cumann na mBan through indignation at a) the British reaction to Easter Week '16 and b) the systemic impoverishment and othering of the plain people of Ireland. Infant mortality across the Free State was running at 7% and that's the average. The rate would have been appallingly worse among the dispossessed crowded into cottages and tenements.

In the late 1920s, when Dr Price [she married Liam Price a lawyer in 1925] started working in St Ultan's [Protestant] pediatric hospital, infectious diarroeia, pneumonia and TB were the three primary killers-of-children in Ireland. It really was the Third World without the malaria and Burkitt's lymphoma. From 1938-1949 there were 43,000 deaths [adults included] from TB in the Free State. It's like the worst of Covid-19 going on and on for 10 years. In the 1930s Dr Price started to obsess about tuberculosis: directing a lot of the limited resources of the hospital to that one disease. Again, it is easy to see parallels with Coronarama where we have not yet counted the deaths and disablements caused by other illnesses and accidents getting untreated during the pandemic.

In the late 1930s, Price was instrumental in bringing tuberculin skin-test diagnosis and BCG vaccination to Ireland and rolling these preventive measures out across the country. It was quite political because BCG Bacille Calmette-Guérin was French and, according to the British medical establishment [and subsequent sober objective analysis didn't work very well. The latter criticism was at least partly because the French statistics on vaccination and its efficacy were all over the shop.  In 1937, Price administered the first BCG jab in these islands, but it was one of only 6 such treatments in St Ultan's before WWII shut off supplies of this heat-labile resource. 

After the war, lots had changed, antibiotics became available in a wide variety of forms, there was better nutrition and better housing and TB isolation wards and whole hospitals were built across the country on the imprimatur of the radical Minister of Health Noel Browne. So there was more to winning the war on TB than BCG. Browne and the Chief Medical Officer James Deeny both wrote themselves up as the centre of credit. Nevertheless St Ultan's is a beacon in the history of equality in Ireland because it was staffed, run and administered entirely by women. One contemporary called it The Women's Medical Republic. It was thus an antidote to the patriarchy. In the 1980s St Ultan's was closed with its assets transferred to the nearby National Children's Hospital in Harcourt Street. There is a now a 180 bed hotel on the site.

Last night at the Wexford Science Café, we were edutained by Anne MacLellan, the Wexford author who has written The Book on Dorothy Stopford-Price; rebel doctor which is available from the publisher or cheaper post-free from Kennys. If you missed the Café you can get the gist from a talk given by MacLellan in 2019 for a symposium hosted by the RCPI Royal College of Physicians of Ireland. Or a 1200 word, 6 minute, executive summary essay. MacLellan's assessment is measured: Deeny and Browne deserve less credit for beating TB and Dorothy Stopford-Price, not the easiest person to like, deserves rather more; hence the biography. Chapeau! for author and her subject both.

More Women in Science

One foot in front of the other

Ireland in the Spring is when, if at no other time, we have weather rather than climate. 30+ years ago we rented a cruiser on the Shannon for Easter week: we had broiling sunshine and horizontal snow and everything in between. It has been really dry for the last month, so it's easy to take the good weather for granted. But really, for outdoor chores - counting the sheep [and the lambs!]; chopping wood; planting spuds; turning the compost - it is a good idea to be up and doing when it's not raining. There's plenty of time for tea later.  

On Saturday at about tea-time, I bestirred myself and brought in a basket of fire-wood. I noted in passing that it looked dramatically black over Blackstairs and though to more about it. I hadn't been [back] on the sofa 10 minutes but the Valkyries roared in with a drenching storm which turned to drumming hail. Part of me was annoyed because I wasn't up in the polytunnel for the full grandstand sound-surround experience; but the other 80% was really smug at having the chores done before dark. An hour later, our neighbour across came by with a dozen free-range eggs <whoa brilliant!> and remarked at the heaps of hail under the eaves of the sheds. They had not even had a tinkle of drizzle although they live less than 1km away. What a difference a county border makes. Later still I went up to the said polytunnel and captured a heap o' hail which had been delivered to the rain-butt. I guess like Everest in the Miocene, there was a lot more at the height of the storm.

Carpe diem, lads; because this evening it may be too late. My pal Russ is on the move this upcoming Sunday 23rd May to raise funds for the local chapter of the RNLI. He's undertaking to walk 18km from his home to Dunmore regaled along the way by a relay of friends-and-relations. I think that's a brilliant concept and the RNLI deserves support because fetching sea-farers out of the drink brings out the best in people. My retirement gift to myself was to finish the third part of my Western European Walk [Portugal 1989 - Spain 2004] from St. Jean Pied de Porte in Gascony to Cherbourg. When it was on the long finger of aspirations, several relations said they'd walk a stage with me. Who knows if/when it will happen: as the disruptive tides of Covid drain away so does the synovial fluid of my antient knees.

Anyway, it's not about me; it's about The [Manchester] Russianside Rambler. Give? I gave already.

The cloths of Heaven

An Fear aka The Man aka St Micheál of Martin, our Leader, announced that, from 10th May, intercontinental ballistic inter-county travel would be allowed for all. Clan Blob were quite slow on the take-up of these freedoms but we expect Dau.II to come across from the People's Republic later today. Though not without faults [who is?], nobody chid Dau.II for not being willing. She can change a plug, mow a lawn, saw a straight line through lumber and is happy with power-tools. 

It didn't seem fair to ask Corkies to break their journey on Costa na Déise to mow 10 or 12 ares of grass simply because they were passing. And there is self-interest in this: I'd rather not wait an extra couple of hours before the English Market hamper is opened and we can start tucking into cake, custard, cheese.

Accordingly, I scabbed a lift with The Beloved last Thursday when she travelled South about her father's business. It was apparent from the photo above that I wasn't the only one with thoughts of mowing: a farmer was in process of taking the first cut of silage from the meadow on the cliff-top just West of Kilmurrin cove. I can definitely be relied upon to take a crap photo; but this captures some of the magic of the Waterford Coast with its receding headlands all the way to Cork and backdropped by the distant Comeragh Hills. If there's one thing my father could capture in his water-colours it was the idea of the variety of clouds in Ireland. Taking a shy-and-retiring role in the composition is the banks of thrift / sea-pink Armeria maritima [prev] which is characteristic of The Copper Coast; partly because of its resistance to heavy metals.

Preparing for a [brief?] interlude of inter-county travel, Dau.II asked me to prepare a Beachcomber's Guide to The Copper Coast. I was nothing loath; indeed I have made a project of this in the past in anticipation of friends-and-relations visiting this gem of hidden charms - geological [go Ordovician], botanical [see above], ornithological [go Choughs Pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax]. All those coves: Stradbally, Ballydwan, Trá na mBó, Bunmahon, Knockmahon, Kilmurrin [see above], Boatstrand, Benvoy, Annestown, Woodstown, [no, not the oyster Woodstown], Kilfarrasy, Garrarus, Trá Mhór. Since she could toddle Dau.II has been to all of them, but unless you're driving and or paying attention to the passing landscape, it can be difficult to a) tick them off in order b) remember which one has the towering purple cliffs and which are only accessible at low tide. It turns out that Waterford CoCo has not been idle during the lock-down but have prepared and distributed a lot of new signage [L], so you know where you be when the car-door opens and you can rush out to explore. As well as the finger-posts, there are new info-boards at each place with some handy annotated photos of what you're looking at. Especially interesting because there have been substantial, photo changing, rock-falls at least on Woodstown and Ballydwan beaches.

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

WB Yeats

Sunday 16

Coronarama
Recruitment drive by a bunch of my pals from Dublin:
Citizen's Science project Viral Resistance Project

You can get vaccinated even if you not white
You can slag anti-vaxxers in a counter-productive manner.
11 reasons for wearing a mask after-vaxx.

• Nefyn [R] - half the garden gone
• Geology? volcano reacts to trash
• Math? Aristotle's Wheel Paradox [spoiler]
• Tech? 5 ft $40 endoscope: check your comings and goings
• ♬♫♩♪? Woelv / Geneviève Castrée - Chanson pour la nuit
• How to sell your house
• How to build your house
• Healing ragas
• Healing rags
• Ulysses
• streetfood.sg - yummy OTT Milo Dinosaur @2.20m
• Maybe, just maybe, with editting, cricket is exciting
• Claire prefers Kerrygold for Kroissants