Skeuomorph, Co. Tipp

Skeuomorph could be an Irish townland; we live a short hop from Skeoughvosteen, Co KK which seems only marginally less unlikely as a toponym. But it is not [an Irish townland]: a Skeuomorph skeuos (σκεῦος), meaning "container or tool", and morphḗ (μορφή) "form" is the archaeological architectural fancy-word for something that retains attributes which were necessary in older forms of the object. The classical example is the fluting on the columns of Greek temples, which might be decorative representations of the fissures in the bark of the tree-trunks which held up the roof of earlier examples of that architectural form. This theory is bolstered by the appearance of carved stylized leaf-like decorations in Corinthian capitals [L] to the pillars. Biology is full of these hang-overs from ancestors: the recurrent pharyngeal nerve, 3 (three!) phalanges in the wee stub of your baby toe. There was a reason for these things once, but the conservative mills of growth and development keep churning out the parts, albeit in reduced or modified form.

I'm getting back to Tipperary! Ahenny to be precise: where there is a clatter of Celtic high crosses in the church-yard. Like the red hats on the moai of Easter Island, the North Cross at Ahenny has a sandstone top-knot which may represent a bishop's mitre. It is also missing one quadrant of decorated circle which braces the arms of the cross. Some months ago, I requested a read of The Archaeology of Early Medieval Ireland by Nancy Edwards from the library. It sat on the shelf in Bagenalstown Library expecting me to come in to collect it. But it took a message from Tramore library, in  a different, more efficient county, to tell me it was waiting. Whatevs, I snagged the book and added it to a tall stack of to-be-read literature with which I have been juggling since Christmas.

The book is available at UCC bookstore, so I guess that, despite being published more than 30 years ago, it still has utility for studenting. Although I can't imagine many students will be happy to lay out €46.40 to secure their own copy. It is certainly an academic book and the vocabulary takes no prisoners [Skeuomorp, indeed] but it is also profusely illustrated with photographs [see R], maps and archaeological drawings. Prof Edwards makes the case that the decoration owes much of its inspiration to metal-workers, who were masters of filigree and wire-working. Think about all the torcs, brooches and chalices which fill Ireland's museums: so much delicate, fussy detail far and away from the object's strict utility. 

You can just hear The Bish, instructing the poor stone mason. "see this chalice, my man, this wire-work edging is the latest thing in Armagh; I want you to include something at least as good in the cross which I have ordered". Maybe the mason rose to the challenge without grumbling; maybe he cursed the day he undertook the commission but he delivered! even the zoom in on the detail doesn't do justice to the fine-work which is a miracle in stone. Megalithic Ireland has better pictures.

Fixit Sunday

Between Jueves Lardero and  Mardi Gras and we have St Fixit's Day

• Billy Bragg handyman
  
• Ould Feller works his dentistry vulcanology on a tractor tire [no PPE, nothing thrown away]
• PPE vs xylene Medici restoration
  
• Bricolage etymology etc.
• Bricolage roundup
• Laura Kampf makes Frankenbiketruck
  
• The ramen sink meme 
• Bodging the bridge
• Kintsugi - embracing change [prev]
  

More 2024 firewood

It was the week of three named storms. After Arwen in November, I can only suppose that somewhere in the WEA experienced Barra and Corrie but it didn't make the news or raise a breeze in our part of the archipelago. Storm Dudley was, au contraire, certainly a secure loose objects thing. Two days later, on Friday, Storm Eunice barrelled through the Southern half of Ireland with even more fizz. The SOP after a stormy night is to check the lane for tree down at first light to see if we could go to rescue their neighbours if it was needed - indeed vice versa. Then breakfast. It was gusty all through the morning of Friday 18th Feb and about 1100hrs, during a lull in the buffet, I got out of my jim-jams [I R retire!], dressed for the outdoors and went to count the sheep and see if anything gravitational had happened over night. Nada.  But about an hour later I looked down the yard because something was aslant in the orchard.

It was a huge lump of ash Fraxinus excelsior which had broken off from our second tallest ash tree where the trunk splits into two maybe 4m off the ground. It was 30-40cm ⌀ in the base and 14m to tip of twig. Because ivy Hedera helix, it photographed as a great green wall but also because its fall had been broken by row of evergreen laurel Prunus laurocerasus coppiced from the felling of their parents in ~2008.

Much as I regret the loss of any tree, this fall was quite remarkably convenient. a) Saved us having to call Sean the Surgeon b) The last twigs merely brushed the top of the nearest woodstack c) I've been meaning to thin or pollard the laurels d) The heavy duty trunk fell parallel to, and 2m North of, the wire fence without touching it e) Winter = no leaves f) The logs, as they are cut, will be really close to where they need to be stacked!

As I R retire, I am fit poor but time rich, so there is no steaming hurry to process the wood.  Not least because two days after Eunice, Storm Franklin drove through the country on Sunday 20/Feb night. I felt we got a worse drubbing from this third-of-three storms; but you wouldn't have known it from the [lack of] twig fall around the farm. Believing in having one day/week without brrrm BRRRRM noise-pollution, I don't do machinery on Sundays. But on Monday, I fired up my little under-powered chain-saw to dismember the tree-fall into its component parts . . . resolving to stop when I got through a tank of gas.

• Cleared ivy for the sheep so I could see where the branches were
• No amount of PPE will protect you from a slap of laurel as you release it from tension
  
• Trimmed back the laurel ends and some of the ash twigs to get access to the ash-branches
• Cut down the oblique up-standing branches
• Parse branches into logs-to-split; logs-as-is; loglets down to thumb-width; kindling
• Laurel logs will take twice as long to cure, so will be stacked separately

On Tuesday, I had another session with the ch.saw cutting off and logging the remaining branches and the top 4m of trunk.

On Wednesday, before another spell of wet weather, I delivered another load of ivy to the sheep and raked all the twigs, leaves and raffle into a heap under the hedge. It's all looking quite ship-shape and bristol titties. A good chunk of split and stack to do; but like I say it's all in place for that.

Thursday morning there was a light dusting of snow but at tea-time a milky sun came out. I cleared the last of the 2016 cypress logs out of their home for the last tuthree years, rebuilt the end wall of their stack and started splitting and loading [Ash 2022] on the existing pallet. A lot done, more to do! Warm evenings in 2024 . . . if Europe as we know it survives that long.

Grim is the underworld

Gahhhd, I spend a lot of time swiping swiping swiping unsatisfied through the back-catalogue of Borrowbox, the Irish libraries repository of audiobooks. I think you'd be pretty well server if your taste is for bodice-rippers or whodunnits but not so much if you prefer non-fiction. Nevertheless, since I discovered this capability in my SIMless smartphone in June 2020, I've been edutained by 44 earbooks (and 5 ebooks): that's better than 2/month. Given that the loan period is 20 days, I've had something on the go pretty much all that time. I've only given up on one book and that was recommended YA fiction. I guess I've reviewed most of these reads here on The Blob.

I was close to tears of rage and despair when I finished The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken (2018) book by "The Secret Barrister". This is an exposé of how the English legal system is a parody of justice from someone who has, through eloquence and hard work, on the balance of probability been responsible for miscarriages of justice. The most compelling case for this was when SB defended Bill Sykes a fat slobby smugly patriarchal father accused by his two now grown-up daughters of sexually abusing them as small children. He got off largely because at least one of the daughters had really gone off the rails as a teenager and embraced a range of anti-social behaviours including lying and telling fancifully disturbing tales at school and to the string of social workers who had served the family through the years. And of course, because the young women had no money, they were served by a random criminal barrister appointed by the Crown Prosecution Service CPS. 

Spare yourself from asking the criminal barrister's FAQ "how do you square your conscience with defending bad people?" because even fat slobby smugly patriarchal people deserve justice law just like squeaky clean you-and-me. Indeed, the ugly and scummy need good lawyers more than us because stitching up the usual suspects is one way the police can massage their conviction statistics. Beacuse, the Home Office loves statistics, benchmarks and guidelines: nobody can measure justice but the HO can insist of those at the coal-face of law meet targets. 

The SB's contemptuous rage is targetted at the targetteers: the legislators in parliament who from utterly base motives [and/or to get re-elected by people who get their opinions from the red-tops] want to be seen to be tough on crime. Tough on crime means giving mandatory six month sentences to juveniles who are carrying a knife. It's hard work and costs money to investigate why some cohorts of English society have agreed that a knife is an important accessory when you're out on The Street. And it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when young Tyron gets well criminalized during his time in detention with much tougher slightly older desperados. But retain some of your spittle for Magistrates who are judge and jury, despite being pathetically ignorant of what the actual law of the land is . . . especially if the actual law disagrees with their choleric, blimpish, patriarchal certainties.

Further legislation has eroded the amount paid to public defenders through legal aid, so that they either take cases as loss leaders or do a perfunctory job of defense in order to keep their hourly rate above the minimum wage. Because a successful day in court is the icing on a lot more hours or days of work preparing the cake. The age profile of criminal barristers is increasing as their are fewer young recruits as the conditions [read rate of pay and hours of work] are eroded by cost-cutting by government. Everyone wants to be tough on crime, even if it means that the dispossessed get no justice. I can't begin to write about the Innocence Tax without looking for my brand and pitchfork.

Patriarchal me assumed that The Secret Barrister is a man, because the audiobook was read by Jack Hawkins. But I may be wrong, at the Oxford Union, the SB was voiced by a woman. Women can certain sure be barristers - we're not in the 19thC any more.

But then again my father used to further enrage my childish self by saying "Life isn't fair". It's a lot fairer for me than it is for the travellers down the nearest halting site.

Ringstone Brochure 2022

The Knockroe Ringstone [OS Map Sheet 68 Grid Ref S827480 52.5776, -6.7815] is one field away from Shannon's Lane, the easiest route to the Mt Leinster uplands from the Scullogue Gap to the South. Part of this stone (the bottom left in the picture above) was revealed when, in November 2007, the existing 2m gateway widened to 3.8m. The original artwork was carried out 4000 years ago (in Newgrange times) when a flat-topped 5 ton granite boulder was incised with a cup-and-ring-with-chevrons design by a Neolithic artist. It is useful to view the Ringstone in the context of other rock-art in the locality. This has been documented by Chris Corlett who wrote Inscribing the landscape - the rock art of south Leinster, the definitive book on the subject. The cover  of that book features the work of The Rathgeran Master a truly wonderful incised stone, 4 km due West, on the NNW side of a hill at Rathgeran, just outside Ballymurphy.

At the end of the 18thC, the hillside was settled, the  approx. 1 hectare fields cleared and the original boulder cleaved into manageable squared off blocks that could be piled up to make stable vertical walls at each side of a gateway. The line of the wall (and presumably the gateway) is present on the 1840 ordnance survey [L], so the splitting of the Neolithic slab occurred ~1800 CE.  The 19thC stone cleavers were not indifferent to their cultural heritage. But they recognised the stone as being a suitable size, flat on one surface and having 2 or 3 almost square faces already present. The "natural" right-angles suggested that the stone had two cleaving planes at right angles which they needed to make Lego-blocks for the verticals of the gateway.  The cup & rings may have been obscured by mud and moss OR may have convinced the cleavers that the grain of the stone was uniform and fine and so would split as they wanted.  

In August 2010, under supervision of Chris Corlett, both sides of the gate-way were taken apart to get a proper look at the incised stones. From the disassembled 3-D jigsaw, it was clear that four of them could be reassembled into a single piece with a natural outside border, giving confidence that all the relevant bits of the incised face had been recovered. Three, apparently undecorated, top bits of the original gateway could also be reassembled and probably represent the rounded ‘back’ of the original boulder. After discussion over lunch (never good to hurry these things), it was agreed to reassemble the Ringstone a) vertically b) to form the end of the wider uphill wall. The back-of-the-rock fragments make up the downhill side of the gateway. In other words, now both its Neolithic and 19thC functions are fulfilled. It would be nice to say that you can’t see the join, but these are as clearly visible as the dashed line in the middle of a road. These are the marks where [oak or steel] wedges were driven into the stone to split it. 

You are welcome to visit. There are sheep so please shut any gates you find shut and leave open those you find open. Dogs, even leashed, will disturb the sheep so please leave them at home.

Nerdniks go 5k

Going going on

• Matt Parker meets Geoff Marshall to collect some seconds
• Benford on the distribution of trailing digits 
• Geoff and Vicky's[R] last of 2,563 stations is Wick [✓]!
  
• Simple Indian recipes
• When the aliens landed in Stavanger
  
• Dialect? Language? Asturiano! 
• Let's hear it for Scots on whc multibloboprevs
  
• How to coffee . . . like wine tasting? 
• Covered in Beeeees
  
• Mutualism in the wild corvids eat macropod ticks
• read the FAQ at the top of the comments 
  
• Shed in a shed in Italian Alps
• Restoring Le Chateau du Thiel
  
• . . . sunshine walked beside her
  

Today Tin Day

Posted on MetaFilter [here be comments] but you prolly don't read MetaFilter as much as me . . . 19th Feb is the 50th day of the year. If you forget to celebrate DarwinDay, you have a week to gird your loins for TinDay ₅₀Sn being the 50th element; but don't let it go to your head. Tin is one of the metals important for future technologies [MIFT] and the spot price has tripled during Coronarama; so we need to know something about it. Tin Day seven years ago.

• Price: $43/kg; aluminum Al $3/kg; copper Cu $10; Nickel Ni $24; Silver Ag $770/kg
• Density: 7.3g/cm³; more than Al 2.7; same as iron Fe 7.8; less than lead Pb 11.3
• Melts in a pizza oven: 230°C, 445°F
• Kernow: Stannary Charters of 1201 and 1305 granted tinners the right to prospect and mine throughout Cornwall but all the tin had to be sent to Stannary Towns for assay: Lostwithiel, Bodmin, Liskeard, Truro and Helston. Geevor [13m] the last commercial tin mine closed in 1990
• Bronze is 10-12% tin. So Cornish tin was in demand through the Bronze Age
• Bronze medal winners are happier
• Pewter:  is 90% tin with antimony Sb 5%; copper Cu 2% [and formerly Pb]. Plates pots flagons and tankards from the Mary Rose
• Irish travellers no longer ply a trade as tinkers because plastic utensils are brighter cheaper
  
• The Creak. Crank up the volume to hear the cry of tin with Andrea Sella [5m]
• Tin pest [11m] with Cody: white β tin will corrupt to a brittle ceramic allotrope called grey α tin if slowly cooled
• Poliakoff and Barnes show and tell [15m]
  
• ITO: Indium (which also creaks) tin oxide is a transparent conductor for touch screens
• TBT: Tributyl-tin was an anti-fouling paint for ship's hulls. Horribly toxic to marine wildlife: sea snails changing sex, deforming the shells of oysters. Banned since 2008 by the IMO.
• Rin Tin Tin [1m] is not made of tin; Tintin is not made of tin, nor is Milou the dog; tinfoil has been made of aluminum [lighter cheaper] since WWII.
  
• Plate glass [7m] : is made on tin by Pilkington. Needs an atmosphere of nitrogen and hydrogen to prevent the ultra-smooth molten tin from oxidizing.
• Solder: I know nothing about solder except it uses more of the world's remaining tin than any other product
  
• Blood diamonds cassiterite SnO₂ in Congo

Tomorrow Antimony ₅₁Sb !