Seachtain na focail

Hi Folks, it's Irish Week! Seachtain na Gaeilge. Baby steps for those who weren't schooled in The Republic or who hated being hit for not knowing the language: today a word search:

BAINNE - BOB - CÁIS - CAISLEÁN - CAMÁN - FÁINNE - IASC - LUCH - MÚINTEOIR - PRÁTAÍ - ROTHAR - SEACHTAIN - SEACLÁID - SIONNACH - SLIOTAR - TAE - TEACH - ÉIRE
Well done, me. I knew the meaning of the green words - and he's never had a lesson in his life!

Democracy? I think not

In Ireland we live in a democracy.  This means that, every few years we go to polling stations and vote for our political representatives.  The politicians want to get elected and the custom has built up that candidates attach election posters to telephone poles and lamp-posts to raise their profile in the consciousness of the electorate.  The standard posters are printed on a sheet of corrugated plastic about 900x1200mm and are often shockingly inept - unintentionally humorous hair-style, fat tum bursting out of shirt, vacuous expression, apparent aura or halo, illiterate slogan.  More 'happening' candidates have recently taken to airbrushing the wrinkles and photoshopping the jowls to such an extent that they are unrecognisable on the doorstep.  The posters are an eyesore for a month before the election but are really useful about our farm afterwards, making compost bins, covering wood-piles.  I do try not to put the politician's face next to the dung - I'm not totally insensitive: even about Fianna Fail.  There is a limit to this allowable littering of the street-scape: nobody may put up a poster within 50m of a polling station.  Likewise, you may not in person encourage people to towards your political beliefs anywhere near the polling station. Nobody wants to run a gauntlet of hectoring party apparatchiks on the way to vote. And of course you cannot carry a poster or a flag into the polling station itself.

This time round, however, we are being warned by the [independent] Referendum Commission that you shouldn't go to vote wearing your position on your sleeve as a rainbow scarf or as a Nil button on your lapel. Furthermore, we are being forbidden to take selfies in the polling booth - the legislation clearly needs to catch up with the social media deluge in which we are now drowning. Posters in the polling-station are one [undesirable] thing but stripping off my Tá button?  Where will it stop?  Will they take my Fáinne?  As it happens, Carlow-Kilkenny is going through a bye-election at the same time as the referendums.  Apparently, outside the Carlow County Courthouse this morning, a security swat-team from the Referendum Commission over-stepped their brief on keeping Yes and No buttons off lapels and arrested a man who turned up to vote in a blue shirt.

Irony warning: this post is intended as satire.

Hi, my pronoun is Sir

Yesterday The Institute had a Diversity & Inclusion Day which was quite low key - and I was looking out for it. Anyone who thinks that non-binary bathrooms are a waste of plumbing could have sailed through the day with certainties all intact. Two things on the agenda: a table in the main concourse handing out wrist-bands, diversity badges and a heap of deeply unhealthy snacks, all of which disappeared very quickly. I've been wearing [with pride] my rainbow wrist-band, which I obtained on preview, 24/7 for more than a month now. Now I've gotten a badge [like L] to match - I R delirah!  The badge is tiny enough that it's not in your face but large enough to suggest that I am a BLT ally. A bit like the Fáinne to show that you are down with the gaeilgeoiri.

"BLT Ally" is a technical term; as I learned from item two on the agenda: a 30 minute tutorial on pronouns from the Student's Union Welfare & Equality Officer SUW&EO. There are 8,000 students in The Institute and 800 staff (tech, teach and admin), so it must have been disappointing to put out seats for 20 and have only 6 people in the room. You don't have to be gay or gender-fluid to join the LGBT+ Society, you just need your heart in the right place enough to support other people's right to be their true selves - a BLT Ally. I suggest that the issue of Naming of Identities is not going to go away and it's unlikely to get any simpler, so it's myopic to ignore the issue. As it was, the young SUW&EO spent most of her talk on how to do gender-naming in the Trans world; and there the issue seems quite straight-forward. Trans people inherited a pink or a blue babygro shortly after birth but, at some later stage, switched strips. They prefer to be addressed in the gender that they've landed in rather than the one they were assigned (after a quite cursory peek between their neonatal legs) at birth. No surprises there but you can't be sure, so it's polite to ask "what are your pronouns?" Someone may, for example, be all het up by having to be discriminated upon this single axis of personality at all at all and prefer the "singular they".  For many, the transition has been drawn out, invasive, expensive and traumatic, and to address them by the 'dead name' or dead pronoun is tiresome and/or offensive.

Yesterday we didn't get as far as Gender Politics 201: gender-neutral pronouns. People have been making things up in this area for more than 100 years. It wrecks ma head at the moment: I feel mighty smug about getting trans-pronouns sorted; gender-neutral is another day's work. Here's a list for you to get your tongue around: E; Ey; Hou; Hu; Peh; Per; Thon; Ve; Xe; Yo; Ze; Ze; Zie; Sie; Zhe. Me, I use s/he when I remember, but haven't sorted the possessives his/hers yet.

As a teacher, in a position of authority and in loco parentis in some sense, it is surely easier to start the term with "Hi students, this is Quantitative Methods 101, my name is Bob, my pronouns are Priv[ilege]and Sir".  It's a bit like my apology for now being too blind to recognise my students out of class. It's better to lay this stuff out at the beginning, to start a conversation, to suggest that I may be crass and oafish [and certainly ironic] in my interpersonal relationships but I'm not wilfully cruel or offensive. A lot of young people have been bullied at school, a smaller fraction have done the bullying and the largest section of all is those who stood by while it was going on. Having a conversation at the start lays down the implicit rule that there will be no such crap on Cap'n Bob's watch. Shamefully 20% of people feel bullied at work among 'adults'. More Bloboprevs on bullying.

We got some [TMI! I cried in my head] insight into what the trans process involves. There are only two qualified gender reassignment consultants in Ireland and the waiting times are as long as other elective surgery - 18-24 months in limbo on top of a lifetime of gender dysphoria.
You can get to inhabit the body that fits with two sorts of intervention:

• hormones [various modes of administration] also has a 18-24 month lag-time, and costs €200/3mo if you go private because you can't wait
• surgery [not only 'down there' but in around the chest and elsewhere: facial feminization therapy].

Now here's another thing that may resonate with the Home Education community. Many Trans people join their local LGBTQAI++ Society when they need support and friends. It can be brutal being gender-wrong so support is needed:

• you get bullied all through school
• you can't use the available toilets
• clothes shopping is fraught
• you can't get a good haircut
• suicide attempts are 3x more likely; 
• self-harm is 2x more likely;
• stress, anxiety and depression 4x more likely;

But get this: after transition is complete, having created a body that feels right, many lapse their BLT+ subscription and avoid their old pals. All they want now is to pass for white their preferred gender; all those queer folk now get in the way of acceptance in their new reality. In 20 years of active membership of the Home Education Network HEN, we met dozens of transitory members. Typically a family would wash up with us because they were finished with school: the kids had been bullied [what? in school?] or failed to thrive or had crap teachers. HEN would take them in, brace them up, offer tea-and-sympathy, play-dates, workshops and an open heart. But after a year or two, these families would have recovered their equanimity, settled the kids, learned some useful lessons . . . and then left HEN because €25/year [including 4 issues of the Newsletter] is a lot of money if there is only one working parent. So Long and Thanks for All the Rice-Cakes.

Whoa! Where did that come from? That sounds quite cross and judgemental. But it's not really; it's acknowledging that Trans people, The Gays, HomeEddies are not defined by being Other, they are just like other folk except in this one dimension: cross, kind, selfish, generous, lazy, honest, faithless,  thoughtful, avaricious, diverse and, well, wonderful in that diversity.

You can't herd one sheep

We have a farm[let], so we're farrrrmers? That's true, I s'pose, for some definitions of farmer.  The current regime at Caisleán Fáinne-chloch is that we have a minimum number [N=15] of sheep to a) stop ecological succession turning our trad hay meadows into old growth oak forest b) attract a modest subsidy from Bruxelles. Although, we are growing a micro oak+ forest next door. The Dept.Ag. requires that we vacate the 4½ ha. of meadow of sheep (and scythe) from mid-Apr to end-Jun; which is peak growth, flowering and seed-set season. The sheep have ~1 ha. of reg'lar fields on which to vacation during the vacate.

I was tidying up the boundary of that field at the end of March: cutting back the bushes makes it easier to count the sheep - no place to hide. Years ago, before our time, when that boundary separated two active farmsteads, that ditch was cleaned up and topped off with iron stakes, a run of sheep-wire and a single strand of robust barbed wire. There followed ~50 years of neglect: brambles, bushes, and full-on trees have filled out the defenses. Several years ago, a small sceagh Crataegus monogyna gave up under the local weight of wire and sagged over to our side of the boundary. The fence, at a 45° angle, was leaning out over a bit of a drop and the combo seemed to be sheep-proof.

But last Tuesday, I heard an unusual hullabaloo loud enough to penetrate by sofa-sacked 'mind'. Such noises often presage sheep-head-in-wire or similar events: 'tis almost as if it's a cry for help. I put on my boots, seized my shepherd's pliers, and strode purposefully across the lane. Most of the noise came from a lamb on the neighbour's side of the ditch; but the beast gambolled away at my approach and all the adult sheep were grazing unsnagged in the middle of the field. From force of habit I counted them and found 15 . . . +1. We had an extra black-faced ewe who had cleared the fence to see if the grass really was greener on the other side but her lamb at foot had baulked at the jump. I called up m'neighbour to say I had one of his. But we agreed that as the lamb was big enough to eat a bit of grass between milky bars, there was no urgency about repatriating the ewe.

I heaved a big put-upon sigh <harrrrumph> and went back home to assemble the rest of my fence-repair kit: 3 stakes, a handful of staples, chainsaw,  hatchet, iron bar, sledge-hammer. I'd cleared the site and was ready to re-erect the fence when I paused to reflect. It would be the divil-and-all to separate one ewe from her new pals and drive her out the gate, down the lane, along the county road and up the neighbour's drive to home. It might be easier for the two of us (and a good dog, hopefully) to catch the sheep and bundle her all willing over the saggy fence. 

A few hours later, evening-time, I went to look the field the final time and counted 15! Herself had gotten bored with the company and fecked off home under her own steam. At first light, I went back alone to fix the fence:

. . . for some definitions of fixed. That fence had been leaning to our side for many years and disappeared into an unkempt jungle in parts so it required some effort to get the sheep-wire more-or-less upright and supported by the new stakes. The rusty barbed wire wasn't coming vertical to match. But <thinks> if I stand on neighbour's side of the ditch I .might. be able to .lever. the wire over the top of the middle post to tighten the whole MacGyver up. I was an inch from achieving this goal when the wire broke and I pitched back off the ditch onto my arse in the neighbour's field. No amount of PPE can protect from that sort of seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time accident. No, I'm fine, thanks for asking.

Fianna Fail = For Fluoride?

Euradvice from a trusted source I

We have European MEP and local elections coming up this week, so we are going to be visited, even up our remote lane, by candidates wishing (us) to contribute to the democratic process. A tuthree weeks ago The Beloved forw me an e-mail from a friend of a friend of a friend of Aisling FitzGibbon thegirlagainstfluoride exhorting us all to pull sharply on the lapel of anyone who appears on the doorstep looking for votes. As she says on her tin, Aisling wants us to request-and-require our political representatives to ban the involuntary addition of fluoride to our water supply. After compelling my EnvChem students to get their teeth into some research on the issue, I have a position on this which is more or less in agreement with TGAF, although perhaps not so vehement.  Hey Lads: it's not too late to buy the 2014 calendar in which she and her pals get their kit off for the cause.

One of the many things that is annoying about the fluoride issue is the amount of inertia in the system. Fluoride was first introduced into the water supply in Ireland in the 1960s, slavishly following the Brits who can afford to carry out research on matters of bio-medico-enviro importance.  The evidence back then was that fluoride could significantly lower the rate of dental caries, which was a cause of distress, disfigurement and lost work-days.  The case is now altered; the rest of Europe having taken the opposite position.  Tooth decay has gratifyingly declined across the continent and indeed the OECD whether governments fluoridate or don't.  But we're still shelling out €4million each year for something that is wastefully administered, of doubtful dental efficacy and potentially damaging to other aspects of our health. Traditionally in Ireland, we barrack our public representatives about wholly local, NIMBY, selfish issues: pot-holes in the roads, a discretionary medical card for my mum/charlady/trisomy21-neighbour. This year it will be wind-farms and high-tension electricity routes.  I may explain what the issues are later to my Ukrainian and Russian readers but I may not: none of the people I know who are getting all exercised about these power-infrastructural issues have thrown away their kettle, microwave, or electric drill as a way of reconciling supply and demand.

I suggest that anyone coming to the door with the Fáinne of the Republican Party be asked ironically if FF stands for For Fluoride.  I'm sure we can think of similar jibes that will leave candidates from other parties speechless and flustered. Not having television, we have few enough things to amuse us.And it will be a welcome change for the WannaBeRepresentative not to trot out their empty platitudes about filling pot-holes.

On the shoulders of dolphins

 About once a decade, a mother will ask me to advise their teenager about careers in science. I doesn't always turn out as Mam expected because my first and strongest advice is to take a gap year after school. Not a this will look good on my CV year designed by Mammy's life coach, but a real wind in my hair escape from home to try something different preferably in foreign because it's never too late to learn another language. Working in a bar in Madrid; or walking the Pacific Coast Trail; or waking σε μια ελληνική παραλία after too many beers; would all fit the bill. The other point to make is: don't over-think it - if you resolve to make your own luck you'll be successful from any one of a dozen starting points.

About 6 years ago, when I was still working at The Institute, we had a handful of Malaysian students arrive to complete their final year of college education in the Irish Midlands. That would seem very random until you factor in that one of our Suits had been on a Malaysian recruiting junket selling the virtues of the education to kids who could muster €10,000 for international fees. One of them elected elected to do a 4th year research project under my supervision - which meant something something molecular evolution using the tools of bioinformatics. And that is how I met Ilaina Khairulzaman:
Bob: Your appearance is a bit surprising, I've sort of run out of project titles. What are you interested in?
IK: I live near the beach, I like things that swim.
Bob: [Remembers a previous "done" project looking at the inventory of bovine immunity molecules] What about dolphins? They can swim. [my pal Des showed that dolphins are effectively streamlined cows].
IK: I lo♥e dolphins!

The genome of Tursiops truncatus bottlenose dolphin had been recently sequenced; I reckoned, as a minority species, it would be notably under-analysed, so there was surely a project in there, comparing the dolphin's immune repertoire with its nearest rellies. Accordingly, I threw her a manual of binfo techniques, and asked her to go and read what was known about cetacean immunology as the basis of the required literature review . . . Answer: Not very much.

It turned out to be a golden bit of research. Partly because dolphins and other cetaceans a very peculiar reduced instruction set innate immune system with genes for hardly any anti-microbial peptides [prev]. But also because Ilaina was dived in for a total immersion investigation of the peculiarities of dolphin immunology. Nobody had done that before. One of the peculiarities of The Institute is that, in order to graduate, the student must complete a 12 week work-placement, usually in some industrial setting. I arranged for her to spend the following summer working in my old lab . . . doing more of the same. But Ilaina made herself useful in that setting as well as continuing to push at the frontiers of science w.r.t. cetacean immunology. My old / her new boss found some money to keep her on the pay-roll  - and said that with a bit of spit and polish her research would make a very nice MSc thesis. And it was so.

There was a PhD in there too but Ilaina had other ideas. Soon after arriving in Dublin she started to hang out in the haunts of public understanding of science because, although she could do original research fine, she could do passion for science rather better and it was more . . . engaging. Since 2017 she has been working with a UK charity Sense About Science, which seeks to promote evidence-based policy and public engagement with science. They've had a very good year because they are part of the antidote to pernicious nonsense which is circulating about Coronarama. Ilaina is Head of international public engagement, training and marketing. Which is probably bigging her up a bit; but heck, why not? If I have retired to be CSO [Chief Sofa Officer] of the Fáinne-chloch Institiúid Smaointeoireachta Éabhlóideach, then Ilaina can be V.P. IPET&M. So long as nobody doubts her commitment to lighting a fire under the youngsters of Europe so that they park their aspirations to be currency traders or Insta Influencers and see that science is a worthy challenge for a thinking body and can be the most tremendous fun at the same time.

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