Outposts

Q. What would you do if your father, an artist and explorer, returned from Svalbard just a month before your birth smelling of pemmican and bringing a polar bear pelvis found detached on the open ice? 
A. Why, of course, you'd grow up to become an artist and explorer yourself.

Of course it doesn't always work out like that: I didn't join the navy and was never in charge of anything, let alone a crew of 600 and 200m of warship. Travel, of which I have been a keen consumer, has involved far more turning the pages of a book than turning over vegetation to reveal leeches and snakes. The genre was given its modern timbre by a pair of books - Brazilian Adventure and One's Company - published in the 1930s by Peter Fleming: older brother of Ian "007" Fleming. Fleming is the quintessence of British stoic aplomb. Maybe not quite dressing for dinner in the jungle but having an unassailable gift for wry humour and intrepid pushing on because going back is really not quite the thing a chap does. After WWII, this mode of travel was carried forward, with some hilarity by Eric Newby and Redmond O'Halloran; and much later by Bill Bryson.

The picture at the top shows Tim Richards père and others outside their Arctic accommodation which is as big as the garden shed behind our house. That was the pot of nostalgic gold which defined the arc of Dan Richards fils trajectory. The thesis of his book Outposts is that striving for distant and inaccessible places can turn a spot-light on a pilgrim's mettle. Sometimes things only qualify as "fun" in the recall but if you never go near the edge you'll die anyway eventually; perhaps without having lived. The outpost-hopping starts repairing sæluhús with/for Ferðafélag Íslands - the Icelandic equivalent of Scotland's Mountain Bothy Association MBA. Sæluhús translates literally as joy-houses because that's what you feel when one of these primitive shelters is espied from afar through a break in roiling ground-level clouds; the alternative being either a) a bleak night's sleep or b) death by exposure. Later, he persuades a Scots pal to join him on a 150km ramble through the Cairngorms sampling the delights of the MBA's rough hospitality.

In between Dan tunes into Le Phare du Cordouan which features as a refuge in the film Diva. This is not inaccessible to anyone who can muster €44 and 4 hours for the jaunt from the coast of Aquitaine. But getting to the top gives a sense of achievement and allows the mind to reflect on what it must have been like when the West coast of Europe was the end of the world.

It takes a little longer to get to Desolation Peak in Washington state where Beatnik Jack Kerouac spent two month lord of all he surveyed as a fire-watcher in 1956. Kerouac parlayed that brief and somewhat unsatisfying experience into a string of best-selling books which dangled like a carrot in front of the next two generations of wilderness wannabees.  Most of us cannot bear our own company for longer than a weekend and would go bonkers to be exposed to the social deprivation of solitary exfinement for weeks at a stretch. While there Dan gets to hang with Jim Henterley [prev].

After several other contrived adventures, the final chapter takes Dan to Svalbard but not as remote on that remote enough place to match his dad's furthest North at Hotel California. Here, after actually seeing a polar bear with two cubs, in their native habitat he reflects, not without introspection, on humanity's place in Nature. WTF is he doing hauling fat-arsed carbon footprint to the distant Arctic when the creatures he comes to see are done-for because the ice is melting from the collective carbon footprint. It's not "fine" but it is trite to make the connexion between flying and snow-mobiling to view the goddamn bears too direct. Bitcoin and FAANG is nixxing the ice far more effectively than all the destination tourists who have ever been to Svalbard.  And you, yes you me, who are virtuously Friendfaceless and compost the carrot-tops . . . you'll have to give up the chest-freezer, the central-heating and the car before you can chid Dan for going to the World's End.

The adventures are "contrived" because this is Richards' fourth book and his idea needed a deal of research and forward planning to come off. It's an [ad] venture to invest so many weeks at a desk thinking what can be done with a finite budget and working out when and where is possible. And when all the travelling is done, many more weeks are required at the desk putting the pieces into a coherent order. But the jokes are not, cannot be, contrived: they spring spontaneously from the self-deprecating adversity in which The Plan has dumped The Author. I laughed: the baton has been passed from Fleming and Newby to another writer who uses travel as a way to explore what it is to be human and alive.

The Leaper

Like a lot of people, I like a bit of salmon: fresh, smoked, tinned, en croute, in chowder. But I would survive if I never got to eat another morsel. Salmon is served at weddings or as stamp-sized canapés and has the whiff of de lox luxe. Back in the day, salmon was so abundant that indentures for London apprenticeships would limit the amount of salmon the poor young chaps would be obliged to eat in the Summer.  The transition from feast to famine is explored in Salmon: A Fish, the Earth, and the History of Their Common Fate by Mark Kurlansky - my latest audiobook.

A large part of my post-graduate education was the formal study of ecology: the complex tangle of interactions and inter-dependencies in the living world. We talk about food-webs nowadays rather than one-dimensional food chains because, on occasion, top predators are partial to a locust or two, or even a bit of grass. But Kurlansky indicates how little I know about what makes the world pulse or what causes one species to drift off-stage . . . forever. By extension, to the nearest whole number, even professional ecologists know <nothing> about the role played by a given species; let alone what other species impact on its life.

Take logging. Forests served a vital role in the life-cycle of salmon: 

• Their roots retained the soil when it rained in winter, minimizing the fine silt that entered the salmon-run rivers. No silt meant that the up-stream gravel beds were more easily exposed for the female salmon to prepare the redd in which to lay eggs. The fertilised eggs had to sink into the interstices of the gravel or be dinner for birds, frogs, caddis-fly larvae and other fish.
• Fallen trees created pools where salmon could pause for a breather in their foodless fight upstream to spawn
• The trees shaded to river from the beat of Spring sunshine and kept temperatures low. More oxygen dissolves in cold water to give the salmon muscles the oomph to carry on.
• The forest supported a wide variety of insects, the eggs and larvae on which the young hatchlings start to feed to fuel their journey back to the sea 

When the trees are felled out and sent down stream:

• The roots lose hold on the banks, so the river straightens out and runs faster; which is good for fluming the logs downstream. Nevertheless the logs are felled in Winter and typically stockpiled inland until snow-melt gives the water depth and impetus to carry the harvest down stream to the sawmills. Which is just the time the poor salmon are fighting upstream against the traffic. And did I mention sawmillsdust? A highly organic waste-product which is dumped in the river where bacterial degradation sucks all the oxygen out of the river.
• You are likely one of the 40 million people who have bought into the NatGeog wolves change watercourses just-so-story
• Take it with a pinch or three of salt [debunkarama]
• But you get the idea. The great salmon rivers (Columbia, Fraser, Snake) of the Pacific Northwest have been straighten and dredged to facilitate commerce in ships - Lewiston, Idaho is a seaport 500km from salt-water!
• No trees; no shade. No trees; different insects. No trees; no topsoil. It takes a long time to wash the silt down-stream to expose the river gravels again.

Tree-huggers, like you and me might have an unthinking affection for clean blue hydro-power. So does FAANG, they site their server-farms right next door. Once you start using electricity it's hard to cry hold enough. More demand requires more damn dams. For more than 100 years, planning permission for new dams has been contingent on allowing migrating fish to by-pass the obstruction. Part of the budget accordingly went towards incorporating fish-ladders but neither the power-company nor the industries and services there-dependent, in their rapacious souls, gave two toot-toots about salmon. Fish & Wildlife Services, let alone distant [first-nations] fisher-folk had a very small voice and short pockets compared to Big Power.

I could go on [and on]. I could fill in the details. But this map review is not the territory. Ya have to read this book, even if you're not a piscatarian. It's not fun but we really need to reset our base-lines. In Ireland Salmon is Salmo salar [the salmon that leaps] but there's many more species in the Family: broadly Salmo in the Atlantic, Onchorhyncus in the Pacific. Here's a list, not least because the common names are so evocative of A River Runs Through it.

Oncorhynchus apache Arizona trout

Oncorhynchus chrysogaster Golden trout

Oncorhynchus gilae Gila trout

Oncorhynchus kawamurae Kunimasu

Oncorhynchus masou Masu

Oncorhynchus mykiss Rainbow trout

Oncorhynchus tschawytscha King, Chinook

Oncorhynchus nerka Sockeye

Oncorhynchus kisutch Coho

Oncorhynchus keta Chum

Oncorhynchus gorbuscha Pink, humpback

Oncorhynchus clarki Cutthroat

In the Atlantic, it's way more complex with 50-60 recognised Salmo species mostly trout: Salmon salar, of which we feast, and Salmo trutta with brown trout, lake trout and sea trout as sub-species. All delicious, all at risk. 

Prev: Green corrie - anadromous - Bradán an Eolais - Ecocide - Russianside - Smoked - Lox - 

Mental Elf

Someone in Coolock branch library decided to condemn as "Worn Out" Joanna Cannon's 2019 book Breaking & Mending: A junior doctor’s stories of compassion & burnout. A local contact snagged it from the discard box and sent it down country to us. Its publication was subsidized by The Wellcome Collection in London, which also hosts an excerpt of the book if you can't find a copy in the library, like.

Cannon left school at 15 but went back to school and then medical school in her 30s because she wanted to work wit people, especially people troubled in their heads. 

I've set out my stall on how the HSE/NHS treat Mental Health as a poor relation. It's easier to get €millions for Cerebral Palsy or €50,000 for a kidney transplant, than to get sorted for bipolar or OCD. Breaking & Mending is clean and compelling reading but it ain't a textbook and Cannon no longer practices medicine, so some assertions and suggestions are allowed. One is that good mental health depends upon being part of a listening, caring, community. Another is that we are all at different positions on multiple spectra. An effective [listening, caring] community makes allowances for outliers [in whatever direction they outlie]. I never thought I'd say this, but maybe the bullying and slaggin' and compulsory gym of school is better for mental health than slopping about in the shallow warm dopamine soup of TikTok in your exclusive bedroom.

The last 20 years, we have been sold a bill of goods by the gods of FAANG [whc polyprevs] - everyone gets their own customized glove-fit echo-chamber. We no longer go out to the cinema and roar together in a waft of shared pheromones. Netflix distributes movies now. Lockdown kept kids from classrooms - but sucked into their customized devices. As social apes, we [most of us, that is, it being a spectrum] are not designed for being alone-with-a-phone. Maybe that's why youngsters go off the rails|: further from the average on the Axis of anxiety, self-harm, OCD, suicideation, depression, paranoia. Back in the day, the unhinged were recognised and accommodated in the community even as they were teased and bullied.

As if one person's story at the coalface of mental health were not enough, I Borrowboxed Will you Read this Please as an earbook. It is editted by Joanna Cannon and chapters a dozen tales told to a dozen British writers. There was a recruitment process, soliciting "mental health service users" to come forward to tell their stories. The "finalists" [there is a reality TV vibe here] were chosen to illuminate the variety of lives which generally go under our collective radar. Normal (2.3 kids, reasonably happy, car in the drive, holidays planned) families go about their normal lives oblivious of the handwashing or gender dysphoria next door. If you have gambling or bipolar or self-harm in your family that is quite enough without embracing the troubles of Others. But we really should a) care b) allocate resources to the Cinderella of the health services.

For the earbook, a dozen different reading voices have been recruited to the project. One nice conceit is that the income / royalties [if any!] are split 50:50 between each troubled person and the tale bearer.

fitted as standard

The latest fash-gadge the iPhone 12 was launched last month without a wall charger. Apple tried to make it a win for the environment because "everyone has an iPhone charger already"; and excluding that lump from the package will allow more boxes per pallet and that will mean fewer carbon-footprint deliveries to the big box stores. Yer, maybe. It's as likely a bean-counter's way of shaving the margin like the finance whizz who calculated that American Airlines could save $100,000 a year by adding 3 olives to the in-flight salads rather than 4. Indeed it could be both: win-win Apple!

Marketing: what a game! largely without shame. 

When we bought our first desktop computer, an Amstrad PC1512, in the late 1980s it came fitted as standard with two 5¼ inch 360Kb floppy discs: one for MS-Word and the other for the document. And inside the box was 512Kb of RAM. That's kilobytes not megabytes. People with a lot of money could install a 10Mb hard drive. Just to emphasise: there are single pictures on my smart-phone which are 10Mb in size. As well as the box, the monitor, the keyboard and the mouse, the package included a Manual. That was several hundred pages long and tried to cover all the eventualities so that users would have the best experience possible and recommend Amstrad to all their pals. It had a nifty list of keyboard short-cuts which I have been touting ever since. Later versions of our home computer - jakers we must have had a dozen over the last 30 years - didn't bother with a manual. Presumably on the same logic as Apple's, that everyone had one in a drawer somewhere. I know I kept that manual, at least till the end of the century because it was still useful. 5¼in floppies became 3½ stiffies became Zip-drives became CDs became DVDs became USB-keys became The Cloud where your whole life is available to FAANG. I've boxes of these media in the attic with no kit to read them.

Now everything is on-line, of course - except the bits that aren't. It's really difficult to find information about early-to-mid-20thC women in science for example without going back to old fashioned research in the stacks of a really good library.

And hardware moves on in a planet depleting way: how many features on your car are essential to getting you from home to work and the weekly shop. Central locking? Button-windows? Reversing cameras with added beep? All these things come fitted as standard without giving thrifty punters the option of doing things on the cheap. And don't get me started on toasters!

Living remote we have feeble cell-phone coverage [watch me fire out the front door holding the phone aloft to catch the rays and launch an e-mail] so we need a land-line in case Zombie Apocalypse. Successive wireless phone-sets have [taken a lightning-strike and] died and this unfashionable medium now costs €80 to buy from Argos. Last night I was upstairs and three times missed the evening call-in from Cork, so we need an upstairs hand-set. If you have a spare phonio in your attic . . . ?

What a difference an L makes

 I've had occasion to slag Oatly before because it is fabricated by food engineers and is mostly water . . . and increased in price by 50%! in just 4 years. I'm really sorry to feedback that the Oat Drink made by Flahavan's in Kilmacthomas Up the Déise, is thin gruel compared to Oatly; which is holding its own as original and best for the half of Chez Blob which has gone all dairy-free. 

Clearly Flahavan's has not been alone in witnessing the frothy rise of Oatly huge mark-up and decided cor, we could have some of that. and jumping on the me-too gravy-train. A couple of years ago siblings Philip and Rebecca Rayner who run Glebe Farm Foods, in Cambridgeshire, England, launched their own brand PureOaty and prepared a large chest to store the money as it rolled in. Not so fast, said Oatly's fancy lawyers - you are not only coat-tailing on our great idea, you are also infringing our copyrights and trade-marks. The British courts have now found in favour of Oaty the home-grown producers and sent Team OatLy back to Sweden where they started. It doesn't work like that in tech: if the Rayner's were e-selling some product or service on the Internet, it would be absolutely expected that they'd have an exit strategy involving selling out FAANG and retiring early.

Oatly is in the news for another reason this week having aggravated the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) in Britain. Not content with selling £50,000,000 'worth' of water-with-a-hint-of-oats, Oatly decided to grow their market with a series of ads making exaggerated and inaccurate greenwashing claims about their whitewash. tsk, it's enough to turn a bloke to milk.

Coder DoBro

My latest Borrowbox 👂earbook is Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World [Penguin 2019] by Clive Thompson, who writes for the NYT and Wired. It's read rather well by Rene Ruiz and is an interesting dive into TechBro culture and its sense of manifest destiny: the delusion that Silicon Valley is a meritocracy. All those white frat-boys who retired on their money before they turned 30 and believe that the $$$s showered down because of their unique native genius. There is a shiver of truth in that someone had to have the idea (and someone had to implement it in code) which changed how millions of people interact with the world.  But lots of .com millionaires were just adequate coders who were available when required . . . and prepared to pull a few all-nighters to prepare product for launch day.

So now we have a FAANG culture driven by Harvard and Stanford math-geek graduates - and their wannabees - who are complacent in their bubble, intolerant of difference, and profoundly ignorant about the real world. Facial recognition software that is excellent at distinguishing one spotty white face from another but flags all black faces as "gorilla". That sort of thing is a failure of imagination as well as ethics. It all your bros did the vom in Harvard Yard back in the day because they couldn't hold their liquor, then there is nobody to pull you up on the narrowness of your worldview. Foosball in the Google workplace? That seems a peculiarly adolescent perk to have fitted as standard.

Thompson unpicks this sense of entitlement with several compelling counter-examples. The most obvious one is the up-and-down history of women who code. The first ever coder was Ada Lovelace [1815 - 1852] after all and most of the early "computers" were women. The boys thought that the interesting stuff was the well 'ardware - voltmeters, vacuum-tubes, screwdrivers and left all that typing and card-punching to girls which became software. Of course, when it became apparent that coding was mentally challenging, fulfilling, fast-moving and, well, the point of all the hardware then the boys stopped disparaging and started displacing. Even today front-end, user interface is considered soft while back-end, server-side is where the real men hang out. Serial misogyny since 1948. Grace Hopper - Margaret Hamilton - Margaret Dayhoff - etc. etc.

Another nice story is about the foundation, by Rusty Justice and Lynn Parish of Bit Source in Pikeville, in the Kentucky rust belt. This gave the lie to the easy dismissal of [ex-]coal miners as burly, dusty, not-very-bright rednecks. If they were clever problem solvers, after all, they would surely be financial traders in NYC. Not so, coal miners do very little with a pick and shovel anymore. They operate, tune, fix, optimize really expensive and temperamental equipment in adverse circumstances where time is money - miners are problem solvers. Bit Source has been hiring and training them as programmers, architects, designers, managers, support technicians, and SCRUM masters and selling their skills and insights across the US including Wall Street. Once-upon-a-miners get to stay in Appalachia and earn good money solving other people's problems. "I'm the only one I know who speaks hillybilly and javascript" YT5mins.

A couple of times Thompson indicates the wrong-headed folly going to college to read computer science or math or physics in order to ease your path into retire-at-thirty territory. Upskilling in C, Java, Python, CSS, SQL will only give you tactical skills. And that market is systematically undercut by hardworking coders in Bangalore. You'd be better off, and have better fun if you go Arts Block for your undergrad: history; languages; exegesis of scripture or the world literature canon; philosophy [R who?] will teach you cogito ergo sum. It will also expose you to different ways of seeing and force you to acknowledge that there are several ways to skin a cat. You can learn Java later. Liberal arts encourages strategic rather than tactical. And heck, if you don't make a million from thinking big at least you'll have the perspective to accept that pursuit of money is deeply unsatisfying.

Coders: good stuff, recommended.

A rough accounting

The Blob PageView Stats, wee hours 22 Oct 2021 = a week ago:

At the start of El Pandemico, I spent several weeks listening to the news and clipping cases and deaths into an Excel file to plot the rates. Then I stopped abruptly and with prejudice. Recording the number of cases was futility closet unless I/we knew and believed the baseline - how many people were being tested and so had a chance of becoming a documented case.

I was like that with The Blob. An earlier front-end of Blobspot made it easy to find how many people had read my deathless prose and so I reported, for example, the milestone of 100,000 PVs in 2015 about 3 years and 1,000 posts after the Birth of Blob. Then I gave up and with prejudice because of some frankly incredible fluctuations in these readership numbers. If Blogspot couldn't differentiate between human eyes-on-phone from a data scraping FAANG robot, the numbers offered no solace or feedback. Luckily for The Work, I didn't need to be thanked to continue to churn out my daily 700 words. 

On the Write Front, I engineered things so that the millionth word I wrote was Zeugma. But the 2 millionth word passed several months ago without any sort of acknowledgement. According to the hive mind these are the best / most clickable Blobs with their rough PVs

1. Stilt Walking Nonsense 15K a take-down of a meme on the molecular basis of happiness
2. Mary Anning's Dog 4K a passable short bio of the famous fossilista
3. Lack for Nothing 2.5K etymology of Waterford slang
4. GCHQuiz clues and Answers 1K  Ruminations on one 2016 Christmas Quiz
5. Normal accident 1K a near death experience by medical error
6. Castle Rackrent 1K an angry polemic about landlords and homelessness
7. Bellos II 1K a reasonable explanation of how Benford's Law works
8. Da Nags 1K a neat enough essay on the naming of race-horses
9. Baltic Ace 1K an anniversary report of a fatal collision in the North Sea
10. WASH 1K random ruminations on clean water

These are neither better nor worse, by any objective measure, than 10 average posts from The Blob. Note the criterion of average, rather than random. There is a tail of utter bollix in the archive: posts where even I, the author, cannot work out what is going on. So I exclude those but it is a mystery why these posts float to the top. 

It is also a mystery what is happening at the beginning of 2017 and in the Spring of last year. Then, more than a thousand visitors a day were dropping by every day [as illustrated above] Or what happened on 19th October this year when more that 5,000 ppl/robots dropped into Blobland and hopped out again sharpish never to be seen or heard of again? Whatevs! If you're reading this sentence, it means you have stamina; I hope you use any residual energy this day to do your community some service.