pro bono pro vélo

Way hey hey, we have an obesity epidemic on our tums. Something - anything - needs to be done to get people out in the fresh air doing some cardiac exercise. If it doesn't raise your heart-rate it doesn't count;  Grand Theft Auto heart-rate increases don't count either because the tin of beer and the bowl of natchos is to hand - when you're not throwing whores out the door while cornering. And I'm sorry but any exercise that involves a subscription to a gym - that doesn't count either. Unless you're a professional athlete working on the abs or the quads, if you're in the gym you are The Profit for a serial entrepreneur who is making money from a created need. If otoh you walk from France to Santiago and shed 15kg of midriff [that's 30! packs of butter] you get to look like The Prophet [R with string holding up shorts]. Here's a thought - if you want a work out, why not rock up to a pensioner's door and offer to mow the lawn, hoover the living room [under the sofa too ye scabby baastid] or clean out the kitchen cupboards. I did the last chore for my nearly blind, nearly centenarian mother a couple of year ago and it was like a BA in Archaeology - so you might catch some free education as you do good.

A couple of weeks ago the 2Dau of our neighbours was giving a talk at the National Environmental Science Meeting. The event was busy with several parallel sessions but I went along to hear her speak. I was surprised to see both parents waiting for the previous talk to finish so that they could slip in and listen to what the daughter had been up to the last four years. A lot of beetles is the answer to that question. As JBS Haldane [prev] remarked [often] God has an inordinate fondness for beetles. While waiting for kick-off, The Da, Mick, leaned across and asked "What are you doing on Sunday the 28th April?"

And that's how I volunteered to act the maggot marshall on the Blackstairs Cycling Challenge last Sunday morning in the drizzle. Funky soundtrack to the 2016 vidroneo of the event. You may deduce from the sign [L showing the mizzly pizzly weather] that they gave me a billet of some responsibility where the shorter circuits cut back towards Ballinkillen and home while the 'ard chaws and the well 'ard chaws went onwards and up- and down-wards for a full circuit of Mt Leinster. Remarkably for such a physical event the average age seemed to be about 50 with only one chap who loooked young enough to be in college. But it is ever thus - middle aged to elderly folk seem to be the demographic for participatory events that aren't regular team-sports - samba schools; singing workshops; djembe drum circles in my experience are quite thin on The Yoof. I was asked to marshal the turn from 1020-1230 and, being me, I got there way too early to scope the lay-out and set up my stall. As you see [L] with a minimalist briefing by txt, I decided to make my own sign to make things as clear as could be for the cyclists. I was glad I thought to wear two pairs of socks as it was chillin' just chillin' awaiting for The Effectives to pass by; the first footers didn't appear before 1055! Before any of them passed a van pulled up and handed me a hank of tin-foil - "A snack for ye" <pause> "and some sweet things" handing out another roughly parcelled gift before speeding off to the next station of the cross-roads.

The snack: 3 buttered scones; 3 small cupcakes; four slices of lemon cake; two generous slices of tea-brack. The sweet things got back to my kitchen table untouched [R]: they'll last me about 6 months. BOOST+ protein bars is a lot of nonsense though: it's got no place in a single day aerobic event because a) what you need to get through the day is calories rather than the wherewithal to replace or build muscle mass b) there's less than 3g of protein (out of 49g total weight) inside the wrapper. The Ingredients in Cadbury [shameful shift of their factory from Keynesham to Skarbimierz, Poland covered here] blue: MILK, sugar, palm oil, glucose syrup, dextrose, skimmed MILK powder, cocoa butter, cocoa mass, whey powder (from MILK), WHEAT flour (with added calcium, iron, niacin and thiamin), fat-reduced cocoa powder, humectant (glycerol), emulsifiers (E442, E471), flavourings, thickener (dried cellulose), salt, BARLEY malt syrup, raising agents (sodium hydrogen carbonate, tartaric acid) I say it would be more honest to call it a MILK+cocoa bar

Nobody seemed to know how many cyclists were going to turn up - on-the-day registration was allowed - but I'd guess a couple of hundred. The 12km family event is free [to get the toddlers hooked, I guess] but the 50km - 140km are €30/saddle, and the accounts claim that they raise about €15,000 / yr for local and national charities but some of that comes from sponsorship; the food and logistics is supplied by volunteers. There cannot have been €30 x 500 = €15,000 people but there might have been half that number.

And the point is? That 50 people got out of bed in the morning to make is possible for 250 people to get out in the weather and burn off their week's snacks and feel that they'd earned a Sunday dinner. By no means was everybody bean-pole thin with calves like ship's hawsers but everyone seemed to be having a good time - either in packs or pairs or singletons and many of them said "Thank you" as they whished by. One of the nicest things to note was that I could hear each group chattering away before they hove into sight round the bend; that doesn't happen with car rallies - too fast, too noisy . . . and the only people getting exercise are the roustabouts and riggers in a distant oil field.

Marking their cards

I've written about the Curse of Knowledge before. This is Steven Pinker's idea that once we know something, it is impossible to imagine what it was like before we knew it. It is a major hurdle in teaching people who do not share your cultural background and basic knowledge. The problem is that once something becomes familiar to us, it becomes to us obvious to all thinking people.
Part of the disconnect between my students and me is that we are at least one generation apart and that's a good reason for me to retire and make room for a younger woman. I am clocking up an inventory of words that mean nothing to some of our students . . . because they didn't have the handicap of my very expensive education, a long long time ago.

• I've mentioned salient from the last time I taught at The Institute.
• Indelible [pen] foxed one of my students where permanent marker was fine.
• Herbivore. This caused much mirth and hilarity among the student's farrrming peers. Which blew up into a discussion of the difference between silage and slurry. Most towny folks think these things are essentially the same because a) they are found about the farm and b) they smell. I find it odd, in these deodorised times, how kids can't handle aNNy smell without have a fit of the vapours; affecting to swoon; and flapping the hands ineffectually in front of their faces.

QM = Quantitative Methods practical computer class at 0900 on Fridays can be a bit out of my control because my colleague the lecturer will decide to schedule class quizzes at 1000. Last week he was assessing the students' grasp of probability and it turned out that about a third of my chaps had never played cards, let alone poker. So terms like flush, straight, two-pair - all standard grist to the mill of probability - were completely foreign to them. And it seems that they were all collectively intimidated enough not to ask for these terms to be explained. They were even quoting terms with which I was unfamiliar. J Q K A are 'honours' - I grew up calling them face cards. Or is face-card a subset of the honours? To count the number of possible straights A 2 3 4 5; 2 3 4 5 6; 3 4 5 6 7 etc. you have to grasp the peculiar concept that Ace can be both low: A 2 3 4 5 and high: 10 J Q K A.  That's a bit of an ask for someone who has never picked up a deck.

But for parity of esteem, let us be sure that few people over the age of 50 would be able to steer Lara Croft [bloboprev] through a 3-D maze; or get to another level in Candy Crush, let alone be cold-blooded enough to throw a whore out of a speeding car in Grand Theft Auto.

World Book Day

The Pirate's Guide to Landlubbing by Jonny Duddle is a available today for £1 or €1.50 in most of the remaining bookshops in these the islands of the Western European Archipelago WEA.  There are nine (9!) other books on sale at the same price aimed at children from tots to young adults.  I gather that kids enrolled in schools get a voucher generous enough to cover the purchase of one of these books - which is also valid against a more expensive book. Landlubbing sounds like a good read, working on a novel trope that the readers are all pirates and inviting them to look at the bizarre antics of land-lubbers. This has enormous scope for helping 5+ readers to question their assumptions (and the assumptions of their parents and older siblings) about how the world ticks.  Why don't we sleep in hammocks and roll them up every morning to make space for a productive purpose?  Why is the act of sleeping - when after all we should be unconscious - so privileged that a whole floor in most Western houses is devoted to this purpose?

The Day is part of a much wider scheme sponsored by UNESCO and as been celebtated in the UK for the last 20+ years.  Predictably, Prime Minister Tony Blair, hijacked (pirated, if you will) the scheme by promoting it as his own in 1998.  Hmmm, just like he presented the Human Genome as if he and Bill Clinton had made if happen if not actually sequenced all that DNA.  Still, that's what politicians do and I think anything that encourages children to read and respect books is A Good Thing. There is many a home in Ireland where the only book the house is the TV Guide - yes, it is referred to as a book, because it is chunkier than Hello magazine, with which it shares the rack under the television.  It's possibly a lost cause - Grand Theft Auto is much more exciting than anything you'll read on a page - but there is a world that may be nurtured by the inside-the-head of imagination. We need that for our future at least as much as ace reaction times and a facility with electronic hardware.

Years ago, when The Boy would have been reading tPGtL if it had been available, he was in a book shop with his mother; sitting on the floor at the back of the store reading carefully and with attention a pop-up book. When they got ready to leave he asked quietly if they could buy this book. We're rich as Croesus now but were not so back then and The Beloved said that they couldn't afford that book . . . or by implication and tone of voice any book that cost more than $1 or €1.50.  The Boy was used to this and trogged off to replace the book on its shelf.  Just then a young fellow, a student, popped his head over the shelves and said that he would buy the book for The Boy. He knew what it was like to have no money and he knew that books caught some people by the throat.  And it was so.

I think Luke 10:37 is in order here.

Coderdojo

I was in a dreary workshop earlier this week and my eyes drifted off the task and onto a whiteboard saying but one word  Coderdojo (yes, in red) and suddenly I was alert.  Because CoderDojo is the coolest, possibly the most important innovation to come out of Ireland this decade.  The brain-child of James Whelton when he was a schoolkid in Cork and midwifed into a global phenomenon by global phenomenon Bill Liao, CoderDojo is a forum to encourage young people to write computer code rather than coat-tail on the millions of person hours that other people have put into writing computer code for you.  I'm not saying that young fellers aren't "active" as they steer Lara Croft by the hips through a labyrinth filled with Uzi-toting heavies; their brains (and other parts) are engaged in the process with problem-solving, planning, and imagination necessary for many of the games they while away the hours at.  It's not the same as TV, which is utterly passive.  But the quality of the graphics and the complexity of plotting must make an aspirant coder feel like s/he's at the foot of Mount Unsurpassable.  CoderDojo is billed at the antidote to that sense of disempowerment.

CoderDojo the template, the concept, the dream has spread to more than 75 places in Ireland (not to mention Burundi, Slovenia and Sweden) and one of them is The Institute every Saturday morning.

With my background, at various times capable of coding in six different languages, if I failed to volunteer, I'd lose my own face.  So this morning, I made myself a CoderDojolunteer badge and turned up in terminal-suite A313.  As Scratch and Javascript are about as opaque to me as Sanskrit, I didn't think I'd be much help . . . and I wasn't.  But I was able to tell the kids that ctrl-C and ctrl-V beats footling about with a mouse and, that cut&paste&modify is quicker and more reliable than typing similar lines in again and again.  I know now that making a working analogue clock appear on the screen requires typing more than 100 lines of javascript.  That's pretty onerous, given that javascript knows that testobj is different from testObj, but a lad of 12 might not.  But I also know that several of the Codistas had the bottle to keep plugging away for two hours and catch their numerous typos to create something nifty that can be built on.  If you can create a black clock you can surely make a green one or a smaller one; but can you make one that runs backwards?  Or a 24 hour clock?  And if you can build a clock face, you've got the speedometer and the rev counter sorted for your own Grand Theft Auto.  But you've got to slog it out at the beginning.  If you can put the graft in with programming, you suddenly find that you can put the graft in on other difficult or time consuming tasks - learning french irregular verbs, or cleaning your room or telling the school bully that you're not having it any more.

More next week!

Space below my feet

Just before Christmas, I flagged a short biographical film about Gwen Moffat, a pioneering rock-and-ice climber of the post-WWII years. A couple of days later, The Beloved was in the local Post Office which as a side-line runs a micro lending [take one put one] library. She picked up a copy of Moffat's autobiography Space Below My Feet published by Penguin [90p] in 1976. It actually cost Garry Styles, Galway 1978 99p because back then Ireland charged VAT on books but the Brits didn't. Someone later had paid £2.50 and the first 100+ pages have fed a family of book worms. And now I have, for €0, the book for a while. It's an interesting read; a lot more interesting to people who do actually rope up and climb rocks. A lot of names are dropped in the first part of the book when Gwen is out there meeting the best young climbers of her generation.

One of the nothing to see here themes is the frequency with which these mostly young, mostly men drop out of the story . . . from a great height. It's like the Towering Inferno [prev] where the director shovels the extras out of the building to indicate that the stars are really up against it. I have to admire the dedication and question the sanity of people who put themselves literally in the teetering edge at every opportunity.  What is also remarkable is how unjudgmental are the mountain rescue people who go out - usually when / because conditions have turned really bad - to find the benighted . . . or pick up the pieces. It's like the lifeboats; those who get rescued have made a mistake or had tough luck; the rescuers have been there themselves because the sea and the mountains can both rapidly changer to danger and are unforgiving when a crap hand is dealt.

Nevertheless, I think its important that, when they are young and supple, youngsters should go outside and put themselves up against it. In a medium that has real consequences and real dependencies on the actions and reactions of others. Grand Theft Auto VII and Assassins Creed III may tune up your sympathetic nervous system and hone your reflexes but without any consonant muscle activity [thumbs excluded] you may jangle the co-ordinated mechanisms for maintaining physiological homeostasis. Don't do this at home, lads: do it on the fells.

There is a glossary, it is evocative:

• abseil: descend by a doubled rope when climbing impossible / inconvenient
• arête: a narrow ridge
• belay: securing the party by a projections - bollard of rock, piton, etc. - The projection so used
• bivouac: voluntary or involuntary encampment with tents
• brèche: a gap in a ridge
• carabiner: a metal snap-link for attaching rope to pitons, running belays etc.
• chimney: a fissure wide enough to admit a climber's body
• chockstone: a stone wedged in a gully or crack
• col: a pass
• corrie: a high, bowl-shaped valley 
• couloir: a gully
• Creag Dhu: hard-chaws from Scotland
• cwm: a hanging valley
• glissade: descent on snowy slope controlled by ice-axe
• jug[-handle]: a very good hand-hold
• mantelshelf: levering up onto a ledge solely by arms and shoulder. The ledge in question
• moraine: clatter of stones and debris brought down by a glacier
• Munro: a Scots mountain [N = 282] higher that 3,000 feet  
• pitch: a section of climb between belays
• piton, peg;  metal spike with a ring in the head driven into a crack to hold a rope or belay a climber
• roches moutnonnées: rounded, glacier smoothed rocks
• run-out: the amount of rope run out for a pitch
• verglas: veneer of black ice on rock - slippy

Are we nearly grown yet?

Last week's Nature has a series of articles on adolescence, that ghastly period between carefree and careworn that used to coincide with the teenage thirteen-nineteen years but now starts earlier and ends later.  I was chatting to a colleague at work a couple of years ago: her son, aged 24, a student, living at home; had borrowed The Mammy's car, driven it and some pals to Kerry and back and returned it with an empty gas-tank. It was only the empty gas-tank that really riled her up; the other dependencies seemed quite natural. By contrast, my aged father-in-law Pat the Salt ran away to sea a few weeks after he turned 14, leaving a note for his mother at the shipping office. 1939 was not the safest year to join the merchant marine but it was quite exciting, and occasionally very wet, for a young chap. A lot more exciting that Grand Theft Auto, that's for sure.

The conservative position is that bringing forward the start of puberty (by a whole year in Denmark between 1991 and 2016) is driven by calories. In the 1980s, Rose Frisch floated the association between fat and fertility as causative. Her hypothesis was that girls were only ready for reproductive activity if they had the spare calories to support a 40 week drain on resources during pregnancy. The developing body assessed 'spare calories' in presence of sufficient sub-cutaneous fat: if there was enough, then menarche was triggered. Frisch's work has been extended and critiqued since then, but it is epidemiologically true that fat girls start their periods earlier than their skinnier class-mates. It's not the same for boys and may even by opposite. But then, a young chap's contribution to the next generation need only be five minutes and a tea-spoonful. A different take on the causes of the earlier and earlier start of puberty is to lay part of the blame on BPA - the plasticiser and steroid hormone analogue that is omnipresent in babies bottles and elsewhere in the commercial food delivery world.

In the aftermath of WWII, there was concern that British children were not getting enough calories and that this might affect how they grew.  If the growth of children was stunted, they wouldn't be much use in the factories of manufacturing economy. A paediatrician James Tanner was tasked with measuring children in a longitudinal study as they grew up. That was useful and one of the outputs of the study were Tanner Charts of normal development. Doctors and parents thereafter could see whether a child was in the normal range of height and weight for their age. There is a bit of skepticism about with the kids who were measured were 'normal' themselves because most were recruits from the National Children's home in Harpenden and may have been calorie-handicapped quite apart from what other traumas separated them from their parents. But while the team was measuring height and weight, they also took the opportunity to measure testis size, sub-cutaneous fat, breast development. They also had regular X-rays to check for bone development (and TB) and dental exams to check for caries. It also seemed important to take photographs of their scrawny and stark naked frames - front and back. Those pictures are in an archive somewhere. None of this would pass modern standards to informed consent, so one could argue that this fundamental data of the speed and order in which things happened during puberty was providentially gathered in a nick of time.

The Nature article makes an attempt to tease out whether adolescent behaviour is triggered by the hormones, or whether the 'child' steps up to the plate of autonomy and responsibility because they are treated like an initiate. Me, I think its a raw deal altogether to wrench an innocent 9 year old [or younger] girl away from playing with dolls and making cup-cakes to start on the whole spots and tufts and boobs gig. But heck, what do I know?

the trumpets shall sound

Let's start off with some Handel, 9 minutes of the trumpets shall sound from the Messiah: play that in the background while you read this. Handel is the past, a deep past where there was no effective health care, huge disparity in wealth, fearsome childhood mortality . . . and sublime music. In The West we have addressed some of these horrors but largely at the price of despoiling the planet to create an illusion of wealth-in-stuff. Unbelievable stuff which I've been addressing on The Blob:

• a red toaster that costs as much as a car; 
• medicine that costs as much as a house;
• water sold as butter
• a democracy sold out to "free" water

A couple of years before I was born Issac Azimov created the character of Hari Seldon, a psychohistorian with a walk-on part in his Foundation trilogy. Hari Seldon was able to analyse the collective personalities and actions of a mass of people and use these data to predict the future. The future is motoring along to become the present in the predicted manner until an outsider called The Mule, a mutant mentalic, appears who is so different that the algorithm no longer works and chaos threatens. It all works out for the Galaxy in the end but then it is fiction.

I mentioned the red toaster above and originally last July when it came crashing through my e-window trying to sell itself because I'd made an idle enquiry about it on Google.  It was a rather crude play, which served to convince me that Big Data wasn't so scary after all. If a ludicrous kitchen accessory was the worst that electronic capitalism was going to lob in my direction, then I could swat it away and move on with my integrity intact. I was naive because The Man knows more about me than I am comfortable knowing about myself. I heard about this because my pal Rissoles pointed me at an article by a couple of Swiss journalists, Hannes Grassegger and Mikael Krogerus, about Big Data getting mobilised with a degree of sophistication. The psycho-number-crunchers are not responding to my poorly articulated desires with a flying toaster but with targeted, personalised messages [social media is so addictive and so real and so self-affirming] about what to do at the next election. Not so much "these aren't the droids you're looking for" as these are the candidates you're voting for.

I'm different from you, but I recognise myself in some people more than others and I often say things like: Jim is just like Ted (and I distrust them both). The Big Data psychometricians [key PNAS paper] can now simplify me to a highly predictable dot in 5 dimensional hyperspace using the OCEAN model. OCEAN is an acronym:

• Openness (how open are you to new experiences?)
• Conscientiousness (how much of a perfectionist are you?)
• Extroversion (how sociable are you?)
• Agreeableness (how considerate and cooperative are you?)
• Neuroticism (how sensitive/vulnerable are you?)

You dear reader will be another dot, reasonably close to me because you are reading my guff instead of playing Grand Theft Auto, running in the dark, or polishing your Nazi memorabilia. To the extent that we have a life on-line, The Man knows what our coordinates are and knows how to shift our equilibrium to behave in ways that suit his agenda. Apparently, these goons were employed to good effect by a) Nigel Farrage b) Ted Cruz and c) Donald Trump. Some people have already made a lot of money out of this. "For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind" Hosea 8:7. That seems suitably apocalyptic.

Aw shucks, the future is so bleak let's go back and listen to Pachelbel while we may.

Trading Places

I'm a navy brat, who shifted homes about every 18 months until my father retired when I was 13. I was born less than 10 years after the end of WWII during which both my parents wore uniform and spend some time at the Front Lines. You really wouldn't have known it, though, because they talked very little about the most exciting (and stressful) time of their lives. I have, therefore, some interest in trying to figure out why people do madly dangerous things when duty and training calls upon them to do so. I am also a utilitarian and a scientist so I have an interest if what I may call The Calculus of Death. My father served the first few years of the War in Motor Torpedo Boats MTBs in charge of a lethal weapon operated by a crew of 12. At some level, my father must have carried out risk assessments on a daily basis: was it worth compromising his crew and their expensive equipment to achieve such an outcome with such a probability of success. In contrast to Grand Theft Auto, a miscalculation could leave real blood on the deck of the cockpit. The title of a famous set of memoirs about US Navy MTBs was entitled They Were Expendable.  My father appreciated that, in certain circumstances, he and his ship were also expendable.

Because of this interest in discovering what makes warriors tick, I found myself watching TEDx talk by Colonel Mike Drowley [L in combat fatigues] There Are Some Fates Worse Than Death.  Drowley talks about shoot-'em-up missions in Iraq and Afgo where there was real incommming from unfriendly forces. In one example, on the very edge of the decision threshold he aborts a rescue mission because he sees that he is risking the lives of 40 Americans to save . . . two. A short while later, he realises that he is over-emphasising the Mission probably at the expense of the Missioneers; and resolves to spend more time thinking about and accommodating the unsexy, boring,  infrastructural aspects of his command. The flight-mechanics, and the rest of the base staff, have to be looked after in the same way as parents have to look after their own oxygen masks before they sort out their children's. Against all his Action Man heroic instincts, Drowley was able to Just Say No.

I was writing about the Nisei, second generation Japanese Americans, the other day in the context of Pete Seeger getting indignant that US Citizens were being sent to internment camps because of their Japanese ancestry. No such ideas were bandied about concerning citizens whose parents came from Italy, Austria or Germany. Despite having their whole community dispossessed, a group of Nisei volunteers were formed into the Japanese-American Combat Team including the 442d Infantry Battalion:  all the squaddies were Nisei from Hawaii and the West Coast but the officers were all of European extraction. This was the same as for African Americans who fought and bled and died for America in black regiments. The 442d became the most decorated unit in the US Army fighting with conspicuous bravery from the beaches of Anzio up through Italy and France. They famously went forward to rescue the Lost Battalion of the Texas National Guard who had been too ambitious in their advance and were surrounded by the German army.   25 minute documentary on the 442d. The 442d sustained far more casualties than their Texan compatriots and the calculus of war was wonk in ordering the relief operation to go forward. This assessment is obvious to us now but, in 1944, the Nisei were not weighed as valuable as white soldiers. They died for their country anyway.

What is the Magyar for woodpecker?

When we came back to Ireland in 1990, we lived in a rented farmhouse out by Dublin Airport, maybe 12km N of O'Connell Bridge. My landlord mentioned that he had done his homework at the kitchen table by paraffin lamp until, when he turned 16, rural electrification f i n a l l y rolled out to his parish and he could see what he was doing after dark. I never got a date on that or indeed Paddy's DoB, but early-50s seemed correct. The Shannon Scheme went live in 1929. Our house was built in 1941 probably w/o the 'lectric. 

A few days ago, through the drizzle, I heard a car-door slam and went to chekkitout: because we were expecting UPS and they needed to turn where that car was probably parked. It was a white van and the driver was thrashing about in our shrubberies on the other side of the lane!?! Turns out he was a contractor for ESB networks checking to see if the electricity poles hereabouts were fit for purpose. I told him I knew that 'our' poles had been installed in Spring 1997. That's information but only a proxy for whether the poles were fit for purpose. And, he added, you're wrong: this pole was erected in 1956 ['56 as circled R]. I had to defer to his domain of knowledge and admit that I had been incorrect about the number of new utility poles (N = 1 [✓]) we got in 1997. And indeed, now I had the correct search-image, I walked downhill to other pole and found a similar tinplate label with "1997" on it.

Me, as a Network Know-nothing, might have put more credence in another sign [L] on the first pole saying "COBRA 1978". Both poles have QR-codes that will contain a lot more information about signage, location, quality, provenance, age; but I don't read QR. We continued to chat in the not-quite-drizzle. Transpired that this Effective had been born and brought up in Hungary but was here because the work was here. Go! Stay The New Irish. Hours of electronic training playing Grand Theft Auto really don't equip the Youth of Today to stand a ladder up against a pole in the rain. It was just as well that we'd had Glavey Tree Experts in July to thin out the jungle and trim some, fell some, trees around that electric pole. According to my new Magyar pal, the best tool for assessing the utility of utility poles is a hammer. Like a um woodpecker! The first few tonks by a woodpecker can assess whether wood is hollow enough to support insects enough to make this tree worth the effort. Apparently ESB networks had, several years ago, acquired a ship-load of Swedish poles which below standard wrt core integrity as per contract and these had attracted A Lot of woodpeckers in a futile hunt for insects.

I've noted before that hitting things with a hammer can yield key information for stone-masons. 

And farmers can get compensated for having ESB poles on their land. Who knew? 

And I'm sure you're hopping about for the answer to 
Q. What is the Magyar for woodpecker?
A. Our newly re-native woodpecker is Dendrocopos major = the great spotted woodpecker. In Hungary they call it nagy [big] fakopáncs or harkály. My Dec'25 conversation about birds was a lot easier [not to say charged with electricity] than one I had [Garrulus glandarius = Vlaamse gaai = Jay] with a monoglot farmer from Gelderland in 1975.

Lyrical on pain

Let's hear it for drugs?  Young chap I know is a champion mountain-biker and trail-rider.  He's a champ because he can drive that mother down the side of a mountain and not come off . . . often. The problem is that, when he does leave the saddle, he's travelling fast and there are no fall-mats or safety-nets. I'm not sure how fair it is but his pals, many of whom don't have the bottle to get off the sofa, let alone zzzing downhill on wheels, call him biscuit-bones.  It may be just that he puts his body to the limits so often that he sustains broken bones OR there might be something in his make-up to suggest that he'd be better off playing Grand Theft Auto like his tubby and unhealthy pals. Whatever and, like, who knows?  ANNyway a few weeks ago, he was hurtling down a Welsh mountain and mis-judged a turn. He came off and so did the skin of his arm from wrist to shoulder and he broke his leg . . . again.  He's been in and out of hospital since then getting pins put in, pins took out and having his horrible arm-wound debrided.

If it was 200 years ago, he would have been given a leather quid to chew on as the surgeon worked away down there - no point in cracking a tooth as you gritted them in pain. Nowadays they do all the invasive stuff under full anesthetic but you still have to deal with the ragged nerve endings when you wake up and aspirin doesn't seem to work. One of his doctors wrote a script for Lyrica aka Pregabalin which is a bit of a cure-all when it comes to tricking the nervous system into behaving differently.

Pregabalin is an analog for gamma-amino-butyric acid GABA and it was discovered  in 1990 at Chicago's Northwestern U by Richard Silverman and Ryszard Andruszkiewicz. They were looking for molecules that resembled GABA which is known as an inhibitory neurotransmitter. Inhibitory NTs are one way in which you can maintain homeostasis in the nervous system. If you have excitatory NTs as well, and we do [glutamate, serotonin, adrenalin] you can imagine, and we apparently have, a system that pulses out teeny amounts of each so that everything is held in check.  It's like having accelerator and brakes on your car. Pregabalin works in a round-about way: because it looks like GABA it stimulates a protein called glutamate decarboxylase which converts glutamate to GABA by removing a CO₂. Glutamate? Isn't that one of the excitatory NTs? Yup: we convert one NT to another of wholly opposite effect by a simple chemical modification. I tell ya, you couldn't design this better if you were god almighty.

So much, so normal. What happens when this delicately balanced system goes wonk? One case of this is epilepsy where neurotransmitters go on a drunken spree and cannot be stopped because they've thrown the brake-pedal out the window. The result is a positive feedback loop that culminates in seizures which are distressing and dangerous. That's what Silverman was working towards: a drug which would gee up the GABA to damp down this run-away process. After the requisite decade+ developing and characterising the drug, testing it on mice, checking for adverse side-effects, administering it to people under carefully controlled conditions and checking back always to ensure that it was safe and efficacious, it was brought to market after approval from the FDA in 2005.  It will have cost something North of 1 billion US$ to carry out all this research and testing, and Pfizer, the multinational MegaPharma which owns the marketing rights, wants to claw those costs back for its shareholders. The current stock price is $30.

Did someone say side-effects: they are many and various: blurred vision, diplopia, increased appetite and subsequent weight gain, euphoria, confusion, vivid dreams, changes in libido (increase or decrease), irritability, ataxia, attention changes, feeling high, abnormal coordination, memory impairment, tremors, dysarthria, parasthesia, vertigo, dry mouth and constipation, vomiting and flatulence, erectile dysfunction, fatigue, peripheral edema, drunkenness, abnormal walking, asthenia, nasopharyngitis, increased creatine kinase level; less common: depression, lethargy, agitation, anorgasmia, hallucinations, myoclonus, hypoaesthesia, hyperaesthesia, tachycardia, excessive salivation, hypoglycaemia, sweating, flushing, rash, muscle cramp, myalgia, arthralgia, urinary incontinence, dysuria, thrombocytopenia, kidney stones. Jakers, I can't spell some of those conditions but I'm sure I have them all . . . and I'm not even taking the drug.  It gives a clue about how systemic neurotransmitters are: there are only a few handfuls of them and they manage the 100 trillion cells, 50 organs and 12 systems [circulatory, endocrine, digestive etc.] that is the miracle of a walking, talking, thinking and urinating human being.

In contrast to Morquio Syndrome's drug of choice Vimizim [prev], there are thousands of epileptics across the Western World, so the doses can be sold cheap -  about $4 / 150mg capsule - because they are sold in bulk. Not cheap like aspirin but cheaper than Vimizim which comes in at €400,000/yr. 9 million people in the US have been prescribed Lyrica over the last 10 years. That might have been enough for an olde style druggist turning an honest penny by pedalling cures. But that's not how capitalism works: the drug company sends out reps to pharmacies, hospitals and doctors and these chaps (mostly chaps, still, I think) get paid by results. And the VP of the marketing division of MegaCorp also gets his Xmas bonus depending on how much stock they have shifted that year.

In 2009, Pfizer and its subsidiaries agreed to pay a $2.3 billion fine for promoting Lyrica and 3 other top-performing Pfizer drugs as if they were suitable for conditions other than those approved by the FDA. As I say above, the FDA weighs the benefits of a new drug against the potential side-effects and comes to a balance-of-probabilities utilitarian assessment about the use of This drug for That condition. The punter is assumed to be willing to suffer pain and feeling crap and even risk death if the drug will avert a death sentence from cancer or infection.  It is  neither appropriate nor ethical to prescribe /market that same drug for an ear-ache. That is all quite apart from the fact that someone is paying for the drugs. Part of the fine went to the administrators of Medicare/Medicaid which had, the case claimed, been fraudulently persuaded to pay for these drugs when they were not FDA approved or appropriate. $2.3billion is a lot of sugar but to put it in context, Pfizer acquired 1) Warner-Lambert for $90bn in 2000 2) Pharmacia for $60bn in 2003 3) Wyeth for $68bn earlier in 2009.  Three years later, Pfizer was fined a further $43 million [chicken feed these mere millions] for persisting in pushing Lyrica for chronic pain, post-operative ditto and migraines. Tellingly, the Pfizer sales-force was instructed to trash-talk Pfizer's own earlier pain-killer Neurontin to promote Lyrica. Ahem: Neurontin was then off-patent and so Pfizer was also bad-mouthing the yellow-pack generic equivalents such as gabapentin because the profit margin was much higher for Lyrica which is still patent-protected until 2018.

Well, is Lyrica appropriate = safe-and-effective for a teenager who has come off his bike . . . again??  That's what his Mum asked me a tuthree days ago. She had seen a lot of adverse comment: kills brain synapses dead etc. and wanted some guidance a) about Lyrica for her boy b) generally about authoritative /objective sources for truth-in-medicine. I suggested the Cochrane Index which has on The Blob dissed Tamiflu and paracetamol but given cautious appro to Feverfew. Cochrane says that 90% of people with fibromyalgia show no benefit from Lyrica. Cochrane is in the business of reviewing all the evidence on a particular topic, doing the stats and coming up with an executive summary. I also suggested that a scan of the original scientific literature at Pubmed might be helpful. But scientists write for each other not for mothers and lots of the papers in Pubmed are hidden behind a pay-wall.  I also caution you to check out the affiliations of the authors of scientific studies: this paper, which is positive about Lyrica, is written by people on the Pfizer payroll.

Down in the small print of the Pfizer fraud story is the information that the investigation was triggered by a whistleblower called John Kopchinski, a Pfizer drug rep who baulked at off-label selling of some of the drugs in his portfolio. He grassed his employer up to The Feds and spent several years testifying but was awarded a $50 million share of the pay-out. That is way more than he'd earn in a working lifetime as a sales rep.  You can see how that might act to help recruitment in the industry: work for a few years hawking drugs and then !Payola! and retirement. Not much different from the Northwick Park story.  That was when 6 young men blew up [cytokine storm] in a drug trial and hundreds of other young men signed up for future drug trials . . . because it transpired that trialees got paid a few hundred £££s for participating.  There is a certain class of 20 y.o. chaps who will risk their health, happiness and immortal soul for £800 and all the food you can eat. There are others who prefer mountain biking.

ZX81 1981

5th March 1981 was the launch date for the ZX81 a super-cheap, super light-weight and super-empowering personal computer. It replaced, superseded and improved on the ZX80. That prototype was based on a Z80 chip - hence the name of the product with a techie X to make it geek-seXy: think Fireball XL5, X-files, The X from Outer Space, xc. xc. Super-cheap meant that it had to be clever, designed for slim rather than chic, it looked and felt cheap. In a way cheap was part of the message, it not only looked cheap, it WAS cheap;

• Sinclair ZX81 $100; 
• Apple II plus $1300; 
• Atari 800 $900; 
• Commodore PET $1000; 
• Dragon 32 $175; 
• IBM PC $1265

It could shave costs because it used all sorts of neat appropriate-technology solutions to the problems of carrying no fat. It was just a processor and a barely functional touch-sensitive keyboard. You were expected to use your TV to see what you were typing and a cassette recorder to store what you had typed. Sinclair, the designing company reasoned that if you could afford £/$100 for the computer, you already had a telly and cassette machine. One of the amazing information-rich efficiencies was that each key had 5 actions [L] rather than just upper and lower case. Indeed, there was NO lower case but you got Trig-functions, graphics pixels, BASIC commands, I/O instructions instead. Once you got the hang of it, you could hammer out code really fast. And for the first months after launch, that's what you had to do, because there was no software that you didn't input yourself.

There was computer journalism at the time, but the ZX81 boom carried new magazines, like Sinclair User [L] aka SU forward. There was quite a reality gap between the exciting cover-art and what computer graphics were capable of delivering back then. In a sense that was good because it encouraged youngsters to fill in the gaps with their imagination. Rather than, as now, leaving nothing to the imagination as you pant after Lara Croft or kill pedestrians in Grand Theft Auto. In a typical issue of SU, you'd get pages of BASIC code that you'd spend the weekend typing in and hope that didn't transpose any lines or forget any commas. In 1983, some genius created a working chess program in 672 bytes. The graphic of the cover here [L] is 16x byte-bigger! If you want a gripping read, you should buy [£0.01!]  Backroom Boys by Francis Spufford [brief-prev] and read the chapter A Universe in a Bottle about the development of the space-trading game Elite. You can google-books a preview. Those boys could code. It is slightly iropnic that, 30 years on, we had to start coderdojos across the land to encourage youngsters to write their own, initially clunky, code rather than sitting all passive and buying their thrills.

I've written before about how The Beloved was there at ground level. Hired as a secretary, it turned out that, despite a formal Irish Times Secretarial Course diploma, she couldn't type fast enough or clean enough. But she could do whatever else needed doing round the office and the company was in the process of going viral, eventually shipping more than 1,500,000 units. She grew with the company - it didn't hurt that both Clive Sinclair, the boss, and The Beloved, the help, loved the poetry of WB Yeats, She blagged herself a transfer to Boston when they opened an office there to service the US market and left the company 3 years after she started as Customer Service North America. The fact that I was then living in a basement as bone-poor graduate student had something to do with the transatlantic shift. On the back of her salary, we were able to move into a semi-basement apartment (a step up!) in Brighton, MA conveniently close to BU and the Sinclair regional office, near Mass General Hospital, downtown. Plenty of reasons to be grateful to the ZX81.

The Elephant

I have a friend who lives in deepest rural Ireland but chooses to get all his News through Al-Jazeera rather than trusting the standard TLAs in the field ABC BBC CBC CBS Fox NBC RTE. I suffer the News on RTE [which is disproportionately about car-crashes and empty promises from politicians] rather than seek it out and I'm not going to make an extra effort to get the Qatari view on whatever-you're-having-yourself. Nevertheless, I do occasionally get to view a story through Al-Jaz such as the recent collision of USS John S Cain, an invisible USN destroyer, and an oil tanker, in the super busy waters off Singapore.

The side bar took me to a cartoon summary of a 2015 interview of Sir Ken Robinson. I've had occasion to mention Ken Robinson, the radical education guru on The Blob before. And if you haven't seen his laconic and inspiring TED talks, then you should stop reading this Now and go forthwith there [2007] and "as I was saying" [2010] and there-abouts [2013].  I could leave it there . . . if I had confidence that you'd spend the next 90 minutes watching yer man Robinson.

Although I've seen those vids multiple times, I didn't realise that Robinson contracted polio aged 4 [in 1954 the year I was born], when polio was scything through the Western World. That bright fast and nimble small child wasn't going to play soccer for his local club after that; so he had to walk (eventually) a different path. In the Al-Jaz piece he talks about interviewing fellow Liverpudlian Paul McCartney which was recorded in his book The Elephant.  It instantly brought to mind the old parable of the blind-men and the elephant: who variously think the beast is a wall, a fan, a snake, a rope, a tree-trunk, and a spear. All on a superficial assessment with less-than-perfect instruments.

I thought that The Elephant was a great name for a book about shoe-horning people into bins which only partially describe them. Like all of Robinson's pals in the School for the Physically Handicapped who were generally dismissed as, well, handicapped. Whereas young Ken recognised them as funny or kind or good at maths: he wasn't going to tolerate them or himself being written off as that pore crippled chil'. But it turned out that I had misheard. His 2010 book, which inter alia  asks McCartney how he got where he finished up, is called The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything; which you can get quite cheap on Amazon.

Robinson's fundamental problem with education is that every child, every person, is different but we spend a huge proportion of the budget for schools dulling down the differences to generate a more uniform product. The minor problem is that we only value what we can measure and so another large chunk of money goes towards devising, administering and collating tests of achievement, especially in the 3 Rs: reading, writing and 'rithmetic.  Being great at soccer or Grand Theft Auto or cutting hair or soldering electronics or making cup-cakes or fixing lawn-mowers is, if not utterly irrelevant in school, of marginal importance at best. That's a shame and failing to nurture these handy talents costs the state fantastical amounts of money later in missed opportunities and remedial work with the disaffected. The unwillingness to consider a revolution in education is the elephant in the room. There, I knew there was an elephant hereabouts - I could smell his greyness.

Boys love a bang

I was idly trolling through Wikipedia's Did you know . . .  section the other day and saw an article on sundial cannon. Knowing precisely when noon is becomes really important in oceanic navigation as Dava Sobel explained in her book Longitude [prev]. Navigating officers use their sextants to determine the moment when the sun stops climbing higher in the sky and starts its afternoon descent to the horizon. If you know when Noon was (or will be) that day back home in Greenwich (because you've got a super accurate, motion-proof, mechanical clock on board) it is a simple matter - and a lot of logarithms - of using spherical geometry to calculate how far you are across the face of the globe . . . and how close you are to a dangerous lee-shore. The lives of pre-GPS sailors depended upon this knowledge. Landlubbers also like to know when noon, and dinner-time, is, especially if they don't have a bio-clock like my father's. He needed his lunch at 1 o'clock +/- 2 minutes, or his sky fell.

Wouldn't it be nice, some mechanic asked, if there was an automatic means of sounding the clap of noon when I was busy about my quotidian tasks outside? And the sundial cannon was born [R elaborate French model from 1800]. First catch your cannon, of course, but thereafter the principles are straight-forward.  You need also a magnifying lens to focus the sunbeams so that they pass over the touch-hole of the cannon and . . . BOOM! The sunlight is focused on an arc which moves across the apparatus, so you want to ensure that the supports are made of brass and stone and nothing flammable. Here's one working. If you're a boy you'll be off for a while down the you-tube side bar watching chaps firing golf-falls across car-parks and otherwise making a lot of noise. When I was a kid we had a teeny-tiny spring loaded cannon that could fire match-sticks at ranks of enemy toy-soldiers. That was a less mind-corrupting sport than say Grand Theft Auto which engages modern boys with the same murderous intent. A palomino was disconcerted to hear one of her barely teenaged sons explaining to a pal "Naa, you have to throw the whore out of the car-door as you go round the corner . . .".

A sun-dial lens can also be used to tally up the hours of direct sun-light in the day if you have the focused light travel over a sheet of paper. If it's cloudy the paper will be white, if sunny it will be charred. If properly calibrated, you can add up when and for how long the sun shone.  It's a bit like a barograph which instrument causes an ink-filled pen to move up and down according to the air-pressure. Needless to say, my nautical father had one of these and one his rituals was periodically to change the paper on the clock-work recording drum. Blimey, I've made the Old man out to be thoroughly OCD but I don't this is true; nor did he dress us up in sailor suits and pipe him aboard with a bo'sun's whistle when he came home.

Fountain pen

Came across a nostalgia piece on MeFi last week about peculiar reverence for a particular brand of ink pen - the Parker "51". They were priced at the cusp of 'status symbol expensive' and 'unaffordable for folks on a salary' - maybe 10 hours work for a middle manager. That artful marketing decision allowed the Park Pen Company to shift about 20 million 51s between the end of WWII and 1972. 20 million!! At a time when ball-point pens were being given away. When I was at school in the 1960s, I owned a fountain-pen - we all owned fountain pens; I suspect that they were in some sense compulsory because only a cad-and-a-bounder would use a ball-point pen. Actually, I owned a succession of fountain-pens because a) I was 11 and treated them casually b) they were the kind of thing that Uncle Jim would give a chap for his birthday or if he won a Latin composition prize. Parker pens had a distinctive arrow-shaped clip on the cap.  A fellow could casually store his Parker in the outer pocket of his jacket and everyone would know he was a Parker chap. Not all Parkers were as pricey as the "51" of course, the company were anxious to sell to poorer people also. But that's like the fact that we all need shoes: €18 a pair in Aldi or Penneys or €5000 a pair made by Lobb's of London. The other chaps in the office will note the difference and apply the appropriate label. Not me, I never check people's shoes - I'm too busy looking for small change.

The basic technology for a pen is the same as it was when Hugo Pictor was scribing his copy of St Jerome's commentary 1000 years ago. A stiffly flexible material (goose feather, sheet metal) is sharpened to a point and split down the middle, so that the ink can run down the slot by capillary action. Hugo would dip his pen in a bottle of ink to fill the hollow shaft of the feather and write till the pen ran dry - then dip, repeat. Fountain pens are higher tech but same principal: the 'fountain' is a reservoir of ink that can be filled - less often than dip dip dip in the 11thC scriptorium. All the marketing crap that we schoolboys, at some level, bought into (18 caret gold or ruthenium plated nibs; heck there was a brand of pen called Platinum) was just flim-flam and cake decoration. For me and my pal Gibbo the key attribute for a fountain pen was the mechanism by which t'bugger was filled. Best was if it was filled by using a little lever that evacuated the air from a rubber reservoir; because it was rubber the reservoir would suck ink in when the lever was released. Gibbo and I were not the first to realise that if you used the lever when the pen was full, then ink would blurf out of the nib and spill on the floor, a white shirt, or your Latin homework.

But I think we were original in drawing an elaborate map of the Kriegsmarine submarine pens at St Nazaire on a piece of paper and seeing how accurately we could ink-bomb them from a great height (about 3m if we took turns standing on a desk). As with painting and decorating, a large part of the process was in the preparation, and final success depended on hand-eye coordination. For the young-of-today <harrumph> the prep is 'borrowing' your father's credit card to order Grand Theft Auto [multi harrrumphy prev] from Amazon.

I R Borrred

 I'm an institutional[ized] kinda guy; that's why I've been happy working at The Institute these last several year. The day, the week, the term, the timetable is so busy that I have little time to be idle at my desk waiting for the next event. I have been in other academic posts where I was expected to adult-up and be responsible for running my own day, week, term, timetable. I didn't cope well and it was the least productive time for which I got paid a salary. In the late 1990s, I told one of my colleagues that I was a really good post-doc[toral] researcher: I was hard-working, dogged, not stupid, dependable and painstaking but I wasn't interested / capable of running my own lab. Part of that was a reluctance to be responsible for the health, welfare and success of people under my care.

Interestingly, that same colleague believed my patter and a tuthree years later hired me to work in his new edge-cutting multi-million €$£ research lab. The was he explained this eccentric decision was that he wanted at least one known quant in the multinational mix whom he hired to push the frontiers of science. In more or less the same month [the Celtic Tiger was starting to leak science-bucks], I was hired to work in another lab to supervise a post-graduate student whose project was at the interface between computational biology [me] and innate immunity [The Gaffer]. In the hiring interview she said that the student welfare/thriving buck stopped with her - she de Gaffer - and that I should just concentrate on wrastling the genomes into submission. Working in two different fields in two different labs at the same time was - tiring, energising, creative and interesting. There was a surprising amount of cross-over and complementarity.

My correspondent G sent me an article from the New Yorker about the science of boredom. I found it difficult to relate to because I'm never rarely bored . . . nowadays. But I guess I'd y-a-w-n be all over it with a dull of recognition, if it was 1988 and I was gazing out of the window waiting for lunchtime. It's worth reading, even if you're not prone to being bored yourself. It will give you insight into the Lives of Others who are less well set up for amusing themselves [Ennui by Walter Sickert L]. As a few experimental psychologists are involved, there are some nifty ways to induce boredom:

• read numbers out of the telephone directory
• watch a film of two guys s l o w l y hanging laundry
• transcribing the reference list of a technical research article

The outcomes seem to require measuring the consumption of junk-food as a consequence of being bored. The take home seems to be that you'll likely be bored if what you are doing is a) monotonous AND b) of no interest / value. Playing Grand Theft Auto is of no interest / value but it would be a peculiar person who was bored by the proxy-mayhem. Contrariwise, I am quite happy tallying up pages of data or repetitetitetitetitively making thumbnail pictures of our incoming students. It's monotonous but when you're in the zone, the time passes and each page is box ticked. There's a lot of that in science: carrying out a protocol reliably, repetitively to acquire data to test a hypothesis is an important part of the process.

What's your boredom threshold? You can measure it if you have the patience to answer 28 [twenty-eight!] not very interesting questions. I found
You don’t get bored easily.Well I knew that; I have The Blob to put to bed each and every day. But the case would be altered 32 years ago. BBC: why boredom is good for you. Grauniad: why it's good to be bored.

Perseids ISS Telstar

One of the benefits of living in the boondocks is the minimisation of artificial light, so we're well placed for star-gazing.  The pretensions of the Celtic Tiger still linger in the desire to floodlight your dwelling to show how big it is and our neighbour across the valley has unfortunately signed up to this sect.  Nevertheless it's waaaay better than Dublin, let alone Los Angeles or London.  So last night I went up behind the house about 11 o'clock and lay out on the grass to watch the Perseids meteor shower.  It's not as exciting as Grand Theft Auto but it's worth doing because it's a natural wonder and rather wonderful for that.

So I was trying not to fall asleep - it was way past my bedtime and 'events' were only coming in every 2-3 minutes - when I saw a very bright light flickering through the trees as it lumbered in from the West. There's a LOT of crap endlessly circling our Earth and if you look up for longer than the time it takes to tweet about it you'll see that the night sky is busy. But the International Space Station is by far the biggest and brightest, and a check later with the Astronomy Ireland website said that the ISS had passed across Ireland at 2303hrs.  It was almost as exciting as 8-year-old me seeing Telstar bippling across the sky in the freezing winter of 1962/3 when there were so few artificial satellites that their appearance was listed in the newspaper under the weather report.  Cue The Tornadoes.

Puzzle time: 
IF
the Earth is 8000km in diameter 
ANDIF
the ISS orbits 400km above the surface
ANDIF
you have an unobstructed horizon and no clouds
ANDIF
the cosmonauts are clipping along at 7.7km/s (that's just under 30,000km/h)
How long will the ISS be visible as it passes overhead?
Answers on a postcard!  Answers added 20/Aug/13 below the fold:

Dreidel-dee dreidel-dum

Hanukkah started at midnight just gone and I'm sure that little Jewish children are waking up today all excited.  Not least because Hanukkah has acquired some of the giftie attributes of Christmas, perhaps because the two festivals often fall in the same month.  But the youngsters can also have intoxicating fun spinning dreidels instead of whacking people playing Grand Theft Auto.  Dreidels are little spinning tops with four different Hebrew letters one to each side. 

shin - nun - gimel - hei

The letters are the initials of a phrase נס גדול היה שם  (Hebrew reads right to left like Arabic) Nes Gadol Hayah Poh which being interpreted is "a great miracle happened here". Each player in dreidel spinning games puts some token into the pot and then each takes turns to spin the top and obey the time-honoured conventions attached to each side.

• nun - do nothing
• gimel - take everything in the pot
• hei - take half (rounded up) of the pot
• shin - put one (or three) tokens in the pot

Simple enough, hours of fun, scope for bitter recriminations and tears - just the sort of game every family wishes to play during the Winter Solstice Festivities. In Western Europe we also used to play Dreidels except that they were called teetotums and often had the letters A D N T instead of Hebrew.  And instead of as in Hebrew an inspirational mnemonic, the letters stood for straight-forward instructions Aufer - take (one); Depone - put (one); Nihil - take none; Totum - take all. Dreidels culture was all explained to me by Larry Reich at about this time 34 years ago. Larry was a) Jewish b) a deft dreidelist c) the only person I've seen leap full-length on frozen ground to retrieve some data (an escaping field vole Microtus pennsylvanicus) d) a man with a prodigious appetite for ice-cream e) about to give up being a field biologist and fulfill his maternal-driven destiny to become a real doctor and not just a PhD.  I was in graduate school and had a desk in the Bob Tamarin Vole Lab.  Part of the rent (kidding!) was that I'd go out and help when they needed to collect data by bleeding their voles.  It was on the way home from one of these expeditions in late 1979 that I first saw Asteroids being played - quite possibly by Larry - in a pizza-shop near Plymouth, MA.  That was yet another (Scrabble, Monopoly, Diplomacy) nail in the coffin of simple gaming pleasures like spinning tops.  With a little help from William Rowan Hamilton, computer graphics have developed from the simple, efficient vector graphics of Asteroids drug-store consoles to displaying rippling muscles and exaggerated body-contours of Lara Croft Tombraider.

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.

Decameron

On Saurday, The Beloved and I went for a walk into Wexford and up the hill which we can see from our kitchen window. It was good to get a bit of stretch especially immediately after lunch when the only alternative is to fall into a drooling snooze and finish up with a wet collar. On the way back we met our Spanish neighbour who was also escaping from her own stir-craziness. Asking a phatic "¿Que pasa?" we got an earful about the tragedy in Madrid's Monte Hermoso private nursing home where more than half of the 130 residents tested Covid+ and 19 of them died. The Spanish government has since declared Eminent Domain to seize all private nursing homes and hospitals. This news gave me a sinking sense of dread because we are only a week behind Spain and on the same trajectory. This foreboding was brought into focus 5 minutes later as an ambulance blue-lighted along the back-country road at the bottom of our lane. It could only be on the way to aid one of our near neighbours.

Because of Madrid, from the depths of my 'mind' an end-of-life phrase struggled to the surface which I tracked down when we got home:

Such as thou art, some time was I,

Such as I am , such shalt thou be.

They say this sentiment was originally [in Normann Frensh] inscribed on the tomb [R] of Edward of Woodstock, The Black Prince, son and heir of England's Edward III. This paragon of knighthood or ruthless warmonger, depending on your nation and class, never really recovered from a bout of the bloody flux and predeceased his grieving father at the age of 45. He is buried in Canterbury Cathedral and I remember his tomb, but not the epitaph, because I was at school in the cathedral precincts and sang there twice every Sunday from 1968 to 1972. It was only a step, or 190,000 of them, from there to the start of the Canterbury Tales in London. I have written in awe of Geoffrey Chaucer before, and have indeed read most of that entertaining set of tales within the framing tale. The frame is that a rattle of sondry folk, a microcosm of medieval society, gathers in The Tabard Inn, Southwark and sets off in pilgrimage for the tomb of St Thomas à Becket in Canterbury.

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote

The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote

Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,

And palmers for to seken straunge strondes

The Tales are funny, dirty, satirical and timeless - recommended.

Chaucer owes a debt of concept to Giovanni Boccaccio whose Decameron was written a generation before Chaucer started to put pen to paper. Literally, because Chaucer's Tales were circulated as manuscripts for 100 years before John Caxton got round to printing them. The Decameron, likewise, of course. The Decameron is another set of tales within a rather more edgy framing story: Seven young women Pampinea, Fiammetta, Filomena, Emilia, Lauretta, Neifile, and Elissa and three men, Panfilo, Filostrato, and Dioneo flee Firenze and the 1347 Black Death to hole up in a rustic villa for a fortnight. That is exactly the same period of voluntary isolation which we are requesting people to embrace to stop spreading Covid-19. How did people do Big Brother before Netflix, Grand Theft Auto and Instagram? that is the question. Well The Lads I Ragazzi get to their destination, unpack, and agree that they'll tell each other tales every night until it's safe to return to the city. Not Sundays, of course, and two other holy days of obligation nix the entertainments; so the Decameron is 10 people's stories x 10 nights or 100 mini-sagas, novelettes. Beyond its existence, I know nothing about the Decameron except that Pier Paolo Pasolini made a film of the book.
If we're going to spend the next several weeks in lock-down because of this century's Great Plague, it might be an opportunity to see what was floating the social boat in similar lock-down isolation circumstances 673 years ago in Italy.

Natural born killers

I was down on the Waterford coast a couple of weeks ago when travel was still allowed but social distancing was all the rage. Talking to the neighbour over the hedge, I asked how his 12 y.o. boy was coping with physical isolation. Not a bother on him, Bob, we've got 5G wired to the house and the chap is up in his room driving a T-34 tank and killing Nazi storm-troopers. I'd have been the same, although the cannon shooting was all in my head with sound effects 50+ years ago. Maybe it's learned, maybe it's innate for young fellers to but as I observed a few years ago, there's a lot of surrogate violence about. My source G was disconcerted to hear one of her barely teenaged sons explaining Grand Theft Auto to a pal "Naa, you have to throw the whore out of the car-door as you go round the corner . . .". A week later I was back home in the mountains and a neighbouring Dad had a similar story about his own 18 y.o. chap. "It's like they are recruiting for the army, a whole generation of boys (and girls) are being taught how to pull the trigger on another human being".  Naaah, I replied, it's only the SAS that wants to recruit psychopaths. Regular squaddies just need to know how to polish their boots and march to cadence.

And it's not true that young men people do actually find it easy to kill each other. There's a section on the topic in Robert Sapolsky's book Behave [prev]. Actually you don't need to go further than The Blob, because there are strong hints of this reluctance in the study of Trolleology in which punters are invited to choose how many people will die under the wheels of a run-away train carriage. Most normal people are able to throw a switch and kill one to save five but only a minority carry the logic to conclusions and claim they'd willingly heave a fat chap over a bridge parapet to achieve the same utilitarian end point. And even those people, like me, who assert that logic would overcome any emotional responses, would probably baulk at actually seizing someone by the lapels and heave-ho. Not least: hmmmm, that dude is bigger than me.

Sapolsky's final chapter is War and Peace in which he looks at human capacity for actual and ritualised violence. Reflecting on the ubiquity of CCTV cameras, he cites an analysis of soccer hooligans frame-by-frame as they trade hoots and chest-beating with fans of The Other Side. Only a tiny fraction of the participants are even pretending to trade punches, the rest are surging about making a noise and sheltering behind each other as bottles and coins rain in from Over There.

If you want a brilliant example of the discrepancy between young men's capacity for pretend violence compared to meting out some actual blows, then get Rashomon out of your video closet. This early film by Akira "Seven Samurai" Kurosawa is a minute investigation of the nature of truth. An incident happens in a forest between a samurai, his wife and a bandit. The story is unpacked later in a ruined temple by the several witnesses. The samurai and the bandit have a fight in which both, according to their own "big me up" testimony, behaved with decision and courage. But an independent witness reports that the fighting cocks spent at least as much time trashing about the bushes with their eyes closed in terror as actually getting to get in some on-target hits. Chest-beating is all very well but if the other bloke has a sword, you might get hurt and we are programmed from young to avoid pain. [Exec Summary Rashomon in 9 mins].

Sapolsky cites On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society by Dave Grossman for another telling example of having a cudgel but not taking it up. After the Battle of Gettysburg, 27,500 single-load muskets were recovered from the field. 24,000 = 90% of them had not been fired but still had powder and ball loaded. Half of these loaded guns had been loaded more than once and one had 23 musket balls choking up the barrel. In the fog of war, the poor squaddies couldn't remember if they'd loaded their gun, and in case would rather [re]load their weapon than actually point it at another man and pull the trigger. And most of the time they were just trying to get out of way of the incommming. Like in Rashomon, many of the heroes were made afterwards from the survivors recycling their own memories until they got to be able to live with them.

And what about PTSD, is that the cumulative load of being scared shitless day and night for months on end? Seemingly not: squaddies in the USAF drone patrol unit suffer as much mental damage as boys with guns deployed in Helmand Province in Afgo but more than medics on the ground in those dusty killing fields. The drone pilots are totally safe as they watch their computer screen in a bunker outside Reno, Nevada but they get to see the results of their actions bleeding out and turning cold in the night-vision camera shots on the VDU a foot from their eyes. Normal people are psychologically damaged by that experience.

In sum, neighbour, I don't think your son will have the chops to become a psycho-killer not matter what his score is on Call of Duty.
.