It has been a pleasant conceit of The Blob to slag off the cult of Harry Potter, mostly on the grounds that it cannot be that good. No matter how much you have enjoyed the books; no matter what dreams you have had about quidditch triumphs or pulling a rabbit out of an owl's hat - Potter doesn't deserve its winner-takes-all success. Somebody needs to whisper in your ear that there are other books out there that should be read before you set off on your second Harry Potter. The great god BBC has recorded two of Ursula le Guin's best books and The Wizard of Earthsea will be available to hear in just under two weeks time on Monday 27th April 2015. Neil Gaiman has described it as simply the best book about Wizard School.
Meanwhile you can hear Le Guin's [L hand] gender-bender novel The Left Hand of Darkness now. You can, if you prefer, go off and read the books because they are still in print despite being published decades ago. LeGuin is now 85 and looks it; and is content to look like an old woman, comfortable in her own genuine, crinkly, skin as she explains in a wonderful interview recorded to launch the recordings. These stories might be fantasy or science fiction but they are also stories for adults which inform us about today's issues perhaps more than they informed people about the times when they were published. 'Darkness' addressed the issue of gender and sexuality and ponders the consequences of there being a spectrum rather everyone fitting into one box or the other. This is much more widely accepted now and therefore many people are happier in their own unstraight-forward skin. Consultant endocrinologist Donal O'Shea was on the wireless a week ago suggesting that 1:10,000 or 1:20,000 people might feel that they just aren't whom their external genitalia determined them to be at birth. That's a tiny minority, far less than the number of people who are blind or Down's syndrome or have cystic fibrosis but it's still half a million people across the planet who need accommodation for their sense of gender.
Another persistent theme in Le Guin's works is the magic power of knowing something's true name and how we must be circumspect in sharing this information with others. This a common theme in many cultures and would have been absorbed by the child Ursula as she was raised by Alfred and Theodora Kroeber, ground-breaking academic anthropologists from Berkeley California. From the beginning Ursula was introduced to The Other: whether that was Ishi the last of the Yahi people or the foreign academics who came to visit with the Kroebers. The effect on the young writer was for her to embrace difference as the complement to herself rather than seeking to become more like girls of her age and class in a comfortable bath of sameness. I first read the Wizard of Earthsea about ten years ago and wondered how I had missed it when I was a teenager and how much of a difference it would have made to my sense of self when that was still plastic. It's never too late, though. If you read it now you'll benefit from it, if you have a child to read it with, so much the better.
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Harry Potter. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Harry Potter. Sort by date Show all posts
Saturday, 18 April 2015
Thursday, 4 January 2018
Five Years a-growing
- 1,000th post where I reflected on the Blob word-count compared to classics like Moby Dick and Ulysses.
- Millionth word = Zeugma
What about Islands, I do love an island: Wordclouds courtesy of wordcloud
Thursday, 11 February 2016
Technetium unmissing
It is vanishingly rare in nature because it is the lightest element all of whose isotopes are radioactive; every atom ever created in the broiling chunk of star-matter that became Earth has long since changed into something else. It was thus impossible for Mendeleev and his peers to verify the hypothesised properties of Tc because they couldn't find enough of the stuff to fill the smallest chemical crucible in the lab. It was found later, initially by Carlo Perrier and Emilio Segrè in 1937, and later in some abundance among the waste of nuclear piles as one of the breakdown products of Uranium and Plutonium. After nuclear physicists had enough scrabbled together to do the chemistry, they were able to measure the wavelengths of light given off when Technetium was heated to incandescence. When this atomic spectrum was shared with the Astronomy Department, the star-gazers were able to report that many red giant stars, in retirement at the end of their long and active lives, showed evidence of Technetium beneath their skins. This proved that Technetium must have been created anew in those stars because any original aliquot would have long since decayed as it has on Earth. That was interesting and informative because it helped cement the idea that elements heavier than Iron must have been created in stars. What boggles the mind is that these heavy elements are then supposed to have been redistributed round the universe when the creating star went all supernova at the end of its billion year life.
Saturday, 23 July 2016
Faster!
When I pass some milestone on The Blob - 100 posts, 1000 posts [two years later], 100,000 page views, two continuous years of daily posts - I put up some specious comparison between the current word-count and Moby Dick, War & Peace or Harry Potter. It's silly because they are different: there is a lot more about whales in Moby Dick, but more intestinal flora on The Blob. On scything, The Blob and Anna Karenina are about evens. I've only read 40 pages of Harry Potter, so I don't know who has more magic.
I mention this because one of the family spent a diverting half-hour flitting through the Blob back-catalogue and wrote to say thanks. I wanted to say how many hours of similar material were available, so googled up "average reading speed wpm" and found that Joe Normal is able for about 300 words per minute wpm. This means that a typical 600 word Blob takes only a couple of minutes. You'd have to read more than one a day to catch up, of course, because new copy is being generated at a little more than 1 Blob/day. At 900,000+ words = 3,000 minutes, you could pull two consecutive all-nighters and read everything I've ever written in this medium. The restless relentlessness of modern life in modern media was captured by James Gleick in Faster! And that was before Twitter.
In the course of finding out the stats on reading speed. I came across this tendentious piece in Forbes which claimed that reading fast is one of the habits of highly successful people. Thast may be true because knowledge is power and information is knowledge. According to the article, a college professor reads 675 wpm which is about 4x faster than the average teenager. Forbes went a step too far in suggesting that IF you read more/faster THEN you'll be 'successful'; that is faulty logic. Of course you will want to know if you are a perfessor or a numskull and Forbes provides a link to a speed test on the Staples site. Be careful, you'll be asked a couple of comprehension questions at the end, so some of what you read has to go beyond the optic nerve for processing. Me, I'm there at 285 wpm which is 8% slower than Josie Median and a lot near to the teens than the professors.
One of the key attributes of being a successful scientist is reading the literature. 1.2 million papers were published last year in the biomedical sciences. Of course, nobody is going to read all those because they are being published at the rate of one every 30 secs, night and day. But you are expected to read, with care and attention, the papers in your field. For example, 2015 saw 1791 new papers published on TLR4, an important (=sexy) immune receptor. Tht's a couple of hours of your day, if you're a TLR4 maven and going to do it properly. No wonder successful professors read fast.
But really is it worth it? Either reading fast or reading more? There are 200,000 new books published in English in England each year and more in India. If you have a job or friends you're not going to read more than one book a day, unless you're in the trade, so you can only cover a tiny fraction of what's available. So a case could be made that you may as well not bother. My father was a reader with taste for history and biography: chunky hardbacks with hundreds of pages. He also had a quota of more ephemeral stuff (a daily newspaper and a couple for the weekend) delivered to his home. At the age of 80 he looked at the ticking clock, felt he didn't have enough time to deal with the back-log and enrolled in a speed reading course! This restless quest for new information killed him in the end. One Sunday night he fell asleep in a chair in front of the TV and surrounded by unread sections of the Sunday Telegraph and the Observer. After midnight, he woke up, gathered an armful of reading matter for the morning and stumbled up the stairs to bed. He never made it. A momentary drowsy loss of balance, and no available hand to catch the bannister, pitched him backwards down the stairs. He fractured at least one vertebra and sustained other painful damage. He died five days later in hospital - in somewhat murky circumstances, but that's another story. The bottom line is that, if it wasn't for the reading matter, he wouldn't have been in hospital that week . . . and he'd be 99 this October and still reading like he could take it with him.
After 50+ years of reading, I conclude that, despite The Blob's Science Matters headline, information doesn't matter. Kindness matters.
a the classic of American Literature is sooo gay. The discussion is summarised by WidgetAlley thus "I can't believe a (probably) young person being surprised and delighted to find that their own minority identity reflected in a piece of the Western cannon of great literature, which is almost exclusively advertised as by and for straight white upper class men, and talking about it in a humorous way, is being met with snobby-sounding, "Why didn't this person already know about this?" Because that. That attitude right there. That is why they didn't already know about this."
I mention this because one of the family spent a diverting half-hour flitting through the Blob back-catalogue and wrote to say thanks. I wanted to say how many hours of similar material were available, so googled up "average reading speed wpm" and found that Joe Normal is able for about 300 words per minute wpm. This means that a typical 600 word Blob takes only a couple of minutes. You'd have to read more than one a day to catch up, of course, because new copy is being generated at a little more than 1 Blob/day. At 900,000+ words = 3,000 minutes, you could pull two consecutive all-nighters and read everything I've ever written in this medium. The restless relentlessness of modern life in modern media was captured by James Gleick in Faster! And that was before Twitter.
In the course of finding out the stats on reading speed. I came across this tendentious piece in Forbes which claimed that reading fast is one of the habits of highly successful people. Thast may be true because knowledge is power and information is knowledge. According to the article, a college professor reads 675 wpm which is about 4x faster than the average teenager. Forbes went a step too far in suggesting that IF you read more/faster THEN you'll be 'successful'; that is faulty logic. Of course you will want to know if you are a perfessor or a numskull and Forbes provides a link to a speed test on the Staples site. Be careful, you'll be asked a couple of comprehension questions at the end, so some of what you read has to go beyond the optic nerve for processing. Me, I'm there at 285 wpm which is 8% slower than Josie Median and a lot near to the teens than the professors.
One of the key attributes of being a successful scientist is reading the literature. 1.2 million papers were published last year in the biomedical sciences. Of course, nobody is going to read all those because they are being published at the rate of one every 30 secs, night and day. But you are expected to read, with care and attention, the papers in your field. For example, 2015 saw 1791 new papers published on TLR4, an important (=sexy) immune receptor. Tht's a couple of hours of your day, if you're a TLR4 maven and going to do it properly. No wonder successful professors read fast.
But really is it worth it? Either reading fast or reading more? There are 200,000 new books published in English in England each year and more in India. If you have a job or friends you're not going to read more than one book a day, unless you're in the trade, so you can only cover a tiny fraction of what's available. So a case could be made that you may as well not bother. My father was a reader with taste for history and biography: chunky hardbacks with hundreds of pages. He also had a quota of more ephemeral stuff (a daily newspaper and a couple for the weekend) delivered to his home. At the age of 80 he looked at the ticking clock, felt he didn't have enough time to deal with the back-log and enrolled in a speed reading course! This restless quest for new information killed him in the end. One Sunday night he fell asleep in a chair in front of the TV and surrounded by unread sections of the Sunday Telegraph and the Observer. After midnight, he woke up, gathered an armful of reading matter for the morning and stumbled up the stairs to bed. He never made it. A momentary drowsy loss of balance, and no available hand to catch the bannister, pitched him backwards down the stairs. He fractured at least one vertebra and sustained other painful damage. He died five days later in hospital - in somewhat murky circumstances, but that's another story. The bottom line is that, if it wasn't for the reading matter, he wouldn't have been in hospital that week . . . and he'd be 99 this October and still reading like he could take it with him.
After 50+ years of reading, I conclude that, despite The Blob's Science Matters headline, information doesn't matter. Kindness matters.
-*-
Moby Dick? There's a great thread in Metafilter set off by a young chap who twigs that Moby Dick, Thursday, 27 March 2014
funding fondling
A number of years ago, I was working part-time in Trinity College Dublin. I'd work mostly at/from home but for two days a week I would be On Site in the lab. Those two days were pretty intense: participating in lab meetings, giving statistical advice, criticising drafts of thesis chapters, polishing grant applications, trying to find 20 minutes for lunch . . . and suddenly I'd be drooling on my own collar as I fell asleep in the bus home. My boss and I would try hard to attend the departmental seminar on Thursday lunchtime - turning up was what you did for the community. It was also about the only time when you would have the chance to be surprised by something because the speakers were almost always From Foreign; in the sense that even a speaker from UCD or DCU (the other universities in town) was Foreign. The students who ran the seminar series would supply sandwiches to encourage people to attend and I learned to be very parsimonious about accepting this free food lest I fall asleep in the middle of our visitor's talk. But I tell ya that I fell asleep aNNyway many times because the talks were so deadly dull and presented in such a stultifying, powerpoint-propped, droning way. Most of the senior people in the department sacrificed whatever commitment they might have to community to their desire to not waste an hour of their life over something that was not in, or even close to, their field of interest. The great thing about being a generalist is that so much more of the universe is at least potentially interesting.
One day, the boss was unavoidably elsewhere, so she missed the weekly seminar. When she came back in the afternoon, one of the graduate students and I were crowing about the best, the most inspiring, the niftiest ("Gad Whistler, I wish I'd said that") talk we'd heard that year; perhaps the best that decade. The presenter was Aled Edwards from the University of Toronto and he talked about a brilliant example of Harry Potter winner-take-all that is costing science dear. The Toronto hypothesis was that, after spending $1billion on sequencing the human genome, we should have something to show for it - new genes revealed, new associations of disease with mutations in the DNA, new drug targets, new ways to seeing. But it wasn't like that! Edwards & Co, analysed two generations worth of scientific literature to count up the number of published papers about specific genes of pharma-medico-biological interest. In particular they looked at druggable targets in three classes: kinases, ion-channels and nuclear receptors, before and after the delivery of the human genome sequence into the public domain by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair (thanks boys!). That's a lot of data to trawl through, as more than 20 million papers have been published since PubMed indexing started in 1950.
What they found, for all three rather different sorts of protein, was that we are still squeezing the last drops of info out of the same proteins that we were studying before the human genome became available. This despite a lot of objective data to show that there were lots of very interesting disease-associations and potential therapeutic targets in the "dark-matter" of the genomic universe. The scientific community is still doing same-old same-old on the tried-and-true. Some time ago, Nobelist Roger Kornberg claimed that scientists have a tendency to "fondle their problems" or to use an even less appetising metaphor, to pick at the scabs of their previous research rather than coming up for a breath of fresh air and trying a new avenue to investigate.
Here's one we did earlier with my Yr3 bioinformatics class. It is a tally of the number of papers published about 4 of the 10 Toll-like receptors that we humans have to detect the hostiles in the environment so that we can mount an appropriate immune response:
WTF? We have ten TLRs, they must each have a(n essential)
purpose. Is it conceivable that the job TLR4 does for us is ten times
more important than that which TLR5 fulfills? D'ye think that some
attention to TLR5 might save lives? Do you think you can make bigger
waves because the TLR5 pond is so under-populated? Go to!
There are three good (i.e. bad) reasons for this scab-picking.
1) It is easier for editors and referees to accept papers that are firmly in the context of existing research - critiquing earlier work or building on previous studies or doing the same analysis in a different species or different human population or different cell line.
2) Research funding bodies are chronically risk-adverse - they don't do Blue Skies and minority interest ERRa is blue skies compared to over-analysed diminishing-returns Era.
3) Research depends upon kit, and there are chemical probes available for the Harry Potter proteins but it costs person-years and multi-dollars to develop new probes for the emerging proteins. The regrettable upshot is that these proteins don't emerge because nobody will risk (investing in) investigating their functions and attributes.
I thought that analysis was brilliant. Like the failures in ethics, failures in statistical power and failures of reproducibility, fondling is systemic in science (blobolinks). In the Nature commentary that sums up this research, Edwards offers some suggestions about how we might break free of these incestuous shackles of familiarity. My Institution is too poor to afford an electronic subscription to Nature, so I can't read that on-line but you may be able to. A longer version of the same material is defo in the public domain. This sort of research is also quite empowering because it shows you that useful and informative research can be done without horsing through thousands of dollars worth of kit and consumables.
One day, the boss was unavoidably elsewhere, so she missed the weekly seminar. When she came back in the afternoon, one of the graduate students and I were crowing about the best, the most inspiring, the niftiest ("Gad Whistler, I wish I'd said that") talk we'd heard that year; perhaps the best that decade. The presenter was Aled Edwards from the University of Toronto and he talked about a brilliant example of Harry Potter winner-take-all that is costing science dear. The Toronto hypothesis was that, after spending $1billion on sequencing the human genome, we should have something to show for it - new genes revealed, new associations of disease with mutations in the DNA, new drug targets, new ways to seeing. But it wasn't like that! Edwards & Co, analysed two generations worth of scientific literature to count up the number of published papers about specific genes of pharma-medico-biological interest. In particular they looked at druggable targets in three classes: kinases, ion-channels and nuclear receptors, before and after the delivery of the human genome sequence into the public domain by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair (thanks boys!). That's a lot of data to trawl through, as more than 20 million papers have been published since PubMed indexing started in 1950.
What they found, for all three rather different sorts of protein, was that we are still squeezing the last drops of info out of the same proteins that we were studying before the human genome became available. This despite a lot of objective data to show that there were lots of very interesting disease-associations and potential therapeutic targets in the "dark-matter" of the genomic universe. The scientific community is still doing same-old same-old on the tried-and-true. Some time ago, Nobelist Roger Kornberg claimed that scientists have a tendency to "fondle their problems" or to use an even less appetising metaphor, to pick at the scabs of their previous research rather than coming up for a breath of fresh air and trying a new avenue to investigate.
Here's one we did earlier with my Yr3 bioinformatics class. It is a tally of the number of papers published about 4 of the 10 Toll-like receptors that we humans have to detect the hostiles in the environment so that we can mount an appropriate immune response:
| TLR | PubMed papers | PubMed reviews |
| TLR4 | 10116 | 633 |
| TLR5 | 882 | 44 |
| TLR7 | 1689 | 145 |
| TLR9 | 3070 | 274 |
There are three good (i.e. bad) reasons for this scab-picking.
1) It is easier for editors and referees to accept papers that are firmly in the context of existing research - critiquing earlier work or building on previous studies or doing the same analysis in a different species or different human population or different cell line.
2) Research funding bodies are chronically risk-adverse - they don't do Blue Skies and minority interest ERRa is blue skies compared to over-analysed diminishing-returns Era.
3) Research depends upon kit, and there are chemical probes available for the Harry Potter proteins but it costs person-years and multi-dollars to develop new probes for the emerging proteins. The regrettable upshot is that these proteins don't emerge because nobody will risk (investing in) investigating their functions and attributes.
I thought that analysis was brilliant. Like the failures in ethics, failures in statistical power and failures of reproducibility, fondling is systemic in science (blobolinks). In the Nature commentary that sums up this research, Edwards offers some suggestions about how we might break free of these incestuous shackles of familiarity. My Institution is too poor to afford an electronic subscription to Nature, so I can't read that on-line but you may be able to. A longer version of the same material is defo in the public domain. This sort of research is also quite empowering because it shows you that useful and informative research can be done without horsing through thousands of dollars worth of kit and consumables.
Thursday, 18 April 2019
Illusory transparency
Nobody thinks nepotism is a good idea - except the benefitting nephew. You hope and expect that the best qualified candidate gets the job; that only the competent students pass the exam; that the marks in some sense are a predictor of ability. In all the examiners meetings I have attended, the objective truth of the marks has been tempered by common sense (=prejudice and expectation). I can't remember a case when a student was done down unfairly rather than raised up without justification: but my neighbour John described one from Durham U thirty years ago.
In 1st and 2nd year college it doesn't matter what mark the student gets; so long as they achieve a certain minimal standard in the learning outcome department. Of course it can give some students a bit of a boost to morale if they do unexpectedly well, and that is no bad thing. At the end of their course in science, most students will carry out an independent research project. In The Institute, about 25% of the hours allocated to our final year students are devoted to project work and the marks are are equivalent; so the mark matters. A few years ago someone distributed a marking scheme with the implication that everyone would follow it to ensure equity, transparency and an audit trail in case of a dispute:
I'm reflecting on this [again] because I was asked to mark student presentations at this week's environmental sciencecolloquium meeting using these criteria:
With 20:20 l'esprit d'escalier I would have split the goddamned prize and given half to Mr Harry and half to Miss Potter . . . partly because we can therefore ♬cue Katie Melua♬. Well, it's not my gig or my community and I won't be going to next year's meeting, so I don't really have locus standi on the high moral ground here.
In 1st and 2nd year college it doesn't matter what mark the student gets; so long as they achieve a certain minimal standard in the learning outcome department. Of course it can give some students a bit of a boost to morale if they do unexpectedly well, and that is no bad thing. At the end of their course in science, most students will carry out an independent research project. In The Institute, about 25% of the hours allocated to our final year students are devoted to project work and the marks are are equivalent; so the mark matters. A few years ago someone distributed a marking scheme with the implication that everyone would follow it to ensure equity, transparency and an audit trail in case of a dispute:
- 50% Written report:
- Presentation
- Methods
- Results
- Understanding of topic
- References
- 30% Performance in Lab
- Planning and organisation
- Dedication and initiative
- 10% Literature Review
- 10% Public presentation
I'm reflecting on this [again] because I was asked to mark student presentations at this week's environmental science
- Slides 30%
- Presentations 30%
- Time keeping 10% deduct 2 marks for every 30 seconds over
- Questions
- Science 20%
- Total 100%
With 20:20 l'esprit d'escalier I would have split the goddamned prize and given half to Mr Harry and half to Miss Potter . . . partly because we can therefore ♬cue Katie Melua♬. Well, it's not my gig or my community and I won't be going to next year's meeting, so I don't really have locus standi on the high moral ground here.
Thursday, 26 March 2015
Travel[ling] books
- What to do? Get more readers for each printed copy.
- How do we do it? Open more libraries.
Mais revenons nous a nos livres. We had friends to lunch on the brilliant sunny Saturday last. Back in the day, when he was very young, the chap had been a trainee padre to the Mersey Missions to Seamen. He's spent most of his life in theatre, and being a priest is not so very different. One of the services which the Missions provided were book-bags: a canvas dunny sack with a draw-string top that was filled with reading matter and topped with an invemtory. While there were limits to what sort of books went into the sack - the Missions were firmly in the Anglican Christian tradition - it was by no means only bibles and religious tracts. The Merchant Marine covered the globe and these bags could be exchanged in Rangoon or Buenos Aires as easily as in Liverpool. Those books were well-travelled and well-used before they fell apart entirely. Books are for reading - they are just a fire-hazard sitting on a shelf.
Monday, 7 December 2015
Du côté de chez Schwann
For my father, who had a practical education fitting for a future naval officer, literary intellectualism was summed up, and more or less dismissed, by "Proust and Kafka". It wasn't that he thought the works of those two European authors was rubbish, he just knew it wasn't to his taste; which leaned towards tum de tum de tum poetry, history and biography. Knowing who fought whom at Austerlitz, Blenheim or Camperdown and what the Defenestration of Prague or the Council of Trent was about would have made him rather handy in certain sections of a Pub Quiz if they'd been invented in time. I've mentioned Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu a few times on The Blob but only in its central anecdote about a fragment of madeleine transporting the great man back in time. I know nothing more about it except that, at 1,250,000 words, it is longer than The Blob and even longer than the complete Harry Potter. I have read Kafka, on the other hand, which was weird but did get built into my expensive education [I can remember some of it]. Strangely, Proust's magnum opus and J.K. Rowling's are both in seven [7] volumes. Proust and Potter haven't been associated only in my mind: at least one other person has mentioned them in the same paragraph. All this is a long journey round a scrap of madeleine to note that the first book of Proust's "most respected novel of the twentieth century" is called Du côté de chez Swann. And that is just an excuse to make a dreadful pun in the title.
The Schwann, whom I want to cosy up du côté de chez to, is emphatically not Proust's hero but a great scientist who did things in the great wide world rather than living entirely in his own head like me. Ken Robinson TED Talker and charismatic educator says that an intellectual's body is a grossly undervalued vehicle for getting the head to its various meetings TEDtalk [38m views 19mins] - Transcript. Get out and dance, professors! Theodor Schwann was born on this day 7th December 1810 - more than 200 years ago. People knew so little back then about how the world ticked that we might be tempted to wonder how they survived at all. But that just silly scientism; because ordinary people can get born, eat food without poisoning themselves, fight off infection, have sex with each other and bring their own children into the world without owning a microscope or having the least idea that yeast, Salmonella and Neisseria gonorrhoeae are living things.
Theodor Schwann was brought up in Neuß Neuss right across the river from Düsseldorf in Western Germany. He was born a French citizen because Napoleon had incorporated that part of Germany into his Empire but the territory was assigned to Prussia at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. This turned out to be good for young Theodor's education, because he went to Universität zu Berlin (which became Humboldt University in 1949) to get his degree and there fell in with anatomist & physiologist Johannes Peter Müller just as the great man was putting the finishing touches to his magisterial Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen. Müller appointed Schwann as his assistant. I could have included Müller in my list of great names about the human body for the Müllerian ducts, microscopic embryonic features that grow and develop to become the uterus in female mammals. I could have included Schwann as well for Schwann Cells which he discovered while working for Müller between 1834 and 1838. Schwann cells are filled with lipids and are coterminous with the myelin sheath à côté de / that wraps around neurons providing a certain amount of insulation and so upping the speed with which electrical signals are propagated. Schwann was the first person to tease apart nerve tissue and recognise how it was engineered.
Don't think that Schwann was a one trick pony. While in Berlin, he also discerned that yeast was a) living and b) its metabolism was responsible for the production of a) alcohol [beer] and b) carbon dioxide [bread]. And while he was about it he invented the term 'metabolism'! He was really the first person to put this, then wildly controversial, idea (that fermentation is carried out by living microbes) into the public domain and he is thus the giant on whose shoulders Louis "Institut" Pasteur and Joseph "antiseptic" Lister stood. He then turned his attention to the process of digestion; isolating and describing the digestive enzyme pepsin. It was the nature of the times that the plains of ignorance were wide open and ready for investigation by people who could put in the hours of focused attention necessary to run down some reliable facts about the world.
In 1838, at the age of 28, Schwann was head-hunted by the Catholic University of Leuven in the brand new Kingdom of Belgium. It was one of the region's great universities before it was split along language lines in 1968 into Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and Université catholique de Louvain. The following year he brought out his own mammoth tome Mikroskopische Untersuchungen über die Uebereinstimmung in der Struktur und dem Wachsthum der Thiere und Pflanzen which was his last huzzah. Nine years later he transferred South to take up a Chair in the University of Liège. Without Müllerbreathing down his neck inspiring him to new discoveries, Schwann took his foot of the research pedal and mollocked about for the next 30 years giving rather good lectures and being amiably collegial about the campus. As he got older he turned increasingly to religion and theology. And why not? he'd done more than his share for science.
The Schwann, whom I want to cosy up du côté de chez to, is emphatically not Proust's hero but a great scientist who did things in the great wide world rather than living entirely in his own head like me. Ken Robinson TED Talker and charismatic educator says that an intellectual's body is a grossly undervalued vehicle for getting the head to its various meetings TEDtalk [38m views 19mins] - Transcript. Get out and dance, professors! Theodor Schwann was born on this day 7th December 1810 - more than 200 years ago. People knew so little back then about how the world ticked that we might be tempted to wonder how they survived at all. But that just silly scientism; because ordinary people can get born, eat food without poisoning themselves, fight off infection, have sex with each other and bring their own children into the world without owning a microscope or having the least idea that yeast, Salmonella and Neisseria gonorrhoeae are living things.
Theodor Schwann was brought up in Neuß Neuss right across the river from Düsseldorf in Western Germany. He was born a French citizen because Napoleon had incorporated that part of Germany into his Empire but the territory was assigned to Prussia at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. This turned out to be good for young Theodor's education, because he went to Universität zu Berlin (which became Humboldt University in 1949) to get his degree and there fell in with anatomist & physiologist Johannes Peter Müller just as the great man was putting the finishing touches to his magisterial Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen. Müller appointed Schwann as his assistant. I could have included Müller in my list of great names about the human body for the Müllerian ducts, microscopic embryonic features that grow and develop to become the uterus in female mammals. I could have included Schwann as well for Schwann Cells which he discovered while working for Müller between 1834 and 1838. Schwann cells are filled with lipids and are coterminous with the myelin sheath à côté de / that wraps around neurons providing a certain amount of insulation and so upping the speed with which electrical signals are propagated. Schwann was the first person to tease apart nerve tissue and recognise how it was engineered.
Don't think that Schwann was a one trick pony. While in Berlin, he also discerned that yeast was a) living and b) its metabolism was responsible for the production of a) alcohol [beer] and b) carbon dioxide [bread]. And while he was about it he invented the term 'metabolism'! He was really the first person to put this, then wildly controversial, idea (that fermentation is carried out by living microbes) into the public domain and he is thus the giant on whose shoulders Louis "Institut" Pasteur and Joseph "antiseptic" Lister stood. He then turned his attention to the process of digestion; isolating and describing the digestive enzyme pepsin. It was the nature of the times that the plains of ignorance were wide open and ready for investigation by people who could put in the hours of focused attention necessary to run down some reliable facts about the world.
In 1838, at the age of 28, Schwann was head-hunted by the Catholic University of Leuven in the brand new Kingdom of Belgium. It was one of the region's great universities before it was split along language lines in 1968 into Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and Université catholique de Louvain. The following year he brought out his own mammoth tome Mikroskopische Untersuchungen über die Uebereinstimmung in der Struktur und dem Wachsthum der Thiere und Pflanzen which was his last huzzah. Nine years later he transferred South to take up a Chair in the University of Liège. Without Müller
Wednesday, 8 July 2015
Kiloblob
1000th Post today, here, now!
Back in May 2013, I was feeling rather smug about having survived the first four months of the new job at The Institute that induced me to launch The Blob on an unsuspecting and largely [7 billion+ unreaders] uncaring world. For the 100th post I went through the back-catalogue picking out the names of people whom I had mentioned and put them all down in a list. 10 weeks later, I wrote my 100,000th word and updated the list of players. Those associations of totally unrelated [except in my 'mind'] names changed Google, so that a search for "Johan Kjeldahl" "Emil Zatopek" now yields four (4) hits - all on The Blob - but didn't before! I've now cranked up my contribution to the weight [60g] of the internet by an order of magnitude to 1000 posts but even an obsessive Blob-watcher like me is not about to go through the back-catalogue and list all the people who have strutted and fretted for a second on The Blob. It's easier to find some classes of people, like 42 women in science, who have been given more substantive attention than a throw-away mention. To get to write 1000 essays in two and half years, I've had to post early and post often. Since 22nd May 2013 I've posted something every day; on occasion by proxy when I was travelling outside the shadow of the interweb. Each post has almost always been an essay of between 500 and 700 words; often triggered by something I've read whose light can be reflected back on some element of my own experience. I'd like to think that I've got write read easier you - YO! So much so that, for Post 500 I offered advice about how to write - the chutzpah! I try my best not to merely rechurn material posted by others in the blogosphere. In quite a real sense my whole life is gradually getting patched together chunk by +500 word chunk into a gurt Blobby quilt that is now far larger than convenient for a normal bed.
Just how large? 1000 posts obviously, but that is also 646,000 words. How big is that? Well it's longer than all the standard mega-novels. 1.42 LOTRs for example:
| Classic | WordCount | Ratio | |
| Moby Dick | 209,117 | 3.09 | |
| Crime&Punishment | 211,000 | 3.06 | |
| Ulysses | 262,869 | 2.46 | |
| Gone wi' the Wind | 418,053 | 1.55 | |
| Lord of the Rings | 455,125 | 1.42 | |
| War&Peace | 544,400 | 1.19 | |
The Blob is still dogging the footsteps of the KJV Bible [788K words of Lord God] or the complete Harry Potter canon [1,084K words of Lord Vol-au-vent]. I'd like to think that The Blob is both more varied and more interesting than either of these; certainly contains more science, and fewer miracles, than either of the others.
- Emil Zatopek: running forever in my heart
- Barbara McClintock: though she be but little she was smart
- Craig Venter: Vietnam vet who came home and shook biology by the lapels
- Ernie Schaaf RIP: stop boxing now
- Bressie: fighting depression
- Fritz Haber: a bit of a shit
- Marshall & Warren: experimenting on yourself
- Nirenberg and Matthaei: crackers of the genetic code
- Mildred & Richard Loving: opposite sex but unable to wed
- John Wolfenden: it's
okaylegal to be gay
So long and thanks for all the pageviews.
Sunday, 25 June 2017
Robots and people 250617
Very miscellaneous today
- Sumo robots losing chunks. [via kottke]
- Lupus Housepus. You only notice peculiar words if they appear twice in quick succession. Dau.II would never have twigged that the Black Doctor in House was partial to diagnosing any and everything as Lupus if she'd seen an episode a week like Christian. Binge-watching a whole series in a day-long marathon was, shall we say, trigger-happy for Lupus.
- Dads catch a few; it's not true to say they are mere sperm-donors.
- Nostalgia alert. AtlasObscura readers share favorite children's books. I recognise none of them which is a rather wonderful celebration of long-tail diversity. There is more to children's literature than Harry Potter and Judy Blume.
- Medieval roof trusses felled in the noisy modern way by The Blob's favorite tree surgeon.
- Soldiering. A few years ago I
hadchose to bicycle the 40km to work because the gear box fell out of the car. We live about 200m above The Institute but it's all up and down between. I was fresh enough to teach my classes when I arrived and set off home in fine fettle. Nearing home there was a stretch where, far from being able to cycle up the hill, my jelly-knees couldn't even walk up the incline. I am a sofa person - Kodaline - Brother - [prev All I want]
- Had lunch with Dau.I on Friday: she suggested Symmetry Breakfast
- If you like drop of Shagsper [recently], you might like to check out the modern blank verse of Charles III. Trailer.
Friday, 23 July 2021
Spectral optics
Diary entry Friday 12 Oct 2018. "There’s a girl on Twitter called Greta Thunberg (we’ve been following each other for a while now) . . ." In hindsight it is hard to credit that, less than 3 years ago, St Greta of Climate was a distant marginalised voice just a girl on Twitter. That entry is from Dara McAnulty's Diary of a Young Naturalist a record shit-happens, mainly in Co Fermanagh and Co Down, from Spring Equinox 2018 to Spring Equinox 2019. In the middle of the book the McAnulty family moves from one side of Ulster to the other which causes a good bit of change-anxiety for young Dara and his younger sibs Lorcan and Bláthnaid who are all somewhere on the spectrum. But here's the thing, first day at the new school Dara is met by a young chap in his class who is his designated buddy; who also shares his interest in the natural world and also the unnatural world of Xbox gaming. There are poignant entries in the diary been here a week and no bullying . . . been here a month and no bullying. Now here's the thing: how is it that one school has systemic bullying and the other doesn't? and what are a) the Head Teacher b) the rest of the staff c) the parents and d) the Department of Education doing about it before the next academic year and the start of another round of institutional inhumanity. Note Greta Thunberg was also bullied in school.
I tease The Beloved about her guru Thich Nhat Hahn being Dalai Lama Light, but that's crass and buys into the Harry Potter Winner-takes-all-ism which is the bane of fame and reputation in our current world system. TNH has a different message, different tech, different presentation, it is othering to bang all elderly meditation blokes in robes into the same ashram as interchangeable cogs in the mindfulness industry. Likewise, it is easy to dismiss Dara McAnulty as Greta-lite on the ecowarrior charts. Obvs Dara is going to get some traction in Ireland because he is Our Ecowarrior but he's got something to say for all of us who are left of the planet. He says, for example, a benison over the 70% of British house sparrows Passer domesticus which didn't leave descendants from 1970. That's not on the red-list by any means but I remember saying ~50 years ago that soon enough there'll be nothing left but rats, cockroaches, sparrows and starlings after all life's wonderful diversity had been swept clean by whatever Miscreant Humanity had been up to in 1970.
The McAnulty book is pretty impressive for a 17 y.o. but some of the extravagant praise by such Econames as Chris Packham and Robert Macfarlane seems a bit dodgy in its sub-text. It's a little like Samuel "Curmudgeon" Johnson's [prev] — 'Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.' Where you substitute An autist's writing is . . .". One thing that I really did get from the book is an insight into one autistic mind. Dara is at pains to note that his brother Lorcan, with whom he's been sharing genes and breakfast cereal for 15 years, has a quite different autistic mind and a different external presentation also.
Buuut, in the Acknowledgements, McAnulty tips a hat to Adrian, at Little Toller, for not trying to 'adult' my voice in the editing process. Which is nice, but a sensitive editor could have done all that and yet suggested some word changes so that this blobby reader was not brought up all standing at the choice of some not-quite-right adjectives. At 17 nobody has had enough time to read enough books or listen to enough podcasts to nail the current nuanced meaning of words in English. Getting this time / experience under your belt is one definition of wisdom insofar as that is different from intelligence [hint - it is]. FWIW, Greta Thunberg's book "No One is too Small to Make a Difference" is even slighter, both in page count and content, than Dara's Diary.
I look forward to seeing this chap develop. I may even get to meet him on a raptor watch if 'my' buzzards and 'his' red kites Milvus milvus finish up on the same mountain shoulder.
Sunday, 9 July 2017
The Talent
There is a great moment in Shakespeare in Love [watch! that's an order] where Art triumphs over Cash.
Hugh Fennyman: Now listen to me, you dregs, actors are ten a penny and I, Hugh Fennyman, hold your nuts in my hand.
>!RUMPUS!<
Hugh Fennyman: Uh, one moment, sir.
Ned Alleyn: Who are you?
Hugh Fennyman: I'm, uh... I'm the money.
Ned Alleyn: Then you may remain so long as you remain silent.
It should be made compulsory watching buy [sic] all who affect to support the Arts. All those who have a comfortable desk in the Arts Council or make decisions on behalf of some millionaire bond-trader who is 'giving back'. The metaphor "actors are ten a penny" sums this attitude up just perfick. Because it's just not true. True talent is fabulously, worryingly, rare. And far too often it dies, like Keats, in a garret. Well, erm, actually, of course, it was the TB that did for Keats. Having talent is not always consonant with having infinite bottle and you can hardly blame youngsters if they give up, or back-burner, their Essential Self to get a job that pays some money - because eating can be fun too.
Yesterday was Small Press Day 2017 in Forbidden Planet in Dublin. I am amazed and delighted that two dozen 'creators' turned up to showcase their work - there is hope for the world if that many examples of The Talent are walking the streets of Ireland today . . . and some of them may even have warm homes and dry beds in which to sleep tonight. I only know about the event because I've known one of the participants, Clare Foley, since before she could tie her own shoe-laces, and Dau.I and Dau.II told me that their BFF was launching her latest oeuvre Frozen Waste [L] [reviewed] yesterday. This recent interview gives some insight into the process of creativity and inspiration. I got hold of a copy of her illustrated version of Honoré de Balzac's La Grande Bretêche which Foley had released plate by hard-won plate on Tumblr before getting a very short run printed. Whatever it was that inspired a young woman to spend months drawing and lettering panels to represent a minority interest short story from a different country, it was not to make a million bucks. That seems to be the empty and unsatisfying 'ambition' of too many unhappy people in these benighted times. I won't make a million bucks either by selling my 1st Edition when Foley goes all Harry Potter on us . . . I'll only make £40,000 for making that modest contribution to the support of a young artist at the beginning of her career. As I said at the top of this piece it's not about the money. It is, as Neil Gaiman says, about Make Good Art. Any art! I've tribbed W¡ld a bunch of young-and-amazing, and like Foley home-educated, musicians before.
And I've written before about paying every adult a Basic Income so that each one can get on with making something of themselves rather sacrificing their talent on the altars of Mammon.
Hugh Fennyman: Now listen to me, you dregs, actors are ten a penny and I, Hugh Fennyman, hold your nuts in my hand.
>!RUMPUS!<
Hugh Fennyman: Uh, one moment, sir.
Ned Alleyn: Who are you?
Hugh Fennyman: I'm, uh... I'm the money.
Ned Alleyn: Then you may remain so long as you remain silent.
It should be made compulsory watching buy [sic] all who affect to support the Arts. All those who have a comfortable desk in the Arts Council or make decisions on behalf of some millionaire bond-trader who is 'giving back'. The metaphor "actors are ten a penny" sums this attitude up just perfick. Because it's just not true. True talent is fabulously, worryingly, rare. And far too often it dies, like Keats, in a garret. Well, erm, actually, of course, it was the TB that did for Keats. Having talent is not always consonant with having infinite bottle and you can hardly blame youngsters if they give up, or back-burner, their Essential Self to get a job that pays some money - because eating can be fun too.
And I've written before about paying every adult a Basic Income so that each one can get on with making something of themselves rather sacrificing their talent on the altars of Mammon.
Monday, 5 May 2014
A light on the darkness
Elizabeth Mary Cochran was born 150 years ago today on 5th May 1864 near Pittsburg, PA, and she was going places where the rest of the girls from her street were not. Here father was a classic self-made can-do American industrialist who foolishly died intestate (don't do this at home, adults) when Elizabeth was six. It was a hard life for women in a Victorian world where they were effectively chattel-slaves and had few opportunities for independent income. Her mother accordingly re-married as a way of supporting her extensive brood of children but chose to wed a yob. During the divorce proceedings young Elizabeth asserted, in the articulate and sassy way that was to become her signature, that “My stepfather has been generally drunk since he married my mother.” Her family moved into Pittsburg where they ran a boarding house and Elizabeth added a "sophisticated" final e to her surname.
When told by a "What Girls Are Good For" column in the Pittsburg Dispatch, that her role was to cook and clean and raise the children, she wrote an angry, articulate, anonymous ("Little Orphan Girl") rebuttal denouncing the assumptions. This caught the attention of the newspaper's editor George Madden who hunted her out and asked her to write more of that stuff. After a one-column trial she was hired at $5 a week using the pen-name Nellie Bly. When she went to Mexico as a foreign correspondent, instead of writing about the tiaras at diplomatic balls, she chose to expose the endemic and divisive corruption of the country and suppression of the press; which led to her being expelled from the country. Six Months in Mexico (1888). Back in Pittsburg she did some undercover reporting, slaving in a cardboard-box factory with other working women and exposing what it was really like to work in a sweat-shop. It was probably not a great deal different from the places where your dirt-cheap shirtings and grossly overpriced running shoes are assembled today in Indonesia and Bangladesh. She got a little too hot to handle and was re-assigned to “stories about flower shows and fashion” until, at the age of 23, she jacked it in and went to New York for more exciting prospects.
Within a year she was hired by Joseph "Prize" Pulitzer to write for the The New York World. Her first, and now notorious, assignment was to fake her way into Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum (they hadn't invented euphemisms yet!). She wrote about the casual cruelty that was meted out on the unfortunates in that institution: thumps, rats, cold baths, crap food, force-feeding. Ten Days in a Madhouse (1887). The film of the book is coming out this year. At least the deranged of New York didn't have to work washing sheets as was required more recently in our own Irish Magdalen Laundries. After that she got herself thrown into jail to see what happened to women when caught up in the US criminal justice system. Those were just the most dramatic of her exposés; the daily grind was writing about the corruption and malfeasance of NYC officialdom that was only quantitatively different from what she'd seen in Mexico.
The stunt for which she achieved lasting fame was attempting to emulate Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days. She set sail from New York on 14th November 1889 and returned 72.25 days later having used a variety of transport (balloon, horse, mule, railway, rickshaw, sampan, steamship) to achieve the circumnavigation. Her telegraphed reports were great for the circulation of her newspaper. All good fun, but nevertheless not a walk in the park. Around the World in 72 Days (1890). However well she wrote, her book titles could be more exciting, no? At the same time, the New York Cosmopolitan staked another young journalist Elizabeth Bisland to go round the World the other way. Bisland took four days longer and so in the Harry Potter winner-takes-all style that is universal in our society is consigned to the dustbin of the forgotten.
Nellie covered the infamous Woman Suffrage Parade of 1913 down Pennsylvania Avenue DC the day before Woodrow Wilson's presidential inauguration. The women were roundly duffed up by a crowd of heckling and jeering men aided and abetted by the police when it came to putting the boot in. 200 women finished up getting treated in hospital for their injuries. Nellie's story was headlined "Suffragists are Men's Superiors" and she predicted correctly that women wouldn't get the vote until 1920. Senate hearings in the aftermath resulted in . . . the replacement of the police chief. It being 100 years ago, black suffragettes were compelled to have a separate parade somewhere else.
Nellie married a very wealthy industrialist 40 years her senior and chaired the company Iron Clad Manufacturing Co. after his death. She was certainly not a place-holder in the board-room and took out patents for a steel drum, a novel milk-churn and stacking garbage-cans. Her 55 gallon steel oil drum eventually became the global standard. So I'm claiming her as a woman in STEM.
Nellie Bly aka Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman died of pneumonia at the age of 57 in January 1922. Elizabeth Bisland died of pneumonia at the age of 67 in January 1929. Such deaths wouldn't happen today, but they will happen to our daughters' generation when the effectiveness of antibiotics has been squandered promoting the growth of battery chickens.
When told by a "What Girls Are Good For" column in the Pittsburg Dispatch, that her role was to cook and clean and raise the children, she wrote an angry, articulate, anonymous ("Little Orphan Girl") rebuttal denouncing the assumptions. This caught the attention of the newspaper's editor George Madden who hunted her out and asked her to write more of that stuff. After a one-column trial she was hired at $5 a week using the pen-name Nellie Bly. When she went to Mexico as a foreign correspondent, instead of writing about the tiaras at diplomatic balls, she chose to expose the endemic and divisive corruption of the country and suppression of the press; which led to her being expelled from the country. Six Months in Mexico (1888). Back in Pittsburg she did some undercover reporting, slaving in a cardboard-box factory with other working women and exposing what it was really like to work in a sweat-shop. It was probably not a great deal different from the places where your dirt-cheap shirtings and grossly overpriced running shoes are assembled today in Indonesia and Bangladesh. She got a little too hot to handle and was re-assigned to “stories about flower shows and fashion” until, at the age of 23, she jacked it in and went to New York for more exciting prospects.
The stunt for which she achieved lasting fame was attempting to emulate Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days. She set sail from New York on 14th November 1889 and returned 72.25 days later having used a variety of transport (balloon, horse, mule, railway, rickshaw, sampan, steamship) to achieve the circumnavigation. Her telegraphed reports were great for the circulation of her newspaper. All good fun, but nevertheless not a walk in the park. Around the World in 72 Days (1890). However well she wrote, her book titles could be more exciting, no? At the same time, the New York Cosmopolitan staked another young journalist Elizabeth Bisland to go round the World the other way. Bisland took four days longer and so in the Harry Potter winner-takes-all style that is universal in our society is consigned to the dustbin of the forgotten.
Nellie married a very wealthy industrialist 40 years her senior and chaired the company Iron Clad Manufacturing Co. after his death. She was certainly not a place-holder in the board-room and took out patents for a steel drum, a novel milk-churn and stacking garbage-cans. Her 55 gallon steel oil drum eventually became the global standard. So I'm claiming her as a woman in STEM.
Nellie Bly aka Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman died of pneumonia at the age of 57 in January 1922. Elizabeth Bisland died of pneumonia at the age of 67 in January 1929. Such deaths wouldn't happen today, but they will happen to our daughters' generation when the effectiveness of antibiotics has been squandered promoting the growth of battery chickens.
Tuesday, 26 December 2017
Boudin blanc d'Irlande
St. Stephen's Day, when we have a second go at the food.
This story needs some background music, so you might open Le Boudin in another tab for the five minutes it will take you to read about John Paul O'Connor [above] who makes white pudding within sight of Carrauntoohill [above] in Co Kerry. I met him the other day in Tramore. I was looking after Pat the Salt and nipped up to Supervalu to buy some bread and milk . . . and came away with 250g of white pudding. Hard to refuse a man who has driven 200km to sell something that he believes in. Very nice it was too: it even got a 'like' from The Beloved and she's a vegetarian. O'Connor is about my age, but he missed out on the very expensive education bit; indeed he left school and left the country when he was 13 to go and work in England. One of his jobs was in a sausage factory in London, before he got his start in construction. He has erected steel all over the British Isles and also across the pond in America. The boom was good to him and in 2007 he was employing not only himself but 20 others besides. We treat our entrepreneurs shockin' poor in this country, expecting them to take all the risks, take people off the live register, and put money aside for retirement or disaster.
Everyone was washed up and laid off in the Crash. In 2012, when the last sliver of construction had worked itself through, O'Connor looked across the kitchen table at his wife Kathleen and they agreed they were too old to emigrate again. They decided that they could make a better sausage than the dreadful concoction they had a hand in when they were young - turns out that she had also worked in the sausage trade in London.
They'd been in business for less than a year when they entered their products in a competition organised by theHarry Potter School of Food Wizardry Commanderie des Goustiers du Duché d'Alençon in Normandy and came away with a Best in British Isles cup and certificate. [L with M.Dupont et M.Dumbledore]. The O'Connors have decided to take Sásta Sausages and Puddings up-market rather than competing with the Big Boys on price. That way they'll be able to keep the quality of their ingredients high. Unless you're starvin' you wouldn't want to go down-market with sausage. I had a choking revelation in Boston when I read the ToC for hot-dogs after I had eaten half a packet: what in heck are chicken non-meat byproducts? apart from being pink? Sásta puddings retail at €12/kg compared to Tesco Finest at €3.34/kg. If you treat meat as a condiment to the calories, like Thomas Jefferson, then you'll be able to justify paying for something that is genuine. Quite apart from supporting a company (and all its employees) that wouldn't exist but for a couple with conviction, courage and a good product.
The puff on the packet claims that the recipe is inspired by JP's grand-mother who used to lash in gorse flowers Ulex europaeus and wild garlic Allium ursinum. That would be interesting, gorse smells of coconut with a hint of vanilla, and ramsons A. ursinum would make your eyes water at ten paces. So I've left pictures of those Summer flowers up [R] so that their whiff will beguile you while you read the modern ingredients:
Pork (80%), onion, pinhead oatmeal, water, rusk (wheat flour, water, salt), spice mix (wheat flour, rusk (wheat), salt, soya flour, preservative sodium metabisulphite, emulsifier: sodium tripolyphosphate, spice and spice extracts, antioxidant E301, rapeseed oil, herbs and herb extracts, flavour enhancer E621).
Notes:
This story needs some background music, so you might open Le Boudin in another tab for the five minutes it will take you to read about John Paul O'Connor [above] who makes white pudding within sight of Carrauntoohill [above] in Co Kerry. I met him the other day in Tramore. I was looking after Pat the Salt and nipped up to Supervalu to buy some bread and milk . . . and came away with 250g of white pudding. Hard to refuse a man who has driven 200km to sell something that he believes in. Very nice it was too: it even got a 'like' from The Beloved and she's a vegetarian. O'Connor is about my age, but he missed out on the very expensive education bit; indeed he left school and left the country when he was 13 to go and work in England. One of his jobs was in a sausage factory in London, before he got his start in construction. He has erected steel all over the British Isles and also across the pond in America. The boom was good to him and in 2007 he was employing not only himself but 20 others besides. We treat our entrepreneurs shockin' poor in this country, expecting them to take all the risks, take people off the live register, and put money aside for retirement or disaster.
Everyone was washed up and laid off in the Crash. In 2012, when the last sliver of construction had worked itself through, O'Connor looked across the kitchen table at his wife Kathleen and they agreed they were too old to emigrate again. They decided that they could make a better sausage than the dreadful concoction they had a hand in when they were young - turns out that she had also worked in the sausage trade in London.
They'd been in business for less than a year when they entered their products in a competition organised by the
The puff on the packet claims that the recipe is inspired by JP's grand-mother who used to lash in gorse flowers Ulex europaeus and wild garlic Allium ursinum. That would be interesting, gorse smells of coconut with a hint of vanilla, and ramsons A. ursinum would make your eyes water at ten paces. So I've left pictures of those Summer flowers up [R] so that their whiff will beguile you while you read the modern ingredients:
Pork (80%), onion, pinhead oatmeal, water, rusk (wheat flour, water, salt), spice mix (wheat flour, rusk (wheat), salt, soya flour, preservative sodium metabisulphite, emulsifier: sodium tripolyphosphate, spice and spice extracts, antioxidant E301, rapeseed oil, herbs and herb extracts, flavour enhancer E621).
Notes:
- The emboldened words are, as usual, flagged as potential allergens
- E301 is ascorbic acid - vitamin C
- E621 is MSG monosodium glutamate the Queen of Umami.
- sodium tripolyphosphate [ahem that's E452], the emulsifier, we've met before as a 'builder' in the chemistry of detergents. Here it helps keep things damp.
Wednesday, 2 April 2014
It's not helping your kids
A home educating pal-o-mine had an educational philosophy which was for the relevant parents to "Shut up and get out of the way". I've elaborated mine a little here, although what I actually did for the girls was close enough to shut up and stand aside - SUASA. This is not to say we did nothing for them. No, they spend hours of the early lives in the car being shipped to ballet, drama, library, music, play-dates, the river, the arboretum, home-ed gatherings. During those journeys conversation occurred over and around whatever talking book was on the car tape-deck - far too much Harry Potter in my opinion. Later, our pal Lulu, organised the HEN transition year mid-teen marathon which shipped her girl and ours and a dozen others all over the island to cultural, historical, scientific and political venues once a month for a year (and a half). Then there were/are 3000 books in the house and Dau.I certainly read more than half of them before she left home. But most of the adult input was The Conversation meandering up hill and down dale wherever the questions drove it and always taking in a little of what could be seen from the vantage points of that developing and emerging landscape of ideas. The great thing is that there was never home-work - which might be defined as a dreary assignment required by someone else to be completed to that someone's schedule.
This was in sharp contrast, and largely in (over-)reaction to, what happened with The Boy who went to almost as many schools as I had homes as we schlepped back and forth across the Atlantic and North Sea. When we finally came home to Ireland for good when he was 14, the Head of his Nth school said that, to thrive in the Irish system, 3 hours of home-work would be required. Consultation with teens in other schools suggested that this was 'normal'. I'm afraid that I did try to 'help' The Boy with his ekkers which meant that I tried to impose my idea of self-discipline on him in exactly the way that had riled me up when my own father had applied that treatment to me. The Boy wasn't having any of that, and by way of civil disobedience and a few rows, encouraged me to back off. It is not surprising that, with a professional biologist in the house, he achieved his lowest grade in that subject in his Leaving certificate. Me attempting to change that was perhaps the lowest point in our relationship. My bad, but I did learn. With home-education there is no sensible way to incorporate homework - and good riddance.
In the same issue of the Atlantic that had a piece on (not) protecting your child, there was another called "Don't help your kids with their home-work". This reports research finding that helping with the homework can be counter-productive because you know less about trigonometry than they do; but also because the way you were taught a generation ago is different from how kids are taught today - so your attempts at 'help' only help to confuse. They also report that helping your children choose academic options is worse than letting them alone for this task. With 20:20 hindsight, I should surely have let The Boy choose his own courses rather than trying to make it easier for him by advising/telling/ordering him to choose a soft option like biology rather than, say, physics which he may have done well in. After all he finished up becoming an engineer (which could be called practical physics) whereas I failed the only physics exam I ever took. One of the few ways you can help your youngsters in school is by throwing shapes to get them into classes with high-reputation teachers - this is what middle class people do all the time: they network for their own advantage among other professional people.
So here's some advice. Treat (your) children like real people: don't talk down to them. Have patience - eventually they will want to do something other than whatever it is you don't value. Don't foist your own failed ambitions on them. Don't assume that college is the best option. Kindness trumps credits.
This was in sharp contrast, and largely in (over-)reaction to, what happened with The Boy who went to almost as many schools as I had homes as we schlepped back and forth across the Atlantic and North Sea. When we finally came home to Ireland for good when he was 14, the Head of his Nth school said that, to thrive in the Irish system, 3 hours of home-work would be required. Consultation with teens in other schools suggested that this was 'normal'. I'm afraid that I did try to 'help' The Boy with his ekkers which meant that I tried to impose my idea of self-discipline on him in exactly the way that had riled me up when my own father had applied that treatment to me. The Boy wasn't having any of that, and by way of civil disobedience and a few rows, encouraged me to back off. It is not surprising that, with a professional biologist in the house, he achieved his lowest grade in that subject in his Leaving certificate. Me attempting to change that was perhaps the lowest point in our relationship. My bad, but I did learn. With home-education there is no sensible way to incorporate homework - and good riddance.
In the same issue of the Atlantic that had a piece on (not) protecting your child, there was another called "Don't help your kids with their home-work". This reports research finding that helping with the homework can be counter-productive because you know less about trigonometry than they do; but also because the way you were taught a generation ago is different from how kids are taught today - so your attempts at 'help' only help to confuse. They also report that helping your children choose academic options is worse than letting them alone for this task. With 20:20 hindsight, I should surely have let The Boy choose his own courses rather than trying to make it easier for him by advising/telling/ordering him to choose a soft option like biology rather than, say, physics which he may have done well in. After all he finished up becoming an engineer (which could be called practical physics) whereas I failed the only physics exam I ever took. One of the few ways you can help your youngsters in school is by throwing shapes to get them into classes with high-reputation teachers - this is what middle class people do all the time: they network for their own advantage among other professional people.
So here's some advice. Treat (your) children like real people: don't talk down to them. Have patience - eventually they will want to do something other than whatever it is you don't value. Don't foist your own failed ambitions on them. Don't assume that college is the best option. Kindness trumps credits.
Monday, 27 March 2023
Catadromous
My statement at dinner that my latest earbook was The Book of Eels: their Lives, Secrets and Myths by Tom Fort was met with gales of incredulous laughter from Dau.II. I was disconcerted at the reaction because monographs on aspects of the natural world are my jam: Salmon by Mark Kurlansky for one example. The laughter came from a place thinking that eels were unimportant, effectively invisible and so rather a niche thing about which to write an entire book. True, but that the great thing about publishing 100,000 new titles every year - there's a long tail to entertain those with minority interests. The world would be a duller place if all there was to read was Harry Potter and Stephen King.
As a book-l'arning biologist, I know something about the life-cycle and economic history of eels Anguilla anguilla but I'm a crap field biologist and lacked the persistence and contemplative habit required to fish effectively. Tom Fort makes the point that anyone in Europe who has walked beside a river, mere, beck, drain or culvert has been within spitting distance of some eels but very few of us have seen them. His book was first published in 2003 and that point is unlikely still to be true for anyone born in the present century. Because like so much of nature's bounty, eels have not proved to be inexhaustible in supply.
After a wigging from my pal P, I have now sorted out the inventory of anadromous species of fish: These are fish which spawn in fresh water but spend some part of their life-cycle at sea. Catadromous fish, including eels, mate and spawn at sea and live the adult part of the existence in freshwater. Whichever way they are going, the transition between a marine salinity of 35 ‰ = 3½% and the 0.2% = 2,000 ppm generates an osmotic shock which requires a host of physiological actions to maintain the internal salinity at a comfortable 9‰ = 0.9%. Eels, salmon and mammals, including us have essentially the same level of salt in our blood plasma and lymphatic circulation. They say that is because when vertebrates evolved the salinity of sea-water was about 1% and pumping excess sodium and potassium ions through the membranes wasn't an issue. The last 450 million years has swept a lot of soluble minerals into the sea. In that time also the Atlantic Ocean has opened up from a crack to a pond 5,000km wide. Gradually the adult eeels have had to travel imperceptibly further each generation to reach the trad spawning grounds.
The first part of Fort's book tells how scientists from Italy (🇮🇹 Giovanni Grassi) and then Denmark (🇩🇰 Johannes Schmidt) showed where adult eels go when they leave their home rivers, lakes, drains and marshes for a last sex-fuelled vacation. That hot coupling destination is the wide Sargasso Sea on the Bermuda side of the Atlantic in the middle of the North Atlantic Gyre. You're quite right to give side-eye to the flag-emojis because wot-in-heck does nationality have to do with the great enterprise of Science? But 100 years ago, chauvinism and flag-wagging was very much to the fore in funding the research to solve the catadromous details of this important species in European feeding.
The second half of the book turns a spotlight on the catastrophic collapse of eel fisheries across the whole North Atlantic 'market'. Lough Neagh, the Rivers Thames and Severn, the Delaware River system, and Commachio where the Po debouches into the Adriatic. I won't even attempt to summarize the details but the story repeats itself. Demanding and cash-rich external influences seduced local fishers into eating their seed-corn. Globalization is a great disruptor of the commons: when resources are shared among neighbours there is a chance for sustainable development even if that looks like same-old same-old rather than "progress". Inexhaustible supply is a tenable position if those involved tweak traditional methods or harvest. If outsiders sweep in to feed at the same trough, often with different industrial-sized techniques, the balance is likely to get upset and the resources trampled into the mud. It may be a small-small thing, seemingly unrelated, like installing street-lights on bridges. Eels prefer to travel on dark and stormy nights: 200W of sodium light across a stream mouth act like daylight on Dracula: no way up there. But what do I know?? my pal Russ actually fished for eels in Waterford.
Friday, 24 January 2014
Jesty scoops Jenner
Arrrh, things allus come in threes. In April last year, to celebrate his birthday, I noted that Jan Jansky did a better job, earlier, of sorting out the nature of ABO blood groups than Karl Landsteiner, who gets all the credit. Last Wednesday I wrote about how botanist Donald Schnell was scooped in one of his discoveries by a humble glass-blower a hundred years previously. The following day, I was meandering through the lanes of South Dorset near where my aged and honoured mother lives. I wound up with a slightly tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement that The Yetties hail from the village where my Mum does the shopping. I was pecking about at this rabbit hole when I discovered that Benjamin Jesty had been born in the same village of Yetminster nearly 300 years ago. I'm amazed that I didn't already have this information in my noddle because Jesty is a third example of unacknowledged/unknown investigators. I mention him at the start of every lecture-course in physiology or environmental chemistry.
Like Landsteiner and ABO blood-groups, any fule kno that vaccination was invented by Edward Jenner. In May 1796 Jenner inoculated 8 y.o. James Phipps (without informed consent) with cowpox ‘matter’ from the hands of Sarah Nelmes, who had caught cowpox from a cow called Blossom (you couldn't make this up!). In July 1797 inoculated the boy with smallpox and noted that he developed no disease. At that time and long after, smallpox was a scourge in Europe, in the times Jesty and Jenner, the virus was carrying off 400,000 people in Europe every year. As the mortality rate in children was as high as 80% and the survivors were likely struck blind from corneal scarring or disfigured by the facial pocks, Jenner was taking a bit of a risk with young Master Phipps.
But 20 years earlier in 1774, as an epidemic of smallpox was coursing through Yetminster, Jesty took his wife and two sons to Chetnole, a hamlet just down the way, where there was a cow with cowpox. Using a needle he removed some 'matter' from the cow's udder and scratched it into the arms of his family. As a farrrrmer, he'd already had the cowpox. The inoculees survived the vaccination, although it as touch-and-go with his wife for a while, and came through the smallpox epidemic as well. The local yokels greeted this successful application of science to saving life with pitchforks and torches and Jesty was "hooted at, reviled and pelted whenever he attended markets in the neighbourhood". Around the time Jenner was doing his work, Jesty and his family pulled up stakes to farm in a different part of the county, where you can see his grave.
What matter? It matters thus: Jenner was given a total of £30,000 as a reward for his services to the eradication and control of smallpox. In today's money that is close to £7 million at an average inflation rate of 2.731% (rate from WolframAlpha). There are at least six other claimants to having been the first to discover the efficacy of vaccination - apart from Jesty, John Fewster from Gloucestershire and Jobst Bose from Gottingen seem to have pretty good claims for priority. But just like Harry Potter, Jenner swept all. No fair! No Fair!
And having started this post with ABO blood-groups we should bring it full circle by noting that my pal Stefan Adalsteinsson has hypothesised that smallpox, being particularly virulent against people with A and AB blood, has served to elevate the frequency of "O" in Iceland. But there is no such effect in Madras, India, so you may take Stefan's result with a pinch of salt. ABO blood-groups have been associated with numerous pathologies apart from smallpox: cholera, TB, syphilis, yaws, gonorrhoea, mumps, candida and malaria and many others too difficult to spell.
Like Landsteiner and ABO blood-groups, any fule kno that vaccination was invented by Edward Jenner. In May 1796 Jenner inoculated 8 y.o. James Phipps (without informed consent) with cowpox ‘matter’ from the hands of Sarah Nelmes, who had caught cowpox from a cow called Blossom (you couldn't make this up!). In July 1797 inoculated the boy with smallpox and noted that he developed no disease. At that time and long after, smallpox was a scourge in Europe, in the times Jesty and Jenner, the virus was carrying off 400,000 people in Europe every year. As the mortality rate in children was as high as 80% and the survivors were likely struck blind from corneal scarring or disfigured by the facial pocks, Jenner was taking a bit of a risk with young Master Phipps.
What matter? It matters thus: Jenner was given a total of £30,000 as a reward for his services to the eradication and control of smallpox. In today's money that is close to £7 million at an average inflation rate of 2.731% (rate from WolframAlpha). There are at least six other claimants to having been the first to discover the efficacy of vaccination - apart from Jesty, John Fewster from Gloucestershire and Jobst Bose from Gottingen seem to have pretty good claims for priority. But just like Harry Potter, Jenner swept all. No fair! No Fair!
And having started this post with ABO blood-groups we should bring it full circle by noting that my pal Stefan Adalsteinsson has hypothesised that smallpox, being particularly virulent against people with A and AB blood, has served to elevate the frequency of "O" in Iceland. But there is no such effect in Madras, India, so you may take Stefan's result with a pinch of salt. ABO blood-groups have been associated with numerous pathologies apart from smallpox: cholera, TB, syphilis, yaws, gonorrhoea, mumps, candida and malaria and many others too difficult to spell.
Monday, 21 November 2016
Gone viral
Could be titled Been&Gorn Viral or Once and Future Viral because . . .
I've been doing The Blob gig nearly 4 years since I started working at The Institute - a sinister corporation for altering the minds of youngsters in the Irish Midlands - and since May 2013 have put up 500 words of sense and nonsense every day for you Dear Reader. I should rather say chère lectrice nowadays because my french readers far outnumber the Anglophones (.ie + .uk + .us). Who knows how long les mecs de Grenoble will hang around before they get bored with the narrow parochialism. There was a time a couple of years ago when the page-view counter reported an unaccountable interest from Ukraine. I tried to communicate directly with them by writing things in Google-translate 'Ukrainian' and making snickering comments about Мать Россия; but it was no use and they've all gone elsewhere.
About three weeks ago, there was an unaccountable surge of interest in what I had to say which included, but wasn't limited to, la francophonie. At least in the recent blip-up it has been obvious what attracted the interest. It was all due to a piece I wrote this last June called Stilt-walking Nonsense. In that post, I applied my crap-detector to an short video clip that purported to be the cartoon of an endorphin being dragged somewhere. Because I bang on at my students about the relative size of things [glucose is smaller than the pancreas etc.] the scale seemed off and I said so. The meme of seeing happiness being moved from one place to another continued to circulate but any interest in my take on the story died away to the echo. Then a month ago, someone posted a link on Facebook and page-views of my analysis exploded like a balloon with Harry Potter's face on it and soon out-shadowed everything else on The Blob: about 7x more interest than the next most viewed posts II - III - IV. And only the II of those has any intrinsic 'merit' because the other two are included in the list in the next paragraph.
I thought we were getting a lot of traffic from people who had some sense of critical thinking and an interest in crap-detecting. Accordingly, I editted the original post so that it was preceded by a number of other pieces I've written in that vein. That had no effect! Folks were just interested in the one thing that they been sent for and then they went back to restlessly checking The Latest on Facebook. There was a certain amount of through-clickery to links at the top of the sidebar on the days when folks were sent to the Blob by Facebook: 30/10 PV=914 - 31/10 PV=952 - 01/11 PV=957 - 02/11 PV=926 but [no | zero | nul | nix | zonders] response to my recommendations. I clearly hadn't scoped the demographic correctly.
Now that minor fad on Friendface has died away and the only people who are reading about stilt-walking and dragging endorphins are those who have been in a cave since the end of October and are only now emerging, pale and unshaven, from an internet-free zone. But we aren't quite at the status quo ante, readers of The Blob are Up from ~100/day to ~1,000/day, and most of those hanging on, as the tide ebbs, are from France. Bienvenue copains, to retain your interest, I'll have to find something interesting to say about Clermont-Ferrand . . . could be difficult.
I've been doing The Blob gig nearly 4 years since I started working at The Institute - a sinister corporation for altering the minds of youngsters in the Irish Midlands - and since May 2013 have put up 500 words of sense and nonsense every day for you Dear Reader. I should rather say chère lectrice nowadays because my french readers far outnumber the Anglophones (.ie + .uk + .us). Who knows how long les mecs de Grenoble will hang around before they get bored with the narrow parochialism. There was a time a couple of years ago when the page-view counter reported an unaccountable interest from Ukraine. I tried to communicate directly with them by writing things in Google-translate 'Ukrainian' and making snickering comments about Мать Россия; but it was no use and they've all gone elsewhere.
About three weeks ago, there was an unaccountable surge of interest in what I had to say which included, but wasn't limited to, la francophonie. At least in the recent blip-up it has been obvious what attracted the interest. It was all due to a piece I wrote this last June called Stilt-walking Nonsense. In that post, I applied my crap-detector to an short video clip that purported to be the cartoon of an endorphin being dragged somewhere. Because I bang on at my students about the relative size of things [glucose is smaller than the pancreas etc.] the scale seemed off and I said so. The meme of seeing happiness being moved from one place to another continued to circulate but any interest in my take on the story died away to the echo. Then a month ago, someone posted a link on Facebook and page-views of my analysis exploded like a balloon with Harry Potter's face on it and soon out-shadowed everything else on The Blob: about 7x more interest than the next most viewed posts II - III - IV. And only the II of those has any intrinsic 'merit' because the other two are included in the list in the next paragraph.
I thought we were getting a lot of traffic from people who had some sense of critical thinking and an interest in crap-detecting. Accordingly, I editted the original post so that it was preceded by a number of other pieces I've written in that vein. That had no effect! Folks were just interested in the one thing that they been sent for and then they went back to restlessly checking The Latest on Facebook. There was a certain amount of through-clickery to links at the top of the sidebar on the days when folks were sent to the Blob by Facebook: 30/10 PV=914 - 31/10 PV=952 - 01/11 PV=957 - 02/11 PV=926 but [no | zero | nul | nix | zonders] response to my recommendations. I clearly hadn't scoped the demographic correctly.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)