Lethal implement

On the wireless last night, in the quirky regional news QRN section, mention was made of the recent conviction for drunk-driving of John O'Shea a farmer of Derrinadin, Mastergeeha, Co Kerry. Over the years, I've had a quite a lot to say about being drunk and driving. We live remote: you can't get further from a bus-stop and still be in the province of Leinster, so we know how convenient it is to own a car. But we also know how expensive it is to service that convenience. Grocers (Mr Tesco etc.) are now happy to deliver food to your door for a lot less than the minimum €60 pw it costs to run a car. We just had two 2.4m I-beams and a bunch of timber delivered 'for free' by the local steelyard, I'm sure we could cut a good deal with Red Mills to have 20 bags of sheep-feed and a bucket of mineral lick delivered to the gate; rather than stress-testing the springs of the poor ould Yaris. So the argument that farmers like us [note: there are no farmers on the planet quite like us] need a car to prosecute their business is a bit wobbly.

We know all about Mr O'Shea and his case because the conviction entailed him being put off the road for three years to stop him from being a danger to himself and others.  But his lawyer pointed out that this would cause his client great hardship if implemented immediately: how would he dispose of the cows, how would he have any social life without his wheels?  The judge beamed down in an avuncular way and made a quip about Mr O'Shea going to the local match-making festival to find "a good woman" who would drive him about the country while he was banned. This caused a predictable twituproar from, inter alia, an organisation called the Irish Road Victim's Association IRVA: "what planet is this judge living on?" . . . "sends the wrong signals".  I suspect that the banter between judge and lawyer was possible because in this case "nobody died", Mr O'Shea piled himself up on the ditch with 4x the legal limit of alcohol on-board and dinged his motor but not himself and, fortunately, not some neighbour out jogging or pushing a pram.

There is, of course, another level at which the blokey legal banter was utterly repellent. Mr O'Shea was effectively being encouraged to trade in his herd of cows, which he would no longer be able to effectively manage, for a fine heifer that could drive. And if we're on political correct tracks, we might ask if Mr O'Shea, by all accounts a 'confirmed batchelor', might not prefer a young chap who could drive , . . and talk knowledgeably about Kerry hurling.

But let's keep some perspective on this.  The average motorist in Ireland drives 10-12,000km every year, there are 2.5 million cars on the road so that's something like 25 billion person-kilometers / year. And this results in 150 road deaths [and a lot more disabling injuries]. So you can drive a helluva lot of miles before you kill yourself or somebody else.  Driving while drunk will decrease the odds that you'll have a fatal encounter but even making a 10x or 100x change in the likelihood still makes that unfortunate event unlikely on this trip home from the wedding.  Something in excess of 500 people kills themselves each year in ways that don't involve a car.  That's a minimum, suicide has negative connotations and doctors will seize straws and bend the truth to avoid calling an unexpected death a suicide. Suicide can spring from depression, depression from loneliness and social exclusion. No car, no pub, no social life, no point, no ose?

And now a road safety message from Steve Carrell and Stephen Colbert about getting drunk.  Don't do this at home, they advise: do it in a bar.  I find it quite like the Ignobel Awards in the sense that first they make you laugh, then they make you think. As one who has been designated driver plenty of times while my pals get playful, most drunken people are only endearing to themselves. And while we're on driving too fast under the influence, let's hear Frank Zappa taking a stand a stand a stand against speed.

Sun Sept Suppl

The day Ötzi the Iceman was discovered 1991

• Read first
•  Keep Calm and  . . . try another tack.
• Cajun French is fine French
• Jigsaw backstory
• Degraded map as jigsaw puzzle
• Drug synergies ungood
• ta-DA! 2021 Ignobel Prizes awarded
• Play later
• Caitlin Rose Own Side
• Susan Riggs From a Distance
• Voi voic voice-over
• Rebecca Watson hangs Dan Ariely out to dry
• Marcus "Math" du Sautoy [wins best T-shirt competition] on the joys of shortcuts
• Bristol Bridge walk 53 km more
• Making Stilton
• Ketamine disinhibition
• Cliff-diving Downpatrick Head

Squeeze me up, Sapolsky

I promised I'd write a bit more about oxytocin and vasopressin; the Squeeze Hormones. In my original piece, I was struck by the fact that the genes for these two neuropeptides are next door to each other  on human chromosome 20. It is a classic example of gene duplication: in non-mammalian vertebrates there is a single gene in that position with some variation among taxa and a few different names - vasotocin, mesotocin, isotocin - to reflect this. Robert Sapolsky in his book Behave devotes quite a few of then 700 (!) pages to these short proteins and their receptors. <duh!>, me. If I'd thought about it for 45 seconds I would I realised that it takes two to tango. Hormones are at nothing - just whoooshing round the circulatory system - until they dock with their receptor; THEN things kick off inside the cells whose receptor is thus jangled.

It seems that a number of different genetic variants of OXTR, the oxytocin receptor are present in the population of normal adults and researchers are beginning to tackle how, if at all, these changes impact the health and happiness of those who have them on board. They may drive:

• the amount of oxytocin required to induce labour [PMID 28456503]
• ADHD and social interactions [PMID 28478728]
• receptiveness to MDMA [PMID 26787430]
• dealing with grief [PMID 29353531]
• effective affective trolleyology [PMID 27497314]
• whether your dog loves you [PMID 28765081]

If these funded research topics make you think hmmmm IgNobel awards, then you are not alone. But then the whole point of IgNobels is first they make you laugh, then they make you think. That last one is interesting because it may be an example of co-evolution and explain the, frankly peculiar, affiliative relationship between humans and dogs. When your pooch looks all big-👁y👁s at you there is a rush of oxytocin at both ends of the stare. Somehow, both species have extended the limits of Us to the exclusion of Them. I see now (I tell ya b'ys, I've forgotten more blobbery than I can remember writing) that I covered this puppy luv phenomenon 5 years ago.

Within this our own species, oxytocin's effects are not indiscriminate. The standard research protocol in neuropeptide research is to spritz a solution of oxytocin up the punter's nose and then test them for implicit racism, or recognising and remembering the emotional state shown in a series of photographs. It turns out that a shot of oxytocin makes you bond more strongly with Us [family first, but also neighbours / people with the same tan as you] but brings out the worst in your assessment of black people [or travellers, if you're Irish]. In that sense oxytocin [and testosterone in a different but parallel tale] makes you more so of whatever your natural proclivities are. Some of your ways of being and interacting with others are genetic (OXTR variants?) but others are learned and that's a whole of can of nature / nurture worms. Sapoxytocsky  in the classroom and bloke-talking with Joe Rogan.

As a black and white sorta bloke, I've had vasopressin nailed as having two quite different but weirdly related functions: 1) it causes smooth muscles of the arteries to contract 2) wearing its anti-diuretic hormone ADH cape it slows water loss through the kidneys. Both of these serve to drive up blood-pressure and ensure that your brain gets enough oxygen to work under a wide variety of [adverse?] circumstances. But that's not all! vasopressin, like its sister oxytocin, also modulates behaviour. In fine, it increases human risky cooperative behavior and probably a rake of other peculiar attributes of the human condition. SADHpolsky in the classroom; where inter alia he kites the idea that autism runs in families that have a particular vasopressin receptor variant which, in other species, correlates with low levels of attachment. As Sapolsky says - it has to be more complex than that; and it is. But ya gotta put a few ideas Out There if we're ever going to shake up our complacency and make some progress in science.

Sunday catch-up 250916

• I was on a spoon jag a couple of weeks ago: functional and disposable. Here's an artistic marathon of spoon: a new carved wooden spoon for every day of the year. What is it with doing one a day for a whole year? Would the sky fall if you missed a day? Well, Bob? Would it Bob??
• Mr Ruud has another installation called . . . Bob. How about that?
• This last week has seen the National Ploughing Championships near Tullamore Co Offaly [really King's County!]. I hear they had tractor football as a sideshow.
• Did someone mention tractor hilarity from Poland?
• Back at the Ploughing: chap from Fenor Co Waterford about carving a leprachaun's chair with a chain-saw.
• Did we do sushi before? We did. But does quality depend on price?
• Forget that fancy furrin stuff and make hardtack.
• You may need instruction about how to eat the stuff.

IgNobel Prizes this year 2016. Nothing really to see here IMO.

hahahahaha incommmming

My late lamented compañero Pepe Malpica was rightly proud that his last publication was accepted in the first issue of PLOS One. Pepe was good copy and great fun because he'd often have a different way of viewing the world. PLOS One was, and is, exciting because of its business model: "papers are not to be excluded on the basis of lack of perceived importance or adherence to a scientific field". Submissions are indeed peer-reviewed but only to check the methods section; context, relevance and scientific significance are excluded from the reviewers brief. Good thing too, because a couple of peers bring their own baggage and [limited, because not infinite] experience to the table and you would not want them (or me, or you) to be the sole arbiters of what gets out into the public domain. You have to allow mavericks like Pepe to break out of the box and frame scientific questions differently. Otherwise it's just a mighty - and mighty expensive - echo-chamber.

In that sense, PLOS One can be a little like the IgNobel Awards whose watch-word is "first they make you laugh, then they make you think". Of course, for most people, most papers, most of the time are just zzzzzzzzzzzzz. And that's one of the most wonderful aspects of the electronic world we live in: nobody needs to take the whole journal to read the one paper a month that is of interest. That saves a lot of dusty paper.  "zzzzzzzzzzz" is on message because now we're looking at Hahahahaha, Duuuuude, Yeeessss!: A two-parameter characterization of stretchable words and the dynamics of mistypings and misspellings a recent paper in PLOS One. Because PLOS is the Public Library of Science y'all can read the whole thing without having to mortgage your firstborn for the subscription price. If you can read the whole thing without the Furrowed Brow of Bafflement then you're a brighter star than me. But the paper is useful because it focuses [my] attention on repeated elements.

1. Romanian soccer commentator Ille Dobre has the longest recorded single breath call of goooaaalll! When the pubs re-open be sure to impress your pals with that fact with or without a hat-tip to The Blob. And for the love of god without an attempt to emulate this feat - that way apoplexy beckons.If you need help being a bloke-in-a-pub, then Moss has you covered with Bluffball.
2. One of the advantages of having a thick-as-pig-dribble phone like my so so retro  Nokia 3310  is that each letter takes ~2 keystrokes on average, so it damps the temptation to writing incommmming rather than merely incommming. The other huge benefit is that its sad-sack text-only processor acts as a really effective emoticon filter - text me your 👱😜👿🙈 nonsense and it comes in as □□□□. Often this is the sole content of the incommming txt. But emojis, as well as being fashion accessories, are phatic comms [metaphorical hugs and mutual de-lousing] rather than data-comms [actual information].
3. Back in the day when it was either quill pens or typewriters [remember them?], you had a choice of upper case CAPITALS or lower case, all fixed width fonts so i occupied the same space as w. You will have noticed that The Blob is quite pedantic about putting species names Orycteropus afer in italics. Because that is how it is done. But in typewriter days no italics so, by convention, underlining was used to represent italics. I have seen folks trying to use another form of emphasis by backspacing and retyping the relevant word a tuthree times to make it bold. We haven't got there yet but there's great scope for incorporating colour into manuscripts to add meta-meaning to the text. 
• Kelly green "#4CBB17" will do for Irish references
• Orange "#FFA500" for marmalade excursions or fried fish
• Dull red "#990000" for fury
• Cambridge "#3d85c6" vs Oxford"#002147" if you're British
• There's a war on about what best represents the Democrats this "#3333FF" or that " #00A6EF" 
• and Republicans are divided been electric #DE0100 or plain #E9141D red
• But then again maybe this train has left the station with Emojis
4. Apart from being longer and consuming more electrons on the server, is there any downside to having hahaha or hahahaha? Nope! But there is a definite downside to having CAGCAGCAGCAG rather than CAGCAGCAG in your genome. This CAG-repeat is a stutter in one of our standard genes, called huntingtin or HTT.  CAG codes for the amino acid Glutamine and you and I probably have a different length of this repeated motif in that gene: the normal range being from 6 to 35 copies. Some families have accumulated a much longer CAG_n tract. The longer the repeated unit, the earlier and the more severe will be the onset of Huntington's Disease. HD is what killed Woody Guthrie. I can see I'll have to write longer and deeper about these trinucleotide repeat disorders of which HD is but one.

Actually (revenons nous a nos moooooutons), you might skip all the math and jargon in that PLOS One paper the conclusions are discursive and interesting.