MeFi 25 Today

In addition to this week's reg'lar Sunday Notcellany, I'm putting up a trib to mark (to the minute!) the 25th anniversary of the first post on MetaFilter. Matt Haughey = mathowie having written the software for a best-of-internet aggregator posted about "I have no idea how these people got their cats wedged into their scanners, or why."

I lurked (technical term) for years on MetaFilter until May 2020 when I coughed up my $5 one-time life-time membership fee so that I could say "Gorgeous!" about some fruit-with-fungi. Up until then, I mined MetaFilter for Blob-copy - usually with acknowledgment / attribution / citation. Through the 00s [peak blog] I followed a number of blogs and other aggregators - Memepool is long gone. Kev of "Nothing To Do With Arbroath" died. BoingBoing turned into an inter-necine shit-show with Ads. Neatorama is still trundling along although I rarely visit. I still check in with "Flippism is The Key" and Tywkiwdbi but not daily. Me, I try to generate my copy from elsewhere than the blogosphere because that medium is so prone to rechurning (technical term) the same old same old content in a sort of tedious reductive plagiarism. I guess I chose a sector of the blogosphere that was interesting to me and so had a certain amount of incest common interest = similar sources.

Anyway, I've learned a lot from MetaFilter, not least about how folks are different but not thereby wrong. And MeFi continues to serve its 1999 purpose of letting The Collective find the cool stuff. Come on in - the water's lovely.

Media diet

Well, yeah, y'know that's just like your opinion, man.

Over on MetaFilter recently, there was a long and opinionated thread about the nature and ethics of piracy. It's quite difficult to square 
a) journalism is work, journalists should get paid
with
b) there was a time when MegaMedia loaded their intellectual property IP up on the internet and we-all could read it for free. 

I've always maintained that the World would now be a better a place if, like for electricity, we'd all been charged 1c for every MegaByte we 'used'. We'd be more thrifty on the servers. 

Free media was how it was at the Birth of The Blob in 2013/'14/'15. I could surf around the web and read news and commentary; quote something; add my own bit of Talmudary; and post it all on The Blob. Nowadays, not so much, I don't read Food & Wine or Vanity Fair or New Yorker or Nature or Science because they are all behind paywalls. Which is fair enough because journalists should get paid. I'll preen myself a bit by asserting that I always tried / try to add something extra to the debate in any Blobs I posted. Many failed to do that, merely re-churning the basic facts of the case often lifting whole phrases and sentences from the original. A practice [plagiarism] which we used to forbid our students at The Institute. Obvs, my years of Sunday Round-up (mostly YT) were an exception of whc I am now ashamed.

There are ways of circumventing paywalls often involving various archive sites which are trying to capture the ephemeral internet. Just to note that Nature and Science is a slightly different case. Both periodicals employ journalists to write copy: opinion, commentary, overview and explanation. These people are paid and readers should pay for access. But the majority of pages in any issue of these keystone publications are taken up with original primary scientific research reports.  For other scientific journals All the pages are scientific papers. The hard graft of creating the IP and writing about it is already paid for - largely by research grants from government or foundations. So Elsevier are gouging punters when they charge $50 to read one article. Other MegaPublishers are available. I've ranted extensively about this. Sci-Hub will get you older 'copyright' scientific pubs.

Fungible media. But Science is not my beef today. I didn't contribute to the MetaFilter discourse but my hot take is that it don't matter tuppence if you cannot access That article which someone else recommends. If you're alert and curious, the gap in your knowledge will be filled with something else . . . anything else? Literature is fungible, I guess I'm saying. There is plenty of choice [R Easons Waterford Ryw Station 1924]. All grist to the mill of keeping the grey cells active. And maybe less is more? My father enrolled in a speed-reading course at the age of 80 because there was so much to read but so little time. It killed him in the end. 

If you feel you spend too much time restlessly scrolling then cold turkey works for me. I've taken a fortnight off from YouTube, Metafilter in the past just to cool down. And I paused the Blob's Sunday Miscellany a while back because my TY links are contributing to someone else's glazed-eye dopamine issues aka GEDI.

Of course if you're alert and specifically curious you will have already subscribed to Matchboxes Quarterly or Model Railway Tunneller.

Mad meds

Years ago, after the Internet but before the WWW, there were Usenet News Groups where folk with similar interests and obsessions could come together to compare notes. It's where someone on rec.arts.books flagged for me The Lost Continent, Bill Bryson's first and funniest book. I made some contributions about maintaining dirt roads, the coexistence of chickens and orchards, what I read in my Summer holidays.  

I was asthmatic before it became ubiquitous - first attack 1956 following a temper tantrum about having to leave Duncannon after a week of sand and chilblains. There were no meds back then and I survived, until as a teen, I grew out of it. The Boy inherited that predisposition and had a near-death experience when he was 15. After that I took asthma [a bit] more seriously. Asthma and Usenet came together then and I used to lurk about the alt.med.asthma group. My only contribution there was to suggest that there might be some merit in The Buteyko Method of managing asthma through breathing exercises. Well! you would have thought I suggested roasting asthmatics on large bonfires. There was a shrill push-back from people who were wedded to their meds: if I don't have my inhaler charged at all times I . will . die. I was conflicted because I was alive . . . but the boy had been seriously ill,  without medical asthma intervention.

This see-saw between meds v. cure-thyself came whooshing back when I read a balanced piece by Devon Price about neurotransmitters, character, mental dysphoria and external impacts. It was flagged <surprize!> by MetaFilter. From Big Pharma's viewpoint, a great med is one which is prescribed for many forever. Statins, for example. This is supposed to be the argument why no MegaPharm financial controller is going to fund a search for novel antibiotics: there's not enough $ugar in a drug which is used for 2 weeks every decade.

I've known one case where the anti-psychotic Olanzapine gave an elderly raving relative a short-sharp shock that brought them back to earth and in a happier place. But it took a pro-active daughter to review that elder's daily pharmacopeia and get Olanzapine removed from the menu by increments over a few weeks. So far, there has been no relapse.  There is, accordingly, an argument that medication can be used, a bit like electro-convulsive therapy ECT? to reset an internal clock. The downside is that the homeostatic feedback of human physiology will, under some regimes, fight back against intrusive meds so that the dose needs to be eked ever upwards. And in any case, your body is not my body and our set-points will surely differ. It is important to work actively with your GP to get the dosage balanced to maximise benefit while limiting the wearing side-effects: headaches, constipation, tremors, flatulence, flushes, more headaches.

My contribution to the Metafilter debate assumed that there were few in the forum who had a stake in mental illness and were old enough to remember RD Laing [R looking baleful]: Interesting. It's helpful to tease apart proximate [mechanistic, neurotransmitter] causes from ultimate causes. RD Laing is 32 years dead but he tried to shift the the angle of attack: "Insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world." and "A child born today in the United Kingdom stands a ten times greater chance of being admitted to a mental hospital than to a university ... This can be taken as an indication that we are driving our children mad more effectively than we are genuinely educating them. Perhaps it is our way of educating them that is driving them mad."  RD Laing talked a strong line about medicalizing the neur-atypical and had a more holistic view of how society impacts on the vulnerable. In an ideal world, some of the money which is currently floating champagne parties in Pfizer, Glaxo and Bayer would be diverted to therapists, counsellors, down-with-drink campaigns and . . . house-builders. But my woofle is less informed and thoughful than Devon Price here.

Fatberg follies

There's a great fat story going viral across the blogosphere today about a 15 ton 'fatberg' that almost completely filled a sewer in Kingston in suburban West London. I get my feeds from Metafilter where it was claimed that 15 tons of lard was the size of a double-decker bus.  They probably read the Daily Mirror who are likely to big up a silly-season story like this, so I turned to the broadsheet The Independent, whence I gleaned that the mass of 'lard' and wet-wipes a) weighed 15 tons b) was the size of a bus c) was found in a sewer 70cm x 48cm in section, that was reduced to 5% of its capacity.

Does this make sense?  Wolfram alpha reports the density of lard as 0.87g/ml or about 90% that of water.  But why keep a dog when you can bark youself?: The 454g=1lb block of butter in our fridge is 13cm x 6cm x 6cm = 468ml which says that butter is almost the same (97%) density as water.  Maybe it's the added salt that ups the density?  We'll call it 0.9g/ml.

Metafilter's "double-decker" bus is 10m x 4.4m x 2.4m = 105cu.m.  The Indo's "regular" bus is not so tall: 10m x 2.4m x 2.4m = 58cu.m.  Whereas the volume of the fatberg (if lard) is only 16cu.m.  Say a 4m x 2m x 2m minibus?  Doesn't sound as exciting as a double-decker does it?  And as sewers are by definition long (must put distance between ourselves and our waste) and relatively thin, any sort of bus is a rather crap metaphor, isn't it? 70cm x 48cm is as near as dammit 1/3 sq.m.  So I surmise that the ribbon of lard was about 50m long.

Has anything useful come out of this "analysis"?  Sure.  If you filled a double decker bus with beer and could get it on board it would satisfy the liquid refreshment requirements of the crew of the Golden Hind for the first year of her round the world voyage in 1577.

Oh yes, and don't pour hot fat down the kitchen sink.  And "flushable" wet-wipes are not biodegradable in any practical sense.

Today Tin Day

Posted on MetaFilter [here be comments] but you prolly don't read MetaFilter as much as me . . . 19th Feb is the 50th day of the year. If you forget to celebrate DarwinDay, you have a week to gird your loins for TinDay ₅₀Sn being the 50th element; but don't let it go to your head. Tin is one of the metals important for future technologies [MIFT] and the spot price has tripled during Coronarama; so we need to know something about it. Tin Day seven years ago.

• Price: $43/kg; aluminum Al $3/kg; copper Cu $10; Nickel Ni $24; Silver Ag $770/kg
• Density: 7.3g/cm³; more than Al 2.7; same as iron Fe 7.8; less than lead Pb 11.3
• Melts in a pizza oven: 230°C, 445°F
• Kernow: Stannary Charters of 1201 and 1305 granted tinners the right to prospect and mine throughout Cornwall but all the tin had to be sent to Stannary Towns for assay: Lostwithiel, Bodmin, Liskeard, Truro and Helston. Geevor [13m] the last commercial tin mine closed in 1990
• Bronze is 10-12% tin. So Cornish tin was in demand through the Bronze Age
• Bronze medal winners are happier
• Pewter:  is 90% tin with antimony Sb 5%; copper Cu 2% [and formerly Pb]. Plates pots flagons and tankards from the Mary Rose
• Irish travellers no longer ply a trade as tinkers because plastic utensils are brighter cheaper
  
• The Creak. Crank up the volume to hear the cry of tin with Andrea Sella [5m]
• Tin pest [11m] with Cody: white β tin will corrupt to a brittle ceramic allotrope called grey α tin if slowly cooled
• Poliakoff and Barnes show and tell [15m]
  
• ITO: Indium (which also creaks) tin oxide is a transparent conductor for touch screens
• TBT: Tributyl-tin was an anti-fouling paint for ship's hulls. Horribly toxic to marine wildlife: sea snails changing sex, deforming the shells of oysters. Banned since 2008 by the IMO.
• Rin Tin Tin [1m] is not made of tin; Tintin is not made of tin, nor is Milou the dog; tinfoil has been made of aluminum [lighter cheaper] since WWII.
  
• Plate glass [7m] : is made on tin by Pilkington. Needs an atmosphere of nitrogen and hydrogen to prevent the ultra-smooth molten tin from oxidizing.
• Solder: I know nothing about solder except it uses more of the world's remaining tin than any other product
  
• Blood diamonds cassiterite SnO₂ in Congo

Tomorrow Antimony ₅₁Sb !

Moranipause

My daughters are big fans of Caitlin Moran; who done good as a journalist and public intellectual without going to secondary school. When they've read the latest Moranifesto they pass it along to me; so I've become a bit of a groupie. Her latest More than a Woman (2020) brings us to date to share some perspective from the shoulders of a 45 y.o. holding up the world. It's a journey. How to Build a Girl was followed How to Be a Woman.  The position for the latest book is the caring professionals and amateurs are disproportionately women with more and more people in need of care. Often a woman will be responsible both as primary childcare and managing the disintegration of both her parents and her in-laws . . . as well holding down a regular job to pay half the gargantuan mortgage.

My residual desire for Social Media is currently met by Metafilter where people discuss things they come across in the media and blogosphere. Metafilter leans left, USA, BLT. All the Republicans have been driven out; and those who are hesitant about vaccines don't brag about it. One of the rules of Metadiscourse is that you must rein in the desire to contribute if you don't have skin in the game. Someone will perk up with Oh no, not #notallmen again if a patriarch like me bridles at being thrown out of the bus with the latest misogynistic monster of media. There is no pain that cis-het ♂ silverbacks can experience which comes close to every day life for black folks. It must be hard to live in a world where you are ex blokio officio responsible for all the wrongs in the world.

Moran addresses with this in a What About the Men? chapter triggered by having her youngest 19 y.o. brother coming to bunk in their married couple two kids London home. This young feller's position is that it's harder for him to navigate the 21stC than it is for women of the same age and demographic. Which comes across as whiny, snow-flaky and bring back National Servicey. Perhaps because she loves her brother, Moran is able to cut him and his peer-group some slack: partly because shouting at him/them is only going to polarize the dialogue even further. And send men in droves off to their cliché pubs, clubs, soccer and Men's Sheds. Still better to be complaining about the ref while watching Match of the Day, than failing to decide between pills or hanging and taking the car out for one last reckless spin. Nobody ever buys men flowers. Men are still dressed like, and behave like, it was 1921. Their roles and their emotional life haven't evolved in 100 years except that in addition to Breadwinner they've also added plongeur, chauffeur, aupair and boulanger to their To Do list. Indeed they can't play the Breadwinner card either because Herself is out to work as well. No wonder they are bewildered.

Another group who are all sheets to the wind in a sea of troubles are teenage girls. Eating disorders and self-harm are no respecters of money or social class and there is a lot of it about. Moran's take is that teenagers have had to shoulder a burden of responsibility about the state of the world which, because young, they are ill-equipped to deal with. This is made worse by St Greta of Thunberg being out there appearing to deal with the world's existential crises and setting an impossibly high bar on other teenagers to be similarly brilliant and effective. Their parents talk about how adults have fucked over the world but that the brilliant youth of today will sort it out for us all. Whaaaaa'? why are we laying the solution on the kids?  It's really hard to work out a script for parents of a troubled teen. One thing for certain, making them responsible for the emotional distress of the parents is no help at all. Moran didn't get her head and her role sorted until her daughter was beginning to see a chink of light in a cycle of anorexia and razors. There are loads of heads out there sounding off about the causes and cures of the epidemic but talk is cheap and mis-steps are legion. But not all of them have been there - as a parent or troubled teen. 

Moran has skin in the game, so is worth listening to. She deals with weighty topics with a light touch; sometimes laugh-aloud funny.  A dash of humility and hefty shake of compassion leaven the mix. The last chapter reflect on how her role is shifting from middle-aged woman to Hag. It won't lessen her responsibilities much just smooze them out a bit so they seem like a helping hand rather than an obligatory part of the daily routine. I suspect she's roughing out the chapter headings for How to Bewilder the Cailleach.

Between psychopath and pollyanna

Ever on the mark for exercising my utilitarian muscles, I was taken from Metafilter to a scrolling cartoon [link was working for me, on company time, this afternoon, but gone down at home, YMMV] about trading puppies for your mother. The story is that, in an interview for the position of a White House staffer, an applicant is asked how much money they'd need to pop a puppy in a microwave. When they've disposed of the money aspects of the transaction, The Man asks how many puppies would the applicant be prepared to see die to save his mother. You get the idea. It's more or less pure trolleology, which The Blob has touched on before.

In such hypothetical scenarios, nobody is going to present you with a puppy, a sack and a brick but they might want to see how you tick and whether you're capable to making hard decisions. By some accounts, fellow students presented ex-UK PM David Cameron with a pig's head, and he was able to do the hard thing. As one of the commenters on Metafilter put it "They don't want psychopaths, but they also don't want moralistic Pollyannas who don't understand that compromises have to be made everywhere."  As Otto von Bismarck said, politics is the art of the possible. In honest democratic government a key issue is trying to get enough money, in taxes, from citizens to run the ship of state in ways that increase happiness or utility or efficiency for those same citizens. An obvious way for the state to spend your tax-dollars in utilitarian ways is in building infrastructure: roads, bridges, libraries, hospitals which are such humongous projects that no person and few companies or consortia could imagine carrying them out. It is hard to see how bridges and highways increase happiness but they certainly increase trade, transport, travel and these are usually viewed as being A Good Thing - even as they despoil the planet, but that's another story. I've had a run at the utilitarian calculus of health care with Morquio & Vimizim - Pembrolizumab - Orkambi - Gardasil. And Caitlin Moran has made the case for libraries as repositories of the common good.

The trouble with modern politics and modern politicians is that the whole caboodle is riven with self-interest. The trouble with democracies is that there are regular elections and the pols need to keep their constituents sweet for the next poll and therefore long-term strategic planning is really hard to get over the line.  Simon Coveney, the Minister of Housing was on the wireless the other day ruefully admitting that, of the 22 rural [rural = unDublin in Ireland] communities targetted for growth in a 2002 planning report, not one got into the "top 20 for growth" communities over the intervening 15 years. I think Coveney must mean the National Spatial Strategy for Ireland 2002-2020, which you can read in full [all 160 pages] in all its quaint earnestness.

Now here, for example, is a peculiar thing. In 2002, there was no such thing as broadband; let alone was it conceived as being an essential part of national infra-structure, happiness, utility and efficiency as it is now. That should give all planners pause. There's no point in building roads if we're going to be zipping about in hover-cars. To paraphrase JBS Haldane [prev] The Universe Future is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.  There you go, Haldane would never write that sentiment in those terms today because queer has now become a technical term in BLT-speak.

Mais revenons nous a nos puppies. Politics really should be about the Art of the Hard. We want our elected reps to make the difficult decisions for us, so long as it's someone else's Mum who is not getting a hip-replacement.

v2g

Our economic and political system is all about acquiring stuff: without consumption of goods [and services] the economy wouldn't grow; and economic growth is the headline statistic summarizing how a society is doing. Crazy stuff happens: every household in our valley owns a cordless drill. The average lifetime usage of such a gadget is 20 minutes.  How much better the planet would be if those 50 households stored a log-splitter, a cordless, a cement-mixer, and a bit of scaffolding in a shed in our midst?

Cars are the same in this sense: unless you are a rep for big pharma, the district nurse or a courier; your vehicle spends 95% of its life stationary at home or in the works' car-park. I chose to have a 90 minute round trip commute making idle time [1.5 ÷ 24 hrs = 96%] but I did less driving on Sat+Sun. There's no way round that if your car guzzles gas [even as little gas as my Yaris]. But if we are going to be moved - kicking and screaming - into a world of electric vehicles then the idle car can be come an asset . . . but only if we can think out side the personal toy mentality of my car.

Utrecht is a city for which I have a lot of affection: we lived there for a while in the 1970s when I was working in Blijdorp Zoo in Rotterdam. The centre was small but perfectly formed round a big church and a market surrounded by a canal where the old cellars and warehouses had been converted to cafés and flower-shops. Utrecht also has a University and has become a bit of a tech and business hub because it's more gezellig and family-friendly than Amsterdam or Rotterdam. It is throwing shapes to be the City of the Future.

My pals at Metafilter flagged a real eye-opening short aspirational film about integrating domestic, commercial and transport electrical energy in Utrecht so that they draw very little from the NL national grid and each sector supports the others to make best use out of car batteries. Because Lithium car batteries have massive capacity for storing electrical energy. Efficient energy storage is vital for any economic planning because renewable energy and human energy consumption both fluctuate wildly through the day, through the week and through the year. 

• Everyone puts the kettle on during the commercial breaks in the Eurovision
• Solar panels don't work at night . . . or in Mayo
• Days are much long during Summer
• Wind comes in storms . . . or it's flat calm.

So ASR Nederland, an insurance company, has roofed the car-park in solar panels and provided 250 bi-directional v2g vehicle-to-grid car-charging points. The drones come to work and plug in their cars. By the time they have walked up to their cubicles, the car batteries have fired up the lights, the computers . . . and the kettle - because no work gets done without koffie. In the afternoon, the sun comes out and the solar panels top up the cars before they are needed to return to workers home.  There are 2,000 solar panels with a capacity for generating 850,000 kWh of electricity. An average home in Ireland - or Nederland - uses about 4,000 kWh of electricity each year. So roughly the 250 cars can bring home the electrical bacon and run the lights and kettles at 225 homes as well as keep the workplace warm, dry and lit. At weekends, the solar panels can feed back into the National Grid.

Currently there are 140,000 personal vehicles registered in Utrecht. Back of an envelope calculations suggest that, when the count electrical vehicles and charge points reaches 10,000, then the whole city will be a closed loop for its electrical needs. I think that's dead cool. Naturally Metafilter adds some value and numbers to the discussion. TIL that Tesla Power Wall is A Thing.

Please send more stamps

A little toot on the Isn't Bobby Clever horn?

I don't do Fiendface or Instah, but over the last several years, I've tuned into Metafilter for my para-social life. At the end of last month, Paul Slade, a British MeFite asked a question about some WWI post-cards which he'd bought. We've met Slade before with his long-form investigation of Kit Williams and the Masquerade hare.

It seems that a clutch of post-cards had been written home in 1915 by a future Tory grandee while he was in boarding school at the other end of the country. It was relatively easy to work out who Robin the Author was but one of the post-cards was covered with numbers and symbols whose meaning was harder to make out than the regular upper-class intra-family slang which filled the other missives. 

Eeee but I do like a good puzzle! I've clipped part of the message [picture top] in the scraggy hand-writing of a 12 y.o. for whom penmanship was not on the curriculum of his very expensive education. When my mother died in 2020, I inherited a small plastic bag containing my own letters home written almost exactly 50 years after young Robin's. My handwriting was terrible too. It wasn't until I started inventing myself aged ~15-16 that I developed a reasonably consistent cursive hand. By then I'd twigged that good handwriting is quicker than scrawl, quite apart from being easier to read.

It's not much to go on (30 words = 150 characters) but if you've inhabited the mind of a small chap writing home from  an Institution, it's defo easier to imagine what could be written: it's rather a reduced instruction set of concepts. Have a go, yourself? But I'll not hold it against you if it's couldn't be arsed. One approach:

• Vowels 
• My first observation was that the message is a mix of numbers, letters and symbols; but that only the numbers 1-5 occurred. I hypothesized that these might represent the 5 vowels a e i o u in that order. 
• 3 appears twice as a single word, so that has to be a or I, the latter being more likely. 
• 2 is far more common than the other digits which accords with the high frequency of e in normal English. 
• English allows double vowels ee and oo, but not aa ii uu so the 44 in line 6 is likely oo. 
• The diphthongs in the message are also consistent with my hypothesis in standard English 45 = ou;  21 = ea; 32 = ie. I'd have rethink my program if the text was indicating ua ia or  ui
  

• Consonants 
• with vowels sorted, similar thinking can be used to assign each of the symbols to English consonants. 
• The first line starts dea? which gives us the symbol for r. 
• Doubles: The last word in line 3 is ?eKK. There aren't many possibilities there ?ebb, ?ecc, ?edd aren't in common English but ?ell is, with ?ess also possible. 
• If that word does end in ll the next word is ?ould which must be could or would. That l also helps with the last word on line 4 ?lea?e. Crossword solver [or similar] is your friend: that combo must be cleave, oleate, please, or sleaze. The same word appears on line 4 but also in the PS at the top of the card - gotta be please. Young Robin being a politely demanding chick still. This sub-solution is handy because s is the 3rd commonest consonant after t and n and appears 10x in the message.
  
• More doubles 
• M5MM? appears twice at the end of the message - could that be Mummy?
• From what we've already deduced, the first word in the last line reads le??er, which could be lesser or, if Robin is Afrikaans, lekker but I'll bet on letter. 

And there you have it. I think the standard operating procedure outlined above would have utility for any simple substitution cipher. I wasn't the only person to solve the puzzle. Answer on Metafilter.

It's Exam Time

I wrote about the executive power of examiners before yesterday's examiners meeting and was quite happy about the decisions we made in contrast to the story I told of another committee. The objectivity of the numbers was tempered by compassion and it was clear the The Institute's regulations had been informed by many other examiners meetings which must have experienced some pretty bizarre circumstances in the past - so here the codification by The Administration makes life at the coal-face easier. 

The results are tabulated in PDF files and rather than print out a couple of dozen copies on trees, the PDFs are projected onto a screen so that all the examiners are on the same page.
PDFs (portable document formats) are designed to be read as (paper) documents so the 12pt % numbers in the boxes are barely visible at the back of the room.  As this is the only time that the sheets are scrutinised, could they not be written so that the numbers themselves (the data!) but not the surrounding bureaucratic guff were printed larger, so they filled their box?  Now here's another thing, the tabulated results for each student are printed on The Yellow Sheets.  Each column is headed by a course code "HS1278" or "CO5066" in the tiny 12pt print The Administration prefers, so the committee chair reads out the course name for each column.  You then know that your results are in Column 2 and you can ensure that the marks you gave have been faithfully transmitted to the official sheets.  And when there is a query about compensation or compassion, you can quickly resolve the issue because you know where the relevant data are and so does everyone in the room. Thus everything can be processed efficiently. Several different groups of students (repeat candidates, honours candidates, diploma candidates etc) may be sitting the same group of subjects, so their results appear on different sheets.  That's fine.  But the order of the course code changes for each candidate category.  The committee chair reads out the column names ... you then know that your results have lurched right to column 7 and can contribute to the meeting.  Over the day, 20 people listen to these readings-of-columns maybe 3 or 4 dozen times.  So the reluctance of The Administration to change their time-honoured practice doesn't scale up.  20 people * 50 yellow sheets * 10 seconds adds up to 3.5 person hours of extra time for the reading alone to which must be added the extra time required as old buffers like me forget that the column has been changed again and start questioning the official results.  Old buffers like me, not me myself personally.  An hour of Admin time two weeks ago would streamline the process downstream for this year and every subsequent year.

And while we're in exam season, I'll point you at an interesting set of data downloaded from an examination website in India by a student at Cornell last week.  Debarghya Das, who had sat the exam last year and who was a geek-colonel, was challenged by his mates back home in Kolkata (we used to call it Calcutta) to get them a preview of their marks before the results were announced.  Mr Das was not hopeful, but rose to the challenge and had a look at the site, to find a glaring security flaw in the coding of the site (javascript embedded in the html in plain sight) and a flaw in the way schools (numbered 001-999) and candidates (numbered within schools 001-999) were encoded.  So instead of getting the scores for a handful of his mates, he wrote few hundred lines of code and scraped the results of 200,000 students into an ExCel spreadsheet.  Ooooo data.  You can see some commentary on the exploit and on the practice of examiners across the world at metafilter.
You can follow the story which shows all sorts of weird anomalies in the data indicating either a) a flaw in the way marks are processed in India or b) a flaw in the way ExCel processes very large datafiles - see the metafilter link for suggestions. 

But I'll abstract one figure to show you where it's likely to be human finagle. The figure left shows the distribution of ~125,000 marks for the Science paper.  It seems that some marks are impossible to obtain. Notably, no candidate has scored 32, 33 of 34% on this exam.  The pass-mark is 35%.  So the examiners don't want to waste any time at their meeting on borderline cases.
As Bob's Law for Examiners Meetings - 2% of the candidates take up 50% of the time - probably applies in India as it does in Ireland, this is clearly a better way of streamlining the process than piffling about changing the PDF font-size.

Scovilles

Hellish hot is how The Boy and his mother like their sauce. But they are nothing compared to their [grand]mother, who sprinkles chili pepper on her cornflakes with a knife.

When it comes to measuring the whoomph of chili-peppers Capsicum spp. you could crush some up, filter it and run it through an HPLC to determine the precise quantity of capsaicin - 8-methyl-N-vanillyl-6-nonenamide- [structure above] and then say a particular chilli is this hot in moles per gram.  It's complicated by the fact that there are several derivatives of the base capsaicin called capsaicinoids which vary as to their pungency. But chili-bums [aka ring-burners?] had developed a comparative scale at least 100 years ago which is independent of HPLC technology. In 1912, a pharmacist called Wilbur Scoville extracted the peppery volatiles by steeping a precise weight of pepper in alcohol.  This essence is then serially diluted in a sugar water until half of a panel of expert tasters cannot detect it. This allows a Scoville Heat Unit scale from 0 for regular bell peppers to much more the 1,000,000 SHUs for chilis like the Carolina Reaper, Bhut Jolokia or Naga Viper. That's a measurement of similarity that is fairly well reproducible even if a dimensional analysis [SI Units?] of what you are actually measuring is not possible.

There is a lot of theatricality, not to say machismo, about the consumption of hot peppers as we you can hear with the hilarity off-stage in Good Mythical Morning, [GMM previously]. If that reminds you of Withnail and Matter, I'm with you. That's all mildly interesting . . . not really funny unless you find boxing or cock-fighting [hmmm haven't covered that yet] amusing. What's more interesting is the variability among people as to their capacity to taste/tolerate hot pepper.  We had an experiment in this line on a visit to Dublin's Taj Mahal forty years ago.

Metafilter had an interesting compendium recently about 'snacksandsuch' Nate a young feller with a shockin' nonchalance as he chews down on a Chocolate Bhut Jolokia and records his subjective impressions for science. I'm afraid it just made me think of people who wake up from a paracetamol over-dose feeling alright but already doomed to die. But his actions also have a taste of JBS Haldane ruthlessly experimenting on himself for science. If you read the comments on the metafilter post, you'll see that, for several people, chili-chewing is a young man's business. As you pass 30 your tolerance of them changes: not so much in the appetite but in the processing. There is a suggestion that the intestinal flora loses the ability to digest capsaicin as you get older - that's interesting and should be followed up.  If your intestinome loses and gains biochemical capability as you age, that may have profound effects in pharmacology. It's sad that Nate adds a note to his Chocolate Bhut Jolokia jaunt "This is my last video. This is because people keep saying my videos are fake." that's a loss for science. But then again, if science post-graduate students burst into tears and went home when a referee dissed their papers, then there would be a lot less science. Then again then again that would possibly be a good thing because 45% of scientific papers have contributed nothing to science.  Here's a suggestion that eating chilis burns fat and reduces weight in the obese, young Nate could follow that up and really help his community.

Head-dinger

It's the clarion of our times: black kids getting an unfair share of attention from cops. Now for not wearing cycle helmets. Bike helmets? Everyone has strong opinions on the matter, but those feelings are not always evidence-based. Nevertheless, some jurisdictions are really hot for helmets and have enacted laws to require them a) is for adult but more commonly c) is for children. And it seems that b) is for black cyclists get an unwanted solicitous interest in their own safety from the police.

That in itself is a reason for a serious rethink of Helmet Laws because it is easier to decriminalize bare-pate biking than it is to de-racialize cops. This issue was discussed with a lot of heat and some light and even some data on Metafilter. I came to the discussion late enough that people were calling each other idiots, so I was hesitant to contribute my 2c-worth of victim-blaming. I was whacked off my bike, in September 1997, by a woman looking down for her mobile phone rather than up for stationary cyclists. Werner Herzog made a film about people who'd killed others while txtn. In all the aftermath of that non-fatal road crash, I had to fill in a lot of forms and they all asked whether [__] I-the-cyclist was wearing a helmet. At the time it gave me a friss of indignation having been the innocent victim of a 1.5 tonne assault on my person causing actual bodily harm. The debate on Metafilter included "blaming the victim" in similar circumstances. It is ever thus when the balance of power is grossly asymmetrical, the powerful <cof>George Hook</cof> put their thumb on the scale by blaming the victim: "she was asking for it with that short skirt". If you cycle without a helmet, you are by definition reckless, and so the blame for the crash can slide off the car's bonnet and anoint the fallen. I am the cliché patriarch: children, grandchildren, silver hair, a farrrrm[let] of land, respeck. All that privilege! Except that one time in 1997 that I was a victim being blamed. Something that women, and POC and children experience with depressing regularity.

I also take this opportunity to boast a bit.  In 1997, cell-phones were still a minority sport; cycling is/was much less common in Ireland than, say, DK or NL; car-tonks-cyclist is comparatively infrequent. Put the numbers in a Venn diagram, and I reckon I've a good claim to be the earliest Irish example of mobile-phone related vehicular assault or at least an early foistee of victim-blaminghood in that field. 

At first glance[ing blow] pretty much everyone say that wearing a bicycle helmet is A Good Thing - for kids certainly and for adults too. And on an individual basis the risk assessment says gerra hat! Because the cost is much less that harm of connecting your unprotected head with the curb or road surface. If you can afford a bike, you can afford a helmet and a bell, reflective strips, lights as well. Then again, then again, the marginal cost of a helmet may stop people who really need the exercise from getting some cardio cycling to work or the shops for a Sunday newspaper. So Helmet Laws may have net negative effect on community morbidity and mortality. The marginal cost may tip the balance. Same applies to bikeshare schemes. A poor person can ride a sharebike across town to a job interview. If they get the job, then they can buy a helmet for the commute. The poor don't have money, car-driving legislators. And, with more force, helmet laws give crook cops yet another stick to beat black people.

The free from helmet lobby worry about victim blaming and that bullying cyclists to wear a foam hat does little for a cyclist who encounters a car travelling at 50 or 80 km/h leaving a partly protected head barely attached to a broken body. Maybe the campaign should be on drivers and their behaviour, hmmm?. It has been argued that typical bike-helmets with their weird holes and baffles make sufficient sound that cyclists cannot hear traffic behind them and so take curb hugging evasive action. The €300 answer to that is the Hövding: an airbag for the head and neck which deploys from its collar [as R] like an airbag on impact. But that will take our POC job-seeker months to pay off.

Most imaginable cases where a bike helmet comes into its calling will involve other damage: road-planing abrasions [wear gloves!], bent forks, wrenched shoulders. It's therefore expedient to take measures to avoid the incident in the first place. What worked for me during 40,000km of commuting:

•  Abattoir boots: white wellingtons: my standard cycling footwear
• A wide reflective SamBrowne belt
• Two velcro reflective strips round the ankles: really effective because they move up and down and are brighter than the . . .
• Big lens lights back and front. Flashing smaller brighter lights came later
• A 40cm reflective plastic flag pointing offside from the back carrier. Kept cars an extra 80cm from my shoulder.   

See what I did there? I measured the psychological effect of intervention X on driver Y. That idea was tested [ooooo data] by a cycling psychologist from Bath, Ian Walker, in 2007. He kitted up his bike with sensors and took to the streets until he had been overtaken by more that 2,000 cars and recorded distance to curb, vehicle size and colour, time of day, bikelane? and helmet? Later he added data with him wearing a blonde [I R a wimmin] wig. The crunched data indicated that cars shaved significantly closer to helmeted cyclists [because protected?] and edged further from wiggy [because women drivers?]. In 2013, the raw data was re-analysed by Jake Olivier a road-safety expert who carries a torch for helmets. If you look at the data through Olivier's stats-lens, then there is no significant effect on driver behaviour. In 2019 Walker went at this rebuttal, fingered a bunch of statistical special pleading in Olivier's case and re-stated The Walker Effect about driver reaction to helmets. That all tells me that the effect is about as clear as whether masks work against CoVid-19. But fuzzy data won't stop folks getting vehement when they are choosing a fence-side.

 

Ben Goldacre & David Spiegelhalter British mavens for the public understanding of numbers wrote a nuanced BMJ editorial about helmets and law and their effects. It's too short to explore all the avenues but it emphasises that we need a more holistic view of public health interventions. Demonizing cyclists and forcing them to the road-margins of our car-obsessed lives is politically appealling because its much easier to cram a helmet on the poor bloody cyclist than it is to pay attention to the view through the windscreen.

Leigh van Valen was an eccentric but brilliant evolutionary biologist in the 1960s and 70s. He was famous form driving a VW beetle through the streets of Chicago wearing a motor-cycle crash-helmet. This being before air-bags. Seat-belt laws were only introduced in the USA in the 1980s. In-car crash-helmets was real nutty professor stuff. But what about it? If we are in whataboutery mode, what about whip-lash? That is the big driver-up of insurance premiums in Ireland and terrible to endure. Do you think that whip-lash is made worse because the torso is tethered to the seat, so all the inertial flexure is taken by the cervical vertebrae. 

Q When will prophylactic orthopedic neck-braces become compulsory for car-drivers and their passengers? 

A bout the same time as plane-seats are forced to face rearwards.

Mental load

As you know, if you've been here before, I surf a corner of the blogosphere which starts at 8-10 jumping off points and then goes off down any rabbit-holes that there present. Even these same-wavelength places have quite long fallow periods where there is nothing that captures my imagination - heck, that might be me in one of my downers. Then there will be a flurry of stuff that calls [yoo-hoo, you!] to be followed up.  If we still had children at foot, or I was a proper farmer, or I rejigged my course notes every year at The Institute, then I wouldn't have time for butterfly hops about other men's flowers.  Then again, I didn't start bloggin' myself until I was furiously busy at a new job and only a week ahead of my students.  I wouldn't say something like "If you want something done, ask a busy person to do it." that was Lucille Ball, I just lived it.  aNNyway, one of those jump-stations is Metafilter aka The Blue and the other day I saw a piece about role-filling in heterosexual relationships; that in turn was citing an original source. That source is interesting because it helps builds my knowledge of contemporary colloquial French because the author Emma is a thirty-something cartoonist who writes in French Faillait demander but gets her stuff translated into English You Should've asked when it goes viral. Her bailiwick is "Politique, trucs pour réfléchir et intermèdes ludiques"; which is whatever is floating her boat this week.

When I worked in the zoo in Rotterdam in the late 1970s, we all mucked [literally a lot of the time] in together but joked [*] that some of the daily tasks were vrouwenplicht - women's duty - while others were for The Men. As the latest addition to the team, I did all the [vrouwenplicht!] cleaning and polishing of the front panes of all the aquariums as soon as i started work and before Jan Publiek was allowed in to grub them up with their poky, pointy finger prints.

*you could make such jokes in those days without

fear of being called up by an Offense Tribunal.

Emma's position is that, although modern chaps fondly believe [ahhh bless, 'em] that they carry half the sky around the house -

• they change diapers nowadays, 
• can wash dishes or or at least load the dish-washer
• can clean a toilet and mop the bathroom floor
• cook up a storm for eight on the weekend - esp if barbecue involved
• as well as the [bizarrely: who makes these decisions?] manly stuff
• take out the trash
• mow the lawn
• wash the car
• fix light-fittings

in fact all the mental heavy lifting is carried out by women.  The extensive commentary on Metafilter seems to agree.

We live in changing times! My father never changed a diaper in his life. I could and did; both in the 1970s with The Boy and in the 1990s with Dau.I and Dau.II. I could also sew on a button, turn up a trouser-cuff, cook, bake flapjacks, wash dishes and saucepans and clean a bath. But I remember, when Dau.I was about 8 weeks old, I was tasked to look after her for several hours while The Beloved went to a business meeting in town. At the end of the afternoon, the child was clean, fed and uninjured BUT diaper bin hadn't been emptied; there were dishes in the sink; the laundry was one wash behind schedule; the bed was unmade; and I had no idea whether there was sufficient tea, sugar or eggs in the house. I sent a You Should've asked link to the family and got two responses.

• One from The Boy pointing out that the French do less housework than any other civilised country.  Skeptix alert: that is published in a British newspaper; an average of 16hrs/wk in France compared to 19hrs/wk in UK and you may be sure that stacks of ménages français do more [and less] than the UK average - the data distribution is going to be heavy on the variation and low of the average.
• One from The Boy's partner: "SO not true in our house!"

That tells me that, in one family [so anecdote not data!], over three generations, The Man is stepping up to the plate and not just stepping up with a plate waiting for it to be filled.

Grace under pressure

 Last week's internet meme and slag-fest?

That would be 15 y.o. Gracie Cunningham fixing her face while musing on the fundamentals of mathematics for her tik-tok pals. She's on about Y = bX + c, the algebra representation for a straight line, where does that come from? she asks. Someone decided that it would be heroic to post this on Twitter as an example of how vapid and shallow the youth of today are. Loadsa other Twitter Knobs piled in to mock Gracie for being a teenage girl asking stupid questions . . . because of course they knew all about the works of محمد بن موسی خوارزمی the Persian polymath who eponymised algorithm for us and laid the foundations of algebra.

I don't tik-tok - I R old - and I only lurk in a teeny-tiny corner of Twitter and Friendface is a closed book to me, so I rely on my pals to filter the memosphere for me and send me the choicest, kindest and most heart-warming bits. For me that would be Metafilter where Gracie's clip and the shallow, cruel and shouty back-lash was cited and explored. Needless to say, in that forum, as in the wider and more thoughtful mathematical community, Gracie came out tops. Thus  muddgirl : "I used to be a middle/high school math tutor and I'd love to have a student as inquisitive as she is. I think history and philosophy of science is so rarely and poorly taught even at the college level". My strong feeling is that if you can't answer the bored, bemused "Why, Sir, are we doing this?, What value does it have for us?" then you should think about changing your teacher duds for a chef's apron or some dungarees and go and do something useful.

But the truth is that someone has to teach math in every high-school and that cohort is far larger than those who really know and care about math. So good Leaving Certificate math teachers know a lot of tricks and carefully read past exam papers and coach their students to answer the likely questions without ever really understanding what it all means. Let alone so structuring the process that the kids find out something anything for themselves. Teaching to the assessment is the hollow heart of education, because the curriculum expands to fill the hours available in two school years and there is no time no time to allow some free-play in math. There's a famous story about sub-teen Euler [blobboprev] looking idle in class and told by his teacher to add the numbers between 1 and 100. It took the chap 10 seconds to fold the sequence in half : 1 2 3 4 . . . 50 vs 51 52 53 54 . . . 100 and add 50 identical pairs of numbers [50+51] [52+49] [53+48] . . . [2+99] [1+100] and "5050, Sir".

A number of competent commentators on Case Gracie suggested that mathematics is all about noticing patterns and thinking about whether they are extendable or whether they can be related to other aspects of the world as we know it. That's how Andrew Wiles cracked Fermat's Last Theorem.  On the Metafilter thread on of the not-math-heads mentioned the thrill of discovering that the square numbers {1 4 9 16 25 . . .} were separated from each other by sequential odd numbers 1 + 3 = 4 + 5 = 9 + 7 = 16 + 9 = 25 . . . Which is indeed pretty neat, especially if you discover it your self. The math-heads got all excitey and showed how this relationship could be derived algebraically in several different and intriguing ways. Good for the math-heads, eye-glaze for everyone else. But that's okay because a different Metathread will bring linguists, historians and railway-buffs out of the woodwork.

Nobody thought to mention that, before the Muslims invented the abstract notation of algebra, the Greeks did all their math as geometry: drawing pictures in the dust of the agora. Each successive square adds an L-shaped block to the previous one. You can see that in a way that algebra is really not good at. Algebra otoh scales up for numbers far too big to scratch in the dust.  I did take the forum-opportunity to cite Gabriela, another 15 year old who was thinking outside the box: which garnered me 6 favorites!

One of the more gracious and respectful commentators cited in the original MarySue piece about Gracie Cunningham was a mathematician called Francis Su "One of the great things about math is that it equips you to see the unseen: things otherwise invisible. There’s structure—patterns—all around us, governing the motion of planets, the spread of a virus, the data that Netflix uses to guess what you want to watch next".  If you're in the business of teaching, especially if like me you're not teaching in Harvard or Heidelberg, you could read with advantage Francis Su's essay on Grace [no no not, in this case our Gracie]: Grace in Teaching. The thing is that, while students in [insert Top Uni here] have their own problems and peculiarities their academic abilities are not in doubt.  What Francis does, and I have tried to do at The Institute, is explicitly recognise students as people, not just as gradable entities. Which has been a hard transition for me because I was really good at schoolwork. There are many posts in The Blob back-catalogs where I've been brought up all standing to realise that something which I accounted as "obvious to all thinking people" was not! See Curse of Knowledge. People may be crap at maths but nevertheless be kind, thoughtful, hard-working, skillful and creative . . . heck, they may be dancers!

Dying ain't what it used to be

Waterford is one of Ireland's oldest cities, having been founded by Vikings in 853, vacated, re-founded in 914 and named Veðrafjǫrðr (ram's fjord). We often pass through on the way to the coast or Cheekpoint but rarely stop long enough to park the car. My sister was over visiting from across the water and on Friday afternoon we went as tourists to visit the Medieval Museum in Waterford city centre.  As we had shared a 60th birthday this Summer and/or because we look notably crumbly we were let in at the Senior rate and saved €1 each. Museums have come a long way since they were filled with a rag-bag of artifacts (including "the head of Sir Francis Drake as a baby" in the museum in Tiverton according to urban legend) piled into glass-topped cases.  Now they are light on artifacts from the past and heavy on interpretive boards, so that Sean Public can come out feeling more educated than bemused.

Many years ago, my father and I were passing close to Clonmacnoise [L with spacious view from its perch on a bend in the River Shannon], the most evocative and romantically situated of all Ireland's monastic settlements, and dropped in as tourists. After the toilets and the gift-shop a teeny theatre was showing a film loop about the history of the place.  It seemed to be pitched at 9 year old children or maybe adults who enjoy an extremely superficial cartoonish interpretation of our heritage. 1000 years in 12 and a half minutes, I think.  After we were as informed as we were going to get, we were ready to view the ruins.  As you leave the interpretive centre. the first thing you see is one of two high-crosses which have survived the centuries intact and remain on the site. As you do, I went up the this richly decorated artifact and gave it a rap with my knuckles; "tonk, tonk" the cross replied because the original had been taken away from the disrespectful assaults of people like me and replaced by a hollow fibre-glass replica.  Whichever way you look at it, this Disneyland solution to a perceived problem doesn't make you think of eternal verities.

Meanwhile back in medieval Waterford, I was told that archery was so important to the defense of the realm that compulsory practice was required of all able-bodied (male) citizens at The Butts just outside the city walls. Records indicate that the perpetrator of a fatal accident that occurred at such a practice was declared not criminally culpable.  Having your young son shot through the head when walking beyond the butts was deemed an unfortunate accident but I bet it didn't make the grieving parents an happier to meet the neighbour who missed his target. Weirdly, almost exactly a year ago I was writing about projectiles (cannonballs then) missing targets and doing damage. Metafilter reports that the cause of deaths in the England of the 1500s has been extensively investigated by two historians from Oxford University and reported in The Lancet who have been reading the archives of coroner's courts and tallying up how ordinary people died. Terminal accidents which we don't hear much of nowadays include:

• falling out of trees in October while shaking acorns down for pig-food
• fetching water from ponds and wells
• act of god
• haemorrhage from cut to leg while scything
• sword-fighting
• crushed while greasing the working parts of windmills

One of the commenters in the metafilter source recommends the medieval death bot on twitter final accounting there is short but rarely sweet.

Something rotten in the state of Dance-mark

Our girls Dau.I and Dau.II grew up in the rural midlands and never went to school. Their education was very much on the unschooling end of the spectrum and they showed no interest in team sports - presumably taking a cue from the parents. But they spent a lot of time in the car [carbon footprint hadn't been discovered in the 00s] listening to audio-books, singing and wrangling [it all started when she hit me back] . . . while en route to events. Ballet, tin-whistle, flute, speech&drama, painting . . . one year they joined a local marching band, had rehearsals one evening a week, with parades on the weekend. The enterprise was run as a business, run by a family embedded in the community transitioning into its second generation of leadership. It was cliquey and incestuous; week after week our girls got to carry the effin' banner while the other kids played instruments. After a season of paying their dues and learning neither fife nor drum, they jacked it in.

In their other musical endeavours there was  a lot of pressure to sit exams. Music teachers are trying to make a living and there is high turnover in the clientele: mostly sub-teens before they discover sex, booze and rock&roll. Teachers need those exam results to establish their own street cred, any benefit for the examinees is incidental.

At least they never opted for Irish Dance where there is an additional burden of the fake hair, the fake tan, the bling of sequins on electric-coloured synthetic costumes, the bleeding toe-nails, the money it all costs. Modern dance-frocks cost as much as a wedding dress: comfortably into the $X,xxx range. A couple of days ago, an Irish Dance cheating scandal blew up. From the headlines it seemed equivalent to the competitive fishing fixing [covered in puns by MetaFilter] or chess cheating [Guardian] and I was all set to post it to MetaFilter as another example of how money and power corrupt every pastime they envelop: even had a clever title which I have recycled above. It's easy to play these things for larfs when a) nobody died and b) we can other the protagonists as bib-overalled rubes [competitive catfish fishers] or cerebral wonks [grandmaster chessters]

Someone else posted a MeFi link about the scandal so I didn't have to. I dithered because, as I read around the story, suddenly it wasn't fun, let alone funny, anymore. A series leaked txts mentioned "exchanging sexual favours for higher scores" which sounded like teachers whoring out their pupils and radio chat-show host Joe Duffy had a segment where the father a dead dancer called in to say that the community and culture of competitive Irish dancing hadn't helped his daughter's mental health. I learned later that the sexual favours were more about teacher taking one [up the oompah] for the team than pimping which brings it down to ordinary consenting adults levels of eeeuw.

Don't get me started on Michael Flatley's Riverdance fascist extravaganzas. Worryingly Lord of the Dance is performing [tix €50-€100] in Meistersingerhalle Nürnberg on 19th October 2022. Just 88 years and 880m from where Leni Riefenstahl shot Triumph des Willens.

Bath Publishing

I've surprised myself by not actually getting Blobercised about the shameful gaslighting and ruination of local Post Office managers across the water. Not until January-too-late did I find a hook in the coincidence of ICL on the periphery of my own life. I guess the itch of my indignation was eased by posts across on Metafilter 2023 - 2020. Sometimes Metafilter comments are from people who actually know what they are talking about.  That something is rotten in the state of POmark has been known since at least 2009 when Private Eye started flagging it [7 page 9,000 word PDF] on the regular.  But corporate and politcal and main-stream journalistic inertia allowed each egregious case to get washed away without any song-and-dance.

One of the White Hats in this sorry tale is Nick Wallis, who (in 2010!) was a local radio talk-show host who started to talk to Sub-Postmanagers about the ruination of their lives and blog about it. He published a book about his, and their journey, for the Christmas market in . . . 2021. The title couldn't be more explicit: The Great Post Office Scandal: The fight to expose a multimillion pound IT disaster which put innocent people in jail. If you want a 1 hour exec summary Wallis was interviewed by James "LBC" O'Brien [whom bloboprev] on the latter's Full Disclosure channel. Hislop at Private Eye and Wallis are extremely magnanimous about someone else (ITV docudrama on the telly over Christmas 2023) removing the final chip from the dams of inertia and obfuscation and release a national tsunami of outrage.

For my money, the worst actors, the Blackest Hats are worn by any and all the high profile pols and journos who are talking large now having been too busy to care about injustice for . . . get this . . . 25 years: since the first prosecutions of PO employees started happening through perjury, gaslighting and the perverse incentives of corporate bonuses.

Anyway, I was googling around Nick Wallis after hearing his book getting a glowing rec from Rory Stewart on his TRIP podcast. And came across The people who published The Great Post Office Scandal who are Bath Publishing. They were a micro WFH company with a niche market in legal text-books: "Employment Tribunal Remedies Handbook" - "Contamination, Pollution & the Planning Process: A Practitioner's Guide" that sort of thing. Wallis was hawking his book about and had it rejected 9 times by risk-averse publishers. But Bath Publishing took an Entrepreneurial plunge on it. I hope they, and Wallis, make a lorra money. I also found a card, an envelope and a stamp and sent them a This is Just to Say [whc bloboprev] tribute:

You have published   for which          we wish you
the plum             you were probably  champagne delicious
going bad in         risking            not too sweet
the postbox          a court case       and so cold

BobTheSidebar

After 2030 days contributing to MetaFilter, 
67 Front Page Posts FPPs, and 
1337 comments 
finally . . . BobTheSidebar. It's one of the advantages to having written +2 million words of copy: there is an extensive mine of material to cut and paste. No sucking the pencil required. Obvs, the intersect between what has interested me in the past and what might be relevant to MetaFilter today ie (Blob  MeFi) is not q u i t e ∅ the null set but - close.

But here I was able to rob a couple of Blobs [counting and Wageningen] to edify MeFi.

Loose talk about φ

I am so, engaged in social media. I'm still pushing out The Blob, albeit now at a slower rate than May 2013 - May 2021> I guess that qualifies as social media, although it is quite one way [= out] in its traffic. My only other outlet [and inlet, it is very much more two-way] is Metafilter, which I tune into most days. One of the wings on that site is Ask(Metafilter) where subscribers put questions for the hive-mind at the rate of about one every hour. It really is a window into the human condition. Last week there was a solicitation for Fun Facts My contribution to this burning question included: ". . . your height from heel to pate is pretty damn close to the span to the fingertips of your outstretched hands and the height from heel to navel vs heel to pate is p.d.c. to φ the golden ratio 1 : 1.618 . . ." Which I stand by as it is stated there.

A couple of days later, in another thread about pseudoscience, participant = MeFite Zumbador offered: In art, and graphic design: The idea of the Golden Mean and that certain proportions are inherently both more beautiful and based on proportions in nature (shells, the human body etc). It's confirmation bias. Not based on science. 

I had to respond or get woollywoo-labelled, and did so thusly: Whoa! As I just made such an assertion over on MetaTalk I'd better qualify it with some data gathered from and by 200 students over several years at my last place of work. The average ratio between height vs height to navel = 1.63; standard deviation = 0.09; range (1.48-1.79) which is significantly (p ~ 0.02) higher than φ = 1.618. I'm glad we've cleared that up. The point I made in class was that humans in all their diversity still maintain consistent proportion in their growth and development that makes each of us recognisably different from, say, koalas. But not before [and not before time] I dug out my old laptop and hunted up the data from Cell Biology classes from 2015 -2019. Data which is summarised in the quote. "p.d.c. to φ the golden ratio 1 : 1.618" is loose talk it is rather close but no cigar close to 1.618. It is exactly the same to one significant figure [1.6 == 1.6] but the range among people is considerable, so it is only imprecisely true.

I have to acknowledge that Zumbador was right to diss loose talk about φ, the Golden Ratio. Their point about confirmation bias is that, IF you have a) a human body [applies to most readers] b) a quest to find the Golden Ratio, ANDIF c) you allow a certain flex because biological data THEN you will surely be able to find two lengths which approximate 1.618 : 1 - between this flap and that nodule. YTF are we choosing heel-head vs heel-navel to measure? Why not heel-head vs heel-nipple? or heel-crutch vs heel-knee? or the difference between the two phalanges of your thumb?

Turns out Dau.II and I had thrashed this out quite exhaustively way back in 2015. I'm not primarily bringing all this he said she said up here to vindicate myself. In these troubled, credulous, times we really need to be careful what we say and how we say it; it is too easy entirely to be taken up wrong by donogoodniks. Let's not give those creatures ammunition.

Gardening in urban wastelands

Straw is really cheap and really versatile.  We use a couple of round bales [a cylinder 120cm high and 120cm in diameter] a year as bedding for the sheep when they are lambing. I think we paid €20 each last Spring.  We have friends who have built houses and sheds from the smaller square bales 1050mm x 365mm x 460mm (42″ x 14″ x 18″) which you see at gymkhanas and municipal barbecues. These bales are handy sized [15-25 kg] for lifting but need a lot of extra work to make them into vertical walls that won't blow over when the wolf come visiting.  There are effectively no ISO standards for straw, just a wish-list for size, density, straw-length, species and moisture content. A baler can pack the straw light - if it is for sale per bale; or heavy - if it's for the baler's own use and needs to be stored efficiently in his barn.

We've been on our farmlet for 20 years this Spring. We were the first people in the valley - in the parish! - to grow lollarossa [L because red] lettuce:  people would walk up the lane just to gawp at the peculiar. We've been swayed by a lot of experiment and fads & foibles in our efforts to grow things in the peaty acid soil that we are blessed with. It's quite diggable down to between 30 and 60cm and then there's an abrupt transition to a sandy yellow clay which is like poorly set concrete.  Nevertheless, digging in gardens is hard work and upsets the soil microbes: crying "Jaysus, where's all that oxygen coming from?" before keeling over. For a couple of years we were persuaded to try no-dig straw-mulch potato growing. The instructions were to lay out your seed-potatoes (in a mandala or a woowah spiral, naturally) on any piece of ground and cover them over with 30-40cm of weed-suppressing straw,  Experience learned us to mow any grass, nettles and thistles before applying spuds direct to the ground and to dig out the dockens Rumex obtusifolius because them buggers can grow through the sole of your boot if you stand still. To be honest, the yield was not great even after those treatments; I think the poor roots used up a lot of energy penetrating the hard-packed soil. So it's better to at least hack up the top of the seed bed before applying the potatoes.

Still we were better off than we'd been in some previous gardens where the good earth was about 8cm deep over an archaeological dig of old bricks, shards of delph, and broken bottles.  It was with a frisson of empathy, therefore, that I read about straw bale gardening in Philadelphia via Metafilter. The recommendation is to buy as many straw bales as you can afford and water them well, applying some 'fertiliser' [unspecified] alternate days for a couple of weeks. After which you can pop your seedlings into a convenient hole and let photosynthesis do the work. Of course, you should lay out the bales so that the open ends aee top and bottom. The design of straw as a hollow tube works well for wicking and storing water.  If you can't afford 'fertiliser' it's probably a good idea to pee on the bales because straw is quite nitrate-deficient; but go easy - urine is salty.

Some of the comments on the Metafilter page express worry about toxins in urban soil - Victorian paint factory round the corner etc. - but the contaminated soil is 450mm from the base of your lettuce if you plant on top of a straw bale. The added urine nitrate, the penetrating plant roots, and the arrival of fungi in a nicely moist environment push on the decomposition of the straw, so that at the end of one or two seasons, you've generated a pile of compost in the form of a nice friable loam.  You can use this for potting up next year's seed . . . and !shazzam! you have a sustainable kitchen garden which will see you through Armageddon.