This is by way l'esprit d'escalier: all those witty and trenchant things you think of as you descend the stairs after the interview. We were invited to a birthday party last weekend. These things are a bit daunting for The Beloved and me, partly because social events happen so rarely that we get out of practice. Birthday Boy is an artist (more conceptual than my father's water colours) with a strong theme of feminism and science about his oeuvre, so you never know whom you might meet at his gigs.
One of the problems with morphing from wrinkly to crumbly is that you get lost in the middle of a sentence and never get it to . . . Part of that is, of course, that conversation is a dialogue and you have to give the other chap some space in the conversation. The Blob is a bit easier that way because a) it's not in real time [it is now 0255hrs as I write] and b) nobody is interrupting.
One of the people I met at the bday seemed to follow what I was saying about databases, servers and the human genome and it turned out that he was Artist in Residence AiR at CONNECT "the world leading Science Foundation Ireland [SFI] Research Centre for Future Networks and Communications". I was intrigued because we have just submitted a grant application to SFI to forment relationships among artists + scientists and + teens in order to promote FITNa. The AiR seemed to be already embedded in that role . . . although I have no idea whether nascent scientists get access to him wearing his AiR hat-of-power. I put forward the idea that Science can be rather magisterial because it is now much more the Age of Science than the Age of Aquarius, The Gods of STEM have brought us cars, mobile-phones, wind-farms and server-farms [just to mention a few of the items of tech kit that had appeared earlier in our dialogue] and it is as if everything worth having is due to science. I suggested that we scientists could have a teeny bit more humility about this because Science is A Way of Knowing [bloboprev] but surely not the only way of generating 'value'. Philosophers, geographers, historians and linguists all add value to the trudge between cradle and grave. Not to mention potters, weavers, painters, poets, singers and sculptors.
Our application was submitted through SFI's Discover programme which promotes inter-disciplinary collaboration. A tiny fraction of the SFI budget [Total = €184m in 2016] goes to that sort of thing. The bulk, I suppose quite properly (There is an Arts Council - [€65m in 2017] after all!), goes to fund those who are hewing at the coal-face of science. The Discover programme could be seen as a crumb that falls from the table: The Gods of Science will allow Art to taste the ambrosia of science. Oh oh the hubris.
But it does not have to be like that. Bringing outsiders in to scrutinise the work of science can be a positive good. I'm not talking about outsiders as peer-reviewers of scientific manuscripts for publication - they are insiders. Outsiders are AiRs - and others - who get to sit in on our lab meetings and a) force us to analyse what we are saying/thinking in order to get the language intelligible. Visiting seminar speakers will often, as a courtesy, have a session with individual post-grads after their talk: a different world-view, a different experience can often expose an unwarranted assumption. Steven Pinker recommends your old college room-mate who is smart but in a different field. If you can't explain your idea to a 15 y.o., or a visiting professor, or an AiR, then it is is probably too woolly to be correct. The mere act of articulating your thoughts, can help you work them through and give insight. But it gets better; once you've gotten over the language barrier, the AiR can act as the grit than niggles . . . and forces the development of a pearl: a truly original creative idea.
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Science as A Way of Knowing. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query Science as A Way of Knowing. Sort by date Show all posts
Monday, 21 August 2017
Wednesday, 29 June 2016
Medicine Watcher
Dau.I sent me two books for my bday two weeks ago: I've already told you TMI about Feynman and Leonard's testicles. The other [super wonderful] book was The Youngest Science: notes of a medicine watcher by Lewis Thomas. Thomas was, according to The Wik, "an American physician, poet, etymologist, essayist, administrator, educator, policy advisor, and researcher". I don't think that evidence of multiple skills makes him a polymath, let alone a genius, in the way that Murray Gell-Mann or Jean-Baptiste Biot or JBS Haldane, could be so classified. administrator, educator, policy advisor, makes him look a bit ploddy; poet, etymologist, essayist, a bit butterfly. Don't dismiss him until you've read his 1974 collection of essays The Lives of the Cell: notes of a biology watcher which is a best-of from his commissioned column for the New England Journal of Medicine NEJM. That book came out just as I started college and the sequel The Medusa and the Snail (1979) was published just as I started graduate school. Both collections won prizes for inspiring youngsters to go into science. This was years before the world wide web, let alone blogs, so there were few enough avenues for putting down some thoughts on a range of topics and getting them published. The essay is a form I like very much: short enough to read at a sitting and long enough to develop some arguments that make you think.
The Youngest Science TYS is billed as Thomas's autobiography but it's really too sketchy to qualify for that. It's a series of themes and anecdotes which are co-terminous with the author's life but leave a lot of detail on the cutting room floor. Discarding the boring makes his life a bit more exciting. The key theme is how the practice of medicine has changed, changed utterly, since Thomas's GP father was struggling to make ends meet at the end of each month in the years before WWI. Young Thomas was never going down the GP route and went through a succession of academic, clinical and administrative positions all over the USA. One of the most striking differences between the work of medicine in 1933, when Thomas first started clumping the wards at dead of night, and 1983, when TYS was published, is the range of diseases were not but are now treatable. In the 1930s there were effective therapies for
All the rest of hospitals' work was 'simply custodial' patients would only be rolled into hospital if they were really sick but there was nothing really to do except "waiting for the illness to finish itself off one way or the other". My father developed pneumonia after being taken for a bracing winter swim in the Irish Sea while at boarding school in 1929. The school called his mother, who sat by his bedside for ten days mopping his brow and talking to him until the fever broke and he started smiling again. His immune system had finally triumphed over the invasive Pneumococci. His mother probably made a difference because of the untapped and poorly understood power of PNI psycho-nearo-immunology [bloboprev]. According the Thomas "If being in hospital made a difference, it was mostly the difference produced by warmth, shelter, food and attentive, friendly care and the matchless skill of the nurses providing these things". Certainly in those days, the nurses saved as many lives as the doctors. And nobody was in it for the money.
Now it seems that it is all about the money. If you're a doctor prescribing a medicine which costs €160,000/yr, you'd be tempted to think "I'll have $ome of that"; you wouldn't be human or have a mortgage if that didn't cross your mind. The Brother spent long years making quality TV commercials for a living. The cost of 30 seconds of airtime in the evening was a king's ransom, just to play: so the companies tended to invest equally heavily in production values, and The Brother and his company (and the key-grip, the best boy, the continuity department and make-up) got a piece of the action.
In a life-time of science, I've had three good ideas and one of them turned out to be wrong and we got scooped on one of the others, so it was never published under my name. It's been a bit like that for Dr Thomas and this book of essays written in retirement allows him to put down a marker on a couple of those unpublishable hunches: possibly to intrigue a youngster to take up the fading scent and keep up the hunt for a solution. One of these is the observation that a peculiar sort of arthritis in pigs is definitely triggered by mycoplasma bacteria [bloboprev] and that both mycoplasma infestation and the 'auto-immune' disease rheumatoid arthritis are both susceptible to treatment with gold salts. Nobody has ever been able to culture mycoplasmas, or indeed any potentially causative microbe, from RA inflamed joint tissue. But the list of bacteria that have never been grown on a Petri dish far far exceeds those that have. I'm with, or at least behind, Thomas on this sort of idea. We will eventually find microbial infection - virus, bacteria or protozoan - acting as a trigger in all autoimmune diseases.
TYS is more than 30 years old, so parts of it are out of date and superseded, but as an inspiration for using science as a way of knowing & being open, curious, hard-working, stubborn and committed, it should be on the reading list for any favorite niece or nephew heading up to Med School.
I'll leave you with a final insight from Lewis Thomas “The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency.” Which may remind you of JBS Haldane's: "I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."
The Youngest Science TYS is billed as Thomas's autobiography but it's really too sketchy to qualify for that. It's a series of themes and anecdotes which are co-terminous with the author's life but leave a lot of detail on the cutting room floor. Discarding the boring makes his life a bit more exciting. The key theme is how the practice of medicine has changed, changed utterly, since Thomas's GP father was struggling to make ends meet at the end of each month in the years before WWI. Young Thomas was never going down the GP route and went through a succession of academic, clinical and administrative positions all over the USA. One of the most striking differences between the work of medicine in 1933, when Thomas first started clumping the wards at dead of night, and 1983, when TYS was published, is the range of diseases were not but are now treatable. In the 1930s there were effective therapies for
- lobar pneumonia [type-specific anti-pneumococcus antibodies; first type your pneumococcus from a sputum sample as quickly and reliably as possible]
- diabetic coma [a dribble of insulin and intravenous fluids]
- acute heart failure [bleeding (!) to reduce blood-pressure; digitalis as in tincture of foxglove Digitalis purpurea leaves to ooomph the heart muscle; oxygen]
- syphilis [bismuth, arsenic compounds and mercury . . . and a lot of time]
All the rest of hospitals' work was 'simply custodial' patients would only be rolled into hospital if they were really sick but there was nothing really to do except "waiting for the illness to finish itself off one way or the other". My father developed pneumonia after being taken for a bracing winter swim in the Irish Sea while at boarding school in 1929. The school called his mother, who sat by his bedside for ten days mopping his brow and talking to him until the fever broke and he started smiling again. His immune system had finally triumphed over the invasive Pneumococci. His mother probably made a difference because of the untapped and poorly understood power of PNI psycho-nearo-immunology [bloboprev]. According the Thomas "If being in hospital made a difference, it was mostly the difference produced by warmth, shelter, food and attentive, friendly care and the matchless skill of the nurses providing these things". Certainly in those days, the nurses saved as many lives as the doctors. And nobody was in it for the money.
Now it seems that it is all about the money. If you're a doctor prescribing a medicine which costs €160,000/yr, you'd be tempted to think "I'll have $ome of that"; you wouldn't be human or have a mortgage if that didn't cross your mind. The Brother spent long years making quality TV commercials for a living. The cost of 30 seconds of airtime in the evening was a king's ransom, just to play: so the companies tended to invest equally heavily in production values, and The Brother and his company (and the key-grip, the best boy, the continuity department and make-up) got a piece of the action.
In a life-time of science, I've had three good ideas and one of them turned out to be wrong and we got scooped on one of the others, so it was never published under my name. It's been a bit like that for Dr Thomas and this book of essays written in retirement allows him to put down a marker on a couple of those unpublishable hunches: possibly to intrigue a youngster to take up the fading scent and keep up the hunt for a solution. One of these is the observation that a peculiar sort of arthritis in pigs is definitely triggered by mycoplasma bacteria [bloboprev] and that both mycoplasma infestation and the 'auto-immune' disease rheumatoid arthritis are both susceptible to treatment with gold salts. Nobody has ever been able to culture mycoplasmas, or indeed any potentially causative microbe, from RA inflamed joint tissue. But the list of bacteria that have never been grown on a Petri dish far far exceeds those that have. I'm with, or at least behind, Thomas on this sort of idea. We will eventually find microbial infection - virus, bacteria or protozoan - acting as a trigger in all autoimmune diseases.
TYS is more than 30 years old, so parts of it are out of date and superseded, but as an inspiration for using science as a way of knowing & being open, curious, hard-working, stubborn and committed, it should be on the reading list for any favorite niece or nephew heading up to Med School.
I'll leave you with a final insight from Lewis Thomas “The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency.” Which may remind you of JBS Haldane's: "I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."
Friday, 24 April 2015
A sense of self
Last night I went to a family gathering in TCD and I don't think anyone there was more closely related to me, in a genes-in-common way, than, say, Michael D. Higgins, our noble President. But it was still my family. Just like at a family wedding or funeral, I met people who were part of my cousinage but whom I'd never actually met. And I also caught up with people who had disappeared off my radar for more than a decade as we met again - a little heavier, a little greyer, with more children or a new partner. The head of the family was hosting a party to celebrate the award she won last year for being the Best Mentor in All Ireland. And we, who had been made better people by her solicitous care and pushing to fulfill our potential, were there to say thanks. The official ceremony in Athlone last year was pinned on the lapel of a meeting of Science Foundation Ireland: where those who run this prestigious research support quango get to have some face-time those who have benefitted from the largesse. It was like a TED conference except that everyone's tab was being picked up by we-the-taxpayer. At TED, the audience cough up $5,000 a head for the privilege of meeting [other] charismatic creative people. As a humble and not notably successful foot-soldier of science, I would never have gotten past the door on my own scientific research record. I got my free dinner in November because I wrote a piece in The Blob which became part of the package that got Our Gaffer noticed.
Very interesting. In the midst of the canapes last night, one of my old work-mates turned to me and said "It wasn't me who told you to go back where you came from? I hope it wasn't!". It would be dishonest to say no, so I said "Yes". She was about as embarrassed as I was, which is to say not very much because we both have a sense of self that is on the positive side of the scale. But then, like the denizens of Lake Woebegone, pretty much everyone is on the positive side of that spectrum: we all re-write history and our recollection of events to put ourselves in a more positive light. I'm glad I wrote the original anecdote in quite neutral terms and didn't conjure her up as a malignant racist hag with one tooth and a pointed hat. It was quite redemptive to see her acknowledge the darker side of her nature: hoping that it wasn't true about herself but being honest enough to recognise that it might have been. It's really hard to change our true selves but the first step is to look in the mirror with clear eyes and some sense of critical appraisal.
I had a running battle all night at the reception, in the pub afterwards, continuing as we spilled out into the chilly street after midnight a little the worse for the dhrink. Battle isn't the right word, but 'discussion' doesn't capture the sense of ding-dong no holds barred exposure of the dark teatime of our souls. At issue was what we should do having recognised that there were better scientists in the World than we were. Was there any point in puttering along in the peleton of La Tour de Science? The metaphor of science being a race with only one winner is, frankly, repellent. And yes, we all acknowledge that there are lots of subsidiary prizes: the maillot à pois rouge is given to The King of the Mountain in the Tour de France; you get promotion if you publish enough papers. The reason why cyclists whistle round the corner in a group is that they can all go faster if they share the burden of pushing the air aside. Geese Branta canadensis in flight do it, and we're surely smarter than geese, you silly goose. We should be more collegiate and supportive and less competitive in science. We'll all go forward faster if we share our data and give our time to those younger or less fortunate than we are. We scientists have a certain talent, a lot of training and a mountain of accumulated knowledge, so we must continue put bricks in the wall of science for as long as our society will support us. It is a privilege but also a duty. Science is a way of knowing that has delivered much of what makes life good to live - indeed it has given life itself to billions of people who didn't get smallpox, malaria, polio or tuberculosis in this and the last century.
There are two points.
1) The stellar scientists, Nobel Prize winners; landers of the million euro SFI fish; the creators of papers in Nature and Science are all standing on the shoulders of giants. But they are also standing on heads and hands of quite ordinary people who are filling in the chinks left by the last Great Leap Forward. Unless we do that, there is no necessary-and-sufficient foundation for the next major foray into the unknown. My Institute's core business is to supply an essential part of this infra-structure; people who are a good pair of hands: who can run the instruments which generate the data - reliably, safely, and reproducibly; 40 hours a week, 48 weeks a year. Each of the Big Guns needs a team of people doing their job processing the samples, dreaming up new ways to do their work more efficiently, and being prepared to give that extra push if a deadline looms.
2) We have no idea where the next great breakthrough is going to come from. If we keep on pushing at the frontiers of something we care [bit of passion is allowable here] about and do the job with attention, and with accuracy, and with honesty but not with blinkers, we might, just might, be the one to discover the Secret of Life the Universe and Everything and today's stars will be eclipsed by our small but incandescent flame.
Very interesting. In the midst of the canapes last night, one of my old work-mates turned to me and said "It wasn't me who told you to go back where you came from? I hope it wasn't!". It would be dishonest to say no, so I said "Yes". She was about as embarrassed as I was, which is to say not very much because we both have a sense of self that is on the positive side of the scale. But then, like the denizens of Lake Woebegone, pretty much everyone is on the positive side of that spectrum: we all re-write history and our recollection of events to put ourselves in a more positive light. I'm glad I wrote the original anecdote in quite neutral terms and didn't conjure her up as a malignant racist hag with one tooth and a pointed hat. It was quite redemptive to see her acknowledge the darker side of her nature: hoping that it wasn't true about herself but being honest enough to recognise that it might have been. It's really hard to change our true selves but the first step is to look in the mirror with clear eyes and some sense of critical appraisal.
I had a running battle all night at the reception, in the pub afterwards, continuing as we spilled out into the chilly street after midnight a little the worse for the dhrink. Battle isn't the right word, but 'discussion' doesn't capture the sense of ding-dong no holds barred exposure of the dark teatime of our souls. At issue was what we should do having recognised that there were better scientists in the World than we were. Was there any point in puttering along in the peleton of La Tour de Science? The metaphor of science being a race with only one winner is, frankly, repellent. And yes, we all acknowledge that there are lots of subsidiary prizes: the maillot à pois rouge is given to The King of the Mountain in the Tour de France; you get promotion if you publish enough papers. The reason why cyclists whistle round the corner in a group is that they can all go faster if they share the burden of pushing the air aside. Geese Branta canadensis in flight do it, and we're surely smarter than geese, you silly goose. We should be more collegiate and supportive and less competitive in science. We'll all go forward faster if we share our data and give our time to those younger or less fortunate than we are. We scientists have a certain talent, a lot of training and a mountain of accumulated knowledge, so we must continue put bricks in the wall of science for as long as our society will support us. It is a privilege but also a duty. Science is a way of knowing that has delivered much of what makes life good to live - indeed it has given life itself to billions of people who didn't get smallpox, malaria, polio or tuberculosis in this and the last century.
There are two points.
1) The stellar scientists, Nobel Prize winners; landers of the million euro SFI fish; the creators of papers in Nature and Science are all standing on the shoulders of giants. But they are also standing on heads and hands of quite ordinary people who are filling in the chinks left by the last Great Leap Forward. Unless we do that, there is no necessary-and-sufficient foundation for the next major foray into the unknown. My Institute's core business is to supply an essential part of this infra-structure; people who are a good pair of hands: who can run the instruments which generate the data - reliably, safely, and reproducibly; 40 hours a week, 48 weeks a year. Each of the Big Guns needs a team of people doing their job processing the samples, dreaming up new ways to do their work more efficiently, and being prepared to give that extra push if a deadline looms.
2) We have no idea where the next great breakthrough is going to come from. If we keep on pushing at the frontiers of something we care [bit of passion is allowable here] about and do the job with attention, and with accuracy, and with honesty but not with blinkers, we might, just might, be the one to discover the Secret of Life the Universe and Everything and today's stars will be eclipsed by our small but incandescent flame.
Monday, 23 February 2015
Glycogen
Gerty Cori died in St. Louis Missouri in 1957 a long way from where she was born (Prague). It took 50 years before she was commemorated with a stamp in her adopted country. When the USPS, not known for the subtlety of its designs, published a series of stamps acknowledging scientists in April 2008, she was the only woman. The others were John "Transistor" Bardeen, Edwin "Red Shift" Hubble and Linus "Alpha Helix" Pauling. Two of these boys won two Nobel Prizes and one won none. Guess which! I've had occasion to be critical of Linus Pauling for running waaaay beyond the evidence about vitamin C. No such complaint was ever levelled at Gerty Cori for the work that led to her Nobel Prize in 1947, of which she shared a half share with her husband; Bernardo Houussay got the other half. There was a bit of a clever-clogs media show in 2008 because a chemist noticed an error in the representation of the molecule that is acting as a sort of speech bubble on the stamp. That molecule is glucose-1-phosphate, a breakdown product of glycogen, whose identification was one of Cori's contributions to science. The error lies in the fact that the phosphate group on Cori's shoulder appears to be joined to the glucose ring by the wrong oxygen atom! Shock, it took me five minutes of staring at the stamp knowing there was 'an error' to not see what the problem was. That was partly because my chemistry has been rusting for nearly 40 years, but partly because the 'error' fails to acknowledge that the picture is just a cartoon representation of the molecule - a gross simplification of what it really looks/behaves like. Whatever, printing errors give you pause to think - so that's a good thing.
The stamp story generates a vision of USPS bureaucrats, under some affirmative action protocol, looking to identify and trib a female scientist - possibly crying "find a woman in a white coat . . . any woman so long as she's a scientist . . . any of these broads have a Nobel Prize?" [picture of 'lady scientist' looking intently at a flask of urine] One could wish that, rather than pedestalling Gerty Cori, they had realised that she'd have been happier sharing her stamp, as she had shared her Nobel and as she had shared a lab-bench for 25 years with her husband Carl Cori. Over a life time, they carried out a wide ranging series of experiments setting out some of the fundamentals of biochemical science, especially in the area of carbohydrate metabolism. Glycogen is a polymer made up of numerous glucose molecules that is reasonably inert and so serves as a reservoir of energy for the body, in much the same way that starch serves plants. The Coris sorted out the mechanics of the biochemistry of Glycogen breakdown and made a good fist at revealing the complex of cells and hormones that control the process. The Cori Cycle where lactic acid, produced from anaerobic activity in working muscles, is transported to the liver, rebuilt into glucose and sent back to the muscle for another go-through, is named for them. Our sports science students learn all this at an early stage in their career as gospel truth, and I don't think they are really invited to remember Carl and Gerty Cori and their work. I don't them being mentioned when I went through college 40 years ago.
Gerty Cori had to tolerate, by-pass, ignore and overcome the most outrageous discrimination to pursue a career in science, starting with school in Prague before WWI where women were groomed to be a doormat or a mattress for a future husband. She married Carl, whom she had met in graduate school in Europe, and shortly thereafter they escaped to the free world and much better food in Buffalo, NY. But, like Jocelyn Bell Burnell, it was always following his career opportunities largely because she had, for much of the time, no career opportunities. At least no honoured or honourable opportunities: she worked for some years as her husband's 'lab assistant' at a tenth of his salary; even as she was co-authoring most of his papers and publishing a few on her own. She only got a properly paying job in Wash U. St. Louis a few months before she was awarded the Nobel Prize. Having experienced hardship and prejudice in post-WWI Europe in the 1920s, they held a sort of open house for brilliant dispossessed scientists in post-WWII St Louis. It didn't matter whether they were male or female, Jew or gentile, if they could cut the mustard, there was work and funding with the Coris. Six future Nobel Prize-winners passed through their lab [page 5], including Christian de Duve, Earl Sutherland, Edwin Krebs, Arthur Kornberg.
The same year she won the Nobel, Gerty got a diagnosis of Myelofibrosis, a fatal bone cancer where the cells that make blood cells in the bone-marrow get converted into a mass of connective tissue. She carried on pushing the frontiers of science for as long as she could stand and think straight through the pain, fatigue and anaemia and died at home at the shocking young age of 61. Six months later, at an even earlier age, Rosalind Franklin pegged out of the science game as well.
Wednesday, 11 February 2015
Science in Plum Village
It must be 30 years ago, maybe longer, that we heard the first distant tinkle from The Miracle of Mindfulness a kind of manual on meditation by a Vietnamese peacenik called Thich Nhat Hanh hereinafter TNH. Whatever sense I could abstract from the book - a little - I was far too busy to take the time to put any of those ideas into practice. Several of you will now be asserting that, if you can't find time to meditate, then you really need to find some time to meditate. Anyway, that book made a difference to our lives as a family and when The Boy grew up there was a certain amount of to-fro as family members threatened to stake each other for a visit to TNH's head office Plum Village in the South of France. Eventually, The Boy won and sent his mother for week of walking and working meditation at Le Village des Pruniers in the Dordogne.
A year later Plum Village hosted a Retreat for Workers in the Neurosciences and, as I had now run out of excuses for not going, we booked to go together with our sub-teenage daughters.The back-story was that, at the end of 2005, the Dalai Lama had been invited to address the [American] Society of Neuroscience at their Annual Conference. Why? Because some scientists were curious about the claims of Buddhist mediation that no-thought could affect the autonomic nervous system which for most of us is absolutely beyond conscious control. Teaching Human Physiology at The Institute, I've come to realise just how much the nervous and endocrine systems work in harness together - sveral neurotransmitters are hormones for example. Not all scientists of course: many were incensed that credit could be given to any other Way of Knowing than science. Which doesn't really sound like the open-minded skepticism about which science flatters itself. Then again, many of those angry enough to sign the petition against inviting old Lhamo Dondrub had names like Wu, Gu and Chang . . . hmmmmm? no bias there. And no bias among Western dogoodniks who go all black and white about China and Tibet.
There was an element of bandwagon about the Plum Village neuroscience gig the following Summer. I wrote before about the tension in respecting both the scientific and spiritual ways of seeing, rather than retreating like Achilles to sulk in our respective tents.
Being There was interesting: a little unsettling, a little relaxing. It made me think and also >!big break-though!< not think so much. We had to get up at 0530hrs to go and sit zazen in a big hall, which was, and is, a really great way to start the day. We were assigned to a multinational "Family" of other attendees at the Retreat, each family being tasked for a particular tranche of working meditation - our "Green Tea" family was required to ensure that 1,000 people had adequate access to tea, infusions and hot water. You could not wish for a nicer group of people to hang out with for a week. The week was not, of course, without its WTF? moments, like when, during a guided meditation, we were all invited to relax the pancreas.
The key event happened in the middle of the week, when we were all sufficiently softened up by a couple of days of walking-, working- and tea-making meditation. It was announced that the [genuine] workers in neurosciences among the attendees were invited to an evening symposium to share their scientific experience with the monastics in advance of a plenary session with TNH and the full Sangha/congregation. I wasn't a worker in the neurosciences but I was a scientist and, with some diffidence, I asked the organisers if my contribution was wanted - it was. But communication was imperfect and a number of other scientists were told that they could wait until the Big Event . . . on the other hand a flood of woo-wah people, who would be a long way from science in my book, attended the earlier Cabinet Meeting. Out of about 1,000 people on the retreat, only 90 made the cut and I constructed a Venn Diagram of the delegates [R]. With that sort of a range, a consensus was never going to emerge within the lifetime of the youngest person there. Accordingly, an inclusive (homeopathic diluting?) compromise was thrashed out: seven themes were agreed (Neuro*, healing/medicine, quantumphysics/computers, ethics, TheArts, community, psychotherapy) and people self-assigned to each group. The task for these committees was to inform the full Sangha about X-and-mindfulness. To achieve this, each theme agreed to spend the following afternoon in (mindful) debate to generate a 8 minute oral Report. I was at the time engaged in immunological research at one of Dublin's great teaching hospitals, so I joined healing-and-mindfulness group. I was the only scientist there unless you include a radiographer and a trainee physiotherapist. The hospital administrator was pushy and ill-informed, the iridologist lacked insight, the chiropractor seemed to know what she was talking about, and the two students from Bilbao were charming and bit naive.
The following afternoon, we found a shady spot under a plum tree and talked and talked until the administrator, who had taken on the mantle of being in charge, was telling us we had reached a consensus. Then fifteen minutes before tea-time, one of our number shook herself out of a trance and said that what was on the table no way represented her thoughts on the matter. Immediately three other people including one of the Spanish students withdrew their agreement and we'd run out of time. In a rush, the administrator was 'parked' and the rest of us rapidly agreed that, bending the rules, we would submit our report as a two-hander because it was clear that we couldn't find one coherent statement let alone agree on who would present it to everybody else. Two penguins from opposite ends of our absence-of-consensus were accordingly pushed off the ice-floe into the chill water of representational responsibility.
And that, friends, is how a chiropractor from Wisconsin and I got to address 1000 people on Mindfulness in Medicine in the Summer of 2006.
A year later Plum Village hosted a Retreat for Workers in the Neurosciences and, as I had now run out of excuses for not going, we booked to go together with our sub-teenage daughters.The back-story was that, at the end of 2005, the Dalai Lama had been invited to address the [American] Society of Neuroscience at their Annual Conference. Why? Because some scientists were curious about the claims of Buddhist mediation that no-thought could affect the autonomic nervous system which for most of us is absolutely beyond conscious control. Teaching Human Physiology at The Institute, I've come to realise just how much the nervous and endocrine systems work in harness together - sveral neurotransmitters are hormones for example. Not all scientists of course: many were incensed that credit could be given to any other Way of Knowing than science. Which doesn't really sound like the open-minded skepticism about which science flatters itself. Then again, many of those angry enough to sign the petition against inviting old Lhamo Dondrub had names like Wu, Gu and Chang . . . hmmmmm? no bias there. And no bias among Western dogoodniks who go all black and white about China and Tibet.
There was an element of bandwagon about the Plum Village neuroscience gig the following Summer. I wrote before about the tension in respecting both the scientific and spiritual ways of seeing, rather than retreating like Achilles to sulk in our respective tents.
Being There was interesting: a little unsettling, a little relaxing. It made me think and also >!big break-though!< not think so much. We had to get up at 0530hrs to go and sit zazen in a big hall, which was, and is, a really great way to start the day. We were assigned to a multinational "Family" of other attendees at the Retreat, each family being tasked for a particular tranche of working meditation - our "Green Tea" family was required to ensure that 1,000 people had adequate access to tea, infusions and hot water. You could not wish for a nicer group of people to hang out with for a week. The week was not, of course, without its WTF? moments, like when, during a guided meditation, we were all invited to relax the pancreas.
The following afternoon, we found a shady spot under a plum tree and talked and talked until the administrator, who had taken on the mantle of being in charge, was telling us we had reached a consensus. Then fifteen minutes before tea-time, one of our number shook herself out of a trance and said that what was on the table no way represented her thoughts on the matter. Immediately three other people including one of the Spanish students withdrew their agreement and we'd run out of time. In a rush, the administrator was 'parked' and the rest of us rapidly agreed that, bending the rules, we would submit our report as a two-hander because it was clear that we couldn't find one coherent statement let alone agree on who would present it to everybody else. Two penguins from opposite ends of our absence-of-consensus were accordingly pushed off the ice-floe into the chill water of representational responsibility.
And that, friends, is how a chiropractor from Wisconsin and I got to address 1000 people on Mindfulness in Medicine in the Summer of 2006.
Monday, 30 September 2019
Suttee
May Sarton was better at the distillation process because As We Are Now is only 120 pages but offers a compelling insight into how the old are discarded when they are no longer useful, even before they start to get whiffy. Not all useless mouths you may be sure but enough of them across all classes and communities that it is a recognised trope. I won't get over-analytical but there is a hint that As We Are Now reprises the 1st sentence of LP Hartley's The Go Between: “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” The tendency to park the old is rather weak in our immediate neighbourhood where I can think of three homes within about 5km where The Elder occupied a seat in the corner of the kitchen until the very end. In all those cases, the old person was included and continued to make diminishing contributions to family life even if it was reading stories to the kids or knitting another woolly hat [Jakers, enough with the hats, already].
The protagonist of May Sarton's book is Miss Spenser, a retired math teacher in Boondocks, USA who lived a life of culture and discernment; taught generations of teens; travelled to Europe before you could fly there; and continued to read and write after her official retirement. All was grand until she had a heart-attack and was moved to her brother's house in a different part of the State: torn from the familiar and having to learn where the light-switches were in her sister-in-law's home. The two women didn't get on and the brother was (like pretty much all the blokes I know, including self) useless at brokering a deal between the three of them so that they could adapt to the new regime. A little kindness goes a long way in such situations.
All too soon for Miss Spenser she is delivered to a rough and ready nursing home run by a snobbish, over-worked, casually cruel woman and her grown-up daughter. The book was published in 1973, but you may bet that similar places exist wherever regulation and inspection is imperfect. Even after the RTE exposé of bullying and elder-abuse in Aras Attracta in 2014, HIQA receives hundreds of complaints each year including 12 about an unexpected death.
Q. Who is doing the complaining?
A. The family. They are the only ones who have skin in the game . . . and lack the resources (emotional, physical, financial, logistical) to manage elder care in their own homes. It costs a lot to refit your home for wheelchair access: the bathroom rails, draining floor, spring-loaded toilet seat?
In this not so fresh hell, Miss Spenser makes the best fist of it that she can and begins to acknowledge that her contempt for her sister-in-law was a) largely unjustified and b) totally self-destructive. And begins to form new relationships that depend not on common culture and intellectual discourse but on other aspects of empathy and mutual respect. So far so good: quite edgy, insightful, with the ring of truth. But May Sarton was a poet and novelist: this is is a novel. As she puts down each vignette of trial and character development, she realises that there must be an ending as well as a beginning and and middle. There aren't too many options:
- Miss Spenser dies
- Her brother and sister-in-law die and she gets to live in their house
- One of her several external visitors takes pity on her and finds the resources to bring her into the bosom of a different family.
- Miss Spenser thinks "I'll make an end of this and take them all with me in blazing finale".
The title of the post will give you a clue that the wrap-up chosen by the author was abrupt, lazy and unlikely. The book is nevertheless not without value and won't take you as long to read as George Sarton's heavier contribution to the canon.
Wednesday, 11 November 2020
Shield of doubt, Spear of truth
Armistice Day, Veteran's Day, Poppy Day! And the war is not over. The war against certainty, intolerance, ambition and hubris in ON. Armistice Day has itself been a trigger for intolerance, conformity and tribalism. My echoed advice for today is to pause whatever you are doing at 1100hrs local time and take one minute to remember people who died so that you have the freedom to do whatever you want at 11 am on a Wednesday in November. It just takes a minute of your reflective time, just 10 or 15 breaths, and then you can go on with your day. It's a little thing, that might do some good for your soul and can do no substantive harm - like wearing a mask in the shops.
As promised 24 hours ago there was a joint meeting last night of the Wexford Science Café and the Wexford Science Festival: Going Viral: The Trials & Tribulations of COVID-19. Just over 30 people registered for the event - and turned up; and there may have been extra rellies on the same sofa at homes across the county. It was well timed because our symposium occurred mere days after the announcement of a new vaccine, which trials suggested might be 90% effective. We spent a little time discussing / explaining the details of this trial and how "90%" was arrived at. We didn't get down to detail-detail like 90±???% but the talk did lurch off towards the politics of the timing of the announcement - just after and not before the US Presidential Election was more-or-less decided.
But the take-home for me was a call to arms by scientists to other members of their tribe to start making the voice of reason heard. That requires the marshalling of evidence, the sifting of data, the integration of results, to make conclusions that are useful [and utilitarian, greatest good for the greatest number, if you are me, ymmv] in the current crisis. If we don't speak, then other voices will fill the vacuum with emotive appeals to nonsense, woo-wah and demonization. This is not to say that there isn't a mort too much specious certainty and drum-banging by some of those who wear the white coat. As soon as you hear Professor Gruyère getting ranty about masks, you may suspect that the evidence for masks is as flimsy as my bandana. That's what people do when they are certain but the data is weak - they raise their voices. Do wear the mask though, it's a little thing, pour encourager les autres.Silver lining front. This pandemic is a threat an opportunity to mobilise our thoughts and articulate our considered findings about items on the agenda which are actually far more difficult to handle: climate change, extinction, bloody tribalism. Bloody tribalism aka othering starts with homelessness and direct provision: it is only a quantitative difference between emergency accommodation in the Gresham Hotel and Hotel Rwanda.
Evidence only, folks. The problem is that evidence accumulates and it is often contradictory, especially if the sample is small because the bean-counters have only authorised a half-arsed study. But whatever the difficulties and hard work, we need a holistic solution: one which allocates the effort, the money, in some sort of rational way [utilitarian, if you can bear it, is a place to start]. Otherwise, we will win the battle, against Covid-19, but lose the War on Cancer, say. And holistic bean counters have a role: it is a waste of money leasing wards from private hospitals if there is no budget to hire repatriating medical staff.
I was sufficiently inspired by some of the articulate science as a way of knowing advocates last night that I left a zoom-comment "I have my Spear of Truth and Shield of Doubt, I just need a horse". Before lights-out, The Beloved, who was about her own business during Going Viral, asked how it had gone . . . and what we were going to do next. That puts a finger on the pulse! We don't need another talking shop if it serves only as catharsis. Action is required from me, and you. Then I had a dream about arriving at the Pearly Gates and accounting for my actions. I doin' a'righ'. Insofar as The Blob is a voice of reason and science, then I might have put in my Gladwellian 10,000 hours on the project. If that work is at the minimum wage (and it's not worth more!) then €100,000 has been thrown into the scales against the windmills of woo-wah.
My mention of horse brought to mind Roy Campbell's thrashing of fellow South African writers for being cosy self-regarding cherries on a seething cake of apartheid:
You praise the firm restraint with which they write –
I'm with you there, of course:
They use the snaffle and the curb all right,
But where's the bloody horse?
Tuesday, 12 September 2017
Sleights of Mind
Having resolved to go easy on the Youtube and Vimeo for 5 minute edutainment fix , I'm free/forced to start reading some books. I have a back-log from the last few Christmas-and-birthdays. Dau.I and I had 20 minutes spare time when I was hangin' with her in Dublin in the Spring. She propelled me into Hodges Figgis Dublin's largest and most venerable surviving bookstore. It's currently owned by Megacorp Waterstones but is still full of books, some, remaindered, cheap enough for me to purchase. Accordingly, I bought a short handful of books that seemed to have possibilities. I have to be ruthless here because we are trying to significantly down-size the library at home. Then again, at €2.50, a remainder paperback is somewhere between a newspaper and a cappuccino in price. Actually it's cheaper than a 0.01c book at Amazon because postage-free. I got good mileage out of Chasing Venus by Andrea Wulf.
But today's book today! And it is Sleights of Mind What the neuroscience of magic reveals about our brains by Stephen Macknik, Susana Martinez-Conde with [much smaller print] Sandra Blakeslee. It is holding its value on Amazon, so it must be good?! The first two authors are married [to each other] and run parallel neuroscience labs in the BNI the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix Arizona. Sandra Blakeslee is a journalist who can write . . . about science. You can find her regularly in the NYT and, for one example, co-authoring VS Ramachandran's [prev] Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind.
I'll get the snark out of the way by suggesting that Blakelee could, for readability, have been given bigger billing and a bigger pair of editors scissors: the book is not richer for TMI anecdotes about the family and friends of Mr&Mrs. Because a funny thing happened to my father in the Spanish Civil War is not sufficient reason to have a section in a book about Magic and Science. Sometimes it seems as if the publishers can only market books of a certain length and authors are required to lurry in material to that measure. Publishers could pay more attention to the physical book as a thing to read. The gutter margin is the additional margin added to a page layout to compensate for the part of the paper made unusable by the binding process. It is a crucial 4-5mm narrower in my copy of Sleights of Mind than my copy of The Running Sky [prev] which makes it very difficult to hold in one hand to read.
I love magic shows, we all love magic shows, so in one sense we are complicit in not wanting to understand how we are fooled. Part of us wants to go with the flow and clap our hands with delight as the rabbits and silk handkerchiefs pour from the hat. Not all magic is the same: some of it is technical, some of it mathematical, and all of it is perceptual.
- For technical a dove pan is a multi-layered piece of kit that can transform one thing into another; how it works is less important that the patter that accompanies it. The days of high-Victorian Marvo-the-Magician with a top hat and a pencil moustache are moving aside for performers who play it for laughs; but the dove-pan lives on. The box for sawing the lady in half is a bigger version of a container with compartments.
- For mathematical, even I can do a 21 card trick, and did again and again when I was 9 or 10 years old. At the start I just followed the protocol I had been taught gathering up columns of cards and laying them out in rows. This relentlessly pushes The Card to the centre of the reduced 21-card deck. Three iterations are enough. If you do this slow enough and inept enough repeatedly in front of the same person, they will eventually twig that you gather up the columns of cards in an idiosyncratic way and the magic is exposed. Real budding magicians work hard on the peripheral flim-flam and misdirection so that the process is, as far as possible, concealed: they get more life out of the trick that way. More importantly they practice practice practice until the actions become muscle-memory and your hands can work independently while your mind controls the audience with obfuscation. Art Benjamin did an early TED talk on his "mathemagical" perf which is more complicated but not that much more complicated. If you worked at it, you could do some of his tricks.
- Perceptual is most of the rest of magic: the art of misdirection - look up there [and not down at my other hand]. What's interesting about the Sleights of Mind book is the acknowledgment that magicians for a couple of hundred (or a couple of thousand) years have known about the biases in human perception and worked with these to s[t]imulate the unbelievable. Our eyes involuntarily track objects that move steadily across our field of vision. Our brains are incapable of multitasking: attention give here prevents it being given there. Indeed, as Daniel Kahneman pointed out in Thinking Fast and Slow, task-switching itself consumes vital energy and multi-taskers are less efficient that those who complete tasks in series. The title says it all, it is less sleights magicians' hands and more bending the minds of the punters.
- Action: at about the same time we found Art Benjamin on TED, this show by Lennart Green surfaced. He acts as a bumbling bohunk playing it for laughs but works his magic behind this facade. tl;dr? try this shorter show.
Summary: the book is a bit woolly and self-indulgent but worth the struggle if you're interested in knowing a bit more about how you tick - and maybe will help polish your crap-detector. Macknik and Martinez-Conde worked very hard on their task of understanding the pattern and process of magic. So much so that, at the end, they passed a test to be inducted into the Academy of Magic Arts in Hollywood. This is one of the trade organisations for those who make a living from bamboozling audiences, and they don't want ineptitude queering their pitch. The neuroscientists did not bring shame upon themselves demonstrating their mastery of a new way of seeing.
Monday, 15 July 2013
Jocelyn Bell Burnell turns 70
Continuing an occasional series on inspirations (Lynn Margulis, Barbara McClintock) for young wimmin in science, let's celebrate Jocelyn Bell Burnell's 70th birthday which falls today. JBB is perhaps the most widely discussed case of not getting a Nobel Prize which she could/should have shared with her supervisor Tony Hewish and his boss Martin Ryle for the discovery of pulsars. The wags dubbed 1974's the No-Bell Prize in Physics for "pioneering research in radio astrophysics".
JBB was definitely a pioneer in the sense of a military engineer because the early part of of her PhD programme with Hewish required her to help whack hundreds of wooden posts into a 4 acre field outside Cambridge, then string wires from these posts so that they became the Interplanetary Scintillation Array which Hewish had dreamed up and secured funding for as a way to measure high-frequency fluctuations of radio sources - aka quasars - Out There. Swinging a sledge-hammer was only the start of JBB's contribution to the project. She was also required to scrutinize and analyse a hundred feet of computer printout generated each day.
One day, she noticed a quarter-inch "bit of scruff" on the printout and thought it was interesting enough to tell Hewish about. He said the scruff must be man-made and told her to ignore it and please stay focussed on her project. He was certainly focussed on the project: he had a hypothesis, he'd asked a cash-strapped British government for a mort o' money and he was using it to get the data to test that hypothesis. There were deadlines to meet, a thesis to write and this was no time for side-lines. But JBB just couldn't leave the bit of scruff, it was nagging at her, so she went back to the printouts after hours when Hewish had gone home, and got out her ruler and saw that the scruff appeared regularly with a frequency of just under one blip per second.
What she had discovered was the first known pulsar, which later turned out to be a neutron star: a dense gravitationally collapsed once-upon-a-star that crams the mass of our sun into an incredibly fast revolving sphere 10-20km across, emitting strong electromagnetic pulses as it turns.
In the summer before she came to Cambridge, JBB had held a Summer internship at the Jodrell Bank radio telescope near Manchester. There, she had been required to do a lot of arithmetic because the main-frame computer in Manchester was always fritzing out or being used for other work. So she'd built up her math-muscle then as she built her red-meat muscle with the post driving. Soon enough, because she worked very hard and was diligent and mathematically competent, she discovered the second, third and fourth pulsars, and was able to convince Hewish that what she had discovered was much more interesting than what Hewish had been looking for. It took them a lot more time to establish that these pulsing scruffs were genuinely Out There and not rogue signals from Pirate Radio, traversing earth-orbit satellites or sparks from an arc-welder down the road. One of the top Soviet astronomers later sought her out at a meeting of the International Astronomical Union to say: "Miss Bell, you have made the greatest astronomical discovery of the twentieth century."
That was 1967, Miss Bell got married the next year and spent the next 20 years trudging round Britain as her husband was posted to one civil service job after another. Each time they moved, after she had unpacked the tea-chests, sorted out a school for their son, located the shops and the laundrette then she looked around for a local job in astrophysics, because that's what she did; usually part-time, because that's all that was possible. In 1974, there was the No-Bell prize kerfuffle, which seemed to exercise everyone else a lot more than it did her. Indeed she was delighted about the Nobel because it was the first recognition by that committee for her field of astronomical physics.
She has not been without honour, indeed without honours, in science. She's been given a string of medals and prizes including the quintessentially British CBE, DBE and FRS. And she's been awarded 20 honorary degrees including one from Trinity College Dublin in 2008. She spoke then about the brief intense joy (in the idyllic Arthurian Garde-Joyeuse sense) of knowing something that nobody else in the world knew, after she discovered the second pulsar. Different part of the sky, different frequency, they couldn't both be a malfunctioning thermostat in the lab next door. That internal satisfaction and hard-won conviction seems to have been much more important to her than the external trappings of recognition and, indeed, fame.
If she'd been a bloke, would she have had to wait more than 30 years between "the greatest astronomical discovery of the twentieth century" and getting a CBE or joining the Boy's Club as Fellow of the Royal Society? If she'd been a bloke though, she wouldn't have had to put her career on free-wheel while she changed nappies and put plasters on small knees. Someone with less equanimity and more cynicism might suspect that she'd now become Jocelyn Bell Bandwagon as universities fall over themselves to give her honorary degrees.
The thing that far too few people acknowledge about JBB is her 30 year association with the (wonderful, empowering, facilitator of heroes) Open University: first as a tutor because she could do that while working part-time from home and much later as an inspirational Professor of Physics; infamously at the time doubling the number of such Chairs in Britain who had two X chromosomes.. She far more than doubled the number of teacher-researchers (rather than teacher-teachers) in her sector of the OU, because she believed that active researchers made better teachers. There's much more to this woman than pulsars.
You don't have to be a rocket-scientist to succeed in science - the young Miss Bell failed her 11+ exam and so wasn't eligible for a free Grammar School place under RAB Butler's 1944 Education Act and she didn't get a 1st Class Honours degree from Glasgow. Would her Upper 2nd Class Honours degree have anything to do with the fact that she was the only woman in a class of 50 taking Physics? How about the fact that for two years, every time she entered the Physics lecture theatre she was greeted with hoots and cat-calls and coordinated foot-stamping? Her response? She learned quickly to control her blushing and got on with the physics. The men who participated in this ritualised bullying, and not only in Glasgow, will also be about 70 now, and only a few of them will have joined the dinosaurs underground.
It helps if you have supportive parents who won't accept that at school boys do science-science and girls do domestic-science. An inspiring science teacher also makes a huge difference - Henry Tillott in JBB's case. You have to be prepared to work hard, with a pick-axe and wire-strippers if that's what it takes, or with a slide rule and deep maths if that is required. Being at home with numbers and order-of-magnitude is useful: "I guess what I’m saying is, even in that first exam I had learnt to check that my answers seemed sensible, that when I came up with a numerical value, that it was reasonable, whatever reasonable means". You have to put in long hours . . . after the working day and at weekends if necessary. You have to be able to park your certainties and see things with a fresh eye. You have to be agreeable . . . but not a push-over - some assertiveness training will help you hold your corner against authority figures when it matters. OTOH, you don't have to treat kids and career as an either/or choice. Juggling family and science is hard work but so is twirling a sledge-hammer.
Much more detail in a long interview.
The Blob's women in science: Florence Nightingale - Barbara McClintock - Maude Delap - Cliona O'Farrelly - Lynn Margulis - Rosalind Franklin - Jocelyn Bell Burnell
JBB was definitely a pioneer in the sense of a military engineer because the early part of of her PhD programme with Hewish required her to help whack hundreds of wooden posts into a 4 acre field outside Cambridge, then string wires from these posts so that they became the Interplanetary Scintillation Array which Hewish had dreamed up and secured funding for as a way to measure high-frequency fluctuations of radio sources - aka quasars - Out There. Swinging a sledge-hammer was only the start of JBB's contribution to the project. She was also required to scrutinize and analyse a hundred feet of computer printout generated each day.
One day, she noticed a quarter-inch "bit of scruff" on the printout and thought it was interesting enough to tell Hewish about. He said the scruff must be man-made and told her to ignore it and please stay focussed on her project. He was certainly focussed on the project: he had a hypothesis, he'd asked a cash-strapped British government for a mort o' money and he was using it to get the data to test that hypothesis. There were deadlines to meet, a thesis to write and this was no time for side-lines. But JBB just couldn't leave the bit of scruff, it was nagging at her, so she went back to the printouts after hours when Hewish had gone home, and got out her ruler and saw that the scruff appeared regularly with a frequency of just under one blip per second.
What she had discovered was the first known pulsar, which later turned out to be a neutron star: a dense gravitationally collapsed once-upon-a-star that crams the mass of our sun into an incredibly fast revolving sphere 10-20km across, emitting strong electromagnetic pulses as it turns.
In the summer before she came to Cambridge, JBB had held a Summer internship at the Jodrell Bank radio telescope near Manchester. There, she had been required to do a lot of arithmetic because the main-frame computer in Manchester was always fritzing out or being used for other work. So she'd built up her math-muscle then as she built her red-meat muscle with the post driving. Soon enough, because she worked very hard and was diligent and mathematically competent, she discovered the second, third and fourth pulsars, and was able to convince Hewish that what she had discovered was much more interesting than what Hewish had been looking for. It took them a lot more time to establish that these pulsing scruffs were genuinely Out There and not rogue signals from Pirate Radio, traversing earth-orbit satellites or sparks from an arc-welder down the road. One of the top Soviet astronomers later sought her out at a meeting of the International Astronomical Union to say: "Miss Bell, you have made the greatest astronomical discovery of the twentieth century."
That was 1967, Miss Bell got married the next year and spent the next 20 years trudging round Britain as her husband was posted to one civil service job after another. Each time they moved, after she had unpacked the tea-chests, sorted out a school for their son, located the shops and the laundrette then she looked around for a local job in astrophysics, because that's what she did; usually part-time, because that's all that was possible. In 1974, there was the No-Bell prize kerfuffle, which seemed to exercise everyone else a lot more than it did her. Indeed she was delighted about the Nobel because it was the first recognition by that committee for her field of astronomical physics.
She has not been without honour, indeed without honours, in science. She's been given a string of medals and prizes including the quintessentially British CBE, DBE and FRS. And she's been awarded 20 honorary degrees including one from Trinity College Dublin in 2008. She spoke then about the brief intense joy (in the idyllic Arthurian Garde-Joyeuse sense) of knowing something that nobody else in the world knew, after she discovered the second pulsar. Different part of the sky, different frequency, they couldn't both be a malfunctioning thermostat in the lab next door. That internal satisfaction and hard-won conviction seems to have been much more important to her than the external trappings of recognition and, indeed, fame.
If she'd been a bloke, would she have had to wait more than 30 years between "the greatest astronomical discovery of the twentieth century" and getting a CBE or joining the Boy's Club as Fellow of the Royal Society? If she'd been a bloke though, she wouldn't have had to put her career on free-wheel while she changed nappies and put plasters on small knees. Someone with less equanimity and more cynicism might suspect that she'd now become Jocelyn Bell Bandwagon as universities fall over themselves to give her honorary degrees.
The thing that far too few people acknowledge about JBB is her 30 year association with the (wonderful, empowering, facilitator of heroes) Open University: first as a tutor because she could do that while working part-time from home and much later as an inspirational Professor of Physics; infamously at the time doubling the number of such Chairs in Britain who had two X chromosomes.. She far more than doubled the number of teacher-researchers (rather than teacher-teachers) in her sector of the OU, because she believed that active researchers made better teachers. There's much more to this woman than pulsars.
You don't have to be a rocket-scientist to succeed in science - the young Miss Bell failed her 11+ exam and so wasn't eligible for a free Grammar School place under RAB Butler's 1944 Education Act and she didn't get a 1st Class Honours degree from Glasgow. Would her Upper 2nd Class Honours degree have anything to do with the fact that she was the only woman in a class of 50 taking Physics? How about the fact that for two years, every time she entered the Physics lecture theatre she was greeted with hoots and cat-calls and coordinated foot-stamping? Her response? She learned quickly to control her blushing and got on with the physics. The men who participated in this ritualised bullying, and not only in Glasgow, will also be about 70 now, and only a few of them will have joined the dinosaurs underground.
It helps if you have supportive parents who won't accept that at school boys do science-science and girls do domestic-science. An inspiring science teacher also makes a huge difference - Henry Tillott in JBB's case. You have to be prepared to work hard, with a pick-axe and wire-strippers if that's what it takes, or with a slide rule and deep maths if that is required. Being at home with numbers and order-of-magnitude is useful: "I guess what I’m saying is, even in that first exam I had learnt to check that my answers seemed sensible, that when I came up with a numerical value, that it was reasonable, whatever reasonable means". You have to put in long hours . . . after the working day and at weekends if necessary. You have to be able to park your certainties and see things with a fresh eye. You have to be agreeable . . . but not a push-over - some assertiveness training will help you hold your corner against authority figures when it matters. OTOH, you don't have to treat kids and career as an either/or choice. Juggling family and science is hard work but so is twirling a sledge-hammer.
Much more detail in a long interview.
The Blob's women in science: Florence Nightingale - Barbara McClintock - Maude Delap - Cliona O'Farrelly - Lynn Margulis - Rosalind Franklin - Jocelyn Bell Burnell
Saturday, 9 January 2016
Edgy
John Brockman was born in 1941 in Boston and has been an active agent for change and a facilitator of dialogue especially in science and at the Arts-Science borrrrder. He doesn't seem to have done any primary scientific research himself but knows a lot of the movers and shakers. Somewhere along the way I've acquired a copy of his When we were kids: how a child becomes a scientist [Jonathan Cape 2004]. I really like this book, not least because Brockman is a very light editor and lets real scientists talk about their formative years. If you have a child, you might with advantage read such a book and tilt the process in your home so that your kid is exposed to science as a way of knowing. That book features, for example Blobistas like Alison Gopnik, Lynn Margulis, Steven Pinker, VS Ramachandran. It also has a chapter by Marc Hauser, Harvard Wunderkind,who has since been drummed out of the regiment after a spectacular fall from grace. In 2014, I wrote crossly about that fall and Brockman's unseemly scrabble to distance himself from the bad apple by purging the historical record. tsk!
Brockman has given a lot of traction to science-in-the-public-domain by setting up the Edge Foundation which holds periodical seminars in which the usual suspects get together round a table in some salubrious setting to talk about science and the interface between Science and the Arts and between science and popular culture. The suspects are likely to include cool-tech musicos like Peter Gabriel or Brian Eno. These seminars are edited and broadcast on the interweb and they're often worth listening to if you like your information in chunks longer than a tweet. For the last several years, the Edge has been able to monetize the intellectual ferment by asking an Annual Question and publishing the answers in hard-copy. They don't ask you or me, they ask those scientists who are gabby enough to have a presence in Brockman's circle of friends . . . the sort of chaps [yes, very often chaps] who are asked to give TED talks. The model is essentially the same as When we were kids: ask successful STEM-folks their opinion on X, edit the answers and order an initial print-run of 20,000 running up to Christmas.
They had a really good question in 2008 What have you changed your mind about and why? I clipped all 166 answers off the interweb and clagged them into a monster PDF which I then sent it to all my techy pals. Few had the patience/stamina to read it. But that's a really important question because it indicates that real thought has been going down rather than re-churning our old certainties about gravity; the non-existence of god; the biological world being shaped by evolution. That's why a symposium among/with some monster-minds from disparate fields has the potential to generate something new. At scientific conferences, and TED fests, and Edge symposia, the really interesting interchange happens off camera over beers rather than at the plenary session in the big auditorium. Although attendance at the plenary session is also an essential part of the process: your reaction to and extrapolation form the talks by the Young Turks on stage is the stuff of progress.
I'm clearly conflicted about John Brockman and The Edge. I bought a copy of This will Make You Smarter the book of the 2011 question What scientific concept will improve everybody's cognitive toolkit? I never read it. I can't find it on my bookshelves so I may have given it to some young scientist when they survived their PhD viva. There's only so much of reading other men's flowers that is tolerable or useful. I'm more and more convinced that you need to smell the people you have dialogue with: the pheromones are somehow important for tuning the crap-detector. Another problem with the format is that there are no citations and no references, so while you might be stoked to hear what maverick gerontologist Aubery de Grey has to say about next-generation antibiotics, the piece provides no leads to follow up the ideas, but thank god for The Blob: read this.
I must say I find the 2016 Question What do you consider the most interesting recent scientific news what makes it important? deeply unimaginative. Whatever we might gain from hearing about the thoughts of some of the smartest folk in the room, we can get less from their thoughts about the thoughts of someone who is not in the room. If I didn't read 2011 having paid ready money, I'm not going to do more than dip into 2016 and advise you to do the same. It is entirely possible that the 194 contributors are not tribbing people outside the conference marquee - they are rather clapping each other on the back for being the mirror of their own brilliance. Then again <confliction alert> you could do worse than read Robert Sapolsky, Edge stalwart, being impassioned, erudite, articulate on Ebola and Science. Or if you are a scientist who has published something in 2015, you might reflect, like Judith Rich Harris, on the truthiness of science: "There are too many journals publishing too many papers. Most of what's in them is useless, boring, or wrong." Hmmm, boring question, answers on the button.
Brockman has given a lot of traction to science-in-the-public-domain by setting up the Edge Foundation which holds periodical seminars in which the usual suspects get together round a table in some salubrious setting to talk about science and the interface between Science and the Arts and between science and popular culture. The suspects are likely to include cool-tech musicos like Peter Gabriel or Brian Eno. These seminars are edited and broadcast on the interweb and they're often worth listening to if you like your information in chunks longer than a tweet. For the last several years, the Edge has been able to monetize the intellectual ferment by asking an Annual Question and publishing the answers in hard-copy. They don't ask you or me, they ask those scientists who are gabby enough to have a presence in Brockman's circle of friends . . . the sort of chaps [yes, very often chaps] who are asked to give TED talks. The model is essentially the same as When we were kids: ask successful STEM-folks their opinion on X, edit the answers and order an initial print-run of 20,000 running up to Christmas.
They had a really good question in 2008 What have you changed your mind about and why? I clipped all 166 answers off the interweb and clagged them into a monster PDF which I then sent it to all my techy pals. Few had the patience/stamina to read it. But that's a really important question because it indicates that real thought has been going down rather than re-churning our old certainties about gravity; the non-existence of god; the biological world being shaped by evolution. That's why a symposium among/with some monster-minds from disparate fields has the potential to generate something new. At scientific conferences, and TED fests, and Edge symposia, the really interesting interchange happens off camera over beers rather than at the plenary session in the big auditorium. Although attendance at the plenary session is also an essential part of the process: your reaction to and extrapolation form the talks by the Young Turks on stage is the stuff of progress.
I'm clearly conflicted about John Brockman and The Edge. I bought a copy of This will Make You Smarter the book of the 2011 question What scientific concept will improve everybody's cognitive toolkit? I never read it. I can't find it on my bookshelves so I may have given it to some young scientist when they survived their PhD viva. There's only so much of reading other men's flowers that is tolerable or useful. I'm more and more convinced that you need to smell the people you have dialogue with: the pheromones are somehow important for tuning the crap-detector. Another problem with the format is that there are no citations and no references, so while you might be stoked to hear what maverick gerontologist Aubery de Grey has to say about next-generation antibiotics, the piece provides no leads to follow up the ideas, but thank god for The Blob: read this.
I must say I find the 2016 Question What do you consider the most interesting recent scientific news what makes it important? deeply unimaginative. Whatever we might gain from hearing about the thoughts of some of the smartest folk in the room, we can get less from their thoughts about the thoughts of someone who is not in the room. If I didn't read 2011 having paid ready money, I'm not going to do more than dip into 2016 and advise you to do the same. It is entirely possible that the 194 contributors are not tribbing people outside the conference marquee - they are rather clapping each other on the back for being the mirror of their own brilliance. Then again <confliction alert> you could do worse than read Robert Sapolsky, Edge stalwart, being impassioned, erudite, articulate on Ebola and Science. Or if you are a scientist who has published something in 2015, you might reflect, like Judith Rich Harris, on the truthiness of science: "There are too many journals publishing too many papers. Most of what's in them is useless, boring, or wrong." Hmmm, boring question, answers on the button.
Wednesday, 13 May 2020
Calatrava
Science is A way of knowing, so it doesn't have all the answers. If you're not at the very pin of your collar trying to survive [food, clear water, shelter] it's only human to want to exercise your mind on what's it all about? Science, and scientists, want a big spoonful of humility if they characterise Arts Block research as kinda useless because it doesn't achieve anything "useful". My years of research in synonymous codon usage SCU wasn't more useful than tracing the evolution of Chaucerian manuscripts . . . until SCU was found to be key to making more insulin and later where SARS-CoV2 came from. Let us, accordingly, give a small hat-tip to art historians, like me niecie, as they try to understand their finite universe. How big is that universe world [none of them have Art data from Mars]? Fermi Problem!! There are 55,000 museums in the World. The Louvre has 35,000 'works of art' on display [and at least as many in the cellars?]. The National Gallery of Ireland a mid-range gallery has about 3,000 paintings in its inventory. The Victoria Art Gallery in Bath has about 1,000. I'll bet you €5 that, within a factor of 10x, there are 50 million paintings available to scholars in the field. That's a lot, and nobody aspires to internalise all that data, so Art Historians specialise to focus on a subset of the global inventory [Op Art, Breugal 'n' pals, Icons of Андре́й Рублёв, Les Fauves, Mannerists, Cubists, PreRaphaelites . . .]. Here's a couple:
One question you might ask is Couple? Because I've stuck them together as a panorama.jpg despite the fact that the Madonna is now in Gemäldegalerie, Berlin while the contemplative bloke is now 6,700 km West in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.
Dude on the right is Don Diego de Guevara, a magnate in the Court of Burgundy in the late 1400s who ended his career as Chamberlain to Carlos V, the Holy Roman Emperor who made lithping a Cathtillian linguistic convention [prev]. Don Diego was a great collector of Art and this portrait was painted by Master Michel Sittow aka Melchior Alemán aka Mychel Flamenco (although he was just passing through Germany and Flanders having been born in Estonia). Sittow was a court painter and friend of Don Diego. Actually, "we" are not completely certain that the DC art is the same piece as one painted 503 (!) years ago in Burgundy. We require the labour of Art Historians to work that out by tracking fragmentary records through testaments, bills of sale and inventories scattered through the libraries, palaces and stately homes of Europe.
One of these scholars notice that a) Don Diego's portrait is exactly the same size as the Madonna from Berlin [bigger pic] b) the carpet on the plinth in each picture has the same design! It's like one of those spot-the-difference puzzles you get in the Kid's Section of the Sunday papers: the divil is in the detail. Who she? History is not written by, for or about women, but she is surely a real woman painted from life rather than an idealised version of femininity. The dates are right that it could (even) be Katherine of Aragon the future wife of England's Henry VIII. If that's the case, the child is defo not hers, but presumably borrowed from one of the women downstairs. The bird clutched by the boy is claimed to be a goldfinch Carduelis carduelis but I don't buy it. Certainly not a male goldfinch, they are really distinctive and have a black cap. In my experience, this week, with my own eyes, goldfinches eat the seeds of dandelions. They swallow the seed and the fluffy bits fall out the side of the mouth. Later in the season they switch to thistle-down and so there is a metaphorical association of the bird with the Crown of Thorns. My twitcher pals Dave and Des have scotched the goldfinch ID. "maybe a siskin? Carduelis Spinus" Paintings are often richly allegorical: full of puzzles put there to add meaning . . . and pose a challenge to the artist's pals and patrons? Art historians love fossicking through this sort of stuff to identify sitters from the heraldic paraphernalia that clutters the corners of the picture.
And that flags (almost literally) another textual textile conundrum in Don Diego's portrait which I've zoomed in for the picture [L prev para]. Underneath his fancy fur collar, the Don is fingering [preening?] his Order of Calatrava [as seen in its full functional capacity R] which he was awarded for loyal service to the Habsburgs in 1517. X-ray analysis reveals that the Order was added later and it's not impossible that it was added by a different hand after Michel Sittow returned to The Baltics, also in 1517. I tell ya, there are plenty of flies to swat in Art History.
Dude on the right is Don Diego de Guevara, a magnate in the Court of Burgundy in the late 1400s who ended his career as Chamberlain to Carlos V, the Holy Roman Emperor who made lithping a Cathtillian linguistic convention [prev]. Don Diego was a great collector of Art and this portrait was painted by Master Michel Sittow aka Melchior Alemán aka Mychel Flamenco (although he was just passing through Germany and Flanders having been born in Estonia). Sittow was a court painter and friend of Don Diego. Actually, "we" are not completely certain that the DC art is the same piece as one painted 503 (!) years ago in Burgundy. We require the labour of Art Historians to work that out by tracking fragmentary records through testaments, bills of sale and inventories scattered through the libraries, palaces and stately homes of Europe.
Wednesday, 10 April 2024
Sea as soup
I was faced with a mountain of washing up and had run out of podcasts and had nothing on the go from Borrowbox. Rather than being the Trappist plongeur or, worse, listening to RTE on the wireless, I logged on and downloaded something, anything, from the non-fiction bin. Came up with The sea is not made of water : life between the tides by Adam Nicolson [prev], which starts with a (for me) wonderful mix of Linnaean binomers and purple (and green & brown & red) prose describing his adventures on the foreshore. In one project he secures permission to create a new rockpool in Argyll. Three days are spend with maul and bar to create a depression which has not been wet since the Jurassic. Rain and the tide duly brim-fills this shallow dip in the landscape and Nicolson settles down to record the immigrants . . . and muse on the etymology of "brim". My experience of tidal pools is entirely superficial: it's wet; there's "a fish"; anemones; a pebble . . . Nicolson has more patience and observational skills and can count.
But nobody can do really useful field-work in the week remaining of their summer holidays and Nicolson turns to the scientific literature to report on the dynamic processes that affect species abundance: mostly nature red in tooth and claw. a cost-benefit trade off played out over evolutionary time. One rock scissor stone tale looked at the interactions of common periwinkles Littorina littorea, green shore crab Carcinus maenus and green algae like Cladophora spp and Ulva lactuca. The winkles eat the algae, which shelter the crabs, which eat the winkles. Who wins depends on how far up the shore the pool is and the local rapacity of gulls which can swallow crabs whole.
It's true that sounds like a very simple ecosystem but you have to start with simple models - preferably generating testable hypotheses - if you're going to establish some principals in our understanding of how life ticks. Later he cites Bob Paine's (1933-2016 obit) concept of key-stone species - often top predators - whose impact cascades down the food-chain. Paine found that when he fecked out all the ochre starfish Pisaster ochraceus on a section of the foreshore, its favorite food mussels Mytilus californianus spread unchecked across the rocks depriving lots of other shellfish of a home. Within a short time the number of invertebrate species halved compared to a control (starfish present) plot. Same with wolves in Yellowstone: in their absence, deer eat all the twiggy saplings leading to deforestation and a catastrophic decline in all the species which use trees for shelter, food or infection (hey fungi have rights, too).
This is, for sure, a beautifully written hello beach, hello sky book. But it is also a philosophical and historical treatise explaining how smarter people than you-and-me made sense of the natural world. He carries a torch of Heraclitus of Ephesus (535 – 475 BCE) in a similar way that botanist Anna Pavord tribs Theophrastus of Lesbos. There's a succinct history on the causes of tides, including enough of the wrong turns associated with famously smart blokes (Kepler - looking at you) to make me realise that tides simple neither conceptually nor locally. This is followed by a weird chapter on Andromeda stories - where vulnerable people (women, esp virgins, suicides, the unhinged) are pegged out at low tide, so that the sea can perform a non-culpable "disposal". Check out Catherine Campbell MacLean for as local example?
Whoa, Adam: that's a kinda niche to be sharing with beachcombers. But the Nicolson rabbit holes are many and varied - a bit like The Blob. Not many readers will be familiar with the works of 19thC marine biologist Philip Gosse, whose biblical literalism conceived and delivered Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot in 1857. Far from untying anything, Gosse made his arguments into a tangle of special pleading to explain why Adam had a navel (omphalos) and why God created loadsa a dead fossils to bamboozle contemporary geologists. As we all know, Darwin brought out a much more satisfying, internal consistent hypothesis two years later with On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. I knew about Gosse b/c very expensive education but also because of his son Edmund's compelling growing up oppressed story Father and Son ". . . one of our best accounts of adolescence, particularly for those who endured . . . a religious upbringing".
Bottom line for the soul: Nicolson's fossicking along the tide-line seems to lead up to his sympathetic ruminations on Martin Heidigger - emphatically not because Heidigger was an enthusiastic Nazi. It was more because of Heidigger's quip "I care therefore I am" and his concept of Dasein - being present when out and about in the world. Nicolson has spent his entire life in reconciliation between his scientific and poetic understanding of existence - both his and each periwinkle's and the interaction terms! I'm on board with this, having made Science as A Way of Knowing a running theme in The Blob. But I also really like that Nicolson accepts that humans are not cartoons. 21stC discourse finds it all too easy to bring down the shutters: oh, that bastard is, like, A Nazi I don't need to engage with, listen to, or acknowledge the existence of such perps. That's easy; much more difficult to look into the dark corners of our own souls and work on that. And dismissing everything that makes me uncomfortable is all too easy to generalise to include the undeserving: the disabled, the poor, communiss, People of The Book, the homeless, that misogynistic colleague, boat-people . . . travellers.
Bottom line for the shore: the sea is big, wet and salty and a very great number of creatures live there. To the nearest whole number we know 0% about how these denizens interact and are inter-dependent. Humans are almost certainly a key-stone species for world between the tides. Blundering about on the beach with our yappy dogs; allowing a company like Exxon to operate 200,000 tonne oil tankers; forcing the sea to suck up all our CO2.
Saturday, 11 August 2018
Hugh the Painter
Despite the non-overlapping magisteria, you can respect scholarship even if it adheres to different standards than your own. The scientific method is A way of knowing what makes the world tick, but science is really not much help with compassion, intuition, dance or painting. Lera Boroditsky suggests that maybe the best way to understand how people tick is to read Jane Austen. Now here's a statement "A small advantage of inquiring into the history of almost a thousand years ago is that one is permitted to speculate on possibilities without necessarily having any evidence beyond reasonable plausibility". Harrumph, with those rules you can never be wrong, but it doesn't matter so much if you are. Although I suppose you could imagine a scenario where an ancient manuscript is re-interpreted to allow polygamy among Christians which sets off a jihad led by people who firmly believe that only followers of The Prophet are allowed that extra expense. That's not to claim that my science has been 'useful' but in general science is more open ended than historical research. There's a lot more to know about Isopods than Isaiah, for example and let that be a lesson to you when picking your specialist subject on Mastermind.
That sketchy statement about low standards of evidence is clipped from a great fat tome Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts by Christopher de Hamel, published by Penguin in 2016. It's more that 600 pages long including 50 pages of notes and references in minute font with few line-breaks and no white space. It's like suddenly the price of paper rocketted but all the notes were deemed essential. The manuscripts are literally that - written by hand on parchment hundreds of years ago before Gutenberg and Caxton started making identical copies of books. Whatever about paper at Penguin today, parchment was hard to come by, therefore expensive, and not the sort of stuff you'd crumple into a ball and throw into the bin if you made a mistake. Each piece was made from a single bit of animal skin: de-haired; scraped of fat and connective tissue, soaked in various noxious substances and then strrrrretched on a frame to dry out. While stretched, the hide was scraped to remove any remaining gunk, but also to reduce the thickness of the sheet. Under tension, a little nick in the skin was likely to open out into a gaping wound. This sort of damage is found, even in the best quality illuminated manuscripts, but repaired with a neat line of cross-stitch.
However much the raw product cost, the parchments, which have come to the attention of Christopher de Hamel after 500 to 1,500 years, have had their value immensely increased by their decoration. Hundreds of hours of painstaking writing with a quill pen, not to mention the illustrations. In my late teens, I wrote out pages and pages of poetry, so I know that you can get in the zone with the lettering and that it is quicker to write neatly than be scraggy. But the art work would be beyond me. The picture above is one of the very first self-portraits: the red letters on either side of the monks head say hu -- go | pic -- tor. We know that, as well as the illustrating, Hugo also wrote the text. Not least from the picture itself, where Hugo shows himself dipping a quill in an ink-horn with one hand and scoring a page with parallel lines with the other.
The book in which this delightful insight appears is a commentary on the book of Isaiah by St Jerome currently residing in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. If you look carefully at the book, you'll notice that it's written with 4 different hands. Actually if you or I looked at the book until cross-eyed we probably wouldn't make this inference, but de Hamel has been in the ancient manuscript business for more than 40 years. Appraising them for 25 years in the last century for London auctioneer Sotheby's and since 2000 as Librarian of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He has ‘ . . . probably catalogued more medieval manuscripts than anyone alive,or indeed than anyone has ever done.’ With that embedding he can recognise the important diagnostic variants, so he could put a credible date and author on whatever came across his desk and write catalogue notes that would put the find in context and sell-it-up by association with other famous old books. Dates are inferred from the content: there is an up-tick in calendars flagging St Thomas's Day only after Thomas à Becket was murdered. At the other end, it's rather difficult to sponsor a book and get acknowledged with a grateful thanks if you are dead. But dates are also inferred from the style: up until 1230 monks wrote above the lines they scored on the page; after that date they started the text under the top line. This fashion swept through Europe in a handful of years. Provenance can also be tied down to distinctive differences in hand-writing: there is an English style of lettering and several variants of continental which experts can recognise.
The Commentaries on Isaiah is now in Oxford but it was earlier catalogued in Exeter but not made there: the style is wrong and the hand is not English. Which hand? Well none of them are English and only one of them is Hugo's. Which? If you start making one assumption (rather than getting out a Ouija Board and asking Hugo's spirit) that all the pictures are by Hugo because he was The Whizz when it came to the colour supplement. Then notice that the earlier folios have been lettered first leaving a space for an illuminated initial (and a note specifying what that initial should be). In the last sections of the book the designs are integrated with the letters; rather than shoe-horned into a space written by someone else. This is nowhere better shown than on the page including the selfie [L], the last page in the book, where Hugo is neatly tucked into and integrated with the zig-zag pattern with which he has chosen to wrap his masterpiece.
I'll give another example of how encyclopedic knowledge, perseverance and luck can fish a candle out of the darkness. de Hamel is in Denmark consulting the Copenhagen Psalter from ?1160?. On one of the blank pages in the prayer book, someone has compiled a list of holy relics: Reliquiarum enumeratio:
The first line starts tantalizingly with Has reliquias possidet [these relics are owned by] and the rest of the line has been scraped clean. If you could only identify the owner - presumably a Nob who will have some kind of historical presence - you can not only date the list and hence the psalter, but get a clue as to where it was stored when Lord Blanko had the list compiled on a convenient page in the same room as the bits and bobs. But the line hasn't been erased as well as intented: you can make out the letters with ascenders -bdfhl- and as importantly text with no ascenders. The first three letters can be made out as d[omi]n[u]s = dns, so Lord Blanko not King Nullo nor Bsp Halo; all you have after that is some ascenders and a lot of spacer-letters and it's all in medieval Latin. It's as if you saw this at the top of the page.
If your life depended on it and you had 20 minutes you could probably work out whose name has been scrorched out by a jealous blogger. de Hamel's solution to his erasure is dns uualdemarus apud ringsta[dium] = Lord Waldemar [the Great] at Ringsted.
Ah go on, get Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts out of the library, you'll feel much cleverer after reading a couple of chapters.
That sketchy statement about low standards of evidence is clipped from a great fat tome Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts by Christopher de Hamel, published by Penguin in 2016. It's more that 600 pages long including 50 pages of notes and references in minute font with few line-breaks and no white space. It's like suddenly the price of paper rocketted but all the notes were deemed essential. The manuscripts are literally that - written by hand on parchment hundreds of years ago before Gutenberg and Caxton started making identical copies of books. Whatever about paper at Penguin today, parchment was hard to come by, therefore expensive, and not the sort of stuff you'd crumple into a ball and throw into the bin if you made a mistake. Each piece was made from a single bit of animal skin: de-haired; scraped of fat and connective tissue, soaked in various noxious substances and then strrrrretched on a frame to dry out. While stretched, the hide was scraped to remove any remaining gunk, but also to reduce the thickness of the sheet. Under tension, a little nick in the skin was likely to open out into a gaping wound. This sort of damage is found, even in the best quality illuminated manuscripts, but repaired with a neat line of cross-stitch.
The book in which this delightful insight appears is a commentary on the book of Isaiah by St Jerome currently residing in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. If you look carefully at the book, you'll notice that it's written with 4 different hands. Actually if you or I looked at the book until cross-eyed we probably wouldn't make this inference, but de Hamel has been in the ancient manuscript business for more than 40 years. Appraising them for 25 years in the last century for London auctioneer Sotheby's and since 2000 as Librarian of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He has ‘ . . . probably catalogued more medieval manuscripts than anyone alive,or indeed than anyone has ever done.’ With that embedding he can recognise the important diagnostic variants, so he could put a credible date and author on whatever came across his desk and write catalogue notes that would put the find in context and sell-it-up by association with other famous old books. Dates are inferred from the content: there is an up-tick in calendars flagging St Thomas's Day only after Thomas à Becket was murdered. At the other end, it's rather difficult to sponsor a book and get acknowledged with a grateful thanks if you are dead. But dates are also inferred from the style: up until 1230 monks wrote above the lines they scored on the page; after that date they started the text under the top line. This fashion swept through Europe in a handful of years. Provenance can also be tied down to distinctive differences in hand-writing: there is an English style of lettering and several variants of continental which experts can recognise.
I'll give another example of how encyclopedic knowledge, perseverance and luck can fish a candle out of the darkness. de Hamel is in Denmark consulting the Copenhagen Psalter from ?1160?. On one of the blank pages in the prayer book, someone has compiled a list of holy relics: Reliquiarum enumeratio:
Ah go on, get Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts out of the library, you'll feel much cleverer after reading a couple of chapters.
Wednesday, 12 June 2013
Dendrometron - some answers.
I wrote a tuthree days ago about a rather good vehicle for encouraging (critical) thinking - estimating the height of a real tree whose photograph is supplied so that nobody goes off and measures the shrub next door with meter-rule. As I said then, I've been posing this question to several dozen teenage scientists over the last several years. So much of the science curriculum is trying to replicate the experiments
of Zipf, Hooke, Newton, Wallace, Hamilton, Lavoisier or Kolmogorov
rather than finding out something that nobody else knows. A little known study by Dorian Pritchard found that boys with end-of-alphabet surnames fared significantly worse on important exams in medical school than those whose names began with A B or C. I haven't seen that study replicated but you might speculate about why it might be true if it was. ANNyway, I wasn't going to risk letting team "D" have their self-esteem eroded so that they couldn't think straight, so I gave everyone in the room a chocolate bar for energy and a random slip with either Team Alpha, Team Prime, Team Top or the A-Team on it. The randomisation was to break up the cliques and enforce a bit of mixing of ideas - we had already insisted that we wouldn't accept two kids from the same school on the programme.
There is no correct answer! When the wind blows the tree's height changes; it possibly changes height during the day as transpiration alters the turgor pressure; probably changes by season as the leaves weigh down the branches; and it certainly changes height year by year. But there are plenty of wrong answers: it is clearly not 50kg high, or 500m or 500mm and if you're being scientific you should include an estimate of the error associated with your answer. Most importantly there is for certain sure no single method for obtaining the answer. So I urge you to think out your own uniquely creative and clever solution before trudging below the fold in the footsteps of some random 15 year-olds.
Last chance!
There is no correct answer! When the wind blows the tree's height changes; it possibly changes height during the day as transpiration alters the turgor pressure; probably changes by season as the leaves weigh down the branches; and it certainly changes height year by year. But there are plenty of wrong answers: it is clearly not 50kg high, or 500m or 500mm and if you're being scientific you should include an estimate of the error associated with your answer. Most importantly there is for certain sure no single method for obtaining the answer. So I urge you to think out your own uniquely creative and clever solution before trudging below the fold in the footsteps of some random 15 year-olds.
Last chance!
Friday, 15 March 2024
Nemeton
Nemeton n. (pl. Nemata). An holy place, sacred in ancient Celtic religion - groves, standing stones, ringstones. Related toponyms are scattered across Europe
I fell into science by accident at the age of 17. IF a particular conversation hadn't happened, and I hadn't found my biology teacher's jokes funny, THEN I'd now be a retired media wonk living in London in a £million house which I bought for buttons in the 70s. I regret nothing! A lifetime in science cannot but infect practioners with sciencism: a belief that everything which matters is (exclusively) discovered through science. Jakers, just look at the top of the page: Science Matters! It's bollix, of course: Science is A way of knowing: and has nothing on offer to comfort the dying, the power of song, or the drive of snog. One aspect of privileging evidence, the rational, and data is that I read, almost exclusively, non-fiction. As if histories were less full of lies than stories.
After I romped through Charlie Stross's parallel universe adventure, I set myself to read The Wren Hunt by Mary Watson. It is a coming of age tale set in an Ireland peppered with Thin Places [bloboprev] where the spirit world leaks through into a recognisable post-Tiger island with taxis, ringtones and tattoos. Librarians tend to shelve it in the Young Adult section. Cripes, YA must have quite the tolerance for the hum of violence - I blame The Hunger Games.
The central thread in The Wren Hunt is the Othering of a community which is different from, and opposed to, the people by whom Wren, the protagonist, was raised. It is, like obvs, a known thing that these Others are the black hats . Wren's people are a) oppressed b) not going down without a fight. The fights are both real - fists and blunt force trauma - and metaphysical - dolls, sacred groves, potions. The magic allows us to suspend our disbelief that a bunch of Wren's people can paraphernalia up and troop off the woods for sunset rituals without the plain people of the townland [neither black hats nor white] knowing their business. (My policy when we blew-in to a rural midlands community 25+ years ago, was to give curious neighbours rather more information than they could reasonably ask for: partly to inhibit them from making monsters of us down the pub). But that's okay - it's fiction.
Without being intrusively didactic, the message that comes through this book is that you can to your own self be true, and that is more important than tribal loyalty: as a young adult you can / may / shd invent yourself. Celtic are not always right; Rangers play the same game to the same rules; they can't be all wrong. And, not to put too fine a point on it, exogamy is okay: The Others bring different stuff to the table - often challenging, but mmmmm so tasty. No more spoilers! If you know any YA [girls?] leave this book on their bedside table. They'll get more out of it than the ineffably boring Inter.Cert. Biology textbook.
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