Science Book Swap

Science Book Swap SBS is an original idea whose time has clearly not come . . . yet. Every month for the last two and a half years on the third Tuesday, Science Café goes down in a pub The Sky and The Ground, South Main Street, Wexford. Born from a gap in 'the market', Science Café is a bit like a book club, or a quilting bee, where people who have something in common embrace a structure to meet more often. The people who rock up to Sci Caf Wex SCW each month are all interested in science and live near Wexford and feel they don't talk science often enough . . . or didn't until Science Café came along. We have N=~30 students, technologists, teachers, foresters, entrepreneurs, farmers, brewers and a pharmacist on the books but the average turn out is a handful. What we do is pick a topic and a presenter and use that as a launch-pad for a couple of hours of networking [at least one of us has gotten a job out of it] and talking in-and-around science.  It's mighty, good for my morale, and I always learn something new.  But it's often difficult to find a volunteer, fired up about some tech-topic, to be ringleader for the evening. For my sins, I am the list-manager and secretary and probably, by default and bystander effect, find myself gabbing about My Baggage more than I should. With The Blob and all, it's prolly easier for me to dredge up some copy than the other members of the Café.

July is the midst of the Silly Season, when folk are on vacation, or mowing the lawn, or taking the kids to soccer, at 8pm on a Tuesday. But I had a Brilliant Idea for a Sci Caff Concept.  It was born from an unconscious memory of Ignite Talks which were all the rage a few years ago in venues like Dublin's Science Gallery [prev]. The conceit there is "a whole conference in an evening" where speakers are strictly limited to 5 minutes and 20 slides to present their ideas. Here's one on Lafcadio Hearn Irish / Greek / American / Japanese story-teller. They're great: you can get a taster-teaser quicker than it takes you to look something up in Wikipedia. Here's another on The Future of Food by Nora Khaldi . . . so you see: super-diverse.  You could get sniffy about Ignite being a product of the attention-deficit sound-byte generation but that's where we live now and it's better than watching commercials on the TV. You'll see commonality with the Pint of Science concept.

I was casting about for something to do for July's Science Café [no volunteers having beaten down the secretary's door to present their stuff] and my eye fell on my most recently read book RRB Chasing Venus by Andrea Wulf, from which I filleted a blob about Mason and Dixon. I picked that book up while shopping with my book-buying daughter [peer pressure] last month. Because it was recently acquired I have no particular attachment to the book and am actively de-cluttering my life so SBS was born. Everyone was requested-and-required to turn up to SCW with a science book, which they would talk up for three (3!) minutes to promote its many virtues and then swap it for a different, but similarly promoted, science book and everyone would go home happy. I cast it as a cross between Ignite, book-crossing and speed-dating. I was well excited and hoped to off-load Venus and acquire [temporarily! I'm not building a library again] some new Summer reading.

Well, among Wexford Cafistas, I'm the only person who seems to be stoked by this idea because when I bounced into The Sky and the Ground yesterday evening I found I doubled the audience and Mike had to leave early to wear his thespian hat. Furthermore Mike hadn't read the announcement and so he had no book to swap.  And so, my friends, I offer up the SBS concept and hope it may fall on more fertile ground in Nantes or Montpellier.

Covid Comms

We've been running the Wexford Science Café WSC for nearly 6 years now. The idea was that STEM-folks in the Sunny South East would have the equivalent of a Book Club, a Choir, or a Men's Shed - a place to gather with like-minded adults to chat about about science. For those who have made the effort - it can be all to easy to stay indoors on the 3rd Tuesday of February if it's dark with a whippy wind and the roads are a litter of fallen branches - it has been rewarding. Then again, there are more people who came once only than those who stayed to learn the handshake and the secret sign. We've covered a few bases because the community is diverse in its interests and expertise:  Air-quality and asthma; Allometry; Back-garden astronomy; Bacteria in food; Cider; Compost toilets; Diabetes & Alzheimers; Diets; Erwin Schrodinger; Galena; Generic meds; Gravity waves; Greenland ice melt; Gut Microbiome;  March for Science; Neuroscience of torture; Oroville dam; Pheromones; Radon; Science book-swap; Soil microbiome; Stephen J Gould’s spandrels; Thomas Kuhn’s paradigms; Toxicity from botox to beer; Urination once again; Water quality; Wolbachia and tropical diseases; Zombies;

The theme or topic for each night is part of the attraction but the networking and the sense of belonging is at least equal in importance. Last year [2019] we tag-teamed with the Wexford Science Festival WSF which had been launched with some razz-ma-tazz the previous [2018] year. That was a success because their publicity machine was better funded than ours and we swept a handful of new STEM faces into our orbit. Our mutual admiration and common ground made us promise to do the same again in 2020. Then Coronarama swept out of Wuhan [L market-watch] as a pestilence and a great disruptor of all social events; perhaps especially those which habitually met in a pub!

Well, whatevs, we are meeting tonight for a discussion about Coronarama. Far too many people pretend to know everything about: Corona Viruses; SARS-CoV-2 itself; Covid-19; epidemiology; statistics; zoonoses; masks; mink! long-covid; asymptomatic covid; my dead neighbour; PCR testing; R-numbers; vaccines; the Economy; care homes; Sweden and intubation. But when the usual suspects are wheeled out for a sound-byte by the media there is far too much hubris and not enough humility. I am working on a hypothesis that the usual suspects are overwhelmingly male . . . because they are so goddamn certain; which means that whatever news requires a response can be explained and finished with in 200 words or 90 seconds whichever is shorter. Accordingly tonight we are digging with the pink foot and hoping for a more measured discussion about how scientists communicate their findings and how they could do better in explaining things to Jo Public. The gig is hosted by podcaster Dr Megan Hanlon and Cliona O'Farrelly, the Chair of Comparative Immunology at TCD.

Megan's channel is called Unravelling Science, where she is currently on a podcast jag interviewing successful scientists about where they came from, where their inspiration came from, what they do and what can they say to encourage early-stage scientists that it is worth the candle. I like the interview genre very much, it conveys the Passion for Science in a way that any number of dry, passive voice, peer-reviewed formal scientific papers manifestly fail to do. The irony is that the only thing which counts in scientific progress [= promotion] is peer-reviewed papers while the only thing that will recruit the next generation is the passion and engagement of mentors and teachers. Strength along these two unrelated axes rarely meets in one person.

Y'all come along down; you need not leave your sofa but you do have to book one of the 100 seats in the virtual Wexford Science Café. Looking forward!

I'm only here for the valence

<The pictures on the right are from the March against Eighth>
Are my ancient bones too old for a bit of protest? Not at all, so long as there are no razor-wire barricades, water-cannon, tasers, or baton-charges by the police.  It's more than 40 years since I was on a march in Dublin protesting about the lack of student grants.  And last Spring, with exquisite poor timing, my Union went on strike on the day a general election was called: so press coverage was almost entirely elsewhere. It's not entirely alien to my culture, then.  We met at the Wexford Science Café this week on Tuesday 21st March as we do every third Tuesday of the month.  I presented an executive summary of the Oroville Dam crisis which is now dissipating from a critical to a chronic problem. It's cost in excess of $100 million just to avert disaster and nothing has been installed to upgrade the ageing infrastructure there. But that's for another time.

The Wexford Science Café WSC has agreed to March in solidarity with others in the USA and elsewhere a month from now in the March for Science. Be careful how you put this information about. The science policy people in Dublin will only get nervous at the prospect of the WSC contingent appearing on their doorstep . . . on a Saturday when nobody will be in their office. March for Science (Ireland Inc.) are calling themselves sciencemarchie which rather more cute than frightening. If you're in Ireland, you may decide to put up a few posters [Link] in your local library or laboratory. If you are in la francophonie, you'll have to make your own. I imagine that there will be similar events Marche pour la science in France. Look out in a university town near you: they may even have affiches.

My girls were marching earlier in the month [picture of march] to assert their rights to reproductive autonomy. I was skyping with Dau.II the night before and she raised her fist a lá Black Power and cried "Fuck the Patriarchy".  I reminded her that, as a patriarch, I could hardly go hollering that on a women's rights march with out getting arrested for solicitation.  aNNyway, back to the riot March for Science. The event is to coincide with parallel marches in the USA and also with Earth Day. Earth Day not to be confused with Climate Day the following week 29th April 2017; or World Environment Day 5th June 2017. I’m planning to be there on 22/04/17 with my I’m Only Here for the Valence [violence] t-shirt.

Unless you did chemistry in high school, that bit of clever-clogs wit may be lost on you. Valency is a fundamental property of each element: its combining power. It's all about the number of electrons in the outer (chemically available) shell of each atom.  This is most easily shown by the series of hydrides for the elements in the top line of the periodic table.

As you travel L to R, each element gets one more electron, so needs to marry one less hydrogen atom to achieve stability. Thus we have CH₄, NH₃, OH₂, FH₁, or in words methane, ammonia, water, hydrofluoric acid. We usually write the last two differently H₂O and HF, but I'm damned if I can remember why.  There is no BH₅ and I can't remember why that is unstable. So Carbon has a valency of 4 etc.  These orderly relationships and the predictable changes in properties as you go L-R or up and down the periodical table was one of the things that fell me in love with science as a teenager.

We all got guts

Wexford Science Café WSC met, as ever, on the 3rd Tuesday [15th] of October 2019 in the Sky&Ground. It was me, again [*], talking about the gut and its darkling denizens. This has been of spectator's interest to me for at least a decade and is more recently surfacing into public discourse both scientific and popular-press. Needless to say, a lot of unsubstantiated nonsense is uttered in the latter medium. The field is at the stage now where a lot of data is accumulating that changes in the gut microbiota are associated with irritable bowel syndrome IBS; inflammatory bowel disease [worse!] IBD: Crohn's Disease CD, ulcerative colitis UC; peptic ulcer [Helicobacter prev]; obesity; diabetes. No surprises there; although it is not obvious what is the cause and what the effect of these co-occurences. What might be more surprising are the psychobiotic associations between the gut flora and . . . anxiety, autism, chronic fatigue, dementia, depression, Parkinson's. And note that your gut flora goes on a journey from cradle to dotage with different classes of microbes rising and falling in a reasonably predictable manner as we age.

Sources: nobody expects you, dear reader, to get down and dirty with the scientific literature. Each paper will normally present only one study indicating that bacterial strain X is associated with condition Y in either mice or humans, occasionally both. If you take the materials and methods on trust [and you shouldn't!], you can get the key factlet from the PubMed abstract. Or you can read Giulia Enders book: Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body's Most Underrated Organ; [originally Darm mit Charme. Alles über ein unterschätztes Organ] which I reviewed a tuthree weeks ago. I was all set to present an ExecSummary of that book when one of the WexSciCaf lurkers pointed me at The Psychobiotic Revolution by Anderson, Cryan and Dinan. Scott Anderson is a US-based science journalist, while John Cryan and Ted Dinan are academics from UCC in the Independent Republic of Cork.

In the airy arm-wavy world of popular science books you have to polish your crap-detector before you invest time and money in 'facts' therein presented. Here, I'll share some of the interesting intel which I gleaned from my reading.

The money is in probiotics but you and I don't want to spend our hard-earned dollars on products of dubious efficacy and doubtful quality control. Dinan & Cryan cite one study where the contents of 13 probiotic supplements were compared to what it said on the tin. Only 4/13 had a table of contents than actually matched the contents. Probiotics are food supplements and have a far lower administrative and licencing bar to leap than drugs which are classified as medicine. But the thrify should follow the prebiotics route: these are the dietary changes that can encourage the growth of good bacteria: try ginger, garlic, carrots, apples for starters. Actually, keep it simple and follow Michael Pollan [multiprev]: Eat food; not too much; mostly plants. Un-food is anything that comes in a packet with more than 6 indredients.

There has been a bit of interest recently in the few cases of auto-brewery syndrome. This occurs when a colony of bakers' yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, against the odds and its normal environment, sets up shop in some person's intestine. There it scarfs up any passing sugar and anaerobically converts it to ethanol and carbon dioxide. The CO₂ causes a certain increase in fartiness but the alcohol crosses the intestinal epithelium and starts to intoxicate. I don't think you'd have a leg to stand on [you'd be legless, arf arf] in court if you got arrested for driving under the influence.

Now before I forget, I'll note some of the major players in the gut flora: some good and some bad; all just tryimng to make a living. There may be 1,000 different species of microbe donw in the dark, but 99% of them fit into 4 different Phyla [major groups of bacteria]

• Actinobacteria
• Bifidobacterium longum, B. breve; B. dentium [richer in infant guts]
• Proprionobacterium shermanii [bubbles in Emmenthal]
• Firmicutes
• Clostridium difficile, C. botulinum [botox]
• Bacillus cereus [re-heated rice poisoning]
• Lactobacillus spp. LABs good guys
• Bacteroidetes
• Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron [prev]; B. fragilis; B. plebeus [freq in Japan]
• Prevotella
• Proteobacteria
• alpha: Rickettsia prowazekii; Brucella abortus [prev Alice Evans]
• beta: Neisseria gonorrhoeae, [the clap] N. meningitidis [meningitis]
• gamma: Escherichia coli and other enterics incl Salmonella; Pseudomonas aerogenosa
• epsilon: Campylobacter jejuni [food poisoning] Helicobacter pylori [ulcers]

[*] Footnote: Wexford Science Café is still trundling along - but seemingly only if  I continue to push and heave t'bugger up hill. It just doesn't seem to be gathering momentum although further adherents occasionally appear. As with a lot of such voluntary things, 90% of the work is done by 10% of the people. As a max of ten people turn up on a good day, the 10% is Me. When the call for next month's speaker is issued, everyone looks at their feet. And nobody seems willing to take on the minute adminstrative burden of calling the faithful to prayer once a month [Over the Summer, I e-asked this question direct of several of our most frequent attenders, only some of whom bothered to reply and all of whom were too busy]

Country matters

I wrote a few days ago about pulling an unfortunate sheep out of a shallow stream. A couple of people have asked for an update on the sheep. One enquiry came on Tuesday evening in the window between end of class at The Institute and presenting something about Hurricane Florence and pig slurry to the Wexford Science Café. I had intended to have an early supper (call it tea with a massive fry if you want) and maybe a zzzzzzz in anticipation of a late night in a Wexford pub. But the enquiry pricked my conscience, so I threw on a hat, phone, binoculars, camera, glasses, boots and set off up the mountain into the blustery, intermittently sunny, evening. Well I regret to report that EI-00445355-4639E is gone to a better place. She managed to shuffle about 10m from where I left her in the sun on Sunday before pegging out. 48 hours later and she was about half recycled. It seems that being stuck in the river wasn't the fundamental problem. Being sick and weak, she may have tumbled into the water and been too tired to get out.

I went off to the Wexford Science Café [WSC] despite this loss, because life must go on. I was ready to present what little I know about Hurricane Florence and polluted waterways. WSC is a lottery, there are 50 people of the mailing list but you never know how many (and who) will turn up on the night. One of our members works for the county council with the environment protection brief. He knows far more than I do about water (and other sorts light, noise, particulates of) pollution. Inevitably, when I speculated about the adverse consequences of having a storm cause a slurry lagoon in North Carolina to brim over; he had a better and more immediate story. An aged pig farmer was grassed up to the Council by a driver who was delivering feed. The place (which after all was producing food for human consumption) looked worryingly untidy and the smell was something else entirely. On inspection, it turned out that most of the smell came from two dumpsters on the far side of the pig-house. They were brimful of dead pigs, the weight of recent additions causing a certain degree of pressure liquefaction at the bottom. Bubble bubble whiff whiff. Farmer was due in cort this week. Here's 3 mins positive propaganda for a properly isolated slurry lagoon

The first storm "Ali" of the 2018-2019 season has just whistled through the country blowing things down that are usually upright. On my way to work yesterday, a big lump of a branch had fallen off a beech tree and was blocking half+ the road. Two cars ahead of me pushed through the branches and sped on their way. Me, I stopped and started to clear the road. Two young fellers also stopped and asked "Can we help you with that, Sir". I liked the "Sir" = respeck! The three of us were able to shift most of the raffle, including the fat end of the branch to the side of the road. As the boys went on their way, I fetched the bow-saw out of the back of my car and cut off the last bit of obstructing branch. The whole aktionsbaum took less than 5 minutes. People don't generally stop like that. I know because several years ago, when I still drove over the mountain along the back roads to work I narrowly avoided a rock which had tumbled out of the ditch into the roadway. I swerved a bit and carried on to work. When I came back home 8 hours later, the golldarned  rock was still there!   I resolved in future to clear these things up on the first pass rather than leaving such a hazard behind until dark. That is why I try to have a saw, a shovel, jump-leads and a tow-rope in the car at all times. Not much anyone can do about suicidal sheep in the road.

Storm Ali?  It is the first named storm of the 2018-19 Winter weather fronts for Britain and Ireland. That's very inclusive: the original and best Ali [ibn Abi Talib] was the son-in-law of The Prophet and is a quintessentially new-Irish name. Pity that Met Eireann, NewstalkFM and RTE pronounced it Allie like it was short for Alison, rather than actively embracing a bit of cultural diversity. Last year we only got from Aileen to Hector. Let us hope we don't get to the second half of the alphabet this season. Here's the full list: Ali, Bronagh, Callum, Deirdre, Erik, Freya, Gareth, Hannah, Idris, Jane, Kevin, Lily, Max, Niamh, Oliver, Peggy, Ross, Saoirse, Tristan, Violet and Wyn. Note that they alternate boys and girls. I don't think that we have any quintessentially non-binary names yet.

Not all men, science edition

International Day of Women and Girls in Science, is A Thing. This year it was marked [but not by Blob] on 11 February 2025. Wexford Science Café came to the party exactly a week too late . . . because we're on the 3rd Tuesday of the month, not the second. I posted about IDWGS on the correct day [Darwinday - 1] in 2018. WxScCa organized their event by having Amy Hassett a just-starting scientist (chatting with / interviewing) Mary Kelly a just-finishing one. They were about the same age as Dau.II and me, so there was a bit of one generation passing the chalice to the next. Gotta say it started off same-old, same-old with statistics about which areas of science had the most appallingly unequal sex-ratio in the 21stC - geology apparently. Of course we all agreed this was A Bad Thing and that things were getting better than 1925; but nobody in the room had a coherent strategy for how to chip away at the patriarchal monolith. It's pretty clear that having an inspiring female science teacher or auntie makes a difference . . . but quotas don't.

Older scientist has interviewed A Lot of people during her career. Her sense is that blokes present themselves as confident even if they are collywobbling inside; whereas women are more diffident and tend to qualify their abilities with a touch of realism. Interview committees [in my experience on both sides of the table] are cobbled together from available bodies and are kinda crap at sorting wheat from chaff: unwilling to puncture specious confidence or draw out shy competence. So Mr Know-it-Some gets ranked #1.

I've been gunning for a job in a formal interview only twice in my science career: for my first job and my last. The first time, I was shortlisted one of three for the post of sub-assistant lecturer in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1983. We three spent the whole day together being shown around, lunched, giving job seminars in turn. At the end of a long day we were sent to wait in one room while the committee made their deliberations across the hall. The other chap was getting antsy because, with luck and a following wind, he might just make a convenient train home; rather than kicking his heels for several hours after dark in a strange town. When the Head of Department burst open the door and beckoned to me to follow him, I demurred. Wouldn't they much rather take Other Chap first so he could get through and catch his train? Nope! They wanted me, and now . . . because my sketchy creds were deemed #1. Only if (on reflection and taking account of one day's lived experience on that campus) I refused the job offer would they move on to the next best candidate. I really was green when I was Dau.II's age. But here I be a few months later:

Almost exactly 30 years later, I was shorted listed for my final job at The Institute [which event spawned The Blob]. Again, I didn't play any cards because I didn't even know what cards to play. Someone asked why I wanted the job. Instead of outlining why I was the bee's knees and the cat's whiskers, I confessed that I didn't want it much but if they looked at my CV, they might decide that I could be a useful member of their team. If they didn't, I was happy-out that something else would turn up. After decades of nepotism and fixing, HR at The Institute was trying to codify the hiring process into a series of check-boxes and attribute scores that would objectively rise the cream to the top. I guess it didn't matter what I said, so long as I was clocking [5] on most of the several desirable qualities.

 Despite trying valiantly to shoot myself in the foot, I was offered, and took, both of those jobs . . . and that made all the difference. It wasn't that I lacked blokey confidence; it was just that my ambition genes were shot off in the war.

Meanwhile back at Wexford IDWGS 2025, Younger Scientist made an interesting point: whatever about hiring and promoting more women in Science, could we not just/also hire more different personality types. Earlier it had been suggested that some women had developed successful science careers by behaving like success men: ambitious, focused, selfish, single. Well, heck, we don't need anymore of those personality types - they make everyone else miserable! Caitlin Moran maintains that if you only hire/promote a limited range of people / types then your enterprise finishes up stupider, less agile, less creative, less profitable . . . and less fun!

Wexford Science Cafe

Founded in February 2015, the Wexford Science Café used to meet in The Sky and the Ground, South Main Street, Wexford, the third Tuesday of every month at 8pm. Since the pandemic we have been meeting on-line and [so?] shifting to earlier [7pm] in the evening. One of the silver-linings of Coronarama is that, while I've gotten my monthly WexSciCaf fix, I haven't had to drive 40km [and 40km dark km back] to get it. I've been the convener since inception. As with any organisation, there are more people who rock up on the regular for a warm bath of scienciness than people who will actually undertake to make a presentation or lead a discussion.  You'll notice that a disproportionate number of the topics we've discussed have simultaneously appeared on The Blob. As soon as possible [October?] we will return to in-person meetings, probably with a video option and likely in the Wexford Town Library, Mallin St, Wexford, Y35 AY20. Meeting in a pub is all very well and The Sky has been wonderfully hospitable but none of us drink any more because a) we are old b) all have to drive home afterwards.

Finally, after pissing and moaning to the inner circle for a couple of years, someone else has accepted the mantel of convener and will be trying to line up a schedule and send out invites each month. All I need do is appear [or not; if something more pressing demands my attention, or I forget]. That's a relief but also intrinsically A Good Thing because New Convener has other interests and a barely overlapping network to draw on. 

The other excellent bit of initiative is that one of our techy members has acquired a domain and set up a webserver powered by nginx at www.wexfordsciencecafe.ie. But our new webmaster was unsure about how to actually populate the site with WSC announcements, gossip, and propaganda. 

I replied thusly: In ~1995, I was one of the top web-designers [in a field of maybe 15] in Ireland, hand-cranking HTML for one of the first WWW servers in the country. The ratio info:<html> was about 5:1 because default HTML is miraculously efficient and elegant. Now the ratio is nearer 1:500 - contributing enormously to the internet's carbon footprint. You defo don't want me to lay hands upon the page: I doubt even if teen-nerds do this sort of thing anymore. 

But the new website needed something, even if it was a placeholder and I was probably the only one in the room who is still writing HTML, like, by hand. Almost every Blob needs a bit of HTML tweaking of the text in ways that Blogspot defaults don't offer. What you see at www.wexfordsciencecafe.ie is what I cobbled together with minimal HTML interventions. If you CTRL+U or right-click on the page and ask for "View Page source", you can see how it works. HTML syntax is simple: each <tag> requires a closing </tag> is all. Signal-to-noise about 3:1.

You can, and web-writers do, make it far more complicated than that making access detectably painful for folks in the Third World or with crappy internet connexions elsewhere. For white folks, who can afford €20/month for their connectivity, bandwidth is not a real problem and the invisible cost of serving pretty pages with enticing graphics is a plume of carbon emissions from the power-station adjacent to the server-farm which is hosting and delivering the data.

Stop Press: Tonight is 3rd Tuesday so we have a session.

March for Science in April

Don't say I didn't warn you because I did, but tomorrow Saturday 22nd April 2017 the March for Science is happening at a venue near you-hoo. The Wexford Science Café agreed to send a delegation to Dublin to start of the event in the heart of the Dublin Digital Hub at 2pm. We the Café scheduled a meeting on Tuesday to arrange logistics, meeting points and the distribution of banners. I was hoping for some practice with suitable call&response and chanting: "give us a T, give us an O, give us anOther, give us a T: what's that spell? TOOT! what's that spell TOOT!]. Well, as you might expect only four people turned up and two of them are going to be unavoidably elsewhere on The Day. I have tried to gee up some sort of response at/from The Institute and on my core-business research mailing list but had more sorry-I'm-elsewhere excuses than I had positive responses. The main response has been a deafening silence. Of course, nobody is answerable to me for whether they go or tarry at home, so I continue to hope that I'll meet loads of my friends, colleagues, collaborators, ex-students and like minded strangers when things kick off after lunch on Saturday.

But I tell ya, boys, if only 30 people turn up the the March it will be a PR disaster for Science in Ireland because the message will be that we're insufferably smug doing very nicely thank you. And thanks for the Government who, through Science Foundation Ireland SFI, has allocated a mind-bending €5 billion to scientific R&D over the last 15 years. Talking of mind-bending, that's €5 billion not spent on mental health and suicide prevention. Or replace that last phrase with whatever engages you this week - refugees, homelessness, cleaning up the police, tuberculosis, opera.

Here's a zoomable map of the locations of satellite marches: only one in Ireland but a few in France.
Here's a Nature series of viewpoints expressed by scientists on whether the March is a Good Thing. There is a disconcerting amount of woolly thinking expressed there. Here's another set of positive assertions from Irish scientists. For less nuance and more soundbite, here is a selection of placards which you can copy, if you lack the imagination to invent your own. In anticipation of a bit of a riot, I've got a back-up poster with the slogan "You'll never take me alive, Cu". And I'm also thinking of writing a message in ASCII, so that only the geekiest will understand the message. One of those qz.com signs is suspiciously close to weforest.org's mission statement Making Earth Cooler.  But maybe originality isn't required so much as a bit of passion and Being There at one of the Marches. I've made my banner out of an old t-shirt, three bamboos, some string and some red poster paint [R held by a daft old buffer giving the science salute, so that others will know that he is One of Us].

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?

Flora de Yola

It's been months since I schlepped 40km SE on a Tuesday evening to do Wexford Science Café. It's so easy to get slumped on a sofa after tea. The May meeting, however, billed Paul Green from Ballycullane who has recently published (2022) his compendious Flora of County Wexford. Is there a better way to display the book than next of a clump of cowslips Bainne bó bleachtáin Primula veris in our front yard? eeee but I do love an expert - they can be so obsessive: and so, reader, I went.

I came away with some insight into what it takes to record all the plants in a given area. And 'area' is fractal; you can like Louis Agassiz get up close and personal with all the beetles in your back yard or you can go global like Phoebe Snetsinger clocking off 8,300 different birds before she died in a car-wreck in Madagascar. Green has split the difference: his checklist is the 2,558 monads of Co Wexford. That's larger than the official 2,367 km² area of the county because of the fringe of monads shared across the county borrrder.  A monad is any 100 hectare 1km x 1km square on the official Ordnance Survey grid which maps the county.  Naturalists also respect tetrads [a block of 4 monads] and hectads [a 10km x 10km region]. The whole island is overlain with a grid of 25 lettered 100km x 100km squares; most of Wexford being in squares S and T. 

Except on the open heath and moorland of the Blackstairs, pretty much every monad in Wexford is traversed by a public road. This is of great benefit to folks whose task involves checking off data on a clip-board containing a species list. Farmers, in general, are hostile suspicious about The Man checking up on their business especially if their own paperwork is perhaps sketchy. This introduces a bias: plants which like gateways and roadside verges are just more likely to be recorded than those which hug river-banks or thrive in the middle of pastures - it's the access innit?

So there I waszzzzz paying attention to the war stories of botanists in search of red-list rarities, when up pops a picture of a small Church of Ireland and its yard - they all look alike but this one was tinkling bells of family familiarity. It turns out that my grandfather's final resting place in Saltmills is the Go To place for orchids especially the green-winged one Anacamptis morio. The botanists have begged the parish not to mow the churchyard in May - when this orchid flowers and sets seed - but the parish is on autopilot for keeping the grass trim - protestants gonna protestant. Heisenberg's observer effect whereby the act of recording something affects its existence should encourage botanists to observe but not intercede but it's right difficult to let nature take its selective course. I gather that some patches of rare plants are reseeded occasionally from seed-banks in the National Botanic Gardens Garraithe Náisiúnta na Lus in Glasnevin. But I don't have a dog in that fight.

There are 850 different species of flowering plant in Ireland. Wexford, like most Irish counties, I guess, sports about 150 species per monad. Obviously, some species will be omnipresent while others will be clinging by their sepals in only one place. Linnaeus decided that the easiest way to definitively ID plant species was by considering the details of their reproductive parts. But flowering may happen at pretty much any [species-specific] time of the year except dead winter. Accordingly, a full survey requires visits in at least Spring, Summer and Fall if not every month. But each monad will occupy the recording angel for 1 to 3 hours, and they must go cross-eyed with the effort after a while. At two monads a day, six days a week, 40 weeks a year, it will take 5½ years to cover each location once. And who pays for petrol, let alone botanist-time? All told such a project, done properly, might cost €500,000 in billable hours and expenses. There is a reason why such Flora projects - which generate data essential to documenting the ecological status quo and thus getting a handle on The Future in a climate changing world - have been traditionally carried out pro bono mundo by vicars who have little to do between Sundays and elders who keep active in body by being engaged in mind.

It is notable that Wexford is, botanically, the best covered County on the island. The vast majority of the work has been carried out by Paul Green and his comrade Paula O'Meara neither of whom are inclined to let mere weather rain upon their parade of data. Hats on! - another lashing shower coming in from the West. Paul Green used to blog about his Wexford project. If there is a second edition of this Flora of County Wexford could someone take a leaf out of Geoffrey Grigson's An Englishman's Flora [bloboprev] and include the Irish names? There are only 800 species on the list! You may start here.

Wexford Science Caffeine

1st October, International Coffee Day, prepare yourself

☕Who knew? Not me! Until the convener of the Wexford Science Café told us . . . and arranged for the nearest date [every third Tuesday of the month, folks] to look at the health science of coffee. He parceled out some analyses among three of the usual suspects. I was tasked to summarize the work of Peter Kistler, a cardiologist from Melbourne. Anne read a paper by Jennifer Temple, from Nutrition and Health, U.Buffalo NY. And Padraig took the interface between James Hoffmann, coffee podcaster and Tim Spector, a gut microbiome maven from UCL, UK. Links and refs at post-foot

☕I don't have direct skin in the game. At home, if I'm lucky I get a latte [L] on Saturday morning otherwise it is strictly tea; although I make it wee-k. Indeed I have ~4 "cups of tea" before breakfast every day but that's not builder's tea the colour of tomato soup; it is nearer to hot water over which a tea-bag has been passed. But coffee research uses "cup of coffee" in questionnaires and reports without ever defining how big "cup" is let alone how much caffeine lurks below the surface. This is adjacent to the famous Primo Levi tale in  which a scientific protocol required peculiarly specific 23 'drops' of a reagent. Turned out a historic typo had replaced 2-3 drops with 23.

☕But, from the evidence gathered and presented at WexSciCaf two weeks ago, coffee should really be promoted as a health-bev. And for A Lot of my section of YT presenters whore themselves out for goop-adjacent products I've underlined evidence, because YT is chocha-mocha with 🧲attractive🧲 assertions about the health bennies of woo. 

☕In many cases the benefits are not due to caffeine, because decaf is quite as beneficial. Coffee is a complex chemical cocktail [soluble fibre; quinic acid; chlorogenic acid; citrate; complex carbohydrates; diterpenes]. Also in several of the reliable studies, the effects are U-shaped: abstainers and over-indulgers [>4 cups a day] get sicker than moderate 2-3 cups a day. Documented coffee-bennee:

• 25% ↓↓ likelihood of heart attack 
• 6%  ↓↓ atrial fibrillation AF
• transitory ↑↑ in blood pressure in coffee noobs; 
• after 2 weeks zero effect
• 12% ↓↓ incidence of type-2 [late onset] diabetes
• 13% ↑↑ energy expenditure so ↓↓ obesity and metabolic syndrome 
• 20%  ↓↓ brain blood flow, so ↓↓ stroke incidence
• 11% ↓↓ in heart failure

☕Kistler's group in particular have trawled the peer-reviewed scientific literature to carry out a meta-analysis of coffee's effects. Meta-analysis will weight larger, longer, case-control studies over small reports with large HEADLINE effects which cannot be reproduced in larger samples, or in a different cohort.

☕One intriguing observation comes out of Spector's UCL microbiome research. The protocol is to invite volunteers to keep a food diary for an extended time and take periodic health check ups with questionnaires about mood, cognitive ability, BP, 'bloods' for circulating inflammatory markers and . . . fecal samples. Team Spector ran those 💩💩 sample and wrote up the results: Coffee consumption is associated with intestinal Lawsonibacter asaccharolyticus abundance and prevalence across multiple cohorts. Lawsonibacter is anaerobic and not a million evolutionary miles from Clostridium spp. [bloboprev] several of which are associated with serious adverse human health outcomes [C.diff, botulism]. Lawsonibacter loves coffee, all adults will have a little of this bug in their gut-soup but they grow gangbusters when you start to take coffee. One of the by-products of its metabolism is butyrate which is known as an essential immune modulator. 

☕ coffee is loaded with fibre. Most of us in the West subsist on a fibre-light diet. Denis "lymphoma" Burkitt was banging on the virtues of fibre for at least 40 years. I think his, and my, idea of "fibre" was all about oatmeal, wholemeal bread and mighty floaters in the t'ilet. But define fibre as complex chained carbs, beloved of good bacteria, and it turns out that 2-3 cups of coffee is supplying 20-30% of the fibre in our fibre depleted diet!

Footnotes, references 

• Temple 2017 The Safety of Ingested Caffeine: A Comprehensive Review
• Kistler 2018a Caffeine and Arrhythmias Time to Grind the Data
• Kistler 2018b Cardiovascular effects of caffeinated beverages
• Hoffmann and Spector Coffee's hidden health benefits [70min YT]
• Lawsonibacter, and also isolation

Thinking at stool

Last night was Third Tuesday so it was Wexford Science Café night.  Last month we had a very interesting and informative presentation from Denis Shannon, organic farmer, about the low input, great output way he runs his small-holding.  It's all about the microbes, stupid!  By looking at and living with his fields over nearly 20 years, he knows each low patch and subterranean boulder and remembers exactly where he dropped and spread a load of farm-yard manure 3 years ago. That will be ready for carrots this Spring. His knowledge of his clods is like James Rebanks' knowledge of his ewes, which is to say near omniscient. In neither case are their sources of income generic 'units' that can be safely treated as equivalent. Larger, more affluent, more 'modern' farmers haven't got the time for that and horse out fertiliser in quantities across the fields so that, on average, they hope to get the dose correct. And because, for these new-magnates, time is money and fertiliser is artificially cheap [VAT-free in Ireland!], there is a tendency to throw a little extra out of the hopper for luck. Extra fertiliser destroys the ecological balance in water-courses as it runs off the fields and boosts the growth of oxygen-depleting algae.

We can, from our city sofas, take the high moral ground on this over breakfast (that's why we try to get The Blob out early each morning) and then retire to the bathroom to ease ourselves. A quick sit, a quick shit, and 12 litres of fecally contaminated water is sent off-site.  Not so smug now, city-boy?  We're not all like this, even in the West.  A vanishingly small cohort of out-theres are engaged with their outputs the same way  as Denis and James are engaged with their inputs. When we moved into the farrrm in 1996, we found no flush-toilet, indeed we found no running water except that which trickled down the drain beside the lane up to the house.  Old Ray, the previous incumbent, did his business in various corners of the fields, presumably in the lee of a hedge if it was driving rain. If every bucket of water had to be carried from the spring, he wasn't about to contaminate one with coliform. He died and we bought, and he was almost the last of a dying breed: there are very few homes in Ireland today that don't have indoor sanitation.  That's progress.

But is it? The presenter last night at the Science Café had questioned the assumptions behind this normality and come up with another solution. When Chris Hayes moved into his grandfather's place ten years ago there was a septic tank and a crappy drain-field and a flush-toilet but he revolted at the idea of contaminating 2 gallons of hard-won potable water every time one of his children 'went'.  After thinking about it, he put off his philosopher's hat, seized his carpenter's saw and built a comfortable and seemly frame round a sturdy 20 liter bucket in a corner of the bathroom. Cost €28. Over the last decade, three times a week, he has carried a full bucket off to a 'humanure' compost heap, covered the contents with straw, given the bucket a rinse and returned it to station. That's a whole lot of bucket!  His calculations indicate that he has carried 18,000 lts of waste, weighing perhaps 10 tons, to the compost heaps at the bottom of the haggard.  That's a lot of honest exercise. This last month, however, after more reflection on the contents of the bucket revealed that 2/3 of if was (sterile) urine, he's parked the old system and installed a urine separating toilet [R above] at a cost of €800 [!?].  His arrangement is a teeny bit more complex than the picture but not by much. Sitting on the seat swings opens a door above the larger hole and advances the collecting tray one notch. There is a mini-voltage electric fan which evacuates any smells and also dries out the stool. This handily reduces the weight that has, eventually, to be schlepped off to the compost system.  The bucket still has to be emptied but now only thrice a month rather than thrice a week. The urine is diverted to a drain lined with alder and willow that will grow taller faster with the nitrogenous boost. Alder Alnus glutinosa is the wood of choice for making seats for saunas and willow Salix spp. makes baskets.  You have to exercise a little caution here because although urine is rich in [growth-rate limiting] nitrogen it is also rich in salt.

We were well impressed, in a good for you + glad it's not me way. But the question we asked was: who is in the market for a such a clever piece of engineering.  With Chris's original system, the kit was all generic: planks, screws, paint, tiles, grout, bucket but I can't just now think of an alternative use for a separating toilet bowl - it's too big for a hat.  If someone is making them and someone else is selling, who in heck is buying?  Where is the market?  Surprisingly extensive . . . and growing. Not only for building-sites and pop-festivals but increasingly as the most economical solution in new-build houses under draconian [and not before time] regulations for the safe and sustainable disposal of human waste. Safe disposal brought to mind some home-eddy friends of ours in West Cork, who had a bucket in the bathroom system but whose bathroom was upstairs.  All went well for many years until the fear an tí stumbled at the top of the stairs and delivered a full bucket explosively to the hallway below.

It's not all or nothing.  As Ireland moves into metered water, and we effectively have to pay for each drop, more of us are going to be less thoughtless with the flush-handle.  In 1998, we had a huge party and needed to cosset our toilet a bit.  We put a sign [not original to us!] up saying "If it's yellow, let it mellow. If it's brown, flush it down."  It was too much for some of our guests to break the habit of a lifetime, but some obeyed the instruction and nobody died.

Bart O'Borgia

Rodrigo de Borgia was born in Spain in 1431. He did well for himself. His uncle Alfonso aka Pope Callixtus III appointed young Roddy a cardinal at the age of 25. Pass it on . . . when Rod, in his turn was elevated to the throne of Saint Peter in 1491 as Pope Alexander IV, he was quick to appoint his illegitimate son Cesare Borgia a cardinal at the age of 18. Cesare was a ruthless careerist, rumoured to have killed his older brother in a love-triangle, and the subject of Machiavelli's The Prince the still relevant text-book of realpolitik. Whoa! Aren't ordained ministers of the church meant to be celibate? And fair-dealing? How much more the top-gun of the Vatican.

But, tush, enough of this. History is often a mystery and written to make a narrative out the mess that is the human condition. And Rodrigo is dead 500 years, that sort of thing doesn’t happen any more . . . does it?

The March meeting of the Wexford Science Café involved a celebration of Wexford scientists of yesteryear. Mary Mulvihill's book Ingenious Ireland has 32 chapters by county and is rather slim pickin's for Wexford. Someone joked that Mulvihill was running out of steam by the time she got to the Ws. But the combined minds of the attendees couldn't really present a lot of biographical fodder for the county. It has long been a source of bitterness that there was no University in the Sunny South East; with the under-thought that it's because there was never any oomph from the [non-existent?] Wexford STEM folk. Before the actual meeting - in the library - in person - the inner circle was tasked to do a show and tell on the Wex Sci Talent.

Someone volunteered to talk about mathematician Bartholomew Lloyd [L], born New Ross 1772, elevated to Provost of TCD in 1831 and died in harness 1837. I was delirah because there is a rumour that me and Bartholomew are related, but knew bugger all about the fellow. Unfortunately, when I offered: "Several years ago I was at a lunch at the Big House in King's County where my grandfather was born and was assured by David Norris that the New Ross Provost Lloyds were related to my K.Co. branch of the clan" Dr. Someone backed off from presenting his findings about early 19thC mathematical education in Ireland and insisted that it was my job. I shudda kept my flappy mug shut. But I would be a poor trained researcher if I couldn't rustle up enough for a five minute talk in about the same amount of Googling.

Bart is famous for bringing The Calculus into Irish mathematical education . . . only 150 years after Newton [1666] and Leibnitz [1672] invented and developed the concept. Which makes Trinity look like a bunch of hicks. But it should be noted that TCD added Calculus to the curriculum some decades before Oxford and Cambridge. Prior to becoming Provost, Bart had been Professor of Mathematics from 1813 and then held the Erasmus Smith Chair of Natural and Experimental Philosophy from 1822.  Thing is that fellows and professors at Trinity College were meant to be celibate - married to the job -  but Bart had married Eleanor McLaughlin in 1799 and they had produced 4 sons; starting with Humphey b. 1800 in Dublin. So that's one tick of walk like a Borgia.

One of the first actions of the new Provost was to ensure that his son Humphrey inherited his now vacant Smith Chair of Natural and Experimental Philosophy! In my book that's tick two of walk like a Borgia. The apple falleth not far from the tree and Humphrey Lloyd became Provost in his turn in 1867. Lloyd Jnr. made objectively the greater contribution to science: doing, like, actual experiments in optics, crystallography and magnetism. And founding TCD's School of Engineering 150 years before I got a free dinner out of the family connexion. But that's a story for another generation.

Soil symphony

Mad busy I was on Tuesday [11Oct22]. Set off 40km NW at 08:50 to attend an Ada Lovelace day event about Women in Science in which I have an interest. The keynote speaker was electronic engineer Orla Feely who is also Veep Research, Innovation and Impact VPRII? from UCD. It wasn't really for me - SETU's largest auditorium was filled with SARS-CoV2 schoolkids and Prof Feely was haranguing them from two enormous Dear Leader screens.  more on this later

After lunch The Beloved and I set off 40km SE to view an exhibition Below Ground of artistic reflections on soil in one of the stable blocks of Johnstown "stately home" Castle outside of Wexford Town. J.C. is one leg of the for profit govt subsidized tripod called Irish Heritage Trust. The exhibition was fine, it featured works by Cathy Reddy, Eileen Hutton, Frank Ashwood, Giulia Canevari, Hanneke van Ryswyk, Wim van Egmond and John Finn; who are all associated with The Model County. It would be a job of work to shoe horn all the works into "Below Ground" but that's okay. Everything stems from, or stands on, or exchanges fluids with, the soil. So we had a pleasant short hour reading the (engagingly informal unpretentious) explanatory notes and came away with Ideas. Win!

To get to the exhibition we had to pass through the turnstiles [€7 each with Elder discount] in a huge café gift-shop where we stopped for a warming bevvie after the edutainment. Did I say it was huge? It was like the departure lounge / duty-free of a mid-sized airport. I guess Irish Heritage Trust entertain tour buses full of people in need of souvenirs: which were enterprisingly diverse, reasonably supportive of local business and frequently priced at €10 flat. If you can't afford €10 for a tin mug with a picture of Johnstown Castle you really should have stayed at home in Akron-Nagoya-Frankfurt?!

They close the Castle at 17:30 "sharp" which left us with 2 hours to kill until 19:30 when the Wexford Science Café was going to discuss Below Ground with Natalie Oram and John Finn co-curators and Teagasc employees. (Dina in 't Zandt the third curator was pushing the frontiers elsewhere that night). Accordingly we went into town and had [fancy] dinner at Green Acres like the comparatively wealthy adults that we are. All day we were shedding cash left and right to prop up the local economy. We even went shopping for birthday cake ingredients in Dunnes Stores opposite the train station.

The WSC Below Ground was the fizziest session we've probably ever hosted: comments, clarifications, questions, push-back, to-fro, insight and viewpoints from every corner of the room. It was great. It's true that the planet would have been better off if we'd ploughed the day's carbon footprint into one of our fields. But we are now better informed about the most effective, elegant and economic way of doing that.

Blue skies

Five years ago, I wrote an 800 word potted Life of John Tyndall. It's not the first place people go to find out something about the man who worked out why the sky was blue: my Blob is half-way down the 6th page at Google. When a new biography of Tyndall was published in the Spring, I asked The Institute's Library to order a copy in case any of our students were interested in Victorian science, politics and mountaineering to all of which Tyndall contributed. The book by Roland Jackson is waggishly entitled The Ascent of John Tyndall to acknowledge five decades of Summer days he spent in Switzerland climbing mountains and scrambling over glaciers . . . but also his rise from very humble beginnings along the River Barrow in Co Carlow to rubbing shoulders with the the elite in London. When I got the note to say that the book had been shelved, I promptly went in to borrow it.

It has taken several months of elapsed time, but now I have trudged through 450 pages of biographical detail to emerge, battered by info but rather better informed, at the end of the text. 80 (!) pages of notes and references and a 16 page index complete the book. It is informatively illustrated with in-text pictures and a folio of glossy photographs in the middle. I say trudged because it is heavy going, being quite Victorian in its attention to detail.

A thread which weaves through Tyndall's life and therefore the book are the meetings of the X-Club an invitation-only dining club which started in late 1864 and met once a month for the next 30 years. The group was brought together by Thomas H "Darwin's Bulldog" Huxley and Joseph "Kew Gardens" Hooker, and included Tyndall, Busk, Frankland, Hirst, Lubbock, Spencer and Spottiswoode.  More than half of these hot-shot men of science have dropped out of the narrative of movers and shakers in the current story of how modern science grew out of alchemy, engineering, hunting and flower collecting. They wanted to talk science in a social setting like our meetings of the Wexford Science Café. Late 19thC England was a world where educated men knew Latin and Greek, Plato and Shakespeare, but were  hazy in their knowledge of logarithms and had no use at all for a sextant. Those tools were for 'mechanics' not the gentlemen of independent who made up the Victorian scientific establishment = The Royal Society. Team-X were mostly :poor and hungry and wanted to create a world where 'Scientist' was a profession with a salary.  Tyndall was one of the few who landed such a job at the Royal Institution where he was paid to give lectures on science to Joe Public.  Whenever a meeting of the X-club is mentioned in TAoJT it is accompanied by a roll-call of attendees. These data are a credit to the author's mining of the historical record but one could wish that such detail was removed from the narrative and put in a table . . . or just left in the kitchen with the potato skins. Same for menus: "We had soup, fish, choice mutton, roast chicken, a delicious salad and three or four kinds of wine . . ." just shows that Victorians of means were intemperate in their feeding habits.

Another thread through Tyndall's biography is particulate matter in the air; so much so that, born 150 years later, he might have been labelled Miasma Man. His current scientific credit lies in his explanation of why the sky is blue - it's the dust particles scattering the short wavelengths innit? But he had a long and noisy association with light-houses and fog-horns and how sound waves are affected by the water droplets in the air. Notably he was able to demonstrate in a lecture theatre the scattering of light by the Tyndall Effect with a nifty piece of apparatus. He was the first to propose that peculiar alpine mists that haunted valley bottoms were most likely due to clouds of dust and pollen and not to do with water-droplets. He spent many years investigating infectious organisms in the air in a dogged fight against the prevailing lazy explanation of spontaneous generation. One effective way he found to sterilise air was to capture it in vials coated with glycerin: soon enough all the floating bacteria-laden debris would touch the sides and be taken out of circulation like Br'er Rabbit and the tar-baby. His poor long-suffering wife had to help him transport sealed vials of old vegetables to Switzerland every Summer where they would open them on pure mountain peaks and outside the hotel kitchens to not how quickly putrefaction took place. She killed him in the end, accidentally giving him a huge tot of chloral hydrate instead of his morning draft of magnesia-for-the-bowels. She outlived him by 47 years, cherishing his memory and hoarding his papers, thus preventing a timely biography which might have cemented his position in the pantheon when his memory was still fresh.

He was famous in his day as a good-pair-of-hands, dreaming up hardware to demonstrate physical phenomena. He thus served as an important interface between theoretical and experimental physics. The theatre and the props made of brass & glass & wood made him a rock-star on the lecture circuit. When Aoife McLysaght and Alice Roberts launch the 2018 Royal Institution Christmas lectures on 26 27 28 December BBC 4, they are walking in Tyndall's footsteps. To reprise the "those who can do, those who can't teach" theme, it is likely that Tyndall's skills and inspiration as a teacher had more impact on the rise and rise of science than all his experimental observations together.

They're giving rain

. . . and I'm giving out [below]
For more than ten years, Wexford Science Café has been running on the 3rd Tuesday of the Month; except when it's not. Third Tuesday is Patrick's Day this March, so the date was shifted forw a week . . . and the guest speakers were announced as MetÉireann veterans Evelyn Cusack and Séamus Walsh. They wrote They Say It Might Rain TSIMR published by Gill last year which is a breezy, profusely illustrated, book about the history of Irish Weather and its prediction. I snagged a copy off the shelf in Tramore library and hoovered through it in  prep for their WxScCaff perf. I particularly like including a number of weather related An Post stamp pictures.

I am a MetÉireann fan, I chekkitout their rainfall every day, sometimes several times a day and I follow incommming storms [so many storms Babet Chandra Darwinday Éowyn Frank] as I touch up my chain-saw to process the damage. This book is defo my jam, and a good bit was new to me. The loss of the Henri IV in the Crimean Storm of 1854. The Royal Charter Storm of 1859. That Éowyn (2025) is running Oíche na Gaoithe Móire (1839) close for being the biggest storm since records began.The [massive, shared] MetÉireann weather computer is located in . . . Iceland. I hope because they have supercheap hydro-power there. I have touched the Finnish equivalent in Espoo; and it is also massive.

The book is grand, and probably fit for parochial purpose: serving the domestic market.  Hopefully inspiring some [Irish] youngsters to embrace meteorology. But I have gripes. In 2017, Gill also published Luke O'Neill's popular science book Humanology; A Scientist's Guide to Our Amazing Existence (2018) which I took apart in 2019.

Like too many Irish books TSIMR runs to chauvinism (unreasonable belief in the superiority or dominance of one's own group or people).  Puffing up any player in the tale who happens to be Irish as if their contributions to science reflect well on the current inhabitants of the island. Cusack, Walsh and Gill claim George "Navier-Stokes Eqn" Stokes (1819-1902) because he was born in Sligo; and "our own" Robert "Boyle's Law" Boyle (1627-1691) because he was born in Waterford. But these prophets were without honour in their own country at the time and upstakes to seek a fortune where their talents were recognised and valued. And "Of course, the weather is all about temperatures and pressure, so Boyle is the dude" is a particularly charmless way of referring to The Great Man and his work. Maybe it is an attempt, using the supposed argot of youth, to make the book, or Boyle, more accessible to teens. The with-no-shame answer for the woeful lack of support for Irish science through the whole of the 19thC & 20thC until Science Foundation Ireland in ~2000AD is to play the MOPE card and blame the Brits.

In 2022, my pal Denis alerted me to a recent pre-print which cast side-eye at the hottest ever in Ireland record temperature 33.3°C observed at Kilkenny Castle on Sun 26 June 1887. That paper. " Given that Ireland is now the only country in Europe to have a national heat record that was set in the 19th century, a reassessment of the verity of this record is both timely and valuable" ie. that 1887 measurement is so extra-ordinary as to require extra-ordinary standards of evidence [Bloboprev Arsenic] but [autoquote] pretty much everyone, including Met Éireann, trots it out with neither sanity-check nor health-warning. Add TSIMR to the list of those whose QC goes squidgy when anything Irish is exceptional. Working hypothesis, one of the KK Castle gardeners popped the thermometer in his tea just before measurement time - for a jape, like.

If I read The Blob, rather than just writing it, I'm sure I'd be annoyed by the tendency to drop clever-clogs I-know-this-thing anecdotes, asides and additions. A good copy editor would ruthlessly hack this crud from the final draft because it impedes the flow and adds nothing but distraction for the reader. My current hypothesis is that Gill copy editors add oxygen-sucking asides to the (?slightly boring, pedantic, but correct?) mss submitted by scientists . . . to make it more accessible. I'll just give one example. p.120 "Similarly the southern lights are aurora australis, from the Graeco-Roman south wind god, Auster. (Terra Australis was the name given in 1570 to the proposed 'southern land' now known as Australia)" It might be more respectful to give some credit/space to the 13 y.o. reader to have their own aha! moment about the etymology.

And sometimes these didactic asides are just .  plain . wrong. p.135 "Iceberg means 'ice mountain' in Danish Dutch Swedish and German". In none of those languages is the statement true: Eisberg DE; isbjerg DK; ijsberg NL; isberg SE; . . . also for completeness ísjaki IS; isfjell NO nynorsk; isberg NO bokmål. Weirdly iceberg means iceberg in FR ES PT IT. Also jäävuori FI cnoc oighir IE. harrumph!

And the WexSciCaf gig?  They announced that the perf would run for 45 mins, leaving 15 minutes for questions. It ran over this wishful thunk by 20 minutes. That stuff really cranks my gears. When they were working to the second presenting the weather for RTE it never happened. Broadcasting abhors a silence, and they were able then, at zero notice, to e x t e n d their slot if the news presenter's toupé fell off OR get what needed saying in less time because The Pope had talked too much immediately prior. Some [far too much] of that time over-run was taken up making a laughing stock of the Infant of Prague. Back in the day, statues of the IoP would be left out in the garden to stay the rain on a wedding day. There were plenty of people in the room whose parents (or who themselves) had been party to this widespread Irish practice. Gratuitously slagging them off is unnecessary and exclusionary. Running over time is also disrespectful. But at least in this case it spared everyone from listening to me get fighty.

Bonus. Because we're all Olds, before kick-off I got chatting to the couple next to me. They turned out to be Frank & Síofra Gallagher, long time stalwarts of Tinahely Courthouse Arts Centre. Which was nice because I got to thank them for the many shows, films and events we attended with or without The Daus back in the day. I mind the night in March 2013 when we drove through fallen branches and floods to see Jiro Dreams of Sushi at Tinahely.  

Re-evaluating certainties

 It's Science Week from Sunday 07 to Sunday 14 Nov 2021. This national festival of STEM has been formally funded in the 2nd week of November for the last tuthree years.  2020 -- 2019 -- 2018 -- 2017. Wexford Science Café has been there, trying to boost our numbers and spread the Joys of STEM. I unloaded the responsibility of convening the WxScCaff this year and so all I have to do is rock up.

There is a bit of money sloshing about to support Science week down in the provinces and this year it was enough to commission a film by local Film Company Crannog Media. We cast about for a couple of handfuls of science-folk who'd go in front of the camera and decided that the topic would be

"What have you changed your mind about?"

or Has any evidence cut across your bows since SARS-CoV2 started pirating about the planet which made you stop and think: I might have been wrong about that. I'd already written about my contribution to this show-and-tell so I had my script already written when Chris and Alan, with Lydon as Best Boy and Key Grip, wired me up and made me talk to camera. I carefully set the backdrop to feature a huge sheaf of bracken Pteridium aquilinum and the scythe used to cut it; but tat was lost in the zoom. They pulled on 9 other lapels whose owners could translate STEM into Yola and edited all that material down to a sharp 20 minutes of mind altering substance. No, no, not Psilocybin this time!

At the Cafésession last night, we watched the film and then opened the floor to discussion. A couple of people remarked that very few of the contributions actually described an evidence-based change of mind since Feb 2020. Whoa! lads. I've had three good ideas during 45 years of science which might be equivalent to a seismic shift in my thought patterns. So the chances that one of these events will have occurred in the last 20 months is zero to the nearest whole number. But it's hard to shake lose the idea that scientists are no more prone to having creative insights than poets or chartered accountants . . . and we do cherish our hypotheses rather than really go at them with the 🪓hatchet of skepticism. Always, always treasure your exceptions with Wm Bateson.

Women against the scourge

 Where were you when JFK was shot? People of my age will know the answer to that [8 y.o. me: in my pyjamas but maybe not asleep in Titchfield, England]. Younger people will have a similar awareness about 9/11. Irish people of my grandfather's generation will have been somewhere during Easter Week 1916. The urban legend is that more people claimed a pension for having been in the GPO with Connolly and Pearse than could have physically fit. Schoolboy Nevil Shute became a stretcher-bearer - not in the GPO, though - because his father was a government official. Dorothy Stopford, a twenty-something member of the Protestant Ascendancy, happened to be visiting with Sir Matthew Nathan, the Under-Secretary for Ireland or most senior civil servant in town that week. She kept a, now digitized and searchable, diary of the events from that perspective.

Although Easter Week and the cross-patch response of the British administration [they were after all getting their ducks in a row for the disastrous Battle of the Somme] were defining events in the political development of Ireland, they were just an interesting but passing blip in the life Dorothy Stopford [L,L with Kathleen Lynn L,R another Irish medical pioneer]. She had just started a medical degree in TCD and qualified as a doctor in 1921. In parallel to her journey through anatomy classes, ward rounds and delivery suites, young Dorothy was radicalised into joining Cumann na mBan through indignation at a) the British reaction to Easter Week '16 and b) the systemic impoverishment and othering of the plain people of Ireland. Infant mortality across the Free State was running at 7% and that's the average. The rate would have been appallingly worse among the dispossessed crowded into cottages and tenements.

In the late 1920s, when Dr Price [she married Liam Price a lawyer in 1925] started working in St Ultan's [Protestant] pediatric hospital, infectious diarroeia, pneumonia and TB were the three primary killers-of-children in Ireland. It really was the Third World without the malaria and Burkitt's lymphoma. From 1938-1949 there were 43,000 deaths [adults included] from TB in the Free State. It's like the worst of Covid-19 going on and on for 10 years. In the 1930s Dr Price started to obsess about tuberculosis: directing a lot of the limited resources of the hospital to that one disease. Again, it is easy to see parallels with Coronarama where we have not yet counted the deaths and disablements caused by other illnesses and accidents getting untreated during the pandemic.

In the late 1930s, Price was instrumental in bringing tuberculin skin-test diagnosis and BCG vaccination to Ireland and rolling these preventive measures out across the country. It was quite political because BCG Bacille Calmette-Guérin was French and, according to the British medical establishment [and subsequent sober objective analysis didn't work very well. The latter criticism was at least partly because the French statistics on vaccination and its efficacy were all over the shop.  In 1937, Price administered the first BCG jab in these islands, but it was one of only 6 such treatments in St Ultan's before WWII shut off supplies of this heat-labile resource. 

After the war, lots had changed, antibiotics became available in a wide variety of forms, there was better nutrition and better housing and TB isolation wards and whole hospitals were built across the country on the imprimatur of the radical Minister of Health Noel Browne. So there was more to winning the war on TB than BCG. Browne and the Chief Medical Officer James Deeny both wrote themselves up as the centre of credit. Nevertheless St Ultan's is a beacon in the history of equality in Ireland because it was staffed, run and administered entirely by women. One contemporary called it The Women's Medical Republic. It was thus an antidote to the patriarchy. In the 1980s St Ultan's was closed with its assets transferred to the nearby National Children's Hospital in Harcourt Street. There is a now a 180 bed hotel on the site.

Last night at the Wexford Science Café, we were edutained by Anne MacLellan, the Wexford author who has written The Book on Dorothy Stopford-Price; rebel doctor which is available from the publisher or cheaper post-free from Kennys. If you missed the Café you can get the gist from a talk given by MacLellan in 2019 for a symposium hosted by the RCPI Royal College of Physicians of Ireland. Or a 1200 word, 6 minute, executive summary essay. MacLellan's assessment is measured: Deeny and Browne deserve less credit for beating TB and Dorothy Stopford-Price, not the easiest person to like, deserves rather more; hence the biography. Chapeau! for author and her subject both.

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