Purpose

Stephen Wolfram, [Bloboprev] who has good claim to being the smartest man in the room during most of his daily existence, has just been interviewed on The Edge.  He talks for 100 minutes. With transcript! if you're the least bit nerdy or interested in AI, you could do worse than skim the transcript.  If you like your edutainment without few car-chases and a blizzard  of ideas, then do the video. Towards the end of his piece to camera he asks if there is any evidence that there is intelligent life on our pale blue dot as viewed from space.  We all now acknowledge that you can't see the Great Wall of China from the moon, it's too narrow and wiggly.  When NASA sent it's exploratory landers to Mars, they included some tests to see if life-as-we-know-it exists on the red planet.  That was a very narrow definition/imagination of life - as the ability to metabolise glucose - which we would be ashamed of today.

One of the ideas that Wolfram develops in his ramble across the universe is that big data and computer literacy such as is encouraged by CoderDojo has been highly empowering to young people. Their effective coding ability can ask, and answer, questions about our world which would have previously been only addressable by academics with access to a big library and decades of experience and accumulated knowledge.  The image [L] of the distribution of Norse Placenames was generated by the British Museum and it's wonderfully informative - there is Danelaw after 1000 years.  But that sort of insight could be generated by dozens of 13 year old data-minors.  Of course they are more likely to map the density of Justin Bieber tweet-tribs than the history of the Vikings but the point is that original, interesting research is available to people who haven't been to college and don't have The Calculus or Ulysses under their belts. My pal El Asturiano sent me some wonderful mappy links a couple of days ago: a zoomable map of the Roman World from the Austrian Institute of Technology. And Harvard's equivalent.

Wolfram goes from programming to the Turing Test for evidence of Artificial Intelligence to the wider question of the planet. Who better to ask about evidence of purpose or structure or intelligence on the face of our planet but a bunch of astronauts.  They didn't mention the Gt Wall of China, of course but rather a) a curious straight line across the Great Salt Lake in Utah - which is caused by a man-made causeway that separates the two halves of the lake into different microbial communities b) a curiously precise circle around Mt Egmont/Taranaki in NZ which is due to differential grazing either side of the perimeter fence of the national park.  Other examples include straight lines of lights along the trans-Siberia Railway and on boringest 150km road across the Nullarbor Plain in Australia.  I've always thought Nullarbor was an aborigine word but it's straight Latin: Null-Arbor = the treeless.

You don't want to confuse regularity (straight lines, circles) caused by 'intelligent life' with regularity caused by pure physico-chemical effects. This has been a problem in trying to find evidence of early life in rock-strata which are much are well over a billion years old.  Perfectly spherical microscopic objects don't answer but fossilised  'tetrads' [L] in ancient rocks are most likely to have arisen in the course of two cell divisions to make four identically sized cells still stuck together in this characteristic pattern.

Blue colourblind

Because these images are clipped from http://allrgb.com/ their originals all have exactly the same amount of information in the Claude Shannon information theory sense.  The conceit at allRGB being that you are tasked to create a 4096x4096 pixel image that includes all 256x256x256 = 16777216 possible RGB colours from #000000 to #FFFFFF.  The fact that you can describe the effective information in the left hand picture with far fewer words than the fractal tree in the middle or the Mandelbrot detail on the right gives a clue about how we keep pictures small on The Blob. I care about these things after the years when every byte that came onto my computer at home had to squeeze up a thin 15km-long copper wire.  I use the wonderful IrfanView to reduce the size of pictures by half or to 10% and the byte-count collapses to the benefit of my copper-wireaders in Bangalore, Ballygobackwards and Bohemia.  Somewhere on the checker-board is cerise, magenta, sky-blue and kelly-green and every colour you've ever seen on a screen, but effectively it's "8x8 512pixel squares alternating light and dark grey" which  description is 52 x 128 bits or about 0.2kb.

The Mandelbrot link above points to his 24/7 talk at the 2006 Ignoble Awards.  That's 24 seconds to talk comprehensively about something than matters, followed by a 7 second executive summary.  Poor old Benoit blew it on the talk (any rambling or parenthesis and the time-up whistle comes before you've finished the first sentence) but summarised his huge contribution to the understanding of our world as "Beautiful, damned hard, increasingly useful, that's fractals".  Like with Globish, such constraints force us to think about what we really mean to say.  Eric Lander, a good showman, has clearly thought about and practiced his nanolecture on the Genome and thought about his summary "Genome, bought the book, hard to read".  And although her talk on Biology is too wordy and technical I like Dany Adams' summary "If it can get infected, it's biology".

And while we are on colour, what are we to make of the La Bandera Astoriana which Wikipedia says is an alpha and omega suspended from a golden (Pantone PMS 109 yellow) Cruz de la Victoria on a blue (Pantone PMS 829) ground?  Because . . . there is no such colour as PMS 829!  I've asked El Asturiano about this anomaly but he took a lurch sideways to tell me about The sacred cave of Covadonga and King Favila who was killed by a bear. The Bear is celebrated by Asturian Republicans, which is rather like the Catalans celebrating the Fall of Barcelona in 1714.   More discussion on the Asturian flag's blue tone.

And thanks to The Blue (Metafilter) for starting me down that rabbit hole.

Endorse-bombing

There are a few of us who haven't signed up for Friendface. I don't have enough friends to make it worthwhile and I'm not really interested in seeing pictures of their children and grandchildren.  Once you've seen one child gurning gapped-tooth at the camera, you don't have to see more. These social-media sites come and go. Bebo died when the number of single men masquerading as teenage girls outnumbered the actual girls.  Some professional social-media sights seem to be gaining traction. I think I signed up with LinkedIn shortly after that enterprise started but as a very early adopter there was nobody there to smooze with, so I've long since forgotten my login details. Now that 5% of everybody is an active Linkedee, it's too crowded to give users any Masonic-insider advantage.

ResearchGate was started in Germany in 2008 and is meant to be for scientists only.  Nevertheless there are 7 million users including, since the end of September, me. For several months, I'd been getting e-mails from ResearchGate telling me that colleagues and co-authors were really anxious for me to sign up so we could all collaborate more vigorously and share data more equally. Aftre ignoring this spam for a long time, I was talking about it with my MSc student and . . . caved.  It was a bit of a bore. I had to do a lot of work for RG to help it/them establish just how broad and extensive my research career has been.  With many previous sign-ups associated with me, RG had a good idea of which papers were mine but before I could change my photo into something rugged, I had to trawl through a long list of publications by Scientist Bob, Scientist BT, Scientist B, Scientist TB, Scientiste B as increasingly unlikely guesses by the RG robots. Each one of which I had to claim or deny.  The default/suggested photo was kind of weird because it was clear that RG had looked for Bob T Scientist on images.google.com and come up with a cartoon of cats from my peripheral involvement with the Irish Times crowd-sourcing cat genetics project from earlier this year. The whole registration process was not without value because I was able to claim as publications a handful of book-reviews I wrote in the later 1990s.  Everyone knows that these are not 'real' pubs because they are not peer-reviewed but they were are worth reading nevertheless.  on 3rd October I received an email with this banner:

. . . a very low bar has been negotiated, so tentative huzzah.

I've been getting 3-4 e-mails daily from RG ever since, trying to stir up my interest in other RG people's doings:

• a chap who wrote a paper with someone I wrote a paper with [I danced with a man who danced with a girl who danced with the Prince of Wales] has written another paper about egg-yolk.
•  a chap from India has viewed my profile
• please 'endorse' the expertise of my Head of School at The Institute

This last is kind of weird because you're really doing RG's work for them. If my HoSch is claiming expertise in motorcycle maintenance, am I expected to scotch the lie?  A couple of days ago I got a message that my pal El Asturiano had "endorsed my expertise".  So I looked to see and discovered that I was meant to be an expert in 'cats' and assumed that El As was making a game of me.  Accordingly, I went to his profile and added "Asturianism" to his list of talents. The next day he added something peculiar to mine:

I guess my ability to make mince-pies at Christmas (and I've won prizes for that) is more useful and interesting than everything I know about biofertilizers which is just horse-manure.  I thought my coinage was a) damned clever b) original but it's been around for a while, having a tumblr site and[slow-load warning!] buzzfeed traffic.

Century of crosswords

On this day, the Solstice, exactly 100 years ago, Arthur Wynne designed a word-cross puzzle that was published in the New York World. It was the sudoku of its day and the idea was widely propagated until just about every newspaper in at least the English speaking world will include one somewhere in  its pages.  I've made up a few of these in my time, for events or for the hell of it.  The Easter egg hunts with which I tormented my children owe a lot to a lifetime to doing crosswords - my mother taught me the basic conventions of British-English cryptic clues before I reached double digits.

The Arthur Wynne Memorial Word-Cross

01ac. 1781 Planet            01dn. Closed
04ac. Primary virtue         02dn. Unspecified place
09ac. 8/9 water              03dn. Extraterrestrial
10ac. One going forward      05dn. 940 Lenok submarine
12ac. R-O-R' chemical        06dn. Sturm und ?
13ac. Our 4th closest relly  07dn. Joe Kraus 1994 startup
15ac. Our day will come!     08dn. S (aa)
16ac. The only home we have  11dn. Phoenician deity
17ac. Sinaasappel.nl         14dn. ENSG00000100503
22ac. The universe of Cthulu 18dn. 42
24ac. Causes Lesch-Nyhan     19dn. from GAG or GAA
27ac. Khmer temple           20dn. palpable, material
28ac. Radio reflecting layer 21dn. El Asturiano
31ac. Found '94 by Wm Ramsey 23dn. Tashkent IATA
32ac. Remembered             25dn. diff.betw. proton/neutron
33ac. Graphite and diamond   26dn. Sharp medical journal
34ac. American hormone       29dn. Cosy for inuit
35ac. Shipworm               30dn. Ειρήνη Σαρανταπήχαινα
Answers on New Year's Day (if I remember). Solstice: things are getting brighter from now on.

Crossword: the answer

On the solstice, to celebrate a centenary of crosswords, I devised one myself.  Didn't get much feedback, certainly nobody claimed a prize of a Chambers English Dictionary and a case of champagne.  The Boy worked out all but two, so I can't have disappeared entirely up my own orifice in making up the clues. At the time I promised an answer on New Year's Day and begob but I almost forgot.  So here are the answers.  Editor's decision is final, closing date passed, now leave me - I have a case of champagne to get through.
01ac. 1781 Planet            01dn. Closed
a Uranus d unopened
04ac. Primary virtue         02dn. Unspecified place
a kindness d anywhere
09ac. 8/9 water              03dn. Extraterrestrial
a oxygen d unearthly
10ac. One going forward      05dn. 940 Lenok submarine
a advancer d india
12ac. R-O-R' group           06dn. Sturm und
a ether d drang
13ac. Our 4th closest relly  07dn. Joe Kraus 1994 startup
a orangutan d excite
15ac. Our day will come!     08dn. S (aa)
a TAL (Tiocfaidh ár lá) d serine
16ac. The only home we have  11dn. Phoenician deity
a earth d moloch
17ac. Sinaasappel.nl         14dn. ENSG00000100503
a orange d NIN
22ac. The universe of Cthulu 18dn. 42
a mythos d answer
24ac. Salts of gout          19dn. from GAG or GAA
a urate d glutamate
27ac. Khmer temple           20dn. palpable, material
a wat d tangible
28ac. Radio reflecting layer 21dn. El Asturiano
a heaviside d fernando
31ac. Found by Wm Ramsey     23dn. Tashkent
a argon d TAS
32ac. Remembered             25dn. diff. between proton/neutron
a recalled d charge
33ac. C                      26dn. Sharp medical journal
a carbon d lancet
34ac. American hormone       29dn. Cosy for inuit
a estrogen (not oestrogen) d igloo
35ac. Shipworm               30dn. Wife of Leo IV
a teredo d Irene                            

Try this for size

Years and years ago, my boss, his daughter and I were on a field trip to The Azores, Cabo Verde and the Portuguese mainland. We hopped about the islands of Cabo Verde by plane because the tickets were absurdly cheap and were too short of time to be cruising about by local ferry. Arriving to the broiling dry heat of Sal, the international terminal, we hung around waiting for the short-hop prop-plane to carry us to Praia, the capital on the island of Santiago 200km to the SW.  We amused ourselves by looking at the local people (the landscape was an uninviting mix of sand, sandstone, salt and salt-bush). One woman dominated the scene - an enormous black woman in  a wide black dress decorated with a discrete scatter of black sequins. We dubbed this redoubtable Cabo Verdean fellow-traveller "Her Vastness" and speculated whether the engineering of the seats of the small plane would be up to the challenge. Imagine our chagrin, and indeed anxiety for our knees, when she sat down into the row of seats in front of us. The seats gave ground with an ominous creaking sound . . . but held. My friend El Asturiano's grandmother was so shaped that her family used to tease that it was quicker to jump over her than go round her. There's a lot of obesity about nowadays and that's a lot of extra weight for flight-planners allocating fuel to optimise the loading of planes. Nobody wants to run out of fuel if there is a slight delay in-flight and the flight-planner has been using a ready-reckoner of passenger weights from the 1950s which says that 100 people weigh 7,000 kg.

Running out of fuel??  That's what happened on 24th August 2001 on Transat Flight 236 [Toronto-Lisboa] in the middle of the Atlantic. Captain Robert Piché, the pilot, demonstrated The Right Stuff when a fuel-line leak drained the last drop of fuel from the engines when he was still 100km from his emergency destination at Lajes Airbase in the Azores. He glided in! taking in a 360 degree turn to shed some height and further slaloming to shed speed and bring the airplane to the runway.  Everyone survived, the most serious injuries occurring in the evacuation. If you can't imagine what it might have been like on board, you can get a flavour from a participant (and check out the comments for other views on the same events). On returning to Toronto Captain Piché said curtly ''I don't consider myself a hero, sir. I could have done without this.'' These pilots: ice-water in their veins. It's in the movies.

The Boy, who through hard graft at Open University made himself an an engineer, is working on the railroad these last several years. In particular his company has had relatively tiny chunks (mere millions!) of the £15 billion which has been allocated to Crossrail - Europe's biggest engineering project driving new railway lines right through London from West to East. I'll do something to bring the propaganda videos to your attention later on this year - it's a HUGE project with some interesting ways-of-thinking. Mais revenons nous a notre fils: for the last year he's been doing a MSc in Railway Systems Engineering and Integration at U.Brum.  Since the book Freakonomics came out, it's been clear that all sorts of human behaviour can be investigated by economists and they can have a ball while doing it. Talking to The Boy, it seems that a similar case can be made for engineers: machinator sum humani nihil a me alienum puto.  

He led a group research project in the Masters investigating how trains can cope better with the obesity epidemic.  Because fat people are going to be using mass transport along with the rest of us. One element of the research was discovering what it is like to be overweight on today's trains. Being engineers they made up an Obese Body Enhancer OBE suit with a 117cm circumference and took turns wearing this on trains. Unaccountably this neoprene uber-jumpsuit [R above taking up a seat-and-a-half] had a Union Flag on the front. They designed a staggered seat arrangement [L] that was reasonably efficient seating everyone within the 95th percentile for girth and also successfully accommodated those beyond this limit. I think that's just great; it's silly and counter-productive to use obviously discriminatory blunt instruments like charging large people for two seats - especially as seat assignment is done at the last minute at the airport.  If we can adjust the engineered world to the reality of the people who are out there, travel will be more efficient and ultimately cheaper and more convenient for all users.

The Boy's solution to the seating problems of the Great Travelling Public made me think of the flap last month about hexagonal seating on airplanes. This is a patent taken out by Zodiac Seats France for a novel arrangement of seats for coach-class passengers in the future. The HD31 design [R with mannequins masquerading as sardines Sardina pilchardus]  inter-digitates forward- and rearward-facing seats to give more shoulder room; to do away with shared arm-rests; and pack more passengers in the tube of 3+3-seat, single-aisle, short-hop aeroplanes. The commentary has been filled with words like cram, horrible, personal space, awkward, and no thanks.  But these are just the negative reactions of people who are terrified of The New. Me, I'd give it a go if presented with a choice; especially if allowed to book the rear-facing seat - famously better to occupy if you desire to survive when the plane hits the deck off piste.

Note added in proof: A paper including the "Thinking Big" project has been accepted for the
Fifth International Rail Human Factors Conference in London next Month

Roadkill

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about  my FFDE (far from death experience) of being whacked off my bike by a txter i/c car aka careless driver. Maybe what I should have done is follow the actions in this (youtube) Russian dashcam story.  It could have been worse.  Globally, it turned out worse for about 1.3 million people last year who were killed by vehicles on the road - that's more than the number who succumb to malaria.  The Pulitzer Center recently presented an informative, interactive map to display the data. It's getting worse each year, especially in the third world, as more people get rich enough to afford a set of gas-powered wheels, but not rich enough to buy one with adequate tires, brakes and steering, let alone a course of driver education.

If you come from a country other than Ireland you should check out the stats at home.  In Ireland  it reports a rate of 4.7 deaths/100,000. That puts us at the lower end of Western Europe - apart from Portugal the most dangerous countries to travel/walk in the EU are all in The East.  A great many of the third-world countries are colour-coded on an estimate of road deaths rather than reported road deaths.  Pakistan, in the example they choose to highlight, has rate of 17.4/100,000 which is credible while the reported 5,192 deaths would give a rate of 2.9/100,000: lower than Iceland, the safest country. 

I shouldn't be reporting it as 17.4 because the last digit doesn't compute with Wikipedia's estimate of the population of Pakistan (182.5 million) although 17/100,000 does.  And we should take the low estimate for Iceland with a small pinch of salt because of stochastic effects (the law of small numbers).  Only 320,000 people live in Iceland (much less than in Belfast) so if the road deaths p.a. slip from 9 to 11 the death rate leaps from 2.7 to 3.3, so let's call it 3/100,000 for Iceland.  And search The Blob for "spurious accuracy".

And here's an oddity identified by El Asturiano.  Whereas the reported road deaths matches the estimated road deaths for Ireland and Spain, there's a substantial discrepancy for our neighbour the UK.  The Pulitzer people crank up a reported 1,905 UK deaths to an estimated 2,278, neither of us could figure out why.  Is it that none of the road deaths involving Pakistanis living in Britain are reported?  Nope! 2% of UK inhabitants (about 12.6 x 100,000) are of Pakistani origin, and about 50 of these get killed on the roads each year assuming the same rate of their neighbours. So there are still more than 300 unaccounted under-reported deaths in the UK.

Map of the Nation

Ever wondered what the circumference of the world is?  It's 40,000km to the nearest couple of miles.  And that's not a coincidence - it's a definition.  In the turmoil after their revolution, the French Academy of Science decided to put manners on us all by replacing yards, cubits and Flemish ells with a single universal measure of length, which they chose to define a the 10,000,000th part of the distance between the North Pole and the equator.  It took the designated engineers Mechain and Delambre the best part of seven years to triangulate between Dunkerque and Barcelona and extrapolate the distance to make the calculations. With the best science of the day, they made some assumptions about the shape of the earth which meant that their official meter is out by 200 micrometers (about the width of the dot on this i).  Tsk!

At about the same time, the British Government decided it would be a sound idea to make accurate maps of the South coastal counties of England, so that if the revolutionaries decided to swarm across the channel in a waft of garlic, the local militia could get to invasion beaches in the shortest possible time.  And out of this, the project to map the whole country was born.  It also explains why the mapping was carried out by a branch of the army.

All this is amply explained by the wonderful Map of the Nation: a biography of the Ordnance Survey by Rachel Hewitt, which was given to me by El Asturiano as I left Dublin at the end of 2012 to start work at The Institute.  It's taken me nearly six months to finish it partly because I've been somewhat busy, but mostly because the font is miserly small and unaccountably hard to read.  But it's worth it for the introduction to the technology and hardship of cartography in the olde days when you had to get out in the rain with your Gunter's chain and theodolite and hope that the gales wouldn't carry away your sail-canvas tent in the night.  The Ordnance Survey started in the South of England (Sheet 1, Kent 1801), and it took them two generations to work their way North and West to knock off Sheet 108 Denbigh in 1870 and cover the whole island.  It is one of the peculiarities of history that Ireland got served first and the Other Island was fully surveyed by 1845.  Which is handy because we thus have an accurate record of what the country looked like when it supported 8 million people before the famine. For example, the field you must walk through to see The Ringstone is called Crowe's and if you look at the 1840 map you can see a black square at the bohereen end of the field.  That was presumably the cabin where Mr and Mrs Crowe and their (numerous?) progeny lived. 5 years ago when we dug up part of the field to plant trees we unearthed lots of broken china at that spot on the map.

After independence, Ordnance Survey Ireland continued to work away in Phoenix Park and they have released an amazing zoomable historical map resource which allows you view the original 1825-1845 survey, the update 50 years later, and a sample of modern satellite pictures which you can over-lay.  I've picked the two views of Borris Co Carlow on the left because they show the rise and fall of the railway in Ireland.  In 1840 (in colour) the South of the village was barely populated, but the advent of the the railway changed

all that.  The GSWR branch-line lasted almost exactly 100 years 1858-1963 but only the viaduct is left now.

Rachel Hewitt's book is the offspring of her PhD thesis and a trove of data and history and vignette and technology.  William Wordsworth and William Rowan Hamilton both feature prominently in the Irish part of the tale. Read it to find out why you need two 20-foot-long glass rods if you want to start mapping a nation.

Lox lag brings bagel boom

I remembered this [source Alistair Cooke's Letter from America] as a headline in the newspapers 50 or more years ago, when there was a supply crisis in the salmon trade of Eastern North America. Google Books [above] says it was a Not-Headline. It was, in any case, similar in its implications of cultural disaster to the cold winter last year which threatened the supply of gefilte fish. Lax/laks/lox is pickled salmon which is traditionally served with cream-cheese and bagels. If there is no lox you have to bulk out with the bagels, already. Lax and bagels are both quintessentially Yiddish words, which have worked their way into the vocabulary of gentiles wherever they can be used appropriately. Wordaday is doing Yiddish words this week, probably because of an article the proprietor Anu Garg was encouraging us to read last week.  In Ireland we do other stuff with our salmon, so Lox is more likely to mean Liquid Oxygen here especially among scientists.  But I think everyone knows what is a bagel.  When I lived in Metro-Boston in the 1980s, Yiddisher words were common parlance and I used some of them like a native: chutzpah, glitch, kvetch, klutz, mensh, maven, spiel, schlep, schmooze. Some even appear in The Blob. So these words come from Yiddish, but where does Yiddish come from? . . . and where is it going?

The answer to the second question is that it is going out with a whisper after engendering a rich culture that valued a certain type of education [picking through the holy book with microscopic tweezers for example] for about 1000 years. Yiddish long ago lost the battle with Hebrew to become the secular language of Israel. There, cultural imperialism was as strong against Yiddish as Madrid's against Catalan, Gallego and Asturiano, or Paris in its attempt to grind out the southern French dialects of Langue d'Oc to establish a truly monoglot francophone nation all singing the Marseillaise in tune. And of course, it didn't help that 6 million Yiddish speakers had a one-way ticket to the station at Auschwitz.

The first question was settled more than 100 years ago by concluding that Yiddish was developed from the German spoken in the Rhineland provinces of Western Germany. Max Weinreich’s History of the Yiddish Language argues that Yiddish came from the West and is fundamentally German, perhaps built on a foundation of medieval French, which has acquired a lot of Slavic words from contacts in the cities of Eastern Europe.  Paul Wexler, contrariwise, argues in The Ashkenazic Jews: A SlavoTurkic People in Search of a Jewish Identity that Yiddish is a Slavic language with some words assimilated from German and Hebrew.  Speakers of English will appreciate the dilemma; English is a German language where whole sections of vocabulary (cooking and law for starters) have been borrowed and absorbed from French. Linguistic archaeology is not what you'd call an exact science. Geneticist David Goldstein famously carried out a study of Y chromosomes from Ashkenazi Jews about 4 years ago and concluded that they were most likely to have arrived in Eastern Europe from Asia rather than from the Rhine Valley.  Intriguingly, there is a lot of evidence supporting the from-the-East hypothesis in the 750 close-typed pages of notes to Max "Westie" Weinreich's book. There is a suggestion that he left on the cutting room floor anything that didn't agree with his originally held views. He wouldn't be the first or the last scholar to do that.  If the last linked long-form article on the Origins of the Jews and their language isn't enough, there's more here, with maps!

I think perhaps that the controversy might reflect the parable which I heard long long ago from dreamy philosopher Alan Watts:
"Is a zebra a black horse with white stripes or a white horse with blacks stripes?"
"Neither, it is an invisible horse colored black and white so people don't bump into it by accident"

Nerdniks go 5k

Going going on

• Matt Parker meets Geoff Marshall to collect some seconds
• Benford on the distribution of trailing digits 
• Geoff and Vicky's[R] last of 2,563 stations is Wick [✓]!
  
• Simple Indian recipes
• When the aliens landed in Stavanger
  
• Dialect? Language? Asturiano! 
• Let's hear it for Scots on whc multibloboprevs
  
• How to coffee . . . like wine tasting? 
• Covered in Beeeees
  
• Mutualism in the wild corvids eat macropod ticks
• read the FAQ at the top of the comments 
  
• Shed in a shed in Italian Alps
• Restoring Le Chateau du Thiel
  
• . . . sunshine walked beside her
  

The Ramsey Boys

Habemus papem!  The new pope seems to have a welcome core of humility (wooden cross, tendency to take public transport, preference for living in a manageably small apartment etc) which is refreshing.  It reminded me of a story that I have dined out on for decades about a similarly humble Archbishop of Canterbury when I was at school.  That prelate would be seen in his ceremonial kaftan buying his own socks in Marks and Sparks and was the only incumbent to have a chauffeur-driven Ford Fiesta.  I can discover no evidence of this fantasy on the internet – so I’ll have to concede St Martin’s cloak to the catholics (for the while). 

But I did spend some time ferreting through the biography of Michael Ramsey who was ABC at the time.  He became Warhol famous years after death, when a couple of bucketful’s of ceremonial artifacts were discovered in the River Wear in Durham, where Ramsey had lived for a few years in retirement. Seems he had tried to raise money for charity by selling some of the golden trowels and silver chalices that he'd been gifted in his working life but these identifiable artifacts had re-surfaced on the auction circuit to cause offense to the original donors.  That put a stop to further discrete sales but didn't deal with the boxes in the attic.  So he went down to the Prebend's Bridge at the bottom of the street where he lived and dumped all the worldly artifacts in the river.  Maybe he was the sock archbishop after all?  

Michael Ramsey was also known for having an atheist brother, the brilliant mathematician Frank Ramsey.  But not before he'd made substantive contributions to mathematics (logic, decidability, combinatorics), philosophy (he was Wittgenstein's academic supervisor) and economics (he was friend and collaborator of Keynes).  He died at the age of 26 in Jan 1930.

The day after I'd read all this, my pal El Asturiano, sent me a link about interesting numbers including Pi. e, Phi and the Graham Number which is the largest number known: it takes 1000 characters just to describe it.  It turns out that Graham's Number is the upper end of (Frank) Ramsey's Theorem. 

Big number, small world.

On Edge again

A palomino sent me and El Asturiano a link to the 2016 Edge Question. I started having rant to myself about The Edge without really knowing what was shaking my equanimity. The contributors attempting to answer the 2016 question are the Usual Suspects: friends of John Brockman, the Great Facilitator.  Many of them were asked their opinion in 2015, 2014 and back to beginning of Edge time BET. Then I started to sound oddly and grumpily familiar and it dawned on me that I'd written a whole critique of the 2016 Question and the Cult of the Celebrity-Pundit back in January. Before that realisation, however, I'd followed the link and read what Freeman Dyson [prev] and Matt Ridley had to say on the matter-in-2016-Question.

Matt Ridley wrote about the connexion between lack of intestinal worms and the rise-and-rise of allergies in the Western World.  I found myself nodding about that, not least because I've recently recognised that others have recognised the association myself.  Nina Jablonski says something similar although her piece is about the relationship between the intestinal flora and obesity and other health issues. The microbiome is the new black.

Dyson, who is always good copy and full of sense [chekkitout youtube], had a rather interesting comment about the Dragonfly telescopic array which is super-efficient, because intrinsically cheap, at finding dim objects in the depths of space.  They are better at this mundane task than fat (foundation and government supported) super-big telescopes and cost a fraction of the price.  It is a great example of appropriate technology producing a neat solution rather than getting suckered into the idea that, as more is better, so more money is better. One of the criteria of success in science, as defined by bean-counters who believe all that matters must be measured, is the amount of external funding acquired by your researchers, departments or institutes.  As with American elections, there is a frighteningly good connexion between investment and result. Nevertheless it is a crude surrogate for actual scientific progress - difficult as that is to a) define and b) quantify. Dyson recommends that a third of all money allocated to funding research should be ear-marked for modest mom-and-pop research projects by comparative unknowns. As Aled Edwards has identified, much [far too much] of scientific research follows safe well trodden paths rather than veering sharp left into jungle to make radically new discoveries. If most of these cheap left-field research ideas come to nothing, then not much is lost. Most Big Science projects come to not-very-much themselves and they beggar the tax-payer. Back in my Jan EdgeQ critique, I cited Judith Rich Harris's essay for pointing out that most published research is useless, boring, or wrong.

Dyson's suggestion made me think about the whole goddam, smug edifice - The Edge; it's 2016 Question, and indeed science itself. Scientific, medical and agricultural 'progress' has been instrumental in creating 5 billion more people than can be sustained on our small blue dot. That's the excess since 1916 when there were less than 2 billion living people on the planet. Their demand for:

• bright plastic buckets; 
• throw-away containers with barcodes
• huge homes in absurdly inclement regions like winter New England;
• a helluva lot of uncomfortable shoes in closets 
• a private automobile and dirt-cheap fuel to make it go; 
• a server in Finland next to a hydro-electric plant to store 100,000 crap photos of kittens doing antic things in bathtubs

has buggered the planet.  The creators of the small grey cinder we won't be able to inhabit don't seem to be mobilising 'science' to sort out the ramified problems engendered by technology.  Let us, accordingly, not ask, the undoubted;y brilliant, Steven Pinker, Martin Rees, Paul Bloom et al. what they think again. Let us rather ask an articulate teenager what she thinks we should do and give that a go.  We can't finish up in a worse place.

On growth and form

Did I mention allometry at all at all? I did, once, just last year. What is it about the control of development that make men have bigger feet than women? It's hard to see how this could be adaptive and goes some way to explaining why teenage boys are apparently so clumsy: for a time they literally don't know where the ends of their legs are - their proprioception [defined/explained] is overwhelmed by the differential growth. It happens to girls too; some >!brilliant!< ten year old gymnasts and ballet-dancers lose it entirely when the hormones kick in - trading in the leotard for spots and an awkward boy-friend probably seems a piss-poor exchange to their parents and teachers. But the realisation that women have daintier feet than men have led some cultures to exaggerate this attribute of femaleness by binding the feet of girls so that never develop properly.  Very attractive until the poor creature takes off her socks [don't look if you are squeamish].

El Asturiano [multiprev: he really is my most valuable supplier of links] sent me a link to a marvellous Wired tribute to D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson a Victorian polymath and scholar who is now only famous for On Growth and Form. The long discursive essay is written by Stephen Wolfram [bloboprev], who is another mighty intellect with diverse interests . . . and a poorly developed Off-button. OG&F explored the topology of shape and how the endless forms most beautiful of the natural world might have been generated. We are all, after all, variations on a theme. I think it's true to say that, at some stage during their embryological development, all mammals have four pentadactyl [five fingered] limbs. However, adult horses walk on a single toe-nail, cows on two and whales have no toes at all. The extra digits have been re-sorbed and re-purposed. In the Figure [L] you can imagine how a regular shaped fish can be morphed into a sun-fish with a single instruction - more cell-division astern.

I mentioned OG&F in passing in a tribute to Alan Turing who made a key contribution to the study of how development and shape might be managed chemically. Something is happening to dictate that we can clap . . . because our two arms are the same length. Presumably some feed-back loop ensures that the arms get longer in sync. Allometry is the investigation of differential growth. Been there before with the idea that a new-born's head is bigger than its legs and our growth and development is the progressive reversal of that ratio. Stephen Jay Gould [prev] started a famous discussion about the disproportionately mighty size of the antlers of Giant Irish Deer [not elk! and not exclusively Irish, either but now for sure extinct]. He pointed out that, before telling a story to explain the size, you should acknowledge the possibility that it just happened because of allometric growth signals. Big deer produce bigger antlers by the same mechanism that boys produce bigger feet: the differential expression of growth hormone. Such mechanistic explanations are an essential foundation for any theories about why the antlers grew so big and what the consequences were. Yes, they're all dead, sure, but what was the immediate cause of their demise?

The moral compass of culchies

This time last year I reported on a study which slit the scientific method up the middle and exposed the wobbly bits: it was not a pretty site, but got us nearer to The Truth. Nosek and Motyl carried out the same experiment in political experimental psychology twice and got completely different results. [Golldarn but you could ask these trend-setters to have Smith & Jones names so we can google 'em easier: Nosyl & Motek?  Mojo and Botox?]  A difficult name did for Matthaei's place in history and share in a Nobel. N&M's result was a disappointing bust until they wrote up The Process and went viral. Experimental psychology is just so damned clever. The practitioners think up these nifty ways to expose how we think and gather up a load of data to test their hypotheses.  The results are important in deflating our own delusions of honorable behaviour in the real world. Three years ago Marc Hauser, poster-boy of the field, resigned his tenured position at Harvard because it was becoming clearer that he'd massaged his data to fit his hypothesis.  The über-trendy and self-regarding talk-shop Edge, where Hauser had been gabbing with the best of them for years, promptly purged him from their web-site as effectively Stalin air-brushed Trotsky out of all the party-photographs. There was a while where you could see what all the fuss was about but those repositories of historical truth have also been suppressed, so we can't make our own judgement of just how good this bloke was [at pulling the wool over his pals' eyes]. This happens a lot (twice is far too much) : The über-trendy and self-regarding talk-shop TED went and purged talks by Graham Hancock and Rupert Sheldrake from TEDxWhitechapel because they actually pushed the frontiers of science rather than talking about it. If that makes you want to find out more about the purgees, then you're probably on the right track [see Streisand Effect] in the pathless land.  Me, with my squidgy moral compass think that the actions at Edge were more shameful than Hauser's original sin.  As for TED, someone should give it a revolver, a chair and an empty room.

Phew that's the backstory. Now the contrary science. Contrary science is the only part that is worth reading about.  A million scientific papers a year get indexed in Pubmed the database of biomedical research papers. Most of them are tedious bits of sand in the cement: not even a brick in the wall. There is a well documented phenomenon in the history of science where one study finds something new and exciting (yay! progress); a replication is organised (different place, different researchers, different sample [size]) and finds no such effect; third study agrees with the first; seventh study agrees with second; fifth study has another take entirely. It is the zigzag path to truth. My pal El Asturiano reads http://io9.com/ and kindly filters and fillets it for me, but occasionally I find time to glance there myself.

And today I found this How Can Two Studies Say Cleanliness Makes You More And Less Forgiving? which cites two different studies in the sketchy field of Experimental Ethics where Nosek and Motyl (I'll get it right if I write it often enough) also made their famous contribution. The experimental details  are hidden behind paywalls at the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology and at Psychological Science neither of which should be confused with the Judean People's Science of Psychology or the wholly reprehensible Journal of Splitters' Psychology. That's okay, I guess. Scientific publishing is expensive and in today's on-line world  the Journal of Scientific Woowah has to get something for their fixed costs if they are going to share their (hmmm?) intellectual property. But which, if either or both, of these reports am I going to cough up $40 for?  The one with the best methodology of course. Trisha Greenhalgh has told us eloquently that if the methods, or in these cases the sample sizes, are suspect then we don't need to read the rest of the paper however exciting the conclusions. Shamefully, but normally, the Abstracts don't include any inkling of the sample size or the statistical tests used to come to these more or less opposite conclusions about the Lady Macbeth Effect. The only available variable is the authors' address, so I must conclude that the worzles (we call them culchies in Ireland) of Devon sampled by the PS report have a different moral compass to the street-wise Londoners published by JESP. Hold the Presses!

The replies on the io9 piece extend the argument in useful and informative ways.

Journal of Auspicious Results

This Spring I discovered that the library at The Institute cannot afford the price of an electronic subscription to Nature.  How in the name of Darwin am I meant to teach science, how are my student meant to learn science without access to the general science journal of record?  The library can afford a print subscription, so me and my students may have to fight for the latest journal in the Nature heap.  We are not Harvard, we have no endowment, could Nature Inc. not cut us a deal?  I can hear my old Dad turning over in his grave to say (again) "Well life isn't fair, Bob".

Yesterday, I took occasion to channel my pal Tony in a scarifying indictment of the scientific integrity of the editors and publishers of scientific journals. Sure it was an N=1 anecdote, and I don't believe that any journal editors are culpably corrupt, but I also know that if they rejected every paper submitted because the science inside was flawed then there would be no more journal (and no more pay-check).  When you consider that the average number of times a paper is "cited" is less than one, you may conclude that eliminating half the published literature would have zero impact on the progress of science.  An uncited paper may have been read by somebody, but nobody (cripes, not even the authors themselves in a subsequent paper) has abstracted anything useful from it.

Journals make their money by

• charging a subscription to readers (almost all of the publishers' income for almost all journals is generated by [confidential] bundling deals struck with libraries) 
• or by levying a fee (£1290/$1985/€1515 per article in one random case) on authors  
• . . . or both!  

That same random journal published 851 articles in 2012.  Let's suppose that page charges are waived for, say, a quarter of the papers which are submitted from the Third World, that's still a gross income of €900,000 pa.  That same random journal claims to have an editorial board N=5 and let's give them each a secretary for another N=5.  Office rentals in Dublin have slumped a little to €325 pa per sq.m, so if we give Random Journal 100 sq.m. (about the size of my home), that's only €35,000 a year for the roof.  Many journals nowadays don't produce a paper copy, so they won't need much for the xerox machine but we'll give them €10,000 a year for stationery.  You do the rest of the math.  It's little wonder to me that every week I get unsolicited mail from a cunning entrepreneur from the Third World asking me to submit my next paper to his new Journal of Auspicious Results.

I'll point out to all both my readers who aren't scientists, all the heavy intellectual lifting in the scientific publishing business - all the reviewing of submissions, all the recommendations of acceptance/rejection/editing, all the reanalysis of the statistics, all the reading for internal consistency as well as much of the copy-editing is carried out by fellow scientists for free.  Indeed I spent a day doing this pro bono publico last Monday.

Last Thursday, we celebrated the PhD of my friend and colleague El Asturiano (huzzah!).  At the party afterwards I found an old friend of mine from college days who happened to be in town from South Africa.  I hadn't seen him for 35 years so it was gratifying to see that he had bigger trousers than me, although my hair was grayer.  We caught up and checked for mutual friends and we were soon talking about Win Hide.  By asking me to help teach a course in ZA at the end of the last century, Win had been instrumental in us celebrating Dau.I's 6th birthday by sipping ice-cold chardonnay while watching the sun slip quietly into the sea from the top of Table Mountain.

By way of Googling myself up to date with ons ou weldoener, I found that rather than whinging like me about the iniquities of the science publication industry, Win Hide had taken a stand.  He's no longer working in the old "coloured" University outside Cape Town where the course had been run, but has a position in the Harvard School of Public Health.  But about a year ago, he resigned from the editorial board of Genomics, a key journal for large-scale sequence-based biology.  Because he grew up in South Africa (albeit not in the townships), he felt he could no longer support a system that accepted much of its creative copy from the dispossessed of the Third World and then tilted the economics so that neither those submitting scientists nor even their institutions' libraries could afford the subscription to read their own papers.

There's got to be a better way.

torc torc

Found art is a thing. It's 100 years since Marcel Duchamp presented a signed urinal as an object suitable for an art exhibition. That's clever-clogs enough, but it gets tired when, say, Carl Andre tried [successfully] a similar thing 50 years later. I'll leave the art know-alls to counter Ruskin's crit of another work of art: “I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.”

The Blob was a couple of tales about someone being a) in the right place b) at the right time c) with their eyes truly open d) appropriately educated to see meaning in an object out of place [and time]. Tetradrachm and our own Ringstone. Because good things always - eventually - come in 3s, another found object [wonderfully R] coursed over my horizon last week. Sergio Narciandi is, in order of importance, i) the brother of my pal El Asturiano [polybloboprev] ii) a massive history buff iii) working for the municipal water company.

At the end of August, Sergio was working along a remote part of his infrastructural territory when he saw something glinting in the dirt. Strict anglophones can get the gist here. He wiggled out a fabulous golden torc from the Bronze Age. Because he knows and cares about the common heritage of Asturias, he immediately grassed himself up the the appropriate authorities who gave a little whoop, vacated their desks, piled into a car and drove asap to the spot. Between them, they soon turned up another torc (broken into six parts) and they returned with trowels, sieves and tooth-brushes to stake out and deep clean the area. Nothing beside remains.

There has been a lot of forehead slapping amazement that the discovery and its investigation was a text-book example of how things should proceed: according to law, according to good practice but not, woefully, according to precedent. Far too many people think that found heritage becomes their personal property but such people are usually too ignorant, too selfish, too avaricious to benefit. According to Spanish law treasure trove is the property of the state but the finder gets 25% of it's value. By doing the right thing, Sergio looks to be in line for a windfall of maybe €50,000. The Museo Arqueológico de Asturias is going to do all the leg work and they'll deliver a much better return than the local fence in Covadonga.

www.hostel.blob

O'Manch is leaving us tomorrow: tying up his few belongs in a handkerchief, cutting a stick out of a hedgerow and going on to seek his fortune in London Dublin.  He's got a few leads and contacts but he intends to hunt out a place to stay and a job to come back to after he returns from eSpain, whither he is Ryanair-booked for the first half of May.  For the short week that's in it, he's booked into a couple of different hostels. I have a wide experience of hostels in Dublin, I haven't heard of anyone who has spent more bed-nights in more different hostels in that city.  When I came back from a long walk in Spain ten years ago this summer, I had a part-time job in Dublin so it seemed foolishly extravagant to rent a room when I was only going to use it 2 nights a week.  On the Camino de Santiago, I'd slept in a wide variety of different places, some scabious, some humble but clean, some quite smart.  There was effectively no correlation between the amount of money you were expected to pay and any objective assessment of quality of accommodation.

It therefore seemed foolishly extravagant to spend €50+ on a hotel when an occasional Dublin bed could be had in a hostel for €12 including breakfast.  Very shortly after that I discovered www.hostels.com which cut you a great discount with a credit card and a couple of days notice.  I consciously decided to try a number of different places as a scientific experiment. Data! Most people don't do this: they are so restless that having gone to one city and stayed somewhere good bad or indifferent, they never go back to that city again. They never find out if the accommodation was scuzzy that week because the regular cleaner was sick. You have to take with a pinch of salt the star ratings that appear on booking consolidators: each one is but a clatter of anecdotes.  So here's The Blob's data-driven list.

All of these places include breakfast (tea, toast, cereal, fruit, OJ) and clean sheets, bring your own towel and flip-flops for the showers.

• Isaac's - original and best; a converted warehouse a minute's walk from the main bus station. It's noisy and friendly, has a functioning kitchen. The lobby is the dining room which is kind of welcoming. No en suite bathrooms. El Asturiano stayed here when he was fresh off the boat from Gijón: within a few days he'd networked a job and a place to stay.
• Jacob's - owned by Isaac's but purpose built round the corner, the lobby looks like that of a 3 star hotel and is often milled with people as another tour-bus disgorges its load of American or German tourists but none of them are eating their dinner: the kitchen and dining room are in the back and have no windows.
• Avalon - a bit out from the City Centre but still within walking distance. Spacious communal areas,  Busy and friendly. I was woken, the whole dorm was woken, at 0400rs one morning as three Aussie back-packers started a water fight.
• Kinlay House - which sounds like a homeless shelter but isn't, is a converted Victorian office building with a magnificent staircase and consequent high ceilings at least on the ground floor. The street door is always locked so you have to get buzzed in, which strikes me as unwelcoming.  Nice breakfast.
• Times, College Green - all the accommodation except reception and luggage is upstairs which is rather nice - you can look down on the busy street and the back of the police-station from the kitchen. The building is old and rickety and maze of stairs and corridors.  After all the experiments this is where I finished up as a regular sleeper.
• Times, Camden Lane - should be quiet (it's certainly hard to find the first time) as it's down a little laneway between Camden and Harcourt Streets. But in fact the night-street is deafening as drunken revellers pour out of Copper Face Jack's looking for somewhere to urinate.  The partying was pretty wild inside the hostel as well and, as an early riser, I used to clear up the broken glass before I sat down for a morning cuppa.
• Ashfield House - 100m from O'Connell's Bridge and round the corner from The Times College Green.  Tall & thin with steep stairs. Street outside is very busy and the place always seemed dark with little natural daylight.  But that's the case for a number of other places.
• Abigail's - right on the river with views across to the North-side and all upstairs.  It is built like a continental boutique hotel but with 6 people in each room instead of a couple.  They don't start breakfast until 0900hrs, perhaps to discourage itinerant workers in favour of hangover nursing back-packers.
• Litton Lane - pokey, perky hostel located on a narrow lane up from the river: more or less opposite Abigail's.  It is decorated with musical material because it used to be a recording studio where all the greats cut a disc.

Don't stay in about half these places if you think there is likely to be a fire. Actually the fire-regulations need some consideration because, although the Dept Environment has produced a 60+ page booklet for fire-safety in hostels "The recommendations in this Guide are advisory only and are not statutory requirements". So you don't see this on any of the websites:

O'Manch has partly taken my advice and partly gone off researching on his own - following the stars or a notional score out of 10 on www.booking.com, which he claims gets him a cheaper bed than hostels.com.  I've talked about the Illusion of Control before, but probably not enough. You can do all the research you want, pour the data into an ExCel spreadsheet and analyse it up the wazzoo. But your happiness, or at the least the quality of your night's sleep, will depend on the particular cohort of people with whom you are sharing your room on the night. There is no prior data available for:

4.5 for roncadors/snorers

who will be oblivious as they ruin of your equanimity.  But

3.5  for axe-murderers

will ruin much more.

Long term storage ATCG

I have an old fashioned steel 4-drawer filing cabinet; indeed we have two. One drawer is brimful of correspondence from the 1980s. Through those years I had a manual typewriter and a supply of carbon paper and hammered out a lot of letters to friends and family; so I have copies of letters sent and the incomming as well. That source of vital daily-grind biographer's information dried up and petered out after 1993. That's about a decade after I [early adopter, me] sent my first trans-Atlantic e-mail - that comms medium was getting widely adopted and letters were only appropriate to my parents. At the same time, I started writing everything on a computer and didn't have carbon paper for the printer. The precipitous fall in the cost of international telephone calls meant that letters were no longer a weekly [or more often] occurrence. Almost all of that electronic to-fro has gone forever as I shifted between ISPs and failed to download the traffic. There is an irony in the fact that my poor biographer is going to be better served from the 70s and 80s than s/he will be for the 90s and 00s. The best medium for lifetime storage is plain old fashioned 19thC ink on paper. It's bulky and sensitive to floods and fire but doesn't require special technology to recover.

There are peculiar streetlights on the post 1993 Dark Ages:

• In September 2010, m'pal Rissoles Hayes took his family off to Extremadura for a year. I thought he'd be home-sick, so I wrote something in excess of 30 letters - about once a week. Because the postage was the same up to 100g, I filled the envelope with the kind of shite that I later distilled into a 700 word Blob but send in full . . . at least they had fire-lighters in their casa in Spain.
• Just about the time Chris returned to Wexford, Dau.I left home and country in 2011 and I undertook to write her letters, at least weekly, and send them, in an envelope, with stamps. That project doesn't seem to have lasted as long.

In any case, I have that correspondence for as long as there are USB ports to read my external backup hard-drives. That's a key fact because a lot of 90s correspondence is stored on 3.5in floppy disks [remember them?] which probably could be recovered but only with enormous faff and expense. And, let's face it; nobody is going to write my biography because I have been effectively irrelevant to the relentless progress of history. When MySpace recently lost 50 million files in a server migration fiasco, nobody seemed to mind very much because they've all moved on to other comms platforms. I guess subconsciously, folk accepted that all those songs, all that to-fro, were just ephemera waiting for a strong breeze to flitter it into oblivion.

My correspondent El Asturiano [prev] sent me a tech-geek link about long-term information storage . . . using DNA! I Blobbed about writing English text in a genetic code: in real life the DNA is read in triplet codons which gives 4^3 = 64 permutations: plenty for a 26-letter alphabet. You can have some harmless fun looking for ELVIS in the human genome. Microsoft is behind the cunning plan to convert text to DNA, and recover it when needed. Their prototype pipeline took 21 hours and cost $10,000 to wrote and read "HELLO" but, as I explained recently DNA technology scales up really well; the same technique would cost [in time and money] the same for 5,000 letters as for 5. And DNA being really small scale will pack a helluva lot of information in a very small container. 

The Arch Mission Foundation is about to launch 30 million pages of information in a rocket to the Moon. It is stored on a 100g electronic device and will last forever out there while the creators of all that data trash head-office to hot wet oblivion. Doubtless, the next archive Wikipedia project will send the same material stored in GM Bacillus anthracis spores - they last forever.

It's just an epigenetic phase

There's an arresting moment in Michael Sandel's Harvard lecture series on Justice when he asks his audience who is an only child or the firstborn. Virtually everyone in the room puts up their hand, with the implication that younger sons and daughters are grinding away in some State School because they weren't smart enough to make the Ivy League. One implication of that is: parents lavish care and attention on Dau.I and run out of steam or interest or money for Dau.II, Dau.III and Son.IV.  The idea that some hormonal change makes second and subsequent children duller, if not exactly dullards, is hard to credit. On the other hand, you could note that rich well-connected families are small, while large families come from poorer neighbourhoods which have crappier schools. I think the status of this is that the observation is true but a widely accepted explanation is still awaited. If you a) haven't seen the Sandel Justice lectures b) have teenage children; then they are recommended.  We sat through a chunk of them before Dau.II left home as leaven from serial binge episodes of House, Desperate Housewives, Masterchef and The Wire.

It appears that birth order may affect whether you will grow up gay.  Seems that with each older brother blokes become a third more likely to love blokes. That doesn't mean that all fourth boys are gay; it means that if, say, 5% of #1s are gay then 6.6% of #2s are and 8.8% of #3s. If that's true, and we're still citing only that 2006 study, we're still adrift about the chemical / psychological /genetic mechanisms by which the phenomenon is achieved. Until the observation is incontrovertible, it is a waste of time to talk about, for one widely circulated example, the maternal immune system getting increasingly fed up with all the extra testosterone down there.  Now my pal El Asturiano has flagged a link in the most recent Nature which suggests that gay is probably not genetic but might be epigenetic. He also came up with the neat title to this post.

Epigenetics is a rather hot topic in genetics these past 5 or 10 years. Most famously in the investigations of the Dutch Hongerwinter of 1944-1945.  After the failure of Operation Market Garden [bloboprevious] when capturing Arnhem became A Bridge Too Far, occupied Netherlands suffered a terrible famine because the Germans diverted all available food to their core territory and the Allies were not in a position to make up the calorie deficit. A study in 2008 reported that children who were in utero during those desperately hard times grew up smaller than their siblings who were in process when their mother was comparatively better fed both before and after 1944. In particular they noted that the gene for insulin-like growth factor II (IGF2) was methylated in such a way as to damp down the effectiveness of its growth-promoting protein.  These epigenetic changes don't effect the underlying DNA but they definitely alter the way genes work . . . and the changes can persist into subsequent generations. You can imagine why such epigenetic control might be a good idea: if times are tough and belts are tight you need to be small and hardy to survive but the system needs to be flexible because cyclical good times favour fatter and taller offspring.  John Greally [see below] has written an informative editorial about the current status of epigenetic studies.

The genetics of gay has always been a bit of a conundrum because it is hard to work out how such a trait could be 'adaptive'. Gay people are surely less likely to have offspring than their heterosexual siblings because we are still ultimately dependent on one sperm and one egg to start the next generation and straight people can achieve this union with rather less trouble [5 minutes in the car-park outside a disco is all that is strictly necessary]. Everything-is-driven-by-selection people are therefore reduced to more subtle arguments about women benefitting if they have a gay brother on hand to help with the household chores and raising lots of nieces and nephews. A Nature report finding epigenetic tags to certain genes to be more common among homosexual men is the sort of thing that keeps the journal afloat as the general science journal of record.  Nature is fully commercial and much of the content is firmly behind their paywall, so material that is freely available may have slipped through the editorial process as too-sexy-to-turn-down. And even a cursory reading of the report should set your skepdar a-whirling because the key finding is based on only 37 hetero-homo identical twin pairs AND was only correctly predictive in 2/3rds of the cases. They report "UCLA computational geneticist Tuck Ngun [the lead author] will present the work on 8 October at the American Society of Human Genetics meeting in Baltimore, Maryland".  It's coincidental only in The Blob (because I read Natures out of sync) that just two weeks ago I was writing about a psychological study published by Nature that also allowed sexy to outweigh grossly under-powered to get something into print which should not have been published at all. And it would be good if the editors at Nature would reflect on their own failings when they take the high moral ground to criticise systemic failings in other areas of science and politics.

Well it seems that there was some robust criticism when these sketchy findings were presented to several hundred active researchers at ASHG15 rather than an editorial board that wanted a bit of spicy copy. Among them was John Greally who gave a really stonking talk to Irish Binfos two years ago in Galway.  He was at ASHG15 and blogs about the tearing asunder of the study, and also about the review process that should have stopped the publishing of such a weak preliminary study much earlier.  There's a great pop-sci summary of the methodological flaws in The Atlantic. It's really refreshing to have  a skeptical, clearly written critique of science and the flaws of the scientific process in a glossy magazine. There is another seam of comment and opinion on Metafilter. Now it may turn out that this little dataset is the first feather in the wind of our understanding the developmental under-pinnings of homosexual attraction; but on its own, as it stands, not yet replicated, it means . . . nothing.