A haaandbag?

We were over in England visiting family including my favourite 22 y.o strong woman Dau.I. Somehow, we fell to talking about handbags . . . as you do when getting in touch with your feminine side. I was going on about the over-specification of stuff, so that The Man could sell you two items where one generic item would do for two related purposes. My rucksack, older than Dau.I, has a main section, 33lt in extent with two side-pockets which can each take a 1 litre water-bottle, there are other parts but it is not really much more complicated than that.  15 years after I bought that, I announced my intention of going on my long walk through Spain.  My work-mates clubbed together to buy me a, then modern, ruck-sack that was a labyrinth of zips and Velcro and about 17 separate compartments. It was about as handy as Rowan Atkinson's multiple-zipped trousers.  It weighed 2x more than my old pack and so, in the final packing I took the lighter, older model.

ANNyway, Dau.I was talking about a pal of hers who, having acquired a baby, had bought a hospital/nappy/diaper bag which was full of dinky sections and compartments: for the nappies, the wipes, a spare Babygro, probably disposable gloves, a baby's juice bottle, mother's 15ml slug of gin etc. etc. She said that the most obviously handy thing was that the bag came with a tiny changing mat. Not as a changing mat, because it was really too tiny; but it was really suitable for sitting down on a wet seat while waiting for a bus. The upshot was that she went off to Amazon to see whether there was a hospital/nappy/diaper bag that would do for carrying six novels, a writer's notebook and the other hape-o-stuff that she lugs about on a daily basis.  You can imagine the outcome: for the next several weeks her interweb experience was seen through a gale of advertisements for gripe-water, baby-buggies, mobiles, pop-up books and all the paraphernalia that modern babies require/acquire. I had a similar experience last year with a ludicrous red toaster, which haunted my interweb for about a month.

Years ago, I was privileged to teach courses in molecular evolution and bioinformatics in Norway and Finland.  It was under the auspices of EMBnet, the European quango of which I was the Irish node.  The latest EMBnet wheeze was to print several hundred neoprene mouse-mats with a map of Europe and the EMBnet logo.  My Finnish minder asserted that these were really handy in Finland for sitting at bus-stops without freezing your arse off.  All very well for you, slim-hips, I thought, a sofa-pilot like me would need four mouse-mats and some duct-tape to hold them together. I really enjoyed teaching in Finland, the students had a very dark sense of humour that would often crack me up.

Talking about dark sense of humour, The Beloved was ear-wigging on our earlier conversation about nappy-bags and contingent advertisements. She suggested that the only way to get Amazon off your back was to look for books like "Grieving through miscarriage".  See how the Amazon algorithm deals with that!

Small country Big data

 As my ambition genes were shot off in the war, I was never very successful in science. If I'd cared more about getting ahead, I'd have been better at the hard work of publishing papers and might thereby have gotten tenure at Harvard Little Rock. I applied there immediately after my PhD - not short-listed! But I did have a lurching mostly on-track career in science for 50 years. I was much better at infrastructure than the cutting edge: filling in the pieces behind pioneers to firm up the foundations for the next Great Leap Forward.  In the 1990s I was the Director-and-Sole-Employee of The Irish National Centre for BioInformatics INCBI which made me the Irish node for EMBnet, an EU-funded quango of bioinformatic support centres. The vision for such infrastructural support of Ireland's bioscience revolution was there but the money wasn't. As the cash dribbled away with the century, I was partway along a cunning plan to get a suit and a carry-on bag and sell seats for eBioinformatics, a commercial platform of getting access to the software and databases for cracking the code of the human and other genomes. Tim Littlejohn, the Australian founder and CSO, was preparing to appoint me sales-and-support Europe. It never happened: eBioinformatics didn't grow fast enough for sufficient Venture Capital to be interested and a handful of  Tim-and-my colleagues in EMBnet developed a clunkier but sufficiently effective free platform called EMBOSS which took the wind out of the sails of any commercial venture.

At about the same time another wannabee Merchant Venturer called Kári Stefánsson jumped ship from actual Tenure at Harvard and returned to Iceland [L þinnvellir rift valley] to investigate the genetic basis of MS. He founded a company called deCODE with a business model to sequence the DNA of everyone in Iceland and cross-reference the genetic variants against their disease status. That way, deCODE might be able to identify the key genes for MS predisposition and start to develop effective therapies against the degenerative disease. And while you're about it why not cover other line-items on the medical charts: cardiovascular, diabetes, stroke, cancer . . . I had a brief fantasy about leaving Ireland and whoring myself out in Reykjavik but nothing came of that . . . because ambition genes and because we'd just bought a fantasy farm and the fairies had delivered two infant girls to look after the hens.

deCODE was in the Covid News last week because, for a small country, Iceland has delivered Big Data. There are 50% more people in County Cork than in Iceland. At the beginning of the pandemic Stefánsson offered the facilities at deCODE to the Icelandic Directorate of Health after the equipment started to melt-down at te labs in Landspitali — The National University Hospital of Iceland. deCODE, as a big science genomic centre, has a lot of capacity and the DoH picked up the tab for anyone with the least hint of covid to get tested and resulted within 30 hours. So about half the population got tested; those who were positive were monitored by public health so we have a bunch of outcomes that should be (with caution) translatable to wherever you live.

• 43 % of people who are infected with the virus are without symptoms
• that is exactly the same rate as found in the N. Italian city of Vo which locked down and track-and-traced in the Spring
• the most common symptoms are
• muscle ache
• head ache
• unproductive cough
• not rise in temperature
• The fatality/case rate is 0.3% !
• seasonal 'flu is 0.1%
• median age for Iceland 37yrs is low, so fatality will be higher in countries with more octogenarians.
• Population death rate 7 /100,000 less than 10% of that in USA or Britain. 
• Ireland: 40/100,000
• Norn Iron: 50/100,000

Tourism supports the economy in Iceland and tourists are being allowed back to visit the place where the Atlantic is spreading its plates [whc prev]. After an outbreak blip traced to two scofflaw tourists, stricter control measures are now required: a) either self-quarantine for 14 days on arrival or b) do two screening tests: one on arrival + one  five days later. 20% of people negative in the first round tested positive on second go! These tourists are pretty hot with the Covid. Which only says that the prevalence is high among the demographic which travels.

Non-science matters also

About 18 months ago, I was listening to Sunday Miscellany, a magazine (essays/poems intercalated with music) programme on RTE Radio 1 and thought "I could do one of those".  In the 90s of the last century, I used to write book reviews for an on-line newsletter called EMBnet News and eventually was appointed Book Review Editor for new journal called Briefings in Bioinformatics.  I tried to summarise each book in 500-1000 words, point out the more outrageous typos and give an opinion about whether it was worth buying, borrowing or stealing.  I also tried to add 'a little bit more': a comment, a digression or synthesis that gave the review some substance in itself rather than just being a wart (visible, annoying but not usually metastatic) on the face of the book itself.  You can google up those early efforts to see if they have anything to say 15-20 years later.  So the preferred length for SundayMisc (700 words = 5ish minutes of talking time on air) was comfortable.  It's hardly long-form journalism - a genre for which I have a grá - but it's more than a soundbyte.  Longer than most articles in the Irish Times aNNyway.  I promised myself that I would write a SundayMisc essay each month for a year and I kept going for slightly longer than that, despite the fact that not one was accepted for broadcast.  They were all politely acknowledged by what I took to be a robot until one time I forgot to attach the essay and "The Robot", a nice woman with a very Irish superfluity of consonants called Cliodhna, pointed out the error.  So that's the background for the next posting.

lol internet

How do you identify? I have recently embraced being An Old, but I don't tbh click heels with delight at being a grandparent, although many do, who can. For all my adult years I've considered myself to be EUropean even when [1973-1993] I was strictly EECropean. That was from an ambivalent attitude to the count[r]y where I was born and which I left at the age of 19.  My current book has given me a new sense of identity - as well as being An Old, I am Old Internet; note to self - get a badge made.

Dau.II put me on to Gretchen McCulloch [R], Lauren Gawne and Lingthusiasm, their chatty, fun informative podcast getting enthusiastic about linguistics. Working through four years of back-catalogue, there have been references to Because Internet, Gretchen McCulloch's book on "Understanding the New Rules of Language". I was surprise and delight when I saw that the book was available on the Borrowbox's patchy and eccentric catalogue of audiobooks. Old Internet People [meeeee!] were there before pretty much everyone else. I was using the internet reg'lar for ten years before Tim Berners-Lee invented the WWW. I created an WWW-server and wrote an early Irish website using hand-cranked HTML. I spent rather tooo long, on company time, making 8px x 8px .jpg icons for the ToC for embnet.news, the newsletter of the EUQuango of which INCBI was the Irish node. McCulloch identifies another cohort of Pre-Internet People; these are people of my age who ignored the internet for the longest possible time. These old buffers are really likely to identify as grandparents because they came aboard only/mainly to see photos of distant grandchilder and <ooo frisson> occasionally Skype them.

Another key question for binning the demographics is "did you embrace the internet before or after your parents". Teens keep shifting the territory on which they communicate - Bebo, Facebook, Insta, Tiktok at least partly to be in another room than their parents. Comparing, flirting, checking, nattering are just about impossible if Mum can overhear. Why, it's almost as mortifyin' as knowing your parents have sex. McCulloch is a scholar and a linguist. She's interested in how language is used; like many linguists she's a descriptivist rather than a judgmental proscriptivist. And the internet provides a huge, already transcribed archive of how actual real people talk with each other. This is different from the language used when a linguist is among them taking notes, or when they are writing an essay for school.

When Pat the Salt retired 30 years ago he had a kitchen table with a distant view of the sea and a manual typewriter about the same age as himself. He set about writing stories about his life and times in Africa. Wanari the Salt-trader is wonderfully evocative of a different place and time. Like The Blob, Pat's typings became a daily stream of consciousness tale of events real and imagined concerning people he'd known back in the day. Salty tales of Mountbatten of Burma, whom Pat met in Nigeria in 1965, and his champagne lunches with an androgynous tennis-coach. The magnum opus filled many many xerox boxes of recycled paper. Slightly more than strictly necessary because Pat would . . . use . . . ellipsis . . . to space . . . his thoughts. This form of punctuation is, according to Gretchen McCulloch, widespread in some arenas of the internet. It indicates a chummy informality, partly because it is transgressive of the punctuation rules learned in school. McCulloch traces the habit back to another era and another medium - PostCards - and has analysed a database of hundreds of PCs sent to Ringo Starr in the 1950s and 1960s. 

Informal comms tell us far more about who we are, what we care about, who we care about, than any of the newspapers of record, formal biographies and stately histories with which librarians like to fill their shelves. 

My audiobook of Because Internet is read by the author which is good. As a media commentator with a good ear, she is acutely aware of the medium and has explicitly acknowledged that the spoken word has additional facility for conveying meaning [tone, timbre, emPHASis] which aren't possible in print. BUT it is less easy to catch some important nuances of internet comms: Capitalisation is one example; lol is not the same as LOL. Using the uc/lc conventions of your peers is an important gauge for whether your interlocutor is one of us. McCulloch makes several concessions to make the audio-book a separate product to the dead-tree version. My audio"reader" has a speed button where you can make the voice go 1.25x or even 3.0x faster than it was dictated. That's great if your return deadline looms and you want to finish the book. I might recommend listening to Because Internet at 0.75x speed because nobody would accuse McCulloch of speaking a languid Southern drawl. However, in whatever medium, at whatever speed, read this book, it explains so much about current discourse.