Disgusting?

All this year in Ireland , we have been having the vapours about police corruption and Garda whistle-blowers.  In January, the head of the Gardai Martin Callinan (taking the salute on the left) called the actions of Sgt Maurice McCabe "disgusting".  What McCabe (looking tired out on the right) had done was suggest that some well connected people - judges, Gardai, chap whose cousin is a Garda, husband of lady who cleans out the bins in Ballybogge Garda Barracks - had their penalty points for speeding quashed.  And not because they were trying to get someone to hospital and so had a reasonable excuse for driving a half-ton assault weapon too fast too close to pedestrians.  A transparent and rigidly honest organisation might have thanked him for exposing such dodgy practice.  We have penalty points because there is evidence that excessive speed on the roads kills people and we wish to discourage the practice without banging the perps (including Bob "Two-points" Scientist) up in chokey. We have a flexible and slightly grey official state in Ireland because that's what we want - you never know when you might need planning permission on a new shed or someone to bump your mother up the list for hip-replacement. In all organisations, however, grassing up your mates is deeply and systemically discouraged.  You have to trust each other because, in the army, in the police, in the fire-service your life may depend on your mates.  So it's an ethical and practical dilemma in which most of us don't behave very well. McCabe claims, again with the ring of truth, that his professional life is in rags since he decided to call it like he saw it. Commissioner Callinan's professional life is over: he was forced to fall on his sword by his boss at the Ministry of Justice.  Anyone who is not directly inculpated has been making political capital out of the situation - grandstanding, calling press-conferences and trying to get themselves into the photo, any photo - preferably in the local paper which all the voters read.

Notablespot-hogs are the members of the Dáil Éireann Public Accounts Committee, including the articulate and sassy Mary-Lou McDonald (Sinn Féin) and self-appointed scourge of corruption Shane Ross (Indep.) and the Chair John McGuinness (FF, Carlow-Kilkenny).  It's a tough job for a public representative but somebody has to do it. They are also laying into Rehab, a traditionally Fine Gael good works organisation which diverts a substantive chunk of their government funding to salary and pension of the senior executives. Rehab are currently taking the heat off the CRC, a traditionally Fianna Fáil good works organisation which diverts a substantive chunk of their government funding to salary and pension of the senior executives.  Am I the only one of the country who is reminded of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the parallel but unconnected House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) ?  Those worthies on the 1950s made hay (using a powerful metaphor chipper&shredder) out of root and branch extirpation of things of which they disapproved.

On the subject of not behaving very well, I've written about men bullying women with impunity in my own cosy academic organisation and also about tolerating innocent children duffing smaller children up, so that shopping your peers becomes established early as something that is streng verboten.  The title to the first of these links is "Nobody Died But . . ." and the same could be said about Frank "Paco" Serpico.  Like Maurice McCabe, Serpico was a police whistleblower: in the NYPD in the late 1960s and early 70s.  Corruption was rather more than doing a nixer for your neighbour about an inconvenient speeding rap.  Serpico used to see his colleagues pocketing half the evidence when they made plain-clothes drug-busts.  But then again, as my pal Pepe Malpica pointed out 20 years ago, Ireland will ever be in the ha'penny place when it comes to corruption.  Serpico complained about the behaviour of his colleagues to those higher up the NYPD food-chain and was either ignored or told to shut-up.  On 3rd Feb 1971, Serpico was shot in the face during a drug-raid and there is a strong suspicion that he was set up to take the hit by his team.  Certainly they let him bleed on the floor rather than making a "Man Down" call to get medical help instanter. I don't think that the quashers of penalty points would do that to McCabe.  Although no Garda would get one of their own murdered, it is clear from the Smithwick Tribunal that some of them were happy to call the shots (literally) on their oppos from the RUC. Or if not exactly happy, not unhappy enough through “some misguided sense of loyalty” to identify their colleague(s) who was more inclined towards IRA than RUC. Serpico is retired now and celebrating his 78th birthday today.  The world, not just NYC because the they made a compelling film of his story, is a better place for his actions.

GUBU

On this day in 1982 the then Attorney General (the chief law officer of the country and adviser to the government on all legal matters), Patrick Connelly, resigned.  Falling on your metaphorical sword is much less common in Irish political circles than, say, in Britain. I'm not sure if it's a devil-may-care-but-I-don't tolerance here or a limpet-like adherence to the trappings and salary of power.  Twenty years ago, for example, a Minister of State was found cruising through a sea of male prostitutes in the Phoenix Park and he maintained his position, and indeed is still a TD now.  That's fine with me but I was surprised it was tolerated by his government colleagues as it's not the sort of action that's guaranteed to secure a landslide of votes at the next election.

Ten years earlier in late July 1982, and not a mile from The Cruising, a young woman was bludgeoned to death so that an unhinged idler called Malcolm MacArthur could have the exclusive use of her car. He needed wheels so that he could go out and buy a gun down the country.  He needed the gun so that he could rob a few banks to restore his depleted funds.  Having a dead body in the back of the car made it too difficult to drive in broad daylight to Edenderry that afternoon, so it wasn't until three days later that MacArthur went out to purchase the gun that had been advertised for sale.  MacArthur's first action with his new acquisition was to shoot the vendor and steal his car to return to Dublin.  This was grist to the tabloid mill and the police eventually ran the murderer down . . . in the home of the Attorney General.  The irony was too great to allow AG Patrick Connelly to survive in government.  The Taoiseach of day Charles Haughey spluttered about "a bizarre happening, an unprecedented situation, a grotesque situation, an almost unbelievable mischance."  As if the louche acquaintances of his legal adviser were tolerably odd rather than exposing a systemic something rotten in the state of Dublin.  Conor Cruise O'Brien, journalist and opposition insider, abstracted the adjectives from Haughey's statement and clagged them into the acronym GUBU which has become rather a cliche over succeeding years.

Ten years after this first of many GUBU events, Haughey was back in power as Taoiseach and I was getting to know a new friend from Madrid.  Jose-Maria "Pepe" Malpica was visiting TCD on a year's sabbatical from his Institute in Spain.  Over coffee one morning I was explaining to Pepe just how corrupt the country was. The latest of gubu shenanigan might have been that the Taoiseach was having his shirts tailored by Charvet in Paris and getting them delivered by diplomatic bag - I forget.  Pepe pulled himself up and patriotically asserted "You call that corruption?  That's small potatoes my friend.  If you want true corruption you must come to Spain, we do things bigger there".  Pepe died a few years ago, I miss him.

St Patrick's diplomacy

If you're getting complacent in your St Patrick's Day nostalgia, the picture above will shake you to your boot-heels. It was put up on Social Media to promote Paddy's Day at the Railtown Café in Vancouver BC and created a diplomatic incident drawing adverse and ironic comment from all over. Railtown is the sort of place that shows a salad with a slogan "If looks could kale . . ." The dribbly Guinness picture has since been removed from the interweb and if you turn up there today with an Irish passport, you'll get a free pint and a chaser of Old Jimmy. I was writing the other day about pretentious gittery. There are experts in any field and there are people who go through the motions of being a connoisseur [from the French to know] but are basically all bark and no trousers.Wine is a case in point. Far too many men make a big palaver about choosing the wine at a restaurant and then make a big show of congratulating themselves for making such a wise choice. They'd be more honest if they just scanned the wine list and chose the second cheapest claret.  Those who drink Guinness used to assert that they could taste the difference between a pint brewed in St James's Gate in Dublin from one brewed in Park Royal in West London. But they never put themselves to a blind tasting under controlled conditions; they just mouthed off about how this pint wasn't the same as that one and how they longed to be back in Morrissey's of Abbeyleix - which was, and is, conveniently halfway between Dublin and Cork before they built the motorway.

25 years ago, I used to drink pints of Guinness a couple of times each week to keep the boss company but my heart wasn't in it and it was a relief when the Summer came round and we could switch to lagers. When I got old enough to resist peer-pressure, I switched to Smithwick's ale which is less of a challenge and less full of hang-over inducing congeners: you may keep your fusel oil, tannin and acetone.  The Irish Bar is a marketing device which has garnered million$ for those who export Irish road-signs and photographs of the 1923 All Ireland GAA champions to Kuala Lumpur and Budapest. Whatever else they serve, there will be Guinness on tap as that is a quintessential part of the Oirish Experience.

Years ago, a couple of years after I'd met my pal Pepe Malpica, The Beloved and I were on holiday in Spain and spent a couple of days at Pepe's gaff in suburban Madrid. He arranged for me to give a seminar at his institute and I was happy to do that as part of the the process of scientific networking. I reckoned it would also increase his street cred by having an foreign national giving a talk there. After the talk, he propelled me along the corridor to meet The Director - who'd been far far too busy to come to the talk. We were introduced, we shook hands, we made small talk for 90 seconds and then we were bounced out to the PA's office. Pepe talked rapidly in Spanish, I was told to sign a slip of paper and an envelope was thrust into my hands. In the hall outside, I opened the envelope to reveal a fat wad of pesetas - something like €200 is today's money. I was amazed and immediately offered to cut Pepe in for half. He was appalled and in full hidalgo mode said that I had impugned his honour by suggesting such a thing; the money was an honorarium and standard practice in that place for foreign dignitaries.  Anyway, he continued, I've got a treat for you.

Apparently his presence wasn't required for the rest of the afternoon and we drove for many miles through the suburbs of Madrid until we pulled up outside an apartment complex with a little row of retail outlets at street level. One of them was an Irish Bar and we spent the rest of the afternoon in there. He wasn't above letting me buy the first round of pints from my new found wealth. In among the usual paraphernalia that you get in such places, there was a python in permanent siesta mode behind the bar in a glass case. That was either super-ironic - St Patrick is supposed to have driven the snakes from Ireland - or just bonkers. I don't think it will catch on in Abbeyleix.

Homage to Catalonia

Title is Homage to George Orwell [prevoblobs] who was fighting there in the Spanish Civil War. Ever since I read H2C as a teenager - along with every other word of Orwell's that I could dredge up - I've flagged the Catalans as the Good Guys. The last hold out against the grey tide of fascism. I was schooled to adopt a less black-and-white view of Spanish politics when I got to be good friends with Pepe Malpica 25 years ago. There were good people on both sides of the barricades who were  sincere in their beliefs and anxieties. After such hideous internecine warfare comes to an end, you, me, we have to move on and the Spanish adopted a collective amnesia, so that after three generations the wounds are healing.

I don't really have a locus standi on the independence referendum that was carried out in Catalonia two weeks ago. It's the same sort of thing as Brexit, about which, as a horse European born in a stable in Dover, I have strong feelings. I believe in SS Europe The Good Ship Europa, especially the aspiration to equilibrate upwards: the belief that a larger market and free-movement would generate so much extra wealth that the poorest outposts of the continent would no longer be dispossessed. Poverty is not just about money, it's about culture and different ideas, and sharing. I found out last week that, in PIE Proto-Indo-European, the word for give was the same as the word for take. Back then on the steppes of Kazakhstan exchange was an essential part of life.
And please note, as did my pal Russ, that "believing in SS Europe" would stretch my politics further right than I feel comfortable about. Big red face on those nautical metaphors.

Strange Maps had a commentary on the prospects of succession in Catalonia which included the map at the head of this post which was created by redditor bezzleford.  I love that map: the flags [multiprev], the borders, the quirkiness of the displayed data, the unexpected findings and the new information.  The snapshot doesn't flag the changes to the map of Europe where a region has already achieved its independence.  Think Slovenia, the first of the regions of the Former Yugoslavia to go it alone.  They achieved this aim in a mere 10 Day War  of succession in 1991, at least partly because the central government in Belgrade was stacked with Serbs and there were only a handful of Serbs in Slovenia.

It was bloodier, longer and uglier in, say, Bosnia which I still associate with Srebenitsa, pogrom, and ethnic cleansing. And part of the reason for that is because the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina was and is ethnically and religiously heterogeneous. Bosna i Hercegovina aka Боснa и Херцеговина is now separated into two autonomous regions with a yellow cherry on top called Brčko. [map L]. The red area is now an autonomous region of the country which calls itself Republika Srpska or Република Српскa. It is a separate auronomous entity from 'the rest' of the country Federacija Bosne i Hercegovine aka Федерација Босне и Херцеговине. It looks like a desperate example of gerrymandering but actually closely tracks the ceasefire line at the end of the Bosnian War. This wiggly line is known as the Inter-Entity Boundary Line Međuentitetska linija / Међуентитеска линија. Although there are two constituent parts of the country, there are three constituent ethnicities which fall out on consistent religious and linguistic lines:

Group	% Pop	Religion
Bosniaks	51%	Sunni Islam
Serbs	31%	Orthodox
Croats	14%	Catholic

There are three official languages, too, but they are essentially the same as variants of Serbo-Croatian. The Serbs preferring to write theirs in Cyrillic. The two blue exclaves at the top of this map don't make sense until you realise that they are just across the border from Croatia. And what about Brčko, the yellow hinge between the two flanges of Srpska?  There, the demographics between Serbs vs Bosniak-Croats are more nearly equal and it is currently run as a sort of condominium. According to the Guardian 3 years ago; it is a beacon of multicultural hope . . . a bit like Lebanon was before it collapsed into its own civil war 30 years ago. It will come as no surprise that Srpska appears on bezzleford's map with more than 50% of the inhabitants favouring independence. They have to sort out Brčko first, I hope they are less black and white there than they were in Sebrenitsa

Just about 15mm NW on the Eurosplit map above is another purple (>50% wanting out) enclave called Veneto which wants to pursue its own dreams independent of the rest of Italy. Where does that leave Friuli-Venezia Giulia [L. zoomed in and coloured red]? An exclave of Italy, is where! This map also identifies where Slovenia SVN and Croatia HRV fit w.r.t Italy, Austria AUT and Bosnia Herzegovina BiH. While self-determination is all well-and-good some consideration should be given to how your self-determination impinges on other people especially neighbours. Ireland isolated by Brexit, Friuli isolated Venexit, Brčko maybe disolated by Srpska in the future.

That-all only deals with geographic divisions. Many of the self-det movements are driven by an unwillingness to help neighbours less fortunate that ourselves.

• Barcelona wanting to dump Andalucia; 
• London [which is a 12% entity on the Eurosplit map] wants to ring-fence itself from The Tanned Other; There is a vulgar substratum of English yobs who really believe that wogs begin at Calais.
• Lega Nord (full name Lega Nord per l'Indipendenza della Padania), which includes Liga Veneta wanting to ditch "Africa", which they consider starts just South of Rome. Padania is more or less cognate with Cisalpine Gaul which Julius Caesar left when he crossed the Rubicon on his march to supreme power.

Other self-det movements are pushed by a sort of romantic vision of history being used as an aspiration for a still rosier future. Last weekend there was an apologist for Catalan independence talking with Marian Finucane on RTE1 about how being a Catalan wasn't a matter of language or genetics but was a sort cultural sense of being. He mentioned that the Catalan 'spirit' had been stifled, if not actually crushed, by 300 years of Castillian misrule. To which Finucane chirped up that 'we' in Ireland had been similarly oppressed for 800 years by our larger neighbour. In her wobbly little noddle, I know that she was referring to my protestant ancestors. It's only a step from there for her to invite me and mine to go back where I came from to preserve the holy fantasy land of Ireland for Caitlín Ní Uallacháin and young subtle Conchubar, dancing at the cross-roads; Niall of the Nine Hostages tucking into colcannon, and Waterford winning the All Ireland. This is the most egregious sentimental nonsense: I have far more in common with a white man from Boston, a scientist from Turkey or a middle class professional mother of two from anywhere on the planet than I do with half the people whom I meet on the road home from work.

Patriotism? The last refuge of the scoundrel.

Samuel "Dictionary" Johnson

Kuru

I've bigged myself up by claiming to have been on intimate terms with (aka in the same room as) several Nobel Prize winners.  Until I wrote about my Dad's sad conundrum yesterday, I had completely forgotten another Nobellist with whom I exchanged two sentences at the end of the last century.  I was then working in (one of) the top-flight departments in Ireland. The Chief was a superlative networker and, no more than me, a serious Nobel groupie.  One day a strange bear of a man rocked up to morning coffee with El Jefe and it transpired that Ursus might be coming to spend some sort of sabbatical in the department. I met my good friend Pepe Malpica when he came on sabbatical, so I thought another such was a Good Thing . . . in principal. Turned out to be Carleton Gajdusek, an anthropologist who had made amazing discoveries in New Guinea in the 1950s.  The community Gajdusek was embedded in and studying suffered from a strange disease called Kuru that was symptomatically similar to a fatal degenerative neural ataxia disorder (meaning they walk wonky and then die) called scrapie in sheep.  Those unfortunates who inevitably succumbed to the disease also revealed the same sort of characteristic lesions in their brains. Gajdusek did the autopsies; he also worked out that the mechanism of transmission was through ritual funerary cannibalism.  That's pretty cool as a successful research project and Gajdusek was awarded a half share of the 1976 Nobel for Medicine.  I think most of us were a little in awe of  this distinguished visitor, so there wasn't much chit-chat.

This was years before Wikipedia became a twinkle in the eye of Jimmy Wales and Google was just a struggling hatchling (remember Atlavista anyone?), so instant information gratification was not freely available for all.  The following day, however, new information was seeping under the front door and spreading rapidly across our community.  Soon enough we all had our metaphorical feet wet with the news that, as well as being embedded in the culture he was studying, Gajdusek was bedding a lot of their young chaps in his hut.  He was furthermore sponsoring them to come back to the US with him to get a Western education.  More then 50 of these youngsters, a generation from sporting phallocrypts and eating their grandfather's brains went off to school in the US.  Years later, one of these fellows denounced Gajdusek, who was duly convicted of child molestation and did 12 months in chokey.  After serving his time he was allowed to go to Europe on unsupervised probation and it was towards the beginning of his itinerary round the Old Continent that he turned up in Dublin.

The newly informed atmosphere was decidedly chillier the following day as people passed their own judgment on the old (75 y.o.) man.  Whether for that collective shoulder or the promise of better croissants elsewhere, he drifted out of our lives about as quickly as he'd appeared, lived in Amsterdam and Paris and finally died ten years later in Tromsø. You can hear Gajdusek's side of the story as a 10 minute clip from a longer documentary: he's quite 'black'; you can also hear there a faceless 'white' voiceover tsk-tsking about the whole worrying story. Do you think that the truth of some of those 50 tales might be in the wide spectrum of grey? With my skittery moral compass, I try to reflect on how I would behave in particular and maybe peculiar circumstances that have been condemned-by-all afterwards.  I don't think I behaved terribly well in l'affaire Gajdusek, my position was flabby and sheepish (in both senses), poorly considered and rather shallow.   I doubt if, presented with a similar situation now, I would behave much better.  But then neither would you.

When we talk about bikes

The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. 

Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. 

Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.

Iris Murdoch. 

Were we on [about] our bikes? We were. The thing is that you can fix your bicycle. It's just cogs, wires, nuts & bolts. Between 1990 and 1996, living outside of Dublin, 12km from my place of work in the city centre, I clocked up 40,000km on my bike. If I'd been less locked into going to&fro to earn an honest crust at the frontiers of science, I could have cycled round the world! It was a good solution. Except at 0430hrs or on Sunday morning, my bike was the fastest way to get to town: the bus didn't even cross the Liffey and I had to walk the last 10 minutes. We had a car and free parking but with each passing year, I would have to leave 5 minutes earlier to start work close to 0900hrs by car. As an academic researcher, there was no clocking in, which meant that if it was raining stair-rods after breakfast, I could wait 20 minutes for the shower to pass through.

Did I mention that my running costs were, like, zero? That my calves were like knotted cords? That one of my three original ideas in science came to me as I labored through Artane on my way to work?

I wasn't obsessive, but I maintained my wheels at weekends and replaced brakes, cables, tires, tubes myself. There were limits: after about 20,000km, I broke a spoke on the front wheel whacking into a pot-hole. I bought a new spoke and a spoke-tensioning key and fixed on the replacement but getting the wheel in true just transferred tension to another spoke elsewhere in the assembly which went sproinnng on me a few days later; and that fix cause another break. My pal Pepe Malpica was on his sabbatical year in Dublin and he asked "Why don't you just buy a new wheel?" Smart boy wanted! I obeyed and that wheel lasted for the neext 20,000km until it (and I) became a road traffic accident. I survived with broken bones but my reliable, trusty, cheap-and-cheerful pink roadbike was gePretzeled.  I had come off my bike unexpectedly before - when a rush-hour car driver abruptly changed lanes in front of me - but I haven't owned a bike since, It's not really feasible to cycle 40km to work with my old knees; although I have done the round trip once.

Solutions for car-free cities: Utrecht - Groningen - Nijmegen - Amsterdam [prev] - Copenhagen
In Netherlands 75% of 2ndry students cycle to school. In Ireland it is too dangerous so The Mammy drives them, which causes a log-jam in morning rush-hours; makes walking to school too dangerous for kids; and piles on the flab. Wired list of 20 Top Bike Cities.

Last word to Chris Boardman.

hahahahaha incommmming

My late lamented compañero Pepe Malpica was rightly proud that his last publication was accepted in the first issue of PLOS One. Pepe was good copy and great fun because he'd often have a different way of viewing the world. PLOS One was, and is, exciting because of its business model: "papers are not to be excluded on the basis of lack of perceived importance or adherence to a scientific field". Submissions are indeed peer-reviewed but only to check the methods section; context, relevance and scientific significance are excluded from the reviewers brief. Good thing too, because a couple of peers bring their own baggage and [limited, because not infinite] experience to the table and you would not want them (or me, or you) to be the sole arbiters of what gets out into the public domain. You have to allow mavericks like Pepe to break out of the box and frame scientific questions differently. Otherwise it's just a mighty - and mighty expensive - echo-chamber.

In that sense, PLOS One can be a little like the IgNobel Awards whose watch-word is "first they make you laugh, then they make you think". Of course, for most people, most papers, most of the time are just zzzzzzzzzzzzz. And that's one of the most wonderful aspects of the electronic world we live in: nobody needs to take the whole journal to read the one paper a month that is of interest. That saves a lot of dusty paper.  "zzzzzzzzzzz" is on message because now we're looking at Hahahahaha, Duuuuude, Yeeessss!: A two-parameter characterization of stretchable words and the dynamics of mistypings and misspellings a recent paper in PLOS One. Because PLOS is the Public Library of Science y'all can read the whole thing without having to mortgage your firstborn for the subscription price. If you can read the whole thing without the Furrowed Brow of Bafflement then you're a brighter star than me. But the paper is useful because it focuses [my] attention on repeated elements.

1. Romanian soccer commentator Ille Dobre has the longest recorded single breath call of goooaaalll! When the pubs re-open be sure to impress your pals with that fact with or without a hat-tip to The Blob. And for the love of god without an attempt to emulate this feat - that way apoplexy beckons.If you need help being a bloke-in-a-pub, then Moss has you covered with Bluffball.
2. One of the advantages of having a thick-as-pig-dribble phone like my so so retro  Nokia 3310  is that each letter takes ~2 keystrokes on average, so it damps the temptation to writing incommmming rather than merely incommming. The other huge benefit is that its sad-sack text-only processor acts as a really effective emoticon filter - text me your 👱😜👿🙈 nonsense and it comes in as □□□□. Often this is the sole content of the incommming txt. But emojis, as well as being fashion accessories, are phatic comms [metaphorical hugs and mutual de-lousing] rather than data-comms [actual information].
3. Back in the day when it was either quill pens or typewriters [remember them?], you had a choice of upper case CAPITALS or lower case, all fixed width fonts so i occupied the same space as w. You will have noticed that The Blob is quite pedantic about putting species names Orycteropus afer in italics. Because that is how it is done. But in typewriter days no italics so, by convention, underlining was used to represent italics. I have seen folks trying to use another form of emphasis by backspacing and retyping the relevant word a tuthree times to make it bold. We haven't got there yet but there's great scope for incorporating colour into manuscripts to add meta-meaning to the text. 
• Kelly green "#4CBB17" will do for Irish references
• Orange "#FFA500" for marmalade excursions or fried fish
• Dull red "#990000" for fury
• Cambridge "#3d85c6" vs Oxford"#002147" if you're British
• There's a war on about what best represents the Democrats this "#3333FF" or that " #00A6EF" 
• and Republicans are divided been electric #DE0100 or plain #E9141D red
• But then again maybe this train has left the station with Emojis
4. Apart from being longer and consuming more electrons on the server, is there any downside to having hahaha or hahahaha? Nope! But there is a definite downside to having CAGCAGCAGCAG rather than CAGCAGCAG in your genome. This CAG-repeat is a stutter in one of our standard genes, called huntingtin or HTT.  CAG codes for the amino acid Glutamine and you and I probably have a different length of this repeated motif in that gene: the normal range being from 6 to 35 copies. Some families have accumulated a much longer CAG_n tract. The longer the repeated unit, the earlier and the more severe will be the onset of Huntington's Disease. HD is what killed Woody Guthrie. I can see I'll have to write longer and deeper about these trinucleotide repeat disorders of which HD is but one.

Actually (revenons nous a nos moooooutons), you might skip all the math and jargon in that PLOS One paper the conclusions are discursive and interesting.

Mutual Aid

When he was young, my late lamented pal Pepe Malpica managed the family farm in Extremadura while holding down a full-time job in Madrid. Every Friday evening he'd leave work, pick up his wife and two small boys and drive 250km SE to Cáceres. Late on Sunday evening, having put in 30 hours of solid work, the family would drive back to Madrid and sleep the sleep of virtuous work. When he came to TCD, on a well-earned sabbatical year in 1992, he compared his hard-chaw farming with farming in Ireland "The fields are green year round; the rains come reliably and rarely too much; all Irish farmers need do is turn the cattle out in the morning and call them back in, several kilos heavier, in the evening." The criticism was offered with an ironic twinkle that turned away indignation but there was a dig there as well. All things are relative and I don't imagine that Pepe would consider Extremaduran farming a doddle compared to hard scrabble subsistence farming in the Sahel trying to raise enough millet Pennisetum glaucum or sorghum/milo Sorghum bicolor to keep the kids from starvation.

 So much to contend with in Sub-Saharan Africa which are irrelevant in Europe: locusts, sand-storms, army-worms; and above all, drought. In the largely artificial capital intensive agricultural systems of The West, monocultures covering prairie-sized fields are not only possible but economically desirable. No farmer in the US Midwest, who can spell the word, believes that the relentless pounding of the soil with corn and soya is sustainable. It is only possible with a) cheap oil to drive the mighty tractors, b) Monsanto to kill everything that impacts on yield and c) depletion of the Ogallala aquifer until it squeaks.

It has long been recognised that intercropping food crops with other species can yield paradoxical benefits. The economic success of pre-Columbian MesoAmerican empires came from the mutually supportive Three Sisters triad of corn, squash and beans. Beans fix atmospheric nitrogen, so all the players can make proteins; the corn provides the bean-pole; while the squash provides water-conserving and weed-suppressing ground-cover. The fact that all three sisters provide something worth eating is almost a by-product: succotash, corn-pone, calabacitas con elote, all mmmmm good.

In the Sahel, the growth limiting factor is almost always water; even in the "old" soils of Africa, lack of minerals, nitrogen and phosphorus is not the deal-breaker. It has been recognised since the 1930s that some plants, like catclaw Acacia gregii and sagebrush Artemesia tridentata are valuable for hydraulic lift. In simple terms, these perennial shrubs can develop a root-system that can tap into deep water . . . and redistribute it where annual crops like millet and milo can use it. They're a bit vague about how this works but the transfer appears to take place underground which implies that the roots of different species are talking to each other.

Nate Bogie is a BSc+PhD Effective working Teamrat Ghezzehei's Soil Physics lab in UC Merced, California. They have zeroed in on a native West African shrub Guiera senegalensis which is tolerated in fields of millet and groundnut Arachis hypogea at least in Senegal where their experiments were carried out. The picture above says it all. The scrawny pathetic plot on the left is millet monoculture; the lushness on the right is millet with added Guiera. The final count was that added shrub multiplied the millet biomass by 10x to about 2 tonnes per hectare and the seed bearing capacity was increased seven-fold. Read the details of their research trying to tease how it works. For me, for now, the bottom line is that the association works . . . wonders.

Sefarad

And the captivity of this host of the children of Israel, that are among the Canaanites, even unto Zarephath, and the captivity of Jerusalem, that is in Sepharad, shall possess the cities of the South. Obadiah 1:20.

This is the only mention of the place Sepharad / Sefarad / Sfard in the Old Testament.  But like early American settlers named their towns after places in the Bible (Lebanon NH, Dothan AL, Salem everywhere), the Iberian Jews referred to their home-place as Sefarad and they themselves accordingly became Sephardim (  סְפָרַדִּי) which distinguishes them from the Ashkenazi Jews of Northern Europe. They landed up here because Islam was particularly tolerant of any monotheists "the people of the book". That's not to say that Muslims are notably anti-anti-semitic, they can't even extend tolerance to different sects (Sunni, Shi'a) of their own religion and nor can Christians (Cathars, Catholics, Protestants, Quakers). Al Andalus ( الأندلس‎,) was a Garden of Eden and pleasure to live in or see, and after the 70 AD expulsion of Jews from Palestine by the Romans in a Stalinist relocation, many of them finished up in the paradise that the Emirate of Cordoba [in about 1000 AD all the green bits L] was making out of the peninsula. The next 500 years was a long drawn out process which gradually whittled the Empire of the Arabs to a tiny enclave in Granada. This reconquista is marked by the many towns and villages across Spain with the suffix de la Frontera. Jerez de la Frontera is where they make Sherry, for example.

Los Reyes Católicos  Fernando II de Aragón e Isabel I de Castilla united the Christians for the final push South and gave the Muslims a good drubbing at the Battle of Granada in late 1491, which led Emir Muhammad XII, whom we know as Boabdil, to surrender the city and the complex of rich agricultural holdings in the surrounding countryside to Ferdinand and Isabella (everyone in this story gets their name mangled).  The treaty of surrender was pragmatically tolerant and allowed the Jews and Muslims to retain their holdings. Pragmatic because the Muslim peasants were the only people with generations of experience managing the irrigation system. But within 3 months the Catholic Kings got a bee in their bonnet about the Jews and on 31st March 1492 signed an edict of expulsion to take effect four months later on 31st July the same year. Which makes them a tiny bit more compassionate than Idi Amin expelling the Ugandan Asians with 90 days notice in 1972.  It took just over 100 years before the patience of the Catholic hierarchy for converting Muslims finally reached the end of its tether and the remaining followers of The Prophet were also expelled in 1609.  Those of both faiths who chose to remain had to convert and became Nuevo Cristianos or Conversos.  If you think that Anne Frank had a hard time hiding away for 4 years in Amsterdam, reflect on these people having to live a double life for generations. The Inquisition would be happy to take denunciations from the neighbours if they were seen to refuse a pork chop or behave a little strangely at Easter / Passover.  Those Sephardim who weren't knifed for the diamonds they were rumoured to have swallowed, took their faith with them and went to seek their fortunes elsewhere, notably in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire (Thessaloniki, Smyrna, and Sarajevo absorbed many). They also took their language Ladino which is based on medieval Spanish the way Yiddish is based on medieval German.

Now here's coincidence that has bothered me for a long time. 1492 is one of the dates that everybode kno, like 1066.  Because

in fourteen hundred and ninety-two

Columbus sailed the ocean blue

which at the time was a small-small thing compared to the momentous events in Al-Andalus but a giant step for mankind. There is a bit of whisper that old Cristoforo. who was born in Genoa but didn't speak Italian and left a weird will, was Jewish and that he sailed on the first tide after the Alhambra Degree became absolute. Now that's not true!  He waited until 3rd August.

So far, so far away. But the Spanish government, for reasons which are beset with fuzzy-thinking, are in the process of passing a law to give Spanish citizenship to the descendants of those expelled more than 500 years ago.  There is an estimate of 225,000 being the Jewish population of Spain in 1492, and there are 45,000 now.  But the Irish diaspora, running the Chicago police department and supplying an occasional POTUS, outnumbers the current inhabitants of the island by at least 10 to 1 and possibly double that.  So the bureaucrats working under Spanish Minister of Justice Alberto Ruiz-Gallardon will have to work out the logistics of his sentimental gesture (see also Turing, and Guildford for further examples of revisonist nonsense|). Someone has published a list of qualifying surnames in Israel and there has been a lot of interest. Apparently the ability to speak Ladino will also allow you an EU passport. As Judaism is a matrilineal religion (because everyone knows who your mother was but your father could have been the milkman), then I can imagine an enterprising company getting a kit to test the mitochondrial genome (which is inherited from the mother because the sperm delivers no mitochondria to the fertilisation process) for "Sephardism".  Testing the Y chromosome is as irrelevant as looking to the surname for establishing Jewishness.

There was a minor scandal in 1990s Ireland when the Prime Minister Charles Haughey organised an Irish passport for a Maltese businessman who had been generous to his Fianna Fáil party.  If my pal Malpica is correct in his assertion that Spain is much better at corruption than the Irish, then there is going to be an unseemly scrum for Ladino classes in South America.