Doubting equinox

As Dava Sobel explained in her book Longitude, determining precise details of the position of the stars above the horizon is [only?] of vital importance for navigation at sea. Nobody on land is going to die if their observation of Rigel or Sirius is faulty by a few degrees or a few minutes. At sea, especially nearing land after an oceanic voyage, particularly in dirty weather, you really need to know where you were on your last clear sighting of a known star. Otherwise you are likely to pile up on a Scillian reef like Sir Cloudsley Shovell and hundreds of his sailors did on 23 October 1707. So for astronomical data you defer to United States Naval Observatory (USNO) and/or United Kingdom Hydrographic Office (UKHO) probably even if you are part of La Francophonie. I had two txt-greets yesterday from tree-hugging pals saying "Happy Solstice".  Which I had to say was wrong wrong almost right because the Solstice isn't always on the 21st December, but swings between the 20th and 22nd and this year it falls at 0448hrs UCT today 22nd December 2015.  In the period 1900-2100 the Winter solstice has fallen 5 times on the 20th; 103 times on the 21st; 91 times on the 22nd and in 1903 edged 20 minutes over into the 23rd.  So dear readers, before you make a faux pas over the equinox this coming March check with the US military.  I can just see your pagan gods face-handing upstairs "Jaysus! They've got it wrong again, if our loyalest supporters are going to get their kit off to dance in midwinter could they not get the date right?".

There are two things going on at midwinter that don't match up precisely. It would be a lot more convenient if the Earth rotated on its axis exactly 28x more than the Moon went round the Earth. Actually it would be better still if the ratio was 30x and the Earth's journey round the Sun took exactly 12 of these integer moonths. But Zeus and Loki and Ganesh have arranged it as a mathematical challenge. The solstice is about the obliquity of the axis [N pole to S pole] about which the Earth turns w.r.t. the plane about which the Earth orbits the Sun. This angle is 23.4 degrees and explains [not here though!] why the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn are 23.4 above and below the Equator. Weirdly and wonderfully the Earth shuffles round on its orbit with the tilt always pointing in the same direction. When the the N pole is pointing as near as it can directly at the Sun, then that's the Solstice. From our Earthbound Northern Hemisphere point of view, the rising Sun creeps closer and closer to a most Southerly point [sun-stand-still prevlier]and then edges back North again.  Stonehenge and Newgrange are aligned to this point on the horizon.

The other thing that is off centre is that Earth's orbit is not precisely circular as required by Plato with his celestial spheres singing their heavenly song. Ptolemy had to fudge the actual data with a raft of secondary circular epicycles to force 'circularly' on the heavens.  Copernicus had a great leap forward when he suggested that planetary and starry prediction would be easier with the Sun at the centre rather than Jerusalem or Alexandria. As Koestler [prevlier] explained in his book Sleepwalkers, there were more epicycles after Copernicus had finished than under the old system, but at least it was a step in the right direction. It took Kepler to twig that planetary orbits were elliptical rather than circular. Earth's orbital eccentricity is about 3% and the perihelion (closest approach) occurs a couple of weeks after the Solstice, as I explained a year ago. The earliest sunset and the latest sunrise and the shortest day are close but not exactly on the same day as the solstice: it's complicated. Obviously, the tilt of the Earth away from the Sun offsets the fact that the Sun is 3% closer but the tilt is much more significant in its effect on our weather. For us in Ireland it has been the most miserable weeping wet December that I can remember.  With my two-week event horizon that's true for every Winter, hmmmm? If the tree-huggers [meeeeee!] would just do their dance today, maybe the weather gods would cut us some slack?

Don't eat anything

☠I dunno, but sometimes the nanny state disappears up its own oompah in respect of risk assessment. I was idly flick-flicking through the paltry edutainment offerings of youtube and came across "Food expert fingers eight foods he refuses to eat". I can't find a link: it has effectively sunk without trace beneath my attention horizon. I only remember watching it because the first refused food was [raw] flour which was, to me, an unexpected source of coliform. That's because I now have a two week event-horizon for most things and had forgotten writing at length about the 2016 E.coli O121 in the flour outbreak that made a few dozen people sick: nobody died but 17 people were hospitalized. 64 bags of flour caused sickness but 5,000 tons of flour were recalled.  Since that flap 50,000,000 tons of flour has been consumed in the USA without ill-effect, yet parents are still being told to warn their kids about raw cookie dough. It seems disproportionate. If the children can't lick the bowl after making some baked-goods, they may wander off looking for other sources of oral gratification and lick the dog.  I don't buy it . . . or rather I do buy rather a lot of flour and it ain't made me sick yet.

☠That's just to soften you up for the recent CR Consumer Reports report on heavy-metal contamination of fruit juice. The problem here is that safe levels of chemicals in foods are set really low, so that there is no chance of adverse effect if the guidelines / regulations are adhered to. If the limit is set at 5 parts per billion you are probably okay if your batch is 10 ppb but you might start paying attention if your favorite bevvy clocks in at 50 ppb which is 10x or 'an order of magnitude'. That's why this denunciation is a little infair "Trader Joe’s Fresh Pressed Apple Juice was the only product above the FDA’s proposed 10 ppb limit for inorganic arsenic, with the three samples we tested averaging 15.4 ppb" Not least because the average of three doesn't give an inkling about the range about 15.4 ppb. If the individual values are 14 / 15 / 17 ppb, you'd be confident(ish) about the accuracy and reproducibility of the published value. If they were 6 / 7 / 32ppb you'd cry foul or outlier or contamination. For reasons none of them can stand over, chemists always measure things in triplicate - no more no less.
☠The Irish EPA currently set safe limits at

• 10 ppb = μg/l for arsenic As
• 5 ppb cadmium Cd
• 10 ppb lead Pb
• 1 ppb mercury Hg

☠There are lots of reasons why you should not buy juice: €1.50/lt for starters. Mums, make your own! 2 tsp of strawberry jam, 2 tsp sugar, 50mg vitC tablet; shake vigorously; drop into school bag while patting offspring on the head; job done.
☠I R delighted to report that Welch’s 100% Juice With Antioxidant Superberry is one of two juices which pipped up above 5ppb for lead. That's a damn-fool name for a beverage; which alone is enough to make a discerning consumer shun the stuff. Anti-oxidant just means there is some residual vitamin C. Because Superberry is wholly undefined I will assume that all the vat-lees and pipe-blowings at the end of the week are stirred up together and marketed as 100% juice.
'Tis a long way from Johnny Keats

O for a beaker full of the warm South! 

Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,

With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,

And purple-stainèd mouth;

that concoction was r'ared.

Blue Screen of Death

If it hasn't happened to you, then you don't use your computer enough. When I started at The Institute, my office-mate said she never switched her desktop off, because it took so long to boot in the morning. You can take this sort of inconvenience on the chin . . . and grizzle about it. I did this for a couple of years.  It was okay, so long as you didn't need to print something in a hurry for a 9 o'clock class.  Then, I mentioned it to our IT guy and he said "Oh you don't have enough RAM, I'll double it for you" - and it was so - about 2 hours later. Often, the solution is to push at an open door: pissin' and moanin' rarely achieves anything, while a polite request might.  Now I can be super virtuous and switch the computer off every night and be confident that she'd boot up sharpish in the morning.

One morning this last week, the first of the teaching term, both the chaps in the office next door came into work to see the Blue Screen of Death awaiting them. I advised them to "Switch it off and switch it on again" but they'd been there before me. I had a busy day but later on saw the IT guy swapping hard-drives and sorting the problems out. He suspected it was a "rogue update from Windows" which made me think the same disaster would happen to me if I tried "Switch it off and switch it on again". The prospect of losing files made me feel queasy and weak at the knees. The worst aspect of it is not knowing which version of a file you're dealing with among the backups: it's almost better if something is gone-gone and you just knuckle down and recreate it. 

One of the last things I did before Christmas was set and mark a computer exam. I could find the damned exams but not the marks. I could also find an e-mail with an anonymised set of marks which I'd used to show the students that some questions had been better answered than others. But that was a long time beyond my two-week event horizon. I exhausted a frustrating hour trying to track the marks down on my Desktop at work and through my December e-mails. Then it dawned on me that I'd marked the exams At Home; on the weekend before Christmas; when I should have been decorating the tree or making more mince-pies [instead of shop-bought].  I hoped so aNNyway, because the laptop was 40km away and not immediately available. The thought of having re-mark the exams filled me with dread. But that evening, it all turned out okay - pheww! - because the marks were indeed on my laptop.

The Blue Screen of Death event next door caused me more anxiety than was strictly appropriate because I knew I hadn't backed-up my work Desktop for weeks and it would be exceedingly wearing to try to sort out a restored hard-drive. Therefore I nipped across town to buy another portable hard-drive to capture the data and files before anyone [like me, for example] tried "Switch it off and switch it on again" and it didn't work.  The last time I bought such a thing from the same electronics megastore - 2+ years ago - a 500GB drive cost me €70. This week a 1,000GB = 1 TB drive cost €70. 1TB is now the bottom of the available range. I could have bought >!bargain!< a 4TB drive for only €130. But I knew that would have been silly because 1TB is wide-open prairies of space. I loaded my precious workfiles onto my new electronic fashion accessory [it's a fetching red to complement my canary yellow button-phone] and 5 years' work filled a mere whisker [see R] of the available storage. I guess it would be different if I took loads of photos. Take my advice: backup early and backup often - you'll sleep better. 

My souvenir 2400 ft magnetic tape from 25 years ago is about the size of a rather fat 12 inch vinyl LP with a physical volume of about 1500 cu.cm; and a data capacity of about 200 MB. 7 cc for each megabyte.  The Terabyte drive takes up about 100 cu.cm. Now you only need 0.0001 cu.cm for each megabyte. That's a 70,000x increase in efficiency! To put it another way, if were still dependent on mag tapes, my terabyte of crap photos, ripped films and viral fail videos would require a space like our substantial woodshed [R] to store it all. If that's what it cost maybe we'd be more ruthless with the editting.

Recording the data

In science, the lab-book is a sacred thing.  It is a record of what you have done at the frontier, why you did it, a record of the results and an interpretation of what it all means.  When someone is accused of fudging or nudging the data to better accommodate a cherished hypothesis, their lab-book is the only record that can be scrutinized: the original solutions and samples have long since been flushed down the sink with copious amounts of water. So the lab-book must never be amended, pages must be numbered, none may be removed, errors may be crossed out but not whited out.  In the course of a PhD, you might build up a dozen lab-books, all numbered on the spine, fat with stuff stuck in.

My old boss (who like all my bosses was younger than me so not that old) used to use the early lab books as part of the loco-parental therapy session when her students, each in turn and some regularly, experienced La noche oscura del alma and wondered if they were mad, and bad, to have embarked on such a crazy and frustrating voyage.  When they complained that they had done nothing nothing in the last three years that amounted to more than a hill of dead animals uselessly sacrificed, she showed them through the books just how painfully ignorant and incompetent they had been when they came to her.  Paradoxically, ladling on of more evidence of uselessness was a great fillip as the students all recognised that progress had been made, if only in their development as a thinking reed and a good pair of hands.

Yesterday was my last class with my quirky, disparate and wholly lovable 3rd Year students.  I've had them for four different classes since January, rarely have all 10 of them been present, but it's a different 5 or 6 or 8 who turn up each week ready to find something out.  Their collective attendance has been patchy and their discipline in handing up their lab-books for scrutiny and marking has been sketchy.  So I used the last class to request-and-require them to submit any remaining material by Friday at the latest because that was the last day of the teaching year.  They get credit for this as CA (continuous assessment) and it's an easy way to accumulate a platform of marks from which to leap at the exams. Lab-books of all colours and classes began to appear from bags and satchels and the xerox box which we used as submission station was soon full. 

Then one of the students asked me if I'd marked his Food&Ferm book, which he said he'd handed to me in class several weeks before.  This was way beyond my two-week event-horizon, so I had no recollection and the mark book showed that I hadn't marked it, so it was a worry.  The labs we use are busy with classes all day every day and some will have a throughput of hundreds of lab-books each week. In the search, I turned up the 1st Year Biology lab-book of another of the students in the same 3rd Year class.  So its clear that you are hunting down through an archaeological dig as well as widely through contemporary material.  Class dismissed and I settled down to mark through the backlog of my 2nd Year group, which I've had for two wholly different classes and who have been quite as patchy and sketchy in their turn-in scheduling.  After a couple of hours and a cup of tea, I mooched back to the F&F lab and looked in the wrong direction and there was a blue lab book tidied away on a shelf near the centrifuges - bingo!

There's got to be a better way.

Shiants

The Shiants = Na h-Eileanan Mòra are a navigational hazard in the middle of the Minch, the channel between the out Hebrides and the Isle of Skye and Mainland Scotland. There are 3 main chunks: Garbh Eilean joined by a spit to Eilean an Taighe and Eilean Mhuire to the East. The top most point on the map of the Minch [R] is the Butt of Lewis and it is inhabited by the Men of Ness. We've met them before going off on an annual hunt to Sula Sgeir in search of guga - young gannet Morus bassana - for the pot. I wrote about the hunt and the island because it featured a couple of weeks ago on BBC Alba. Now because things always come in twos, guga hunting came up again in my current book The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane which The Boy gave me for Christmas in 2012. That was unfortunate timing because I was super-busy preparing classes for my new career in The Institute which started, with The Blob!, in early January 2013. The Old Ways sunk beneath a heap of notes about the pancreas, the ozone layer and logarithms.  I'm fairly sure I've read some of the chapters before but, with my two week event horizon, it was all as new.  In one Chapter, Macfarlane and friends sail an open boat from Port of Ness to Sula Sgeir [recently] as a two day there and back trip. When they arrive, they find that they have coincidentally turned up within an hour of the guga hunters - they are met with truculent stares and realise that they are Not Welcome.  Guga is very much acquired taste which is eloquently expressed by a crofter "I gave a piece to my dog and it spent all week licking its arse to take away the taste". Yum!

The previous chapter is about another open-boat voyage out of Lewis: from Stornaway to The Shiants. It is a small-small adventure for Macfarlane and his skipper the folklorist Ian Stephen. They travel the hwæl weg of ancient Anglo-Saxon poetry and indeed meeting a few Cetaceans along the way.  The Shiants are much more substantial than Sula Sgeir. Each square on the Ordnance Survey map above is a sq.km. = 100 hectares.  The names translate as Rough Island, the Island of the House and St Mary's Island. There is a bothy maintained on, and giving its name to, Eilean an Taighe the Island of the House. The place was privately owned and was made available to anyone adventurous enough to get there [no train, no bus, no airport, no ferry] by Adam Nicolson, grandson of Sir Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West but the archipelago's website now refers to him as the previous owner because he recently ceded the fairy-tale to his son Tom Nicolson. The last year when there was an orderly booking system was 2015.  You will know something of Vita Sackville-West if you have seen Sally Potter's 1992 film Orlando. Which is to be recommended as is Potter's super film The Tango Lesson.

Mais revenons nous a nos oiseaux! It is true that there are sheep on at least one of the islands, but the place is really an amazing bird sanctuary with more puffins - about a quarter million - Fratercula arctica than you can shake a stick at. Confusingly Puffinus spp. refers to much smaller and drabber birds which we call shearwaters. French, sensibly or at least consistently, calls these chaps puffins. Sadly for human and avian inhabitants, the two larger islands are infested with black rats aka ship-rats Rattus rattus. Despite a number of the trapped specimens being brown in colour none of them were of the lab rat Rattus norvegicus species. That paper in the Hebridean Naturalist used a neat, appropriate technology, surveying tool call a rat-stick which is a piece of wooden kindling soaked in margarine and driven into the ground. Teeth marks in the wood indicated the presence of rats!

A few years ago the Daily Mail did a sort of Hello magazine piece on the Islands and the Nicolsons. Maybe put the Shiants on your bucket-list?

More islands

Byzantium

It is all so long ago. With my two week event horizon, 15 years seems impossibly far away.  But back then, rather than being a humble foot-soldier of science teaching in a modest Institute of Technology in the Irish Midlands, I was an international quangoman, clocking up air-miles and nicking teaspoons from a wide range of different airlines. I achieved this by being in the right place at the right time, becoming the Irish node of a European consortium that provided bioinformatics infrastructure, developed software and offered training courses. It was a classic EU initiative - equilibrating upwards so that the marginal edges of Europe got closer to the military-industrial-capitalist rich countries at the hub. Closer economically but also closer socially, so that Calabrians from Italy could meet Cantabrians from Spain at the Universitas Cantabrigiensis (as us classically educated chaps call Cambridge) in England.  I was famous in three continents back then on the back of As Easy as ABC Aoife's Bioinformatics Course which I had developed with Aoife McLysaght before she was famous herself. This time last year, I was remembering the courses I was asked to teach in South Africa, which enabled us to celebrate Dau.I's 6th birthday sipping ice-cold chardonnay on the top of Table Mountain.

But a few months earlier, I'd been doing the same thing in Turkey. I don't think the Turks are going to be joining the EU any time soon with the Greeks insisting that they don't drink Turkish coffee like the rest of us but rather the indistiguishable ελληνικού καφέ. Nevertheless, the Turks joined our bioinformatics quango and were quickly allocated money to run a training course in their country.  A handful of the top guns in the field, and little-old-me, were asked if they'd like to spend a week in Turkey at someone else's expense. The course was organised in the early part of 1999 to take place at the end of September. At 0300hrs on 17th August 1999, there was a tremendous earthquake, epicentered on Izmit, a biggish city (300,000 pop) 100km East of Istanbul.  It would have been legitimate, even easy, to cancel the course, but the Turks don't wimp out at the first hint of trouble, so we were told to come on anyway.  We yabancılar were to be accommodated in the über-swish brand-new private Sabanci University which was just about to take in its very first students, while the course itself was to take place in the neighbouring Gebze Yüksek Teknoloji Enstitüsü. Both these places are about halfway between Izmit and Istanbul, so we spent a lot of time in a minibus tooling from the üniversite to enstitüsü to seaside taverna for lunch and back again. We also spent many hours tooling around the world of bioinformatics because Gebze IT had an undamaged computer suite. What we didn't do is spend a lot of time tooling around the internet because the earthquake had severed all the phone-lines and it was like being back in 1992 downloading packets at 300 bps. In the last ten minutes each day before being whisked off for dinner somewhere interesting and delicious, I'd try to send an e-mail home. It was painful - the glacial speed of the connexion coupled with the Turkish keyboard rich in diacritics, accents and funny letters made it  v e r y   s l o w.

On the Thursday, we knocked off early and minibussed into Byzantium to see Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque.  It was, for me, a pilgrimage to be walking on the same beat-up paving that Emperor Constantine XI (Κωνσταντῖνος Παλαιολόγος) trod during the final mass before the Ottoman Turks sacked his city on 29th May 1465 and finally ended the "Roman" empire. We went for dinner afterwards at a little restaurant in a narrow street somewhere in the city. Opposite was a small hotel and, before we minibussed back to bed, I had booked two nights there for the following weekend. It was far better, even on my own nickel, than spending two nights virtually alone in the empty campus at Sabanci U.  I spent Saturday wandering around a huge covered market buying star & crescent tee-shirts and diamante Turkish slippers for my girls, and cushion covers for the sofa and a box of Turkish delight for The Beloved.  Irish pounds (this was just before the Euro) were a lot harder than Turkish pounds so everything seemed to be for half nothing.

The last day, when I made my way to the airport, I still had a 100,000 note left. I thought about buying a bottle of plonk but that would have left me with a handful of truly useless change, so I resolved to send it to the impoverished graduate students who had helped out on the course. When I got home I forgot to do this and the banknote went into a drawer with all the kroner, rand, escudos, finnmarks that we all used to accumulate back then (huzzah for the Euro!).  Sometime about 2004, I took all the foreign folding money (mostly replaced by Euros) to the bank to get what I could for it. I think I came out with a about €20. But I still had the 100,000 note because it was now, after 4-5 years of gallopping inflation in Turkey, worth 17c and the bank couldn't be bothered with the exchange.

Precovery

You know you shouldn't pick at scabs but it's very difficult to refrain.  It's even poorer form to pick at somebody else's scabs, but sometimes you just can't stop yourself bringing up an issue which others would rather keep buried.  I'm here (or rather there - waaaay out beyond the orbit of Neptune) because of the Galileo/Marius priority spat 400 years ago.  You'd think we'd left all that ego and aggro behind in modern civilised gentlemanly science, but we haven't. Science is about discovering something about the Universe . . . which nobody knew before.  We could, with advantage, spend much more time verifying or replicating or contradicting other people's work but it's much more exciting to find the next new thing. And there's no money to be had for tidying up what we all already know.  This is part of the reason why “It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.” can remain in textbooks for so long.

Mike Brown is an astronomer from Alabama who is currently on the faculty at CalTech.  His career choice may have been tilted by attending the  Virgil I. Grissom High School which was named after one of the more colorful astronauts on NASA's Gemini program. In the early part of this century, Brown was concentrating on locating objects at the edge of the Solar System beyond the orbit of Neptune aka  trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) or Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs).  Knowing that scientific credibility depends on having a three-letter acronym (TLA), Brown and his colleagues David Rabinowitz and Chad Trujillo called themselves “Three Guys at a Telescope (TGT)”.  Their business plan was to program the Mount Palomar telescope to take three consecutive photographs of the same patch of sky and see if anything had shifted in their three-frame movie.  Computers had cranked up the throughput, but it was the same fundamental technique that Clyde Tombaugh had used to discover Pluto in 1930. It took 2 generations before David Jewitt and Jane Luu (who won the Annie Jump Cannon award in 1991) from Hawaii discovered a second TNO called "(15760) 1992 QB1". The boys from CalTech had been massively successful, finding at least 11 TNOs between Christmas 2001 and Christmas 2004. On 28 December 2004, TGT found another object which they nicknamed Santa and decided to work on establishing its credentials (mass, diameter, orbit, atmosphere etc.) with a view to publishing at a major conference in September 2005.  In order to register for the meeting they submitted an abstract to the conference organisers in July. They were gutted to find that they had been scooped when a week later Pablo Santos-Sanz and Jose-Luis Ortiz of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía in Granada, Spain announced on 27 July 2005 that they had located the same object on some old pictures.  Brown bowed to this gracefully and conceded defeat on Santa "(136108) 2003 EL61", not least because he had discovered two other TNOs within a few weeks which they had designated Xena (the Warrior Princess) and Easterbunny (because it was found just after Easter). Clearly they were dredging the depths of American culture for name ideas.

But a series of unfortunate events revealed that the traces of CalTech's primary data for the discovery were in the public domain on the interweb and access_log records showed that someone from Granada had downloaded the numbers between the publication of the CalTech abstract and the announcement of discovery and establishment of priority by Ortiz.  The event-train was precipitated by Brown googling (as you do) "K40506A" - their official code for Santa. Caltech called foul, Granada said they had merely been verifying their discovery to make sure it was correct.  At The Institute, we are very strict on acknowledging sources and it looks like the Spaniards were a little slacker about this than we'd like to find among our students.  But then again, if I could read Spanish better, I'm sure I could find evidence that it was another example of Yankee-dog cultural imperialism. But if Ortiz is claiming by precovery, he needs to cede priority to people who took photos of Santa/Haumea from Palomar Observatory all the way back to 1955! Since Ptolemy and Eratosthenes everyone with two good eyes could see Uranus in plain-but-faint sight but it took the Herschels to recognise it.

Brown and Co. settled down and moved on after a while and renamed his three new planets with more gravitas: Santa to Haumea; Xena to Eris; Easterbunny to Makemake (Easter Island deity!).  Eris turns out to be the biggest of a current count of 1500 TNOs. But I don't think the wound really healed and ten years later Brown was after Ortiz again with "this hurts me more than it hurts you" head shaking post in which Brown finds Ortiz going a step beyond what the data is capable of supporting. I think it is not bitter-and-vindictive sniping: the TNO world is vast out there but small and exclusive here on earth and if you're in the club then you read everything by friends-and-rivals with care and attention. It's actually a rather good anecdote about how science makes progress by pushing out and rowing back.

The discovery of Haumea, Eris and other lumpy objects beyond Neptune led to the demotion of Pluto to a dwarf-planet or plutoid. Brown writes in an engaging gallop and if you can find his book "How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming" cheap, it's probably worth reading. You can hear Brown defend his position as Mike the Pluto-killer.  He'll have to be circumspect in what he says about Nibiru, lest he be taken out by the shadow government! 

I'm a little bit embarrassed to report that in a previous life beyond my two-week event horizon, I was onto the same story a year ago, from a slightly different angle.

Shaun the Sheep

Shaun Shorn the Sheep! You'd have much more fun to watch an episode of, like, Shaun the Sheep [see R,R]. But I'm playing the Web-Log card here and now to record when things happen on the farrrrrm, so we don't need to remember over my two week event horizon TWEH. We are blessed to have Paddy-the-Clip 3.7km NNE of here; he's prepared to come up our bucketty lane in his scut-truck, unload his board and clipper-hanger, change his boots and trews . . . to shear a dozen or 15 sheep. In a just world, like a plumber, he'd have a call-out / set-up charge and then an hourly rate. Perhaps he does in his head. We pay what he asks and consider it a bargain. His core business at this time of year is shearing scores or hundreds of sheep in one place with his tea and dinner thrown in and someone to catch the sheep and deliver them arse-down on his station. It's a work out, for sure, even then.

Paddy has his day-job as a farmer, his family-time, his strong-farmers-too-busy-to-shear to juggle; it's okay if we're low down on his list with our piffling small flock. And then there is the weather: it's wrong to shear wet sheep: the shearer gets soaked and it is impossible to dry wet fleece. Wet fleece ferments and has been known to spontaneously combust. It amazes me how efficient sheep are at drying fleece when it is still attached; shorn wool not so much. And everyone appreciates that shearing is an animal welfare issue. Sheep are really uncomfortable wearing woolly jumpers in high summer and fly-strike [and then maggots] is a real problem.

On the last Sunday evening in June we took a call from Paddy to say that it seemed dry enough; he could fit us in; and would be round in half an hour. Whoa, no! we replied as we looked out at a drubbing thunderstorm and down-pour. We had to "take a rain check" with the promise that he'd try again later in the week. Tuesday tea-time he put us on 30 minutes notice again, so we dropped everything and assembled our part of the necessary kit [fleece-bag, very old clothes, electric-cable, hat]. Then we druv the sheep from their paddock up to the sheep-handling unit to wait. Ideally ya should starve sheep for a few hours before shearing as they have been know to stress out and die under the clippers if they're brim-full of grass. 

It actually took an hour or more before we heard the jeep rattling up the lane. But, at 4 minutes / ewe it took only one hour to relieve all the sheep of their burden. Plus a bit of time to set-up and an equivalent interval to de-construct the caravanserai, pack it up and say goodbye. Ten minutes later a light drizzle started to fall, so this year we made it in a nick of time. It is absurd how diminished [R] sheep are without their fleece. The following fore-noon we took the bag of wool into the Agri-store and were quoted a price of 10c/kg. Our cropping weighed in at 45kg and our neighbour who works in the agri store said it wasn't worth cutting a check for €4.50 but that when they had shifted the parish's wool off the the wholesaler, they'd call us in and we could be paid in Mars bars or a [small] box of wood-screws. It's just not worth their while in this economic climate for them to trade in fleece and they only do it as a good-will gesture for their customers.

Last year the price of wool was 20c/kg. In 2016 is was €1.00/kg and 2015 'twas €1.45! We didn't get sheep-shorn until 17 July 2022, nearly 3 weeks later in the year and at least two of the sheep were (mildly) maggotty. Paddy is of the opinion that the higher the farm, the lower the cases of fly-strike. That is credible. Upland plots in Wicklow are used to grow certified seed potatoes which are much less riven with Potato-virus X PVX and Potato-virus Y PVY which are spread by aphids. The idea is that uplands are so windy that the poor bloody aphids cannot settle. In Netherlands, [because no mountains] they grow their seed potatoes in the windswept polders actually below sea-level.

Museum afternoon

In the depths of last winter we went to see gripping, if paint-dripping, film called Museum Hours in which the male lead is a museum guard in Vienna who has used the long tick slow tock clock tick time tock waiting for potential vandals to study the paintings under his charge.  Me, I tend to race through museums glancing at a few of the most striking pictures before heading off to buy post-cards in the gift shop.  But I know that there is another world of insight and interpretation in the best paintings, if only I had the time and aptitude to devote some focussed and informed attention.  Years ago on one of a couple of lonely Bobby-no-friends trips I made to Paris in my teens, I was listlessly rubber-necking through the Jeu de Paume Museum when I overheard an erudite American explaining a picture to his two guests.  As I had just nodded past this same painting, I was amazed at how much detail and sensibility could be abstracted from a painting which had been hardly worth a glance from me.

Monday afternoon we spent with P in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on the edge of Downtown Boston.  We started off with an extravagant lunch, that will require a working week to pay for.  The Beloved had arrived before the rest of us so had the chance to have a quick scoot round one of her favorite Museums after an interval of 30 years.  Over lunch she described a striking analysis of the fluid dynamics of flamenco by John Singer Sargent [El Jaleo R] and filled in the detail that, at the opening of trhe Museum in 1903, Sargent said that Gardner had done as much for the painting by her hanging of it and he had in the painting of it. If I'd been given that sort background when I was young, I might have stayed in the Arts Block and not made the abrupt change to a lifetime in Science.  Then again, I couldn't draw or paint to save my life.

When we finally poured out of the restaurant, somewhat the worse for drink, we only had 45 minutes to cover the whole museum, so I asked to be shown the three key accessions in the building.  El Jaleo was the first and nearest of these. I was then pushed out doors into the Monk's Garden which is a maze of shrubbery-beds with small but perfectly formed trees separated by winding pathways of steel-grey brick. From the chill air-conditioned interior it was like entering a Chinese laundry - warm and damp with a strange smell - and the intricate curves and intersections of the paths made me think of Euler's  Königsberg Bridges problem.  Must get map of museum and count the odd nodes!  Then we rushed upstairs to see the 'white' portrait of Mrs Gardner [L] as she makes a dramatic entrance into a room in Venice.  TB and P were arguing about who was the painter when the absurdly young attendant said "It's Zorn".  As none of us had asked her and she was wearing a uniform we could not hear what she said, so she repeated "Zorn".  Well, dang me!  If I'd ever known anything about Anders Zorn, it has long since slipped beyond my two-week event horizon.  Now it may be that this young woman is an Art History major at one of the myriad Boston area Universities or it could be that she is just paying attention to her surroundings.  Either way, I'm impressed.

But actually none of these exhibits did it for me as much as a long cool dark corridor on the second floor lit from the end by a brilliant medieval stained glass window looted-by-almighty-dollar from some European cathedral.  And it wasn't really the window either, just the length of quietness. You cannot help either but be taken by well of the courtyard around which the house is built - with its attention to detail and the relentless sound of burbling water it reminded me of the Alhambra.  If you have a shed-load of money you can do things right.  We were hanging out of one of the many upstairs windows drinking in the scene when TB suggested "I'll close my eyes and count to 15, and you each have to appear in a different window" but we were far too old and knee-compromised to go off on such a playful romp.

We're heading home to Ireland this afternoon much richer for having spent a fortnight in Massachusetts.  For starters we need a fountain in our yard and at least one room paved in dark red tiles.

Behave yourself

A couple of months ago, my friend P in Gt Boston told me I had to read Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst,” by Robert M. Sapolsky. [shown right: clearly a primate, quite possibly an alpha-male] She added that I'd met Sapolsky in the '80s when we are all in grad school together: he had been dating one of the women from the B.U. Biology eco-evo floor where P and I met. I didn't remember any of that, but I can obey orders and the Irish Library Service [remember them?] found the only copy in the country and delivered it to me for collection in Tramore. It's a pity it never got published as a talking book because I would have finished it in a couple of weeks of commuting [remember that?]. As it was, it  took me a couple of months to soldier on to the end: it's a heck of a book with 700 big pages and weighing 1.14kg - you could do damage if you fall asleep reading it in bed. With my two-week event horizon, I couldn't remember the first chapters when I got to the meat [what people do to each other, much of it unkind] at the end.

Since Grad School Sapolsky has pursued two barely unrelated fields in parallel for about 30 years as a research scientist - every summer he'd put on his bush-hat and travel to East Africa to record the antics of Baboons Papio cynocephalus;  the rest of the year he wore a neuroendocrinologist pointy hat (presumably with electrodes attached) in and around Stanford U. He's read his field notes and his back-catalog of papers and those of his pals, rivals and collaborators and written this mighty explicitly didactic brick book. "explicitly didactic" means Sapolsky can get a little school-marmish about the neurological details.
Important brain bits of which you may have heard nothing [spelling test later, kids]: PFC is the pre-frontal cortex and some of its sub-bits are dlPFC vlPFC vmPFC ; amygdala; hippocampus; hypothalamus; fusiform gyrus; insula; dorsal anterior cingulate cortex DACC; paraventricular nucleus (of the thalamus).
You lost? Me too, folks. Sapolsky seems to imagine that I will recall all these grey matter bits'n'bobs, and what they are responsible for, when they come up in later chapters about baboons picking nits off each other or college students being tested for implicit racism. You can manage without the anatomical details but if you start skipping acronym-fattened paragraphs then you'll really race through the book and po[o]p out the back-end without doing much digestion.

There's a lot in there and I won't attempt to summarise Proust in 2 minutes like Monty Python but I may well lift a couple of interesting views of the human condition when I'm short of copy. I'd certainly like to bulk out my, now embarrassingly superficial, executive summary of the squeeze hormones vasopressin and oxytocin.
Here's the great man talking about his stuff at the California Academy of Science. Wot! that's more than an hour long, Bob. Stop whining, I stuck with him for two months. Indeed, The Beloved and I made a stay-at-home date a couple of weeks ago and that was our movie. Turns out we've met Sapolsky before talking about pandemics [ aha, fooled ya: thought we could get through a blob without Coronarama? nope] with some prescience.

A lot of old cobblers

You may have guessed that Bob T Scientist is Phnom de Penh and that I have a day job and a real name.  It's not super common, but it's not a rare combo of First and Last names. Accordingly, it is sometimes quite hard to get credit for my contributions to science.

• Depending on what parameters you search with, I could be mistaken for having an expertise in lidocaine injections, evolutionary metapsychology and certifying fitness for corporal punishment. These would be Type I = false positive errors.
• OTOH, some of my co-authors forget my middle initial on submission which means that paper gets a bit lost in the grass. These would be Type II = false negative errors.

Imagine if your name was John Smith or Jean Dupont, it would nice to have a mark that would distinguish you from your nominal clones. Every so often, maybe twice a year, someone asks me for an up to date list of my scientific publications and I check Pubmed with Scientist BT then I do Scientist BT [AU] because the first search is clearly over-egging the pudding, to see if anything new has appeared. With my two-week event horizon, I can't be expected to remember a paper on which I was 4th author out of 12, so it is as well to check. Unfortunately specifying the T sensibly excludes Scientist B [AU] and I've have been known to submit a list of pubs that is one or two short. And y'know what? the sky does not fall!

ANNyway about 5 years ago, someone had the idea, not for the first time to hang a unique author-ID on everyone who publishes in science. This project seized on a somewhat unfortunate Acronym ORCID for Open Researcher and Contributor ID. Before the Summer, all the active researchers were gathered into a [small] room at The Institute and more or less ordered to set up an ORCID account and capture our publications. For youngsters this was the work of moments, for an old stager like me if was a bit more work. It wasn't so much that my publishing career goes back through 7 working addresses in 3 countries it was more that ORCID uses a rather wide net for 'contribution'. For several years at the turn of the century I was the book review editor for a journal and would often enough keep the free book by writing the review myself. These were Blobs in all but name before The Blob had been thought of, and have at least one nugget of peculiarity in each one. But I cannot remember them all; not to save my wife.

This all came rushing back to me before Christmas when I was up in Dublin and picked up an old copy of Science while waiting for the next meeting.  John Bohannon a piece in there about mobilising The Data for ORCID to investigate migratory scientists. And why not? There are now 4 million people registered on ORCID which is about 1% of those using LinkedIn. If you have an identifiable researcher, with all their past publications and all their past addresses, then you can mashup the data and do some hypothesis driven sociological research.
= Do successful scientists move about a lot? [maybe]
= Which country exports the most PhDs ?[the UK by far]
= Can we generate some truly appalling graphics ?[yes R]
It is impossible to deduce from the picture which direction the migrants are travelling. The print version is much better.

The best thing I discovered in finding out about ORCID is that they have a nominal place-holder to run trials for up-grading the software. This is an old science hand called Joe Carberry who has been investigating psychoceramics at Brown U since 1930.  At that time he was billed to give a lecture on "Archaic Greek Architectural Revetments in Connection with Ionian Philology" and the bugger never turned up. Ever since on Friday the 13th and February 29th, cracked pots [psychoceramics, geddit] appear all over campus and students fill them with small change to promote the Life and Works of Professor Carberry. In reality the Brown library uses the money to purchase books for their collection. All good fun and these additional books are given a special bookplate with the slogan  "Dulce et decorum est desipere in loco" [It's okay to be silly once in a while]. For example, the psychoceramics lab has investigated whether you need to wash your tea-cup at the office.

I suggested above that ORCID was an unfortunate coinage but only because όρχις = orchis is the Greek for testicle. Men of a certain age will know the word orchidectomy as a solution (hopefully unilateral) to testicular cancer.  And you'll now be curious about the family of exotic plants are called Orchids. It is so called because the type species sports two peculiar tubers [R] from the base of the plant. To Aristotle and other ancient naturalists, these looked enough like testes to name the family. And while we are down there, you might be amused by this joke.
Note for inglês segunda língua folks: a lot of old cobblers = harmless nonsense from rhyming slang [prev] cobblers awls = balls.

Interviewing the Ordinary

D'ye remember my hymn to fulfilling potential and celebrating the ordinary back in May?  I view with increasing loathing the winner-takes-all ethos which permeates too many aspects of our society.  Gold medals, Nobel prizes, the Top Ten, Justin Bieber (bless!), the gross disparity in take-home between the board-room and the shop-floor, VHI money being spent on 1 transplant rather than 100 pelvic floor repairs.  I could go on.  Begob, I just have!  An encouraging word or a positive comment in a lab-book for our median students may make a huge difference to them - they have spent a life-time being ignored by  teachers who devote disproportionate time to their ad astras and disasters.

On Sunday I was listening on the wireless to Aoibhinn Ní Shúilleabháin double-interviewing Tom and Dorothy Cross (again).  I say 'again' because I remember a very similar interview maybe 7 or 8 years ago.  It's great because they are brother and sister but he is Science (molecular evolution of fish) and she is Art (installations, identity, sexuality).  In about 2001, they collaborated on a project about jellyfish which was one of the brief moments when the yawning gap between the Arts and Sciences was bridged. I guess that's why I remember it - I normally have two-week event-horizon - it was so rare and extraordinary. The yawning gap is a particularly apposite phrase because the second law of thermodynamics will put half of all university graduates to sleep and post-modern lit.crit. will dozzzzzze off the other half.

But Aoibhinn's programme is also not so great: we've seen&heard those sibs already, so it's not very adventurous to wheel them out again, is it?

My neighbour, who is more or less the same age as I am, lost his father at the age of 16 and found himself with a widowed mother and two or three younger sibs to look after. The following Monday he went out into the market place as a tractor-for-hire: ploughing, cutting and hauling silage, spreading dung - whatever would earn an honest penny for his family - as well as managing the family's own modest holding.  While I was picking up my very expensive education, he was picking up bacon and spuds on the way home from a hard day's work.  When we blew-in to the valley I often used to meet him in the lane or chew the fat leaning on a gate: we'd talk about farming and science, politics and the weather. I often thought that he'd have benefitted from the education I got, because he was interested and interesting, engaged and insightful. A few years later, my more famous brother Jack, was visiting the farrrrm and met the neighbour and talked round the houses for a while.  He thought there was a great game show to be made with four Irish farmers pitted against four Norfolk firemen and four West Country cider-bottlers. A bit like "Eggheads" on the BBC now.  We waste our human capital because there is insufficient flexibility in the system, the brightest of the dispossessed have no school or crap schooling while the well-to-do buy resources for their dim-bulb offspring.

So the next time RTE wants a pair of interesting friends-or-relations to interview, don't pick the Crosses, nor yet me and The Brother, that would be same-old same-old. Find a taxi-driver they can always talk and they've been around and they might have a different take on things.  Or my farming neighbour - any of my farming neighbours - they've usually got something interesting to say.

I'll finish up back on the wireless to quote Aoibhinn "Looking back, they reflect on Fountainstown, the scene of so many childhood memories, and how the rocks remain unchanged since their childhood."
"the rocks remain" is a rather clever Arts/Science reference being a quote from an operetta by AP Herbert:
"Nothing is wasted, nothing is in vain: The seas roll over but the rocks remain."
and also from a poem by Stevie Smith:
"Oh why do they leave me, the beautiful people, and only the rocks remain, To cry Love me, as I cry Love me, and Love me again"
But it is also the title of a book by naturalist Gavin Maxwell.  The rocks at Fountainstown may be the same now as when Tom and Dorothy were kids and turning blue coming out from the sea, but the water is definitely different. Fountainstown was one of only four beaches in Ireland that failed the EU quality control regulations in 2012, the others being Ballyheigue, Rush and Clifden.

Dankdag

TIL that every year at the Pieterskerk in Leiden, there is a thanksgiving service on American Thanksgiving [today, 4th Thursday in November] to commemorate the hospitality enjoyed in the city by the Pilgrims on their way to the New World. 

Since 1981, it seems that Butterball [since 2006, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Carolina Turkeys: the largest turkey-slaughterers in the States] has funded a support line for the stressed and distraught during the holiday season - Thanksgiving, חֲנֻכָּה Hanukkah, Sinterklaas, Christmas, Kwanzaa. NYT made a micro-doc for behind the scenes. Something running that long is bound to accumulate a bunch of funny-peculiar anecdotes.

"I left my turkey in a snowbank to thaw and now I can't find it" 

This gave me frisson of recognition. During grad school in Boston, I took BI 504 Mammalogy with Tom Kunz [multiprev]. An integral part of the course was The Field Trip. We piled into a minibus and drove North far into New Hampshire bear (Ursus americanus) country. On Friday evening we arrived at a remote scout camp with wooden bunk dorms and primitive 'facilities'. Before dinner, as dusk was falling, we were instructed to lay out lines of snap-traps, wherever seemed good to us, as a way of sampling what small mammals might be present in the locality. I think the course had an old-style requirement to submit skins and skulls of a certain number of species.

Overnight 20cm of snow fell which made trap recovery a bit of a problem. But I was 40 years younger then two week event horizon and had a pretty good idea where my 10 traps were [at the foot of that spruce, under that fallen log, between the two rocks] and was able to recover them all . . . the last couple only by whacking the powdered snow with a stick until the trap exploded upwards. Not everyone was so lucky /organized  and the University had to suffer some shrinkage in its trap inventory. Tom was phlegmatic about the loss "If it hadn't snowed, some of those mice might have been carried away trap-and-all by something further up the food-chain".

Kunz was grievous bodily harmed by a car in while attending a 2011 Bat Conference but lingered on more or less bed-ridden, for 9 years before being carried away by CoViD in 2020.

I'm not proud of attempting to kill small mammals for no very good purpose. I killed a lot more later in the 80s, trying to establish an ethological connexion between melanin and adrenalin. Then again, I'm not righteous about [not] eating meat. But I've never had any grá for turkey, neither during the holidays nor at any time of the year. At least half my family agree that the key part of celebratory meals is the roast potatoes: everything else (gravy, stuffing, meat, brassica, carrots) acting in support. So:

Don't be so negative

We had the whole descendant family visiting in series and parallel over the holidays and inevitably (with my two week event horizon) people were remember whenning . . . events I didn't recall. One of the tasks I (was) volunteered for was to mind a neighbour's dog and cats. They live about a mile [1.5km] away and Green Me decide to toddle back and forth twice a day by shank's pony, rather than firing up the Little Red Yaris to drive. To make the Winter's day outdoors as long as possible I did my pet-duty in the gloaming. To get as much positive as possible from the experience I ran down the lane [300m] recovered my wind <puff puff> and then also ran along the section of "main" road [200m, slightly uphill] to limit my time in the peligro de muerte baol báis zone. Of course, the family insisted that I wear my Farmer's Journal /RSA Hi-Viz jacket. It's a desperate bit of road for pedestrians or cattle drovers because two relatively straight stretches are connected at a junction with a blind corner:

One evening, on my safe return, Dau.I shared the time when 10 y.o. her was walking the late lamented Rashers-the-Dog along that road when a boy-racer careened round the bend far too fast, missed the pedestrians by about 3m and elbowed into the fence at ⬇ stopped, got out, inspected the damage, and zoomed off on his urgent business. Not a glance at the girl  to ask if her PTSD was developing nicely!

Did someone mention the RSA, the Road Safety Authority? Every year about this time they count the bodies killed on Irish roads in the previous calendar year and see how we're doing on the lethal weapon stakes.

Whom	2019	2018	%diff
Drivers	81	56	45
Passengers	16	20	-20
Motorbikes	16	15	7
Pedalbikes	8	9	-11
Pedestrians	27	42	-36
TOTAL	148	142	4

Because RSA is a bit dull, they just report the data with some helpful interpretive glosses. The total fatalities are up, sure, but the average loss of life for each month is the same in 2019 as in 2018. Which encourages the belief that we're about the same as last year. And indeed, statistically [5 x 2 contingency table with Chi.Sq test] showing the expected values on the assumption / null-hypothesis that the values are the same in each category:

Whom	2019 (Exp)	2018 (Exp)	Row Tots
Driver	69.9	67.1	137
Passen	18.4	17.6	36
Mcycle	15.8	15.2	31
Bicycle	8.7	8.3	17
Pedest	35.2	33.8	69
TOTAL	148	142	290

Chi.sq = 8.2 p = 0.083. So 2019 v 2018 not significantly different overall using an appropriate statistical test. You'd be amazed if exactly the same number of people died each year, month, day, so you shd expect some differences just from sampling error and accidents like that of Boy-racer and Dau.I [above] that could have been a fatality but providentially were not.

But goddamn journalists don't do dull, they only do sensation and preferably a disaster. The Journal shamefully rotten-cherry picked the data to make this shouty headline:

45% increase in number of driver deaths

on Irish roads in 2019. 

Which is technically true but does not convey the boring reality. They could have mentioned that innocent by-standing pedestrians are 36% safer from the tyranny of the private car. I've sounded off a lot about road traffic accidents 2018 - 2017 - 2016 - 2015 - 2014 - 2013 [worse things than dying]. One of the shockin' good things is things are A Lot Better than in the past in 2005 there were 396 deaths on Irish roads 2.5x as many as last year. And, unbelievably, in the 1970s it was habitual to report 600 deaths a year . . . when there were fewer targets people and far fewer cars. I feel safer in 2020 already.

Another victim-blaming headline about death-by-car.

Blue skies come to earth

I was up mad early yesterday morning and fielded an e-mail from my old gaffer, sent late the previous night, looking for a recent reference for one of her brighter students, who was asking some on-the-button questions that predicts a bright and shining future in science. Looking to me, with my two week event horizon, for that sort of thing is a bit of an ask but I can still do research so I went looking. It turned out to be a paper that we had talked about a couple of years ago. It showed that the work I had pursued twenty years ago as quintessential pure science which had no earthly 'use' in a curing-cancer or feeding-the-millions sort of way, turned out after a lapse of two decades to be really important in biotechnology.  Score 1 for funding blue-skies research. Then, as I left for work, I heard about a letter signed by 900 Irish Scientists which urged the government to start funding less obvious projects and open a seam of support for pure, blue-skies, higher risk research. I worked myself into a lather about that because I felt that I had been disrespected by not being asked to sign too.  But it was for sure a blue-sky day.

When we came back to Ireland in 1990, I secured a job doing a particular/peculiar class of research involving the analysis of DNA and protein sequences. You may like to have a quick refresher of how the genetic code works. It was interesting and intellectually challenging and hinged on the fact that genes of low-to-mid-range expression used 'codons' (the DNA triplets that code for particular amino acids in proteins) more or less indiscriminately while highly expressed genes use a biased subset of codons and you can use this to infer the expression level of an unknown gene. Almost all microbes had such an expression pattern but each species used its own characteristic subset of codons in its highly expressed genes. It was canny enough in its day, the data was patchy before mega-genome sequencing kicked in ten years later. You had to work hard and read a lot to make sense of the data and find the signal in amongst the noise. But we helped set the ground-rules for the field of synonymous codon usage research. I've had three good ideas in 40 years of science, and one of them came out of that project. I'm not making any such bigging-me-up claims for my 30-years-ago research on domestic cat genetics that came back to the spotlight for 15 minutes on Tuesday.

I hasten to say that I was too thick to appreciate at the time how this codon useless usage knowledge could be mobilised for anything more than honing my crap-detector and generating some papers that were cited a few dozen to about 200 times by other scientists. The average paper is cited less than once and 45% of all papers are published and never referred to again . . . by anyone: so we had some modest impact on science. But in October 2013, a paper was published in Nature showing that if you want to make some useful product (insulin, say, or in this case an enzyme that will efficiently degrade chitin for better health) using current biotechnological techniques you'd better pay attention to codon usage.  In particular you should modify your gene of interest so that it looks as much as possible like a highly expressed gene of the carrier species that will be grown in a 10,000 lt vat and generate kilos of your Amazing Therapeutic Protein. If you just lash in the human gene, as it is found in nature, it won't get fast-tracked by the expression vector, and may not work at all. As I say, I didn't have any of the key insights that got this paper published in Europe's premier science journal, but it is fair to say that they stood on the shoulders of our 'useless' research from the end of the last century.  I might say "I have done the state some service", as I prepare to exit stage right.

EV Drive mode

There was time, five years ago, when the EU almost got to boot daylight saving time into the black pit of hell where it deserves to live. But Covid put that initiative on hold and the opportunity seems to have passed: it's off the news anyway. One of the petty annoyances of twice yearly hour-shifting is resetting all the devices: the cooker, the car. This is only annoying because a) the change protocol requires an idiosyncratic combo of menu, buttons, pushes and push&holds b) I've forgotten [two week event horizon] the path in the intervening 180 days.  Frustration also applies with rental cars, because car makers are forever fripping about with extra features and the different brands won't talk to each other to find common ground. It doesn't help that car-rental people have neither time nor inclination to give clients a lesson in the peculiarities of This car that you want to drive off the lot, Now.

So we bought a new-to-us Yaris in September, which was a) hybrid b) automatic c) key-free ignition and that all took a bit of getting used to. The fan, for example, to stop the windscreen fogging up in winter the driver has to cycle through options to direct air at face; face&feet; feet; screen&feet. There is no option [R] to go screen only. BUT the designers claim you can set and maintain different temperatures for driver and front-seat passenger. The written manual is trying to service several different models of Yaris Hybrid with quite different controls: some with buttons & knobs; some with touch-screen some with both [a new dimension to Hybrid]. And the index is woeful: there is no entry for Clock except under M for Multi-Information Display.

Then the effn clocks changed on us and neither I nor my two 20-something effectives could discover how to make the Yaris clock go back an hour. That's not the end of the world. But it is still legitimate to take a swipe at the designers of a) the car b) the manual. Then for the first time in my life, I saw a key battery low alert on one of the several Multi-Information Displays on the dashboard. Nothing of help in the user manual but youtube offered several ingles-not-first-language explanations about a) what this meant b) how to prise open a keyfob c) the necessity to buy a CR2032 3v lithium coin cell.

I R old, I R the Patriarchy, so I felt no compunction about dropping into the Toyota dealer to change the key battery and the clock. The chap behind the service desk was ever so slightly patronizing. He didn't call me Gramps, let alone blithering ould fule, but you could sense him s l o w i n g down to s h o w me how to change a key-fob battery. I was therefore ever so slightly gratified, when he was unable to change the clock and had to fetch one of the mechanics from the shop-floor. Of Course and, like, well obvs the clock change is mediated by an unlabelled menu button on arm of the steering wheel [R]. That menu multi-button services: ABS brakes; Bulgarian dictionary, Cam-shaft optimizer, Dashcam, Eco-Fuel monitoring device, GPS integrator . . . far too much to fit on a label smaller than the steering wheel itself.

It is engagingly peculiar that in a User Guide so telegraphic that it omits mention of clock controls and key-fob batteries, the editors [and indeed the vehicle designers] found room for an oddly specific highly focused image of social engineering. Down on the floor nigh-invisible near the hand-brake is an [EV] button. I quote: EV Drive Mode in EV drive mode, electric power is supplied by the hybrid battery and only the electric motor is used to drive the vehicle. This mode enables you to drive in residential areas early in the morning or late at night, or in indoor parking lots etc. without concern for noise or emissions.