First Class

Things are gearing up in The Institute.  Yesterday we were inducting (not inducing, that's down the road in the maternity wing) and orienting (not orienteeering, that's up the mountains this weekend) our first year intake of students.  We expect that the second and subsequent years can remember where to find the library, the t'ilets and room D410.  If anyone finds D410, please let me know, because I'm scheduled there a lot this term.

Today I had my first actual class in the dreaded room E909 which is made with cardboard walls and a wonky floor and no regulation in the temperature department.  35 of us crammed in there (each giving off 100W) made it like a sauna, if a bit more decorous in the clothing department.  I gave them an Anonymous Induction Quiz to gauge how far we were apart between what they can remember from their Leaving Cert Biology 4 months to 20 years ago and what I think every person should know about themselves and how they function.  It's a Human Physiology class, so it's silly to treat it as text-book-l'arning without bringing our own experience to bear on subject.

I'll share that quiz here:
Q1 What is your star-sign?
Q2 What is your blood-group?
Q3  How many chromosomes do you have in each cell of your body?
Q4. Indicate on the diagram, where his kidneys are.
Q5. Indicate on the diagram where his adrenal glands are.
Q6. Indicate on the diagram where is his larynx?
Q7 How many bones are in a typical human body?
Q8 How many bones are contained in the red oval (one fore-arm to hand)?
Q9  How many cervical (neck) vertebrae do you have?  How many does a mouse have?  And how many does a giraffe have?
Q10  Appendix - Colon - Duodenum – Esophagus – Stomach.  Please put in descending rather than alphabetical order.
Q11 How fast can Usain Bolt run in km/h or mph?  If the last bus is moving away at 20km/h do you have  a chance of catching it and knocking on the door?
Q12 About how big is a human brain (in litres or kilos)?
Responses below the fold.

Marathon

Μάχη τοῦ Μαραθῶνος, the Battle of Marathon was fought on 12th September 490BCE, or possibly the month before depending on which ancient Greek city's lunar-solar calendar you can make sense of and believe.  2500 years ago, the Persian Empire was expanding inexorably Westwards and had enveloped and consumed the Greek cities on the Eastern side of the Aegean.  The Athenians sent an army out to engage the Persian Army which had just landed in Attica near the town of Marathon. Strategically an action was called for that would hold the Persians at the beach-head until the Spartans stopped combing their hair and celebrating a local religious festival, and hurried North to boost numbers.

But after a five day stand-off, the Athenians seized an opportunity, whose exact nature is a little murky from the dawn of written history, and caught the much larger Persian army in a tactic called double-envelopment.  The Persians broke and fled back towards their ships and the Athenians butchered them along the away. The dead-count at the end of the day was 6400 Persians : 192 Athenians + 11 Plataeans.  So 'twas a famous victory.

If Miltiades the Athenian general hadn't seized the moment, everything would have been different. Two days ago, I said something similar about Dennis Ritchie's impact on today's Wired World, but Marathon's impact was huge, a different result and everything would have been different.  The bloodied nose discouraged the Persians from pushing onwards with their Westward tramp for another decade and boosted the confidence of the nascent democracy in Athens enough to allow them create the beginnings of pretty much everything that we in The West call civilisation.  Starting with Sophocles Σοφοκλῆς who was 7 when the battle was fought, Euripides Εὐριπίδης who would not be born for another ten years and especially Aeschylus Αἰσχύλος who was there, doing his democratic pro patria duty at the age of 35.  So proud was he of this achievement, that his epitaph omitted all mention of his stunning, timeless plays 

Αἰσχύλον Εὐφορίωνος Ἀθηναῖον τόδε κεύθει 

μνῆμα καταφθίμενον πυροφόροιο Γέλας· 

ἀλκὴν δ’ εὐδόκιμον Μαραθώνιον ἄλσος ἂν εἴποι 

καὶ βαθυχαιτήεις Μῆδος ἐπιστάμενος

If the favorites had won at Marathon, there would be no Antigone, no Eumenides, no Oresteia. And Socrates, born 20 years later, wouldn't have had the leisure to think things through in a way that has saved the rest of us from that onerous task.

Cupboard in a bedsitter

Domestic science today: after a look at what beginning cooks thought was a suitable batterie de cuisine half a century ago, let’s look at the food that was processed with those tools.

This is what Katharine Whitehorn, in her classic Cooking in a Bedsitter suggested as sufficient for a civilized store “cupboard” (quite possibly a card-board box) in a 1960s bedsit.  I've made it sepia for historical authenicity.
Salt, pepper and (French) mustard;  mixed herbs and a bunch of bay leaves; Olive oil: nice but expensive - groundnut oil: flavourless, odourless, dirt cheap and less messy than lard; (wine) vinegar; (plastic) lemon juice; (tube) tomato paste; Bovril cheaper than Oxo; (powdered) garlic if liked; plain flour; sugar; (Patna) rice; grated cheese; spices: paprika, curry powder, chili powder, cinnamon & ginger.  And she rounded off this modest list with “If this seems too much to keep around, it may interest you to know that all that lot, plus a bottle of milk, a tin of coffee, a butter dish and packet of tea bags, a pot of jam, a pound of onions, three tomatoes, six eggs and a packet of instant potato all fit quite easily on one medium sized tray.” 

That’s thirty different ingredients as the back-bone of a sustainable and varied diet for an indefinite period.  Less than the ingredients in a single shop-bought cake nowadays.  On our kitchen shelves today, we have four sorts of vinegar, five sorts of pepper (Piper nigrum – I’m ignoring all the Capsicum spp.), seven sorts of flour: but I don't think we are 4x, 5x or 7x better off or richer for it.

The old house on Lansdowne Road that was demolished to make way for the Berkeley Court Hotel behind Jury’s (now D4) had a laurel tree Laurus nobilis overhanging the railings.  That was my introduction to bay-leaves and I’ve never been without them since.  We have a matching pair of bushy trees growing nearly 3m tall behind our house now.  A blessing.

Dau.II called me from Cork on Sunday morning.  She & He had moved into their flat the afternoon before, and she was off to do her first shop at Aldi.  I've asked her to put a list or publish her first till-roll on her blog, but she's not obeying orders any more.

Globish

Ho hum, back to work. The Institute is going through a Corporate Strategy Internal Consultation Process. The President has given every member of staff and a generous handful of students a day off from the regular business of the college (like preparing my Human Physiology lectures, hmmm?) to brainstorm our response to drafts of our Core Values and Strategic Themes. These appear under the Mission Statement (which we were not called upon to parse yesterday). Do you feel your eye-lids drooping? Do any of these phrases perk you up?:
learner-centred experience that engages
proactively seek creative collaborations
transparency and stewardship of resources
optimise the learner experienc
peer-review and quality enhancement culture
ensuring access and progression opportunities
They are all clipped from the proposed Core Values and Strategic Themes. Do you speak like that? I don't. So I suggested that all these Values, Goals, Themes should be passed through a Globish scanner. Which you can find here. This is particularly important because there is a cohort of people from outside the EU who will pay The Institute full fees but for whom English is a second or third language. Globish was created for such people. The words in red in this post are not.

A third of the words comprising half the letters in the "perky phrases" above are not.  Reading text with different colours is hard, no?  So imagine what it's like if you're reading the Mission Statement in Bangalore or Krasnoyarsk or Tianjin, trying to decide whether to invest your time and money in The Institute or a place where they speak Plain English.

I first heard about the Globish Corporate-speak scanner from Bill Liao who founded WeForest.org to plant trees in the Third World and save the planet. He insisted that their Mission Statement be Globish acceptable:

WeForest: Making Earth Cooler

How cool is that?!

dmr

There can't be many people who come up near the top of the page with a Google search of their initials.  But just under
Designated Marksman Rifle
Digital Mobile Radio
. . . and before
Differential Microwave Radiometer
Department of Mineral Resources
. . . and 12 million other hits 
"dmr" points you to Dennis M Ritchie's home page.  Which you might read for a moving note from his surviving siblings acknowledging an extraordinary level of response to Ritchie's death in October two years ago.  And also for a fascinating, illustrated view of Being There at the birth of universal computing.

Google: BtS points to the British Thoracic Society, Bratislava Airport, Base Transceiver Station and 63 million other hits without acknowledging me at all at all.  Part of the difference is that Dennis Ritchie had dmr as his username and e-mail address at Bell Labs for 50 years whereas I go by Bob rather than BTS.  He could do that (corner the name) because he was galloping about on the wide open prairies of computer-land years ahead of the posse.  
He wrote the C programming language!  
He wrote The Book (with Brian Kernighan)! !
He wrote half of the Unix operating system (with Ken Thompson)! ! !
These are awesome tasks in the world of geekdom: a bit like being the chief engineer of the Union Pacific Railroad, founding St Louis  and being half of Lewis and Clark. His contributions to the world as we now experience it - the whole internet runs on Unix boxes; and that operating system is written in C! ! ! ! - are so important that they almost defy belief.  Without Ritchie's take on it, it would ALL be different.

"What we wanted to preserve was not just a good environment in which to do programming, but a system around which fellowship could form. We knew from experience that the essence of communal computing [is] to encourage close communication." dmr, 1980.
That's a fellowship of which I have been a member for the last 25 years, not as a grey-beard Wizard like Ritchie, Kernighan and Thompson, of course, but in the ethos of that fellowship even humble hobbits like me have been succored, trained, empowered and treated with respect. Without Ritchie's take on it, it would ALL be different.

So seventy-two candles for the birthday of dmr today, hats OFF and a sweeping wholly respectful bow.

Wagga Wagga

When things stand out from prevailing norms, they perk up the interest of any scientist.  I've often wondered about Wagga Wagga, the largest non-coastal city in New South Wales.  The other towns in Oz of which Irish people have heard are named for solid Victorian politicians, governors or royalty - Melbourne, Sydney, Newcastle, Brisbane, Adelaide.  Woollongong is clearly one exception to this and Wagga Wagga is another. It's easy enough to figure out that they are named through one of the 1000+ indigenous languages of the Continental Island.  How do I know the number?  Because ABC the Australian Broadcasting Corpo has recently produced a luscious colour map of them. Link thanks to Tywkiwdbi. It has an amusing feature that mousing over the map produces a Sherlock Holmes circular magnification so that you can actually read the names rather than just enjoy the colours.

It shows that Wagga Wagga (red-circled lower-right) is in the middle of territory occupied by the Wiradjuri people both now and at the time of European settlement.  The Wiradjuri don't seem to have a Baden-Baden stutter but all their immediate neighbours to the West do: BarabaBaraba, DadiDadi, LatjeLatje, MadiMadi, NariNari, WadiWadi, WembaWemba, YithaYitha, YortaYorta.  So maybe the key ford over the Murrumbidgee River was held by a group of these intrusive Westerners as later intrusive Westerners built a settlement that became a city on the site?
And the First Australians are as woolly about their names as the Irish: the Wiradjuri are aka Waradgeri, Warandgeri, Waradajhi, Werogery, Wiiratheri, Wira-Athoree, Wiradjuri, Wiradhuri, Wiradhurri, Wiraduri, Wiradyuri, Wiraiarai, Wiraidyuri, Wirajeree, Wirashuri, Wiratheri, Wirracharee, Wirrai'yarrai, Wirrathuri, Wooraguri.
 
Next week: Walla Walla, Washington.

Bloody Borodino

The Battle of Borodino - Бородинское сражение - is billed as the bloodiest ever fought by La Grande Armee of Napoleon.  The Russians had been retreating eastwards since Napoleon had crossed the border at the R Niemen in the middle of June 1812, at the head of 286,000 soldiers - a city on the march.  This retreat was strategically the correct thing to do, but politically impossible and at the end of August the Russians changed generals and appointed Prince Mikhail Kutuzov as CnC.  The Russian army fought the French to a standstill on 7th Sept 1812 just 125km from Moscow and continued their retreat as a functional unit

Scientists often measure things and often they see if two variables are correlated.  So, for example, very early on in my career at The Institute, I put forward the hypothesis that the abundance of the 25 elements that have a function in the human body might match their abundance in the lithosphere.  Science has the whole world as its bailiwick, whereas history has a far more constrained range of information sources - mostly written for events of 200 years ago.  So you'd think that, with everyone working through exactly the same material there would be some agreement about the data.  Not a bit of it!  Wikipedia summarises Mikaberidze's work reporting wildly different estimates of the number of soldiers fighting on the two sides.  25 historians have gone to the library and had a go at this task.

 

A perfect example of zero correlation (r = 0.008)!  You'd think that if Historian X was extravagant with his estimates s/he'd big up both sides to make it seem more majestic/horrific.  And similarly Historian C for conservative would be careful not to exaggerate - either side. They can't even agree on the ratio: estimates here range from there being 20% more Russians to 40% more French.  Well really!  Is it any wonder that scientists look at the output of The Arts Block and think it is woolly, irreproducible and wholly subjective?  Part of the problem is that this battle acquired rather active legs for Soviet propaganda; and no French historian could be expected to approach the task without some sort of baggage.

There is a little more agreement about the frightening level of casualties.  The French lost 35,000 (about a sixth of them dead on the day, the rest wounded; almost all of whom would starve or bleed to death or be murdered by looters over the next few days - the French were at the very end of their tether for supplies).  The Russians found that they had lost 45,000 effectives - being a Home Match the survival rate among their wounded would be marginally better than for the poor French boys dying so far from home for La Gloire.  Historian Gwynne Dyer, in his book War compared the carnage at Borodino to "a fully-loaded 747 crashing, with no survivors, every 5 minutes for eight hours."  A metaphor which puts 9/11 into perspective. 

The Math: Boeing 747 capacity 525 * 60/5 * 8 = 50,000; which is counting almost all the wounded as 'no survivors'.

Two extraordinary things came out of the debacle: 

1. Tchaikovsky's commemorative 1812 Overture. 
2. "Probably the best statistical graphic ever drawn, this map by Charles Joseph Minard portrays the losses suffered by Napoleon's army in the Russian campaign of 1812." Says graphics-guru Edward Tufte, who will sell you a copy of Minard's chart as a poster. 

Little enough positive in the balance against smashing 80,000 fit young men to bloody rags, isn't it?