Who owns the ideas?

In talking about the position of women in science yesterday, I suggested that there might be a correlation between loudness and success.  It's a rather a woolly association, and I don't claim high predictive power for this hypothesis, but if you present your work with confidence and ringing tones at the annual meeting people can at least see what you're about.  If you're too diffident to do that or you mumble at your shoes or address the entire presentation to your own powerpoint slides, then you're less likely to get the job that will advance your career.  Stimmt?  There's a story of a famous and autistic physics professor who habitually turned her back on the students and addressed all her lectures to the chalkboard as she wrote her equations.  A colleague noticed this happening and explained that the students preferred to see the face of their lecturers.  The professor, clearly not stupid ("professor" after all), absorbed this idea intellectually and presented subsequent lectures as scribble scribble scribble TURN talk talk TURN scribble scribble TURN talk talk  . . .  She couldn't really see the point in the TURNs because the information content was the same; but her student assessments went up and her HoD was happy.

Back in the day I was Senior Scientist in bioinformatics for a research group that was after landing some grant money.  The Gaffer announced that, if she employed a graduate student to push back the local compute frontiers, I could supervise that aspect of the work and she could supervise a) the student b) the project.  And it was so.  When you get to a certain seniority in research, you no longer have time (grants to apply for, papers to write, meetings to attend, budgets to reconcile and probably some teaching too) to do regular work at the lab-bench.  Unless you do regular work at the lab-bench, your hands get less sure and your skills degenerate.  Technology nevertheless moves on and after a couple of years you couldn't operate the kit to save your life.  But with seniority comes longer and wider experience and your crap-detector doesn't lose its edge: you can still interpret the results that your research group shows you and suggest new avenues to explore.  Unless you pick total lemons to work for you, you can trust the youngsters to hear about and implement the latest techniques - they talk shop at meetings and over lunch and read the literature - and all you need to do is rein them in when the consumables bill gets silly.

We were at a lab meeting one day about a year after the hire when The Gaffer had a bioinformatic insight!  She didn't really speak the language, because even in her halcyon days at the bench she'd had no experience with computers, but she made a good enough stab at articulating the germ of her idea.  This tender sprout was instantly drenched in cold water by the new compute-chap who was smart, confident and ambitious. He explained patiently and in some detail why such an idea was going to be a total bust. The Gaffer absorbed all this, shrugged, and the meeting moved on.  The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.-(Linus Pauling) after all.

Three weeks later, another lab meeting (relentless progress of science here) and the compute-chap comes up with an idea which he proceeds to elaborate until he stops bemused because The Gaffer and I had just fallen off our chairs roaring with laughter. If she hadn't caught my eye, I would have been able to keep a straight face, so it was her fault. The ill-conceived, hopeless and ignorant idea from earlier in the month had been absorbed, evaluated positively and owned.  Before you think that this is a joke against the young feller or a comment on hubris, look humbly into the history of your own ideas and ask where they came from. “Any new fact or insight that I may have found has not seemed to me as a ‘discovery’ of mine, but rather something that has always been there and that I had chanced to pick up.” P. V. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar - for starters. But there's also the fact that ideas are brought to light by bouncing them about between people, and then no one person owns them. Also it takes time to absorb new information and we always re-write history so that we come out looking a little better and a little brighter in our own estimation than we are seen by other others who are also re-writing history to their own self-boosting agenda. I've had three original ideas in thirty years of research. One of them came in the course of a conversation with two graduate students.  I wish that talk had been recorded (no webcams back then) because I've a sneaking suspicion that the core of the idea came from one of the students and I just adopted it.  A bit like Pallas Athene springing fully armed from the head of Zeus [above L on a vase] - it doesn't really happen like that.

Emily Graslie Brain Scooper

We should pay attention to minority scientists because they may have a different take on the world or the small portion of it that we are both looking at/for.  Science education is a trade-off between getting to know the shoulders of the giants of previous generations and developing the natural curiosity of children into more formal hypotheses that can be tested. "Mummy, mummy, why is the sky blue?"

John Tyndall was born down the road in Leighlinbridge and I often drive past his home-place on the way to work in The Institute. He worked out that the sky was blue because minute particles of dust and/or water vapour scattered the incommmming sunlight and that blue (short) wavelengths were more scattered and so more visible than yellow and red.  This idea is often called Rayleigh Scattering rather than the Tyndall Effect, because John Strutt, Baron Rayleigh developed the idea further.  It could have been that Rayleigh became associated with the idea because he was better connected than the Irish son of a police constable - we've met Strutt before helping Ramsey discover Argon.  Or it could be that Tyndall had such a wholly unconvincing hook-on beard that the quality of his science was called into question. They were both wrong - about the dust/vapour - and it took Einstein to show that the scattering is due to the gas molecules of the air itself and definitively (for now) answer the child's simple question.

I'm only half jesting to say that it matters who you are and where you come from when it comes to assessing whether people listen to you.  We live in a winner-takes-all world where Finalists in Masterchef get $500,000 and the other contestants don't even get to keep their aprons.  Although it must be said that Luca "MC-USA 2013" Manfe was kind as well as cook.  I've just posted about how 70,000 talented people got left on the cutting room floor when Sung-bong Choi won Korea's Got Talent and went viral.  The Nobel Prize and Harry Potter are other egregious examples where one sheep, perhaps a little better than the rest of the flock (Latin: grex, gregis, hence egregious), gets the golden fleece and the rest get shorn.

In the world of science blogging (if twitter had pre-dated blogs, I bet us bloggers would "witter") and its recent mutation vlogging (wittering on camera), a tuthree sites rise to the top - admittedly because they are more cream than scum - and the rest sink to obscurity in the depths beyond the second pageful of Google hits. Emily Graslie has pointed out that, of the score or so of science vloggers, 90% of them have XY chromosomes.  But isn't that the ratio in many cohorts in the realm of science - Nobel Prize winners, Professors, Honorary Degree recipients?  No, no, you may cry there are other STEM cohorts where the XX/XY ratio approaches or even exceeds parity of esteem: undergraduates, technicians, makers-of-tea and moppers-of-brow, people who have not yet reproduced.  We need to work to address this because it's all too easy to let the louder, more self-assured, blokier types convince everyone that their solution is correct and so get promoted.  But the still small voice of calm may be closer to the truth and that voice is much more likely to be a young woman's.  Or even if not closer to the truth, then perhaps another way of seeing that has merit.

Emily Graslie runs a show called thebrainscoop out of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, which features 5-6 minute youtube episodes answering tumblr- & twitter-fed questions. Probably suspecting that people who tweet have the attention span of a gnat, these are answered in an average of 21 seconds (N=22, from Ask Emily #1 and #2).  thebrainscoop also features attention-getting and attention-to-detail-requiring tasks like dissecting a dead wolf, which is a little more true to life-and-death than the sanitised stuff you see on CSI.  It reeks true because the overwhelming and never-to-be-forgotten smell of mammal-guts is explicitly addressed in the video. Eeeee when I were a lad, you could either do dissections yourself and/or look at pictures in a book like The Anatomy of the Cat. Video with commentary is now a wonderful alternative with huge educational potential.  We'll be dissecting a pickled rat in Yr1 Biology in the Spring and I shall make watching a Brainscoop dissection a pre-requisite for my lab sections. I've only just discovered young Graslie with her engaging enthusiasm (I doubt anyone refers to her as still small voice of calm) and quonky sense of humour, so I haven't seen what else she has to offer, but I'm really looking froward to finding out.

And hey, it's important!  Graslie doesn't have a PhD in Science; heck she doesn't even have a first degree in science having majored Studio Art in U Montana a couple of years ago. So she hasn't had time to sweep scurf of the shoulders of Cuvier, Darwin, Hooker & Huxley.  Standing on her own independent feet without a steamer-trunk full of baggage, I have great hopes that she'll find stuff out because she won't know what everyone knows to be true.

How long is a nanosecond?

about a foot!

Grace Hopper was born in NYC on 9th Dec 1906, 107 years ago. She shouldn't be celebrated as a woman in STEM but rather as a person in STEM who made a difference.  In 1953, Crick and Watson discovered the structure of DNA with a peculiar combination of reading, bouncing ideas around, plagiarism and model building.  Their model of the structure articulated the function, was internally consistent and consistent with all the external data available at the time.  Later, PB Medawar and others, without in any way disparaging the achievements of Watson and Crick, pointed out that the discovery of the structure was inevitable and would have happened in the next few years; even if it came out in dribs and drabs, with false starts and partial solutions.  Most DNA replication happens one particular way in the natural world, so there is no utility, although a lot of fun, in inventing more elegant ways in which it might perform its coding function.

In the development of computers, however, there is an infinity of branching roads in the yellow wood of history: places where things might have been different. Three months ago I wrote, more or less on my knees, about Dennis Ritchie.  He was early enough and central enough to have made a difference in the ethos of computing, quite apart from writing C the programmers programming language and half the Unix operating system.

Grace Hopper was early too.  She was the third person to make the Mark I computer do her bidding.  That's the Harvard Mark I, not Alan Turing's Colossus Mark I (1944), or the Manchester Mark I (1949) or the Ferranti Mark I (1951).  Imagine how different our world would be if all these early computers had been called Jethro.  The Mark I was 16m long, 2.4m tall and 0.6m thick and weighed four-and-a-half tons so was hardly suitable as a mobile phone.  But your phone is orders of magnitude more powerful, so we've made some progress on your behalf. The computer was not only lumpy, it was s-l-o-w, it could only make three additions in a second, so something as simple as calculating the average of a set of numbers took a long time.  One of Hopper's famous exploits was to ask her engineers to "cut off a nanosecond", so she could show the Navy Brass why it took so long for electronic communications to travel back to Washington via satellite. The engineers sent her a piece of copper wire 30cm long which was the maximum distance that electrons (or light, indeed) could travel in a billionth of a second.

Hopper wrote her computing instructions in something that was more or less opaque to outsiders - not for nothing was it called code. So she was an early adopter of the idea of making it easier for people to instruct computers.  She was forthright in her advocacy of sharing useful code fragments, so that one engineer could build on another's successful debugging and implementation of a routine.  That's why, after a decade of coding exclusively in FORTRAN, I learned PERL in 2001 - so I could 'borrow' some sub-routines that worked from others in the lab where I'd just gotten a new job. It's not very helpful if the instructions (2+2=, say) you are sharing are written in pencil and look like:
[register] [source] [operation]
1000001 0110010 0001111
1000010 0110010 0001111
1000001 0000010 0101011
1000001 0000000 0001110
0000000 0000000 0000111
Swap a pair of those 1s and 0s and you've fritzed the program entirely. How much easier if you could write instructions that looked like a very formal, reduced-vocabulary English? Hopper's team wrote such a very early 'compiler' that would accept 20 English-like words and translate them into the binary which was all that the computers could handle. It was called FLOW-MATIC and was the mother of COBOL which became the standard business-and-accounting programming language for the next 3 or 4 decades.  Her persistence in this vision for democratizing and facilitating the process of coding in face of nonsense:  "I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. ... they carefully told me, computers could only do arithmetic; they could not do programs" was dogged like Barbara McClintock's vision of how things must be.

Hopper signed up for the US Navy Reserve in 1943, giving up a civilian job to serve her country in WWII.  That wasn't so unusual in the extreme circumstances of the day.  She finished up as an Admiral!  That's pretty rare.  I think that she probably did better in the military than in academia.  Navy people are used to making decisions, even if they are dangerous, even if they cause loss of life.  When promoting the adoption and standardisation of COBOL, for example, she applied her talents at advocacy in the key quarters . . . and it was so!  Women in civilian departments at the same time (and this is long after the War) were still typing up and filing reports and being barred from the senior common room. That was certainly her own assessment:
"I've received many honors and I'm grateful for them; but I've already received the highest award I'll ever receive, and that has been the privilege and honor of serving very proudly in the United States Navy."

The Dogs in the Street

If you're offended by language that that denigrates women just because they have XX chromosomes and don't conform to a rarely attainable standard of symmetry and youth, you can stop reading now.  Indeed you shouldn't have read the the title ("Dogs" etc), you sensitive person.

Still with us?  I was tooling though the youtubiverse yest-morning and I came across Sung-Bong Choi from Korea. I was going to post solely about him with a waggish title like Sung-bong your heart out. We, as a family, gave up the ould telly about 25 years ago and I continue to feel smug about the decision.  All those hours saved for reading books, staring at the ceiling, making jam rather than watching the sadly derivative TV material you have to sit through to cop the occasional gem. The Sung-bong youtube shows him make the judges of 코리아 갓 탤런트 (Korea's Got Talent) tear up at the grinding poverty & random violence that the boy went through living on the streets before his talent as a singer was recognised.  The derivative nature of the show extends down to having two oriental clones of Ant & Dec who herd the hopefuls along the chute to the slaughter-house on stage. Why do we tolerate/celebrate a system that ensures that a young chap with the voice of an angel sleeps in a public toilet and earns $1-a-day while Justin Bieber earns a $1-a-second (*)?  It's very little satisfaction that Sung-Bong (who isn't as white and symmetrical or as English-speaking and gelled-up as young Bieber) will now claw his way a little further up Mount Celebrity - he leaves a thousand similar kids on the street selling chewing gum for pennies. Sung-bong was assured by Ant-clone and Dec-clone that everyone, or at least the whole 50 million population of South Korea, was behind him.  More than twice that number have now watched his discovery/revelation on youtube. If everyone of them shed a single tear that's more than 5 tons of salty water to lubricate his career.

Sung-Bong has been compared to Susan "I live alone with ma cat called Pebbles" Boyle, a woman from Glasgow who is frankly frumpy and had the temerity to volunteer for Britain's Got Talent a tuthree years ago.  She was sent along the chute by the original Ant & Dec to be patronised by Simon Cowell, Piers Morgan and The Blonde Wan.  But their dismissive contempt soon turned to shame when Ms Boyle belted out I had a dream and brought the audience to its feet. Amanda "TBW" Holden seems a nice enough woman, and I shouldn't refer to her as if she is a token, but she seems to be famous for being famous and doesn't have half the chutzpah and heart (not to mention a voice to bring a smile to Lucifer himself) of Ms Boyle.  Who did get to sing with Elaine Paige.  And lest we take the easy knee-jerk of putting it all down to sexism, I'll segue seamlessly to Charlotte and Jonathan.  
Charlotte is a nice enough girl who appeared on BGT last year accompanying a mountainous chap called Jonathan who was 8 months older and 75 kilos bigger. When they shambled on with the crap clothes and Essex accents, everyone, judges and audience and viewers at home, was expecting excruciating.  What they got was stunning.  The Boy Sung-good, like Sung-bong before him on the other side of the planet.  Jonathan and Charlotte have now been given a chance, a contract and a tailor who may have trained as a sailmaker, and I wish them well but I liked them just as they were: nice kids from Ordinaryville. Charlotte has clear reserves of kindness, of which we can never have enough.

But perhaps the take home of these three stories is not that some succeed and others fail but that we all succeed if we are satisfied with enough.  Young Charlotte, wiser than her years, considered coming second - they lost to a performing dog - in the Final of BGT as a major achievement rather than a source of disappointment. Another thing is that singing, especially singing together, is part of the human condition and we should all, must all, do it more often.

STOP PRESS:  Check out raw talent before it is discovered on Україна має талант (Ukraine's Got Talent):
Feibhár: Little Red Riding Hood and Everybody's names and True
And I've written about W!ld before: 
W!ld: Stardust and 100 other songs (w/o pictures, though).

This is good 09DEC75 copy.

(*) The $1-a-second earnings of Bieber is actually a 2x under-estimate -  discovered 5 years or 67,000,000 seconds ago, he is now "worth" $130 million.

Shifty words

Here's a striking map showing the words Europeans use for Church/Eaglais and here's a bunch more maps to cover such essentials as beer and apple.  In the church map I like the fact that the Turkish for church is clearly from the Greek: almost all Turks being muslim they'd need to borrow a word for a christian place of worship.  I also relish the fact that so many sources and ultimate etymologies have been dusted off to describe a building designed for prayer, including royal hall; assembly; lord's house; fort; and monastery.  There's another nice example of this in the fact that the Iberian words for head cabeza, cap and cabeça are clearly derived from classical Latin caput but French tête and Italian testa come from soldier's slang meaning box.  Testudo the tortoise comes from the same root.  It's as if a colloquial phrase like "I'll knock 'is bleedin' block off" gets promoted to formal language.

I am a lousy linguist, possibly because I have a bit of a tin ear, but have been collecting dictionaries ever since I first encountered yard-sales in Boston in the early 1980s.  How could Bob the Cheap turn down Teach Yourself Norwegian when the price was 25c or a Dictionary of Colloquial Roumanian for 10c?  Bound to come in useful for the children, I said.  Knowing other languages helps make sense of your own.  “Trap-door” loses some of its dangerous, not to say Freudian, associations when you know that trap is Dutch for stair.  In that same language dapper means brave, while in English it is quick/little and active/spruce.  Presumably, in Old High German, Tapfer was originally an adjective applied to knights. Over the years, Dutch knights, possibly valuing courage (Dutch courage after all) more than other cultures, retained the nobler part of the original meaning, while English knights concentrated on merely looking the part.  Horse appears to have no equivalent in other European languages although cavalry shares a root with Irish capall, French cheval and Italian cavallo.  But, not so, because in German ross has the sense of steed or charger.  Almost all European languages come to us from “Proto-Indo-European” PIE.  By finding things which have common words in most Indo-European languages you can hazard a guess at who the PIEians were and where they lived.  Sometimes the connexion is subtle – sheep, mouton (fr.), and caora (ir.) all seem very different but our ewe is essentially the same word as the Latin (ovis) and Sanskrit (avis) for sheep in general.  And from this one can deduce that PIEians herded woolly animals and other evidence/speculation/assertion suggests that they did this in central Asia more than 5000 years ago.

Sometimes the association is not obvious until you accept that languages evolve in quite consistent ways so that, as Jakob Grimm (Grimm’s Fairy Tales!) noted 150 years ago: PIE bh changed to b to p to f as the PIEians moved from Asia to Eastern Europe to Germany; while dh went to d to t to th. These two rules are both illustrated by the change from Greek poda (tripod, podiatrist) to our foot. Another example is gh – g – k – h (Latin cordis to English heart).  Nobody seems to know why this occurred. Is there any truth in the rumour that the th sound for S and Z which distinguishes Castillian from South American (and Andalusian) Spanish stems from the fact that mighty monarch Emperor Charles V referred to himself with his Habsburg lip as Carloth Thinco, and all the courtiers followed suit?

If you’re still with me but wondering where this is wandering, I’ll share some information that will be very useful if you go off to West Africa for an enriching experience.  Hausa is a language widely spoken in the region and is richly expressive in its use of useful proverbs and aphorisms.  I am sure you’ll be able to work these phrases into the conversation.

• Giwa a garin wani, zomo: an elephant in another town is a rabbit
• Tusa ba ta hura wuta: breaking wind won’t bring the fire to flame.  

Come to think of it, as Ireland gets more multi-cultural, you won’t have to go as far as Ouagadougou to try them out.

Critical attention

Dem bones dem bones dem loonngg bones.  I have two lab-sections for 1st Yr Sport Health which meet every other week on Weds afternoons. The students have spent some time looking down microscopes at cells and drawing what they see rather than what they know from their school biology text-book.  That's been difficult and the results have been not-so-good.  I want them to be able to draw a bunch of cells, with as much interior detail (but not more!) as the instrument and their eye is capable of discerning.  I want to be able to point to a particular cell in the drawing and for them to be able put a needle point on that cell under the 'scope.  It's been a struggle to achieve this, but nobody who has attempted this task with any real engagement will claim that it is easy.

Earlier this term we moved on and up in scale and were drawing a longitudinal section of a sheep humerus.  Longitudinal section means that the butcher has been asked to saw through the bone along its length to expose the interior marrow and the different elements of the internal structure.  There was a bit of a cock-up in the supply chain and for the Mon and Tues classes, fresh bones weren't available and they had to deal with last weeks cast-offs which, despite the fridge, were getting a little rank.  So I was very much relieved when I found a small bag of new bones new bones ready for us. I find it best to start by pulling out a random bone from the bag and talking briefly about the engineering.  How that humerus has to support a whole sheep's weigh for at least part of the time when it is galloping up the field, so it must be strong, but that a solid bone would be weight-inefficient.  Casting the bone as a hollow tube sorts out this compromise.  A brief aside asking how many lab books can be supported on a single vertical toilet roll compared to the number on a single horizontal toilet roll is useful here.  We also look at a section cut through the bone under the microscope which reveals (mirabile visu!) how a hollow cylindrical structure is repeated in the osteons that make up the compact bone's anatomical structure.

Clearly long-bone structure is more directly relevant, and therefore engaging, to sport-scientists than the cells of a layer in an onion.

That evening I came across an inspiring talk on the blogosphere that, despite a provenance from the Arts Block, was directly relevant to what we'd spent the afternoon doing.  Jennifer Roberts, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities at Harvard, teaches Art History. Elizabeth Cary Agassiz was the wife of The Agassiz, and no mean scientist herself.  One of the substantive tasks that Professor Roberts sets her students is to write an essay on a single picture of the student's choice.  Because the students are Harvard students they could knock off such a task in a week of solid book learning and submit their 5000 words a week before the deadline - and have time to party.  But Roberts insists that the first element of the task if for each student to sit in front of the picture itself (neither wikimedia nor a postcard will do) for THREE HOURS to get sucked into the details. It's a bit like deep-listening (you can do a 4 days course in that) with your eyes.  You can see what picture Roberts chose - Copley's Boy with a (flying) squirrel - and the extraordinary things that were revealed by her contemplation.  Or for the video-generation, a filum. A quote:
"And that’s why, for me, this lesson about art, vision, and time goes far beyond art history. It serves as a master lesson in the value of critical attention, patient investigation, and skepticism about immediate surface appearances. I can think of few skills that are more important in academic or civic life in the twenty-first century."  Amen, amen, sister, hear her, hear her, hallelujah.  

We are all in a rush nowadays, flicking from soundbyte to youtube to tweet.  This affects our whole lives in a "medium is the massage" way.  We have been insidiously trained to have little patience to sit for a couple of hours minutely examining and recording our impressions of a mutton bone.  I know a couple of our most succesful Irish scientists, professors both, who are passionate about fishing.  The ability to sit still and think like a fish for a few hours is one way of honing the 'critical attention' which is so important in science. Cripes if Barbara McClintock can think like a transposable element of maize DNA, surely thinking like a fish is possible/useful. It's not the only way to progress science, however, and I know other equally successful professors whose view of fishing is "sometimes I sets and thinks and sometimes I jest sets" and who would rather tonk themselves on the head with a mallet until ideas come.

Sinterklaas

Today it is St Nicholas' Day. He is the patron saint of sailors, merchants, archers, thieves, children, pawnbrokers and students (I think that covers half the planet). λένε ότι the good man threw a purse (or three) of gold down the chimney of a poor man to supply dowries for daughters. The Day is celebrated across wide swathes of Europe, but in Holland the festivities begin and end on Sinterklaasavond - yesterday - a bit like many N Europeans do the family gifting on Christmas Eve.  In the old days in the Netherlands, Sinterklaas was the main Winter festival when the secular aspects of holy days were expressed.  Calvinists and Catholics alike were apt to treat Christmas as the Birth of The Lord and spend the day in church or prayer and contemplation.  But even the starchiest white ruff over the blackest of coats needs to have the hair let down over it once in a while and Sinterklaas was when you gave children a whole orange or a few sweetmeats.

This time in 1978, I was coming to the end of my half-year stint working in Rotterdam's Diergaarde Blijdorp to fund yet more education.  I've given tribute to the generosity and kindness of my work-mates, but I should also acknowledge that the management were remarkably civilised. On Sinterklaas everyone in the Zoo was given a boterletter (see S at right) by the administration.  There was a fair bit of joshing around about this as the default was that you'd get the letter appropriate to your first name.  Women called Ina would invent a sick nephew called Willem for whom the (larger) W boterletter was destined.  Despite the Is having generous serifs so that they weighed the same as the Ws and Ms, nobody quite believed it.  I couldn't find a picture of the wonderful golden boterletter I got doled out at the canteen that lunchtime, 35 years ago so I've included a chocolade-letter instead.  You can see that the S boterletter is a much better deal: basically a half kilo of marzipan rolled in a thin crust of puff-pastry.  Indeed I have no memory of chocolade-letters, so they may be a recent invention. I think we were also given a half-day holiday, so that everyone could go home and celebrate with their family. 

The orange I mentioned earlier has a long association with being given to children at Sinterklaas and the legend of the Saint is tied up with Spain.  Not least in the tradition that Saint is accompanied by Zwarte Piet a wholly politically-incorrect golliwog sort of a servant who doles out the oranges, speculaas and pepernoten which are clearly products of the take-over of the spice-trade by the VOC De Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie - Dutch East India Company.  Over the last two generations the plain people of the Netherlands have succumbed to the relentless pressure of multinational consumerism and homogenisation by taking to celebrating Christmas as well.  I hope that the distinctive traditions of a small corner of NW Europe keep above the flood - diversity is to be encouraged.  "Treasure your exceptions" as early geneticist William Bateson had it.