Mid Oct Sun Aye Noe

Dang! Entirely missed the aurora borealis on Th 10/10

• ♩ ♬ ♫ ♪
  
• Mark Knopfler & Ruth Moody - Wherever I Go
  
• Kodo drummers - well fit
  
• Hayde - Wayfaring Stranger
  
• Home Free - Man of Constant Sorrow
•  0.4146825098 prime nerd land
  
• Mark Huneycutt flies again after Helene 
• E-scoots banned on trains - Lithium fire risk
• MegaProject California Delta Conveyance ≋≋
  
• MiniProject Mossy Earth make a wetland in Portugal
• Really, do we need another golf-course?
  
• Career change after mislaid job application
  
• Some centenarians are not 100
  

evidence based

Pundits can be a pain in the fundament. I am a big fan of the BBC podcast Sideways which allows Matthew Syed to talk about people who march to a different drummer; who look at the world that standard media and Jan Modal might consider a bit out there. If we all think alike, it may be cosy and non-confrontational but it might also be bzzzt wrong. The podcast is fun because it explores some peculiarity of the human condition, develops some makes-ya-think ideas,ties everything up with a Message and signs off after 30 mins. Malcolm Gladwell, with his breezy certainties, and tidy stories, is an exemplar of the genre. As some wag had it "My take on Gladwell: his books should have been magazine articles and his magazine articles should have been tweets." 

But now I've read Matthew Syed's second book Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn from Their Mistakes (2015). It's a book in form but it's really journalism in substance. Which is fine - chacun à son goût métier - so long as you don't expect reporting on science to be, like, science. Scientists are generally really crap at explaining their ideas to ordinary folks; so there's defo a niche for Syed and Gladwell and Jared Diamond [whose breezy hypothesis about the end of civilization on Easter Island was just demolished on MeFi]. Diamond also had theories about the end of Viking Greenland [blob].

Syed contrasts the response to mistakes were made in the aero and health industries. But there are many examples from business and politics. Key message is that some corporate cultures make it very difficult to admit error so there is no learning opportunity. Nobody likes to be wrong and we tend to double-down if errors are pointed out. If management mistakes are re-framed as "shit happens" and "nothing to do with me" then the errors repeat. 

When a plane goes down, by contrast, investigators will go to extraordinary lengths to work out why. The black box for Air France 447 Rio-Paris flight was recovered from the mid-Atlantic floor 4,000m below the surface, 2 years after the plane crashed. Despite the headlines, air-travel is famously safe: and this is because pilots and engineers fess up when things go pear-shaped. Reports are filled and submitted and collated and analysed. Most importantly, international warnings, recalls and advisories go out to minimise the chance of something similar happening again [ever]. Here's another near [1.3m = 5ft] miss story analysed in the book]There has been much recent 737-max criticism of Boeing for turning a premier engineering company into a shareholder's company. 

When you tally up the number of avoidable iatrogenic deaths it is, according to Syed quoting a 2012 epidemiologist referring to a 2000 report,  equivalent to two full jumbo-jets falling out of the sky every 24 hours [USA data]. An arresting image, indeed. But more recent analysis on much larger samples specifically looking at the problem of medical error finds that two full jumbo-jets might be 10x - 20x too high.  Nevertheless even if only 5% of deaths in hospital are due to mistakes, it's still too high. And, Syed sez, nobody is comparing notes; let alone sending reports, analysis and conclusions to a central repository. Au contraire, when they killed my father in 2001, his hospital records mysteriously disappeared. We see this all the time: when babies die or are incapacitated in/by hospitals, parents usually have to lawyer up to get to the bottom of it. Mostly, they just want an explanation, an apology and some assurance that no parent will have to suffer like them in future. It's ugly and makes it all about the compo; as if a €million will get their baby back.

Afrique. Later on in the book  Syed re-tweets a story from Tim Harford [multoprevo] about evaluating interventions to better educate young Kenyans. Aid agencies have $50 billion to spend in Africa each year. Harford's useful way of evaluation such large numbers if to divide them by the relevant population. If distributed evenly, that's  a little less than $1 a week each. Anyway, the study in Kenya was effectively a controlled experiment or randomized controlled trial RCT. They found that 

• lurrying textbooks [in English] into schools made no difference
• lo-tech flip-charts with engaging brightly colour pictures ditto brrrp! 
• otoh, dosing all the kids (and the teachers?) with anthelmintics to reduce the parasitic worm burden perked everyone up, ready to learn and less likely to pull a sickie. Result: demonstrable improvement in the LOs Learning Outcomes.
  

Don't believe a word of it until it's been replicated in Cameroon! Nevertheless it's probably better if you read (some of) this book than spending the equivalent amount of time restlessly swiping left-right or slack-jawed watching youtube. As Gladwell said of his own works "The mistake is to think these books are ends in themselves. My books are gateway drugs—they lead you to the hard stuff." Which is characteristically too clever by 'arf.

!! But why waste time with secondary sources when you can get the key ideas from the horse's mouth? I have been recently quite the fanboi for Sean Carroll's Mindscapes podcast. Mindscapes#1 was with Carol Tavris the co-author of  Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) [2007] on Mistakes, Justification, and Cognitive Dissonance. Also on YT.
Five years and 200+ episodes later Carroll returned to the theme in Mindscapes#233 with Hugo Mercier (co-author  of The Enigma of Reason [2017] on Reasoning and Skepticism. Also on no pics YT. In my reality, I absorbed these two hour+ blasts of erudition within a couple of days of each other. So it was a bit like binge-watching House on lupus in an all-night session.

Stick it to the man, dessert edition.

RIYC?? In the early 90s, a couple of friends of my sister left the Woo of Findhorn to settle and make a living in Ireland. They bunked with us for a few weeks. But as soon as they got some gig work, they left our spare room and rented a teeny tiny flat in Dun Laoghaire. One Saturday a few weeks later, we piled into the car for a surprise visit to our new pals K&L. For a jape, we paused at the garden centre at the bottom of our rural Northside lane and bought a massive sack of spuds as a house-gift. They were delighted to see us, gave us tea and we all went on a promenade along the East Pier. That Winter, The Boy got well into D&D and wanted to attend a session in Dun Laoghaire after school on Tuesdays. K&L, well obvs, offered to give him a bed for the night and make sure he brushed his teeth before going back to school in the morning. And it was so.

For a while L was working the night shift as a waitron in the Royal Irish Yacht Club. It was a club, for rich people, so the tips didn't appear as a golden rain and the management paid only minimum wage. But, at the end of the shift, the staff could take home any unsold desserts as a gratuity. "rrrr, thank ye for my wages, marster". K&L, whose ancestors had left in the 20thC and 19thC respectively, worked real hard at re-anchoring their dynasty in Ireland. But it just didn't come together in pre-Tiger Dublin and so they pulled the plug and went on to British Columbia. When we went to help them pack for leaving, they presented us with a neat stack of 6 RCSI dessert bowls. L had never been in a hurry to return the receptacles for her dessert 'bonus'. I guess I was, wearing my épater les bougies bonnet, happy enough to fence her loot.

After they left, K&L borned and raised a chap together who was about the same age as Dau.I and Dau.II. And then, just before Christmas 20 years ago, K had a heart attack and died. We were bereft, it was as if his heart was too big for this world. The only time the three kids met was when L came back to Ireland with her Boy and his father's ashes to scatter at the Home Place in Tulla, County Clare. On that trip L revealed that the sack o' spuds which we'd dumped on them as a joke a decade earlier had been a lifesaver. After the rent was paid that month, they had literally no money left for food. Morto, I was! At the time I was on a crazy tax-free EU-funded gig in TCD and would happily have given them a pound of rashers and a cabbage as well as the spuds! And son-of-K&L? He turned out well.

Vth Column

It's more than 100 years since the foundation of The State = Saorstát Éireann which didn't formally sever the last umbilical to the UK until Easter 1949 when the The Republic of Ireland Act 1948 came into force. The Free State / Saorstát had been minting its own coins since 1922 but they were the same size and denomination as British coins and the latter circulated freely in Ireland, at face value. UK paper money was also accepted in Ireland when I was student in the 1970s; although not vice versa - you'd get very peculiar looks if you proffered £5 Irish in middle England. 

One of the neatest buildings in Trinity College Dublin is the 1937 Reading Room which was commissioned in 1919 to commemorate the 491 students and staff who had perished [in uniform!] in The Great War. The Hall of Honour atrium wasn't finished until 1928. 'NIKH' is inscribed in foot-high letters on the outside portico although 'Victory' rang kinda hollow for the 491 and their grieving families. The functional rest of the building - serving as a Post-Graduate reading room - wasn't finally completed until 1937! 

One of the neatest features of the design is that the massive hardwood doors are studded with bronze pennies [as L]. I've always believed that these pennies all bore the date 1937 because that would be a cool nod to future post-armageddon archaeologists. Similar to the practice of putting coins under the foundation stone of many public buildings when they are a-building. Most recently, in August, I urged Gdau.I and Gdau.II to check out the doors when they went on a city break with their aunties. They were unimpressed! So the next time I had idle minutes in TCD, I went to look at the disappointment myself.

And WTF! There are no Irish pennies, let alone 1937 pennies at all at all. Rather they all sport the profile of GEORGIVS V DEI GRA: BRITT: OMN: REX FID: DEF: IND: IMP: = George V by the Grace of God, King of all the British territories, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India . . . who died in 1936. I was initially outraged that Trinity was acting up as a Fifth Column for Empire long after that ship had sailed from the 26 counties. For a Republic, there's a lot of this historical inertia about: Royal Irish Academy, Royal Dublin Society, Royal College of Surgeons, Royal Irish Yacht Club. But a moment's thought revealed that the doors were probably completed for the 1928 structure and, however bamboozled, those remembered inside died for 'King & Country'. And no, not Brian Ború (941-1014 Clontarf), High King of Ireland.

Lonelio Noleoni

 Grass-widder agane this w/e: just me n the sheep

• Jackie Lennox - Chicken Supper, Mushy Peas and Tanora - Tanora 
• adverse review
  
• is closed forever
• Veg rennet pecorino making
• UnVeg!! Reducing half-a-pig at hometo chops and sausinges
  
• Modular homes ? two bois have a rant
• Not a bike-shed
• TDs behaving badly
  
• Moel Fferna Slate Mine
• Retrogressive permafrost thaw megaslump
• Sean Connery reads Ithaka [prev] to Va♫gelis 
• Lee Marvin [→] b under a Wand'ring Star (1969!)
• HeyHo, a Proustian madeleine for me: ole gravel voice grrrrresonated with the miserable lonely 15 y.o. that was me when it came out. Never seen the whole movie.
• Portishead
  
• Ryanair know where you live how close together are your eyes
  
• Irish Spa Hotels sweep prizes 8/25 incl. #1 = Adare Manor in CondeNast Europe Resorts survey. 6/25 in the list are in Turkey [Asia ahem] so the whole process is suspect
• Not-Streetview: googlecars can't cover the whole planet: entrepreneurs and dogoodniks are filling the gaps.
  

Gavagai!

In't language wonderful? We make these sounds with lingua, lips and larynx [Ug Ug beep beep] and other humans (and some dogs) can understand them to carry a particular meaning. Not all other humans, of course; your {family | roomies | co-workers}will probably get your drift; but someone who has just struggled from a leaking inflatable through the grating roar of pebbles which the waves draw back  and onto Dover Beach - maybe not so much? [and every day, as someone with a tin ear, I thank St Fursey I grew up Anglophonic).

It's not fair, or sensible, to ignore that wet Somali refugee because, even if we SHOUT, he can't understand what we want. Not sensible? Because we are making a sorry hames of running things hereabouts and could really benefit from new ways of l◎◎king at the problems that haemorrhage our social capital and aggravate inequity, unfairness and exclusion.

That's why we need linguists (and signers, translators, grammarians); to see what falls through the cracks of communication when people speak to each other. I returned a rental-car the other day and pointed at the nearside front corner
Bob "those scuff marks were on it when I took delivery"
Avis "these alloys?"
Bob "I've no idea, it's your car"
Avis "No: do . you . mean . the . alloy . wheels?"
I'm glad we cleared that up, because extra charges have been anxious-making in the past.

The best ling thing on the internet since sliced infinitives is Lingthusiasm which I've riffed on before. In the latest of nearly 100 episodes they cite a linguistics 101 story about two lads in countryside who have no language in common. A rabbit exits the hedgerow and runs across the field and one man points and says "Gavagai!". What does the other person make of that single word - it matters because establishing the meaning might be the beginning of a beautiful mutually intelligible friendship. Probably "rabbit"?? But could be "fast" or "big-ears" or "I like a lorra shaggin' too" or "mammal" or "fox incommming". 

The Lingthusiasm discussion transitioned from [parts of] rabbit to a handy resource for inter-language comparison. Morris Swadesh (1909-1967), a student of Edward Sapir [of Sapir and Whorf prev]. . . became the GoTo for lexicostatistics and glottochronology. In 1952 he delivered a 215 word list of language universals, to facilitate the comparison of languages - how many members of the Swadesh List have the same root in, say, Hindi and Irish. IF all languages, and this is the hypothesis behind the lists, have a word for [alphabetically] - bird - come - drink - earth - foot - give - hand - know - leaf - many - neck - push - rain - tree - THEN you can be confident that speakers of two languages are talking about the same thing . . . and you can make your comparisons. You may be able to see the connexion with the Gavagai tale. I guess that populating the Swadesh List for a newly discovered language would involve the same sort of non-leading questions as used to fill a Linguistic Atlas: "What do you call the long, tapering, orange-coloured root vegetable with feathery green leaves?"

Anyway. Swadesh recognised / included only 5 colours [wot? no cerise or teal?] because, for e.g., blue is not universal. Here are those colours in 9 different EU languages. What I've done is sort the five words in each language alphabetically. Your task is to match the colours between each pair of languages. Maybe start with EN and Nederlands?

Maybe not so easy? - even when you exclude the two not IndoEuropean tongues = HU and FI. You may express your admiration for those 19thC scholars who wrangled the Indo-European family of languages to appreciate that they were all descended from PIE - a language spoken by central Asian shepherds maybe 5000 years ago. Swadesh Lists for more languages [Hausa Telugu Tagalog Klingon] than you can shake a stick at on wiktionary.

Answers

	EN	FR	HU	NL	PT	CZ	FI	IS	IE
87	red	rouge	vörös	rood	vermelho	červený	punainen	rauður	dearg
88	green	vert	zöld	groen	verde	zelený	vihreä	grænn	glas
89	yellow	jaune	sárga	geel	amarelo	žlutý	keltainen	gulur	buí
90	white	blanc	fehér	wit	branco	bílý	valkoinen	hvítur	bán
91	black	noir	fekete	zwart	preto	černý	musta	svartur	dubh

In context, you can believe that yellow and geel and gulur have a common [Germanic] origin. As for black, English has gone rogue by adopting blæc an Old English word for ink. But we keep the standard meaning in swarthy. Also ewe.

Other ways of being

I gorra new Podcast: Mindscapes run by Sean Carroll where he "hosts conversations with the world's most interesting thinkers. Science, society, philosophy, culture, arts, and ideas." I should be okay for a while because it's been running since 2018 and 290+ thinkers have given an hour of their time to the project. Sean Carroll was trained a cosmic physicist [PhD Harvard 1993] but has also been one of those Public Intellectuals like Steven Pinker. Cosmology is hard and physicists in search of new challenges were definitely the grit that niggles at the start of the rise and rise of molecular biology in the 1950s. Carrol has read Erwin Schrödinger's What is Life? for example and has ideas about evolution because he's read widely in the field and is interested in Life, The Universe and Everything including the antics of the diverse inhabitants of this our small blue planet.

Mindscapes 269 featured Sahar Heydari Fard on "Complexity, Justice, and Social Dynamics". She has not read Erwin Schrödinger's What is Life? but she is up to speed on, say, punctuated equilibria and other key issues in the evolutionary philosophy. So her convo with Carroll was quite high-falutin' but pretty interesting, not to say gripping. The question addressed was what tools are available to document and support change in society. Like 1950s physicists brought their ways of seeing to DNA, proteins and evolution in the 1960s; so with social dynamics today: maybe we don't need to re-invent the wheel if established complexity theory can be mobilized to make models to get our heads around really hard problems (and unintended consequences) in society. 

One of the biological theories that the philosophical physicist and the philosophical economist cite with approval is Wright's idea of adaptive landscapes. Acknowledging that the Perfick is the enemy of the Good enough. They like the idea of local optimum solutions that may not be The Answer but are pretty good in a particular place and time. But Wright's landscape is barely a theory, let alone a testable hypothesis - it's a metaphor! But Fard riffs off on the idea to imagine an actual landscape of communities all trying to get along with the cards they have been dealt - a maybe sharing some of Things That Work with other similar communities to save them having to re-invent the wheel er blackjack table [Mixed metaphor morass alert!].  But that's okay: matter a damn where the ideas come from; just seize those which seem useful. The podcast set my poor mind off in a number of different directions. 

① One was to reflect on our Kindred Neanderthals who kept on keeping on for 200,000 years - through climate changes the like of which we haven't yet experienced - sharing, propagating and using a very basic set of technological tools: chipped stones, tanned hides, sharp sticks and red fire. The Blob has asked, rhetorically, where do the ideas come from? in science. For reasons unknown, Neanderthals don't seem to have budged much on the implemented ideas front for a hella long time.

② I was talking to my neighbour Local Solar the other day. He asserted that he was, like me, def'ny a morning person. But he recognised that night-owls had their place too. He reckoned the distinction went back to when the common ancestor of Us and Neanderthals had just come down from the trees. It was desirable that someone in the clan should be awake to tend the fire (and keep watch for cave-bears). Groups which segregated for larks and owls [as we do for green eyes and brown], retaining some of each type, survived better while less bioclock diverse parties left the stage. I'd never heard that argument before and I've no idea if it's even testable scientifically. But I love the idea that we are selected to be diverse rather than identical (to a fallen angel?)

③ Carroll and Fard were also asking how stable societies can nevertheless embrace change. For hundreds of years Han Chinese carried out foot-binding on their infant girls. Then in the space of one generation, about 100 years ago, the practice was shoved into the dustbin of history. This collective decision worked where Edicts from Manchu Emperors in the 1600s had been brushed aside. How come? Lots of other cultural norms in that society - some of which seem weird to us - continue as before. When we came back to Ireland in 1990, it was still pretty darned white, pretty darned catholic and pretty darned bacon & cabbage. In 1996, when we moved to the deepest rural midlands, our nearest neighbour confessed that they'd just tried frozen pizza for the first time - induced to do so by their teenage daughter. Now there is a Chinese take-away in Borris (pop ca. 800), not to mention Polskie sklepy, black and amber GAA players and Grand Theft Auto. 

One way to make change in the way we live now is to present lots of options and give some of them a go. Immigrants? Bring 'em on!