environment, history, links, medical, natural history, science

Monthly Links

Here are my monthly links to items you may have missed, but didn’t know you didn’t want to.

Science, Technology, Natural World

Despite extensive studies, scientists still can’t agree on Chernobyl’s impact on wildlife. [LONG READ]

Try putting your ear to the ground … scientists are discovering that life in the soil is unexpectedly noisy. [LONG READ]

So can melting permafrost release ancient pathogenic microbes? [£££££]

It seems that magpies care! They’ve outwitted scientists by helping each other remove tracking devices.

But an even bigger problem … Do birds have language, at least in a way we would recognise? [LONG READ]

Finally in this section … a very short piece on the curiosities that are Britain’s pipefish.

Health, Medicine

A very worrying look at how the GP’s job has changed in the last 30 years. [LONG READ]

Researchers are discovering that bones are a lot more than bits of scaffolding.

How does what you eat affect your sleep, and vice versa?

What happens when depression collides with the menopause and perimenopause? [LONG READ]

Oh dear! Apparently everything we thought we knew about posture is wrong. [LONG READ] [£££££]

At last some good news … Apparently dark chocolate (at least in moderation) is good for your health, and for the microbiome.

Sexuality

So here’s a relationship therapist on how to have better sex.

Environment

Cranes were reintroduced to Britain in the late 1970s, and now they’ve had their best year for 400 years.

History, Archaeology, Anthropology

A fossil of a large pterosaur has been found on the Isle of Skye.

Recent research is suggesting that the meteor which killed off the dinosaurs fell to Earth in the Spring.

Palaeontologists are coming to the conclusion that the extinction of the Neanderthals was not caused by the brutal domination of Homo sapiens.

Remains of woolly mammoth, and some other Ice Age remains have been found in Devon.

Some important prehistoric chalk sculptures, thought to be childhood artefacts, have been uncovered in Yorkshire.

Trousers are one of those wonders of civilisation in that their construction is not overtly simple or logical. So it’s astonishing that the oldest known “pants” seem to have originated in Asia, and a pair is survived around 3000 years. And the weaving is absolutely amazing.

Back at home, Museum of London archaeologists have found an 8m Roman mosaic floor in Southwark, just south of the Thames.

Here’s our favourite Medieval Historian on the power and influence of women in medieval times. [LONG READ]

Still with the medieval, researchers have found what appears to be the earliest known account of ball lightning in England, dating from 1195.

London

Just one London item this month … the Museum of London will close this December for 4 years, while it moves to its new home in the old Smithfield Market.

Lifestyle, Personal Development, Beliefs

And finally in this issue … British Naturism has, again, pointed out that it is not illegal to go naked in your back garden, and that it is not a matter for the police.

amusements

Christmas Amusement Answers

Back on Christmas Day I posted a link to the 2021-22 King William’s College General Knowledge Paper.

The Guardian have today published the official answers at https://www.theguardian.com/games/2022/feb/27/the-king-williams-college-quiz-2021-the-answers.

No I’ve no idea how well I did – except it’s guaranteed to be badly – as I consigned my answer sheet to the recycling a couple of weeks ago. Anyways round you probably did better!

current affairs, medical

Why are GPs Leaving the NHS?

Dr Clare GeradaEarlier this week there was a long read article in the Guardian by Dr Clare Gerada, a senior GP and former chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners. In the article Dr Gerada draws on her own experience to show how the GP’s role has changed in the last 30 years. No wonder the NHS is haemorrhaging GPs because it is not a pretty tale.

“In my 30 years as a GP, the profession has been horribly eroded”

We should be very worried, because we are clearly not getting the healthcare most of us would want, or expect.

amusements, music

February Quiz Answers

OK, so here are the answers to this month’s quiz questions. All should be able to be easily verified online.

February Quiz Questions: Music

  1. Which Renaissance composer wrote a madrigal entitled El Grillo? Josquin des Prez
  2. What was the name of the band formed by Jack Bruce, Eric Clapton & Ginger Baker? Cream
  3. Who composed a piano piece called the Golliwogg’s Cakewalk? Debussy
  4. Part of which Christopher Smart work was set to music by Benjamin Britten? Jubilate Agno
  5. Which astronomer is name-dropped in Bohemian Rhapsody? Galileo

Answers were correct when questions were compiled in late 2021.

quotes

Monthly Quotes

Our monthly collection of quotes …

Boris Johnson is a terrible prime minister and a worse human being. But he is not a monster newly sprung from a rent between this world and the next. Twenty years have passed since the Conservative party first selected him as a candidate. Michael Howard and David Cameron made him a shadow minister, and Theresa May gave him the Foreign Office. Thirty years of celebrity made him famous for his mendacity, indifference to detail, poor administration, and inveterate betrayal of every personal commitment. Yet, knowing this, the majority of Conservative MPs, and party members, still voted for him to be prime minister. He is not, therefore, an aberration, but a product of a system that will continue to produce terrible politicians long after he is gone.
[Rory Stewart; Financial Times; 21/01/2022]

[What exists] is now, all at once, one and continuous … Nor is it divisible, since it is all alike; nor is there any more or less of it in one place which might prevent it from holding together, but all is full of what is.
[Parmenides]

At the same time he managed to retain in a reasonably flourishing state … what General Conyers would have called his ‘personal myth’ … The General, speaking one felt with authority, always insisted that, if you bring off adequate preservation of your personal myth, nothing much else in life matters. It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.
[Anthony Powell; Books Do Furnish a Room]

People think because a novel’s invented, it isn’t true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Because a novel’s invented, it is true. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they can’t include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that. The novelist himself lays it down. His decision is binding. The biographer … can be only tentative, empirical. The autobiographer … is imprisoned in his own egotism. He must always be suspect. In contrast with the other two, the novelist is a god, creating his man, making him breathe and walk. The man, created in his own image, provides information about the god. In a sense you know more about Balzac and Dickens from their novels, than Rousseau and Casanova from their Confessions.
[Anthony Powell; Hearing Secret Harmonies]

Life becomes more and more like an examination where you have to guess the questions as well as the answers. I’d long decided there were no answers. I’m beginning to suspect there aren’t really any questions either, none at least of any consequence, even the old perennial, whether or not to stay alive.
[Anthony Powell; Books Do Furnish a Room]

Think about it … Every single corpse on Mount Everest was once a highly motivated person. Stay lazy my friends.
[unknown]

I would challenge you to a battle of wits, but I see you are unarmed!
[Not William Shakespeare; attributions to Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde and Winston Churchill are also unsupported. See, inter alia, https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/06/24/wit-battle/]

Pertness and ignorance may ask a question in three lines, which it will cost learning and ingenuity thirty pages to answer. When this is done, the same question shall be triumphantly asked again the next year, as if nothing had ever been written upon the subject. And as people in general, for one reason or another, like short objections better than long answers, in this mode of disputation (if it can be styled such) the odds must ever be against us; and we must be content with those for our friends who have honesty and erudition, candour and patience, to study both sides of the question …
[Bishop George Horne (1730-1792)]

The [Covid] vaccines, I am informed by passionate people with degrees from Twitter State University, are making the coronavirus strains worse, turning vaccinated people into destructive super-spreaders, making them far more likely to die from the next variant, giving them ADE, making them sterile, giving them heart attacks, giving them cancer, destroying their immune systems, giving them HIV outright, rearranging their DNA, rearranging it so that their DNA is now covered under evil Pharma patents and they are now thus owned by drug companies, rearranging it so that they are now technically another species entirely, targeting this particular ethnic group over here, deliberately sparing this particular ethnic group over there, filling everyone’s bodies full of tracking devices, filling them full of alien nanotech micro-bots, filling them full of 5G antennas, filling them full of aborted foetal cells, filling them full of Satanic messages and portraits of Bill Gates and trial memberships for Amazon Prime and God knows what else.
[Derek Lowe, https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/usefulness-rebuttal]

Life’s too short. It was too short even before I got vaccinated and thus apparently turned myself into a reptilian middle-management demon from Zeta Ridiculoon. That’s me, all right: 50% RNA by body weight, and the rest is brimstone and shredded takeout menus.
[Derek Lowe, https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/usefulness-rebuttal]

food+drink

Rustic Apricot & Marzipan Tart

Another culinary delight this evening, which I thought up lying in bed last night! This apricot & marzipan tart was designed partly to use up a spare piece of marzipan to complement some apricots. Like much of what I cook, it’s rustic because doing precisely pretty isn’t my thing.

Apricot & Marzipan Tart
Here’s the actual one I made earlier
Ingredients
  • 1 pack puff pastry
  • 2 punnets fresh apricots (or indeed any stone fruit)
  • marzipan
  • 50ml Amaretto (or similar almond liqueur; or Cognac)
  • 1tsp almond essence
  • ½tsp sugar
  • glacé cherries (optional)
  • candied peel (optional)
  • flaked almonds (optional)
  • butter for greasing
  • 1tsp icing sugar for dusting (optional)
What to do
  1. Preheat the oven to 220C/fan 200C (or according to the pastry instructions).
  2. Rinse and halve the apricots, removing the stones and blemishes.
  3. Grease a 20cm (or thereabouts) flan tin.
  4. Rollout the pastry as thinly as possible, and line the tin. Trim off any excess pastry (and keep it). Prick the base all over with a fork.
  5. Line the case with baking parchment and add baking beads (or dried beans).
  6. Blind bake the pastry case for 10 minutes.
  7. Meanwhile mix the Amaretto, almond essence and sugar to make a glaze.
  8. Slice (or roll) the marzipan quite thinly (2mm is good) so you have enough to cover the base of the tart.
  9. When blind baked, remove the pastry case from the oven, and remove the baking beads (this will be easier if you have the parchment to pick up).
  10. Cover the base of the tart with marzipan, using fragments to fill the corners and gaps.
  11. Brush the marzipan with the Amaretto glaze.
  12. Now layer the apricots on the marzipan, in whatever decorative manner you wish.
  13. Brush the apricots, and exposed pastry with glaze.
  14. Add a few glacé cherries, a sprinkle of candied peel, and a sprinkle of flaked almonds if wished.
  15. Bake for about 30 minutes until beginning to colour and the apricots are soft.
  16. Remove from oven, and while still hot brush the apricots with any remaining glaze.
  17. Allow to cool until still slightly warm before removing from the tin, dusting with icing sugar (if wished) and serving either nude or with some thick double cream and a glass of Armagnac.

If you have some apricot halves left over (as I did) use them with the pastry offcuts. Reroll the pastry (no it doesn’t do puff a lot of good, but what the hell) to make some roughly 15cm squares (they don’t have to be neat). Brush the pastry with the Amaretto glaze. Put an apricot half or two or three on each piece of pastry, with a glacé cherry if wished. Fold the pastry over the fruit, seal and glaze. Bake in the oven for about 30 minutes.

current affairs, medical, ramblings

More Covid Stupidity?

So our pathetic government appear to have decided that all Covid-19 restrictions will be removed in two weeks time, as part of the plan to save Boris’s skin. Basically they seem to be saying that Covid is over, the case numbers are falling rapidly, there’s no longer any need to isolate, and we can all go back to normal. [1,2] Essentially this says “we don’t care; go back to normal; if you get Covid well tough luck, but it is now only a cold so continue going to work and spreading the disease further”.

Let’s look at this.

  1. Of course the government reported case numbers are falling; they’re designed to. People are being urged to go back to work, and testing is not being pushed. There is now no requirement to get a confirmatory PCR test following a positive LFT; and there’s no requirement to log the result of a LFT; so testing has dropped off a cliff – people just aren’t bothering. So as the government reports only confirmed positive tests, of course their numbers are falling.

  2. However this does not accord with data from the Office of National Statistics (ONS; a government body) who do random sampling of the population. Nor does it agree with the data from the Zoe Covid Study, who track reports from their 4 million subscribers. [3,4,5] The Zoe study is showing rates still incredibly high at around 200K/day (as it was at the beginning of January) and the ONS data is tracking this fairly closely. That means around 1 in 25 people currently have Covid [5] and anything up to 10% of those are re-infections [3,5].

But it is worse than this …

  1. Going back to normal, means no testing and no isolation. So people will be walking around with Covid as they think they have a bad cold (or are even asymptomatic), they’ll keep travelling and going to work/school, and spreading infection. Many will be forced back to work as many employers won’t tolerate time off sick with a cold (which is in itself stupid, but part of the “work at all costs” ethic).

  2. More people walking about spreading infection means that the number of cases will rise, as will hospitalisations and deaths. And because there’s no testing the government won’t know, until hospitalisations, deaths or school absences start climbing out of control. But by then it is too late; the genie is out of the bottle. (Remember that hospitalisations and deaths lag behind infection by 2, 4 or even more weeks.)

  3. That in turn puts the vulnerable at even greater risk. And many vulnerable people (like me) are feeling even more that they’re condemned to “house arrest” because they dare not risk going out and getting infected.

  4. It also means more children off school, or having their education impacted because their teachers are sick.

  5. And the higher the rate of infection, the higher the number of cases of Long Covid which will severely impact the patient’s life for … well we don’t know how long!

  6. More infection also means the virus has even greater opportunities to mutate. That’s the way evolution works. These new variants may be less or more infectious, and/or cause more or less severe infection. And again we wouldn’t know, because there’s no testing.

  7. All this is compounded in that immunity wanes. We know that the good immunity provided following two vaccinations was falling off rapidly after 6 months [7]; hence the booster programme. But it does now seem that immunity provided by boosters falls off rapidly too, such that someone like me who had their booster in mid-October (17 weeks ago) now has almost no benefit from it [6]; I’m back where I was last June with a risk of around 4 times the norm [8] (and I’m by no means in the extra-super-mega-vulnerable range). We seem to be needing a new booster every 3 months or so, but there appears to be no plan for this – indeed the current booster programme has effectively stalled [3].

  8. According to the BBC “The law will be replaced with guidance … and for example people will be urged not to go to work if they have Covid” [2]. Frankly the government can provide as much guidance, urging and recommendation as it likes, but people are going to take little notice: they need to work and their employers aren’t going to tolerate high levels of absence.

Is it any wonder the vulnerable and the disabled are worried. They feel that the government doesn’t care about them and wants them out of sight and out of (their) mind. (From a personal perspective, friends are going to increasingly not understand of one’s avoidance of social gatherings etc.)

I have seen a number of respected scientists, including some members of Independent SAGE [9], suggesting that the government’s proposed action is nothing less than “criminal negligence”. We don’t know what is round the corner in terms of new variants, so they could well come back and bite us in the bum at any time. And when it does the consequences are going to be a direct result of yet further government failure.

Whether it is actually “criminally negligent” only a court could decide, but I would certainly class it as totally stupid and intensely unethical.

[1] Guardian; 09/02/2022; https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/09/covid-rules-axed-england-is-pandemic-end-really-in-sight
[2] BBC News; 09/02/2022; https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-60319947
[3] Independent SAGE; 04/02/2022; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21TKKKFfGYo
[4] Zoe Covid Update; 03/02/2022; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUfjJ1z-a6s
[5] Zoe Covid Update; 10/02/2022; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2Zm9OcULDs
[6] Telegraph; 24/12/2021; https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/12/24/fourth-jabs-possible-covid-booster-immunity-will-fall-millions/
[7] University of Edinburgh; 21/12/2021; https://www.ed.ac.uk/news/2021/covid-19-vaccine-protection-wanes-three-months
[8] QCovid Risk Calculator; https://qcovid.org/
[9] Independent SAGE; https://www.independentsage.org/

memes, words

Ten Things: February

This year our Ten Things each month are words with particular endings. Clearly this won’t be all the words with the nominated ending, but a selection of the more interesting and/or unusual.

Ten Words ending with -kin

  1. merkin
  2. bodkin
  3. kilderkin
  4. firkin
  5. oilskin
  6. snakeskin
  7. foreskin
  8. mannikin
  9. bumpkin
  10. siskin

Your challenge, if you choose to accept it, is to write a story in at most three sentences using all these words correctly. Post your attempt in the comments before the end of the month and there’s an e-drink for anyone who I consider succeeds.

food+drink

Quick Bread Lasagne

Making lasagne is a time consuming fiddle, and despite likin it I generally can’t be bothered. But in a spirit of adventure the other day we tried out a quick way of making it: use bread, not pasta (yes, really, it does work!), and some of the contents of the freezer. There’s no making Bolognaise sauce from scratch, nor having to cook sheets of pasta, so it’s fairly quick and easy.

This is flexible, and you can obviously substitute according to what you like and/or have available – it’s a good way to use up some of the odd portions of food languishing in the freezer (or just to make a bit more room). It would be just as easy to do veggie or even vegan. Oh, and all the frozen ingredients, and the bread, were homemade!

What follows made two hearty meals for the two of us. You should adjust quantities as necessary. This is what we used …

For the meat sauce
1 portion frozen Bolognaise sauce, thawed
1 portion frozen chilli con carne, thawed
a good quantity of frozen tomato sauce, thawed
a pack of frozen barbeque sauce, thawed

For the white sauce
butter
flour
milk
grated cheese
black pepper
a pack of frozen onion sauce, thawed (that’s white sauce with onions)

For the lasagne
5 (or more) large 10mm thick slices of bread, crusts removed

To finish
butter
grated cheese
black pepper

And this is what we did …
1. Pre-heat the oven to 200C/180C fan.
2. Well butter a large roasting dish (I used our largest glass roasting dish).
3. Roll out the bread slices so they are thin, like actual lasagne.
4. Put all the meat sauce ingredients in a saucepan and heat through thoroughly.
5. Meanwhile make a good thick cheese sauce according to your usual method (don’t be mean with the cheese); add and blend in the onion sauce.
6. When the sauces are ready, put a layer of meat sauce in the bottom of the roasting dish. (You’re aiming for at least 2 full sets of layers.)
7. Now add a layer of bread to cover the whole dish, and a sprinkle of grated cheese.
8. Follow this with a layer of cheese sauce.
9. Repeat the layers as required, finishing with a layer of cheese sauce.
10. Sprinkle with some more grated cheese and black pepper.
11. Bake in the over for 30-45 minutes until browning nicely.
12. Serve with a robust red wine.

This was really tasty. The barbeque sauce and the chilli gave it a nice tangy, but gentle kick.

However, do not expect this to cut nicely into portions when it is hot; it’ll probably collapse, but will taste just as good. However when cooled it should be solid enough to portion prettily before reheating in the microwave.

Sorry no picture! It was so good we ate it !