36.2055 years in science communication
It’s been a few years since we’ve ventured into our old haunts of Thorpeness and Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast; places we visited family fairly frequently for the best part of two decades. Anyway, yoga and wildlife walking trip, with a wonderful group of people, activities led by Denise and Kevin, respectively. I got a few snaps here and there.
TL:DR – There are lots of regional slang names for the House Sparrow.
Do you have a local word for Passer domesticus, the House Sparrow? Where I grew up in the North East of England we called them Spuggies, I hear from a Shropshire lad that it’s a common nickname for this species in that part of the country too. They’re also sometimes simply called spugs in Northern England. In the South P. domesticus is known as a sparr, sparrer (or Cockney sparrar), spadger (Northern Ireland too), spadgick, and phip or philip. That latter one is intriguing.
In Scotland, they’re often known as a spur or sprig (also Spriggies after a Mr Sprigg, apparently, that sounds unlikely given spriggies sounds like a dialact variation on spuggies). One contact on twitter (hahah!) said that his father who grew up in North Lanarkshire called them speugs, pronounced “spee-ugs”.
It’s very difficult to discern the etymology of these nicknames some sources cite spadger as originating in Leeds in the North rather than the South of England. But just as nicknames for games and people often arise with -er on the end. Bradders, was an occasional nickname for me as a bairn (child). Soccer is short for association football as Rugger is short for Rugby Football. Sparrow perhaps became sparrah, spugger, spuggie…
The same species is often called an English Sparrow in North America where its nicknames are commonly spatzie or spotsie, from the German Spatz. Australians might know the immigrant species as a Spag or Spoggie. And, perhaps less common Sprog or Sproggy and even spridgy or spudgy.
There are others: spyng, spurdie (from The Orkneys), chummy, craff, hoosie, row-dow, thatch sparrow, tile sparrow, and eave sparrow. (Cited here).
In Dutch, the species is known as a mus, or more specifically huismus, but that’s the official common name not a nickname. Spatz in German.
Reader Steve E emailed to tell us that in East London sparrows are often known as squidgers.
When a new disease comes to light, AIDS, SARS, and most recently COVID-19, the health experts and the media bandy about words like epidemic and pandemic. Today, COVID-19 has been described as on the verge of becoming a global pandemic.
The word pandemic with relation to disease means affecting all the people. pan meaning all, demos meaning people or district, Greek pandemos. So medically, speaking we see it as either potentially affecting everyone or more usually affecting every possible region of the world, in the sense of a global pandemic.
An epidemic has a similar meaning, the epi means among, and the demos might refer to people or a district with people, so among the people of a given district. It is usually used to refer to an outbreak in a specific region or among a group of people, hence the word epidemiology, the study of epidemics, outbreaks of disease in a given area or among a group of people. There is also usually some implication of the rapid spread of a given disease in an epidemic.
In contrast, a disease that is endemic is usually confined to a specific geographical group of people or region. The en simply meaning in.
Our neighbours have a man in to replace their old garden fence. He’s a friend, I had a chat with him while he was digging the holes for the new fenceposts and mentioned that our broadband and phone cables run along the boundary between the two gardens. He pointed out that he’d already noted their presence.
Unfortunately, a slip of the spade and an errant clematis root led to the severing of our information artery. He was very apologetic and carried out a repair with a couple of coax connector blocks and a phone line coupler. He asked me to check our broadband, phone, and TV before he would embed the new connections in resin to preclude water ingress and prevent corrosion.
Now, here’s where this story gets weirdly interesting. Once the broadband was booted up, I ran a speed test on the connection. Seems we are now getting a 50 megabits per second greater rate than we are paying for. We seem to have jumped from a nominal 150 Mbps to well over 200 Mbps. Now, I don’t know for sure whether our provider was already pushing us speeds of 200+ but, that’s not what our account says, so, that’s nice…
It gets weirder, Mrs Sciencebase received a couple of landline calls, actually from the fence man, and she reported back that the phone seems rather more clear now than it did before.
So, how could that be? How can cutting and repairing a wire improve anything? Surely, the presence of those metal connectors halfway along the cable between the roadside box and our inlet junction would lead to some kind of degradation. I was expecting our connection speed to be a little lower, if anything, not more than 33% faster.
I asked another friend, an engineer, who has worked in the telecoms industry for more decades than he would perhaps care for me to admit on his behalf. He correctly surmised that we had a cable provider rather than upgraded phoneline broadband.
“Your provider uses a broadband protocol called DOCSIS, version 3.0 here, which is nominally 200 Mbps max,” he told me. “This protocol is quite sensitive to signal levels – too strong a signal is just as much of a problem as too weak. If the signal level is wrong, the speed suffers. They’ve obviously adjusted the signal level better at the green box.” So perhaps what was happening was that we had a strong signal that wasn’t working optimally but the cut and reconnection have taken the top off that strength just enough to make it work slightly better.”
Perhaps now that we’re back up and running it is time to add a more reinforced sheath to the cable so that an accidental severance doesn’t happy again, I cannot imagine that we would get a speed boost a second time with another splice.
One of my musical heroes from way back…my early teens in fact, which were in the early ’80s…is Peter Gabriel. I once met a session guitarist who had worked with him at Real World, but that’s the closest connection I have, other than having seen him perform live a few times.
Anyway, we’ve never done any covers of his nor Genesis songs with C5 the band. There were murmurings of covering “Don’t Give Up” (one of the PG/Kate Bush collaborations) with the bigMouth choir, but that’s not happened yet. I have, however, recorded a few of his songs solo in my home studio. So Happy 70th Birthday PG:
Sledgehammer – with my daughter boo on backing vox
Solsbury Hill – a kind of Vampirish cover
Here Comes the Flood – a consciousness deluge
It’s just over three decades since myself and Mrs Sciencebase toured Australia. We started in Melbourne and took a greyhound West, up through the Red Centre, to Darwin, back down and then East to Townsville and Cairns and then South along the coast and back to Melbourne. It was during an air strike, we couldn’t fly, so never go to Perth, but it was amazing, exhilarating. One of our offspring is currently seeing the sites of coastal Western Australia, hence this little post.
Anyway, the Melbourne to Adelaide Greyhound was almost luxurious, but by the time we were getting on at Alice to head for Three-ways it wasn’t quite so salubrious. I remember seeing the incredibly calloused feet of an elderly gent who sat near us, it was almost as if he were wearing crocs made from human skin.
Three-ways was a very quick and humid pit-stop at 1am with only five minutes to have a bathroom break. Toothbrush in mouth I carried out another essential simultaneously function only to be asked by a fellow backpacker off a different bus whether I was German. No, Geordie, I said, he was bemused. I never did ever ask any Germans whether they would do the same, it’s perhaps not that hygienic, but then neither was hot-bedding in a Portakabin backpackers in Coober Pedy.
Oh, and yes, we did climb (the chain). Sorry. We were told it was fine. We were told that the local elders had given permission and that they got a cut. We were young. It was probably naive to imagine that it was ever fair. But, when we reached the top and were absorbing the incredible view, at least we weren’t doing our “lippy” as one other climber was doing…
Two Pipistrelle Bats flying around the corner of a pasture field at the edge of Rampton Spinney at lunchtime today. Pipistrelle comes from the Latin word for bat, which is vespertilio, which literally means evening bird (as in “vespers”). We usually two to three Pipistrelles circulating in our back garden on balmy, calm summer evenings. Each bat can eat up to 3000 flying insects every night, including moths…
Not seen a bat flying in broad daylight, except in a church, when it was presumably disturbed from its roost on a day we climbed the bell tower (with permission).
I tried to get a decent photo, but they’re fast-moving creatures and this is the best I could do of either of the pair even when they were flying overhead:
Of course, it’s winter and these two really ought to be tucked up in crevices in old trees, hibernating through the cold period. But, it’s been relatively warm this winter with perhaps only one or two mornings with a frost. Inordinately, warm weather and something that disturbed them may have brought them out of their self-imposed torpor early.
David Bradley reporting from the Royal Society, January 2004
The list of emergent viruses continues to grow. In the early 1990s, there was HIV, ebola, lassa, and others, almost all having jumped from their natural host species to humans. More recently, hepatitis C, Sin Nombre, West Nile, and of course SARS emerged. The common factor, said Dr Eddie Holmes of the University of Oxford, is that they use RNA rather than DNA to carry their genetic code.
Holmes believes that the genetics of our immune systems and viral genetics should be an equally important research focus. To infect a new species, an emerging virus has to overcome the new host’s immune system and to replicate in its cells, the success of which depends on both viral and host genetics and other factors.
But, Holmes asked, why do such pathogens emerge and what controls the emergence? Ecological change, as emphasized in Tony McMichael’s talk, is the governing factor – change in human proximity and change in host-species population density. The key to understanding lies in the fact that RNA viruses mutate a million times more rapidly than organisms with DNA. This endows them with great adaptability. On the other hand, a high mutation rate constrains viral evolution by capping the viral genome’s size, which limits adaptability. Higher mutation rates, after all, mean more chance of error in the viral genes. This “error-threshold”, explained Holmes, means that if a virus has to evolve a lot to jump between species then it is more likely to fail. We eat a multitude of plant viruses every day but no one has yet fallen prey to turnip mosaic virus.
The coronaviruses such as SARS, are different. They have a much bigger genome than other RNA viruses, which means that SARS and its relatives should evolve more slowly but their larger genome gives them greater adaptability. A better understanding of the constraints to RNA virus evolution will allow us to make better predictions about the emergence of new viruses and help us find improved therapeutic procedures. Rather than thinking about what RNA viruses can do, we should concentrate on their limitations.
Read on… Influenza and emerging viruses
First week at high school, first-year art class. I’d done what I thought was a nice sketch of the postbox at the end of the road, that was the simple brief, draw a post box, or pillar box as we used to call them. I sat in the cold for an hour or more sketching it. It looked okay. I didn’t see myself as having any talent for sketching, not like my mate Phil who could rustle up a tiger, a horse, or a Harley Davidson with nothing more than a few scratches of HB.
The nasty bastard of an art teacher told me my art book was too small (we couldn’t afford the twice the size one, which was three times the price, and the school had said in the letter home to parents that the size I had was fine. He also dismissed my sketch are awful because I’d used a ruler to get the straight verticals of the pillar box. Nobody in primary school ever told me not to use a ruler to draw a straight line. In fact, if you didn’t use a ruler you got told off and one teacher at junior school used to slap the tips of your fingers with his metal ruler for minor misdemeanours. At the age of 11, how are you supposed to know that rulers are precluded from art.
I didn’t bother trying again in art class after that and dropped the subject as soon as it was allowed. I did do an option on technical drawing (TD) where you used set squares, rulers, pairs of compasses, and all sorts of devices to make sure your lines were straight and at the correct, right, angles etc.
Meanwhile, in the music class, those of us with a musical bent were not allowed to touch any of the musical instruments in the classroom unless were having private lessons at home on piano or some other instrument. What snobbish educational posturing by ignorant teachers that was. It had been the case in primary school too. Awful stifling attitude and although I’d forgone putting any effort in for art class, music was my first love, as they say…I got 98 percent in the first-year exams and was second only to Alison (who got 100% and was learning piano and viola at the time and in the school orchestra, which is fine).
I got a chance to learn saxophone, but for the first couple of weeks of those lessons we weren’t even allowed to put the instrument together we just had to use the mouthpiece and practice getting a sound without in any way damaging the precious reed. For actually feck’s sake, what? I was eventually allowed to put the sax together, it hung naturally on me and I could probably still play Three Blind Mice and Merrily We Roll Along, on a tenor sax. But, playing it used to give me awful headaches and worse I would have to be in the woodwind band and at that age I was far too shy to be exposed in front of other people doing something I couldn’t do. I ended up teaching myself to play guitar from books and listening to records of bands I loved. Didn’t take any more formal music lessons until sixth form, aged, 17, one term of piano.
I had meanwhile, always been into sharks and dolphins, and magnets and motors, and dinosaurs and volcanoes and space and everything else sciencey so that was the route I ultimately took. I wrote about the person who was probably the only inspiring teacher I had at high school, Miss Hall. I’d love to be able to get in touch with her to thank her. She was in her early 30s back then, so probably in her early 70s now if she’s still around.
Obviously, this is all ancient history, but it does affect how your life goes when teachers deliberately stifle you and others close off opportunity. I hoped by the time our children got to school that things might have changed, but in some ways, I don’t think they had at all. There were still teachers who were bullies, stifling and condescending attitudes, and limited resources available.
I don’t think much has changed since they left school either, although education seems to be more of a commercial enterprise focusing on business targets and metrics now rather than actually teaching our children anything useful or giving them opportunities to grow into the people they might imagine they would like to be. It’s sad.
I am sure there are exceptions. There are inspiring teachers, I know a few and there are. But, those teachers are constrained and constricted by forces beyond their control. I just hope that the bullying and negative attitudes of my old art “teacher” have been pushed out of the system by all those metrics and the business head…I can almost feel from here that they haven’t but one can hope.
I’ve got another gig performing for local seniors. It’ll be an afternoon singalong in a residential carehome, it’ll be fun. I’ve recruited some people I know who will bring guitars and pianos to play and all of whom can sing really well. The last time I did such a gig was a harsh moment of learning.
We were actually a late booking as the proper old-time music band had cancelled a the last minute. We didn’t have any time to pull a setlist together letalone rehearse. I thought…okay…the majority of the audience is in its 70s, same as my parents were and my parents love Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison, ELO, ABBA, oh and The Beatles…so, I thought I’d start with a nice solo acoustic, all gentle like – Norwegian Wood perhaps?
Well, two lines into the song, this old guy at the back who I later learned was 94 heckled us: “Bloody awful! Totally inappropriate!”
It was an odd moment, it threw us. We ploughed into a chorus and brought that song to a rapid close. Babs on piano grabbed her “old-time songbook” and we launched into some stuff from the 30s and 40s, all a bit ad hoc song about bluebirds and nightingales and white cliffs and meeting again. The nonagenarian seemed appeased went back to his cake and ale (it was a party after all). Unfortunately, the youngsters in the front row seemed to be a little restless, they didn’t really want to hear Vera Lynn, they had quite liked The Beatles, that was their era, even if the old guy perceived that band as a bunch of long-haired louts.
We changed tempo again and went for Waterloo Sunset by The Kinks. The ladies on the front weren’t jumping into the moshpit or stage-diving as such, but some were tapping along with their fingers and feet and others were singing a few of the words. The ones they knew and even some of the ones they didn’t. It was a sweet moment. Ol’ Mr Heckler didn’t shout again, he’d been glad-handed by our local MP (Heidi Allen) who was also attending the event as a guest of honour and was to give a speech after we’d done our turn.
As I sang the final refrain of “Waterloo sunset’s fine”, and Barbara echoed with a harmony “Waterloo sunset’s fine”, Heidi caught my eye as she turned from Mr Heckles and gave me a little wink…it was a moment, hah, a musical moment, a meeting of minds, she knew.
Norwegian Wood’s fine too…
I must confess the moment didn’t persuade me to vote Tory, but there’s always a little nod if we encounter each other at other events.
I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me?