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As most readers will be aware, yesterday 13th May 2021 was World Cocktail Day. And to celebrate, gentle readers, we’re going to present one with a truly international flavour, the Italian Twinkle. A little background: this has been brought to our attention by a regular contibutor who discovered it on the menu at a branch of the Ask Italian chain of restaurants, somewhere in Southern England. As you will see, it is simple, refreshing and perfect for the opening out of the warm summer days to come. And not just for Ladies who Lunch.

The recipe: Sadly the recipe at Ask Italian is a closely guarded commercial secret. But here is our stab at things, and on the whole we think it’s rather fair.

Firstly, everything must be cold, all your bottles, glasses, even the lemons; for there is no ice to speak of in this.

Take a flute glass and add one measure of good cold vodka. Add 1/2 measure of elderflower cocktail-St Germain is a prime exemplar, but as our old friend Ms. RS of Southend would have it: “Iceland have probably got the same, on’y less poncey and ‘alf the price!” Next add a good twist of lemon peel. Now top up with Prosecco, or if you can’t get hold of some, Cremont or Champagne may be acceptable substitutes.

You are now ready to sip and enjoy. And remembe this-keeping the bottles at close hand will facilitate easy refills for you, your family and friends.

Why do we never see this in Montalbano? Was this Rafael’s secret tipple throughout the Renaissance? Because we think it’s a fine one, and should be enjoyed more world-wide!

#italy #elderflower #vodka #cocktails #montalbano #camilleri

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News that trouble is flaring yet again in the 3000 year old dispute between Israelis and Palestininans should be enough to cause any of us in the rational community to slump in despair. But first, where do we get 3000 years from? Well, look at the etymologies of words like Philistine, Palestine and Israel-you don’t have to be an expert in the Bronze Age to get the connection, do you? It’s like one of those ancient feuds between families in backward agricultural communities, so old that no one can remember how it started-but they’ll die to keep it going. Are such people chronically stupid-or just missing a vital point?

Elsewhere two other stories caught our eye today. Anthony Cuthbertson in the Independent reports on a really significant advance in battery technology which could transform electric car technology. Elsewhere James Gallager for the BBC reports on the results of a major project to research the epidemiology of ovarian cancer. OK, it hasn’t “worked” quite the way its founders hoped. But we feel sure that the data and techniques evolved will one day help someone to come to grips with this terrible disease. Honest people, working at the limit, to make life better for us all.

And this is what the Israelis and Palestinians miss. What you can achieve when you don’t waste all your time and energy on frivolous disputes.No, they are not stupid-there are clever people on both sides. But as they sink deeper and deeper into grievance, mutual recrimination and uncontrolled anger, they have allowed their emotions to overcome their reason. Israelis and Palestinians are actually all too human. All of us can fall into the traps of hatred, from which it is then very difficult to climb out. They are an object lesson in futility to us all.

Ovarian cancer: Setback as major screening trial fails to save lives – BBC News

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/holy-grail-battery-breakthrough-sees-scientists-solve-40-year-problem/ar-B

#israel #palestine #middleeast #reason #rational #cancer #globalwarming #electriccars #batteries

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The obcure origins of the larger groups of animals and plants-vertebrates, arthropods, that sort of thing, are a bit like marmite and cricket. Enthusiasts love them, outsiders don’t. Fair enough, we’re not asking you to drop everything and read the works of Thomas Cavalier-Smith, a biologist of formidable power and intellect. We’ll let Nature tell that story in the link below, should you feel so inclined.

No, gentle reader, our purpose is different. For we think this man’s approach to science, and to life so illuminates that all of us could learn from it, if we could rustle up the necessary humility. Look at these quotes from Thomas Richardson’s article (our bold type)

He gave the infant field of evolutionary cell biology a common language and a set of ideas to either work with or to disprove.

Cavalier-Smith’s ideas were indeed challenged and subject to extensive revision. Nobody championed these revisions more than he ………. The idea that a scientist (indeed any intellectual adventurer) could not completely restructure their understanding, or even destroy their own previous synthesis in response to new data, was anathema to him.

The great plague of the world is people who get hold of an idea and then cling on to it, come hell or high water. Everyone does it, even scientists. Perhaps the best research we could now do would be in psychology, to find out why.Then we might get a few more people like Cavalier Smith and JM Keynes and few less of the religious and political fanatics who currently waste so much time and resources with their trivial little disputes.

Evolutionary biologist Thomas Cavalier-Smith, who helped to shape our understanding of the tree of life, has died, aged 78. “His ideas were based on the thesis that we cannot grasp evolutionary history without understanding how all dimensions of a cellular system — function, structure, biochemistry, economy and spatial organization — arose,” writes his former student Thomas Richards. Cavalier-Smith’s hypotheses were challenged and subject to extensive revision — often by himself, says Richards. “The idea that a scientist (indeed any intellectual adventurer) could not completely restructure their understanding, or even destroy their own previous synthesis in response to new data, was anathema to him.”Nature | 4 min read

#evolutionarybiology #metazoa #middleeast #northernireland #afghanistan #thenarcissismofsmall differences

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Fans of The Wolf of Wall Street will recall the moment when a drugged up Donny Azov takes his eureka moment from pills and booze and yells “Steve Madden! STEVE MADDEN!” The rest, as they say, is history for Stratton Oakmont. But can you name the music that Scorsese threw on his soundtrack * as Donny floats past Jordan Belfort and into financial immortality, and many indictments?

If you said Henry Purcell What Power Art Thou?*, then you are spot on, dear reader. Purcell still remains England’s greatest composer and a brief acqaintance with his work will soon show you how and why. We at LSS are no musicologists. We’ll simply say you’ll see how his style bridges the seventeenth and eighteenth century, and leave you to the Wikipedia article* linked below. We want to hit another note, if you will pardon a little pun.

Purcell,who died young, lived his life at the moment when England probably became the most advanced nation in the world. He was born in the last year of the Republic, and lived through the Glorious Revolution and into the proper consolidation of a Parliamentary system. His contemporaries included Newton, Hooke, Wren and Boyle. It was an age of gathering belief in learning, reason and trade. When Shakespeare died in 1621 England was a monarchical tyranny (for those who don’t know, a monarch is a Dictator in funny clothes) When Purcell died in 1695 there was a free press, parliamentary votes, a sophisticated banking system and the beginnings of a consumer society. The new stock jobbers and gutter street journalists would have recognised Jordan, Donny and their crew as kindred spirits; amoral, restless, showy and money grabbing. The South Sea Bubble was just around the corner. If you want the sound of the Whig ascendancy and the start of the Enlightenment, Purcell is the perfect place to begin.

There’s another,deeper point. We at LSS are Whig fans ourselves. In our opinion national greatness comes from making the right reforms, encouraging science and the arts, and successful business. The French carried on with Royal dictatorship, court ceremony and long term decline, ending in a fearful revolution. But at some point, the God of History seems to single out one nation to carry forward progress. From 1689 England was that choice.

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=wolf+wall+street+purcell+what+power+art+thou&qpvt=wolf+wall+street+p

Henry Purcell – Wikipedia

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=+purcell+what+power+art+thou&&view=detail&mid=086607E75E93A9824

#wolfofwallstreet #henrypurcell #baroquemusic #enlightenment #parliament #gloriousrevolution

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We’re sorry that last week’s round up was delayed due to technical problems

Antimatter Stars It’s a kind of truism that in theory there should be a particle of antimatter for every one of matter. Except there isn’t-so where did all the antimatter go? Science News has a possible answer

Stars made of antimatter could lurk in the Milky Way

_{We thank Mr Gary Herbert for this article}

The cost of ignoring science The lesson of the Enlightenment was clear- facts and reasons should trump emotion and belief. Countries which devalue science pay a terrible price. Here’s a link to a Nature editorial

By sidelining their scientists, the governments of Brazil and India have missed out on a crucial opportunity to reduce the loss of life, argues a Nature editorial.Nature | 4 min read

Are we heading for a crash? A week is a long time in politics as Harold Wilson once famously remarked. But in modern markets, another day can sometimes feel like another world. So will the recent dizzy highs last? This is from Forbes:

Is The Stock Market Going To Crash? (forbes.com)

Ten most expensive restaurants While that portfolio of yours is going up, you may want to spend a little of your wealth. Here’s wealthy gorilla with a few ideas for a good, if costly night out with a few friends

The 10 Most Expensive Restaurants in the World (2021) | Wealthy Gorilla

#astronomy #antimatter #stockmarkets #restaurants #covid-19 #pandemic

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Let’s take a trip back in time. It’s May 1961 and you have decided to cross the Atlantic from Southampton to New York on the Queen Mary. Forget being crammed into one of those poky little jets that are starting to fill the sky, you’ve got enough time and money to do the thing in style. It’s six o’ clock on a Friday night, your first day out at sea, and you have just settled into the cocktail lounge and clicked your fingers at the waiter. LSS has the document to take you right there.

It’s the Queen Mary cocktail menu from May 1961. Have a look at the top left photo, because the design stands at a unique point in time. The stuffy, formal fifties are just starting to give way to the more fun sixties (although the colours and layout are still a bit Festival of Britain). That said, let’s open up and go inside. The first thing to surprise is that all the prices are in shillings and pence! A courvoisier brandy will set you back 2/3d. A Martini will be 3s. To buy a White Lady will cost you 3/3d. This is ten years before decimalisation, but a shilling was about 5p. We suspect that this was the second class cocktail bar, because humbler tastes and pockets are catered for as well. A bottle of Worthington or Bass ale was a snip at 1/2d; thrifty Scots could knock back a McEwans for 1s; the future lay in lagers like Carlsberg and Tuborg at 1/3 a bottle.

But the biggest shock of all is the casual way that cigars, cigarrettes and tobaccos were hawked around without a care in the world. We think this bar must have been as smoky as the three glorious funnels towering over the ship.What was it like to sit next to a huge American puffing away on a 4s hand made Havana, the best for sale on the ship? What music was playing? Who else were you sitting near to, and what did they talk about? Mr Kennedy? Tottenham Hotspurs? IBM computers?

Well now the Queen Mary sits immobile in Long Beach, Ca. All regular transit services are in the air now, and cruising is not really the same. But the great liners marked a certain point in style and elegance, and what’s the harm in us cocktail sailors indulging in a little nostalgia on a Friday Night?

#cunard #queenmary #cocktails #poundsshillingspence #smoking #liners

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News that the fast-dwindling Channel stocks of fish are being fought over again by British Jerseymen and French fishers shows the limits of ethno nationalism as a philosophy. Why? Let’s go back to basics.

The ethnonationalist view means that one’s own group must always come first, and therefore must win. It compels its adherents to believe that any gain for the other party to a negotiation is a loss to its own. So, front line players and negotiators first job is to make the folks back home feel strong and dominant, not necessarily to obtain the best outcome. Nowhere is this mindset more destructive, and long term self-defeating than in disputes over resources such as fish.

As we write, the world’s oceans are becoming ever more depleted, polluted and degraded.* As a glance at the map will show, British and French fishermen are a tiny part of this. Huge fleets from bigger, better armed nations are currently sweeping the seas of every living thing, and every maritime nation jealously squabbles over stocks of things like tuna and cod. And who can blame them? Better to take up every last haddock and kill the stock rather than let the hated enemy take them!

We at LSS genuflect to ethnonationalism as a driving and inescapable force in the the human psyche. But there are more powerful forces, such as nature, facts, and reasons. The problems of the world , such as pandemics, climate change, sexual and economic inequality are now so great they they will destroy us quite soon. The only hope lies in solutions agreed by all.

Take fisheries as one example. A world fishing authority, comprising scientists, oceanographers, economists and fisherpersons’ representatives could manage stocks so that they could last forever. And maybe even lobby to clean up the seas a bit, who knows? It’s the sort of thing we in the Rational Community have been advocating for years. And our time must surely come.

Our links today are from two of the very finest Enlightenment, Rationalist and Educated websites you will find WWF and Wikipedia. Apart from the fact that both begin with W, both could do with a little cash. Could you find it in your heart to help them? We at LSS have done. John Locke would have been proud of you.

What is Overfishing? Facts, Effects and Overfishing Solutions (worldwildlife.org)

Overfishing – Wikipedia

#uk #france #overfishing #marinedepletion #ethnonationalism #enlightenment #rationality #jersey #normandie

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_{Warning-somewhere in here is a little pun, to test if you have really understood this blog. Can you spot it?}

A philosophically-inclined correspondent of ours recalls an interesting difference in the behaviour of men and women, encountered while he was a Training Manager for a large financial services corporation and recruiting new employees:

“we sent detailed instructions stating that the essential requirement was to teach us something, anything. in twenty minutes” he recalls

Some candidates, particularly women, read their briefs and managed to teach the interviewers something. they hadn’t known. Others, mainly men, emphatically did not. They went into long presentations, taught nothing, and became indignant when they were closed down as their time ran out.

All of which got us thinking. Are women better listeners than men? Are they better readers too? Have you ever come up against a really bad listener? The type who completes your sentences for you before you have finished? Who interrupts, stating that you haven’t understood what you are saying? Or, if you met a man with three legs, he will undoubtedly know one who has four?

We suspect that many of the world’s disputes will only be resolved when people learn to listen better. We’ve got two lovely links for you, which we hope these will get you started.

Audrey Nelson of Psychology Today takes on the women v men problem. * Trying to get beyond first impressions, she suggests the sexes may be listening in different ways. There’s a nice summary of what good listening skills might look like. Which leads us in to a more general discussion in Persuasion by James Borg. * It’s one of our favourite books in the management/self help genre and we honestly recommend that you try it, as there’s a lot more in there besides.

And so, gentle readers, we leave you with this age old thought :why do people so often hear, but so rarely listen?

James Borg Persuasion Pearson 2004

Are Men Really Lousy Listeners? | Psychology Today

#management #psychology #menvswomen #listening #communications

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After Covid-19 declines and everyone goes back to parties, holidays and festivals, and start committing all the health-sapping things associated with such events, the problem of of antibiotic resistance will remain. As this little blog often reminds, we are going to need all sorts of new antibiotic molecules, vaccines, bacteriophages and researchers equipped with the latest IT. Up to now our treatments are based on a simple, one -dimensional model: put in A and wait for effect B, which hopefully consitutes a cure. Now a new study tries to look athe complicated, iterative interactions of bacteria, antibiotic and immune system.

Rachel Wheatley and Julio Diaz Caballero, reporting in The Conversation, looked at the how the bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa, which causes lung infections, develops its resistance to antibiotics in real time. They showed that the best time to “send in” the antibiotic helper is when the patient’s immune system is in full cry. And that later, even if antibiotic resistant bacteria come back ,curses, the immune system may be able defeat them. You can read the link we have posted below.*

The implications are thought-provoking. Maybe the timings of antibiotic doses are just as important as the dose strengths. Maybe the immune system and its capacity to “learn” and modify could be fruitful areas for more research. In which case, it will be important to look very carefully at things like at signalling, information and stimulation. Perhaps the research teams should be recruting a few Information Scientists alongside microbiologists and chemists.

https://theconversation.com/how-our-immune-system-helps-us-fight-antibiotic-resistance-159831?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%

#antibioticresistance #covid-19 #bacteria #infection #health #medicine #informationscience

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At first glance the troubles of Cornish villagers and the followers of Manchester United may seem far apart indeed. But recent events make us suspect they may be connected-and point the way to bigger troubles in future.

Firstly, the background. For those not totally hooked on Line of Duty, yesterday saw fans of Manchester United riot so comprehensively that the club’s fixture with arch-rivals Liverpool has had to be postponed. Commentators talk of long-standing grievances against the rich American Glazer family that owns the club, which were accentuated by the latter’s flirtation with the recently mooted European Superleague. *

Meanwhile down in beautiful Cornwall tensions are running high in the village of Feock * near Falmouth. It’s the same old story as in other areas of natural beauty, such as Wales. Impoverished locals are infuriated by rich outsiders who move in with big wads of cash, buying up properties, changing shops and generally acting, it is alleged, with a swagger and panache that goes with economic superiority.

We do not imagine that Football fans or Cornish villagers are Communists or Socialists to any particular extent. Both are heirs of the final victory of Capitalism in 1991, and would welcome its freedoms to travel and trade across the widest possible areas. Yet both are (relatively) disadvantaged groups who see their traditional customs and social structures deeply disturbed by the action of these same market forces and the much richer individuals that ride them. Both sides have some deep questions to answer. Do free markets always guarantee the happiest outcomes? If not, and you start to tamper with them, where does that end? If you join a free market zone, do you thereby allow strangers the same rights in your community as you have?

It is issues like this where nationalist parties gain their first footholds. We note that Mebyon Kernow are now involved in the travails of Feock the way that Plaid Cymru and the Scottish Nationalists learned to fish in troubled local waters back in the 1970s. Could there one day be a Cornexit from the UK, mirroring the recent Brexit from the EU? What about Quebec, and Corsica and California? As we have said before, local and national feelings run deep and should never be dismissed or mocked. We may be at the beginning of their consequences.

both stories today are from the Guardian, but you will find them well covered in other media

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/may/03/real-thuggery-cornwall-boats-vandalised-amid-incomer-tensio

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2021/may/03/fans-frustration-must-be-understood-says-minister-after-m

#cornwall #feock #manchesterunited #football #capitalism #socialism #inequality