Language teachers have always known: make it visual, make it useful, and they’ll want to learn.
So, gentle readers do you want to know how progress is going on Covid-19 vaccines? What are the types of vaccine? How they work? And how far they have got? It’s all in the attached article by Artur Galocha in El Pais.
We think that the graphics and visuals are so good that most people will understand what’s happening. You could use your translator. But here’s a bit of fun. Try this glossary and see if you can work out a bit of what he’s saying for yourself. Are all the words really that different? Try looking for words you know in English, especially nouns. Maybe you’re better at languages than you thought you were!
Recent discussions of Britain’s future after Brexit have sometimes included a CANZUK trope. The idea is to revive part of the old British Empire by uniting Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom and New Zealand in a single customs union, trading and political block. There seems to be little enthusiasm for including other formal imperial countries such as Nigeria, India, Pakistan and Kenya.
However, it may be hard to keep such countries out. In a recent article in Pocketworthy, Brian Gallagher looks at how Indian billionaire Gautam Adani used his vast resources to” capture the hearts and minds of Queenslanders” so that his companies could exploit its coal reserves. Gallagher goes on to show how the manipulative techniques of the very rich can be understood in terms of game theory, and how inequality itself distorts the whole political and economic process away from optimal outcomes.
We at LSS understand how CANZUK might appeal to many people, particularly those of an Imperialist or nostalgist bent. It was an idea sometimes floated in the Empire’s heyday. The historian Corelli Barnett dissected the idea rather thoroughly in The Collapse of British Power. The main problem then was strategic: if you create a valuable trading bloc, you have to be prepared to defend it. The strategic problems of defending such a scattered group were difficult enough in the nineteen twenties, when the Royal Navy was powerful and Britain still had a manufacturing base. How much more difficult will they be in the twenties of our century?
We thank Mr Peter Seymour of Hertfordshire for the idea for this piece
Citrus lemon, an evergreen of the family Rutaceae, was first introduced to Europe in the 2nd Century AD, from its native Assam. Sadly, Europeans left is cultivation to the Arabs and Persians, only resuming its mass production in the mid fifteenth century.* From Genoa it spread to the New World colonies. Its beautiful shape and aroma have made it a staple of every kitchen ever since. Except, sadly, you can’t drink it, however much you crave its vitamin C.
Unless of course you mix it with something else. And our extensive scientific research for this blog (aka The Ultimate Cocktail Book, Hamlyn) revealed a lengthy list whose glorious and evocative names include:
Brandy Sour, Between the Sheets, White Lady, Mike Collins, Walters, Brandy Sidecar, St James, Zombie, Mississippi Punch, French 75, Brooklyn Bomber, Singapore Gin Sling, Honolulu, Alice Springs, Rum Cristophe, Tobago Fizz and many, many more.
Well, there isn’t time to review them all in one night, let alone sample them. But here for the cognoscenti are three delicious lemon-based cocktails we think you might like.
Short and tangy=the Brandy Sour
Put 4-5 ice cubes in your shaker. add three drops of angostura bitters, juice of 1 lemon, 3 measures of good French brandy and one teaspoon of sugar syrup. (without the latter, even the most sophisticated tippler will have gut rot all night long) Shake and por to a medium glass, chilled, and decorate with a slice from your lemon
Long and satisfying=the Singapore Gin Sling
Here the whole point is to partner your lemon with a number of other ingredients to produce blend of flavours. Chill a nice hurricane glass. To your shaker we add no less than eight chunky ice cubes, juice of 0.5 lemon juice of 0.5 orange, 1 measure cherry brandy, 3 measures of good white gin, 3 drops of angostura bitters. Shake good and hard. Pour, with cubes into your hurricane. (the glass, not the aeroplane). Top up with iced fizzy mineral water. Decorate with lemon, orange and a cocktail cherry. Best drunk with straws, which now we hope are recyclable!
Big Night Out=the Brooklyn Bomber
Bit of a trick one to prepare, so pay attention. Take six ice cubes. Put three in your shaker and three in your chilled long glass. The shaker should now take 0.5 measure tequila, 0.5 measure curacao,0.5 measure cherry brandy, 0.5 measure galliano, 1 measure lemon juice. Shake enough to crack the cubes a bit. Now pour over your cubes in the long glass. Slice of orange and two cocktail cherries to decorate.
Here’s wishing all members of the learned and scholastic community a happy Friday night.
Commentators of the right often exhibit a profound nostalgia for the nineteen fifties, which they see as an age of order and stability. Their followers, in places like the Dog and Duck go back further to the nineteen forties. At this point we often long for a time machine (perhaps shaped like a Spitfire) to transport them back to their Golden Age, for we wonder what they would find.
Taxes were much, much higher- marginal rates in the US and UK were around 95% for high earners. State spending, paid for by borrowing, was on the rise. Trade Unions were a vital part of the national process, seen more as partners than enemies. Abroad, things like exchange controls and Bretton Woods regulated the world economy and made life hard for would be entrepreneurs, hedge funds and other adventurers on the wilder shores of capitalism. The results, contrary to all economic theory, were massive increases in prosperity. property ownership and general well being that are hard for anyone under fifty to now recall, except as old man’s tales.
Jonathan Hopkin of LSE writing in Aeon is another chronicler of our Decline and Fall. Following in the well-trod path of Will Hutton and Thomas Piketty, he sees the problem as the essential breakdown of the relationship between capital and democracy, starting with the oil crisis of 1973 as the root of our current angst. Older readers who remember that terrible winter, and gloomy spring which followed it, will recall that sense of something irretrievably broken and gone for good. Here in Thirty Glorious Years he charts the breakdown and speculates if anything better will ever come-unless there is another war.
Our only regret is that he pays little attention to the role of the media in shaping the Zeitgist. History is written by the winners. If you can pay the most journalists, create the best news stations and pump out the most messages, you will have written it before it has happened. Money can do all those things. Progressives take note.
If you had sat down to dinner with a leading biotechnology entrepreneur around about 2008 0r 2010, the chances are he would have waxed lyrical about stem cell research. And rightly so. It has allowed tremendous advances in medicine-for example, in the treatment of damaged nerves and other tissues. Yet waiting in the wings, or bubbling under as they used to say in the old radio Hit Parade shows, was a new idea so revolutionary that it will transform life itself. We refer of course to the CRISPR “genetic scissors” discovered by Emmanuele Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna for which they have been jointly awarded a Nobel Prize. Quite right too, we say.
The story of what they did, mucking around with a new molecule called tracrRNA in an obscure bacterium called Streptococcus pyogenes is best read in the piece from The Conversation from Kalpana Surendranath of the highly prestigious University Of Westminster.( Plug: their languages department is pretty hot, too) For us at LSS the moral is deeper.
According to statistical research which we have done, women represent approximately 50% of the human population. If you systematically deny this half the right to education, and chain it to the kitchen, that’s half of your human potential lost at a stroke. No more CRISPR. No more epigenetics. Of course there are many societies and cultures that delight in the oppression of women, on the grounds that it makes for better social harmony, or the God has told them to do it. They should remember this: over time, they will be out competed by those groups that systematically cultivate their full human potential, which means the education of women above all.
As a coda we include a link to Wikipedia* to Mary Woolstonecraft’s pioneering Vindication of the Rights of Women. How proud she would be today of Charpentier and Doudna!
Language teachers and learned institutes of language are always pushing the benefits of learning another language. Well, it’s their job, innit? Stands to reason, mate. And so the argument rages back and forth-are bilingual people cleverer? Do their endless mental gymnastics looking for the right word in two languages make them more adept? Or do they just get to see a bigger variety of newspapers and TV shows?
Here’s a couple of pieces which discuss this question. Vincent de Luca* of Birmingham University (The Conversation) gives a very concise summary of the psychological and neurological factors at play. We’ve thrown in Neel Burton of Psychology Today for those with time for a second opinion.
We’ve looked at more: and for us at LSS, the answer is a firm and resounding “Don’t Know“. We don’t often take a personal note here or on Facebook. We know persons who can speak two, four and even six languages, and they are pretty smart cookies. But we also know many monolinguals who are far, far cleverer than the writer of these words. And have always remained so, despite our many years of effort in Spanish. What counts is success in life, and that depends on many factors.
For thousands of years humanity was in the grip of terrible diseases. Polio. Tuberculosis. Measles. Bubonic plague. Cancer. And the only apparent remedies we had lay in the hands of shamans, faith healers, magicians, holy men and witches. People who, whatever their theological qualifications, knew nothing about biology, chemistry or reasoning. Instead of vaccines, spells. Instead of antibiotics, charms. Instead of surgery, chants. The victims died-horribly. Reality always trumps belief.
Slowly some began to learn the tools of reason. Of accumulating facts, and checking them. Realising that any theory had to obey two essential rules. 1 Does it fit with all observable facts? 2 Is it internally consistent?
Sometimes, this way of opinion prevailed. So it is heartening to report a rare success for our side. Today Nature reports on the marvellous discovery of hepatitis c, a terrible illness that ruined lives and often killed its victims. Here’s the report and a link for a short but enjoyable read.
A trio of scientists who identified and characterized hepatitis C — the virus that is responsible for many cases of hepatitis and liver disease — are the recipients of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology of Medicine. Harvey Alter, Michael Houghton and Charles Rice share the award. “It stands out as an emblem of great science,” says Ellie Barnes, who studies liver medicine and immunology. “We’ve got to a point where we can cure most people who are infected.”
Houghton has turned down high-profile awards because they didn’t acknowledge his collaborators, George Quo and Qui-Lim Choo. “It’s all based on the Nobel prize,” explained Houghton in 2013. “In his will, Dr. Nobel says there can be no more than three. All of the other major awards tend to copy that and limit it to three. It’s antiquated.”Nature | 5 min read & National Post | 5 min read (from 2013)
The other side are back in the ascendant. They have many advantages. The emotional luxury of wallowing in grievance, anger and cheap beer. The lazy luxury of not having to think. Of being backed by well funded media machines. By contrast, our side delivers tangible results. They can’t do without us forever.
According to Larry Elliott* of the Guardian, the answer is “yes-it could”. Stalling economic growth, collapsing exports, and fewer to remittances by migrants to poor countries all suggest and economic time bomb which could blow at any time. According to Elliott, the canary in the mine is Zambia, but there are many other countries who will find it incredibly hard to pay their sovereign debts. Ellliot’s article is well hyperlinked, but if you really want to lift up the hood and look at the engine, the one linking to Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the IMF, is a good place to start.*
Debt crises are always agonising for the countries that live through them. But they are for everyone else too. Bondholders, both private and state, have to take a haircut; a lot of good investment capital is always tied up or lost altogether when these things blow up. Poor people anywhere means less demand for goods and services. Think Greece and Argentina, both well within recent memory. But above all it means political instability, extremism, and migration. To put it brutally, we at LSS always see immigration as an objective economic phenomenon rather than a political or moral one. Migrants behave like ions in an electric field. They move from negative (hunger, political repression) to positive (money). A new wave of migrants crossing the Sahara and Mediterranean could bring problems indeed to the richer countries of the north.
As the American death toll passes 200 000 and even the President and his team are ravaged by the Sars-Cov-2 virus, spare a thought for Africa, where they’re coping quite well, actually. Everyone remembers all those predictions in the Dog and Duck just before the pandemic. “Oh it’ll destroy Africa, their countries will collapse, blah blah.”
Not so. Liberia, population 5 million, has had only 82 deaths. Senegal, population 16 million, only has 302 deaths. Karen Attah for the Washington Post, surveys the story in the round. It should change your assumptions about this and many other things. (Spoiler alert: we sometimes get opening and paywall issues with the Washington Post. But it is a fine publication, and well worth the effort. so here are two links to try!)
We hope you all enjoyed your cocktail night. There’s a wealth of stories for all you intelligent educated people to consider this week, so here goes- we are just going to line ’em up.
Doing it all wrong
Why the baffling differences in the way Coronavirus behaves in different places around the world? Here’s a high death rate in city A, while there’s none over in city B. Country C is poised for disaster, they said back in March-except of course, it hasn’t happened. According to Zeynep Tufecki in the Atlantic, we have been concentrating too much on the famous R rate in our modelling, and not enough on a factor called k which measures its dispersal potential. The article is written in lucid, intelligent Atlantic style. It’s a journal we recommend to anyone. Correction. Everyone
Why is being a chief executive like a man in a bookshop?
Imagine you are standing in a bookshop, and you can only afford one book. But as you look along the shelves, there are hundreds of quite good ones. History, Science, business, psychology, novels………All screaming “I’m good, buy me!” It’s the same for a Chief Executive. All your underlings are trying to get their ideas noticed, as are salesmen from outside the company, who are trying to sell you things like IT apps and water coolers. According to Warren Buffet the secret of success is to say “No!” to just about everything. Here Marcel Schwantes of Pocket explains why.
Go to the ant, O sluggard. Consider her ways and be wise (Prov 6, 6)
How do complex animal societies like ants of bees manage to work together? Apparently by a few simple rules, which are observed by all. Kevin Hartnett for pocket looks at how simple algorithms hold ant societies together. “She prepares her bread in summer, and gathers her food in harvest.” !!
we thank Mr Peter Seymour of Hertfordshire for the above stories
Nature is another publication that we rate highly. Here’s a fantastic story about using AI to diagnose Covid 19 just from your voice. There’s a link to the main story as well
Alexa, do I have Covid -19?
Researchers are exploring ways to use people’s voices to diagnose everything from coronavirus infection to depression. They are using artificial intelligence to recognize when a condition is disturbing the delicate dance of the brain, nervous system and vocal anatomy. Even the words you use can be a sign: for example, a shrinking vocabulary might indicate a neurodegenerative disease. Researchers emphasize that the technology would be only a part of a clinician’s diagnostic arsenal, and there are serious privacy concerns — but the advantages of such a light-touch tool are clear. “This is not invasive, it’s not a drug, we’re not changing anything,” says Tal Wenderow of the voice-analysis company Vocalis. “All you need to do is speak.”Nature | 12 min read
We hope you shall be restful today, gentle readers, as befits a good weekend. We at LSS are going to be rather occupied with some good people who want us all to survive global warming. We may well come back to you, so watch this space.
Learning, Science and Society 