Today, in full cognisance of the impending arrival of Valentine’s Day on Monday, we had over our blog to The Savoy Cocktail Book, published by Constable. all we’ve done is pick out a few from their huge and stylish range which seem to have a sort of valentiny-ish theme. We will leave you to do the rest. Including drink them. One caveat :although the book is excellent , their measuring system is impenetrable. For example, in many a recipe they say a quarter, but a quarter of what, exactly? There are no units! So we have adapted our own measures, honed from long experience. You will need ice for all by the way.

Sweet Patotie: 1 measure fresh orange juice, 1/2 measure Cointreau, 1 measure dry gin. Shake over ice, and pour into cocktail glass. Decorate with lemon.

Cherry Mixture: 1 measure French Vermouth, 1 Measure Italian Vermouth,1 dash Maraschino 1 dash angostura bitters. Shake over ice and pour to chilled cocktail glass, Decoration: Cherry

Should give you that nice reddish pink Valentine’s glow

Pink Gin 1 glass of dry gin. 1 Dash of Angostura. They used to like this in the Royal Navy, though quite where the Valentine’s connection enters in we’re not sure! To whom would sailors send a Valentine on a long sea voyage?

There’s loads more pink ones but as they seem to recommend the use of uncooked eggs, but we’re not sure we can recommend them on a science and health website. But there is enough here to get you started. And if the above is not sufficient, you can always try mixing pink Cava with cold lager.

Happy Valentine’s day to you all

One more murder in Manchester: is it worth comment? Yes, because Manchester could stand in for any great city. The circumstances are detailed in the Manchester Evening News. [1] This report is more lurid because for once it was possible to name the perpetrators. The old debate about causes will now follow its weary course through inequality, hormones and high spirits, gangster chic, music, deprivation and even too much lead.

We think the cause lies elsewhere: a failure of education. A working education system lifts up, inspiring from the local to the general, from despair to possibility. Without it, attention focusses on the petty, the parochial -the narcissism of small differences if you like. And among the uneducated such preoccupations prove fatal the world over.

It is in this light that we read the thoughts of Simon Jenkins of The Guardian.[2] He describes a dreary system of exam factories and narrow curricula that could have been purpose-built to alienate huge numbers of young people. We need exams. But a neurotic focus on them teaches nothing of life skills, emotional intelligence and flexibility , the core qualities of a thriving workforce. And kids know that. And reject accordingly. And are lost, as these ones were.

[1] Reece Tansey killers named for first time as judge lifts reporting restrictions – Manchester Evening News

[2] Wasteful, costly and cruel: it’s time to bin GCSEs for good | Simon Jenkins | The Guardian

#crime #gangster rap #crime #inner cities #youth #education #schools

No issue has torn through the heart of western societies like immigration. No problem has produced such anxiety and polemic. On both sides of the political divide, to be be fair. Nothing explains Donald Trump, Brexit, populism and webhate as well as immigration. If the politics of the twentieth century were all about class, those of our own are all. about identity.

The Left want to pretend the problem does not exist, like Victorians avoiding the mention of sex. The Right can think of nothing else but shouting, building walls and sending in The Navy. None have any value. For they are concerned with symptoms, not causes. Peoples’ fears and concerns are very real and deep. Unless we address the real causes of the mass migrations, they could yet destroy us all.

Writing in the Conversation, the admirable Seb Rumsby makes a real and earnest stab at the task. Read it, and think. Seb may not have all the answers. But at least he tries.

https://theconversation.com/economic-migration-the-root-problem-is-not-smugglers-but-global-inequality-174073?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Lat

#immigration #ehtnic identity #webhate #donald trump #brexit #inequality

Stories of more than passing significance

Not the end yet: Seasoned readers may recall our piece Is Omicron the last Hurrah for Covid? (LSS 20 12 21) in which we noted speculations that omicron might spell the end for Covid-19. Not so fast!- as Nature makes all too clear: Will Omicron end the pandemic?

The World Health Organization and others have suggested the rapid spread of the Omicron coronavirus variant could signal the end of the pandemic, because of the short-term surge in immunity that will follow. Researchers warn that the situation remains volatile and difficult to model. Different vaccine strategies, types and take-up rates from country to country, as well as fluctuating rates of infection and recovery, have left a diverse immunological landscape. So, how will it end? Not with Omicron, researchers predict. “This will not be the last variant, and so the next variant will have its own characteristics,” says infectious-diseases modeller Graham Medley.Nature | 7 min read

Denisovans are not just DNA The initial discovery of a new lineage of humans, the Denisovans, entirely by their DNA was exciting. But where are the remains of this third member of the modern human family? There are a couple of fingers, a tooth and a jaw. Now Michael Marshall of New Scientist speculates that a partial skull from Xujiayao in China might be linked to our exiguous cousins. Could there be more fragments, some in the ground, some in museums, which could shed more light?

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2305830-160000-year-old-fossil-may-be-the-first-denisovan-skull-weve-found/

MIcheal’s piece may be paywalled, so here is the original paper

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047248421001718

Hangxiety Do some people get panic attacks after a night on the booze, in addition to all the other unpleasant symptoms? Craig Gunn looks at the whos, whens, whys and whats for The Conversation

https://theconversation.com/hangxiety-why-some-people-experience-anxiety-during-a-hangover-176285?u

End of the ice won’t take ages Greenland alone is now melting at a terrifying rate. The reason we respect this is that it comes from the impeccably right wing Daily Mail, not a bastion of woke correctness. Moral: if they’re worried, so should you be

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-10476139/Climate-change-Greenland-lost-ice-2002-submerge-1-5-FEET-water.html

Fish Spill clue to human mystery species The mystery being : How can any creature dare to call itself Homo SAPIENS, goddammitt, when it can do things like this to the planet? Guardian and agencies

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/05/shock-in-france-after-giant-trawler-sheds-100000-dead-fish-off-coast

On that sardonic note, we’ll leave you. Let’s hope there will be enough fish in the ocean to go with your Friday night cocktail

#denisovans #human evolution #Sars-Cov-2 #covid-19 #ecology #sustainibility #global warming #climate change

“When facts change, I change my mind.” When JM Keynes wrote those words he spoke not just for economists, but for intelligent people everywhere. Which is why we’d like you to at least think about the work of Professor Livnat and his team at Haifa Univeristy, as ably reported by Ryan Morrison of the Mail [1] For the Professor and his team may have found evidence of non random mutations in the part of our genes that codes for the HbS protein that helps protect us from Malaria.

Why is this important? Because the central tenet of evolutionary theory is that mutations in the genome accumulate at random; the consequences of these are selected in the environment so that those with the most favourable mutations survive and reproduce at higher rates. The alternative, proposed by Lamarck, is that somehow organisms “learn” from their environment, and thus modify their own inheritances. So far there has been little evidence for this.

Yet now the team at Haifa seem to have found evidence of mutations in the HbS genes occurring at a rate faster than might be expected from random, inherent mutation. If so, it will be ground breaking, doing for Biology what the famous Michelson Morley result did for physics. So how do we at LSS respond?

1 Caution, as ever. There have been Lamarckian upswings before in the history of biology-most recently associated with epigenetics-but the central doctrine, as t’were, has still held firm

2 There seems to be one supporting study (see the article) but we’d like to see a lot more

3 If information gets back to the genes from the environment, how? And how is it stored. If giraffes learn to grow longer necks by stretching, how do they tell their genes to store the new data?

4 Professor Livnat agrees random mutations still play a big part. Pray tell us, how is this contribution integrated with the “learned” contribution-at a level of explanation that would satisfy an information scientist.

Yes, we at LSS are open minded, and long for more money for the Professor and his team. But we are also skeptics on all matters, and the wisest counsel is: wait and see.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-10465347/New-study-suggests-genetic-mutations-NOT-random.html

Ryan’s article has a great hyperlink to the original paper

#natural selection #mutation #lamarck #dna #evolution #biology

Kent, garden of England. Land of apple orchards and oasthouses. Of prosperous gin-and jag commuter towns. Of Geezers in white vans of whom it was once said “they have tools and language, but no culture”. Harsh! Of white cliffs and deep green forests. And all of them voting Conservative since at least the time of King Oisc (458-512 AD) You’d think Labour would love to get a foothold there somehow. And so they did in 2017 when the affable Rosie Duffield took the Cathedral/University town of Canterbury. If you want to learn how Labour will now throw it away, read this link by Jessica Elgot of The Guardian:

ttps://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jan/30/canterbury-mp-rosie-duffield-considering-quitting-labour

The reason that the Tories keep winning is that they have a far better understanding of the words “needs” and “grievances.” What each word means, and what importance to address to either. Working class people aren’t fools: they too have dictionaries. Until Labour (and many other progressive forces such as liberals, social democrats, socialists and the rest) make the same effort, they will continue to lose. And rightly so.

#politics #rosie duffield #labour #conservative #working class

_{Only one this week, but we think it’s rather important:}

Maybe those old Enlightenment guys, Adam Smith and the others, were on to something. Their findings were painfully simple. Facts would be collected and subjected to Reason. Conclusions could be drawn, and Right Action initiated. It gave us such things as soap, democracy, mass education, telephones, scientific medicine, even space travel. Well, it had a good run, but now its day seems to be coming to end.

Because facts and reason are not how most people guide their lives. The history of the last ten years has seen freedom fall to tyranny, conspiracy theories surge, and explosions of irrational popular rage. Most peoples’ decisions aren’t made through reading learned articles in The Economist, but through a bundle of competing grievances, unmet needs, insecurities and obsessions. Readers, we’re not asking you to abandon fact and reason. But they must be applied urgently to understand the raw dark matter of human unreason, or we are all lost. Dazzled by our progress in things like space and computers, this has been left in its infancy. Better roll up our sleeves and get started.

One such place is an intriguing paper in Nature Behaviour :Conspiracy Mentality and Political Orientation across 26 countries by Roland Imhoff and his collaborators [1]. We liked it for many reasons. The size of the data sets. The thoroughness of the statistics. The quiet humility in the face of the facts. Above all for the questions it posed. What is an Authoritarian personality? Why are conspiracy theories more common among the defeated and the lower-educated? Why did the phrase “deprived of political control” keep coming up? If you believe one conspiracy, do you believe them all? Do conspiracies offer the bewildered a chance to restore a feeling of control, of understanding? That the terrible task of having to engage with complexity has been magically staved off?

For us, this work is a jumping-off point, a source of questions, not answers. But it lays down themes which we will be coming back to, with your help of course. To end, a little quote from Proverbs 3:12, always one of our favourites in dark times:

Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, and the man that getteth understanding; For the merchandise of it is better than the merchandise of silver and the gain thereof than fine gold. She is more precious than rubies and all the things thou canst desire are not to be compared unto her

As David Brent would say; “It starts here!”

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01258-7

#conspiracy theories #climate change denial #Qanon #religion #alternative facts #illuminati #political left #political right #Donald Trump #anti-vaxxers

This week, courtesy of Drinks International[2] and Vinepair,[1] both stalwart voices for sophistication and style, we are proud to offer their take on the top 50 cocktails for 2022. Which will help to set the tone for the rest of the twenties, we hope. After all, if 1922 was the birth of the modern, according to the BBC,[3] why should 2022 not offer itself as the Birth of the Modern Cocktail?

We won’t get between you and them much further, ladies and gentleman. Read the link for yourself. Every one has a pretty good recipe, plus a well-taken picture to check if you’ve got the mix just right. There’s real old favourites like Long Island Iced Tea and the Sidecar. Topical themes like Penicillin and the Moscow Mule. Bond fans will recognise Dry Martini, Vesper and Vieu Carre (well he wrote spy fiction too, didn’t he?). And finally you will find the Top Five, with a cheeky newcomer at Number 1. But we won’t spoil it for you. And one note of caution: don’t try to make all 50 in one go! One a night, which is to say Friday Night, should be enough for all and any one of you.

[1] https://vinepair.com/articles/50-most-popular-cocktails-world-2017/

[2] https://drinksint.com/

[3] https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/m0013r19

#friday night cocktails #top 50

Imagine you are a member of the Taliban, or one of their admirers in the Humanities Departments of certain western Universities, and you read about someone who made some of the most important contributions ever in theoretical physics. That this person collaborated closely with Albert Einstein. Then went on to transform mathematics. But you discover that this person was a woman. How do you feel now about banning education for women?

Emily Noether (1882-1935) began her working life as a teacher of foreign languages, as women were not admitted into science departments. Gradually her abilities shone through enough for the more thoughtful souls to recruit her as a teacher and researcher in the mathematics department, though the pay and pensions package was decidedly exiguous. Our Wikipedia link [1] will tell you all you need to know about the profundity of her achievements. Suffice thereof these tiny quote from Wikipedia which shows how Emmy took the biscuit, intellectually speaking of course:

_{She discovered Noether’s theorem, which is fundamental in mathematical physics.^[1] She was described by Pavel Alexandrov, Albert Einstein, Jean Dieudonné, Hermann Weyl and Norbert Wiener as the most important woman in the history of mathematics.^[2][3] As one of the leading mathematicians of her time, she developed some theories of rings, fields, and algebras. In physics, Noether’s theorem explains the connection between symmetry and conservation laws.}

Not only was she a woman, she was Jewish. This combination of offences was enough to enrage the new Nazi Government of Germany who drove her from her post at Goettingen University. She fled to the United States and was welcomed at Bryn Mawr. Sadly she only lived for two more years, not enough to witness the downfall of the ignorant, murderous and misogynistic regime which had done her such harm.

Emmy’s legacy is greater than her work. For it shows like nothing else the fullest possible education of women is of imminent benefit to us all. And that those who oppose it, and their cheerers-on, are our most fundamental enemies.

#Islamic extremism #nazi #physics #mathematics #women #education for girls #science #

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether

Two thousand years ago a group of Chinese mathematicians came up with a new form of mathematics called matrices. It must have seemed a bit abstract and ivory tower to the man-on-the Shanghai-omnibus. “yeah, just the sort of stuff that metropolitan elite like,” he would have sneered. Well the metropolitan elite, or to give them their proper name, the Educated, carried on with this line of abstract research. Eventually Larry Page used an aspect their findings called stationary distributions to create the multitrillion dollar company Google. Quite an application for the pure research.

David Sumpter, writing in the Guardian, has a whole set (unintended pun) of examples of how pure, seemingly abstruse research turned into practical applications. [1]. Click to the link to see how Cauchy‘s ideas of gradient descent changed the game for YouTube. Or how Sir David Cox‘ theory of logistic recession is the toast of all successful gamblers everywhere. Our own example is James Clark Maxwell, without whose theories you would not have turned on an electric light this morning, let alone be reading this.

And so it goes. Today’s abstract, new, thought is tomorrow’s refrigerator. Or laptop. Or vaccine. In this seemingly intractable war between the educated and the uneducated, our side must defend the value of learning for its own sake. One day it will pay dividends. It’s a theme we shall return to in future posts.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/24/equations-google-billion-dollar-bits-of-maths

#pure research #applied research #education #mathematics #technology #google #youtube #computers