Feb 05 2021

Book review: Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake

entangled_lifeEntangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake is a book which came to me via my wife, as she read it she kept providing me intriguing nuggets of information about fungi so I thought I would read it next. For the older reader Sheldrake might be a familiar name, his father Rupert Sheldrake was something of a character perhaps best known for his theory of morphic resonance.

Entangled Life is not a dry, systematic study of fungi but rather a rambling exposition with much biographical detail. Each chapter contains a good description of some facet of fungi, alongside some broader discussion of the people and places Sheldrake visited to write the chapter and musings on the broader meaning of the facet.

The first chapter, entitled "A Lure", is on truffles, looking back this chapter is designed to entice us into reading further by talk of a very financially valuable, and desirable fungi. Sheldrake takes us to the woods of Italy for a truffle hunting trip providing scientific detail alongside the human story.

Next comes "Living Labyrinths", inviting us to change our mindset about how an organism is put together. Fungi are not like plants or animals, they are a network composed of hyphae. Different fungi have different network structures, and the hyphae in a network can be arranged in different large scale structures such as chords and rhizomorphs. The mycelium network can transport substances over distances, and also signals, although it isn’t clear how they do this. Mycelium networks can "solve" maze-like problems, I’ve seen reports of this in the past and I don’t see it as evidence of intelligence – essentially the networks solve a diffusion problem by using diffusion. They are a type of analogue computer.

"The intimacy of strangers" introduces us to lichens – fungi-algae symbionts. The structure of lichens and symbiosis were discovered in the second half of the 19th century. The discovery was something of a revelation, previously there had been organisms and their parasites – none of the cooperation that symbiosis is founded on. It is fair to say we are still learning a lot about lichens, including the fact that the partners in lichens can be quite fluid. Lichens challenge our ideas about what it means to be a species.

"Mycelial Minds" is definitely the most terrifying chapter – it details how ophiocordyceps takes over carpenter ants and has them behaving in very specific ways (climbing to a high point on a stem and waving their legs around) for the furtherance of the fungi. Also discussed in this chapter are LSD and the Psilocybin mushrooms, fungi or their derivatives that are psychoactive in humans.

"Before roots" covers the long standing relationship between plants and fungi – it is proposed that it was fungi that hauled plants out of the waters and onto land, hundreds of millions of years ago. Fungi specialise in accessing minerals locked in rocks, and the remains of lichens would have formed the first soils on land (they still do, when new land from volcanic activity or otherwise is exposed). This would have provided water-borne plants with a mechanism for accessing nutrients on dry land. Fungi still form a critical partnership with plants, extending and enhancing the plant’s own root network in exchange for energy derived from the sun by photosynthesis – fungi cannot photosynthesise themselves.

"Wood wide webs" talks about how forests are knitted together with mycelium networks which link one tree to another, and another. In a small patch of woodland one tree was found to be linked to 47 others via the mycelium network. The mycelium network can transmit some of the plant distress signals as well as moving nutrients from one tree to another. In some ways Sheldrake dislikes the reference to the Wood Wide Web because it sees the trees as the "servers" in network and the fungi reduced to the lowly cables and routers.

"Radical mycology" – the science side of this chapter is the development of fungi for the remediation of pollution and producing recyclable "green" materials. It starts with a discussion on the coal measures laid down in the Carboniferous period – this was a time when the mechanisms for decomposing wood were limited. Since then fungi have evolved which are efficient in degrading lignin – a key component in wood – this is a rare skill. The human side is the longstanding mycology counter culture, fungi have not had a high academic profile but have attracted an enthusiastic amateur following initially interested in psilocybin mushrooms but now more generally involved in research and discovery.

"Making sense of fungi" – the scientific element of this chapter is around fungi particularly their use in making alcohol. I was intrigued to learn of the "drunken monkey" hypothesis of our taste for alcohol – essentially our ape ancestors used alcohol as an indicator to find ripe (or even over-ripe fruit). Humans have a mutation in an enzyme which enables them to process alcohol, otherwise it would be (more) toxic to us – they evolved this ability before they started deliberate fermentation to make alcohol.

One of the recurring themes of this book is how relatively little studied fungi are, they don’t fit into our neat, longstanding picture of the living world consisting of plants and animals, and individuals rather than symbionts being the fundamental unit of biological thought.

I found Entangled Life a fascinating and enjoyable read, and I didn’t even have to buy the book!

Jan 16 2021

Book Review: History of Britain in Maps by Philip Parker

history_of_britain_in_mapsI’ve always been a fan of maps, so the History of Britain in Maps by Philip Parker is right up my street.

The book is ordered chronologically with each map getting a short page of text facing a page of the map, with some maps earning an additional double page spread. Except for the earliest periods the maps are contemporary.

The book has the air of written as a set of separate map captions with some repetition between maps relating to the same period.

There are some recurring themes through the book, maps for the pleasure of maps seem to play a role, as do military maps showing defensive positions or explaining military actions. Maps of ownership are also common. Finally there are maps for travel, first by road and then later by canal and railway. Also apparent is the evolution of mapmaking skills.

Aside from the exceedingly schematic representations of Britain on the Roman Rudge Cup from 130AD the earliest maps of Britain date to the medieval period and Matthew Paris, a Benedictine monk who was active around 1250AD. There are religious Mappa Mundi from slightly earlier but Britain is very much on the edge of these schematic representations of the religious world with Britain perched at the very edge, if visible at all.

The earliest map of Britain that looks like a map is Matthew Paris’s map of 1250AD. The shape of coast is heavily distorted but some names recognisable to the modern eye appear (such as my home county of Dorset). Rivers are prominent most likely because they were the key method of transport over longer distances. There is a strand of maps that portrays the nations of the British Isles, the counties within them and cities, particularly London which are about place, belonging and power rather than navigation or even defence. Towards the end of the 16th century such maps start to look very much like modern maps, they are relatively accurate and follow modern mapping conventions (rather than being panoramic views or schematic views).

Also produced by Paris is an "itinerary map" showing the progression of towns a pilgrim to the Holy Land would pass through on their trip from Britain. This type of map is a recurring theme through the book, it is not interested in the details of the landscape, it is not a plan view, it is a linear track with distances. This is highly relevant to the traveller who is constrained to travel along the roads rather than view the landscape from above, as a bird does. In some respects this path turns full circle with Beck’s highly schematic but very clear London Underground map.I was interested to learn that road signage was not introduced until 1696.

Although there are earlier examples of coastal maps Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in the 16th century which led to open season being declared on Britain by the Pope, produced a number of coastal maps of the South of England. These are a recurring theme. The monarch, and his counterparts in Europe, were both keen to map the defences of the South Coast. Similar maps were produced during the Napoleonic Wars and the Second World War. Also falling into the military remit are the various maps of military engagements of the Civil War. The earliest work of what was to become the Ordnance Survey in Scotland in the mid-18th century and then in Kent related to military interests (the clue is in the name).

Maps of ownership are another recurring theme, these start in the early 15th century typically establish the land and rights of the monasteries. Later maps, in the early 19th century, show the results of the Enclosure Acts which took from Common land from everyone and gave to the wealthy now-landowners. Similarly the tithe system whereby a tenth of the produce of an area was owed to the parish was converted to a land taxing system where money was given instead.

There are the 19th century "social" maps of cholera by Jon Snow’s, deprivation by Charles Booth and the census of 1841 by August Petermann. Fi

The book ends with a map of the votes cast in the 2016 EU referendum, a bitter topic as I write in January 2021. 

Obviously as a fan of maps, I enjoyed this book. It is a nice skim through British history if you don’t want anything too heavy going, it is also a good overview of what types of maps people were making and when. I’d seen quite a few of the maps shown in other books, you can get a flavour of these here on the maps tag of my blog.

Dec 31 2020

Review of the year: 2020

It’s been a bit of a year!

On the scale of things we were pretty well situated, my wife and I both have jobs which can be done online effectively although Sharon’s university employers, in common with many universities, had an unwarranted enthusiasm for maintaining some face to face student contact and getting students on site.

We have a moderate sized garden where Thomas (now nearly 9) and I played a lot of football, touchingly (and rather naively) he thinks I should be a professional football player! Thomas and I also did quite a lot of baking together. Home-schooling was a battle of attrition, Sharon took the lead on this, for which I am eternally grateful. My part was largely the baking which we passed off as "maths". Thomas took the philosophical view that home was not school and we were not teachers therefore there could be no home-schooling. By the end, and in common with many parents, he was spending most of his time watching videos and playing games on a tablet but we made it through and he is now really happy to be back to school.

me_and_thomas

We live next door to a supermarket which was handy particularly in the early days of lockdown when there were shortages of random food items, and often queuing to get into the shop. As a result of covid, and the forthcoming final exit of the UK from the EU, we now have a second freezer and a moderate stockpile of food.

We are on the edge of Chester, so we can walk from our front door into the countryside. I also discovered cycling for leisure again, and found the routes out along the Greenway and back along the River Dee were rather good – car-free, well-paved and almost entirely flat. I also cycled out to Ness Gardens as part of my company’s annual "challenge", any "challenge" that involves coffee and cake at the mid-point is fine by me!

This years blogging has been thin but rather more varied than usual, I found I had less time for reading than normal. The traffic to my website has increased this year though, presumably because people have more time on their hands.

I wrote a couple of technology blog posts (Type annotations in Python and Unit testing in Python), these are pretty popular – I guess people are often googling for just the problem I have been seeking to fix.

I attending some counselling sessions for anxiety earlier in the year, so obviously blogged about that. Coronavirus has not been a problem from an anxiety point of view (other than the normal anxieties everyone else has!): I have been largely forbidden from doing the things that made me anxious!

Since I was spending more time in the conservatory, playing drums and guitar, I gave it a bit of an upgrade. I also wrote a rare "Gear review" post about the Boss RC-3 Loop station – it’s a guitar thing!

On the book front You look like a thing and I love you by Janelle Shane had me sniggering quietly to myself reading it on the train, it’s an overview to machine learning mainly focussed on the often hysterical results of machine learning. I read How the states got their shapes by Mark Stein, followed by 1491 by Charles C.Mann about pre-Columbian civilisation in the Americas. The Black Lives Matter movement reached the UK, and I was rather proud to see the residents of Bristol (one of my home cities) chuck a statue of the slaver, Edward Colston, into the harbour. My actions on BLM were modest, I deliberately started followed people who weren’t like me on social media, and read Black and British: A Forgotten History by David Olusoga – this has helped me think differently about British history. Also by David Olusoga (and Melanie Backe-Hanson) I read A House Through Time and related to houses, I read The Address Book by Deirdre Mask.

Along the lines of my more usual reading in the history of science I read The Egg and Sperm Race by Matthew Cobb – which is about how we came to understand reproduction in animals (and humans). The Pope of Physics by Gino Segrè and Bettina Hoerlin – about Enrico Fermi, Science City by Alexandra Rose and Jane Desborough – about science in London, The clock and the camshaft by John Farrell – about technology in the medieval period, who would have thought hammering was so important! Finally, and a little unclassifiable were  Sea monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps by Chet van Duzer and Your voice speaks volumes by Jane Setter.

We didn’t really manage a holiday away this year, we visited my father-in-law in Malvern for a few days but various restrictions and our caution made anything more an impossibility. Here we are climbing up to British Camp on the Malvern Hills

IMG_20200817_144221114

Thomas learned to ride a bike! He’s not shown much interest until now, we bought a cheap second hand bike from Bren Bikes and he was riding without support within a couple of hours.

As an end to a poor year my dad passed away a week before Christmas. He’d moved to a care home in January this year following the death of my stepmother a little over a year ago. Initially rather ill, and a little confused, his health improved as the year progressed. By lockdown he had started making short trips out on the train. In lockdown he engaged with the social life of the care home, and was making daily walks around the garden but towards the end of the year his health was declining. He died rather suddenly on Thursday 17th December, my brother had seen him the previous Saturday. We are grateful for his mercifully quick end, and the final year he had. I wrote an eulogy which you can find here. The funeral was held on 30th December with most attending online, as many have done through this year – I posted the Order of Service here which includes the music, readings, eulogy and photos.

A picture of dad with Thomas and Sharon

IMG_20130414_090733-001

My winter gloom is not so bad this year because I’m not cycling to and from work in the dark, obviously circumstances have made it a rather sad end to the year.

I guess all that can be said now is "Here’s to a better 2021!".

Dec 30 2020

Order of service

A Service of Celebration for the life of

Andrew Hopkinson

11th August 1939 ~ 17th December 2020

Christchurch Ceremony Hall

Wednesday 30th December 2020 at 11:00am

Service conducted by Anna Wildeman

Order of Service

PROCESSIONAL MUSIC

‘The Elements Song’ – Tom Lehrer

WELCOME WORDS

READING

‘You want a Physicist to speak at your Funeral’ – Aaron Freeman

You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.

And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him/her that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let him/her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her/his eyes, that those photons created within her/him constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.

And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.

And you’ll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they’ll be comforted to know your energy’s still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly.

THE EULOGY

by Ian and Paul

The eulogy is here

MUSIC FOR REFLECTION with PHOTOGRAPHS

‘New World Symphony – Largo’ – Dvořák

An album of photographs of Andrew Hopkinson on Google Photos

READING

‘Miss me, but let me go’ by Christina Rossetti

When I come to the end of the road
And the sun has set for me
I want no rites in a gloom filled room
Why cry for a soul set free?

Miss me a little, but not for long
And not with your head bowed low
Remember the love that once we shared
Miss me, but let me go.

For this is a journey we all must take
And each must go alone.
It’s all part of the master plan
A step on the road to home.

When you are lonely and sick at heart
Go to the friends we know.
Laugh at all the things we used to do
Miss me, but let me go.

THE COMMITTAL

A TOAST TO ANDY

CLOSING WORDS

‘As we look back’ by Clare Jones

As we look back over time
We find ourselves wondering
Did we remember to thank you enough
For all you have done for us?
For all the times you were by our sides
To help and support us
To celebrate our successes
To understand our problems
And accept our defeats?
Or for teaching us by your example,
The value of hard work, good judgement,
Courage and integrity?
We wonder if we ever thanked you
For the sacrifices you made.
To let us have the very best?
And for the simple things
Like laughter, smiles and times we shared?
If we have forgotten to show our
Gratitude enough for all the things you did,
We’re thanking you now.
And we are hoping you knew all along,
How much you meant to us.

RECESSIONAL MUSIC

‘Coronation Scot’ – Vivian Ellis

A recording of the funeral service

Thank you for attending this service in loving memory of Andy

Donations, if desired, for

Sustrans – the charity making it easier for people to walk and cycle

may be made online by visiting www.tapperfuneralservice.co.uk

or sent to Tapper Funeral Service

89~91 Barrack Road, Christchurch BH23 2AJ

Tel: 01202 478887

Dec 29 2020

Book review: The Address Book by Deirdre Mask

the_address_bookNext up is The Address Book by Deirdre Mask, this book is work related but to be honest I’d be reading it anyway. I work for a company, GBG, which provides address lookup services, it takes addresses typed by consumers and matches them to the definitive address data to provide a "clean" deliverable address. This means I have contemplated the structure of addresses, how they vary from country to country and how important they are for our day to day life.

The Address Book starts with some motivational chapters around why we should be interested in addresses, starting with a description of the situation in West Virginia where consistent street addressing was only introduced in the 1990s, and the problems that arise from this! Also included in this section are reports from Kolkata and Haiti.

In Kolkata the focus is on Addressing the Unaddressed, a charitable organisation which provides those living in slums with an "address" which enables them to access services. We often use an address as part of the identity of a person, a name is not enough. There are a number of Ian Hopkinson’s in the UK, and indeed around the world but I am the only one living at my address. In fact the Addressing the Unaddressed addresses are based on Google’s Plus Codes, these are not traditional street addresses, rather shorthand for latitude-longitude pairs. What3words provides a similar, closed source service. Mask discusses the shortcomings of such systems towards the end of the book. Essentially they provide no sense of community around living in shared labelled spaces.

In Haiti the discussion is around an outbreak of cholera, ultimately linked to the UN forces there to support the country after the 2010 earthquake but it starts with a discussion of Jon Snow and his famous work on the Broad Street pump. The importance of addressing is that when Snow was doing his work In London the General Registry Office had relatively recently (1837) started recording births and deaths, including the address at which they took place. This type of epidemiological study is not possible without street addressing, certainly not at that time. Nowadays we can use GPS devices to pinpoint deaths in the absence of addresses.

Addressing starts with street names, and in the UK, and other European countries street names started with function. Main Street, Church Lane are the more socially acceptable examples. However, as cities grew duplicate names became a problem. In 1853 London had 25 Victoria Streets and 25 Albert Streets. The pressure to add numbering to street names comes from centralised governments, if you want to take a census of your population to tax them or raise an army or plan services then numbered street addresses are pretty much essential. Registration of land ownership is also important. Such censuses generally started in the 18th century. Following on from this was the introduction of cheap, universal postage – which also requires street addressing. Requiring citizens to have surnames was part of the same process of enumerating the population.

The common scheme of using odd numbers on one side of a street and even on the other was invented by Clement Biddle in 1790, it is not the only system. There are other ways though, in Japan numbering is often by date of construction i.e. newer buildings have higher numbers. The Czech Republic has a dual numbering system, each address has a number used for navigation and a number used for government registrations. There are also systems where numbering is based on distance along a road.

The American scheme of numbering rather than naming streets, or at least naming them in a very systematic and often anodyne fashion dates back to Philadelphia and the Quakers involved in its founding. Quakers were not enthusiastic about naming things after people – hence the numbering system.

Circling back to street names, these are often intensely political, Mask talks about naming and commemoration in South Africa, America, Iran and Germany. In South Africa and America these disputes revolve around race, for South Africa it is to what degree figures from the apartheid era are celebrated, and what actions should exclude someone from commemoration in a street name. In America it is the celebration of Confederate figures that stirs passions. Iran likes to celebrate revolutionaries in its street names, and the case Mask cites is Bobby Sands, the IRA hunger striker – an uncomfortable topic for me as someone who is English (and grew up during the IRA bombing campaign in the seventies). Germany is included for its Nazification/De-Nazification process – after the Second World War many streets and places simply reverted back to pre-Nazi names. There are a surprising number of "Jew Streets" in Germany, Jewish people have long been restricted to living in particular places.

Naming and addressing are deeply personal, efforts to number houses are often resisted or treated with suspicion. The removal of long standing place names causes a sense of dislocation, the selection of names can cause distress. We’ve seen some of this in the UK with our branch of the Black Lives Matter movement.

In New York City there is a process for buying street addresses, so developers will pay money to get an address on a desirable street even if their building is not accessible from that street!

This is an enjoyable read, written in an approachable manner about a fascinating subject.