Incompetent design

I am incandescent.  I took my grandchildren to Auckland Zoo today, and found these two appalling examples of dangerous design.

I used to work in museums, and I know how important it is to make sure that everything is safe and fool-proof.  I wasn't a designer, but I worked with designers, and I and my crew worked with the designers to make sure that stupidity like this was not allowed to happen.

If it had happened on my watch, heads would have rolled, mine among them--and rightly so. I had a staff member lose a fingertip in a steam engine, and it isn't a laughing matter.

I am posting this here, as well as on Facebook, because I am aware of a nasty bureaucratic tendency to demand of Facebook that posts be taken down.  Facebook are craven muppets who concur far too easily with shouting blimps.  I am also sharing it on Google+, and I have other blogs up my sleeve.

So, Auckland Zoo, you have just one valid choice.  Try to take this down, and I will put it up on another blog.

Before fingers are severed, I suggest you pull your fingers out, and get rid of these highly dangerous installations.

Analysis: The problem is shearing action. The discs in the first picture are more than 2 cm thick, made of plywood, and close-fitting.  The square hatches are about 40 cm square, just as thick, and if anything, even closer-fitting. Any downward pressure in either case would crush or sever digits.  In a jostling crowd, that is bound to happen, sooner or later--or a single child will drop the undamped square hatches on its or somebody else's hand.  These things are heavy!

Here is what I wrote on Facebook:

This is about gross stupidity.  I am NOT about to be nice. 

Dear Auckland Zoo, I know I could be polite and professional and send you an urgent polite message suggesting that you take your designers and counsel them.  I have elected to tell you publicly to take them outside and kick their arses until their noses bleed.

These installations that I saw today in a children's area at your zoo partake of the nature of guillotines.  One bit of misplaced weight and fingers will be severed or maimed beyond surgical redemption.  The edges are too close together, and the possibilities for high mechanical advantage should be apparent to a roadkill possum.

I used to work in museums, and I know how important safety is in interactives.  Now I suggest that you pull your fingers out--BEFORE you have to pull children's severed fingers out of these ill-conceived designs.

I do this in full awareness that now you have been made aware of the dangers inherent in these designs, you will have VERY limited legal defences hereafter.  So be it.  You have a VERY simple, quick solution.

Now here are some search terms to help make this show up in Google searches:

legal liability, dangerous design, poor design, safety, children, culpability, mismanagement, misguided bureaucracy, health, welfare 

Afterword: I had several strident-to-abusive messages from muppets who just didn't get it.  I was accused of being OTT (Over The Top) for speaking out on safety, and I was told that children have to learn to cope with dangerous situations, to which I asked if that particular idiot wanted to send children into a minefield.  The last one accused me of being PC.

Get it straight people: I understand danger when I see it, and I see the need to underline it. The zoo told me they had been monitoring it (no sign of that when I was there), and that they were planning "repairs".

I replied that they needed to get rid of the whole installation.  I will be happy to provide statements and advice when somebody is forced to sue these fools. The harm will probably come when teenage schoolkids are pushing and jostling, and some uninvolved child has its hand in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Are scientists really mad?

There are most definitely mad inventors: imagine how
the operator of this machine is going to dismount!

I am in New Zealand at the moment, playing with the grandchildren, revising a couple of manuscripts and gathering some data. The result is that I am a bit busy, so here is something from the Odd Bits Basket.  I dug it out because, as a grandfather, I want my grandkids to have a world to live in.

It was written in 2009, and published once before in a defunct blog. I have pulled it out and polished it up a bit, because regrettably, most of it still holds true, except that now the mad pollies who formerly foamed in the background have now taken charge.

If I asserted that the world was flat, and a politician heard me, would he (these idiots are almost always male) then demand that scientists explain why it wasn't flat before they spent lots of taxpayer money to launch a satellite?

An idiot who shall remain nameless has just burst onto the airwaves with his news that a conference he attended was told that solar flares account better for global warming, so before we do anything, the scientists have some explaining to do.

Yeah, right, Nero, and we'll keep the fire brigade in reserve, will we, until we know that Rome's really burning? What's that? You want them to come along to your violin performance? OK . . .

Sorry, we return now to our transmission. But you know, don't you, that this sort of rubbish rhetoric is the stock-in-trade of a certain style of politician. It's enough to make any scientist mad as hell.

Kurt Lambeck, president of the Australian Academy of Science, had some strong things to say in 2009 about the global warming "sceptics" in Ockham's Razor, and you can read them at http://www.abc.net.au/rn/ockhamsrazor/stories/2009/2589206.htm#transcrip..., but I have to wonder why uninformed twits like the unnamed polly feel that they have a democratic right to deny the science, simply because a half-baked idiot at a conference with curiously shady funding denied the science.

As Luis Alvarez, no mean scientist himself, commented once: "There is no democracy in physics. We can't say that some second-rate guy has as much right to opinion as Fermi." Mind you, Alvarez was talking about physics among physicists. I hate to think what he would have to say about the polly wanting to derail everything just because he's been conned by snake oil merchants.

I think the polly feels free to thump his tub and posture in public because so many of the uninformed, the unwashed and the unwary (i.e., people like him) subscribe to the view that all scientists are mad scientists. If you can dismiss scientists as mad, then you may feel free to call into question the careful, but often hard-to-understand views of the scientists. The world is flat, you muppet, anybody can see that, and if you don't, you must be mad!

So: are there mad scientists?  Or mad people with scientific tendencies?

If you are a forensic psychiatrist in a secure unit, you are bound to seek an outlet for your creativity. Around you, psychotic patients are pursuing the patenting of their inventions for inflatable moon buggies and the like, and it occurred to David James and Paul Gilluley that the British Patent Office might be a repository of psychotic ideas, so they went on a trawl.

Oddly, they were unable to find evidence of mad inventors, but they nonetheless described their experiences. The abstract is at http://pb.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/abstract/21/12/764 -- if you go there, you can download the PDF of James, David V. and Paul L. Gilluley, Psychotic patients and patent applications: The mad scientist revisited?, Psychiatric Bulletin (1997) 21: 764-768.

The authors surveyed unusual patents and authors with unusual track records, but found nothing as odd as what their patients wished to patent. Unabashed, they wallowed in nutty inventions, and later, shared the tastes, sights and sounds. Their conclusion: "the only creative 'mad scientists' are those who were creative scientists before they became mentally ill". I was glad to read that.

Definitely recommended for a few light moments, and even a bit of serious introspection.

I wonder why there have been no studies of mad politicians. It certainly isn't for lack of material! 

PS

A couple of hours after posting this, I found this account of shonky doings behind the climate change deniers, here in New Zealand.  Read it, and get mad!

The trick cyclist in upper west Central Park

This story involves dead germs, invertebrate eyes and a mutant foxglove. Be warned!

 

I was actually doing a small vignette on Coley's mixed toxins when I came across Bertram Buxton. Coley was in the habit of treating sarcomas with a heat-killed mixture of two bacteria, Serratia marcescens and Streptococcus pyogenes. He injected his brew into cancers of the colon and uterus. "Coley's mixed toxins" as the brew was known, had mixed results, but a few of them were spectacular.

Now before you shrink back in horror and disgust, these were serious germs. Various strains and infections of Streptococcus pyogenes can cause impetigo, strep throat, scarlet fever, erysipelas and toxic shock syndrome. Serratia marcescens plays a role in some forms of bacteraemia, so neither is something to take lightly, but the treatment was certainly less deadly than the disease.

More importantly, medical lore had recorded cases where gangrene infections had seen off cancers, so there was a scientific basis of sorts. A decade or so back, researchers started to see that the secret was probably a cytokine, a chemical known as Tumour Necrosis Factor or TNF. For a while, there was a flurry of activity, but then it all died away again.

Anyhow, that took me to the pages of Science to see what had been said about Coley's toxins. That brought me to Dr Buxton when I encountered his obituary, written after he died in Devon at the age of 82, in 1934.

Buxton had somehow fetched up on a cholera ship in New York harbour in the 1890s. I will have to poke around later, to find out what a cholera ship was, but I can make a guess. Ten years or so later, now aged 50, he was working as a pathologist, "preparing Coley's toxins for the treatment of inoperable sarcoma".

NOT Dr. Buxton.

He returned to England in 1912, but before then, he had shown a stern distaste for the money-grubbing that so often characterises modern science—and even more medicine. When some of his work looked as though it might be commercially important, he decamped to Venezuela and wrote "a remarkable study of the invertebrate eye". He was also an expert and a pioneer in microphotography, but where I would regard that as a diversion, his obituarist, one James Ewing, did not.

"His sole diversion was riding the bicycle and his remarkable skill in trick performances was long remembered by pedestrians on the upper west side of Central Park."

Back in England and now aged 60, Buxton turned to plant physiology at the John Innes Horticultural Institution, and "produced by mutation a giant fertile hybrid of foxglove which was recognised by the Kew authorities as a new species".

Ewing quoted an earlier obituary in The Times, which referred to his work in agglutination, laying the foundation for studies in the assay of toxins and antitoxins. "The perfect charm, breadth of view, and superb technique are memories of Buxton which will not easily be forgotten by his many pupils and associates."

My current writing program has no place for Buxton, so I thought I would share with you this man who seems to have devoted his life to knowledge.

They just don't breed them like that any more.


No, not the foxgloves, silly!

Dogs and navigation

As the year turns over, I am currently engaged in trying my hand at something new, YA historical fiction. Usually, I write factual material, but I have been aiming since 2005 to fit some of the many bits and pieces I have read and written about, into a coherent fictional narrative.  Where will I publish it?  Dunno: I have genial interest from one publisher, but I may just go to e-book

Dubbed (in my head) The Cornish Boy, the series involves a teenager who acquired the basics of science and technology before being forced to flee Cornwall for Australia, where he does the things teenagers did in those days, like going exploring, digging for gold, and other stuff. The other stuff is all determined and drafted, but as yet, under wraps: suffice it to say that pirates and lost treasure are involved, as are paddle steamers, but everything is closely related to reality.

Mary Reibey, who is on our $20 note.

For example, women in the 19th century often wore male clothing for a variety of reasons (including disguise, practicality and safety), and one of my female characters will be given advice in wearing male clothing by an elderly Mary Reibey, who was sent for trial as a male horse thief named James Burrow, before her gender was discovered.

Book 1 includes a degree of setting-up, and as he needs, in book 2, to be able to navigate, and because he may need to be able to manage dogs in a later book, dogs appear as well.  Mainly, though, this yarn is a simple way of explaining the longitude problem: in book 2, the Cornish boy and his employer use the satellites of Jupiter to determine their longitude.

Sir Kenelm Digby (Wikimedia Commons)

That tempted me to slip in a true tale. It relates to a hypothetical dog based on an invention credited to Sir Kenelm Digby, who was both a naval commander and a diplomat. His father was involved in Guy Fawkes’ Gunpowder Plot, but the son was only two years old and suffered no taint.

As a naval commander, he understood the need for portable time, but as he died in 1665, long before somebody put forward the invention I am about to describe, he ought to escape any taint once again.

Digby developed a nostrum called ‘a sympathetic powder’ for the cure of wounds. This powder was to be put on the weapon that caused the wound, not the wound itself. He claimed that when a dressing from a wound was placed in a basin of the powder, the person jumped.

Digby died in 1665, so he is innocent of what happened next. In 1687, an anonymous inventor proposed that each ship putting to sea be provided with a scientifically wounded dog, which was to travel on the ship while the dressing remained in the home port.

Each hour, day and night, some careful person in the home port would take a dressing which had been on the wounded dog, and place it in Digby’s sympathetic powder. This would cause the dog to yelp, thereby indicating for those on the ship the time back in the home port.

Sadly, the sympathetic powder time system never worked, so explorers needed to load up with sextants, chronometers, barometers, thermometers and more—and use them a good deal.

But it gives a whole new meaning to the watchdog—or at sea, to the dog watches.

Now about dogs in exploration, Ludwig Leichhardt’s last kangaroo dog died almost at the end of their expedition, but their terrier, taken as a pet and watch dog, died of heat exhaustion much earlier. Leichhardt commented:

"During summer, the ground is so hot, and frequently so rotten, that even the feet of a dog sink deep. This heat, should there be a want of water during a long stage, and perhaps a run after game in addition, would inevitably kill a soft dog. It is, therefore, of the greatest importance to have a good traveller, with hard feet: a cross of the kangaroo dog with the bloodhound would be, perhaps, the best. He should be light, and satisfied with little food in case of scarcity; although the dried tripe of our bullocks gave ample and good food to one dog. It is necessary to carry water for them; and to a little calabash, which we obtained from the natives of the Isaacs, we have been frequently indebted for the life of Spring."

Both John McDouall Stuart and and Ernest Giles' companion, Alfred Gibson had dogs called Toby, which was a popular 19th century dog's name. Stuart’s Toby died of the heat, Gibson’s dog wandered off into the desert while both Giles and Gibson were ill and Toby was never found. Gibson died later in what is now Gibson's desert.

In 1876, a few years later, Giles was taking better care of his dogs, as this tale reveals:

On this occasion a tall, gaunt man and his wife, I supposed, were gazing at Tommy's riding camel as she carried the two little dogs in bags, one on each side.

Tommy was standing near, trying to make her jump up, but she was too quiet, and preferred lying down. Any how, Tommy would have his joke - so, as the man who was gazing most intently at the pups said, "What's them things, young man?" he replied, "Oh, that's hee's pickaninnies"...

Then the tall man said to the wife, "Oh, lord, look yer, see how they carries their young." Only the pup's heads appeared, a string round the neck keeping them in; "but they looks like dogs too, don't they?"

With that he put his huge face down, so as to gaze more intently at them, when the little dog, who had been teased a good deal and had got snappish, gave a growl and snapped at his nose. The secret was out; with a withering glance at Tommy and the camels, he silently walked away - the lady following.

Somehow or other, that tale may well seep in.  All I need is a bigger shoehorn.
  
Postword:

Within 48 hours of my posting this, Mary Ludwick in Texas shared a link from the Christian Science Monitor to an old-fashioned email list we are both on, which offers another possible reason why explorers may have taken dogs with them.  I wouldn't bet on it, though...

On tinned meat and dense brains

I have been thinking much about tinned meat of late, because in the 1950s, we children in Waratah Street would rise at 4 am to wake our parents and open some parcels before we met in the street and play with our new toys. The childless Mr and Mrs Lane would keep an eye on us and then haul all the kids they could find off to the beach for a swim, while our bleary-eyed parents snatched a couple of hours of light sleep before we returned.

Then the parents would all pile into the Lanes' flat down the street and consume much fluid while we continued to run quiet riot in the street. Christmas dinner arrived at about 3 pm, and by then, my father was nicely pie-eyed, and ALWAYS cut his hand opening the tinned ham.  It was part of Christmas.  That was how I first recall seeing tinned meat.

Last night, Christmas night, I heard Stephen Fry on QI refer to the Franklin expedition consuming very early tinned meat, circa 1845.  Franklin, by the way, had earlier been the Governor of Van Diemen's Land before sailing off to seek the North-West Passage from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean.

The context of Fry's comment was that in the earliest days of putting meat in cans, the solder was too high in lead.  The expedition suffered lead poisoning, but it wasn't an early mistake, because canning meat was old technology by then.

I knew it was old, because I recalled right away that on Christmas  day, 1813, exactly 200 years earlier, just across the Blue Mountains, George Evans wrote (my emphasis added):

"Being Christmas day we remained for a day's rest; yet we walked about as much as a day's journey looking around us, and ascending Hills to see the Country, which is excellent pasture, the soil is light, but exceeds the Forest Lands in general on the East side of the Mountains. The day is so hott the Fish will not bite; it is the only time they have missed; therefore I opened my tin case of Roasted Beef."

That reminded me of Donkin's Hill, which I have yet to visit. It is at 14:58 S, 125:30 E, near enough, and it is named after Bryan Donkin who, with John Hall, made tinned meats in England. The hill commemorates a tin of Donkin's meat eaten there in 1820. The leader of the eaters was Lt Phillip Parker King, much later an Admiral and leader of Sydney's scientific community.  Here is what he wrote in September 1820:

"A steep peaked hill near our landing-place was named Donkin’s Hill after the inventor of the preserved meats; upon a canister of which our party dined. This invention is now so generally known that its merits do not require to be recorded here; we had lately used a case that was preserved in 1814 which was equally good with some that had been packed up in 1818. This was the first time it had been employed upon our boat excursions and the result fully answered every expectation, as it prevented that excessive and distressing thirst from which, in all other previous expeditions, we had suffered very much.

At the end of the 19th century, David Carnegie was rather more scathing of tinned meat:

"Tinned meat is good, sometimes excellent; but when you find that a cunning storekeeper has palmed off all his minced mutton on you, you are apt to fancy tinned fare monotonous! Such was our case; and no matter what the label, the contents were always the same—though we tried to differentiate in imagination, as we used to call it venison, beef, veal, or salmon, for variety’s sake! ‘Well, old chap, what shall we have for tea— Calf’s head? Grouse? Pheasant?’ ‘Hum! what about a little er—minced mutton—we’ve not had any for some time, I think.’ In this way we added relish to our meal."

These chaps have all been in my mind, because they are all potentially players in one of the Not Your Usual series, Not Your Usual Explorers, which will look at some of the unexpected people who went exploring in Australia.  Teenagers (even teenage girls), foreigners, convicts, Aborigines and women were all involved, as were a number of complete fools who also need to appear in any true history.

Speaking of fools, Christopher Pyne, has the notion that as Minister for Education, it is his anointed role to determine what shall be taught as Australian history, and I will warrant none of the above characters or events would appear in his tight-sphinctered list of dead white males.

George Evans is a typical example of the competent human who was attacked by feral oafs for extraneous reasons.  Like James Cook and Joseph Banks, among others of that era, George could not spell.  That was enough to set the third-rate pedant wannabes rolling in the aisles.

The public schoolboys sniggered and nudged each other because George thought a rivulet was a river lett. Superciliously, they added that to the map as a joke on old George, and he was barred from leading further expeditions.  Lucky John Oxley took George along as a 2-i-c, and safely away from the pen-pushers, had George running long-range independent forays.  Oxley understood competence.

That line of thought made me recall where I met Pyne's type before.  Now a bit of background: I have always been a debater, and like most debaters, I relished the role of third speaker, but as something of a demolition expert, I always got the gig.  I was articulate, I could think on my feet, and I knew where the jugular was.

When I went to university, slightly over 50 years ago, I found that most people treated each other as equals, taking people as they found them. That said, a certain type of wet-behind-the-ears public schoolboy would enquire as to the school I attended, and when I said I had attended Manly Boys' High, they would withdraw a little, as from a leper, saying in tones of shocked surprise, "Ooooh, you don't speak like a state school boy!"

Come into my parlour, said the third speaker to the fly...

I am small and harmless-looking. I would smile gently, and explain that while some people had to go to a special school to learn how to speak well, others of us acquired it through breeding.  Suddenly, they would realise that they were ankle-deep in acid.

Soon after, they became aware that ankle-deep is not good, not if you are head-downwards.

Before long, the word apparently went around about me, and as I approached, you could see this type scattering. They would cross, in order, themselves, their fingers, their legs, their eyes and the road as they fled from my gaze.

That is exactly the phenotype I see when I look at Christopher Pyne: ignorant, arrogant, stupid and quintessentially uninformed, sadly lacking in education, empathy or awareness. Pigeons ripe for the plucking.

Here is my challenge to this buffoon: meet me anywhere in public to debate what Australian history should be. I undertake to cross-examine you and demonstrate your woeful ignorance of facts, figures (both numerical and personal), motives, motivations, techniques and technologies, societies, societal standards, traditions, ideas and ideals, language and a great deal more.

In the improbable event that you win, I will have won in any case, because you will have been forced to take a crash course in Australian history. I recommend the book on the right as a starting place. The pictures are already coloured-in.

My bet is that he will end up resembling Carnegie's minced mutton.  I am growing old, but I am still up to slam-dunking a pipsqueak, and showing a pipsqueak up for what he is would be one of the best services I could do the next generation.

Please, Chris, come into my parlour.

For my last dunking of Christopher Pyne in hot psittacoid waste material, see The Foolish Minister.

Words of wisdom from 1949

I spend a small part of each day correcting OCR records in the National Library's 'Historic Newspapers Collection', and today, I was digging in 1949. There is a method to my digging, but it is hard to spot: at one point, I went through and corrected every story published on the day I was born, though you would be hard put to find it now, because so many newspapers have come on line since then.

No matter: for those who know something of my affairs, I am solidly into the Cornish Boy series again, and that is eating my thinking time. More of the Cornish Boy and his adventures some other time, here is a fascinating series of excerpts taken from a lecture in 1949: the source and a link to it appear at the end.

One thing: I have picked two elements from this to use in Cornish Boy, so I am off to amend the ms as soon as this goes.  See if you can guess which ones they are.

* * * * *

HENRY TONKS, a surgeon and one of the greatest art teachers England has produced… diagnosed one of the principal complaints of modern civilisation. I think it was Max Beerbohm who said that he was tired of the expression, 'the age of the common man.' What he wanted to hear about was the age of the uncommon man. The aim of civilisation is surely not to produce a uniform and dull level of shared mediocrity. Still less is it to produce a society, such as we see in certain parts of the world, where the voice of the uncommon man is effectively silenced. We must be on guard, therefore, against the dangerous cult of mediocrity which is steadily spreading throughout the world. One of the symptoms of this growth is the hostility that is increasingly shown to personal distinction in manner, in speech, in dress, and, not least, in intellect. No great nation seems to be exempt.

* * * * *

In the United States and Great Britain second-rate film actors, writers, and even crooners are mobbed as if they were national heroes; whilst in Soviet Russia painters who perpetuate the worst academic traditions of the nineteenth century are hailed as masters of the modern movement. I have already referred to the tendency for members of mass formations to impose their collective opinions and values on other members of the community. Scarcely less deplorable is the way in which the taste of the people is regulated and controlled by commercially standardised changes of fashion. It is a question, not of choice among many new looks, but of the one and only new look, which the public is allowed to take but not, alas I to leave. 

* * * * *

Respect for the past has ceased to be, for many sections of the com- munity, an important factor in regulating and guiding political decisions; for these sections the past is merely something to be swept away as quickly and thoroughly as possible. During the period of rebuilding that followed World War One a member of the Georgian Society remarked that the highest praise to be given any beautiful house in London was to say: 'It is almost good enough to deserve demolition.'  The remark is equally applicable to the lovely early Colonial architecture of Sydney. This architecture should be as inviolable as the parks. Like the parks, It serves no industrial or commercial purpose. Like the parks, it is a reminder of values other than those of industry and commerce. But in an age without respect for the past, and with little heed for beauty, these gracious memorials of Australia's past seem doomed to disappear.

* * * * *

THIS careless and ungrateful destruction is more than a symptom; it is a symbol. An age of mediocrity not only dislikes the past: it fears it. Fortunately ours is still a free society, and it is possible to draw attention to the dangers both of historical neglect and of false history. History teaches us that those societies which have turned to the past for inspiration have also best adapted themselves to changing circumstances.

* * * * *

A student of the Eighteenth Century may be forgiven if he draws attention to certain peculiar merits of that century. I should like to argue, if there were time, that it produced the last civilised society the modern world has produced. The century had a rational approach to life, an approach which is summed up in Its splendid title, the 'Age of Reason.' The basis of this rational attitude was not only good logic, which is rare, but good manners, which are rarer still. It was an age of tolerance, but not of undiscriminating tolerance. Its governing principle may be summed up in the sentence: 'Let us tolerate all but the intolerant.' 

This spirit of tolerance made it possible for an atheist, the historian Gibbon, and a Christian Bishop, Watson, to exchange sincere compliments in the midst of the most heated controversy of the age. It also made it possible for the far-reaching reforms of the nineteenth century to be initiated, if not without bitterness, at least in accordance with the peaceful machinery of a democratic constitution. In other words, the 'Age of Reason' is a reminder of those values of reasonable conduct, tolerance, free enquiry, and humane sentiment. which the world needs so badly to-day.

* * * * *

BUT there must be one reservation in our praise. The great qualities of the eighteenth century, its merits and its benefits, were, confined to a very small class. Very few members of this class seem to have worried, because this was the case. This was a grave fault, and I think we can claim an improvement in our own times. To-day, there are much fewer people who enjoy some peculiar privilege or benefit and do not look forward to the day when the same privilege or benefit can be enjoyed by every member of the community. 

Most of us, I suppose, have some idealistic friend who talks of the classless society. I must confess that I do not fully understand this phrase, for even if we eliminate the classes made by man, there will still remain the classes instituted by nature. But there is a sense in which the ideal of a classless society was realised even within the limitations of the eighteenth century. Let me venture upon a somewhat heretical definition.

* * * * *

A classless society is one in which the members address one another, not as 'comrade,' but as 'sir.' It is a society based not on universal familiarity, which is a low ideal, but universal respect, which is a high one. Such was the society of the famous Literary Club, of which Dr. Johnson, Reynolds, Goldsmith, Burke, and others were members. If we are to set before ourselves an ideal community, as we should, let it be one in which all members, however moderate their gifts or humble their occupation, show respect to others, and deserve it themselves. If man cannot only master his machines, but return also to the standards of the 'Age of Reason,' the future of democracy will be safe, and the common man will recognise and respect, both in himself and in his neighbour, un common potentialities.

* * * * *

The author is Joseph Burke who was then the Herald Professor of Fine Arts in the University of Melbourne, in the Syme Oration delivered in Brisbane to the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons the previous night 

The Courier-Mail (Brisbane), Wednesday 8 June 1949, 2.

When pumice comes to visit

In July 2012, a seamount in the area of the Kermadec Islands, between New Zealand and Fiji, began to erupt. The result was a huge raft of floating rock. We call that rock pumice.

We have been picking up a bit of pumice recently, just odd lumps here and there, but in the past few weeks. the coast of eastern Australia has been getting quite a share of it.

What's more, the pumice has been carrying passengers, so over the last couple of days, I have collected a few of these to share with you.

In the first shot, there is an Australian $2 coin, which is there as a scale: it is 2 cm (8/10 of an inch) across.

I didn't use a scale on the others, but the life forms will let you jump from one to another.

The passengers included gooseneck barnacles, but only on a few of them, and sadly, the barnacles came adrift as I was carrying the pieces home.

The main other passengers were bryozoans , also call polyzoans, as seen on the left. To get a scale, look at the tubeworms (probably Galeolaria) in that shot and below.

The last shot is just a closer look at the bryozoan.

I am busy right now, working on a project called Cornish Boy, but sooner of later, I will get around to Not Your Usual Rocks, when I will talk about pumice, the only rock that floats.

 And why does it float?  Wait for the book!
 



 

The last of the bushrangers

I have been exceedingly busy, getting the first seven Not Your Usual... books ready for publication. There are now five of the seven "in the bag", the sixth only needs some navigation links inserted, while number seven needs some serious revision.

That was the position when I came across a reference to a bushranger called Tom Hughes. In Not Your Usual Bushrangers, I had declared that the bushranging era was dead and over in 1880, following the executions of Captain Moonlite and Ned Kelly.  Annoying my sense of the neatness of things, Hughes came on the scene in 1887.  Here is a new end portion that I have just crafted for Not Your Usual Bushrangers.

****************

Envoi

Declaring somebody to be "the last of the bushrangers" can be a dangerous business. I was doing the last revision on this book when I chanced on a reference to a policeman whose father had once captured "Hughes the bushranger".

Luckily for my reputation, curiosity got the better of me, mainly because I had never heard of Tom Hughes. I saw a bit about him, and then saw that, after being acquitted of a robbery in 1887, the police were sure he was responsible for a number of burglaries in Perth and Fremantle, so they began watching him closely.

By 1944, The Daily News saw fit
to illustrate O'Connell's killing.

One night, two constables, Franklin and O'Connell, saw him near Fremantle, followed him, and when he ran, they gave chase. They got him by the legs as he went through a fence, but he drew a pistol and shot Constable O'Connell, who later died.

Hughes took off into the bush, but from my point of view, he was not worth looking into, just a burglar who killed a policeman. Assuming that he would have gone to the gallows for that, I almost dismissed him, then and there, as not much of a bushranger, and far from interesting.

I glanced at the next article in my search, and it was headed "Cowboy and Bushranger". I wondered if this might explain why Hughes was such a late entrant into the bushranging game. Could he have got romantic notions of bushranging, while he was in America, and moved to Australia?

I read on—and discovered pure dross. Take this introduction and note the overall smell of baloney, tinged with malarkey and topped with a liberal dose of Yellow Press sauce: it had apparently been published first in the New York Sun.

Colonel Tom Ochiltree sat in the barroom of the Hoffman yesterday drinking champagne with a friend, when a reporter came in. 

"Say, Tom Hughes has been bagged,' he remarked to the reporter. He was much surprised to learn that the reporter was not acquainted with Mr. Hughes. 

"Why, he was at one time one of the first citizens of Denison and at another time of Lareda. Why, everybody in Texas and every other State must have known Tom Hughes. But let me tell you, his capture was accomplished only because of his hard luck, and hard luck was an infrequent incident in the picturesque life of one of the old-time-spirits that fifteen or twenty years ago gave a zest to life in this country."

The Daily News (Perth), Monday 9 January 1888, 3,

 A Texas colonel, swilling champagne in a New York bar? Pull the other one, it's got bells on it!

Still, I did some checking, and found that there was a famous Texan Ochiltree who was a colonel, but he died in 1867, so that made this colonel sound fictitious. I saw, though that he was William of that ilk, so I looked for Tom, and uncovered an original character of that name who had been a Texas Ranger, a Confederate Colonel, a US Marshall, and a Congressman from 1883 to 1885, after which he retired to play the stock market in New York.

So  Ochiltree was genuine, but what of the facts? Hughes would have been dead at the end of 1887: nobody likes cop killers, so there was probably no story for me there! I felt somehow that there was a distinctly fishy odour to Ochiltree's yarn, but I was busy, so I set it aside to get on with some real work.

And so it came to pass, the following night, that my newspaper search filter was set to pull up records from the 1940s. The Tom Hughes itch started, and I ran a search on <Tom Hughes bushranger>, mainly planning to see when he went to the gallows. It would have been neat, I thought, if he was hanged before January 26, 1888, the centenary of the first white settlers landing in Australia.

What I found was a report with the heading "WA's Most Desperate Bushranger Dies". Its date was December 16, 1944. Now without wanting to underline my senior citizen status too strongly, he died after I was born, meaning that in a technical sense, I was born in the era of the bushrangers. Now there was a definite story for me, and it is largely summed up in the first three paragraphs:

WA's Most Desperate Bushranger Dies 

Tom Hughes, only bushranger worthy of renown in that dubious trade Western Australia has known, was buried in Karrakatta cemetery on Tuesday. Many years ago he hurried over that now consecrated ground when hotly pursued by mounted troopers who wanted him for the killing of a policeman at Fremantle. For weeks Hughes had been sought around Fremantle and Perth. It was not long after he ran over the scrub lands that are now Karrakatta cemetery that he was captured and he spent the greater part of his remaining life in gaol.

It is a remarkable fact that when West Australian bushrangers are spoken of the name of Moondyne Joe is first mentioned. Moondyne never engaged in gun play. He was an expert gaol escapee and he robbed settlers' huts; but he never fought pursuing police nor fired a shot at anyone as Hughes did on many occasions. Tom Hughes was born and brought up in and about a humpy where there is now the well populated riverside suburb of Bicton. As a lad he worked as a coachman for a Roman Catholic prelate, but he quickly became a burglar. He robbed the licensee of the Freemasons' Tavern which is now the Palace Hotel in Perth. After three trials, at the end of each of which juries disagreed, he was freed. 

Robberies At Fremantle There followed robberies of tools and explosives from quarries near the traffic bridge at Fremantle and a watch set by police culminated in the chasing of Hughes one Sunday evening as he sneaked away from the quarry with goods he had stolen. Lying in wait for him were two policemen named O'Connell and Franklin. That was in April, 1887, when Hughes was 21. When they challenged him Hughes dropped his bundle of stolen goods and scaled a wall into the street along which buses run into Fremantle centre today after crossing the bridge. The two policemen were so fast after him that they were able to grab his legs as he scrambled through a paling fence on the opposite side. People who had been at church were returning home when they saw the chase.

The Daily News (Perth), Saturday 16 December 1944, 23.

Further digging revealed that the Ochiltree story had some true bits about it, but it was a case of mistaken identity. Our Tom Hughes had a younger brother in Perth who had also tried his hand at burglary, but the boy was only 11, and Ochiltree's Tom Hughes would have been in his forties.

The American Tom had a cool head, if the following story of his being bailed up near Fort Scott in Kansas is true. When I read it, I almost wanted this to be the same Tom Hughes as the bushranger, given the way he tricked his would-be robbers.

Hughes, with his knees knocking together and lower jaw drooping, kept his hands up, but they wore flopping about in a way that made the man with the pistol laugh. He couldn't help turning his head a minute to remark to one of the men with him that he 'never see sich a idjit,' but he never said anything else after that. The moment his eye got around to his companion, Hughes' shaking right hand dropped down on the butt of a revolver somewhere about his clothing, and even before the robber saw the motion, Hughes sent a bullet through his heart. He shot one of the others with the next pull of the trigger, and then told the third to hold up his hands and make tracks toward Fort Scott, which was done instanter.

The Australian Tom Hughes was a superb bushman, who eluded the police for a large slice of 1887, but in the end they got him, after he was shot in the thigh. According to reports at the time, he told the police he expected to pay for his crimes (meaning with his life), and wished they had killed him outright.

He knew he was guilty, everybody did. So why didn't the bushranger Hughes swing? Well, it seems popular sympathy went his way, and all he got was a verdict of manslaughter for killing O'Connell. He was given a long sentence and closely watched, but it wasn't enough.

With the help of another prisoner, Jarvis, they overpowered two guards, seized a gun and forced other prisoners to put up a plank that they used to scale the 18-foot (5.5 metre) wall. Warders gave chase, but they lost the escapees' tracks and Hughes and Jarvis stayed at large for some time, but in the end they were caught.

Reading between the lines, he suffered for his brutal attack on the warder, but after that, he behaved himself and waited for his sentence to end.

One thing is certain: having served his time and been released, Hughes died at the ripe old age (in those days) of 79. He was a late entrant into the bushranging game, and he was young when he did so.

I think I am fairly safe if I now dub him "the last of the bushrangers".

But you never know...

***************************

And the series?  I am looking at a January release of seven e-books. Stay posted.

And just an afterthought, here is a link to an earlier piece I did on another unusual bushranger.

The Foolish Minister

I am playing whack-a-shark today (it's like whack-a-mole, but with shinier teeth), but I set things aside, because something is annoying me.

Yes, Minister, I write history. Do you?

I would like to muse briefly on the concept of educational policy, and the way in which it ought to formulated in the Westminster system. This is brought upon because I am a professional writer, and I write a lot of history. I am no historian, but I am soaked in history, and I know what matters.

History isn't about dates, it isn't about the names of dead white males, it is about ideas and about ideals. It is inspiration, it is about wit and intelligence. It is about methods, and technology, and cleverness, and bravery, grit and determination, wherever it comes from.

At the moment, a preening coxcomb (you point, I'll whistle) has been swaggering around declaring that he is the Minister of Education, and he will decide what is to go in the history syllabus.

The man is a fool, of course, but he also has the cunning of a sewer rat, and he is playing the populist card. Think of somebody talking about ''********-bashing'', given that the missing word is specified as a profession. If I say this form of bashing is a popular sport, what word will you put in place of ''********''?  It won't be sharks or moles...

Nobody would bother singling out dentists, accountants or grocers for extreme abuse (aside from Mr. Chesterton, who had a thing about grocers, that is). Those professions are not seen as worthy targets.

To my way of thinking, there are just three professions that draw down the spite and ire of the general public to the extent that people want to badmouth them and tell jokes about them—and politicians want to join in bashing them. Lawyers probably come first, then doctors, then teachers.

It occurs to me that we really ought to bash pollies first and foremost, but like the schoolyard bullies they undoubtedly were, once upon a time, they see the need to distract their victims by leading them to an attack on somebody else. So lawyers, doctors and teachers cop it from the public—but politicians fear crossing the doctors and lawyers, so teachers are the low-hanging fruit.

Two of these professions are seen as bastions of the rich (as in ''the law is an appropriate study for the avaricious who cannot stand the sight of blood'') and as homes for aloof users of obfuscatory language, but why are teachers in the target range?

Teachers are not well-paid when you look at their training and the hours they work, if you compare them with the other two professions—and they use simple language. While they have professional expertise, teachers describe what they do in simple terms, unlike lawyers and doctors. So why bash teachers?

Some people may be aware that over the years I have worn a mixture of hats, and some years ago, wearing my media hat, I attended a media briefing on genetic modifications, where several CSIRO heavyweights and UTS researchers gave excellent accounts of their work. I have formal training in genetics, and I found their accounts fascinating.

At the end, a well-known television nonentity spoke up (no names, but he liked backyards). ''I used to breed budgerigars, so I understand genetics, and I know that GM is wrong,'' he told the scientists, and those who (he assumed) would be hanging on his every word.

I know very little about the breeding of birds of any sort, but I do understand genetics, and I am well-versed in the many variations of technology.  From this background, I am convinced there is no such thing as a bad or wrong technology, though I realise that many technologies can be misused. The objection was founded on a sadly flawed premise.

Let me put it this way: GM can be used for good or bad purposes, so can a motor vehicle, which may be am armoured personnel carrier, a tank, a Mob getaway car—or an ambulance, a school bus or a fire engine. So would you ban motor vehicles or not?  You should, if you would ban GM because it can be dangerous!

Back to the idiot Don, for some reason, I said nothing at the time, but like the other people present who knew their science, I left the venue wondering how this bloke could be so thick as to think he knew it all. After several purely medicinal applications of diluted carbonated ethanol, we concluded that it was because the idiot knew so little of genetics that he really WAS convinced that he knew it all. [Comment added, ten years on: Don Burke was a fine example of the Dunning-Kruger kind,]

I believe that this is where the teacher-bashers come in. When we stand in front of a class, education, teaching, training, wisdom, knowledge, learning, understanding and erudition are all parts of what we should be transmitting, along with culture, enthusiasm and a few other things.  It is a rich and nourishing meal that we deliver, day in and day out.

But to the simple critics, teaching is what they did when they taught a younger blood-relative to ride a bicycle, or to swim, or to drive. There are no nuances, no finesse, no planning—you just step up to the mark and commence your spiel. No control problems either, because the young'n has volunteered, is alone, motivated, and with a relative.

Because the would-be critics have never stopped to evaluate their respective performances, they are convinced that they achieved perfect results in minimum time. In fact, any decent cost-benefit analysis and standardised pre-test/post-test evaluation would show that in most cases, the driver-teaching was abysmal in terms of productivity, woeful in terms of societal attitudes transmitted, and directed at reaching a pass-mark, not at achieving true excellence.

Why else do we have so many traffic accidents and incidents of road rage? I blame the teachers, you know...

Nonetheless, from their data-free position, the critics of the teaching profession believe themselves well-placed to sit in judgement on those who devote their working lives to trying to broaden the views of their children. It is their self-assigned role to find teachers wanting, because they have taught, and they know what it is all about.  As well might they claim expertise based on breeding budgerigars!

It is my belief, based on my own observations and those of my father before me (he was in the same game), that over the past 50 years, the most amazing disasters among New South Wales ministers of education were mainly those who had teacher training. Like my budgerigar-breeding acquaintance, they thought they knew it all. One of the greatest disasters had been a lecturer in education, another gained a Dip. Ed. as a tertiary teacher, but never faced a school classroom.

A minister of the crown is, by definition, a politician, one versed in doing that which is politic, They need good people skills, and I envy them that—even the poorest back-bencher outshines me on that dimension. Ministers would not be where they are without some sort of brains (Charlie Cutler was an exception), but they are generally not great thinkers, and ministers of any portfolio and political complexion are most certainly not people with expertise in the byways of their department.

No medico, lawyer or teacher is, by virtue of training in that discipline, capable of administering a large system in the area in which they are trained. They lack the necessary experience to lead, and they are far less fitted to play the part of despot.

It is the role of the minister to play the part of a ship's owner and say ''sail to this port", but not to specify the alloy that will be used to cast the propeller, the oil with which the engines will be lubricated, or the frequencies to be used by the radio operator. Any sensible ship's owner would leave that sort of thing to the captain and crew.

It is inappropriate for a minister, any minister, to formulate operational policy in any portfolio, and any minister who does so in the field of education is, to the extent that the ministerial policy is forced upon schools and students, an inept failure.

Ministers are not there to micro-manage: their task is to provide directions at the level of, say, ''we want more excellence''. Ministers are there to be advised, and to make choices between carefully designed policies. Allow them anything more than that, and we have a recipe for disaster.

Allowing ministers to dictate curriculum or to determine daily and operational policy is the equivalent of making somebody transport supremo on the basis that he or she once saw Mulga Bill's bicycle, half a mile off, on a stormy evening, by lightning flashes.


* * * * * * *
This blog covers quite a few different things, so I tag each post. I also blog about history, and I am currently writing a series of books called Not your usual... and the first two have been accepted by Five Mile Press, The offcuts appear here with the tag Not Your Usual... . For a taste of Australian tall tales, try the tags Speewah or Crooked Mick.   For a miscellany of oddities, try the tag temporary obsessions. And language us covered under the tags Descants and Curiosities, while stuff about small life is under Wee beasties.

All about answers

 I do apologise: I have been off writing a book. I have mentioned before that I am working towards a series of e-books under the series title Not Your Usual... and so I have been looking in other directions than to this blog.

The first batch reflects a cleaning-out of my files and a couple of drafts as well, plus a couple of things that I thought needed to be said. The initial release will include Not Your Usual Bushrangers, Not Your Usual Australian Hero (tall tales about Crooked Mick of the Speewah), Not Your Usual Gold Seekers (some nuts and bolts background to the Australian gold rush), Not Your Usual War Poems (going beyond 'Flanders Fields'), Not Your Usual Quotations (science quotations of a delectable kind), and Not Your Usual Australian Verse (well, it does actually include all the old favourites, but also a great deal of lesser-known stuff. 

For balance, I needed to get one more title to reflect the fact that I really am a science writer. Therein hangs a tale: I was using material previously researched and in most cases drafted, so it was mainly assembly and editing, and it went ahead very fast. I got to 330,000 words, equal to six trade paperbacks, and knew there was a lot more to come, so I rejigged the existing content into four volumes—with at least two more to come, and I have now cleaned up the first volume of Not Your Usual Science.

There is still some technical stuff and some  editing to do, but I am almost there. Anyhow, Not Your Usual Science is mainly about how we found answers to many of our questions, so here are a few musings on answers.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

In Old English, an answer was a reply made to a legal charge, a form of defence. Literally, andswaru was taken from two roots: and, meaning 'against', and swarâ, meaning 'swear', so to an Anglo-Saxon, an answer was a 'swearing against', but these days, we see it as a reply to a question or a response to an examination question.

It can also be a return hit in fencing, while to a musician, an answer is a part of a fugue, the name given to the subject when it is sung by the alto and the bass, but to dive further into this would be to dig into muddy technical waters which is a waste of time, as the holes are unstable.

Returning to crime and legalities, we have also injected a sense of personal responsibility into the word when we talk about somebody being answerable for something.

For the most part, we may answer a description, and we may answer a telephone, but most other answers are only offered in response to a question.

The computer community alone stands out in one sense, publishing lists of answers as FAQs, or frequently asked questions, rather than as FSAs, or frequently-sought answers.

Even in those pre-Norman days, the word was used in the main modern sense, and we will find terms like answaru liðe, literally a lithe answer, but more reliably, a soft or gentle answer, in the sense intended in the book of Proverbs, where we are told that a soft answer, an answaru liðe, turneth away wrath.

The 'and-' prefix is usually considered not to appear in any other words these days, but a trawl through Old English reveals a few interesting parallels, like and-efn which is equivalent to our 'uneven' in the sense of 'not equal'. The term and-git means intellect or understanding, which we might suspect has something to do with the modern English derogatory term 'git'. Certainly andgit-leás means 'foolish, so it may be that, by stripping off the negatives fore and aft, we got to a trimmed-down 'git'.

Some hint of a different sense of 'answer' appears in A Comedy of Errors, where we find this exchange in Act IV, scene i:

SECOND MERCHANT:
My business cannot brook this dalliance.
Good sir, say whe'r you'll answer me or no; If not, I'll leave him to the officer.

ANTIPHOLUS OF EPHESUS:
I answer you! What should I answer you?

ANGELO:
The money that you owe me for the chain.

Here, the answer was a payment in response to the delivery of a chain, but this is a Shakespearean comedy, and identical twins are involved, so, well, you get the picture, and I am not answerable for it.

Gertrude Stein, of course, knew that answers are not everything. According to her biography, her last words were "What is the answer?" and after a pause, ". . . In that case, what is the question?"

This was a lesson that Douglas Adams learned well when he first published the answer to life, the universe and everything as "42", and then later published "the question" as "what do you get when you multiply 6 by 9?"

Curiously, the product of 6 and 9 is 42, provided you are counting in base-13 notation, where "42" means, in our more normal base-10 mathematics, 4 x 13 + 2 = 54 (base-10).

Mathematicians around the world are still trying to decide if this use of the tridecimal number system has any real value, perhaps as an indication of the number of digits found in mice when they are viewed in six dimensions.

How far we have come since the days when scholars would debate how many angels could dance on the head of a pin! Now we are more likely to seek the number of pins that can dance on the head of an angel.

Who needs to be right?

Christian Doppler was in Prague in 1842 when he wondered if he might be able to explain the colours of binary stars. He came up with an idea that we now call the Doppler effect, to do with the perceived frequency of a wave and the way the relative velocities of the source and the observer affect the observed frequency.

This picture has nothing to do
with this story: I just fell prey to
the pictorial imperative.

 

Confused by the opaque prose? Not to worry: think about what happens when a train goes through a level crossing where a bell is clanging: as we pass, we stop approaching the bell and start moving away, the tone of the bell seems to drop.

If somebody drives past sounding their horn, the pitch drops in the same way. It happens with sirens as well, but it's harder to spot, because the siren is varying anyhow.

Well, Doppler thought it might have been the reason why stars appear to have different colours. It was a great theory, but completely wrong.

Then in 1845, a clever young Dutch physicist with the curious (to our eyes) name of Buys Ballot said that it was all a load of old cobblers, but he reckoned there was something in the idea itself, even if it didn't cause the colours of binary stars.

He got some musicians loaded on a train on the Utrecht-Amsterdam line, and as they whizzed through Maarssen station at 70 kph, musicians on the platform listened to the calibrated note being played by the other musicians on the train, and the principle was established.

Sadly, even though Doppler was way off course, he had thought of the effect first, so even today, we refer to Doppler shifts, Doppler radar, Doppler this and that. It plays a big role in ultrasound work, and oddly enough, there is a Dopper effect on star colours, though our eyes can't see it.

Stars that are receding from is show a red shift, and the few objects whizzing our way show a blue shift, but we can only detect that by taking a spectrum with a spectroscope, invented by Kirchhoff and Bunsen. We really only recall Bunsen today by the Bunsen burner, which he didn't even invent! Credit in science can be funny like that.

A few years later, in 1848, nationalist uprisings hunted Doppler out of Prague and back to his native Vienna, where a few years later, he played a part in educating young Gregor Mendel, but that's another story.

Poor old Buys Ballot, who was right, and who proved that the effect existed, is hardly even a footnote, a bit like Maarssen station, which is now closed.

All about earth

Our word 'earth' is from a Germanic root (and here I will use the þ symbol for the 'thorn', the soft 'th') erþa in Old Teutonic and airþa in Gothic, while the Swedes and the Danes have jord, and the Dutch have aarde (to make hard work of it, the aardvark of the Boers is a dirt-pig, or maybe an earth-pork), and in German, the ground is die Erde.

Soil is the tribal patch of ants. Don't knock it!

The Anglo-Saxons used eorþ and had some delightful combinations: the cucumber was an eorþ-æppel or earth-apple (and nothing like a pomme de terre!), a person who was injured and crept on the earth as an earth-creeper was an eorþ-crypel (compare this with our cruel label,  'cripple'), and an earthquake was what we would now call an earth-din (eorþ-dyne) or an earth-shaking (eorþ-beofung), while the things that lived on the earth were eorþ-cyn, or earthkind.

But even in those days, 'earth' also had the idea of element attached to it, as in this Old English phrase: "Seó eorþ is dryge and ceald and ðæt wæter wæt and ceald" — the earth is dry and cold, the water is wet and cold (compare 'Séo' and the German 'sie').

There seem to be about six ideas used in different languages that relate to "earth": in English they are represented by dirt (as in 'dirty'), soil, land, earth, world and planet. In Latin, the main terms are terra, humus and solum, with humus being what we are buried in, according to the student song, Gaudeamus igitur (which means let us rejoice, but seems usually to be sung as a dirge), rather than our more restricted use of the word. I wonder what Latin word was used for earth in the sense of one of the four elements?

Ant lions live in the earth, too. Look out, ants!

At different times, many of these have been used interchangeably. John of Gaunt is made to speak of "This blessed plot, this earth, this Realme, this England" in Richard II, but England is Angleterre to the French, and our Great South Land is Terra Australis.

(Whatever happens to the Great in the Latin version?)

Anyhow, terra which is the soil in the Italian terra rossa is now a land, as it is in Tierra del Fuego, though not yet promoted to the level of terrestrial, which can be either on dry land (terra firma) or something found on our planet, as opposed to extra-terrestrial.

We speak of a man on the land when we mean a farmer of the male persuasion, while those who live off the land are exploiters of the environment in all its forms.

It seems almost as if the word we use depends on our continually widening horizons over the past millennium or so. For example, the Icelandic jörð can mean earth, land or estate, depending on the context.

What began as the garden became the land we lived on, then the tribal patch, the land that the clan lived on, then perhaps a continent, and finally the world.

All the same, the world of the Romans (mundus) was far less than the world of the Italians or French (mondo or le monde). To the Romans, the world was just a small patch around the Mediterranean Sea (which is the sea 'in the middle of the world').

The need for a name for the area larger than one's normal reach and travels came with trade. The Swahili word for 'world' is dunia, and the same word is used in Indonesian.

This is not surprising, as it is an Arabic word, brought in by Arabic-speaking traders in each area, but I have minimal knowledge of Arabic, so I cannot say what precisely it means in Arabic.  All I know for sure is that the same word is also used in Turkish.

I note, in passing, that Frank Herbert apparently had some Arabic, and his planet of Dune was almost certainly cognate with dunia — he uses enough other Arabic-related terms in that novel.

So the short answer is that our word 'earth' is very old Germanic, but the interchange over time of the various words used to mean the stuff under our feet is a much longer story.

Hoist with his own petard

I will studiously not comment on this, much as I would like to: I have just drawn it from the archives to use in the current book.

"Bischoff, one of the leading anatomists of Europe, thrived some 70 years ago. He carefully measured brain weights, and after many years' accumulation of much data he observed that the average weight of a man's brain was 1350 grams, that of a woman only 1250 grams. This at once, he argued, was infallible proof of the mental superiority of men over women. Throughout his life, he defended this hypothesis with the conviction of a zealot. Being the true scientist, he specified in his will that his own brain be added to his impressive collection. The postmortem examination elicited the interesting fact that his own brain weighed only 1245 grams."

—Scientific American, March 1992, 8, quoting from an unidentified source in Scientific American, March 1942.