Pirate Luthier update Back in July I had a lucky day finding two violas and a violin at Gloucester Green market. All of them have red paint splattered on them but I can live with that. May have served in some kind of art project. I've now set up one viola (number 3) and am working on the other. The one I have set up turned out sounding very nice, so I immediately took it to a session and played it quite a bit and I'm very happy with it. It is an interesting mental exercise to transpose the tunes I play on the violin to fit them into the lower register of the viola. So here's the one I set up and the other one in the state I found it, kind of a before and after photo. It looks a little bit disproportioned because I set it up with a violin bridge. The viola bridges I ordered turned out to be much too big for these, so I preferred having a bridge on the small side rather than one where I have to throw away lots of material and still end up with too much. I may have been lucky with the one I randomly picked to set up first, because so far I haven't been able to get equally nice sounds out of the other one, and the pegs are causing me a bit of trouble. But I'm still hopeful it will be playable some time soon. It would be weird if they really sounded so different, because they have the same provenance, and the same label, saying Berini with the drawing of a cat playing fiddle: Since the last pirate luthier post, I've also made the half-size cello playable and handed it back to the youth orchestra folks who are keen on using it. * * * NB I've now moved the list of instruments that pass through my pirate luthier workshop to a permanent page which I will update whenever necessary, independent of the blog entries.

The Oxford León Association is holding a fund raising evening with delicious Nicaraguan food on **Friday 6 November, at 7 pm in Divinity Road, Oxford.** The aim is to have fun with a Latin American flavour and raise funds for friends in need in our twin city of León – for our clean water charity, which supports remote communities, supplies small farmers with clean water, agro-ecology and community projects and for Nicaragua Education, Culture and Arts Trust (NECAT) which helps train teachers in León in the Montessori method. **The food will be prepared by a very experienced Chilean cook and will be a culinary experience not to be missed!** **The cost of a ticket will be £30 per person and will be limited to 18 people.** A few places are still available – use the contact page or email Jen Houston if you’re interested. Por Pasionyanhelo – Trabajo propio, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16048130 ### Compartir: * Share on X (Opens in new window) X * Share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook * Like Loading... ### _Related_

a special treat: Baked and frozen quinces. Own photo. It's quince season and my little tree has produced a record harvest of around 80 kg, so I have quinces on my mind quite a bit. I've given away just under half the load to around seven people via freegle and I think I now have the rest reasonably well under control. I've spread out the quinces on four pallets in an unheated space so I can use them up through the winter without too many of them starting to rot. One full pallet like this is between 15 and 20 kg of quinces, so this ia less than a quarter of the harvest in this photo. Own photo. Way back when I started using a complex recipe for a baked quince dessert, with sweet wine (vin santo), cinnamon and cloves and whathaveyou (by Rowley Leigh in the Guardian in 1997, before the start of their current website), and over the years I simplified it more and more, such that now I just cut the quinces in quarters (or eighth if they are huge), cut out the core, wipe them off with a quarter of a lemon, and bake them at 170 deg (fan oven) for just under an hour, rotating the tray by 180 deg after half an hour, also turning the quince wedges in the corners as they tend to burn quite quickly. If I have untreated lemons, I also add shavings of the peel before baking. These days I like to eat them cold, with some half-defrosted blackberries, and I've also discovered that they can be frozen - as they naturally have the texture of a fruit sorbet, they come out of the freezer as a quince sorbet snack you can eat with your fingers (see photo at the top). One could present six wedges as a star with a scoop of something in the middle (whipped cream, custard, ice cream?). That's my desserts sorted through to February ... One tray like this takes around 600 - 700 g of cored and quartered quinces, after baking they're reduced to just over half the weight. Own photo. Will have to work on my food photography skills. Also, revive the quince tag, which I hadn't used in the last 15 years ...

The Turkish writer talks about her nomadic childhood, being targeted by the Turkish government and overcoming depression to write her latest novel

This offbeat tale of machinations at an eccentric poetry magazine in 80s New York is laugh-out-loud funny – and a paean to the power of poetry

New discoveries from Australia's oldest known underwater archaeological record reveal how First Peoples lived, transported goods and used different places within a vast cultural landscape that was submerged when rising seas transformed the continent after the last Ice Age.

Until now the alien white-hot worlds of exoplanets have been depicted as circular, but new research has revealed the true shape of their atmospheres to be a deformed sphere rather than perfectly circular.

In the 1970s, researchers began to observe drastic amphibian declines in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, a global hotspot of frog biodiversity. For decades, these disappearances remained a mystery. Now, new research from scientists at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute and Pennsylvania State University, published today in the journal Molecular Ecology, points to amphibian chytridiomycosis, a devastating infectious disease, as the likely culprit.

Bazaruto Archipelago, Mozambique: Researchers from the Bazaruto Center for Scientific Studies (BCSS) Ocean Observatory have documented ancient forests that grew on the Mozambican coast thousands of years ago and have been found beneath the sea, where they now serve as hotspots teeming with marine life similar in biodiversity to coral reefs. The discovery raises the question of how many more of these hidden peat reefs exist around the world’s coastlines and how to evaluate them as a carbon store and develop policies to protect them and their biodiversity.

A circular hole in a 75,000-year-old scapula suggests lethal conflict involving sharpened wooden spears among Neanderthals in the Middle East. The remains also show evidence of brutal facial injury at least a year before death, meaning this Neanderthal was likely cared for prior to dying violently.

Turning concealed information into usable energy in microscopic systems: physicists at the University of Konstanz and the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen publish a new study in the journal Nature Physics that reports how hidden information can be converted into usuable energy – an important step toward cyclic microscopic information engines.

Future Arctic winter sea ice is likely to shrink by around one million square kilometres more than previously thought, after researchers used clues from a warm period 6,000 years ago to improve the reliability of climate models.

I just discovered that my latest book, Intertwined is already available as an audiobook, from Tantor Media. Last I heard was that the audio rights were sold last summer. Glad to hear from the sample clip they found a British narrator for this (Mike Cooper) and an actual human, just before AI gobbles up everything. Sounds good to me, even though I'm not sure I would want to have 12 hours worth of my own words read back at me. Anyways, if you would like to listen to Intertwined, now you can! There is also an ebook version as expensive as the hardback, but no news yet on a paperback.

My new book, exploring how all life on Earth is connected to everything else, is out today: **Intertwined** From Insects to Icebergs by Michael Gross Johns Hopkins University Press 15. October 2024 424 pages ISBN 9781421449975 Hardcover RRP £27.50 / $32.95 It can now be ordered from the publisher's website or from wherever else you get your books (eg from Oxford's very own Blackwells). I understand that an audiobook version is also in the making, slightly scary thought, but as long as I don't have to do the reading out loud, it's all good. I prepared a magazine feature based on the introduction of the book, which came out yesterday in The Scotsman magazine. Here's a snippet: I have found and made many connections over the years and have broadened my interests from the physical sciences into ecology and environment issues. Increasingly, I became aware that ecology is all about how in the living world everything is connected to everything else. Beyond the predator-prey relations of the food web, there are multiple ways in which species shape their environment and create opportunities for others. And this web of connections operates across a vast range of different scales from the molecular interactions (related to my background in biochemistry) to global cycles of important chemical elements like nitrogen and carbon. For instance, microscopically small cyanobacteria were responsible for giving our planet an atmosphere rich in oxygen. Ecology is a relatively young concept, with the term coined by Ernst Haeckel in 1866. Many of these crucial connections are only beginning to be explored by science, although human activities have already started to destroy them. For instance, whales, sea birds, migrating fish like salmon, and bears are all part of a global pump that transports nutrients uphill, against the flow direction dictated by gravity and the hydrological cycle. Scientists only discovered this connection within the last few years. By this time, its capacity to cycle nutrients was already severely reduced, not least by the industrialised whaling of the 20th century, which was only stopped just in time to avert extinction of the species targeted. Hydroelectric dams blocking salmon runs and the decimation of big beasts like bears by hunters and habitat loss also helped to disrupt this nutrient pump. And here's the table of contents: Introduction: Everything is connected Chapter 1. Plants and their little helpers Chapter 2. Fantastic animals Chapter 3. Insects rule the world Chapter 4. Looking after our forests Chapter 5. This time, the asteroid is us Chapter 6. Save our seas Chapter 7. Living with animals Chapter 8. Listen to nature Chapter 9. Animals shaping the environment Chapter 10. Life in the times of climate change Chapter 11. Our shared burden of disease Chapter 12. The Anthropocene and beyond

From correspondence following my earlier blog entry on the lives of the Caesars, I learned that the use of the Latinised name goes back even further than the first Lutheran vicar in the lineage, Johannes Keyser / Caesar (ca. 1480-1543). According to a newspaper piece from 1925 referring to documents in the town archives of Nördlingen, Johannes's grandfather Jacob Keyser used the name Caesar as his scholarly name (Gelehrtenname) when he published a book about herbs. The paper did not approve of the fad of taking Latinised names. After I posted the original "lives of the Caesars" entry, the next street library I visited at Düsseldorf had the matching book ready for me. The background is formed by two copies of my favourite Latin dictionary, Stowasser, in the Hundertwasser edition (it came in four colours but I have only got two of them so far). Own photo. Based on this information, we have another little CV to write: * * * **Jacob Caesar** (14th/15th century) If Jacob really was the grandfather of Johannes (estimated birth year 1480) we have to stack up two rather late fatherhoods, say each at age 45 to arrive at an estimated birth year of 1390, which would fit the first thing we actually know about him: Jacob Keyser came to Nördlingen from Ulm and swore the oath (Bürgereid) to become a citizen of the free city in 1409. The 1925 article claims that the relevant document was still in the city's archives at that point. I understand the archive survived WW2 unscathed so I assume it's still there. At the time, there were an average of 23-24 new citizens coming in per year, with nearly half of them arriving from other cities, like Jacob. Becoming a citizen invoked a fee, and moving away again was also taxed. Later on he received money from the city council for the writing of a book about herbs. We don't know when. And I haven't been able to find the book (yet). Nördlingen had been a Free Imperial City since 1215. Note that in 1409, many of the major historic buildings were yet to be built. With around 6,000-8,000 residents in the 15th century (extrapolated from the number of tax payers, which was 1294 in 1404), the town was smaller than regional cities Augsburg, Nürnberg and Ulm, but it was located at an important crossroads and became a significant location for trade especially for the locally produced fustian fabrics. Construction of the gothic St. Georgskirche began in 1427. Jacob can't have lived to see it completed in 1505. Nördlingen saw a rise in population until 1437, when harvest failure led to a regional famine. At the end of the 1440s, regional wars between cities led to further population losses. It took until 1480 to recover the population strength it had in 1430. In 1494, there was an epidemic (possibly the plague), which again led to a fall back in population. For our grandfather connection to work, Jacob must have had a family in the 1430s and at least one son must have survived the famine. Unfortunately, there were no church records for Nördlingen at that time, as they only started in 1579 (still quite early compared to most places). The only thing one could probably find in the city archives is his tax record and those of his sons and grandsons. Tax records are nearly complete from 1404 onwards. Sources: Ingrid Bátori: Herren, Meister, Habenichtse. Die Bürgerschaft der Reichsstadt Nördlingen um 1500. In: Rieser Kulturtage Bd. VI/1, Nördlingen 1986. S. 252–269 Ingrid Bátori Daily life and culture of an urban Elite: The imperial city of Nördlingen in the 15th and 16th century History of European Ideas 1989, 11, 621-627 * * * My famlily history index pages: people -- surnames -- places -- migration events

New research shows that the mere smell of predators is enough to change deer behavior and limit browsing damage to tree saplings. The findings offer a potential tool for forest recovery and highlight the important role large predators play. The research is published in the British Ecological Society’s Journal of Applied Ecology.

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Some thoughts on > Children of radium: A buried inheritance > Joe Dunthorne > Hamish Hamilton 2025 Waterstones Carl Auer von Welsbach (1858-1929) was an Austrian chemist who discovered several elements and patented a new kind of gas light using a fabric mantle known as the Welsbach mantle (Auerstrumpf in German). The Auergesellschaft (originally called Deutsche Gasglühlicht AG, DGA or, as if to sound out the letters: Degea) was set up in 1892 to market this innovation in Germany. Osram was a later spinout from it. The mantle in the original Auer gaslight typically contained thorium dioxide, and there are many other aspects of the company history that are a bit radioactive. During the Weimar Republic, it became a leading manufacturer of gas masks, which defined the company's identity to the extent that its in-house magazine was called _Die Gasmaske_. As research into the effectiveness of gas masks required the handling of all of the dangerous substances that the mask was meant to filter out of the air, the company had a good excuse to handle dangerous gases including those that had been used as chemical weapons in World War I and whose use was banned in Germany under the Versailles Treaty. Under Nazi rule, the company was “aryanised” and affiliated with Degussa. Together with Goldschmidt AG, it set up a new company called Orgacid at Ammendorf near Halle in 1934, which produced chemical weapons including mustard gas “just in case”. Although Hitler famously rejected the use of chemical weapons at the front, there were some in the military who wanted to have the option if needed. And the research also fed into the mass murder conducted in the gas chambers of the concentration camps. Meanwhile, at a separate site in Oranienburg, just north of Berlin, the company hoarded uranium for nuclear fission research. We now know that it was insufficient for atomic bombs, but during World War II, its presence earned the town a massive bombardment leaving it one of the most contaminated places to this day. (There's a brand new paper in PNAS Nexus showing the German atomic bomb project couldn't succeed, but I recall others reaching the same conclusion a few years ago when I wrote a feature about nuclear forensics.) As if to put a bright smile on all these dealings with death, the Auergesellschaft also developed a radioactive toothpaste called Doramad, which was sold from 1940 until the end of the war. The news from Hiroshima and Nagasaki presumably along with the emerging fate of the "radium girls" dying horrific deaths from chronic radiation exposure made it sufficiently clear that this product wasn’t such a bright idea. The toothpaste is also where Joe Dunthorne starts his exploration into his Jewish-German family’s involvement in this history. He knew that his grandmother grew up brushing her teeth with Doramad, and that her father had been in charge of developing it. Apparently, the family took stacks of the radioactive material with them as they emigrated to Turkey in time to avoid persecution for being Jewish. At the start, the author seems to have expected to find a romantic story of a lucky escape from the Holocaust, maybe like “When Hitler stole Pink Rabbit.” It turned out to be a very different story. Siegfried Merzbacher (1883 - 1971), the author’s great-grandfather, left a memoir of several thousand pages which nobody had read. Hidden behind endless pages of irrelevant memories and information copied from encyclopaedias, Dunthorne discovered the admission that Merzbacher had taken part in chemical weapons research at Auergesellschaft and was also closely connected to the colleague Karl Quasebart who set up the production facility near Halle. The presumed escape to Turkey, it turned out, was a relocation paid by Auergesellschaft, which also continued to pay part of his salary while he continued to work on chemical weapons in Ankara, and regularly corresponded with Quasebart. The notorious massacre conducted by Turkish authorities against the Kurdish village of Dersim in 1937-38 may well have been the result of this German-Turkish co-operation on chemical weapons, as the author finds out on visiting the location. After the beginning of World War II, the contact was lost (Turkey remained neutral for most of the duration) and the Merzbachers were stripped of their German citizenship for being Jewish. Nevertheless, Siegfried Merzbacher helped out his old friend Quasebart after the war by testifying that he had always supported Jewish colleagues. It was just a bit unfortunate that he also helped to develop Zyklon B, the poison gas used in the Holocaust. Quasebart died before his denazification procedure was completed. Although Siegfried Merzbacher and both his sisters got out of Germany in time, there are also Holocaust impacts on the family which the author reveals in the final part of the book. Siegfried’s sister, Elisabeth Kitzinger, ran a Jewish orphanage in Munich, which was so successful it eventually cared for children of all ages and even young adults, eventually accommodated in its own building with 20 rooms from 1926. After it was closed by Nazi authorities, Elisabeth’s close friends and long-term coworkers Alice Bendix and Hedwig Jacobi were deported with the last 12 children in their care and presumably murdered at Auschwitz. The author stumbles through this minefield of moral complexity like an inquisitive but endearingly clueless family history researcher depending on luck more than on expertise, accompanied by snarky comments from his mother who, he writes, insisted on remaining anonymous. While the resulting book is a gripping read I feel the material deserves a more academic treatment. At the time of this writing, Siegfried Merzbacher does not even have a Wikipedia entry in German or in English. The genealogy is online, however, and his son, physicist Eugen Merzbacher (1921-2013) is in Wikipedia in nine languages. Heck, even Siegfried's father Eugen Merzbacher, his grandfather Abraham Merzbacher, and his nephew Ernst Kitzinger are in Wikipedia so I'm beginning to find it suspicious that Siegfried isn't. I am sure Siegfried's life straddling the moral divides of the Holocaust would make a fascinating PhD project for a more expert historian. PS I'm intrigued to see that a German translation has appeared the same year as the English original: Kinder des Radiums: Auf den Spuren meiner jüdischen Familie Piper Verlag 2025 * * * My brand new list of book reviews is here.