At the end of last month, an article in New Scientist announced a research project that, if it goes ahead ( I wonder if USAID is involved in the funding somewhere down the line), will investigate a little-understood...
<understatement>
(ie NOT understood)
</understatement>
... source of oxygen:
Dark oxygen: New deep sea expedition to explore mysterious discovery
The shock discovery that metallic nodules could be producing oxygen in the deep sea made headlines last year – now the team behind it is launching a new project to confirm and explain the findings
Manganese nodues Marine scientists who made headlines last year with their discovery that deep sea nodules could be producing “dark oxygen” are embarking on a three-year research project to explain their findings.
Amid swirling controversy over their research, project lead Andrew Sweetman at the Scottish Association for Marine Science says he hopes the new scheme will “show once and for all” that metallic lumps of rock are sources of deep sea oxygen and start to explain how the process is working. “We know that it’s going on, and what we need to now do is show it again, and then really start getting at the mechanism,” he says.
Predictably, potential exploiters are queueing up to destroy the millennary bounty before there's a chance to understand it; it stands to reason, given the splendid job we've done turning Africa into a desert.
In a recent BBC radio programme – which I've tried and failed to find again, using BBC Sounds' pitiful indexing tool...
<tangent>
Honestly, it's worse than useless. They pollute the airwaves with repeated claims about their unrivalled back-catalogue, but the chances of finding anything in it are nugatory (excuse my French, it's a bit like nougat). Perhaps it's just a matter of time, and the programme was just too recent to have been properly indexed yet.
</tangent>
... – Daron Acemoglu...
<parenthesis>
(Nobel Laureate economist, recognized for his contribution to research into the link between automation and inequality)
</parenthesis>
...was talking about AI, and different possible approaches: the Musk/Trump unregulated expensive and wasteful pro-inequality model ...
<half-remembered-quote>
'If China didn't exist the Silicon Valley elite would have to invent it.' This was said in an interesting comparison between AI-development amd the Manhattan Project..
</half-remembered-quote>
... amd the more realistic and attainable regulated version.. If I find the programme, expect an update (but don't hold your breath).
L'envoi
This term's concert (HD 2025: mentioned in a recent post)... reminded me of this old post of mime...
<autobiographical_note type="mea maxima culpa">
(back in the halcyon days before Blogger: issued a 'much-improved' update of their indexing tool that made it virtually impossible to use, so that the word-cloud of index tags covers the first nine-odd years of this blog, but not the latest five. I should really do something about this (like hide the whole thing on the grounds of diminishing currency), but feel a strange attachment to the earlier stuff.
</autobiographical_note>
...which referred to a television programme about Alan Bennet's Diaries:
<prescript>
The television programme was loosely based on an edition of Private Passions, notable (to my hyper-sensitive – not to say anal – ear) for Michael Berkeley's mis-quoting of the words he had just heard (from The Dream of Gerontius): "Softly and gently, dearly ransom’d soul". He said "dear departed soul". Come to think of it, it may not be a misquote but a quotation from elsewhere in the text, made to sound like a misquote because of the editing. He surely can’t be that cloth-eared? (Though, come to rethink of it, the angel, in the Celestial Arrivals Lounge, surely wouldn't have addressed Gerontius as departed ; he'd only just got there, for Heaven's sake.)
The collocation “departed soul” is a pretty strong one; and the syllable-count and stress pattern are right ... But it makes dear define soul, whereas in the original – by John Henry Newman – dearly modifies ransomed.<autobiographical_note type="hair-splitting">A lot of ransoming goes on in Christianity. In the second line of the version of “O come O come Emmanuel” that I learned at my mother’s knee (which was never far from Aunty Katy’s, genuflecting away like billy-o,...<digression>
(a coincidentally – I didn't know until I checked the spelling – but strangely appropriate word, given one of the possible derivations of the word; as The Phrase Finder says,...Alternatively, the derivation is said to be from Joseph Billio, the zealous 17th/18th century Puritan preacher. Billio preached at the United Reformed Church in Market Hill, Maldon, Essex, in and around 1696. He was an enthusiastic 'hellfire and damnation' preacher and, given his name and reputation, ought to be a serious contender as the source of the phrase. They are certainly convinced in Maldon, and it must be true - they have a plaque to prove it.But, as I was saying, genuflecting....)
</digression>...as only knees can [that’s one for the etymologists]) was And ransom captive Israel. In the C of E-preferred version I have sung since then, the words of that line are Redeem thy cap/tive Israel. Wha...? Israel's not Emmanuel's captive – not guilty, yer 'Onner – it's Pharaoh's captive. Israel was (in the 15th-century, when the carol surfaced in France) a metaphor for Christendom, and in the words of Elgar's angel, the ransom (the price paid for redemption) was dear (in the expensive sense): the soul may be dear to some people, but the point is that it was dearly ransomed.
</autobiographical_note></prescript>
Anyway, here's the lowdown:
