Links I found interesting for 13-12-2014

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Where I’ve been this year

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The overnights meme:

List the places where you spent a night away from home this year, marking places where you spent two or more non-consecutive nights with an asterisk.

*London, England
Nicosia (north), TRNC
Glasgow, Scotland
*Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
Belfast, Norn Iron
Lys, Burgundy
*Kidderminster, England
Loughbrickland, Norn Iron
Budapest, Hungary
Ljubljana, Slovenia
Florence, Italy
Budva, Montenegro
Tirana, Albania
Brussels, Belgium (stayed in town last night after work Xmas party)

14 different places, well down on last year. Same as 2009, more than 2011.

Also a day-trip to Berlin and transit through Munich, changed planes in Istanbul en route to Cyprus, changed planes in Vienna en route to Montenegro, drove through Irish Republic en route to Loughbrickland, so tally of countries visited for the year is 14 (Albania, Austria, Belgium, Cyprus [both parts], France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Montenegro, Slovenia, Spain, Turkey, UK), up from last year’s 9.

This is the first calendar year since 2001 that I have not been to the USA.

Previous years: 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006.

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Wednesday reading

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Current
Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
The Dying Days, by Lance Parkin
δ3
Elizabeth’s Bedfellows, by Anna Whitelock

Last books finished
ℶ1
101 Ways to Win an Election, by Mark Pack and Edward Maxfield
α3
β3
Fear of the Dark, by Trevor Baxendale
The Fat Years, by Chan Koonchung
γ3

Last week’s audios
Welcome to Night Vale eps 9-19b
The Monstrous Menagerie by Jonathan Morris
The Night of 1000 Stars by James Goss
Murder at Moorsey Manor by Simon Barnard and Paul Morris

Next books
Earth Girl, by Janet Edwards
Infinity Race, by Simon Messingham

Books acquired in last week
Doctor Who and the Rebel’s Gamble, by William H. Keith Jr
Islands in the Sky, by Arthur C. Clarke
The Sands of Mars, by Arthur C. Clarke
Earthlight, by Arthur C. Clarke
The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke

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Richard III’s mtDNA and and Y chromosomes

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I’ve been very intrigued by the story of the identification of Richard III’s remains, published in Nature a couple of days ago. For an occasional genealogist like myself, the connection between the historical lines of descent and the genetic evidence was particularly intriguing. It is pretty amazing that two separate and verifiable mother-to-daughter lines, one of 17 generations and one of 19, were provably established from Richard’s sister, Anne of York, to people alive in London today.

The first line of descent, to cabinet-maker Michael Ibsen, included a number of women whose husbands and fathers – or in one case, daughter/sister/aunt – were notable enough to have made it to Wikipedia. I edited the relevant articles to make reference to this (Sir Robert Constable, Henry Chomley, Thomas Belasyse, Sir Henry Slingsby, John Talbot, Sir Henry Gough, Barbara Spooner Wilberforce, and Edward Vansittart Neale). When the findings were first announced in February 2013, it was also stated that another line of descent had been identified, but that the living individual concerned did not wish to go public. I wondered whether this might be a descendant of the musician Margaret Harrison, referred to in an earlier Guardian piece (one-time fiancée of Percy Grainger, daughter of the painter Peter Harrison and the writer Alma Strettell); and if so whether this would really help much, given that such a person would have been not so many generations removed from Michael Ibsen; any failure of methodology with regard to his lineage would likely apply also to Margaret Harrison and her descendants.

But in fact it turned out to be much more robust. Wendy Duldig, a social policy researcher, is descended from a different daughter of Sir Robert Constable and his wife Catherine (née Manners), Richard III’s great-niece, back in the early 16th century, with an extra two generations in her lineage compared to Michael Ibsen. Only two of the intervening links in Wendy Duldig’s mother-daughter line had close family members who made it to Wikipedia (Sir George Wentworth and Sir Benjamin Truman), though one of them was painted by Gainsborough.(Truman’s granddaughter Frances Read, see right). I found this in itself interesting – it shows that even without historical notoriety, the present-day researcher can pursue good genealogical links through the ranks of the upper middle classes. 

It shouldn’t be very surprising that such lineages rise and fall in income bracket and level of social prominence over the centuries. Taking it in the other direction, consider Mary Garritt, the wife of Thomas Webb, a surveyor in Stow-on-the-Wold in the mid-18th century. Her daughter Frances (1775-1862) married Thomas Salisbury, landlord of Marshfield House in Yorkshire. Their daughter Anne (1806-1881) married another gentry type, Edwyn Burnaby of Baggrave Hall in Leicestershire. Their daughter Caroline (1832-1918) married a widowed clergyman who was the grandson of a duke. Their daughter Nina (1862-1938) managed to bag an earl as her husband. Her daughter Elizabeth (1900-2002) did rather better than a mere earl. Her daughter, another Elizabeth, was born in 1926 and is still alive; those of you in the UK and Canada will find her depicted on certain useful everyday objects, ie money. But her direct female line ancestry can be traced back only six generations before it is lost in Gloucestershire.

These lineages are in fact very fragile. 17 generations on, Michael Ibsen is 57, and he and his siblings have no children, so the lineage from Sir Robert Constable’s older daughter will die with them. 19 generations on, Wendy Duldig, in her fifties, is not reported to have siblings or children either. Had Richard III’s remains been discovered forty years later, there might have been nobody around to compare his DNA with. There may be other undocumented maternal line descendants still around, daughters whose descendants were written out of the record for reasons easy enough to envisage; but the Leicester researchers seem to have done a pretty thorough job and it’s difficult to imagine that much slipped past them. On the other hand, we know for certain that everyone alive today had at least one female-line ancestor who was alive in 1485. We must all be descended maternally from a fairly small number of women even going back only a few centuries. Mitochondrial Eve is reckoned to have lived 100,000-200,000 years ago, but for a lot of us, our most recent common maternal ancestor will have been much closer to the present day.

A couple of demographic notes. The average mother-daughter age difference in Michael Ibsen’s lineage is 30.5 years, which is perhaps a little older than I had expected. The average mother-daughter age difference for Wendy Duldig’s lineage is 27.5 years, which I find less surprising. The biggest generational jump is 42 years, between Michael Ibsen’s grandmother and his mother. There are just four other births to mothers over 35 among the 33 births in the two lineages – Michael Ibsen’s great-grandmother, her grandmother, Wendy Duldig’s grandmother, and poor Anne of York who at 37 died giving birth to Anne St Leger in 1476, the link that kicks off the entire process. At the other end, there are no provable teenage mothers, though it’s quite likely that at least one of the uncertain early 16th century 20-year-olds would have qualified.

Three women are known to have outlived their daughters (one seventeenth-century, two eighteenth-century). Two of these lived to over 90 (both born in the seventeenth century and living to the eighteenth century). The average lifespan of the women born in the fifteenth century was 43.5 years; of those born in the sixteenth century, 47.8; of those born in the seventeenth century, 62.4 (skewed by the nonagenarians, though the Duldig lineage is also pretty robust in general in that era); for both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, 70.6 years; and for the two born in the twentieth century, 79. (I have no data on the ages of the fathers.)

It’s also interesting to note that Michael Ibsen’s family emigrated to Canada, and Wendy Duldig’s to New Zealand; but both Ibsen and Duldig have ended up in London.

Finally, the newspapers had great fun with the other side of the story, that the Y-chromosome analysis for male descent failed; comparison of Richard III’s DNA with that of several known descendants of the fifth Duke of Beaufort showed that they did not have a common male ancestor in Edward III, as had been thought from historical records, so therefore at some stage the recorded father-son link did not reflect the biological facts. Does this mean that the entire British royal line is illegitimate? Well, probably not – or at least not for that reason!!! Four generations separate Richard III and Edward III, but the fifth Duke of Beaufort was 15 generations removed from his royal ancestor; on the face of it, it’s therefore almost four times as likely that the bogus link is on the Beaufort side rather than the York side. On top of that, of the 15 Beaufort side links, only the first two are shared with Henry VII. So if for some peculiar reason you believe that Elizabeth II has a right to rule Britain and various other places due to Henry VII’s descent from John of Gaunt, you can probably rest easy.

Links I found interesting for 06-12-2014

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Wednesday reading (belated)

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Current
Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
Fear of the Dark, by Trevor Baxendale
α3

Last books finished
χ2
Shades of Milk and Honey, by Mary Robinette Kowal
The Grass is Singing, by Doris May Lessing
ψ2
ω2
Ages in Chaos: James Hutton and the Discovery of Deep Time, by Stephen Baxter

Last week’s audios
Welcome to Night Vale eps 2-7

Next books
The Fat Years, by Chan Koonchung
The Dying Days, by Lance Parkin

Books acquired in last week
Doctor Who and the Rebel’s Gamble, by William H. Keith Jr

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Links I found interesting for 04-12-2014

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Links I found interesting for 03-12-2014

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Links I found interesting for 01-12-2014

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November Books

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Non-fiction 1 (YTD 45)
TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 5: Tom Baker and the Williams Years, by Philip Sandifer

Tardis Eruditorum

Fiction (non-sf) 4 (YTD 41)
Home, by Marilynne Robinson
Rules, by Cynthia Lord
Beach Music, by Pat Conroy
The Grass is Singing, by Doris May Lessing

Home Rules Beach Music The Grass is Singing

SF (non-Who) 16 (YTD 110)
ι2
κ2 (gave up, won't finish)
λ2
μ2
ν2
ξ2
ο2
π2
ρ2
σ2
τ2
υ2
φ2
χ2
Shades of Milk and Honey, by Mary Robinette Kowal
ψ2

Shades of Milk and Honey

Doctor Who 4 (YTD 56)
Empire of Death, by David Bishop
Lungbarrow, by Marc Platt
Time Zero, by Justin Richards
The Crawling Terror, by Mike Tucker

Empire of Death Lungbarrow Time Zero Crawling Terror

Comics 1 (YTD 18)
Sugar Skull, by Charles Burns

Sugar Skull

~8,500 pages (YTD ~90,100)
8/26 (YTD 75/270) by women (Robinson, Lord, Lessing, ι2, ρ2, χ2, Kowal, ψ2)
0/26 (YTD 16/270) by PoC

Reread: 1/26, Lungbarrow (YTD 10/270)

Reading now:
Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
Ages in Chaos: James Hutton and the Discovery of Deep Time, by Stephen Baxter
ω2
Fear of the Dark, by Trevor Baxendale

Coming soon (perhaps):
The Fat Years, by Chan Koonchung
Elizabeth's Bedfellows, by Anna Whitelock
Earth Girl, by Janet Edwards
The Jonah Kit, by Ian Watson
The True Deceiver, by Tove Jansson
Stopping for a Spell, by Diana Wynne Jones
Kushiel's Justice, by Jacqueline Carey
Tree and Leaf, by J R R Tolkien
Wages of Sin, by Andrew M. Greeley
Getting the Buggers to Behave, by Sue Cowley
Het achterhuis, by Anne Frank
The Balkans, by Misha Glenny
The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Een geweer in het water, by Hermann
I Don't Know How She Does It, by Allison Pearson
The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon
Transit of Earth
The Painted Man, by Peter V. Brett
The Egyptian, by Mika Waltari
Islands In The Stream, by Ernest Hemingway
The Invisible Gorilla, by Christopher Chabris
The Dying Days, by Lance Parkin
Infinity Race, by Simon Messingham

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Links I found interesting for 28-11-2014

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Wednesday reading

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Current
Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
Shades of Milk and Honey, by Mary Robinette Kowal
The Grass is Singing, by Doris Lessing

Last books finished
Lungbarrow, by Marc Platt
σ2
Beach Music, by Pat Conroy
τ2
Time Zero, by Justin Richards
υ2
φ2
The Crawling Terror, by Mike Tucker

Last week's audios
Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, adapted by Jonathan Barnes
The Widow's Assassin (6/Peri), by Nev Fountain
The Bounty of Ceres (1/Steven/Vicki), by Ian Potter
Welcome To Night Vale #1

Next books
Liberal Language, by Graham Watson
The Fat Years, by Chan Koonchung
Fear of the Dark, by Trevor Baxendale

Books acquired in last week
101 Ways To Win An Election, by Edward Maxfield and Mark Pack
Seychelles: The Saga of a Small Nation Navigating the Cross-Currents of a Big World, by Sir James R. Mancham (courteously presented to me and signed by the author, who was the country's first president)

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Links I found interesting for 26-11-2014

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Ireland in the 16th century

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As previously mentioned, we went to the Mercator musem a few weeks ago; and I was very intrigues by this 16th century Italian map of Ireland, apparently by the Roman cartographer Lafreri (possibly a Frenchman whose name was Lafréry).

I wonder how many places we can identify?

Lafreri Ireland
This being my home territory, I can make a few guesses.

"HULTONIA" is Ultonia, meaning Ulster.
"Logh Herne" is Lough Erne.
"Banda flu." is the River Bann.

"Donagal" looks at first sight like it is meant to be Donegal town; and it's tempting to identify "Leche" to the south with Laghey, which is however only a short distance from Donegal; and what then of "Afroye"? What of "Tellin" and "Ara" (??Ardara)? And surely "Sligach", just a bit anti-clockwise around the coast from the estuary of the river Erne, is our Sligo, which is also not so far from the estuary of the Erne – but inconveniently south of Donegal rather than north? Indeed, "Tonerella" looks a closer match to Donegal town.

"Norbowrowe" has me baffled, but the "Purgatoriū S. Patricij" is obviously St Patrick's Purgatory on Lough Derg, and "Swylly" and "Foyle" are rivers/inlet loughs rather than towns.

On the lower Bann, I must say I'm stuck to find place names that could be "Band****" of which the last letters are illegible, or indeed "Lampreston" – let alone "Racheres", "Wolwofrith" or the island of "Donselus" (which is roughly, but only very roughly, in the right place for Rathlin).

Then it gets easier – "Knokfergos" is obviously Carrickfergus, "Magynows" is the County Down heartland of the Magennis clan, "Isannium Pr" appears to be the Ards Peninsula, and "Stranford" and "Armach" are fairly obviously Strangford and Armagh.

Lafreri Ireland E

This is pretty easy; continuing down the cast, with little change from the modern spelling, we have Ardglass, Greencastle, Dundalk and Drogheda, with Navan, Trim and Mullingar inland from the last of these. (Dundalk is on the Castletown River, Abhainn Chaisleán Dhún Dealgan in Irish, which doesn't look a lot like Lafreri's "Dongale").

Farther down, I'm not at all sure about "Brúnor", "Greenok" or "Ledepe" but "Holmpadryk insule" are the Skerries off Skerries, onme of which is St Patrick's Island, and the others are obviously enough Lambay, Ireland's Eye and Howth (which was probably a peninsula rather than an island at that point).

Continuing south, we have Dublin itself, Bray Head, Kildare, Leighlin, Wicklow, Arklow, [New] Ross, and – one last puzzle – "Blascarryk".

Lafreri Ireland S

I'm going to confusingly go right to left here, west to east, but it's consistent with going clockwise round the island.

In County Wexford, the town itself escapes notice but I'm pretty sure that "Fodirt" is Fethard. "Suirus" is the mislabelled River Suir, and Kilkenny, Thomastown, Waterford and Dungarvan are pretty clear.

The towns on the real (as opposed to mislabelled) Suir are a bit confused – "Charigeu" must be Carrick-onSuir, "Clemel" Clonmel, "Carrick" actually Cahir, and "Cassel" Cashel.

After the relatively clear nomenclature of the east coast, we are back in the wilds from Cork on. "Balycotyn", anyone? "Enchilford"? I can see at least Baltimore, Cape Clear, Berehaven, Dingle and the Blaskets, but my Munster geography is not all that great. Swinging back north again we have Limerick, Galway and, far inland, Athlone.

Lafreri Ireland W

Finally, the Wild West. (And let's bear in mind that this area is north of Galway and south of Donegal). There are ten place names on this part of the map, and the only one I can identify is the somewhat misplaced Armagh. Can you do any better?

The lesson here, of course, is not to sneer at the heroic efforts of early modern cartographers to put names to places they (and most of their customers) would never visit, but to consider how the perception of Ireland's geography has changed over the centuries. For a 16th-century merchant of Rome, a vague sense of the relative dispositions of Ardglass, Dundalk, Dublin and Dungarvan was much more important than knowing whether Sligo was north of Donegal or vice versa. Today we think we have nice objective measures to tell us where we ought to be. But are we missing some of the human dimension that Lafreri, perhaps unintentionally, captured half a millennium ago?

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Two museums: Mercator and Lascaux

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We managed a couple of excursions last weekend and this, to a couple of new arrivals on the Belgian museum scene.

Last weekend we went to the new Mercator museum at Sint-Niklaas near Antwerp, arriving on the day after it had reopened after a complete reconstruction. Gerardus Mercator was actually German, by most modern measures, and why exactly Sint-Niklaas (a town near Antwerp, and nearish to his birthplace, which otherwise boasts the largest market square in Belgium, and perhaps in Europe) had claimed him was not made clear. But the museum itself is a very decent presentation of the history of cartography from ancient times to the present day, concentrating on Mercator who gave us both the famous projection and the word "atlas"; you can play with electronic copies of his sixteenth century maps and admire the sincere craftsmanship that he brought to it. There are lots of gorgeous artefacts, real and replica, and nicely produced video interviews with actors playing Mercator himself and various other contemporaries such as John Dee (msteriously all speaking fluent modern Dutch with mild Flemish accents). Underplayed but present is the importance of cartography in the European colonial effort, just getting going in Mercator's lifetime (1512-1594). The biggest drawback to the museum – and it is fairly significant – is that absolutely everything is in Dutch. However, they had opened literally the previous day, and perhaps they plan to cater for non-nederlandstalig visitors in due course.

Yesterday F and I went to the Cinquantenaire Museum in Brussels, where they have on show the travelling replica of the Lascaux caves, complete with paintings. It's quite a small exhibit, and on the second Saturday after it opened it was pretty crowded, but if one can tune out the other people in the room it is really quite incredible – the artists descended into the caves, in the dark, 17,000 years ago to create amazing art – for what audience? Not for us their descendants of hundreds of generations later. And they were better artists than, frankly, I am; so how did they get that way? I did pathetic watercolour daubs at school, and pencil scribbles on pieces of paper, before giving up on my ability to draw; what on earth were the Upper Palæolithic equivalents? The bison and horses and aurochs and stags are not drafts or journeyman pieces, but finished compositions. There was a whole tradition of visual culture there, of which a few hundred cave paintings are the only surviving evidence. It's as if one tried to work out what was going on the sixties and seventies using only Doctor Who. I left with a lot more questions than I had had going in, and the pious intention of going back some weekday before it closes in March, if I can afford to take an extended lunch break from work. (I confess I didn't actually check whether the audioguide is available in English as wel as French and Dutch, but I'd be quite surprised if it isn't.)

Anyway, both strongly recommended, though perhaps non-speakers of Dutch should wait for the Mercator museum to broaden its outreach a bit.

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November Books 6) Lungbarrow, by Marc Platt

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I first read this way way back in the month that David Tennant took over, December 2005; it was only the third original Who book I had read after New Who began, and the only the second of the Seventh Doctor New Adventures – and I think I had seen precisely one Seventh Doctor TV story all the way through, and didn't much like it. Now, almost nine years on, I have seen all of the Seventh Doctor stories at least twice, read all 59 of the preceding New Adventures, and perhaps equally importantly listened to the Big Finish series of Gallifrey audio plays which take the Leela/Romana relationship which starts here – heck, I've even had my picture taken with Sylvester McCoy – and I have a much better sense of Lungbarrow as the capstone to one set of stories, and the foundation of another.

I have warmed to it (rather more than, say, Phil Sandifer). It's still a bit weird – the new information about how Time Lords come into being, by being “woven” on Looms, did not survive into other strands of continuity, and the Doctor’s relatives here (other than Susan) were never seen again. But the book does what it has to do in winding up six years of stories (longer than any TV Doctor’s reign bar Tom B) and tying the TV Movie (retrospectively) into the Virgin story arc.

I said in my previous review that I loved the scenery, and I loved it even more this time, the Doctor’s home of Lungbarrow being pretty obviously Gormenghast on Gallifrey, and the internal struggles between President Romana and the other power centres in the Capitol suitably obscure and yet comprehensible. This time around, I very much appreciated the notion of Leela and Andred lifting the curse on Gallifrey, which obviously was lost on me previously when I had not read Cat’s Cradle: Time’s Crucible, and of course having now followed Chris Cwej through 21 previous books, rather than coming to him completely fresh, I appreciated what Platt did with him much more.

I read the version that was downloadable until 2010 from the BBC website, which has apparently some quite major surgery to the original text and also a decent set of notes by Platt on the process of composition and of where he drew his ideas from. He also has thoughts on Who as a whole, including this lovely tribute to another of its great writers:

Apart from Runcible, Unstoffe, Glitz and Dibber, I love periphery characters like Nellie Gussett and the wonderful denizens of Megropolis 3, Singe and Hackett. [Robert] Holmes was truly great at bringing his locations and characters to life with bizarre language, quirky personal details and references to unseen events, people and places. He could create whole worlds in a couple of sentences and had a gloriously evil sense of humour.

Time permitting I’ll do a longer post on the Virgin New Adventures as a whole, but it may wait until after I have re=read The Dying Days next month.

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Links I found interesting for 23-11-2014

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November Books 5) Rules, by Cynthia Lord

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A decent and humane American YA novel about a teenager whose younger brother is autistic; she develops friendships both with the boy in the wheelchair who is a fellow client of her brother’s therapist, and with the new neighbour’s daughter; and the two friendships compete, though as it turns out mostly in her mind. More about growing up than anything, but in a real world where real people are dealing with real disabilities.

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