I’ve been spending some time at the Victoria & Albert Museum recently. Unlike the British Museum, it doesn’t contain items as world famous as the Rosetta Stone or the Elgin Marbles but despite that the collection is huge and I find it equally absorbing. I’ll show you just one piece of contemporary porcelain from Japan. It’s by a woman called Keiko Masumoto who made it only last year, in 2012. It’s surprising to see it in a museum already, but she’s been a so-called Toshiba Ceramics Resident at the V&A and you can see some more of the work she’s made here. This is a 30 x 45 x 26 cm rice-bale bottle, a traditional form with a 500-year history. You’ll see more of them if you look here. I think they originate in Korea, but I should say that I know nothing about them except that the name is intended to mean ‘a bottle in the shape of a rice bale’. Oh, and this one has a beautiful blue-and-silver painted mackerel jumping out of it.
This one below isn’t my photograph, I got it from the artist’s show in a London gallery here, but it’s interesting that it seems to to be able to be tipped to stand vertically – well, it would be able if it weren’t in a glass case in the V&A.
If you click on my pictures, you’ll see more detail.
A Bad Guide 
I noticed just the other day that we have rather a lot of decorative animals scattered about the house. A seagull, a horse, two cats, a mouse, a chicken, a cock, some ducklings and, especially, lots of pigs. Archaeologists would conclude that we were pagan animal-worshipers. But mackerel we reserve for lunch. Anyway, I rather like that piece. Maybe they should sell copies for Christmas.
The Heron is amazing!
That’s impressive, dearie. I feel an urge to compete. What about Alma’s painted eggs of Kant, Descartes & Nietzsche: do they count? We have a hell of a lot of dogs.
Cat, I liked the other ones, I meant to say, but this is the only one I actually saw in the flesh and I admire its quality. It’s beautifully made.
Rene Descartes was a drunken old fart
I forgot the rhino.
Dearie thank you very much for the drinking song. I sang it all yesterday evening while I was drinking. I’m glad to hear you have a rhino. I’ll inherit a turquoise rhino when my mother dies, always assuming someone else hasn’t bagged it.
Now, if you feel like it, take a look at this report about bee deaths. Does it sound right to you? Never mind if you’re busy or it’s too boring, I was just wondering.
http://www.treehugger.com/natural-sciences/scientists-discover-another-cause-bee-deaths-and-its-really-bad-news.html
>A.J.P. Crown
This ban has started today:
http://www.eubusiness.com/news-eu/bees-chemicals.oqv
Thanks, Crown. (i) Environmental scares usually have the characteristic of being bogus. The bee colony collapse, however, is real as far as I know – it’s certainly why I have persuaded my wife not to try bee-keeping, even though we own a nice hive. (Picked up free at the roadside after being thrown out by King’s College.) (ii) As analytical methods get ever more sensitive they can detect ever lower levels of anything you like to mention, which means that it’s often hopeless to compare before-and-after. This study, however, doesn’t seem to be like that – but it’s hard to see exactly what it is like because she doesn’t mention control groups. (iii) The author fails to distinguish fungicides from pesticides; that sort of muddle is never encouraging. Is she just stupid (most journos are) or is she using “pesticide” as a boo word while really meaning fungicide? Dunno. (iv) There’s no mention of any physiology being offered to explain how the fungicides do their damage.
So the story is odd, especially the line “they do not identify the specific cause of CCD”; it seems they’re not claiming to have solved the mystery anyway, but rather to have put up a worrying hypothesis about a potential contributor to it. If they’re right (and Lord knows whether they are) then of course it’s good news because it opens the possibility of doing something about the problem.
The story says CCD “has wiped out an estimated 10 million beehives … over the past six years”. Not bees, but hives. The figure seems not to be a misprint, given this statement that “inn California, the almond industry requires the use of 1.4 million colonies of honey bees, approximately 60 percent of all managed honey bee colonies in the United States.”
That’s one hell of a lot of bees, and only in the USA at that. It’s interesting that the hives are what count, not individual bees. The plot of Bee Movie, in which one teenage bee heroically pulls the rudder around, now seems a bit implausible. Although I grant that he achieved this by organizational talent.
When a natural catastrophe occurs, for instance the recent monsoon in Myanmar, we are always merely told the number of deaths and the amount of property destruction in dollars. Perhaps, by analogy with the bees, a more accurate assessment would include the damage in terms of productive economic units – families, businesses. After all, if X people died and Y amount of property was destroyed, you couldn’t even begin to restore what was lost by importing X individuals and Y items of property at a nominal price of 1 dollar.
… nominal unit price …
This will not help, for instance: X Burmese-speaking football hooligans and Y cheap Chinese teddy bears.
Just in case the drift of my argument is not clear: the amount of time, money, planning and cooperation that will be needed to restore social and economic structures must be much, much larger than is suggested by statements about how many tens of thousands of people have died.
Stu, you need both stories to make any sense of it: both the number of deaths and the economic & social implications. Sadly, not very many people care about either bees or almonds, but most people care about money. You could be right that 10m hives are too many. There are an awful lot more things besides almonds growing in the central valley of California, so I don’t know why they’re only mentioning the almonds. I never eat almonds, only walnuts and they grow in California too. My daughter was just in Paris on a class trip and she brought back a kilo of French walnuts in their shells. They had so much more flavour than the shelled kind.
Jesús, thanks for the ban. I’d ban all pesticides & fungicides, but then I know nothing about it and will never be in a position to ban anything, so it’s easy for me to say.
Dearie, thanks for the analysis. And, yes, I thought the same: any news is good news. It’s really too bad that both the article and the study itself require quality control. Maybe the people doing the study ought to write a blurb that could be copied word-for-word by the nitwit journalists. There are one or two architecture journalists who are both knowledgeable and insightful – Rowan Moore in the Observer is my favourite – and perhaps there are one or two who provide a similar service for science subjects, but I don’t know who they are. George Monbiot is not one of them.
Actually, Crown, you eat pesticides by the figurative bucketload. One of the wonders of evolution is that plant cells all carry their own load of pesticides, long before man found out how to synthesise them. I remind myself of this every time I wash an apple before eating it; the washing might clean off man-made pesticides, but it does nothing about the plant-made ones.
>A.J.P. Crown
We need use pesticides as fertilizers. If not, we wouldn’t be able to feed us and animals. The problem can be that we have to research more about them and their consequences. Sometimes we use an excessive quantity because of ignorance (“the bigger the better”).
What about genetically modified organisms? In my opinion, it’s a similar problem.
Obviously, organic farming is better but I think its success perhaps could be related to small surface used. I mean, usually you have a smallholding surrounded by others where owners are using pesticides; those lands are “insurmountable” barriers to pests.
(I think I got myself into a real jam.)
>Dearieme
As for “pesticide”, I was very surprised you don’t include fungicide into this kind of products. In Spanish, the word “pesticida” is since 1989 (actually an Anglicism) and it’s a hotchpotch.
Jesús, I prefer precision; if she meant fungicide she should have said fungicide. I suspect that most of her readership will assume that pesticide = insecticide, without having a precise idea of which wee beasties are strictly insects and which aren’t, in the eyes of biologists. Anyway, it’s a smallish point compared to the big question viz what were their control groups?
>Dearieme
Thanks. It’s true: I’ve even known veterinary surgeons who said spiders are insects!
As for control groups, it’s clear they are necessary to assert that kind of findings.
Vets do bugger all to help spiders. They’re probably not even on the curriculum.
>A.J.P. Crown
“Vets do bugger* all to help spiders”, including the vulgar Bulgarians, don’t they?
* I’ve just learn this verb (in English, of course).
“Bugger all” is a vulgar expression that means “nothing”.
>A.J.P. Crown
Thanks! I can’t say you do bugger all to teach English to me.