Word of the day

Irie – great, fine, all right; pleasing to the senses; powerful; good or excellent quality.

Sowell says

Activism is a way for useless people to feel important, even if the consequences of their activism are counterproductive for those they claim to be helping and damaging to the fabric of society as a whole.

— Thomas Sowell Quotes (@ThomasSowell) May 11, 2024

Woman of the day

The Woman of the Day is Ida Freund :

Woman of the Day chemist and suffragist Ida Freund of Austria died OTD 1914 in Cambridge, the first woman university chemistry lecturer in the UK and the author of two key chemistry textbooks. She devised the periodic table cupcakes. Have you ever heard of those? Not being a chemist, I hadn’t, but they were typical of her innovative and engaging teaching methods.

Ida came to England in 1881 to live with her uncle, her guardian after the loss of her mother and grandparents within a few short years. She had been educated at Vienna State Training College for Teachers but the natural sciences held her interest and she enrolled at Girton the following year. As a girl, Ida had lost a leg in a cycling accident and got about using a prosthetic leg, walking sticks and a self-propelled tricycle wheelchair. It didn’t hold her back.

In 1886 at Cambridge, Ida achieved first class honours in the Natural Sciences Tripos, a demanding course and particularly so for someone who had only school level English. For the Tripos, students cannot study just one discipline but must choose three different areas of natural sciences plus one in mathematics. A BA is awarded after three years.

Not to Ida though. Of course not. Cambridge did not confer degrees on women until 1948. Women were awarded a Certificate of Proficiency instead, which makes it sound as though they’d passed a basic cycling and road safety test.

Perversely, women were not admitted to the University Chemistry Laboratory until they had passed Part 1 of the Tripos, so when Ida followed a laborious women-only route until she was promoted to staff lecturer in chemistry at Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1893 – the first woman appointed as a full lecturer in chemistry in the UK – she was responsible for preparing her women students for this hurdle. Many came up to college with no knowledge of chemistry. In any case, women were barred from the university laboratories (of course they were) and so Ida took a keen interest in improving science teaching in girls’ schools.

She taught extra classes, organised workshops for women science teachers during term breaks, wrote textbooks, experimented with different teaching techniques. Her favoured approach was one in which her students read original research and tested its validity themselves.

Ida’s written English was excellent but she never quite managed to speak it fluently. One of her students said, “Miss Freund was a terror to first year students, with her sharp rebukes for thoughtless mistakes. One grew to love her as time went on, though we laughed at her emphatic and odd use of English. Yet how brave she was, trundling her crippled body about in her invalid chair, smiling, urging, scolding us along to ‘zat goal which is ze Tripos’.”

Her standards were exacting but she liked to introduce an element of surprise in her teaching methods. One of her students recalled, “We were requested to go and make a further study of the ‘Periodic Table of the Elements.’ We found a very large board with the Table set out. The divisions across and down were made with Edinburgh Rock, numbers were made of chocolate, and the elements were iced cakes each showing its name and atomic weight in icing. The nonvalent atoms were round, univalent had a protruding corner, bivalent two, trivalent triangular and so on. We divided it up between us!”

Ida’s onerous teaching duties left her with no time for research – she published only one academic paper – but her 1904 textbook “The Study of Chemical Composition: an account of its method and historical development with illustrative quotations” was regarded as a gamechanger.

“I aimed at giving by means of class teaching not only a common ground of knowledge but also a common standard concerning the nature of scientific proof and the meaning of real accuracy”.

Ida died at just 51. She had been an active campaigner for the admission of women to the Chemical Society and wholeheartedly supported women’s suffrage but didn’t live to see either. Women were not granted the vote until four years after her death and only admitted to membership of the Society in 1920, six years after she died, but she pushed at those doors as hard as any woman could.

If wild animals do this . . .

Wild bison are mitigating carbon emissions:

A herd of 170 bison reintroduced to Romania’s Țarcu mountains could help store CO₂ emissions equivalent to removing almost 2m cars from the road for a year, research has found, demonstrating how the animals help mitigate the worst effects of the climate crisis. . . 

The latest research, which has not been peer-reviewed, used a new model developed by scientists at the Yale School of the Environment and funded by the Global Rewilding Alliance. It calculates the additional amount of atmospheric CO₂ that wildlife species help to capture and store in soils through their interactions within ecosystems. The European bison herd grazing in an area of nearly 50 sq km of grasslands within the wider Țarcu mountains, was found to potentially capture an additional 2m tonnes of carbon a year. That is nearly 9.8 times more than without the bison – although the report authors noted the 9.8 figure could be up to 55% higher or lower, given the uncertainty around the median estimate. This corresponds to the yearly CO₂ emissions of 1.88m average US petrol cars.

Prof Oswald Schmitz of the Yale School of the Environment in Connecticut in the US, who was the lead author of the report, said: “Bison influence grassland and forest ecosystems by grazing grasslands evenly, recycling nutrients to fertilise the soil and all of its life, dispersing seeds to enrich the ecosystem, and compacting the soil to prevent stored carbon from being released. . . 

What’s the difference between the impact of wild bison and free range farmed cattle, deer and sheep?

If wild animals grazing grasslands evenly, recycling nutrients to fertilise soils and compact soil to prevent stored carbon from being released wouldn’t free-range farmed animals do the same?

Could this mean, that New Zealand’s very efficient farming of livestock could be helping to reduce carbon emissions and are an asset to the environment instead of the eco-vandals that we’re told they are?