Brian Clegg's Blog, page 102

Nerd vision

Last night saw me at Swindon's Art Centre for a performance by Festival of the Spoken Nerd in their Full Frontal Nerdity tour. I mean, I was told there would be entertaining spreadsheets: how could I resist?

It was great to see an audience of 150 or so really getting into maths and science with an edge - and no doubt the nerds could tell you the edge's exact angle. The trio of Matt Parker, Helen Arney and Steve Mould work well together in a combination of science demos, wryly humorous scientific songs, banter and what was alleged to be maths, although it turned out to be primarily technology, fluid dynamics (physics) and computer science. But there were truly amazing spreadsheets!
Probably most impressive was the physics demos (I would say that) from the amazing electrified pickle to the revelation of the non-existent colour, but the whole was supported by well-scripted chat from all three. Even old chestnuts like breaking a glass with an amplified voice (achieved despite the technology coming over all prima donna) and Conway's Game of Life came alive with the FOTSN touch.

All three proved entertaining performers with a great balance of laughs (often reliant on a little geeky knowledge) and genuine enthusiasm for science. They kept the audience with them all the way and spread the word for nerddom.

I was surprised by the range of the audience - I expected mostly twenty-somethings, and they were certainly well represented and the noisiest, but there were plenty of oldies there too. No children, which is worth emphasising as a recommendation, both because there's what you might primly call 'inappropriate language' and because health and safety is gloriously and explicitly abandoned at the beginning of the gig - and there are couple of things here you definitely don't want kids trying at home.

For the rest of us, though, a great night - and there are plenty of opportunities to see them around the UK through to April. Take a look at the website for venues and bookings, but hurry, as some have sold out already.

Dual flushed away

One of our dual flush controls, earlierNow here's the thing. Any modernish toilet in the UK is obliged to be dual flush. The idea is that, should you not want a great deluge of water, then you can opt for a lightweight flush, thereby reducing your water consumption, saving the whale and generally being ecologically friendly and getting a gold star. And I have nothing against that. But as someone who has always taken a great interest in user interface design, the design of most dual flush controls is downright useless.

Take, for example, the dual flush control illustrated, on one of our toilets (yes, we have more than one - aren't we des res?). Clearly there is a big friendly button and a smaller rectangular bit. My guess is that pressing the big button without the rectangular bit is a small flush, but pressing it with the rectangular bit is a large flush. But it is a guess, because there is nothing about the controls that indicates what they do. There's no reason why, for instance, pressing both shouldn't mean 'special economy flush'.

It's also a guess because, frankly, there is no obvious distinction to the amount of water that flows whether you press just the big button or both of them. In fact I sometimes suspect toilet manufacturers don't fit dual flush at all - they just fit dual buttons and hope no one notices that they don't do anything different.

Failing to make controls obvious is a common enough design fault. Think, for instance, of the controls of a four burner cooker hob. Usually the hob is arranged with the burners in a rectangular array, but nine out of ten times, the controls are in a nice straight line. Because the designer thought it looked neat. But this means it is impossible to deduce which control is for which burner - and the manufacturer accordingly has to give us an instruction book, in the form of little graphics we have to check to see which control does what. If they had put the controls in a rectangle too, there would be no need for instructions.

In the case of dual flush, the design is doubly disastrous, because not only is not obvious what to do, there usually isn't even a graphic to instruction you what the controls mean. It's guesswork all the way. It's easy enough to design a triple flush with no instructions. You have a big button split in half unevenly. The small part does a small flush, the big part does a big flush and pressing the whole does a royal flush. It's a little harder to design a dual flush control that is obvious from the shape of the control on its own, though I believe it is possible, but simply engraving a + on the square button (if that's what it means) would at least bring the flush control up to the level of a cooker.

Come on, sanitary ware gurus. Get your fingers out.

The Flat Iron experience - anything but flat

I recently had the pleasure of having a meal up in London with one of my daughters. Until recently the default fare would have been something like T. G. I. Friday's, and being a sucker for US food, however chainified, I wouldn't have complained. But as my offspring are now adult(ish) and sophisticated, it was suggested that we try a trendy London restaurant.

Of itself, this was a bit worrying, as trendy usually means expensive, but I was assured that in the case the main courses come in at a wallet comforting £10 a head. So my only remaining concern was a review I read, which said that the writer was the only person in the place over 30. This turned out to be approximately true for me too, but as it happened it didn't matter and I had a great meal.

The venue is Flat Iron, in Beak Street, just off Regent Street, where you'd expect to pay tourist prices. But this is an ex-popup restaurant with rather original ideas of how to behave. It's no booking, which is actually an advantage if you are prepared to eat at an off-peak time. I've heard of people waiting 2 hours for a table in the evening, but we turned up 5 and were seated straight away (it was getting quite busy by 6).

Said seating is on shared tables, most of six, though there was at least one four. The gimmick, if you want to call it that, is that the menu only has one main plus a special. The main is a flat iron steak, not one of the more expensive cuts, but tasty and a bargain at £10. I went for the special, which is sometimes a different cut of steak (this isn't a place for veggies), but on our day was an excellent burger, with plenty of shallots and a béarnaise sauce.

The main - flat iron steakThe main comes with a tiny dressed salad, and there are optional sides of chips and a couple of veg - and that's about it. But it really was good, and came in with drinks at around £20 a head. Oh and there's a nice little pot of seasoned popcorn while you are waiting for the food.

The place has a good feel to it too, very friendly staff, and a dinky oddity of providing a small meat cleaver instead of a knife.

I rarely bother to write up restaurants, but this was both different enough, and likely to put me off if I hadn't been forced to go, that I think it's worth a mention - and worth a try.

Unplug and unwind

For anyone who has missed my posts since last Thursday - apologies, but I have had a glorious unplugged weekend. We had a short break in our favourite rental holiday cottage, which amongst its best features includes no mobile phone reception and no internet. When we first went to it about 17 years ago it also had no TV aerial. There was a TV, but you could only watch DVDs - but now it's all hi-tech and TV is available.

Does this mean it offers lots of activities instead? Yes and no. If by activities you mean going for a walk or... going for a walk, then, yes it does. Oh, and Saturday and Sunday you can have a cream tea, should you desire it, in the cafe which is handily but not obtrusively attached to the cottage. Anything else you would have to drive to get to, and we didn't use our car all long weekend.

This might sound like hell in our zappy, connected world - but it really isn't. It is glorious. We did watch a bit of TV and read a newspaper (at the cost of a mile walk to the nearest shop), but mostly it really was a case that being detached from the world for a few days was brilliant. Seeing 'No Service' on the phone was not an irritation, it was a joy.

I admit this would only work with the right location - but there's a reason this is our favourite holiday cottage. This is the view from our bedroom window in the morning.


I usually have mixed feelings about liking houses based on the view. We currently have no view, where our last house had superb vistas. And I really don't care. Once you've looked at the view and gone 'Wow!' for the first 30 seconds, the excitement wears off and you hardly ever look at it. But the thing about looking out on the sea is that something is always happening. It's a view with action, whether it's the sea itself, or the boats or the beach activity - mostly dog walkers and mad surfers at this time of year. It's great.

With a view like this, only the words quoted so often by Wellington in that great cartoon strip, the Perishers can suffice: 'What is life, if full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?'

Randi devil

In my book, Extra Sensory , I describe how the magician James Randi reproduced a trick that Uri Geller did on the Barbara Walters show in the US.

The source I had, involved Randi carefully not telling us how he did the trick, so in the book I speculate how he might have done it. In the trick, Walters draws a picture and seals it up. Randi concentrates, then appears to draw on a pad, then puts his pen down. Walters opens up her envelope and shows it to the camera. Randi then, almost immediately shows a similar drawing. Here's what I said:

What we see when watching the show is Randi apparently drawing his copy of the picture on a pad using a ball pen, before Walters reveals her picture. It is possible, even using the technique I’m going to suggest, that Randi did do a little drawing at that point in the proceedings – if so, what he produced was probably a basic box, which he could adapt later for whatever was needed. It’s equally possible that he didn’t draw anything, but merely moved the pen to make it look as if he was putting something on paper. 

When Walters shows her picture to the camera, and all eyes are on the image, Randi is holding his pad in front of him, with the writing surface facing towards his body. He isn’t holding the pen, so he can’t be drawing anything, right? Except there is an old magician’s trick of fixing a pencil lead under the fingernail, and using that to draw something unseen, concealed behind the pad. The same thing can be done with the end cut off a ball pen refill. What you get, in effect, is a finger end that draws like a pen. 

This is, I’m convinced, is how Randi performed the trick, adding in details to the image while Walters was displaying her picture to the camera. He couldn’t look at his own picture much as he did so or it would have given the game away – and this would explain why his stick figure ended up on top of (or as he put it “in”) the house rather than alongside it. The clues that Randi may have given when he described what happened are that he made a big thing at the time of adding the sun to make the picture more like the original – emphasizing, perhaps how he worked by adding drawings after the event – and also he would later stress in a video where he discusses the event, that he used a ball pen where Geller used a big marker pen which would be harder to duplicate with this technique (in fact, Geller drew his image in plain sight, so couldn’t use this technique).

Take a look and see what you think.


Yesterday, though, I received an email from an Italian reader. Apparently Randi had admitted on Italian TV how he did this, and it wasn't with a fingertip pen. It seems he used his belt buckle - and certainly, just before the camera pulls away from Randi and onto Walters showing her image, his pad is moving very close to his belt. Even if it wasn't prepared, some metals will leave a coloured marking on paper, and I'm guessing that this is what my Italian correspondent (himself suitably magically mysterious) was suggesting.

London blinkers

Media City, Salford -
where Londoners can't be bothered to comeWhen I lived in Manchester, the general feeling was that the local news spent far too much time on those scouser scallywags in Liverpool. However, something I think both Manchester and Liverpool could then and can now come together in agreement on is that institutions in general in the UK are far too London-centric.

I hear it time and again - the London-based chattering classes use London as a picture of what the UK is like - and yet, inevitably, the English capital is entirely different from the vast majority of the country. They assume we all have an excellent public transport system and a chi-chi smoothie shop on every corner. They assume what they experience is Britain. But it's not.

Even when an organisation tries to do something about it, there are difficulties in making it work. When I went to Media City in Salford to record University Challenge I thought it was wonderful - and yet I hear that there are difficulties getting people to go there to be interviewed, so it wouldn't be surprising if at least part of the BBC section moves back down to London when the lease is up for renewal.

The thing that set me off on this minor rant was some self-opinionated person on the Today programme this morning. He was talking about how disappointing the lack of black and Asian people in film and broadcasting is. And he was right - his message was spot on. And then he spoiled the whole thing for everyone outside London by comparing the ethnic makeup of people working in the offices in the BBC with the ethnic makeup of London. Assuming, as his type always does, that London is the UK. I'm sorry, it's not the London Broadcasting Corporation. That first word is British, and any comparison should be against British statistics not London ones.

So, please, broadcasters at least, make an effort. When you want to do a vox pop or visit a school, go somewhere other than a London suburb. When you think of what the country is like, don't just think of London. Don't get me wrong - I love London. But it's hard to imagine anywhere less typical of the UK.

You say causation, I say correlation... let's call the whole thing off

Thanks to the excellent Rosy Thornton for pointing out this piece in the Guardian blogs, suggesting that we should 'make sure the next book we read is by a woman.' I find this offensive and I suspect behind the rhetoric is my favourite bugbear, a confusion of correlation and causality.

I would suggest that the vast majority of people do not choose their books based on the gender of the author, even subconsciously. Instead, most of us read books in a genre or genres that we like (and there's nothing wrong with that, though I always encourage people to experiment and take a tiptoe out of their habitual genres).

Here comes the correlation bit. In quite a few genres, one sex of author dominates. I happen to read mostly popular science and science fiction, which have a preponderance of male authors. If instead I happened to enjoy reading fiction the genre that is usually labelled 'chick-lit' (though I think the term is going out of fashion), I suspect I would be reading books where most authors are female - but I don't. In fact a genre I read less frequently, but do read occasionally, is crime, and there female authors do dominate my reading. If you look on my shelves for crime books*, you will find titles by Margery Allingham, P. D. James, Ngaio Marsh, Susan Hill, Ruth Rendell and Elizabeth George hugely dominating those by Colin Dexter and Jonathan Gash, who are the only male crime writers I own books by.

Now I don't think there is anything sinister in the predominance of male writers in science fiction or women writers in crime. It isn't some conspiracy by the publishers - it's quite simply that more men choose to write science fiction and more women choose to write crime. In both cases there are plenty of exceptions, but I'm just talking about the overall picture. So if I, as a man, have chosen to read more books by men (and I think that is true), it is due to an incidental correlation of the sex of the author with the genre they write in, rather than a causal connection between the authors' gender and my decision to read their books.

I think to suggest that we should consciously decide to read a book by a woman is a terrible approach - because we should never be choosing books on the gender of the author (surely the whole point of this business), yet that is exactly what we are being asked to do. I suspect if there was a better understanding of the difference between correlation and causality in the literary world this wouldn't be an issue.

* If anyone thinks this is unrepresentative as a sample of modern crime authors, I only really read the sub-genre of 'traditional English crime'.

Chemical conundrum

A (relatively harmless) ingredients list, earlierAnyone with the faintest sympathy for science winces when a friend announces that they are 'Fed up of food that is full of chemicals' or 'Only buying organic food, as it's the only way to get food that is 100% chemical free.' As I'm sure we're all aware, everything we eat (and most things we don't) is totally and entirely made up of chemicals. However, when you look at the ingredients list of processed food at the supermarket, it's easy to see why people are concerned.

Take this product, which you can find in any major UK supermarket:

Aqua 84%, sugars 10% (of which fructose 48%, glucose 40%, sucrose 2%), fibre 2.4% (E460, E461, E462, E464, E466, E467), amino acids (glutamic acid 23%, aspartic acid 18%, leucine 17%, arginine 8%, alanine 4%, valine 4%, glycine 4%, proline 4%, isoleucine 4%, serine 4%, threonine 3%, phenylalanine 2%, lysine 2%, methionine 2%, tyrosine 1%, histidine 1%, cysteine 1%, tryptophan lt 1%), fatty acids lt 1% (linoleic acid 30%, linolenic acid 19%, oleic acid 18%, palmitic acid 6%, stearic acid 2%, palmitoleic acid lt 1%), ash lt 1%, phytosterols, oxalic acid, E300, E306, thiamine, colours (E163a, E163b, E163e, E163f, E160), flavours (ethyl ethanoate, 4-methyl butyraldehyde, 2-methyl butyraldehyde, pentanal, methylbutyrate, octene, hexanal, styrene, nonane, non-1-ene, linalool, citral, benzaldehyde, butylated hydroxytoluene (E321), methylparaben, E1510, E300, E440, E421, aeris (E941, E948, E290)

Scary, isn't it? To start with this stuff is 94% sugar water (quite similar to Coca Cola which is also approximately 10% sugar). It also contains a range of toxins and carcinogens. Then there are all those colours and flavours - surely unnecessary? And there are enough E numbers in there to make the average hyperactive child bounce of the walls. It probably ought to be banned.

What makes this contents list interesting, though, is that it isn't some artificial rubbish - it is a blueberry. Not vaguely blueberry flavoured gunk, an actual blueberry fruit, that most beloved of the superfruits amongst the healtherati.

I think there are number of lessons here. Fruit is primarily sugar water, and as such should be consumed in moderation. There are good things in there, but you don't want too much of that sugar. The trouble with 'five a day' as a concept is that it doesn't distinguish between fruit and veg. Of those five at least three and arguably four should be veg.

Secondly, practically every food contains poisons and carcinogens. Many edible plants, for instance, contain vicious natural pesticides that are harmful to humans too. But they are in such small quantities that they have no noticeable effect. Poison is always a matter of dosage.

And finally, for the E-number obsessed, remember that many natural and/or harmless substance have E numbers, as the blueberry kindly demonstrates. Note the last item for instance. Ingredients listers (is there such a trade?), especially those in cosmetics, like to call water 'aqua' to make it sound more impressive. So I have done the same with the last item, which is just air. Simply putting it in Latin makes it aer, which is a bit too close to English, so I've taken the liberty of making it 'of air' to sound more impressive. And look - good fresh air contains E numbers.

Of course I'm not saying every item in a ingredients list is harmless in the quantities used. However, the fact that we don't provide contents list for fruit and veg does make other foods seem unfairly nasty and unnatural, and I think it is valuable to see how much this can be an illusion.

This has been a green heretic production

Data courtesy of Graham Steel who passed it on from James Kennedy.

Nice one, Stanley

For Christmas I was given a Blu-ray of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. I quite often refer to this film in my books, usually to point out the dangers of making extrapolations based on the present, but it's the first time I've actually watched it properly since seeing in Cinerama in 1968, and I have to say that one segment absolutely blew me away.

Effectively, it's a film in four parts. There's the first 'dawn of man' segment, which these days looks rather hokey, a second section on a space station and the Moon, the third on Discovery's voyage to Jupiter and the fourth the weird bit through the stargate that no one really understand.

The part I've usually criticised is the second. Here, for instance, we see space shuttles operated by Pan Am (remember them?) and a Bell Telephone operated video phone with large screen live video - but no mobile phones. However I had forgotten just how great the third segment is.

This is the part with the infamous HAL 9000 speaking computer who becomes murderous (giving us the film's catchphrase line: 'Open the pod-bay doors, Hal.' Of course, once more the tech extrapolation is way off. Here we have a pretty well sentient computer built in the 1990s and the ability to send a manned mission to Jupiter in 2001. If only. (For IT history buffs, by the way, it struck me for the first time that when Dave takes out Hal's circuits to 'kill' him there is an interesting reversed parallel with the old IBM 'golden screwdriver' trick, but that's a different story.) However, there were three aspects of this segment that were stunning.

First was the silence. Kubrick made the brave decision to play it how it really is, so whenever we see action out in space, it is completely silent. When it's from the viewpoint of someone in a spacesuit, you hear their breathing, but in the 'outside' shots it is dead, eerily silent. This is particularly effective when Dave has to enter the ship without a helmet and is blasted into the airlock by the outrush of air from the pod. Wonderful - and really shows up pretty well every movie since.

Second is the quality of the visuals. As we watch the Discovery float past a star field it's easy to be blasé, because we have seen it all so many times with CGI. But what you have to remember is that this was 1968. There was no CGI - or anything even comparable in looks. This was the original and it still looks stunning. Much kudos to Kubrick, Douglas Trumball and the rest of the special effects people.

Finally there was the interior environment. It would be impossible to send a mission to Jupiter without using some sort of rotating environment to provide artificial gravity - and there it is in all its glory. (Admittedly, I think the diameter is too small to avoid motion sickness, but that's being picky.) And boy does Kubrick use it. His main interior set is basically a circular strip that the two main characters walk around the inside of. Wherever their feet are, is down. So you will see them walk to what was, effectively, the ceiling to sit in a chair - all looking perfectly natural. It is a work of genius.

The shame is, I don't think many young sci-fi movie buffs would have the patience to sit through it, because it is glacially slow. In 1968 these visuals were so jaw-dropping you could happily spend 5 minutes just watching a spaceship passing - but it is agonisingly slow now. Bring yourself to get past that, though, and you can only marvel at the wonders of this film.

Image from Wikipedia

My name is Big Brother, but you can call me Big

 Science, on the whole, is morally neutral. It can be used for good or evil. The same goes for many technologies, which is why you will sometimes find a new piece of technology that can engage a really uncomfortable bit of mental discomfort when on the one hand it is extremely attractive - I want it, and I want it now - yet on the other hand it has really scary and potentially nasty implications.

Just such a piece of technology is NameTag, one of the products of Facial Network. First working on Google Glass, the search company's ubergeek specs, NameTag can also be expected soonish as an app for your favourite phone.
What Name Tag does is spot people in the camera's visual field and tries to identify them - from social networks, online stuff and a database of criminal history. So, you just look at someone (or look at them through your phone if you aren't a Glassnerd) and you find out who they are, (assuming it works) not to mention if they are registered as not very nice. 
As I say, I can think of all kinds of good reasons why I want this. I'm rubbish at putting names to faces, and having a little prompt that reminds who people at a meeting are would be great. And just walking through the streets, identifying people would give a wonderful sense of omniscience. And as the makers point out:

“I believe that this will make online dating and offline social interactions much safer and give us a far better understanding of the people around us,” said NameTag’s creator Kevin Alan Tussy. “It’s much easier to meet interesting new people when we can simply look at someone, see their Facebook, review their LinkedIn page or maybe even see their dating site profile. Often we were interacting with people blindly or not interacting at all. NameTag on Google Glass can change all that.”

However, you don't have to be paranoid to see all sorts of negative possible uses of this technology. While you can register as not wanting to be identified, it has the potential not only for invasion of privacy, but sinister manipulation of knowledge about an apparent stranger. Apparently Google is not currently supporting facial recognition on Glass, and it really isn't surprising.

So there we have it. The technology will exist. It will inevitably be used by some, whether or not it is made commercially available. Do we take the 'bad people will find a way to use it anyway, so we might as well all have it' approach, or the 'this feels wrong, let's ban it on principle' approach? It really is disturbing, because I absolutely understand the negatives... but I'd still like to have it myself.

O tempora, O mores.

See it in action: