Brian Clegg's Blog, page 103

Finders keepers?

A 2p piece on the pavement (photo has been blurred
in case someone recognises it and says 'it's mine')There are various bits of path I quite often cover on my daily dog walks, and I've noticed a 2p piece on the pavement now for several days. This got me thinking. Clearly a lot of people (me included) couldn't be bothered to pick up 2p. So what is the minimum we'd go for? And what if it were a lot of money? What would be the maximum you would pocket, rather than hand in?

After a very unscientific Twitter/Facebook poll, it was interesting to see quite a few people would pick up any coin (some because picking up a penny is lucky), though others wouldn't bend over for less than a quarter (25¢), or 50p. Personally I think my minimum is 5p financially, but I might leave it because they're just too small and fiddly, making my actual minimum 10p. Others pointed out the condition of the coin mattered - they would only pick a coin up below a certain value if it was 'clean' (I'm not quite sure how anything on the pavement is going to be clean, but I know what they mean).

The large sum aspect generated a more varied response, though quite a few would set a break point around £50-£100/$100. One obvious factor here is where the note(s) were found. If it is on an anonymous bit of pavement, most would quite reasonably be less likely to hand it in than if it's somewhere with an obvious location to do so, like in a shop or outside a bank.

Personally, the lowest I've tried to hand in was £5, which I found in a basket in Tesco - but they didn't want me to hand it in, because it was too much trouble for them to fill in the forms for that amount. I've also handed in £100 which, rather amazingly, I found just sitting in the dispenser of a cash machine at a shopping mall. Someone had made the transaction, taken their card, then walked away leaving a wedge of cash.  As it happens, honesty had its reward here, as it wasn't claimed, so the mall gave it to me, meaning I could keep it without feeling guilty.

Some clearly do feel guilty, though, and mentioned giving the found money to charity instead. I can sort of see the logic of this, though if it's not practical to return it to its owner, I don't see any great onus on the finder to give the money away. I certainly never asked one of my daughters to do this when she used to regular harvest lost notes at Center Parcs. At the end of the rapids outside the swimming pool is a big plunge pool. She used to swim down to the bottom where several times she found notes on the extractor grating. I think it's fair that she kept the money a) because she went to the effort to retrieve it and b) because anyone foolish enough to go round a water rapids with banknotes in their swimwear pocket deserves to lose it.

I'm sure, if it hasn't been done already, there's a nice psychology PhD in the whole business of how we do or don't pick up lost money, what we do with it, and how it makes us feel. I suspect we are much more likely to keep cash than something more concrete - a piece of clothing, say, or a wallet - even if there is still no way to identify the owner. It's almost as if cash is so abstract and transactional that it doesn't really belong to the individual, they just borrow it, so once it is in the public domain it is up for grabs.

Whatever - it makes you think, which can't be bad.

Tax is always taxing

There has been a minor explosion of outrage in the knee-jerk political twitter/Facebooksphere telling us that David Cameron's advisor has suggested getting rid of income tax and putting VAT up to 33%. Most of this response seems to be to red top tabloid articles, which we should know better than to rely on, rather than the original blog post from Paul Kirby, so it's worth reading that (rather long and tedious though it is) first.
One thing that is worth emphasising, as the headlines got it wrong, is that Kirby is not 'Cameron's advisor', he is Cameron's former advisor - and to be honest, if he still was an advisor I imagine he'd be given the push for this, as it's political suicide and I am sure Cameron wouldn't touch it with the proverbial bargepole.
Let's see what Kirby's arguments are first. Yes, I know we can immediately see what's wrong with the idea - but the thing I've learned with looking at green issues is that you mustn't have a knee-jerk reaction to keywords, you have to check the substance first, and the same goes for all politics.
Kirby suggests that if we kept all our salaries then we would be in control, deciding what to spend, what to do with it. This is true as far as it goes. Getting rid of income tax with no other change in taxation would be a good thing for us all, if there was some magic way to fund necessary spending without it coming out of our pockets. Cloud cuckoo stuff, yes, but it's an acceptable point. After all, one great thing the Liberal Democrats have done in the coalition is to push through the increase in the point at which income tax cuts in to £10,000. (I know it's fashionable to criticise the LibDems for not doing everything in their election pledges, but that is ridiculously naive. You can't do everything you want in a coalition, and I think the LibDems have done reasonably well under the circumstances.) Not paying income tax is actually a good thing, but you have to go about it the right way. In fact I think we should go a step further and introduce negative income tax for the first chunk of earnings - so the government pays you for every pound you earn up to a certain point - but that's a different debate.
Kirby then suggest replacing the lost revenue by removing all VAT exemptions and putting the VAT rate up to 33%. I have to take his figures as correct that this would balance out the loss from income tax. But does it make sense?
He says that it would encourage people to save more, and would give them more choice over what they did with their money. He does also acknowledge that it would hit those on lower incomes harder (something the second hand reports tend not to carry), and says that to compensate we would have to increase benefits.
But look what the implications are. By removing exemptions there would be just as heavy taxation on essentials as on non-essentials. You can argue that the current exemption system is far too complicated - it is - and has all those silly loopholes - like the 'is a jaffa cake a cake or a biscuit?' argument - it does. But there are very good reasons for having exemptions and Kirby makes no attempt to counter those arguments. A more sensible version of his scheme would keep the exemptions but push up the VAT on luxuries even more.
What he doesn't do, though, is consider the impact on UK business. There's a good reason that businesses are uniformly in favour of reducing (or even getting rid of) VAT, rather than income tax. VAT turns businesses into tax collectors, adding significantly to their administration costs, and it makes their goods less attractive. Ramp up VAT significantly and, yes, people will save more. But they will also stop buying things. And lots of businesses will go bust. Meaning more unemployment. And more benefit payments. Doesn't seem awfully sensible to me.
Also, of course, he fails to address the elephant in the room, the point we all saw at the start. The lower your income, the harder this will hit you. If you earn £10,000 a year you get no positives but your outgoings shoot up by a vast percentage. It simply doesn't work to say that you can give people on low earnings more benefits to compensate, both because of the way Kirby's brand of politics stigmatises benefits (and would immediately be crying for them to be taken away again) and also because benefits are a poor answer that totally corrupt Kirby's argument that people should be able to do what they want with the money they earn, because benefits aren't earned. We should be trying to minimise the need for benefits, not putting in a system that hugely increases dependence on them. It is absolutely bonkers.
However, I still think we should actually thank Paul Kirby for making us think (those of us who are thinking, rather than knee-jerking about this), because there is no doubt that the current system isn't good enough. He's right - we need more opportunity to decide on what we do with our money. Why not, for instance, cut all income tax for the first £20,000 and rebalance the books further up the earnings scale (or even better by getting a decent cut of tax from all company income)? That would mean we all had a good chunk of money to decide exactly how we spent. There's no doubt the tax system can be improved... if we could ever get a government that had the guts to do it.

The Club Revisited

The Garrick's rather dour exterior hides a gem of a placeA while ago I commented on my visit to the Reform Club in London and how I couldn't really understand the attraction of such places. I now discover I have to rejig my thinking a little. It's still true that most of the traditional functions of a club are easily provided in other (and cheaper) ways. If I want to have a meeting up in town, a coffee shop is fine (and I get wifi). If I want to stay over, Late Rooms will find me a cheap hotel bed. And there are several of the other benefits of the club, such as a library to work in when I've a few hours to spare, or a convivial bar, provided for me by the RSA's London House, which I have access to as a fellow.

However, I confess I was impressed by the charms of the Garrick Club when attending a publisher's function there last week. Despite all that tradition and yes, a certain fustiness, it seemed a lot more of a fun place than the Reform. People were clearly having a good time. Somehow, despite having to wear the dreaded jacket and tie, there was a sense of informality to the formalness. Not to mention being a place where you are almost bound to have the chance to casually not react to a famous actor sitting across the room, or passing on the staircase.

It was interesting when, with two female members of the publisher's staff, I was shown round the place by a member. Although, not surprisingly, the other guests were not happy about the Garrick's current 'no women members' policy (as was our host), their response was not to say 'I wouldn't want to have anything to do with anywhere that is so sexist' but rather 'I hope it changes, because this is a great place.'

So there we have it. Perhaps not a whole hearted conversion on the road to Damascus, but what was once the club for the unclubbable (actors and literary types, beyond the pale, don't you know) has certainly made me realise that London clubs aren't necessarily all bad.

Image from Wikipedia

All skued

Give us back some controls!A New Year request to Apple: give us back some skeuomorphism.

If you aren't familiar with the term, a skeuomorph may sound like a monster on Dr Who, but it's just the use of virtual real world items in a computer program user interface to make it more approachable.

Until recently, Apple went a bit mad on skeuomorphism. You would get, for instance, a calendar app with a background like a sort of leather blotter. This serves no purpose and looks a bit tacky, rather like those early American electronic devices that came in a plastic casing made to look (badly) like wood. But functional skeuomorphism - making an on-screen control look like a button you can press, for instance, is very valuable because it clearly identifies which bits on the screen are active and which aren't.

Take a look at the current iPhone calendar app, pictured alongside. The words 'Wednesday 8 January 2014' are not controls - they are just a label. But the words 'Today   Calendars    Inbox' at the bottom are buttons. If you touch them, they do something. The only distinction is the colour, which isn't enough.

Not only do the words at the bottom just look like labels, rather than controls, there is no indication of the span of the active area. Is that bar divided into three equal segments, or is it just the text that is active? It's not clear.

The fact is, on-screen buttons are just as well established now as real buttons. They aren't really skeuomorphic, they are just very useful. A good visual user interface, which is what Apple aims for, should be so obvious that you never have to ask for help. It should be clear where you touch the screen to do what. And that just isn't the case with this uber-minimalism.

So don't go mad. Don't bring back the visual knickknacks for the sake of it. But for goodness sake give us back decent, functional controls that are obviously that, and not confusable with basic text. It's not difficult to do. And you know it makes sense.

Tread lightly

For Christmas I got a DVD set that took me back to my youth. It was the Granada comedy series The Lovers. I hadn't seen this programme, written by the late, great Jack Rosenthal, since it was first broadcast in 1970/71 and was a little nervous, because at the time I thought it was brilliant. In fact, despite the inevitable ageing, going on the first episode (all I've seen so far) it has in many ways stood the test of time, because it was genuinely unique in style and approach.

The show features Geoffrey and Beryl, who have just got back together after going out a while before. The basic premise sounds tired and dated - Geoffrey wants to have sex, Beryl wants to get married - but the way it is handled makes it far more interesting. After all, it was a new world. As Geoffrey points out, in the trendy 70s 'everyone is at it', so why not?

There are two things that made the series great - and still make it watchable, though not as funny as it once was. The first is the writing. Rosenthal mixes very naturalistic dialogue with strangely poetic lines, delivered in an almost artificial way that make the whole thing feel special. This was clear from the opening, where we see the two main characters (and despite various supports, this really is a two-hander) and hear their thoughts for a good few minutes before anything really happens. There are also some aspects of the writing that were deliciously memorable. Despite a 43 year gap since seeing it, I could remember that Beryl refers to Geoffrey as 'Geoffrey bubbles bonbon', and could also remember one line (approximately) that I am sure is in there, though I am yet to encounter it: 'Everything has an end, Geoffrey, except a [black] pudding, which has two.' It's no surprise that both those examples have a character's name in them: one of those poetic artificialities is that the two leads use names in dialogue far more than is natural.

The second contributory factor was the actors themselves. I have to be honest, at age 15 I was a little in love with Paula Wilcox (if not Beryl) - and she is quite remarkable. She delivers Rosenthal's lines with aplomb, but is out-acted by the remarkable Richard Beckinsale. Because he died so early, Kate Beckinsale's dad only ever acted as young man, but his ability to come across as truly likeable and intelligent (as the characters point out, they did get their O-levels) yet occasionally a little slow to catch on is superb.

If, on my recommendation, you decide to take a look at it, I ought to warn you that there is a truly shocking line in the first episode. Before they get back together, Geoffrey and Beryl are covertly watching each other and thinking about their former boyfriend/girlfriend. At one point in each chain of thought they get so carried away that their thinking is said out loud - when each is standing next to an increasingly shocked woman with two children. Geoffrey's out loud line is horribly unacceptable now. I can't imagine it was brilliant then, though to be fair to Rosenthal, what I think he really would have wanted to write was a more straightforward expression of sexual desire, which would have been unbroadcastable then, but what was written sounds horrendous now. I know they should have known better, but bear in mind that this was broadcast in the heyday of On the Buses. We can't really judge output of the period by today's standards.

Is it dated? Well, of course. The colour is washed out and everything feels a bit Warmington on Sea. But the handling of the difficult dance of courtship is wonderful - as are some of the period observations. At one point, Geoffrey comments (while standing outside Beryl's front door) 'I see your neighbour has BBC2') to which she replies 'Only the aerial.' I had totally forgotten the switch from 405 lines to the higher resolution 625 line broadcasting that came with BBC2 and how it required very visible new aerials. BBC2 also, of course, brought colour - and that was the final surprise, as I originally saw The Lovers in black and white, but now could see it as intended.

Overall, a great trip down memory lane, and a truly innovative series that makes many modern situation comedies look unimaginative and dull. If you want to take a look, it's available on DVD at Amazon.co.uk.

The night of the hamster

The picture in question (I'm bottom right)For my recent appearance on the University Challenge Christmas Special I was asked to provide a picture of myself while at Lancaster University, which has caused some amusement to those who saw the show (they seem surprised by the hair). What wasn't obvious is that this was actually a group photograph of those of us who shared a kitchen in Bowland College, pictured after a birthday celebration.

Looking at it brought back remarkable memories of an excellent year - but also of one of the spookiest moments of my life.

I was in bed, determined to finish a book I was reading that night. (Not because it was a great book, but because I just wanted to get it over with. It might have been Inferno by Niven and Pournelle, but it might not.) It was about 3 am. (What can I say? I was a student. Students do crazy things.) As I read, out of the corner of my eye I caught a movement in my room.

I sat up abruptly. The only illumination was a dim reading light over my head. But I could see nothing out of place. Two pages later, I glimpsed it again. Something white, moving rapidly across the floor. A small, white ball. Could it be a ball lightning? It had gone again. I looked back at the book, but kept a side-view onto the floor. And then it appeared in all its glory. A fluffy white hamster. I had no idea how it got into my room, but I had no intention of letting it stay.

Bearing in mind that it was 3am, it seemed reasonable to try to catch it by putting a carrier bag on the floor with a piece of cheese in it. Remarkably, this also seemed reasonable to the hamster, who casually entered the bag and I scooped it up. So far, so good. But I knew no one with a hamster.

So I went into the kitchen portrayed above, clutching my carrier bag. By now it was about 3.15 am, but there were a couple of people around. (We were students, crazy things, etc. etc.) Remarkably someone knew that my next door neighbour but one, who I didn't know as he used another kitchen, had a hamster. I knocked on his door and reacquainted him with his pet. While not ecstatic at being woken up, he seemed quite pleased to get it back.

Back to my room. I shut my door behind me, grabbed my book, slid into bed, looked down... and there on the floor was the hamster. Again. I checked that door. There was no more than a half inch clearance, while the hamster looked four times that height, but somehow it had followed me back.

This time it let me pick it up by hand. Finally the hamster was returned and placed firmly in its cage. I was worn out. There was no hope of finishing the book. But there was one more memory attached to Bowland College and that (rather tatty) kitchen.

Spin dizzy

I had an interesting tweet the other day from a reader of my book Gravity. Richard Atkinson said: 'reading your gravity book. P3 "the whole thing is rotating" why? If uni started from a single point what made it spin?' It's a thought provoking question.

I ought to start by clarifying the quote. The 'whole thing' I was referring to was the cloud of dust and gas from which the solar system formed, not the whole universe. Whether the universe as a whole is spinning is a whole different question, where the mind struggles to get around the concept of 'spinning with respect to what' given that there may be nothing else. It is possible it does spin (see this article) but we certainly don't know for sure.

But let's get back to the actual quote, about the solar system. What made that spin? Pretty well everything within the universe spins. Overall the angular momentum of the galaxies seem to pretty much cancel out, but for any particular galaxy, as it forms, the slight rotation produced by linear motion combined with gravitational attraction inwards gets magnified as the galaxy condenses (the old 'skater spins faster as (s)he draws her/his arms in' effect). In principle, if all the bits that coalesced to form a galaxy started off still and symmetrical, a galaxy (or solar system) could form without spinning, but in practice there is always movement and asymmetry to start with and the result is to produce a rotation, which then increases with time.

Similarly as the solar system forms, the cloud of gas and dust picks up an increasing spin, which produces the flattened disc shape of both galaxies and solar systems. Yet again, planets spin increasingly quickly as they condense under gravity. The real oddity here is Venus, which rotates in the opposite way to expectation. There is a theory that this could be due to a massive collision, but there is no good evidence for this (other than the spin), so at the moment it is arguably an intriguing mystery.

If you fancy a little mental challenge yourself, you can take a look at Gravity on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.

Evolving statistics

One of the great puzzles for British people is that Americans seem quite like us, mostly because of a shared language and to some degree a shared culture, yet at the same time there are aspects that raise our eyebrows - and never more so than over the attitude to evolution.
Thanks to US legal writer Donna Ballman for pointing out a fascinating survey on public views on human evolution in the US. I just wanted to pull out a few of the figures.
The headline number that is decidedly worrying in what is, after all, the world's leading nation for science and technology is that 33% of adults believe that 'humans existed in present form since beginning' - i.e. they have not evolved over time. But what was really interesting was the way these beliefs varied significantly when put alongside a few other measures.
There is, perhaps not surprisingly, a strong correlation between religious views and attitude to evolution. Unfortunately we aren't told anything except about Christians or 'unaffiliated' - there is nothing about other faiths. But the variation within Christian sects is stark. Where 78% of 'white mainline protestants' are behind evolution (well above the national average), only 27% of 'white evangelical protestants' think evolution had a role in our development. That's pretty shocking. Perhaps less surprisingly, there is also a correlation with education - the more educated the person, the more likely to believe in evolution.
But perhaps the most distressing breakdown is the difference between Republicans and Democrats. Where 67% of Democrats believe we evolved, only 43% of Republicans do. As always with statistics, we have to be careful about confusing causality with correlation. The chances are that it is not the case that being a Republican makes you less like to support evolution, but rather you are more likely to be a Republican if you have certain religious beliefs (for instance). But the reason I label this distressing is that in just 4 years there has been a significant shift in the split. Back in 2009, those percentages were 64% Democrats to 54% Republicans, only a few percentage points off being statistically insignificant. The split is getting stronger and that can't be good.
Interestingly, the Democrat/Republican split is almost exactly the same as the 18-29 versus 65+ split, where 68% of the youngsters are pro-evolution, but only 49% of the oldsters. 
It's not my place to tell US political parties what to think, but surely the Republicans powers-that-be should be worried about the statistic that less than half of their voters think human beings evolved - and that this percentage is dropping. It doesn't bode well for the future of US science under Republican administrations.

A quite interesting year

The 'quite interesting' year I refer to is not a look back at 2013, but a glimpse of the summer of 1927 given to us by Bill Bryson in his latest book. In fact a glimpse is a bit of an understatement as a description of this doorstep of a tome.

As the cover suggest, one of the major themes of the book is the rise to outstanding fame of Charles Lindbergh as a result of his aerial Atlantic crossing. As Bryson surprisingly informs us, this was not actually the first crossing by air but around the 120th. It had certainly been done by plane earlier by Alcock and Brown. But somehow Lindy's flight caught the imagination of the world and he became a superstar.
The rise and fall of Lindbergh occupy a fair amount of the book, but we also meet his competitors and other notables of the period in America from politics to sport (notably baseball and boxing) and bringing in everything from famous murders of the period (through to the details of their electrocution) to the sad disaster that was prohibition and the gangsters who profited from it.
Overall, Bryson's skill is in weaving all this together into an enjoyable tapestry. If I'm honest I much prefer his travel books, where the personal story and humour makes the writing a lot more fun, and I had to skip over the sports sections which I found deadly dull, but despite being about an obscure year in a foreign country it still made for a very readable book that kept the pages turning.
For me, one of the greatest delights of the read was finding out more about Texas Guinan, who features in one of my favourite numbers from the Yale Song Book, George Jones.
You can find out more about One Summer at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk

Prime time

I am indebted to Simon Singh's excellent new book The Simpsons and their Mathematical Secrets, which I recently reviewed, for providing me with what must be the longest trivially memorable prime number at a whopping 31 digits.

Prime numbers are much loved by mathematicians. Of itself this is no great achievement - mathematicians are routinely besotted with numbers that only their parents could love - but primes are genuinely interesting. (For a start, the RSA mechanism that keeps your banking details safe when you buy online depends on them.) You will probably remember from school that primes are the whole positive numbers that are only divisible by themselves and 1 - so they begin 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17...

You may wonder why 1 is not a prime and you would not be alone. In fact it was until a couple of hundred years ago, when mathematicians decided it was too unique (they probably missed the pun) and excluded it. Mathematicians can do this (unlike physicists), as they make up their own rules.

The number revealed in the book is Belphegor's prime, named after one of the princes of Hell, though I think it would be much better called the devilish prime. One thing that helps make it memorable is that it is a palindrome - it reads the same forwards as backwards - but the main (dare I say, the prime) reason it springs to mind so easily is its devilish construction.

Start with the number of the beast, 666 and stick a horribly unlucky 13 zeroes either side. Finally cap it off with bookends of 1 and you get

1000000000000066600000000000001

... a 31 digit prime number that is entrancingly memorable. Thanks, Simon!