Brian Clegg's Blog, page 11

First Light - A Celebration of Alan Garner - Ed. Erica Wagner ***

I have been a fan of the British fantasy writer Alan Garner since meeting him, age 11. Garner attended the same school as me (significantly earlier), and came to give a talk, not to a huge auditorium but just a classroom of young readers. 

For nearly a decade he brought out books that almost perfectly aged with me in their target audience, from The Weirdstone of Brisingamen to Red Shift (with the last we parted company as I found it too depressing). I was sufficiently fascinated by his books that I made a home movie in the late 70s visiting many of the locations used in them. 

For those who remember the copper mine on Alderley Edge used evocatively in his writing as a dark underground location, a friend and I (probably illegally) explored a bit of it - which is where the photos below come from. In The Weirdstone there is a strange booming noise in the mine, coming from the goblin-like creatures, which meant we did eventually decide to leave in a hurry when we heard a similar sound.

This is all an extremely long lead up to why I couldn't resist buying a copy of First Light when I saw it advertised at a discounted price (it originally came out in 2016). I am probably glad I did, though it was a mixed experience. The book pulls together commentary on Garner's writing, many stories of people meeting up with the Garners, biographical material and even short fiction and poems inspired by Garner (one, oddly by a previous Archbishop of Canterbury).

There were some gems in here, particularly from writers inspired as I was by Garner's early books. I was also fascinated to read about Garner's short time as a running companion to Alan Turing. There is also a lot of repetition from people who admired his writing saying the same kind of thing... and a fair amount of pretentious commentary. Getting through this can make the reader feel something of a Treacle Wader (bad in-joke for Garner fans). All in all, I'm glad I bought it, but I can't imagine I'll ever read it again - though it has stimulated me to re-read those early novels.

Images by the author

You can buy First Light from Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com and Bookshop.org

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Surviving the Bristol bike lane

At the moment I’m commuting to Bristol once a week to do some work at the university on behalf of the Royal Literary Fund. I’m very fond of Bristol as a city, but there times when I wonder if their green policies have been entirely thought through.

When they first introduced rental e-scooters I pointed out that they were sometimes left in hazardous locations - this seems less the case now, though I did come across one recently nearly blocking a pedestrian crossing. But the most dangerous aspect is some of the central bike lanes.

I’m all in favour of getting people out of cars and buses, but I wish there was more focus on walking. This is significantly better for you over a particular time duration than using a bike or e-scooter - but that’s not my point. Inevitably fitting bike lanes into an old city centre can be tricky. And some of them here are downright dangerous. The only time I’ve been nearly killed by a bicycle was someone coming down the steep slope of Park Street in Bristol and transitioning from the bike lane to the pavement at about 30 miles per hour.

Of all the facilities for bike riders, though, the one portrayed above strikes me as particularly dangerous. The bike lane runs through a large stretch of pavement - but it is only distinguished by colour and a change of paving stone. There are no effective tactile warnings that you are entering a bike lane on foot for those with limited sight - and the riders show no care for stray pedestrians who may not even know that the darker bit is a bike line (there are a few faded markings on the ground, but that’s all - no big clear signs). At one point you have to cross the bike lane to continue on the pavement. This is marked (again, only on the ground) to show bikes should give way to pedestrians - but I’ve never seen that happen.

People do get seriously injured and even killed when bikes collide with pedestrians. This needs a re-think.

Image by the author

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The Science Museum goes large

To the south of Swindon, just outside the village of Wroughton (where my daughters went to school) is what's now rather grandly known as the Science and Innovation Park. This huge 540 acre site houses the Science Museum's store facility. It's also home to the museum's amazing library, where I can be seen telling the (then) BBC's Robert Peston about quantum theory - and acted as a track for the TV show Grand Tour before it stopped being a Top Gear lookalike.

Last Tuesday, I was honoured to be invited to the unveiling of the new Hawking Building a massive store housing over 300,000 items from the huge to the tiny. The scale of the building is remarkable - it really does look like one of those CGI, bigger than anything you can really imagine, store houses you see in movies. But this is for real.

Walking round is quite an experience. Unlike a modern, carefully curated museum, this is a wonderful jumble, where you might find a Dalek lurking near a submarine alongside a Glasgow tram. Not to mention a plastic duck used as a model of comet 67P/ Churyumov–Gerasimenko. There is so much to see it's hard to take everything you are seeing (a tiny fraction of the contents). 

Its main reason for existence isn't as an exhibition space. I was talking to one of the curators who said it is transformative for them, as they can locate any one these many thousands of objects extremely quickly - and it's all easily accessible for study or to be moved to a display.

Even though it is primarily a store, it is regularly open to the public on guided tours (see the Park's link above for visit opportunities). This being the case, my one small moan is that it would be good if visitors could, say, use an app to identify what objects are - most aren't labelled other than by catalogue number.

Congratulations to the Science Museum team for getting this amazing structure up and running, and giving more access to the public than ever before.

Images by the author.

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Word of mouth goes global revisited

REVISIT SERIES - 
An edited post from October 2009

Some of the old posts I'm revisiting are merely still interesting (hopefully), but I was surprised to see as far back as 2009 that the impact of social media on the spread of news and views was already clear, even if I perhaps underplayed the negatives. It's also notable as I had totally forgotten about this story in writing my new book,  Brainjacking, out next month, which very much picks up on the way the ability of storytelling to inform, influence and manipulate has been amplified by technology, from writing through to AI.

There has been much comment and complaint in the electronic world as a result of Jan Moir's unpleasant Daily Mail article about the death of Stephen Gately.

What I found most fascinating was how out of touch Moir was in her response to the wave of complaint that surged around the internet like a tsunami. She described this as a 'heavily orchestrated internet campaign.' This shows a magnificent lack of understanding of how word spreads around vehicles like Twitter and Facebook.

A 'campaign' like this doesn't need to be orchestrated - if it strikes the right nerve, it will grow and grow. The only difference between this and old, literally word-of-mouth responses is that Twitter, with its high speed and greater connectivity, ensures that any such reaction will take place in hours rather than weeks.

Twitter's role in the Moir affair also underlines the wisdom of something Malcolm Gladwell once wrote. I think it was in The Tipping Point that he suggests that there are some super-connected people, who push a trend out to a much larger network than the average person. On Twitter, such super-connected people are much more obvious and with an even bigger network. An obvious example is Stephen Fry, who claims he was very much a Johnny-come-lately to the Moir effect, but would still have provided a ramping up of the Twitter response. People like Fry act like amplifiers in a circuit, suddenly hugely boosting a signal.

It's fascinating, and though there are many people who over-emphasise the power of Twitter and Facebook, I still do think that they are changing the way we communicate, and so far (unless you are Jan Moir) the effect has largely been positive.
Image by Ravi Sharma from Unsplash.

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The best advice I got as a newly published author

When I wrote my first popular science book, Light Years , I got some lovely reviews - and one or two stinkers. I asked my editor if I should respond to the negative remarks. She said 'Definitely not - unless the review contains something that's factually untrue, you only do yourself damage by attempting to put straight what is, in the end, an opinion.'

This is an attitude I've stuck with through thick and thin. Since then I have also reviewed many hundreds of books. I have only twice had an author or publisher kick back against a negative review. One was of an adult colouring book (a genre, I confess, I detest - I ought to stress I didn't ask for a review copy, I was sent it unsolicited), where the author felt that, as an author myself, I was letting the side down - we've all got to earn a living. I did, as a result, remove my review from Amazon.

The other has just happened - and the response was not just a moan. Either an author or the publisher put in a DMCA request to have the review taken down, which the host for my reviews did. There was in theory an opportunity to counter claim, but the links provided by the host for this process (a well-known search engine company beginning with G) only pointed to a page for reporting an issue, not for countering a claim, so it didn't prove possible. If I'm honest, I can't be bothered to fight to restore a review of a book from four years ago I didn't particularly like. 

The complaint itself was entirely specious. The review only contained one quote: 'Electric vehicles are cheaper. Autonomous vehicles are too...' - and it's perfectly acceptable to use short quotations for illustrations in a review. Clearly that wasn't the reason - it was just that someone didn't like the review. Shame on them. That's not playing the game.

I have emailed the publisher to point out that this isn't a great thing to do - I'll let you know if they respond.

Image by Julien L from Unsplash

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Is the Earth gaining a second moon?

I was amused to read on the BBC News site ‘ Get ready for a cosmic surprise this autumn - Earth is about to get a second moon, according to scientists.’ I named my first science quiz book How Many Moons does the Earth Have? precisely because of this kind of silliness. My answer was ‘one’ and it still will be while a chunk of passing rock is briefly caught by Earth’s gravitational pull.
Apart from anything, the suggestion that something is a moon just because it is briefly pulled off track by a planet’s gravity seems to reflect an underlying misunderstanding of how gravity works. Everything with mass distorts spacetime and causes moving objects to be displaced from their natural straight line path. This would make practically everything in space a moon if you took this argument to its limit, because they are all being pulled of track by the planets.
The news item is also amusing because back in 2013, the TV show QI claimed that the Earth had a large number of moons (it was QI’s various attempts at numbering our moons at more than one that inspired my book in the first place). If this were true, the current story isn’t even news. But it’s not really: I reproduce below what I wrote at the time.
QI excuse their latest, 20,000 (that's from memory - it was some large number) value [for the number of the Earth’s moons] by saying there are lots of little lumps of rock that get captured by Earth's gravitational field for a few days and while captured they are natural satellites, which makes them moons. But this is the excrement of the male cow. You might as well say the Sun has many thousands of planets, because of all the asteroids, as a planet is a satellite of the Sun. However, we all know there are just eight planets.

Now to be fair, with planets there are clearer rules. To be a planet the body has to (in my wording):
Orbit the SunBe roughly sphericalHave swept its orbit clean of minor debris... this last one being the rule that did for Pluto. But I would suggest, whether or not there is an IAU definition of 'moon' as there is for 'planet' there are still clear intended consequences of using the word 'moon' as opposed to just 'satellite'. These are that the body in question should be:
Long lasting - I suggest staying in orbit for at least 1,000 yearsSizeable - say at least 5 kilometres acrossThis would still allow moon status for the pretty dubious companions of Mars, Phobos and Deimos, which are about 20 kilometres and 10 kilometres across. For comparison, the ‘moon’ described by BBC News is 10 metres across.
Clearly such rules are there implicitly when we talk about moons. If the time rule didn't exist, then every lump of rock that spent 5 minutes in our company would be a moon, while without the size rule, we would have to count every tiny piece of debris in Saturn's rings as a moon - every one of them is, after all, a natural satellite.
Image (which really is a moon) from Wikipedia by Gregory H. Rivera reproduced under CC3.0

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Form without function revisited

REVISIT SERIES - 

An edited post from September 2009The white goods company Electrolux has been running a lab design competition to come up with designs for domestic appliances for 2099 (apparently, in 2009 Electrolux was 90 years old). There were eight finalists who came up with various unlikely possibilities, of which the most fruit-cakey are the two I have included here.

I'm all in favour of designers being given a bit of free rein with creativity if they then refine to reality, but there seems to be a problem with the criteria used to select these designs. Two essentials are missing. Scientific practicality - would this be feasible in 90 years time? - and practical relevance. An obvious question to ask, surely, is who would want a domestic appliance that does this? Each of these 'novel' ideas falls down at one of these hurdles.

The first, shown at the top of the page, is a teleporting fridge. According to designer Dulyawat Wongnawa: Technologies seem to be progressing at an increasingly faster rate nowadays. In the next 90 years, we will see a lot of technologies that today we think are completely impossible. Even though my teleportation concept might sound far-fetched, scientists have already succeeded in teleporting small particles such as photons. So over the next 90 years, this technology will have time to develop and become part of our everyday lives.

Unfortunately there's a disconnect of logic here. The same people who are teleporting photons are very clear that there is no prospect for teleporting an object like the apple used in the 'demonstration' of the fridge. I love the whole business of quantum teleportation - it's one of the stars of my book The God Effect - but I'm really not convinced that it is going to be used to move food around 90 years from now. Note, by the way, that moving is all it does - so that ham that your fridge teleports would have had to be sitting in a warehouse somewhere. Sounds impractically complicated to me. Of course, back in 2009, I didn't have supermarkets delivering food within an hour.

But at least the fridge is inspired by real science, and there's a vague point. It would be kind of handy for your fridge to be able to summon up produce through the airwaves (though, to be honest, if I were designing it, I would have the items delivered into a closed fridge, rather than an open box). By comparison, the other design I want to highlight does something of magnificent pointlessness. It's a greenhouse designed to roam around Mars, scouting for material to keep alive a single plant in the top of it.

Why? In what possible way would anyone want one of these for the kitchen? Designer Martin Miklica struggles to answer the question 'What are the main consumer benefits of your product?' with this magnificent piece of woffle: One thing you notice on Mars is the silence and serenity. That’s quite good for one week’s vacation in the countryside, but for modern people it’s very depressing to live in such a place for several months or years. Therefore, the main benefit of Le Petit Prince is that it’s not just a machine, but more like a pet or silent friend that you can speak to when you aren’t in the mood to talk to people. On top of that, it is a good gardener that grows any plant you want or need to bare [sic] life or just for its beauty.

Right. I'll have two.

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Scientists - please stop trying to appear art-friendly by making absurd statements

While some from the arts or educated in the humanities proclaim a profound disinterest in science, most scientists have an interest in the arts. However, sometimes scientists go too far in trying to appear art-friendly or to make arty types feel loved. One of the most egregious examples of this recently has been the attempt to claim that Vincent van Gogh had a deep and intuitive understanding of fluid dynamics.

Last Wednesday's Times newspaper dedicated more than half a page to this bizarre suggestion. According to article-writer Rhys Blakely, a study of one of van Gogh's most famous paintings, The Starry Night 'suggests he also had an uncanny grasp of some of the most elusive laws of physics.' No he didn't.

The idea from this study, lead author Dr Yongxiang Huang of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology is that the swirly bits in van Gogh's painting are 'not randomly placed' but rather 'follow patterns that appear at just the right distances from one another with the correct size differences and intensities - as predicted by Kolmogorov's physical laws of turbulence.' (Incidentally, this idea isn't new - it featured in a pre-print from 2006.)

I'm sorry, but this is pure fantasy - wishful thinking from those who want to see a connection where none exists. At the very best this is falling into the trap of confusing correlation with causality. There is no reason to suppose that the painter had some uncanny grasp of something not observable by human senses. At the worst it's playing fast and loose with data that vaguely approximates to theory.

We shouldn't need this kind of justification to the art world for science. It's embarrassing. The article mentions Richard Feynman - it would have been more beneficial to have read Feynman's address on 'cargo cult science' because refers to a parallel with what we see here, even though the application is rather different.

Still, it's a great painting and inspired a rather good piece of music in Don McLean's Vincent (even if I disagree with McLean that lovers often commit suicide).

Image: public domain

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Variations (and Fantasias) on a theme are great

Some of my favourite pieces of music are variations (or variants) on a theme. Unlike a pop cover version, these aren’t just a different arrangement of the same song, but rather the composer takes a snippet of music, often by someone else and go off in all sorts of directions. My personal favourite is the Ralph Vaughan Williams piece Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (it’s a fantasia because it’s a looser continuous form referencing the original, rather than a set of separate variations, but in essence it's the same kind of thing). The original is a rather staid (though beautiful) hymn tune, but Vaughan Williams takes it to amazing new heights.
I was therefore rather disappointed listening to composer Debbie Wiseman talking about her Paralympic homecoming piece I'm Walking with You (played beautifully by a blind pianist called Lucy - I don't think she's called 'Lucy the pianist' as the image seems to suggest, I think she featured in a TV show called The Pianist). 
I may have missed it, but I heard no mention of the fact that Wiseman's piece is a variation (or fantasia) on a theme by Handel. It was just referred to as a ‘song’ by the composer. On her website, all it says is 'Debbie Wiseman has composed a new piece.'
I don’t claim any originality in this observation. I can’t imagine that anyone who knows Handel’s Sarabande wouldn’t spot the relationship. It just seemed a pity that this doesn’t appear in the title and wasn’t a point discussed with the radio programme’s presenter.
To give an appropriate comparison, as Wiseman's piece is primarily on piano, here's a piano version of the Sarabande (I suggest listening to the first 20 seconds or so then switching to the other for immediate comparison):
And here's Wiseman's piece:

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Midsomer Madness revisited

REVISIT SERIES - 
A post from September 2012It can be highly entertaining when a drama series attempts to incorporate science into the plot, so last night I watched Midsomer Murders, and the entertainment came thick and fast.

In this particular case, the science in question was astronomy. We started with a dramatic scene. A total eclipse of the Sun. Many folk from kids to serious astronomers are gathering to a witness it. I was a little unhappy with the advice an expert gave a youngster (roughly 'don't look at it through binoculars or a telescope...' so far so good... 'unless you use one of these filters.' Not so good.) But we'll overlook that. What, though, about the eclipse itself? These don't happen randomly, after all.
From the car registrations this clearly wasn't the last eclipse visible in the UK in 1999. Anyway, while the location of Midsomer isn't specified (it's filmed in Buckinghamshire and Berkshire), it clearly isn't Cornwall. And the next eclipse visible here... is not until 2090. Hmm.
This falls into the 'irritating but possibly allowable to keep the story going' class. But the next one was a doozie. In a conversation with Inspector Barnaby, an astronomy professor is musing over the meteorite that killed someone during the eclipse. (Don't ask.) I nearly literally rolled on the floor laughing. So wonderful was it that I have gone back on ITV Player to get an exact transcript of his words.

There's megatons of metal floating around out there. Carbon compressed to its deepest density, sucked into black holes. Which is probably where our own planet will end its days.

What?!? There are not words to describe the awe I feel at the magnificent incorrectness of that little speech. What black holes? If the carbon was sucked into them, how did it get out again? No, it's not 'probably where our own planet will end its days.' Lovely.
One other example that raised a snigger. One of the amateur astronomers who had supposedly discovered an extra-solar planet (yes, I know) is asked for an alibi during another murder. It was nighttime and, like most astronomers he was observing. Good alibi. But then he has to go and give some detail that spoils it. I haven't bothered finding the exact wording but it was approximately 'I was watching the transit of Venus.' Marvellous. Leaving aside the fact that this is a rarer event than a solar eclipse, there's one big problem. Like eclipses, transits of Venus are one of the few times when astronomers get to observe during the day. It's Venus crossing the face of the Sun. It happens in daytime. So not exactly a great nighttime alibi. For one brief moment I thought this might be an intentional clue, a subtle hint that this was the killer. But no. It was just a script error.
On one level, moaning about this kind of thing is nerdy silliness. It's a story, get over it. But on another level it is perfectly legitimate. Making a two hour drama is an expensive business. They could have afforded a few hundred pounds to have someone who knew their science look over the script. (I'm available, TV people!) The eclipse itself we'd let through, because it was fairly central to the plot, and so it's fine to bend the facts. But the dialogue that went horribly wrong could easily have been made accurate without any impact on the storyline. Surely they could have managed that?
Image from Unsplash by Averie Woodard

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