Brian Clegg's Blog, page 116

Bloomsday doomsday

The shrine of the literary trainspotterI gather Sunday, apart from being Father's Day, was also 'Bloomsday' the day when James Joyce fans with nothing better to do celebrate their master's work.

You might suspect that I am not among their number - and you would be right. I have had a couple of attempts at reading Joyce and failed miserably. In part it is because I absolutely hate stream of consciousness. I have never, ever seen it work acceptably. It is just boring . But also because, while I am prepared to put some effort into reading a book - I don't expect it all to be effortless page-turning - I do expect the author to have some expertise in putting information across, and, frankly, I think Joyce is terrible at it.

This is rather similar to my beef with the kind of artists where it is impossible to appreciate their work without an instruction book. Art should communicate. If you need help to understand it, it is bad art. It might take time for the language to be fully understood (think of the iffy reception the likes of Beethoven had early on), but the viewers/listeners should be able to get there on their own.

To me, being a Joyce fan is a bit like being a trainspotter or a mountain climber. (As far as I am concerned they are basically both people who like to tick things off in their little books, mental or otherwise. It's just the trainspotters have found a way to do it where you don't risk your life and you can  drink a flask of tea at the same time. We won't mention anoraks.) Reading Joyce is about patting yourself on the back for having managed to achieve the feat, but you don't get photos of yourself on the summit to bore your friends with.

Let's be clear. I have nothing against mountain climbers or trainspotters. But I think we need to put Joyce into proportion - and making the comparison helps clarify things for me.

Why I am not impressed by a lot of flying saucer photos

 A while ago I reviewed a book of UFO photos, commenting that I had severe doubts about the images, partly because a fair number of them were very similar to the fakes I used to do in my youth (just for fun).

I commented 'One of the problems with the hubcap technique is that it tended to fly, and so to be photographed, at an unnatural angle – yet time after time these “unexplained and inexplicable” shots in the book are of fuzzy, out of focus hubcap-like objects at the same kind of angle as I found so irritating when I tried to fake my pictures.'


I am gradually scanning in my old photos and have just found a couple of these hubcap style photos (this was actually a metal camping plate). They were taken over Aviemore in Scotland in a very high wind that meant if you threw the plate against the wind it would hover extremely impressively.








 

This is clearly a real saucer because it is hovering in the same position in two separate photos, just at a slightly different angle. This was intentionally done, using the mound the person is standing on in the second image as a reference point. Note also that it was clearly there a long time, as the first shot is in early dawn light and the second much later. (Actually they were minutes apart, that's a bit of cheeky post-processing.)
Here is the traditional much-too-blown-up shot from the image above. If this was in a UFO book we would be asked to note the clear pyramid-shaped lighter coloured propulsion unit beneath, the suggestion of a superstructure above the saucer, and the way the drive field is distorting the air around it. 
No, it is just a tin plate, throw frisby-style into the wind.

Of agnostics and unicorns

I am not agnostic about this. It is a horse with
a narwhal tusk as a rather showy bit of blingEvery now and then the hoary business of religion and science rears its head. I am generally quite happy with Stephen Jay Gould's concept of non-overlapping magisteria, and if we stuck to that we'd have a lot less bickering (and hopefully hear a lot less from Richard Dawkins), but I made the mistake of commenting on a Facebook post after someone was promoting atheism as the best scientific viewpoint. I retorted that I thought the only true scientific viewpoint was agnosticism. (This doesn't mean, by that way, that scientists can't be believers or atheists - merely that when they do so, they are not being scientific. NOMa.)

I got a kick-back moaning that you couldn't be agnostic about god, and if you did, you might as well be agnostic about unicorns. This irritated me and I made a rather snippy remark, asking if they knew what 'agnosticism' means. The dictionary definition of agnostic is 'A person who believes that nothing is known or can be known of immaterial things, especially of the existence or nature of God' - so to say you can't be agnostic about God doesn't make a lot of sense, because it is inherent in the definition of the word.

In fact, the comparison with unicorns misses the point. I believe that sloths exist, even though I have never seen one, based on indirect evidence. I similarly believe that unicorns don't exist based on a total absence of evidence. Although as they (irritatingly) say, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, we would expect there to be some physical evidence of unicorns because they are supposed to be physical creatures. But we don't.

God is a whole different ballgame, and the proper comparison would be an invisible dragon in my garage that does not trigger any kind of sensor, not a unicorn. As these are hypothetical non-physical entities, the absence of physical evidence is clearly not enough to establish non-existence of either God or the dragon. So the starting point really ought to be agnosticism. In principle I am agnostic about the existence of invisible, undetectable dragons. But I tend towards atheism on the matter of there being an invisible dragon in my garage, because no one is making this claim. Certainly not me.

There is a difference of scale, though, between God and the dragon. Billions of people claim that God exists. This doesn't make it true. Lots of people used to think the Sun went around the Earth. Lots of people still believe the Earth was created in 4004 BC. There is good evidence they are wrong on both counts. But the point is that there is no evidence that the God believers are wrong - merely absence of evidence that they are right. And this being the case, I genuinely believe that agnosticism is the only scientific view to take.

If you want to tell me there is an invisible dragon in your garage, and you genuinely believe this to be true, then I am happy to be agnostic about that too.

Image from Wikipedia

Deer Island

This is a book I would never have read if I hadn't met the author in a writers' forum, but I am very glad I did. It is way outside the classifications I generally read. In fact it is probably outside classification altogether. It is a sort of social issues/nature memoir.

Realistically, the author's life experience is way outside mine. Leaving aside the two main topics of the book, in the intermission, as it were, he is riding an ancient motorbike around the far North of the UK with his Swedish girlfriend. In a rough Scottish town he is told to keep his voice down as it's a rough place and if he were noticed it would be provocative. He comments he had often been told this - in Belfast, Harlem and Bogotà. How unlike the home life of our own dear Queen. Or for that matter, most of us dear readers.

If, like me, you find flowery descriptions of nature off-putting, don't be thrown by the introduction - like the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy which famously begins ('Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.') after a while it settles down. 
The main thrust of the book alternates between life pretty much down but not out in London and life in semi-paradise on the Hebridean island of Jura. The London segments are the more gripping - one working with a charity for the homeless and the other as a squatter in a building with what starts as a quite a gentle experience but goes down hill over the year the author was there. I can relate slightly to the first of these - it reminds me in some ways of my time as a volunteer with a rather down-at-heel branch of the Samaritans - but the second is scarily alien.
Then there is Jura, twice visited, so different in character from the city. This I find much easier to relate to. The author mentions hitchiking a lot elsewhere, and when his bike broke down on Jura on the first visit, he and his girlfriend had to hitch to the village. I have never hitched in my life, I am far too wary. But when I spent 2 weeks  on the next island out from Jura, Colonsay, it was notable if ever you walked along the road, every passing car would stop and ask if you wanted a lift. You didn't hitch a ride, they hitched a passenger.

This is a short book - if it had been fiction, it would be a novella - and you can read it in afternoon. It left me wanting more, and having read it, I suspect I will savour it much longer.

You can find out more/buy Deer Island at Amazon.co.uk here, and at Amazon.com here.

Science is not my friend

Now look, I am all in favour of this science thing. I spend my time telling people how good it is, and writing about its wonders. So you would think that in return it could at least behave itself. But no. It has to go and show itself up for the spoiled brat of an intellectual field that it is. It's all a matter of carnations. Go red, you horrors!
In my role of occasional domestic lab assistant I was asked to prepare a classic 'carnations with food dye to demonstrate osmosis' jobby. No worries. I did it all by the book. Fresh flowers? Check. Newly cut diagonally under water to prevent air bubbles? Check. Warm but not hot water? Check. Ten to twenty drops of food colouring? Check. And three days the later the little horrors have not taken on a hint of colour.
My suspicion is that they are now treating flowers to make them last longer out of water without wilting with something that prevents or at least reduces their ability to take in water. But that's not the point. This is science. Repeatability is everything. I have been let down.
On a more serious note, it demonstrates how a small variation in materials/initial conditions can be disastrous in terms of outcome - and this does make you wonder just how many real science experiments, with much more complicated setups, have elements in their construction that the scientists aren't aware of that could introduce a variation in output. Could a new type of oil on some minor component in ALICE produce a different result for the LHC? I doubt it, but can we be certain? 
Last year's brief 'neutrinos go faster than light' shock demonstrated that it is entirely possible in one of these big experiments for a small aspect that doesn't seem central to the measurement to totally throw the results, just like my carnations. 
Of course it's not really science I have a problem with, it is our ability to know exactly what we are dealing with when we assemble an experiment. In his fascinating book Time Reborn , Lee Smolin makes the point that we tend to assume our experiments are closed systems. That most fundamental of physical principles, the second law of thermodynamics, only applies to closed systems. Yet, in fact, we have no experience of a true closed system (unless the universe is a closed system, but even that may well not be the case). 
There are many ways that closing a system is impossible, but the most obvious one is gravity. We can't exclude the impact of external gravitational forces because we have no way of shielding against gravity. We are just very lucky that gravity is incredibly weak compared with the other physical forces, so on the whole (but not always) we don't have to worry about its impact.
So spare a thought for scientists, whether building an experiment on the desktop or something on the scale of the LHC. They don't just have to get the right equipment together to make their measurements, they have to try to exclude all possible misleading inputs - even when they don't know what they are. There are unknown unknowns, as Donald Rumsfeld might say. 
I think I might have to ring CERN for some help with my carnations...

All in a good cause

I am currently scanning in some old photos from my university days and I feel I have to share the Winter 1976 British Lecture Attendance "Record Breaking" Expedition that took place in Cambridge on 20 February 1976. The aim was to attend as many lectures as a possible in a single morning, raising funds for RAG '76.


Those present above are Dave Izod, Rod Hill, Me, Helmut Jakubowicz, Dick Lacey, Neil Thomas and Andy Brookes and (taking the photo but on the right below) Mark Saville. We stormed into the lectures, held up the lecturer and demanded money with menaces.

I do appear to be wearing a skirt. This is because a couple of those present designed a 'British Board of Lecture Censors' certificate to post up at each lecture. In the corner of the certificate was a picture of their sponsor, 'Mrs Ethel Trappit.' For some reason they used a picture of me with a Newcastle Brown bottle. (I was not amused initially.) So I had to, really.

Those attending the lectures seemed highly entertained. Not surprising really. They were students.

Perhaps rather more surprising was the good grace of the lecturers, who allowed us to disrupt their teaching with surprisingly few moans. Although the physicist below did seem a little wary of the (toy) gun. (We would probably be arrested as terrorists today.)

What I had totally forgotten was the 'Boo Now' sign in the bottom left of the photo below, prepared to get the audience on our side in case we had any trouble from lecturers. It is also notable that the gangster with the hat, shades and violin case to the right below is now himself a professor. I wonder how he would react if this happened to him?


There is an epilogue. A year later I went to visit someone I knew from home, who was at Lancaster University. He had on his wall one of the British Board of Lecture censor certificates, given to him by a friend of his who had been at one of the lectures we hit. So this person who I was visiting had my picture on his wall without realising it. Unfortunately I don't have a copy of the certificate any more, but this is a fuzzy picture of what was there:

What's yours and what's mine?

We have a difficult dilemma. Our daughter has had an iPod (and now an iPhone) for a number of years. When she started using it she was a child, so of course we set her up on our account.

Over the years she has bought a fair amount of music. Now, this is fun for me, because my iTunes has access to all these trendy songs, some of which I rather like. But here's the thing. Now she is an adult she wants to do her own thing. She doesn't want to be on our iTunes account any more. But if she starts a new account, she starts from scratch. She loses her hundreds of tracks. And there is no way to transfer them across.

Take a look online and you will find lots of people asking how to split an iTunes account, sadly in many cases because a couple has split up. It's almost a cliché, a couple deciding who gets which CDs from their collection when they break up and go their separate ways, but on iTunes they are scuppered. It is all or nothing.

Now it is possible that the indivisible iTunes library could mean fewer divorces. But I think on the whole this inability to split a digital library is a bad thing. It is going to be needed more and more as we move to a more cloud-based world. And it is time companies like Apple and Amazon caught up with the reality that they are hosting some of our most treasured assets - and they had better find a way to split these when someone starts off on their own.

Is the Director of Public Prosecutions innumerate?

It varies a lot, so Mr Starmer couldn't average itListening to the Today programme on Radio 4 a few days ago (5 June), I couldn't help wonder if the Director of Public Prosecutions, the exotically named Keir Starmer, struggles with numbers and particularly with statistics.

There were two issues with Mr Starmer's answers. The interviewer was trying to get Starmer to put a percentage on the point at which the prosecution service would take a case forward. What was the probability of success required before prosecuting? Starmer couldn't reply. There just, he said, had to be a reasonable chance of success. The actual percentage could vary from case to case. That's really not good enough. What does 'a reasonable chance' mean? There is an implied number in there - but he's not admitting what it is. And if it does vary from case to case, fine. But what are the criteria? It's fair enough to say there isn't a consistent percentage of likelihood across different types of case (though there needs to be a clear reason for varying it), but there needs to be a good logical reason for doing this. Without it, the justice system is anything but transparent and potential subject to misuse.

The second problem Mr Starmer has is that he clearly doesn't understand what an average is. He was asked how long it took them to consider a case and replied 'It varies a lot, so we can't come up with a average.' Well, no Mr Starmer, this is exactly when you can come up with an average. If it was always 21 days you wouldn't need an average - it is only if there is variability that you need one. Of course if it is an interesting distribution you need to tell us a bit more - the median, perhaps, and what the distribution is like. But this provides no excuse for hiding behind vagueness.

There are two possibilities here. Either Mr Starmer is innumerate or he was trying to conceal things with deliberate vagueness. Taking the kind view that no deception was involved, perhaps we can make sure that when he is replaced we get someone who has familiarity with the basics of statistics and can make sure his department is acting fairly and logically - impossible without having a grasp of those numbers.

With light handling marks

One of my salesWe hear a lot about how evil Amazon is, the way they ruin things for friendly local bookshops. And there is a degree of truth in this. But it isn't an entirely balanced view. After all, with Amazon I can be shopping in the afternoon and have a book delivered next day, far easier than ordering a book from my local shop. But that isn't the advantage I want to discuss here.

I get sent a lot of books to review, and when I have finished with them I sell them most of them. I don't feel guilty about this - I'm mostly not paid for doing the reviews so a fiver or whatever I get for selling the book on is not exactly an unreasonable compensation. And I am always reminded of science fiction author Brian Aldiss's excellent memoir  Bury My Heart at W. H. Smith's in which he remembers working in a bookshop in Oxford which had frequent visits from poet laureate John Betjeman, turning up with boxes full of books he had been sent to review and wanted to sell.
I am a very careful reader, and the books usually still look new after I've finished them, so I tend to sell them 'Used like new - has been read with light handling marks.' And here's the point I wanted to make about bookshops. That is the condition of a book you buy as 'new' from a bookshop. If you are lucky. Because they have been taken off the shelves, manhandled, sneezed on and generally abused by the browsers. Where if I by a book new from Amazon it really is new, as pristine as when it left the publisher.
This might seems trivial, but it is not. Why, after all do I still buy paper books? I can read them just as well and usually cheaper on an iPad. But I quite often do buy paper books, for the pleasure of owning and handling them. And if I am going to do that, I much prefer them not to have been pawed by the general public.

One up for buying online, I feel.

Too many charities

As I left the supermarket the other day I had to run the gauntlet of someone collecting for an obscure charity. I pointedly looked the other way and hurried past. This sounds heartless, but I genuinely believe that we have too many little charities, which result in dilution of the results that the money provided could bring.

Don't get me wrong - I am not talking about all small charities. I used to be a trustee of a local charity called the Zaslowya Project (ZP), and I am still a supporter. This was one of a good number of charities, usually with 'Chernobyl' in their name, that were set up in response to the Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster, usually targeting children in neighbouring Belarus, which bore the brunt of the fallout.

Like most of these charities, ZP was set up to bring children to the UK on extend stays - usually about a  month - because it has been put about that by doing so, the level of radiation in the children's bodies dropped significantly and this extended their predicted lifespan by a considerable amount. It has turned out that the whole Chernobyl/radiation thing is something of a red herring. There was never any scientific basis for the original claim, the impact of the radiation seems significantly less than first thought, and even if it were true, taking the children out of the country for a few weeks could only ever have a minor, short term effect.

What ZP does now is concentrate on supporting the children back home - because there is a lot of poverty which, combined with rampant alcoholism amongst adults, results in some dire home lives. The charity does still bring children over on a small scale, but this is primarily to make bonds with donors - the real work goes on back in Belarus.

I have no problem with ZP, or a charity supporting, say, a local hospice. They do great work. No, the ones I have problems with, like the one in the supermarket foyer, are those that nibble away at a bigger charity's important work. They usually combine children with a disease - leukaemia is a common one, tugging at the heartstrings. And I absolutely understand why people feel the need to do this. However I would suggest that the most important thing with diseases is to get them cured, and it would be much better if the money given to these small charities was focussed instead with the big boys like Cancer Research. Yes, care is also important - and if you want to, go with something like Macmillan. But cure and prevention is by far the top priority. I'm afraid these little, well-meaning me-too outfits must divert funds from where they can do most good.

You may wonder if the same should also apply to something like ZP - as I mentioned this is one of many 'Chernobyl' charities. There are several others in Swindon alone. However, ZP concentrates on a single Belarusian town (as many of these charities do), confusingly called Zaslavl rather than Zaslowya (don't ask) - and as I've already indicated, it seems to be one of the few that really understands the need on the ground, rather than reprising the 'holiday from radiation' story.

The news suggests people are giving to charity less at the moment. The last thing I want to do is encourage that. But I do think we ought to be a bit more discriminating - find out a bit more about a charity before we donate. And that means, unless you know the charity already, ignoring those heart-rending pleas at the supermarket entrance.