Brian Clegg's Blog, page 117

Shiny isn't always best

The soundbar looking just right under an iMac I like to think I'm very rational when it comes to choosing my IT equipment. Those of you who aren't Mac users may be sniggering and rolling around on the ground at this point because you know perfectly well that us Mac users pay far over the odds for what is basically just a prettier PC. Well, you are wrong. I am now into my second year on a Mac and it's still the case that every day I use it I get far more enjoyment out of interacting with it than I did with my old PC. If you are on the computer most of the day like me, that is well worth paying a bit extra for. And that's without all the added slickness in interworking with my iPad and iPhone. However...

... I must admit that there is a mindset that goes with being an Apple lover that says 'if it looks sexy and shiny it's worth paying extra for.' And I have just had a classic example of why this isn't always true.

Although the iMac's screen is superb, its sound through the built-in speakers is so-so at best. It's not bad on the high registers but it has very little bass. I don't have music on while I'm writing, but during the rest of my activities I quite like to delve into my reasonably chunky iTunes portfolio - and to be honest the iMac's sound just isn't good enough. So I invested in something called an XtremeMac Tango soundbar. Let's see what it had going for it:

It has the word 'Mac' in the nameIt looks sleek and Apple-like in its designIt fits beautifully under the iMac screenIt has good reviews on Amazon Old speaker hiding coyly behind iMac and sounding great
(the subwoofer is on the floor)Now, I think my soundbar was faulty. There certainly was more bass than with the built-in speakers,  but the higher frequencies were very fuzzy, like listening to an AM radio. And it soon developed an irritating interference buzz. So I sent it back. But here's the thing.
Once I'd got the improve-the-sound bug, I thought 'let's see what things sound like with my old system.' Because I had a circa 15-year-old Altec Lansing 2 speaker+subwoofer rig sitting on my desk, still attached to my old PC which I keep around in case there's some ancient email I need to access. I plugged it into the iMac... and wow! Not only does it blow the soundbar out of the water, it is much better than it ever was on my PC. Even the little alert pings and whizzes the computer makes sound exquisite.
So there's my lesson. Rather than shelling out £70 on a soundbar I should have checked out the old tried and tested first. Ok, it's ancient. It looks rubbish (though it's out of sight, so that doesn't matter). It's dirty and has seen better days. But boy does it make my iMac sound better. 
Repeat after me three times: Just because something is shiny doesn't mean it's better (at least, if you don't have to look at it to use it).

Who was the monkey in this trial?

Anyone who knows anything about the battle to preserve rationality in supporting the theory of evolution against marauding creationism will know of the 1925 Scopes trial - or 'the infamous Scopes monkey trial' as it is often known. What I didn't realize until reading John Grant's excellent rallying cry for embattled reason, Denying Science , was that the whole Scopes trial was a publicity stunt.

It's not that there wasn't a serious issue to be fought. The trigger was the signing of an act prohibiting the teaching of evolution in universities and schools in Tennessee. But the Scopes trial was apparently one of those good ideas that civic leaders have when they've had a drink or three down the local saloon. Apparently the dignitaries of Dayton, where the trial took place, spotted that any such trial would bring a lot of cash into town. So they got together both the prosecution and the defence, and looked for a likely candidate as defendant.

Scopes, a general science teacher (who had probably never taught evolution) was approached and agreed to be prosecuted. The town's bigwigs then went on a hunt for celebrities to be involved in the case. They failed to get H. G. Wells as a witness, but they succeeded superbly in getting hold of the lawyer Clarence Darrow to represent Scopes. It's a mark of how much this was all a setup that one of the main prosecution witnesses, pulled to pieces by Darrow, William Jennings Bryan, offered to pay Scopes' fine if the prosecution was successful.

I ought to stress that the fact that the whole thing was a setup in no way contravenes the effectiveness of the demolition of the prosecution done by Darrow. This was the first of many clear legal decisions in favour of evolution - though in the end, the legal system with its ancient Greek idea that the best way to get to the truth is have an argument and the best argument wins (as opposed to science, which is dependent on data and experiment, rather than the quality of the legal team) is not a great way to make an appropriate decision. There are still legislators, particularly in the US, attempting to impose creationism and 'Intelligent Design' on schools and colleges, which have no place in the science classroom (except when studying the psychology of self-deception).

But I do find it fascinating that the Scopes trial, in many ways the pinup of the good guys in this battle, was a setup job to get a town some publicity. And the fact that we are still talking about it today shows what a good job it did.

Stop blaming the customer

I am fed up with the way that every time farmers get ripped off by the supermarkets, or a tragedy occurs while manufacturing cheap garments, the customer gets blamed. Frankly, it is a load of reproductive oblate spheroids, and not of the canine variety.

What we hear, both from the stores and on ill-thought out TV documentaries and news reports is that it is the consumers' fault because we demand cheap milk and cheap clothing (say). That is ludicrous. When did anyone ever stand outside a supermarket yelling 'What do we want? Cheap milk! When do we want it? Now!'? When did anyone email Primark saying 'It is disgusting that your tops cost £6! I want them for £4!'? It just doesn't happen.

Of course customers will buy things cheap if they are made available cheap. They would be stupid not to do so. I would rush out tomorrow to buy a Jaguar XK if they were £10,000 instead of £70,000, but strangely Jaguar has no intention of selling them at that price.

So yes, it's true - I buy my milk at 25p a pint from Asda, because that's the price they sell it at. If they decided to sell it at 35p a pint and give an extra 10p to the farmer, I would still buy it. But the choice of how much to pay the supplier is entirely down to the shop, not to me. Of course if they made it £10 a pint I would go elsewhere - but no one is suggesting that should be the case. In reality, if Asda wants to sell milk for 25p a pint, that is entirely up to them. But they should still pay their farmers a fair amount - if they want a loss leader, Asda should take the loss, not the farmer.

Similarly, it is entirely the responsibility of Primark et al that they squeeze every penny out of the suppliers, not the consumer. No one asks the shops to do this. And when there is a disaster like the terrible loss of life recently in Bangladesh, while most of the blame has to go to the local country's government that didn't maintain safe standards, the rest falls squarely on the shoulders of the aggressive retailer.

Some retailers will try to play the competition card at this point. 'We can't increase our prices,' they say because everyone will go to our competitors.' Unfortunately this just doesn't hold up. I suspect there is little evidence that price sensitivity is so strong that the few pence per item required to move from being an aggressive squeezer of suppliers to a more sustainable model will make much difference. But if it really does, then make the price change anyway - and instead of aggressively squeezing your suppliers, aggressively take it out on your competitors. Point out that the only way they can undercut you is by mistreating their suppliers. Make a big campaign of it. Name names. Blame and shame. Of course, this is only a safe course if you yourself are squeaky clean, but then you will be, won't you?

So please stop this ridiculous claim. Customers don't 'demand' low prices. They will take advantage of them, naturally. But pricing is not their decision, and to suggest that it is is to shift blame and weasel out of responsibility. Only the shops (or the government through legislation) can ultimately make the choice to set prices fairly and pay their suppliers fairly. And it's time they did so.

This has been a Green Heretic production

The mystery of memory

This is definitely in colour. Sort of.Human memory is a strange and wonderful thing. We can't help but think of what we remember as fact - but in reality we need to, erm, remember that memory is a totally artificial construct of the brain, not a video recording of the world. And it is often wrong.

I had a wonderful of example of this at the weekend. I was doing one of my regular appearances on the Saturday show of the excellent local radio presenter Mark O'Donnell. On my way in to BBC Wiltshire, I was listening to the show, as I like to be able to fit in with any discussion that has been taking place. Mark was asking listeners to recall when they first saw colour TV. Two separate listeners said the first thing they saw in colour was the 1966 World Cup final - always remembered in the UK as England won. Even I, not exactly a sports fan, watched it, though in black and white as we didn't get a colour set until around 1970.

However, a niggling doubt set in. 1966 seemed very early for the introduction of colour. So as I sat in the car park, before going into the studio, I did a quick Google search and discovered that according to a BBC website, the first colour broadcast was of Wimbledon. In 1967. Both listeners were describing false memories. This was fascinating and Mark got the listeners back on the line, where they had to admit that they couldn't be quite sure.

What is likely to have happened is that they have seen colour images since and combined the two in their memory. Memories are both faulty and not fixed and permanent. I pointed out the example of the remarkable experiment undertaken in the early years of the 20th century that I describe in Extra Sensory :

On December 4, 1901 there were as a horrendous incident during a seminar on criminology at the University of Berlin. As Professor Franz von Liszt gave his lecture, one of the students interrupted to give an alternative viewpoint to the professor’s “from Christian morality.” A second student jumped up and disagreed profoundly. He said that he was fed up of with these Christian morality arguments. The first student was incensed. He pushed the desk over and strode over to his opponent, pulling a gun from under his coat. There was fight, the two students wrestling for control until the gun went off. The second student fell to the floor, apparently dead.

Not surprisingly, the rest of the class was in shock. Von Liszt picked up the gun and asked for attention. He apologized, telling them that he had staged the event in order to perform an experiment. He now wanted everyone present to write down exactly what they had seen. Still shaken, they all obediently wrote out witness statements. And here’s where it gets interesting. The versions that the students gave differed wildly. This was no distant memory and featured no ordinary everyday event. They were giving their recollection of something amazing that had been seared on their memories just minutes before.

When the different reports were compared there were, for example, eight different names given for the person who started the fight. Across the observers there were wildly differing accounts for the duration of the event, the order in which things happening and how the whole scene finished with von Liszt’s explanation. Some were convinced that the gunman had run from the lecture room – which he hadn’t. He had remained standing over the body.

 My point in describing this was that there is an exact parallel with those who remember seeing remarkable events like spoons that they thought they saw bending on their own with no one touching them under the influence of performers like Uri Geller, again dramatic events that they believe they have witnessed. There is very good evidence that we can’t believe what people 'have seen with their own eyes' if the only information we have is their testimony. Without clear video evidence, for example, such recollections are practically worthless.

The same, frighteningly is true of witness evidence in court (which was von Liszt's main point). A jury puts a lot of weight behind what a witness says they saw - and yet the fact is that it is amongst the least reliable of the evidence that is likely to be presented. We really need to change our legal system to take account of this - and we have known this for over a century.

Luckily, memories of the World Cup are not going to put anyone in prison. But it still is a reminder of just how uncertain memories really are - and how remarkable the human brain is.

Image of the 1966 World Cup champions' statue from Wikipedia

Dealing with royalty

If you are an author, one of the mixed joys and horrors of your life is the royalty statement. The joy part is that this could be a piece of paper telling you that you have earned some money. The horror is two-fold. Sometimes instead, the royalty statement tells you the reverse. Because books are sent out to stores sale or return, it is entirely possible in a six month accounting period to have negative sales when returns outweigh outgoings. This is highly dispiriting the first time it happens. But the other horrific aspect is that royalty statements often suffer from byzantine complexity. And this means it is very easy for the publisher to make mistakes. This is not malicious - it is just that as an author you are one of many and there is only a limited amount of effort they can put into getting it right.

Because of this, I recommend that all authors check their royalty statements with a fine tooth comb. If you have an agent you may feel 'It's okay, I don't need to do this, my agent will do it for me.' And perhaps he or she will. But in my experience agents have neither the time nor the inclination to do this properly (and some, I suspect, struggle with the numbers). It really is on the author's shoulders.

Here is a royalty statement:

As you can see it is quite a loaded document. (Incidentally this particular format has one oddity which is that it is almost impossible to find the name of the book. It is positioned where I have put the little green arrow, quite difficult to spot.

I have accumulated a whole list of possible mistakes that have been made in royalty statements - not all to me, and not all from the same publisher, but all things that the sensible author should check. So here we go:

Is it the right kind of book? Contracts often have different rates for, say, a hardback, a trade paperback and a mass market paperback. If they use the wrong category, you could get the wrong rate.Are the basic values right? Are, for instance, the percentage royalties the same as the ones in your contract?Have escalators been applied properly? The percentage the author receives often increases after a certain number of sales, but this isn't always reflected in the statement. This is one of the most common errors.Do the return numbers make sense? If you have returns, add up the total for a particular type of sale across all periods. If the final value is negative there is a problem: it seems they have had more returned than they sent out.Have any special triggers been reflected? Contracts sometimes have special triggers, providing, say, an extra advance if a certain number of books are sold. Make sure these are applied.Are returns being counted at the same percentage as sales? If there is an escalator you could have  several different percentage royalties. If for instance your base percentage is 10% and the escalated value 15%, but it hasn't been triggered, make sure that returns are not being made at 15%.Are translations, rights deals, serial rights etc. in there? A lot of money can be made from, for instance, giving rights to another publisher to do a translation. As these are not part of the normal accounting it is easy for the publisher to forget to include these. Don't rush this one - they may not come in until the period after the deal is set up, but if there's nothing by then, flag it up.I'm sure there are other possible mistakes - these are just the ones I'm aware of, so please do let me know of any others! I am not suggesting you should be a thorn in the flesh of your publisher - you are both on the same side - but they can make errors, and it is in your interest to check. If you do think you've found an error, don't be aggressive - ask nicely. Apart from anything else, you could have got it wrong!

Think before opening mouth

As someone who is passionate about science communication, I am all in favour of any means that can get information about science out to the general public. Scientists often criticize science journalists for being too simplistic, but I can testify to the ease with which an over-simplified explanation slips out when you are in a radio studio, being interviewed by a jolly breakfast DJ who hasn't a clue about science and, to be honest, hasn't much interest. It is natural to highlight the sexy aspects of the science and inevitably to distort the picture.

The same temptation occurs when writing about science, but at least then there is the opportunity to take a step back and think about what it is that you are saying. However there is always a difficult balance to be made between making a subject approachable and capturing the science accurately.

There is another sin of science communication, though, which strangely scientists are just as prone to as science writers - and that is drawing unnecessary conclusions.

I found a great example of this in a piece in Chris Smith's Naked Scientist book, which consists of Smith's short write-ups of really interesting scientific papers. The example in question comes in a piece on the discovery of complex planetary system around the star 55 Cancri, about 41 light years from Earth. It was already known this had four gas giant sized planets, mostly occupying the space that rocky planets take up in our solar system (one is so close to the star that it orbits every 2.8 days).

The paper in Astrophysical Journal (back in 2008) described a fifth planet, in a 260 day orbit (so roughly positioned like Venus), at least 45 times the size of Earth - which made 55 Cancri's the largest planetary system that had been identified. So far, so interesting and uncontroversial. But the piece ends with a quote from co-discoverer Geoff Marcy. It's not clear if this is in the journal or whether Chris Smith interviewed Marcy, but either way the remark is a classic of what not to say. Marcy remarked 'We now know that our Sun and its family of planets is not unusual.'

The implications of this statement are a) this system is like ours and b) there are lots of them out there. But what are the facts? Admittedly 55 Cancri is not dissimilar to the Sun, but this is a system with five planets discovered, all of them vastly bigger than Earth, and with the closest three in 2.8, 14 and 44 day orbits - extremely tightly packed around the star. (Compare Mercury's 88 day orbit.) So not at all like the solar system. And discovering one other example doesn't make something is not unusual. We think there are billions of planetary systems in our galaxy. This deduction is made from two of them. Two points, it has been observed, do not provide any information on a graph.

You might argue that everyone has the facts, so will be aware this is a dramatic exaggeration. But when an expert makes a pronouncement like this it is those words that get picked up on, not the detail. There's some pressure at the moment for scientists to make more effort to communicate directly to the public. And that's fine. But they need to be trained to think as carefully about their public pronunciations as they do about their peer reviewed publications.

A little competition is a good thing

To celebrate my newest book Extra Sensory 's arrival I am arranging a little giveaway with a 1 in 4 chance of winning.


We'd all love to have 'psi' abilities like telepathy, telekinesis, and remote viewing. But is there any solid evidence to back up these talents, or are they nothing more than fantasy? That's what Extra Sensory is about.

We still only understand a small percentage of the capabilities of the human brain—and we shouldn’t dismiss such potential powers out of hand. Although there is no doubt that many who claim these abilities are frauds, and no one has yet won James Randi’s $1M prize for demonstrating ESP under lab conditions, we still have a Nobel prize winner suggesting a mechanism for telepathy, serious scientists researching the field and university projects that produced potentially explosive results.

What’s the verdict? By looking at possible physical mechanisms for ESP and taking in the best scientific evidence, the reader can discover if this is all wishful thinking and deception, or a fascinating reality.

If that sounds interesting and you fancy a copy, then buy either a paper book or a Kindle version from Amazon via my Extra Sensory page between now and 12 June and you can win a signed copy of one of my other books. If it's not up your street, the same offer applies to my other recent book Dice World .

In Dice World, we take an incredible trip around our random universe, uncovering the truths and lies behind probability and statistics, explaining how chaotic intervention is behind every great success in business, and demonstrating the possibilities quantum mechanics has given us for creating unbreakable ciphers and undergoing teleportation. Along the way we meet Maxwell's demon and Schrödinger's cat, and an experiment involving a mug, a golden retriever and the most controversial theorem in probability. Again, buy either a paper book or a Kindle version from Amazon via my Dice World page and you can win a free signed copy of another book.

I'll pick a quarter of entrants as winners - a 1 in 4 chance of winning - and you can choose from:


Inflight ScienceThe Universe Inside YouHow to Build a Time MachineBefore the Big BangArgmageddon ScienceUpgrade MeGlobal Warming Survival KitThe God EffectLight YearsGravity(See www.brianclegg.net to find out more about the books on offer.)
All you have to do is drop me an email at brian@brianclegg.net if you buy a copy of Extra Sensory or Dice World from their pages on my website. No need to send proof of purchase unless you win. I'll email you on 12 June if you are a winner. Simples!

Audio train spotters

Me as a student being very careful with a vinyl record
(this was just before I bought my decent deck & amplifier)When I was a student I took my music reproduction seriously. While I couldn't afford top of the range equipment, I did eventually save up money from my holiday job to buy a nice record deck, and treated my vinyl collection like they were made of, well, vinyl. (You had to if you didn't want clicks, pops and bangs as you played them - remember that, folks.)

When CDs came along I heaved a sigh of relief. No more dust removal and clicks and pops. No more delicate handling. Clean, digital sound wherever and whenever I wanted.

Now I'm somewhat older and probably wiser I really don't give a monkey's about the quality of my sound system. When I was student I used to sit down and listen to music in a chair carefully positioned to get the best stereo placement. Now, to be honest, I don't sit and listen to music as a sole activity anymore. Ever. I have it on while I'm doing something like driving or boring admin or tidying up (I can't write with music on, it's too distracting), and as long as there's reasonable tone and volume I'm not particularly fussed about the perfection of reproduction quality. Frankly, I probably wouldn't notice if I had left and right channels reversed.

So I was a bit saddened to see in the excellent Observer last Sunday, in the same section as my piece on lightning, an article about some called Pete Hutchison who is bringing out new vinyl records that cost around £300 each. Hutchison is quoted as saying that digital music 'is the great con. They said that CDs were indestructible, but they weren't. They said it would sound better, but with the MP3 we are at probably the lowest point in the history of sound. It's a compressed file. If you try to play an orchestra over a proper sound system on MP3, it's just garbage.'

Now the first bit is just silly. The music industry did perhaps over-stress the robustness of CDs, for example showing how they could still be played after they got jam smeared on them. But you have to put this in the context that up to then we had lived with these nightmare vinyl discs that warped at the first sign on the sun, and that you only had to look at and they were coated in enough dust to make them sound like a bowl of Rice Crispies.

It is certainly arguable whether CDs or vinyl sounds better - and MP3s definitely are worse quality, because they are a compressed format. But again, a CD always sounds better than a vinyl record with lots of clicks and pops - which is pretty well every vinyl record, unless you dedicate all your spare time to keeping them pristine. And while it's true that in the early days, when storage was at a premium, people over-compressed MP3s and got fuzzy audio, at the kind of sample rate used these days, you have to be a real anorak of an audiophile to notice the difference.

Since most of us spend most of our time listening to music in the car or through earphones as we walk, or blaring out from a different room as we do the washing up, rather than in a dedicated music room with a perfectly positioned listening chair, let's face it, an MP3 usually works a lot better. Try playing vinyl in your car or on a record deck in a backpack and see where it gets you. And that's just the start of the convenience of MP3s in terms of being able to manage a huge library to great effect in a way that just wasn't possible with LPs. Instead of playing through a single LP at Christmas, for instance, I can pull up and randomize a playlist of 200 carols. Let's see you do that, Pete.

I much prefer to listen to my MP3s routed through my stereo amplifier and my Monitor Audio speakers. It is a vastly better sound than through earbuds or the computer's built in speakers. But taking that extra step of plugging a record deck in to get the final 3% improvement has very limited extra value for all normal listening. I'm sorry, Pete, but you are wrong - an orchestra sounds just fine from decent MP3s through a good system.

Don't get me wrong, as long as people want to buy Pete's products they are welcome to. It's not for me to say they can't, just that they are silly. The tiny minority who will are the trainspotters of audio, in the sense that they pursue something that has no value simply for the sake of the pursuit. They are people who are fanatically interested in the technology and the way it reproduces exact tonal qualities, rather than people who just enjoy listening to the music. One is tempted to say 'Get a life.' But it's probably too late for most of them.

Zzap!

It being a public (bank) holiday here in the UK I am having a lazy day and simply referring you to my piece in yesterday's Observer newspaper on lightning. Enjoy!

Wide Open Spaces

PCs and I go back a long way. My second PC at work, for instance, was IBM's AT model, of which I was privileged to have the second one that IBM imported into the UK (at least that's what they told me - they probably said that to all their customers). And it was a huge improvement on my previous XT, doubling the hard disk* space at a stroke to 20 Mb.

I tell you this, not so you can snigger at granddad, but to emphasise how things have moved on. In the early 1990s there was a huge business in software that automatically compressed files on your hard disk so you didn't run out of space. It slowed the computer down, but the introduction of music and photos was jamming up disk space terribly. But then something changed. Disks got really big. For my last few computers I've had more disk space that I knew what to do with. Let's take a look at what my computer has on offer and what I've used:

... and that is keeping every email I send, every important one I receive, everything I've written since I started writing, lots of scanned documents, music, photos etc. etc. I've still got 73% free.

The same thing is now happening online. I recently mentioned cloud backup services like Dropbox, Skydrive and Google Drive. But things are even more extreme with photo storage thanks to a breathtaking move from Yahoo. Where, for instance, Google's Google+/Picasa gives you a respectable 5 Gb free, Yahoo's Flickr has now started offering 1 Tb. A terabyte. 1,000,000,000,000 bytes (actually more than this as a Kb is really 1,024 bytes because computer scientists can't count, but let's not be fussy). That's as much space as my entire hard disk. Stunning or what?

(At least, that's the theory. I suspect Flickr has been overwhelmed by people signing up, because when I just went to get a screenshot of my pathetic 100 Mb of photos in 1 Tb of space the image to the right is what came up.)

It has left me rather confused. I really don't know what to do now. I could now have all my photos for all my life available online, sharable how I like. It would take a long time to get them up there, but it would probably be worth it. Will I do it? I don't know. But I'm tempted. How about you?

*If anyone wants to point out to me as a British person I should spell this 'disc', the convention is in computing to use the likes of 'disk' and 'program' instead of the UK equivalent.