Brian Clegg's Blog, page 12

The Examiner - Janice Hallett *****

Ever since the release of her stunning The Appeal , Janice Hallett has amazed with her ability to tell a mystery story through the medium of a collection of documents - The Examiner maintains that remarkable quality. Here the main vehicle is a university intranet’s chat groups, though we do also get some emails and WhatsApp threads.

The setting is a new MA course in multimedia arts, where the six students are very diverse. We are told right up front that there is a suspicion that one of the participants has died. Once again, Hallett enables us to get a wonderful picture of the personalities of the course members and their tutor - and it rapidly becomes clear that something odd is going on. The delight is in working out exactly what has happened and why.

Along the way there are several big twists as different evidence emerges. One of these is brilliant - only achievable through this kind of storytelling. And while the underlying plot is in places quite dark, Hallett continues to be able to include a considerable amount of humour, often in the lack of self-awareness of some of her characters.

My only mild negative here is that elements of the plot when finally fully revealed are, to say the least, far fetched. But that didn’t spoil my continuing admiration for the skill with which Hallett assembles these amazing novels. The epistolary form often makes a book feel a little sterile, distancing the reader from the characters and from the action, but it never does in Hallett’s novels. Superb.

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The New Tyson Fight Revisited

REVISIT SERIES - 
A post from September 2014

One of the interesting aftermaths of the Scottish Referendum debate was that I have seen a number of people saying 'A lesson to learn is don't trust the traditional media, get your information from social media.' I know where they were coming from, but there are two dangers here - one is that (even more than watching, say, Fox News) you won't get information you will get propaganda, and the other is that even when you aren't being told what you want to hear by your friends and political allies, a lot of internet sources are unreliable. The Tyson story I want to tell you illustrates this doubly.

The Tyson in question is not Mike, but science populariser and astronomer, Neil deGrasse Tyson. I was surprised the other day to hear that Tyson was being pilloried for making up quotes to support an argument. The argument in question is that a lot of people (including many in the media and our elected representatives) are extremely ignorant about science and so (I presume) aren't well equipped to make decisions about science teaching and science funding. This is an argument I strongly support - but clearly not by making up data.

There seem to be three quotes that have caused the furore. Tyson claims that:

George Bush made a speech after 9/11 distinguishing 'we from they' by saying 'Our God is the God who named the stars.' Yet lots of named stars have Arabic names - Bush made a silly argument, claimed Tyson.A congressman uttered the sentence 'I've changed my views 360 degrees on that issue.' Which showed basic ignorance of what 360 degrees is.A newspaper headline in New York City: 'Half the schools in the district are below average.' - Tyson claims 'we have to re-think the foundations of mathematics if this were false.'There is video evidence of Tyson's use of these quotes, so that much is pretty definitively true. But the furore is over whether any of these allegations are true, or Tyson just made up the quotes to suit his message.
Tyson's detractors claim the following:The Bush quote was not made after 9/11, but after the Columbia disaster and he actually said 'The same Creator who names the stars also knowns the names of the seven souls we mourn today.' This had nothing to do with Christians versus Muslims and was simple consoling rhetoric.There is no evidence of the 360 degree comment being made as quoted, though Representative Maxine Waters did say 'You have done a 360 degree turn' to someone.The information on schools below average in the headline, which no one can find, could well be false, so Tyson misunderstood statistics by claiming that you would have re-think the foundations of mathematics if it were false.Others have weighed in claiming that this is a anti-intellectual right wing campaign against Tyson, some even suggesting that it is because he is black.
What really applies? As far as the basic facts go, the detractors mostly have it right. The Bush quote was misapplied and misquoted. The 360 degree 'quote' was not word for word. And in principle the headline could be reasonable and can't be found in a New York City newspaper headline (online, at least). The reason the headline could be reasonable is that it is not true that exactly half a population will be below average, as Tyson seemed to imply. Take for instance a room full of ordinary people and Bill Gates. Look at the average net worth of the people in that room. Chances are everyone except Bill is below the average. The number that is in the middle of the grouping is not the average, it's the median.
So what have we established? Tyson's use of the Bush quote was a real, and unpleasant error in the way he misused it. The 360 degree quote was mis-worded, probably typed from memory - he should really have checked, but frankly it's close enough. And no one can find the 'below average' quote, but if it were true, we needed more information to criticize it, as it isn't stupid in its own right. It's still quite likely the newspaper was misreading the information (apart from anything else, the media often call a median an average because they think the readers don't understand 'median' - see my article on this happening over 'average house prices'.) So Tyson could have been making a worthwhile point, but it would have needed a lot more unpacking than he actually did to be sure.
To be honest, I don't like Tyson's approach to public speaking - it tends to the pompous and bombastic (perhaps this is just a US/UK style thing), belittling those who don't agree, which I don't think is a great way to make an argument, even if they are wrong. He made a clear mistake on the Bush quote and messed up with the the 'below average' business. So he ought to clean his act up, and admit this. But frankly these errors have nothing to do with a serious and important message. So by all means consider Tyson reprimanded - but don't confuse the message and the messenger. What he was saying about the media and the political class being dangerously ignorant of science is still true.

However, those who defend Tyson saying this is a fuss over nothing are also wrong. He is not a gutter press journalist, he's a scientist. And he knows perfectly well that two of the biggest failures for a scientist are to make up data, and to rely on anecdotal evidence. And he has clearly done at least one of these here. It was a serious error of judgement, hence the need to apologise.
The reason I said at the beginning that this is a double error of trusting unverified online sources is that firstly people have been coming out pro and anti Tyson based on reports that take one or the other extreme view on what happened, and secondly because I suspect the reason Tyson got the quotes wrong in the first place was that he too relied on a dubious internet source. We all slip this way occasionally. I certainly have. But it's a good reason for taking a step back from that 'get your information from social media' suggestion.
"Neil deGrasse Tyson August 3, 2014 (cropped)" by Mingle Media TV - https://www.flickr.com/photos/minglem.... Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

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Don't Knock the Cox revisited

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A post from August 2011 (text updated)It has become popular in the science writing community to be slightly sniffy about Brian Cox.

As spoof videos like the one below show, the style of his TV show is easy to mock, with a tendency to go to some distant location just to make a passing comment - but that says much more about the BBC's distinctly tired documentary style (I blame that nice David Attenborough myself) than it does about Brian Cox himself.

Personally speaking, I think those of us who write science books should be very happy about Brian Cox's appearances It's hard not to suspect just a smidgeon of jealously amongst those who knock the Cox. But in reality, what he does gives more exposure to science and is liable to encourage some of those millions of viewers to find out more, which is where those of us with the more in-depth books can step in. (For that matter, they might move onto Cox's own excellent books with Jeff Forshaw, such as The Quantum Universe .)

A couple of times since his series has been on I've been asked by people who didn't know I was a science writer 'Did you see Brian Cox's programme last night'... which can't be bad. It has raised the profile of science. Of course some people think that his slightly manic enthusiasm is fake - but it really isn't. I had coffee with him a number of years ago while waiting to do a joint gig at the Science Museum's Dana Centre in London (this was before his TV appearances) and he was just as enthusiastic then, and though rather dazzled by the media, came across as a genuine nice guy. He even kindly wrote a piece for my Popular Science site.

So please, fellow science writers, don't knock the Cox. Instead celebrate the exposure he continues to give to physics.



Image of Brian Cox by Duncan Hull from Wikipedia, licensed under CC4.0
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Bach to the Future revisited

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A post from August 2010 (text updated)

A string of somewhat trollish comments in my eariler post criticizing opera reminds me that music can raise strong emotions. One emotion that music rarely does well is humour. Generally musicians tend to the twee or even downright painful when trying to be funny. Which is why I want to make sure no one forgets P. D. Q. Bach, the last, least and funniest of the children of the great J. S.

I don't think I give too many secrets away in saying that P. D. Q. is the invention of Peter Schickele, self-styled professor at the University of Southern North Dakota, Hoople. Schickele has put on a number of concerts and produced a range of recordings over the years celebrating P.D.Q.'s fictional musical output, which strays through many musical styles. Sometimes he can write a piece of some length and complexity without a single original musical theme in it, wonderfully and anachronistically stealing from left, right and centre. At other times he sets a piece for unlikely combinations of instruments like his Pervertimento for Bicycle, Bagpipes, and Balloons. Or he simply sets wonderful words, as in his madrigal where the original line 'Your face is like the sun,' is, when repeated, overlaid by a second line that runs '...set over Pittsburgh USA.'

For anyone who cares about music, there is a huge rich vein in all the references Schickele builds in, along with a magnificent fictional biography of the great-ish man himself.

This is absolutely wonderful stuff. I first came across it accidentally on a record in Cambridge over 40 years ago and have since collected quite a few of the records on vinyl (though thankfully some is now available to stream, as I no longer have a record player), as well as the P.D.Q. biography. All well worth hunting out.
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The Moonlight Market - Joanne Harris ****

There's a popular marketing approach that involves describing a book as 'X meets Y' - in the case of this new urban fantasy fairy story by Joanne Harris, we're told it's 'Neverwhere meets Stardust' - and I've never seen such an accurate comparison. Yet Neil Gaiman need not worry: although there are strong echoes of both books here, this is never a ripoff of his work.

If you've only ever associated Joanne Harris with romance (perhaps in the form of her novel/film Chocolat) she may seem an unlikely author for the genre - but she has form with her excellent Gospel of Loki - and, as was the case with Neverwhere, this is a romance in its own way, underlining the difference between lust (or glamour) and love.

The similarity to Neverwhere is that the book features a London with a mysterious magical hidden side, including the secret nighttime market of the title, into which our innocent main character Tom is plunged, while the Stardust side comes with the unknown magical nature of the main character and its gradual revelation. We also get a classic fantasy setting of a location that is only visible, or not ruined in moonlight. In this case it's Old London Bridge*, where that market takes place when the moon is out.

The central theme is of a centuries-old enmity between two groups of humanoid creatures, one moth-like, the other butterfly-based. At some point in the past the Moth king and Butterfly queen fell in love and had a child - but this child is no more with only vague echoes of his existence and the creatures have lost their kingdom, been existing in London ever since, in part thanks to the meddling of a mysterious Spider mage. All too often when a fantasy writer invokes fairytale the writing style becomes dull, but Harris avoids this and manages to make these earthbound creatures believable.

The one really irritating thing about this book is the hero, who is perhaps the least perceptive main character ever known. Not only does he repeatedly (many, many times) ignore everyone who tells him that his obsession with a character called Vanessa is both doomed and due to an illusion, he is also totally oblivious to the much more attractive sounding character who loves him. When it is finally revealed that this is the case, he bewails 'But she hit me with a brick!' (technically true, but it was to save his life). Has he not seen practically any romcom from Much Ado About Nothing to the present day? A bit of this sort of thing is entertaining, but it is sustained for too long.

Overall, though, a highly satisfying urban fairy tale fantasy read.

* The cover oddly seems to suggest that Old London Bridge was where Westminster Bridge is now. It wasn't. UPDATE: Thanks to Joanne Harris for pointing out that the image is, of course, St Pancras Station. I was confused as I'd looked at the US cover, which does show Westminster and saw the UK image as a stylised version, imagining I was still seeing the Thames.

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Silicene revisited

REVISIT SERIES - 
A post from August 2014

Ten years ago I wrote about a new development in '2D' materials - a silicon equivalent of the wonderful graphene. As far as I can see, although research is ongoing as silicene has some potential benefits for making field effect transistors, we are yet to see much progress.

I'm not a great one for using press releases as blog posts (although, come on, it is the silly season), but this one was so interesting, I wanted to share it.

It's about silicene, which is the silicon equivalent of graphene, a single atom thick sheet of the substance. Just as graphene has proved an incredibly versatile material, the same is likely to prove true for silicene (which the spellchecker keeps trying to change to silicone - sigh). It's early days, but watch this space. Here's what the IoP had to say:

An international team of researchers has taken a significant step towards understanding the fundamental properties of the two-dimensional material silicene by showing that it can remain stable in the presence of oxygen.

In a study published on 12 August 2014, in IOP Publishing’s journal 2D Materials, the researchers have shown that thick, multilayers of silicene can be isolated from its parent material silicon and remain intact when exposed to air for at least 24 hours.

It is the first time that such a feat has been achieved and will allow scientists to further probe the material and exploit the properties that have made silicene a promising material in the electronics industry.

Silicene is made from single, honeycomb-shaped layers of silicon that are just one atom thick. At the moment, silicene must be produced in a vacuum to avoid any contact with oxygen, which could completely destroy the formation of the single layers.

Silicene must also be “grown” on a surface that matches its natural structure — silver is the leading candidate. To create silicene, a wafer of silicon is heated to high temperatures, forcing single silicon atoms to evaporate and land on the silver substrate, forming the single layer.

Silicene can also be transformed from a 2D material into a 3D material by stacking more and more single layers on top of each other. However, previous research has demonstrated that silicene has “suicidal tendencies” and always reverts back to silicon as more layers are added, because a silicon structure is more stable.

In this new study, an international team of researchers based in Italy and France fabricated multilayers of silicene using a silver substrate kept at a temperature of 470 K and a solid silicon source, which was heated to 1470 K. A total of 43 monolayers of silicene were deposited onto the substrate.

Once fabricated, the researchers observed that a very thin layer of oxidation had formed on top of the multi-layered stack of monolayers; however, it was shown that this preserved the integrity of the stack, acting like a protective layer.

The stack of monolayers remained preserved for at least 24 hours in open air, in which time the researchers were able to use x-ray diffraction and Raman spectroscopy to confirm that the material was in fact silicene and not ordinary silicon.

Lead author of the study Paola De Padova, from Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche in Italy, said: “These results are significant as we have shown that it is possible to obtain a silicon-based 2D material, which up until a couple of years ago was deemed inconceivable.

“Our present study shows that multi-layered silicene is more conductive than single-layered silicene, and therefore opens up the possibility of using it throughout the silicon microelectronics industry. In particular, we envisage the material being used as gate in a silicene-based MOSFET, which is the most commonly used transistor in digital and analog circuits.

“We are currently studying the possibility of growing multi-layered silicene directly onto semiconductor substrates to explore the joint superconducting properties.”

Image of silicene's buckled hexagonal ring from Wikipedia by Jozef Sivek, reproduced under CC3.0.

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Murder at the Monastery - Richard Coles ***

This is by far my least favourite of Richard Coles 'Canon Clement mysteries'. Let's get the negatives out of the way first. Coles has never been a great mystery writer - his success, particularly with A Death in the Parish (his best so far), was in his engaging description of village and church life in an old-fashioned 1980s parish, which is beautifully observed. But this entry in the series has the weakest murder plot so far - there really is no sense of trying to solve the mystery alongside the detective. Everything is hidden from the reader until the solution is revealed, while the motive and opportunity are both weakly conceived.

The limited mystery content is usually compensated for by the excellent village/church life aspect - but here the main character has retreated (both literally and metaphorically) to the monastery where he was previously a novice, so the social aspects are much more bitty as Coles swaps between what's going on amongst the brethren, general village life, and the activities of the village gentry (plus the main character's mother). As a result nothing much develops in the village. We do see a fair amount of the monastic life, which is the most interesting part of the book - but it's hard not to compare this negatively with Ellis Peters' Cadfael novels which equally give a good feel for the cloistered life (if in a different period) while providing both satisfying mysteries and some history.

All in all it just didn't come together for me - it felt a bit like a 'the other two have been successful, let's rush another one out' book. Hopefully, Coles will develop the inevitable successor rather more effectively than this one.

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Whatever Happened to the Rocket Men?

This morning I heard Elton John's Rocket Man and noticed the line about not understanding the science and it's just a job he has five days a week. It reminded me of a sociological oddity of early science fiction films. If you watch a film about spaceflight from the 50s, say, the crew almost always included a 'working man' type. If it's a British film he'd probably be a cheery cockney, while the US would give us a wise-cracking or cynical man of the people (they were always men).

The reasoning was pretty obvious - the filmmakers were basing their ideas of a spaceship crew on that of a traditional ship. Even Star Trek, despite starting well into the NASA era, fell for this idea - though they at least had a big enough crew on the Enterprise to require a whole range of roles. But those old, primarily black and white, films usually only had a small crew. So what were they expecting the role of the 'I don't know about the science, just do my job' person to actually be? Turn big brass valves with greasy rags?

I think part of the reason for this occurring to me was reading Adam Roberts' new marmite of a novel, Lake of Darkness, which explicitly mocks the way that most science fiction seems to base its model of future starships on the social structures of traditonal seagoing ships, and often military vessels at that. 

You might think there was one other reason for putting in that 'man of the people' character - fulfilling the role that the companion traditionally takes on in Doctor Who. That's someone to ask what's going on and get an explanation from the more scientific types. But I don't particularly remember this happening in the old movies. Whatever the reason, these characters were an entertaining anachronism of their time.

Image (not M&S) from Unsplash by Andy Hermawan. 

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Innocent Blood - P. D. James ***

This is an unusual novel from the late, great mystery writer P. D. James, first published in 1980. It is arguably a murder mystery in the sense of it's a novel that involves a murder and has some twists - but it is anything but a traditional mystery novel and does not feature James' detective Adam Dalgliesh at all (despite the US version being described as an Adam Dalgliesh mystery).

What we get instead is something between a Greek tragedy and a modern soap opera. This might seem an odd juxtaposition - but soap operas these days tend to put characters into terrible situations far more than the older kitchen sink versions. The main character in the book, Philippa Palfrey, is 18 and adopted (and possibly a sociopath). She feels she needs to know about her birth parents to discover who she is - but discovers that they were jailed for the rape and murder of a child. Her birth father is dead, but her mother is (conveniently) about to be released from jail. Add in the father of the murdered child, who has dedicated his life to killing Philip's birth mother on her release and we get all the elements required for such a tragedy.

It's an elegantly agonising scenario, brilliantly conceived. But I found a large chunk of it painfully slow - which is why I can only give it three stars. It's a novel in three acts. The opening one, where the situation is set up is excellent, as is the closing one, where everything comes to a conclusion with a couple of twists. But the long middle section spends far too long for me exploring the minutiae of Philippa's gradually getting to know her birth mother, the child's father planning his revenge, and (particularly) Philippa's adoptive mother living with her inadequacy. 

All of this probably does work well as a literary novel - but I can't help but come at this with the expectation of a mystery writer's tight plotting and exposition, which really isn't there in that central section. Still a worthwhile read for any P. D. James lover, but decidedly an oddity.

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