Brian Clegg's Blog, page 122

Step away from the hydrogen

There's one thing about Top Gear that irritates me. No, not that - I actually enjoy all those things that usually irritate people about Top Gear. Even Jeremy Clarkson. What gets on my nerves is something that the show shares with Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was Governor of California. They think that using hydrogen to power cars is a good thing.

I have always found this extremely dubious - and I am glad to say my view is backed up by the interesting and authoritative book I've just reviewed, Project Sunshine .

On a shallow level (come on - Top Gear, Arnie??) hydrogen fuelled cars make sense. Hydrogen is an effective fuel and when it burns all you get is water. No nasty carbon dioxide. But hydrogen is also a real nightmare to handle.

Firstly, as a gas it takes up a lot more room than petrol. Around six times as much at a practical compression. So for any particular tank size, you will have 1/6th the range. It is also wildly inflammable, would need to be stored at high compression (so thick, heavy walls required for the tank, industrial scale connectors)... and despite being obtainable from water, it is quite expensive to make and transport - everything about it screams 'avoid me like the plague'.

Bizarrely, Project Sunshine suggests a much more likely fuel than hydrogen (or batteries) is methanol. The stuff they run some racing cars on - you would have thought a much more natural affiliation for the Top Gear petrol heads. Although this does give off carbon dioxide it is cleaner than petrol and can be made from the carbon in the air, making it carbon neutral. The interesting point the book makes is that storing energy in chemical bonds - in a fuel like methanol - is likely to always be significantly more efficient than batteries. So strangely even the electric car may turn out to be a relatively short term blip in the future of driving. Bring on the methanol.

This has been a green heretic production

Arriving at Home

I don't get to read a huge amount of fiction any more, which is why it is particularly enjoyable when I do. At the moment I'm drifting back towards science fiction, which I had abandoned for quite a while, and had an enjoyable weekend with Richard Sutton's Home.

I thought to start with this was going to be a typical 'stranded in space/revert to savages' type novel, but in fact Home is much more about what it is to be human, and what it would be like to be dependent on a largely superior race. As someone brought up on Star Trek, I thought Sutton's humanoid and interbreeding aliens were very reminiscent of the Star Trek humanoid universe, complete with its explanation of early shared origins - and I don't say this as a bad thing.

Home is a gentle, enjoyable read. If anything it could have done with a bit more menace, but because a lot of it is about inner exploration (I was slightly reminded of Heinlein's early inward looking phase, before he got too self-indulgent), this isn't a problem.

Overall this was a very enjoyable book, that would appeal to anyone who likes thoughtful science fiction. It is self published, but definitely at the positive end of that spectrum - well edited and as good as any traditionally published title. (And the ebook version is very reasonable.)

You can get Home in paperback  from  Amazon.com  and Amazon.co.uk, or on Kindle from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk or on pretty well any ebook format from Smashwords .

The Jonathan Creek effect

One of the joys of having Netflix is being able to revisit old series and enjoy them again, and I've been working through Jonathan Creek, which despite sometimes being extremely irritating in its implausibility is, nonetheless, highly entertaining. However there is one flaw in its approach that is all too common in detective and problem solving stories - and it happened again in the Challenger TV movie about Richard Feynman the other day.

In a typical Creek episode, our hero will be trying to work out the solution to the locked room mystery, or whatever the problem is, and suddenly he will see something, or his sidekick will mention something, that sets off a flashbulb of inspiration. In the Challenger story, the Creek moment involved some cryptic reference to Ivory Soap (or some such US product), which made Feynman's Yorkshire wife (who had probably never heard of it) instantly spout some advertising slogan, which then triggered Feynman's imagination. As with the Creek, I say baloney. Inspiration is so infrequently like that.

The fact is that, on the whole, when someone comes up with an idea to crack a problem it just comes to them. It doesn't depend on seeing a ladder leaning against a wall, or hearing someone talk about pot noodles. It just comes. It's not that creative thought can't be triggered. There are all sorts of creativity techniques to do this - including the one I use most, which is to take the dog for a walk. But the technique does not present you with the solution, it gives you a different starting point.

But it is rare indeed that someone accidentally comes up with a direct pointer to the solution. I'm not saying it doesn't happen. Famously, for example, the chemist Kekulé came up with the structure of the benzene ring after having a dream of a snake eating its tail. But this kind of thing is very unusual, which is why it makes for a good story (and even this was an internal prompt - he didn't see an actual snake eating its tail, which would be the Creek equivalent). The frequency with which this occurs to Mr Creek (and many other on-screen problem solvers) is just so ridiculously high that it is irritating and nothing more.

So stop it, writers, okay? Don't be so predictable. Get a grip.

Image from Wikipedia

The phantom book

Generally speaking, a book either exists or it doesn't. But I am in the strange state of having a book that exists in a shadowy world that is neither real nor imaginary. Just as Aristotle considered infinity to be a potential state that both existed and didn't exist, it seems I have a potential book with my name on it. It's almost a quantum book, in a state of superposition.

It's called Exploring the Weather and it was a follow-up to my illustrated book Exploring the Universe . So far, so straightforward. You can see the cover here (and, yes, the title font is too small) - and if you take a look on Amazon.co.uk they claim to have some copies in stock. But here's the thing. Two weeks before the book came out, the publisher, Vivays,  went into liquidation. I have received a single advanced copy, but nothing else. I believe that the first print run was produced, but have no idea who has it, what will happen to it, what will happen to the rights and when and if I will get paid was I was owed for it.

Meanwhile it continues as a ghost book, haunting the likes of Amazon. I haven't even put it on my website. I suppose I should, for completeness sake, but it seems a bit like advertising a train wreck. What the administrator will do is a mystery, though they appear to be attempting to sell Vivays as a going concern, but the suspicion is that an author will come pretty low down the pecking order when it comes to getting anything out of the wreckage.

I'm not even sure what I'd like. The money the owe me? - obviously, especially if someone else takes over. A stack of books? - better than nothing, I suppose, if the whole thing goes belly up permanently.

It is, as someone once said, a bit of a pickle.

Challenging the Challenger

Like a lot of people who studied physics I hold Richard Feynman in great regard and put him up with the likes of Newton and Einstein. If you haven't come across Feynman, he was one of the lead theoreticians developing the atomic bomb in the Manhattan Project, went on to get a Nobel Prize for his work on Quantum Electrodynamics - the hugely successful theory of how light and matter interact - developed the approach and diagrams that were crucial to vast swathes of quantum theory and, towards the end of his life, became a bit of a celebrity because of his role in the enquiry into the Challenger shuttle disaster.

This is of interest now because the BBC has recently shown a drama-documentary, Challenger, on Feynman's role in that enquiry. If you hurry (and are UK based) you can still catch it on BBC iPlayer.

Feynman was, effectively, the only truly independent person on the commission, and where the rest seemed largely inclined to try to minimise any negative impact on NASA, Feynman wanted to get to the truth. He hadn't particularly wanted to do this job, seeing it as primarily bureaucratic, but if he was doing it, he would understand the science and technology and get to the truth - which, with some semi-undercover steers from engineers on the project, he did.

Challenger's solid rocket boosters failed because it was very cold on the launch day, and the rubber O-ring seals failed to flex into place. Feynman's gift for theatre (and he was a superb lecturer) was responsible for breaking the wall of silence. It was claimed at a televised commission hearing that the O-rings would not lose their flexibility down to -40*. Feynman put a clamped O-ring into a glass of iced water and on camera released the clamps to show that it did in fact lose flexibility at freezing point - and it was a good few degrees colder on the launch day. You can see the actual revelation here:



How did the drama do? Pretty well. William Hurt did a great job of looking like the ill and ageing Feynman (though for some reason he didn't attempt Feynman's pronounced New York accent - I don't understand why, this grated for me throughout). Joanne Whalley was underused as his distinctly Yorkshire third wife. But the whole thing was lavishly done, looked great, and got the message across well. If it was rather 'Feynman v the world' this is how he presented it himself.

Because I ought to say that Feynman was a great story teller. One of the reasons he is so loved is his superb collection of tales from his life on the Manhattan Project, Surely You Are Joking Mr Feynman? It's here we learn of his rebelliousness, regularly breaking into safes and secure filing cabinets to demonstrate their weakness. However, it is widely accepted that these stories have to be taken with a pinch of salt. They are brilliant stories, but may have been embellished. And the Challenger line is very much based on Feynman's own account (in What Do You Care What Other People Think? ). Does it make the whole thing untrue? No. And it's wonderful storytelling, with significant elements definitely true. But like all personal stories we need to be a little careful taking it as accurate history.

Do see the programme if you can. It's excellent. Enjoy it. Accept it mostly - but do apply the same sceptical scrutiny that Feynman himself would certainly have applied.

* When I say -40, you may be wondering if I am talking Celsius or Fahrenheit. The answer is yes.

Getting accounting right

Like a lot of people running small businesses or who are self employed, I've always struggled with accounting software. Frankly it's too complicated. By far. It's designed for accountants, not human beings.

When I first set up my own business I did look at the accounting software on offer, but it had two big problems. Not only would I have to get a finance degree to understand it, frankly it was from the dark ages. I have always provided invoices electronically, first to computing magazines, who not surprisingly were early adopters, and more recently to pretty well everyone. Yet the accounting packages I looked at insisted on working on paper. Groan.

So I wrote my own system in Microsoft's Access database. It did the job, and was very much tailored to my business, but it got creaky over the years, not helped by the fact that I never successfully managed to update it for more recent versions of Access, so I had to keep a copy of a circa 1997 version around to make my accounts work.

Somewhat over a year ago I decided enough was enough and hoped against hope that accounting software had moved on. The good news was all the packages now handled electronic invoices... but all the computer-based packages still required membership of the Freemasons and a certificate in accounting terminology to be able to use them. To make matters worse, I knew I was going to cut my main computer over to a Mac fairly soon, and not all the packages ran on that.

My saviour, bizarrely, was one of the crustiest of the old guard, Sage. I did take a look at their PC-based software, but it is still a mega dinosaur. However they had just brought out Sage One, which is a web-based package, and I confess I love it. I've been using it about 18 months. It does all I need, but in an accessible way (if your accounts are even simpler than mine, they have a really basic 'cashbook' version too). I can access it wherever I am - and my accountant can dig into it direct and furkle around with all those accountanty things they do with one trouser leg rolled up. It even does VAT returns if you suffer those.

Like anything doing a biggish job it takes a little while to get into, but I am now on top of my accounts in a way I never was before and it takes very little time. I pay £10+VAT a month for it, but the accountant assures me that their bill for doing my annual return will drop by more than £120 as a result of them having access to it - so it pays for itself.

It's not perfect. There could be a much wider range of reports, for instance, and as yet the VAT side needs a bit of manual assistance of you do anything complicated like buy something from outside the UK. But it really has made doing the accounts, dare I say it, almost fun. Now that is worrying.

You can find out more about Sage One at this website - and there's a month's free trial, which is what I did, to see if it works for you...

Revenue management for a new century

There are some businesses that have an unusual problem. They sell commodities that have a value up to a certain point in time, but that value drops to zero after that moment. A classic example is an airline's inventory. The value of an airline seat drops to zero at the moment the check-in closes. The realization of this simple fact changed the way airlines sold seats in the 1980s and 1990s, pumping up revenue significantly. How does this knowledge make you money? Because with the right systems, as time runs out, you can sell off the seat that won't go at full price much cheaper and provided you cover the incremental costs of carrying the passenger, then you are still making extra profit.

I bring this up, because it struck me there was a new, more interesting possibility that could easily be made available to push up profits even further. I was buying a railway ticket online and, as you can see, the system generously offered to bump me up to first class for a suitable extra bit of cash. Now here's the interesting bit. I am too tight to pay what it was asking - but I would have paid something extra to get a first class seat. The chances are that the train will travel with lots of empty first class seats. They usually do. So why not let the customer say what they would pay for an upgrade. Let's say I was prepared to pay £7. With a suitable algorithm, the system could decide whether or not to accept my offer. If it did, the the rail company would still benefit. And I'd be happy too. Win-win.

In principle a haggling system could also be applied to buying a seat in the first place, but it could be brought in painlessly by starting with upgrades, a situation where you already have the customer and it's just a matter of seeing how much you can get out of them. But remember this isn't a case of the nasty company squeezing the customer for every last penny - because the customer benefits too, getting something they would like at a cheaper price. As a customer I want haggling.

It's interesting that it is only now, decades after computer booking systems were introduced, that they are getting clever enough to cope with that oldest of human negotiating tools, haggling. I think the technology could be made to work now. It's just a matter of a company having the guts to give it a try.

League table lottery

It's not exactly news that school league tables have their problems, but I have rarely seen a better example of 'Lies, damned lies and statistics' at work than in the recently published secondary school league tables. Two observations I made - there was not a single school in Swindon in the comprehensives top 100, and my old school, Manchester Grammar School only came 65th in the independent schools.

Now the facts are that there are some very good comprehensives in Swindon, and that MGS is without doubt one of the top handful of independent schools in the country. So what went wrong?

In Dice World , my new book on randomness and probability, out next month, I point out that we are very good at reading meanings into numbers that just aren't there. In the case of these tables there is a totally bizarre assumption being made that the average number of points achieved at A level is somehow the same thing as relative merit of the school. But why would it be? I don't if it is still true but when I was at secondary school we were discouraged from doing too many A levels for the sake of it. It was considered more important to focus on the right things, to get the minimum required A levels for your course and the spend the rest of the time getting more rounded education. That's just one of many factors that could influence average A level scores adversely.

Should we have league tables like this at all? I'm not sure. But if we do, I am convinced that the measure used needs to be better thought through. For example it would be much more interesting to know how many university offers (perhaps graded by university, though that's another can of worms) were made to the students, rather than totalling up grades alone. That way you could include how well the school prepared them for interviews as well as crude exam passes.

There has to be a better way...

If you're on Facebook and want to be kept up to date on Dice World, just like its page:

Cardboard is so passé

Here's a card I had (much) earlier...Business cards are very useful things, even if you have to be a little careful with your etiquette when handing out and receiving them in the Far East. But in some ways they are a bit of a pain - because they don't naturally interface to our electronic world.

For many years I have been typing the information from business cards into my computer and then discarding them. (See what I did there? Discarding.) But that, frankly, is tedious and there should be something better when we walk around with camera-loaded smartphones. Sure enough, there is - but in a strangely hybrid fashion.

There have been scanners, and more recently apps for your phone to do OCR and automatically read the text on them, for a while, but they have always been a bit hit and miss, particularly as the formats of business cards can be wild and wonderful. But I've just put an app on my phone that is as close to perfect as you can get. You have to be a member of Linkedin to use it - but apart from that small effort (no effort in my case as I was already a member), it's free.

Called Cardmunch it's starts off with the usual approach of taking a picture of the business card with your phone's camera - but then the aforementioned hybrid mode kicks in. Rather than use dodgy OCR it ships the image off to a real person, who reads the card and types in the information. Okay, it's not quite as instant as OCR, though when I tried it, the data was available in about five minutes. And the person on the other end can make a mistake - but all the evidence is that this approach is significantly more reliable than even the best scanner software.

Once you get the thumbs up, you can optionally send a link request (if the person is on Linkedin) with a single touch, and similarly it just takes a couple of touches to get the person's details into the address book on your phone (and if it's linked like mine, your computer as well). Business card to electronic contact with about 10 seconds of effort. Can't be bad.

Getting Siri-ous

When I first got an iPhone that supported the Siri voice-controlled assistant, I thought it was a bit of a gimmick. I did the usual stuff of asking it 'What is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything?' and other silly questions. And then for a long time I didn't touch it. Which was a shame, because I have discovered it is really useful.

The thing is that I often think of something I need to do or remember while I'm out walking. It's one of the reasons I like walking the dog or going to the post office - I get my best ideas in the process. The natural thing to do is to stick something in my diary, or make a note... but it's a bit slow and fiddly on the move, especially if you've only one hand free. With Siri it's a piece of cake. In fact for quite a lot of entries, like the one I made to demonstrate the feature for this blog post, it's quicker to use Siri than it is to do it by hand, even if you are sitting at your desk.

What I said to Siri was 'Schedule tomorrow 9am blog post about Siri.' It came back with the response you see in the photo, offering me the meeting and pointing out I already had something in my diary at that time. All I had to do was press or say 'Yes' and the item was in my diary.

Of course like any voice recognition there are some words it will struggle with. But it's not bad at all, and for this kind of thing it really is very impressive. You can also do things like call someone or text them, find out where you are, get a route to a location and all sorts of other things, just by talking. I was truly sceptical, but with a little practice I wouldn't be without it.