Brian Clegg's Blog, page 122

Alea jacta est

I'm delighted to say that my latest book, Dice World is now available for sale. Subtitled 'science and life in a random universe', it's about randomness (well, duh), probability and statistics. It explores how the ‘clockwork universe’ imagined by Newton, in which everything could be predicted given enough data, was disproved bit by bit, to be supplanted by chaos theory and quantum physics. This is a world in which not only is accurate forecasting often impossible but probability is the only way for us to understand the fundamental nature of things.

Where else do you get a chance to meet Maxwell's Demon, Schödinger's cat and take part in an experiment using Bayesian statistics to see how a mug on my desk alters the probability of my owning a golden retriever (no, really)?

I've really enjoyed writing this book, and I hope it will be of wide interest.

As a launch special, anyone who buys a copy from Amazon.co.uk today 4 April can be entered into a draw to win one of three free copies of any one of the following:
Inflight ScienceThe Universe Inside You GravityHow to Build a Time MachineArmageddon ScienceBefore the Big Bang... just drop me an email at brian@brianclegg.net telling me if you bought the paper or Kindle version (no need for proof of purchase, though I'll need to see it if you win).
And whether or not you bother to email me, if you do intend to buy a copy, please try to do it today, so we give the Amazon ranking a good push!
You can see the paper version here at Amazon.co.uk and the Kindle version here at Amazon.co.uk. The paper version is expected any moment on Amazon.com here (there are already some Marketplace sellers), but the Kindle version is already there on Amazon.com.
Ooh, er, I'm all excited!

Forget the clockwork universe. Welcome to Dice World!

Google the reader killer

Feedly in a browserI am not feeling the love for Google at the moment.

I suspect the problem this behemoth of IT has, even more than Microsoft did at its zenith, is that it really doesn't care about its customers, because it gets its revenue indirectly from advertising. So it has no problem with messing its users about.

Like many people I read feeds from many blogs and the like using an RSS reader - specifically the Google Reader. I don't use it direct, I use a front end app on my Mac and phone/iPad - but behind these are the Google engine. And the big-I-am has decided to pull the plug. Much wailing and gnashing of teeth ensues.

I had hoped to stay with Reeder, the Mac-based app that I use most, as they announced pretty quickly that they would find a new back end. And they have - but it's a paying service, and that's something I am reluctant to do for this kind of facility. So it's time to head off in a new direction.

I've tried out several alternatives before settling for Feedly - it doesn't have a Mac app, but it does have a plug-in for Safari and other browsers, plus iOS (and Android) apps. It is free, quick, rather elegant and promises that it will seamlessly transfer over from the Google back end to its own when then time comes. Another essential for me - the Safari plug in has a 'save to Pocket' option, which is the captured info app I use from my reader.

It's not perfect as a replacement. With Reeder the app sat at the bottom of my screen with a little counter, showing me how many new posts there were to read. Now I have to go into Feedly from my browser before I find out. However I used to have iGoogle as my home page on my browser (something else they're giving the chop), so I've now switched over to Feedly. It's certainly a whole lot better than being dumped in the ditch by the ungrateful Google.

You rotten lot.

Has the time boldly gone?

While I loved the original series of Star Trek, for me the ultimate was Star Trek, the Next Generation. With better acting, more depth of characters, much better visuals and some excellent storylines it was a transformation of the Star Trek theme. I mean, come on, Patrick Stewart as captain? What's not to love?

So I was rather excited to have a chance to review a book called On Board the U.S.S. Enterprise by Denise and Michael Okuda, which is a detailed exploration of the NCC 1701-D, both in the pages of the book and on an accompanying CD-ROM with a graphic reconstruction of various parts of the interior.

I suppose I should have realized I was setting myself up for disappointment. Part of the reason for this is that if you watch an STTNG episode now, frankly they can be a bit creaky. So it's not entirely surprising that the same applies to the book. Just as graphically the TV series now looks rather fuzzy, badly coloured and crude, so do the images, mostly taken from screenshots, in the book. Yes, we are told quite a lot about the ship - but there's nothing there you wouldn't have picked up if you hadn't watched the series. And if that was the case, you wouldn't want to read the book. It really doesn't extend what was there already. It's not enough, for instance, to tell me about dilithium crystals - I want to know where they come from, how they work...

Similarly, the graphics on the CD-ROM are quite good, though at each location you are limited to viewing from two or three places in the scene, but the end result is strangely empty feeling, rather like those graphics you want to skip through on DVDs that come before you choose an episode.

My biggest problem with this book is who it's for. An STTNG fan will not get anything more than a whiff of nostalgia - there's certainly nothing new here. Perhaps the best person to buy this book for is a youngish person, discovering the series for the first time and not yet immersed in the Star Trek universe.

I'm sorry not to be more positive - of course if you are the kind of total fan that collects everything to do with STTNG you will want this. But for the mild fan who hasn't got the complete boxed sets but enjoyed it very much at the time, this was a let down. Do, however, feel free to see for yourself. The book is available from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.

Lazy computers

Happy Good Friday (if that's not an oxymoron).

I should have had a standing order paid today, but my bank has kindly allowed the computer the day off as it is a bank holiday.

They also give the computer the weekend off, so it doesn't get too tired.

And guess what? Monday is a bank holiday too.

So the standing order due today will actually be paid on Tuesday.

Welcome to the world of 365 days a year, 24/7 electronic banking.

And the banks tell us they are listening to customers.

Arggh!

It's a knockout

Have you ever had the urge to slip someone a Mickey Finn? Well, don't. It's not just illegal, it's dangerous too. But if you had given in, the chances are you would have used chloral hydrate, the subject of my latest podcast for the Royal Society of Chemistry.
Hurry along to the RSC compounds site to discover more about Mickey himself - or if you've five minutes to spare now, click to to have a listen to my podcast on chloral hydrate.

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.