Brian Clegg's Blog, page 125

The dreaded CFCs

My latest podcast for the Royal Society of Chemistry features the compounds we loved to boo and hiss before carbon dioxide became our favourite baddy - chlorofluorcarbons or CFCs. Remember the hole in the ozone layer? That's the one.

Amazingly, the same man who came up with CFCs also was responsible for adding lead to petrol - if ever the environmental movement wanted a bad guy, Thomas Midgley was their man. Yet he got a medal for it - because at the time his work seemed brilliant. So slap on the factor 50 and hurry along to the RSC compounds site - or if you've five minutes to spare now, click to to have a listen to my podcast on CFCs.

Puff, puff

Would you take note of an endorsement
by this man?An almost inevitable feature of a new book is some gushing comment on the cover - known in the trade as a 'puff'. Publishers love these - but do they make any difference?

We're all familiar with the kind of thing that is put on comedy books, where someone goes entirely over the top:

Before I read this book I was in a deep depression and thought my life was pointless. Now, thanks to this book, I realize life is worth living. It is quite literally the best thing since sliced bread, and I would pay £1,000 for a copy. Or give up a lesser organ.

This reflects an underlying concern - does the person giving the 'puff' really mean it? Have they even read the book? Were they paid to say nice things? And do you care what they think?

There certainly needs to be careful selection of anyone endorsing a book. Some publishers seem to think 'if they're famous, that's good enough' - but it certainly isn't the right approach for me as a reader. An enthusiastic comment from an Only Way is Essex 'star' is not going to get me heading excitedly for the tills. In fact the matching can be quite subtle. I have seen popular maths books endorsed by Carol Vorderman, and I can imagine the publishers rubbing their hands in glee. Who could be more mathsy than our Carol? Sorry guys, that just doesn't work for me, or I suspect, most of the audience for popular maths books. I think I do take a little notice if the person making the comment is someone relevant who I respect - but that's about all.

The good news is that people don't get paid for making these comments (well, I never have) - and personally I would certainly never endorse a book without reading it first. Nor would I say something I didn't mean. However, it's also fair to say that a one-liner comment can't really capture an overall view. If you take a look at my review of the book I'm quoted on in the photo here, I liked it, definitely - but there are a few balancing remarks too. A puff inevitably provides only one side of the balance.

Overall, then, I don't think such cover endorsements are a bad thing, nor would I totally ignore them. But I only give them a pretty small weighting in my buying decision - and I suspect you do too.

Hitting QI in the asteroids

The 2009 Orionid Meteor Shower (Courtesy of NASA)I dearly love QI, the BBC's quirky factoid quiz show hosted by Stephen Fry. However, as I've pointed out before, the programme's 'aren't you thick, nah nah' attitude makes it fair game when its researchers get it wrong, as they regularly do.

One of their rather nice revelations on the show was that if you see a meteor crash to earth (a timely subject given the recent Russian meteor strike) and rush to pick up the resultant remains - a meteorite - it won't, as you might expect be incredibly hot, but instead it is likely to be painfully cold. This is because as it comes in through the atmosphere lots of fragments will be ablated from the surface, carrying away the heat, preventing the remnant from heating up.

Unfortunately, according to NASA scientist Donald Yeomans in his book Near-Earth Objects , they haven't got it quite right.

With a rocky object - which is most of them - this ablation will indeed occur, but Yeomans reckons the temperature on impact will be 'little more than ambient temperature' rather than freezing cold. It's worse though. Metallic meteorites are significantly rarer - but they wouldn't ablate in the same way and would retain most of their energy. They would be hot. And here's the clincher. Most meteorites that get found are metallic. Because they stand out. How could you find a few small bits of stone at ambient temperature in a field, say? The majority of meteorites that are ever found are metallic - and chances are these would have been hot on arrival.

Sorry QI - failed again.

Thanks, by the way, for the messages of encouragement to come back to the blog. I had to have a break for medical reasons, which still may cause further interruptions, but at the moment, we're back on track.

I'm going out and I may be some time

For reasons beyond my control (as they say) this will be my last blog post for a little while - apologies to my regular readers (both of you) - I will resume as soon as I am able.

In the good old days, when TV broadcasts used to break down, as they did with considerable regularity (it only seems to be Channel 4 these days), they used to be kind enough to play you some music while you wait. In that same spirit, I thought I might leave you for the moment with a piece of music.

I was going to give you one of my favourite Tudorbethan masterpieces, but I thought instead I'd make it this excellent example of rather more modern but still exciting choral music:

Quantum vampires

The title of this piece may sound like the latest Young Adult bestseller (and I reserve all rights, thank you very much) but I was thinking of something a little more down to earth... yet at the same time rather more exciting. Even though it has been out for a while, I get more emails about my book on quantum entanglement, The God Effect  than almost any other. I think it is because the subject is mind-boggling even to physicists (the whole business really started when Einstein wrote a paper to the effect of 'this entanglement stuff is so weird, quantum theory must be wrong'... but it was Einstein who was proved to be in error), and because some of the applications are amazing, notably quantum teleportation, which produces an effect like a Star Trek transporter on the scale of quantum particles.
I just thought I'd give a taster for the subject by using a little extract from The God Effect where the scientists head for the sewers:
By 2004, [Anton] Zeilinger and his team had achieved teleportation over significantly greater distances – in fact across the river Danube. A year after their ground-breaking long range transmission of entangled photons across the Danube, the Austrian team was back in the sewers, this time achieving teleportation from one side of the river to the other. (Quantum entanglement experimenters seem to have a functional relationship with the sewage system rivaled only by utility workers and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.)
As always with teleportation there are two “channels”, one carrying the entangled particles, the other transmitting the conventional information that will be used to complete the teleportation process. Entangled photons were pumped along a fiber optic cable running through the sewer system under the Danube, while the conventional information was beamed by microwave for 600 meters across the river. This may not seem ground breaking, but as their paper in Nature commented they had “demonstrated quantum teleportation over a long distance and with high fidelity under real world conditions outside a laboratory”. 
This is a significant blow to those critics who have said that teleportation could only occur under highly controlled laboratory conditions. The team points out that it’s also possible that this technique could be used as an alternative approach to make quantum repeaters that would enable entanglement to be shared anywhere around the world, as teleporting an entangled particle transfers the particle’s state, including its entanglement.
As this demonstrates, even if there never can be “real” teleportation of physical objects, it doesn’t mean that this isn’t a development of great importance. Teleportation even its limited form will prove vitally useful in making quantum computers real. Quantum computers rely on qubits, where information is stored in the quantum state of a particle. This may be very powerful, but it is also difficult to transfer that quantum state safely from place to place within the computer – or even between two quantum computers.
Teleportation means that, provided a supply of entangled particles is available, something that is now relatively easy to achieve, a qubit can be teleported from one place to another using only a conventional link. So a satellite pumping out entangled photons to two locations could enable quantum computers in two locations to swap qubits over the Internet.

Chopping logic

These are twins. The one on our left is older.I have had an interesting discussion with Paul Nahin, the author of The Logician and the Engineer, which I'm currently reading to review.

Nahin quotes a logic problem that is apparently well known amongst mathematicians. In it, one person is trying to guess the (integer) ages of the other's three daughters. He is given some information that allows him to narrow the possible ages down 1, 6 and 6 or 2, 2, and  9. Then the first gives an additional pieces of information. 'My oldest daughter,' he says, 'likes bananas.' Immediately the second person knows the girls' ages.
The accepted correct solution goes that the daughters can't be 1, 6 and 6 because there isn't an oldest daughter in this scenario, so our logician can deduce they are 2, 2 and 9. But I say that this is rubbish - at the very least poor logic.
Why? It is perfectly possible to have two six-year-old daughters born 10 months apart. Clearly one is older than the other. However even with twins, one is always older than the other for legal reasons. 
Prof. Nahin counters with two points. One is that integer ages were specified, and the other than this is a pure maths problem so legality doesn't enter into it.
I would say it doesn't matter about the 'integer' ages bit - both daughters have the integer age of six in both my counter examples. (And even if they literally had to be six that day, they could still be twins). As for the 'pure maths problem' argument, that doesn't hold up either. This clearly isn't a pure maths problem. It features a person liking bananas. Pure maths? I think not. It is an attempt to apply logic to a (admittedly rather odd) real world situation. In the real world it would be perfectly acceptable for the father to comment about his 'oldest daughter' even if the six-year-olds were twins, because she is accepted as such. As a father of twin daughters, I have done this.
If logic is being applied to a real world problem, I'd suggest it should take into account the way that the real world describes things.

Beating Andy Murray

There are all sorts of unlikely but possible things in life. I could win the lottery. one of my books could win a major prize... but there equally many things in life that are never going to happen. I'm not going to be king of England, I'm not going to play sport for my country and I'm never going to beat Andy Murray. At least that's what I thought.
However, I had a piece on 20 amazing human body science facts in the Observer on Sunday, and for some reason it caught the readers' imagination. On Monday morning it was pointed to me that it was the most viewed piece on the Guardian/Observer website. I pulled up the listing and there it was at the top. Above Andy Murray and his defeat, which was in second place.
By the time I grabbed the picture Murray had slipped out of the top six - but I did comfortably beat Andy Murray. And came higher in the charts than Justin Bieber.
I too have slipped off the list now - such is the inevitable fickle nature of news, but I do know that in those first couple of days, the article had more than three times as many page views as this blog has had in its entire lifetime.
And who said the press has no influence anymore?

The Music of Business

I don't usually do guest blogs, but I'm making an exception for Peter Cook. For nearly 20 years now, Peter has written, spoken and consulted about the parallels between the business universe and the world of music, be it rock, jazz, classical etc.  This follows his much longer involvement with three passions that have fuelled his career: Science, Business and Music.  We met when he hired me to speak on creativity and physics.  He recently completed his 5th book “The Music of Business”, acclaimed by Harvey Goldsmith. I asked him to explain more:

"The Music of Business” offers a carefully crafted cocktail of business intelligence, mixed with the wisdom of pop and rock’s monarchy.  I have a Slideshare presentation which gives a rapid overview of the book.  One way into understanding what the book is about is via some of the questions it attempts to address:
 What can you learn about creativity and innovation from The Beatles, David Bowie and a night at the opera?Can Jazz and structured improvisation help you succeed in a complex and changing business world? What can Lady Gaga teach you about business strategy and using social media to build a powerful and durable brand?What can Spinal Tap, Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin teach you about business strategy and project execution that a business school cannot? Can Britney Spears, Bill Nelson and The Kaiser Chiefs help you become a true learning company? The book has come from my career, which seems to rotate (accidentally) in 18 year cycles – almost Schumpeterian in nature!  I spent 18 years in Pharmaceutical Research and Development at the Wellcome Foundation, bring novel life-saving drugs to market and fixing factories around the world; 18 years working for Business Schools on MBA programmes and 18 years running my own business.  Along the way, I’ve played win a number of rock bands, which added “attitude” to my CV, performing with people such as Bernie Tormé, John Otway, Wilko Johnson, The Fall, Altered Images and Classix Nouveau to name a few.  It’s an unusual combination of deep industrial experience, supported by formal learning about business and management and less formal lessons from the school of hard rock.

In case anyone is in any doubt, the book has four solid business themes: Strategy; Creativity; Innovation and; Leadership of Change.  Each chapter offers a solid business idea, reinforced by bite sized examples of how such ideas work in business, using the musical concepts to help make the business pills go down better for longer lasting and better learning value.

Strategy is no longer just about rigid plans and Gantt charts to execute your strategies.  In a turbulent world, strategy is a continuous process of reconnaissance, involving colleagues, clients, customers and competitors.  Execution of strategy is also about responsiveness and the ability to change course in mid-stream, whilst avoiding being blown off course by the myriad of business fads that bedevil the business landscape these days.  We compare AC / DC with Radiohead and the Kaiser Chiefs in this respect, making connections with Unilever, Apple and many other business examples.  Failure is an instructive way of looking at strategy and we examine strategic mismanagement, along with a trip to the Opera to examine complex strategy execution where there is no room for error or failure.

In Creativity we look at examples of great improvisers such as Deep Purple, Joe Pass, US creativity specialist Michael Michalko and virtuoso jazz-fusion guitarist Scott McGill, drawing parallel business lessons out in each case.  We also compare the creative style of Hendrix versus Clapton.  We look at the importance of creativity principles and techniques via articles from The Beatles with parallel lessons from Proctor and Gamble, First Direct and others.  Punk rock offers a metaphor for disruptive thinking and we explore punk creativity via chapters on marketing and spontaneous thinking.

Under Innovation we address questions of individual personality via the examples of Marc Bolan, Steve Jobs and Richard Strange, the godfather of punk.  We also examine principles of business innovation, using the examples of The Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol, Prince, Lady Gaga, Dyson, Innocent Drinks and more.  Finally we explore the impact of the built and psychological environment on innovation using Stax Records and the experience of my hard rock friend Bernie Tormé, guitarist to Ozzy Osbourne and Ian Gillan.

Under Leadership we examine questions of stability and reinvention via Bill Nelson, leader of 70’s pop art group Be-Bop Deluxe and who reinvented himself at the expense of x-factor style popular acclaim.  We compare this with chameleons who have done the same thing but taken their audiences with them – Madonna, David Bowie, Nokia, Stora Enso et al.  Leaders need to have abilities to bounce back from setbacks, be sensitive to others but not overwhelmed by feedback and this part of the book has significant content from Professor Adrian Furnham, Punk folk group Chumbawumba, Britney Spears and Daniel Goleman.  Toyota is compared with Sony and Marks and Spencers, as a company that is responsive and adaptive compared with others that have nearly perished through their rigidity.

The most enjoyable part of writing this book was the day when I had a chance encounter with Harvey Goldsmith – I felt that it might be worth making an approach but, what do you say to start the conversation?  In the event I pointed out that I’d been to a lot of his ‘gigs’ but he had never showed up!  Against the advice of what many PR experts would have given, he laughed out loud and this resulted in getting his endorsement for the book.  It is the hallmark of all great people that they make time for others less important than themselves and make them feel like they are the only person in the room.  Harvey Goldsmith is a shining example of this.

The Music of Business is available (at bargain prices for business books) at Amazon.co.uk as a paperback and on Kindle, and at Amazon.com as a paperback and on Kindle, or alternatively via The Music of Business webpage.  Peter is also offering a free iPhone app with daily business tips on business in the same mode, available via the webpage.  Peter also has some Business meets Music events planned with HSBC.  These include a launch event aboard a ship with some very special rock star guests.

What's your best price?

If we can accept it's okay to use vouchers, why not haggle?British people are infamously bad at haggling. On the whole we tend to accept the price and just buy something - and yet all the evidence is, especially at tight times, that people who are selling goods and services are prepared to negotiate on price.

I've experienced this from both sides. When I give creativity training to a company I have a list price for my services, but I am well aware that some customers will discuss modifications to this. What surprises me is the ones that won't. I don't mean the companies who just pay up the full price - I have no objection to them, not surprisingly. I mean the ones who say 'Sorry, we won't be using you, you are too expensive,' who haven't even attempted to negotiate on price. This I really don't understand. When I was was at British Airways, our purchasing people where like razors. There is no way they would limply say 'Ooh, sorry, we can't afford that.' They would say 'Okay, how about doing it for free?' Admittedly they probably went a bit far, but at least they knew an unaffordable price is a starting point, not a reason not to do business.

As a purchaser, I have traditionally had certain categories of product and service where I expect to haggle. When I last bought a car, as I've mentioned before, I bought it primarily for one of my daughters from one of those car supermarket places. I have never paid full price for a car, and they were adamant they never drop the price. In the end we bought it (with some free mats thrown in because the manager realized he had to salve my pride) - but only because it was for my daughter who loved the car. If I had been buying for me I would have walked out. They couldn't believe I was prepared to drop the sale because they wouldn't budge - but I so wanted to.

Similarly I would expect to negotiate on price when buying tyres. The last time I did, I must admit I said to them 'I could phone around and get a better price and come back to you, but to avoid wasting our time, how much can you drop that price?' Quite a lot, apparently. I also do it when buying office stationery. But. There are lots of purchase where I don't haggle.

I can't quite believe it, but according to one of those money saving websites, even supermarkets will haggle over 50% of the time. (I can't imagine this is for a pound of onions - I assume it's if you are buying a big ticket item.) I really must try harder.

One of the problems is that the interface with the shop or service provider doesn't always support haggling. I love buying things online, but have to face up to a lack of a haggle box, where you put in the price you are prepared to pay and it comes back with a compromise. (Please, internet shopping software providers, we need haggle boxes! It would make the experience so much more fun.) And in many chain stores you are served by a 16-year-old who a) doesn't know what haggling is and b) has no authority to do so. So you have to find a manager and it's all a bit painful and embarrassing.

However, I really think it's something we could do much more. Vouchers have become socially acceptable these days. No one raises an eyebrow if you produce your 20% of voucher in Chiquitos or wherever. (And if you ever eat in a chain restaurant without getting a voucher first, you have money to burn.) You would be mad to buy anything from Dell without hunting down a voucher. This acceptance that saving money is not, somehow, bad form should spread to the way we purchase things more generally. Haggling is part of business - and it makes you feel great when you achieve a saving. It's mano a mano, facing up to an opponent and bringing home the bacon.

Feel the haggling force, people. Feel the haggling force.

It's a blitz

At Christmas, my niece bought us a card game. Now I love my niece dearly, and she usually has exquisite taste, but this time I thought she had blown it. We aren't great game players, and I thought this was going to be something that was quietly put away and ignored. And such would be the case if we hadn't thankfully been forced to play the game with my brother and sister in law (who also received one). And it was brilliant. I can honestly say I haven't enjoyed a game as much for years. It's quick, fun and simple.

The game is called Dutch Blitz. Apparently it's not easy to get in the UK, but well worth tracking down. In essence it is a bit like each player is undertaking a shared game of patience/solitaire. That sounds deadly dull - but the competitive aspect makes it fast, furious and wonderful.

Unfortunately the printed rules are quite hard to take in - the actual game play is a lot simpler than the sheet seems to suggest. We were lucky as we got the simplified explanation and didn't have to work it out ourselves. But I can assure you that it is well worth fighting past those instructions to play.

You can play with two to four players (more if you get extension packs) - I think it's best with four, where  you get more pressure than two, as you are trying to follow what everyone is doing simultaneously.

It is really hard to describe how enjoyable it is. An indication is what happened on New Year's Eve. We tend to see in the New Year, then go to bed pretty soon after. But we had been playing Dutch Blitz up to 11.30 and decided we just had to go back to it... and were still playing at 3am.

So even if you don't really like games I would encourage you to track down Dutch Blitz. It's brilliant. If you fancy it, it is available in the UK on Amazon, but you can get it at half the price (don't ask why) from this motor parts shop. You can also find out more on the official site - including seeing the rules... but remember actually playing it is much simpler than the way they describe it!