Brian Clegg's Blog, page 127

A diner to die for

You could argue for several things as the greatest contribution that the US has made to world culture. You could point to rock music. You could highlight personal computers or the internet (though not the world wide web). However I would like put in a vote for American food.

I pause here for foodies amongst you to pick yourselves up off the floor and suppress your hysterical laughter.

Okay, I accept there are some problems with this concept. Like cheese that bears more resemblance to plastic than a dairy product. And American chocolate. And we won't even contemplate much of their beer. Yet I can't help loving many aspects of American food. Pancakes with maple syrup and bacon for breakfast - come on! I prefer American pizzas to the Italian version. Tex Mex has largely been Europe's route into Mexican food. And, of course, the pinnacle of the American food pyramid is the hamburger.

We won't discuss the pros and cons of McDonalds - but T.G.I. Friday's has been doing a reasonable job of giving us a respectable American eating experience over here for a while now and I am fond of them. But T.G.I. has lost its crown now that Ed's Easy Diner has moved into town. I fear I am a little in love.

They seem to have got pretty well everything right. The atmosphere is great - very 1950s diner down to the table-top jukebox selectors and the option to sit at the counter. The food is good, and most importantly you can get the right things. Burgers, hot dogs and chicken with all the essential variants. (I personally recommend the chilli cheese burger). Not to mention the impressively huge milk shakes, malts and, yes, cola floats. The staff are excellent. And it only costs about twice as much as a McD's for a fun sit-down experience.

The newly opened Swindon Ed's is in our designer outlet centre and it's telling that when visiting at late night shopping hours in the lead up to Christmas, when most of the shops were dead (we spent about five minutes in Kurt Geiger and never saw a soul, including sales assistants), Ed's Diner was packed.

If you decide to find an Ed's (there are about 15 in the UK so far) I'd recommend visiting the website first and signing up for their 'Ed's Club' as you get some generous benefits. Apparently the brand has been going for 25 years, but this the first time I've come across it.

I'm sorry if this sounds like an advert - but if, like me, you are fond of American food, and find it hard to get a decent approximation in the UK, then try Ed's and you'll understand why I'm so enthusiastic. Woo and not a little hoo.

The long winter's nap

It's the time when this blog prepares to hibernate until the new year, but before I go, I just wanted to briefly contemplate the wonder of single day songs.

I suppose the most used one day song is 'Happy Birthday to You,' though this is a bit of a cheat. It might only apply to one day for any individual, but around the world it is being used each and every day.

A more realistic choice is 'Auld Lang Syne', traditionally sung on New Year's Eve (though I have heard it sung at other Scottish celebrations, so it doesn't quite make it).

Then there are Christmas carols. Most are certainly not one day songs, designed for the Christmas season (though strangely usually sung in the Advent season that precedes it), though a few should be according to the words - for example 'Hodie, Hodie, Christus Natus Est' (Today, Today, Christ is born) - in practice, though, they are not limited to the one day.

Perhaps the most outstanding example is the carol with the one day verse. O Come All Ye Faithful is a very familiar carol but has one verse, beginning 'Yea, Lord, we greet Thee/Born this happy morning' that is only ever sung from shortly after midnight on Christmas Day. And it feels rather splendid because of it. It's like having a shared secret, a clandestine verse you only allow out on a special occasion.

To those who celebrate Christmas, have a happy one - and to the rest of you, a merry bah, humbug. And to all a happy and prosperous New Year.

I won't give you O Come All Ye Faithful, as it's more than a little over-played, but here's my idea of a beautiful carol if you have a couple of minutes to spare:

Brainstretch Friday

It's either a brain or a Christmassy enormous walnutHowever much we like to think those noses are pressed as firmly as ever to the grindstone, when we get this close to Christmas, there's a certain tendency to ease off. You may say this is easy for me, as I don't have a 'real job', but as far as I recall it was much the same at British Airways.

That being the case I request - nay, respectfully order - you to take a moment from the busyness of business (see what I did there?) to give your brains a little stretch. You never know - it may even make you more effective at thinking thereafter.


I normally drive over to pick up my daughter from school at 4pm (this is not true, it's a story. Go with the flow). One day, she is let out of school one hour early and decides to walk back, meeting me on the way. We get back home ten minutes earlier than normal. If I always drive at the same speed, and left home at just the right time to pick her up at four, which of the following pieces of information would you need to determine how long she had been walking (you can choose as many as you like): her walking speed, my driving speed, the distance from home to school, the colour of her coat, the speed limit.
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If you haven't already got an answer, try to jot one down now. Don't read any further.
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Last chance to consider your answer.
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There was an element of sleight of hand here. The answer is you need none of these extra pieces of information: you already know enough. As we got back ten minutes earlier than normal, I met her five minutes earlier than normal (trimming five minutes off outbound and inbound journeys), so she spent 55 minutes walking.

I think this is a useful reminder of how often we get overwhelmed by - or spend our time chasing - unnecessary information.

This exercise is from my book Instant Brainpower .

Is it time to stop worrying about freemasons?

I've just re-read Stephen Knight's book The Brotherhood which is an early 1980s exposé of freemasons and the malign influence of masonry (not the bricks, you understand. It would be silly to think that bricks could have a malign influence. I mean the organization).

Knight goes out of his way to be unbiassed (or certainly to appear so), which makes the book sometimes rather tedious reading as he balances different statements and pieces of evidence, but the overall conclusions are clear. Knight tells us that this is an organization based on a religion that is incompatible with most major faiths, it has been misused by criminals, spies, politicians and the police and it really isn't an organization that anyone with a public role should touch with a bargepole. Yes, there are plenty who live up to the stereotype of harmless, sad, boozy old businessmen with rolled up trouser legs - but the opportunities for and evidence of misuse were considerable.

At the time Knight wrote the book, soon after the P2 masonic scandal in Italy, he was able to credibly give real concern to the possibility that the KGB could use the masonic system to infiltrate the  British establishment. I suspect the post-Soviet position is very different. But also I wonder if, to be honest, the whole business of masons will soon be gone and forgotten.

This is an organization based on the fundamental acceptance that the establishment is always right, that conservatism with a small c is the essential way to carry on, and that the Englishman was most happy away from the company of women, enacting silly rituals and swapping anecdotes over a brandy and a cigar. (I know there are many masons outside England, but the blame seems to lie firmly with the English.) It's the sort of group that I suspect is finding it harder and harder to get members. Of course there will always be those who join in the hope of self-preferment (you aren't supposed to join for selfish reasons, but we all know it's not like that). However the appeal of this whole bizarre business seems as dated as liking spam and pining for powdered eggs.

Perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps people (sorry, men) are queuing up to join the freemasons. But in some respects, modern society is significantly better than it once was. And I suspect the general attitude to the whole masonic rigmarole will reflect a healthy taste for such distasteful, secretive mumbo-jumbo and fraternal backscratching.

A farewell to the Christmas CD

Joe who? I can say with some certainty this
won't be on any of our Christmas lists...Traditionally, Father Christmas has tended to put a CD into each of our daughters' stockings (hung on the chimney with care/in the hope that St Nicholas soon will be there). It's not exactly one of those family traditions that goes back decades - when I was a lad, Santa would have had serious trouble stuffing an LP into my regulation grey knee sock. But the CD makes music a natural gift. At least, it used to.

The thing is, young people - it is impossible type that without sounding over 70 - young people don't listen to music the way we used to. On the whole we were linear music listeners at their age (no more so than under the influence of the dreaded music cassette). We put on an album and played it from the beginning to the end. If there was a track we didn't particularly like (think Beatles' White Album) well, it might grow on us and it would soon be over.

Now, though, we're in zippy zappy instant access music world. It's not just a matter of pressing the exciting shuffle button on their iPods. Them young things never listen to an album linearly - in fact they rarely buy albums anymore, just downloading the tracks they fancy. And that's without mentioning their most IRRITATING habit, which comes to the fore when an iPod/phone is connected to the audio system in the car. They NEVER listen to a track all the way through. By around 70% of the way into the song, they are already looking for the next thing to play.

So, under the circumstances, it doesn't seem right for Father Christmas to pop a CD into those stockings. My suspicion is that he may resort to an iTunes voucher. Okay, it's not as personal as a CD of a favourite band. But it fits much better the way the yoof of today consume music. And old MC FC is never one for being behind the times.

Molecule vs Molecule

In a number of recent posts I’ve looked at the ways that nanotechnology coatings like those produced by P2i can be used to make everything from mobile phones to trainers water repellent – and at the natural examples of this same phenomenon – but I haven’t really considered the science behind this technology – which is all about the electromagnetic interaction of molecules.

We’re probably most familiar with this kind of interaction in an attractive way. As I write this, there is a heavy frost outside. Water is turning from liquid to solid. Yet were it not for a particular molecular interaction, this would be an impossibility because water would boil below -70 °C. There would be no liquid or solid water on the Earth and, in all probability, no life.

The interaction that makes life possible is hydrogen bonding. This is an electromagnetic attraction between a hydrogen atom in one molecule, and an atom like oxygen, nitrogen or fluorine in a second molecule. When hydrogen is bonded to one of these atoms there is a relative positive charge on the hydrogen and a relative negative charge on the oxygen (say). This happens because the hydrogen atom’s only electron is in its bond, leaving a positively charged ‘end’ to the molecule, while the oxygen atom has four outer electrons not in its bonds, which are repelled away from the electrons in the bonds, giving it a negative charge.

Put two molecules alongside each other and the positively charged hydrogen is attracted to the negatively charged oxygen in its neighbour. The two molecules are drawn towards each other. There’s a force pulling the molecules together, and that means if you want to break them apart – say to boil liquid water – then it takes more energy that it otherwise would, as you have to overcome that force. Result: a much higher boiling point.

This inter-molecular attraction also accounts for another oddity that means aquatic creatures can survive in icy cold weather. Solid water – ice – is less dense than the liquid form, so it floats, leaving the water beneath still liquid. It’s sometimes said this is a unique property of water. It’s not – acetic acid and silicon, for instance, are both denser as a liquid than a solid – but it is unusual. It happens because the six-sided shape of a water crystal won’t fit with the way the hydrogen bonds pull the hydrogen of one water molecule towards the oxygen of another. To slot into the structure, these bonds have to stretch and twist, pulling water molecules further apart than they are in water’s most dense liquid form.

Hydrogen bonding would not be a good mechanism to consider if you wanted to keep liquids off an object. It would tend, rather, to keep them in place. So to produce a water resistant coating, you are looking instead for molecules that won’t attract. I have a personal interest in this. My father was an industrial chemist and was part of the team that developed one of the world’s first fabric conditioners. He used to bring home experimental jars of turquoise gloop from work to try out at home. And the principle behind a fabric conditioner or fabric softener is the opposite of cosy hydrogen bonds.

Such conditioners work by making clothes dirty with a special kind of dirt. Conditioners leave a thin residue on the fabric fibres. These molecules have several roles, but the significant one here is that they tend to repel each other, making the detailed structure of the fibres fluff up and giving the fabric a softer, more luxurious feel, lubricating the fibres when they move against each other.

This is very much fabric conditioner on fabric conditioner interaction. But to achieve a water-repellent coating we need to combine aspects of the two effects to get an interaction between the molecules in the coating and the water molecules that we are trying to get away from a product as quickly as possible.

P2i’s nanocoating is a polymer with molecules that are long-chains which can be either hydrocarbons or poly fluorinated . These start out as individual monomers – the molecules that will eventually be bound together in a polymer – which are exposed to a low power radio signal at 13.56 MHz to produce a plasma, a gas-like collection of ionised monomers, which then polymerize directly on the object being coated. It’s not a case of applying a polymer like sticking on an outer coating, but rather of creating it in place on all surfaces of the object to be protected.

The molecular action here is rather more subtle than in a fabric conditioner. The coated surface has a low surface energy – significantly lower than that of water. Surface energy is a way of describing how much ability the surface of a substance has to produce interactions. P2i’s coating is unusually reluctant to interact, giving it a very low surface energy, around 1/3 that of the non-stick substance PTFE (Teflon). This means that the water is much more attracted to itself, through hydrogen bonding, than it is to the surface of the material. The result is that rather than wetting the surface – spreading out as a thin layer – the water forms spherical drops, because most of the attraction the water molecules feel is towards other water molecules and with all this inward attraction the natural result in the formation of a sphere.

As the water is in self-contained droplets on the surface, it will roll off in these beads without interacting with the material. This is why you can have the kind of remarkable result shown in the Richard Hammond TV show where he pulled a ringing phone out of a toilet and it still worked. The water was not given a chance to wet the surface and short out or corrode the electronics.

We tend to think of a substance in terms of its macro properties – those that we can see and feel. But we can only properly understand what’s going on by taking a close up look. When it comes to how stuff works, it’s a molecule versus molecule world.

What shall we buy Fred?

Ho, ho, ho!I try to avoid the hard sell on my books here, but I like to think of this more as a helpful hand than a hard sell.

Every year we get faced with those difficult-to-buy-for people. You know the ones. They are often, but not always men. A pair of socks won't hack it as a present, and perfume is really not their thing. You would like to buy them a book... but don't really know what they like.

As long as they enjoy exercising their minds, you can't go wrong with a popular science book. As a particular incentive, I'm offering a range of my books at just £7.99 including first class post in the UK. What's more it'll be a signed book - always goes down well. But you have to be quick. I'm afraid it's too late for Christmas for all but UK buyers - last posting date is Thursday 20th, but for safety I would recommend getting any orders in by tomorrow, Tuesday 18th.

I've got on offer: Inflight Science, Build Your Own Time Machine, Gravity, Before the Big Bang, Upgrade Me and Armageddon Science. If you don't think any of those would do the trick, head over to www.popularscience.co.uk and check out the five star books for some more recommendations. But, of course, they probably won't be signed.

If you aren't giving books this Christmas... you aren't giving. (Actually that's rubbish, but I felt I should have some suitable salesy tag.) Not long to go now. We're in last minute territory. I would say 'Don't Panic!' but that's sadly inappropriate. Panic, immediately.

Artists and Spirit Mediums

My artistic masterpiece, created in 2 minutes on an iPad:
brown vista with blue thingsAs you may have gathered from previous posts, I am not a great fan of abstract or conceptual art. I can see the point of art that really grabs you when you look at it, or art that involves real skill - but when it is about painting a whole canvas the same colour, dribbling paint at random, or displaying a pile of bricks or an unmade bed, perlease!

It struck me recently that there is a parallel between abstract / conceptual artists and spirit mediums. There seems reasonable agreement that spirit mediums fall into two classes. There are the frauds who know perfectly well what they are doing is rubbish, but do it to get money out of the people they deceive, and there are the innocents who genuinely believe that what they are doing is genuine - even though their performances are just as worthless as the conscious fraudsters.

Similarly, I suspect there are abstract/conceptual artists who frankly know perfectly well they are producing worthless stuff, but sit back and enjoy the vast amounts of money thrown at them by the idiot but rich punters, and there are those who genuinely believe in what they do. Like the mediums, this doesn't make what they do any more worthwhile, but this section of the artistic population has no intention to con anyone.

And what of the glitterati of the art world - the gallery owners, the people with the big cheque books? They are the equivalent of the venues and audiences where the spirit mediums operate. Some know it's rubbish, but cynically make a profit, others are true believers, as deluded as some of the mediums/artists.

There you have it. The contemporary art world explained. The only difference from spirit mediums is that sceptics haven't turned their beady eyes and attacks on the art world. Yet.

In case you have any doubt that the art world is deluded, I leave you with a story told in Paul Bloom's book, How Pleasure Works :

David Hensel submitted his sculpture, a laughing head called One Day Closer to Paradise, to an open-submission contemporary art exhibition at the Royal Academy in London. He boxed it up with its plinth, a slate slab, for the head to rest on. The judges thought that these were two independent submissions, and they rejected the head but accepted the plinth.

A touch of literary madness

Every now and then I have the pleasure of appearing on the internet radio show Litopia After Dark. Usually this features interesting discussions of the latest events and developments in the literary world, but this was the Christmas special in the form of an office party (with games) and was totally bonkers.

If you want to hear Professor Elemental the ever so jolly British imperial rapper, Ian Winn, Ali Gardner, Dave Bartram and myself having a somewhat surreal conversation and playing some silly games while literary agent Peter Cox attempts (but fails) to maintain control - and perhaps join in and see if you can beat us to the answers - take a listen.

According to Mr Cox, Phyllis Diller once said "What I don’t like about office Christmas parties is looking for a job the next day." Exactly.

Why not dip in and enjoy, preferably with alcohol and mince pies. You can listen on the thingy below or nip over to the show's page.

Via Radio Litopia

Through a media glass darkly

Was it really only last year?There has been a lot of buzz in the UK media in the last couple of days about the 2011 summary census results, which are just out. However, strangely, the headlines missed out on one significant conclusion - how distorted some aspects of media reporting are.

Most English media organizations, with the exception of the BBC's recent major move to Salford, are based in London. This makes a lot of sense. The media world is one of communication, and though today's technology in principle means that you can work from anywhere, I appreciate (if only from the number of invitations to press events I turn down) that there are lot of opportunities for first hand interaction that require journalists to be in London.

However, the trouble is that whenever, say, a TV news programme wants to interview pupils or teachers in a school they are rather lazy. Being based in London, they will nearly always go to a London school. And  this will be totally non-representative of the country as a whole. This comes shining through in the census reports.

Take ethnicity. According to the reported census results, in London 45% of people identified themselves as 'white British'. In the population of England and Wales outside London that figure is 86%. It's pretty easy to see that doing a vox pop in London will not give you a representative ethnic mix. The same is very likely to be true of many other factors, like wealth distribution and occupation, but these weren't reported in the media response to the census, which for some reason concentrated on ethnicity and religious beliefs.

The message of the numbers is clear. Broadcasters and journalists need to break out of the capital and use more representative vox pops, school visits and other ways they portray the nation. It simply won't do to use London to represent the country as a whole, because it is patently so different to everywhere else. In many respects that's a good thing. We want our capital to be special, unusual and outstanding.  It shouldn't be average. But it is time that shoddy, lazy journalism stopped presenting such a misleading picture.