Brian Clegg's Blog, page 131

Too soon, Apple

Yes, Apple, thin is sexy... but not always practicalRecently there has been an IT media frenzy on the subject of Apple's new iPad Mini. What's it for? Does it go against the better judgment of the late St. Steve? Does it make the iPod Touch redundant? In amongst all this, Apple has made another technology decision that I think in some ways is more important, yet it has hardly been noticed. The new version of their desktop all-in-one, the iMac, no longer has a CD/DVD drive.

I use an iMac and I love it. You only have to see one of those huge, shiny screens to get all excited. It is a superb product. And I probably would buy one without a CD/DVD drive - but I would resent it.

The reason they've done it is, as far as I can see, is primarily to make the computer wafer thin. It does look stunning because of this, but the fact is I can't get too excited about the difference in depth. In the end, I look at the front of my computer. As long as it doesn't stick out beyond the edge of the desk, I don't really care how deep it is. But I would miss the CD/DVD drive.

Apple would probably say it's just like losing your diskette drive. Do you miss that? Well, no, I don't. Not only does my iMac not have a diskette drive, neither did my previous Dell desktop which I used for three years prior to the iMac, and I never once missed it. And no doubt at some point it will be similar. But I think Apple has made the move too soon.

Okay, I can buy music on iTunes or from Amazon, but I still get a fair amount of my music on CDs. Sometimes it's a gift, sometimes it's something that isn't available as a download. And just occasionally I want to take a look at a DVD while at my desk. And then there's the writing side. Admittedly an external hard drive handles backup via my network, and I usually transfer files to other computers here via WiFi or memory stick. But I still find myself putting things like homebrewed music onto CD or DVD-ROM to provide it to someone outside the house. I don't know if it's still the case, but when one of my daughters did a Media A-level recently, she had to provide videos on disc as part of her course. A CD/DVD drive and burner is still useful.

Okay, yes, I could use an external drive. But I don't want to - it detracts from the whole point of having an all-in-one. And yes, eventually I will abandon CDs and DVDs entirely. But not yet, Apple, it's too soon.

Paid to view

We're all familiar with pay per view - the idea of paying money to watch a sporting event or whatever on TV, but now there's the inverse. Paid to view. An opportunity to be paid to watch those miniature masterpieces known as adverts.

At the moment, apparently, you have to be invited, but soon I think anyone will be able to pop along to the Nectar Adpoints site and be made rich beyond their wildest dreams by watching a few ads.

Okay, I exaggerated a bit. A lot. All the payments are in Nectar points (which as cunningly worth half as much as pennies, so the impressive-sounding 500 nectar points is £2.50). There's an up-front joining award (currently 250 points), then you get an amount for watching an ad (typically 4 points), another 4 points for answering a couple of multiple choice questions and a bonus point for clicking through to the manufacturers website. So that's typical 9 points, or 4.5p per ad. As most ads lasts 30 seconds, allowing another 30 seconds for faffing around with the questions that's £2.70 an hour, rather below minimum wage (though I suppose it's more fun than working in McDonalds).

However, don't give up your day job. You are only allowed to earn 250 points - £1.25 - a week.

The question that fascinates me is whether or not this process gives any real benefit to the advertisers, who presumably are paying for the privilege. And funnily I would suggest it doesn't, because of the way Nectar has decided to make sure you are actually watching the ads. Some time in every 20 to 30 seconds they pop up a little box on the screen. The viewer then has to click the box within 5 seconds or the ad starts again. I can see why they do this, because they don't want you starting an ad then doing something other than looking at the screen. But I still think it's a bit of a shot in the foot.

To see how the system worked, I did try out a few ads (the things I do for my readers...). To begin with I was treating it like a very slow video game. Wait for the box to come up and click it. But after a few ads I actually watched one or two of them I hadn't seen on TV. And found every time I actually watched the ad, I missed the box and had to start all over again. So the only way I could get my magnificent reward was to not watch the ad. Of course it is possible to do both with a bit of practice, but I did find the more interested I was in the ad, the more likely I was to forget to click the box, and so got irritated with the advertiser - surely not what they are trying to achieve.

Time, I think, to rethink the attention checking mechanism!

Where are the flying saucer pics?

My UFO photo, possibly concealed by the MOD/FBI*On Sunday I appeared on that interesting internet literary radio programme, Litopia After Dark (it's the 21 October show, not yet uploaded when this post was published). I was slightly thrown as I expected to be talking about publishing and books, but because of the closeness to Halloween, the topics were primarily the supernatural. At one point this strayed into the matter of flying saucers. One of the other guests was asking, if a flying saucer landed on your lawn and an alien came in for a cup of tea, what would you do? Would you tell people?

This started me on a different train of thought. Flying saucer photographs. As Fermi once asked about  visitors from another world, where are they all? You might say that there are plenty of photos of flying saucers. In fact I recently reviewed a whole book of them. But in a way, these emphasise my point.

Most flying saucer pictures are really, really bad or look fake (or both). I know a little about such fakes as I went through a phase of making them in my teens. (Just for fun.) Broadly there were two kinds. A relatively detailed model, suspended against the sky with fishing line, which typically had to be a little out of focus to cover up that this is what it was, or a hubcap or metal plate, thrown high in the sky, frisby style.

The trouble with this second approach is that the thrown object usually travelled at an angle that made its flight look totally unrealistic. And fascinatingly, several of the 'UFOs' in the book I reviewed had exactly the same problem - they were flying at a weird angle, just like my hubcap. I was also amazed that the book included a famous picture of UFOs over the nighttime Capitol building in Washington. It does look impressive. A formation of flying lights apparently close over the dome of this impressive structure. That's what you see in the book. But if you take a look at the uncropped version of the photo, there are a series of street lights on the steps in front of the building. In exact mirror formation to the 'UFOs'. The UFOs are just the camera producing a reflection of the bright lights on the dark sky.

The point that occurred to me during the radio show was this. The reason UFO photos are universally so awful is that the vast majority of the people who claim to have seen them didn't have cameras with them when they come across a UFO. So it's just that 1 in a 1,000 time someone did have a camera that we get the shots, and there are sufficiently few that most are rubbish. At least, that's the argument. Only it's not like that anymore. These days I never go anywhere without a camera and video camera. It's on my phone. And the same goes for many millions of others. So why haven't we seen a sudden burst of vast quantities of good photographic/video evidence of UFOs and little grey men?

Sadly, the answer seems straightforward. Because they were never there in the first place.

* I had hoped to illustrate this with one of my old fake UFO photos, but my albums are in boxes in the loft and the relevant albums weren't in any of the easily accessible boxes. Coincidence? Or conspiracy?!?

Hitting the lithium

It's time for another Royal Society of Chemistry compound podcast - and today I'm an contemplating the joys of lithium carbonate. It's a surprisingly versatile molecule, even though it tends only to have one association for most of us.

Take a listen and in around 5 minutes you'll find out more...

Today versus clean energy

Rather worryingly I have just heard the Today programme make a total hash out of explaining a new and clean way to produce petrol. Frankly, they were very close to just laughing at what, to me sounds an excellent idea.

You might say that petrol (gasoline) is yesterday's fuel - but you'd be wrong. It's today's fuel and we are a good way - 20, 30, maybe 40 years off it being seriously phased out. We neither have the infrastructure, cheap enough vehicles or good enough range on electrics to switch to hydrogen and/or electric cars. People who think it will be sooner live in cloud cuckoo land. And don't think the switch will be driven by us running out of oil. Apart from untapped oil reserves in harder-to-get-to places, many countries have coal reserves, and coal can be converted into oil. The US alone has enough coal to fulfil current oil usage for around 200 years at costs less than current oil prices. So we need ways to do petrol in a more environmentally friendly fashion, which this is.

The scheme is a clever one because it gets its carbon from carbon dioxide in the air, so when you use the petrol you aren't adding any CO2 to the atmosphere. It's a demonstrator at the moment, producing something like 5 litres a day, but in principle it can be scaled up. It uses carbon dioxide and water vapour to produce methanol, which is then converted to petrol, and the energy to do all this is renewable. Here's a quick video:



So let's see how Today got it wrong. First, Evan Davies, for whom I usually have quite a lot of respect was mocking the fact that it only produced 5 litres a day. 'That'll solve our problems,' he said (roughly). Come on, Evan. It's a demonstrator. The quantity is irrelevant.

Then their economics correspondent (or environment correspondent, this is from memory) waded in. He pointed out that you have to put the energy in to make the petrol here, where the energy came from the Sun in fossil fuel, so it will take a lot more energy in compared with the energy you get out. This is true to a point - but bear in mind petrol doesn't jump out of the ground into your car's fuel tank. We have to have extremely expensive (both financially and in energy terms) discovery and drilling operations, not forgetting the cost of cleaning up nasty oil spills. And it's not petrol that comes out of the ground, it's crude oil. So then you have the energy intensive operation of cracking and extracting the petrol from this.

Finally, there was no mention of the most significant point. That pretty well all the energy expended in the extraction, preparation and use of petrol today involves burning fossil fuels and adding to the CO2 load of the atmosphere. By comparison, in this method the energy used in producing the petrol is renewable and the petrol itself came out of the atmosphere so doesn't add to the CO2 load when its burned.

Realistically there are problems. The process might not scale up well. It could be expensive both financially and in energy terms (I don't know how much energy goes into the discovery, drilling, extraction and refining of petrol). But to effectively dismiss it out of hand the way the Today team did is appalling.

But is it art?

brown vista with blue thingsIt's not art. It's not anti-art. Roughly the words of the 'yellowist' who scrawled on the Mark Rothko painting at the Tate Modern. If you read the 'yellowist' manifesto on the subject, it is either a delightful wind-up, or overinflated tosh. I am strongly reminded of the Henry Cecil book Ways and Means . In this enjoyable, if slightly dated, book a pair of conmen and their wives perform some excellent examples of what would now be known as the long con. Complicated setups where they fool people into paying them large sums of money.

In one of the stories, Basil and Nicholas invent a fake school art called something like partists (I don't have my copy to hand to check the actual name) who only paint parts of the body. The plan itself is mostly a way to get round the rather limited gambling rules of the time to run a kind of football pools on paintings, but somehow yellowist always brings back the idea of this made up style - so I hope it is indeed a wind-up.

However, either way I am surprised how little the news coverage has picked up on what, to me, is the obvious point that there really is no difference between the scrawl and the original. There is no talent in Rothko's work and similar 'art'. It really is the case of the emperor's new clothes, or in the case of art, the art world's new works. There is nothing there to appreciate.

Above you will see my original art work 'brown vista with blue things' (it is essential that the title is only rendered in lower case). I am proud of this. It took me at least 2 minutes to create on my iPad. I genuinely feel that the longer you look at it, the more you will see in it. This is actually a function of the way the brain works. What I can't see is any difference between this and the Rothko in terms of artistic merit, except mine has more interesting patterns in it. What makes his red blobs great (expensive) art and mine worthless? The interpretation? In that case it's not the picture that's art, it's the words that describe it. And let's face it they are pseudo-intellectual claptrap. The man who did it? Then we're looking at the merits of designer labels, not art.

I find it hilarious when they show the gallery and inevitably someone is sitting one of those rather uncomfortable gallery benches, staring at a canvas with a few strokes of paint on it that some conman or other has persuaded a naive and brainless 'elite' to spend millions of pounds on. They should go out and sit on a bench and contemplate nature or the stars instead. Because there really is something to see there.

P.S. A serious question. Could you honestly say if you went in Tate Modern and saw the picture above on the wall labelled as a serious work by a serious painter, that you would immediately spot that it wasn't? If you say yes, I think you need to re-examine your honest circuits, they're on the blink.

Voting for police commissioners is idiotic

Like me, if you live in the UK and you are on the electoral register, you will probably have had one of these through the letterbox: an invitation to go and vote for your friendly local police commissioner. (Sorry, I just can't say that without thinking of Batman and Commissioner Gordon.)

I think this is probably the most stupid thing the present government has done: electing someone to the job of police commissioner. I mean, think about it. Imagine you ran a big business and you are recruiting someone to an important position. What would you say to the HR person who came along and said 'I have a bright idea! Instead of the usual recruitment process, we'll ask each candidate to produce a glossy brochure about themselves (though you won't see all of them), and you will then give the job to the person whose brochure you like best! {Bright HR person smile}' If that happened you would be advertising for two jobs: the original one and a new HR person.

So how would I appoint a police commissioner? I would use the existing jury service system to call together an electoral jury for the police area. That jury would do exactly what an appointment board would do for a real job. Read an application form, see the results of psychometric and problem solving testing (yes, our would-be commissioners would have to undergo testing, shock, horror) and interview each candidate before deciding on the best person for the job.

Which approach do you think would get the best candidate?

Come to think of it, what about MPs? I don't propose removing the franchise to elect MPs, that's too important for democracy. But at the moment we know very little about our MPs before we vote for them. So I would have several electoral juries assessing each candidate and the results of those assessments would be put online (including videos of the interviews) for everyone to see. You could look at each would-be-MP's psychometric and problem solving test results, read their application forms, watch their interviews.

Why several juries? Because I think would-be-MPs ought to be tested on a number of areas, so I would have juries with a range of specialities. These might be:

Local issuesFinanceForeign affairsEducationScienceHealthEnvironment
The 'local issues' jury would be for any voter from the electoral district, but we could give weighting to people with expertise in science etc. for the specialist area juries. Each jury would recommend a person for the job, information that would also be available to voters along with the test results, videos etc.

What's not to like?

Nano nightmares

Nanotechnology, like genetically modified food or nuclear power, often produces a knee-jerk reaction. It’s somehow ‘not natural’ and so is considered scary and dangerous. This is primarily a reaction to words, the same way that it easy for advertisers to push emotional buttons with ‘natural’ as good and ‘artificial’ as bad.

This is a silly distinction. There is a lot in nature that is very dangerous indeed – and much that is artificial protects us from that. If you doubt this, try removing everything artificial when you are flying in a plane over shark infested waters. For that matter, many of the most virulent poisons like ricin and botulinus toxin are natural. Water crammed with bacteria and faecal matter is natural. Clean, safe drinking water from a tap is artificial. Yet we can’t help reacting like puppets when the advertisers use those magic words.

Sub-microscopic machines: NOT what we're talking aboutSome concerns about nanotechnology are down to what is at best futurology and at worst science fiction. Prince Charles infamously caused headlines back in 2003, when newspapers reported ‘The prince has raised the spectre of the “grey goo” catastrophe in which sub-microscopic machines designed to share intelligence and replicate themselves take over and devour the planet.’

Charles later denied ever meaning this, commenting that he never used the expression ‘grey goo’ and saying ‘I do not believe that self-replicating robots, smaller than viruses, will one day multiply uncontrollably and devour our planet. Such beliefs should be left where they belong, in the realms of science fiction.’ But he certainly did express concerns that not enough was being done to assess and manage any risk associated with the use of nanotechnology.

Unlike the grey goo headlines, this is a perfectly reasonable attitude. The very nature of nanotechnology implies using substances in physical formats that our bodies might not have encountered, and hence we can’t make assumptions without appropriate testing and risk assessment.

If we are to be sensible about this, we need to first avoid a blanket response to nanotechnology. You would be hard pressed to find a reason for being worried about the impact of nanometer thin coatings, such as that used by P2i (sponsors of the Nature’s Nanotech series) There is a big difference between manipulating coatings at the nanoscale and manufacturing products with nanoparticles and small nanotubes.

We know that breathing in nanoparticles, like those found in soot in the air, can increase risk of lung disease, and there is no reason to think that manufactured nanoparticles would be any less dangerous than the natural versions. When some while ago the Soil Association banned artificial nanoparticles from products they endorsed, I asked them why only artificial particles. Their spokesperson said that natural ones are fine because ‘life evolved with these.’

This, unfortunately, is rubbish. You might as well argue it is okay to put natural salmonella into food because ‘life evolved with it.’ Life also evolved with cliffs, but it doesn’t make falling off them any less dangerous. There is no magic distinction between a natural and an artificial substance when it comes to chemical makeup, and in practice if there is risk from nanoparticles it is likely to be from the physics of their very small size, rather than anything about their chemistry.

There are three primary concerns about nanoparticles – what will happen if we breathe them, eat them and put them on our skin. The breathing aspect is probably the best understand and is already strongly legislated on in the UK – we know that particulates in the air can cause a range of diseases and have to be avoided. There is really no difference here between the need to control nanoparticles and any other particles and fibres we might breathe. Whenever a process throws particulates into the air it ought to be controlled. (And this applies to the ‘natural’ smoke from wood fires, say, which is high in dangerous particulates, as well as any industrial process.)

When it comes to food, we have good coverage from The House of Lords Science and Technology committee in a 2010 report. They point out that nanotechnologies have a range of possible applications in food that could benefit both consumers and industry. ‘These include creating foods with unaltered taste but lower fat, salt or sugar levels, or improved packaging that keeps food fresher for longer or tells consumers if the food inside is spoiled.’

The committee’s report sensibly argued ‘Our current understanding of how [nanoparticles] behave in the human body is not yet advanced enough to predict with any certainty what kind of impact specific nanomaterials may have on human health. Persistent nanomaterials are of particular concern, since they do not break down in the stomach and may have the potential to leave the gut, travel throughout the body, and accumulate in cells with long-term effects that cannot yet be determined.’

Their recommendation was not to abandon these technologies, but rather that it was essential to perform appropriate research, preferably across the EU, to check the impact of such nanomaterials when consumed, and to ensure that all such materials that interact differently with the body from ordinary foodstuffs are assessed for risk before they are allowed onto the market. This seems eminently sensible.

The final area, applying nanoparticles to the skin, is perhaps most urgent, because most of apply them on a regular basis. Most sun defence products, and a number of cosmetics contain them. It is hard to find a good reason to allow for any risk in a pure cosmetic, and arguably they should be prevented from containing nanoparticles. But the story is more nuanced with sun creams.

Most sunscreens contain particles of titanium dioxide or zinc oxide. These invisible particles, ranging from nanoscale to significantly larger, provide most of the sunscreen’s protection against dangerous ultraviolet. What has to be weighed up is the benefits of using products to prevent a cancer that kills over 65,000 people a year worldwide – and would kill many more if sunscreens weren’t used – against a risk that has not been associated with any known deaths.

The potential for these nanoparticles to cause harm depends on them penetrating through the outer layers of the skin to reach cells where they could cause damage. In theory a nanoparticle is capable of doing this. But the current evidence is that the particles remain on the surface of the skin and do not reach viable skin cells. Skin cancer is a particular risk in Australia, so this is a topic that has been studied in depth there. As Cancer Council Australia concludes: ‘there is no credible evidence that sunscreens containing nanoparticles pose a health risk. There is plenty of evidence however, proving that sunscreen can help reduce the risk of skin cancer, in particular non-melanoma skin cancer.’

Overall, then, we should not be lax about nanoparticles and their effect on our bodies. We need careful testing and where necessary regulation. But equally we should not be swayed into knee-jerk reactions by emotional words carrying little meaning.

Images from iStockPhoto

Prometheus versus Cabin in the Woods

Over the weekend we had a bit of an iTunes smackdown, watching Ridley Scott's prequel to Alien, Prometheus and the Joss Whedon produced Cabin the Woods. I can't say either was brilliant, but I definitely preferred the lower budget number.

First, Prometheus. You have to say there was great CGI - very realistic looking. Inevitably there were movie references - I couldn't help sniggering when a ship's computer with a voice like HAL addressed someone called David. That couldn't be a coincidence, even though there were no pod bay doors mentioned. And there is no doubt that Ridley Scott has a good line in creating tension. Of course if you've seen Alien (I did first time round in the cinema) once the protagonists got in the room with lots of egg-like cylinders you couldn't help feel a little nervous for them. But even though Alien was little more than hide and seek in space, it was very good, tense hide and seek in space, where I struggled more to get engaged in Prometheus.

There was very little plot structure, the aliens were tediously consistent in being homicidal monsters and I really didn't care for many of the characters. Whenever Hollywood does someone really old by piling on the rubber it looks so fake that you wonder why they can get monsters right but not this - the really old man, who was an important part of what plot there was, was truly bad. (On the plus side, Charlize Theron was stunning, if something of a cipher.)

I'm afraid I couldn't help but laugh aloud at one point, when two of the protoganists were trying to run away from a huge space ship that was falling on them... by running along the length of the ship rather than going sideways and covering a fraction of the distance to safety. It was pure Road Runner. And the baby Alien at the end looked far too much like a child dressed like Alien for Halloween. All in all it made me appreciate how brilliant Blade Runner still is. But at least Prometheus was better than the remake of Total Recall.

So we come to Cabin in the Woods. This was a relatively low budget movie that for some reason was shelved for several years before it came out. Despite getting very mixed reviews, I had to love it to some degree as I'm a huge Joss Whedon fan. Buffy, Angel, Firefly and Dollhouse all score high amongst my favourite TV. And Whedon didn't do badly with the Avengers Assemble movie, though I think his ability to combine drama, fantasy horror/science fiction and big dollops of humour works best on TV because there's more time for things to develop. He also has more chance to produce his trademark reversal of expectation in TV - but having said that, this was something this film certainly packed in. Whedon wasn't the director, but he was writer and producer, and it shows.

Whedon fans will be delighted that three of his rep company are present in the cast, though mostly underused, apart from the nerdy self-deceiving scientist from Dollhouse, who is excellent as a stoned fool who turns out to be a key character against all expectation. It might be portrayed as a traditional teen horror slasher, but the first scenes with a kind of industrial control room, manipulating what's going on in the teens' horror story make it clear that it's something different and won't play as expected. (One of the best bits was the phone conversation with the evil harbinger at the gas station near the cabin, who really gets peeved when he finds the control room has him on speakerphone to laugh at his portentous remarks.)

In the end, I don't think it quite works. The overall concept is brilliant if bonkers, and some parts of it work well, but the ending clearly was a 'we can't think want to do next' bit of writing. Having said that, a major theme in Buffy et al is how you might have to sacrifice your friends and everything to save the world. The ending inverts this traditional Whedon mainstay by putting friendship ahead of saving the world.

I can't stand gore/slasher movies like Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Saw, so when it turned out that some of the baddies would be zombies with TCM tendencies I was not thrilled - but actually even though there are times when a scene is absolutely swilling with human blood, you don't see too much detail, which makes it more acceptable for me. For all its problems, there was much more originality and inventiveness in Cabin in the Woods than there was in Prometheus and I have to say it made for much the more enjoyable evening of the two.

Both are now available on DVD/Blu-ray.

The Perishers Dilemma

Where a Perishers strip would be shown if I had confidence I owned itAs I think I have mentioned before, I am a great fan of the old UK comic strip The Perishers . This started, I suspect, as an attempt to cash in on the success of Peanuts in the US, but it very quickly developed a feel and approach that was all its own. Although the humour could sometimes be childish, it often had a surreal character that lifted it far above its apparent level. I don't know if Wellington's habit of remarking something like 'Colour me amazed' originated with the cartoon, but it was certainly highly appropriate for a black and white strip.

However, this post isn't really about the Perishers per se but about the whole position of reproduction rights of a work of art. Specifically, if I buy an original artwork, do I own it or not?

The reason I ask this is that is that many years ago, a friend who knew I loved The Perishers very kindly bought the original artwork of one of the strips for me. I assume I own this - it was certainly paid for. Yet do I have the right to reproduce that strip on this page? I really don't know. Anything else I own I would say 'yes.' And surely it's only fair if the thing is the original and has been paid for that I can do so. Yet I have a suspicion that I don't have that right. Which seems a little unfair.