Brian Clegg's Blog, page 137
July 19, 2012
I blame Dawkins
The recent furore (well, furore in teacup) over Free Schools teaching creationism has made me quite angry. We have seen the creationist/intelligent design lobby in the US over the years use all sorts of dirty tricks to try to sneak creationist pseudo-science onto the agenda. But now those opposing religion, specifically the British Humanist Association, but also plenty of others who should know better, are resorting to their own dirty tricks, and it's not good enough.If you want to make your point by using good reasoned argument, you mustn't cheat or you will be ignored when the truth comes out.
The problem I have is this. There is every good reason to oppose creationism, which in its most extreme ('young Earth') form says God made the Earth, essentially as it is now, 6,000 years ago, and in its watered down ('old Earth') form says God made the Earth as it says in Genesis in the Bible, but over a longer timescale. Creationism is biblical literalism.
However the majority of believing Christians (and basically this is an attack on Christianity, let's not pretend otherwise) in the UK are neither creationists nor literalists. They believe in a creator God but believe that said God used the mechanisms that science thinks are responsible for things being the way they are, whether it's quantum theory and the standard model or evolution.
All this sound and fury is because certain factions are conflating creationism and a Christian belief in God, which are simply not the same thing. I don't think they are doing this accidentally - this appears to be a deliberate attempt to mislead. They are trying to make 'creationism' just another word for 'Christian' and I object, if only as a writer to this misuse. It would be ridiculous to say that, for instance, a CofE school in its assemblies or RE lessons could not teach about a creator God - that's thought police territory. Such a school shouldn't be able to teach creationism as science - and they aren't allowed to - but the two things are totally separate.
Of course there is a different issue of whether we ought to allow religious schools at all - I don't think we should - but that debate is quite different from this one. While they exist they have the right to do what the law says they can do.
I'm afraid I really do blame Richard Dawkins and his cohorts of muscular atheists who never seem to let their bad effect on the general public's opinion of science get in the way of really irritating people. This is anti-religious bigotry pure and simple.
Bah.
July 17, 2012
I'm repressing my memory of Freud
I've been reading a lot on psychology recently for a book I'm writing and was fascinated to discover just how much doubt there is about the whole business of suppressed memories.The idea that we can find memories so horrible that somehow the brain will edit them out has no scientific basis in origin, coming from the work of Freud and his ilk, who simply made things up as they went along. Freud's work has largely been removed from the the scientific viewpoint, but the idea of repressed memories got left behind. It's time we forgot it.
To make matters worse, we now know that processes like hypnosis are quite good at implanting fake memories. So when a 'therapist' tries to regress someone to get to memories that have been suppressed - of child abuse, say, or alien abduction - instead of getting to hidden memories what they are doing is constructing new ones. There are fascinating experiments where by simply being told a convincing story repeatedly even individuals who are not hypnotised can begin to incorporate these stories (a typical one is about getting lost in a shopping mall as a child) into their memories and treat them as 100 per cent real.
Even when an individual originally claims to have no memory of traumatic event that was known to have happen, all the evidence is that they are consciously failing to report it, because they find it embarrassing or don't want to be disloyal to someone else, not because their brain had decided to lock the memory away.
So please, fiction writers, stop making use of repressed memories - they are even less likely than that creaky old favourite of soap operas, amnesia. At least there are good examples of that happening, but not of repressed memories. It's as much the invention of the imagination of unscientific analysts as were Freud's lurid interpretations of dreams.
It's time companies got the hang of networking
I've mentioned before the powerful aspects of networking as identified very clearly in the interesting book Wikinomics (see details at Amazon.co.uk or at Amazon.com) - unfortunately it's something many companies haven't got a clue about.I was just rapidly emptying my inbox of commercial newsletters, which I have a habit of accumulating in the hope of winning a year's supply of electric bananas or some such essential, when it struck me how many of them came from that strangely named person 'donotreply' AKA 'noreply' AKA 'dontreply'.
Even the rather witty weekly roundup from the IT intelligence site Silicon.com comes from a non-human sounding address silicon@newsletters.silicon.cneteu.net that it seems highly likely won't get you anywhere if you send an email to it.
These companies who employ 'noreply' are, frankly, dumb. Organizations spend a vast amount of money on building a relationship with customers - yet the very moment a customer wants to talk to them, they say 'we aren't interested in what you have to say: it's only what we say that's important.' Isn't it time they sacked noreply and replaced her with her cousin pleasereply, and waited for the conversation to begin?
This post first appeared on my Nature Network blog - I'm bringing some of the old posts over to my new home, as the NN blog is liable to disappear soon.
July 16, 2012
Nature's Nanotech
This is the first of a series of features on www.popularscience.co.uk that I will also be featuring on my blog:
When we think of nanotechnology, it’s easy to jump to the conclusion that we are dealing with the ultimate in artificial manufacturing, the diametric opposite of something that’s natural. Yet in practice, nature is built on nanotechnology. From the day-to-day workings of the components of every single biological cell to the subtle optics of a peacock feather, what we see is nanotechnology at work.
Not only are the very building blocks of nature nanoscale, but natural nanotechnology is a magnificent inspiration for ways to make use of the microscopic to change our lives and environment for the better. By studying how very small things work in the natural world we can invent remarkable new products – and this feature is the first in a series that will explore just how much we can learn and gain from nature’s nano tech.
As I described in The Nanotechnology Myth the term ‘nanotechnology’ originates from the prefix nano- which is simply a billionth. Nanotechnology makes use of objects on the scale of a few nanometres, where a nanometre is a millionth of a millimetre. For comparison, a human hair is around 50,000 nanometres across. Nanotechnology encompasses objects that vary in size from a large molecule to a virus. A bacterium, typically around 1,000 nanometres in size, is around the upper limit of nanoscale items.
A first essential is to understand that although nanotechnology, like chemistry, is involved in the interaction of very small components of matter, it is entirely different from a chemical reaction. Chemistry is about the way those components join together and break apart. Nanotechnology is primarily about their physics – how the components interact. If we think of the analogy of making a bicycle, the ‘chemistry’ of the bicycle is how the individual components bolt together, the ‘nanotechnology’ is how, for example, the gear interacts with the chain or pushing the pedals makes the bike go.
This distinction is necessary to get over the concern some people raise about nature and nanotechnology. A while ago, when I wrote my book on environmental truth and lies, Ecologic , I had a strange argument with a representative of the Soil Association, the UK’s primary organic body. In 2008 the Soil Association banned nanoparticles from their products. But it only banned man-made nanoparticles, claiming that natural ones, like soot, are fine ‘because life has evolved with these.’
This is a total misunderstanding of the science. If there are any issues with nanotechnology they are about the physics, not the chemistry of the substance – and there is no sensible physical distinction between a natural nanoparticle and an artificial one. In the case of the Soil Association, the reasoning was revealed when they admitted that they take ‘a principles-based regulatory approach, rather than a case-by-case approach based on scientific information.’ In other words their opposition was a knee-jerk one to words like ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ rather than based on substance.
Of themselves, like anything else, nanoparticles and nanotechnology in general can be used for bad or for good. Whether natural or artificial they have benefits and disadvantages. A virus, for example, is a purely natural nanotechnology that can be devastatingly destructive to living things. And as we will see, there are plenty of artificial nanotechnologies that bring huge benefits.
In nature, nanotechnology is constructed from large molecules. A molecule is nothing more than a collection of atoms, bonded together to form a structure, which can be as simple as a sodium chloride molecule – one atom each of the elements sodium and chlorine – or as complex as the dual helix of DNA. We don’t always appreciate how significant individual molecules are.
I had a good example of this a few days ago when I helped judge a competition run by the University of the West of England for school teams producing science videos. The topic they were given was the human genome – and the result was a set of very varied videos, some showing a surprising amount of talent. At the awards event I was giving a quick talk to the participants, looking at the essentials of a good science video. I pointed out that they had used a lot of jargon without explaining it – a common enough fault even in mainstream TV science.
Just to highlight this, I picked out a term most of them had used, but none had explained – chromosomes. What, I asked them was a chromosome? They told me what it did, but didn’t know what it was, except that it was a chunk of DNA and each human had 46 of them in most of their cells. This is true, but misses the big point. A chromosome is simply a single molecule of DNA. Nothing more, nothing less. One molecule.
Admittedly a chromosome is a very large molecule. Human chromosome 1 is the biggest molecule we know of, with around 10 billion atoms. Makes salt look a bit feeble. But it is still a molecule. The basic components of the biological mechanisms of everything living, up to an including human beings are molecules. Chromosomes provide one example, effectively information storage molecules with genes as chunks of information strung along a strip of DNA. Then there are proteins, the workhorses of the body. There are neurotransmitters and enzymes, and a whole host of molecules that are the equivalent of gears to the body’s magnificent clockwork. These are the building blocks of natural nanotechnology.
So with a picture of what we’re dealing with we can set out to see nature’s nanotech in action and the first example, in the next feature in this series, will show how nanotechnology on the surface of a leaf has inspired both self-cleaning glass and water resistant trainers.
When we think of nanotechnology, it’s easy to jump to the conclusion that we are dealing with the ultimate in artificial manufacturing, the diametric opposite of something that’s natural. Yet in practice, nature is built on nanotechnology. From the day-to-day workings of the components of every single biological cell to the subtle optics of a peacock feather, what we see is nanotechnology at work.
Not only are the very building blocks of nature nanoscale, but natural nanotechnology is a magnificent inspiration for ways to make use of the microscopic to change our lives and environment for the better. By studying how very small things work in the natural world we can invent remarkable new products – and this feature is the first in a series that will explore just how much we can learn and gain from nature’s nano tech.
As I described in The Nanotechnology Myth the term ‘nanotechnology’ originates from the prefix nano- which is simply a billionth. Nanotechnology makes use of objects on the scale of a few nanometres, where a nanometre is a millionth of a millimetre. For comparison, a human hair is around 50,000 nanometres across. Nanotechnology encompasses objects that vary in size from a large molecule to a virus. A bacterium, typically around 1,000 nanometres in size, is around the upper limit of nanoscale items.
A first essential is to understand that although nanotechnology, like chemistry, is involved in the interaction of very small components of matter, it is entirely different from a chemical reaction. Chemistry is about the way those components join together and break apart. Nanotechnology is primarily about their physics – how the components interact. If we think of the analogy of making a bicycle, the ‘chemistry’ of the bicycle is how the individual components bolt together, the ‘nanotechnology’ is how, for example, the gear interacts with the chain or pushing the pedals makes the bike go.
This distinction is necessary to get over the concern some people raise about nature and nanotechnology. A while ago, when I wrote my book on environmental truth and lies, Ecologic , I had a strange argument with a representative of the Soil Association, the UK’s primary organic body. In 2008 the Soil Association banned nanoparticles from their products. But it only banned man-made nanoparticles, claiming that natural ones, like soot, are fine ‘because life has evolved with these.’
This is a total misunderstanding of the science. If there are any issues with nanotechnology they are about the physics, not the chemistry of the substance – and there is no sensible physical distinction between a natural nanoparticle and an artificial one. In the case of the Soil Association, the reasoning was revealed when they admitted that they take ‘a principles-based regulatory approach, rather than a case-by-case approach based on scientific information.’ In other words their opposition was a knee-jerk one to words like ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ rather than based on substance.
Of themselves, like anything else, nanoparticles and nanotechnology in general can be used for bad or for good. Whether natural or artificial they have benefits and disadvantages. A virus, for example, is a purely natural nanotechnology that can be devastatingly destructive to living things. And as we will see, there are plenty of artificial nanotechnologies that bring huge benefits.
In nature, nanotechnology is constructed from large molecules. A molecule is nothing more than a collection of atoms, bonded together to form a structure, which can be as simple as a sodium chloride molecule – one atom each of the elements sodium and chlorine – or as complex as the dual helix of DNA. We don’t always appreciate how significant individual molecules are.
I had a good example of this a few days ago when I helped judge a competition run by the University of the West of England for school teams producing science videos. The topic they were given was the human genome – and the result was a set of very varied videos, some showing a surprising amount of talent. At the awards event I was giving a quick talk to the participants, looking at the essentials of a good science video. I pointed out that they had used a lot of jargon without explaining it – a common enough fault even in mainstream TV science.
Just to highlight this, I picked out a term most of them had used, but none had explained – chromosomes. What, I asked them was a chromosome? They told me what it did, but didn’t know what it was, except that it was a chunk of DNA and each human had 46 of them in most of their cells. This is true, but misses the big point. A chromosome is simply a single molecule of DNA. Nothing more, nothing less. One molecule.
Admittedly a chromosome is a very large molecule. Human chromosome 1 is the biggest molecule we know of, with around 10 billion atoms. Makes salt look a bit feeble. But it is still a molecule. The basic components of the biological mechanisms of everything living, up to an including human beings are molecules. Chromosomes provide one example, effectively information storage molecules with genes as chunks of information strung along a strip of DNA. Then there are proteins, the workhorses of the body. There are neurotransmitters and enzymes, and a whole host of molecules that are the equivalent of gears to the body’s magnificent clockwork. These are the building blocks of natural nanotechnology.
So with a picture of what we’re dealing with we can set out to see nature’s nanotech in action and the first example, in the next feature in this series, will show how nanotechnology on the surface of a leaf has inspired both self-cleaning glass and water resistant trainers.
July 13, 2012
It's got to be brown
A while ago I eulogised on the subject of barbecue sauce. I admit I am practically an addict - yet I ought also to recognise an older allegiance that is still there. Because I am also very fond of brown sauce.This is something that could only be invented (or at least named) in the UK. In France it would be (and is) sauce picante. In the US it would be super-tangy fruitified meat sauce or something. But here it's brown sauce. Brown. Plodding. Tells you nothing but the colour, nothing of the delights that lie within.
For me there is nothing better (sorry barbecue, but you don't cut the mustard) to go with, say, a sausage or a pie. I confess (though this is a personal oddity) I have it with fish and chips. But the ultimate has to be as an accompaniment to a cooked breakfast or a bacon sandwich. Those who go for ketchup in these circumstances totally miss the plot.
So essential is it to have this accompaniment that even those bastions of US imperialism McDonalds and Starbucks provide brown sauce with their breakfast rolls, wraps and paninis.
Rather like cola, while there are many clones and copies there are only two serious contenders for the brown sauce crown. I have to dismiss immediately Worcester(shire) sauce. This is a great cooking ingredient but it totally fails as an accompaniment to breakfast. When I lived with my parents we were a Daddies sauce family, but my grandparents went with HP sauce. I'd say Daddies is the Pepsi of brown sauces to HP's Coca Cola. HP is the original, the leader of the pack, and is more subtle than Daddies - a little less fruity, a bit more spicy. When I was a child I had my parents' brown sauce. When I became a man I put aside childish things and converted to HP. After all, how British can a sauce be? It's Houses of Parliament sauce, for goodness sake.
So, if you've never tried it, put off by the name and the look of it - be brave. If used correctly it is nectar of the gods.
July 11, 2012
Are you having a laugh?
It's Royal Society of Chemistry podcast time again, and this time round we're having a laugh. In fact it's a gas. Nitrous oxide to be precise. Why not spare five minutes for a giggle - and you'll learn a bit as well about a substance that had them rolling in the aisles over a hundred years ago and has become popular at parties again. Take a listen.
Too cheap to meter?
This is the sort of thing you can do with cheap powerWhen I was researching my book Ecologic I came across one of those irritating quotes that seem to belong to more than one person.(The classic example of this phenomenon is the aphorism 'Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal' or its variant 'Good artists copy, great artists steal', which are attributed to T. S. Eliot, Stravinsky and Picasso.)
A popular quote that the media use to show how misguided early fans of atomic energy were is that they thought it would be 'too cheap to meter.'
A fair number of UK sources attribute this to one of the British pioneers, Walter Marshall. But I am yet to find a single reference as to the context in which this was said or written, if it ever was, by Marshall.
What seems to have a stronger attribution is that these words were said by the chairman of the US atomic energy commission, Lewis L. Strauss. However the context in which he said this is absolutely essential in understanding it.
Strauss was addressing the National Association of Science Writers in 1954. It was one of those hand-waving, vague visions of a utopian future. Yes, he did say that 'our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter' (though not specifically that it would be generated by nuclear fission) but also that there would be an end to disease, hugely extended human lifetimes and world peace. It was that kind of speech. You know the sort of thing.
This is a prediction with about as much support at the time as Alvin Toffler in Future Shock saying that by now we would all be wearing paper clothes, or Clarke and Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey showing Pan Am commercial flights to a space station, and life-size video telephone booths operated by Bell in 2001. It was woffly future-gazing, yet the media repeatedly pick it up as a real expectation that wasn't present in either science or industry at the time.
This prediction isn't a miss, it's a myth.
(If anyone can give me a source for the quote from Walter Marshall, I would be grateful.)
This post first appeared on my Nature Network blog - I'm bringing some of the old posts over to my new home, as the NN blog is liable to disappear soon.
Image from Wikipedia
July 9, 2012
The footballist and the law
Warning - this post contains asterisks
I gather from the news that a footballist by the name of John Terry is in court because of saying something to another footballist called Anton Ferdinand. For me the court case highlights a perversity in the law that I've mentioned before, but this brings it out stronger than ever.
According to what I remember from last night's news (so wording may not be exact), Ferdinand taunted Terry about his extra-marital affair and used an obscene gesture. In response, Terry said to Ferdinand 'F*** off! F*** off! You black c***!' and it is this phrase that has landed him in court.
As someone with once red hair, who got the usual taunting when younger, I think it is totally unfair that this is treated totally differently to what would have happened had Terry responded to a red-haired player by saying 'F*** off! F*** off! You ginger c***!' In those circumstances I presume there would have been no case.
Surely the law itself is racist here. It is illegal to abuse someone based on their colouring if they are one race, but it is not illegal to abuse someone based on their colouring if they are another race. This is blatant discrimination.
In practice it is a travesty that a week's court time is being taken up with this. Okay, the footballists will be paying their legal bills, I guess, but there is still the cost to the taxpayer of the whole business and a court locked up for a week delaying other cases. I'm not saying the incident should have been ignored. The FA should have fined both of them for verbal abuse and bringing the game into disrepute - and rather than the piddling fine liable to come from court I'd suggest at least a month's wages, which should be paid to charity rather than going to the FA. But the court case is just wrong.
I gather from the news that a footballist by the name of John Terry is in court because of saying something to another footballist called Anton Ferdinand. For me the court case highlights a perversity in the law that I've mentioned before, but this brings it out stronger than ever.
According to what I remember from last night's news (so wording may not be exact), Ferdinand taunted Terry about his extra-marital affair and used an obscene gesture. In response, Terry said to Ferdinand 'F*** off! F*** off! You black c***!' and it is this phrase that has landed him in court.
As someone with once red hair, who got the usual taunting when younger, I think it is totally unfair that this is treated totally differently to what would have happened had Terry responded to a red-haired player by saying 'F*** off! F*** off! You ginger c***!' In those circumstances I presume there would have been no case.
Surely the law itself is racist here. It is illegal to abuse someone based on their colouring if they are one race, but it is not illegal to abuse someone based on their colouring if they are another race. This is blatant discrimination.
In practice it is a travesty that a week's court time is being taken up with this. Okay, the footballists will be paying their legal bills, I guess, but there is still the cost to the taxpayer of the whole business and a court locked up for a week delaying other cases. I'm not saying the incident should have been ignored. The FA should have fined both of them for verbal abuse and bringing the game into disrepute - and rather than the piddling fine liable to come from court I'd suggest at least a month's wages, which should be paid to charity rather than going to the FA. But the court case is just wrong.
Do sceptics rush in where angels fear to tread?
I'm currently reading the new edition of Michael Shermer's
Why People Believe Weird Things
which is an excellent book debunking pseudoscience and superstition, from the man who is probably our best known media sceptic.However, at one point, Shermer does trip over his own assertions. (I point this out in the same spirit as that of Bill Bryson, using examples of bad English that he found in guides to English usage in his own guide.)
Shermer is careful to first explain the difference between the scientific method and the way most pseudoscience is reported. (He doesn't mention it, but I love Robert Park's encapsulation of this in Voodoo Science as 'data is not the plural of anecdote'.)
Shermer tells us that in science we should be scrupulous about presenting data that goes against our theories, rather than being selective with the observations. But then, only pages later, he indulges in a little selectivity himself. To illustrate the recent growth of science and technology, he tells us that transportation speed has undergone geometric growth. His list goes from stagecoach (1784) 10 miles per hour, through bicycle (1870) 17 mph, steam train (1880) 100 mph, airplane (1934) 400 mph, rocket (1960) 4000 mph, space shuttle (1985) 18000 mph to TAU deep space probe (2000) 225,000 mph. (I've skipped some entries, but this gives a feel for the sequence.)
There's more than one bit of naughtiness with the data here, I fear. The last entry isn't human transport, so really can't be counted as being from the same data set - you might as well put the speed of a bullet in there. If you drop that last entry we have a graph that flatlines 22 years ago.
But, more worryingly, there is also a discontinuity in the data. Up to airplane, they are all modes of transport available to normal people. From rocket onwards, they are specialist devices not available to the rest of us. If you keep the more consistent comparison of generally available transport, the graph is much more interesting. It goes a lot higher than 'airplane', because in the 1970s we got Concorde taking us to Mach 2 (over 1500 mph). But that was the last upward step. And since Concorde was withdrawn, the transport speed graph drops to less than half its previous value. It is currently in the high 500s. So that geometric progression isn't anywhere near so solid as Shermer's figures suggest. Say after me, Michael - 'We should be scrupulous about presenting data that goes against our theories'.
I don't point this out to knock Shermer, or the book, which is very good, just to point out the difficulties that come hand in hand with being a sceptic. (Or should I say skeptic, as the book uses US spelling. I just love reading the word 'skeptic' because to UK eyes it looks so seventeenth century, a bit like spelling optics or physics as opticks and physicks - I'm sure the reverse is true when US readers see some of our spellings.)
This post first appeared on my Nature Network blog - I'm bringing some of the old posts over to my new home, as the NN blog is liable to disappear soon.
July 6, 2012
Supporting zombies everywhere
Okay, there are some causes that not everyone buys into. If you are dog lover, for instance, you might not want to contribute to the cat's protection league. But there is one cause I feel everyone can get behind. Who doesn't love a good zombie? Even better, who doesn't love a zombie crawl?
If you happen to live in sunny Herne Bay you can go along and see one on November 3rd 2012 - but even if you don't, you can give those zombies money to stop them scooping out your brains electronically by clicking through to JustGiving.
Best of all, rather than trying to eat your money, said zombies are giving the donations to Kent Air Ambulance. Awww. Sweet.
If you happen to live in sunny Herne Bay you can go along and see one on November 3rd 2012 - but even if you don't, you can give those zombies money to stop them scooping out your brains electronically by clicking through to JustGiving.
Best of all, rather than trying to eat your money, said zombies are giving the donations to Kent Air Ambulance. Awww. Sweet.
