Brian Clegg's Blog, page 138

We're going on Higgs hunt

We're going on Higgs hunt,
Going to catch a big one!
I'm not scared - been here before.

And haven't we just. With rumours flying wildly that the discovery of the existence of the Higgs boson (or that nautical favourite, the Higgs bosun as some members of the press will unerringly refer to it) would be announced from CERN yesterday morning (and in the end it was, sort of), it was fascinating to see the US Tevatron team rushing in with a non-announcement earlier in the week that they might have seen something that might be significant.

This is ironic in a way, because the US should have been here first with the heavy guns. The Superconducting Super Collider was going to be the machine that finally laid the is-it-isn't-it saga to rest on the Higgs boson, a.k.a. the God particle. After spending around 2 billion dollars on it, funding was pulled when the option was to either continue this or the US contribution to the International Space Station (which, incidentally, has much less scientific benefit). Now the European Large Hadron Collider, which interestingly hasn't cost hugely more than had already been spent on the SSC, has delivered the goods.

Yesterday we were bombarded with the Higgs on the news - this is the sort of science news that makes the mainstream, though it usually gets the non-science journalists in a twist as they try to explain with limited success what a Higgs boson is (or isn't). And inevitably there was some muttering about whether we should be spending all that money on pure scientific research.

A frequent argument in support is spin-offs. Look at all the benefits we've got, they say. This is actually often a weak argument. Admittedly pure quantum physics research led us to electronics (I was amused to hear a particle physicist say that electronics was a spin-off of particle physics rather than quantum physics), and CERN has already given us the world wide web, but this isn't really the right argument. Also it can be mis-deployed. Look at NASA, with a budget last year of around £12 billion. Well, they've given us, erm teflon, haven't they? Well, no. It was discovered long before NASA existed, and its first big commercial use was by a Frenchman in Tefal frying pans. Okay, well, there was velcro, wasn't there? Well, no. That was also invented long before NASA existed. By a Swiss guy. About the best you can do for NASA is memory foam mattresses.

(Please don't tell me NASA was responsible for the microcomputer - development of that was driven by commercial pressures, not one-off uses.)

However, I'd say that focussing on spin-offs misses the point. The circa £2.6 billion spent on the LHC is worth spending for pure science, for the discovery, for the wonder. Let's put it in perspective. The UK contribution to CERN is around £95 million a year, of which just over a third is direct to the LHC. Compare that with the UK's international aid budget where we happily spend over £9 billion - indubitably more than £95 million of that goes into back pockets of dictators and corrupt officials. Or even our arts budget at over £1 billion helping subsidise opera houses and knit-your-own-yoghurt whale hugging seminars. By comparison £34 million or so a year on the LHC to help discover the mechanism of the universe seems a very small price to pay indeed.

Introductory verse with HT to Michael Rosen
Image from Wikipedia

On the merits of rock concerts

Someone whose gig I would go toMusically speaking, I was a strange child. The first album I ever bought, age 11, was Elgar's Dream of Gerontius (Barbirolli, I think). To be fair, we were doing it in the school choir, I didn't just didn't randomly feel the urge to buy it. I was 15 when I first bought a contemporary record - the Beatles' Abbey Road.

Similarly, while all my friends were going to gigs by Tyrannosaurus (sic) Rex and Van der Graaf Generator, I...wasn't. I just wasn't interested. Since then the closest I have come to a rock concert has been Cliff Richard (don't laugh - I didn't go voluntarily), the Flying Pickets and Al Stewart. (Now that was a brilliant gig. Next time Mr Stewart is touring in the UK I will be along there like the proverbial gig ferret.)

Now I've always said, if there's one band I really would like to see live it's Pink Floyd. I love their music and they allegedly gave great shows. Realistically it is never going to happen, so when it turned out that acclaimed tribute band Brit Floyd were coming to a theatre near us, I jumped at the chance and bought tickets.

The gig was last night. And I nearly didn't go. When it came to it, on the day, I wasn't sure I could be bothered. What I think it really was is that I rarely have enthusiasm for sitting listening to music (unless it is the brilliant Mr Stewart). I normally only do it in the car. I can't work to music, for instance - I just find it an irritating distraction. So despite paying nearly £60 for two tickets, I almost left them to get on with it and stayed at home.

However I did go, and I have to say they were brilliant. Ever since mistakenly buying a live Yes album I've always been a little worried about live performance of complex contemporary music, but Brit Floyd really hit the classics (and they did many of them) spot on. It was visually impressive and musically excellent. The only time I raised an eyebrow is I didn't remember a Floyd piece that had a reference to the Doctor Who theme in it, but a quick web search tells me there is one, on Meddle, one of the few of their albums I don't have.

I'm not sure I'd go to one of their gigs again - it's one of those 'I've done it now' things. But I'm really glad I went. In case you don't believe decent Floyd-a-like can be done, here's Brit Floyd doing Money:




Image from Wikipedia

O stoats and weasels!

Leaving aside the fact that the title of this blog post would make quite a good mild expletive - something definitely due a comeback after all the explicit four letter words on reality TV - it reflects a frustration I've finally decided to finish.

Taking the dog for an afternoon walk in pale autumn sunlight [ok, this is a repost of an old one, but to be honest, pale autumn sunlight seems about the best we can hope for this July], our path was crossed by a creature resembling a stretched limo version of a mouse. But was it a stoat or a weasel? Which is the mouse-sized version?

My frustrated lack of ability to remember is stoked to greater heights of fury by a friend and ex-King's Singer (but that's another story) I occasionally go for a walk with, who has the habit of gnomically uttering 'a weasel is w-easily recognised as a stoat is s-totally different' or some such remark, which doesn't help a great deal.

If I read Wikipedia right, the weasel, as we know it in the UK, is actually the least weasel and is a lot smaller than the stoat. (Don't you just love it that an animal can be a 'least something'?) So with natural perversity, the one with the shorter name is the bigger of the two (to help me remember). So there.

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

Einstein does a funny

A journal which I'm sure is very readableA while ago, straying through the depths of Nature Network, I saw an item on writing more readable papers. There may well be several out there - it's a hoary old topic.

I don't dispute the suggestion that many scientific papers could be better written, but in the end, however approachable, they are unlikely to get a reprint in Heat magazine, so it is still a matter of writing to the audience. Without doubt, though, it's a relief when the writer of a paper adopts a lighter tone and writes like a human being, rather than a robot.

I suppose the best known instance of putting a human face to a paper, which some have held up as a shining example of what's possible, is Einstein's paper on subjective time. The abstract reads:

When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute - and it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity.

In the paper he allegedly describes undertaking an experiment to test this, with the help of film star Paulette Goddard, who he met through mutual friend Charlie Chaplin. However there are three big problems if anyone considers Einstein's very approachable sounding paper a model of how to write more effectively.

First, get real. This was Einstein. He could have written a paper in mirror writing and someone would have published it.

Second, we usually only hear of the abstract. The main body of the paper sounds very unlikely. Einstein undertaking an experiment? That's fishy.

Finally, though I have only ever seen this mentioned as if it were a real paper, I haven't been able to find any reference to the journal it was supposed to be published in anywhere, other than references to Einstein's contribution. It may be this is a really obscure journal (or even a very famous one in its own field), but given what its significant initials spell, I'm inclined to doubt it. And if the whole thing is fictional, maybe it doesn't provide such a great role model.

Where was it allegedly published? In the Journal of Exothermic Science and Technology.

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

Science and Paris Hilton

A not very popular science writer at workI write in a genre that's usually labelled "popular science" to distinguish it from the real academic stuff. In a recent Scientific American, the excellent Michael Shermer writes that popular science writing is often esteemed less than technical writing, and that he considers it very narrow and naive to regard anything other than peer reviewed papers as "mere popularization."

I must admit, I've always had a bit of inverted view, thinking that, at least from a quality of writing viewpoint, most science writing other than popular science is pretty unreadable. (Someone has to stick up for the poor science writers.)

Yet enthusiastic though I am about popular science, I feel a little nervous about that word "popular." Reading about celebrities like Ms Hilton is popular [2012 note - of course celebrities come and go - if I was writing this now I suppose it would someone from TOWIE or Pippa Middleton], but is reading about science? It's certainly true that there was a brief flowering of popularity around A Brief History of Time, but on the whole, I don't see much science up the front of the bookstores on the "new and exciting things" shelves. I'm much more likely to find a cookbook or a celebrity biography.

This may sound like a moan, but it's not, it's a spur to action. All of us who write this kind of book should be looking for ways to make science genuinely popular. Not only would this boost our royalties (which few of us would object to), it's also important because getting science across to a wider public matters a lot.

My first small contribution is the website www.popularscience.co.uk which is a review site for popular science books, but that's largely preaching to the converted. As for the rest, I intend to keep trying.

This post first appeared on my Nature Network blog back in 2007- I'm bringing some of the old posts over to my new home, as the NN blog is liable to disappear soon.

Why arty plays will never be popular

Don't expect much entertainment hereI was listening to James Naughtie on his series about the 'New Elizabethans', being reverential (as he always is about anything arty) about Harold Pinter and his work.

There was much discussion of how Pinter's plays represented real life, with all its contradictions, without resolution, without true endings. How it's wonderful that everything is left in the air and unexplained. And it struck me exactly why such theatre isn't exactly commercial.

The fact is, we can all experience real life and real conversations and contradictions and lack of resolution. We can all be left in the air and have things unexplained. It happens every day. That's where we live. We don't need to go to a theatre to experience it. The fact that Pinter encapsulates it wonderfully is a big 'so what?' It makes for theatre that is about as engaging as Big Brother. We don't want to go to a theatre to see real life, we want to be entertained or informed or surprised or excited, or even better all four.

I suspect the minority with a 'literary bent' will continue to be thrilled by Pinter's kind of thing, perhaps because their lives are a lot less real than those of most people. But for the rest of us, I'd much rather we celebrated playwrights who are good at entertaining us, at giving us that delightful, informing, surprising, thrilling evening.

Image from Wikipedia

Paying for travel

There's a lot of debate going on in the UK over the fact that the Chancellor of  the Exchequer (isn't that a wonderfully archaic term when you actually look at the words) has announced that he is not going to increase petrol duty by 3p from August, putting it off to January at least.

Leaving aside the political insults flying about U-turns (get a grip politicians! When are you going to realise that admitting a mistake or the need for change is a good thing?), it has been useful in exposing the debate on what we should do to tax driving. There are two broad needs, to raise revenue (in principle, though not explicitly to pay for the road network and secondary costs thereof) and to discourage use of fossil fuels/high carbon emission activities/pollution.

At the moment there are two weapons in the government's armoury. There is an annual car tax (formerly known as road fund licence), and there is fuel tax. The annual tax is ridiculous. Although it has gradations for emissions, it is still a tax that gets cheaper per mile the more you drive. It is totally counter-functional and ought to be dropped immediately.

As for fuel duty, while it is proportional to the amount you drive and how much of a gas guzzler your car is, it is very heavy handed because it applies equally to someone driving through a crowded, polluted city with a superb public transport system and someone driving in the depths of Cornwall, where the car is an absolute lifeline, the nearest shop is 10 miles away and there is practically no public transport system.

I heard on the radio the other day a Labour person saying what we really needed to do was to go back to the idea of a road pricing scheme, which would monitor exactly where you are driving and charge you accordingly, something the previous government was interested in, but that was squashed because of a ridiculously biassed campaign against it resulting in a huge anti-petition, based much more on emotion than logic.

The trouble is, the Labour plan is also a disaster. It requires far too much technology to work, needing every car to be fitted with a tracking device, and a vast computer system to monitor and collect movement data. It is also hugely Big Brotheresque. There has to be a better way. And there is. Here's Brian's cunning plan to sort out this mess:

Dispose of car tax immediately. This will lose some revenue, though not as much as you might thing as it's quite expensive to administer. If necessary slap on a bit of extra fuel duty.Find a workable way of doing road pricing. The most important thing is that it should be passive - active systems, requiring technology in the car, are too complex and costly. I'd suggest doing it only on motorways, major trunk roads and in cities to keep costs down, using a camera system like the London congestion charge.Once you have the road pricing system, remove the fuel tax entirely.If a load of people whinge about it in a petition, ignore them. You can't always be popular. But if you make it clear that petrol prices will drop by around 70p a litre, people may be more enthusiastic.Successive governments have been too timid about this. Get your act together, guys.
Image from Wikipedia

About four inches

The answer was 'about four inches' - what was the question?

Once you have finished sniggering in the back row, the real answer is an unreal pretence of accuracy.

This mini-rant was inspired by a weather forecast, heard on the radio a few days ago for some eastern part of the UK or other. We were told that 100 millimetres of rain was expected 'which is about four inches.'

Now it is perfectly reasonable to say that 100 millimetres is about four inches, as it is actually pretty close to 4.16 inches. But the point is that there weren't really going to be 100 mm of rain.

In reality that '100 mm' number was just a round figure guess. There was no significant accuracy to the value. So the inches version should be a round figure too - in this case, four inches, not 'about four inches'. Otherwise it suggests a totally spurious accuracy in the original 100 millimetres.

When I worked for a certain large airline with the initials BA, we used to have a similar problem with the people involved in scheduling aircraft. The planning system included various variables, like passenger load, and we worked out the weight of the total passengers on board (because that influences the amount of fuel you need) using an average figure. One of our planners wanted us to change the system so he could put in passenger weights to two decimal places. But given this was a vague estimate, such accuracy was worse than meaningless: it gave the figures a spurious reality.

And that's why I'm picking up the weather forecaster highly unfairly on what was actually a very natural thing to say. It's just too easy to give a forecast figure, which in the end is an informed guess, a spurious sense of accuracy, and we need to be on our guard to avoid this.

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Mind Storm

Creativity in business is a funny thing. We all pay lip service to how important it is - but when times are tight and money is short we tend to pull up the drawbridge and say 'We can do without all this new-fangled innovation. While we're in trouble we need to stick with what we know.'

In reality, of course, this is absolute tosh. The very time when you need to be most creative as a business is when things are difficult. But it's understandable that, in times of financial stress, you don't necessarily want to spend lots of money to train people in being more creative.

There's an assumption in that previous sentence, of course. I'm taking it for granted that there is benefit in training people in creativity. I hope there's no doubt about the need for creativity. If everything around you stayed exactly the same, then you could carry on as you have before and thrive. But the fact is that the environment (financial and physical) is changing. Your customers are changing. Your competitors and your industry are changing. Techology is changing. You need creativity for new ideas, and you need it to solve problems. I think it's no exaggeration to say that in this environment, creativity is nothing less than a survival essential. It's a case of be creative or go to the wall.

However, is there any point in training people in creativity? Haven't they either got it or not? And what can you possibly do? Give them a pot of paint and say 'Get creative?'

In fact, there is a huge point. Everyone can be creative, but most of us suppress that natural ability. We block it in ourselves and in others. We're great at doing this. (If you doubt that statement, next time you are in a meeting, watch out for someone coming up with an idea, then see how everyone else finds reasons why it won't work.) And in the last few decades practical techniques have been developed that will enable anyone to come up with a much richer pool of ideas, and help them to develop and implement those ideas effectively. We're not talking about airy-fairy conceptual creativity, but down-to-earth, practical tools that solidly deliver ideas and problem solutions.

So, creativity training, good - cost of creativity courses, bad. If your business has the money, I would still get yourself a proper course. You can't beat the interaction with a good creativity trainer to get people up and running with creativity quickly. But if the budget doesn't run to it, I've put together a simple, self-managed 25 module course in the form of a PDF ebook called Mind Storm that won't break the budget at £19.99.

To get a better feel about what's involved, the first chapter of the book is available to download for free - or you can find out more details and purchase the full course here.

I really think, given the current conditions, any business that isn't doing something about its creativity is asking for trouble.

Funny business on the price tag

Have you ever wondered about those strange prices that dominate the retail world? It's not £5, it's £4.99. Forget £10, it is bound to be £9.99. Just occasionally a retailer will rebel. For a brief bizarre period around 10 years ago Asda experimented with pricing CDs and the like with prices that ended with numbers like .74 or .27 - it looked much stranger than you might expect, so engrained is the notion that .99 is what nature intended.

I think there is little doubt that the reason that retailers do this is psychological. We aren't hugely rational when it comes to decisions, especially when they involve those alien things numbers, which didn't exist as concepts when our current brain structure first evolved. So it doesn't matter how much you consciously tell yourself that £10 is pretty much the same as £9.99, your unconscious, shopping-powering mind will see it as considerably less. And it helps if you have to describe your purchase to a penny-pinching other half. 'It was only £9,' you can say, simply not specifying your rounding rule (and who would).

Interestingly, though, a book I'm currently reading for review suggests that the practice of using these trailing .99s predates the awareness of such psychological factors. According to The Universal Machine by Ian Watson, this practice originated with the first cash registers. These were designed to prevent the salespeople ripping off shop owners by clearly registering a transaction and by ringing a bell so the supervisor could see the assistant drop the money into the till.

Apparently the theory was that if you had something priced at £5 then you could be handed a £5 note which you slipped into your pocket and as far as the shop was concerned, the item had been stolen by a shoplifter, while you were £5 better off. But if the item was priced at £4.99 you would almost inevitably have to give change, making it necessary to 'ring up' the item and be under your supervisors scrutiny.

So there you go £4.99? It's surprising how much you get for it.

(The full review of The Universal Machine will be posted on www.popularscience.co.uk in a few days time.)

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