Brian Clegg's Blog, page 140

Carbon tet

Between school and university, with a shiny new chemistry A-level under my belt, I spent the summer working in an industrial lab. As the lowest of the low, my jobs were those that no one else wanted to do. Our lab’s role was testing incoming raw materials at a plant that specialised in fatty acids. The worst job was, without doubt, being ‘lumper bumper’ - a nickname of uncertain origin for going out in all weathers and climbing up on top of chemical tankers to take samples of the hot contents. At best this meant handling sweet-smelling cocoa nut oil… and at worst, reeking tallow. After these excursions, the sampling equipment joined the endless piles of dirty labware that were also my responsibility. And that’s where I got my introduction to carbon tetrachloride.

Take a listen to my Royal Society of Chemistry podcast on carbon tetrachloride's bumpy ride as a solvent, cleaner and dangerous substance. Click here to listen.

No more Dell

I have been buying Dell computers for around 20 years. Perhaps more significant for that company, as someone who ran the PC department for BA and has written for a good number of PC magazines over the years, lots of people have asked my advice on buying PCs, and I would say because of that advice Dell has sold dozens of computers. But my advice has changed - whatever you do, don't buy a Dell.

This has nothing to do with my recent conversion to using an iMac - I accept that Apple isn't for everyone, and are overpriced. It's just that Dell has let me down in a big way.

The reason I've recommended Dell for such a long time is not because they are the cheapest, or have the absolute best machines. It's because I've always found their service to be good when things go wrong. So when number 1 daughter wanted a laptop, I didn't hesitate to get a Dell. And because it has always worked for me, I got an extended onsite warranty.

So two years in, with two years of warranty to go, the M key falls off. A bit of the keyboard has detached itself. So I get in touch. And guess what? Apparently it is not covered because it's 'wear and tear'. Would they say the same if the screen fell off? (I did ask one the 3 representatives who I've talked to if this was the case, but his English wasn't good enough to understand my question.) The fact is bits shouldn't fall off your computer in ordinary use. That's not wear and tear, it is bad quality manufacture. If they extend the warranty, it should also cover this kind of thing.

In fact another Dell person, the support manager, made a very telling point. 'Ah,' he said, 'it's the N key, isn't it?' Well, no it wasn't, but this seems to be a clear admission that they know there is a problem with keys around that area falling off this particular laptop. Could it be that it has a design fault? But no, it's 'wear and tear.'

To make matters worse, they have been sneakily changing the warranties and there are number of complaints on Dell's bulletin board where they have refused to do on-site visits when that was in the original contract, because they have changed what the warranty is called to something that only includes return-to-base.

Now I know extended warranties are often a rip-off, but I've always done it on my computers because they are central to my business, and I wanted the same protection for my daughter's PC. I feel Dell has really dropped the ball - they are clearly more interested in squeezing the last drop from profits than their customers.

So I won't be buying from them again, and my advice to anyone wanting to buy a PC or laptop is to avoid them. They have just destroyed their one great selling point.

(Oh, and if you take out an extended warranty, get it in writing that it covers bits falling off your computer...)

My Mother was an Upright Piano

Actually she wasn't. My mother was not an upright piano either literally or metaphorically. But that is the title of Tania Hershman's new collection of very short stories. (I dislike the term 'flash fiction' - I don't really even know if that's what these are.)

This is not, I must admit, typical reading for me, but I like to try something different occasionally and I had very much enjoyed Tania's collection of science-based stories, The White Road (and other stories) , so it seemed a good gamble.

 There were two things the stories in this book reminded me of. One was poetry. I don't know if it's intentional, but a lot of these pieces read to me like blank verse. There was the feeling that the words had been very carefully selected, the feeling that each line almost stood alone as a crafted object, rather than having the normal flow of a story, and the feeling that these stories worked best read aloud. Whatever, I had to seriously slow down my reading style, which is normally very quick, getting the jist, almost ignoring anything descriptive. I needed to slow down and appreciate the words.

 The other thing it reminded me of was a story by my favourite fiction writer of all time, Gene Wolfe. Wolfe is a prolific story writer and I buy all his collections, though I have to confess I am much more fond of his novels. But one story has always fascinated me, so much that I included it in the business creativity book Imagination Engineering I wrote with Paul Birch. We finished each chapter with a short piece of fiction, to help the reader think differently, and I was determined to get this story in. It's called My Book and it is, just like the stories in Piano, a very short short where every word in carefully selected and where about 90% of the story is implied rather than explicit. I managed to obtain it at a very reasonable rate, and got a lovely typewritten letter from Gene Wolfe as a result.

 So, for me this is a brilliant collection. And the stories are so short that if you don't like one it doesn't matter - you are already into the next (the difficulty is putting it down). You have to be prepared as the reader to do some work, to fill in that implied 90%. But is that a bad thing? Expect to spend some time staring into space as you do this. You may get some funny looks, but what the heck. Available from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com and direct from the publisher.

Jerusalem

Over the Jubilee weekend it has been hard to avoid renditions of Jerusalem (And did those feet/in ancient time) - and I've heard it described on the radio as a jubilant anthem and a celebratory hymn. In fact only one of those key words loosely applies to this strangest of songs.

Let's take 'jubilant' and 'celebratory' first and give them a good kicking. It's nothing of the sort. It's a whinging NIMBY protest song. When William Blake wrote the poem, they were building a factory in sight of his house (from memory it was in in Chiswick, but don't quote me), and he didn't like it one bit. This was a rant about his view being ruined.

Then there's that word 'hymn'. You will admittedly find the song in both the UK's big traditional hymn books, the far superior English Hymnal and the uninspiring Ancient and Modern. But this is arguably a mistake. In structure it is more like an anthem - and it's certainly beyond most congregations to sing well. I've never heard anyone but a choir get the ending right, for example. But more importantly, it's not really very Christian. Apart from the protest song element, the main theme is a bizarre myth that has nothing to do with conventional religious beliefs.

So there we have it. Neither jubilant anthem nor celebratory hymn, but an ornate and tricky protest song.

If you aren't British and wonder what I'm droning on about, here it is in an appropriately regal setting:

Forget the Queen, I have more birthdays

Apparently this is the Queen's Official BirthdayAs I am a mild republican on the quiet (I don't want them all taken out and shot, but I am very doubtful of the benefits of paying for a royal family, even more doubtful about the benefits of having Prince Charles become king, and feel it's time we liquidated most of the royal estates) I won't be celebrating the Queen's diamond jubilee over the next few days. I will just enjoy muttering 'Bah humbug,' and taking potshots at bunting. But I thought I would put up a post that mentioned herself.

One of the oddities about the Queen is that she has two birthdays. This isn't due to some biological peculiarity from inbreeding, but for some reason she has a separate 'official birthday'. (Don't ask.) Funnily, in this age of e-presence I suspect more and more of us will be like the Queen in this respect.

This occurred to me when that excellent living typo Peet Morris congratulated me on my birthday on a day that, well, wasn't my birthday. This reflects an intentional casualness I have about my date of birth online. I am profligate with my dates of birth. The only rule is that none of them is correct. We all know that date of birth is one of the ways financial institutions and others try to make sure they've got the real you - so it seems best not to broadcast your birthday this way if you want to avoid identity theft. (Actually it's academic, as the only time I've suffered identity theft so far they used totally random dates of birth and it wasn't picked up. But hey.)

So you will find, for instance, that on Goodreads I was born on April 1, 1959. I have no idea where it got this date from - it's not the date I put in, but I rather liked it when it came up, so I stuck with it. In the 'Rochdale Hall of Fame' (don't laugh) which I proudly share with the likes of Gracie Fields and Anna Friel, I was apparently born on March 22, 1955 (closer but no cigar). And Wikipedia (I must do something about that photograph - I don't know who put it up, but it's terrible) accurately but coyly places me in 1955. I can think of at least three other dates I've used, though I'm not quite sure where they are.

So move over, Mrs Windsor. Two birthdays? Pah! That's nothing.


Photo from Wikipedia

When is a bug not a bug?

Is it a bug or a feature?I spent a fair number of years at British Airways both programming myself and working with programmers. Arguably the most fascinating sociological aspect of the computer programming environment is the concept of the bug. The error in the code that makes it do the wrong thing. I might not be rich, but I could probably afford a pint of beer if I had 10p for every time I heard a conversation between programmer and user going a little like this:

User: 'There's a bug in this software. It does X and it should do Y.'
Programmer: 'Sorry, that's not a bug, it's a feature.'
User: '??!?'

I need to briefly dive into the origins of this word 'bug' before exploring the sociology. You will see it said that the word originated from the early days of computing. A (valve) computer failed and on investigation it was found by the early computer expert Grace Hopper that there was a large insect in the machine had caused a short circuit. The insect was stuck in the computer's log book with a write up that said there was a "bug" in the system. And so the term started to be used.

This would be a good story for the origin if the term hadn't been in use by engineers in Victorian times. While it probably did refer to some such incident in the dim and unrecorded past with a mechanical device, the early computing example was just making use of a term that already existed.

Meanwhile back at that programmer/user conversation - a bug is when a computer program does something it shouldn't because of an error in the code. A (bad) feature is when it does something the user doesn't want it to, but there is no actual error. The code is operating fine. It isn't making any logical errors. It's just that (say) it won't let you put more than nine passengers on a plane. Not much use in a system for calculating loads on a 747, but it is a feature, not a bug.

This all came back to me when I had an argument with the support department of a software company called Yabdab. (Boggle.) As a result of my move to Mac I've started re-writing my websites, as my old website software doesn't have a Mac version. I'm using a product called RapidWeaver, which has lots of bolt-ons called stacks. And I'm using a nice little stack from Yabdab called PaySnap that makes it easy to take payments on a website. With me so far? A big advantage of this over using Paypal direct, as I did previously is that it sets up a nice little shopping cart/trolley on your site and you only go off to Paypal to handle payment when all the items are in the cart. Excellent.
Hang on, that was £10.99 a minute ago...
I was implementing this on my Hymn CDs site, which has two versions, one operating in UK pounds, the other in US dollars. This is appreciated by US customers, who prefer to pay in their own currency - and why not?  But here's the thing. As far as I can see, Paysnap only sets up one shopping cart on a computer. If I put an item into the cart from the UK site, then go to the US site and add an item in dollars, then the first item is still in the cart - but its price has been switched from pounds to dollars. Put it in at £10 and it is now $10. A bargain.

Yabdab aren't interested in doing anything to fix this because as far as they are concerned it's a feature. So stuff stays in the cart? Not ideal, but hey. I argue, though, that because it crosses the line and makes an actual mistake (converting from pounds to dollars or vice versa by simply changing from £ to $) it's a bug. They still won't fix it - but I feel I have the moral high ground.

Top illustration from Wikipedia

Goose bumps

I think the thing I enjoyed most about writing The Universe Inside You was the chance to explore how small aspects of the human body could help explore some entertaining science. Take skin, for instance.


The outer layer of your skin is primarily the same material as your hair and nails, a protein called keratin. One of the interesting things about keratin is that it isn’t a living substance. Your outer skin, hair and nails are not alive. This means, of course that all those hair adverts claiming that a product will nourish your hair are rubbish. You can’t nourish hair, any more than you can nourish a boulder. It makes no sense. But what I find particularly interesting is the paradox of what makes you a living creature. You are, without doubt alive – yet parts of you aren’t. Many of your cells could be considered to be alive, yet on their own, they aren’t you. Where does the divide come between you and the cells that make you up? Your hair and skin are certainly part of you – but they aren’t alive.

On a more mundane level, when we take a look at our skin, we can get some insights into the development of human beings. Because when we’re cold or feel threatened we get what was called goose pimples in my youth but now seems to be better known as goose bumps.

Goose bumps are a great example of the way many of our body’s responses live in the past. What is happening when you get goose bumps is that your body is fluffing up your fur. It doesn’t realize there’s not a lot to fluff because we appear relatively hairless. (I say ‘appear’ because we have as many body hairs as a chimpanzee, but those hairs are so small and fine as to be useless as fur).

The response happens when we’re cold because fluffed up fur is better at keeping an animal warm.  When the fur is fluffed up it traps more air, and this acts as an insulating blanket, just like a woolly jumper does. Only the body hasn’t cottoned on to the fact that we don’t have a nice coat of fur – so the result is to give you chicken skin.

Similarly we get the bristling feeling of our hair standing on end when we’re scared or get an emotive memory. Once more it’s a useless ancient reaction. Many mammals fluff up their fur when threatened to look bigger and so more dangerous. (Take a dog near to a cat to see the feline version of this in all its glory. The cat will also arch its back to try to look bigger.) Apparently we used to have a similar defensive fluffing up of our coat of fur – but once again, the effect is ruined by our relatively hairlessness. We still feel the sensation of having hair stand on end, but get no benefit in added bulk.

Image from Wikipedia

Selling top hats on eBay

Got the hat. Time to feed the pigs...It sounds like a joke - Did you hear the one about someone selling top hats on eBay? - But it isn't, it's a demonstration of how flexible and innovative our farmers can be.

Many farmers have had to diversify. These days, with a relatively small farm, it's difficult to make a living from agriculture alone. So, for example, some good friends of mine who farm cattle now also have a successful microlight airfield and skydiving school operating from their farmland.

When I was running a creativity session for the CIME Project in Wales the other day, I came across another example of diversification at its best from a farmer. In this case he's selling things on eBay. Specifically he's apparently now one of the country's biggest seller of top hats. This, was, I hasten to add, not one of your gentleman farmer types, all Barbour and Range Rover, but a proper, hands dirty farmer.

More than that he imports and sells hat adjusters - on the whole these hats don't fit very well. A cheap little plastic add-on makes for a perfect snug top hat. And apparently sales of them are booming. They're more popular than ever for weddings and such.

I thought this was wonderful. The need to diversify coupled with real imagination coming up with something highly unlikely but profitable. A lot of our businesses could learn a thing or two from farmers.

Image from Wikipedia

That's the way the cookies crumble

If you have a website, you live in the EU and you aren't the slightest bit nervous about the European Cookie Law, you ought to be. This sounds like a 'Yes Prime Minister' plan by the EU that says we should stop calling biscuits 'cookies' (dratted American influence) and instead have to all call them biscotti. But no, the EU is trying to interfere with the internet.

Cookies, as I'm sure you are aware, are little files that websites use to store information on your computer. Of itself a website has no memory. A cookie lets it keep a note of some information and come back to it next time you visit the site - essential, for example, if you want it to remember what you've put in a shopping basket. The EU has decided, in its overpaid wisdom, that sites using cookies should be forced to ask visitors whether they want cookies to be used.

But isn't this stupid?

It certainly is, on a number of levels. First the EU doesn't own the internet. It really shouldn't attempt to apply this kind of petty jurisdiction. Secondly cookies are pretty harmless and many of us value the way they keep info so we don't have to re-input it. Thirdly every browser has a mechanism to block cookies, so why force the site to offer it as well? (And in principle, from Saturday when the law came into force, this is exactly what is legally required.) Finally, and with a real Sir Humphrey flourish, guess what is the only way a site can remember that you don't want it to use cookies? You guessed it. With a cookie.

Time to panic!

I had vaguely heard of this law, but it didn't really sink in until last week, with days to go. Like most operators of little websites, I have no idea if my sites use cookies, and no idea how to provide an opt-out. It might seem strange that I don't know if I use them, but anyone who uses site builder software like FrontPage or Rapidweaver, or a content management system like WordPress or Drupal (or even Blogger or WordPress for a blog) has no idea if that software is making use of cookies without explicitly mentioning it to its owner. This legislation is fine for big companies with dedicated professionals crafting HTML - it is a nightmare for all the rest of us.

No, no cookies hereSo do I use cookies?

Luckily there is a way to find out. Fire up Firefox (if you don't use this browser it's free to download) and visit here to get the 'view cookies' add-in. Take a look at your web pages and when you are on a page, in Firefox select Tools > Page Info. Click on the 'Cookies' tab and it will tell you if your page has any cookies in it.

One place you will always find them is any site that remembers your login information - so if your bank, for instance, hasn't checked if you want cookies, technically they are breaking the law since last Saturday. Naughty banks.

A randomly selected bank breaking the law

What was the outcome?

I was, on the whole, clean. The WordPress login page has one, but unless you make users login, this doesn't apply to them. The only place I did have them was where I'm selling things: as soon as you use, say, a Paypal shopping cart you are loading on the cookies.

Does this mean I had to provide an opt-out?

Luckily, no. There is an exception to the need to offer opt-out if the cookies are being used for an essential function like a shopping cart. I am gradually adding a privacy statement to sites that do this, making the situation clear, but there should be no breach of the law.

So if you have websites, no need to panic, but for peace of mind it might be worth checking what's going on in those pages. Oh, and to think once again, do we really need to be part of the EU?

Image from Wikipedia

The versatile compound

One of the all time favourites in any chemistry set was potassium permanganate. Those crystals look beautiful in their own right, and make a great purple coloured solution, but that's only the start.

My latest entry in the Royal Society of Chemistry compounds podcasts takes on this simple chemical that is equally comfortable as a disinfectant and as a source of spontaneous combustion. Embrace purple! Listen to the story of this chemistry set star.