Brian Clegg's Blog, page 141

Lessons in WordPress

Despite being only a few days in, I am very pleased with the way things are going with the WordPress migration of the www.popularscience.co.uk website - I just wish I'd done it sooner.

 However I do have a couple of lessons for anyone considering such a move. The first is that you will have to do something about spam.

Even though the site has only been live for about a week, it already has over 100 spam comments. I originally thought it would be enough to moderate them before they went live. Obviously this stops them being seen but it still would be very tedious. Luckily the anti-spam plug-in that comes semi-preloaded works brilliantly.


 The second lesson is the matter of backups. I've never bothered to back up my websites because they are created on my PC/Mac and uploaded, so the back up of the local machine keeps them safe. But now the Popular Science site is being updated online which means I have no backup on my desktop.

My immediate thought was to ask the web host if they provide a backup service. They don't, but their help desk kindly pointed out to me that 'there's a plug-in for that.' I begin to realise this is as much a mindset with WordPress as 'there's an app for that' on the iPhone/iPad.

 So now I'm safely backed up. The plug-in cunningly backs up to the brilliant free Cloud storage service Dropbox (if you aren't using Dropbox, you ought to be!), so there's no need to have anywhere to upload the backup to, and it will all trundle along happily on its own in the middle of the night. Very neat indeed.

Going all studio

Science and beauty can be uncomfortable bedfellows. Like anyone with the vaguest ideas of scientific terminology I wince at the 'science bits' in most beauty product advertising on the TV. 'New improved CrackFilla with DNA piped light technology.' What? However there is one place that science and beauty come together effortlessly and that's in software.

We all know that magazines have airbrushed pictures since... well since they've had photographs in them. And of late that touching up to make photographs look their best has all been done in software. Most of us don't have the Photoshop expertise to do this effectively manually, but I have been genuinely hugely impressed by some software that I have been sent to try out called Portrait Professional. It's described as 'intelligent retouching software' and it's remarkable.

Here on the right is the picture of me I tend to use as an author photo at the moment.

Andon the left is a touched up version. The differences are subtle but still surprisingly effective. My skin tone has been improved, the wrinkles in my forehead have been reduced, my teeth are a little whiter. Even the shape of the face has been subtly changed.

I have to admit it's an improvement. Of course there are limits to what can be done with this particular example. It's a head cropped from quite a large area of photo rather than a proper head and shoulders portrait, so it doesn't have as much detail to play with as a seriously taken photo.

And that, to be honest, this highlights the only hesitation I have in saying that everyone should get  copy of this software. In looking through our family photos to try to find a picture to demonstrate on, I found it really difficult to find a single full face portrait. It's not the kind of picture we tend to take.

I thought I'd have better luck with my daughters' collections of photographs because they are always taking pictures of their friends... but again they are very rarely anything like a studio portrait, and not  necessarily ideal for this software. But there were a few, enough to be able to do this before and after. So here's the original:


And here's my improved version:


Note I have done no manual touching up - all the changes from removing the freckles to changing the eye colour were done with sliders. Some of the changes are a bit clumsy - but bear in mind this was done in less than 5 minutes. Well, I was impressed.

I expected this to be the kind of software that had professional pricing, but it's actually surprisingly reasonable (just under £30 at the time of writing) - and you can try before you buy. If you ever take photographs of people it really is worth considering. Take a look at the website.

And yes, I will be using the improved photo from now on...

Call that ancestry? Bring in the physics

The stately homeI get a bit irritated when you get some old buffer on the TV pointing out that his family has owned a particular house for 400 years, or that she has ancestors going back to the Norman Conquest. There are two problems with this. One is that unless such folk can claim to be a non-human species, we all have ancestors going back the same extent. But the more important one is that 400 or 1,000 years is a trivial ancestry compared to the way we can all trace our origins back billions of years.

As I point out in The Universe Inside You , the atoms inside you (and in the old buffers) have been circulating around on Earth since life began, well over three billion years ago. Fossils can be used to trace life back in rocks that were formed around 3.2 billion years ago, while the date can be pushed back a few hundred million years more on the basis of chemicals that suggest the existence of life. But before then, the atoms were still there. They didn’t appear out of nowhere. The atoms that make you up were present when the Earth was formed 4.5 billion years ago (apart from a few that arrived since on meteors from outer space).

Before that they floated for aeons through space. Some have been around since the beginning of the universe. According to the big bang theory, our best idea of how the universe began, all of the hydrogen in the universe and some of the helium and lithium was created when the remnants of the big bang that formed the universe cooled down enough to stop being pure energy and formed matter. So the hydrogen in the water and organic molecules in your body dates back to the very beginning of the universe.

After a while, some of this hydrogen clumped together, pulled by gravity, and formed stars, which burn in their youth by converting hydrogen, the lightest element, into the next element, helium. When most of the hydrogen is used up, helium too can be consumed, working up the elements all the way to iron. And this is where elements like the carbon and oxygen that are so important for life were forged.

Later still, some of those stars would become unstable and detonate in catastrophic explosions called supernovas. Ordinary stars don’t have enough energy to make the elements that are heavier than iron, but supernovas have so much oomph that they can create elements all the way up to uranium, the heaviest of the naturally occurring elements.

This means that quite literally you are stardust. Every atom in your body either came from the big bang – so is 13.7 billion years old – or from a star, which would make it between seven and twelve billion years old.

Now that's what I call ancestry.

Image from Wikipedia

Hello WordPress!

The new look WordPress siteNo, when I mention 'WordPress' I'm not deserting Blogger for hosting my blog, but my oldest website www.popularscience.co.uk is in the process of moving from being a bespoke website to a WordPress site. It's all the fault of this pesky Mac I'm typing on.

Almost everything I did on the PC translated across smoothly, but I knew there were two big issues to sort out. One was my business accounts, which I'd knocked up as a hand-crafted Access database back when I used to program regularly. This had become unwieldy and unmaintainable. So last summer I switched over to using SageOne, an online accounts package, which had the big advantage of being web-based, so there was nothing to migrate to the Mac. (It can also be accessed directly by my accountant, which is spooky.)

The other problem was my rag-tag collection of websites. These had all been written originally in FrontPage, but I had switched over to a host that doesn't support it particularly, so I had gradually replaced most of my websites (like www.brianclegg.net) with sites built in the flashy Webplus. This works well, but doesn't have a Mac version. So I've started a long process of redoing these using a Mac app (RapidWeaver).

So far, so good. But I never got the Popular Science website into Webplus, as it's simply too big (over 1,000 pages). I was maintaining the site by editing pages in FrontPage, then manually uploading them using FTP, unwieldy to say the least. So moving to Mac made me face up to the fact it was time to do something about it.

The obvious solution seemed to be WordPress - and so far it has been fairly painless, though I wouldn't recommend it for technophobes. My hosting company said the server www.popularscience.co.uk is on wouldn't support WordPress, but they could move it to one that did. About an hour later I was ready to install the WordPress software - which is kind of a scary business. I wouldn't say their 'five minute install' took 5 minutes - more like an hour - but the same day I decided to go to WordPress the first pages were up and running.

I am putting all new reviews into the WordPress site and am gradually migrating the old posts (though it will take a while). It took me a day or two to sort out a suitable layout, but I think I'm getting there. Some things are less flexible than the old site, but it's much quicker to add a post and there are all sorts of new facilities for users - most notably, visitors can add comments to any of the reviews, which should be interesting. Using the www.popularscience.co.uk link now takes you into the WordPress site, but the old site is still available, so nothing is lost.

Charley's Horse revisited

In my younger and child-free days, my wife and I (ooh, posh) sang in a vocal group called Nonessence, loosely based around Slough and Windsor. There were eight singers and the musical director/arranger/keyboardist. And on our good days we weren't bad at all.

It was with this bunch that I discovered a new and exciting cuisine - Mexican. At the time (we're talking the 1980s) Mexican food was pretty unusual in the UK, but lurking in a railway arch in Windsor (and yes, it was as dark and lurkacious as it sounds) was a newly opened 'Mexican cantina' called Charley's Horse. We went there a number of times, in part I suspect because it was reasonably priced, but also because of the novelty. After all, as the sign eventually and proudly stated, this was only the second Mexican cantina in all of England.

What is delightful about all this, and why I mention it is that we were in Windsor last Friday to attend a creakingly painful play at the theatre. (Never did I think I would have Liza Goddard looking me straight in the eye in a curtain call and I would look back with a big smile out of sympathy.) Usually we go somewhere like Brown's to eat, but as we queued to get into the town (the Horse Show was on), we drove under the railway arches and there was a sign for Charley's Horse, still standing after all these years.

And it was just the same. Of course memory plays tricks, but I would swear it was just the same. The menu was good, Mexican rather than Tex-Mex, and still reasonably priced (hence, I suspect, the way the rest of the clientele made us feel ancient). I won't bore you with details of the food, but the nachos I started with, including the likes of homemade guacamole and chorizo, were miles better than the typical chain joint nachos.

So if  you are ever in Windsor, in search of an unsophisticated but enjoyable meal, don't be put off by the location or the rather grim entrance that looks like a cross between a municipal dog's home and a seedy nightclub - take a look at Charley's Horse. (If you are tight like me, I'd particularly recommend going between 6 and 7 on Wednesday to Saturday, when they do starter + main for £10.50.)

It's here:


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Spamtastic

Just occasionally I get spam emails that are so hilarious that I feel I have to share them. I have just received this one 'from' the FBI.

I don't know what's more funny, the idea that the FBI would send emails from an AOL account (it's quite funny anyone still uses an AOL account), or that a/the director of the FBI would write 'this is the final warning you are going to receive from the fbi office do you get me?'  Or, for that matter, manage to put the entire email in the 'Subject' field. Whatever - enjoy:

From: FBI OFFICE
Subject: Attn: This is to inform you that we the fbi have a warrant to arrest you if we dont hear from you immediately,this is the final warning you are going to receive from the fbi office do you get me? I hope youre understand how many times this message has been sent to you. We have warned you so many times and you have decided to ignore our e-mails we have been instructed to get you arrested immediately, and today if you fail to respond back to us with the payment then, we will close your bank account and jail you and all your properties will be confiscated by the fbi.Robert Mueller, III FB I Director

Ooh, I'm scared.

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

I sometimes have the pleasure of being sent a book for review that doesn't fit with www.popularscience.co.uk and cover it here. In this case I've got the double pleasure of both a review and a short interview with the author.

The book in question, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs has been very popular in the US and should do brilliantly over here. It's the kind of fantasy that I've always found particularly appealing - one that is set in the real world, but where some strangely different things occur. In this case it's peculiar (in the sense of strangely gifted) children, living on a island off Wales, and strange manipulation of time. But despite the author noting at the back of the book that he consulted a 'leading authority on time travel,' the time travel aspects bear no resemblance to the real physical possibilities for time travel, which is one of the reasons I label this fantasy - you've just got with it and ignore the obvious impracticalities and lack of sense.

It's a very atmospheric read, on a par with some of my all time favourites. This is particularly strong in the first part of the book before the main 'reveal' - I wish the author had kept this back until later, as once everything was explained you lost some of the tension. Even so the story continues in an excellent fashion. The only other slight complaint I have is that the book doesn't really finish - it was clearly written with a sequel in mind and is more the first part of a book than a real, standalone novel.

What sets this apart from other books of its ilk is the use of photographs. The author has made use of a pile of strange photographs, mostly Victorian/Edwardian and incorporates these wonderfully into the story. Although this might pale in future books, and I hope he has another trick up his sleeve, for this book it really was a wonderful extra, adding hugely to the atmosphere. Take a look at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com.

I can't say much more about the book without giving too much away - I'd only say it is one of the few YA fantasy novels I've read in the past 20 years (including the Harry Potter books) that really deserves to be in the hall of fame with the likes of the books I compare it to below. So, over to author Ransom Riggs:


Did seeing some weird photos inspire writing a book, or did the idea of writing a book this way inspire you to look for photos?

The pictures came first. I brought them to my publisher, Quirk Books, and told my editor there that I thought I had something interesting, all these creepy pictures of kids from years and years ago. He suggested I use them to write a novel, and I, having never written one before, was surprised that he had that much faith in me – it opened up all kinds of possibilities in my mind, and I went off and developed the story, and feverishly began to collect still more photos to use, and it went from there. But yeah, the pictures were the initial impetus for the story.


More specifically, were the photos used in the book the inspiration for those aspects of the story, or did you have the storyline in mind and look for appropriate photos?

I really used the photos as inspiration for the kids’ characters. I treated my collection of pictures almost like headshots in a casting call for a movie, and when it was time to introduce a new character I’d look through my photos and see who I wanted to invent. It was a lot of fun, a really new experience for me. Sometimes, though, I'd find an amazing photo and fit the story around it; other times, I'd have a story idea that cried out for a certain photo to go along with it, so I'd go out searching for something specific. That's a lot harder, though -- it's all about luck!



Why Wales?

I was looking for a country that most American readers wouldn’t know a lot about, but also where people speak English, and that hadn’t been done to death in fantasy fiction (not counting Arthurian legends), like Ireland has. And I have some Welsh ancestors, or so I'm told, so it seemed a natural fit!


What I really loved about the book was a similar feel to two of my favourite classic YA fantasy novels: A Wrinkle in Time and Something Wicked This Way Comes. Did you have any favourites when younger?

Oh, definitely. I loved all the Narnia books, and The Secret Garden -- I must've re-read that fifty times. Stories about people like you and me opening doors to find secret worlds. And since I couldn't find any actual secret worlds when I was a kid, I guess that's why I looked for them in books, or wrote them myself, in short stories and things.


Without giving too much plot away, given the choice, would you stay in a loop?

It can be pretty isolating -- maybe if I found just the right people to spend pseudo-eternity with. But while I would like to live a very long time, I don't think I need to live forever. So no! Unless horrible monsters were chasing me, of course.

The gap in Apple's imagination

Regular readers of this blog will be aware I have become increasingly enthusiastic about Apple products. I had a Mac SE as a toy at work circa 1990, but at the time, most things about Apple irritated me. Now, though, after being eased in by iPhone and iPad (with a touch of Apple TV) I have gone all-Apple.

The great thing about Apple products is that they combine style and function so well. They look good and they are a  delight to use - an irresistable (and sadly rare) combination. But there is one thing I have to seriously criticize them for, an essential for usability that they have repeatedly ignored.

For years now I have used a series of ergonomic keyboards. The picture shows my last one - Microsoft's robust battleship of a board, the Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000. I didn't go for this kind of thing because it looks funky. When I switched to writing most of the time, I found that I increasingly suffered from painful wrist strain after a typing bout. I can easily type 3,000 words or more in a day on a manuscript, without even counting blog posts, emails and all the other typy things I do. The ergonomic keyboard solved the problem overnight.

If you look at your wrists when you use a normal keyboard, what happens is that your arms are heading inwards from either side of your body towards the keyboard. Then, at the wrist, they angle outwards to make the hands parallel at the keyboard. This twist is where the strain arises. The split keyboard means that your hands are positioned in a straight line with your arms. It takes a little getting used to, but I've been touch typing on them for years now.

So, when I moved to Apple, surely this innovative, clever, aware company would have an ergonomic keyboard? No they don't. Of course you can buy a third party one, but it won't have the style of the Apple keyboard, nor necessarily will it have the special Apple keys. It's a real pain. Literally. Get your act together, Apple. Ergonomics is part of usability.

Wipe your feet

This is me, looking constipated
because I am slightly miffed.
You should see me angry.I don't know about you, but I get slightly miffed when someone gets shirty in comments on my blog. I have no objection to people disagreeing with me. The posts here are my opinion, and though I am clearly always right, I accept that other people will have differing (if wrong) opinions. That is their prerogative. But I really don't like it when they get nasty about it.

A good example has recently occured over an old post of mine about why I dislike opera. This was always intended to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek (not least because a good friend of mine is an opera singer), but does express some genuine dislikes I have. Realistically there is no real right and wrong about an issue like this. Whether a piece of art is good (or art at all) is purely subjective.

Recently I've had a few comments from an anonymous poster and I just wanted to make a few comments about these.

First there is that anonymity. I have nothing against this per se - it can be practically easier to make comments this way - but when you come in on the attack, I think it is only polite to be honest about who you are.

Then there are some of the specifics:
'This is the problem with the internet,' (s)he says. 'It gives a voice to self-important, ill-informed heathens.' Ah yes, the ad hominem attack. The last resort of those who don't have any legitimate arguments. (Oops, was that a recursive ad hominem attack?)'Your sarcastic put downs don't impress me.' I have no interest in impressing you. My remark was sarcastic - I retain the right to be sarcastic on my own blog - but with good reason.  'Understanding the true brilliance of a work like Tristan demands a certain higher mindedness that most people don't possess.' Ah ha! Now we have it. The common herd don't appreciate great art. I would suggest that if it's true that a work of 'art' can only be appreciated by the cognescenti it isn't art at all, it's just showing off. 'Aren't I clever,' it says. Art is a medium of communication. If ordinary people can't appreciate it, it's bad communication and bad art.But I didn't want to get into a sparring match. My main point really is that this is my blog. I expect you to wipe your feet on the way in and play by the house rules, Mr(s) Anonymous. Feel free to disagree by all means, but try to be polite about it. If you want to play by different rules, get your own blog. Then you can make reasoned, cogent arguments like 'Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha! That's the funniest thing I've heard all year' as much as you like.

The lifesaving killer

What do you think when you hear 'DDT'? Do you think of a dangerous chemical pervading nature, killing the birds and building up in fatty tissues of animals and humans? If so, it's down to Rachel Carson's famous book Silent Spring. But the funny thing is that Carson never advocated banning DDT, just using it in a controlled way - because this chemical saved millions of lives and could have saved many millions more had it not been for the stupid way it was used.

This is the latest in my contributions to the Royal Society of Chemistry's podcast series Take a listen and decide for  yourself if DDT is hero or villain.