Brian Clegg's Blog, page 142

Shiny!

Shiny!One of my favourite TV shows, Joss Whedon's inexpicably cancelled Firefly (boo to the studio execs) invents some future slang, including the use of the term 'Shiny!' as an equivalent of 'Great!' I loved this, partly because it works so well in context, and partly because it seems to reflect the magpie-like aspect of human nature I recognize so well in myself.

I can see this in my attitude to Apple products. Every time I use my iPhone or iPad, I get a little thrill out of it, because it does the job, certainly, but also because it is shiny, not in the sense of reflecting light, but rather in the way that its design lifts your heart, and using it gives you a little smile. I've recently gone through the turmoil of the decision whether to stick with Dell (after buying them for 15 years) or switch to an Apple Mac. You can talk about all the technical pros and cons (and the ridiculous Apple pricing) but if I can't help but feel i went with the Mac because it is shiny.

The ultimate in this respect is an object I'm drooling over after Facebook helpfully popped up an advert and just for once I did actually click on it. This is an object that is shiny with total purity. The thing is, the shiny Apple products do a job. They have a purpose that is useful, and being shiny is a nice extra that makes all the difference. But this new object of desire is a product whose sole role in life is to be shiny. I can think of no reason for having one whatsoever. But I really want one because it is shiny.

It's one of these lasers. 'The world's most powerful laser you can legally own.' (Probably not legal in the UK, but hey.) How I would have loved one as a teenager - and I still get slightly weak-kneed at the thought.

I can't see any possible reason to have one. I certainly couldn't justify buying one. But if I won the lottery tomorrow it would be on my shopping list. Because... well, you know why.

Shwop? Nope.

I am usually very positive about Marks and Spencers' green credentials. They really make something of it with their 'Plan A' materials plastered all over the stores. They were one of the stars of my Sustainable Business book. Many people think of M&S as the doyen of green businesses. But I think they have got it horribly wrong with their latest 'shwopping' campaign.



Firstly it's fronted by Joanna Lumley, who really gets on my nerves. (Partly because of all those injury lawyer adverts she does for the radio, but also because her voice is so irritating, and she comes across as totally false, hardly ideal for this kind of campaign.) Someone must love her, she's on the TV so much, but I really don't understand why.

But mostly I'm against it because the idea is awful. The concept is that if you buy a piece of clothing you can bring in an old piece of clothing to be recycled. You don't get any benefit from this - M&S just kindly recycles it on your behalf. But frankly it is so much more effort per item than simply flinging a pile of stuff in a bag and either leaving it out for a collector or popping it into a clothes recycling bank. You have to consciously be going to M&S to buy a piece of clothing and think to take one (and only one) item along with you. It's a nightmare.

If they gave some incentive, like 5% off if you 'shwop' something, fine. (Please, that word is awful!) But as it stands it neither makes good financial sense nor good recycling sense. One to avoid.

Want to write about science?

Brian speaking - this event will be less formal...I spend most of my time writing books and articles on science topics. I've been given the chance to put on a workshop in Cambridge (UK) to help others with the necessary skills. It's on Saturday 30 June 2012 at the St John's Innovation Centre in Cowley Road and runs from 9.30 to 3.30 including lunch.

As well as my imparting words of wisdom there will be practical experience in choosing topics, getting together a pitch for an article or a book proposal and the whys and wherefores of science writing. Each attendee will be given free copies of two ebooks: Non Fiction Agent, which gives detailed guidance on putting together a non fiction book proposal and getting it submitted, and Upgrade Me, one of my popular science titles, which we will use to take a look at book proposals and the whole process of writing a science book in the workshop.

Attendees will also get a free review from me of a magazine article or book proposal, giving tips on improving it, after the event by email.

It costs £145 (set by the local organizers) but I think this is a realistic going rate for a professional hands-on workshop like this, which I think would be very useful both for anyone wanting to get a science book/articles published or working in science who would like to publicize their work.

If you would like any further details, you can drop me an email at brian@brianclegg.net - or take a look at the website, where you can also book a ticket (booking is essential as places are limited).

Want to be secure? Kill a tree

I am all in favour of online security, especially when dealing with banking, but I am currently experiencing the security equivalent of health and safety gone mad.

My business has a business savings account (one percent interest - whoopee!) with a fairly well known brand that has recently been taken over by a big five bank. So the big five company is switching the account to their side of the business, and their online systems.

Fair enough. But the paperwork and bits and pieces of stuff involved has been horrendous. So far I have received, each in a separate mailing (and I'm excluding all the leaflets, envelopes and assorted flyer type stuff):
Two 'authentication cards'One Pinsentry deviceTwo Businesscall membership cards and lettersTwo telephone banking passcodesTwo authentication card PIN lettersOne 'more about the move' letterOne online banking membership card and numberI'm really not sure this is all necessary - and it certainly isn't environmentally responsible.

Image from Wikipedia

Something for the weekend

A little extra post for you, with some bouncy musical listening from the band Moho Mynoki which happens to feature my god daughter (but this in no way influences me in saying it's very good).

Not heavily into electro pop? Listen first, then criticize.

If you like it, you can download the music or a buy an EP from their website.

Have a good weekend!

<p><a href="http://mohomynoki.bandcamp.com/album/... Book by Moho Mynoki</a></p>

Youth must adventure

The kind of engine that pulled us to Edinburgh (a Deltic)
- ugly things, but they made a great noiseI heard on the radio the other day that one of the reasons that young people aren't getting as much exercise these days is because their over-protective parents don't want them to go out. It's too risky. This is very silly - young people have to have adventures.

When I was fifteen, with two friends, I spent a week away from my parents on the railways. We all liked railways and we decided we were going to get the most you could out of a one week railrover, a ticket that allowed you to go anywhere on the railway network. Our timetable was superb. We even managed to include two of the great trains, the Flying Scotsman (the named train, not the engine) and the Cornish Riviera Express.

From leaving a grey Manchester on that week we travelled to London (several times), Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Inverness, Glasgow, Cardiff, Birmingham, Salisbury and Penzance (amongst others). I admit we didn't do a lot of sightseeing. In the entire week we only left the rail network twice - one night at Salisbury Youth Hostel and one night at Lands End Youth Hostel (we had to get a bus to this from Penzance, which was the only bit of our timetabling that let us down). Apart from this we slept on trains, except for one horrible night spent until 5am on Cardiff Station, a truly terrible experience.

Okay it wasn't anything special - but it was an adventure. You really see a country from the railway, more so than from the road, and we might not have got off the system much - but we really took the place in. There was even the need for a little crafy deception. Back then the YHA didn't let you stay in their hostels if you weren't walking. We had to pretend we were hikers, then sneak off to the station, which felt very wicked.

Perhaps not very exotic. And yet our parents had let three 15-year-olds out on the loose for a whole week. We had been in plenty of evil big cities. They had no idea what we were doing about eating and sleeping - we organized everything ourselves. We didn't have mobile phones, so they had to make do with a couple of calls from phone boxes. They were no doubt totally stressed - but they let us do it. We had an adventure.

Was there risk? A little bit. But it was so worth it. Risk means that things will go wrong occasionally - that's life. It involves risk. Every time you do anything original or creative you take a risk. If you let young people have adventures they will sometimes get hurt, sometimes even get killed. But very, very rarely in the UK. We are so lucky that adventures here are relatively safe. And we ought to be letting our young people have them, however painful it is for us parents.

Picture from Wikipedia

I Hypocrite

Not long ago I did a post about not having the patience to watch book trailers, so there is a certain amount of irony that my publisher has kindly produced one for my latest masterpiece, The Universe Inside You .

At first glance this might seem a touch hypocritical. One minute I'm slagging them off, the next I'm doing one. But in the end, it was fun to do ('Hey, I'm the centre of attention, this can't be bad!'), and it does demonstrate a little bit about why I think there's so much fun to be had with the human body (settle down in the back row) and why it makes a great linking theme for a science book.

So if you've got more patience than me (it's not very long), here it is:

The Archers and the objectification of men

I'm sure the title of this post would make an excellent PhD thesis. I was listening to the Archers omnibus on Sunday and struck by the remarkable sexism that was going apparently totally unnoticed. The cricket club has a very attractive new coach and we were hearing how women were attending practice just to watch him, and the gay characters were commenting on his attractiveness and how the women had turned up because they wanted to see him in his cricket whites (nudge, nudge, wink, wink).

If a load of men turned up to see a new female hockey coach in her kit they would be rightly accused of being a load of perverts. So why the double standards?

It's the same on TV shows judged by a panel. It seems absolutely fine for female and gay judges to keep making suggestive remarks about the men, but it would rightly be frowned on if similar comments were made about the women.

I appreciate the 'You've done it to us for so long, now it's time to get our own back' argument, but I don't agree with it. Two wrongs don't make a right. We might not be perfect at it, but it is broadly accepted in the mainstream media that the objectification of women is wrong. Surely it's time there was parity for the men?


Image from Wikipedia

A floppy what?

The sad remnant of my diskette collectionI was watching the first series of 24 the other day on my mission to use Netflix to catch up with the good stuff I never saw the first time around. At one point someone needs to get information from one computer to another. She puts a black rectangular object into a drive and uses this to pass the information. I swear this is true: for just a moment, I thought 'What's that?' It was, of course, a diskette, something that was central to our computing lives only a few years ago and yet, to all intents and purposes, disappeared off the face of the planet more rapidly and completely than black vinyl records ever have.

I had a sudden wave of nostalgia for floppy disks and diskettes. At one point I ran the PC department of a certain large airline whose initials include B and A. We genuinely did get those old hoary misuse stories of the 5 1/4 inch floppies. People really did occasionally staple them to a report. And one user really did complain that their disk wouldn't read when they shoved it into the gap between two drives.

When the rigid 3 1/2 inch diskettes came along, confusingly still called floppies by many, it was wonderful. They were much harder to damage, you could slip them in your pocket, they held about four times as much data (yes, children, over a MEGABYTE per diskette) - they were great. Unlike floppies they protected the read area of the magnetic disk, where floppies left it open for prying fingers and dirt. I used to have cases on my desk especially made to hold diskettes. I backed up onto diskettes. (And yes, after the hard disk failed twice on my IBM AT, I really did back up with some fervour on the more modern machines that took diskettes.)

And yet now they're gone. We don't have a computer in the house that takes them, though I do have an external diskette drive left over from an old Sony laptop that was too slim and sexy to have a built-in drive. And yes, in the drawer if I dig around, I do have one or two diskettes left. But even so - how the mighty have fallen.

What exactly are they witnessing?

At tract ive?In 14 years at our previous house, thanks to its relative isolation, we never got Jehovah's Witnesses at the door once. Now, in a more cosmopolitan area, we get them regularly. In my head, beforehand, I am happy to engage them and challenge them on their own level - but somehow when they turn up I crumble. So there was that jolly smily person with the neat opening line:

'Do you ever think about the Lord's Prayer?'

And all I could do was mutter (after a bit of a pause) 'I'm afraid I'm at work.'

So, with their usual politeness and lack of pushiness, they gave me a tract and left. In fact the one occasion when I've desperately wanted to invite Jehovah's Witnesses in (for the only time in history it was two incredibly attractive women), I was at home ill with flu and had to send them away.

Usually the tract goes straight in the bin, with the usual observation about look and feel. I don't know why it is, but material like this from the US always has a look and feel that seems very old fashioned. But this time I happened to glance through it. Given they'd mentioned prayer, my eye was caught by a section on prayer. I don't know the Bible off by heart, but I have read it and am familiar with most of the key bits, and something seemed wrong with the quote they had used. It says:

Jesus taught us to avoid repeating set formulas in our prayers. "When praying," he said, "do not say the same things over and over again." (Matthew 6:7).

It just didn't seem right. So I dug out the real thing. It actually says

'In your prayers do not go babbling on like the heathen, who imagine that the more they say the more likely they are to be heard. Do not imitate them. Your Father knows what your needs are before you ask him...' And then it gives the Lord's Prayer.

Now of course all English bibles are translations. My version, the out-of-favour New English Bible will be different from the US version they used. But I think their 'translation' reverses the meaning. Our JW's are saying it says 'don't use a set formula', where the text actually says 'don't go on and on with miles of specific detail, just use a set formula (and here it is)'.

What is fascinating here - and I think it's something we should bear in mind when anyone of any religion says they are doing something because that's what scripture says - is how easy it is to take the same original text and put two very different interpretations on it - in this case pretty well opposite interpretations. I almost felt like running after them and finding them and pointing this out. But I didn't.