Brian Clegg's Blog, page 143

Go creative for Friday

Before getting into popular science books I wrote a number of business books on being more creative in business. Not how to paint a nice business-related picture, but how to generate ideas and solve problems in a business context. My book of creativity techniques, Instant Creativity , written with Paul Birch is still a steady seller and I thought it would be entertaining to give you a little technique from it to try out.

You can do this individually or in a group. Pop over to an 'on this day' website - if you don't know one, try the BBC's or this rather encyclopedic site. Pick out two or three entries that appeal because they are bizarre, exciting or just make you think of something. Typically the dates in such lists represent an event in history, or the birth or death of a person. Imagine yourself present at the event, or being that person. How would you look at the problem? What would you do about it? What different perspectives would you get from being at the event or from the sort of activity that was typical of this person? Would the period of history involved generate any misunderstandings?

Combine different ideas from different sources. Be prepared to treat them as a starting point, rather than a final solution.

Like most creativity techniques the approach here is to give you a different starting point so you come at a problem or need for a new idea from a different direction. The mix of people and events should give a source of inspiration (and it can be a bit of fun too). If you wanted to extend the technique you could try combining events to interesting effect. What would the painter Gaugin do about your problem if he had just seen the first Zepplin destroyed? What would Richard the Lionheart (or Harry Houdini) make of the first Olympic Games, and how would it inspire him?

You can find out more about Instant Creativity and whole bunch of other books on improving business creativity on my creativity books page.

Randi science

I admire the work James Randi does in debunking fake mentalists and demonstrating how easy it is for trained magicians to pull off the same stunts, though I do find that his in-your-face words can have something of a Dawkins effect - they can put people off by being insulting.

I've recently read his old but still entertaining book, Flim Flam (tip - the Kindle version is a lot cheaper than paper equivalents). It is an effective dismemberment of various claims to supernatural and paranormal abilities and events. It might seem at first sight he over-analyzes some cases. For example he spends page after page on the detail of the Conan Doyle fairy photos. This might appear unnecessary, because those pictures are so obviously fakes - the images of the fairies are quite clearly paper cutouts. Yet Randi usefully examines the different ways those who were apparently taken in by these crude fakes supported their beliefs and ignored the obvious.

However, I do notice one thing. Randi is understandably heavy on scientists who have a tendency to be naive when presented with fakery. It isn't their field. But because of this, he ought to be careful himself when writing about science, because his opinions in the scientific arena can be more than a little naive too. I found one example rather entertaining. Randi writes:

 Jack van Impe, a TV evangelist who perspires and preaches his version of science regularly to millions of believers, recently gave us an Easter message that reflected his ignorance of science. He referred to the preposterous "Jupiter Effect" so beloved of some nuts, which is supposed to cause wonderful catastrophes in 1982. The Earth should be a mess at the end of this claimed alignment of the planets, and I can hardly wait to see the show. Said Jack, "The Earth will be seven times hotter." Codswallop. The term has no meaning. "Seven" is a number, Jack. If you take the normal temperature to be 70 degrees Fahrenheit, that makes the new reading 490 degrees Fahrenheit. If you're in Europe or Canada, that same temperature is 21 degrees Celsius, giving the other folks a break with 148 degrees C, which is equal to only 298 degrees F.

Yes, of course seven is a number - but that doesn't mean that something can't be seven times hotter than something else. Temperature is a measure of the mean kinetic energy of the atoms or molecules in a substance, and one thing can have seven times as much energy as another. So something can be seven times hotter than something else. (Or the world can be seven times hotter at one point in time than it is at another.) What Randi is really identifying is the arbitrary nature of the temperature scales he uses in his illustration. (And the stupidity of the prediction.) But the way he phrased his attack shows that he too can get it wrong when working outside his field of expertise.


Image from Wikipedia

The universal postal myth

I was listening the other today to someone from the Royal Mail moaning about competing services cherry picking and doing the lucrative postal deliveries inside London, while the poor old Royal Mail had to do all the difficult expensive stuff. And this had to be the case because of the need for a universal post, which 'everyone agrees' is essential.

Well, I don't think everyone does agree. I, for one, don't think it is essential.

Think about it. Would you expect to pay the same price for a bus into town and to get to Edinburgh? Hardly. Why should mail be any different? We understand we need to pay more to send a letter to, say, Hong Kong - why shouldn't it cost more to send it somewhere far distant and expensive to reach in the British Isles.

Yes, you might say, but what about the poor people who live at the furthest reaches of the UK? What indeed? They have every right to live there. But I'm not sure they have a right to expect me to subsidise their postal service every time I send something just down the road to Salisbury.

I think part of the problem with the universal post system is the lack of creativity applied to getting around the practical difficulties of doing anything different. At first sight you might imagine it would be a nightmare, having to work out how far it is to your destination. And it would be if you did this (although the railway manages to operate a fares system that copes - and so could the Post Office). But here are two easy-to-implement alternatives:
Simple banding. Anything to the same postcode letters is local, anything in the same country is country, anything to a different country within the UK is crossborder. Three bands, automatically detectable from the postcode. Easy peasy.Receiver pays. This is the more interesting idea. Still have a universal price to send a letter anywhere in the UK. But if you live more than a certain distance from the nearest sorting office, you pay a premium to receive your post (or go and collect it for free). This would be fiddly to do on a per-item basis, but could be simply implemented monthly or annually through the council tax collection.If we moved away from a universal pricing system, we could then get proper competition in the postal system and Royal Mail wouldn't be able to whinge about other companies cherrypicking as they would be adequately compensated for the difficult-to-get-to destinations and could provide a competitive base price for the local stuff. It would probably bring down the cost of many mail items.

It's not perfect - it's top of the head, 5 minutes thought stuff, I admit it. There would be extra complications. But the fact is that the idea of having a single price for a letter to anywhere in the UK is not sacrosanct, it is not written into the constitution (hardly surprising when we don't have a written constitution), and it's not necessarily the best way to go about things. It is at least worth thinking about the alternatives, rather than taking the usual stick-our-heads-in-the-sand approach.

Image from Wikipedia

Don't hide the A303

Stonehenge when I first visited and you weren't kept outEvery now and then there is a scheme to send the A303, the main road that passes Stonehenge, through a cutting or a tunnel. The idea is that it means those visiting this stunning ancient monument don't have to see traffic rumbling past. However, I think this suggestion gets things totally back to front.

First of all, it's silly to think that somehow you would be able to lose yourself in neolithic times if only the road were hidden. That might have been the case in my youth, when you could wander around the stones to your hearts content. But now you are kept a good distance away by a fence (unless you have some ridiculous druidical religious belief (largely made up in a pub in London in Victorian times - I've seen the plaque), in which case you can trample all over the ancient monument that has nothing to do with your 'religion'). This forces a visit to Stonehenge to be a 21st century experience, so just accept it.

The reason I say the idea of burying the road gets things back to front is that I think it takes the wrong viewpoint. I drove down the A303 to and from the Brympton Festival on Sunday and it was totally wonderful getting that heart-stopping view of the monument as I drove past each way. If they put the road in a cutting or tunnel, thousands of people a day would miss out on that stunning view of Stonehenge - and I think that outweighs any prissy attempt to make the visitor experience better.

Keep that wondrous view from the road, please!

Festival fun

Brympton House, location of the festival - gorgeous buildingI spent Sunday at the Brympton Festival near Yeovil. It was an interesting experience. This was the first attempt at this festival and inevitably the organizers were on a bit of a learning curve. It was a lovely venue and a very warm and friendly experience (the festival is still running until Thursday with some excellent speakers to come, so do get along if you can). And, unusually for such events, there was brilliant food. But the organisation was a bit mixed - part of the problem being, I think that the programme was too complicated and also because day ticket holders don't seem to have had to pre-book events, meaning the organisers had no idea who would turn up at any particular talk.

Numbers were quite low overall, and I did wonder just how many literary festivals the UK can support - I would say this one deserves to keep going more than a fair number of festivals that I have attended, but there has to be a point where festival fatigue sets in.

Because the venue was so unique (it's worth going just to see the house) I do want to just reflect on the remarkable opportunity to experience life as it was in a great house 100 years ago. The speakers' hideaway room was a remarkable drawing room. It must have been about 20 feet high and at least 30 feet square. As far as I could detect, the only heat came from the roaring fire in the sizable fireplace.
The speaker's drawing room
This led to the bit that was fascinating - the realization that in a big house in Victorian times it was COLD. Sitting on the sofa on the left of the photo (that's my book), fairly near the fire, I was just about okay. But I still felt the need to occasionally come close to the fire and warm various bits - in fact I recreated that traditional Victorian image of standing in front of the fire warming up. They really did have to do it.

For me, it was worth going for this experience alone. (Not to mention a toilet that Queen Victoria would have recognized.) Lovely.

Treat 'em mean, keep 'em keen

I have never subscribed to the adage 'treat them mean, keep them keen.' The suggestion that this is a good way to deal with a member of the opposite sex, presumably because they will take you for granted otherwise, has always seemed to me to be fine if you are effortlessly attractive, but not necessarily helpful for ordinary mortals. I am fascinated to discover, though, that this approach extends beyond humans, and indeed living creatures, to companies.

The example that has brought it to mind is Apple. There is no doubt that Apple is a marmite company - one that you either love or hate. If you hate them they are the kings of style over substance, peddling overpriced technology that doesn't do anything more than the cheaper stuff, but that has a strange hold over the media, and that is particularly good at product placement (just take a look at an episode of Neighbours and you'd be convinced there is no other make of computer). If you love them, they are the ultimate innovators, the champion of the individual over the corporate machine (that was so much easier when the enemy was IBM), the people who realize that technology should be beautiful and functional.

It has been quite entertaining watching Apple, with their recent success, go from being the underdogs to the hated corporate on the opposite side to the plucky Android (from that tiny startup, Google).

I have to be honest - I love Apple products. But something I've found out recently doesn't help my image of the company - because they are the ones I was thinking of when I opened with 'treat them mean, keep them keen.' (Yes, I hadn't forgotten that bit.) According to someone in the know, a source I can't reveal in case they send round the heavies, Apple takes exactly this approach to its resellers. Apparently if you go into a shop that sells Apple products and buy a replacement power supply for you Macbook, the shop will make exactly £0 on it. They have no markup at all. Even more bizarrely, buy a Macbook battery and in theory the shop will make a loss, because the wholesale price is actually higher than the retail. (I say 'in theory', because I presume the shop doesn't source from Apple wholesale, but perhaps they are made to.)

It seems that Apple's attitude is exactly that of the highly attractive lover. They know that their resellers adore them, so they treat them mean to keep them keen. And that's fine in the good times. But Apple ought to be careful. There's nothing worse than a spurned lover. Maybe it's time to go back to your roots a little, Apple. Remember this:

Should you buy a self-published book?

Once upon a time you knew, on the whole, that if a book had been published (unless it was written by a celebrity) that it would be of a certain quality, because the whole of the publisher's might from copy editing to proof reading had been applied to it. Of course there were always the products of vanity publishing, but you ignored those by the plague.

Now, though, there is a middle ground - the self-published book. Because it is so easy to pop something onto Kindle (say), these are appearing in large quantities. So what to do? Ignore the self-published books, stick a toe carefully into the water, or plunge in neck-deep?

I certainly wouldn't totally ignore self-published books. Think of the parallel with jams. I could always buy Bon Maman, and be sure I was getting the same high standards all the time. But equally I could pick up something at a farmer's market, lovingly crafted that may well taste much better. Or could have gone off. Or could have a dead mouse in it. The difference, I suppose, is that it is much harder to write and edit a good book than it is produce a good jam... yet many more people think they can write a book than think they can make jam.

I get bombarded with suggestions for self-published books to be reviewed on www.popularscience.co.uk but I ignore 95 percent of these. One or two do catch my fancy, though. I very much enjoyed The Rocketbelt Caper , which subsequently became a real published book. And most recently I have been sent Nothing and Anywhere , a novel by Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon, which I was told had enough maths content in it to make it worth considering for the site.

In the end, I didn't include the book on Popular Science because it really doesn't have enough science/maths content to be appropriate, but I do feel it is worth commenting on it here. I love edgy real world fantasies like those of Neil Gaiman, and the opening section of the novel, which is the best part, has that kind of feel - it reminded me a little of Gaiman's Neverwhere, not just because of the title but also because of the strange visitors and the way the main character is plunged into a confusing and life-changing world. Other aspects of the novel - particularly the big set piece attack on a Scottish castle and the very random conversations about favourite pieces of music and the like (a little self-indulgent, I'm afraid) - didn't work so well.

Overall, though, I felt it was a book I was glad that I had read. I was conscious throughout that it could have been a lot better if it had been well edited, but it had a raw enthuasiasm. This very much echoes my experience of reading two other self published novels - Alice Turing's Dance Your Way to Psychic Sex and Henry Gee's gothic By the Sea . I enjoyed the read, even though the experience was a little bumpy in places.

So my conclusion? You have to be very selective. I really need to be sold on a self-published book before I take a look at it. But it is worth dipping a toe into the water. After all, some of those homemade jams really are delicious.

Be your own laboratory

When I wrote The Universe Inside You I wanted to include a series of experiments to try out as I had done in Inflight Science . The difference was that many of these experiments were going to involve using your body as a lab, with quite a few using the brain.

It seemed the best thing to do would be to put together a website with those experiments that aren't so easy to do on the kitchen worktop, as opposed to (say) dropping antacid tablets in vinegar or extracting DNA (both in the book). And while I was at it, I could provide a more detailed 'further reading' section with links to other books, as a good few people had suggested that Inflight Science should have had suggestions for finding out more.

The outcome was www.universeinsideyou.com - I originally intended this purely as an adjunct to the book, but I've showed it to a sample of people who assure me it is quite interesting in its own right, so on their recommendation it's worth taking a look even if you don't have the book, whether you want to see someone walk on custard, experiment with optical and audio illusions, hear a piece of music that has travelled at four times the speed of sound, or interact with a piece of software that pretends to be a human being. Take a look!

Black holier than thou

When I give talks on the universe I often get questions about black holes. Everyone loves a black hole. They are the movie stars of the cosmos with a whole mythology of their own, which is pretty amazing when you consider that they are basically theoretical concepts that have never been directly detected (although we have good reason to believe they're out there).

Here's a quick black hole primer, if you haven't quite got the hang of them:

Although quantum physics is mostly about the very small, there are some hypothetical large scale quantum objects. Perhaps the best know is the universe at the point of the Big Bang - but it is pretty much rivalled by the black hole.

In a crude form, black holes were dreamed up in the 1700s when British astronomer John Michell imagined the way escape velocity - the velocity needed to get away from a planet - getting bigger and bigger as the planet got more massive. With a heavy enough star, Michell realized, the escape velocity would be bigger than the speed of light, and light would never get out. The result would be a dark star, or as the astronomer John Wheeler first called them in 1969, a black hole.

The modern idea of the black hole came from Einstein’s general relativity, which considers gravity to be a warp in space and time. The more massive a body, the more it bends spacetime. With enough mass in a small enough volume, the warp would be so great that nothing - light included - would get out. To get the Sun, a middling-sized star 1.4 million kilometers across, compressed enough to go black it would have to be condensed to just 3 kilometers in diameter.

Normally when a star is active, the outward pressure from the nuclear reactions that power it keeps the star “fluffed up”, but as nuclear fuel runs low, pressure drops and the star begins to collapse. Now another force comes into play - a quantum feature called the Pauli Exclusion Principle that means that similar particles of matter that are close in distance must be different in velocity. This will counter the gravitational collapse - unless the star is too massive. The mass required for this is around one and a half times that of the Sun. Some such stars explode as a supernova. But if this fails to happen, the star should contract, getting smaller and smaller until it becomes a black hole.

In theory, the contraction will continue until there is a singularity, a point of infinite density, at the center of the black hole. This singularity is a quantum object. I say 'in theory' because at a singularity the maths breaks down and this could mean that something completely unexpected happens.

There are several inaccurate myths about black holes. Their gravitational pull is nothing special for a star. If you were orbiting a star that became a black hole, the pull would get no stronger. It's just that you can get much closer to one than an ordinary star, so can experience much more dramatic forces that way. Also they're not totally black. They are expected to give off faint 'Hawking radiation.' And they aren't gateways to another universe. Get in a black hole and you're stuck.

To finish off, a few fun black hole factoids:
If you flew towards a black hole, the difference in gravitational pull between your feet and your head would be so big that you would be stretched out long and thin like a piece of spaghetti. This process is actually known as spaghettification - who says physicists don't have a sense of humour?General relativity says the stronger the gravitational pull, the slower time runs as seen from the outside. If we watched an object travelling into a black hole it would get slower and slower before stopping forever at the event horizon (the point beyond which no light escapes). It should take an infinite amount of time (from our viewpoint) for the object to get any further. Technically, the singularity at the heart of a black hole is a point in time, not a point in space. Onve you have passed the event horizon (which from your viewpoint is no problem) you will inevitably reach the singularity at a particular point in time. Image from Wikipedia

Pretty pictures

There seems to be a trend towards the use of infographics in blogs. I think what has happened is that people realize that us bloggers are lazy types, and if someone gives you a pretty graphic to use for free, then they are happy to do so. The blogger gets a nice look, while the graphic owner gets a little push.

Those nice people at Icon Books have produced one for The Universe Inside You. Not only am I going to share this with you, but if anyone wants to reproduce it, they are very free to do so. I just ask that you link from the post either to the book's page on my website or the book's own website. Here it is in all its glory (if it doesn't fit on your screen, click on it to see a suitable sized image):