Brian Clegg's Blog, page 147

The acid that rules your life

Generally speaking you expect to find really strong acids locked away in the cupboard of a lab. So it may come as something of a shock to find out that one of the big names - hydrochloric acid - plays a big part in your everyday life.

Find out why - and much more about this stomach-churning compound - in the latest Royal Society of Chemistry podcast on hydrochloric acid. Click here to listen...

The 24 Mystery

One of the delights of having acquired Netflix (see previous post) is being able to take a look at films and TV shows that caused a big buzz when they came out, but I never got round to seeing. Last night I watched the first two hours of the first season of 24.

As everyone said at the time, the real time format is very clever and engaging. What's more, how sweet all their antique 'modern' technology is. Jack Bauer is using my old phone! But I desperately need a 24 fan to explain to me the logic of the bad guys in those first couple of episodes.

[SPOILER ALERT]

Okay, it's clever of the writer to make us all think the photographer is the killer to start with. But come on. WHY does the following happen? What the bad guys want to do is replace a top photographer with a ringer, who can then get close to a target and kill them. Fair enough. The photographer is flying in to LA. So they wait for him to get off the plane, kill him and replace him quietly and efficiently? No way.
They blow up the plane with the photographer on in mid-air. So the people involved in this highly secret plot think the best way to keep things secret is to blow up a 747? Nice one, guys.Their evil agent takes the photographer's ID and jumps off the plane before it blows up. Okay, so their ringer can now turn up with a real ID. Great. Only this is real ID for someone the authorities know was blown up on the plane he was arriving on. A little thinking through required here, guys.The evil agent (after sitting around with no clothes on, as she appears to be a naturist), buries the ID with a radio beacon before being taken to their evil lair. About five seconds later (this is real time, remember) someone else on a motorbike with a detector for the radio beacon digs up the ID. This newcomer then hides the ID and extorts money from the rest of the baddies. But why did they bury it and retrieve it seconds later? What possible advantage was there to burying the ID and having it dug up five seconds later?Someone please explain!


Image from Wikipedia

Oh for the wings of a dove

I do quite a lot of talks based on my book Inflight Science , and one thing that is guaranteed to raise a bit of an argument is when I cover how wings work.

If we were taught anything about the reason why wings lift a plane at school, it is likely to be down to the Bernoulli principle. This is great, because it's really easy to demonstrate. Just get yourself a bit of paper (say about 1/4 of a sheet of A4 or Letter), hold it at one end so it droops and blow over the top of it. The droopy bit rises up as it experiences lift. And that's how a wing works, we're told! Only, it isn't.

DIY BernoulliWhen you blow over the bit of paper you get the air moving over the top of it, thinning it out a little. So there's less pressure on the top than the bottom (where the air isn't moving), and you get lift. That's the Bernoulli effect.

A wing is different, of course. The air is moving over the top and the bottom. The explanation usually given is that the wing is specially shaped so the air has further to go over the top than it does under the bottom. So the top air has to speed up to catch up with the bottom air. Reduced pressure, lift, Bob's your uncle. But when you think about it, this is daft. Why should the air going over the top care about keeping up with the air going under the bottom. It's not like the molecules are best mates and desperately need to keep together.

Fluid flow is altogether more complex than this. As it happens the air does go faster over the top, and there is a Bernoulli effect, but it has nothing to do with trying to keep up with the air going under the bottom. And the lift from the Bernoulli effect is nowhere near enough to get a plane into the air. Instead, what does the trick is Newton's third law of motion. The wing is shaped so that as it cuts through the air, it pushes the air downwards. Push the air down and that pushes the wing up. Exactly the same principle as the jet engine uses to get the plane moving in the first place.

So by all means have fun blowing over bits of paper. It is strangely comforting. But it's not how planes get into the sky.

Is my book blaspheming?

One of my best selling books is The God Effect , which describes the truly remarkable phenomenon of quantum entanglement.

I do sometimes wonder if some of the sales of the book arise not from an interest in quantum physics, but rather because it sounds like a slightly wacky religious book. That was certainly never my intention, though obviously I wanted it to have an eye-catching title.

The name was inspired by Nobel Prize winner Leon Lederman's nickname for the Higgs boson, 'the God particle.' It's possible to look at the mechanism this hypothetical particle is thought to give other particles mass as a kind of entanglement, so it seemed reasonable to call entanglement 'the God effect', especially as entanglement does produce such remarkable outcomes. I really don't think it was hyperbole to subtitle the book 'science's strangest phenomenon.'

I now learn from New Scientist that Lederman originally refered to the Higgs boson as 'the goddam particle' rather than 'the God particle' - but his publishers didn't like this apparently blasphemous term, so they changed the name and came up with 'the God particle' instead.

If this is true, I have to face up to the fact that my book really should have been called The Goddam Effect, which somehow doesn't quite give the feel I was aiming for. Though it would be quite amusing. And, to be honest, I feel it would have been better than just calling it Quantum Entanglement as the book nearly was.

Protecting the enhanced life

A pocket computerEvery now and then someone proudly produces a ten-year-old mobile phone and announces that they have no need for modern technology. 'It makes phone calls and it texts,' they say. 'What more do I need?' But they miss the point.

As the organizers of the Mobile World Congress are quick to highlight, mobile technology is far more than just phoning on the move. It's for books, monitoring health, navigation, making payments and connecting with friends. It might involve a Kindle or an iPad, a GPS device or a widget to give keyless access to your car. For the moment, though, the smartphone is the most significant device – and this is where our smug old technology owner misses the point. A smartphone isn't a mobile phone that does some other fancy stuff. It's a genuine, accept no substitutes, pocket computer (as mentioned in the Blondie song – about 2' 41'' in the video) that happens to be a phone as well.

At one point most technology pundits would have told you the PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) was the way forward. I would have been one of them. It seemed impossible to cram everything you needed for a viable pocket computer into the form factor of a phone. Yet that's exactly what a smartphone does. I reckon about 20 percent of the usage and about 5 percent of the value I get out of my iPhone is making phone calls and texts. The rest is much richer.

If I look at my mobile phone usage over a week, yes there will be calls and texts. But I will also have listened to music, found where I was (and how to get somewhere else) on maps, dropped into social networks, looked up information online, played a couple of games, read a few documents, located my nearest favourite coffee shop (and found out when it was open), paid for a coffee, looked up a friend's address, repeatedly used my diary and made a few notes. Oh and used it to take some photographs too.  Not to mention deploying it as a torch.

I don't think it's exaggerating to say that the phone in your pocket has the potential to enhance your life. It's a small scale human upgrade, without the need for a Matrix-style socket in the back of your neck. That's quite some power provided by that tiny pocketable box. But, as Spiderman so wisely observed, with great power comes great responsibility. What happens if I lose my smartphone? Or drop it? Or have to use it in the rain? There's a whole lot of disaster waiting to happen if I put so much of my life in the hands of an all-too-frail device.

There are broadly two things I need to protect to ensure that my mobile life remains smooth – my data and my way of getting to it. Until recently, the data was the key. It's a pain, but I can get another phone. If I lose my data, though – addresses, diary, photographs, music – it's gone for ever. But now the reality has flipped. Increasingly the data isn't on the phone, it's in the Cloud. There isn't a single bit of significant data on my phone now that isn't either replicated or coming direct from the internet. But if my phone stops working when I'm using it to find my way across a city, I won't be happy.

I would never use a phone without a case. The best smartphones look very pretty, but I'd rather cut down the visual wow factor in exchange for protection. So far so good. But when I use my phone outside I'm also challenged by the British weather. Electronics and water don't go together particularly well (as my daughters have discovered when they respectively dropped a cup of tea and a glass of orange juice over their laptops). Standing in the rain trying to follow a map or send a tweet (both of which I've done) is a scary business.

You could put the whole thing in a waterproof casing, like an underwater camera – but that swings the balance too far the other way, rendering the device impractical. Instead I would dearly love my phone to have the ability to repel water, a super power that does apply to at least one smartphone, Motorola's new Razr. If I'm honest, it's not a phone I'd buy, but Apple please take note – I want that protection.

The Razr uses a technology called Splash-Guard developed by P2i. It's an interesting application of nanotechnology, incorporating a coating applied using a plasma. Plasmas are fascinating – the fourth state of matter, next up the scale after a gas. It's bizarre that we don't meet them sooner at school, as plasmas account for around 99 percent of the universe's detectable matter, and are much more obvious than gasses because they often glow. Where a gas is a collection of atoms or molecules, a plasma is a collection of ions – atoms that are energetic enough to have lost or gained electrons and become charged. Stars are mostly plasma, and flames usually contain plasma.

The technology bonds to the phone and its internal components at a molecular level, producing a coating that causes liquid to form into droplets and roll off. You can see how it's applied in their process video (a bit corporate, but bear with it).

I really want this stuff on my phone. This video shows just what it does very nicely:



Does this mean if I have a suitably protected device in the future I'm going to be happy standing in the pouring rain using it? Probably not. I will always be a little wary. But surely it makes sense, when so much of your everyday business depends on something as potentially fragile as a smartphone, to do what you can to protect it? Smartphone manufacturers take note.

Whiter than white

I saw a TV advert the other day that left me just short of jumping up and down, screaming and throwing things at the television. It took the 'dubious promise' technique to a whole new level.

The advert in question was for the quaintly named Arm and Hammer toothpaste. In it, ex-Blue Peter presenter Katy Hill was very enthuasiastic about their whitening toothpaste. She told us it would make your teeth 'up to 3 shades whiter or your money back.'

Let's examine that claim. 'Up to' is of course the magnificent marketing weasel words term. 'Up to' is totally meaningless in that it can be anything from zero to the amount specified. So 'Up to 50% off' could mean 'nothing off'. The '3 shades whiter' bit is sort of okay. No normal punter probably knows what three shades whiter looks like, but there is an official definition. But here's the killer. 'Or your money back.'

By combining 'Up to' and 'or your money back' Arm and Hammer has produced a magnificent paradox. We have to ask the makers, what do we have to do to get our money back? The ONLY circumstances in which you can get your money back is if it actually makes your teeth darker, or if it makes them more than three shades whiter. Anything else and there's no refund. Surely this wasn't the intention? Boggle.

Thanks to the wonder of the interwebz I can show you the ad, though interestingly it has been trimmed to avoid the offending claim:

Culture clash

This is apparently Joshua Bell
- the Brian Cox of the classical music world?I was interested to read on Jen Campbell's blog about a Washington Post experiment where Joshua Bell, who is apparently a world famous violinist (I'm afraid I'd never heard of him), playing a violin 'worth $3.5 million' busking in a subway (admittedly only for 45 minutes - come on Josh, where's your staying power?) raised a mere $32. Apparently 'only 6 people stopped and stayed for a while. About 20 gave him money'. He was playing some Bach, apparently including 'one of the most intricate pieces ever written.'

Now the interesting thing about this experiment is that it was supposed to give insights into how we perceive beauty and recognize talent. But what I got out of it was quite different - it seems to me it shows how we over-value a form of entertainment that frankly isn't to most people's tastes. And that often there are more important things in life than art.

Before I explain that, I ought to stress that I love Bach myself - this argument isn't based on a dislike of the music played.

Here's the thing. I think this 'experiment' is hugely flawed on a number of points.
It demonstrated the lack of popularity of serious classical music, not the lack of attention. When I was at university, my mate Helmut (now Professor Jakubowicz), who was a great amateur violinist, used to go out busking. Back in the 1970s, he could raise several times as much as Mr Bell did (admittedly on a longer session). But he would play fun virtuso pieces (probably something like Monti's Czardas). He entertained, he didn't try to do 'art'. The experiment was back to front. I think what it demonstrates is that most of the money in high art (in this case classical music) is down to showing off and being seen. Only a relatively small amount is down to the desire to hear the music. (Have you ever watched an audience at a classical concert?) I'm not saying some people don't want to listen to this kind of music - they do. But they are a relatively small percentage of the population, and most of those who do, don't value it as highly as ticket prices suggest.They missed the importance of the location. I love music. I hate buskers on the tube/metro. They really irritate me. I don't want to listen to music when I'm trying to negotiate a railway system. It gets in the way. It's not important to the task. Listening to music has its place, but it's not as important at that moment as getting to work or whatever else you are trying to do on the underground railway.So there we have it. Same 'experiment', totally different results. They say we should appreciate Bell's busking performance more - I say we should value his stage performance less. For me this just demonstrates that the arts aren't as important as those who work in the arts think they are...

A bloody story

Roses are red, violets are blue... actually, when you think about it, it's a load of rubbish. Roses are any old colour, and violets are, well, violet. The clue's in the name. But one thing that is, without doubt, red is blood. Its colour is its most dramatic quality. And yet the reason it's red is often given wrongly.

'Ah yes,' someone will wisely observe. 'Blood is red because of the iron in it. Like rust.' Well, yes, red blood cells are mostly haemoglobin, and the key characteristic of that interesting compound is four iron atoms. But as far as the colour goes it's pure coincidence. Find out why - and much more about haemoglobin - in the latest Royal Society of Chemistry podcast on haemoglobin. Click here to listen...

Be quite, Classic FM!

Serious music snobs will wince, but when I'm driving I quite often tune to Classic FM. Okay they sometimes play opera, in which case I have to switch to another station, and they play far too much Mozart, but their 'bitty excerpts' approach is actually more suited to filling in on a 15 minute drive than Radio 3.

There are three classes of music they play that I genuinely enjoy:
My kinda music - Tudorbethan  church music, Bach, Stravinsky, Vaughan Williams... an eclectic enough taste to hit on occasionallyNostalgia music - My father had very different musical tastes to me. I was brought up on a diet of the standard piano concertos, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky Korsakov, Mendelssohn - the romantic greats that were so popular back then. This isn't music I have on my iPod, but it brings all kinds of memories backGenuine discoveries - I admit it's not very often (okay it has been twice), but occasionally they play something I don't know and really want to know. So far it has been Grieg's Holberg suite and the modern composer Eric Whitacre.I say all this primarily to establish that I'm not one of those whiny people who moan all the time about Classic FM. But one thing about it really irritates me. Their announcers are too loud. Here's the thing. Serious music has much more dynamics - louds and softs - than popular beat combos. You want the louds to be LOUD and to be able to hear the quiet bits. So there I am, steaming up the A419 with Bach's exquisite Toccata and Fugue in D minor blasting out. This, I think, is why I quite like drum and bass. The bass on a good organ playing something with welly like this is stunning. But to play it at a sensible volume, when the announcer came on, he blasted out like a foghorn and deafened me. I had to drastically turn down the volume.

So get with the plot, Classic FM. Real classical music is not all quiet, peaceful and chilled. Sometimes it has to be played BLOODY LOUD. Please adjust the volume of your announcers accordingly.

Want to hear a bit of organ with welly? Turn up your sound for by far the best organist I know personally, John Keys, at work (you can find some recordings of his playing here):

1803. Bach - Toccata in D minor by brianclegg

The 35 year lifespan myth

Why couldn't they just say '70'?What is the human lifespan? We still tend to hold on to a magic number from the Bible – "three score years and ten" or seventy years as an idea of the natural length of life, but what has human life expectancy really been like through history?

Average life expectancy has grown phenomenally in the last hundred years. From the dawn of history through to the nineteenth century, average life expectancy has been between 25 and 35. Now it is in the high 60s, and higher still outside Third World countries.

How, then, did the writers of the Bible come up with the over-inflated but visionary figure of 70? This is because average figures can be very misleading. The historical figures are dragged down by a very high infant mortality rate. Before modern medicine, most children would not make it to adulthood. Similarly, many women died while giving birth, in their twenties or younger. If early deaths are excluded from the average, lifespans in the 50s, 60s and 70s were not uncommon.

Typical lifespans of those who survived into adulthood dropped as we moved from the pre-industrial to the early industrial age, though more children were surviving, so this isn't clearly reflected in the averages. Then lifespans started to rise as modern medicine kicked in, up to the current impressive high. Now, childhood mortality is at an all time low. As Armand Leroi points out (in his book Mutants), 1994 was a remarkable year in this respect. In 1994, no eight-year-old girls died in Sweden – not a single one. While this was just one point in the statistics – the next year, no doubt a handful did – it is still a notable fact that would have been inconceivable to our medieval ancestors.

When there's a funeral for a baby or a child it is always a very emotional and particularly sad occasion – it's sobering to think that not many years ago, and throughout all of history before that, the majority of funerals were for babies and children.