Brian Clegg's Blog, page 153

It's too soon

A Christmas tree (not this year) plus reindeer substituteI can't say I'm overwhelmed by the way people seem to be decorating their houses earlier and earlier for Christmas. I must admit I'm extreme. Given a free hand I wouldn't put anything up until a week before, but I have to give way to family pressure and go for a fortnight before. However I was quite surprised how many Christmas decorations I saw on houses in November.

Days-to-Christmas-ometerIt's not that I'm against Christmas jolity. And I must admit our days-to-Christmas-ometer does go up at the start of December. But I think there are good arguments for not decorating too early:
If you do, you've given in to the shopkeepers. There was a time when no one would have decorations up this early. But as shops have pushed back the point they go into Christmas mode sooner and sooner, so houses have started to get their fairy lights out of the loft at an earlier date. I think we should stand up for our right not to be hustled into Christmas decor too soon.If you have a real tree it will be looking pretty sad by Christmas Day. This is, after all, the start of Christmas, and more to the point, the day when you are likely to spend more time in proximity to your Christmas tree than any other. Remember it has to last another 12 days after this. Get it at the start of December and it will be balding by Christmas Day.You can only sustain so much 'specialness'. If the decorations are up all through December they have become everday by the 25th. The whole point is to make Christmas special, but there's a real danger it just becomes part of the wallpaper.So give it a thought. Let's have a campaign for a real Christmas and not an extended retail period.

Strangely pleasant

Now here's a challenge. I quite often write a bit of a blog post when an idea occurs to me, then fill it in later. Thanks to Blogger's mobile app, I can do this anywhere, tapping it in on my phone. So I'll write a title and a couple of lines of text that summarize the idea, then fill in the details later.

This particular post started that way, but with a difference. All I wrote was the title. And I can't for the life of me remember what it was supposed to be about.

It certainly wasn't about the sensation you get when you pull a piece of dry skin off yourself, though I do find this strangely pleasant. (I still remember when, age 10, I broke my arm and after the plaster came off the entire arm was covered in dry skin. Heaven.)

Nor was it about the slightly related pleasure that comes from an unopened jar of instant coffee. You take off the lid and there underneath is that pristine seal, waiting to be broken through. For some reason I remember discussing this with someone I used to work with at British Airways (I don't suppose you remember, Sue), well over 20 years ago. We both agreed about the pleasure, but then discovered it was from a totally different action. Mine was to run the end of a spoon around the edge, crisply slitting it open. Hers was to attack it with a spoon, bashing dramatically through. (Freudians have a field day. But remember psychoanalysis has no scientific basis.)

So what did it concern? Junk food? The peace that sometimes unexpectedly turns up during the day? Cadbury's Whole Nut? I really have no idea. Perhaps you have some thoughts...

Some different Christmas music

It's that time of year when, should you venture into a shopping mall or supermarket, you will be bombarded with Christmas music. Similarly the radio stations be increasingly groaning with Christmas tunes. Now, I like Christmas music. And I can't be humbuggy enough to point out that it's currently Advent, and Christmas doesn't start until December 25th. For some reason, Christmas music is all about anticipation. But I just wish they pumped out a bit more variety.

There are about 10 Christmas carols and 10 Christmas songs (please, not Slade!) that will get circulated over and over again. But it really doesn't have to be like this. I try to buy myself a new CD of Christmas carols every year, and this year went for this one - Fear and Rejoice, O People. It's mostly quite modern stuff (in the sense of post 1900), but nothing too weird.

There's a good mix of really top notch numbers, from the moving Howells Sing Lullaby that opens the disc to Tavener's hypnotic A Hymn to the Mother of God at the end. Generally the performances from St John's College Cambridge under Christopher Robinson are excellent, though the solo trebles are perhaps lacking in a little welly. The inevitable Rutter is one of his most subtle, There is a flower. There are two of Robinson's own carols - I preferred his traditional Hereford Carol, though Fear and Rejoice is interesting. Two lesser known treats are Geraint Lewis's Howells-like A little hymn to Mary and Arthur Oldham's Remember, O thou man, which has become one of my favourite choir carols since singing it at the Oxford University Physics Department Carol Service a couple of years ago.

Overall I really liked it. You can hear samples of the tracks at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com. If you want to stretch your Christmas music experience there's a whole range of recommended CDs here, from traditional carols to quite challenging modern stuff.

Flipping coins!

Thanks to Peet Morris for this excellent example of probability running counter to common sense.

Imagine I have a huge stack of coins and flip them one after another. These are fair coins, with a 50:50 chance of coming up heads or tails.

First of all I flip the coins one after another (leaving the flipped coins on the table) until the sequence H T H comes up. At that point I stop and count the coins. Then I repeat this experiment many times.

For the second part I again flip the coins, leaving them on the table, until the sequence H T T comes up. At that point I stop and count the coins. Then I repeat the experiment many times.

On average would you expect it to take more flips to produce H T H, more flips to produce H T T or the same number of flips?

Common sense says this is pretty obvious. It's the same number of flips. And certainly if I take three coins and flip them, there's the same chance of H T H or H T T coming up. But, remarkably, things are different in the experiment above. On average you will take fewer flips to produce H T T than you would to to produce H T H.

Just take a moment to think how that might be possible.

Here's the sneaky probabalistic component that isn't obvious: in both cases, you need the sequence H T to come up first. Now imagine that you then get the wrong face on the next flip. So if you were looking for H T H you actually get H T T and vice versa. With this starting point, H T T has an advantage. If you were looking for H T T, and actually got H T H, then the last coin in the sequence is H. So you only need T T to complete your sequence. If you were looking for H T H and actually got H T T, then the last coin the sequence is T, so you need all three of H T H to complete the sequence.

The reason H T T does better is that the sequence of faces that isn't correct ends in the face that starts your sequence. For H T H, the wrong result produces a bad starting point, so you have to run the exercise that bit longer.

Relativity can be riveting

Looking back a long (long) way to my physics degree, special relativity was one of my favourite subjects. It's weird and wonderful enough to be amazing, but (unlike general relativity) the maths is relatively easy. Don't worry though, I'm not going to throw equations at you - I just wanted to share one of the remarkable paradoxes of relativity.

I've seen paradoxes defined as contradictions that can't be true, but I think a much more appropriate definition for physics is situations that appear to involve a mind-boggling contradiction, that the physics tells us really is the way things are. And special relativity is full of them.

This particular one below I hadn't seen before, and I picked up from Andrew Stearne's book The Wonderful World of Relativity . (This sounds like a children's book, but actually it's a relativity primer that is probably best appreciated by those about to start a physics course at university, as it's a bit too textbooky for the general reader.)

Here's the scenario. We've got a table with a 10mm deep hole in it. At the bottom of the hole a beetle is happily beetling about, unaware that we are about to fire a rivet into the hole. The good news is that the shank of the rivet, the bit that will go into the hole, is only 8mm long, leaving room for our (rather small) beetle to feel safe and snug.

Unfortunately, though, the rivet is fired towards the table at a fair percentage of the speed of light. It's somewhat typical of this book that all it tells us about the speed is that γ is 2, which doesn't really give you an idea of how fast the rivet is going, but if my back of an envelope calculations are right, this is around 0.87 times the speed of light. Quite a fast rivet, then.

Now one of the weird effects of special relativity is that an object moving at high speed is squashed up in the direction of travel as seen by an observer. So from the bug's viewpoint the rivet won't by 8mm long, it will be just 5mm long. 'Wow,' thinks the bug, 'what was I worried about?' But before it sits back and starts reading the newspaper, there's something it needs to consider. Relativity works both ways. From the rivet's viewpoint, it's not the rivet that's moving, it's the table. This means from the rivet's view it remains 8mm long - but the hole is contracted and is now only 5mm deep. Squish goes bug.

So what really happens? (I use 'really' loosely. Let's face it, Wickes does not sell a 0.87 times the speed of light rivet gun.) Is the beetle somehow both live and dead, in the manner of the famous quantum cat? Sadly no. It's squish all the way.

Let's follow the event from the beetle's viewpoint. Down comes the rivet and slams into the table. At the moment before the impact the rivet is still just 5mm long as far as the bug is concerned. But here's the thing. Just because the head of the rivet has come to a sudden stop doesn't mean the whole rivet does. A wave has to pass along the rivet to its end saying 'Stop!' The end of the rivet will just keep on going until this wave, typically travelling at the speed of sound, reaches it. That fast-moving end will crash into the beetle long before the wave arrives. It will then send a counter wave back up the rivet and after a degree of shuddering will eventually settle down as an 8 mm rivet in a 10 mm hole. Too late, though, for that bug.

Isn't physics great?

It's toys time of year

I confess I asked for a review copy of this book because it's hard not to get nostalgic about toys as Christmas approaches - waves of James May style nostalgia wash over you. I realized they were onto something good here when I opened the book to flick through it and found I'd read about 25 percent of it before I could force myself to stop. It's just good fun.

My suspicions are that the reason a book like this is so attractive is that when we were young (well, at least when I was young) and there were no personal electronic goods to tempt us, toys were the prime objects of our desire. We genuinely used to look into toyshop windows and lust after these things. We used to wait with eager anticipation to see if Father Christmas (none of this 'Santa' rubbish) had delivered on the day. We hadn't been bombarded by give-aways in McDonald's Happy Meals - toys were exciting.

Inevitably there are one or two favourites missing. Matchbox and Corgi cars were present, for instance, but not Dinky. And the text, while providing a lot of interesting historical factoids, was occasionally too rose-tinted. The Spirograph entry, for example, didn't mention that hardly anyone has ever made a Spirograph picture without slipping and spoiling it. Yet this collection of double page spreads, with big colour photos and genuinely interesting content was pleasurable and page-turn-demanding.

Really this ought to be the ideal gift - many, many adults over the age of 30 will appreciate it (though plenty of the toys shown are still going, or were until recently, so the appeal may be even wider). The only trouble is that some people may wonder what you are saying about them if you give them a book about toys. (Especially if it's a bloke and they're getting a book with a picture of Barbie on the firont.) So it may be that this is a gift that, on the whole, you will have to buy for yourself. But if you fancy an escape from the Christmas pressures into a time when things were less complicated, I can highly recommend it. Take a look at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com

Wonderful magazine, great taste

There is no doubt that for those interested in popular science in the UK, that the premier magazine to buy is New Scientist. I can say this with firmness as they've just published their collection of 'popular science worth giving this Christmas':

I draw your attention particularly to the penultimate book on the 'shelf. Of this we read:

Inflight Science: Brian Clegg, Icon Books - Everything you ever wanted to know about the science of flying - from the terrible taste of tepid in-flight tea to how we manage to defy gravity in a pressurised aluminium cylinder.

 What can I say? Excellent taste guys. (And some of the other choices are pretty good too.)

What is it with zombies?

If I'm honest I'm not a great fan of zombie movies (I even found Sean of the Dead a little hard going). Partly it is because I find gore-based horror sickening and in no sense entertaining. (I have to look away in bits of Casuality.) For me a great horror film is one that can scare you without showing you anything gross. And then there's the usual problem with zombie movies of the slow moving predator that somehow the prey can never manage to run away from.

However, I can't deny the popularity of zombies, whether they're turning up in civil defence planning, variants of Jane Austen or in the government.

So I was very interested when 'Dr Austin' provided me a copy of his Zombie Science 1Z. This is rather a neat idea - Austin Low (the real name of Dr Austin) is a Scottish performer who specializes in comedy, working with children and science. He performs a spoof lecture on 'zombieology' and this is the book of the lecture. The idea is to take the idea of zombies seriously, try to explain them, getting in quite a lot of medical science (he suggests it's a prion-based infection) and to entertain as well.

The original version of the book was, frankly, rather poorly produced - in fact, I thought it was self-published - but it has now been significantly tidied up and though I find the content occasionally a little whimsical, it's an excellent way to get a young(ish) zombie fan interested in a bit of science. Take a look at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com (Kindle fans can find it here for the UK and here for the US).

What were they thinking?

There's a lot to love about the new TV advert for the UK's electrical/electronic retailers of last resort PC World and Curry's.



The pastiche of Star Wars is rather well done. The landing craft is believable and there's some nice acting like the almost-entirely-suppressed wince when the manager's car is crushed. Darth Vader is pretty good too.

However, have they really thought through the picture this ad puts across? Here are the key messages I pick up:
Our shops are run by an evil empire - buy things here and you are funding evilOur training involves fear and perilOur attitude to customer service takes its lead from Darth Vader, a (fictional) mass murderer and war criminalOur staff are massed mindless automata of a controlling stateWe are the bad guys All in all, is this really the image that they want? Back to the drawing board, I think.

The version shown is the 'Director's Cut' which is slightly longer than the advert as broadcast

Have a word with your authors, please, publishers

A review by some blokeI know a bit about reviews. The first paid writing I ever did was a review for PC User magazine of a brand new shiny piece of software called Excel. I quite liked it. There followed a number of years writing reviews of business software, then computer games (which really is money for old rope) and finally books.

These days, apart from reviewing for www.popularscience.co.uk and for my blog, I do a fair number of book reviews for print publications from Wall Street Journal to Nature. And I have noticed a worrying trend. Probably because of the increase of easy communication through websites and social networking, people rather expect to be able to get in touch with a reviewer after reading their review. And a rapidly increasing number of authors are dropping me an email.

I put these emails on a scale, from 'appreciated' to 'not a good move', and sadly there are rather too many down the bottom end. Here's how they look:
Appreciated - a nice little note saying thank-you for the review. What's not to love, though the only downside is than when I see an email from an author titled 'Your review' I do get a few moments disquiet before I see it's a nice one.Okay if justified - some emails correct an error in a review. This is fine with an online review as the correction can be published, though there's not a lot of point with a print review. However, make sure it is a genuine error. I recently had one complaining because I'd said the author used a technical term without saying what it meant. He asked me to correct the review, as he had explained the term in a note at the back of the book. Sorry, hardly anyone reads notes - the book was still difficult to understand as there was no explanation in context. I did correct the review, but I can't say I was impressed.Silly - complaining about an opinion. A lot of the content in a review is inevitably an opinion. I recently received one as an editor (someone else wrote the review) starting 'I'm really sorry you thought this, and I am surprised at your conventionalism.' Frankly, so what? Why should I take any notice of your opinion of an opinion? All you are going to do is irritate me, and I may be responsible for another review of one of your books in the future. What's the point?Not a good move - ad hominem attack. Some authors can't resist starting to make nasty remarks and name calling if they don't like a review I wrote. I'm sorry, I can't like every book. I didn't like yours. This is really self-defeating. Not only will this somewhat discourage me from saying nice things about you, if the insults are bad enough I will inform your publisher that you are a loose cannon and they won't be particularly happy. This isn't good for your career.So, my recommendation: by default stick with a dignified silence. If you've got another review that's good, read that instead. If not, wonder why not. I really would only get in touch with a simple thank-you or to correct a specific factual error in an online review (e.g. if it says your book doesn't have an index, and it does). Anything else may make you feel good for a few seconds but isn't going to help and might make things worse.