Brian Clegg's Blog, page 155

Can supermarkets ever be green?

On the way to the corner shop (picture not same day)I was toddling down to our corner shop, aka the Asda Walmart superstore on Sunday on a beautiful (if chilly) blue skies morning, wondering why anyone ever drives to the supermarket if they live as close as I do. It was so much nicer to walk.

At least, that's what I thought on the way. Coming back, carrying everything for a Sunday roast plus milk, cans of Coke etc. I felt like a decidedly overloaded beast of burden. Usually, though, I manage fine, using the supermarket as a corner shop and just buying what I can easily carry. It means I go more often, but I can walk and feel smugly green.

The only thing is, I'm not really encouraged to do this. Asda has a deal that if you spend £40 you get £5 off your next shop - but unless you are buying high value items, it's hard to spend more than about £20 and carry it home. This isn't just an Asda problem. All the main supermarkets have deals where you have to spend £40, 50 or even 60 pounds to get discounts, money off petrol and so on. In effect these deals tie the customer into using a car.

Come on supermarketpersons! Let's see a deal that allows your shoppers to be green! There must be some way to amalgamate a series of small purchases over a relatively short period of time. Get imaginative.

Replication and big toys

A simulation of a Higgs discovery. Allegedly.The recent kerfuffle about faster-than-light neutrinos has stirred an old concern in my mind. One of the essentials of good science is being able to replicate the results. Any particular experimental setup can always mislead those using it because they get something wrong that they don't realize. This is why the neutrino guys have asked other experimenters to try to confirm what they have found.

A classic lesson in the dangers of relying on a single experimental setup is the one that emerges from the work of Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons. They were the people behind the cold fusion debacle in 1989. This was, as far as I can tell, a serious experiment by good scientists. They got some amazing results from their single experimental setup then did something stupid. Instead of attempting to publish in a journal and get peer review, they went straight to the press.

There are two reasons this was stupid. It was partly because it missed the opportunity for critical suggestions from reviewers. And it was partly because the science community hates a show-off and is always suspicious of going directly to the press. It meant that the rest of the community was much heavier on the pair, who had a perfectly legitimate idea that turned out not to be particularly good, than they otherwise would be. Most ideas in science fall by the wayside. There's no problem with this, if you go about it the right way. But once other labs tried to duplicate cold fusion and got nothing, the suspicions started to rise and Pons & Fleischmann were torn to pieces. (Not literally. Scientists aren't that bad. Not quite.)

But here's the concern I have. Just imagine the LHC gang announce that they've found the Higgs boson. Whoops and hurrahs all round. But who is going to duplicate this result? If theirs is the only toy big enough to do the job, who can say that this isn't another cold fusion? Of course they'll check it and do all they can to ring the changes - but the fact is it's the same experimental setup with the same people, and that always carries a risk. I don't want to rain on anyone's parade - but I do think particle physicists need to be really careful about exactly what they announce when their experiments can't be duplicated.

Image from Wikipedia

A pleasingly rotund Rumpole

As many a comedian-turned-writer has found to his or her cost, writing good humorous fiction is a whole different level of difficulty to simply being funny on stage. I can count on the fingers of one hand the authors who have consistently managed to combine genuinely funny writing with style and readability. Wodehouse, of course, has to be one of those digits. (But don't get me started on so called humorous Booker Prize nominees - they wouldn't know funny if it bit them.) And one chubby finger surely must be allocated to John Mortimer and Rumpole of the Bailey.

Mortimer wasn't the first to combine the law and humour. There was a lot of gentle amusement to be had from Henry Cecil's series of law-based novels like Brothers in Law . Cecil's was observational humour. His stories were based on experiences real barristers might go through, just exaggerated to bring out the funny side. Rumpole, on the other hand, is full scale legal pantomime, bringing on full scale laughter to Cecil's gentle smile.

As a character, Horace Rumpole has everything going for him. He is a supporter of the underdog, always the defender, always prepared to pull a success from the jaws of failure, despite the whole legal system weighing against him. If he has a tendency to resort to catch phrases... it's not exactly unheard of in comedy. He is a relic in his chambers, for ever battling the forces of modernization and efficiency, forever injecting the human touch... plus a cigar, and a large glass of Chateau Thames Embankment.

Rumpole is, simply one of the best literary creations of the twentieth century. If you haven't read any Rumpole, the new collection I've just got hold of is going to be the ideal introduction. It combines seven stories chosen by the author as his favourites in 1993 with seven of a more recent vintage. This gives an excellent feel for the whole opus, around 80 stories and a handful of novels. If, like me, you are a long term Rumpole fan, I admit there is less to make you rush to the bookstore, as they've all been published before, though the most recent of the stories, Rumpole and the Christmas Break, is one that had so far evaded me.

For the out-and-out Rumpole devotees there are also the first three chapters of a Rumpole novel, left unfinished on Mortimer's death. I really can't bring myself to read this, as once I've started a Rumpole I need to finish it, and as soon as possible. To venture into that would be cruel indeed.

If you haven't read much Rumpole (or none at all), or if you want a Rumpole-oid gift it's hard to go wrong with this 500 page collection, as pleasingly rotund as the great man himself. It's pure legal comedy gold. Forever Rumpole is available from Amazon.co.uk as a hardback or on Kindle and similarly from Amazon.com as hardback and on Kindle.

The HD/Blu-Ray fraud

[image error] Please don't ask why they're watching an HD microwaveI was privileged to be one of the first people in the UK to see broadcast HD TV in action at Sky's launch of their HD box many years ago. At the time very few TVs were HD ready - now it's the majority. Yet there was a question I was bursting to ask at Sky's event that still applies when you see HD and Blu-Ray being pushed today.

What I couldn't understand was why Sky didn't show HD alongside normal TV, so you can see how much better it was. They kept going on about the extra detail and clarity and brilliant picture, so I asked this at their launch why we didn't see that side-by-side comparison. They came out with some technie-wechnie excuse for why they couldn't show both images simultaneously. But there was a much better reason for their decision.

Just go into a TV showroom and look at all the TVs showing HD and Blu-ray. Again, why isn't there a clear comparison so we know it's worth paying extra for the technology? Here's that same issue rearing it's ugly head.

The fact is that, although HD is significantly higher resolution, producing clearer, sharper pictures, ordinary digital TV is already pretty good and on many programmes the difference is hardly perceptible. They don't do side by side comparisons because if you saw them, you'd realise there's no great advantage to switching. Except to the wallets of manufacturers and retailers.

My head's in the iCloud

For many years my definitive address book and diary have resided on my computer. I really can't remember when I last used one of those paper things. The problem with this was that when I was out at a meeting, I couldn't check my diary, so had to cross my fingers and hope, if necessary ringing up to modify an appointment later.

Since having the iPhone (and more recently the iPad) things had improved significantly, because every time I synchronized my mobile devices they got up-to-date copies of diary and address book, so when I was out and about I had access to these crucial resources. They might be a touch out of date, but essentially it was all there. What's more I now had extra backups of this essential data - and unlike users of a mobile phone with a conventional, unsynchronized address book I would never lose my phone numbers.

In the last week, Apple has launched iCloud, and with it my situation has changed again - and more fundamentally than I first thought. The migration was not without a little pain. When the Apple software was attempting to set things up, its duplication correction module went beserk, so now every entry in my diary is in twice and several people in my address book have two copies of their address.

What's more, the process has partially screwed up my desktop control centre, Outlook. It has moved my address book and diary to one hosted on iCloud, patched through to the Outlook system. Outlook is designed to be able to incorporate external sources, but it very much regards them as 'the rest' rather than the main one. So several of Outlook's useful features, like displaying the next six diary entries on the home screen and being able to add flags to emails to put them on your to do list have stopped working.

But in return I have a more fundamental change then I realized. Up to now, mentally, my 'real' address book and diary have been on the PC. So if I want to look up an address I would use the PC, even though it's a bit clumsy. Now my 'real' address book is in iCloud, so my natural tendency has moved to use either the iPad or the iPhone - and that's quite a fundamental shift. (It also means I can see my diary and address book from any internet connected computer, but the times I'm likely to use this seem very small.)

This is a significant shift of mindset, which I simply hadn't realized would come with the process. It will be interesting to see how things evolve...

Is this a Christmas song record?

I had the misfortune to have to listen to a bit of Radio 1 at the weekend (it's not my fault, the children made me) and suffered the new Justin Bieber record.

I'm sorry to go all grumpy old man, but it's OCTOBER for goodness sake, and he's released a Christmas record.

And what a Christmas record.

It's as if the writers said 'How many Christmas clichés can we cram into one song?' To save you the pain of listening to it, here are the ones I spotted:
Beautiful time of year[Christmas] cheerUnder the mistletoethe winter snowChestnuts roasting [on a fire]Santa's coming tonightReindeers flying in the skyMaking a listWise men followed the starVery merry ChristmasSomewhat bizarrely in the chorus he seems to be enjoying being with his 'shoddy'. Rumour has it that what he was intending to sing was the southern US slang 'shawty' for girlfriend, but I'm convinced he's singing 'shoddy' - which pretty well describes this song.

Nostalgia cash

A Barclaycash slip - lug holes either end of blue stripOn a university tour with one of my daughters the other day, after an hour of trying (and often failing) to make out what a 'student ambassador' with an impossibly thick accent was saying, I stopped at a cash machine and was overcome by a sudden wave of nostalgia.

The thing is, I first used a cash machine when I was at university. But, children, we are not talking cash machines as you know them today. There was no plastic card involved. This was Barclaycash, a cross between an ATM and a chequebook.

You put the slip in drawer 1, entered
your pin and opened drawer 2
Customers were issued with a book of little slips and a PIN. The slips were for fixed amounts of money and had to be located on little lugs before the machine ate them and spat out the cash. Or, rather, you opened a drawer and there was cash waiting. (I had forgotten until seeing the example above that you signed the slip, just like a cheque.)

Ah, how jealous friends who were with different banks marvelled at the advanced technology. We were practically living the 21st century life. Any day soon we'd have jet packs...

Enter the wonder drug

It's Royal Society of Chemistry podcast time again.

We take painkillers like paracetamol for granted these days, but when aspirin emerged on the scene, it was a dramatic breakthrough. Its cousin might have been easing pain as powdered willow bark for millennia, but this was something special - so special, in fact, that it featured in a treaty that ended a world war. Have a listen to the rise, fall and rise again story of aspirin.

A dalek in Asda

[image error] A dalek (probably not in Asda)Yesterday there was an dalek in our local Asda. Apart from offering the opportunity for a quick tweet ('Just seen a dalek at Asda. I always thought they shopped at Lidl.') it inspired me to think about what has happened to fear in children.

If, at the age of 8, when I first encountered daleks on TV, I had met one rolling down the frozen food aisle, I would probably have wet myself. In practice this couldn't have happened. First we didn't have a fridge when I was 8, and second there were no supermarkets in Rochdale yet. We still did our food shopping at the Home and Colonial. But I digress. I am a member of the generation that genuinely hid behind the sofa to watch something like Doctor Who.

We peered in terrified delight over the top of the couch at the rather murky images of that first Doctor Who adventure, ready to duck down if necessary. Daleks were seriously scary. In 2011, as far as I can gather, nothing much phases an eight-year-old. Given there hasn't been a huge amount of evolution in my lifetime (I'm not that old), what has happened? Is it that they're all exposed to Saw and other such DVDs from the age of two? I really don't know. But I didn't see one child clutching at their parents, showing fear when the dalek came down the aisle. Bring back the good old days, I say...


Image from Wikipedia

Potatoes and dogs

[image error] Probably not very tastyN.B. Before reading this, please be assured I do not condone eating dogs. It shouldn't be done. I love dogs. We are in hypothetical world here.

I was on one of my rare excursions to the pub the other day and the conversation turned, as it does, to potatoes (we'd just been served up with a bowl of chips). One of our number who should have known better (he has a chemistry degree) said something to the effect of 'I've always wondered how potatoes can be so varied in the way they cook. You know, some are great for mash, others for roasting or whatever.'

We raised our collective eyebrows and pointed out that given selective breeding had produced such a range in dogs (for instance), it was hardly surprising that you could get different kinds of potatoes that cook differently.

'Ah, yes,' he pointed out. 'Dogs look very different. But they probably all taste the same.'

Now here's the thing. In a purely hypothetical, scientific fashion, I can't help but wonder if he was right. Is a chihuahua like chicken, but a great dane more like beef? Or do all dogs taste the same? I really don't want anyone to find out, but it does make you wonder.

We then went on to discuss Greek gods. Specifically, did the ancient Greeks believe in their gods as actual entities, or did they consider them merely to be instructive myths?

You see, that's the sort of thing you get down the pub. Downright educational. It's not all football.