Brian Clegg's Blog, page 156

The missing translations

Between 1999 and 2001, initially with Paul Birch and then on my own, I wrote a series of business books for publisher Kogan Page titled Instant X where X was something like creativity or time management. These did reasonably well - a couple are still in print (and some out of print ones are available as bargain price ebooks - one is even free).

These books were written for a small advance, but some have made a steady little income through translations. To give you an idea, there are eight books in the series, but this is what my set of unique copies looks like:

Those eight books have gone a long way
After the first handful, the rest are all either in different languages or versions for other countries.

This is lovely, but there is something of a frustration that attaches to my rather nice boasting shelf. I haven't got copies of all the translations. Every now and then I will get a letter from the publisher to say they have sold these books in Indonesian - or a new entry will creep onto the royalty statements. And sometimes, as you see above, I get my author copies. But I know of at least two sets that I have never received.

There's something rather spooky about there being some editions of my books out there in the world that I've never laid eyes on. I can but hope they will arrive one day.

The key to the road

My very own, rather battered RAC keyThis is the story of an iconic object that has become a useless part of a bygone age.

I was driving #1 daughter back from her shift in the pub kitchen the other night (if you've got children, it's only fair that they get sent out to work) and we passed a car pulled up on the verge. The owner was beside it, talking expansively into his mobile phone.

'What,' she said, as if speaking of ancient history, 'did people used to do when they broke down before they had mobile phones?'

I was able to explain that once upon time there were phone boxes scattered by the roadside in out of the way places, boxes that could only be entered by those who carried the special keys issued by the AA and the RAC. That's how you would ring for rescue. A bit like a Dr Who police box, but for drivers. I'm not sure if she believed me.

I don't know why, but I cherish my RAC key. It roots me in a different time. Don't get me wrong, I prefer having my iPhone. The key is useless for almost everything I use the iPhone for every day. But it still feels special.

Recovering nicely

My next book to come out is How to Build a Time Machine, which launches in the US on 6 December - expect to hear rather more about it then. It has produced a lot of interest, including an extract which is going to feature in a major US magazine (more on that later too), and I think it could do well.

What has been fascinating is that it will the first of my books from US publisher St. Martin's Press that will also be published in the UK by a British publisher that has bought the rights - in this case the fiercely independent Duckworth.


As I have already mentioned, they have decided that the UK edition will have a different title - Build Your Own Time Machine - and they have now gone public with the cover, which is strikingly different in style from the US version. I like both, but I'm sure some people will have a favourite.

The British version is out in January - and I'm looking forward to receiving my copies of both, and, hopefully, arranging to do some talks on the subject.

I have seen the original design for the UK cover, where the inventor had a suit and tie, with the tie flying back in the breeze. As open neck shirts are definitely more me, I'm pleased to see that he has thrown away his shackles of formality in the final version.

Turning a pale blue

I'm shocked. I have discovered that I'm feeling more positive about the Conservatives than I ever have before. I'm not a Conservative voter, which makes this decidedly worrying. (Apart from my very first election when, as a student, I voted that way as a protest against all the holier-than-thou preaching from the left wing students.)

The thing is, my heart is Liberal Democrat, but my head is Conservative. This is why, despite voting Liberal for many years, for a couple of elections I supported New Labour. I really thought we might be getting the best of the two, while the reality seems to show we got the worst. This is also why I was very pleased to have the coalition.

It's not that I agree with all Conservative policies. I think their ideas on the NHS are poor, and their approach to university fees is wrong, for example. But I've never yet come across a government that had policies 100% in line with my own - and this is hardly surprising. In the end, I am pro-business. I know capitalism is terrible - but like democracy, despite being awful, it's better than any of the alternatives. I like the idea of limiting government interference. And I like the idea of people being rewarded for making an effort.

What made me realize that the balance had tipped is that apart from the issues mentioned above, where a topic is contentious in the coalition, I tend to come down on the blue side, rather than the yellow.

Now there's a problem here. My friend Henry Gee has discovered that it's not a good thing to be a Conservative in the primarily left wing science community. His colleagues seem to feel that his political inclinations represent a moment of madness, and he should be regularly told how stupid he is about this. As the writing community also has more than its fair share of the left leaning, I expect I might get one or two nasty comments myself. But I felt it was important to be honest.

I'm open to persuasion to return to the fold. My heart still loves that black bird on a yellow background. But my head subscribes to the Times iPad edition.

New World dissonance

Ah, America. Love it or hate it, you can't ignore it. Looking from the outside it's a continent of contrasts and mysteries. Both north and south were colonized by great powers of their day, yet their histories could not be more different. I can hardly think of an American I've met who wasn't an affable, helpful, kind person - and yet American institutions have been responsible for so many unconscionable actions. Perhaps most of all, this is the continent that was once the New World but has now to face up with being the Middle Aged World as the New label moves to China and India.

Given the significance of the Americas, we could all do with a better understanding of where this continent's present state all came from, which is where Charles C. Mann's book 1493 comes in. As the tag line goes it's about 'how Europe's discovery of the Americas revolutionized trade, ecology and life on Earth.' That's a big claim, but on the whole it delivers. I'm no historian, so I can't give any comment on how accurately Mann covers the past, but I can say this is the kind of history book that draws you in. It's not dull, it's good historical story telling.

The only real complain I have about this book is the size. I can't stand big fat books - and this is, without doubt, a wristbuster. It's the best argument for the Kindle I've seen in a long time. It's getting on for 5 centimetres thick and weighs in at around a kilo with 535 pages including back material. I would have enjoyed it even more if it had been half the size. Still, undoubtedly interesting. Read more about it Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com (if you have delicate wrists it's also on Kindle at Amazon.com).

What has happened to nursing?

[image error] Come back Florence, all is forgivenThere has been quite a lot of fuss in the news this week about terrible care taking place in hospitals. I was listening to the Health Secretary on the radio and he was saying that poor care from nurses was down to bad leadership. I'm not sure this is the whole of the answer.

When they had a vox pop on the programme a little earlier, the daughter of a badly-cared-for patient was saying that she repeatedly asked for help from nurses to do basic things, but 'they didn't care - they seemed to feel it was beneath them'. And I'd suggest that this is a contributory factor.

Once upon a time, nurses did basic medical checks - but their primary role was nursing. Caring for people. In the last 30 years, their training has become increasingly medicalized (if there is such a word). They are trained to be and to think of themselves more as doctors lite. The inevitable result is that some nurses feel that it really isn't their problem to worry about a patient's basic physical state, they are there to deal with the medical side.

Don't get me wrong. Many, many nurses do a wonderful job. But I would suggest that those who do are managing to do this despite their training, rather than as a result of it, and there should be just as much focus on this as on failings in leadership.

Picture from Wikipedia

The compounds made to kill

It's Royal Society of Chemistry podcast time again.


My grandfather served in the first world war, lying about his age in his eagerness to sign up and fight for his country. In later years, he told many tales of warfare in Belgium. But nothing held the same horror for him as the gas attacks. Though he never experienced them first hand, they remained the ultimate bogeymen of that terrible conflict.

The sulfur mustards were the final, most terrible agents of chemical warfare deployed in the first world war - and they are the subject of today's podcast. The evil compounds that most of us know inaccurately but potently as mustard gas.

The Litmus test for science in fiction

I love both popular science and science fiction, and like the idea of lablit, fiction with a science setting that isn't science fiction per se. But there is another crossover between science and writing that ought to be great but that never quite makes it - this is fiction that has the intention of putting across a serious scientific message.

Every now and then we get a book for review at www.popularscience.co.uk that attempts to do just this. A good example was the novel Pythagoras' Revenge by Arturo Sangalli. The idea was excellent and Sangalli nearly achieved the desired result. It genuinely did put across the maths (in this case) in a more approachable way. Unfortunately the fiction itself wasn't great. And this seems to be the challenge that most attempts at doing this fall down on. Either the fiction is poor, the science isn't very good, or the whole thing comes across as too worthy and dull. It is clearly very difficult to do well.

So I had mixed feelings when I got a copy of Litmus , a collection of short stories illustrating science themes. You can see what I thought of the book by following the link to the review, but in summary it was another worthy failure. Many of the stories were either not very good, or so full of their own artistry that they obscured the science. The book tried to get around this by following each story with a little explanation of the science and historical context, but this made things worse. It broke the flow of the stories and poured on a rather condescending dullness.

I don't like to admit defeat in anything that is being used to popularize science. But I am beginning to think that using fiction to get across the message is doomed to failure because you have two such contradictory aims. Something rather similar seems to happen on TV show QI when someone on the panel who is into science starts to expound a little on a science subject. The other panellists typically start acting bored and the whole thing falls flat.

Don't get me wrong, there are lots of ways to get people more aware and informed about science that can entertain and inspire. But I'm not sure writing fiction with a science context is one of them. Science in fiction is fine - but as soon as it becomes 'education about science in fiction' it falls flat.

The Fox and the hounds

UK news is currently full of the story of Defence Secretary Liam Fox. Doctor Fox, as he is all too frequently called (wasn't that the name of a DJ?), is in the middle of a storm of accusation because of allowing a close friend, Adam Werritty to act as if he were an official advisor and accompany Fox on a range of official visits. This doesn't look too good, especially as it's possible Werritty could benefit financially from it - something that he may not have done, but certainly could have done.

What I find fascinating is the way that those who speak up on Fox's behalf - bluff Tories one and all - are producing the most irrelevent arguments. They seem to fall into two camps:
Liam Fox is a nice guy -  well, yes, so are quite a lot criminals. This doesn't signify anything.They are saying this about Liam Fox because they want to do him downLet's look at that second accusation in a bit more detail. Notice that it is an argument about motive, not substance. Just transfer the argument to a mass murderer for a moment to show how useless it is. Imagine someone has very clearly committed a mass murder. There is absolutely solid evidence that he did it. No question. But his defence team argue that we should ignore it, because the people who are putting forward the evidence don't like the murderer. Yes, that's a fine argument, folks. That will get him off.

The facts seem to be that Werritty presented himself as an offical advisor, including having a business card saying this, embossed with the trademark portcullis of the government. There is good evidence that Werritty accompanied Fox on 18 of his 48 overseas trips (not spin from his enemies, data from the Ministry of Defence). It really doesn't matter why people are saying this, the facts are clear.

This was unacceptable behaviour for someone in Liam Fox's position and he must have known that. This makes it rather pathetic when those defending Fox say 'I'm sure he has learned from this.' A 15-year-old would know this isn't a good idea. If he needed to learn from this, he shouldn't be doing a serious political job. Send him back to the surgery.

I genuinely don't want the government destablized. I think it is bad for the country in the current difficult climate, and it's a shame. But this is a fox that should be given to hounds and dispatched immediately.


Image from Wikipedia

The joy of analogue

I was half-listening to the BBC radio show The Museum of Curiosity over the weekend when something caught my ear. One of the guests, popular maths writer Alex Bellos, was talking about a mechanical pocket calculator from the 1940s. One of the other guests, Jimmy Carr commented that it went out of fashion when 'everything went digital' (or words to that effect). I was expecting Bellos to jump on him from a great height, but instead he said that, yes, soon after computers took over.

Not only is Jimmy Carr's statement inherently wrong, but the whole discussion is an example of (probably unintentional) historical revisionism, missing out on a fascinating stage in the development of computing technology.

My dad's circular slide ruleCarr's comment was so wrong because a mechanical calculator is digital. We tend to equate digital and electronic - but forget why we do this. It's because (digital) mechanical calculators were mostly ousted in science and engineering by analogue calculators (also mechanical) which in turn were replaced by (digital) electronic calculators. To take the story straight from mechanical to electronic is poor history to say the least.

The analogue revolution that Carr and Bellos ignored is the slide rule, making fast complex calculations easy. We tend to look down on analogue solutions because they are approximate - though they can be made as accurate as you like - but all we're really saying there is that they're natural. Digital may be the reality at the quantum level, but the world we experience (including many aspects of the way our brains work) is analogue.

I used to have a beautiful circular slide rule that was my father's. The advantage of the circular version is that in a compact device, less than 10 centimetres across, you had the equivalent of a straight slide rule much too long to use. And it was lovely to twiddle and do those calculations. I confess I sold it, because I'm not much of a collector, and it is certainly obsolete, but it doesn't stop it being a wonderful device.

I'm all in favour of using humorous programmes to get across science and history - but do make sure you get your facts right, guys.