Brian Clegg's Blog, page 157

Ball of Confusion

For UK TV viewers of a certain age, Johnny Ball is something of a legend. Sadly I never watched him as a child, but for a whole generation he made finding out stuff about how the world works fun. And I can say from personal experience that (unlike many famous people) he's a really nice guy.

This is a book of 'puzzles, problems and perplexing posers' - just the thing for a Friday. They vary from classic 'if two cats could kill three mice in...' type problems, through logic problems to tricky little numbers that rely on very careful reading of the question.

Inevitably, if you've been about a bit like me, you will have come across a few of them before. And there are bound to be some you just can't be bothered with. But as long as you get any enjoyment out of these types of brain teasers you are bound to find something that is truly entertaining. And, of course, Johnny Ball presents them with his characteristic charm. Just occasionally I found his 'funny' intros to the problems better suited to a ten-year-old's taste than mine, but mostly they are fun and keep the book from being literally a list of puzzles.

The only criticism I have is that when you are setting puzzles, some of which involve trickery and misleading wording, you have to be absolutely spot on with the wording of your challenge, or it can be legitimately cheated. Here's an example where Johnny got it wrong:

Find a fluted glass and a large and a small coin; say a 5p and a 10p. Place both coins in the glass, so the larger coin lies flat and over the small coin. Your impossible task: can you get the small coin out, without touching either coin.

The solution given is relatively complex and not something you may think of (and it wouldn't work with the kind of flutes I have). But the book misses the obvious one. Pick up the glass and tip the coins out. You have got the smaller coin out without touching either coin. There's nothing in the problem statement that says that the larger coin has to stay in the glass.

This is a rarity, though, and many of the mental challenges and puzzles (mostly they don't involve something physical like this) are genuinely entertaining. If you have friends and relations who enjoy a bit of head-scratching fun, this is the present for them. See at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com - also on Kindle at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.

A farewell to Jobs

It's very sad news that Steve Jobs has died. There will be plenty of pieces posted saying how wonderful he was, how visionary and how unique. And that's fine. He did some amazing things, and in the last few years has transformed Apple from a quirky personal computer manufacturer into the ultimate designer of personal electronic accessories. But I want to consider one point that is unlikely to be brought up in the eulogies that rightly will follow his death. How much he owed Apple's current success to John Sculley.

In 1985 - just one year after the Mac was launched - Jobs was forced out of Apple, as the company headed for crisis. The man behind this was Sculley, brought in from Pepsi to make Apple a more commercial operation. At the time Jobs was pushing Apple towards producing high end UNIX technical workstations. He would set up the not-particularly-successful NEXT computer company to produce the machine he thought Apple should be making. (The only time I've ever seen Jobs do his black turtleneck spiel on stage was at the launch of NEXT in the UK.) NEXT wasn't a total flop, but it wasn't a burning success either, and it was when the company was bought by Apple that Jobs came back to the fold in 1996.

Under Sculley, Apple was to produce one product and one vision that for me are absolutely the seeds of the iPhone and the iPad. Sculley's pet product was the Newton, a touchscreen personal digital assistant. It had problems, particularly with its text recognition, but it was a truly interesting product. Even better, though, was the 1987 concept video, Knowledge Navigator. This, without doubt, set the direction that would eventually produce the iPad. At the time I was blown away - and I still think the concept video is great (see below).

Now I suspect this period is going to be almost airbrushed out of Apple's history, but it's crucial. The really innovative ideas came when Jobs wasn't there, though I don't want to underplay the vast contribution he made in adding the detail and crucially the design orientation that made iPhone and iPad what they are today. I very much want to celebrate Steve Jobs' wonderful work in the history of ICT - but lets not forget the roots of that work either.

Don't blame TV for the cult of celebrity

Not the picture in question. But
a good one - whoever painted it.We often hear moaning about how TV has exposed us to the cult of celebrity, where people are valued simply for being famous, not for what they produce or perform. I think it's very short sighted to blame TV - the real culprit is the traditional arts, which no doubt would snootily blame TV, but actually started this cult of celebrity long before Logie Baird came on the scene.

Take a point of example. We have recently heard that a 'fake' picture allegedly by Leonardo da Vinci could be real. If this is the case, the picture, which last sold for £14,000 'could be worth millions.' Now either this is a great work of art or it isn't. If it's great, it should be worth a lot of money. If it's not, it shouldn't. Why does it matter whose name is attached to it? That's just a matter of celebrity, as much as paying money for the rights to Kerry Katona's latest exploits. Who made the picture is irrelevent to whether or not it's a great work of art.

It's the same with music. Whether a piece is by Mozart (say) or one of his less famous contemporaries, it shouldn't make any difference - merely how good it is. Anything else is just idiocy riding on the back of celebrity.

Note this doesn't say there's anything wrong with expecting something interesting from paintings by Leonardo because he's a great artist. That's just like wanting to read the latest book by your favourite author. It makes sense. But when it comes to the value of an individual painting that should stand alone. After all, even the best author can produce a turkey, and the best book you've ever read could be by a new author.

Behold, the cult of celebrity in its worst possible form - and it's the art world that keeps it going.

Image from Wikipedia

Date me, I can explain general relativity

I was browsing through the pages of that excellent magazine, New Scientist, when I noticed this advert for 'New Scientist Connect'. Yes, now scientists have their own dating site where lovers of geeks and nerds can browse for a hot postdoc (with or without marshmallows).

I first became aware of this kind of thing a while ago when Classic FM started advertising a service called something like classic duets. (Geddit? Duets, classical music? Oh, for goodness sake.) I suspect they got too many complaints from people who thought it was a site to listen to, well, classical duets, not a dating site. But now it goes from strength to strength as Classic FM Romance.(It's interesting that the URL format of the two sites is similar. Surely it couldn't be the same company behind them?!)

I suppose the concept has some merits. You would know you had an interest in common. Or maybe not. Perhaps on the 'opposites attract' theory, New Scientist Connect is mostly browsed by beauty therapists and professional footballers.

It does make me wonder whether there also sites for, say, traffic wardens to get together (after all, who else could love them), or the Dawkins GeneSplice site where aggressive atheists can spend their time slagging off everyone else. And for that matter I also wonder who designed this ad, and really thought that someone dressed as Biggles, running across snow carrying a toy plane typified an attractive scientist...

Get your act together, Volkswagen

The naming of cars is an important and serious business. The sort of thing that pushes Jeremy Clarkson and his Top Gear buddies to the realms of ecstasy. Which is why I wonder about the sanity of those in charge at car manufacturer Volkswagen. It seems they name their models by picking nouns that look interesting out of a foreign language (i.e. English) dictionary.

They are so random in their selection.

For example, there's:
the one named after a dog-related wild animal, (Fox/Lupo), the pair named after hit-ball-with-stick games (Polo/Golf), the one named after a wind (Sirocco), the one named after a spelling mistake (Passat), the one named after an Essex girl (Sharan) and a couple that are so boring I can't even remember what they're called.

Come on, Volkswagen. You can do better than this. A five-year-old can do better than this...

Image from Wikipedia

Entrepreneurial rhubarb

I was listening to some Labour shadow minister on the radio. 'The biggest obstacle to people setting up their own businesses is lack of capital,' he said. Utter rhubarb. The biggest obstacle that prevents most people setting up their own business is that they don't really want to start their own business. Certainly not enough to put the time, effort and money in. They want someone to give them a job. And that's fine. But Labour shouldn't imagine there are millions of people who would be entrepreneurs if they only had that startup capital.

Now you may say, 'They do need some money,' and that's true. But it's often not the case that you need huge capital investment to start a business. Need a computer? - the price of 10 cigarettes a day will cover it. Need a website? - easily covered by the cost of a basic Sky subscription. Both expenditure that many people looking for jobs these days would consider part of everyday life.

To be honest, I also get more than a little narked by the way governments of all colours disregard people who just get on with it and earn a living self-employed or running their own company, without necessarily employing other people. You'd think the only good company is one that employs others. Yet there are millions of us beavering away, making money for the country, gaining exports, paying taxes, all without ever employing anyone else, or wanting to. Joining this forgotten army, starting your own business, doesn't have to depend on a huge injection of capital - this is a myth that seems to depend as much on Dragon's Den as it does good economics. There are plenty of ways to take a little ingenuity and very little cash and earn a living.

Let me stress, I'm not saying everyone who is unemployed should start their own business. It's not for everyone, and I accept that. But we would do a lot better making it more attractive in tax terms to work for yourself, even if you don't employ others, that worrying so much about startup capital.

Come back ammonia, all is forgiven

It's Royal Society of Chemistry podcast time again. We're off to visit the compound that hair dye manfacturers delight in telling their customers isn't in a particular product. Because it's not the most beautiful of smells, reminiscent of the farmyard and animal houses at the zoo.

Yes, it's ammonia. Smelly - and yet it's a chemical that is made in vast quantities every year for fertiliser and other uses. Any idea where the name comes from? It's a back formation that links camel dung and the temple of an ancient Egyptian god. Which turns up in Chaucer. Take a listen...

Identity theft blues

I have been the victim of a really shoddy bit of identity theft. Let me explain. A few days ago in the post I received two statements from a mail order company, one for more than £500 worth of goods, the other for more than £300. I had never bought anything from them in my life.

I rang them up and it seems that someone had managed to slip through their anything but rigorous security checks. I'm really amazed that the company in question didn't have systems that could spot that this was a fradulent activity. They did a credit check on me to see if it was okay, but there were so many oddities in the application that it's bizarre nothing was flagged up. After all:
Two accounts were set up for the same address (mine) on the same dayOne was for a Ms B Clegg, the other a Mr D Clegg, so neither matched me exactly for the credit checkThe date of birth given was wrong - again something the credit check should have picked upTwo orders were place, each using up most of the credit, each going to a different delivery address, not my address. One in Middlesex one in the midlands. Not suspicious, guys?The kind of order was not typical. These were orders for lots and lots of relatively low price items like T-shirts, not for big money goodsIt wouldn't exactly take top flight artificial intelligence software to spot there was something strange. Don't get me wrong, the company was very good about it, assuring me that they would sort it all out - but they seem to be very casual about giving away around £1,000 of credit.

The one good thing that came out of this, apart from having a topic for a blog post, is that at the company's suggestion I did a check on myself with one of the credit checking agencies, something I've been meaning to do for ages, and it was fascinating, though it emphasized even more how much incorrect data the mail order company was ignoring. Also it's interesting that when we hear 'identity theft', we think 'internet' - but in fact this was good old fashioned basic personal information misuse that could have been done without a computer in sight.

Faster than light neutrinos

The first sighting of a neutrino, only 41 years agoOh, wow. Physics is in the news. Just for once someone at CERN other than the LHC teams has made the headlines. It seems some neutrinos have been measured moving faster than light. I have seen headlines saying 'Einstein's theory shattered!' or similar. This is baloney. Here's the reality.

Neutrinos are particles produced in nuclear reactions that are almost impossible to detect. Every second about 50 trillion neutrinos pass through your body as they pour out of the Sun. They aren't exactly obvious. Neutrinos can be detected, but only indirectly as a very small percentage of them will interact with matter - what you see is that interaction, not the neutrino itself. It's telling that when a picture was taken of the Sun using neutrinos, the Sun was the other side of the the Earth at the time. Most neutrinos zip through the Earth as if it's not there.

In the CERN experiment neutrinos were sent down a 732 kilometre tunnel, and the timing was out by a matter of 0.00000006 seconds, making it seem that they went very, very slightly faster than light. This, then, is the evidence that is being presented and that has produced statements like this from the BBC:

The speed of light is widely held to be the Universe's ultimate speed limit, and much of modern physics - as laid out in part by Albert Einstein in his theory of special relativity - depends on the idea that nothing can exceed it.

It's really interesting, but I don't think it's earth shattering. The chances are, this is experimental error. Although the experiment has been repeated around 1500 times, it was using the same setup and assumptions. They've only got to get the length of the beam wrong by a tiny amount, for example, for the whole thing to be a mistake. And there is other evidence, comparing neutrinos and light from a cosmic source where there is no such disparity - so there is already some contradictory evidence.

However, even if it is true, the BBC's version is simply wrong. Modern physics doesn't depend on nothing exceeding light speed. We're talking about special relativity here, which is the basis of some modern physics, but light speed being a limit is a consequence of that theory, not a starting point. In fact we already have well established experiments in which particles travel faster than light speed.

This is a consequence of quantum mechanical tunnelling. One of the strange aspects of quantum physics is that particles don't have an absolute location, just a probability of being in various places. This means that particles can jump through an obstacle without passing through the space in between.

This sounds like something obscure and unusual, but it's actually how the Sun (or any other star) works. For nuclear fusion to take place, positively charged protons have to be pushed incredibly close together. So close that even the temperatures and pressures in the Sun aren't enough to get it going. The Sun only works because every second billions of particles tunnel through the barrier of the repulsion and fuse.

That same tunnelling technique has been used to send particles faster than light. All the evidence is that there is zero tunnelling time. A tunnelling particle literally doesn't travel through the space in between. So if you imagine a particle going 1 centimetre at the speed of light, tunnelling 1 centimetre instantly and going a further centimetre at the speed of light, it will have traversed the entire distance at 1.5c - one and half times the speed of light.

I'm not saying this is what is happening in the neutrino experiment, but I do imagine it is going to be something similar. Not a collapse of special relativity, just a way around it. If it's not experimental error, which still seems most likely. Special relativity has been tested so many times and has always delivered. GPS satellites have to be corrected for it, or they'd get more and more inaccurate. Particles demonstrate it in experiments every day. As far as I'm concerned, special relativity is solid as a rock.

Heavy handed supermarket?

I was, to say the least, shocked to read a piece on the Guardian website where a journalist describes being approached in a Tesco supermarket while writing down the price of  a bottle of water. The assistant manager apparently told him: 'You're not allowed to do that. It's illegal.' When the journalist was then faced with the manager, he was told 'Look, it's company policy, you're not allowed to do it.'

I found this absolutely bizarre. Clearly it's not illegal. Of course they can decide they don't want you to do something in their shop and ask you to leave if they don't like what you are doing, but you are not breaking the law. But could it really be company policy that you aren't allowed to write prices down?

I emailed Tesco, and this was their response:

Please be assured it is not company policy to stop customers, or journalists, checking or writing down prices in our stores. We have contacted the journalist in question to apologise and we're looking into this to ensure it doesn't happen again. As I'm sure you're aware, our prices are displayed on our website so are readily available for all our customers to compare with others, if they wish to do so.

While the final sentence is irrelevent (as website prices aren't necessarily reflected in stores, especially Tesco Local or Metro or whatever they call it), the Customer Service Executive who contacted me makes it clear that it is not company policy to stop people from writing down prices. This seemed likely to be the case, though it makes you wonder why the store manager didn't know company policy. And for that matter, why he thought that the company would have any objection to people writing down prices.