Brian Clegg's Blog, page 2

Tesla and the Magic Roundabout

No, not the Magic Roundabout that was a teatime treat on TV many years ago. And not Nikola Tesla either. We are taking about the US electric car company and one of the best-known features of my home town Swindon - our Magic Roundabout.

The reason for this post is that Tesla has been doing some testing of fully self-driving cars in the UK, and a test site they have publicised is getting across the Magic Roundabout. We inhabitants of Swindon are rather proud of our ability to fearlessly cross the Magic Roundabout, but it certainly puts an aspect of nervousness into many who encounter it for the first time.

What can be scary about a roundabout? Because it isn't really that at all - it is five mini-roundabouts joined together by very short sections of roadway.

The diagram alongside shows the layout of the roundabout, and two possible routes for getting from the bottom left road to the right hand one. This is what makes it so much fun. You can go whichever way you like around the whole structure as long as you stick to proper roundabout protocol on the mini-roundabouts. There is never just one way to get from A to B.

However, the diagram also demonstrates that to a logic-following computer, there really is no complexity to navigating the Magic Roundabout. At each point there are clear options - and it doesn't really matter if you choose a non-optimal route. You will still end up where you want to go.

For me this is a classic example of showing how an autonomous vehicle can cope better with things humans are bad at. We struggle initially with getting our heads around the Magic Roundabout as a single system, rather than simply heading towards where you want to go, considering each mini-roundabout in its own right. But computers have always been better at some things than humans. Just because Excel is a lot better than me at adding up a column of numbers doesn't mean it can write books better than me.

A real test for a Tesla in fully automated mode, or any other self-driving car, is things that people are good at, but provide a challenge to computers. A far better test as far as UK driving goes, would be navigating the country roads just a couple of miles from the roundabout. These involve tight turns, around which you might meet a sheep or a bicyclist, requirements to give way where visibility is not great, potholes to avoid and potential debris in the road from tree branches to horse muck. (Oh, yes, and knowing how to pass a horse and rider travelling in the opposite direction.) If a Tesla could do all of that, I'd be impressed. But the Magic Roundabout? Pah.

Here's the Tesla in action - of course it looks impressive, but we are looking at it through human eyes:

Tesla image from Unsplash+ by Tesla Fans Schweiz. Magic roundabout image from Wikipedia by Hk kng, cmglee

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Stone and Sky - Ben Aaronovitch ***

I am somewhat amazed that, despite having read all 10 main novels in the series, this is the first of Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series that I've reviewed. It might seem odd that a book in a series with that title is set in and around Aberdeen, but you need to realise that the 'rivers' in question are genii loci - spirits of a river, one of whom is present.

What I love about the series is that it combines police procedural (Aaronovitch delights in details like airwave radios and stab vests) with magic. In the early books, the central character, DS Peter Grant, is a newbie to the whole magic world, but ends up posted with a specialist unit dealing with magical threats (and trying to drag them into the twenty-first century). This time round, the oddities include dangerous magical beasts, kelpies and mermaids.

This is, unfortunately, probably the weakest in the series. In part this is because Aaronovitch splits the first person narrative between Grant and his niece Abigail, who is not with the police but is apprenticed to the unit's head, Nightingale. This really weakens the police procedural nature of the books, as Abigail does her own thing. Also, I find this middle-aged man's attempt to give the inner narrative of a young black woman a little queasy-making, telling us that something is 'bare vexing' or 'Nightingale says you've got to buss sleeves and ting when you're finessing the bush'.

Aaronovitch usually gives us a big scene of high risk, this time on an oil platform in the North Sea (though again, splitting the narrative with Abigail, who isn't present for the denouement, weakens the drama), but the whole context seemed less effective and more contrived than it is in most of the earlier books. And of the main characters, both Nightingale and Beverley (Grant's wife and a genius loci) feel underused, except in the 'with a single bound she was free' ending. 

Reading this inspired me to restart the whole series with the original Rivers of London - and immediately I realise why I enjoyed the early novels so much: it is much better, plunging you into the action. By the end of chapter two, we've had a decapitation, a witness who is a ghost, a baby thrown out of a first floor window and a man's face falling off. Here we have a possible sighting of a magical big cat. Within days I was already on book 4 - but I felt no such urgency to carry on reading with Stone and Sky. But it's not just the action - Grant's narration is far more fun in the early books and there's a constant, driving energy that just isn't present in Stone and Sky. It's not the end of the world - even Terry Pratchett had a bit of a dip around this point of the Discworld series before getting even better. Hopefully Aaronovitch can get his mojo back too.

Stone and Sky is not a bad novel. Compared to many real-world fantasies, Aaronovitch's skill shines through: he can't help give us a readable book with occasional flashes of humour to lighten the dangerous situations. But it almost feels as if the author is trying to mix a young adult romantasy novel in Abigail's chapters and the more heavy duty matters in the Grant chapters, and it doesn't quite work. Whatever you do, read the other books first - don't start here - but if you have done so, it is still worth adding this to your Rivers of London reading.

You can buy the Stone and Sky from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com and Bookshop.org.

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What is a fair review revisited

REVISIT SERIES - 

An updated post from July 2015

I've recently had a very mild case of being trolled when someone moaned about a review I wrote of a book called Chilled. 

Before anyone thinks I got too horrible in my opinion, I ought to point out that I gave the book four stars, was very positive about it and the publisher gave every evidence of being highly pleased with the review. But someone wasn't (and certainly wasn't chilled), as I received this tweet:

If this sounds rather confusing, I had said in my review:
There are comments on both the front and back covers by Tony Hawks. Now, my first inclination was to wonder what a pro skateboarder had to do with the science of cooling. But it turns out that this is Tony Hawks the comedian and raconteur. Ah, well, it's obvious what his connection is. Well, no, it isn't. Apparently he did a TV show and/or book where he went round Ireland with a fridge, and this is the only reason for having him along to give the book a puff. It seems, to say the least, a little tenuous.
Incidentally, I know the pro skateboarder is Tony Hawk, not Tony Hawks, but in my defence, I once briefly reviewed computer games for a living, and one was called Tony Hawk's Pro Skater or some such, so I've always considered it fair game to appear to get them confused. I thought it was, to quote, 'rather a good joke', and I was sorry it wasn't for my critic. (If you are wondering where the quote is in the cover shot above, it was removed from the paperback. The original is alongside.)

I thought I'd explain a bit more. And we got into a 'discussion' about whether or not you have the right to say what you want on a review site. The final riposte from my critic was that the freedom of the internet also allowed him to comment on 'unfair criticism like this.' And this is what got me thinking about what makes for a fair review. Was what I had written unfair criticism? Really? If I had said something about the book that wasn't true, yes, it would have been unfair. But I honestly don't think the review was unfair - nor was there anything non-factual about my comment (okay, apart from the joke about Tony Hawk).

In the end it comes back to the reality that reviewing is a subjective art - it is a published opinion, not a scientific measurable fact. The review, including the (brief) moan about the puff on the jacket was my opinion. If someone doesn't like it, that's fine. Perhaps they should set up their own review site. But there really is no point arguing with a review simply because someone else doesn't have the same viewpoint.
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Goldilocks driver assistance

One of the interesting things about moving from an ancient car to a recent model is the availability of mechanisms to help the driver. At the extreme level, such as claimed by Tesla, this goes all the way to driving for you (occasionally into things you don't want to drive into). My car doesn't go that far, but for me provides three levels that give me what feels, for the moment, to provide the Goldilocks ideal of not too intrusive, not too feeble, but just right.

At the highest level, which I use on motorways and fast dual carriageways, it keeps me at my desired speed, slowing down if there's an obstacle in front, keeps me in lane and (when it's in the mood) will change lane when I indicate. The fascinating thing about this is that because the steering movements are very gentle it is almost impossible to detect that it is steering unless you take your hands off the wheel (at which point, the car fairly rapidly starts to complain). Steering is such an automatic thing for an experienced driver that you hardly notice that you aren't doing it when it involves gentle movements.

If you try to use the same feature on a typically twisty British A or B road, it doesn't work well. The problem is that this requires constantly making small adjustments to the steering to follow the frequently changing road direction. Manually, this is a smooth operation, but the software makes it feel a touch jerky. (I have no idea if fully self-driving cars have the same problem as they rarely seem to be tested on British back roads, but I suspect they will.) More importantly, it can't avoid potholes! What is useful, though, if there are vehicles in front going slower than you want to on such roads (as there often are), is to engage the second level of automation, adaptive cruise control. This doesn't steer, but matches your speed to the vehicle in front.

For back roads without obstacles, or built-up areas, more often than not full manual control seems to be best. Although the adaptive cruise control will slow for some obstacles like sharp bends and roundabouts, it can't be relied on to keep you at a safe speed - and, frankly, it's more fun to go DIY on a truly open road.

I could be wrong, but for me this is just the right level of driver assistance. We'll see what the next car brings...

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If a tree falls in a ditch does a celebrity chef hear it?

The question of whether a tree makes a sound if it falls in a forest with no one there to hear it is usually ascribed to the philosopher cleric Bishop George Berkeley, better known in mathematical circles for his attack on fluxions as 'the ghosts of departed quantities'. Apparently he never said it. But I was reminded of it on seeing one of BBC News' entertainingly bad headlines.

It read: 'It felt personal': Si King on avoiding Sycamore Gap tree felling site until now

For those not familiar with his work, King was one half of The Hairy Bikers, a likeable pair of TV chefs. We are told of King's visit to the site as if it were the location of a massacre: 'He takes several deep breaths, steeling himself, then walks slowly up to the stump.'

In case you have somehow missed the story, in 2023 a pair of idiots cut down an attractive tree that nestled in a wide ditch alongside Hadrian's Wall near Haltwhistle. It had endless news coverage, first of the vandalism itself, and then of the subsequent trial and conviction of those accused of cutting it down. (At which, incidentally, they were given sentences of four years and three months, which seems suspiciously harsh, given significantly shorter sentences handed out for

 worse crimes of GBH, sexual assault and more.)

There is no doubt it was a pretty tree in a nice location. But there are estimated to be around 3 billion trees in the UK. Sycamores are not rare or endangered. It's a shame it was cut down - but I can neither understand why it was in the headlines for so long, nor why people get so emotional about it. I love trees. Cutting it down made the view less pleasant. But so does every bit of graffiti I see from the train, for example. The media need to get a better sense of proportion. This kind of excessive coverage is simply not justified. 

Image (the actual Sycamore Gap tree before felling) from Unsplash+ by Jonny Gios.

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Tequila Fat Burn

REVISIT SERIES - 

An updated post from July 2015

No, it's not a new, rather disgusting sounding cocktail. I was amused to see headlines on Facebook saying that drinking tequila could help you lose weight. Can it?

TL;DR version: No. Move on. Longer answer follows.
If I had £1 for every new story where [insert your favourite alcoholic drink] is shown to have some positive effect, I could retire immediately. And, surprise, surprise - this is yet another such story that has no basis whatsoever as far as the headline goes. But it does have one interesting possibility for an alternative to sugar and existing sweeteners.
All the press coverage comes up with statements like 'You won't believe why drinking tequila might actually help you lose weight,' or 'You won't feel so guilty after that extra shot.' To be clear. Tequila will definitely not help you lose weight, and even if the implied benefit were true, which it isn't, the dangerous impact of alcohol would far outweigh the benefit. In fact the research specifically points out that the beneficial substance this report is based on, of which more in a moment, is not found in tequila.
Hidden beneath the 'drink your way to weight loss' stories is a much more interesting possibility. The actual research, reported at an American Chemical Society meeting, showed that agave, which happens to be the plant tequila is produced from, contains some very interesting sugars called agavins. Instead of the usual fruit sugar fructose, these sugars are fructans, which are effectively fructose polymers. The result of this different structure is that the sugars can't be used by the body and so don't have the negative impact of sugar. They even appear to somewhat reduce blood sugar levels - and they still give a sweet taste. Admittedly they're not as sweet as a conventional sweetener, but still offering the hope of a substance that has few potential side effects (see below) and no negative impact on blood sugar levels.
It should be noted that this study was a trial on mice (always a red flag as anything more than a pointer where further research is indicated), and was funded by a food company and a company making agave products - while that doesn't necessarily mean that the research is dubious, it is an indicator to be wary.
A really interesting story - but almost entirely hidden by the baloney about tequila being 'good for you.'
For some people, though, fructans-containing substances are a no-no as they can have the same impact as gluten intolerance. If you benefit from a low FODMAP diet (recommended for the likes of IBS), the this definitely isn't for you. As yet (in 2025), agavin sweeteners don't seem to have taken off... we'll see.
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Research showed revisited

REVISIT SERIES - 

An updated post from July 2015One of the themes I return to with regularity is the way that the media rarely concerns itself with the quality of scientific sources. There is a huge difference between a Cochrane survey of all available research, or a large scale properly controlled trial, and the type of 'study' where you choose 12 people who only ever buy Volkswagen Golfs and ask them what's the best family car. Yet the media just churn it all out with equal weight, telling us that 'a study has found...' or 'research shows...' They may give us a hint of a source, but that rarely gives enough information to be sure of the quality.
As a demonstration of this, I did a bit of a butterfly-on-a-wheel analysis of a story in today's papers. It tells us what the top ten things are that parents do to embarrass their children - things like dancing and trying to use yoof-speak. And according to my favourite newspaper (the i ), this is the result of research.

So let's dig a little deeper. What's the source? According to the paper it is that highly respected research establishment Thorpe Park, which is a theme park in Surrey. Now, in principle, it is possible to obtain reasonable quality data at Thorpe Park if the the park undertook the survey properly and professionally, although immediately we have a problem because the type of people who attend Thorpe Park are self-selecting and will not be typical of the population at large.

So how did Thorpe Park undertake the 'research'? Well, they didn't. It wasn't done at Thorpe Park at all - it was a poll taken for Thorpe Park by an online polling company. In a way this is a better situation, because online polling companies can address a wider section of the population, though of course they can only ever interact with people who have access to the internet - a much larger, but still self-selecting group. However, being professionals, pollsters can use statistics to at least try to correct for this.

That assumes, of course, that this was the right kind of poll. There are some online polling companies like YouGov that are pretty hot on getting their sample right and other good things, though even they have their limitations. But there are others who are essentially marketing organizations who are less worried about sampling and data quality and more interested in delivering useful messages for companies to use in their PR. Let's be clear - I am not saying these marketing-oriented pollsters make things up. They definitely don't. They pay out good money to people to take part in their polls. But in the end, the aim of their polls is to gain publicity.

Not entirely surprisingly, this poll was undertaken by a marketing-oriented pollster. According to its website Our research enables brands to create unique data-led content – content that can be published and shared across multiple channels with a view to grabbing attention in a busy media landscape. What we don't know is what data the pollsters provided, because someone somewhere is certainly misinterpreting it. The newspaper says that the list of ways it gives for parents to embarrass their children is the 'top ten things' that parents do. This could only be discovered if respondents were given a simple text box and asked to type in the embarrassing things with no prompting. Actually, what the poll did was to already decide what the top ten things were and got their respondents to order them by marking those they considered the worst.

So was this 'research' in the scientific sense? Obviously not. And I don't want to make a mountain out of a molehill. It was just a fun story, put together so Thorpe Park had a reason for getting its name into the news. But I really think that newspapers should use better language. Don't call something like this 'research' or a 'study'. Call it a fun poll or a straw poll or an entertaining guess that makes it clear that this is not in any sense scientific. Otherwise, when they carry a story about 'research' on climate change or particle physics the public might be inclined to be equally dismissive.
Something I'll add for the 2025 update. In my recent book Brainjacking I suggest a quick three-part checklist for anything like this. What's the source? What's the evidence? What's the quality? You might call it a bullshit detector. I think this example demonstrates its value well.
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Masters and Green series - Douglas Clark ****

I have to admit, I was initially drawn to this box set of 13 murder mystery novels because it was just £1.99 ($2.99) on Kindle, but it has proved largely enjoyable. The series features a Scotland Yard murder squad, sent out to help struggling provincial police forces, headed up by the urbane Superintendent Masters and the rough and ready (chief) inspector Green (he was promoted part way through the series), who initially seriously dislike each other, adding to the fun.

It's important to realise that these books were written in the 60s and 70s - the earlier books in particular feature a decidedly dated approach to women from the male police. (To be fair, this was also true of, for example, the earlier Morse novels.) What I really liked about the first seven books though, was both the period feel and the old fashioned approach of portraying the entire story from the viewpoint of the investigator (just as was the case, say, with Sherlock Holmes). Once the books reach the 70s, there is more of a tendency to open the novel with a chapter or three featuring the people involved in the crime - but for me (at least in Douglas Clark's hands), it doesn't work as well as giving us exactly the same information viewpoint as the investigators. I hadn't realised how much difference this makes until I was able to make the comparison.

Although one or two of the books have pretty easy-to-guess outcomes, there are some clever plot devices, and a good range of settings. I did get rather fed up with the opening part of The Libertines, set in Yorkshire, where there was too much background before the police got involved - and much of that seemed to involve cricket, which was dull indeed if you don't like the game... but that's only one out of 13. My only other complaint is that it's quite hard to have been reading for many hours and find you are only 25 per cent through the whole - it would feel less of a marathon if each book were a separate file, rather than all 13 in a single Kindle book.

Even so, I enjoyed this extended read, and at the ridiculously cheap rate, it was definitely a good buy.

You can buy the Masters and Green series from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.

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History of Britain in Maps - Philip Parker ***

As someone who earns most of my living from writing books it is genuinely painful to be negative about whole classes of books, but for me, there are definitely three circles of bookish hell.

The worst, without doubt, are adult colouring books. I once upset Alex Bellos by being snarky about a mathematical adult colouring book he wrote the words for, both because it missed the opportunity to give far more text to accompany the pictures and also because... well, it was an adult colouring book. But that was arguably one of the better examples of the species.

In the next circle come the coffee table books. These seem now to be something of an endangered species. You don't see them as much, perhaps because fewer people have coffee tables these days (or perhaps because there's less pretentiousness in home decor - we have less of the Changing Rooms vibe). The idea of a coffee table book is that it should be large format and picture driven. No one is intended to read it from end to end - it's just to flick through when you need a minute or two distraction.

Coffee table books are not always disastrous - I was quite impressed, for example, by Images from a Warming Planet, for instance, (and if I'm honest, my own Scientifica Historica has something of a coffee table vibe, though there is a fair amount of text).

Finally we reach the circle of the gift book. Some of these can be excellent, even if their entertainment timescale is quite short. I loved my copy of Jan Pienkowski's pop-up book Haunted House (which I was given as an adult). I am very fond of How it All Works, which I think I can say because I only wrote some words to accompany Adam Dant's wonderful artwork. And I was transfixed by the J. M. Richards/Eric Ravilious book High Street (which I really did encounter on my sister-in-law's coffee table, but is far more than a coffee table book).

Gift books can be a godsend when trying to buy a present for that 'difficult to buy for person' - which is probably why I get so many. Which brings us on to the titular topic of this review, History of Britain in Maps. It was originally published by Collins but has been reissued by bargain bookstore Postscript Books, who rather oddly are selling it at a discount of £1 more than the list price.

It sounds really quite positive in the description: 'Including the earliest known map of pre-Roman roads and one showing Beeching's proposed cuts to the railways in the early 1960s, Philip Parker presents reproductions of around 90 maps and uses the complex information they contain to trace the history of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland from prehistory to the 2016 EU Referendum.' We've got, to pick three at random, the Hereford Mappa Mundi (though the partial image in the book doesn't really give the feel for its structure), a sketch map of Elizabeth I's Norfolk progress in 1578, which at a glance could be a constellation, and the ground plan of the 1851 Great Exhibition.

In theory, many of these maps could be quite interesting. But in practice, I really struggled to find any enthusiasm to do more than flick through a few. I certainly won't be going through it end-to-end. By all means buy gift books, but I do recommend at least reading the text for a few pages before buying them. 

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Free Live Free - Gene Wolfe ***

Technically, this 1985 Gene Wolfe novel could be classed as science fiction, but the reality is far closer to fantasy. I particularly love the cover image from my UK edition, because it's the worst example of a cover artist not knowing anything about the book I've ever seen. It portrays a hi-tech future city complete with a spaceship, where the actual novel is set in a seedy, run-down US city with a 1970s feel - and even when surprising technology does arrive, it's decades old.

It feels like Wolfe is still finding his feet with real-world fantasy, and the book has a number of flaws, but it's still interesting. Four individuals down on their luck end up staying for a few nights free at the condemned house of Ben Free. The majority of the book simply features these four going about their lives, often in near-farce. This is particularly the case in a section involving a mental hospital where the staff assume everyone they meet is mentally ill.

The two female characters - self-styled witch Madame Serpentina and part-time hooker Candy Garth - are the more interesting. The men, failed salesman Osgood Barnes and unregistered private eye Jim Stubb (I could never remember which was which by name) are fairly forgettable - which I suppose is reflecting their position in life, but doesn't help the reader keep on top of the way over-long and meandering plot which is, to say the least, episodic.

We've known for a while there's something not quite of this world about Ben Free and in the last few chapters everything is explained (but doesn't quite make sense). This part, by contrast with the rest, is really rushed, to the extent it is pretty well impossible to follow the logic of how it comes to a sort of happy ending. To be frank, I got bored in places with the majority of the book, then confused at the end.

This may make it sounds like a disaster - and it's certainly not one of Wolfe's great novels. But to a Wolfe fan it's an essential because this is arguably the experimental lab that resulted in There are Doors. There are similarities between the novels - both feature, for instance, a mental institution and have a sudden, drastic turnabout at the end. It just doesn't quite work here. An oddity, but an important one in that progress.

You can buy Free Live Free (used) from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.

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These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee or taking out a membership:Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here