Brian Clegg's Blog, page 26

Americast vs The News Agents

Interesting things are afoot in the world of UK news podcasts. The former presenters of the BBC's best podcast, Americast, have shifted to rival Global and have gone from a weekly-ish podcast to weekdaily one as The News Agents. Meanwhile, the BBC has just broadcast the first of a rebooted Americast. And the good news is, both are excellent.

Let's start with Americast. There was a real danger that when the original leads Emily Maitlis and Jon Sopel left that we would end up with a pale imitation, as happened when the Top Gear team departed. (Admittedly that was under more dubious circumstances - I don't think either Maitlis or Sopel punched anyone.) However, rather than replace the originals with amateurs, the BBC has been clever here. They've kept the solid, American third leg of the programme, Anthony Zurcher, and replaced the duo with a pair of BBC big hitters, Justin Webb and Sarah Smith. 

Going on the first episode (which was confusingly launched on the Newscast podcast), Americast is in good hands. I think it's fair to say that Webb and Smith are yet to have the easy chemistry of Maitlis and Sopel - but the show had the mix of solid content and lightness of touch we've come to expect from Americast. I'll be sticking with it.

Meanwhile, we have Maitliss and Sopel, joined by Lewis Goodall (like Maitlis, from the BBC Newsnight TV show) as The News Agents. We've now had a few of their shows to listen to and they're coming along well. At the moment they are overdoing the cutesiness - referring to 'News Agents HQ' and giving everyone nicknames, which is mildly irritating, but the old Maitlis and Sopel magic is there and it's shaping up well. 

One thing is certainly true: the podcast beats the BBC's equivalent, Newscast hands down. Newscast seems to have gone a bit downmarket having lost some of the political big hitters like Laura Kuenssberg and feels rather too much like a podcast version of the One Show on an off day. Main anchor Adam Fleming is reliable, and Kuenssberg's replacement Chris Mason not bad (though isn't so interesting), but the content isn't well focussed and rarely asks the searching questions. There's no doubt that The News Agents is the better of the two.

All in all, my podcast schedule is having a great week!

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The strange case of the French bottom of erotic principle

Way back in the early 90s, I attended a lecture by the Austrian-born computing pioneer Hermann Hauser, one of the pair behind Acorn computers, the maker of the BBC micro. In his talk, Hauser was describing the difficulty of computers understanding a language like English, illustrating this with a pair of phrases:

    Time flies like an arrow
    Fruit flies like an apple
Hauser pointed our the difficulties of machine translation, as long as computers had no understanding of the underlying language and context. For a computer, it would be natural to interpret those phrases the same way. As it happens, machine translation has moved on by taking a totally different direction - it still doesn't understand language, but by using vast amounts of data, it has become quite strong on context.
A few years after this lecture, I received an email which brought Hauser's point back to me. At the time, machine translation was in its infancy. The email was distinctly interesting thanks to the strange case of the French bottom of erotic principle.
My oldest web address belongs to my creativity training company - it's www.cul.co.uk. At the time I got it, I was rather proud to have a 3 letter URL, which matches the initials of the company and thought no more about it. I was probably vaguely aware that 'cul' means bottom in French, as in 'cul-de-sac' but otherwise it was just a web address. Imagine my surprise, then, to receive this email:

Please allow the transfer, I use a mechanical software because I very English of cannot.
On the 14éme, in the porque one, I slap a search with the form returned www.cul.co.uk. Then to say to you, cul is a bad French word? It average rest-on the flesh of the rectum of anybody. Since this, cannot think you the need to want the nation French with the arrangement of creative. Thus I give to help in all fraternity, to think please for the change.
Familiar the most pleasant
Henri.
Though a little suspicious that this was a wind up, I replied and got the equally entertaining response:

Brian Estimable
The considerable thanks of you answer. You software for the language is improved much that my kind of shareware - where is to be found.
It is now possible to include/understand the reason of the bad word. Internet is problematic with much pornographique available if the button supported on danger pressed. I do not require to see the French bottom of erotic principle of Alta-Vista that www.cul.co.uk accidental gives. Families with the small particular person in danger.
Since the text of slit into type is vanilla, umlauf nonvisible. Is very the easy error in time forwards with the European of the trade unions. Better to speak  friends than the argument of the football which recent English have.
pleasantries
Henri
Delightful indeed. (The bit about the 'umlauf' is because I pointed out that the CUL logo, as illustrated, had an umlaut on the U.) Of course, Henri could be un artiste des pissoirs, but I like to think he was a genuine Frenchman with a concern for my moral welfare.

Familiar the most pleasant,

Brian

Interzone 292-293 review

I review SF books on the Popular Science website, but this is a review of a science fiction magazine, which seems a sufficiently different prospect to find its way onto my blog instead.

Interzone is the classic British science fiction magazine dating back to 1982 - I last read it many moons ago when David Pringle was the editor and it was formatted like a magazine - now it's in more of a glossy digest format. As it happens, this double edition marks the change of an era, as it is the last from current editor Andy Cox, who is handing over to Gareth Jelley. 

Apparently, the Science Fiction Writers of America don't consider Interzone a professional magazine due to the unusually low rates they pay (just 1.5 cents per word) and the circulation - I think it's a shame. Frankly, they ought to pay more and it's sad that this magazine seems to be looked down on by the SF establishment as it is practically the only such magazine we have in the UK.

As a reader primarily of SF books, I have mixed feelings about Interzone's current incarnation. The format feels odd. Each story has a title illustration, which as a book reader makes it feel a bit childish, but worse, it's a full colour magazine and presumably to make this worthwhile, after the illustration, each story is set in pages with a coloured border reflecting that illustration - to me, this just gets in the way of the words and makes it feel a bit like the design of a 'My Secret Confessions Diary 1982'.

However, it's the content that really matters. This is a double edition - Jelley is apparently going back to bi-monthly single issues, combined with an online magazine Interzone Digital. Apart from an SF news roundup and film review, the content of the magazine amounts to 11 stories - which seems thin for a double edition. Part of the problem was that too many of them were long: more of a mix would have been better. [Updated 22 August (see comments)] I am told that the next two editions editions will feature more stories for a single edition, and will have more shorter stories. [End of update]

For me, there was one standout, a handful of okay stories and a couple of definite misses. The one that jumped out to me was Alexander Glass's The Soul Doctor. This was fairly long, but easily carried the length, rather than feeling padded out. Oddly, for a contribution to a set of SF stories, this was in some ways closer to what used to be called Science Fantasy, on two levels. One is that it is based on the Many Worlds hypothesis, an untestable interpretation of quantum theory that some physicists regard as fantasy. The second is that even if Many Worlds holds, in the story, a character can switch at will between alternate universes, which seems scientifically impossible, especially as he seems to be able to combine this with time travel as he is able somehow to sample different alternate universes until he finds one with the outcome he wants - but Many Worlds doesn't stop the passage of time (in fact it's inherently tied to it). Despite this, what we have here is a really good story, instantly engaging and beautifully developed.

Interestingly, after reading this magazine, the next thing I happened to do was to re-read New Writing in SF 20, edited by John Carnell in 1972. This was part of a series of paperback books featuring new SF stories. The stories in there are, to be honest, of higher quality (I suspect it paid more). It's not that they were more staid and less experimental. The very first story,  for example, Conversational Mode by Grahame Leman, takes the form of a conversation between a patient and a psychiatric computer that at times verges on stream of consciousness, but is a real hit in the gut. So there's a touch of 'could do better' for Interzone -  I have no doubt that there are even more great SF stories out there now.

My other concern is for the future. In his introductory editorial, Jelley tells us his focus is 'fantastika' which apparently is made up of 'horror and fantasy and sf and all the subgenera that subtend like fruit from that triad'. This pretentious wording is Jelley quoting eminent SF expert John Clute, who should know what he is talking about - but to be honest, when I read a magazine like Interzone I want it to stick to science fiction. Of course this can have a horror flavour (or for that matter crime or romance or other genre), and I'll stretch to the Science Fantasy of The Soul Doctor, but I don't want pure horror or fantasy.

Overall, I've mixed feelings about Interzone. I bought a six edition subscription, and I will read the remainder that I receive, but I'm not sure I'll go back to it. I'm really glad it's there, because we ought to be able to support (plural) SF magazines in the UK, but there wasn't enough content that really worked for me.

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Review: The Generation Killer - Adam Simcox

Urban fantasy, which brings fantasy elements into the everyday world, is far more interesting than the totally imaginary setting of a classic fantasy, because the clash between familiar life and weirdness provides brilliant opportunities to stretch the imagination. Of late, some of the best urban fantasies have incorporated a police procedural element - most notably the Rivers of London series. But Adam Simcox inverts the whole approach. 

Standard urban fantasy/police procedural crossovers feature real world police coping with fantasy-driven problems. Simcox gives us a refreshing new approach in dead detectives who deal with crimes defeating the mundane police. This is linked into an afterlife that seems loosely based on the Catholic triad of hell, purgatory and heaven, with the main fantasy setting being the Pen, described as purgatory, but in reality distinctly hellish. It’s from here that dead cop Joe Lazarus sets out, making a dangerous transition to our world, which the dead refer to as 'the soil'.

Simcox gives us an impressively layered fantasy realm with its own mind-boggling problems (introduced in the first novel in the series, The Dying Squad). The Pen is run by a 16-year-old (dead) Warden Daisy-May, who struggles with keeping in control as she is new to the job, had little in the way of induction training and is dealing with a realm of rebellious souls and half-souled 'dispossessed'. 

The fantasy location of the Pen is interesting (though a reader who hasn’t read the first book might find it hard to get their head around). But the book’s real strength is when crimes are investigated in the real world - this happens in two parallel storylines, with Joe Lazarus pursuing the Generation Killer of the title in a very dark and gloomy Manchester, while the Duchess (Daisy May’s predecessor as Warden) is trying to stop her sister from wreaking havoc in Tokyo. Each of these storylines is strong enough to support a book on their own, and whenever the action moves back to the afterlife, I was impatient to return to the soil.

Simcox has come up with such a rich piece of world building that it can sometimes be tricky to follow the logic - good fantasy (unlike magical realism) has to be internally consistent. It seemed a bit odd, for example, that people in the afterlife could be killed - did they end up in the afterafterlife? Was it turtles all the way down? But in the real world action parts, this feels less of an issue.

The Generation Killer is an original, gripping and gut-wrenching approach to the urban fantasy genre. It works on its own, but I’d recommend reading The Dying Squad first.

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Review: The Undeclared War (Channel 4)

With apologies to the late T. S. Eliot, this is the way the series ends: not with a bang but a whimper.

I held out a lot of hope for The Undeclared War because it was set primarily in GCHQ - always interesting - and it centred on computing and cyber attacks. As someone with a programming background I was sure this would appeal to me - and those core aspects really did, which is why I stuck with it through six episodes. But on the whole it was shambolic, poorly plotted and ended with an unforgivable double deus ex machina.

** SPOILER WARNING - I WILL DISCUSS DETAILS OF THE FINAL EPISODE **

Admittedly, from the start I had some doubts. Recognising that just watching people doing stuff on screens wasn't the most thrilling TV, it was decided instead to use a very heavy-handed visual simile. So when our heroine, Saara (who is basically Famous Five material, as she is student who defeats the baddies when the experienced adults can't), was searching through lots of code, we saw a version of her, equipped with an IT utility belt, wandering past vast stacks of boxes. When she had to break into some hidden code... she had to break into a locked location. And, for no obvious reason, when things were difficult to understand, she stared into a big glass structure, apparently left over from the set of The Cube - I was expecting Philip Schofield to turn up any moment.

Then there were the characters - often so two-dimensional and stereotyped that it was wince-making. The two best characters - Mark Rylance's ageing code breaker and Kerry Godliman's cynical British journalist working for a Russian propaganda TV channel to produce fake news - were only effectively bit players, but they were far more interesting than the leads. And so much just seemed to happen randomly, such as a Russian hacker's journalist girlfriend being propelled from being not much more than an anti-Putin blogger in Russia to the main frontline presenter in the UK on said TV channel.

Still, things staggered along with just enough to keep me interested until we got to that final episode.

Up to this point, the Russian state cyber-baddies had been running rings round plucky GCHQ and poor old head of operations Simon Pegg kept being hauled in front of COBRA (are the Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms really located in such a concrete bunker of a place?) to explain why once again GCHQ had messed up. On the whole this seemed to be because the Russians could do magic, because what they were achieving certainly isn't physically possible.

In the final episode, GCHQ discovers what we've known for several episodes - that the Russians have hacked GCHQ's internal CCTV. Simon Pegg's character is confused, because the CCTV is air gapped. Which means it can't be hacked without physical intervention. Just to be clear, an air gap means that the system isn't connected to the internet, nor is any system it is connected to. You can only hack it by physically connecting to it - and there was no suggestion that this had been done.

But that's a minor detail. In deus ex machina event 1, Saara hauls in her secret weapon, a savant mathematician (another student Famous Five wannabe) who can crack anything. The whole plot centres on some code used to attack the BT network. This code had a secret second payload, which was much nastier that Saara discovered. (No one explains why the code was still running at this point.) But Saara realises there is a third payload which had enabled the software to pass on secrets from first the NSA and now GCHQ. (This means the Americans don't trust us anymore.) She can't find that payload, so brings in her tame mathematician. He tells her that some apparently junk data is really encrypted code, but he has an algorithm that will decode it so they can see it. And it turns out that when a few episodes ago Saara ran the malicious code in a sandbox, the third level payload started emailing out all the secrets. It was all her fault (sort of).

It's hard to know where to start with what's wrong with this. Encrypted code can't run because the software that runs the code can't read it. So how was it supposed to be running? If there had been a decryption algorithm also in the code, then that would have been found. For that matter, a sandbox is a secure place to run code that might cause damage. So sandboxes, particularly somewhere like GCHQ, are air gapped (see above). Anyone who's ever worked with computer viruses and worms knows you work on them using an unnetworked computer. So even if the encrypted code had somehow managed to magically run, it could neither access NSA and GCHQ data (which wouldn't have been in the sandbox) nor could it email the secrets out.

Having found the code, computer whizz Saara can't kill it, but the maths whizz does with a quick flurry on the keyboard. Phew. But the Russians are now escalating the cyber attacks to full scale war. Enter deus ex machina 2, the Russian hacker we met earlier, who coincidentally was in the same class as Saara at a UK college the previous year. At the last moment, he sends all the Russian code to the UK so they can win back the trust of the Americans and triumph. He also sends them a video of his FSB training, where the lecturer triumphantly describes exactly how they have pulled the wool over the eyes of thick old GCHQ. Bravely, our hacker sits at a desk in the FSB offices, translating this lecture as a baddy homes in on him. Yet he was still able to send all that code. Did it not occur to him that GCHQ might have one or two people who spoke Russian and he didn't need to provide a live translation, he could have just forwarded the video as well?

And then the programme just stops, as if the writer got bored. Wow. I kept thinking 'It's going to get better. They'll have a clever ending planned.' They didn't.

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Canterbury Festival talk - 20 October 2022

Tickets are now available for my Canterbury Festival talk - Ten Days in Physics that Shook the World - Thursday 20 October, 8pm, Augustine Hall, Canterbury.

Physics informs our understanding of how the world works – but more than that, key breakthroughs in physics – from thermodynamics to the internet – have transformed everyday life. I will be taking the audience back to ten separate days in history to illustrate how particular breakthroughs were achieved, meet the individuals responsible, and explain how each breakthrough has influenced our lives.

It is a unique selection. Focusing on practical impact means there is no room for Stephen Hawking’s work on black holes, or the discovery of the Higgs boson. Instead we have the relatively little-known Rudolf Clausius (thermodynamics) and Heike Kamerlingh Onnes (superconductivity), while Albert Einstein is included not for his theories of relativity but for the short paper that gave us E=mc2. Later chapters feature transistors, LEDs and the Internet.

Tickets £12 from the Festival website (Incl. £1.50 booking fee).

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Going grumpy on technology

The wreck of a footpath near homeAt the moment, the streets near our house are a mess as noisy drills are heard all day and large swathes of the pavement are closed off with blue plastic fencing. This is because they are laying a new fibre optic cable.

Surely, you may think, this is a good thing. And if we hadn't got fibre optic connections already, it surely would have been and I would have been all in favour. But we already have two fibre providers in our road: Openreach, which is used by a wide range of telecoms companies, and Virgin. So why the need for more disruption? According to the banner for the new provider, City Fibre, their USP is gigabit connectivity (though I could swear Virgin's vans also mention this).

Here's were I go into grumpy old man mode. We already have 100 Mbps guaranteed, typically running at around 130-150 Mbps. That's more than enough for our requirements. Interestingly, our provider recently gave us a free month on 300 Mbps to try out the benefits. They only told us, though, when they were about to take it away. And until then we hadn't noticed any difference, because there's nothing we do online that could make use of that kind of bandwidth.

Why then, should I care that I will have the potential to get 1,000 Mbps (i.e. gigabit connectivity)? I suppose the argument is that before streaming TV, I was quite happy with much lower speeds than we now have. Who knows what the future might bring? Do I hear anyone say 'Metaverse'? But given the current infrastructure can already support 500 Mbps or more, we have a lot of 'who knows' headroom left. 

I spoke to Neil Madle, City Fibre's local area manager. When I put to him my doubts, he commented 'It's a good question, one we get asked a lot. True, not every resident needs 1Gb - or anywhere near it, to be honest - but that doesn't mean full fibre shouldn't be the goal...' Full fibre is just marketing speak for the more technical 'fibre to the premises' (FTTP) - but we already have that from both our providers. Neil went on to say that 'If it’s genuine FTTP and not part-fibre FTTC [fibre to the cabinet], then it’s likely we’ll use the BT Openreach infrastructure in your area, as we’re allowed' - but from what's happening outside my office window, it seems that they aren't.

I ought to stress that we're heavy technology users here at Clegg Towers. I do all my work on a connected computer. I quite often have to upload and download large files. Almost all the TV we watch is streamed, while our only radios in the house are smart speakers. I even read the 'newspaper' on an iPad. But I really can't see the need for this disruption to get something that doesn't seem to deliver any benefits. 

Bah humbug, City Fibre, bah humbug.

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Marks and Spencer Scan and Shop review

I've recently tried out the Marks and Spencer 'Scan and Shop' app and I haven't had so much fun in ages shopping for a couple of food items. You might think I live in the dark ages. Most of the major supermarkets give you the ability to scan your shopping as you go around the store, while Amazon even has a handful of stores where you simply pick the stuff off the shelves and go.

However, here in the Wild West we don't have those Amazon shops, and there is one huge difference between the M&S experience and the scanners in conventional supermarkets. Go round Waitrose or Asda, say, with a self-scanner and you end up with a trolley load which you take to a till and pay for under the watchful eye of staff. But the M&S app lets you walk around the shop (food section only) scanning stuff and sticking it straight into your shopping bag. At the end you pay on the app, then walk out of the shop, never going near a till.

This is especially useful in our local Marks and Sparks as they only have three self-service tills, crammed into a very small space. But the benefit is not just time-saving on queuing for the till - the biggest boost is the aspect in which it's closer to the Amazon experience than conventional supermarket scanners. There is is simply a wonderful frisson of naughtiness that you get from taking something off the shelf, giving it a quick scan, then dropping it straight into your shopping bag. It really is rather exciting (I probably should get out more).

Clearly this kind of thing has the potential for misuse: after you've paid on the app, you get a screen up with a list of what you've bought which you are encouraged to keep ready, just in case a staff member stops you on the way out. Even this adds to the experience - the possibility of someone pouncing on you and being able to say 'Sorry, it's legit,' with a big grin.

Where I live, we have three food shops in walking distance - a massive Asda supermarket, a smallish Lidl and Marks and Spencer. I'd never do a major food shop at M&S - it's all about picking up a couple of things they do especially well - so this is ideal for my kind of shopping. Anyone need anything? I want another go... 

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Review: Aberystwyth Mon Amour - Malcolm Pryce *****

There is now a genre of TV show known as Cymru Noir, modelled on Scandi Noir but with more drizzle - however, Malcolm Pryce, with his Louie Knight mysteries, brought the original American noir genre to Wales in a series of books starting with the 2001 Aberystwyth Mon Amour, that are sheer genius. 

Pryce could have simply transported a Sam Spade-alike to the Welsh seaside - and that's certainly part of the attraction of these books, but the deadpan humour derives from the fantastical development of what might be considered Welsh stereotypes of old into the key elements of a noir detective novel. So, for example, the druids replace the mafia as the local gangsters, good time girls wear stovepipe hats, the friendly bartender becomes an ice-cream salesman and the tea cosy takes on a much darker meaning.

This is a setting beautifully brought alive in Pryce's lyrical description of Aberystwyth and its surroundings that will be be evocative to anyone who spent a wet week in a Welsh caravan as a child - but Pryce develops a whole mythos around an alternative Wales where, for instance, the country had its own equivalent of Vietnam in a failed attempt to take over Patagonia in 1961 with an attack force that included two ex-war Lancaster bombers.

I've never seen anything like these books by another author. It's a kind of urban fantasy, dark humour, noir crime genre - but the urban fantasy is not so much driven by magic (although there are witches), but rather by Welsh seaside stereotypes taken to the extreme. Where else could you meet schoolboy genius Dai Brainbocs, who has solved a long-thought impossible theorem that makes it possible to change the lettering part way through a stick of rock, the mysterious, stovepipe-hat-wearing nightclub singer Myfanwy Montez or the sadistic ex-freedom fighter and games teacher Herod Jenkins? 

I've just started re-reading my set of these six remarkable books, and am enjoying every moment.

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Aberystwyth Mon Amour is available from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com and Bookshop.org.

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The delights of scientific misunderstandings

I've just had published a fun little book of 50 misunderstandings and misconceptions in science. Lightning Often Strikes Twice  looks beyond this tip of the iceberg when it comes to what may of us wrongly believe about the world around us. Whether it's word of mouth, myths you've read about online, or misremembered facts from school, we're bombarded by misconceptions about science all the time.

In a light way, the book explains the real science and theory that debunks these popular myths. From fears about the exponential growth of the human population to the misapprehension that we are all descended from chimpanzees or gorillas, the book separates science fact from fiction.

For your delectation here's one of the 50 articles in the book:

A coin dropped from the top of the Empire State Building can kill you

The Empire State Building doesn’t even make it into the fifty tallest buildings in the world any more. At the time of writing, it’s only the seventh tallest in NewYork City. Yet the combination of it topping the world’s building height charts for a lengthy period between 1931 and 1972 and its appearance in over two hundred and fifty films, starting with the iconic scene in King Kong, mean that it remains a visual and emotional touchpoint for anything requiring a significant measure of height.

Image by Guille Sánchez from UnsplashIt is likely that the idea that a coin dropped from the top of the building would be deadly to someone on the sidewalk below arose when the Empire State Building still held its crown as the tallest building in the world. It seems quite a reasonable assertion. After all, many coins are heavier than bullets, and a bullet can cause terrible damage. The amount of oomph with which something hits a target is measured by its momentum– the mass of the object times the velocity at which it travels. Current British coins weigh between 3.5 and 12 grams (0.12 to 0.4 ounces), while US coins range from 2.3 to 11.3 grams (0.08 to 0.4 ounces). Not a lot. But the deadly capabilities of a falling coin rest on the assumption that it can get up to a considerable speed when dropped from the height of the Empire State Building.

The exact height involved is a little vague as the Empire State Building is topped with a radio mast and a high pointy roof (added to the original design to make sure it was taller than the rival Chrysler Building) – but even if the coin thrower were to climb to the upper parts King Kong style, it would be extremely difficult to throw a coin and manage to get it over the edge of the building, so we probably have to assume that the coin would be dropped from the observation deck 320 metres (1,250 feet) above the pavement below.

How fast, then, would the coin be going when it reached its potential victim? The starting point is the acceleration due to gravity. Although the Earth’s gravitational pull drops off as you move away from the planet’s surface, the building’s height has a trivial effect. Gravity acts as if the planet’s mass were concentrated at its centre.When we stand on the Earth’s surface, we are on average 6,371 kilometres (3,959 miles) from the centre. There is not going to be much difference between 6,371 kilometres and 6,371.32 kilometres.

The acceleration due to gravity at the Earth’s surface is 9.8 metres (32 feet) per second per second. That’s to say, after 1 second you are travelling at 9.8 metres (32 feet) per second, after 2 seconds at 19.6 metres (64 feet) per second and so on. Working out the speed this implies would be reached in a fall of 320 metres is not totally trivial, but there are plenty of calculators out there. If nothing else were involved,a coin would take 8 seconds to make the drop and would arrive travelling at around 79 metres (259 feet) per second. Going for a coin of 10 grams (0.35 ounces), this would give a momentum of 79 × 0.01 = 0.79 kilogram metres per second. To put that into context, a handgun bullet can have a momentum of around 450 × 0.007 = 3.15 kilogram metres per second – around four times as much. (Converting this to non-metric units is messy and probably no more meaningful.)

In practice, though, there’s another consideration. The air. We tend to ignore it, but falling objects are slowed down by the atmosphere’s resistance to objects moving through it. As a result, any object has a ‘terminal velocity’ – the fastest speed it will fall through air, depending on how much resistance the profile of the object puts up. (This is why a parachute, with much more surface area presented to the air, slows a person’s descent, compared to falling without one.)

For a typical person, that terminal velocity is around 55 metres per second (180 feet per second) belly down – for a coin it’s likely to be around 28 metres per second (92 feet per second), which would take its momentum down to around a twelfth of that of a bullet.

Being hit by a coin falling from the Empire State Building would certainly be unpleasant – but it won’t kill you. The TV show MythBusters created a special gun to fire a coin at the appropriate rate and showed that it was survivable (please don’t try this at home). And a more comparable experiment from around 2007 showed that coins were even less dangerous than the MythBusters experiment suggested.

Louis Bloomfield, a physics professor from the University of Virginia, devised an experiment that automatically dropped a whole cache of coins from a weather balloon, high enough up for them to reach terminal velocity. He claimed that they didn’t hurt, feeling like the impact of heavy raindrops. Bloomfield used one cent coins, lighter than the weight used above, but also found an additional slowing factor. The coins’ unstable fluttering tended to reduce their speed to as little as 11 metres per second.

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Find out more about the book or buy a copy here.