Brian Clegg's Blog, page 29

Can we learn from cautionary tales?

 I'm a big fan of Tim Harford's Cautionary Tales podcasts. In them, the economist and presenter of the BBC's excellent Radio 4 show  More or Less relates examples of where human error and misunderstanding has resulted in disaster (or, occasionally, triumph). I also love those pop psychology books such as Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational which tell us about all the ways we make bad decisions and suffer from biases, This is perhaps in part because I made a bad decision myself in my first year at university, when I wanted to take psychology as my fourth subject in Natural Sciences and instead allowed my tutor (a crystals scientist) to persuade me to do crystalline state instead, which I hated.

On this morning's walk, I was listening to one of Tim's podcasts from June 2020 (I came to the series relatively late and am catching up on earlier episodes). In it, he admits that he himself did not step back and think about the implications when he first found out about the pandemic and, as a result, assumed, for example, that he would have money coming in from gigs over the summer. He compares this with other, more disastrous occasions when people did not change from their planned activity, despite evidence that they needed to (for example, in the remarkable case of the tanker Torrey Canyon, which he covered in his very first podcast).

What lesson did I learn from this cautionary tale? If Tim Harford, someone who spends his working life thinking about this kind of thing, did not change his behaviour in the face of one of the common errors and biases he describes, is it likely any of us will? Is there actally any point to this kind of information? I confess, I quickly forget most of the specific cognitive biases within days of reading about them (in part because there seem to be so many). 

I think the answer is that these tales and books are valuable - but not in the life changing way they tend to be presented. They're partly worthwhile because they are very engaging. They tell us about the human condition and why we make so many mistakes. And hopefully, even if we all, Tim included, fail sometimes to learn the lessons, there are a few underlying motifs that those of us who are fans are likely to pick up on at least some of the time:

Be aware of human failings (yours included)When you hear a piece of information that may be important to you, question it and dig deeperBe prepared to change your viewpointThink before you act, even if guided by an expert (or GPS)I suspect this kind of broad guidance is all the practical benefit we get from these tales and books. But just as is the case with diets and health, there isn't enough to make a book out of the valuable stuff. The health thing is basically eat a varied diet with plenty of vegetables and a reasonable amount of fruit and not too much fat and sugar while taking regular exercise. Doesn't make much of a book. Similarly here, the 'think before you act' type advice is the only important lesson you can hope to benefit from and the rest is window dressing. I'm not going to stop listening to these podcasts and reading these books: I very much enjoy them. But I realise that they aren't going to change my life much, once I've got those basics embedded in my brain.

A new (free) way to subscribe to all my online writing

Thank you to those of you who currently subscribe to my personal blog Now Appearing.

I'm trying out a new way to subscribe (still for free) to all my online writing - I'd be grateful if you could give it a try and see if it works for you. 

Just go to authory.com/BrianClegg and sign up with your email address. You will then get notifications when I publish new pieces online, not only in this blog but also in a range of other places from Nature and Chemistry World to popularscience.co.uk. You can also take a look at anything I've published previously there.

Whether or not you already subscribe, please do take a look.

Experiment with a washroom door

On my morning walk today, I was listening to one of Tim Harford's Cautionary Tales podcasts. In it, he mentioned the importance of design and referred in passing to one of my heroes, Don Norman. In his book, The Design of Everyday Things, Norman pointed out many examples of objects where the designer has gone for elegance at the expense of usability. A simple example he gave was the controls for a cooker hob. Take the example below (images from Unsplash):

Which of the burners does the control with the arrow correspond to? It's obvious, isn't it? Because the designer thought about usability. 

Now look at this hob:

Again, which ring is the control responsible for? This time we can only be sure by looking for some kind of caption to the controls, because the design totally ignores the functionality, preferring to provide a neat line of parallel knobs, building in no information. 

Many years ago, when I worked at British Airways, I did a non-scientific study on another example of a designer prioritising form over function. This was at BA's then new (though said in 2021 to be likely to be sold off) Waterside development. The toilets in the building had rather beautiful, tall wooden doors, which only opened inwards as seen from the the corridor. But the designer liked symmetry. They had put pull handles on the inside of the toilet doors or they couldn't have been opened - so they also put pull handles on the outside of the toilet doors.

Now, pull handles and push plates on doors are not just decorative - they combine form and function. They make it clear to the user what they have to do to open the door. This designer, though, broke the communications code. I stood outside the toilets on one floor and watched people going in. (I think I had a clipboard to make the observation look a bit less creepy.) Lots of people went in. And every single one pulled the pull handle, then found the door wouldn't open, then pushed. Time and time again, the design failed. The chances are many of these people used that door every day. But they still kept getting it wrong.

Of course, this isn't exactly earth shattering. The example Tim Harford used when referring to Don Norman was the disastrous design of the control room at Three Mile Island that resulted in a nuclear accident. (Harford also refers to the far less significant, but equally stupid design fault in the Oscars winners cards that resulted in La La Land being awarded Best Picture, despite the card being for Best Actress.) But that's not the point. Someone's idiotic design decision at Waterside proved a pain for many, many users of those toilets.

We should always remember that design is not just about making something look pretty - its more important role is to make it less possible for mistakes to occur by steering the user into correct usage.

Review: Treacle Walker - Alan Garner *****

Alan Garner is, without doubt, one of the UK's greatest fantasy writers. I was privileged to grow up with his books, which aged in audience as I did, peaking for me with The Owl Service. Garner also visited my (and his) school, which the book is dedicated to, when I was 12, a really important moment in my young life. But I lost some enthusiasm with his adult titles, which were both difficult to follow and depressing. However, now well into his 80s, Garner has produced what is arguably his best yet.

Although Treacle Walker is a very compact book in large print, it is so intensely written that it still has considerable heft - I've seen it described by someone as poetry, and although I wouldn't personally say that, like the best poetry it does pack a huge amount into relatively few words. The book's protagonist is a young boy, but this is not a children's book. The closest parallel I have is Ray Bradbury's wonderful Something Wicked This Way Comes - the book captures much of the essence of childhood, but does so in a way that appeals to the nostalgic side of an adult who can see far more in it than a young reader.

Like all Garner's work a sense of place and time is hugely important. As someone brought up in Lancashire, the use of language from Garner's Cheshire youth evokes many memories, though you don't have to have that background to appreciate it. Just the references to donkey stones and rag and bone men, for example, bring so much back. There is even a reference to the old Pace Egg plays performed by mummers in the North West, when a character of Garner's says 'I have been through Hickety, Pickety, France and High Spain' - compare this with the doctor's claim in the traditional Pace Egg play to have travelled 'Through Italy, Sickly, High Germany, France and Spain'.

At one level, the book is a folk fantasy, and of course Garner does this brilliantly well. He has always combined local material with wider ranging concepts (for example the use of Ragnarok in his first novel), but never more so than here, where one of the elements, also featuring on the cover, is the white horse at Uffington, a powerful image, coincidentally situated near where I now live. But there is also more going on, particularly in the ending, suggesting a totally different take on what has occurred with a distinctly darker undercurrent.

Overall, this is a masterpiece, a book I will re-read many times. If it is a swan song, then like the legendary original it is something of intense beauty. Remarkable. 

Treacle Walker is available from  Bookshop.org ,  Amazon.co.uk  and  Amazon.com .

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

The Mysterious Case of Father Brown

For many years I've been fond of G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown books. Brown is quite different in feel to his pre-war contemporaries such as those in works by Christie and Allingham. This mild-mannered, sleuthing Catholic priest relies on his experience of human nature, while justice weighs heavier than a strict interpretation of the law. But a TV adaptation has highlighted a strange anachronism that turns up surprisingly often in detective series.

Since 2013, Father Brown has appeared in daytime TV programmes on the BBC, though the stories are largely detached from the originals, in part because the series was moved to a postwar Cotswolds village, and, as often is the case with TV versions of literary detectives, other regular characters were added to the cast. The move to a fixed village location is useful to establish those regular characters, but it throws up the worst version I've ever seen of an incoherent anachronistic setting.

Period dramas like this - even cheapish daytime ones - often go to significant lengths to ensure that details of the setting are accurate. So, for example, a recent episode featured a copy of the Asimov book Second Foundation. Father Brown uses this to roughly fix a date, as the book 'only came out last year' - which would fit with the circa 1954 setting. Yet there is one glaring oddity.

A weaker example of this occurs quite often when dramas, especially murder mysteries, feature a church. For arts sake, the production people like to use old church buildings, yet for reasons of plot or simply to provide more dramatic fixtures and fittings (the inevitable confessional, for example), the buildings are decked out as Catholic churches. To put a Catholic church into a medieval English building would be like claiming that a first edition of John Donne came out in 1953. It's ignoring all of history since the Reformation - with the odd exception, we simply don't have ancient churches in this country that are used by a Catholic parish.

In the Father Brown series, though, things are taken a step further - not only does Brown have an ancient village church, but pretty well everyone in the village is a Catholic. It's mindbogglingly dissonant with reality, a timeslip from the sixteenth century. Still, the bread bin looks right for 1954, so that's okay.

Review: Five Little Pigs - Agatha Christie *****

As someone who writes the occasional murder mystery, I am entirely in awe of this book (which I received as a Christmas present). If I'm honest, I've tended to think of Agatha Christie as someone who turned out formulaic potboilers, partly, I suspect, because I've seen them on TV rather than read most of them. I was partly swayed from this view by The Murder of Roger Ackroyd , but the 1942 Five Little Pigs totally changed by view: it is a lesson in how to put a totally different twist on the detective story.

On paper, it shouldn't work - because nothing much happens. The key events took place 16 years earlier. All Poirot is able to do is talk to a few people. There is hardly any narrative development. Yet it is a masterpiece of construction. Poirot's client's mother was convicted of killing the client's father all those years ago - he is asked to find out if it is true. 

All the book consists of is an introduction, Poirot interviewing each of the five other suspects, a written statement from each suspect, and Poirot pulling it together. But in that sparse format, Christie weaves in an impressive mix of red herrings and subtle pointers to what really happened.

Don't come to find much engaging drama in this book - but if you like a cerebral murder mystery it is arguably one of the greatest ever written.

Five Little Pigs is available from  Bookshop.org ,  Amazon.co.uk  and  Amazon.com .

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review - The Christmas Murder Game ***

Around Christmas, a good murder mystery goes down well - and all the better if it's set at Christmas time. I've got mixed feelings about this one. It's an entertaining premise - various family members stuck in a country house, with a clue to solve on each of the twelve days of Christmas. The winner of each gets a key, one of which will take them to a secret room where they can claim the title deeds of the house. And the book is reasonably readable. But there are some issues.

The first person central character, Lily, spends far too long agonising over life, the universe and everything. In fact, she's a bit of a misery. Right at the start she is given a way to just have the house and end the whole thing, but doesn't bother for no obvious reason. Meanwhile, the storyline, which involves several deaths without anyone doing much about them, seems far-fetched to say the least. The 'clues' in the form of a sonnet a day are pretty much unguessable by the reader. And the whole motivation for the various crimes that feature seems totally out of proportion to the potential reward.

Add in a tendency to floweriness in the writing and some far-fetched similes (for example 'the sky is the cold dark blue of flames ticking a Christmas pudding' and 'the Yorkshire lanes don't help - artery-narrow, hedgerows encroaching on the road like bad cholesterol' are packed into the same short paragraph) and it can be hard work sometimes. But then, Christmas is a time when we want to turn off and don't necessary need excellence: I quite enjoyed the book despite its flaws.

Fated is available from  Bookshop.org ,  Amazon.co.uk  and  Amazon.com .

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review: Alex Verus series *****

There are broadly two types of urban fantasy. Ones where the setting is primarily the normal world, intruded on by the fantasy - think, for example, of fantasy books where conventional police officers investigate supernatural crimes - and ones where there is a parallel magical society. The latter was the case with the Harry Potter books, and is also what we find in Benedict Jacka's excellent Alex Verus books. This series, beginning with Fated, is now complete with Risen, its twelfth title, which seemed an excellent point to review it.

I was a touch suspicious about this 'new master of magical London' tagline that appears on some of the books - apart from anything, I'm fed up with urban fantasy books set in London. But Jacka gives us something genuinely original. This is a society where the small, magically endowed subset of the population is impressively self-centred. I'd go so far as to say that most of them are psychopaths. But the central character, Alex Verus is different. He is considerate of others and as a mage, in theory a more senior figure in the magical establishment, he tries to help the lesser adepts and apprentices.

Unlike many of the others with magical abilities we come across, Verus has relatively weak abilities, unable to form a shield or attack with some form of force - instead, he is a 'diviner' who can see possible futures, using them to anticipate what others will do.

Jacka manages the difficult balance in a series of this length of giving each book a satisfactory storyline that comes to an end, while maintaining a series arc across the whole thing as we see Verus rise in magical society, discover more about his past and gradually accept his own personality. At the same time, he develops a Scooby gang of weaker individuals (the parallels with Buffy are quite strong in some ways, including the way that the central character transforms) who he nurtures, and one of whom he falls in love with (though we spot this long before he does).

The final book ties things up well with some dramatic twists, especially in the way it plays with first person narrative towards the end. A powerful series that keeps up the pace without the series droop that is common with a run of this length. Recommended (reading the books in order is essential, though).

Fated is available from  Bookshop.org ,  Amazon.co.uk  and  Amazon.com .

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Meta Whodunnits

As someone who writes murder mysteries (see https://www.brianclegg.net/fiction.html) I also love reading  them and watching them on TV, but perhaps because of spending time thinking about book plots, I've noticed that sometimes the relationship of the reader/viewer to the medium makes it possible to get clues that the characters can never access.

In TV mysteries, for example, there is always the 'well known actor' syndrome. This says that actors who are famous are likely to have an important part in the proceedings, as they wouldn't be hired just to do a bit part. Then there's the weird placement effect. What we are shown on TV or read about in a book is carefully controlled. So although we have to deal with red herrings, the fact that something is mentioned that doesn't need to be alerts us to its possible significance.

However, I've just come across an even more meta* example of a piece of information providing the solution to a whodunnit where not only could the characters not access it, but even the information itself was specifically intended not to give anything away.

At the weekend I watched an Agatha Christie documentary on Netflix which used the hook of ten of her books to tell the story of her life and work. The second of these was the 1926 gem The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Rather oddly, I had a copy of the book, but I had never read it (the Penguin copy, illustrated here, is a 1949 edition I inherited from my grandmother). If I'm honest, I've only read about three Christie books as I've always given more weight to the likes of Margery Allingham and Ruth Rendell, but the documentary inspired me to read this book (and a few others of Christie's are now on my reading list).

I was pleasantly surprised - although written in the 1920s it's surprisingly unstuffy and although the writing style is fairly basic, entertainingly plotted. Yet, thanks to the documentary's attempts to keep it secret, I suspected strongly who did it all along.

Here, then, is the meta bit. What every said in the documentary was that the book had an amazing plot twist - that all the evidence was there, but the ending was extremely surprising. And that, for me, was what gave the game away. I admit there are probably more, but I can only think of three truly remarkable plot twists in a whodunnit. Two of these, I knew were used in other Christie works (one book/film and the other a play). So it seemed very likely that the third was the case with Roger Ackroyd - and this proved to be the case.

I'm not going to give it away - and ask you not to do so in the comments. If you don't know the book and want to see if you can make the same correct deduction I did, then email me at brian@brianclegg.net and I will be happy to confirm if you've guessed right.

 The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is available from Bookshop, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

* The term 'meta' here and in the title of this post is not in away connected with Facebook's appropriation of a commonly used word - which arguably they should not have been allowed to do.

Mirror, mirror

A little while ago I had the pleasure of giving a talk at the Royal Institution in London - arguably the greatest location for science communication in the UK.

At one point in the talk, I put this photograph on the screen, which for some reason caused some amusement in the audience. But the photo was illustrating a serious point: the odd nature of mirror reflections.

I remember back at school being puzzled by a challenge from one of our teachers - why does a mirror swap left and right, but not top and bottom? Clearly there's nothing special about the mirror itself in that direction - if there were, rotating the mirror would change the image.

The most immediately obvious 'special' thing about the horizontal direction is that the observer has two eyes oriented in that direction - but it's not as if things change if you close one eye.

In reality, the distinction is much more interesting - we fool ourselves into thinking that the image behind the mirror is what's on our side of the glass with left and right swapped. But that's not really what's happening at all - something that is illustrated when you have a closer look at that photograph.

In it, I'm holding a copy of my book Ten Patterns that Explain the Universe (which is what the Royal Institution talk was based on). You can see the spine of the book in the image, on the side nearest the phone that's taking the picture. Now put yourself in the viewpoint of the mirror me. Holding a book like that, he is looking at the front of the book, because the spine is on his left. But I was looking at the back of my book, not its front. 

What the mirror does is not swap left and right, but turn reality inside out like a rubber jelly mould, turning the back of my book into the front of the mirror book. In this process, by doing that same thing to, say, my left hand it makes it look as if it is the mirror reflection's right hand. But it's not - it's a back-to-front inverted left hand.

Welcome to the world of the looking glass.