Brian Clegg's Blog, page 30

A science book like no other

 I've had a bit of a flurry of publication, mostly due to dates shifting thanks to Covid, resulting in three books being published in September. Two of these were Ten Days in Physics that Shook the World and Ten Patterns that Explain the Universe (in an attempt to corner the market in books with 'ten' in the title), but the most unusual one by far was How it All Works, written with Adam Dant.

In fact, 'written with Adam Dant' is a huge understatement - this is very much Adam's book. He is a remarkable artist who produces wonderfully detailed crowd scene drawings. All I did was suggest some scientific principles and phenomena to go in the illustrations, and added a few words on each. The result is a sort of cross between Where's Wally and a popular science book. You really don't have to care much about the science to enjoy the remarkable illustrations. 

Rather than do what appears to be blowing my own trumpet (though my enthusiasm is all for the drawings), take a look at this review by Jill Bennett - although it's a children's book review, as she says 'The potential audience for this unusual book is wide – from KS2 through to adult and it’s most definitely one to add to a family collection as well as those of primary and secondary schools.'

How it All Works is available from Bookshop, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com

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Here's just one of the spreads - though of course there is far more detail in the book:

Percentage of what?

Every now and then a use of numbers pops up on the news that mildly irritates me. One of the worst thing the news media often do is to use a percentage without giving absolute figures to put that percentage into context.

For example, imagine that we hear that the murder rate in a city has gone up by 100% compared with last year. Shock, horror, sack the police. But if it happens that the murder rate last year was 1 victim, that 100% increase is 1 extra person. Not exactly a massive change and highly unlikely to have any statistical significance.

The latest version of this problem has been repeated over and over. We are told that unless the triple lock on pensions is suspended, the state pension in the UK could go up by 8% next year. A vast increase. But again, without the context it's impossible to tell what 8% means. As it happens the UK has an unusually low state pension for a European country. There current maximum is £718.40 (confusingly, this is over four weeks but isn't that far off the monthly amount).

So an 8% increase would amount to an extra £57 per monthish. I'm not saying whether or not this amount is large - that's up to you to decide. But to me, that number feels very different to the apparent largesse an 8% increase. Despite this I have never seen/heard that figure on the news. I'm sure it will have occasionally been mentioned, but the fact that it rarely is amounts to misleading reporting.

How to Stop Fascism - Review

The author, Paul Mason, always came across as a thoughtful presenter on the TV, but released from the constraints applied to broadcast news, his unashamed Marxist viewpoint shines through in this history and analysis of the threat of fascism.

I found the historical aspects really interesting - we did the Second World War as part of history when I was at school, but there was very limited material on what drove the rise of Fascism and how it operated. I also found Mason's expectation of a second major rise of Fascism and analysis of what to do about it interesting, but in a different way - here it was more an opportunity to see how an intelligent person's thinking can be painted into a corner by his ideology.

For example, Mason spends a considerable amount of time exploring why the left failed to stop the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany - but doesn't touch on the more useful potential of why fascism failed to take off in the UK, which would be a far better source of lessons - one probably being the lack of Marxism in mainstream UK politics. Similarly, Mason links the right wing with violent language on social media leading to fascist action, yet this does not fit with the reality that you are much more likely to find hateful language on social media from the left aimed at the right than vice versa. The left tell us they hate Tories, the right that they disagree with Labour. And Mason rightly berates the far right for its antisemitism, conveniently forgetting that the left has had more problems that the right with antisemitism of late.

Occasionally I found Mason's views distinctly amusing. He tells us 'The ideas of these self-styled "philosophers" of the far right are not simply grotesque: they would not last five minutes if subjected to the rigours of logic and analysis in an actual philosophy department. That's why they communicate in obscure, long-winded and unintelligible prose. However, they are persuasive.' Leaving aside how anything  unintelligible can be persuasive, no doubt what he says about right wing extremists is true - but has he ever read the obscure, long-winded prose produced by many academic philosophers? It's hardly a discipline that specialises in a clear, comprehensible writing style. 

Another hilarious lack of understanding came when Mason says 'At this stage Thiel, despairing of a political solution, urged libertarians to create communities of survival not resistance; this is the rationale for Silicon Valley's obsession with building undersea cities and space travel.' No, it's because they're science fiction fans.

One final quote that produced a raised eyebrow. Mason tells us 'Large numbers of people experienced the years after 2008 not just as economic dislocation but as a crisis of identity. They asked: if I am no longer a consumer, or an atomized individual in a competitive marketplace, defined by the brands I wear, the car I own and the credit card in my wallet, who am I?' It does make you wonder if Mason has ever spoken to a real person outside academia. I can honestly say I have never met anyone who has asked this.

Underlying the issues with this book is a problem I see all the time in undergraduate essays - stating 'A therefore B' without presenting any evidence that A causes B. For example, he repeatedly over-simplifies developments such as Brexit, linking them to Trump in the US and racism without having good justification for this. Sometimes this results in statements which it's hard to link to reality such as 'Tory leaders openly celebrate Britain's history as a slave power.' Like those undergraduates he can be quite poor about defining terms before he uses them. For example, he refers to the 'working class' all the way through the book, but it's only about three-quarters of the way through that he defines what it means in a modern world, where the original concept is a very poor fit to the reality.

All in all an interesting book that is thought provoking, but it would have been better written by someone who doesn't still believe that Marxism has the answer to everything.

How to Stop Fascism is available from  Bookshop.org ,  Amazon.co.uk  and  Amazon.com .

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Superheroes are not science fiction

Time for a short rant. 

I occasionally peruse Apple's News app, which puts stories under topic headings. Recently one such topic was 'Science Fiction' - and it included something about a new Marvel superhero film.

In practice, the majority of films that are labelled science fiction are really sci-fi - an approximation to the real thing with very little attention to the science, or for that matter to decent fiction. For that matter, I loved the first Star Wars - but it was a fairy tale with SF trappings, not the real thing. However, the majority of superhero movies are not even bad science fiction.

While Iron Man and Batman, for example, just about makes into sci-fi (though in practice they break the laws of physics with painful regularity), the vast majority of superheroes are out-and-out fantasy characters. Their abilities are nothing more or less than magical. There is no possible real-world explanation for them. 

Again, this isn't a criticism per se. I enjoy a good fantasy story (though if SF movies are sci-fi, film fantasy is usually fant-fi, were there such a term). 

But we shouldn't pretend superheroes are something they're not. Their stories are fantasies.

Rant over.

The Issue at Hand - Review

This is one for the real SF nerds. It's a collection of articles, framed around reviews but giving more opinion on what makes a good science fiction story than would be common in a review, written by James Blish in the late 50s and early 60s. Fairly obscure stuff, admittedly - I've only heard of about 10 per cent of the stories and half the authors mentioned - but it is still interesting both from the insights Blish (writing as William Atheling Jr.) gives and from the sheer vitriol he pours on stories he doesn't like, even from revered names such as Asimov and Bradbury.

Part of the usefulness to would-be writers of science fiction is that Blish underlines some of the pitfalls they face, whether they be basic writing errors (he tears into a couple of newish authors for the wild variety of alternatives to 'said' they use in reporting dialogue, a classic beginner's mistake) or problems that are specific to the SF genre. The only one of Blish's complaints I would fundamentally disagree with is that he insists that it is essential to describe characters, where often I find the descriptions that were common in the period he was writing entirely unnecessary.

I was quite surprised initially when Blish lays into Bradbury - but reading further it's clear that he very much admired Bradbury's writing talent. What he complains about, rather, is when Bradbury strayed from the natural home of his writing, fantasy, into science fiction, where his total ignorance or lack of interest in scientific matters makes the whole enterprise uncomfortable reading. I've always been mildly horrified that practically the only science fiction book from a supposed SF writer that the literary establishment were capable of celebrating was Fahrenheit 451 - it may be closer to SF than much of Bradbury's so-called science fiction stories, but it is still painfully flawed (and not just because, as I discovered by trying it as a youth, paper doesn't spontaneously ignite at 451 degrees Fahrenheit).

That acerbic side of Blish's comments reminds me of how much fun negative reviews can be to read. You hardly ever see vicious reviews anymore, and that's a real shame. (In fact, I was once asked by a magazine to make a review more supportive because they didn't like to run negative reviews.) It makes me feel like I ought to write more. Having said that I have been quite pleased with a couple of mine - one on the truly dire Murder in the Snow by Gladys Mitchell and the other about a colouring book by an otherwise respected author who I won't name here, but who rather embarrassingly (for him) messaged me to complain about it. It's a bit like the way we don't get enough scientific papers with negative results - if all the reviews you see are glowing, the whole process lacks context and value.

The Issue at Hand is very much a specialist title. It is only going to appeal to real devotees of the genre. But I'll be buying the sequel very soon. The book is obviously long out of print, but available on Kindle thanks to the wonderful Gollanz SF Gateway reprints from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.

Food, obesity and naughty statistics

We've just had the latest report for the government to ignore on the National Food Strategy. You can see the BBC coverage of it here. 

I absolutely agree with finding ways to encourage people to eat healthier food, and I have no particular aversion to taxing sugar and salt in manufactured food. Don't get me wrong. I love the occasional burger and chocolate biscuit and suchlike. But I'm all in favour of keeping the junk in moderation, and clearly a lot of people need help with that.

So it's not a case of disagreeing with the report or its findings. But I do think they have been guilty of misuse of statistics in presenting their results.

I had a look at the review's report (176 pages in the 'evidence' part alone, though it's not quite as scary as it sounds as each page is essentially a slide, often with graphics). The evidence is divided into two main sections: nature and climate, and health. My issue is with something in the health section, though I do note in passing that the nature section isn't always clear about what it's saying - so, for example, page 15 tells us that 'the amount of land under organic production is declining' - my immediate reaction is that this is a good thing, as it means the land is being used more efficiently, but I'm not sure if that's what the report's writers had in mind.

But the naughty bit I'm particularly interested in is page 100, a version of which provides the only data on the BBC News story and which was brought up as a major item in discussion with the report's lead author Henry Dimbleby on the radio this morning. Here's the original from the report:

Relative price per calorie of different foods (National Food Strategy Independent Review)
There's a lot of detail here, but the main takeaway is that healthy veg like broccoli cost around 3 times as much per calorie than junk food. That's fine, apart from their being other healthy veg like lentils which are cheap per calorie and no one mentioned that, but it's the way this statistic was used that's dubious. We were told that this means that eating healthy food cost more than eating junk. But a major point of eating healthily is to eat fewer calories - so it's senseless to make a comparison on cost per calorie. What's important is cost per meal - and a plate of homemade vegetable curry, say, costs a lot less than a plate of junk food. 
This is a worthy cause. But using misleading statistics is not the way to support it. In fact, it gives entirely the wrong message, because it suggests to someone on limited income that it's cheaper to live on junk food, which just isn't true - because eating junk food results in eating far more calories.

Imagination's misfires

A commonly-held misbelief is that science fiction is about predicting the future. It really isn't. However, this doesn't mean that SF views of the future are not useful in hindsight. They are very good for highlighting the ways in which the imagination misfires.

One of my favourite examples was  a James Blish novel, where the author pointed out that electronics would be useless in Jupiter's atmosphere, because the immense pressure would collapse the valves (vacuum tubes) that were required for pre-transistor electronics. But the particular case I would like to use here is more about SF's approach to information. Science fiction from the 1960s and early 70s had a huge miss in envisaging something that is commonplace now - ready access to high bandwidth information flows.

A classic example of this was on the original series of Star Trek, where Mr Spock is regularly seen inserting little plastic rectangular objects into a console to access different data stores. Of course these looked hi-tech when compared with the methods of storing data most of us used back then - but the approach entirely missed the point that it made no sense for data to be stored on little objects you had to manually shuffle when it could simply come from a central store.

Even more dramatic in its fail is a science fiction story I'm currently reading in a collection published in 1970 - SF-17, part of long-running 'New Writings in SF' series edited by John Carnell. In the story More Things in Heaven and Earth by one H. A. Hargreaves, a character decides that they want to listen to some guitar music played by Andres Segovia over breakfast. As I've recently mentioned my music listening is now all streamed, so I was able to do this just now to accompany my writing with a couple of clicks - or have done so by asking Siri. But in the story, the character 'began to absently leaf through the tape listings, then dialled a Segovia'. Shortly after, she 'picked off a cassette as it came through the slot, and slipped it into the console' so now guitar sounds could 'float through the room'. This is in a story set in a university where lectures are given using 3 dimensional holographic video connections, used in interactive lectures across half a continent.

What's fascinating to me is the gap between the imagined future and reality. H. A. overshot on 3D holographic video, but failed to see that the idea of physically transporting information on tapes would not be necessary in a world capable of such data communication. 

I'm not saying that science fiction needs to be better at predictions - once again, it's not what it's about. But I do think when we are trying to be imaginative, these misfires reflect assumptions about what can't be changed. We need to be bolder in thinking beyond the way things are done today. All too often imagination is limited by the way things have always been done, or by assumptions about what can and can't be changed. 

Next time you are looking for ideas, ask yourself what assumptions you are making, and what could happen differently if those assumptions didn't hold.

A farewell to copper

The hidden connector on the routerSome revolutions happen so quietly that many people don't notice - and one such revolution is happening to the telephone system right now. 
Our traditional phone system is, frankly, an anachronism. We have a connection to the house designed to bring us voice calls. The internet - frankly our main use of these copper wires now - is clumsily piggybacked onto this antiquated system via the dreaded ADSL filter. But, without any fuss - without, I suspect, most people yet knowing about it - this approach is being phased out.

As of today, the phone sockets in our house no longer work. Instead, the phone is plugged into the back of the broadband router, into a connector hidden behind a sticker. Our 'phone number' is now a dummy thing, with calls arriving across the fibre optic link as Voice over IP and being translated to a fake old phone signal at the box.

Gone but not missedIt was only a matter of time. The old system was well past its sell-by date. Yet the transfer is not without its issues - both for us and for the phone company.

One thing, of course, is that any hardwired phone handsets around the house will no longer work. We can plug the base of a set of wireless phones (or a single wired phone) into the router, but that's it. As it happens we aren't using any wired handsets, but we did have one on standby in case of a power cut. Traditional phones run on their own power system, so still functioned if the mains power went down. With the new 'Digital Voice service' system, this won't be the case. We are told to use our mobiles instead. 

And there's the rub for the phone companies. Like many others, we already use our mobiles for all outgoing calls, only keeping the landline for three households who still use it to call us - plus all those irritating phishing calls. Now's the point when we (and presumably everyone else as they are eventually migrated - BT's timeline is to get everyone over to Digital Voice by 2025) have a big prompt to think 'What's the point of a landline?' and join the increasing number who get rid, or never have one in the first place.

Arguably this isn't really a digital voice service - it's a signal that phone companies are finally taking the step to become solely internet companies and saying goodbye to dedicated voice connections. Like all revolutions there are likely to be some bumps along the way - but I can't say I regret it. It was about time.

A fairwell to copper

The hidden connector on the routerSome revolutions happen so quietly that many people don't notice - and one such revolution is happening to the telephone system right now. 
Our traditional phone system is, frankly, an anachronism. We have a connection to the house designed to bring us voice calls. The internet - frankly our main use of these copper wires now - is clumsily piggybacked onto this antiquated system via the dreaded ADSL filter. But, without any fuss - without, I suspect, most people yet knowing about it - this approach is being phased out.

As of today, the phone sockets in our house no longer work. Instead, the phone is plugged into the back of the broadband router, into a connector hidden behind a sticker. Our 'phone number' is now a dummy thing, with calls arriving across the fibre optic link as Voice over IP and being translated to a fake old phone signal at the box.

Gone but not missedIt was only a matter of time. The old system was well past its sell-by date. Yet the transfer is not without its issues - both for us and for the phone company.

One thing, of course, is that any hardwired phone handsets around the house will no longer work. We can plug the base of a set of wireless phones (or a single wired phone) into the router, but that's it. As it happens we aren't using any wired handsets, but we did have one on standby in case of a power cut. Traditional phones run on their own power system, so still functioned if the mains power went down. With the new 'Digital Voice service' system, this won't be the case. We are told to use our mobiles instead. 

And there's the rub for the phone companies. Like many others, we already use our mobiles for all outgoing calls, only keeping the landline for three households who still use it to call us - plus all those irritating phishing calls. Now's the point when we (and presumably everyone else as they are eventually migrated - BT's timeline is to get everyone over to Digital Voice by 2025) have a big prompt to think 'What's the point of a landline?' and join the increasing number who get rid, or never have one in the first place.

Arguably this isn't really a digital voice service - it's a signal that phone companies are finally taking the step to become solely internet companies and saying goodbye to dedicated voice connections. Like all revolutions there are likely to be some bumps along the way - but I can't say I regret it. It was about time.

Listening to music

When I was at university and in my 20s I took listening to music seriously. I had chunky speakers and a big, scary-looking amplifier to wrangle the output of my record deck. As much as possible I listened to music seated appropriately to get a good stereo image.

How things have changed. More often than not (as I write this, for example) I listen to music on reasonable, but not exactly mega speakers attached to my computer. On the move I use AirPods - wireless earbuds - and, again, the sound is fine. And I've now got rid of the final iteration of my home stereo to replace it with what's shown above - a pair of HomePod Minis, each about the same size as my fist. And that's it. No other equipment, no vinyl or CDs cluttering up the place.

Is the sound as good as those chunky speakers and hefty amplifier produced? Well, no. But do I care? Not at all. It's good enough. And in exchange for some loss of audio quality I've got access to the vast majority of recordings that exist as and when I fancy it. I can play a piece of music in several rooms simultaneously when I'm wandering about. I can get suggestions of stuff I've not listened to before which is uncannily clever at being something I'd like, but that stretches my repertoire. 

The fact is, I listen to music differently now - so the serious hi-fi was a bit like someone using a Ferrari to do the school run. I'm much happier with the new setup.