Brian Clegg's Blog, page 35

Sleeping with the Lights On - Review

Before considering the contents, I ought to say what a great-looking book this is - small and beautifully formed with a really unusual cutaway front. It's a great gift book if you know someone who's into their horror. Because that's the topic we're dealing with here: ghosties, ghoulies, long-leggity beasties and things that go bump in the night.

There is always a danger in having an academic write about genre fiction that it all gets a little po-faced (or, in this case, Poe faced). And, I'm afraid, Darry Jones, an English professor specialising in nineteenth century literature and popular fiction, does rather have this tendency. It's not that his analysis lacks interest, but it can be a touch short on readability. There's also a distinct over-reliance on Freud, apparently not realising his work, from a scientific viewpoint, is more fiction than science.

The book is divided into sections on monsters - including, of course, vampires and zombies - 'the occult and the supernatural', 'horror and the body', 'horror and the mind' and 'science and horror' (featuring Frankenstein), with a final section that highlights twenty-first century work. It covers books, film and TV, though the medium that comes across strongest is film. It did seem that on the book side, there was a heavy bias to the literary over the popular (Jones, for example, doesn't distinguish sufficiently between the covers of Dennis Wheatley's books and their content), where the approach to films verges on the trashier the better - but I suppose that reflects the academic reverence for 'literature'.

I've always been more into science fiction and some areas of fantasy than out-and-out horror, partly because I see no entertainment value in gore, but it's interesting to read about genres that give us insights into readers and writers, and there's no doubt that Sleeping with the Lights On really delivers in this respect. There's plenty of enjoyment of discovery - for example, I was interested to learn that Arthur Conan Doyle’s father was a painter who specialised in fairies, given Conan Doyle's disastrous Cottingley fairies photographs incident.

I was all set to give Jones a drubbing for having a whole sub-section on vampires without mentioning one of the greatest TV shows of the turn of the millennium, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This omission seemed to illustrate perfectly the over-seriousness of some of the text... except, in practice, Jones merely keeps Buffy, with its excellent subversion of the genre and inversion of expectations to the end as an example of the way things should be. There was an effective contrast here with some of the moribund churning out of sequels and copies that often typifies Hollywood horror. While I still feel that Buffy ought to have at least been touched on in the vampire section, this was excellent to see.

Overall, this is a genuinely attractive object, and a book that will make both the horror fan and the horror hater think again about the genre.

Sleeping with the Lights On is available from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.

Why you have (probably) not already bought your last car

Photo by Alex Iby on UnsplashI have just read an (unintentionally) hilarious article on the BBC News website. In it, Justin Rowlatt sets out arguments as to why you have (probably) already bought your last car. Aware that this sounds a little unlikely, Rowlatt starts by suggesting we'll be scoffing - I'm not. I understand the arguments - but I think they show an impressively bubble mentality.

The article tell us 'tech analysts' predict that in less that 20 years we'll all have stopped owning cars and all cars will be electric. Let's leave aside the obvious point that most of us buy cars more frequently than every 20 years and look at the main arguments in the article. They are:

Self-driving cars cut taxi journeys from $10 to $5Electric cars have less moving parts so should last at least 500,000 milesElectric car prices will fall as they become mainstream, reducing self-driving journeys even further to $1Accident rates will plummet. Within 10 years 95% of journeys will be self-driving and human drivers will be banned.'Don't worry that rural areas will be left out. A vehicle could be parked in every village waiting for your order to come.'So let's take fast dominance of electric cars first. I would love to have an electric car - but I simply can't afford one at the moment. To get a reasonable range for non-urban driving (300 miles), there's pretty much nothing under £55,000 new. I could get a new petrol car with that range for £6,000. That's a big differential. And what about used? At the moment there are more than three times as many used car sales in the UK as there are new. It will take a long time before there are enough electric cars in the used car market to dominate.
As for the technology claim - it may be true, but it's also highly misleading. Electric cars do have fewer moving parts - but there's a lot more complex technology to go wrong. Crucially, that 500,000 mile figure ignores a typical battery life of 100,000 miles. Then you have a bill of between £5,000 and £25,000 depending on the car. That's more than many people pay for a new car now.
So now let's move from the car itself to those self-driving, shared vehicles. Let's say (highly doubtful) they really could reduce the cost of a taxi-style journey to 10% of its current value. Do you really think that means the price will be reduced by the same amount? If so, please consider buying Tower Bridge off me, as I've got it available at a bargain rate. But I also don't think this 10% value takes in the extra costs involved. Remember Manchester's equivalents of Boris bikes - Mobikes. They lasted all of a year before being withdrawn due to vandalism. How do you think driverless taxis will fare? 
The accident rate argument is a good one, but it omits one huge psychological problem which I think is hardly ever addressed. Driverless cars will save lots of anonymous lives, but will kill lots of people with friends and relations to complain about them. At the moment around 1,700 people are year are killed on the road in the UK (and over 1 million worldwide). Yes, it would be wonderful if we could drop that to, say, a quarter of the current value. That's saving over 1,200 lives a year in the UK. But that would still mean over 400 people killed by driverless cars each year. And that's a lot of lawsuits. We accept a small risk to use preventative medicine. Vaccines harm a few people, but save many. However the percentage risk we tend to accept is very small, and I'm really not convinced that driverless cars (which have already killed people) will ever get down to acceptable levels.
I've kept the best til last - 'Don't worry that rural areas will be left out. A vehicle could be parked in every village waiting for your order to come.' I'm sorry, but this is such a city-centred view. Surely Rowlatt has never lived in a village. I used to live in a village with about 2,000 inhabitants. During 1 hour each workday morning around 200 cars left the village for work and on the school run. Do you think those 200 families would read 'A vehicle could be parked in every village waiting for your order to come,' and think 'That's okay, then'?
Let's take it up a notch. I now live in Swindon, a town with a population of around 200,000. Again, is it realistic to think that there could be enough cars for the peaks available in Swindon? Even at this size, we aren't big enough to justify Uber setting up, while Deliveroo only covers a very small central area of the town. Shared facilities only work with a high enough density of requirements for short journeys.
And I think that's at the heart of the perception gap between Rowlatt plus his 'tech analysts' and the rest of the country. The prescription would work in London and a few other big cities, but not for the vast majority of towns and villages. I'd suggest a good measure is that this approach could work where it's possible to summon a black cab by stepping onto the pavement and waiting a minute or two. So that's London and probably a handful of other UK cities. Outside very high density occupation with mostly very short journeys this timescale is not going to happen.

Oberland - new fantasy thriller

Although my main business is writing science books, I've always enjoyed writing fiction and I've recently had the chance to revisit a title I made a first draft of about 30 years ago. It's now finished and available (if you use Kindle, you can get a copy free of charge if you download it by Friday 5 October 2018 at the latest - see Kindle links here).

Called Oberland, the book is set in the Swiss alps, centring on the beautiful Lauterbrunnen valley. I wrote parts of that first draft while on holiday there, so the locations were still very fresh in my mind.

In the story, when English twenty-something Jo Fuller takes a summer job on a campsite in the Swiss alpine valley of Lauterbrunnen, she does not expect her whole understanding of the world to be turned upside down. A camper dies in suspicious circumstances. With three broken individuals - Bob from America, Paula from Australia and Werner from Germany - Jo discovers a strange alternative world at the top of the Schilthorn mountain.

Each of the four faces death at the hands of the inhabitants of the alternate world, intent on preserving their secret. But Bob has something that may keep them alive. Amongst the beautiful Swiss mountains, each must face up to their fears and survive. This fast-paced fantasy thriller leaves Jo, Bob, Paula and Werner unsure who to trust as they attempt to uncover the secret of the mountain before it is too late.

It was a lot of fun writing it - I hope it's just as enjoyable to read.

You can find more details and links to buy either the paperback version (direct from me, or from Amazon), plus the Kindle ebook on this web page.

Statistics can be true but misleading - shock, horror, alcohol is bad for you

Headlines on the BBC News tell us starkly (if somewhat smugly) 'No alcohol safe to drink, global study confirms.' But like all statistically-based stories, the devil is in the detail.

First port of call in any such situation is David Spiegelhalter, the Winton Professor of Public Understanding of Risk at Cambridge. And the story, according to him, is rather different from the scare headlines. He starts by pointing out a bizarre omission in the paper quoted - they only show relative risk, not absolute risk.

The trouble with relative risk is that it is often hugely misleading. Imagine the headline 'Murder rate in city increases by 100%'. Wow - that city appears to have hit the ropes, big time. However, that is a relative statistic. We don't know what that 100% represents. Exactly the same data could also be represented by the headline 'One murder last year, two murders this year.' That is a 100% increase. But far less scary sounding. So the paper's authors should be reprimanded. Luckily, though, apparently the press office, often the villains in misrepresentations of papers, actually published the real numbers - which to the BBC's credit, they do use, rather than just the relative values.

And what do those real numbers say? Four people in 100,000 who had around 1.25 units of alcohol a day would develop a related health problem or sustain an alcohol related injury in one year (it's hard to imagine how 1.25 units could be shown to cause an injury, but we'll overlook that). That's a low number. All activities have risks attached (getting out of bed, crossing the road, going in a car...). And that's not even considering relatively high risk activities. Life involves risk. The mere existence of risk is not in itself a reason not to do something - there's always a cost/benefit tradeoff, and many people who drink relatively small amounts get considerable pleasure from it.

This is why it's worrying that the paper goes on to say that their findings suggest public health bodies should consider recommending total abstention. The significant problem here is not light drinkers, but heavy drinkers, where the risks start to go up in a big way.

Something the BBC doesn't cover is Spiegelhalter's other key point, which is also interesting. He notes that this study seems to contradict earlier research which showed that those who abstained from drinking alcohol had a significantly higher (20%*) death rate than moderate drinkers. I have already seen this used elsewhere in an attempt to debunk the science - but that's the wrong message to take away. This higher death rate was from all causes, not just specific alcohol-related causes. And as Spiegelhalter points out, the kind of people who are advised by their doctors not to drink any alcohol tend to be those who have serious medical problems. It's not the lack of alcohol that kills them, it's those problems.

So, media people - please be careful how you use statistics. It's fine to report studies like this. But don't - as the BBC did - put just part of the essential explanation right down at the bottom and make it sound like a minor quibble, rather than something that goes against your shock headline and the tenor of the vast majority of the article.

* Yes, I know this is a relative statistic, but this is the kind of circumstance where they are useful. 

Cost is as important as benefit in recycling

Not easy to clean
(Photo by Steven Lilley from Wikimedia )The other day on the radio, some government person or other was berating the poor old householder. He was asked by the interviewer why it was that a surprisingly high percentage of plastic sent for recycling ends up in landfill. He pointed out that the lazy old taxpayer often doesn't wash out their sauce bottles properly, so they can't be recycled.

This made me think - I have never seen a proper environmental cost/benefit on recycling. I do recycle - I'm all in favour - but, for example, in the case of the sauce bottle, I generally send it straight to landfill. This is because there is a considerable energy use in washing out a sauce bottle - it usually takes a fair amount of hot water and quite possibly some washing up liquid. It also takes up some of my time, which also has a cost (I assume the reason the recycling companies don't themselves wash out sauce bottles is that the cost outweighs the benefit.)

I don't know for certain how the balance lies as I've never seen appropriate figures, but my suspicion is that more environmental damage is done by cleaning out the bottle (and transporting it far further for recycling than for landfill) than is done by sticking it in a hole in the ground.

So, yes, government, please do encourage us to recycle sensibly - but give us the data to make it sensible. When a green activity is done for show, rather than to help the environment, it's greenwash - and I think this particular complaint about the householder is exactly that.

This has been a Green Heretic production.

The Phantom Horseman of Lady Lane

Lady Lane is a rather spooky back road in Swindon, which has been closed to traffic for a number of years and is being gradually taken over by nature. I recently discovered there what appears to be the very large mark of a horseshoe (see photo - size 9 foot for scale). There is something odd about this horseshoe print.
The mark is at 90 degrees to the roadway. It has to be a rear hoof, as it's too close to the edge of the road behind it to be a front one. But one step forward would take a cart horse into the high hedge in front of it. But what if it's something very different? The other side of the hedge, straight in the direction in which the horse appears to have been heading, is the ruin of Blunsdon Abbey. The old house burned down around the end of the nineteenth century.
So a picture starts to emerge. Back when an abbey that was later converted into a house was still a religious site, chances are they would have had some heavy horses for agricultural work. Could it be that the ghost of a monk from the abbey rides towards the site of the burning building, into his ghostly future of the nineteenth century to then leave a mark in the present? In the monk's time there would have been no hedge. Perhaps the ghost was on a futile mission to save the inhabitants of the burning building.
In reality, I don't believe in ghosts - but I am fascinated by the psychology and sociology of ghost stories and alleged hauntings. And my suspicion is that many ghost stories emerge from small oddities, coincidences and cherry picking of evidence. Walking down spooky Lady Lane in the dusk, it wouldn't be too hard to put the pieces together as I did in the previous paragraph and perhaps to imagine a ghostly presence associated with this mark.
In reality, my story is full of holes. It's true that the position of the mark is odd, but only if it really is a horseshoe print. It's a reasonably horseshoe-like shape, but it may well not be that (it seems a bit thin to me for such a big shoe). Our brains are superb pattern recognition engines which interpret shapes given only a vague approximation to reality - the effect is known as pareidolia. As far as I'm aware, no one perished when Blunsdon Abbey burned down. And most significantly, unlike many manor houses with the 'abbey' name which were converted from old abbeys, Blunsdon Abbey was a fraud. It was a Victorian house whose occupants tried to give it a touch of class by making it sound older than it was. It never was an abbey. (Wikipedia suggests there was an earlier monastic structure somewhere in the vicinity, but the history document in the local church denies this.)
I'll leave you with the closest thing, perhaps, there is to a real ghost of Lady Lane: my old dog Goldie, no longer with us, walking down the deserted roadway.

Review - Cork Dork - Bianca Bosker

In a friendly, personal way, Cork Dork takes the reader into the very strange world of the American sommelier (I'll come back to the A word a little later). The author, Bianca Bosker gives up her job to investigate this bizarre sub-culture as an immersive journalist, only to end up becoming part of it.

Like many, I enjoy wine (though I prefer a good real ale with a meal), but find the whole business of flowery, pretentious descriptions and ludicrously inflated prices for the better bottles off-putting and something that feels like either a con or self-deception. Bosker promises to transform our views.

The book certainly made me think a little more about the whole business - and her exploration of strange people and their obsessions makes for an excellent read - but I can't say it's changed my viewpoint. While it's clear that you can train yourself to distinguish more in taste and smell than most of us do - and the sommeliers do this to extreme - that doesn't really help the rest of us or explain why we should consider paying £100 or more for a bottle of wine. And it's very clear from what Bosker uncovers that the whole business is extremely subjective and involves a lot of self-deception.

This comes across in a number of ways. For example, she points out that in tests, the experts quite often rate the same wine totally differently - for example an identical wine in different bottles being described at the same event both as undrinkable and gold medal quality. And, to Bosker's frustration, the sommeliers persist in believing the totally discredited tongue map model of taste. All the way through there's a sense of being pulled in two directions. Yes, there's a remarkable achievement in being able to blind taste a wine and identify its grape, origin and vintage... but most of the descriptions they give convey no information and are pointless, while despite caring about what's good in wine, sommeliers are, in the end, in the business of extracting as much money from their customers as they can, so can't really be trusted.

Some of the most interesting parts of the book are where she moves away from the sommeliers and takes in other aspects of the wine industry. I found particularly fascinating just how industrial the US basic wine industry is. I know even the top notch producers these days make use of plenty of tech, but I hadn't realised how much cheap wines can be chemically manipulated for taste, odour and colour.

There are some problems with the book. It's about one third too long, repeating similar observations about sommeliers and their views too many times. It is also very US-oriented - the whole setting feels alien from a UK viewpoint and it doesn't give any idea of what the equivalent situation is here. Perhaps worst of all, there is no real acknowledgement of the increasing medical evidence of the damage caused by anything more than very moderate alcohol drinking. At one point, Bosker suggest we only drink, say, Chardonnay for a week to get a feel for it. That somehow doesn't feel like the recommended alcohol intake level. The book is, in some ways, a celebration of self-destruction without acknowledging it.

I'm very glad I read it, though - and will think slightly differently next time I'm faced with a wine list, perhaps even daring to ask the wine waiter (I don't really like the 's' word) for advice. But given what she reveals, I find Bosker's Damascene conversion from journalist to sommelier baffling.

Cork Dork is available from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.

Is it the EHRC or the Observer that's telling fibs?

In today's Observer I read 'Tories in new race row over identity checks for elections.' The article tells us that a leaked letter from the Equality and Human Rights Commission to Cabinet Office minister David Liddington raises concerns that identity checks to vote will deter immigrants and others from participating in the democratic process. Jeremy Corbyn, of course gets his views in, using this to bash the government. But is it true?

Apparently the crux of the letter is that under new rules, being trialled in several local authorities at the 3 May local elections, 'people will be asked at polling stations to produce documents proving their identity - such as a passport or driving licence - before casting their vote.'

But here's the thing. I happen to live in one of those trial authorities (Swindon). And it's just not true that you are asked to bring a passport or driving licence. The polling card quite clearly asks you to bring... the polling card. Nothing else.

Surely either the EHRC or the Observer couldn't be trying to mislead us for political reasons?

He's Gone - Alex Clare - review

I'm always on the look out for good new British crime fiction and someone recommended He's Gone by Alex Clare. To be honest, this meant I bought it without looking at too much of the detail, and my first reaction on taking a closer look was one of disappointment.
The reason for this negative reaction is that it has become such a cliché for police officers in crime novels to have a personal problem - and the protagonist here, DI Robyn Bailley, looked likely to be exactly such a cliché. But I am pleased to say I couldn't have been more wrong.
Firstly, He's Gone works superbly as a police procedural. It's always difficult to get the balance between giving too much detail (because in the end, most police procedure is boring) and making the whole thing trivially easy. The crimes - a missing toddler, a 3-year-old murder and a series of burglaries - are handled by Clare in a way that simply keeps the interest throughout. It's an excellent book on that level alone.
But then there's the personal problem. Because Robyn Bailley was DI Roger Bailley a couple of weeks early and is beginning the transition. It's hard to imagine any job where it would be harder to be transgender, and this is made doubly so when the first case causes the investigating team themselves to be under the media spotlight. Just for once, this feels like a personal problem that isn't thrust on the main character to tick a box - it's a major part of the narrative, and like the police procedural aspect, Clare handles it beautifully.
The only negative I'd say is that while many of the characters are well rounded, the mother of the missing toddler is a two-dimensional, cardboard cutout of a nasty person with no saving graces, which is a shame.
Overall, though, Clare's book is the best crime fiction discovery of the year for me and I'm rushing out to buy the sequel.
He's Gone is available from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.

Review - Landscape Pro Studio

Like most people these days I take a lot of photographs on my phone, and the quality can be excellent - but particularly with landscapes it's easy to get a result that's disappointing. On the other hand, I don't have time to spend hours touching up each photo - I want something that will enhance a landscape photo quickly and easily.

It was a pleasure, then, to try out Landscape Pro , as it does some heavy duty work, but with relatively little effort.

As a test, I used this image of the Mitchell Library in Glasgow, where I gave a talk a few weeks ago:


It's a gorgeous building (not helped, obviously, by the scaffolding), but my photo did not do it justice.
First step on loading the photo into the program is to identify key areas, which can be handled as one. This is done by dropping markers on them, then adjusting the coloured area to cover the edges. This a simple dragging mechanism, which copes with most boundaries well, though occasionally you may need to go with a more fine detail tool. Here I'm just completing identifying the building with the statue on the dome still to be included:

Then it's a matter of adjusting presets and sliders to enhance your selected areas. You can also, for example change the lighting on an area. The main changes I made were to improve the dull-looking sky, brighten up the building (and give it a subtle touch of sunlight on the top left of the dome), and to play around with the appearance of the car slightly (though I eventually left it much as it was):

Photo significantly improved in five minutes. Of course, I could have done far more (for example, in my hurry I failed to spot I'd lost the pyramidal glass roofs on the two sides of the building). But for me, the importance of this kind of software to someone who isn't a pro is what you can do quickly - and I was very impressed.

Another image I had a go at was to be used as a backdrop of the header of the website:


I wanted to put white text on top of the image, so I needed to darken the sky. I tried this in Pixelmator, my image editor of choice, but I couldn't get the border between the people's heads and the sky clean enough. It was alway very obviously edited. But five minutes with Landscape Pro Studio and it became the perfect backdrop. The sky colour looks a little unnatural, but it's what I wanted for the purpose:


There are a number of tutorial videos to help you get started, but I found it mostly easy enough to simply play with it and find out how to use it. If there's one things I would have liked included that isn't there, it's a facility to remove unwanted objects, such as the horrible street sign in the Glasgow image. I can do that separately with Pixelmator, but it would have been nice to have the facility here. Photoshop users can get the combined effect as there is a plug-in for the software.

Overall, Landscape Pro does what it's supposed to do, very well and a reasonable price, running on both Windows and Mac. You can pay up to £99.95 for the Studio Max version, but for all I need, the basic version at £29.95 does the job just fine. See the website for more details.