Brian Clegg's Blog, page 36

Review - A Night in the Lonesome October - Roger Zelazny *****

If you're wondering why I review less here, my SF reviews are now all on www.popularscience.co.uk - but this one is fantasy.

Roger Zelazny has always been one of my favourite authors, so it was a delight to discover his last novel, which I'd never read. It sounds like an unlikely topic to be successful. The book is narrated by Jack the Ripper's talking dog, Snuff. It tells of the preparations for a strange Game played out when Halloween falls on a full moon - featuring some familiar fantasy characters (full marks if you spot who Larry Talbot is before it's revealed) and Lovecraftian dark forces. If this sounds an unlikely plot, Zelazny is the master of taking the unlikely and making it entertaining. And he does it here to the maximum.

Although some of Zelazny's work was science fiction - the excellent Doorways in the Sand , for example - he's best known for his wisecracking fantasy series set in Amber. However, the style in A Night in Lonesome October is very different. In fact, if you were given a copy of this book with no idea of the author, you'd be more likely to guess at Neil Gaiman - it's hard to believe Gaiman, particularly in his short stories, wasn't influenced by it.

There's also a touch of Bradbury about the combination of wistfulness and playfulness in much of what happens. It's not high art, but if you like this kind of thing, it's altogether a little gem of a book. Full marks to Farrago Books for bringing back this previously out-of-print classic.

Available on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com

MPs in their cups

Image from WikipediaIt's interesting that many who have spent a lot of time arguing that MPs must make more decisions suddenly don't like it when they come up with an answer that doesn't apparently fit with the zeitgeist. The matter in question was whether or not to apply a 25p charge on disposable coffee cups, as used by all those coffee shops you can't avoid these days. The MPs said 'No.' And they were right.

The problem is often compared with the success of the 5p charge on supermarket carrier bags. But it's a very different problem. Not only is it very easy to carry an empty shopping bag, we are much less likely to go supermarket shopping on a whim. And the 5p bag is an optional charge - I can choose whether or not to buy a bag. I can take away my purchase without one. I often do with a small shop. Try taking away your coffee without a cup.

More to the point, the solution is simply economic madness. According to a Cardiff University study, applying a charge would result in 3.4% fewer disposable cups being used. Leaving aside that this is a pathetic percentage, we have to look at what is being done by imposing a tax. We would be replacing the cost of disposing of those 3.4% of cups responsibly - hard to see how that can amount to more than £2-3 million a year - with at tax on 100% of cups - which would cost the consumer over £600 million a year.

This is a classic case of greenwash, where being seen to do the right thing is considered more important that actually sorting things out. A coffee cup tax would not work, and parliament should be congratulated for spotting this. It would be far better if they made it easier to recycle coffee cups - helped, perhaps by encouraging the use of this kind of cup.

This has been a Green Heretic publication.

Does it matter if organ donor opt out doesn't work?

Image from NHSI saw an article this weekend bemoaning Westminster's decision to make organ donation opt-out rather than opt-in in England. Tim Worstall, writing on the Adam Smith Institute's blog, suggested that it was madness to take this step. And at first glance, his argument was quite strong.

Many government decisions are, frankly, guesswork. There is no good data to back up whether a change will be beneficial or not. But in this case there was some interesting data to consider. Because Wales made this decision earlier, and we now have two years of data on the outcome. According to the BMJ, 'Welsh opt-out law fails to increase organ donations.' There has been no significant increase in donation as a result of the change from opt-in to opt-out.

When you think about it (and I suspect few have), this is not totally surprising - because it's relatively rare that a death will result in organs being available and suitable for transplant. It pretty much requires the donor to be relatively young and healthy, which typically implies being in accident, as a result of which they die in hospital, so the organs can be harvested quickly.

However, I think in terms of social benefit, the opt-out system may well be worthwhile even if it doesn't do a lot to increase the number of donated organs. It says that we, as a society, care for each other. Politically, I'm a little to the right of centre, but I certainly don't subscribe to the kind of Ayn Rand view of 'All I care about is direct benefit for me'. There is little doubt that social attitudes can be changed by this kind of measure.

Is this 'doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results' as the blog post suggests? Apparently Einstein said insanity was indicated when this happened - but there's a lot of difference between a controlled physics experiment (and Einstein, of course was no experimentalist) and a large scale social experiment. Especially when we're trying to compare an outcome for a country with a population of 3 million with one of 55 million. I doubt if the Adam Smith Institute would consider the economy of Wales a good model for that of England, and it's equally not an ideal model in this case. Over those two years, we are only talking order of 100 cases in Wales, so this is a very small sample on which to draw any conclusions. We really need significantly more data to be able to draw useful conclusions.

Overall, then, I think rather than decrying it, we probably should see this as a worthwhile step.

Story arcs are great - but don't lose the single episode show

Many great TV shows have been based on single episode shows. So each week you would get a new story with a resolution at the end of the show. (Occasionally a 'to be continued' would be used to extend this to a double episode.) This didn't stop there being story arcs, where something ran in the background through a series of shows, dominating occasionally - but most individual shows still had a satisfying narrative in their own right. For me, the master of the balance between arc and individual show was Joss Whedon. (Please come back, Joss - your TV shows were far more innovative than your movies.)

Of late though - I don't know if it's the influence of Scandi Noir - there's been a tendency to let the arc dominate to the extent that each episode has no standalone narrative whatsoever. They just become chunks of a vast film. And I honestly think that, in many cases, this has been a negative step. Two good examples are Suits and Star Trek. The early seasons of Suits had great single episode storylines, but the last few entirely failed in this respect. And though there were some good things about the Netflix Star Trek reboot Discovery (especially the very final scene), again I pined for the single, occasionally double, episode approach of the classic series. As for the X-Files reboot, I've given up on it, so depressing is its unrelenting arc. (Also it's rubbish.)

Please, show runners, don't lose the power of the single episode narrative. An arc should support and enhance, not dominate. It's fine for single thread dramas like House of Cards. But the more open structures of the likes of Suits and Star Trek have the opportunity to do something more interesting. Don't give it up.

Waving, not drowning

My latest book in the Icon Hot Science series is Gravitational Waves . All too often, this remarkable phenomenon get labelled in the media as if 'proving Einstein right' was its main role. There are two problems with this. In some ways gravitational waves prove Einstein wrong (he said they were so weak, they would never be detected)... and they're far more important than that.

To give a flavour of why, here's the opening of Gravitational Waves:

There are times when those working on a major science project receive public accolades. Typically, it’s when the data from a live science run is released, and what has been an intense period of private work becomes public property, to be dissected by the researchers’ scientific peers and celebrated by the world’s press. But on 14 September 2015, the huge team working on LIGO – more formally, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory – had no such expectations. No one realised that 50 years of fruitless work was about to be rewarded in an unexpected fashion.

The immense LIGO experiment, covering two sprawling sites in the US and supported by over 1,000 scientists working around the world, was undergoing an engineering run. This was routine technical testing before the gravitational wave observatory would go live a few days later. It was the eighth and  final cycle of fine-tuning before things might get interesting. Yet around 7.00am Eastern Standard Time – midday in the UK – a  first email was sent out to interested parties that signalled the beginning of the biggest change to astronomy since the introduction of telescopes.
On that day, our understanding of the universe took a leap forward.

[..]

For over 50 years, scientists had been looking for the tiny distortions in space and time caused by a distant cosmic event that would add a new, powerful approach to the astronomer’s armoury. They had never achieved a single result. Some even suggested that gravitational waves would be impossible to detect unless we could take the leap of building an observatory in space, as the tiniest local tremor was enough to confuse the incredibly delicate instruments. But for now, these worries were put to one side. No careers were at risk of yet another failed detection of these elusive waves on this run. It was simply a matter of ensuring that the technology behaved as it should.

However, just because this was an engineering run did not mean that the observatory was inactive. Unlike the dome of a traditional telescope, with shutters to prevent light coming in, there is nothing that can stop gravity getting through. Gravitational waves may be incredibly weak and difficult to detect, but nothing can hinder their progress across the universe. And the 14 September email told the members of the LIGO collaboration that an unexpected event had occurred.

[..]

Over the next two days, excitement grew. The event seemed more and more likely not only to be a real one, but also to provide a very significant discovery. No one had expected gravitational waves to be obvious in the data stream, but these were clear, visible signals – so strong that, were this a real detection, they had both found gravitational waves and made the first-ever direct observation of black holes. In which case, the team was surely looking at a Nobel Prize. More than that, their work – which some still believed was pointless, because they thought that LIGO wasn’t sensitive enough – would have been the first step into accessing the mysteries of the universe in a way that had never been possible before. They were genuinely at the frontier of science. Yet it would be many months before the details could be made public. Months during which the teams had to lie to colleagues and repeatedly try to quash the rumours that began to fly around the scientific community. The countdown to gravitational wave astronomy had begun.

Read more in the book...

Forecasts aren't facts

I regularly write about the fun to be found in probability and statistics - but also the difficulties we face in understanding them, because our brains don't seem to be wired in a way that adequately deals with this kind of mathematics. However, there's one misunderstanding that stands out heads and shoulders above the rest - and this is that we find it very difficult to distinguish between forecasts and facts.

Data about past events can be (though isn't necessarily) accurate. Data about the future is often only accurate if you are lucky. I'm not saying all forecasting is worthless - it's the best of a set of bad options (certainly better than relying on Mystic Meg) - but we always need to be aware of its limitations.

Let's take a simple personal example. My mortgage will soon be coming off a fixed rate, and the bank has kindly offered me a series of options for new fixed-rate details. To be able to decide between them, whether consciously or not, I have to do some forecasting. The choice came down to a two-year deal, fixed at a rate slightly better than I have at the moment, or a five-year deal fixed at a rate that is slightly worse than my current one. With my forecasting head on, I suspect that interest rates will rise significantly over a five-year period - and so I opted for the five-year deal. However, let's be clear about what I just did: I took a bet on what interest rates will do over the next five years. This is gambling just as much as taking a punt on a horse running in the 3pm at Doncaster. The probabilities may be different - but I don't know what's going to happen. All I can do is guess, based on the data I have, and place my bet.

This educated guessing applies just as much to the majority of decisions I may make about the future (financial or otherwise) - or, for that matter, to leaked Cabinet Office forecasts of the impact of Brexit or to a company's budget. The forecast isn't a fact, and when we make a decision based on it, we are taking a (hopefully calculated) gamble.

Let's finish of with that business favourite, comparing forecasts with actuals. I have witnessed many times anguished post-mortems where companies attempt to explain why what actually happened has differed from the budget or sales forecast, or whatever the prediction happens to be. They look for changes in the market, or the environment or their staffing... but what they hardly ever do is say 'Yep, the forecast was wrong, wasn't it?' Admittedly, incorrect forecasts aren't always the reason for a deviation. It can be due to those external factors. But I suspect poor forecasting is to blame in many of the cases where an organisation spends many person-hours trying to unpick what went wrong operationally.

I'm not suggesting you should shoot the messenger, or, in this case, the forecaster. Because we are dealing in probabilities and, yes, guesses, they will go wrong. Equally the forecaster may have biasses themselves - because there are usually a huge amount of assumptions in making a forecast. Rather, when we hear a forecast, it's essential to get a better idea of the probabilities involved (if known), the accuracy of the data and, crucially, the assumptions that are being made. Only then can we make sensible use of a statistical crystal ball. If that information isn't available, don't give the forecast the time of day.

I regularly write about the fun to be found in probabilit...

I regularly write about the fun to be found in probability and statistics - but also the difficulties we face in understanding them, because our brains don't seem to be wired in a way that adequately deals with this kind of mathematics. However, there's one misunderstanding that stands out heads and shoulders above the rest - and this is that we find it very difficult to distinguish between forecasts and facts.

Data about past events can be (though isn't necessarily) accurate. Data about the future is often only accurate if you are lucky. I'm not saying all forecasting is worthless - it's the best of a set of bad options (certainly better than relying on Mystic Meg) - but we always need to be aware of its limitations.

Let's take a simple personal example. My mortgage will soon be coming off a fixed rate, and the bank has kindly offered me a series of options for new fixed-rate details. To be able to decide between them, whether consciously or not, I have to do some forecasting. The choice came down to a two-year deal, fixed at a rate slightly better than I have at the moment, or a five-year deal fixed at a rate that is slightly worse than my current one. With my forecasting head on, I suspect that interest rates will rise significantly over a five-year period - and so I opted for the five-year deal. However, let's be clear about what I just did: I took a bet on what interest rates will do over the next five years. This is gambling just as much as taking a punt on a horse running in the 3pm at Doncaster. The probabilities may be different - but I don't know what's going to happen. All I can do is guess, based on the data I have, and place my bet.

This educated guessing applies just as much to the majority of decisions I may make about the future (financial or otherwise) - or, for that matter, to leaked Cabinet Office forecasts of the impact of Brexit or to a company's budget. The forecast isn't a fact, and when we make a decision based on it, we are taking a (hopefully calculated) gamble.

Let's finish of with that business favourite, comparing forecasts with actuals. I have witnessed many times anguished post-mortems where companies attempt to explain why what actually happened has differed from the budget or sales forecast, or whatever the prediction happens to be. They look for changes in the market, or the environment or their staffing... but what they hardly ever do is say 'Yep, the forecast was wrong, wasn't it?' Admittedly, incorrect forecasts aren't always the reason for a deviation. It can be due to those external factors. But I suspect poor forecasting is to blame in many of the cases where an organisation spends many person-hours trying to unpick what went wrong operationally.

I'm not suggesting you should shoot the messenger, or, in this case, the forecaster. Because we are dealing in probabilities and, yes, guesses, they will go wrong. Equally the forecaster may have biasses themselves - because there are usually a huge amount of assumptions in making a forecast. Rather, when we hear a forecast, it's essential to get a better idea of the probabilities involved (if known), the accuracy of the data and, crucially, the assumptions that are being made. Only then can we make sensible use of a statistical crystal ball. If that information isn't available, don't give the forecast the time of day.

Review - Summer in the Islands

I can think of few better antidotes to a grey and miserable English winter than Matthew Fort's Summer in the Islands. It features a food writer and TV presenter in his sixties, setting off for six months of puttering around the Italian islands on a pink Vespa, obviously bringing us the eating highlights, but much more, the enjoyment of slowing down and simply living life in a series of fascinating landscapes, rather than the everyday battling through it back home.

In a puff on the back of the book, Jamie Oliver mentions the term 'midlife crisis'. Leaving aside any concerns about the definition of midlife, I'd say that Fort's adventures are the absolute antithesis of a midlife crisis. This isn't about showing off to your peers in an unsuitable sports car - it's about stepping into a different culture and gently absorbing and enjoying it.

The strange thing about the enjoyment of this book is that the reader does not need any sense of wanting to be in Fort's place. Any two-wheel transport fills me with horror, and the thought of negotiating Italian roads on a scooter would be a nightmare. I may love food, but have a very limited range with seafood, and inevitably on the islands there is very little else. And few of us share Fort's ability to find himself being invited out to dinner by complete strangers. But that doesn't matter. Because we can vicariously piggyback on Fort's enjoyment, wafted along on a Mediterranean breeze and lifted by his wonderful mix of erudite observations from history and literature and visceral interaction with his surroundings.

Something that comes through strongly is the difficult pull between commercial exploitation and the desperately needed cash that tourists bring. Acknowledging a degree of hypocrisy on his part, Fort can't help dislike the crowds on the beaches and the bland eateries that can spring up to support their gustatory needs - but at the same time admits that without the tourism there would be very little left on some of the islands. And he has to accept that, in the end, he too is a tourist. It's an old, old problem - but one that seems to be being played out particularly vividly on some of the islands.

From his exploration of a prison island to attending an opera where three different opera companies are at war with each other, to his final magnificent destination of Venice, Fort gives us a fresh-eyed view on Italy's beautiful fringes. His lifelong love of the country and expertise in food shines through - and so does a very human viewpoint. A book to treasure.

Summer in the Islands is available from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com

Can you discover the periodic table?

I follow the excellent historian and philosopher of chemistry Eric Scerri on Facebook and a recent post of his intrigued me.

In it, Eric uses the verb 'discovered' for what Mendeleev did with periodic table. When I queried this, he suggested that the use of the term depended on whether or not you are a realist. But I'm not sure if that's true.

Let's take a simpler example, then come back to the periodic table. Specifically, we'll use the star Betelgeuse, the distinctly red one of the four main stars of Orion.

If I'm a realist*, then I think there is something real out there that I am labelling Betelgeuse. In good Kantian fashion, I can't know the reality - the 'Ding and sich' - but I can report on the sensory data from Betelgeuse and believe that I am talking about something that really exists. As it exists independent of humanity, we can discover it. However, Betelgeuse is also a class M star on the endearingly random looking stellar classification system that goes from O to B, A, F, G, K, and M. This system is not part of the reality that is Betelgeuse, it is a classification system that people devised - it's a representation of something - a different class of thing to a star. As such, the classification system cannot be discovered: it has to be invented or created by human beings.

If I am a non-realist, who presumably doesn't thing there is a defined reality behind the label Betelgeuse, this has no effect on the constructed classification system, which is still invented or created.

Let's now shift that picture to Mendelev and the periodic table. As a realist I can accept that there are relationships between different atoms based on their atomic weights and properties - that is something that can be discovered. But like the stellar classification system, I would suggest that a periodic table is a representation, a model, not an aspect of reality. As such, even as a realist, I would suggest it can only be created or devised, not discovered.

* Note this is my interpretation of these terms - not everyone will necessarily agree

Review - A Murder for Christmas

I finish my murderous Christmas roundup with a solid but unimaginative performer.

I was wary of reading this as it's part of a long series featuring the 'Sanford Third Age Club', in this case on their Christmas jaunt to a hotel in Leeds, which all sounds a bit twee and forced. But in some ways it was better than my expectations.

Let's get the negatives out of the way first. The characters tend to have one or two simple characteristics that drive their behaviour. So, for example, our amateur detective and chairman of the Club, Joe Murray is obsessed with not spending money (he is a Yorkshireman after all) and is very observant. The writing style is workmanlike, but in some places the author forgets 'show, don't tell.' The police are pretty hopeless, apart from anything else in not arresting our amateur at the end after he withholds evidence for a day that he knows has been handled by the killer, loses part of it and handles all the rest repeatedly (admittedly with gloves). And the denouement, where in Agatha Christie style everyone but the dog is accused one after the other, drags on for far too long.

On the other hand, there are some interesting aspects to the plot, putting all involved in a hotel over Christmas, makes for good atmospherics and it genuinely is quite difficult to spot how the clues are going to be used to come to the satisfactory conclusion. What's more, the setting provides some nice observation of the second rate entertainment likely to be encountered on this kind of break. Oh, and there's only one murder - far too many detective mysteries have to have a string of them.

One other oddity is that this looks and feels like a self-published book, despite having an apparent publisher and being well edited. Certainly the author seems unfamiliar with mainstream publishing, as he puts one character on a book tour in the UK (which hardly ever happen) for a book which the character admits is an academic tome that will only sell a few copies. This is probably the strangest part of the story, and surely one the detective should have investigated further.

A Murder for Christmas is available from amazon.co.uk and amazon.com

... and if you too are still hunting, my murder mystery novel  A Timely Confession  is also a Christmas-set mystery.