Brian Clegg's Blog, page 41

The Hydrogen Sonata - review

I've generally loved the Iain M. Banks 'Culture' novels, but was decidedly disappointed when I happened on Consider Phlebas,  (admittedly his first) - but thankfully The Hydrogen Sonata was much more the kind of on-form writing I've come to enjoy.
I will get one moan out of the way up front - it's too long. I can't be doing with these doorstop books as a whole, and quite a lot of it felt in need of a good tightening edit. But having said that, there's a whole lot to enjoy here in the complex machinations between different races and seeing different Culture ships exhibit behaviour that isn't necessarily quite what you'd expect.
As usual with Banks there's plenty to ponder in the 'what if' department, here particularly around the concept of 'subliming' where individuals or whole races opt to become part of a disembodied multidimensional spacetime - probably some people's idea of heaven and others of hell. But equally, as Banks did so well, there's plenty of straightforward action, humour and adventure.
This is definitely one of the Culture books I'd recommend to get immersed in the Banks' canon - as all his best books do, it sucks you in early. There are a lot of characters to get your head around, and occasionally I struggled with which ship was which - but generally speaking, as long as you're prepared to go with the flow, it's a great ride.
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is available from amazon.co.uk and amazon.com

Andrew Chamblin Memorial Lecture

This is primarily a thank-you to the organisers of the annual Andrew Chamblin Memorial Lecture in Cambridge. I attended yesterday courtesy of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, and it was fascinating to hear Kip Thorne, until recently Feynman Professor of Physics at Cal Tech, give an insider view on the development of gravity wave astronomy and the LIGO observatory.

The lecture was packed - in fact, it appeared to be relayed into other lecture theatres by video link - with an audience that would have given a brilliant score in the I-Spy Book of Physicists (had such a book existed). Thorne began by asking how many in the audience had physics degrees, doctorates and beyond - it was a distinct majority in the main room, but he then made it clear he was addressing his talk primarily to the non-technical remainder, and managed to do so very effectively.

What was particularly interesting from my viewpoint was the speaker's ability to balance the scientific content with the political, organisational and personal aspects of getting a project of this size off the ground. I won't relay lots of detail here, but one very effective story brought out the scale of the problem facing those building the LIGO detector. Thorne pointed out that in a book on gravitation he had said that a LIGO-style detector was 'not promising'. This was because of the scale of the movement of a mirror that has to be detected to 'see' a gravitational wave. Thorne built this up impressively:

If you begin with 1 centimetre and divide by:
100 you get the thickness of a human hair (10-4 m). Divide by 100 again you get the wavelength of the light being used to make these measurements (10-6 m).  Divide by10,000 you get the diameter of an atom (10-10 m). Divide by 100,000 you get the diameter of the nucleus of an atom (10-15 m). Divide by 100 again you get the magnitude of the largest motion (10-17 m) we might expect to see in the separation between the mirrors a few kilometres apart. It was a surprisingly exhausting day, making a 9 hour round trip for just over an hour's lecture - but well worth it.

And that round trip did include a walk back to the station across one of the more remarkable parts of (pretty much) central Cambridge, pictured here - a relaxing end to the day.

Renationalise the railways? Really?

Our railways aren't great. In fact, some of them are terrible. (As it happens, GWR, which is my usual company, isn't bad, but I know that elsewhere things are dire.) So, not unreasonably, many people feel we need to do something different, and the slogan is often 'Bring Back BR.' The only trouble is, British Rail was terrible too.
I had the relatively unusual experience of working for a company that was a nationalised industry when I joined it and which was then privatised after a few years. I have to say, it became a far better company as a result, both as a place to work and in the service it gave to its customers. (These days it's not doing so well, but then it's no longer really a British company.)

The reason, I'd suggest that the BA privatisation worked where BR one didn't is quite simple - we had real competition. Without that, privatisation is a joke. It can bring benefits, but unless tightly regulated it can leave us in the kind of mess the railways now are. Privatisation works when the customer has a choice. But if I want to travel, say, from Swindon to London it's GWR or nothing. It would be complicated to manage, I admit (but then so is airspace), but I honestly think the two keys to improving rail travel are:

a) Competition on major routes. At the very least all the really big routes should have a minimum of two companies operating on them. That means there's choice, and that means companies have to perform to keep your business. Of course there are real difficulties because of the limited amount of permanent way available, but airlines have to manage with very limited airport slots.

b) Some serious subsidy. This seems odd if we're talking about private companies - but environmentally speaking it doesn't make any sense for it to be cheaper to fly to places in Europe than it is to travel by train. Most other European countries manage their subsidies more effectively than we do. Again, it would not be simple, and EU regulations may well prevent it at the moment, but then...

I'm not doing a Donald Trump here. I realise this isn't going to be easy. Getting railways right is phenomenally difficult. But renationalising the railways isn't the answer.

Review - Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

I'm not quite sure where I picked up a recommendation for this book, but I'm glad I did as I've been able to add Cory Doctorow to my fairly short list of contemporary science fiction writers that I truly enjoy.

In this entertaining short novel, Doctorow takes on the classic SF question of 'What if?' for something that genuinely could come to pass - the no wage economy, where everyone gets the basics they need and it's up to them, through ad-hoc arrangements, to find ways to earn social credit to get more, should they want it. In a way, the social credit (known for unexplained reasons, unless I missed it, as Whuffie) is the equivalent of the rating system in the Black Mirror episode where everyone constantly rates everyone else. The other major change to society, which is far less likely to happen, is that when someone dies they are recreated from a clone which is imprinted with their backed up memory - so death becomes a minor irritation (unless you aren't entirely comfortable with a copy of yourself being a true replacement), while some choose to be put to sleep for thousands of years.

Our hero, Julius, ends up at Disney World, where he works with a group that help maintain and run a group of the attractions, in a period when some of the traditional attractions (the gem of his group's collection is the Haunted Mansion) are being replaced by direct brain access experiences. The main thread of the story follows Julius's attempts at guerrilla action to save his beloved ride in a world where social capital is everything.

On the whole the novel works well - Doctorow manages to be genuinely interesting about the challenges faced by a society where no work is required and lives are indefinite, while never getting into boring polemic. The storyline had some small issues for me, particularly when an outcome is flagged up very early - but I really enjoyed this book, which feels like the kind of thing Pohl and Kornbluth would be writing now if still around - no greater accolade - and I will certainly be trying more of Doctorow's output.

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is available from amazon.co.uk and amazon.com

Why a coffee cup tax won't have the same effect as the plastic bag tax

I see in the i newspaper that the Lib Dems, with policies I increasingly find sad, are proposing a 5p tax on coffee cups (I assume they mean treated cardboard when they say 'plastic') to try to have the same effect as the plastic bag tax, which has reduced usage of single use carrier bags by about 85%. Unfortunately, I don't think it will work unless it's thought through a bit more.

The point is that the plastic bag tax works because people pay it explicitly and separately. If you use a bag you pay a visible fee. But a coffee cup charge will inevitably be absorbed into the price of a coffee because it's not really a separate item. You can't just have the coffee and not the cup. People won't notice it the same way.

Admittedly, there is a kind of way to have coffee without a cup, and that's to take your own cup in. Starbucks, for example, have a 25p discount on takeaway coffee if you do this. So they are effectively imposing a 25p disposable coffee cup tax - five times as much as that proposed by the Lib Dems. And certainly some people do take their own, but it's an inconvenient thing to do, compared with a carrier bag you can stuff in your pocket. Based on observation on visits to the chain, it's a tiny proportion of people who do - probably significantly less than 8.5% rather than 85%.

For this kind of action to deliver you have to do two things - make the tax visible and easy to avoid by doing the right thing, then to monitor alternatives to ensure you're not just shifting the problem elsewhere. The carrier bag tax has done the first of these, which is great. I haven't seen any reporting on the shifting of the problem, however, which is a little worrying. I know that when Ireland introduced a similar tax there was a surge in production of other types of plastic bag to cover situations where people had been repurposing carrier bags, so the actual reduction in plastic film going into the environment was significantly less than the apparent reduction by merely looking at carrier bag use. I've not seen any figures for this in the UK yet.

Environmental measures should not just be for appearance's sake. They need to deliver a benefit and to have a measurable impact. And I find it hard to believe that the 5p coffee cup tax would be anything more than greenwash.

This has been a  green heretic  production.

Upgrade your OS!

You can't escape the WannaCry ransomeware attack in the news. And it's a good thing that there has been plenty of coverage. But I do wish the news concentrated a bit more on how you can keep yourself safe and less on trying to find someone (other than the hackers) to blame. There are three things that everyone should do, any of which would have prevented data loss, and two of which would have prevented the attack succeeding in the first place.Do regular backups. I know it's boring, but do it. In the very early days of PCs, I had two hard discs fail within six months, in each case losing everything on them. The first time I was unprepared and lost months of work. The second time I was backing up every day and lost nothing. These days it's really easy - with something like OneDrive, Google Drive or Dropbox you simply keep your work in a specific folder on your computer and it is all automatically backed up. As it happens, in the case of the ransomware attack, you might find that the encrypted data started to replace the backups - so rapid disconnection from the internet and an occasional local backup as well would have been an additional good precaution.Don't click on links in emails. This attack was initiated by a fishing email where a user had to click on a link that didn't go where it said it did. In practice, you hardly ever have to click on a link in an email - for example, if you get an email from your bank, or Amazon, or Paypal or whatever, log in normally and check for an alert within the site. Most email software will tell you the address a link goes to if you hover the mouse pointer over it, either as a floating box or at the bottom of the screen. You can use this to check if a link is legitimate, though be careful as some malicious emailers use addresses that sound like the real thing. But most don't.Always install operating system updates as soon as you get them. Although it hasn't been hugely covered, this was the biggest problem in the case of the ransomware attack. Microsoft had issued an update in March that would have prevented it from happening. The number of times when I see other people's computers and they have an operating system update outstanding is remarkable. OS updates almost always include security patches. If you don't install them as soon as possible, you've only yourself to blame.Although not about direct prevention, there are a couple of other minor things. Some were probably hit because they were running versions of Windows like XP that are so old that Microsoft no longer updates them. I know this can be tempting, especially when the alternative is the awful versions of Windows that have been issued lately. But there comes a point when you have to move on. One of the reasons some don't is because Microsoft has typically charged quite a lot for new versions of operating systems. This, arguably, is another reason for switching to Apple (which doesn't). Not to mention the lower levels of attack on Macs. (If you have a Mac, though, don't fall into the trap of thinking you don't need anti-virus - you do. I'd recommend the free Sophos product.)
Don't let the news of the ransomware be just a pleasant distraction from the election, or a frustration if you are worried about an NHS appointment. Make sure you keep yourself protected too.

Danny Dyer is not so special

To be honest, I don't really know who Danny Dyer is, but I was forced against my will to watch some of the BAFTA TV awards last night, and one of the clips featured him being gobsmacked that he was descended from royalty, as if this somehow makes him special. It really doesn't.

Let's be clear, this isn't about my anti-monarchist leanings. What I mean is that I can guarantee that you are descended from royalty too.

There's a fascinating bit in Adam Rutherford's book A Brief History of Everyone who ever Lived that shows that if you have European blood, the chances of you not being descended from the Emperor Charlemagne are negligible. (Don't worry if you aren't at all European - you'll have a royal lineage too.) In fact you are a descendent of everyone alive in Europe in the 10th century who has living relatives now. So, if you prefer your royalty British, provided they have living relatives, you are a descendent of Alfred the Great, Rhodri the Great, almost certainly Macbeth (he's just a little late, but I had to go with him) and Brian Boru.

So, please don't bother to get excited about being descended from royalty, Danny. We all are.

The difficulty of setting a novel in a different country

I've just finished Elizabeth George's latest Inspector Lynley novel, A Banquet of Consequences. As always, I enjoyed it (though I really wish she could keep the length down - this one weighed in at over 650 pages). But, as always, a rather evil part of the entertainment was spotting where this American writer fails to get her English setting right.

I, certainly, would never be brave enough to try this. I've had enough experience with US versions of popular science books ('What is a skirting board?' 'A coconut shy?') to realise it's almost impossible to get everything right. I'm certainly not objecting to George doing it, but as a consequence, I do think she's fair game for spotting where things just don't quite work. According to the acknowledgements, she always employs locals to ensure she gets things right, but if this is the case they are being overly nice to her, because a handful of errors always slip through - and there were several cases in this one.

I'm not going to pick out them all - there comes a point where overloading with examples becomes breaking a butterfly on the wheel - but there are two that illustrate perfectly the dangers of this approach. One is in speech idioms. One of George's recurring main characters is a circa thirty-year-old female police sergeant. She always uses very strange euphemisms when questioning suspects (I just can't see a police officer asking a subject about their sex life by asking them if they've been indulging in 'dip the banger'), but the thing that really is hilarious is the way she frequently refers to women as 'birds', as if she was in some kind of The Sweeney time warp.

The other example is more subtle and involves a practical day-to-day difference between the US and the UK. Someone is buying an item in a shop and signs the credit card receipt. I can't remember when I last saw this happen - signing for a credit card payment went out with chip and PIN a good 20 years ago. But because US banking has always been bizarrely slow to move to new technology - how long were US customers having to print of cheques for monthly bills while we had direct debits? - it's no surprise that a US author doesn't spot how incongruous this is.

I really don't understand how her British checkers miss these things. But it illustrates well the difficulties of setting a novel in a different country.

Back to the fold

The Mac version of OneNote in actionFor a good number of years I used Microsoft's OneNote for all my note taking. It is wonderfully freeform - a bit like having a scrapbook for anything and everything you can clip or write or type. But as I observed a whole 6 years ago, Microsoft were slow to get things going on (Apple) mobile phones and tablets - and when they did, it just didn't work with the sophisticated facilities of the desktop version.

I've recently been alerted to the latest version of OneNote and I'm pleased to say that the mobile versions are now good enough that I've moved back from Evernote. Although Evernote is great, it lacks the on-page flexibility and structuring of OneNote - it's like coming home.

It has taken a little while to move back, but Microsoft do provide a migration tool to get your notes in from Evernote. They then take an age to synchronise on all platforms (at least if you have 800+ notes like me), but now we're there and it's great. What's more it's free - where Evernote now charges if you use more than 2 devices, or do significant monthly uploading or want facilities like business card recognition.

There are still things Evernote has the edge on - for example its synchronisation seems much faster than OneNote's. But for those who make complex notes, annotate by hand, put together all kinds of resources in planning a book... OneNote can't be beat.

Getting in a twist about time travel

I've read a couple of things lately about time travel that just don't make any sense to me. Specifically, both said that it wasn't possible to travel into the future. One was Time Travel by James Gleick, which commented that what special relativity offers is 'just time dilation' not real travel at all, the other being Richard Muller's The Physics of Time, which I am yet to read, but according to this article suggests that you can't travel into the future as it doesn't exist 'yet.' Both of these appear to entirely miss the point.

Unlike the TARDIS in Dr Who, real time machines find travel forward in time much easier than backwards, which may be theoretically possible but is practically implausible. And the approach taken to reach the future is totally different from a time machine that disappears from 'now' and reappears at another time - but it is ridiculous sophistry to suggest that a time machine based on the special theory of relativity doesn't allow us to travel into the future. There is well established science, demonstrated in many experiments: it's possible to travel as far as you like into the future - you just have to set off in a spaceship and come back to Earth. When you arrive, you will have moved into the future. The faster you go, the further you will travel into the future.

If you move fast enough, you could end up hundreds of years into the future. Everyone you knew - including a twin if you have one - will be dead. The date will be the future date you reach. Of course, it's not an instantaneous leap into the future - but who says time travel has to be instantaneous? No other form of travel is.

The fun thing about all this is that the mathematics to work out just how far you travel into the future requires nothing more than GCSE maths - in fact, in my new book The Reality Frame I even show how to calculate it (though I admit I put it in an appendix for those who are averse to a few equations). There is no doubt about this - this is real time travel into the future, and those who say it's impossible make science seem far less interesting than it really is.