Brian Clegg's Blog, page 47

Could Trump's election be the impetus we need to do something about climate change?

Don't get me wrong - I'm no Trump supporter. But his anti-climate change stance could provide the pressure that's needed to get a meaningful plan put in place to tackle this pressing world problem.

A while ago, a website labelled me a green heretic, by which they meant that I thought it essential we use science, technology and economics to tackle green issues, rather than relying on fluffy bunny, feel-good gestures. I was delighted. We need more green heresy - and I think Trump could be the stimulus to make this happen.

Climate change is real and a huge threat to the future population of the world - I'm sorry, deniers, but the science is solid, it's only the models dealing with how fast it will hurt us that are subject to question. It will be a disaster unless we do something about it. (I ought to say, though, that you needn't worry about saving the planet. The Earth itself will shrug whatever we do off in a few million years. It really doesn't care. This is about saving humanity.)

I'm afraid for all their meetings involving vast numbers flying around the world, the scientists and politicians trying to sort this out have not got the right balance. And worse, they don't understand people. We humans are capable of being aware that something is bad for us and still carrying on doing it. (Big Mac with a double espresso martini, anyone?) It's not enough to make scary predictions and agree to limit something you only have limited control over. We need to be investing more right now in two things. In energy sources that don't produce greenhouse gasses - both classic 'renewables' and nuclear - and in technology to actively reduce the temperature or take greenhouse gasses out of the atmosphere. At the moment, both of these essentials are underfunded.

It's a matter of pragmatism. Even without the Trump effect (I am not referring to farting cows), we will overshoot what we need to do. And now it could be even worse. So stop assuming it's enough to be scary and appeal to doing the right thing and start taking practical steps to mitigate it. That means more money for research. Not just from governments either. It's great that, for instance, Bill and Melinda Gates are putting so much into Malaria research. But this is an even bigger problem long term - and we should see some more billionaires shedding their billions for their children' sake.

This doesn't mean, by the way, that we can leave everything to other people and get on with our lives as usual. We should continue (or start) doing our collective bits - and I try to as much as the next person. I recycle, I've cut my domestic energy use to about 1/3 of what it was, I use public transport when I can and I've only flown once in the last 20 years (care to match me, academics?) We need this as well - but on its own it isn't enough.

So, while I don't deny that the election of President-elect Trump is liable to make things get worse faster, it may just be the wake-up call we need.

If I only had...

In amongst the spam and oddities that appear in email there is occasionally an official one that causes some confusion - and I got such a mail today. It was from the DVLA, and as far as I can tell it was genuine. And it was advertising an auction of personalised car registrations.

Impressively, it was a personalised email, as it was suggesting my company might be interested in a specific numberplate. But the initials on the numberplate were ABR an my company initials are CUL - which seemed a pretty hefty miss. Then I realised that the targeting of the email was cleverer than I had thought. After all, the 'C' in the company's initials stands for 'creativity. I was supposed to read the whole numberplate, not just the first three letters. I don't was a personalised numberplates - I think they're tacky. But if I did, I would have got excited if I only had...

Review - The Severed Streets

I was so impressed with Paul Cornell's London Falling , that I've had to buy and read the sequel, The Severed Streets within days - and it doesn't disappoint.

In the first book, a motley crew of three police officers and an analyst discover the dark magic lying beneath London. This second 'Shadow Police' title (I'm not sure about that series name) takes them deeper into the weirdness that lies out of sight to most, as a series of rich men are slaughtered horribly with a razor. All this takes place alongside ant-capitalism riots and a police strike, leaving London a place that's best avoided.

In reviewing London Falling, I said:

imagine a combination of a modern version of The Devil Rides Out, a dark police procedural and a sprinkling of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere and you might come close

Here were discover why that last comparison was particularly apt (I had no idea, honestly) - because Neil Gaiman is a character in this book and the suggestion is that the book version of Neverwhere was inspired by his experiences.

I ought to stress that this book is nothing like Neverwhere - it's much more gritty, without the comedy (though Cornell can't resist a Sweeney joke at one point), and tries to establish what a set of unconventional coppers would do faced with the discovery of an occult world.

There's some good character progression here from the first book. Three of the four main characters have experiences that enable us to see far more of their characters, while a fifth, mysterious character on their side is given a little more exposure. The situation the officers find themselves in is dire - it's difficult to see how they are going to survive this one and it is as much of a page turner as its predecessor.

I liked The Severed Streets very much, though I don't think it's quite as good as the original. This is because some of the subplots don't work quite as well, because the introduction of a real person like Gaiman feels wrong, and because the police inspector's experience in the second half sits uncomfortably with the style of the rest, shocking though it is. Nevertheless, this book cements Cornell as the UK's new master of this kind of urban fantasy... and I've already ordered volume 3.

The Severed Streets is available from amazon.co.uk and amazon.com.

There's lies, damned lies and political pie charts

There's been a graphic doing the rounds which, according to the Independent 'Remain supporters are using to invalidate the decision to leave the EU.' It looks like this:

The yellow segment is the those who voted to leave. Look how small it is compared to the whole set of public who could, in principle have voted. (Blue is remain and the two grey bits are people who didn't register, and registered but didn't vote.) This is being taken as disproving the idea that Brexit is 'the will of the people' as worked up Brexiteers tend to blather, because it appears to be a minority decision.
Unfortunately, those who use this chart simply don't understand the statistics that arise from a voting system like ours. You could never definitely say what the will of the people is for sure unless you force everyone to vote. Look at this chart below. Here the grey section is the equivalent of the yellow section above - it's the people who voted for the actual outcome. A far smaller slice.

Terrible, isn't it? Clearly not democratic. Yet the grey section is the percentage of people voting for the government in the 2015 election.
The fact is that unless you do make it a legal requirement to vote, you have to assume that those who don't vote don't mind the outcome and can't be counted. It's the only possible sensible thing to do - and because of that, the way these pie charts are being used is manipulative and wrong. I don't mind you arguing for or against Brexit. Each has powerful arguments. But I do mind if you are going to misuse statistics.

Get your shades on for my new book

 I'm really pleased I've been able to follow up my science quiz book How Many Moons does the Earth Have? with a second volume - What Colour is the Sun? It was just as much fun to write - and I hope equally enjoyable to read. What's more it's a great stocking filler - on Amazon at the moment it's just £5.49.

Although it's not how most will use it, there are two pub quiz style science quizzes in there, each with six standard rounds and two bonus rounds, which combine pictorial and puzzle solving work. However, it's written to make reading through it fun. Each of the 96 main questions has the question plus some supporting factoids on one page and the answer, plus a page of further reading on the next. So you can test yourself on each question - then find out more.

These aren't the kind of question you'd get in a science exam (thankfully) - they're more the quirky kind of questions you get on QI, with the bonus that science is right more often. So you'll find out, for instance:

Why do hands and feet go wrinkly in the bath?What is a chiliagon?What is measured in slugs?Which scientific term is the most commonly used noun in written English?What would win in a fight between T. rex and Godzilla?Who can breath metals and still survive?… and many more, including, yes, What colour is the Sun? (which QI gets wrong).




In case you are of the US persuasion, you'll be pleased to know that you don't have to suffer that weirdly spelled cover - you've got the more familiar spelling.





To give a feel for how the book works, here's one of the 'question' pages with its factoids:

... and here's the start of the answer page (there's more):


To find out more or buy in either paperback or ebook form, just pop over to the book's web page.
Warning. Shades may be needed to cope with this cover.

Moonshine statistics

The moon (in case you aren't sure what we're talking
about). Image from Wikipedia A seriously dodgy statistic from that renowned historian of science Cherie Blair, just had me jumping up and down in the coffee shop. She proclaimed in an article in the i newspaper:

'It took less than 40 years to put a man on the moon.'

'Really? did it really? And how the heck did you work that out?' I nearly shouted.

Leaving aside whether or not it should have been 'fewer than 40 years', let's try to pin it down. The first manned moon landing was 1969, so assuming nvestigation of Outer Space Rocket Devices
was published in 1903, Goddard was flying rockets by 1915 and published his paper A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes, where he suggested a rocket would reach the moon 5 years later. And, of course, rockets themselves had been around far longer.
Putting aside the age of Homo sapiens as the best 'it took n years...' date (after all, you can't put a man on the moon without a human), I'd say there are only really two sensible time periods. It's either 8 years - the time between Kennedy's 'this will be done in the decade of the sixties' speech and the landing, or it's around 280 years from Newton's Principia being published, as that provided all the science required and the rest was just a matter of engineering.

I don't offer these periods seriously, but rather to illustrate what a daft idea it is to say 'it took less than 40 years...' History rarely works like this - history of science and technology even less so. As statistics go, it's moonshine.

London Falling - review

I've never been a great fan of what most people think of as fantasy, typified by Game of Thrones. I can cope with a few classics like Lord of the Rings, and some variants like the Amber series, but for me, the kind of fantasy that is really exciting is set in the real world where something then goes adrift, introducing fantastical elements. And that's exactly what happens in London Falling by Paul Cornell.

The first 30 pages or so could be a straightforward, gritty police procedural featuring undercover cops. But suddenly and dramatically the main characters' universe is pushed askew. It's hard to describe exactly what results, but if  you imagine a combination of a modern version of The Devil Rides Out, a dark police procedural and a sprinkling of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere and you might come close.

Four individuals - a detective inspector, two recently undercover officers and an intelligence analyst - are pulled into a world where a kind of magic dependent on the sheer depth of London history makes the impossible happen. This is genius on Cornell's part. Pretty much always in this kind of urban fantasy it's a group of unqualified misfits (think the Scoobies in Buffy) who have to sort out the occult threat. The authorities get left out of it, because they just wouldn't understand. But Cornell makes those misfits work for the police, and so they are trying to use traditional policing methods alongside a gradual growth in understanding of the arcane requirements needed to deal with an ancient character who is obsessed with West Ham Football Club.

If that sounds a fairly light concept, it's a contrast to the darkness of the theme, where their main foe's power is derived from boiling young children alive. And that's just the beginning of the horror.

Just occasionally I found the inner monologues of the main characters hard to follow, especially when they were beginning to get a slight feel for what they were facing, but were still mostly confused. But that really didn't matter as the book has enough page-turning momentum to keep the reader moving on.

All in all, the best fantasy book I've read all year, and I'm delighted to discover there are two more books featuring the same police group to get my teeth into. Recommended.

London Falling is available from amazon.co.uk and amazon.com.

A new low in tabloid science reporting

Every now and then I have to sit down and breathe deeply when seeing a tabloid science headline that is about as far as the truth as is possible. Usually such headlines use a kind of bait and switch mechanism where the headline proclaims something dramatic, but the article makes much weaker claims, or points out that most scientists think this is a load of tosh. (Even New Scientist rather likes doing this.) But the Daily Express has come up with an outright winner where the article backs up the headline with a story that bears little resemblance to science as we know it.

Let's see if we can spot what's a little iffy with this 'Scientists discover what existed BEFORE the beginning of the universe' article:
Scientists have not 'discovered' anything. That means finding something. What has happened is someone has come up with a model that produces these results. It's a bit like confusing having a business plan with being a billionaire.We read in the article 'they discovered what came before this universe was.. another universe or more accurately another "cosmological phase".' See above re what a discovery is. In reality they've made an educated guess based on a model.But best of all, we read 'Despite being infinite in size our universe is cyclical and has always existed in one of four stages.' Whoa - Paul Baldwin, the writer of this piece seems to know an awful lot the rest of us don't. We don't know the universe is infinite, we don't know it's cyclical and we don't know it has always existed in one of four stages. The rest - 'Despite' - is true.When we get on to quotes from the scientists involved it all settles down. All they talk about is their model, not the universe itself. They point out their model avoids singularities, which is a nice to have (though hardly unique).
So, as a guide for intrepid tabloid hacks, here's the main thing to remember. A model is just that. To say that universe is like X because someone has a model of it is like saying a child can destroy Westminster Abbey by standing on it, because someone built a model of the abbey out of matchsticks and that's what happened when a child stood on the model.
Let me finish off with that sentence again, because it fascinates me. It has all the attraction of a slow motion traffic accident. 'Despite being infinite in size our universe is cyclical and has always existed in one of four stages.' Wow.

10 ways clickbait marketers get our attention - number 10 is amazing!

See number 10See number 10See number 10See number 10See number 10See number 10See number 10See number 10See number 10By promising something like this. But they never deliver.

A farewell to time travel?

I recently had pointed out to me that all my efforts in writing How To Build a Time Machine (aka Build Your Own Time Machine) were wasted because time travel is apparently impossible - at least according to this new theory which suggests that 'now' is defined by the extent of expansion of the universe and new time is only created with that expansion.

Thankfully, we don't need to worry too much. To begin with, the idea the theory presents of 'now' being defined by the state of expansion of the universe seems strangely detached from the fundamental idea in relativity that simultaneity is relative - the author seems to postulate a universal 'now' - which just doesn't exist.

And for that matter, it's a bit late to say that time travel isn't possible, because it is always happening on a small scale - relativity makes it inevitable. Tell the Voyager 1 probe, which has travelled over a second into the future that time travel isn't possible.

So even though the TARDIS or the Back to the Future DeLorean will certainly never work, there's no need to write off time travel.