Brian Clegg's Blog, page 5

The Grand Illusion - Syd Moore ****

It's easy to mistake this book for a historical fiction/fantasy crossover, but apart from one small element, it is straightforward fiction in a historical setting. The military had shown an interest in camouflage in the First World War, when some ships were given disruptive or 'dazzle' paintwork that made it hard to see where the ship began and ended or what its direction of travel was. But the whole business was supercharged from 1939.

A rag-tag group of professionals including a zoologist, artists and a stage magician designed camouflage and fakery both to hide machinery and make fake airfields to distract bombers. Later guns and tanks would be disguised to look like trucks. Syd Moore sets her fictional team in this world, but faced with an even bigger challenge: trying to prevent the German invasion of Britain by playing on the occult leanings of Hitler's high ranking officers.

The central character, Daphne Devine is stage assistant to the illusionist Jonty Trevalyan. She is pulled into this plan, despite mixed feelings from the military about a woman's involvement. Devine is an appealing character, reminiscent of Amanda Fitton in Margery Allingham's 1933 novel Sweet Danger (later reappearing as Campion's wife). Where Trevalyan's role is primarily limited to devising a mechanism that will be used to give the appearance of a 'real' occult ceremony, Devine goes though much more and is central to the ceremony being pulled off.

It's a great setting for a story, and Moore makes the most of the clash between the army's inflexibility and the exotic nature of the team attempting to produce the grand illusion. She even slips in a passing reference to Dennis Wheatley for older readers. It was an enjoyable read, but is distinctly slow paced, apart from the action scenes. For example, we don't even get an inkling as to why Devine and Trevalyan have been recruited until around page 181. Part of the slowness was due to a lot of inner monologues - and the use of the present tense, often employed to give more of a sense of immediacy doesn't overcome this.

One entertaining point was the use of a variant of the Dan Simons and Christopher Chabris ball pass counting experiment as a way to establish the awareness of a series of recruits. The actual experiment wasn't undertaken until decades later, of course, and it's very unlikely that it would have worked with the static test used of counting skittles, rather than the dynamic ball passes in the modern experiment - but it's a fun addition to the storyline.

The element of fantasy comes in where there appears to be some doubt as to whether or not the ceremony had an actual effect - which felt a little out of place in what was working as a straightforward historical novel. There was also an oddity that it was clear that the deception would only work if the occult ceremony could be reported back to German high command (almost certainly with moving pictures). That this happens seems to be accidental, rather than being an essential that had to be arranged by the team, which is odd to say the least.

Overall, though, this is a really original use of one of the stranger developments of the Second World War and how it might have been taken to new heights.

You can buy The Grand Illusion from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com and Bookshop.

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Art inspired by science

Over the years I have come across a number of ways that art and science have come together effectively, often in a way that makes science more accessible. Sometimes this involves the explicit illustration of scientific principles, as in Adam Dant's entertaining How it All Works , for which I had the pleasure of coming up with the scientific principles to be covered by his delightful illustrations (small version of one of Adam's images alongside, but you have to see them full size to appreciate their genius).

I've recently come across a project by artist Lewis Andrews, who took a book a month for a year and used each as the inspiration for a series of artworks. Two of my books were included in the project: Dark Matter and Dark Energy, and Gravitational Waves.

You can see Lewis's project Scientia in full on its web page. But I can reproduce two of the striking images here.

Halo IV

One of a series of digitally enhanced drawings inspired by Dark Matter and Dark Energy. Lewis: 'The "Halo" series of digitally enhanced drawings touch upon the theorized properties of dark matter and its ability to hold galaxy clusters within a series of threads, filaments, and halo-like shapes. Zooming out, if you could visualize this architecture of our universe, it would appear to almost be a vast cosmic web.'

Kilonova IV

One of a series of Giclee prints on paper inspired by Gravitational Waves. Lewis: 'Kilonova focuses on the death of two already dead stars. Neutron Stars are the left-over corpses of supergiant stars that went supernova. Neutron stars are, as a result, full of extremes. A sugar cube-sized piece of Neutron Star would weigh roughly a billion tons. Over time, Neutron Stars may stray too close to each other and begin a death spiral until they collide. When this happens, another massive explosion is generated called a Kilonova.'

I've always been wary of science-art collaborations as they can feel like a failed attempt to paste over the cracks of C. P. Snow's Two Cultures divide (see my article defending science fiction for some background on that). But sometimes they work well, and I think, each in their own very different way, this is true of both Adam and Lewis's work.

Images © Lewis Andrews and Adam Dant

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In praise of ancient lanyards

I'm currently doing some work at the University of Bristol as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. This excellent charity puts professional writers into universities to help students (and occasionally staff) with their writing skills. 

As these days you can't do much at a university without a pass attached to a lanyard I have one - but I stand out somewhat because practically everyone else I see has a rainbow lanyard, while mine is black and white.

Being of a nervous disposition, I sometimes wonder if I'm going to be stopped and accused of being anti-woke or some such thing because I'm not flying the rainbow flag. In practice, I have no objection to it at all, but I was first issued with my lanyard during my first stint as a Fellow about 10 years, and the black and white ones where all that were on offer then. 

Given the thing is pretty much indestructible and will probably outlive me, on environmental grounds I really don't want to swap it to another one and throw it away (as I presume most of the longer-serving staff have). And, to be honest, it gives me a tiny vicarious thrill each time I wear it because of the passing resemblance to the lanyards worn by police in all the TV dramas. So I intend to stick with my ancient lanyard and not move with the times.

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A salutory reminder of the sophistication of AI hallucinations

I'm not an AI luddite. Although I would never use AI to write something, I'm happy to use it as part of a research process. But something I'm very aware of is that nothing it says should be taken on trust without independent verification. Andrew Stephens passed on an example which I detail in full below. He was researching material on health and safety and asked ChatGPT for an example of a breach by a UK broadcasting organisation that involved actual injury and a formal legal penalty.

Here's what it came up with. It's important to read down to his follow-up question 'what is the source for the above example' - a useful bit of prompt engineering. I've highlighted it in red below.

📍 Incident: BBC fined after technician crushed by a studio door

Broadcaster: BBC
Date of Incident: January 2018
Location: Broadcasting House, London
Legal Outcome: BBC fined £28,000 in 2020

🛠️ What Happened:

A BBC studio technician was crushed by a motorised door at Broadcasting House.

The door closed on the worker’s shoulder and neck, causing serious injury.

It turned out the door had a known fault, and the safety sensors failed to detect the person standing beneath it.

⚖️ Health and Safety Investigation:

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) investigated the incident.

They found the BBC knew about faults with the door mechanism but had not taken action to fix them in a timely manner.

💸 Legal Consequences:

The BBC pleaded guilty to breaching Regulation 3 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, which requires employers to properly assess workplace risks.

They were fined £28,000 plus costs.

🧾 Lessons Highlighted:

Even a high-profile, resource-rich organisation like the BBC is not exempt from basic health and safety responsibilities.

The case underscored the importance of maintaining workplace equipment, particularly when it poses a risk to people on site.

Would you like a list of other UK broadcasters with similar incidents? ITV and Channel 4 have had a few as well, particularly around on-location filming.

You said:what is the source for the above exampleChatGPT said:

Apologies for the earlier confusion. Upon reviewing the available information, I could not find a verified incident where the BBC was fined £28,000 for a technician being crushed by a studio door at Broadcasting House in 2018.

Image by Aidin Geranrekab from Unsplash

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Does a tidy disc reflect a tidy mind?

The first professional PC I had was an IBM PC XT - hard disc space 10Mb. That's about 100,000 times smaller than my current 1Tb storage. In those early days, particularly as images started to be stored, the requirement for space outpaced the increase in size of hard discs. As a result, there was a busy market in compression software to keep file size to a minimum. This ranged from the humble ZIP file we still know and love to a company that used fractal processing to hugely reduce the size of images. They took ages to compress, but were very quick to unpack.

Over time, though, disc* space has increased at such a rate that it's rarely a problem. That word 'disc', of course, is becoming just as anachronistic as the 'Save' icon that is based on a 3.5 inch diskette (see above). I've just replaced my previous desktop, which was the last one I'm likely to have that makes use of disc technology. The new one is SSD - just as much an anachronism as there is no 'disc' in that Solid State Disc. It's really flash memory, but it's confusing to refer to two different types of memory in a device.

Because we can be so profligate with space now it's easy to allow junk data to accumulate out of control. This isn't so much a problem of storage as of transfer when you do upgrade. Checking out my disc space, I was using around 700 Gb of my storage, which would take a long time to send across even with a fast connection. 

As a result I decided on something of a purge and took a hatchet to my unwanted data, to be able to make a quicker transition. I was mildly amazed to be able to dispose of around 300 Gb of unnecessary stuff:

Eat your heart out, Marie Kondo. Was it necessary? Not really, I suppose - my new storage is just as big as my current one, with plenty of headroom. But it's a good feeling to have disposed of such much unnecessary virtual stuff, especially as in the transfer process the computer got it down to 262 Gb.

* I know the systems refer to disks rather than discs, but hey, I'm English.

Image (memories of storage past) by the author

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Mechanical Computation revisited

REVISIT SERIES - 

An updated post from April 2015It's of the nature of coincidences (that's another post) that your attention is drawn to something when it comes up several times in a short time span. I'm just in the process of moving to a new desktop computer, and this reminded of the post below on mechanical computers from ten years ago, where (back then) mechanical computation came up four times in the period of a couple of weeks.
The first example was when I was proofreading my 2015 title for St Martin's Press, called Ten Billion Tomorrows . The book about the relationship between science and science fiction, and I point out that when I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968 (in the cinema in Cinerama, an ultra-widescreen attempt to get people away from the TV), the only computer I had ever seen before I encountered the remarkable HAL was my Digi-Comp I. This was a mechanical device with three plastic sliders, which could be programmed by adding extensions on the side of the sliders which flipped metal wires, and as a result could provide the action of different gates and reflect the outcome on 3 mechanical binary displays. Sophisticated it was not. If I'm honest, while I managed to follow the instructions and get it to do some operations, it really taught me nothing whatsoever about computers.

Examples two and three involve good old Charles Babbage. You just can't talk about mechanical computers without mentioning Babbage. He first came up in my review of James Tagg's Are the Androids Dreaming Yet , which confuses an image of the Science Machine's Difference Engine with the Analytical Engine. (The Difference Engine was a hard-geared mechanical calculator, while the Analytical Engine, never built, was a programmable computer that would have used punched cards. Babbage built a small segment of the Difference Engine, but never got anywhere with the Analytical Engine, which almost certainly would not have been practical given Victorian engineering tolerances.)

Then Babbage popped up again in a Guardian article about a graphic novel featuring the Analytical Engine. As Thony Christie points out in a blog post, the article wildly overstated the contribution of Ada King* to the project saying that 'Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage designed a computer ... for which Lovelace wrote the programs.' In fact King had nothing to do with the design, she translated a paper on the concept from the Italian and added a series of notes. These included an example of what a program might be like. We have no evidence that she wrote this algorithm herself, and even if she did, it didn't make her the machine's programmer, or the first as Babbage had already written several.

The claim that King wrote programs comes up again in Matt Parker's entertaining Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension , which I was then reading for review. But of more interest is his description of building a working computer (admittedly only capable of adding up to 16) with 10,000 dominos by using the interaction of falling dominos to produce gates. This was a wonderful feat for which this tireless maths enthusiast should be congratulated. You can see the 10,000 domino computer in action below.

* I prefer Ada King to the more commonly used Ada Lovelace, though I admit I seem to be about the only one who does. Her full name was Ada King, Countess of Lovelace. While in principle a countess can be referred to by her title in place of surname, the usual reporting standard is to use the surname. So, for instance, when referring to the Duke of Bedford, he is called Andrew Russell, not Andrew Bedford. People sometimes get confused because the royals don't really have surnames, so there's no other choice with them. But I think with Ada it's primarily done because 'Lovelace' sounds more exotic.


Image by Pierre: Digi-Comp I (photo from Wikipedia)

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A thank-you to the University of Buckingham - and thoughts on science and truth

On Friday, on a beautiful sunny day, I was delighted to be awarded an honorary Doctor of Science degree by the University of Buckingham.
The whole day could not have been better, from being given a chance to give to speak to graduands from the IT and Health faculties (see below) to the honour of receiving the degree, hearing about remarkable work done in those faculties, and the pleasure of meeting fascinating people, from Sir Magdi Yacoub to the University Chancellor Dame Mary Archer (who I'm pictured above alongside). Not to mention sharing this with family and Buckingham-based friends.
Here's an approximate version of what I said to the students.
This excellent establishment was not granted royal charter until well after I left education, but is a place I would have been proud to attend for its open-minded approach. Basing decisions on evidence, not bias, is is so important when it comes to dealing with truth - and truth is something it's essential to understand in my job as a science communicator. Science is often portrayed simply as a search for truth, but I think it's important the public understands that the reality is more nuanced than this.
Part of the problem we face in explaining science is that researchers hope to achieve the next big thing so they can secure funding. This often leads to university PR departments over-hyping findings. My favourite example of this occurred a few years ago when Fox News trumpeted
Star Wars lightsabers finally invented
I think it's fair to say that many would expect Fox to go a little over the top, so to balance this from the more sedate end of the media, the Guardian reported 
Scientists Finally Invent Real, Working Lightsabers
I just love the way they both say 'finally', as if to ask 'What have these scientists been doing all this time?' Intrigued, I took a look at the original paper that the press release was based on. It described how two photons - particles of light that usually ignore each other - briefly interacted in a special substance known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, cooled to near absolute zero. A lightsaber it was not.
This is an extreme example, but every day newspapers carry reports of the latest research findings - what this week's view is on the impact of red wine on your heart, for example. More often than not, these are preliminary findings that need further work to get anywhere near something that could be regarded as 'the truth.' Often there will never be certainty.
Most of the time science doesn't prove things. It's not really about absolute truth. Mathematicians can prove theorems because they control their environment. They define what the entities they work with mean - and the result is absolute mathematical truth. They don't have to deal with a messy, real world. Usually, though, the most we can say about science is that it gives us the best possible theory give current data - but we have to remember that this may change in the future.
For a science communicator this can be difficult to put across. People like things in black and white, with clear outcomes. But results often have to be interpreted statistically. In some fields, sample sizes are rarely big enough to have confidence in the outcomes. It's arguable too that some subjects that consider themselves sciences (dare I mention economics) may use the tools of science, but arguably aren't true sciences at all.
However, I don't say this to be negative about science. It has done a vast amount for us practically, as well as hugely expanding human knowledge, a joyful pursuit in its own right. The best possible theory given current data will always be far better than a random opinion on Tik Tok - scientific findings provide a wonderful resource as long as we understand what they are saying. And this is why I love being a science communicator. I'm not dispensing absolute words of wisdom and truth - that's more the remit of the clergy [the ceremony took place in Buckingham parish church]. I have the privilege of explaining these remarkable theories and why they provide the best understanding we have of the universe... unless new data changes our view.
I hope that with the open-minded and thoughtful approach the university has given to you, that you too can enjoy the fascination that arises from the scientific view of the world around us. By all means search for the truth - but make sure your truth is backed up by the best theory given current data. And if that's the case, you can't go far wrong.

Image by Peet Morris

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Were astrologers the original p-hackers?

Science writers rarely mention astrology, other than to moan when someone accidentally uses the word instead of astronomy. There is, of course, no scientific basis for astrology, but when we are considering history of science it is impossible to ignore astrology as many of the early astronomers earned a fair amount of their living doing a spot of astrology on the side. This didn't mean that they necessarily believed in it (though Roger Bacon, for example, makes an argument for it as an environmental influence, as opposed to a predictor of the future), but it brought in the cash and often the support of the nobility.

The reality with astrology and other fortune telling approaches is that, even though it has no basis for working, inevitably some of the predictions will come true. If every single prediction didn't happen, it would actually be a very significant outcome - astrologers would be successfully predicting what wasn't going to happen.

I was struck the other day when writing about the dubious scientific result-generating mechanism of p-hacking that astrologers, in effect, do the same thing. The social sciences generally accept a 'p-value' of 0.05 as meaning that a finding is statistically significant. Getting this value tells us that if there were no genuine cause (the so-called 'null hypothesis' were true), the measured effect should occur about 1 time in 20 (hence 1/20 = 0.05). Before the practice was identified as being extremely dodgy, p-hackers would take a set of data from a study and slice it up in many different ways. If they got, say 40 different outcomes, then with a 1 in 20 chance of an apparent effect when the null hypothesis was true, the chances would be high that at least one of the outcomes would appear significant without any basis.

In a similar way, if a horoscope makes enough predictions, especially if they are vague, it is very likely that at least one of them will prove to be true. I admit Monty Python is showing its age, but the show's horoscope sketch still holds up well for demonstrating this exact principle when we get to the spectacles:

Image from Unsplash by Vedrana Filipovic. 

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Houdini's psychology fail

I'm currently enjoying Tim Harford's three part series on Houdini on his Cautionary Tales podcast . Although best remembered as an escapologist, in the later part of his life, Harry Houdini included a section in his act that involved unmasking spirit mediums as fake.

Earlier, Houdini had become friends with Arthur Conan Doyle, who became a fervent spiritualist and whose wife was a medium. Apparently, in one final attempt to persuade Doyle of the folly of his beliefs, Houdini did a demonstration for Doyle in his New York apartment. He hung a small blackboard from the ceiling out of reach, asked Doyle to to go out of the apartment and write a message on a piece of paper. When Doyle returned, Houdini got Doyle to stick a cork ball soaked in white ink on the board - to Doyle's amazement, the ball then wrote out his message (the Aramaic phrase Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin - mentioned in the Bible's book of Daniel) on the board.

Houdini did this to demonstrate how the apparent abilities of spirit mediums could be reproduced and even bettered by using a magic trick. Doyle, unfortunately, simply didn't believe Houdini's denials and thought it was the act of a genuine medium.

But here's the odd thing. To be a stage magician you need to be a good psychologist. Yet it was almost inevitable that this would be the outcome. Houdini told Doyle he wasn't going to explain to him how the trick was done - Doyle had to take Houdini's word for it that it was faked. In my recent book Brainjacking, in a chapter on deception, I look at how Derren Brown describes using psychology to build the impact of a simple trick. But this only really works because in his book, as part of doing so, Brown describes how the trick works. 

You might say, 'But magicians can't explain their tricks, or they lose their mystique'. However, it seems that Houdini had learned magic originally from a book. And there was nothing to stop him saying to Doyle he would tell how the trick worked as long as Doyle - a gentleman who wouldn't break his word - swore not to tell. The only way this 'proof' would have succeeded was if Houdini had thought a little more about the psychology of his interaction with Doyle. Things could have ended very differently. 

If we are to unmask deception (or disinformation) we need to be careful not to be practising deception ourselves as part of the attempt.

Image from Unsplash by The National Library of Wales

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Chlorine-washed chicken panic? Choose your battles...

Whenever the possibility of a trade deal between the UK and the US crops up, 'chlorinated' chicken comes back to menace us, much like Frankenstein's monster. But really it's a paper tiger. (This must surely be a mixed metaphor?)

There is no doubt that there are potential dangers to such a deal for the UK, notably around food and medical supplies and services. However, when the press gets over-excited about chlorinated (or more properly chlorine-washed) chicken, it dilutes the whole argument, because this is absolutely fine.

If you buy a bag of ready-to-eat salad in the UK it will have been chlorine-washed. This kills off the dodgy bacteria such as E. coli, Salmonella and Listeria that can easily be carried by salad leaves - the treatment makes it safer to eat. No one seems to panic about this. Now let's consider chicken. In the old days we used to be told to wash chicken before cooking it. We don't anymore because there is a real danger that doing so will splash the dodgy bacteria that chicken carcasses are likely to have on them, such as Campylobacter and Salmonella, into the air, making them easier to breathe in and cause an infection. All chlorine washing does is to kill off those bacteria before packaging. The case against using chlorine-washed chicken is that makes lower welfare standards easier to maintain - but bear in mind that despite our standards, the majority of chicken sold in the UK does carry such bacteria.

So, please, stop moaning about debugged chickens. By all means dig into the less salubrious aspects of US food and medical deals, but don't get distracted by the less than foul fowl.

Image from Unsplash by J K Sloan. 

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