Brian Clegg's Blog, page 58

Politics has got interesting

I've always been interested in politics and take the opportunity to bore friends on the subject on a regular basis in revenge for them boring me with sport. But it takes a particularly inward-looking person not to think that politics has got interesting (sadly sport never will achieve this).

It started with the Scottish referendum, took on speed with the potential US presidential candidates and is now back with us over here for a potential Brexit.

Underlying all these events is a dissatisfaction with the status quo and the political establishment - and it really is about time. I'm not going to comment on the US situation as its not my country (though a Trump / Sanders or even a Trump / Clinton election would be fascinating), but I can certainly reflect on the possibility of a British exit from the EU, where I'm a floating voter, currently leaning slightly towards the out side.

I am opened to be swayed, but please don't try using ad-hominem attacks on individuals, on either side of the debate. I find it amusing that those who deride the Out camp for including the likes of Nigel Farage and George Galloway are usually the same people who want bank bosses hung from the lampposts... while apparently failing to spot that said bosses are firmly in the In camp. So for once, try to make a political argument without simply calling people names. If you arguing for In, remember you are in bed with David Cameron and George Osborne.

Here's my starting point. There are clearly pros and cons of In and Out. (Sadly, Dave's option of 'shake it all about' didn't deliver much.) But there is no doubt that EU regulations put significant difficulties in the way of our deciding our own fate, and the UK is a very different beast to most of Europe. Companies moan that leaving the EU will be bad for trade. Personally, though, as a small business owner, I find it much easier to sell to the US or Australia than the EU. In fact I've had to give up selling ebooks directly to the  EU altogether because of their ridiculous regulation that EU businesses have to pay VAT on e-goods at the level that applies in the buyer's country to that country.

Against leaving, I can certainly see that Brexit would cause an upheaval, and it seems very likely that EU countries would punish us by taking it out on us any way they can. But rather than put up a straw man, I thought I'd use a well-reasoned 'why stay' argument from this article in The Guardian by Timothy Garton Ash.

Before we hit any sensible arguments, let's take on Ash's bizarre moan that non-British EU citizens who live in the UK won't be able to vote in the referendum. That's surely less of an issue than the way non-Scottish British citizens weren't allowed to vote in the referendum to split up the UK - yet (and I may be maligning him, as I certainly didn't read everything) I don't remember Ash complaining about this. Whatever, this is an irrelevancy.

So what are Ash's arguments, and do they sway me? In summary they appear to be:

It would be madness to allow Britain's membership of the EU rest on how effective Cameron's emergency brake was.Out is riskier than In. We know what In is like, but not Out.The negotiation will be painful.It's cold outside - Norway and Switzerland don't have fun.The EU helps keep us safe from terrorism.It would be hard on Ireland.Scotland would leave the UK.At first sight, an impressive bunch of arguments, but to be honest, they're mostly unfounded rhetoric. The first is true, but irrelevant. It isn't a major reason for wanting to leave. The second is almost true. But 'riskier' is the wrong word. Far better is 'more uncertain.' Because the 'riskier' argument only applies if being In isn't bad. To take an extreme example, if you were faced with a choice of being executed or attempting to escape, the escape is more uncertain, but staying is riskier. If you believe staying is bad for Britain, Ash is using a pointless argument. If you believe it's good, then it's self sustaining. In effect it's a concealed circular argument.
The negotiation will be painful? Absolutely. No argument about that. If you get yourself into a mess it usually is painful to get out of it. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't try. This is probably my strongest wavering point because I believe some countries, notably France and the Eastern Europeans, will be as bloody minded as they can and make it as painful as possible. So definitely a consideration, but not an argument for not doing the right thing, should Out be the right thing.
It's cold outside. Possibly. But, leaving aside Switzerland seems to do quite nicely, these are both far too small a country to make a realistic comparison. Canada might be better. But to think that other countries, especially the US and the Commonwealth countries, won't do a trade deal with as big a market as the UK is ludicrous. Some businesses will end up worse off. Others will thrive from losing EU red tape. It's nuanced and certainly not a deal breaker.
The EU helps keep us safe from terrorism. Really? Evidence? Certainly sharing intelligence helps, but do you think EU countries will stop sharing intelligence and risk their own security just to spite us. Whereas having full control of borders can, in principle, have a positive effect on reducing the terrorist threat.
It would be hard on Ireland. So? Much as Ireland thought about the UK when it set corporation tax so low that all those nasty multinationals based their HQs there rather than the UK? I don't remember all those Irish politicians saying 'What about the negative impact on the UK?' And as for Irish workers in the UK, this hardly started with the EU and it wouldn't stop without it. We won't stop having a special relationship with Ireland just because we leave the EU.
Oh, yes. And the clincher. Scotland would leave the UK. Firstly this isn't a fact, it's a hypothesis. The i newspaper today suggested that it's one thing for Nicola Sturgeon to make the threat and it's another for a referendum-weary electorate, knowing that Scotland can no longer rely on oil revenues, to back her. But even if it were the case, as I mentioned at the time, I'm all in favour of Scottish independence. I think it would be a large benefit for the rest of the UK. So this isn't an anti-argument for me.
There we have it then - Mr Ash has failed to persuade me. But I am genuinely unsure which way to vote and would love some more effective arguments. Tell me why I'm wrong...

UPDATE - A couple of early contributions to help persuade me otherwise.

Mark Fielder on Facebook suggests that:
One is the lack of any coherent plans should there be an exit from the EU.
Second is that an out vote triggers a bloodbath in the Tory party that allows a much harsher group of politicians to take over.
Thirdly, if we don't like it and want back in, it'll be on "their" terms, including the Euro. Right now, we're in the EU largely on our terms.

Some fair points. There has been some work done, I believe on wargaming the impact of exit and how to deal with it, but I don't know what the plans are. Some would argue that your second point would be good, as it means they're less likely to get re-elected. And I'd have thought the obvious outcome would be Boris taking over, which I'm not sure would be a huge shift to the right. And thirdly - I don't think we're likely to want back in any time soon if we leave. And that scenario assumes the Euro doesn't collapse entirely - too speculative to be helpful.

Alexander Armbruster on Twitter points me to this article by Anatole Kaletsky.
The main arguments seem to be:

It won't happen anyway because the Out camp will be split and the public won't go that way.There will be huge economic costs because of our dependence on services.There will be no political benefits.The first argument isn't argument to change the mind, just a prediction, so irrelevant for my purposes.
The second argument may have an element of truth, but makes use of the weak Norway/Switzerland model. The UK is a much bigger market for European goods and services than these countries, and European countries would have a lot to lose if their actions produced a trade embargo. I'm really not convinced that the only way they would tolerate our service sector is if it were neutered. 
The third point is just a statement - no argument is provided.

Sara Crowe on Facebook points to this pro-Brexit article which points out it is possible to be anti-EU without being anti-Europe or a 'little Englander'.

Time for more murder

After some very positive responses to my first Stephen Capel murder mystery I'm delighted to say that the second book, A Timely Confession , is now available.

In the sequel to A Lonely Height , we find Stephen Capel settled into his first parish in the village of Thornton Down. As Christmas approaches, an unlikely confession of murder throws Capel into a complex and dangerous investigation. A software developer has been killed just before the launch of a make or break new product. While trying to help those left behind, Capel is pulled into the mystery of who really killed Mark Nelson. As Capel attempts to cope with an upheaval in his private life and to help those whose lives are torn apart by a second murder, he must search the snow-covered streets of Bath for answers before another victim dies.

It's just £6.99 for paperback or £1.99 on Kindle.

Nothing like a good murder to get you through the winter...

Paperback:   
Kindle:   

What is a paradox? It's paradoxical

Is the definition of a paradox paradoxical? Before we get into a philosophical spiral, this thought was inspired by a complaint I received when I published a review of a book about the Fermi paradox. Mark Hogarth remarked 'They'll call anything a paradox these days.' When I pointed out the name Fermi paradox dates back to the 50s, he responded 'Yes, I know, but you gotta agree that the word 'paradox' is rarely used properly... here it's just a puzzle, like the twin 'paradox'. Now Russell's paradox - that IS a paradox.'

So was Mark right? Have many of us (me included) been using the term incorrectly? So you don't have to, I delved into the trusty source of all things wordilicious*, the Oxford English Dictionary. And got quite a surprise.

Apart from an obsolete usage, the dictionary's first definition is the one that I use - a statement that appears to contradict itself or be ridiculous, but which turns out to be well founded or true. Rather confusingly, the second definition is an almost opposite version which I know some people use, making a paradox a not-so-obvious fallacy. And the third definition is the logician's version, which makes a paradox an argument that appears to be sensible and based on logical principles, but which leads to a conclusion that is, as the OED coyly puts it 'against sense.' Like Russell's paradox** or the rather crude example I've used as an illustration above.

However, what is really interesting is that (apart from the obsolete meaning) my definition has the oldest citation, going back to 1569, the negative definition is almost as old, with the first example dating from 1570 - but the logician's definition has no evidence before the 20th century (in fact Bertrand Russell himself in 1903 is the first  usage they know of).

So, interestingly, Mark's complaint was back to front. It's not that they'll call anything a paradox these days, but rather that logicians have taken a word with a long established meaning and (relatively) recently given it a different one. Don't you just love words?


* Sadly, 'wordilicious' isn't in the OED. But it ought to be.

** Very crudely, Russell's paradox, which requires some basic set theory goes something like this. Imagine we've got the set of all sets that are members of themselves (lets call it the SELF set). So, for instance, the set 'dogs' is not in the SELF set, as the set 'dogs' is not a dog. But the set 'things that aren't dog's is in the SELF set, because it isn't a dog.

The paradox arises when we consider the set of things that aren't in the SELF set. Is that set in the SELF set? If it is in the SELF set, then it isn't in the SELF set - which doesn't make sense. But if it isn't in the SELF set, then it's not a member of itself, so it is in the SELF set - which also doesn't make sense. But it does make your head spin.

Stop Teslaing me

When I ask not to be Tesla'd, I am not referring to the electronic stun guns of the TV show Warehouse 13, but pointing out that I really would prefer it if those of you who like to put 'memes' (yuck, horrible word) on Facebook would stop sticking up the kind of guff illustrated on the right, which purports to be Tesla 'describing a cell phone.'

There are a number of problems with this. One is that Tesla didn't have a good grasp of electromagnetic radiation, nor did he accept quantum theory, so he would have had serious problems with the mechanisms required to make a mobile phone work.

More to the point, though, Tesla's handwaving remark was in a long tradition of broad predictive comments which certainly show that an individual is open minded, but do not necessarily indicate that they are inventing something ahead of its time.

For instance, I dearly love the thirteenth century friar Roger Bacon - so much so that I've even written a book about him. But no one sensible would suggest that Bacon understood television or aircraft. If, however, I use the 'Tesla foresaw X' approach, he seemed to predict both. In one short burst in a letter to an acquaintance, for instance, he listed self-powered ships, the horseless carriage, the flying machine, something that sounds like a pulley system, and a diving suit or diving bell, most of which would not become practical for another 600 years.

Elsewhere he wrote:

We may read the smallest letters at an incredible distance, we may see objects however small they may be, and we may cause the stars to appear wherever we wish. So, it is thought, Julius Caesar spied into Gaul from the seashore and by optical devices learned the position and arrangement of the camps and towns of Brittany.

Such devices are very unlikely to have existed in Bacon's day (let alone Julius Caesar's) - the first microscopes and telescopes would not come along for about 300 years. And to make some of Bacon's claims true would need TV rather than a simple optical system.

Admittedly it's possible that Bacon achieved something like a crude telescope and/or microscope by messing about with lenses - but certainly nothing capable of what he described, nor would he understand how to do it. Bacon was not 'describing a telescope' any more than Tesla was 'describing a cell phone.' Tesla was speculating, given the knowledge of the time, as many others did, what was possible in principle. And that's a very different thing. Nikola Tesla was one of the greatest electrical engineers ever, but this kind of myth building doesn't do science any favours.

The book event horizon

Mostly books I won't re-read, as these
four shelves are books wot I wroteWhenever we have tradespeople in the house, they tend to point to my wall of books and say something like 'Someone likes reading.' Leaving aside the sad reflection that having a few bookcases is now comment-worthy, it brings to mind another slightly depressing thought.

I probably have about 1,000 books on the shelves (I halved the collection when we moved 6 years ago, but it grows back), almost all of which I have read, but I keep them in case I want to re-read them.

Now, let's say I've got about 20 years of reading left in me. I read about 60 books a year, but of those 2/3 are new. So that's 20 re-reads a year. So, realistically, at maximum, around 400 of those books are going to be read again. Which seems a shame.

Note that I'm not advocating throwing most of them out. I don't know which I will re-read, and I want a choice. (A friend recently said he re-reads The Lord of the Rings every year. It seems such a waste if you do have a book event horizon looming.) However, what I have started doing is if, like the book I'm re-reading at the moment, I think 'I'll certainly never read that again,' I do dispose of it, if only to make a bit more room on the shelves.

Black hole firewall paradox? Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn

Image based on NASA image, credit ESA/NASA/SOHOAs someone who writes about physics and cosmology I occasionally get asked my opinion on something like the black hole firewall paradox. If I'm brutally honest (which I rarely am, because I'm far too polite) I will reply: 'I don't know. I don't care. It bores me stiff.'

In case you aren't sure what the paradox is, it emerges from a combination of quantum theory and general relativity (which don't go together, but hey), and relies on piling about four levels of mathematical supposition on top of each other to come to the conclusion that the information that could be considered to exist on the event horizon of a black hole can't (as it was hypothesised it did) represent all the information in the 3D interior with gravity included, and 'therefore' something passing through the event horizon would burn up. Simples.
This topic involves theorising about a phenomenon that almost certainly doesn't exist in the real universe, using physics that almost certainly doesn't apply. Now, medieval theologians are often maligned by suggesting they wasted their careers arguing how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. They didn't - it's a myth. But physicists really have spent a reasonable amount of time and effort on this modern day equivalent. 
Personally I'm much more interested in science that helps us understand phenomena we know exist than I am in mathematically driven flights of fantasy. Show me some observational or experimental evidence for a firewall and I will get excited. But stare at your navel and make it up and I really don't care. 
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that theoreticians should be prevented from playing around with these ideas, just as mathematicians shouldn't be stopped from thinking about mathematical structures that have no relevance to the real world. But I do think us science writers give far too much exposure to this kind of thing.

So, how many angels do you reckon could dance on the head of a pin?

What would you add?

I have just been moved into a new office at Bristol, with the luxury of a whiteboard, which I felt I ought to fill with amusing/meaningful quotes on writing etc. What would you add?

The strange case of ethnicity and nationality on the screen

I was thinking on my walk to university about how different modern screen actors are from those in my youth. Back then, any attempt at a different accent was fraught with difficulties. I have to confess to having a bit of a thing for Hayley Mills when I was about 11, but I found it hard to forgive her for her attempts at Yorkshire and American accents. And who can forget the 'delights' of Dick van Dyke's cockney? Yet now you never know if an actor is Australian, American or British - they all seem to do accents near-perfectly.

However, that is only indirectly the topic of this post. We rightly are now repelled by white actors 'blacking up' for non-white roles. Try watching Peter Sellers or Spike Milligan doing 'Indian', for instance. And I can totally understand the raised eyebrows when a white actor was recently cast as Michael Jackson. But why, I wonder, do we ignore other situations where actors pretend to be of a race or nationality that they aren't?

This is where we get back to those accents. Okay, modern actors mostly can do very good accents from different countries - but is it acceptable for them to do the equivalent of 'blacking up' in this way? There's an even stronger argument with red hair. As someone (formerly) with red hair, I'm well aware that it has ethnic origins. Yet actors with no appropriate ethnicity often dye their hair red in films. Is that acceptable?

Let's be clear. I'm not saying this as an apologist for white people playing black roles (or vice-versa). I don't think that's usually acceptable (there should surely be exceptions for parody etc.). But I genuinely ask, assuming that this isn't in the best possible taste, why it doesn't also apply to Americans playing Brits or brown-hairs playing redheads.

Another competitor for 'overblown science headline of the year'

Thanks to Ian Bald for pointing out the impressive headline 'The Death of Relativity Lurks in a Black Hole's Shadow' in Wired.

What's so impressive here is just how much it's possible to get wrong in a single headline. Black holes, of course, don't have 'shadows.' I think what they mean is its event horizon, though the article is so fuzzy it's difficult to be sure.

However, the real shocker is the apparent claim that general relativity is dead. Here's the thing. No it isn't. What the article actually says is that if a black hole's 'shadow' (event horizon?) isn't perfectly spherical or isn't just the right size for it's mass, then general relativity's predictions would be wrong. Well, duh. This would also be true if it were pink or singing the Stars and Stripes. Note however, that no one has discovered that its shape or size is different from prediction. (Or that it's pink.) They're just saying that we might be close to being able to make a measurement to see if it lives up to prediction. That's all.

Even if there is a disparity, as the article says 'If Einstein is wrong, general relativity won’t go away—it’s too good at what it does. It just won’t be the whole story anymore.' Right. And that fits with the headline how?

I appreciate editors want headlines that grab people's attention, but if they are going to deviate so far from the facts in order to do so, why not go the whole hog? I look forward to the headline on an article about a new extrasolar planet, where the story is that it's about the right size for life to read:

NEW PLANET HOME TO KILLER BEES, PROVED TO BE THE UNIVERSE'S BIGGEST COLDPLAY FANS.

Why not? It makes as much sense.

Hover cars, tri-vees and v-phones

I've just re-read a science fiction book I quite liked as a teenager. Called Prisoner of Fire , it's by the now largely forgotten British science fiction author Edmund Cooper. Back in the 70s he was quite popular and wrote a whole string of SF novels, but, to be honest, I can see why he's largely forgotten. The writing style seems from a different era, mannered and dated.

However, Cooper's ideas are still interesting. The topic of the book is the common enough SF trope of paranormals - it features a number of children with mental abilities, able to read minds, to block other telepaths, or to kill remotely. The reason it's interesting is that Cooper examines what such a capability would mean for governments, both in terms of protecting themselves and espionage, and how it could lead to an 'end justifies the means' attitude to the young telepaths as weapons.

That's not why I bring the book up now, though, so forgive the long introduction. Prisoner of Fire, written in the 1970s and set in the 1990s, wildly over-predicts technological advances. This was a common problem in the 60s and 70s. Things had moved on so much since the Second World War that it was assumed changes would be even more dramatic in the next 20-30 years. (Think how much 2001, A Space Odyssey from the late 60s overshoots what 2001 was like.) So Cooper merrily deployed hover cars, tri-vees and v-phones.

As I point out in Ten Billion Tomorrows , the problem with hover cars and tri-vees (in case you hadn't guessed, TVs that project a 3D image into empty space, a bit like the Princess Leia bit in the first Star Wars), the problem is that the authors weren't really thinking through the technological advances required. We just don't know how to practically make a car that floats or to project a hologram onto thin air. However, the v-phone is a more interesting one because we effectively have the technology but rarely use it.

I assume v-phones were video phones (it's never explicitly explained). These days, pretty well any smartphone or internet-connected computer is, in effect, a video phone. Using Skype or FaceTime, we can make video calls. And occasionally, for example, when family is on the other side of the world, they are very effective. But for 99% of our calling we don't use them. Because they feel strangely unnatural. The assumption has always been (video phones have been talked about since Edison and Tesla's day) that we would get the same benefits from a video call as a face-to-face conversation. And this can work with a sophisticated video conferencing setup. But for a chat on the phone it's a disaster.

There seem to be a number of reasons for this. One is that a smartphone is too up close and personal. It doesn't seem quite as bad on a computer where you can sit well back from the camera, because the view will take in a fair amount of the room. But on a smartphone video call, the other person's face pretty much fills the screen. To have an actual conversation with a person whose face fills your vision to that extent you would need to be around 10cm away from their face - a position that we just don't have conversations in, even with intimates, let alone strangers.

Another difficulty is focus. Although good listeners spend a lot of time looking at the person they are talking to, they also look away a fair amount, if only for fractions of a second. A solid focus on someone's face is intimidating. But in a video call, the other person is pretty much constantly looking straight at you.

Finally (I'm sure there are more issues, but these are the three that occurred to me), we don't always want the exposure that comes with being seen. A telephone is useful for many conversations precisely because we don't want to give too much away, whether it's because we're answering the phone in our pyjamas, because the room is a mess, or because it makes it easier to lie.

So poor old Edmund failed on all three, but the v-phones were arguably the most interesting fail because it's technology we can use, yet mostly choose not to.