Brian Clegg's Blog, page 60

Mobile printing for Apple-heads - review

I'm sure I'm not alone in finding that I'm increasingly doing stuff on mobile devices - in my case iPhone and iPad - that I used to do on a desktop computer. If, for instance, I just want to make a quick entry on a simple spreadsheet, it can often be easier to pull it up on a mobile device. And as long the document is one where the screen size isn't too much of an issue, it generally works very well - unless I want to print something.
Of course, you can print from iPhones and iPads if your printers support their AirPrint standard - but, inevitably, neither of mine do. (Printer aficionados might spot that my laser printer is around 15 years old.) However, I can now merrily print from the iPhone and iPad anywhere in the house, thanks to a nifty little package called Printopia.
This isn't an app - I use the standard 'send to printer' option from the mobile device. But Printopia is a cunning little add-on that sits on my Mac, which brings up my printers (and optionally various other destinations, like sending the print to Evernote or the computer) as if they were the real thing.
There's a free trial version, but it's one of the few add-ons I have willingly paid for, because it is solid and it just works. Once it's installed, it's controlled from the standard Mac settings panel (shown above) - but you rarely have to do this, because Printopia is transparent - it just lurks in the background and pretends to be AirPrint printers.
Of course, because the add-on runs on a Mac you have to have a Mac on the same network as your printers and it has to be powered up (though not active - Printopia works fine if the Mac's asleep).
I know 'people who use iPhones/iPads and have a Mac on the same network as their printers' is probably a relatively small cross-section of the world. But for those of us who fit in this niche, Printopia's well worth a try.

You don't have to be a sadist, but...

I was recently doing an interview about science and science fiction to support my recent book Ten Billion Tomorrows and along the way I had to explain that it's not surprising that fiction (science or otherwise) usually has bad things happening in it, because without problems and challenges, there's not much of a story.

This is something that is well-known in writing circles. Almost all fiction can be summarised as 'Obstacle arises or something terrible happens. Protagonist tries to deal with it.' He or she may, or may not succeed, but without those problems, there really isn't a story. 'People have a nice time,' simply doesn't work.

But what I haven't seen discussed before is what effect this constant need to make characters suffer has on the writer. As writers, we either want to, or have to, write. (For many writers it seems to be the latter. We don't seem to have much choice in the matter.) And to write fiction we have to put our characters in difficult positions and make them suffer. So does that make us virtual sadists, getting a kick out of the suffering of our invented personas?

To date, I have published two novels. The first,  a young adult SF novel, Xenostorm Rising , has a protagonist whose parents go into hiding, leaving him to fend for himself. YA authors frequently have to find ways to rip teenagers from the safety of their families, to give them the kind of independence that the Famous Five achieved simply by having a scientist uncle who didn't give a damn. Without that, the YA protagonists can't really do their stuff - but it does put the author in an unenviable position of having to either kill off or remove parents (or make them truly horrible), always a delicate task.

In the second of my novels, the murder mystery A Lonely Height , my central character, Capel, gets off pretty lightly (don't worry, he will suffer significantly more angst in the second book in the series), but of course it's inherent in a murder mystery that a fair number of the characters will be having a horrible time, and it's rare that the detective gets away with Midsomer Murders style domestic bliss for long. (I really wish that simpering wife would do something truly evil.)

Realistically, whenever we venture into fiction, the chances are that one or more characters is going to suffer. So, while you don't have to be a sadist to be a fiction author, it arguably makes the process of writing that bit more enjoyable if you are.

Is objectification always a bad thing?

It's all too easy to take a widely accepted statement as a universal truth. But if we are to be thinking people, rather than knee-jerk puppets, we should always question anything presented as such a truth. So, for instance, we all know it's wrong to objectify people. But is it really? Is there any scientific basis for this assumption, or is it based on 'common sense' that objectification is inherently a bad thing?

The reason I bring it up is two recent discussions on Facebook. One was on the matter of Poldark, the BBC TV series. As usually seems to be the case with this programme, the main topic was the body of the actor playing the eponymous Mr P. This is surely just as much objectification as the old, thankfully departed Page 3 girls in the Sun, and my immediate reaction was to condemn it. But I really couldn't, because it was hard to see what harm was being done. If the women involved had been making the remarks directly to the actor, then it certainly would have been inappropriate, but is a touch of objectification really such a bad thing when it comes to images (still or moving)? After all, is n'tthat what we do whenever we produce a photograph or a painting with a person in it? Surely we shouldn't be banning all representation of people?

The second controversial discussion was one I started, having seen a couple of men haplessly attempting and failing to select a packet of nappies in a supermarket. I said 'It may be sexist, but still funny watching men in supermarket, unable to decide which pack of nappies to buy.' I got the response below:


Leaving aside the fact that it was a joke, not a 'liberal trope' (what's liberal about it, anyway? Liberals think men make great parents), in effect when we engage a stereotype like this we are once again objectifying. And certainly some stereotypes can be misused. But they are also very useful shorthand communication tools, and personally I think, in this instance, totally justified.

Is all objectification acceptable? Probably not. But has the pendulum swung too far against it? I suspect so.

Documentary downer

It used to be ever so middle class to deny watching much television. About the only things it was acceptable to say that you viewed were the news, plays and documentaries. It was almost a mark of being educated that you liked documentaries. But, personally speaking, I have real problems with them. In general, documentaries bore me.

This can be a bit embarrassing when someone says 'Did you see Horizon on quantum physics?' or 'Did you see that latest David Attenborough?' Because I won't have done. I've never successfully watched a full episode of a David Attenborough documentary. Admittedly it's partly because wildlife films are rarely about science, but I think the main problem is that I'm too word-oriented. I enjoy good story-telling TV, but I find that factual programmes manage to take about two pages of text and stretch it into an hour's worth of documentary. I'd much rather read the two pages. (This is also why I can't be bothered with the YouTube videos people are always saying I should watch.)


So I wasn't the ideal person for someone near and dear to persuade to watch the Netflix-streamed documentary  Cowspiracy . Apparently this anti-animal farming documentary is turning people into vegetarians in droves. I must admit, my immediate response to it was a strong urge to go and get a hamburger, but I'm perverse like that.

First the good news about it. It made a couple of decent points that would have made up a whole page in a book on the subject. It is ridiculous that swathes of the Amazon rainforest are being cut down to raise cattle. And American levels of beef consumption are ridiculous. And it's true that most green protest groups ignore the issue. The filmmaker showed lots of green movement representatives looking embarrassed when he brought the subject up. This was presented as being because they are funded by agribusiness (and that may be true with some US groups). But to me it came across more as embarrassment because they didn't want to admit their ignorance. Given green groups' knee-jerk response to nuclear power, it doesn't surprise me at all that they ignore farming as not having the right image for their campaigns.

But. A lot of the rest of the documentary had me shouting 'That's not true!' at the screen. (Sadly, given the subject, I didn't think at the time to mutter 'Bullshit.')

I think the biggest problem with Cowspiracy was that it was totally Americas-centric. I don't think they interviewed anyone who wasn't from America, and it was all done from the viewpoint of the pretty much unique American approach to agriculture, plus their vast meat consumption (nearly twice as much as Europeans) - but their statistics were then scaled up as if it represented how the rest of the world would become. Most hilarious in this respect were comments on dairy, given the fact significant chunks of the world can't even consume it, as they don't have the appropriate gene.

So, for instance, we had pompous American 'experts' telling us that wherever you can raise animals, you could do better raising crops. I'd like to see what crops they would grow on the Welsh mountains instead of having sheep eat grass. There were also long (long) swathes of the film about water consumption, telling us how much water we use to raise a pound of beef (all in gallons, of course). But they didn't point out a) how much this varies (I don't think those sheep are given much water) and b) how almost all the water 'consumed' in raising animals is rapidly released back into the wild. If a cow contained all the water they said was used in raising it, it would be the size of a skyscraper.

Of course America uses lots of water inappropriately for agriculture (strangely, the documentary didn't say how, for example, the almond industry, used to make make milk for the vegans the film praised, was one of the worst examples) - but it's misleading to suggest that somehow raising animals consumes vast amounts of water in some kind of permanent way. It leads to short term issues, particularly in regions of the US that aren't naturally water rich, but not to long-term global problems.

There were without doubt seriously dubious 'facts' in play. We were repeatedly told that animal agriculture produced 51% of greenhouse gasses (as CO2 equivalent). This was stated as 'fact'. Yet the figure comes from a single, non-peer reviewed paper, where the scientific consensus is around 18% - cherry picking at its worst.

However, the biggest problem was an either/or attitude. It's the same logical fallacy you often see used by Intelligent Design creationists. They say 'if mechanism A can't explain a particular biological feature then it must have been a designer. But it just means A is wrong, not B is right. Here it was 'the way Americans eat and raise meat is unsustainable.' True. So the world must stop eating meat. Which simply doesn't follow in any logical fashion.

Most hilarious were a set of images towards the end where the documentary maker 'saved' a chicken from being killed and fed assorted cows. Yet his entire argument up to this point was we shouldn't raise animals. So he should have been killing them, not 'saving' them. All emotion, no reasoning.
As you might gather, I wasn't convinced by Cowspiracy, though it did emphasise just how bad the American situation is. But more than that, it made me surer than ever that I am not the right audience for a documentary.

This has been a  green heretic  production.

Magical fantasy - The Watchmaker of Filigree Street - review

I'm not a great fan of the dominant 'swords and sorcery' arm of fantasy (think Game of Thrones), but I love real world fantasies, where a fantasy element creeps into an otherwise ordinary world - the kind of thing authors like Ray Bradbury, Gene Wolfe and Neil Gaiman excel at. The Watchmaker of Filigree Street promised to be just such a book, and I was not disappointed.

Set in Victorian England against a backdrop of terrorist activities by Irish nationalists, the book (presumably due to author Natasha Pulley's personal experience) unusually mixes English and Japanese cultures of the time. What is striking about the book, reminiscent of one of my favourite books, The Night Circus , is a sense of the fantastical and magic in the air. The very solid and steam-driven world of Victorian England is set against both the Japanese village (where Sullivan conducts the first performance of the Mikado) and the exotic clockwork creations of the eponymous watchmaker.

It's in these remarkable constructions, from a clockwork octopus to a watch with a form of clockwork GPS that Pulley's imagination beautifully runs riot. While these creations are certainly fantasy, in the sense of being far beyond the realistic capabilities of clockwork, they are gorgeously conceived, and fit well with the enigmatic character of the Japanese nobleman-come-watchmaker who has surprising mental abilities. Pulley also has a genuinely interesting central character in telegraph operator and failed pianist Thaniel Steepleton, and the first two acts of the book manages to combine this wonderful touch of fantasy with a very engaging storyline.

There are a few issues. The final act sags somewhat, partly because it is so complex, which means it takes a lot of untangling, and partly because of the disappointing approach to the main female character. This is a male-dominated book, so it was good to have a strong female character who was a physicist, especially one who is attempting the Michelson-Morley experiment 3 years before it actually took place (though several years after Michelson devised the interferometer she is using). However, she is not handled very well by the writer, especially in her bizarre activities during that final act. (And she's not a very good physicist, as she regards a null result from the experiment as a bad thing, rather than the fascinating thing it really was, and that any real physicist would have considered it to be.)

Yet despite not being up to The Night Circus on overall performance, this is an impressive first novel and well worth reading if you like this kind of fantasy - one of my favourite fantasy books of 2015. I'd certainly be queueing up to buy a sequel.

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street is available from amazon.co.uk and amazon.com.

Science Fiction at its finest - The Thing Itself - Review

This latest book from the master of intellectual science fiction, Adam Roberts, is a mind-bending delight - and nothing like the combination of the title and the cover suggests (yet even this deception is not entirely straightforward). Anyone versed in the genre would instantly make the leap, with the combination of 'The Thing' and a polar setting, to the classic science fiction film The Thing - and indeed Roberts does make a passing bow to this in the opening of the book. However, the monster in the movie is about as crude as they come - here, what we experience as alien is both horrible and transfigured as a possible reality for the concept of god.
Another classic theme we meet in the book is SETI - the search for extraterrestrial intelligence - but, once again, Roberts subverts the standard genre concepts. Here what is alien is not just not-human, but involves a different perception of the universe itself.
The way that Roberts makes this near-impossible portrayal of something truly alien come to life is to invoke the work of Immanuel Kant, where the 'Thing Itself' in the title is not so much a monster in the manner of the movie, but Kant's concept of the 'Ding an sich', which seems to be rather like Plato's world outside the cave where we only perceive via the shadows we see in the cave. However, in Kant's case this is taken to an extreme, where human perception of aspects of the universe like space, time and causality are simply our veneer on the underlying 'thing itself' which could be perceived totally differently by an alien species.
If this all sounds a bit heavy, it can be in places. There certainly is an awful lot of exposition and discussion of Kant and the relevance of his ideas to physics - and the implications of finding a way of messing around with the 'modalities' we perceive like space and time. In fact, while I'm in warning mode, I ought to also say there's a lot of sex of various ilks, and the book has my least favourite structure for a novel, having a main storyline in alternate chapters with a series of apparently unconnected chapters set in other times and places. I always find with this kind of structure that I want to get back to the main thread and tend to skip-read the intervening chapters - not helped in this case by one of them being written in a Joyce-like stream of consciousness that I really couldn't be bothered with.
So, without doubt this book is sometimes hard work. But it repays the effort of reading because it is so cleverly written (those apparently unconnected chapters slot nicely in by the end), because nothing is what you expect it to be, and because the idea of taking Kant's metaphysical waffling and turning it into science fiction is absolutely genius, producing one of the few ever glimpses I've ever seen of something truly alien in science fiction. And part of it is set in Swindon. What more can you ask?
I ought to briefly say something about the 'science fiction' label. One of the reviews quoted on the back of the book says 'in the tradition of Swift, Orwell and Atwood', which smacks to me of someone in typical literary fashion considering that something is 'not really science fiction' if it is well written and clever. It's a bit like the way I was recently interviewed about science fiction by a journalist who said that something I referred to presumably wasn't science fiction because there were no ray guns and spaceships. I am absolutely sure that Adam Roberts would proudly say that this book really is science fiction, and so he should, because this is classic SF material.
I can say without any doubt that this by far the best science fiction book I've read all year. I can also say that it won't be to everyone's taste - so don't blame me if you don't like it - but to some it will be a revelation of what science fiction can be. This is the kind of science fiction that should be winning the Booker Prize. Simple as that.
The Thing Itself is available from amazon.co.uk and amazon.com.

A fair amount of dribbling - review

If you don't enjoy book reviews, I must apologise: as I work through my Christmas gift pile there will be quite a few.

I am a huge fan of Bill Bryson, so his new tour of Britain, The Road to Little Dribbling was an essential for me. I absolutely loved the way he gave an outsider's view to both delight in and be infuriated by Britain in his original Notes from a Small Island, and I expected more of the same. And to a degree I got them.

As usual with a Bryson book there is a mix of anecdotes, fascinating factoids and shrewd observations. I must admit these days I'm a little more suspicious of his content after reading he does fabricate a tad, and certainly his factoids are occasionally a little adrift from reality, but on the whole he knows his stuff, and this is the kind of book it's very difficult to resist reading out little snippets to friends and relations as you go. (In fact, I didn't resist.) Bryson manages once more to entertain most of the way, with a mix of enthusiasm for Britain and the good aspects of British values, and pointed remarks when we get it wrong. He has a clear and genuine love of the British countryside and knows what makes an attractive town. And at least one anecdote is genuinely gripping.

However, there are some issues. At times it seems as if what he really wants is Britain in the 1950s. He moans, for instance, about menus with fancy food and pesto, wanting us to go back to prawn cocktails and black forest gateaux... but at the same time he eats a lot of Indian food, which you wouldn't have been able to get back then. In reality British food has never been better, and this is just faux nostalgia. It's a bit like the way in his US books he longs for the old moth-eaten motels (which his family detest). It works there, because he's only half-serious, and because he has his family to put him right. Here, traveling on his own and taking it all pretty seriously, he just sounds strangely misplaced.

Bryson also moans about the demise of small town shops - which is sad, if inevitable - but also seems to moan about all the cafes that have sprung up, despite seeming to spend a lot of time in them. And it's just silly to bemoan the passing of old gentlemen's outfitters, which he admits he would never shop in, simply because they are quaint. It's not that he's missing the target when he shows how a lack of funds has meant that, for instance, many seaside towns have declined, but to equate this with 'everything was better in the past' isn't a useful or realistic observation.

The other complaint I have is that he doesn't give us the same degree of visit as he has in other books. It all seems a little routine and summary, perhaps because he has done some of it before. So we don't really get much of a feel for many of the places he visits, nor the same kind of delight at recognising quirks of places we know. He does at least, however, upgrade Cambridge in his opinion, after slating it in his first book in comparison with the far less attractive Oxford. (I may be biassed in this statement, but I genuinely find Cambridge far more pleasant to stroll around.)

Don't get me wrong, there's a lot still to like about this book. But it is a little too mired in the past - he's not that old - and there's too much of a feel that Bryson is doing it by numbers. I'm still giving it a 4 star rating, but only because the systems don't generally allow a 3.5.

The Road to Little Dribbling is available from amazon.co.uk and amazon.com.

Quick Christmas Quiz

It's that time of year when no one can be bothered to do any real work. So here's a few little Christmas challenges for you. Answers down the bottom.

1. Which well-known Christmas song is almost always performed as just the chorus without the less familiar first verse starting like this:



2. Just mixing up my imp nieces? What Christmas delicacy am I cooking?

3. The Twelve days of Christmas song has 11 what?

4. Which Christmassy Poirot story by Agatha Christie is set in the fourteenth century manor house Kings Lacey (bizarrely made a 1920s building in the TV version)?

5. Ilex and Hedera. Not two rejected reindeer but...?

No Googling, please - all your own work.

While you get your answers together, the ad break...

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If you enjoy a little mental quizzing, there's only one book to get your hands on this Christmas:


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And here come the answers:
1. White Christmas2. Mince pies3. Pipers piping4. The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding5. Holly and Ivy

What is a science quiz book?

If you are panicking about last minutes presents, I can (in an entirely unbiased way) heartily recommend my bargain priced science quiz book How Many Moons Does the Earth Have?  You can get it at book stores, Amazon.co.uk and (with free worldwide delivery) Book Depository. But there has been a certain amount of confusion about what's actually in it.

The book is divided into two 'quizzes' - each has six rounds of eight questions, plus two special rounds with things like pictures questions and puzzles. So you could use it in a traditional pub quiz format. But the main intention is just to read through and enjoy testing yourself, so it's much more than just a collection of questions and answers. It's probably best if I come up with a specific example, and as an anonymous commenter berated me about doing a Santa-related post yesterday, I know exactly which one to give.
A question page looks like this, with the question itself and a few 'while you're thinking' factoids... but the answer is over the page, so you can sort out your answer before peeking.

As we don't have a page turn on the blog......I'll give you a moment to think......Before you scroll down......As the equivalent of a page turn......


So it's not just the answer, but also an exploration of the topic in a little more detail, plus a book where you can read more (all the referenced books are detailed at the back).
In case you've now realised this is something you need to buy for those last minute gifts, here's the purchase details again: you can get it at book stores, Amazon.co.uk and (with free worldwide delivery) Book Depository.

Santa logic

I was impressed to read some impressively logical thinking about movies featuring Santa Claus / Father Christmas the other day. You know the kind of film I mean. Those like Elf and The Santa Clause, where cynical adults who don't believe in the jolly rotund fellow get their come-uppance. There's a distinct logical flaw in these movies.

Before I disclose the gaping hole, I need to address an obvious objection to my endeavour. Surely to worry about logic in a merry seasonal fantasy misses the point? However, I've always argued that, while fantasy can clearly change whatever rules it likes, once the nature of the fantasy world is established, it should be logically consistent. This is why I don't have trouble with vampires and werwolves and slayers and magic in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, because that is the part of the rules of the world. But I do have a bit of an issue when a hobbyist manages to come up with a robot that is all but indistinguishable from a human being - because the technology in Buffy is the technology of our world, and that just isn't possible.

So back to the Santa flaws. (It's just one flaw really, but 'Santa flaws' sounds much better.) The article I was reading (sadly I've lost the link) pointed out that, in these films, Santa Claus is real and goes around the world delivering (at least one) present(s) to good children on Christmas Eve. That's fine. That's part of the premise of the movie. But bearing in mind these presents magically turn up in everyone's house each Christmas morning, why would anyone not believe in Santa? That just doesn't make sense. And without logic, the magic falls apart.

Ho, ho, no.