Brian Clegg's Blog, page 72

Why less can be more in a bookshop

I have a confession that will make most authors' lib people - you know, the ones who unfriend you on Facebook if you confess to buying anything from Amazon - quake in their sandals: I find independent bookshops intimidating.

I don't like their often dark, claustrophobia inducing interiors, and I don't like being talked to by staff. (Please note, Mary Portas, who regularly advises that good customer services involves welcoming customers and trying to help them. I don't want to be chatted to by a stranger. I'd rather help myself. If I want assistance I will ask for it. If your staff approach me, I will leave without making a purchase.)

So it was with some nervousness that I entered the Mad Hatter Bookshop in the pretty (or to put it another way, Cotswold tourist trappy) location of Burford, surprisingly close to my no-one-could-call-it-tourist-trappy home of Swindon. But I'm glad I did. I was even glad to be welcomed as I came in, though I admit if other shop owners said 'You're Brian Clegg, aren't you?' I would be happier with the concept, Ms Portas please note.

The reason I was particularly glad was that I discovered the real advantage a shop like this can have over Waterstones. (And, no, I don't mean the advantage of selling hats.) A largish Waterstones falls uncomfortably between two stools. It can't complete with an online store on stock. So if I want a specific book, half the time it's not there and I'm much better off going online. But, on the other hand, the Waterstones is too big to browse eclectically, so the customer tends to limit herself to the categories she always visits. And that's a real pity.

I think most of us have experienced the fun of browsing through the bookshelves of a friend with interesting tastes, discovering all sorts of unexpected pleasures. Looking through the shelves at Mad Hatter was very much like that.  It was small enough that I could sensibly look through the entire stock, including subjects I'd never normally think of sampling. Even the fiction section wasn't big enough to be overwhelming. It had exactly that same feel of looking through the large collection belonging to a friend who has a very wide range of tastes. And that meant far more opportunity to discover something new and interesting.

I'm not saying that I have totally got over my nervousness of indie shops, particularly the ones that feature crystals or alternative therapies in the windows. But I will certainly be inclined to take the plunge more often.

You can find Mad Hatter on Burford's steeply sloping High Street, on the right as you look up the hill.

Innovative science blogging

The first association many of us may have with marine biologists (stereotype alert) is that they only do it to get paid beach holidays in exotic locations, but at April's Guardian Science Communication Masterclass* I met Tom Evans, who is using his blog in an innovative way to get across what's new and interesting in his field. He is hosting a regular hot marine biology news award.

The traditional approach, used by both science bloggers and the likes of Physics World is to do a regular roundup of interesting science stories. This is fine, but hardly original. Tom is essentially doing the same in his Beneath the Waves offering, but as well as giving edited highlights of what's interesting from the past fortnight, he gives readers the opportunity to vote for the (entirely nominal) Beneath the Waves Award. It's not a big change, but somehow it makes the whole thing significantly more engaging.

Of course all the research is valuable, and there is the argument that such an approach could trivialise the work, but I think if it's taken as a bit of fun that, apart from anything else, gives the reader an incentive to look at all the topics not just the ones of immediate interest, it gives the blog an interesting edge.

There are many ways to communicate science, and blogging is already a relatively innovative and flexible one. But this additional detail, for me, makes Tom Evans' approach a winner.

* The Science Communication Masterclass proved so popular it is being run again in July. Details here. 

Does architecture explain our problem with coalitions?

A more representative House?In yesterday's paper there was a report of a poll saying that in the face of another no-overall-majority election, over 60% of respondents would prefer a proportional representation system. (Where were they when we voted on it?)

Yet many European countries manage quite happily with coalition after coalition. Why do we find them so difficult to deal with? My suspicion is it's a matter of architecture. Specifically, the psychological impact of the layout of the House of Commons.

Most parliaments are laid out in a curve, but by putting the two biggest parties directly facing each other, there is a requirement that we don't consider what would arguably be the only coalition that could genuinely argue that it had popular support - a Conservative/Labour coalition.

I know at this point supporters of both parties are probably falling to the floor and frothing at the mouth, but in many respects the parties aren't hugely distant, and a compromise between the two would ensure that we got through the maximum number of policies that had public support. Of course the negotiations would be painful - but politicians have to do something for their wages.

Whether or not it makes sense, I suspect we don't consider such a coalition - I haven't even heard it mentioned as a possibility - because of the seating plan of the House. And that isn't really a good enough reason.

Lotteries, plane crashes and lightning

As anyone in the final week before an election knows, statistics are easy to misuse, whether accidentally or intentionally. It really quite saddens me to see friends, who know enough science not to massage figures to present the case they want, cherry picking, mislabelling and generally giving statistics as much mangling as they like as long as it shows the opposition in a bad light (it's odd, but they much more often seem to use stats to show how another party is bad, rather than the positives of their favoured party).

Occasionally I point out one of these errors, but this tends to get me labelled an enemy of the cause, so it probably isn't worth it. However, there's another example of statistics being manipulated where I shouldn't feel the wroth of political sensibilities, and that is on the matter of lotteries.

For some reason those with a scientific bent love to produce a flurry of probabilities that show how entering lotteries is for suckers, because the odds are so astronomical. As I point out in Dice World , my book on probability and randomness, this is often due to a total misunderstanding of the nature of entering a lottery. Seen as an investment, it is certainly ridiculous. However, seen as a game, it's a different matter. What lottery players pay for is not the statistical benefit of the prize times the chance of winning - an unimpressive payback - but the anticipation. It's about the chase, more than the kill.

Another popular way to label lottery players mathematical losers is to compare the odds of winning with those of being in a fatal plane crash, or being struck by lightning, which are considered to be on the same order of magnitude. Here there's a double error. As well as not understanding the gaming nature of lottery play, these comparisons aren't even good probability, for several reasons.

First, the comparison is only ever made with the probability of winning the jackpot. Pretty well all lottery games have a range of prizes depending how many balls you match. Matching three balls is significantly more likely to occur than six. Okay the prize is a lot less, but the fact remains that with the UK Lotto, for instance, you can win not with the usual 1 in 14 million chance given for the jackpot, but more like 1 in 54 for all the possible ways of winning. That's a very different figure.

Secondly, the UK lottery has several games. If instead of playing the Lotto you play Thunderball there is a significantly better chance of winning. Okay, the main prize is only £500,000 - but 'only' applied to £500,000 is something of an oddity. Here the jackpot remains a painful 1 in 8 million away (though this beats Lotto), but the chances of winning plunge to the very accessible 1 in 13. if the naysayers are telling me that's my chance of being struck by lightning, someone up there doesn't like me.

And finally, in making the comparison with messy ways to die, our statistical misery guts are committing a classic statistical error - applying a statistic from a skewed population to everyone in the population. If you buy a lottery ticket, the stated statistics apply to your single ticket. But you can buy more than one lottery ticket and change those statistics. (With Thunderball, for instance, you can guarantee a win with 14 tickets.) Those struck by lightning or in a plane crash don't have an equivalent option. Even more interestingly, the statistics for these two hazards aren't those that apply to most of the population at large - and are way out for many individuals.

Take the chances of being in a plane crash. Clearly this depends on how frequently you fly. As some people fly weekly or even daily, their chances will push the averaged probability up significantly. If you only fly for a holiday once a year, your chances will be significantly lower. Even more so for me - I've flown once in the last 25 years, and have no intention of flying again. So don't tell me the chances of my being in a plane crash are the same as my winning the lottery.

A similar argument applies to being struck by lightning. People who spend a lot of time in at-risk environments are more likely to be struck than those who avoid exposed high places. So golfers and national park rangers, for instance, will have a significantly higher risk than a city dweller, pushing up the apparent risk.

I'm not denying that you are vanishingly unlikely to buy a ticket that will win the jackpot in a major lottery. But I do think those who use probability and statistics to sneer at lottery players, ought to think through their maths (and psychology) a little more.

An absorbing story

Experimental carbon capture panelFor the last few years we've put climate change on a back burner because of the financial crisis. But it is not going to go away. The Green Party wants us all to abandon the use of oil and gas to move to low carbon sources of energy generation like wind and solar (they conveniently forget that nuclear is low carbon). However, like most of the Green Party's manifesto, this is a desire based more on hope than an understanding of human beings.

Frankly, a much better way of getting people to do the right thing than forcing the hair shirt option on them is to make it easy. So, for instance, I would leap at having an electric car as a runaround if you could buy a Leaf or a Zoe for the price of an Aygo. But charge three times as much and I'm not going to be in the queue.

When it comes to power generation from oil and gas (and even, dare we mention it, coal), the Cinderella technology is carbon capture and storage (CCS). The developers of CCS recognise that we are not going to ignore out fossil fuel reserves, but that it should be possible to use them while at the same time taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, so the net contribution is zero or even negative. At one time the British government was quite enthusiastic about CCS... but then withdrew most of the funding.

There are a number of mechanisms for storing carbon dioxide away when it has been captured, but we don't have very efficient means of doing the capture in the first place. So I was interested to see this piece in Physics World on a synthetic material for capturing CO2 from the atmosphere. Remarkably, this stuff is 1,000 times more efficient than trees at sucking in the carbon dioxide. And let's face it, trees are very slow absorbers (which is one of the problems with using trees in carbon offsetting programmes).

The substance used is a resin that collect between 10 and 50 per cent of the CO2 passing over a collection panel made from it. Of course this doesn't just remove the CO2 from a power station exhaust - but it doesn't matter. Carbon dioxide is carbon dioxide. As long as you can hoover it up fast enough, you can balance out the output.

Apparently you would need about 100 million large collectors to totally counter the world's carbon emissions - but that's a huge step forward, and even reducing emissions by a small percentage would help.

The biggest problem with this approach is dumping the CO2 once it is captured. The collectors would become saturated in about an hour, needing replacing in some kind of conveyor system that takes them to deposit their load, when they can be reused. The CO2  naturally emerges from the resin in a humid atmosphere (so the CCS devices would have to be sited in dry locations) - it could then be taken away in a number of ways.

The concept isn't perfect. Although releasing in a damp atmosphere is easy to do, it also limits their value in, say, the UK. And there would be no point using such an approach unless the energy used in swapping out the panels and dumping and storing the CO2 was a lot less than the energy produced in emitting the carbon dioxide in the first place.

Even so, there can be little doubt that this is a step in the right direction.

This has been a  green heretic  production.

A bright burner

When I read about them in my youth, there seemed something magical in the description of the acetylene or carbide lamps that were used on early motor vehicles. The idea that adding water to the lamp started a process that could generate a flame seemed wonderfully counter-intuitive.

But acetylene, the unusually triple bonded inflammable organic compound that was generated by a reaction between water and calcium carbide is more than just a flash in the lamp. Find out more about this zippy little molecule, in my latest Royal Society of Chemistry podcast.  Take a listen by clicking to pop over to its page on the RSC site.

Fed up of tribalism in politics

There is much wailing, moaning and gnashing of teeth* on the ineffectual nature of politics and politicians in the current general election, with the newer thrusting parties like the SNP, the Greens and UKIP (there's an unholy alliance) blaming the old guard and the Westminster elite.

Actually, I'd suggest that most of the problems with politics are caused by tribalism, and nowhere is tribalism stronger than amongst the likes of the SNP, the Greens and UKIP. They aren't the solution, they are even more dramatically more of the same.

I suggest it's time to redesign parliamentary democracy for the 21st century. After all, we don't do medicine the way they did back when Parliament was establish - why should the democratic processes stay the same in an internet interconnected world?

Here's a few suggestions:
MPs become solely local representatives. Their full time role is helping their constituents.As well as a local MP, we vote for policies, which have to be fully independently costed before the election (it may be better for there to be a rolling set of policies with 'NHS week, defence week, education week etc. to avoid overload)Each policy has a champion who is not an MP but an expert in the area, whose role after a policy is adopted is to manage it into practice using the civil service.Of course there is a lot of detail you could moan about. For instance:How would you balance the economy if people could vote for any old policy? Clearly you couldn't expect it just to happen by osmosis. There would have to be a balancing mechanism where you could only change policy to one that costed more if other changes enabled funding to be released.But what if people voted for a policy that is bad? Erm, this is democracy. The most contentious issue is with things like the death penalty and ring-fencing the aid budget, where the 'elite' generally has a different view to the larger populous. The line between democracy and mob rule is an interesting one. I'm really not sure about this one, as I'm with the elite on both those examples, but I don't think it highlights a problem with my suggestion, but rather a problem with democracy as a concept.And there will be lots of other picky details. Well, of course. This is a fuzzy handwaving idea, not a proper proposal. You wouldn't expect to sort out politics in half an hour. But I still think that this is the kind of radical re-think we need. Anything else is just tinkering.
* I can't type 'gnashing of teeth' without retelling the old Ian Paisley joke. 
Paisley is preach hellfire and damnation and tells his audience that when the sinners among them go to hell there will be a wailing and a gnashing of teeth.
'I'm sorry, Mr Paisley,' says an elderly lady from the audience. 'But I have no teeth.'
'Teeth,' responds Paisley firmly, 'will be provided.'

Enlightening the International Year of Light

It seems that 2015 is the International Year of Light. And to be honest, I'm all in favour of it. Not just because one of my favourite books, Light Years is out in a new edition this year*, but also because I can't think of a better topic to show how science can be essential, fun and fascinating.

Let's face it, we wouldn't have much of a life without light. In fact we wouldn't exist. Nor would anything else. It's not just a matter of not being able to see. Light also provides us with the energy to live. Apart from nuclear power, tidal power from the Moon and geothermal energy, light is responsible for all the energetic input to our lives. It's light from the Sun that keeps the Earth at temperatures that support life, and light from the Sun that powers the weather system.

More fundamentally at a quantum level, photons of light are the carriers of the electromagnetic force. No light, no electromagnetism. And that doesn't just mean no electricity and magnets. It's electromagnetism that enables us to interact with matter. It's electromagnetism that stops you falling through the floor - and that is the reason that the floor exist at all. Without photons - light - atoms wouldn't exist. So it's pretty important stuff.

I've far to little space to cover everything that's fascinating about light (you'd need a whole book... ahem) but a few pointers:
Light can travel faster than light – in the strange world of quantum mechanical tunnelling, photons carrying the signal of Mozart’s 40th symphony have travelled at over four times the speed of light.We could soon be computing with light – electricity just isn’t flexible enough to keep up as computers get quicker and quicker. Soon the insides of a computer could be full of a spider-web network of light as data slams back and forth through thin air.You can’t run away from a laser – If you were to travel at 99 per cent of the speed of light away from someone shooting you with a laser, the light would still come towards you at the full 299,792,458 metres per second. Unlike anything else, however fast you move away from or towards light, it still comes at you at the same speed.The human eye can see a candle flame 10 miles away – your eye is remarkably sensitive, needing only a five or six of the individual photons that make up a light beam to trigger a response. The most distant thing most of us can see with the naked eye is the Andromeda galaxy, 2.5 million light years away.Ordinary colour vision works using the three primary colours. Night vision is quite different, registering only brightness. But there is a cutover period (called mesopic vision) when both types of vision occur together. It’s as if there was a whole new colour added to the spectrum that hadn’t existed before. Sight at this dusky light level has strange qualities – perhaps why so many ghosts and other phenomena are seen at dusk.Algae rules – more light energy from the sun is absorbed by photosynthesis by tiny algae in the sea than by all the plants on the land.Special materials have been used to slow down light to walking pace or even bring it to a temporary halt.Our eyes are incredibly flexible – light on a sunny day is 100 times brighter than a typical office, but our eyes balance out the difference. Full moonlight, which we can see quite well by, is around 300,000 times weaker than sunlight.A waterspout inspired fibre optics – the fibre optics that carry most of our telephone and computer signals on beams of light were inspired by noticing that light followed a spout of water, gushing out of a hole in a tank.So if you felt any urge to snigger when you read it was International Year of Light, don't. If anything deserves its own year, light does. And that's why I'm so fond of Light Years.


* This is the third edition, and for the first time I've been allowed to include as an appendix, as I always planned, a set of original documents from the history of understanding of light, including Newton's letter on light and colour.

Doing the science communication thing

The Guardian's rather wavy HQ and home of the MasterclassOn Saturday I had a great time up at Grauniad Towers, curating a Science Communication Masterclass. (Sorry, I hate that 'curating' word in this context, but it's what the G people call it.)

Marcus Chown, Angela Saini, Jenny Rohn and I covered science for magazines and newspapers, TV and radio, books and blogs with a really responsive and interesting audience of 50+ people.

It was a full day event, so it would be over the top even to give a summary, but a few snippety takeaways:
From Marcus: an article (for newspapers particularly) should be like a fractal. You should be able to take, for example, the first part of it and it should still give you look a bit like the whole. From Angela: getting into broadcast media is a bit like getting into Fort Knox. Have a showreel. Oh, and don't put a lot of effort into smartening up the sound quality of a recording: the BBC can do it much better and quicker than you can.From Jenny: if you use pictures of your lab, make sure there are no caged animals or containers labelled 'dangerous genetically modified organism' in the background. Funny, but a serious point behind it. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but those words can be highly misleading if not carefully taken.From me: check out the mouse if slides keep moving on themselves, and record podcasts under a duvet.Just a quick explanation of my two lessons. During my talk, the slides kept backing up of their own accord. I first thought that I was accidentally pressing a button on the 'clicker' but it kept happening even when I put it down. What I discovered afterwards was that the presenter's desk had a slide-in shelf with the keyboard and mouse on it. The mouse was trapped between the shelf and the desktop, so every time I brushed against the shelf it pressed a button on the mouse. Spooky!

The duvet bit caused much amusement, but I genuinely was given this advice by a professional broadcaster/recordist. If you want a studio ambiance in your home, going under a duvet produces a suitable 'flat' soundscape. It does really work, though you feel a bit of a twit.

And no, I don't use a torch, I read my script from an iPad*.
*Other glow in the dark tablets are available.

Writers and social media

The RLFI am off this evening to sunny Bristol, where I'll be on a panel for the Royal Literary Fund, discussing the topic Social Media for Writers: Brave New World or Circle of Hell? If you are in the Bristol area and of a literary bent, please do come along and join us. It's free and starts at 7.30pm - the location is Waterside 2, The Watershed, 1 Canons Road, Harbourside, Bristol BS1 5TX.

If you aren't able to join us, just a few passing thoughts.

A platformFor quite a while now publishers have been very excited about writers (particularly book authors) having a 'platform'.

This does not mean that you should rush out and buy a train set (though feel free to do so, should you wish), but rather that you should have a mechanism for making yourself visible to as many potential readers as possible.

You might think that a publisher's website does this. After all, every book should be listed there, and they usually have some kind of author profile. Here, for instance, is mine for St Martin's Press, my main US publisher:


To be fair, it does also include a twitter feed and links to my books. But really... not only is it rather outdated, who looks at a publisher website (other than authors)? As a buyer you might go to a bookshop website, or an author's website - but it's pretty unlikely you'd even known which publisher to look at, let alone visit their site.
Given those two visit points, it's a good idea to have an author page on Amazon (here's mine) and a website (ditto) - but even these will need some first contact to encourage someone to go to them. And that's where the social media side can help.
What I can say for certain is that mentioning a new book on Twitter or Facebook or whatever won't sell lots of copies. It may well sell a handful, but don't expect floods of sales. But if you plug at social media over a reasonably lengthy period (we're talking years, not weeks), you can build up a network of contacts who will be interested in your work.
There are lots of hints and tips for doing this, but I think two are key:Don't be always selling. No one likes 'Buy, buy, buy' all the time. (Or for that matter, 'Here's my breakfast' or 'Aren't my kids amazing?') I reckon at least 90% of your output should be funny observational material or stuff that's interesting for your target market.Remember it's a conversation. Don't just broadcast, respond to others, particularly when they reply to you. The idea is to build a relationship, however stunted by the technology.It's not really possible to quantify the benefit as an author from being accessible via social media (and I'd include blogging like this as well as part of a social media platform). But if you do it right it doesn't need to take up a huge proportion of your time, potential readers will be more interested in your work, and you will benefit from the contributions of others. What's not to love?