Brian Clegg's Blog, page 74

Express excess

You might be surprised to learn that I follow the Daily Express on Facebook, but this is because the inaccuracy of their posts is often the funniest thing of the day.

This week they have excelled themselves. Let's see if you can spot the subtle difference between the headline and what appears after the first few paragraphs in the body text.

Here's the headline:


That sounds pretty definite, doesn't it. 'On collision course' in my book means 'is going to hit unless we take evasive action', which is pretty difficult to do when 'we' is the Earth.
But get through the first effusive paragraphs (by which time, apparently over half readers have stopped reading) and we get these two quotes:

Detlef Koschny, head of the near-earth object segment at the European Space Agency, said: "There is a one in a million chance that it could hit us.

and

NASA's Asteroid Watch said there is no chance the asteroid will hit Earth

Ri-i-i-ght. That's pretty conclusive, then. It's clearly on a collision course.

Friedrich lives!

I have to come clean straight away. I was already a huge fan of Friedrich when he first appeared online - and I still am in book form.

To simply consider the plot of Lucy Pepper's frankly bonkers story of a wronged mouse who takes to Quentin Tarantino levels of violence to extract his revenge (this is not a cartoon for pre-teens) is to find something entertaining, but nothing special. (I ought to say for any biologists that Friedrich has a rat grandmother, hence the tail.) However, Friedrich is so much more. 
The reason for this is artist Pepper's bewitching use of a whole range of different styles and techniques that sees characters in the cartoon sometimes drawn in pen, sometimes colour washed, sometimes 3D. Arguably Friedrich is a stunning serial doodle where Pepper uses whatever comes to hand to continue the increasingly gripping story. (At one point this features a plaster cast in a hospital, and at another an unexpected outdoor scene.) The outcome is totally unique.  It is really difficult to describe this visual treat with its mix of time travel, German-style beer Kellers and evil hench-animals. But all I can really say is that I love it.

If I have one criticism it's that these miniature works of art deserve to be bigger - I'd have liked a square format with one image per page, but I appreciate that would probably have made the cost of the paper version astronomical.

Friedrich is available as a Kindle book from Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com, but despite being significantly more expensive, I would recommend going for the paper version to get the full impact of the images. (Definitely don't go for Kindle unless you have a proper colour graphics reader, such as a Kindle Fire or iPad - it would be pointless on an e-ink reader.) You can find the paper version at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com

Missing the point of non-doms

DomAs the various parties' manifestos become clear before the general election, as usual what I really want to do is mix and match from various parties - they almost all have some good stuff on offer.

Although it's not a vote-winner, there's one point on which I'm 100% with Labour, and that's over the matter of non-doms.
Non-DomFor those who live under a bucket, or not in the UK, this is not people who aren't called Dom (like me), but those who are judged non-domiciled.
This was apparently a tax wheeze set up alongside income tax 200 years ago and that is now hopelessly out of date. A non-dom lives in the UK but is officially not a UK resident and can opt to pay tax on their earnings from outside the UK in another country.
Clearly some people find this highly lucrative, because they opt to pay up to £90,000 a year for the privilege. What is particularly bizarre is that you can be a non-dom even if you were born and spent all your life in the UK, as you can inherit it from a parent.
Labour has announced they will scrap the concept, which has resulted in the inevitable squealing from the friends-of-the-rich. Here's a typical whine from Mark Davies in The Spectator, reported in the i newspaper:

Labour claims scrapping non-dom status will raise hundreds of millions. But these figures are uncosted and there are incalculable factors, such as how many non-doms will leave the UK as a consequence.

I could point out the magnificent logical peculiarity in this argument - Davies complains that the figures are uncosted, then tells us that they couldn't be costed - but he entirely misses the point. To be honest, Labour shouldn't have even mentioned savings. Because this is not about savings. I wouldn't care if it did lose us a bit of revenue, because it is an unfair, ridiculous and outdated concept that needs doing away with. (A bit like the Royal Family, but that's a different blog post.) Sometimes government should do things that aren't about saving money, but about doing the right thing, and this is one of them.
It's not as if our non-doms can flee to another country to regain the status, because you won't find this bizarre system elsewhere. And, frankly, even if some did leave, would it be a great loss? I suspect not. The fact is that we would be doing the right thing - and it's a shame that the Conservatives can't follow suit on this one.
Photo of Dom Joly © paul bednall photography 2011

Apologies to Marcus Chown for stealing the Dom/Non-Dom joke

Snap, crackle and... what?

It's irresistible. You are eating your breakfast, and the most interesting reading in sight is the cereal packet. (It's that or more election news*.) So you start to read, and you notice that your cereal is 'fortified' with niacin. Now hang on there, cereal people. Why are you feeding me this strange chemical that sounds somehow related to nicotine? For that matter, why is my cereal so weedy that it needs fortification?

The answer comes with a decision made by government decree, but that strangely is more like to end in over-consumption than under-consumption these days. Find out more about niacin, aka vitamin B3, in my latest Royal Society of Chemistry podcast.  Take a listen by clicking to pop over to its page on the RSC site.

* This is the expected humorous form. In fact, I can't get enough election news.

Parochialism is not inherently bad

There has been a certain amount of moaning amongst the chatterati of late that we (I'm not sure if that 'we' is the British press, or the British people in general) are terrible in our parochialism, as there has been no where near as much fuss about the 148 people killed in the Garissa attack compared with the overwhelming response to the much smaller Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris.

It's certainly not true that the media have been ignoring Garissa - the last time I watched the TV news on Sunday it was the lead story, for instance, and it led on the BBC News website on at least two days. However it is the case that the level of response has been different. What surprises me here is this negative reaction, which seems to come mostly from a left wing political standpoint (e.g. seen more in the Guardian than elsewhere).

One reason is that I find it rather disturbing that these people can try to play point scoring between atrocities. They are both atrocities, committed by Muslim extremists. Playing a numbers game, pointing out how many more people were killed at Garissa seems a really callous, unpleasant attitude.

But the main thing is that I don't understand why these people consider that parochialism is inherently bad, because it is a sensible human behaviour. If you genuinely don't consider your own family of more significance to you than random strangers, you are, I would suggest, a flawed human being. Similarly we are psychologically incapable of feeling the same degree of empathy and interesting in people we don't know than our friends - again it would be bizarre if we didn't. And this also extends in a weaker form to nearby countries and or/countries with a similar culture to our own. It's perfectly natural and there's nothing wrong with such parochialism.

The only time parochialism becomes a problem is if we use it as a reason to ignore the plights of people outside our 'friends and neighbours' zone - for instance when UKIP suggest removing the International Aid Budget. That is bad parochialism. But to expect us to truly feel the same about everyone in the world is unrealistic and unnatural. Of course we empathise with those involved in Garissa. And it is important news. But we can't be expected to respond the same way as we do to something in Paris or London - any more that the reverse would be true for someone in Tanzania, if you exchanged the Paris and Garissa information.

Parochialism (or localism as it is called when people don't want to be negative) is important, because in our 'parish' we can know more and do more. It doesn't prevent us reacting to and sending aid to those beyond our particular bounds, but to argue that parochialism is a bad thing is a silly response from individuals who really don't understand human beings.

The new ban-the-bombists

Credit: Tony FrenchI am old enough to remember CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) marches, and generally speaking was always a bit wary of ban-the-bombists, particularly because there was a tendency to lump nuclear weapons in with nuclear power - I'm all in favour of a power source with very little impact on climate change - but the thought of nuclear weapons terrified my when I was younger and the threat seemed greater, and they still fill me with horror.

After watching the leaders' debate on Thursday with interest, it struck me that the Labour party was missing out on a serious trick - something emphasised in today's quick defence of the nuclear deterrent after the Conservative attacks on the subject. After all, senior Labour figures have been ban-the-bombists in the past, and I think Labour should seriously consider adding not renewing Trident and scrapping the current 'nuclear deterrent' ASAP. There are several potential benefits:
Huge savings - while I'm suspicious of the £100 billion figure, it's certainly a hell of a lotWin over lots of young undecided voters - young people, generally speaking, I suspect would support this moveClearly distinguish Labour in a way that didn’t happen in the debate - it was very much the big three versus the littlies in the debate. A 'get rid of Trident' Labour position would really differentiate themReduce SNP’s leverage - without the nuclear submarines on the Clyde, the SNP would have less of a stick to wave at WestminsterOf course you might argue that there's a cost to put against my benefits: reducing our security. This morning on the radio, the defence secretary called Trident our most important expenditure, more important it seems than the NHS or the conventional army. But is it really true that losing Trident would put a terrible dent in our security?

The whole concept of deterrence is questionable, but it is only of any value against a rational superpower opposition. If, for instance, ISIS got a nuclear weapon, our weapons have no deterrent effect, as the unhinged are quite happy to sacrifice everything to wipe out those that they believe their religion opposes. The fact is, the threats we face are not the kind where nuclear weapons are any use, and even if Putin started to rampage across Europe, there are others with nuclear triggers to hand. Let's be realists. Germany, the Netherlands, the Scandinavian countries, etc. etc. all get along fine without a nuclear weapon capability. It is perfectly possible to argue that we are clinging onto a past glory that we can no longer afford nor justify.
I sent this suggestion with my bullet points above on Saturday to both Ed Miliband (in the cringe-making 'Ask Ed' feature on the Labour website) and the Labour candidate for my ward, Mark Dempsey. (There didn't seem a lot of point sending them to the Conservatives, who seem more ideologically dependent on nuclear weapons.)  Dempsey's campaign has been largely on local issues, so I thought it would be interesting to see how he responded to a big picture question.

As yet neither has responded, but if they did, I suspect it wouldn't be an enthusiastic one. Apart from anything else, the Conservative intervention today pretty well ensures Labour can't back down. But for the future, maybe this is something they should consider.

You tweet my back, I'll tweet yours

One of the mysteries of using Twitter is how a particular tweet gets spread to the world. I might have got all excited when my tweet about seeing Loki on the underground was re-tweeted over 1,500 times, but a typical tweet of mine probably only merits a handful of retweets.

There is a way round this. A site called CoPromote offers a service where you indicate a tweet you want to boost and others retweet it. Why should they? Because this earns them points that enable them to put up their own tweets for retweeting. (It also works for Facebook pages, but I'm less convinced by the value there.)

Assuming that being retweeted is a good thing, this doesn't seem a bad idea (I'll come back to whether or not it is). It's not like paying for fake followers (apart from anything else, a basic account is free), and it should get your tweets wider visibility. At the moment, the system has two problems. One is that the tweets offered to be retweeted are usually heavily self-promoting, so not the sort of thing you want to retweet. And secondly, even if you can find something worth retweeting, there is no opportunity to modify it to put your own stamp on it, so it's difficult to give it your 'voice'.

I think it's also worth revisiting that assumption. Is being retweeted a good thing? I think it is, but not as much as people think. It means your tweet gets seen by a wider audience - which in the end is part of why we use Twitter - there's a chance for a wider conversation - because Twitter is two-way - and a very small number of people might follow you who otherwise wouldn't. But it's not exactly transformational.

I think I will continue to play with CoPromote - but I'm not yet 100 per cent convinced of its merits... oh, and if you don't follow me on Twitter - feel free to click the follow button on the Twitter thingy in the right hand column! I'd love to connect.

Doorways in the Sand - Review

Every now and then I take a break from reading science books and unwind with a spot of fiction. This is often something new, but I also like to dip back into old favourites... and was so glad that I did with Roger Zelazny's Doorways in the Sand, which I haven't read for about 20 years, but was a delight to return to because it remains totally brilliant.

I was a huge fan of Zelazny's Amber series in my teens (I used to haunt the SF bookshop near Piccadilly Station in Manchester, as it sold US imports, and had the latest addition to the Amber books long before they were published in the UK), and still enjoy them, despite the output getting a bit strained towards the end. Doorways, though, is SF rather than fantasy, with that same type of wisecracking hero who would have been portrayed by a young Harrison Ford in the movies.

For the first few pages this could be a 1920s comedy, with a night climber at university who has a trust fund that pays him until he graduates - so every time he comes close to graduating, he changes to a different course, never quite accumulating enough points to graduate, despite the university's determined attempts to see him pass, leading to a comic encounter with the latest in a series of student advisors.

However, there are strange things afoot. Fred, our main character, seems to be receiving garbled messages from the universe, while chapter endings result in sudden, often quite baffling shifts of situation. You have to be prepared to go with the flow and enjoy the scintillating words that Zelazny throws at you and eventually all will become clear (if not straightforward). The book is a total delight, and I don't know anyone currently writing in SF who can achieve this kind of masterful mind play mixing science fiction, humour and adventure. (If there is, please let me know.)

If you've never read it, you really must. Come one - there's a talking wombat. Need I say more?

Still available from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com though you'll have to resort to second-hand.

Giving away money for profit

The internet has thrown up some interesting and different business models - but I think few are as innovative as Chris Holbrook's idea of giving away money. It sounds a pretty impressive way to get people to your site... and that's what he does at the Free Postcode Lottery site.

Before you get too excited, we aren't talking vast sums of money - it's currently around £170 a day, so it's not going to change anyone's life.  But it is free to enter, there's a guarantee that your email won't be sold on, and with Holbrook giving away around £62,000 a year, it is still, at face value, a fast route to bankruptcy.

So how is Holbrook managing this feat? Nothing magic - just advertising. It seems that he has managed to get enough revenue that way (which is pretty impressive, going on the few pence I get from Google) to fund the site, which is apparently significantly in profit. In fact, profitable enough that he has quit his job to concentrate on the venture. The growth in the daily prize fund (it was £20 at the start of 2014) gives some indication of the increase in interest and advertising revenue over a surprisingly short period of time.

He does have one little trick up his sleeve. Players are entered with their postcode (the clue is in the name), and each day a winning postcode pops up, selected at random from those in the draw. But it's only available on the site. Don't check if you've won and 24 hours later your winnings roll over to the next winner. So there's an incentive to get eyes returning to the site day after day - an advertiser's dream.

At the moment, players have to live in the UK. Holbrook has looked into other countries but a combination of strange local laws in some countries that don't allow money to be given away and postcode formats that don't work so well with the approach have limited the possibilities - however, he hopes to launch in the Republic of Ireland once their postcodes go live in the summer.

Will it work long term? I really don't know - but I do think it's a real example of being creative about making use of the different kind of interpersonal contact the internet offers. Holbrook already has three different lottery games running (which means you have to look at three different pages to check if you've won - more eyeball space) and I can see scope for expanding the model even further.

Gambling isn't everyone's cup of tea, and it's arguable that even free gambling might encourage you then to have a go at the better rewarded payed version, but for me it's a very clever piece of work. Well worth popping over and taking a look.

The fluoride terror

There are few compounds with such a range of associations as fluorides. To some, these compounds of the halogen fluorine bring to mind healthy teeth, but for others, terms like fluoride and fluoridation suggest a terrible danger to health (and quite possibly a communist plot).

Find out the pros and cons of this controversial compounds in my latest Royal Society of Chemistry podcast on fluorides.  Take a listen by clicking to pop over to its page on the RSC site.