Brian Clegg's Blog, page 76

What is design for? The new Apple Macbook, hobs and toilet doors

Of all the companies involved in the IT and communications world, Apple arguably has the most style and elegant design. We all know that design is brilliant on a thing you just look at, but when you also have to use it, usability comes in too - and there is frequently a tension between the two.

Many years ago, I did quite a lot of work on user interface design, and that's all about the balance, making something that looks good, but is also effortlessly usable. Generally speaking, Apple's UI designers get this, and in part maintain it by keeping more of a grip on the user interface than do rivals. However, on Apple's hardware side, the design/usability balance has sometimes strayed too far towards looks above function.

This happens all the time in everyday items. I've mentioned before the toilet doors at the British Airways Waterside HQ, which had pull handles on both sides, even though you had to push them when going in. I used to delight in watching person after person approach the door, pull it (because that's what you automatically do when you see a pull handle), fail, hesitate, then push the door. The designer let the visual elegance of symmetry overcome the practical value of a push plate.

Another great example I've mentioned before is the hob - the bit of the cooker with rings that you put pans on. Most of these have four rings, arranged in a rectangular shape. But because it looks better, designers almost always put the controls for these rings in a straight line. So there is no way of telling which control is for which ring without looking at the labels. If they just put the controls in the same shape as the rings it would be immediately apparent without any labelling.

So we come to Apple's new Macbook, coming out next month. It looks gorgeous. Super slim with stunning graphics. It may well be one of my favourite laptops ever. And the designers have really thought about how nasty the side of a typical laptop looks with all those different shaped ports and have come up with a cunning design of a single type of port, USB-C (see pic above) that can act as power in, USB, display adaptor, HDMI - whatever you need. Because the laptop is so slim you could only get one of these per side, but because they're so flexible, you'd be happy with the limit of just having two of them. But it only has one.

Just think about that. A single port for everything. Design bliss possibly (though for symmetry, there really ought to be one each side). But practical? Hardly. Okay, battery life is good, but who would willingly do a whole day's presentation from a laptop that can't be connected to the mains, because the only socket is being used to connect it to the projector? As it happens, Apple has that one covered. You have always had to have a special adaptor to connect a Mac's proprietary video port to the VGA or HDMI used by video projectors. So the new adaptor not only has a video out socket, but also a connector for the mains unit (and a USB socket). That's okay, although arguably this should come with the laptop, rather than being a £65 extra.

However, that's not the only problem. Far more people use USB sockets at the same time as the power than use projectors. They might need to swap information on and off a memory stick. They might be synchronising or charging a phone or iPod. They might want to pop on a USB mouse. Well, tough. If you want to do this, you will have to disconnect your mains supply, unless you spend £65 on one of those adaptors. If your laptop is low on charge - doubly tough. You will just have to wait to get those extremely urgent documents off that secure memory stick, because you will run out of battery if you disconnect the mains.

This can't be good. Just putting one socket either side - or providing a USB/mains adaptor with the laptop - would have made all the difference. But design has triumphed. In fact it has even robbed us of one of Apple's unique features. Anyone who has sat in a living room with four people all using laptops on mains cables will know the hazard they form. You either trip over a cable, or send a laptop flying off the sofa to crash to the floor as your foot gets wrapped in the wire. So for many years, Apple has a used a lovely 'MagSafe' connector that doesn't plug in, but is attached magnetically.   Get your foot caught in this cable and it detaches safely. But the new USB-C connector isn't magnetic. Lose-lose it seems.

When I get my hands on one of these it may still be one of my favourite laptops ever, and in the end I suspect I will overlook this flaw. But that doesn't stop it being a sad example of design over usability.

The wonderful world of Ladybird art, science and technology

If you are of a certain age in the UK, you will have read Ladybird books as a child. The brand, owned now by Penguin/Random House, has been resurgent for some time, and there are plenty of the small format, large print books available.

I was inspired to write this post by the science and technology bit I'll come onto in a moment, but I must start with the art part, which combines the best subversive pastiche I've ever seen with some real David and Goliath action.

A couple of years ago, artist Miriam Elia produced a spoof Ladybird book called We Go to the Gallery. It has exactly the same format as a Ladybird reading scheme book, and used images from original book(s), but here the format is used to provide a wonderful and subversive take on modern art. Here's an example of the text for the page that has the same image as the cover of the book:

There is nothing in the room.

Peter is confused.

Jane is confused.

Mummy is happy.

'There is nothing in the room because God is dead,' says Mummy.

'Oh dear,' says Peter.

The book is absolutely brilliant and was immediately popular. Orders started to flood in and a first run was printed, but then Penguin muscled in with demands that the print run be pulped because of breach of copyright of the images Elia had used. The legal battle has rumbled on for some time, with Penguin consistently unable to produce any evidence that they had copyright in the images. Since changes to the law making spoofs and satires less open to legal change, and a change in Elia's design to make it a Dungbeetle Book instead, a new version is sale (you can only buy the books directly from Elia's website - well worth a look.

The science and technology side was brought to my attention by the excellent actor
We can laugh at the way that their book on 'The Rocket' portrayed the future of space travel, or the ungainly 'mini computer control unit' in 'The Computer'. But what's really sad is that they show examples where children are investigating what's in a battery by pulling it to pieces, or starting a fire (to cook sausages) with a magnifying glass and the BBC writer comments that this would never be allowed today because of health and safety.

I think it's fair to say that most of the scientists I know of my kind of age did plenty of hairy experiments in their youth (in my case, mostly in chemistry, and often featuring bangs) and I genuinely believe that we ought to recognize the need for a little more risk taking in the development of our scientists of the future. I took batteries apart too - quite possibly inspired by a Ladybird book. And I'm glad I did.

To finish off, here's a little Channel 4 News video from March 2014 with more on the spoof Ladybird art book.

A rank error

There's are two distinct shifts of focus when you become an author. First it's all about getting the book (or proposal if it's non-fiction) in a perfect state to send off to agents/publishers. Then it's all about getting someone to publish it. And once it's out there, it's about whether or not, and how much, it sells.
Now, you will get a few authors who genuinely say 'I don't care about sales. It's all about the art/achievement/fulfilling a lifelong goal.' But for most of us sales matter - and the more, the merrier. It can come as quite a surprise to a new author that sales are really quite opaque. Mostly publishers will only update you on sales in their twice-a-year (or even annual) royalty statement. Which is sent out typically four months after the end of the previous sales period. That's a long time to wait to find out how your baby is doing.
Clearly the publishers have access to much better information, but rarely do they give access to authors. The only exception I know of is Penguin Random House, which has an 'author portal' website which gives figures for both 'shipped' and 'sold' on a weekly basis, up to last week. (The difference between the two figures is a scary one, bearing in mind the book trade has the archaic system that stores take their books on a sale or return basis.) If other publishers have similar systems for their authors, please let me know.
Otherwise authors really only have one place to turn. Amazon. The behemoth of books has a magic number on the page of every book that has sold at least one copy called its 'bestsellers rank'. In one sense this is quite simple. A big number (potentially in the millions) means it's not selling much at all. Numbers get smaller when more are selling. So, for instance, if I nip to the page of a book I liked very much when I reviewed it, Lee Smolin's Time Reborn , which has been around since 2013, I see this:
The book's 'Bestsellers Rank' (previously called sales rank) is perfectly respectable 16,092. (You will also note that it is number 48 in Astronomy, which is odd (if typical) as it's not an astronomy book, but that's more use for boasting than monitoring sales.) And what an author can do is keep an eye on that bestsellers rank and see how it goes up and down to get a feel for sales. There's even an impressive free (if slightly fiddly) website called NovelRank, that monitors the number for you.
So, I suspect a number of authors felt the bottom had dropped out of their world when a Huff Post blog post announced that 'Your Amazon ranking has nothing to do with sales.' This post by Brooke Warner claimed that 'all your ranking means is that people are looking at your page.' This would be very depressing if true. But is it true? Warner gives no source for her assertion, although in answers to comments she refers to 'my Amazon source', so presumably has a contact who works there - but that doesn't mean she is right.
While no one can say definitively what goes on in Amazon's no doubt byzantine algorithm (or 'logarithm' as Ms Warner engagingly called it until she was corrected) there is strong evidence that it is primarily sales based. First, Amazon actually says it is. They say here, referring to the sub-categories, but then bringing in the main rank: 'As with the main Amazon Best Sellers list, these category rankings are based on Amazon.com sales and are updated hourly.' That's a pretty straight answer. And NovelRank's creator, Mario Lurig, who told me that Warner was 'wrong. Flat out.' has a useful page pulling apart various myths about the ranking - his conclusions may be based on small samples sometimes, but everything he says bears out the experience of regular sales watchers.
It's quite interesting to read the comments of Warner's post, as she becomes increasingly defensive, falling back on the statement that what she really meant was that the rank shows how well a book is selling 'in relation' to other titles. (And says she'll get Huff Post to correct her main text, which may have happened by the time you read this.) However, sadly, this just shows once more Warner's limited grasp of anything vaguely mathematical. Of course a ranking is relative to other titles - that's why it's a ranking, rather than an absolute sales figure. But it still should go up when you make sales, and then decay until your next sale.
The only proviso to this, which Lurig makes clear on his site, is that if you are lucky enough to get a ranking in 3 figures or lower, it won't go up for each sale, because at that kind of level, books are selling fast enough to have more than one per hour, and selling 20 in that hour, say, won't be much different in rank change from selling 21.
So, conclusion? Amazon Bestsellers rank is still the best guide authors have to sales, and when it goes up, you can be pretty sure you have made a sale. Here's my best ranking outside of Kindle (where there are fewer titles) to date. We can always hope for smaller...

Scientist, heal thyself

An interesting blog post was brought to my attention in something written by Sabine Hossenfelder, a physics professor who has a real passion for the better communication of science. 
She picked out a passage in the blog, commenting 'spot on':

Sciencey headlines are pre-packaged cultural tokens that can be shared and reshared without any investment in analysis or critical thought — as if they were sports scores or fashion photos or poetry quotes — to reinforce one’s aesthetic self-identification as a “science lover.” One’s actual interest doesn’t have to extend beyond the headline itself.

I must admit, I find that paragraph hard to understand, and while it may sound correct in isolation (if it means what I think it means), it doesn't work in the context of the rest of the text. The central thesis of the post is that scientists aren't making the outrageous claims. It's partly the fault of science journalists ('overblown science headlines are still a major aspect of the problem') and partly the fault of the ignorant unwashed general public ('many of your friends and relatives — and most likely, even you — are now implicated in this onslaught of misinformation').
However, in my experience, these contortions of the true picture of science largely originate with scientists and with university press offices - not the science journalism community or the public at large. I'm not saying science journalism isn't rife with misinformation that has come from the journalist (often not a science journalist but a health or lifestyle correspondent or similar) - but I'd suggest the biggest sources are back at the universities.
Let me give you two examples.
If I am writing about, say, the big bang, I always make sure I include the proviso that what I am covering is the current best-accepted theory given the data we have right now, but that the picture may change in the future. I have lost count of the number of scientists who write something like 'the universe began around 13.7 billion years ago...' and go onto describe the hot big bang with inflation model as if it were absolute fact.
And then there's the matter of light sabers. (I know it should be 'light sabres', but that's the way they spell it.) Here are some newspaper headlines from 2013: 'Star Wars lightsabers finally invented,' 'Scientists Finally Invent Real, Working Lightsabers,' and  'MIT, Harvard scientists accidentally create real-life lightsaber' were among the dramatic headlines. (I love that use of 'Finally' as if it is about time that those lazy scientists managed to get around to something so trivial.) Silly journalists. Now all the common unwashed people will think that light sabers really exist.
Is this what had happened in the lab? Nope. By using a Bose-Einstein condensate, the scientists had been able to create what they called 'light molecules' - pairs of photons that were temporarily linked together. Interesting, and possibly useful in photonics, but not a light saber by any stretch of the imagination. So how did those wacky science journalists come up with the imaginary light saber image? Did they just make it up? No. One of the scientists involved, Professor Mikhail Lukin of Harvard said: “It’s not an inapt analogy to compare this to light sabers.”
Perhaps, then, the answer is that scientists who like the media spotlight should think twice before coming out with such a remark. And then not do it. But to blame this kind of thing on science journalism (why should the journalist know more than the professor?) or the unwashed public (why shouldn't they find a headline like that worth repeating?) is simply wrong.

Happy Birthday, Phil!

Yes, it's birthday time today for old Phil Trans, or more properly Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the world's oldest continuously published scientific journal which is 350 years old today.

Back on 6 March 1665 (centre image), the first copies of this remarkable document appeared in London. Since then it has carried a whole range of mid boggling papers, including everything from Newton's breakthrough paper on light and colour in 1672 (left image), Benjamin Franklin's account of flying a kite in a storm (not performed personally it now seems) in 1752, Eddington's (rather dodgy) 'proof' of the general theory of relativity from eclipse observations in 1919, published in 1920, through to the present day.

What sadly it no longer includes are the more wacky topics that turned up in the past, from an account of a 'very odd monstrous calf' (by Robert Boyle in the first volume) and 'of a way of killing ratle-snakes (sic)' to an analysis of the young Mozart that somehow managed to deduce he really was a musical genius.

Those nice people at the Royal Society are celebrating by making all RS journals content free to access to the end of March (though to be fair, they ought to always be free to access). There are also special commemorative issues, films and more - take a look at the 'Publishing 350' site.

You can read more about the history of Philosophical Transactions, and download a 26 page ebook on it here.

If you want to read the very first issue, you can also do this, as all the historical editions of Transactions up to 1943 are available freely online here. Scroll down to the bottom to find volume 1.

Altogether now: Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you! Happy Birthday, dear Phil, Happy Birthday to you!

Teachers - go forth and demo!

When I talk to scientists who want to write a popular science book rather than a textbook, there are two connected differences I emphasize - narrative and drama. A textbook can be just a collection of facts, but that's anathema to the popular science audience. Narrative steals some of the tools of fiction, both on the small scale and in giving the book as a whole a narrative arc. And drama gives tension and excitement.

Some scientists and historians of science have always complained about the use of drama. 'It wasn't really like that,' they moan. 'It wasn't one person against the world, coming up with a great idea, it was a team effort, building incrementally on other's work.' Well, yes, to a point. But as long as you don't trample on facts, I think an element of drama is essential, and it can usually be found, even if it has to be given slightly more prominence than it really had.

When giving a talk about science, these two factors are equally important - and the opportunity for drama is so much greater, because it's not just in the information, it can be in the way the information is put across. At its most basic, it's about presentation style - not reading from notes in a monotone. But also there's the chance to the demonstrate. If you take a look at this video of my Dice World talk (don't worry, no need to watch it all!):



... the first thing I do is give away a free book. Not a conventional 'demonstration' but something active, rather than just talking. Then from 2:40 to to about 6 minutes I do a little demonstration involving flipping a coin. It doesn't contribute hugely to the information content of the talk, but from feedback, it's something the audience really appreciates. Later on, I get the audience standing up and partaking in an experiment, and when I finish with the Monty Hall problem, I don't just describe it, I run the gameshow. And it really helps.

So if you're a science teacher or technician, you've got something in your armoury that can easily add drama to lessons. Demonstrations aren't always used as much as they once were, partly because of the strictures of the curriculum and partly because of Health and Safety (my brother-in-law, a former head of chemistry did manage to get the building evacuated with one of his better demonstrations). But we forget demonstrations at our peril.

Those nice people at British Science Week have come up with a cunning plan to get more demonstrations happening. They want to make the Thursday of Science Week (19 March) 'Demo Day' when you can pledge to make a demo in return for a prize draw that includes a wifi microscope - can't be bad! And they've got some excellent video resources giving demonstration ideas (don't just show the video, that misses the point). Why not pop over to the Demo Day web page and take a look.

I'll just finish of with a video they made last year called Demo Day, The Movie:

Quantum quackery

One reaction to my writing The Quantum Age is that the number of emails I receive based on a sort of 'quantum mysticism' has doubled. This is where the jargon of quantum theory is applied recklessly, without any of the background science, to imply that something strange and wonderful can happen... because it's 'quantum'.

 I recently had this article on the website of the 'Committee for Skeptical Inquiry' with the same name as my current post brought to my attention. It is rather dated, as it was written 17 years ago, but much of it holds up. A lot of blame is laid at the door of Fritjof Capra's popular book, The Tao of Physics, which draws parallels with aspects of quantum theory and Eastern mysticism (though to be fair to Capra, he doesn't the extra step, made by many New Agers, of going from parallels to assumed causality).

The author of the CSI piece, Victor Stenger, is very blunt in his dismissal of anything mystical, if not mysterious, about quantum theory. He was a physics professor, but the view he gives in this article is not 100% what I'd regard as mainstream physics. He is so enthusiastic to get rid of any possible weirdness that he plays down some aspects. This comes across particularly strongly when he merges the concepts of quantum entanglement and wave function collapse. He says, for instance, that Einstein called wave function  collapse 'spooky action at a distance', but that was a reference to quantum entanglement, a phenomenon that does indeed allow the kind of instant communication at a distance that Stenger is at such efforts to dismiss, although admittedly it is a not a mechanism that allows the communication of non-random information, as there is no way of controlling what is 'transmitted'.

Stenger also seems to dismiss the Feynman path integral approach, commenting that quantum behaviour can be understood 'without discarding the commonsense [sic] notion of particles following definite paths in space and time.'

What we have here, I think, is almost an inverse of Capra. Just as Capra could sometimes be a bit loose with making something of parallels that didn't mean anything, Stenger is so determined to show that quantum physics really isn't strange but is 'common sense' that he overplays the idea that quantum theory is really just good old classical physics with a few bells and whistles.

However much I find the Stenger piece irritating, though, there is no doubt (as often seems to be the case with skeptics with a 'k') he is doing the wrong thing for the right reason. Because there are plenty of people trying to deceive others by claiming all sorts of quantum holistic hogwash. Just because something has a probabilistic component, and seems weird to common sense, as quantum theory certainly does, it does not follow that everything weird is valid. There is no scientific basis for using quantum theory to justify magic.

We know that there are some quantum effects in biology - and it's just possible, despite Stenger's firm denial, that quantum physics plays a role in human consciousness (though it's relatively unlikely, as quantum effects dislike warm and wet conditions). But there is no firm evidence to date for quantum physics underlying strange psychic abilities or medical magic. Unlike a skeptic with a k, I don't dismiss these possibilities out of hand - there is slight, though certainly not definitive, evidence for at least one aspect of ESP (see my Extra Sensory ). But even if such abilities were definitively proven, there is no basis as yet for saying that quantum physics has any role to play. And its relevance certainly can't be deduced from any mystical mumbo jumbo.

So, unless it's used in a scientific context*, beware 'quantum' like the plague.

* With the exception of uses where it is not intended to portray weird mysticism, such as the Bond film Quantum of Solace, or Finish Quantum dishwasher tablets, which actually work quite well.

No, I don't want a super car experience, thank you

Every now and then I get a semi-spam email (i.e. something I probably accidentally signed up to receive, but never really wanted) offering me the opportunity to buy cut-price 'treats', like a super car experience. I know some people love this kind of thing, but I just don't get it.

I've got three problems with the whole 'super car experience' thing. (If your mind is heading back to the early Gerry Anderson series, illustrated here, which I loved as a boy - our Ford Anglia was excellent for playing Supercar, as the heater controls made an excellent substitute for the throttles, and it even had little wings on the tail - I am not referring to Supercar, but rather an 'experience' day where you get to drive something like a Ferrari or an Aston Martin.)

My first issue is that I wouldn't actually want one of these cars as they are incredibly impractical (anyone remember the Top Gear where they tried to get 3 out of an underground car park in Paris?), ludicrously expensive and make a silly noise. I've never understood the appeal of the sort of noise boy racers try to imitate by having a dustbin in place of an exhaust pipe on their Ford Fiesta. It sounds loud, nasty and industrial. My favourite car noise is an electric car - but that's a different story.

The second problem is that they wouldn't just give you the keys and say 'Have fun,' they would expect you to drive it around a track, with experts looking on and sniggering at your inability to 'take the correct line' or brake at the sweet spot, or G spot or whatever it is. I did once accidentally go to a track day, and quite enjoyed being driven around by an expert (scary though it was), but there was no way I was going to do it myself, in front of others.

Most importantly, though, if I did have a drive in a super car (and if I did, it would be an Aston Martin, no question), it would have to be my own. I don't understand the envy-driven gratuitous excitement of having a go at something you can't actually have. It's a phenomenon that's quite closely related to pornography, perhaps most closely in those house porn 'Escape to the Country' style house programmes where people who are selling a 3 bed semi in London look round 10 bathroom mansions in the country, which normal people could never afford, so they watch the programme to drool instead. It's one of the nastiest aspects of capitalism.

So there you have it. Super car experiences are for those whose existence is unsatisfactory. Get, as they say, a life.

Making experiments (some on your own brain) come to life

There has been a significant amount of noise on Twitter and elsewhere about 'The Dress', the phenomenon of a photograph of a dress which it is claimed that some people see as black and blue, and others as white and gold. My suspicion is that this is a hoax - a very nice piece of PR.

The reason I am suspicious is that I've seen pictures on different sites where I see it as each of the colours (and the pictures are different at the RGB level)*. But if it were genuine, it would simply be demonstrating how false the image of the world we think we see through our eyes really is.

This was one of the points I wanted to demonstrate when writing The Universe Inside You . In its predecessor, Inflight Science , I included a series of science experiments that the reader could do on a plane. It was a bit harder to do something similar with TUIY, where I wanted to show things from optical illusions, with a reveal of what was happening, to demonstrations of a Crookes radiometer and the early 'artificial intelligence' program ELIZA.

In the end I put together a website to accompany the book which has the experiments on it, often as videos. When 'The Dress' came up, I immediately thought of a couple of the demonstrations on there - the experiments include both an optical and an auditory illusion. So if you want to do a little experimenting with the universe (and your brain), take a look at the Universe Inside You website.

*ADDED: HT to Stuart Cantrill for pointing out that some people see the same image differently at different times, and that two people looking at the same image at the same time can get different results - so it isn't all a hoax. But there certainly are many mocked up versions in the Twittersphere etc. which definitely are fixed.

Lost and found in translation

I was reminded at the weekend of the apparent translating boo-boo that resulted in Cinderella's very impractical glass slippers. Allegedly, in the original French, she had slippers that were 'vair' - made very sensibly (if you don't belong to PETA) of fur. However, the translator was clearly having a bad day, and just as I tend to merrily type 'there' instead of 'their' when I'm tired, he or she read this as the similar sounding 'verre' - meaning glass. (Sadly, according to Snopes, this is unlikely to be true - HT to Matthew Surnameunknown for pointing this out. I still suspect there was something in it, though.)

So far, so amusing. But then it made me think of my books.

My various titles have been translated into a good few languages, and for all I know they could be replete with interesting changes of meaning. Of course they were translated by good, professional translators, but even so slip-ups can occur.

As it happens I know this for certain, by taking a quick look at my biography in the German translation of 'Instant Egghead Guide to Physics', which becomes 'Physik für Eierköpfe'.


I'm not sure where they got it from, as there isn't a biography in the English version, but if you take a look at this snippet from my website, you don't need to be a German speaker to spot what's wrong in the first line of the German version:


I know that's more a transcription error than a translation problem - an error that could occur even in an English version, but at least with English texts I see the proofs and can correct them. 
There are now rather a lot of translations out there, as the picture below indicates, with a good few more in production as we speak. With most, frankly, I haven't a clue, and my rusty school French and German would be little help in attempting to spot any errors even in those relatively familiar languages.
So what is the moral of all this? There may be errors, but there's not a lot I can do about them (unless an eagle-eyed reader sends me an email). That being the case, it's best not to say anything. After all, it is best not to be rude to a translator. They have an important job to do - and I don't want the literary equivalent of an insulted waiter spitting in a  customer's soup.