Brian Clegg's Blog, page 79

Inaccurate information can be worse than none

We live in an information-rich world. With the internet at our fingertips, we can access what we need in moments. And companies are getting better at providing us with useful information and facilities. I heave a sigh of relief when I go to a restaurant's website, for instance, and discover I can book online, rather than go through that exercise of ringing up where you either a) get no answer, b) get an answerphone that doesn't take a message, c) get an answerphone that does take a message, but then are never sure if they took your booking, or d) speak to someone who makes it clear that you have to be an idiot to be making a booking so close to the date, as they are always very busy.

This information bounty has even stretched to that bane of life, the home delivery. Time was when you sat in all day on the off chance the delivery driver deigned to call. As it happens, working from home, so I have it easy compared to many people. But even I have problems as most days I pop out a few times. Walk the dog, nip to the post office, hit the corner shop. And you can guarantee that the delivery driver, who has clearly been sitting at the end of the road watching my house, waiting for me to go out, will pick the middle of the five minutes I'm out to attempt a delivery.

One option is the ability to pick your package up somewhere convenient. That's great if you are a commuter, and can do a pick-up on your way home. But I'd still rather have something delivered, particularly if it weighs a ton. And to my rescue comes that shining example of information excellence, the delivery slot.

The first people I remember doing this was the food delivery companies, but now several of the better known courier services do it. How I laughed when I first got an email from DPD like the one above and discovered I was getting a delivery between 9:22 and 10:22. But aside from the comical time range, it's a brilliant collection of information. When it will be delivered, who the driver is (not sure why I should know, but nice touch) and easy access to reschedule or track. Admittedly I didn't initially trust the time range, but to date they have had clockwork precision.

So when I was expecting an urgent parcel yesterday, it was a relief to see this text:
Admittedly there was that suspicious 'is estimated', but their website was more cheerful, telling me it would be delivered in the time range. So at ten past two I merrily took the dog for a 10 minute quick walk - only to discover on my return this depressing piece of paper:

Call me old fashioned, but 14:20 is not between 15:32 and 16:32 on my clock. Not by a long margin.
So, I eventually get to my point. Information like this is great - it really helps you organise your life. As long as it's correct. But if it's not, it makes matters worse. If I had expected the driver might turn up during my walk I would have stuck a note on the door saying I'd be back in 5 mins and with my mobile number. In this case I didn't bother, as I knew he* wasn't due for over an hour. And so the bad information was worse than no information at all.
Conclusion? This kind of thing is great, and I accept it will go wrong occasionally (we'll see if it happens again when they try to redeliver today), but once you start giving out time slots you ought to do everything you can to stick to them - and if you miss your slot, the company ought to know this and offer instant grovelling apologies. As yet, that highly informative squiggle on the card above is the only response I've had to their cockup.
* To avoid accusations of lazy gender stereotyping (why should the van driver be male?), I actually saw him as he drove away just as I got back to the house.

Is biodiversity good for human wellbeing?

I was interested to see on the BBC News site that a link has been shown between biodiversity and human wellbeing. It seems widely accepted that exposure to the countryside is good for most people's wellbeing (though some can't stand it, and I wouldn't want to perpetrate a lazy stereotype), but biodiversity is a whole different kettle of fish. Nonetheless here's a direct quote of the subtitle of the piece on the BBC site:

Scientists need to capitalise on a growing body of evidence showing a link between biodiversity and human wellbeing, a US review has suggested.

Now, there are several issues here. Luckily (and sadly rarely), the original review paper 'Exploring connections among nature, biodiversity, ecosystem services, and human health and well-being: Opportunities to enhance health and biodiversity conservation' (snappy title) is open source and you can read it here for free.

I have three issues:

What is wellbeing? I am currently reading for review a book on happiness and it makes it clear that most existing studies miss significant aspects of what happiness is, and don't properly understand the nature of what makes us happy/gives us wellbeing. As far as I can see, in the review paper there is no attempt to qualify what was being measured as 'wellbeing' and whether the studies were all measuring the same thing.The review paper doesn't describe a link between biodiversity and wellbeing. It shows links between being exposed to nature and wellbeing, and says that there may be health benefits from being exposed to biodiversity in bacteria. But it says nothing useful about whether, say, the number of newt species reducing from 15 to 14 (that isn't a fact, it's just to give a feel for what reducing biodiversity means) has any effect on wellbeing. My suspicion is that it doesn't - that the benefit (leaving aside the bacteria/health aspect) is purely from being out in nice countryside or a park, rather than how biodiverse that habitat is. But more to the point, the paper does not show the specific link claimed by the BBC article. The paper actually says 'Thus, with one major exception discussed here, the actual roles of biodiversity in promoting human health and well-being remain largely uncertain.' And that one exception is on bacteria and health, not general biodiversity and wellbeing.What is the natural world? I found the review paper's definition confused. They start by saying 'We used the generally accepted definition of nature as the physical and biological world not manufactured or developed by people.' Yet later on then say 'contact with nature (broadly defined in the introduction and including urban green space, parks, forests, etc.)' So they appear  to be unaware that parks were developed by people. As frankly is almost all the countryside in the UK. This is confusing, to say the least.Don't get me wrong. I am very happy to go along with the idea that exposure to nature improves the wellbeing of many people. And I am all in favour of biodiversity (though we do need to realise that there have always been changes in species populations, and we shouldn't try to preserve nature in aspic). But claiming that there is a link between biodiversity and human wellbeing seems to me to be a clear distortion of the science.

The green dilemma

I'm interested in, and care for, the environment - so why do I have so much trouble with the Green Party? After all, I grew up in a good, Manchester Guardian reading household (though admittedly my parents gave the newspaper up when it weaselled off to London).

I certainly have issues with some of the party's policies. I objected previously, for instance, to their £10 minimum wage by 2020 target. And their politics is generally too left of centre for me as a default liberal. But there is no party that exactly represents my views, so I had a suspicion there was something deeper - and I have realised what it is.

When writing about green issues online, in Ecologic , and also in my latest book Science for Life , I point out a common failing which is letting the emotion behind certain trigger words overcome logic. So words like 'natural' and 'organic' with all their warm fuzzy connotations become equated with 'good' - even though there's a lot that's natural and organic (think the deadly poison ricin, for instance, or the bacteria and viruses and parasites that cause everything from malaria and ebola to flu) that is anything but good. Similarly there are keywords that are automatically considered bad. And the problem with the Green Party is that they come at environmental issues - a scientific endeavour - in a way that ignores the science in favour of fuzzy feelings.

The most obvious example of this is the total inability to think about nuclear power. It's a head-in-the-sand approach that says 'As soon as I hear the word "nuclear" I turn off.' No reasoning, no thought goes into it - it's pure knee-jerk. Instead they have the impractical target to have wind as the UK's 'main source of power by 2030.' In the end, all solutions to problems have pros and cons - but the Greens aren't prepared to look at them in a detached, scientific manner. And that's not good enough.

Now you may, quite reasonably, say that politics isn't a detached, scientific business. It's about hearts more than minds. It's about tribalism, not science. And of course I recognise there's an element of this. But the fact is we live in a world that is defined by science and technology. It's just not good enough to approach environmental and energy issues with that same hearts over minds stance. Almost all politicians are bad at taking a scientific viewpoint - but I find it particularly off-putting in a  party whose raison d'être is those science-based issues.

UPDATE: I'm also unhappy with a their general policy detail, now it is available. Apart from being suspicious of their taxation plans, I don't want to live somewhere that terrorism is considered 'an extremely loaded term' and all we need to do is be nice to everyone, which means we can pretty well get rid of our military. And when the party leader says 'So it’s simple, really: we have to entirely redesign the system,' in a piece in the Independent, that's really scary. Because that casual 'It's simple' suggests that these people haven't a clue how to make it happen. They seem to be taking the part of the innocent idiot Jim Hacker from Yes Minister repurposed with a change of party colours.

Take their concept of a 'citizens' income' which every citizen gets, eliminating most benefits. Sounds great in principle. Apart from not making it clear how they could possibly keep the cash flowing for this when they also want to shrink the economy. It's a brilliant example of something that sounds simple, but really isn't. Want more evidence? Look at the Green party stronghold, Brighton. It would obviously have the best recycling rates in the country. Or maybe 302nd out of 326. Hmm.

This has been a  green heretic  production.

"Green Party of England and Wales logo" by The logo is from the http://www.greenparty.org.uk/ website.. Licensed under Fair use of copyrighted material in the context of Green Party of England and Wales via Wikipedia

Mea culpa on the naming of black holes

Anyone writing a popular science book is likely to make occasional errors. In my experience they happen most often when the writer assumes that a 'fact' is correct based on memory and doesn't bother to check it. Things go downhill from then on.

I think it's fair to say that pretty well every book I've written has had at least one mistake in it, and some of them I've perpetuated several times, as once I've made the error, it's in a book... so it must be true.

Since I'm now occasionally followed by that scourge of science history inaccuracy Thony Christie, I thought it was best to come clean on an error I've just discovered that I have been repeating for some time - and that's over the origin of the term 'black hole'.

I have several times said that the name was first used by the American physicist John Wheeler. To compound the matter, in my otherwise excellent (ahem) Gravity , said that it was in 1969, rather than 1967, but that was just a typo. To be fair, Max Tegmark, who knew Wheeler personally, makes exactly the same mistake in Our Mathematical Universe . However, it turns out that the real history is significantly more murky.

Wheeler seems to have been the first to use the term consistently in publications, but the origin is at least as early as an AAAS meeting in January 1964. It was written up in an article in Science News Letter by Ann Ewing, but she was reporting on what she heard at the meeting. The problem is no one is sure who actually said it. The News Letter's successor Science News
Sigh. No one ever said science writing was easy.

Home Fires - review

Gene Wolfe is possibly my favourite fiction author, full stop. So coming across a book by him I haven't read, in this case Home Fires from 2010, is something of a red letter day. I think it's fair to say that this novel is a minor addition to his works, but welcome nonetheless, with many of the trademark Wolfe characteristics.

Arguably there are three different types of Wolfe books. There are his collections of short stories, which can be beautiful and frustrating in equal measure. There are his best-known books, the New Sun series, which to be honest I've never particularly enjoyed, though I know many people love them. And there are his real world (i.e. set in ordinary America) fantasy books, which are the ones I can't get enough of. Books like There Are Doors, Castleview and The Sorcerer's House. This title, Home Fires is a bit of an oddity as it fits into the final category, but it's not fantasy. (There is another book, Pandora by Holly Hollander that I'd say is also like this, probably Wolfe's most easily approachable title and a little gem.)

Where Pandora is a mystery story, this is science fiction. Set in a future where there is hardly any oil, most of the action takes place on huge, sail-powered liner. There are significant science fiction themes - the main character and his 'contracta' (roughly member of a civil partnership) have been separated for 20ish years in his time, but only 2 in hers, as she has been fighting in space. There's also a touch of Dollhouse in one aspect of the plot.

I'm not going to give anything more away, but there's enough complexity to keep the intrigue going - it just feels a little lightweight to me. As I mentioned upfront, there are still the trademark characteristics. The reader has little idea what is going on for a fair part of the book. Chapters sometimes end with something totally unexpected. The characters are multi-layered and rarely transparent. It's a bit like a book equivalent of Twin Peaks without the weird bits.

So do I recommend it? To a Wolfe fan, absolutely. And I will certainly read it again, because if there's one thing certain about a Gene Wolfe book, you don't get it all in the first reading. But if you are new to his work, I would suggest having a go at one of the other titles mentioned above first.

You can find Home Fires on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.

One thousand years ago

In case you prefer to read it in the original
(actually the first page of the Peterborough version)I feel that the typical 'on this day' or 'what happened a century ago' is far too shortsighted, so armed with the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle I thought I'd give you a quick tour of the highlights of 1015. (For more, see  The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle - Whitlock, Douglas and Tucker)

In this year the great assembly at Oxford took place, and there Ealdorman Eadric betrayed Sigeferth and Morcar, the chief thegns belonging to the Seven Boroughs*: he enticed them into his chamber, and they were basely killed inside it. And the king the seized their property and ordered Sigeferth's widow  to be seized and brought to Malmesbury...

(Come on, forget Game of Thrones, this is the real deal)

At that same time, King Cnut came to Sandwich, and then turned at once round Kent into Wessex, until he reached the mouth of the Frome, and ravaged then in Dorset, in Wiltshire, and in Somerset. The king then lay sick at Cosham. Then Ealdorman Eadric collected an army, and so did the atheling Edmund in the North. When they united, the ealdorman wished to betray the atheling, and that account they separated without fighting, and retreated from their enemies. And then Ealdorman Eadric seduced 40 ships from the king, and then went over to Cnut; and the West Saxons submitted and gave hostages and supplied the Danish army with horses and it then stayed there until Christmas.

(I think, despite all the moaning about the electorate not being engaged, I'm happier with modern politics)

* A footnote in the book kindly explains this was probably the Five Boroughs plus York and Torksey, so now all we need to find out is what the Five Boroughs were. And where Torksey was. I've heard of York. Apparently the Five Boroughs were the main towns of the Danelaw, namely Derby, Leicester, Lincoln, Nottingham and Stamford. And Torksey is a village in Lincolnshire that back then was a more significant town. So now you know.

Caution - deduction from infinity can lead to madness

I'm currently reading for review Max Tegmark's intriguing newish (well, new in paperback) book, Our Mathematical Universe. It's generally rather good, though it's a bit infuriating that they clearly haven't updated the text to reflect this edition, as Tegmark keeps referring to the image on the front of the book as showing the Cosmic Microwave Background - if the CMB really looks like that, cosmology truly has got exciting again.

However, that wasn't my point. Having set the stage with an explanation of the hot big bang with inflation theory, Tegmark begins launching off into the possibilities for multiverses, and there's a lot of deduction from infinity. (If this doesn't mean anything to you, I'll get there in a moment.) Georg Cantor, the great mathematician of infinity, ended up in a mental hospital - you play with this stuff at your peril.

What I mean by deduction from infinity is arguing along these lines. If eternal inflation holds, there are an infinite set of big bangs producing universes (of which ours is one). Each will be subtly different due to quantum fluctuations. So as they are infinite, every possible outcome will happen in one of these universes - for example, one where you read this blog and sneer, rather smile at its cleverness as you currently are doing. (Hopefully.)

The problem is that infinity can't be used like this to deduce things. Let's look at some simpler infinite sets to see why. First, bear in mind that every member of an infinite set does not have to be different. So, for instance, you can have the set 1, 0, 0, 0... where all the members are zero except the first. If 1 represents our universe, all the others could be devoid of life. (I do remember those quantum fluctuations, but that doesn't mean that you couldn't end up with all but one devoid of life.)

Here's another one that's a little more interesting: 1, 4, 9, 16... - the infinite set of the squares. One for every universe that has life in it. But what if the actual infinite set of universes only corresponded to the numbers that aren't squares with a different value to its square root: 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8... - there's an infinite set of those, none of which has life, apart from no 1 - us.

Or again, think of the infinite set of positive integers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6... If one of these could be part of an infinite set but also demonstrably unique, that could like the condition for life. And guess what - 1 is unique. It's the only positive integer that is its own square and that when something else is multiplied by it, that something else doesn't change. So despite there being an infinite set of subtly varying possibilities only one is in the 'life' state.

My examples here don't prove that there aren't all those different variations of you in parallel universes, but rather they demonstrate that you can establish pretty well anything you like if you try to deduce things from an infinite set - and my suspicion is that the deductions made by cosmologists are equally suspect.

Conspiracy History - review

There are two aspects of this book that might raise a suspicious eyebrow in a potential reader. One is the cover, which is a trifle garish and reminiscent of those local history books you get on holiday in Devon. The other is the idea that, as a book about conspiracy theories, it is going to be all about topics like the Moon landings being faked and Princess Diana being murdered at the behest of the British royal family.

I can immediately allay those fears. This slim book is a solidly written collection of historical stories, many dating back several hundred years or more. The lunatic fringe conspiracy theories are mentioned in the introduction, where Andrew May does exhibit possibly excessive open-mindedness by saying that David Icke's theory that the world is run by shape changing lizards is 'probably too far fetched to be true'. But in his historical explorations, which range from ancient Egypt, through a whole raft of British and European kings and queens, to twentieth century events, he is soberly careful to distinguish what probably was indeed a conspiracy from wild speculation.

It's arguable that some of the stories - for instance the establishment of the rump parliament or the massacre of St Brice's day are more quirky historical facts than true conspiracies, but that doesn't stop them being interesting if, like me, your grasp of history is largely confined to the narrow topics covered in school. In writing style, May sometimes veers dangerously close to 1066 and All That with phrases like 'he couldn't stand to see other people enjoying themselves, and he believed the end-times were imminent' - but this isn't a significant problem.

Overall I felt I'd learned a lot of interesting oddities in history, many of them with a conspiracy flavour. Some I would have liked to delve into in greater detail. For instance, in the suspicious death of Napoleon, possibly by arsenic poisoning, could green wallpaper in the damp house he lived in have had a role?

Many modern conspiracy theories fail because they involve a situation where incompetence is a far more likely cause than conspiracy, especially in a world where far more information is available for far more people to check, making it difficult to cover up secret goings on. In the historical periods May describes, there was far more opportunity for a small number of powerful people to succeed with a conspiracy and get away with it. And some of the stories he tells are excellent examples.

So get over the book's cover and your wariness of conspiracy nuts - this is an excellent smorgasbord of strange historical delights.

You can find Conspiracy History on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.

Have we lost the 15-25 effect?

For decades it has seemed to be the rule that the music we listen to between the ages of 15 and 25 (give or take a few years either way) defines our musical tastes for life. It's certainly true for me - assorted prog rock groups, the likes of Simon and Garfunkel, plus the same basic taste in classical music, serve me still many years later, and if I buy an album these days, it is far more likely to be filling a gap in that oeuvre than anything more trendy.

However, it struck me the other day as I listened to one of my 20-year-old daughter's Spotify playlists in the car, that this phenomenon may now be doomed. In the olden days we bought albums, and once we got into an artist, we bought more of their albums. And this continued indefinitely. (Witness the fact that my Christmas stocking contained Al Stewart albums and a Curved Air album.) Now, though, a playlist is an ever-shifting collection of individual tracks. Certainly the download-and-stream generation will have favourite artists, but these also seem much more fluid, in part because the listeners are not immersing themselves in artist's work.

Of course things could change. It's too early to say what the download-and-streamers will be doing in their 30s. They may still develop a longing for the music of those key years and start to expand their playlists to include more from the bands and singers they liked best. But equally, and particularly if they are pretty much pure streamers, their taste could continue to evolve. If so, it will be a sad day for those whose pension resides in their backlist.

In one way, the new approach has advantages. It's more eclectic, less set in its ways. But I can't help but feel it's not the best way to really appreciate music.

A different world

It looks a bit like 1955, but the date is actually 1933
I suspect most of us have little family items that we treasure. One that is particularly close to my heart is this - a little, leather-bound booklet that is primarily a list of subscribers to a particular cause - and the opening pages show just what that cause was - my grandad.
He played cricket in the Lancashire leagues, and was the professional for a couple of teams, most notably this Penrith side. The position sounds quite glamorous (though the professional was very much the second class citizen among the amateurs), but was actually an act of desperation. The job didn't pay much, but it was better than nothing, and as a mill worker, laid off because of the depression, the alternatives were dire.
Even though he'd rather not have done it, my grandfather did look back on his sporting achievement with pride. And even though I have zero interest in sport, I can't help but feel a lump in my throat when I see this reminder of his achievement as well.
I never saw my grandad play, but I did quite often see him umpire, and when he went onto the pitch this unassuming, gentle man became something more, gained an unexpected authority. Cricket was very special to him.