Brian Clegg's Blog, page 8

Patronising Bastards - Quentin Letts ****

Parliamentary sketch writers have a very dated style of writing - their 'humour' feels both heavy handed and has a grotesquery more suited to an eighteenth century political cartoon than the modern day. In this book, Quentin Letts (a sketch writer in his day job) does deploy some of this style in his ad hominem remarks about individuals - and I probably disagree with about 90 per cent of his viewpoints (though I'm definitely with him on hymns, the House of Lords and justice being blind).

But - and it's a big but - what I do absolutely agree with is that subtitle - 'how the elites betrayed Britain'. Letts highlights the horror of the Establishment when the people turn against them by, say, voting for Brexit or a certain US president. Without supporting either of these it is easy to see why it is happening. Just this morning I heard on a podcast a well-known political commentator (and self-affirmed member of said elite) saying how Brexit remains incomprehensible to people like him. And that's the problem.

Letts catalogues a whole parcel of ways members of the Establishment feather their own nest without considering the ordinary people. He gives us a tour of public bodies such as the Arts Council, various commissions, the whole EU gravy train, of course the House of Lords, and far more where our liberal elite rewards those who network well and have friends in the right places at the expense of the rest of us. He is pitiless in uncovering the patronising attitude of the liberal elite to ordinary people. The same commentator on the podcast was hoping that the voters would realise how wrong they were in a wonderfully patronising fashion - he called their decisions irrational, without even trying to understand the genuine reasoning that is there.

This combination of patronising distaste and 'we're obviously right because we personally benefit from the approach' is particularly obvious if you live outside of London and the South East (think of the difference between the treatment of the Elizabeth Line and HS2). The result is lashing out the only way the masses can. Leaving the EU, for instance, may well be considered self-destructive in terms of GDP, say, but to paraphrase a northerner Letts quotes, why should he care about GDP when he never sees any of it.

This, then, is the reason I give the book four stars. There are very few commentators from the elite (which Letts certainly is) who really get what's behind the populism and how things really need to change if we are to get away from this situation. It's a difficult book to read when you do feel naturally antagonistic to many of Letts' viewpoints... but if you can put aside that feeling it's very informative.

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A Short Infinite Series - #1

An infinite series is a familiar mathematical concept, where '...' effectively indicates 'don't ever stop' - for example 1 + ½ + ¼ + ⅛... an infinite series totalling 2. This, though is a short series of posts about infinity.
I wrote A Brief History of Infinity a while ago because it's a topic I've found fascinating since I was at school. To kick off the series, here's the introduction of that book, which summarises why it's a subject that intrigues so many:
The infinite is a concept so remarkable, so strange, that contemplating it has apparently driven at least two great mathematicians over the edge into insanity.  In the Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams described how the writers of his imaginary guidebook got carried away in devising its introduction:

‘Space’, it says, ‘is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the street to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space. Listen…’ and so on. After a while the style settles down a bit and it starts telling you things you actually need to know… 

Infinity makes space seem small.
Yet this apparently unmanageable concept is also with us every day. My daughters were no older than six when they first began to count quicker and quicker, ending with a blur of words and a triumphant cry of ‘infinity!’ And though infinity may in truth make space seem small, when we try to think of something as vast as the universe, infinite is about the best label our minds can apply.
Anyone who has broken through the bounds of basic maths will have found the little ∞ symbol creeping into their work (though we will discover that this drunken number eight that has fallen into the gutter is not the real infinity, but a ghostly impostor). Physicists, with a typical carelessness that would make any mathematician wince, are cavalier with the concept. When I was at school, studying A-level (high school) physics, a common saying was ‘the toast rack is at infinity.’ This referred to a nearby building, part of Manchester Catering College, built in the shape of a giant toast rack. (The resemblance is intentional, a rare example of humour in architecture. The companion building across the road, when seen from the air, looks like a fried egg.) We used the bricks on this imaginative structure to focus optical instruments. What we really meant by infinity was that the building was ‘far enough away to pretend that it is infinitely distant’.
Infinity fascinates because it gives us the opportunity to think beyond our everyday concerns, beyond everything to something more – as a subject it is quite literally mind-stretching. As soon as infinity enters the stage it seems as if common sense sanity leaves. Here is a quantity that turns arithmetic on its head, making it seem entirely feasible that 1 = 0. Here is a quantity that enables us to cram as many extra guests as we like into an already full hotel. Most bizarrely of all, it is quite easy to show that there must be something that is bigger than infinity – which surely should be the biggest thing there could possibly be.
Although there is no science more abstract than mathematics, when it comes to infinity, it has proved hard to keep spiritual considerations out of the equation. When human beings contemplate the infinite, it is almost impossible to avoid things theological, whether in an attempt to disprove or prove the existence of something more, something greater than the physical universe. Infinity has this strange ability to be many things at once. It is both practical and mysterious. Mathematicians, scientists and engineers use it quite happily because it works – but they consider it a black box, having the same relationship with it that most of us do with a computer or a mobile phone, something that does the job even though we don’t quite understand how.
The position of mathematicians is rather different. For them, modern considerations of infinity shake up the comfortable, traditional world in the same way that physicists suffered after quantum mechanics shattered the neat, classical view of the way the world operated. Reluctant scientists have found themselves having to handle such concepts as particles travelling backwards in time, or being in two opposite states at the same time. As human beings, they don’t understand why things should be like this, but as scientists they know that if they accept the picture it helps predict what actually happens. As the great twentieth century physicist Richard Feynman said in a lecture to a non-technical audience:

It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don’t understand it. You see, my physics students don’t understand it either. That is because I don’t understand it. Nobody does. 

Infinity provides a similar tantalising mix of the normal and the counter-intuitive. 
All of this makes infinity a fascinating, elusive topic. It can be like a deer, spotted in the depths of a thick wood. You will catch a glimpse of beauty that stops you in your tracks, but moments later you are not sure if you saw anything at all. Then, quite unexpectedly, the magnificent animal stalks out into full view for a few, fleeting seconds.
A real problem with infinity has always been getting though the dense undergrowth of symbols and jargon that mathematicians throw up. The jargon is there for a very good reason. It’s not practical to handle the subject without some use of these near-magical incantations. But it is very possible to make them transparent enough that they don’t get in the way. To open up clear views on this most remarkable of mathematical creatures, a concept that goes far beyond sheer numbers, forcing us to question our understanding of reality.
Welcome to the world of infinity.

You can buy A Brief History of Infinity from Amazon.co.uk, NEXT Amazon.com and Bookshop.org

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Cashless spending 2008 style revisited

REVISIT SERIES - 

An updated post from October 2008The excellent Claudia Hammond has recently done a podcast on the Mondex experiment, an early attempt at a cashless approach to shopping. I took part in this experiment, so it seemed an ideal opportunity to take a look back, both at the experiment itself and how cashless payments differ from what seemed likely in those heady days when contactless and smartphones were in their infancy.
Pretty well everyone needs money really, I guess, but what I meant was 'who needs cash?' [The original post was entitled 'Who needs money?'] The irritating chunks of metal that mean I rarely have a pair of trousers that last more than a year without holes appearing in the pockets (hint, trouser designers - stronger pockets, please). And you always accumulate all those copper coins that you can't be bothered to bag up and take to the bank, so they end up in a charity box or gather dust in a big jar.

Now, when I first moved to the Swindon area a little over 12 years ago, I arrived at the tail end of an experiment that held out hopes of changing all that. It was called Mondex, and it was brilliant.

You got a chip and PIN style card and you downloaded money onto it. Then you used it for all purchases where you'd normally use cash. Of course that's not so different from a debit card, but this was more controllable, and you could use it at lots of places that wouldn't have a debit/credit card reader. Where merchants get stung for accepting a credit card in a way that makes buying a bag of sweets that way inacceptable, with Mondex it was fine. Even the street newspaper vendors in Swindon had them.

Perhaps the biggest advantage it had over cash was you could get money at home. With a card-reading/writing Mondex phone, you could put cash on your card whenever you liked.

Now Mondex is a museum piece but Barclays has recently announced the OnePulse card, combining a credit card, Oyster Card and payment card, usable in over 1,000 shops in London for purchases under £10 (though payment does come from the credit card, not loaded cash), which may see the resurrection of the concept. I'm very tempted to get one.

However, I suspect the next generation of cashless payment will be different. The best contenders at the moment are either expanding debit card use so it is acceptable for a 20p purchase (and everyone accepts them, which means slashing the cost to merchants) or using something else like a mobile phone to initiate the payment.

Admittedly we already have this to an extent in those car parks where you can pay by phone, but they are too low tech and desperately slow. With mark II phone payment I would imagine typing a number from the car park (or newspaper vendor or whatever) into my phone (or more likely scanning a barcode or reading an RFID chip), entering the amount I want to pay and paying instantly.

Whatever the technical solution, I just can't wait to get rid of cash!
I'm rather proud looking back from 2025 just how much I got right - including using a phone and reading an RFID chip (i.e. contactless), though parking apps on the phone were something I'd yet to encounter. I didn't get a OnePulse, which rapidly disappeared.

Image by Erik Mclean from Unsplash

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How not to sell AI

I get a fair amount of cold selling emails, and recently received one that showed exactly why it's important to check what is going into an email, particularly if the email itself reflects what it is you are trying to sell. 

The company in question is attempting to demonstrate how AI can help a business... but all they manage to do is show how it can be a disaster.

Here's what I received (to avoid embarrassment I have removed the name and website of the sender who was the owner of a company whose strapline is 'Do you know how to effectively integrate AI into your business':

What is clear is they don't know how to effectively integrate AI into their business. It doesn't help that they actually tell us that the email is supposed to include an AI-sourced first line from a 'artical' (sic) they saw. And what did they really appreciate? Their website is slick and clearly has had a fair amount of effort put into it. It's unfortunate that they could demonstrate so effectively how to get it wrong.

Image by Igor Omilaev from Unsplash

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O Sing Unto the Lord: Andrew Gant *****

This is one for the music history fans, and/or those with an interest in church music. This definitely includes me - I've sung in choirs since I was about 10 and this kind of music is amongst my favourite listening. Andrew Gant does a brilliant job of digging into English church music throughout history, though almost inevitably the biggest focus is from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

This might seem a very dry subject, but Gant brings it alive, helped by his even drier sense of humour. This is obviously a matter of taste, but if you find amusing his remark on Prince Albert's compositions 'He certainly did not possess a strong enough musical personality to overcome the prevailing tendency to write bad Mendelssohn, but he did it quite well. His Te Deum and Jubilate contain some quite good bad Mendelssohn,' you will enjoy it as I did.

Inevitably the Reformation and subsequent switches of England between protestant and Catholic features heavily with its fascinating impact on composers and their work - particularly complex during Elizabeth's reign, when a staunchly Catholic composer like Byrd was able to keep his balance (and his head) by being considered a sufficiently impressive musician that he was allowed to get away with much that might have end the career or life of another. The basics of that were familiar to me, but a lot of the period through to the Victorians was new. Music we would consider everyday now like hymns and their tunes (which Gant points out even turn up as football chants) really only started to come together towards the end of the eighteenth century (and weren't technically legal for use in Church of England services until 1820), while Anglican chant, familiar to any choral evensong fan was primarily a nineteenth century innovation - along, of course, with much of the Christmas repertoire.

The twentieth century and beyond gets rather summary treatment. In part I think this is fair. As Gant points out it was a time of splintering. Where almost all earlier periods had specific styles and approaches, most twentieth century church composers very much did their own thing. I think Gant could have put a bit more into analysis of the development of worship songs (rather outside his comfort zone, I suspect, though he says some positive, or at least fair things). 

A couple of small negatives. The book is a bit too long. While prepared to mention quite a few unfamiliar names from, say, the Tudorbethan period, it sticks to the well-known in Victorian and Edwardian times, ignoring those who were very popular then but have pretty much disappeared. For example, I was disappointed not get a mention of Caleb Simper whose sheet music sold incredibly well (over 5 million copies) and was a staple of many country and colonial churches. The illustrations are also irritating - they were clearly designed for plates, so are bunched together in two lumps, but are just printed on ordinary pages, so could have been placed near the text they illustrate to much greater effect.

I realise that the readership of a book like this is relatively limited. But if, like me, this kind of music plays an important part in your life, then it is an absolute must to own.

You can buy O Sing Unto the Lord from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com and Bookshop.org

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Is biodiversity good for human wellbeing? - revisited

REVISIT SERIES - 

An edited post from January 2015I 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, still 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 have reviewed several books on happiness (such as Happiness by Design and Happiness ) and they tend to make it clear that most 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', how effectiveness the measure was, 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 bacterial 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.
This has been a  Green Heretic  production. See all my Green Heretic articles here.

Out of interest, I put 'biodiversity' into Unsplash to find a suitable image - all they were was countryside or nature images, so I've used one of my own.

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A Detective's Life: Sherlock Holmes - Martin Rosenstock (Ed.) ****

There's quite an industry involved in producing new Sherlock Holmes stories, some excellent, others less-so. I was recently somewhat disappointed by a Holmesian Christmas novel, but reflecting that I've always preferred Doyle's short stories to his full length Holmes cases, I gave this collection of 12 stories a go, and was generally impressed. The approach is to primarily cover the early days and last days of the Holmes-Watson duo, effectively filling in gaps, which works well.

Inevitably with each story written by a different writer there is some variation in the skill with which they match 'Dr Watson's' writing style in the originals - some get it spot on, others feel a little out of place. This is more notable in the early-set stories, as by the end we've reached the 1920s and it wouldn't be surprising if Watson had adopted a slightly more modern approach to his storytelling. I was surprised how much consistency there felt to be between the stories, apart from one that seemed to suggest Watson had gone through more wives than a Hollywood star.

It's difficult to pick out any individual outstanding stories - they rather merge, but in a pleasant way. Perhaps the oddest is Cavan Scott's The Wild Man of Olmolungring which, set it Tibet, is a very strange mix of the Edwardian style 'adventure in the wild' story with a Holmes-related twist verging on Scooby Doo. There was one story, The Elementary Problem by Philip Purser-Hallard where I was able to work out the solution to the puzzle Holmes was facing from the title alone - I'm not sure if that's a good or bad thing, but made me feel suitably smug. All-in-all, we got indirect connections to well-known Holmes canon events and characters in a way that was comfortable, familiar and enjoyable.

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The Christmas Eve Murders - Noelle Albright ****

This is the last of my Christmas murder mystery reviews for this year (though there will be more crime). It's a very engaging, if distinctly implausible story.

The implausibility is a result of the contrived setting. Maddie, a Scottish journalist working in Manchester is heading home for Christmas, but when her car breaks down she gets stranded in a pub in the Yorkshire Dales in a heavy snowstorm. During an in-pub treasure hunt, one of those present gets murdered - in effect it's a classic country house murder mystery with a modified setting. What makes the situation more than a little contrived is that there happen to be a DI and his detective constable sidekick in the pub, so they can contact an investigation (with Maddie's help) while they're snowed in.

Once you get past this unlikely setup (plus one weak restriction of which more in a moment) though, Noelle Albright keeps the action going in good page-turning fashion. For the first few pages the writing tends to be a little over-descriptive - and the central character is surely in the wrong job as she is wary about almost everything - but once the action starts, Albright has a steady hand in building the tension and surprises. It helps that the pub has enough secret passages to keep every old house mystery lover happy.

To make the isolation work in our modern, connected world we had to have a location with no phone signal (perfectly realistically given it's the Yorkshire Dales) and that would have no landline or internet connection - this latter part was necessary, but provides that weak restriction as Albright simply has the killer cut the phone wire. We had this happen when I was at university and an over-enthusiastic audience member at a punk gig ran amok through the  building cutting the phone lines for no obvious reason. It took about 10 minutes for me to fix our phone. If instead the author had made use of a smashed fibre broadband box it would have worked far better - but I admit this is a picky complaint.

The book is described as a 'hilarious and cosy festive murder mystery' - there was no obvious humour here apart from some tension-breaking jokes between characters, but there is certainly an element of cosiness and it gets full marks on both festivity and mystery. I surprised myself by enjoying it far more than expected, always wanting to read the next chapter.

You can buy The Christmas Eve Murders from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com and Bookshop.org

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So-called embarrassment quotes revisited

REVISIT SERIES - 

An edited post from January 2015There is a usage that is becoming more and more common, verbally and in writing, which I hate. The most frequently used verbal form is 'so-called', and though it can also appear this way in writing, the usual written approach is what I call embarrassment quotes - misused quotation marks.

The reference that set me off on this bijou rantette was a comment on the Today programme on Radio 4, when they referred to 'so-called exoplanets'. Exoplanets exist. There is no doubt about this. Yet according to the OED, 'so-called' means 'called or designated by this name or term, but not properly entitled to it or correctly described by it'. In other words, by saying 'so-called' the speaker implies that there's no such thing.

Now, admittedly, the OED does qualify this definition by saying 'More recently, and now quite commonly (esp. in technical contexts), used merely to call attention to the description, without implication of incorrectness', but I am not prepared to accept this. It's stupid. If you simply mean that an object is an exoplanet, say 'exoplanet'. The 'so-called' is an unnecessary waste of space and confuses those of us who know what the term actually means.
Admittedly, NASA doesn't help with the way they label the picture I've used here which is attributed to 'NASA Hubble Space Telescope' - this genuinely makes it a so-called Hubble Space Telescope image, as it clear isn't a photo from Hubble (and the accompanying text says 'This is an artist's concept of the exoplanet WASP-121 b, also known as Tylos. Credits: Illustration - NASA, ESA, Quentin Changeat (ESA/STScI), Mahdi Zamani (ESA/Hubble).'
I've linked this phenomenon with embarrassment quotes, as these are used all the time by the press and by the BBC in a similar fashion. Whenever they use a word they're a little uncomfortable with, or that might not be correct, they stick it in quotation marks. A 10 second glimpse at the BBC News website gives us, for instance:

Second body found after sea 'dare'

And

A&E waits in England 'getting worse' 

No doubt there were many more. You may suspect that the reason for the quotation marks in the second example was that the last two words were a quote from someone - but they weren't. In both cases, all we have are observations where, for some reason, a particular word or phrase makes a so-called journalist feel a little 'uncomfortable' so 'he or she' resorts to the embarrassment quotes.

Sad.

Image by NASA  from Unsplash

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Murder under the Mistletoe - Richard Coles ****

In previous books by Richard Coles, such as A Death in the Parish, it has been clear that the former pop star and current Anglican priest has a far better grasp of describing period village life and the church than he has of murder mysteries. That is even more obvious here: despite the title of this novella, murder hardly features - in fact the death occurs very near the end of the book.

Once again, Coles' observations of the niceties of 1980s village and church life are delightful - with the added special dusting that Christmas brings. Perhaps his finest creation is the central character Daniel Clement's mother Audrey, who personifies the period middle class's obsession with the delicacies of status and admiration of the upper classes. One of the stars of the book is Audrey's bread sauce, a turkey accompaniment that dates back to when English cooking embraced plainness, to the extent that the recipe is published at the back of the book.

Coles handles nicely the relationship of the vicar with his congregations, expanded significantly over Christmas time by the once-a-year brigade, something that happened even more in the 80s than is the case today. Somewhat bravely, he even includes a short but complete sermon. Admittedly, there were a couple of details that raised an eyebrow. Clement's churchwardens, sidespeople and other churchy supporting cast deserted him to clear up after the Midnight Mass alone (despite a 200-ish congregation - Coles it seems isn't a fan of accurate headcounts). And Clement and his friend were struggling to get fairy lights not to go through various flashing cycles - this feels unlikely in the 80s when white lights weren't LED and rarely flashed.

These books are pure atmosphere with a smidgen of plot attached - something that works particularly well in a Christmas title. Though not as good a mystery as A Death in the Parish, I very much enjoyed this one as a light seasonal snack.

You can buy Murder under the Mistletoe from Amazon.co.uk and Bookshop.org

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These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee:Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here