Brian Clegg's Blog, page 80

So-called embarrassment quotes

There 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.

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.

Don't be weedy - hit the chemistry set

Is your garden a touch messy? Chances are you'll be reaching for the weedkiller. Generally speaking we know these more by the brandname than the active chemical, but there is at least one compound that has taken on a life of its own - and that's paraquat.

Find out the pros and cons of this controversial chemical in my latest Royal Society of Chemistry podcast about 1,1'-Dimethyl-4,4'-bipyridinium dichloride, as I like to call it.  Take a listen by clicking to pop over to its page on the RSC site.

No need to panic, Jezza, you don't need to read the instruction book

This is how you do it - with big friendly picture to helpI know it's popular for people with more than three brain cells to despise Jeremy Clarkson, but he is genuinely an entertaining writer, and Father Christmas sometimes includes one of his books in my stocking.

In the latest, (reviewed here) there are a couple of times when he makes a reference to Macs being worse than Windows PCs 'because you can't right click.' Well, I'm here to tell you not to panic Jezza, because you can. 
It's true that the very first Macs had a dinky little mouse with a single, big, friendly button and no other option, but that went out with the dark ages. Both the mouse on my iMac and the clicky pad thing on a MacBook are capable of doing right clicks. 
'But,' the baffled Jezza would no doubt reply in his trademark 'I don't understand' small boy voice, 'when I do a right click it doesn't work, and being a man, I can't look in the help section.' Fear not, because the whole point of a visual interface is that you don't need to get help. Let's guess what to do instead. That should suit you as well as a pair of baggy jeans.
So we open Settings, click on the Mouse/Pointy Thing bit, and low and behold we can switch on right click. There's even an animated picture to show you what it does, for the hard of thinking.

You can argue, probably correctly, that Apple should have switched right click on by default, because it's jolly useful - but even a Top Gear presenter can manage to engage it without assistance or instruction books. So stop moaning, Mr C., and get yourself a decent computer.

Science for Life

I'm unusually excited that my new book Science for Life is now on sale.
It's quite different from anything that I've ever done before. The idea is to take on all those science issues we constantly get pumped at us in the media (especially from the Daily Mail and Daily Express), telling us about a new discovery in science and how it influences in our lives. It could be that red wine is good for you... or bad for you. It could be that there's a new sunscreen you just drink, or that listening to Mozart will make your baby cleverer. What I try to do in the book is both explain the
 difference between real science and the media representation of science, and to cover as many different topics that have an influence on our lives as I can.

It's divided into Diet, Exercise, Brain, Psychology, Health, Evironment and Fun sections, each containing a host of little articles on all these many topics. And because it's never really going to be finished, there's an accompanying blog where I'll continue to add new topics and update existing ones.

The book is now available both as a rather handsome hardback and as an ebook (all the main formats) - please do click through to its web page and find out a bit more about it (or even go mad and buy a copy). The nice thing about it is that though it should interest my usual science audience, I think it will be really appreciated by a much wider set of people who are simply confused by all the conflicting information the media pump at us.

In case you didn't believe the bit about a drinkable sunscreen - and to see a little of what the book's like - here's the entry on that subject.

Drinkable Sunscreen

In May 2014 the British newspapers were flooded with articles about a new, miracle product. The Daily Mail took the lead, splashing the headline: ‘World’s first DRINKABLE sun cream goes on sale – and just a teaspoon will offer three hours’ protection.’ According to the Mail, the product ‘works by molecules vibrating on the skin, cancelling UVA and UVA [sic] rays’. (The Mail clearly meant to say ‘cancelling UVA and UVB rays’.)

This is a bizarre claim. The Mail tells us that the product’s developer says: ‘If 2mls are ingested an hour before sun exposure, the frequencies that have been imprinted on the water will vibrate on your skin in such a way as to cancel approximately 97% of the UVA and UVB rays before they even hit your skin.’

There are serious problems with this explanation. The suggestion is that somehow the frequencies ‘imprinted on the liquid’ can cancel out light the way noise-cancelling headphones cancel out noise. If this were possible, the military would be rushing out to buy this product for their planes as ‘cancelling out light’ would make them invisible. But in fact light is nothing like sound – you can’t cancel it out with a vibration, even if something you drink could make your skin vibrate with a particular frequency – which it can’t.

The real concern is that people will use this product and then undertake dangerous levels of sun exposure – and a particular concern is that this would seem ideal for children. There’s no worse job when arriving on a beach than having to coat your children, who want to be running around, in sunscreen. Imagine how attractive the idea is of just being able to give them a drink and they are protected. But should parents do this, they will be exposing delicate skin to the sun’s rays without protection, which can result in very serious outcomes.
Of course, scientists are coming up with new treatments and products all the time – but when the description of how a product works is one that bears no resemblance to known science, when the product has not been tested by any authorities for safety, and when the result of it not working could have very serious health implications, it is extremely irresponsible of newspapers to cover it in this way.


There is nothing you can drink that will protect you from the sun. 

Does 'Arts Funding Bring in £4 for Every £1 Spent'?

I was interested to see, in a moan about the Labour party's lack of intention to reverse Conservative cuts to arts funding, this punchy statement:

But does arts funding 'bring in £4 for every £1 spent'? And just what does 'brings in' mean? The website had picked the statement up from a Local Government Association Press release, which itself referred to a report called 'Driving growth through local government investment in the arts' which referred (keep up) to a 2013 Arts Development UK Report. (Phew.) And here we find that magic number - but it certainly wasn't about what I expected.

Saying arts spending 'brings in £4 for every £1 spent' and I suspect most people would think that if you spent £1 of public money on the arts, £4 would flow in either directly from ticket sales, merchandising etc. or indirectly from extra tourism to your town/city etc. That's certainly what I assumed it meant, as did a straw poll I did on Facebook - and as, presumably the ranty person with the headline meant. But it wasn't that at all.

Arts Development UK kindly provided me with their 2013 report from which this 'statistic' was taken. What the report actually says is 'For every £1 spent by local authorities on arts service, leverage from grant aid and partnership working brings in £4.04 of additional funding.' So, when a local authority spends £1 it gets that additional money from grant aid and partnership - which is largely partnership with other authorities and with bodies like Arts Council England. In other words, £1 of local government spend brings the local authority another £4 of public money. Excellent for the local authority, but hardly supporting the argument to spend more on the arts.

To be honest, this 'statistic', which I suspect we will see used plenty more times, is wrong on just about every count. What the numbers refer to is being misrepresented (accidentally, I'm sure). And it's entirely the wrong way to argue for funding of the arts.

We should fund the arts. But not because they're a good return on financial investment - they rarely are, at least in the short term. It's very difficult to show that there are significant financial benefits. The tourists may well have come even if that £1 hadn't been spent (most come for the sights and commercial entertainment, rather than publicly funded arts). The money spent on the tickets, brochures, CDs, etc. etc. is likely to have been spent with someone else anyway. As one of my straw pollers, Richard Carter put it 'I used to assess business cases for a living. You can get them to say pretty much anything you want.'

Instead, we should fund the arts because they are important to what makes us human. You can argue about how much they need funding, and how we do that funding, and I would argue that it's a disgrace to spend so much on elite establishments like the Royal Opera House when regional arts funding is nose diving. There is also lots of money wasted on silly things. But one of the problems with the arts is that one person's silly thing is another's true artwork.

So here's the short version:
Yes, keep some art spending (redistributing it with less to big London institutions) but No, don't use misleading numbers and No, don't argue it's a money spinner. It's not. It's more important than that.

Ten Pieces - opening the world of classical music?

If you have children in primary school in the UK you may find them exposed to something called Ten Pieces at the moment. It's a BBC initiative to promote ten pieces of music to 'open up the world of classical music to primary age children.' What's good about this is that any school (or parent) can download the pieces free of charge (or stream them) here.

I've got really mixed feelings about this. Is it a good idea to introduce primary children to serious music (perhaps a better label than classical, as most of these aren't strictly classical)? Absolutely. Can you specify ten pieces that will do the trick? I'm not sure. I think there's a danger of the same sort of problems they have in English when everyone reads the same set texts.

What definitely is not good is the way I heard one of these pieces played on the radio (for some reason on Radio 2). The piece they happened to be playing is Zadok the Priest, and the presenter seemed to assumed that the opening orchestral section was just filler, so talked over it until just before the singing came in. This was musically inept as the most interesting musical aspect of Zadok is the way that the introduction seems to crescendo, then pulls back, so the real crescendo is vastly more engaging. This was totally missed.

But that was just one silly presenter. What about the list itself? I'd say 5 or 6 of them should be there, but there are some sad omissions. And that, of course, is the problem with every such list. Everyone will different ideas of what should be on it (I just know that at least four of these shouldn't.) The list is:
Adams: Short Ride in a Fast MachineBeethoven: Symphony 5 (1st movement)Britten: 'Storm' Interlude from 'Peter Grimes'Grieg: In the Hall of the Mountain KingHandel: Zadok the PriestHolst: Mars from The PlanetsMeredith: Connect ItMozart: Horn Concerto No 4 (3rd movement)Mussorgsky: A Night on the Bare MountainStravinsky: The Firebird (Finale)I wouldn't include the Adams, not because I've anything against film music, but simply because there's far better film music - this is pretty tedious. Can't really argue with Beethoven, though I can't see any point in including the Britten. Grieg - fine. I wouldn't include Handel, because there should have been some Bach and there's no need for both. Holst, certainly. Meredith - sorry, no justification, this is just blatant tokenism. There is much better contemporary serious music. Mozart - I'm not a fan, but I can see he might deserve a place. And you can't question the final two.
What do I think's missing? Apart from Bach, I would have included Vaughan Williams (probably the Tallis fantasia), I would have put in something Tudorbethan - probably a spot of Byrd - and I would have included a bit of opera with singing in - probably Dido's lament from Dido and Aeneas. For a contemporary piece (and I'm conscious I might have gone over 10, so let's drop Mozart), I'd use Whitacre's Cloudburst, especially as that gives us another choral piece.
Still, bearing in mind it truly is a 'no one could agree' thing, the list is not a bad effort, BBC. Pat on the back deserved.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong review

At risk of alienating half my readership, I rather enjoy Top Gear. In fact there was one moment in the infamous 2014 Christmas special that was arguably the funniest moment on TV over the festive viewing (certainly funnier than certain prime time 'comedies'). What's more, if it's possible to take a dispassionate view, Jeremy Clarkson is a good newsprint writer, so I look forward to his books that are made up of collections of his columns.

If I'm honest, the pure comment columns are better than the car reviews collected here. Clarkson is at his most excellent when allowed to flow unconstrained, without the limits of talking about a car. Admittedly even in a review he does manage usually to spend about half the word count talking about something else, but when we get to the actual vehicle, it all gets a bit samey, especially as the reader is faced with two years of reviews at a time.

Having said that, some of the non-car bits are definitely entertaining, and if you've only ever seen the TV programme, you'll be surprised how often he says positive things about ordinary cars. In fact, while accepting their appeal, he regularly emphasises that no one with an ounce of intelligence would ever buy a supercar, and generally comes down on the very sensible and practical options of a VW Golf for a smaller car and a Range Rover for the more lavish end of the market. As always (and as Clarkson detractors seem incapable of spotting), there is a stream of self-deprecation, admitting his own failings (while admittedly pointing out one or two others' problems as well).

So while I probably wouldn't recommend the book for anyone other than an ardent Clarkson fan because of the abundance of car reviews, it does remind me that his books of pure comment columns are well worth revisiting.

You can find out more about the book at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.

A Tale of Two Covers

One lights up the room... the other doesn'tBook covers are emotional things to an author. However much we might be encouraged not to judge a book by its cover, the fact is that everyone does. And while some publishers are enlightened enough to give their authors a say in the covers (my UK publisher Icon is particularly good at this), in the end an author is generally at the mercy of the designer and what the publisher is happy with.

Generally speaking I've been pretty lucky with my covers, but one has always struck me as a bit of disaster, which was the cover of the Macmillan version of my first popular science book, Light Years. It's dull and murky, and if it were ever face forward on a shelf it would appear pretty much blank if your nose wasn't pressed hard against it. You can see what they were trying to do by spelling out the title with star fields... it just doesn't work.

Now I'm delighted to say that that Light Years is being republished by Icon, with a design that fits in with my other five Icon titles in their latest editions - and suddenly it's a joy. A cover that jumps off the shelf at you.

It's out on Kindle on 1 January and as a p-book a week later. If you've already got a copy, frankly, it's not worth getting the new one. It has an appendix that was dropped from the original version of the book, which has some of the original documents (like Newton's letter on Light and Colour) that are referred to in the text, but that's about it. (On the other hand, if you haven't got a copy, take a look!)

It might seem a trivial thing, but that change of cover has transformed the book from something I used to hide in the corner on my bookstall after a talk to something that will be centre stage.

Happy New Year!

The sad fate of the bound proof

Some have boring covers, others look like the
real thing, but there's usually a clue...What do you call a book that's not a book? A bound proof (or if you are American and like a good acronym, an ARC, standing for Advanced Reading/Reader Copy).

It sort of makes sense. While I, as a reader, would always prefer to read a finished copy of a book, the publisher likes to get reviews in as early as possible, particularly if the reviewer is likely to provide snappy remarks to put on the cover. So quite often, before the book is actually produced, they will typeset and bind as a paperback the uncorrected proofs and send them out to eager reviewers.

The reviewer reads this not-quite-a-book as usual and produces his or her words of wisdom. But what to do next?

With a real book I have two choices. If I love it, I put it on the shelf for future re-reading. But shelf space is very limited and I can only do this with 2 or 3 books a year, where I review about 50. The rest, I'm afraid, I resell. Some people mutter about a free copy being sold, but short of putting it in the recycling, whatever I do will result in that free copy going on the market. And bearing in mind I don't get paid for the reviews I do for www.popularscience.co.uk, I don't think this is an unreasonable thing to do. (It's not just me. One of my favourite bits of Brian Aldiss's excellent autobiography, Bury My Heart at W. H. Smith is his description of John Betjeman regularly coming into the bookshop Aldiss worked in with a pile of review books to sell on.)

However, with a bound proof I am faced with much more of a quandary. I don't really want to keep it, even if it is a great book, because it's not the real thing and doesn't look good on the shelf. And I can't sell it or even give it away. So they really do end up in the recycling. And that feels awfully sad.

A Scandi too far?

Pronounced?..In the old days, foreign product names were anglicised where necessary, to avoid undue confusion in the British populace. But gradually, over time, as we've got more sophisticated, we have been exposed to more of the real thing without our brains exploding. So, for instance, despite much moaning, the brand we always called 'nessuls' as in 'Nestles Milky Bar', sneakily switched to being 'nesslay' as a better approximation to Nestlé.

Now, perhaps thinking that we have been prepared for the exotic by our fondness for The Killing and The Bridge, that household standard Ikea has made the risky switch from 'eye-kee-uh' to 'ick-ay-ah', presumably also closer to the original pronunciation. As far as I can tell, the Great British Public (GBP) has yet to adopt this. People still sigh and gird their loins at thought of facing the industrial-strength unfriendliness of the car park of a Eyekeeuh store. But perhaps we will end up with something like the puzzling hybrid used by the more educated driver in an attempt to pronounce the name of the car manufacturer also known as VW. I suspect the initials will always remain 'vee double-you' rather than 'fow vey' as I suppose they should be, but where some of the GBP goes for the full English 'vokes-waggon' many adopt 'vokes-vargen' as a halfway house to 'folks-vargen'.

I don't know why, but my suspicion is that there is a limit. Chances are that yummy mummies will continue to take their kiddywinks on the school run in a 'volvo' rather than a 'wolwo', because, frankly, in English it sounds rather silly.

But who can tell...