Brian Clegg's Blog, page 85

Code breaking for treasure

I'm not a great one for putting out press releases as blog posts, but this is one I can't resist sharing. So let me hand you over to the University of Manchester's press office to discover the opportunity to crack a cryptic code and win some movie goodies in honour of Alan Turing (and, yes, the new film with Mr Cumberbatch about him). Luckily, the treasure hunt won't  turn out like the infamous Masquerade book, which gave cryptic clues to the burial place of a solid gold hare, and resulted in all manner of places being dug up to the irritation of their owners and embarrassment of the publishers. Here the treasure isn't really buried (and, sadly, isn't real silver ingots as Turing is supposed to have hidden).

So, over to you Manchester U:

A new fiendishly-challenging online brain-teaser, featuring cryptic clues, has been launched by mathematicians at The University of Manchester.  The online cryptography competition has been designed to coincide with the launch of the film ‘The Imitation Game’, which tells the real-life story of mathematician Alan Turing, who is credited with cracking the German Enigma Code.

The cryptic conundrum is based around a true story of how in 1940, Alan Turing converted his savings into silver ingots and buried them in Bletchley Park. In real life the silver has never been found, but for the purposes of the competition, a location has been chosen and three coded clues are there to be deciphered.  The answers to the clues can then be used to find the location of the silver.  Participants submit their solution and winners, who will be drawn at random from correct solutions, receive film-related merchandise kindly donated by StudioCanal, distributors of the film.

Turning, who was a pioneer of computing, artificial intelligence and mathematical biology had close links with the University of Manchester.  In 1948 he was appointed Reader in the Mathematics Department and soon afterwards he became Deputy Director of the Computing Laboratory at the University, working on software for one of the earliest true computers - the Manchester Ferranti Mark 1.  Actor Benedict Cumberbatch, who plays Turing in the film, also has ties to the city and The University, where he was a former drama student.

Dr Andrew Hazel from the School of Mathematics said, “Having seen our annual online Alan Turing Cryptography Competition, StudioCanal contacted us to propose a one-off competition related to the release of The Imitation Game. We were delighted to take the opportunity to share our enthusiasm for mathematics and cryptography, and to highlight the close ties between the University, Alan Turing and Benedict Cumberbatch.”

The Imitation Game Cryptography Competition will close at midday on 28th November 2014.  It is free to enter and open to any resident of the United Kingdom but only one prize will be awarded per household.  Full details available online.

Wishful thinking on the demise of supermarkets

Should I give up Asda, 5 minutes walk away, and drive a 10 mile round trip
to get to a butchers, greengrocers etc?I have a bit of a history with 'natural food' journalist Joanna Blythman. Don't get me wrong, I've never met her, and we've never argued, but I have often mentioned a quote from her in her days at the Soil Association when she came out with a statement that managed to be both an understatement and an unnecessary scare. Writing in the Guardian, she remarked:

You can switch to organic... Or you could just accept that every third mouthful of food you eat contains poison. Are you up for that?

The understatement is because practically every mouthful you eat contains poison, whether you buy organic or not. Food contain poisons both natural and artificial. Usually far more are natural - typically around a factor of 1,000. And the unnecessary scare is because the fact is that the levels of pesticide residues on non-organic food are sufficiently low that they provide far less risk than that from the food itself - and that risk is (for uncontaminated food) is minimal with almost everything except that ubiquitous poison alcohol. The key to understanding poisons is that it's the dose that matters. However, I should move on, as this isn't the topic of this post.

In her recent article in the Observer, Ms Blythman celebrated the demise of the supermarkets. I don't disagree with her assessment of some of the issues faced by the big supermarkets, but I think she is indulging in pure wishful thinking if she thinks that in a few years they will have disappeared and we will all be good Stepford Wives/Husbands, spending the entire day trolling from butchers to greengrocers to half a dozen other shops in order to have the tea on the table when our partners come home.
Yes, it's true that we are tending to shop more frequently in small quantities, rather than a single big weekly shop, but most of us don't live in a fashionable London suburb, or a quaint market town, that still has its neat row of butchers, bakers and candlestick makers all ready for us to pop in with our hessian baskets akimbo. For good green reasons I do most of my food shopping on foot - and that means shopping at an Asda superstore or a Tesco convenience store. The Asda (pictured above) is closer and has much more range - and is very friendly and has some good pricing - so that's where I go.

About once a week we do a bigger shop, though no longer the traditional 'shopping for the week' and for that we go to Waitrose. It's a new building, well-designed with great facilities in which to sip your free latte (or whatever). It is actually the most enjoyable supermarket I've ever used. Unlike the butchers, I don't have to stand in a queue - in fact not even to check out, as Waitrose have the natty check-yourself-as-you-go system.

Of course it's a dangerous trap to assume the rest of the country is like you. (Could Ms B be doing this?) Lots of people have a day job that makes it less easy to pop to the shop than mine does - and many of them will pick up food shopping in whatever they pass on the way to the bus or the station. They don't want to spend an hour browsing round six different shops, they want to quickly pick something up and get home.

So by all means enjoy the decline of the big supermarkets. They were, indeed responsible for the kind of misleading selling that Ms Btythman mentions. But it would be wrong to assume that this means that they are going to disappear - they will change and survive - or that most people will go back to toddling round a whole range of food shops on a daily basis. It's not going to happen. It will remain a self-indulgent luxury for those who have the money to live in the right places and the time to do it.

Space travel is inherently risky

In the wake of the Virgin Galactic tragedy, it is worth thinking a little about the realities of risk and space travel - especially as we are so bad at handling probability, which is what risk is all about.

But I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to click here to pop over to my Huffington Post blog, where you will find the piece.

Nothing to lament about here

I'm not a great reader of historical fiction with the exception of titles where it overlaps with crime. Perhaps the greatest proponent of that crossover is C. J. Sansom, and his latest novel, Lamentation, featuring the hunchbacked lawyer Matthew Shardlake, operating in the complex times of Tudor England, is to my mind his best. Oddly, this is despite - or, rather, because - this isn't much of a crime novel. Instead what we have here is a full blown Tudor political thriller, with all the twists and turns, machinations and backstabbing (in this case sometimes literally) that you would expect in the modern equivalent.

The crime that Shardlake investigates appears simple. The disappearance of a compromising manuscript written by Henry VIII's last queen (on whom Shardlake has a long-term crush), Catherine Parr. But the setting, mixing the dangerous teetering between traditionalist, near-Catholic beliefs and 'reformer' protestant beliefs with the political manoeuvring that became ever more strong as Henry's death became obviously close is fascinating, engrossing and gripping.

I admit I'm probably the ideal reader of this book. I read a lot of crime, I like political thrillers, my favourite music is from this period and I find both the religious and political battles absorbing. All three of Henry's children, who haven't featured much in the previous Shardlake books, appear towards the end, and with the prescience of foreknowledge we can feel sorry for Edward, a shudder at what Mary will be responsible for, and hope for Elizabeth - directed by Sansom's expert light touches.

It's a long book at 642 pages, and this would usually put me off, but for once it is justified as there really is never a feeling that the author is padding things out. In reality, the book ends at page 619 with the rest taken up with historical notes - don't skip these as they fill in some details that you will probably find extremely enlightening. I certainly did.

So there we have it: gripping, historically impressive, yet never overloading the detail to the extent you feel that you are being educated, a page turner and yet thoughtful too. Wonderful.

Lamentation is available from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.

Does cocoa reduce memory loss?

I was listening to Steve Wright's show on Radio 2 the other day (I'm sorry, it was someone else's car) when an item caught my ear. They reported that a paper in Nature Neuroscience (yes, that's the kind of highbrow stuff you get on Radio 2) said that older people could reduce memory loss by drinking cocoa. Now my next book, due out in January, is all about the claims made for science (good and bad) in areas like health, diet, exercise, the brain and so forth, so it seemed worth looking into, and so I got hold of a copy of the original paper.

I'll be honest, it wasn't one of the better ones I've seen. Most scientific papers are hard work to read, but this was a bit more fuzzy about some things than I would expect to be made explicit. As is often the case, while the paper was interesting, and highlighted something worthy of further investigation, what it demonstrated was more complex than the media report suggested, and at this stage it didn't offer substantive proof of benefits.

In the trial, a group of healthy people aged between 50 and 69 were split into four groups. Two groups spent three months on a diet that was high in cocoa, two on a low cocoa diet. At least, that's how the paper describes it in headline terms - dig in further and it seems the 'high cocoa' group took a daily supplement of 99mg of cocoa flavanols. To get this much naturally you would have to eat 25 individual chocolate bars (not recommended!) - I don't know how much that is in cups of cocoa, but I suspect it's a lot. Each group was also divided into half that were sedentary and half that took regular exercise.
The scientists then looked at two things - how a particular part of the brain responded in an fMRI scanner, and how well the test subjects did at two memory tests. What they found was that those on a high cocoa diet did better at one of the memory tests - the equivalent, it was claimed, of being almost 30 years younger.
This is interesting, but the results presented aren't enough to suggest we should all get out and start consuming lots of cocoa flavanols. The test groups were small with only 8 to 11 people in each. This doesn't mean that the results are meaningless, but it does suggest further tests are required. It has also been pointed out that the claim that result is statistically significant is doubtful. The value isn't what most scientists would consider significant - the results could be obtained in error with about 50 per cent probability, which isn't good enough to be considered useful.
What was claimed to be observed is that the cocoa increased blood flow to the dentate gyrus region of the hippocampus in the brain, which is thought to have a role in memory handling. In the trial, the high cocoa group did better at a memory test where they had to remember whether a shape they were shown was one of 40 they had just seen in a sequence. But they didn't do any better in a test where they had to recall words from a list, 60 minutes after three attempts to learn it.
Another oddity of the trial is that no improvement was found in those who performed exercise, even though in a previous trial by the same experimenters with a different subject group had found a benefit from exercise. This doesn't rule out the findings, but does emphasise the need to repeat the trial, several times and with bigger groups. Oh, and the authors declared no personal interest, but it wasn't strongly flagged up that the study was funded by the Mars chocolate company.
There seems to be some evidence here that this cocoa-sourced substance might help with the short-term recognition of shapes, which is something we get worse at as we get older. This can't be a bad thing if true. But it isn't a miracle cure for the way that ageing effect our memories, and taken on its own, this trial is not enough even to demonstrate that.

Without doubt it raises the question: should the media be reporting this kind of trial in the way they do, or should they wait until there is enough evidence to make a clearer statement? I'm not saying they should conceal the trial: the more reporting of science, the better. But it could have had more provisos attached. We shouldn't be too harsh on Steve Wright's show, though. They, realistically don't have time to read such a paper in full, and the way the findings were summarised left something to be desired too.

You can see the full paper at Nature Neuroscience, though you would need a subscription to read more than a summary. It is Enhancing dentate gyrus function with dietary flavanols improves cognition in older adults - Adam M Brickman, Usman A Khan, Frank A Provenzano, Lok-Kin Yeung, Wendy Suzuki, Hagen Schroeter, Melanie Wall, Richard P Sloan & Scott A Small - Nature Neuroscience (2014) doi:10.1038/nn.3850

A throw of the dice

I mentioned a few days ago how much I enjoyed doing my talk based on Dice World in the John Rylands Library at the Manchester Science Festival, courtesy of the Royal Society.

If you didn't make it, but would like to find out more about tossing a head ten times in a row, running a horse racing scam, why half my audience would turn down an offer of £5,000 with no strings attached and how a probability problem embarrassed a large number of US academics, you can now watch my talk courtesy of the wonders of YouTube.

I can obviously only touch on a tiny part of what's covered in the book (someone bought it just to read about golden retrievers and Bayes' theorem), so if this has wet your appetite, I've links to buy it in all kinds of format from its web page, or you can even get a signed copy direct from me (after all, it's nearly present buying season!)

Mars recedes

One of the most interesting aspects of writing Final Frontier was the change in the nature of space exploration since the Moon landings. In science fiction, space travel was usually a private venture, but in reality it has been dominated by governments. But now things are changing. Not only are some of the supply ships to the ISS now privately run, we have the likes of Virgin Galactic soon to offer space tours around the bay (as it were), various would-be asteroid mining concerns making their plans and a pair of Mars missions, all from private ventures.

When I wrote the book, both Inspiration Mars, which plans a Mars flypast by a two person craft, and Mars One which plans to land at least two groups of four on the surface, had punishing schedules. Inspiration Mars was intending to get out there in 2018, while Mars One was expecting an unmanned equipment drop in 2016, with astronauts heading out in 2023 and 2025.

A lot of the media coverage has been about the way that Mars One is intending to fund its scary concept of a one-way manned mission. (It's much easier to get people there in one piece than to bring them back.) The intent is to operate the mission as a reality TV show, with all the training and flights broadcast and viewers able to decide which of the teams in training will be the first to land on the red planet. However, there has been rather less coverage of just how tight these timescales are.

Both ventures depend on the still-in-development SpaceX Falcon heavy-lifter rocket. SpaceX has a good pedigree, already successfully getting cargo to the ISS, but deadlines for this kind of engineering development are always very slippery. The chances of the Falcon heavy-lifter being ready for 2016 were always low.

Interestingly, both ventures have now slipped back their timescales. Inspiration Mars has shifted from 2018 to 2021, and Mars One from 2016 to 2018 for the equipment run, with astronauts going out in 2024 and 2026. These dates are not as random as they appear. With its separate, larger orbit, Mars goes through cycles where it is further from and closer to the Earth. At opposition, its closest point in each cycle, which comes at intervals of a little over two years, Mars seems to do a loop in the sky. From the Earth’s viewpoint it doubles back on itself, coming closest to the Earth for a brief period. But that cycle is not uniform.

Some oppositions are much closer than others. Although Earth and Mars come relatively close to each other every couple of years, 2018 gives us our best chance until the similar close encounter in 2035, hence the urgency. (It’s a shame we missed 2003, when Mars was at its closest for six thousand years.) Inspiration Mars has given up on that ideal (but thrown an additional loop around Venus into the pot as a sweeter), while Mars One has captured the sweet spot for its unmanned first venture.

Will either mission really fly? I honestly don't know. But I do think that manned space missions are important for the human race, and that the involvement of commercial ventures will have a positive impact, lifting the sights of what has been an increasingly moribund NASA, and possibly working with the ESA (to date notably shy of manned flights), and the blossoming Chinese and Indian space ventures to make the world a whole lot more interesting.

Pass me the Haynes, I've an alien dissection to do

There was a time when Haynes manuals were, frankly, rather stuffy, step by step books, beloved of those who liked taking a car apart in the garage, and mocked by everyone else. But the publisher has relatively recently realised that the books' distinctive form can be applied to all kinds of different subjects. We've seen, for instance, a maintenance manual for the Death Star and a UFO investigations manual, which took a pretty straight approach to the possibility that UFOs were indeed alien craft.

However, the latest Haynes to join my reviewing shelf is unashamedly a work of fiction - though it technically never admits this, maintaining a straight-faced attitude at all times. The Alien Invasion Owners' Resistance Manual is allegedly written by a member of the UK's 'Ministry of Alien Defence' and is packed full of entirely made up, but entertaining statistics and information on the various alien invaders, their modus operandi and just what it is they're up to. As the introduction states 'This annual is not designed for astronauts, boffins or eggheads. It's for everyone. In true Haynes style, we aim to demonstrate how with the right knowledge, training and the largest available roll of aluminium foil, the concerned citizen can really hit ET where it hurts.'

Throughout, the manual is given the look of being heavily used with oil stains and what may be cigarette (or ray gun) burns on most pages. The author has also kindly 'hand written' comments to add to the information. Someone has put an awful lot of work into this - and it is often very entertaining. I love, for instance, a section which begins 'It may seem strange to readers that while classic TV series such as Firefly are cancelled, reality shows with their "follow-a-nobody" formula are regularly getting into their fifth series,' and goes on to suggest that this might be an alien plot to damage the IQ of humans.

Inevitably some parts work better than others, and once the book has established the main categories of alien and the nature of their ships, it can feel a little bit samey as it then goes through defence strategies and the like. In the end it is a single joke carried to extraordinary lengths. But you have to admire the impressively straight-faced consistency and nice attention to detail (one section is redacted with the remark 'For legal reasons, Haynes Publishing would like to state that a cloaked Draconian vessel did not crash in Nigeria in 1983, and that three reptilian bodies were definitely not recovered and taken to Area 51') - overall it does a far better job than I imagined possible.

What's scary is that it really wouldn't surprise me if some people take this book seriously.

If you want to be prepared, and to have the best design for a stylish yet practical tinfoil hat, you can find the manual on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com. It's probably not suitable for younger children, but should work for sophisticated 10-year-olds who can get the joke, through to adults who enjoy a good alien invasion romp.

P.S. - Despite the title of my review, unless I missed it, one thing it doesn't mention, perhaps for copyright reasons, is the infamous 'alien dissection' movie.

A cracking venue

I love giving talks, whatever the setting. I am happy in a school classroom or a 1,000 seater auditorium.  (Okay, I love the buzz of a big audience, but sometimes the intimate little gatherings are the most rewarding.) But just occasionally you get a chance to speak somewhere that really feels special.

That's what I call a ceilingPerhaps the most striking example I've had of this feeling of awe is the Royal Institution. It's hard not to be a little daunted and delighted in equal measures by the string of big name scientists from Davy and Faraday onwards who have lectured there. But a close second has to be the venue for my talk based on Dice World last Thursday, the John Rylands Library in Manchester.

I had heard about the library a lot as youth, when going to school in Manchester, and I passed it on the bus hundreds of times, briefly noting the way it stands out from its surroundings rather like that cathedral in New York. Certainly the outside is striking. In fact you could well call the library a cathedral of learning. But it's only when you get into its historical reading room that you discover this example of high Victorian gothic at its most truly wonderful. (Full marks also, by the way, for the way the modern extension is integrated with it.)

So next time you are in Manchester (and, as my old history teacher used to say, 'If you haven't been to Manchester, you haven't lived!') take the time to deviate from your busy schedule and make a trip to Deansgate. Once the city's posh shopping street, and still with some fancy brand names, you will find nestling anong the office blocks, restaurants and boutiques, this architectural treasure. Pop inside and feast your eyes. Best seen, I think, in the dusk, when the extravagant lighting really sets the place off.

Another poke in the QI

I love the BBC TV show QI dearly, but since they so delight in the misunderstandings of others, they are fair game when they get something a trifle wrong. Recently they did just this - or to be precise, they omitted an important part and focused on an answer that, while true, was not the best picture.

Specifically, they were asking about Sherlock Holmes and what kind of reasoning he employed. Inevitably, someone fell into the trap of saying 'deduction', because we associate phrases like 'And what can we deduce, Watson?' with old SH, even if never said. 'No,' said the awesome Stephen Fry, 'he used abduction.' Now I would like to suggest that this is an incorrect remark on several levels. Firstly, occasionally Holmes did use deduction. And, yes, he did sometimes use abduction. But I think his main technique was, in fact, induction.

Here's a quick summary of the three, using that most delightful of reasoning tools, the logical swan. (These examples are probably not perfect if you are a nitpicking logician, but good enough for QI purposes.)

Deduction: Mr Davies makes model swans. He only makes white model swans. I have in this box one of Mr Davies' swans. I can deduce (without looking at it) that it is a white swan.

Induction: I have been down to the river and all the swans I examined (possibly with a magnifying glass) were white. I form the hypothesis 'all swans are white' (and it holds up pretty well until I visit Australia).

Abductive: All the swans I have observed are white and the most likely explanation for this is that 'all swans are white'.

The distinction between induction and abduction is extremely subtle. Both go beyond what is logically proved by the evidence (known in the trade as being 'ampliative') but abduction specifically requires an explanation - the reason that the swans I have observed are white is that all swans are white, where induction is more statistical: 100% of the swans I have observed are white, so I will use the hypothesis that swans are white without worrying about the reason why this is the case.

So when Sherlock does his party trick of saying something to the effect of 'I see you are an ex-military medical man, recently returned from Afghanistan,' Holmes is almost certainly using abduction, but when he does his day job, using cigar ash or a footprint in the soil, it is likely that he is using induction.

Back to QI, to be fair and logical they did not say that what Holmes did wasn't induction, because no one brought it up - but to state plonkingly that what Holmes used was abduction is no better answer than the 'deduction' that got so derided.

Image from Wikipedia