Brian Clegg's Blog, page 88

On the road to Doom - review

I was delighted when someone pointed out the book Masters of Doom. It's not a new title, dating back to 2003, but it covers a period that anyone of a certain age with an interest in computer games will regard with interest.

Describing the rise and fall of the two creators of id software, John Carmack and John Romero, it is a classic silicon valley business/bio - with some particularly extreme characters. I knew nothing of these people at the time, but reading the book brought on waves of nostalgia as they were responsible for three of the key milestones in gaming history. I was still programming PCs when Wolfenstein 3D came out and I remember being amazed by the effects and responsiveness they coaxed out of the early PC's terrible graphics. By the time Doom and Quake came along, I was reviewing games for a living. Though my personal tastes ran more to the X-Wing series and Seventh Guest, I was stunned by the capabilities of the id games. They were the only first person shooters I ever found interesting - and each moved on the field immensely. All the first person shooters that are popular today from Call of Duty and Halo to Destiny owe them so much.

So from a techie viewpoint, this was fascinating, though the author does tend to rather brush over the technical side to keep the story flowing. And from the personal side, there were plenty of fireworks too. While the book slightly overplays the traditional US business biography style of presenting disasters and triumphs to regularly fit chapter boundaries, there is no doubt there was a real roller-coaster of an existence in a way that all those reality TV stars who overuse that term wouldn't possibly understand.

Although there are plenty of other characters, the two Johns are at the book's heart - Carmack the technology wizard behind the engines that powered these worlds, and Romero the designer and flamboyant gamer. The pair inevitably clash on direction and when they split it's interesting that it's the John who doesn't go for the classic US software developer heaven of turning the offices into a playground who succeeds.

All in all, truly wonderful for anyone who was into games in that period (and should be of interest to those who have followed them since). It's a shame it stops in 2003, as things have moved on a lot since its 'how the main characters are now' epilogue - but a quick visit to Wikipedia can bring you up to speed.

You can buy Masters of Doom at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.

Is £10 an hour a sensible target for the minimum wage?

I was interested to read that the Green Party of England and Wales is proposing that we should immediately raise the minimum wage from the current £6.50 to a living wage (currently £7.65 an hour outside London) and that by 2020 they say that the minimum wage should be £10 an hour.

I am generally in favour of allowing markets to set prices, and at first glance, if someone is prepared to do a job for a certain amount, then it might seem unreasonable to pay them more. But there are good reasons to have a minimum wage at what is, frankly, the very reasonable level suggested as a living wage.

Apart from anything else, if someone is paid less than a living wage, then they end up being supported by the benefit system - so that just means more taxes for the rest of us. If someone is doing a job then they ought to be able to live on the proceeds of a reasonable working week. Anything less is close to concealed slavery.  Let's have that living wage now, please, government - and why doesn't it also apply to 18-20 year olds who get a pathetic £5.13 minimum wage at the moment?

However, despite my whole-hearted support for the living wage, I can't support the Green Party policy of a £10 target, as it is entirely arbitrary. There are two suspicious things about it. One is the round number nature of £10. This shouts out that it is a number picked out of the air that sounds impressive because it has two digits. The other is having a target for 2020. Unless the Green Party has a time machine they haven't told us about, that's just too far ahead to make accurate forecasts for. We don't know what inflation will be. We don't know what the economy will be like - and to make a commitment to a specific number seems crazy.

What would be much better, but less attention grabbing than that £10 number, would be to have a target of maintaining the minimum wage at a living wage level, year on year. That would be far more practical and meaningful. And it could mean a minimum wage of more than £10 in 2020 - we can't know, of course, we just know it would be the right amount, where £10 certainly won't be. So how about it Green Party? Can you move away from PR-based politics (the driving force, sadly of most green activity) and do something that really would be a good thing? We shall see.

"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

The Toffler Scorecard Part 1 - Disposability

My rather battered
version of Future ShockWay back in 1970, when the world was very different 'futurologist' (I hate that word) Alvin Toffler produced an immensely popular book called Future Shock that predicted what he believed life would be like in the twenty-first century. In a series of posts I'm looking back at some of Toffler's predictions to see how they've turned out and what that can tell us about then and now.

Reflecting the change, particularly in America, that had brought in more and more of a throw-away society, Toffler envisaged a future where this approach was taken to the extreme. Apparently, in 1970 paper dresses were all the rage (I can't say I remember this), and wear-once-then-throw-away clothes were something Toffler assumed would become the norm. I don't know if he lived in Florida or California, but realistically paper clothes were always a non-starter as anything more than a gimmick - certainly in Manchester or Scotland, say. But is certainly true that the current young generation does think of clothes as more short-term purchases than a generation that bought clothes and kept them until the wore out. (My raincoat is over 30 years old and still going strong.)

However, what Toffler missed is the way that an awareness of green issues would become a natural background to life. While the younger generation don't hang onto clothes they way some older folk do, they also don't just throw them away. Instead they resort to recycling, whether via charity shops or services like eBay and Depop. And the same goes for much of our everyday things. Yes, we do change some products a lot more than we used to, but equally we tend to recycle them, ideally for money. It would have seemed crazy in 1970 to change your phone ever two years, say (it would, have course, have been a landline phone), but when we do make the change, we trade in the old one, or sell it.

On balance, then, this is a 50:50 prediction. Neither a hit nor a miss. We certainly do treat far more things as temporary than we used to. With technology, particularly, we feel driven to upgrade. I do have one bit of ICT kit that is over 10 years old (an HP LaserJet printer that simply does the job), but the average age of my ICT is probably about 2 years. Strangely, though, despite this, we are in a society less inclined to throw-away than Toffler's. We reuse, repurpose, recycle. Where he described a tendency to increasingly knock down old buildings, we (at least in the UK) now tend to treasure them and reuse them more than was the case in the 70s. It's ethical disposability. And that's rather interesting.

If you want to discover Toffler's predictions for yourself, you can buy Future Shock at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.

Scrubs up well

Your great grandma might not have known about phenol - but she certainly would be familiar with carbolic, the harsh soap that included carbolic acid, now properly known as phenol. This simple aromatic compound might have dropped out of our morning cleansing routine (thankfully) but it has more recent roles from the production of aspirin to Agent Orange.

Discover more in my latest Royal Society of Chemistry podcast about phenol. Take a listen by clicking play on the bar at the top of the page - or if that doesn't work for you, pop over to its page on the RSC site.

Demodex-traordinary

An eyelash miteI had the pleasure of appearing on Radio Scotland yesterday. No, not to discuss the Independence vote, but the matter of eyelash mites.

When I wrote The Universe Inside You , which uses the human body as a starting point for exploring all kinds of science from the nature of light to evolution, I just had to include (with a title like that) the veritable zoo of creatures that call our bodies home. Of course I explored the bacteria, which, with ten times as many bacterial cells in the body than human, are pretty impressive. But I also included Demodex, the eyelash mite.

These tiny little arachnids - typically 1/4 to 1/3 of a millimetre in length - feed on sloughed skin and sebaceous oil, in effect clean-up scavengers. They are transparent and pretty well impossible to see, mostly living at the base of eyelashes and eyebrow hair. What I said in UiY is that it was thought that around half of adults have them, but the reason they had become news, featured in national newspapers and on Radio Scotland, was that a study had shown that all adults had them. (Or at least, that's how it was interpreted. More on this in a moment.)

There was some interesting psychology as to why this change made them news. I suspect it is because it went from feeling like something like head lice that other people have (until there's an outbreak at your children's school) to something you have.

In fact the study is both more interesting and limited that the reporting suggested. The PLOS One paper does not actually say that mites were discovered on 100% of adults - in fact they were only spotted on 14% of adults, as it's hard to do. But what the researchers did was to take a sample of sebum and search for Demodex DNA. They discovered it on 100% of adults over 18 and 70% of eighteen-year-olds. Admittedly this isn't a perfect determinant, but as the paper puts it 'Though it is possible Demodex 16S rDNA could be found on the face of an individual without mites, the likelihood that we detect such transferred DNA in our limited sampling area would be low.'

So an interesting development. One of the conclusions was 'The diversity of D. brevis 18S rDNA found on individual humans suggests that not only do all adult humans have Demodex mites but that colonization is likely to occur more than once.' This is the interpretation that I'm a little worried about. The study is based on DNA testing on 19 adults, all from Raleigh NC. I'm not convinced that this provides sufficient data to make the the sweeping statement that all adult humans have Demodex mites - which then led to the news flurry. It may well be true, but this seems a very small sample to build that conclusion on - though its clear that the mites are significantly more prevalent than previously expected.

A bit of fun, though. Got itchy eyebrows? I thought so.

Image "Haarbalgmilbe". Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

A question of waves

A tide, earlierEvery now and then someone sends me an email with a question in it, and I try to answer.*

Sometimes these questions are rather silly - and that's fine. That's how we learn, by asking silly questions. (I do it myself all the time with real scientists.) Sometimes the questions are pretty straightforward, or mind-bogglingly wacky. But just occasionally you get one that's really interesting - and I had such a one the other day about the tide.

As we all know, the tides are primarily influenced by the Moon, though there is also some input from the Sun. But my questioner wondered why this would be the case, as the Sun has a much bigger gravitational pull on the water than the Moon does.

Two questions, then. Was he right, and if so, why does the Sun's influence appear so understated? This is one of this areas where a few back-of-an-envelope calculations can give you a useful feel for what's going on. Thanks to Mr Newton (we don't need general relativity for this, thankfully), we know that gravitational force is proportional to the mass of the body producing it divided by the square of the distance. Plug in the numbers for the Sun and the Moon and you'll find that the Sun does indeed out-pull the Moon by a factor of 160 or so. (This shouldn't be surprising - the Earth's orbit would be distinctly scary if the Moon beat the Sun.)

However, tides are not about absolute gravitational pull. Working out the actual details of tides is messy indeed, but we can get a feel by thinking that the key factor in producing them is the difference between the pull the water feels on the surface of the Earth and the pull it would feel if it were at the centre of the planet. (There are other factors, including the spin of the Earth and the fluid nature of water than add the horrendous complexity of the real calculations, but this gives us a feel.) That distance, the Earth's radius, is significant in terms of the distance to the Moon, but makes very little difference compared to the distance the Sun. It's the amount of variation of gravitational pull that matters for tides, not the absolute value. This results in the tidal effect being approximately dependent on the inverse of the distance cubed, not the distance squared as in the usual gravitational calculation. And hence the Moon becomes the big cheese. As it were.

* If it's about something in one of my books. I reserve the right not to answer questions about, say, One Direction or fashion or many other subjects.

A guilty defector to the Battlestar

Of all the guilty pleasures, perhaps the most insidious are those that involve a volte-face on a personal dislike. Once you hated it, now it is rather nice. Perhaps it's why churches never have any problem finding sinners.

As someone who was very fond of the original Star Wars trilogy, I regarded the (original 1970s) Battlestar Galactica as a cheap, horrible, knock-off imitation and despised it deeply. Actually I still do. (Even the logo of the original series looks suspiciously like that of Star Wars.) I wasn't alone in this. Apparently Isaac Asimov said 'Star Wars was fun and I enjoyed it. But Battlestar Galactica was Star Wars all over again and I couldn't enjoy it without amnesia.' Not to mention the reaction of 20th Century Fox, which promptly sued Universal.

However I recently had an evening to spare, and meandering through Netflix for something to watch I came across the 2004 Galactica reboot. It had one of the highest star ratings of anything I've ever seen on Netflix, so I thought, grudgingly, I'd give it ago. And having sat through 3 hours of the opening miniseries, I'm hooked.

Okay, bits of it are still derivative. Where it's not playing on Stars Trek and Wars, it has huge dollops of Heinleinesque Starship Troopers (not the movie, the original book). But having said that, there is much to like about it - whether it's the intriguing presence of the phantom, red dress wearing Cylon woman, apparently in the head of the amoral, in-it-for-himself British (inevitably) computer wizard, the pull between state and military, or the idea that the Battlestar was essentially a museum, so has the relatively low tech that is the best defence against the robotic enemy.

What's more, now I've discovered it ten years after everyone else, I've got four whole seasons to watch...

Psychological marketing of an aerosol

We are used to some things being marketed by being made to look like something they aren't. Food and drink that looks good for you and isn't. (Anyone remember the original Sunny Delight?) Cars that look sporty but are really just family hatchbacks. As an author, I am ashamed to say it is even done with books (though not, of course, mine). But the latest entrant in this class is an air freshener.

It's not that it is made to look like, I don't know, a deodorant. (Best not to get those confused.) It does look like an air freshener. But here's the thing. We all know that aerosols are evil and environmentally unfriendly. Admittedly not as much so since they took out the ozone layer killers, but anyone with an environmental conscience looks at an aerosol with severe doubts. So the good thing is that some products can be bought with a reliable, old fashioned, pump spray. Instead of dubious gasses doing the propelling, your hand does.

However, what's interesting about this Febreze can is that though it appears to have one of those eco-joyous pump jobs, it's actually a perfectly ordinary gas-powered aerosol under the hood. Now it may be that the manufacturer is totally innocent in this and just thought it looked funky. But do we really believe that, children? Hands up who does... and please re-take Marketing 101.

This has been a Green Heretic production

America Unchained review

I bought this book as holiday reading, expecting a humorous travel book, and though the humour is there, it proved to be more of a straight tale - but was none the worse for that. After suffering a comedy tour staying in bland chain hotels, Dave Gorman decided to try to cross America from coast to coast without giving any money to 'the Man', avoiding chain hotels, chain restaurants and chain filling stations.

As is often the case with these kind of books, the car itself (regularly breaking down) is one of the main characters, as is the video cameraperson who is Dave's companion as he attempts this remarkable feat. Despite a total disaster part way through (which reduces the vegetarian author to eating three burger meals, one each from McDonalds, Burger King and Wendy's in protest, with dire consequences) the feeling is mostly upbeat, and inevitably provides a fascinating exploration of small town America: charming and wonderful at its best, unfriendly to strangers and downright scary at its worst.

While I would have appreciated a touch more humour, as Bill Bryson managed so well in his early travel books, Gorman kept my interest throughout and made his remarkable road trip well worth the read. If you'd like to find out more about small-town America (and how it is disappearing) from a British viewpoint, it's highly recommended.

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

The surprising chemistry of Osmium Tetraoxide

When it comes to elements we meet in everyday life, osmium doesn’t come high on the list. Let’s face it, a metal that is best-known for being used in an alloy in fountain pen tips isn’t exactly the substance-de-jour. Yet its compound with oxygen, osmium tetraoxide, is both versatile and surprising.

Discover more in my latest Royal Society of Chemistry podcast about osmium tetraoxide. Take a listen by clicking play on the bar at the top of the page - or if that doesn't work for you, pop over to its page on the RSC site.