Brian Clegg's Blog, page 98

Peaking late

I'm a great enthusiast for Netflix - partly in terms of the range of interesting TV available (we're currently working through the original Swedish/Danish version of The Bridge, and Last Tango in Halifax for light relief) and just because of the impressive way it just works to do something that is quite amazing, when you think about it.

Recently, though, I've dipped a toe into what used to be Lovefilm Instant, which I now get free through Amazon Prime. One of the advantages of watching Netflix is I can do so on a proper TV, using an Apple TV box, but that doesn't support Amazon's offering - luckily, though, our Blu-ray player does (ah, the wonders of modern technology). To be honest there's not a lot in the free stuff on Amazon I wanted to watch, but I was delighted to see one thing. When I first got Netflix, I'd noticed the classic David Lynch TV show, Twin Peaks was on there and duly put it on my 'to watch' list. To my horror, by the time I got round to it, Twin Peaks had dropped out of the library. But joy etc. - there it was on Amazon.

So over the last couple weeks I've had a Twin Peaksathon, watching both seasons with some serious binge viewing, something TP is ideal for. For those of you who remember it, it's still just as weird and wonderful as everyone said it was at the time - and holds up very well to the modern eye, apart from the 4:3 ratio. It's remarkable how much of a buzz it caused back then - even though I never watched it, I could remember from 1990 that the murdered girl was called Laura Palmer. For those who didn't see it, this starts off as what appears to be a straightforward murder mystery, featuring a very strange FBI agent (played wonderfully by Kyle MacLachlan - whatever happened to him?) - but ends up with strong elements of fantasy and downright strangeness.

I know the show was cancelled, so the ending might not have been exactly what Lynch would have hoped for the whole enterprise (and there is a movie prequel/sequel, though it sounds as if that doesn't exactly tie up loose ends), but it did illustrate for me the classic 'great urban fantasy issue.' I'm a huge fan of fantasy writer Gene Wolfe, not for his off-Earth stuff that seems to have made most of his money, but for the superb fantasies set in a not-quite-right real world like Castleview and There Are Doors. But if Wolfe has one flaw it is that he builds up such a weird and wonderful and intriguing complex scenario that the end of the book is almost always a disappointment. I suspected this would be the case with Twin Peaks... and it was. In spades.

Nonetheless, there are many characters in there I'll treasure (though I could have done without the one played by Lynch himself) and a story and setting that will haunt me for a long time. If you have access to it, and didn't see it first time around, I'd recommend giving it a go.

For fans, here's the theme music:



Image from Wikipedia

The ride is rough with Lovelock

A couple of days ago, I mentioned James Lovelock's antipathy to peer review in his new book. The review of the book is now live on www.popularscience.co.uk and because I think it is a book worthy of wide exposure, I am reproducing that review here.

James Lovelock is unique, both as a scientist and as a writer. He may be most famous for his Gaia hypothesis that the Earth acts as if it were a self-regulating living entity, but has done so much more in a 94 year life to date.

Rough Ride (not to be confused with Jon Turney’s Rough Guide to the Future ) is an important book, but it is also flawed, and I wanted to get those flaws out of the way, as I’ve awarded it four stars for the significance of its content, rather than its well-written nature. It is, frankly, distinctly irritating to read – meandering, highly repetitive and rather too full of admiration for Lovelock’s achievements. But I am not giving the book a top rating as a ‘well done for being so old’ award – far from it. Instead it’s because Lovelock has some very powerful things to say about climate change. I’ve been labelled a green heretic in the past, and there is no doubt that Lovelock deserves this accolade far more, as he tears into the naivety of much green thinking and green politics.

He begins, though, by taking on the scientific establishment, pointing out the limitations of modern, peer reviewed, team-oriented science  in the way that it blocks the individual and creative scientific thinker – the kind of person who has come up with most of our good scientific ideas and inventions over the centuries. He does this primarily to establish that he is worth listening to, rather than being some lone voice spouting nonsense. I’m not sure he needs to do this – I think there are few who wouldn’t respect Lovelock and give him an ear, but it’s a good point and significant that he feels it necessary.

The main thrust of the book is to suggest that our politicians (almost universally ignorant of science) are taking the wrong approach to climate change. He derides the effort to develop renewable energy, despises the way the Blair government chickened out of nuclear power (and is very heavy on the Germans and Italians for their panic reaction after the Japanese tsunami) and makes it clear that from his viewpoint, our whole approach to climate change is idiotic.

With the starting point that the whole system is far too complex to allow any decent modelling, or to be sure what any attempts at geoengineering could achieve, Lovelock suggests that the answer is to let Gaia get on with sorting itself out, and instead of worrying about trying to manage carbon emissions in our current situation, we should instead put our efforts into adapting the way we live to cope with changes in the climate. He points out, the kind of climate we had before the industrial revolution (or accelerated evolution, as he believes it to be) was not the typical climate of the Earth either, which would be more like its state in the grips of an Ice Age.

Rather that trying to somehow get it back to an imaginary utopian state, he argues we should be looking at new ways to live that will enable us to manage despite what the climate throws at us. He points out, for instance, that in our fears of the impact of 2 to 6 degrees of warming we miss that Singapore manages perfectly well in an environment that is 12.5 degrees above the global average. Of course, you might argue that we couldn’t sustain that way of life for 7 billion people – and Lovelock is sanguine about this. He doesn’t expect humans to carry on at that kind of population level, as part of the adaptation.

What’s fascinating is that while reading the book I also read an article by that most demonised of environmental figures, Bjorn Lomborg, and it was remarkable how much similarity there was in their views of the approach we should take, though coming at the problem from very different directions and with very different predicted outcomes.

A final thrust of the book is perhaps less convincing. Lovelock, looking 100 million years or more into the future, suggests that the best way our descendants can survive to keep Gaia going is in electronic form, as it would be possible to live on for many more millions of years despite the Earth warming, due to the Sun’s gradual increase of output, to a stage where it is uninhabitable by biological life. At the same time he dismisses terraforming Mars (and doesn’t even consider starships) as a mechanism for keeping a future humanity alive. This seems a bit of an stance and dilutes, rather than helps the central message of what we should do about climate change and human existence on Earth.

As I mentioned earlier on, you may well find the book a frustrating read because of all the repetition, but this is a book that will really get you thinking about our approach to climate change, and whether we’ve got it all terribly wrong. Read it.

You can find out more about the book at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com, and it's also on Kindle at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.

This has been a green heretic production

Employment transformation

After George Osborne's recent enthusiasm for full employment there has been a lot around in the media about getting people into jobs, helping people find an employer and the ways that employers can be encouraged to get more people on their payroll. I do think there's an element here of the way the gas companies reacted to the electric light by trying to invent a better gas mantle.

My problem with all this is that you hardly ever hear anything about providing support to people to become self-employed. And yet, as dinosaur industries bite the dust, we can expect that more and more of us are likely to be self-employed. And I think that's a good thing. Having spent about half my working life with a large company and half self-employed there is no comparison. Being your own boss is wonderful, with the upside far outweighing the negatives.

So it's fine to have all this stuff, but why don't newly self-employed people get a national insurance holiday, like the one being offered for newly employed people? Why isn't there as much effort going into helping people set up their own businesses as there is in apprenticeships and encouragement to take on staff? The fact is that micro businesses are an extremely important part of the economy, but governments of all political colours are welded to the old idea of working for large companies as an employee being the only significant model.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not falling for the easy trap of 'I have got on okay for 20 years self-employed, so why can't everyone do it?' I know it's not for everyone. Some just want to clock in for a job, do the work and clock off. And there still will remain plenty of companies that need to be big, with lots of employees. But a sizeable part of the workforce is self employed, or runs their own extremely small companies - and that part could and should grow considerably.

Self employment and startups really are by far the best solution when a dinosaur industry dies out. Yet despite whatever weasel words there may be from the government (and from Labour), the fact is that politicians just don't get it. Our whole system (especially the tax system) is set up to support and reinforce the old way of working. It's time for a radical redesign, and to really give help to those who want to earn money by their own efforts. How about it, Mr Osborne?

End of the peer show

I am currently reading for review the latest book by James Lovelock, and a strange and sometimes wonderful thing it is too. I was fascinated to read fairly early on an impassioned attack on something most of us take for granted as part of the mechanism of modern science - peer review.

The idea of peer review is that before a paper is published or an experiment etc. is funded a group of other scientists (the peers in question) with appropriate knowledge assess the value of the paper/experiment and act as gatekeepers, only allowing through work they feel is worthwhile. But Lovelock points out that this process tends to support the status quo, rather than radical new thinking, and is heavily biassed in the way it is operated towards the 'throw large teams at it' approach that emerged largely in the Second World War and is strongly weighted against individual scientists working on their own, which, he suggests, is a problem.

Lovelock points out, correctly, that only individuals can come up with an idea. You can't have an idea by committee. (It's interesting, we use 'team' when we want to make the concept of throwing a group of people at a problem to sound good, and 'committee' when we want it  to sound bad.) It's not that he's against teams, but he sees them as largely responsible for the grunt work to support the ideas from the individuals. And this is fine and good, but unfortunately the peer review process has come to assume a certain way of working, and will tend to reject without consideration input from individuals who don't fall within the classic academic institution model.

One of the examples used to support this is an experience Lovelock had in the early days of the CFC/ozone hole debacle. Lovelock had applied for a small grant from the Natural Environment Research Council as part of a plan to travel on a ship to Antarctica and back, using a device he had invented that enabled him to measure the levels of CFCs in the atmosphere down to parts per trillion. The peer review included this wonderful piece of text:

Every schoolboy knows that the CFCs are among the most inert of chemicals, it would be difficult to measure their abundance in the air, or in sea water, as low as a part per million; the proposer claims to be able to measure their abundance at parts per trillion. The claim is bogus and the time of our committee should not be wasted by frivolous applications of this kind.

Lovelock made the journey and took the readings unfunded, providing the primary evidence that would result in the eventual banning of CFCs. The more common form of peer review, deciding on whether or not a paper should be published in journals, he suggests, is equally biassed against anything new/outside current received wisdom/from individual scientists working alone - it's just rare that the negative comments get seen.

There is no doubt that Lovelock is right, but unfortunately what he doesn't do (unless it comes later in the book - I am only part way through) is come up with a solution to the problem. Because the fact is that there are far more people who really will be making bogus claims and coming up with silly papers than happen to be effective individual scientists like him. But at the very least, the processes should allow for an individual who, like Lovelock, has the appropriate qualifications and experience to be published or funded just as much as those who are part of academic institutions. (Admittedly there aren't many such people, but there are still a few.) At the moment this just doesn't happen.

What's more, I do think Lovelock has a point when he suggests that the vast majority of new thinking and new inventions come from such individuals, rather than from big teams. The way we go about science now is very conservative (with a small c). Which is fine where things can continue in 'more of the same' mode, but when we need a radical idea to overthrow current thinking - or for a really impressive new invention (Lovelock stresses most of the great scientists have also been inventors, something big team science doesn't seem capable of matching) - then we are likely to be moribund if we don't find a way to support these maverick individuals. Science will, frankly, be a poor cousin of what it could be otherwise.

Poor old Andrew

I feel a bit sorry for Andrew Lloyd Webber. Only a bit, you understand. But he is probably feeling a bit depressed about his latest musical, Stephen Ward, which closed at the weekend after running for less than four months with so-so ticket sales.

It perhaps wasn't the most inspired of choices for the subject of a musical. Outside the UK no one is likely to have heard of the Profumo affair, and even here, what was once a national scandal has become a vague, faded memory. Yet there is no doubt that there was an interesting story there.

We went to see Stephen Ward on Friday, its penultimate day, and I'm glad we did. It was no Cats or Phantom of the Opera. It wasn't packed full of memorable tunes. It only really had one lyrical song, though there were a couple of distinctly effective pieces (even if the one for the orgy scene is worryingly reminiscent of Bustopher Jones in White Spats in places - though ALW has always had a habit of reusing musical flourishes). Notable was the opening song, Human Sacrifice, with its bizarre setting of the Blackpool chamber of horrors, an extremely atmospheric piece. All in all, though, it was an effective evening's musical theatre. And as well as making for an enjoyable outing, it did really make you think about the hypocrisy of the establishment in the early 60s.

I would much rather go to a fine but not flashy work like this than a large scale 'musical' that is just a rehash of existing pop songs in a strung-together storyline like Mamma Mia or We Will Rock You. At least this was original music, written for this story, and producing a whole with a degree of integrity. So while I can understand why Stephen Ward wasn't a hit - and I would have been reluctant to have paid full price to see it - I think that it deserved to have been seen by rather more people. And that genuinely does make me feel the teeniest bit sorry for our Andrew.

Georgia on my mind

Like pretty well everyone else in Europe (and most of the rest of the world) I am always totally baffled by the American attitude to guns. I have friends in the US who are lovely, kind people, who will defend to the hilt their constitutional right to bear arms, and given the record of gun killings the country has, this seems bizarre. But I always hold off commenting, because in the end, it's not my country it's not up to me to decide what their laws are, or whether a constitutional amendment designed to allow for militias should apply to the general public in everyday life.


However, one thing is very clear now. Given the new gun laws there, I will certainly never be visiting Georgia. Now admittedly this was pretty unlikely, as I have only flown once in the last 20 years - it's not something I do very often, so I am unlikely to visit the US at all. But while I don't think it's down to me to criticise the decision to allow ordinary citizens to carry guns in bars, restaurants, churches, airports (airports?!?!), libraries, sports grounds, youth centres and primary school classrooms, I do think it is entirely fair for me to say there is no way I am going to set foot in a place where everyone in the restaurant I pop into for a meal could carrying loaded guns.

Of course, those who are in favour of carrying weapons will point out that these guns are purely defensive. As long as I don't do anything I shouldn't, I'll be fine. But hold on. Remember this combines with the 'Stand Your Ground' law, which allows those gun-toting citizens to defend themselves with deadly force if they feel they are threatened with serious harm. So I don't have to pull my own weapon (which, of course, I wouldn't have) to get shot. Someone from a very different cultural background merely has to misread my body language, or way of speaking in a way that makes them feel they are threatened and they can shoot me down. I am not prepared to take the risk.

Now over here in the UK, we are always saddened when Americans stop coming to Europe in their droves if there is a terrorist attack. It seems an over-reaction. So is my response here a matter of double standards? I don't think so. When an attack occurs it is a one-off, undertaken by extremists who are likely to be dead or captured afterwards. If anything, a country is safer to visit after an attack than it was before - and the chances of being in a place where one will happen is extremely tiny. But in Georgia we aren't talking about a handful of individuals being dangerous on one specific occasion, but potentially every adult I come across every minute of the day - and what's more, the law supports them being able to shoot me and get away with it. Is this going to ensure they don't pull the trigger if they get a little irritated? Again, I'm not prepared to take the risk.

Sorry, America, I love you dearly, but Georgia is on my mind for all the wrong reasons.

Review - Among the Creationists

Subtitled 'dispatches from the anti-evolution front line', Jason Rodenhouse's book is a fascinating look at creationism from the outside. Rather than simply poke fun at silly creationist ideas, a game that palls rather quickly, Rodenhouse attends creationist and ID (Intelligent Design) conferences, visits centres and generally immerses himself in the culture, in particular its interface with science. While he does this from the point of view of an atheist, he is respectful of those he is meeting with, and in return, repeatedly emphasises that even when he asks difficult questions after a lecture, he his treated with warmth and kindness, rather than booed and heckled.

In effect, the book has two different types of chapter. Some delve into the detail of creationist and ID beliefs and make strong efforts to see if there is a way to justify them. The only trouble with these chapters is that, even though they always end up coming down against the creationist view, it can be a bit like reading a theology or philosophy textbook - it gets a little stodgy sometimes. By contrast, the book really livens up with the other chapters, which describe Rodenhouse's experiences, what he witnesses at the events and the creationist centre he visits, and the conversations he has with creationists (including a fairly heated one in a queue for a Subway sandwich).

If you read this hoping to find that Rodenhouse changed his opinion - or managed to change the opinion of a single creationist - it isn't going to happen. But if you come at it from an atheist viewpoint (as I suspect most of the readers will), you will learn a lot more about what creationists believe and why - often because of being presented with distorted facts - and if you come at it as a Christian, you may find some uncomfortable thinking is generated by its careful arguments. More so, in fact, than from the polemic school of Dawkins, Hitchens et al.

The only chapter I wasn't totally happy with was the one entitled 'Why I love being Jewish,' which suffered a bit from American parochialism. Rodenhouse classes himself as a cultural but non-religious Jew. He enjoys Jewish culture and ritual without believing in God, and seems to suggest that this is something unique about Judaism. However, in the UK I'd say that I have come across a similar approach to a good few religions - Hinduism, for instance - and especially in the UK in the form that Astronomer Royal Martin Rees describes himself as a 'Church of England agnostic' - again, someone who enjoys the culture and ritual without having a religious belief.

Overall an interesting book if you really want to get to grips with why creationism is so strong in the US. See more at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com

In this respected science author Brian Clegg

I use a program called Mention to keep an eye on references to my books etc. online, and just occasionally it pulls up something that boggles the mind. Here I am in one of those weird pages that assemble text randomly from the internet for bizarre search engine purposes:


I just love the surreal nature of that second reference.

Finding Roger - #1 - Get The Right Bacon

It is over ten years now since I wrote my book about Roger Bacon. Purely by coincidence I find myself writing two separate magazine features with a flavour of Bacon about them - so I thought it would be interesting to blog an occasional series of posts about some of the aspects of the the great RB that won't be appearing in the articles.

For this first entry in the series, I want to make one thing very clear. There is more than one kind of Bacon, and you need to get the right one. I am not thinking Kevin Bacon here. Even in the history of science there are two Bacons to contend with. When I first told a friend I was writing a book about the thirteenth-century proto-scientist Roger Bacon, he was surprised. 'Surely,' he said, 'Bacon lived in Elizabethan times?' This astonishingly original thinker has been obscured by the shadow of his inferior namesake, Francis Bacon.

For the sake of clarity, there is, as far as we know, no relation between Francis Bacon and Roger Bacon. Francis (the Elizabethan) was primarily a politician, but was one of the first to explicitly lay out the scientific method. Roger, the medieval Franciscan friar was a natural philosopher. He seems to have performed some experiments, and certainly wrote an awful lot about science.

In my book, in tongue-in-cheek fashion, I labelled him The First Scientist. This isn't a label that can really be applied, but it's useful, if only to wind up history of science nerds. They will tell you:
He couldn't be a scientist, as the term wasn't invented until 1834. (In an analogy from 'artist'. If an artist did art, then surely a scientist did science?) This is total rubbish. To suggest you can't be something until it is named is like saying that dinosaurs didn't exist until we gave them names. Rhubarb.He didn't do any science, he just wrote about it. This isn't true. There is reasonable evidence he did some experiments, and certainly developed some original theories. He was more a theoretician than an experimental scientist - but then so was Einstein. Bacon was mostly incorrect, but then most were back then.He didn't understand what we now call science, depending too much on the word of authority. His understanding was certainly not modern - he was of his time. But he did emphasise the importance of experiment at great length, running entirely counter to the ancient Greek view, he stressed that maths was essential for science, and there is a lot of science in his 'books'*. What is definitely true is that he wasn't a good scientist in the modern sense - but why you expect the first person to achieve something to be good at it? They'd be borderline rubbish, I would have thought.In reality there can be no definitive first (and if there were, Roger isn't it), but Roger was certainly an early and prominent example of someone who was determined to find out more about nature and communicate his results, and we should cherish him, rather than dismiss him as many seem to these days.
* I say 'books' in inverted commas because most of Bacon's surviving writing is actually a book proposal, not truly a book. But what a proposal. The first volume runs to 600,000 words...

Compound number one

Some while ago I covered element #1, hydrogen, in a Royal Society of Chemistry podcast. Now it's the turn of the very first compound ever to exist - and a surprising one at that. Helium hydride.

With the latest science news focussed on big bang discoveries it's the ideal time to take a trip to the earliest venture into chemistry. So 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.