Wading Through Treacle

Yves St Laurent cream

2012-01-24T12:15:00.001Z

Yes, the famous Forever Youth Liberator cream has arrived, based on "Glycobiology". Apparently it emulates the effects of natural Glycans which regenerate the skin.

I expect to be monitoring progress over the next week. (Not on me!)

I've been working hard this morning on a client document - just surfaced for a breather.

An Ode to Clumper

2012-01-23T21:26:00.002Z

Oh Clumper, you titan of sinew and bone
I bought you, not stole you, so don't run off home
I dismount, defend you and kill off your foes
I look but where are you now? God only knows!

Clare says "Too many 'I's" but Alex will appreciate this homage to a 1,000 gold piece nag in Skyrim.

"Back me or sack me!"

2012-01-22T16:41:00.001Z

At the end of Mass this morning the priest asked us to sit, as he usually does, so he can deliver the notices. After a brief remark about a mistake in the Bulletin ("The Ecumenical Service will be at 6.30 this evening") he moved on to mention that "Some concerns have been expressed within the Parish."

I guess I was expecting some feedback on fundraising for the roof fund or the like. Far from it: what came next was truly astonishing. Here is what the priest had to say.

"Concerns have been expressed within the Parish, and of course we have to take concerns seriously. Particularly when the concerns are about me."

At this point the congregation noticeably stiffened.

"I hear the some people are concerned about the style of preaching from the altar. Well, I now need to know what the whole Parish thinks. If concerns are widespread then of course I will resign."

At this point you could have heard a pin drop.

"If the problem is confined to just part of the Parish, then other measures will be necessary. Now, please stand."

And with that there was the final prayer and hymn and the Mass was ended.

The priest delivered this bombshell in a perfectly matter-of-fact voice, without the slightest trace of emotion.

As we walked towards the newspaper shop I asked Clare whether this was normal behaviour for a priest. In a lifetime of Mass-attendance, she said, she had never heard the like.

As I write this with the Sunday afternoon light fading, Clare is playing online scrabble with Alex (who is in Reading), with Skype providing the voice channel.

"Are you winning, Clare?"

"Yes."

Google Sky Map

2012-01-16T20:12:00.001Z

If there's one thing a smartphone has got to be good for, it's astronomy. In a flash of inspiration this evening I downloaded the free Google Sky Map app.

It's augmented reality: you stand outside and look at the stars, holding the phone in front of you. The phone knows its own orientation so you see the same night sky on the screen - but everything's named.

The constellations are drawn in and you can enter the name of an object (eg the Andromeda galaxy, M31) and the screen will point you to where it is (pretty much overhead after dinner this evening).

In other news, the next phase of my contract has started and I was huddled over a laptop for most of the day.

Now if I could only get some of that new Yves Saint Laurent Forever Young Liberator cream.

Crashing The Courtesy Car

2012-01-16T17:21:00.002Z

I stood forlornly on the freezing forecourt, buffeted by icy gusts. Looking up at the leaden pre-dawn sky with its scudding dark clouds, I reflected that it did indeed look very much like a TV screen tuned to a dead channel. I pulled my coat tighter against the flurries of snow and walked into the service center.

I had booked my car in for its 30,000 mile service a few weeks ago. After completing the paperwork and handing over the keys, the guy behind the desk got around to the Courtesy Car, which I would need to continue on to work. But there was a catch.

‘If you happen to have an accident,’ he said, ‘There’ll be a $1,000 excess to pay. But if you hand over $10 for an insurance deal right now, that excess will be reduced to only $100.’

I was thinking furiously: so they want me to pay them $10 but is it really value for money? How likely is it, I thought to myself, that I’m going to crash their car today? But perhaps there’s a different, more informative question: what does this guy’s proposal tell me about the garage’s assessment of my chances of damaging their vehicle?

Let the crash probability be p. I have to start with the assumption that the garage has set the pricing on this offer so that they’re indifferent to whatever option I end up taking. This would be their rational position, so I’d end up paying the same expected amount to cover repair costs whether I took the offer or not.

Let’s equalize my expected outlay on both sides of the deal – this is the amount I spend times the probability of the accident happening. So:

1000p = 10 + 100p

recalling that I have to pay them $10 regardless in the second case.
So clearly p = 1/90.

This seems a rather high probability of crashing. Driving 270 days a year at this probability I would expect to have three crashes a year (I don’t). But of course, I don’t drive an unfamiliar courtesy car every one of those 270 days. I believe the chances of my crashing their courtesy car are considerably less than 1.1% but would I pay $10 to avoid a very remote risk of paying an additional $900?

They obviously expect a continuing cash-flow from risk-averse drivers with this deal!

With the car rocking under the impact of successive wintry squalls, I drove into the morning traffic without handing over any cash; amazingly, I didn’t crash that day. I was, however, considerably confused by the way the engine turned itself off every time I halted at traffic lights: something about combating global warming, I believe.

---

This would have been my last "science feature" article for sciencefiction.com, had they chosen to use it. They evidently thought it was not 'SFnal enough' and I have to agree.

A modest proposal re: affordable child benefit

2012-01-15T15:19:00.000Z

Clare asked me to publish her thoughts on affordable child benefit as follows.

"The issue of reducing the bill for child benefit is hotly debated in the media and I have a suggestion. Universal child benefit should be continued, with a modification which would reduce its cost. All parents currently receiving the benefit should continue to receive it in full: this would circumvent the issues relating to increasing poverty for existing large families.

New parents should receive the benefit for two children only, however.

Personally I found child benefit a very useful addition to family income but (like many others, I suspect) I would never have considered applying for any state aid which was not in the form of a universal grant."

When will we see the Kindle Fire in the UK?

2012-01-14T12:26:00.000Z

I have decided I'm a convert to eReaders. It's incredibly convenient to order a book via the Kindle app and get it a few seconds later. There are other advantages these cold winter evenings: a dimly-lit secluded living room with the fire burning away merrily and Clare watching alpha-male Trevor Eve in "Waking the Dead" on DVD ... I can relax and read Lawrence Krauss's latest or Ian Mcdonald's remarkable The Dervish House which reminds me of our Andante trip to Istanbul.

But ... reading on a smartphone screen is just a little too constricting: I want the larger, Kindle-sized view of the page and I want backlit for that comfy gloom. So come on Kindle Fire, I promised myself I'd hold off to release 2 (never buy at release 1.0!) but now I'm not so sure. I hear rumours my plight will be resolved as early as the end of this month.

My contract has finished for the time being (it was for some preparatory work for the client) and the experience has sent me back to my "Voice Teletraffic Systems Engineering" book to produce this white paper. There may be a further phase of work: watch this space.

White Paper: Sizing WAN Access Links

2012-01-14T11:16:00.004Z

A PDF version of this paper is available here.

Table of Contents

1. INTRODUCTION
2. USING THE POISSON DISTRIBUTION FOR TRAFFIC MODELLING
3. DIMENSIONING VIRTUAL CIRCUITS
3.1 MULTIMEDIA STREAMING DATA
3.2 NON-REAL-TIME DATA
4. TRAFFIC DIMENSIONING
5. NOTES

1. INTRODUCTION

Imagine an office, part of a multi-site company. It has 12 staff who undertake normal office activities: access their email (with attachments); download Word, PowerPoint and Excel files from the remote data centre; make multimedia calls from their desktop conferencing software. All this traffic needs to enter/exit their site on the Wide-Area Network (WAN) access link, so what capacity link do they require? This White Paper describes a process to work it out.

In the old days, networking was circuit-switched telephone calls. Suppose there were 12 desk phones for the 12 staff. If they all phoned at once, the access circuit would need to carry 12 voice channels (at 64 kbps each this would be a 768 kbps link). But what a needless expense: the chances of 12 simultaneous phone calls being made are vanishingly small in normal business.

Instead, a model is used to work out the probability of 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ... calls being made simultaneously. If the probability of making a phone call in the Busy Hour is 0.1 (a six minute phone call during that hour) then 12 users contribute 12 * 0.1 = 1.2 Erlangs of traffic. If we want no more than a 1% chance of someone getting an engaged tone when they try to dial, we turn to the Erlang-B tables. These tell us that we need to provide no more than 5 circuits on our access link: it’s certainly cheaper than provisioning 12 circuits.

The Erlang-B formula is the Poisson distribution modified to capture more life-like behaviour when someone calls and can’t get through. However, in the high-level modelling of this paper we will just use the Poisson distribution.

2. USING THE POISSON DISTRIBUTION FOR TRAFFIC MODELLING

Whether it’s multimedia conferencing or data traffic, it’s convenient to conceptualise it in terms of old-fashioned voice calls. Suppose there are a very large number of desk phones, n, and each phone has a probability of being in-use at a particular time of p. This means that if we inspect any phone at a random time, the probability of finding it in use when we look is p.

Given n phones, the expected number (i.e. the average number) of phone calls we expect to see if we take a random look is n * p. Call this number l.

Example: for our 12 people with their desk phones, if each has a probability of 0.83 of making a call at any moment (in the Busy Hour) then the expected number of simultaneous voice calls will be 1.

We would now like to know the probability, at a random moment, of observing k = 0, 1, 2, 3, etc simultaneous phone calls. This is what the Poisson distribution gives us: the formula is:

P(k;l) = (l^k/k!)e^-l where e is 2.71828... and k is 0, 1, 2, 3, etc. Here is the table for l=1.

Figure 1. Poisson distribution for l = 1 (l is the mean)

In this table k is indicating how many simultaneous phone calls and P(k;l) is the probability of seeing each value of k. if we add up the probabilities for all values of k, from zero to infinity we’ll get 1. As you see, the probabilities get very small, very rapidly.

Looking at this table, the probability of k = 0, 1, 2, 3 or 4 = 99.6%. So if we supplied 4 voice circuits, we’d satisfy the site’s phone needs 99.6% of the time. The remaining 0.4% of the time 5 or more people would be trying to call at the same time and some people would get the engaged tone.

In this example, the number of Erlangs was one (l = 1). In the Introduction we considered the case with 1.2 Erlangs and found we just needed an extra circuit (5 circuits) to give us the required grade of service.

Fine, you may say, but these days we don’t do circuit-switched voice, we do data:- streaming data and bursty data. This is true, but we can use the same method of analysis.

3. DIMENSIONING VIRTUAL CIRCUITS
3.1 MULTIMEDIA STREAMING DATA

Let’s return to the 12 people back at the office. Now they’re making multimedia call using a desktop conferencing system. Let’s suppose that they each make a multimedia call of ten minutes duration during the Busy Hour. So for each user the system is working 10 minutes out of 60, therefore with a probability of 1/6. So the mean number of simultaneous multimedia sessions, l, equals 12 * (1/6) = 2.

So now we can ask what is the probability of seeing k = 0, 1, 2, 3, ... simultaneous multimedia calls? Here is the Poisson table for l = 2.

Figure 2. Poisson distribution for Multimedia calls, l = 2

If we add up the probabilities of k = 0-6 we get: 99.55%. So if we supply enough bandwidth for six simultaneous multimedia sessions we will only encounter capacity problems if 7 or more people want to make calls at the same time. The probability of this is less than half a percent.

*** Bottom line: provision capacity for six simultaneous sessions ***

Let’s assume a multimedia session occupies 512 kbps = 0.5 Mbps. We will need this when we come to size the access link below.

3.2 NON-REAL-TIME DATA

What about the Word, PowerPoint and Excel downloads; the email attachments; the Internet pages? We proceed by turning these downloads into ‘calls’.

Suppose that each of our 12 users downloads 64 MB in the Busy Hour. If there is contention, TCP will simply slow down the download so let’s decide on a minimum rate we’re prepared to give users: say 1 Mbps each.

The second assumption we need to make is how many separate files get downloaded per user (a file download looks like a ‘call’) during the Busy Hour. Let’s assume 16 files per user spread over the data files, email attachments and Internet traffic. We’re assuming therefore that the average file is 64/16 = 4 Megabytes = 32 Megabits.

At 1 Mbps, the slowest speed we find acceptable, this will take 32 seconds. This file download has a probability of ‘occupying’ the access link of 32/3,600 = 2/225 during the Busy Hour.

Note that if the access line rate is greater than 1 Mbps (which it almost certainly will be) then many file downloads will be a lot faster, which lowers the overall probability of contention, so it’s the worst case scenario we’re dealing with here.

So we now imagine 12 * 16 = 192 little ‘file daemons’ all wanting to do their file download (= ‘make a call’) during the Busy Hour, with probability 2/225 each. The expected number of simultaneous downloads = l = 192 * (2/225) = 1.7.

We now need to know the probabilities of k = 0, 1, 2, 3 ... simultaneous file downloads as shown in figure 3 below.

Figure 3. Poisson distribution for Data/Internet traffic, l = 1.7

If we add up the probabilities for k = 0 – 5, we get 99.2%. So we can achieve the required service level if we provision enough bandwidth for five simultaneous file downloads (at 1 Mbps each).

As I mentioned, this analysis assumes that ALL file downloads occur at 1 Mbps. In fact most of them would happen much nearer the (faster) basic line rate, so freeing up more time for other downloads in a virtuous circle: in other words, this is very much the worst case.

4. TRAFFIC DIMENSIONING

We are now in a position to dimension the access link so that both multimedia conferencing users and data users meet their expectations more than 99% of the time.

We decided that we need to budget for:

* 6 simultaneous multimedia sessions at 0.5 Mbps each = 3 Mbps.
* 5 simultaneous file downloads at 1 Mbps = 5 Mbps.

Total bandwidth required for the site access link is 3 + 5 = 8 Mbps.

This analysis is conservative but to allow for some headroom and growth, we might order a 10 Mbps access link.

5. NOTES

5.1 Because of the non-linearity of the Poisson distribution, there is not a direct connection between number of users and the required access link bandwidth. If we considered 24 users, the access bandwidth required would be less than 16 Mbps.

5.2 We have considered the streaming real-time and data non-real-time traffic requirements separately and simply added them together. This is conservative: there would be further stochastic gains in reality – but not sufficient to invalidate the analysis here.

5.3 Traffic is uploaded as well as downloaded. However the links are bidirectional and downloads are normally greater in volume than uploads.

5.4 In practice the analysis of this paper should be used to create a spreadsheet which automates all the calculations shown above.

5.5 Many file downloads can be expected to gain access to the full line access rate (10 Mbps in the example here). At this rate a 4 MB file will be received in just over three seconds. This is roughly equivalent to the service a UK residential broadband service could provide, close to the exchange.

The Iron Lady

2012-01-12T20:59:00.001Z

Seen this afternoon at the Wells Film Centre. We thought we'd be the only ones there but it was jam-packed.

The story is centred around present-day Thatcher, living like any other elderly lady: mostly housebound, occasionally confused, prone to hallucinations of her husband Denis.

The flashbacks of the major Thatcher events (miners, Falklands, poll tax) are familiar to any middle-aged brit.

The film is good though, and reminds us that we're back to the same point in the cycle: too much public spending, too many entitlements, not enough get up and go. It's a message which has resonance.

Lost in Hilbert Space

2012-01-09T16:15:00.001Z

In an SF story I was once writing I needed to get the hero out of his closed prison cell. In the old physics, he could simply have blown a hole in the wall with some explosives – but of course, the guards never let him have any.

In physics terms, the scientist is trapped by inter-molecular forces in the cell walls. An explosion simply dumps energy which disrupts these bonds – the fragments (and our hero) burst free.

But how to make things work with the new physics?

My first thought was new fields. So I started to look at the inflation field of the early universe , or some of the new stuff in supersymmetry. This is still something I continue to research but I’ve come to believe they don’t really help. The coupling between new fields and the potential barrier would still be via energy transfer so it’s just another explosion – I’ve no idea what a controlled local inflation field would do but it doesn’t seem very survivable.

Continue reading at sciencefiction.com.

This article is really an extended joke, the 'victim' being Michael Lockwood whose "Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics" doesn't seem to say too much which is new.

---

Back in Reading, finishing up some documentation for the client at this moment. Alex is in process of geting a Plusnet phone service and WiFi broadband network installed here.

At this moment the phone works while the broadband should be up within a couple of days. I'm getting my Internet connectivity as I write this from my HTC smartphone which can be configured as a WiFi hotspot, backhauling via its 3G connection.

Not bad, but it doesn't beat copper.

The Daily Telegraph?!?

2012-01-06T19:08:00.001Z

So how did I find myself with The Daily Telegraph on my phone? Here were my choices: Financial Times (6 pounds a week); The Times (2 pounds a week but an unusable registration process & a poor layout); The Guardian (I Am Not A Teacher); or The Telegraph (2 pounds a week and acquired painlessly via Amazon Kindle).

Perhaps I've suddenly become an old person :-)

Was it smart of The Telegraph to use the Kindle as its channel to market? They lose direct control of their smartphone customers - Amazon has the credit card numbers and customer data - but they surf Amazon's remarkable market penetration and ease-of-use. I reckon they're right.

Tube Life

2012-01-05T22:01:00.001Z

Back on the tube, after a year. In the centre of the carriage there are four seats on either side. I was standing in the crush and counted three kindles out of the four people sat there.

Yesterday it was only 50%: a kindle and an iPad, which was showing the Daily Mail.

I was squashed next to a guy reading ... a book! I wanted to scream at him: what are you doing? Where is your kindle? (I managed to control myself).

I've had The Times app for the last couple of weeks but today it was uninstalled. Hey guys, your design is poor - articles turn up under too many categories; also I was even tempted to subscribe at two pounds a week till you asked me for a ton of irrelevant personal information and then your registration screen locked-up. Take a look at the London Evening Standard for how an app should be done.

I'm trying to work out whether I should be more concerned about the crisis in Iran (will it be war?) or the crisis in Hungary (authoritarianism, default?) or whether I get the client document written tomorrow. Events, dear boy, events!

Drowned in Reading

2012-01-03T21:37:00.001Z

First meeting with the client today. I left the flat mid-morning for the ten minute walk to Reading station. As I stepped on to the Thames-side path the skies opened and I was engulfed by torrential rain slammed into my very body by extreme gusts of wind.

It's strange walking through the ricochets of fast-impact raindrops on the pavement; like walking through long grass. My socks were soon soaked; my shoes provided no protection. I haven't been so wet since arduous training with the army cadets in Snowdonia (the 1960s).

I had partially dried out by the time we met with the client ...

Friends and Lovers

2012-01-02T17:36:00.000Z

You may have first learned your Myers-Briggs personality-type indicator (MBTI) through work. Perhaps you went for a job and they gave you a battery of psychometric tests; or maybe there was a team-building or personal development program and the instructor told you about the different personality types – usually they tell you it’s about how to get the best out of people.

Personality types are real and also say a lot about your friendships and relationships. Before we get deeper into this, you may need to discover your own personality type – take an assessment here.

Read more at sciencefiction.com.

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This is quite a complex article - it goes deeper into the Myers-Briggs/Jungian theory than is usual. But the payoff is an insightful view of how relationships work - so much more profound than untrained intuition would deliver.

I'm writing this from Reading: I have a client meeting tomorrow in London where I hope to discover more about the scope of the work and how long this particular contract is likely to last.

Too many large Christmas meals!

2011-12-28T20:06:00.003Z

We we have decided to move decisively to the Mediterranean Diet from now on, hoping to lose at least a pound a week. Except for the subject of the picture above, who lives outside our bedroom window. She's eschewing carbs altogether and sticking with the Atkins Diet.

Love and Asperger's

2011-12-27T12:09:00.000Z

A very interesting article about a couple trying it make it all work, each with Asperger Syndrome. It's worth clicking on the video links as you go along.

Dancing Around The Xmas Tree

2011-12-26T19:02:00.006Z

My nephew Chris is currently finishing his three year course in computer animation at Cardiff. This allows him to create the most wonderful art-pieces such as the following which arrived on Christmas Eve for our delight. Warning: the animation includes sounds of a high and screechy kind.

Personalize funny videos and birthday eCards at JibJab!

To get the point, it helps to know that Chris reviewed this blog to extract pictures of wife Clare; sons Alex and Adrian; my mother and myself: these have been pasted onto the characters. I also used to play guitar, my mother not; Alex tells me he has not played the drums (unlike Chris who has and does).

Here is another echo of Christmas day, at the local Catholic Church Christmas Day Mass.

You were meant to be admiring the flowers in this admittedly rather poor shot.

Science Feature: The Neocat

2011-12-26T15:12:00.000Z

"In the early hours I was awakened by paws, patting their silent way across my duvet. Claws slid across my cheek, encouraging my sleep-glued eyes to open. I awoke to behold the neocat as it sat, ghostly-green, on the pillow.

‘Caught-a-vole, caught-a-vole, caught-a-vole!’ it said in its high-pitched, breathless voice and patted me again with its claws extended.

I stumbled downstairs, half-asleep, while the cat swirled dangerously around my ankles, squeaking in self-satisfaction. In the kitchen, the puss was all high-energy, catching and recatching the hapless beast while evading me with practiced ease. For variety it would occasionally let it go then bat the catatonic creature from paw to paw.

‘Bip – bop, bip – bop, bip – bop,’ it sang eerily.

When Puss sat back and started to juggle the vole in the air, my patience finally snapped. I took the big kitchen brush and literally swept the poor rodent out of the back door – I think I saw it scuttling off into the night.

The cat was locked in the kitchen. ..."

Continue reading at sciencefiction.com.

Christmas Eve at Priddy

2011-12-24T21:06:00.004Z

Our last pre-Christmas shop this morning. Lots of footfall on Wells High Street but the Coop was manageable and well-stocked: croissants and crumpets for breakfast tomorrow.

After lunch we took my mother to Priddy (village green pictured) and had a drink by the fire in the New Inn. It was very quiet.

Priddy is interesting - perhaps the nearest village we know to the fictional Ambridge of The Archers. There's little to see there: two pubs plus a large green surrounded by farmers' houses - the picture above illustrates the idea. Yet there is an unceasing flow of highly-popular events taking place in Priddy: the summer fete (with sheep racing); the Priddy folk festival; the Fireworks Bonfire; another music festival - and so it goes on.

In my nightmare I end up living in Priddy and find myself forced by irresistible social pressure onto no less than than a dozen organising committees. As I said - Ambridge. By contrast, in the rather quiet part of Wells where we live the neighbourhood is low-key and private. We live a secluded life, mainly venturing out on business and into cyberspace.

I have a few more posts to come at sciencefiction.com but I have agreed with a somewhat reluctant management team that my articles are increasingly discordant with the media-event market positioning that the site has now evolved to.

The current branding successfully differentiates the site from its competitors in the SF fandom space, but it needs a fundamentally different kind of science article - shorter, less complex and more closely tied to the cycle of media events. Not really where I want to go and additionally I don't have access to the US media which mostly drives the site. I hope to continue reviewing books for them though.

All the signs are good to start a new telecoms consultancy contract in the new year, so watch this space.
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App news: now using the free (30 day trial) The Times app. So far it's pretty good.

The Bitterness of Pomegranate

2011-12-23T20:44:00.001Z

Our afternoon was enlivened as Clare attempted to eat a pomegranate 'for health reasons'.

I'm guessing this is a food strategy with a limited shelf life: my mother is less than impressed!

A Parable about Orbital KE Weapons

2011-12-19T15:06:00.001Z

"The Teacher stood at the mouth of the cave and gazed up at the midnight sky. Stars like jewels shone out over the freezing Afghan desert. Deep inside the caverns behind him, his followers were gathered around warm fires, talking quietly and preparing to sleep.

From beyond the memory of living man this land had been a waste land. Once again the foreigners had come with their killing machines and alien ways. In response the zealots, with their AK-47s and home-made bombs, led young men astray in a suffocating blanket of dogmatic conformity.

The Teacher had been ignored for so long, condemned as an apostate and a heretic. Yet recently the war-weary population had begun to turn to him, crowds gathered where he preached his message of charity, sharing and selflessness. Tomorrow he and his band of followers would go to the Capital, and perhaps the masses would choose his way.

The Teacher looked up and saw a bright meteor-trail in the velvet western sky. Unlike the sin and ugliness on the ground, in the heavens there was only beauty."

Continue reading at sciencefiction.com.

You will not be surprised to discover that the meteor-trail is not entirely what it seems.

Mass in B Minor at St. Cuthbert's

2011-12-17T21:58:00.000Z

We strolled down in the biting north-west wind to St. Cuthbert's this evening to hear the Beaumont Singers and orchestra presenting J.S. Bach's Mass in B Minor.

Here's a picture of the orchestra just assembling, about a quarter of an hour before the performance started.

The start of this work is quite spine-chilling, but unfortunately after that the performance fell rather flat. The chorus was repetitive (to be fair, this is a feature of the work) and the brass and wind sections were rather boomy. After an hour, Clare and myself felt we had sampled enough Bach and so we left at the interval.

Here are a couple of pictures of Broad Street and the High Street as traversed en-route to the pub. There, amidst the ripe Somerset accents, we enjoyed pints of Cheddar Ales 'Potholer' and a warm fire.

It's Christmas

2011-12-15T19:11:00.002Z

Internal Xmas tree assembled, lights strewn around it, sundry decorations affixed: check! External Xmas tree likewise sorted - check! Fairly lights adorning the perimeter of the kitchen and hall - done!

Just finishing Neal Stephenson's tech-thriller README. Fun, cute characters and a lively - if implausible - plot. What tends to mark out Stephenson's main characters is that if male, they're smart, wise-cracking and incredibly-accomplished intellectual types; his women are similar but feisty. As someone said about his Baroque Cycle, Stephenson knows his audience.

I hope to be reviewing some hot-off-the-press titles for sciencefiction.com soon. More later.

Vodafone SureSignal down today

2011-12-14T23:34:00.001Z

All today the Vodafone SureSignal device (which was working yesterday to my premature amazement) has been down.

Five minutes ago it acquired synchronisation and I now have a 3G signal again.

I wonder why I'm not surprised.
---
Update Thursday: the 3G signal has now been up for 24 hours and seems stable. I'm guessing it took this long for Vodafone's back-office systems to sync up.

Vodafone SureSignal

2011-12-13T12:45:00.001Z

The Vodafone SureSignal box (pictured) contains a tiny 3G transceiver (a WCDMA femtocell) and an Ethernet port which connects to a broadband router. By registering your 3G phone number and USB 3G dongle with Vodafone, these devices can then connect to the SureSignal box and their traffic will be tunneled across the broadband network back to Vodafone.

So I now have a mobile base station in my very own home and consequently an excellent mobile phone signal, plus my mobile data service works too - which helps when BT is messing up access to the WordPress image-upload windows at sciencefiction.com.

I had very little hope of this working. When the box arrived on Saturday the Vodafone site was down and stayed down until this morning. Once I had logged in, it proved impossible to navigate through the useless Vodafone layout to register the device: I was fored to make the 191 call-centre call. The guy there, three months into the job, fixed everything and after less than an hour of self-configuration everything now works!

I'm so not used to that.

Note: femtocell technology like SureSignal must be such a boon to the police. The mobile phone company can pin down my location to a resolution similar to that of GPS (they know where the SureSignal box is located, and they know I'm logged on to its short range signal).
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All over the world physicists are glued to their computers, waiting for the CERN webcast (1 pm UK time) which will brief us on the updated Higgs story. I'll be checking the live blog here.

Update: the signals are consistent with a 125-126 GeV Higgs, but also with a statistical fluctuation in the decay products from other interactions. So we need to wait for more data in 2012.

Our universe from nothing at all

2011-12-12T15:03:00.001Z

"Many visitors to ScienceFiction.com will be familiar with the timeline of the Big Bang, the idea that our universe started from some kind of ‘gigantic explosion’ some 13.6 billion years ago. But this is not the version of reality accepted by most cosmologists: their story is far, far stranger.

In the beginning (and probably way before 13.6 billion years ago) there was no space, time, matter or energy. All that existed was a totally empty geometry containing no points whatsoever – a particular solution to Einstein’s field equations. Quantum principles still applied though and the totally-empty universe was able to tunnel to a peculiar metastable state called the false vacuum.

At this point the new universe (at c. 10^-52 meters) was 17 orders of magnitude smaller than the Planck length .

The false vacuum was permeated with a field called the inflaton field with a strange property: ..."

Continue reading at sciencefiction.com.

An Urban Myth about Marines

2011-12-12T09:16:00.001Z

After (presumably) reading my article on Heinlein's 'Starship Troopers' (where a similar incident occurs), my brother sent me the following article (click on it to make it larger).

Sadly, it's only partially true.

Starship Troopers (retrospective)

2011-12-10T09:14:00.000Z

Sciencefiction.com asked me to write a retrospective on Robert Heinlein's 'Starship Troopers'. Here it is.

"With all the news about the ‘Starship Troopers’ remake, we couldn’t help but feel a little bit of nostalgia and decided to revisit the acclaimed book with some discussion.

Johnnie Rico jumps to the top of the tallest building in the neighborhood. He flips the snoopers up, looking for a target worth shooting at. There’s a tall building on the horizon. He lets the rocket see it and says “Go find it, baby” as the nuclear-tipped missile leaps away. Pausing only to fry a skinny popping up ahead of him, he jumps in long, easy strides towards the recall beacon as enemy slugs bounce harmlessly off his powered armor. It’s just another morning’s work for the Mobile Infantry."

Continue reading at sciencefiction.com.

---

I have been trying to work out what David Cameron's "veto" means for the future of the UK: The Economist blogs were particularly useful. The UK's political elite consistently underestimate how central the European project is to the mainland countries of the EU - they will not let the project, or the Euro, die. So all this talk of countries exiting the Euro is way off the mark.

One way or another the non-UK countries of the European Union are going to make Europe work. Their model is over-regulated, over-welfared and under-enterprised so it will no doubt take decades to get right. Our best UK hope is to be the Taiwan or Singapore, offshore to a less efficient monolith. But don't be thinking they won't retaliate.

Logically, we could have allied with the Germans and other North Europeans to help sort out the south and get the European project motoring. It surely would work a lot better with the UK pushing it along. But having lost an empire, I guess we weren't ready to be junior party to the Germans, in competition with the French :-).

Let's hope in twenty years time we won't regret it.

The Cat with the Gozzy Teeth

2011-12-08T15:07:00.000Z

A great title: one for my next sciencefiction.com piece perhaps?

He's been looking a bit down in the dumps the last few days so Clare decided we should take him to the vet this morning. I grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and lowered him into the catbox: his flailing claws dug a hole in my thumb from which blood spurted like a new oil find.

The vet told us a dire story about a cat in pain, teeth breaking off, consequentially infected gums, and directed us to their main office at Wedmore (ten miles away). As I write the animal is there, recovering from a general anaesthetic and the loss of his wonky canines. I will be dispatched shortly to collect him and pay an amount which could buy us a whole new family of cats.

Clare has remade our bed upstairs "in case he's feeling low when he comes home."

---

I was at the dump shortly after dawn this morning off-loading a spare bed and what seems like a million Daily Mail free CDs dating back to the last millenium. Despite a clear-out of my mother's front bedroom, it seems we have only scratched the surface down there :-)

If the council worker was intending to go through the sack looking for priceless gems from Max Bygraves and Des O'Connor, he certainly kept his desires well-hidden. "Over there in the non-recyclable landfill," he said, and went back to his office.

My Week with Marilyn

2011-12-06T22:38:00.001Z

Good film with fine acting from an assortment of UK luvies. Marilyn was done well but I don't think her essential being can be replicated by acting, no matter how fine.

Colin Clark was another brilliant portrayal as the upper-crust ingenu besotted with M.

In the end, despite all the cleverness the film fails to be sufficiently involving, it's hard to say why.

Cogito Ergo Sum

2011-12-05T15:12:00.000Z

"I first met René Descartes’ famous aphorism, “I think, therefore I am”, when I was a young teen. Naturally I wasted no time in deciding that the Great Man’s thought was trite and glib, a maxim whose proper home was surely the tee-shirt. Later, at university, I took philosophy classes and was surprised to discover that there were people who thought they’d refuted Descartes. How on earth was that possible?

Monsieur Descartes spent his youth as a soldier, seeing action in many battles. Later, when he became an academic, he used to stay in bed ’til noon thinking deep thoughts. Doubt plagued him: how can anyone be sure of anything? As you look around, the things you see, hear and smell could merely be a dream or a staged virtual environment."

Continue reading at sciencefiction.com.

This article touches centrally on the research I did on "First Order Intentional Systems" for my Ph.D. An example again of how artificial intelligence can shed new light on old philosophical puzzles.
---
In other news, we successfully assembled the new Dyson vacuum cleaner (this was by no means a given!) and today Clare vacuumed the car with it.

I'm down to do a retrospective review of Heinlein's Starship Troopers so I'd better get back to re-reading it.

New Dyson Vacuum Cleaner

2011-12-01T13:04:00.000Z

Normally I wouldn't bore you with such domestic minutiae as the contents of the box shown below.

However, the person shown in the picture is going to have to assemble this after lunch and then push it through thick pile upstairs and downstairs to show off its superior suction.

I can't tell you how much I am looking forwards to this.

Science Fiction Personality Poll

2011-11-30T11:50:00.005Z

I'm putting together an article about personality types and the kinds of people who tend to read hard science-fiction. This is also an excuse to play with polling software of which blogpoll seems to be the simplest (surveymonkey is more powerful but more complex). Anyway, please feel free to have a go.

The answers correspond to the Keirsey temperament types NF, SP, NT and SJ for those people who are into that.

Newton's Collapsing Universe

2011-11-28T15:37:00.000Z

"Sir Isaac Newton was possibly the greatest scientist who ever lived. But even great men can make mistakes – it’s just that their errors are more interesting than other people’s.

Newton’s law of motion (force equals mass times acceleration) is taught in every high school. Newton’s law of gravitation (the inverse-square law) is precise enough to be used by NASA for space mission design and was used by Newton himself to determine the motion of the planets. Given the wide applicability and accuracy of his theory, it was natural that Newton’s questing intelligence would turn to the question of the structure of the universe itself."

Continue reading at sciencefiction.com.

Book Review: ‘Steve Jobs’ by Walter Isaacson

2011-11-28T10:34:00.000Z

For most people, the arc of Steve Jobs’s career is defined by the Apple II, the Macintosh, Toy Story and other Pixar blockbusters, the iPod and iTunes, the iPhone and App Store, the iPad and iCloud. None of these would have happened except for Steve Jobs’s extraordinarily intense personality.

Biographer Walter Isaacson talks of ‘Good Steve’ and ‘Bad Steve’ but the latter was more frequently in evidence. Take the engineer who’d been working 80 hour weeks (how do you even do that?) for ten months and had the misfortune to meet up with Jobs one Friday afternoon for review. Jobs fell into a typical fury and began abusing the engineer, calling his work ‘shit’: shortly afterwards the engineer quit. This sounds terrible, and it is, but without ‘Bad Steve’ there would have been – nothing.

When engineers design a product it is typically efficient but clunky; over-functional and under-integrated. When accountants are in charge you get what the engineers wanted, but on the cheap. In most product companies, designers are humble artisans, serving up a ‘user-friendly’ wrapping over what someone else decided to produce.

By contrast, wherever Steve Jobs went the designer was in charge: Jobs was the super-user, the ambassador of the user experience. But when design is king, everyone else is required to move mountains to meet the central design concept. Naturally they consider this to be utterly unnecessary if not outright wilful.

Jobs’s reality distortion field denoted the triumph of ‘unrealistic’ design excellence over ‘good-enough’ engineering practice. Yet design is inherently subjective, there are no algorithms or equations that can tell you what Steve Jobs knew. The triumph of the apparently-arbitrary requires the power of a tyrant, yet that power was not (in general) wielded for personal reasons, but in the service of the design.

The design is not to be messed with. The Apple walled garden of total integration and control is the antithesis of the modular mix-n-match we associate with PC and Internet culture. But when the user (or the manufacturer) simply integrates a solution from market-available components there can be no over-arching design concept: flexibility, of necessity, breeds clunkiness. So which is best?

Everything in life is a trade-off. If you want a seamless, elegant and intuitive digital experience, then Apple will give it to you at a price, provided you stay within the Apple universe. Outside it you will have wider, cheaper and perhaps more innovative options, but the systems are uglier, harder to use and prone to odd failures. That’s what you get when there’s no adult supervision of the user experience.

Apple’s talented chief designer, Jony Ive, was dismayed by talk that Apple was (in the longer term) doomed to become just another company after Jobs’s death. ‘Many of the ideas were mine and I’m still here’ seemed to be his position; and with Tim Cook as the supportive CEO what was to stop the show going on? Just the missing ingredient of ‘Bad Steve’, the tyranny which breaks the resistance of all those reasonable voices from engineering and finance who can find a million excellent reasons for not entering the reality distortion field.
—
Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs , despite its door-stopping 600 pages, has been a runaway bestseller. Based on meticulous research (more than one hundred interviews) you get page-turning fly-on-the-wall access to the key episodes in Steve Jobs’s personal and business career. This is also an insider’s history of Silicon Valley high-tech from the dawn of the PC-age.

For several days while I was reading it I was boring my family by reading aloud amusing and frequently horrifying anecdotes of Steve Jobs’s behaviour, not all of which reflected badly on him. It’s highly recommended.

The Tramp in the Church (redux)

2011-11-27T15:31:00.001Z

We've been here before.

As Clare led the way into the church this morning, she spotted him occupying the pew just before the back one, the one where we usually hang out on the right hand side of the aisle.

"Where would you like us to go?" she whispered back to me.

"On the other side," I replied, meaning the other wing of the church, the one facing the Holy Land rather than the north-facing wing where we currently were.

Clare mistook my meaning and we continued to the rear pew on the other side of the aisle, where I was able to keep watch on the somnolent tramp from the corner of my eye. With no little schadenfreude I kept count of latecomers, who were forced by overcrowding into the empty pews in front and behind him.

During the service he stayed crouched down, occasionally turning in one direction or another. Finally we approached the part of the Mass where the congregation make the "sign of peace". I didn't think he would venture as far as me but I had prepared a little script involving bowing to him and whispering 'pax vobiscum' in a detached kind of way. Hopefully that would save me from having to use Clare's wet-wipes afterwards.

In the event, as the moment came, he enthusiastically shook his dirty mitt with the family in front and the young man behind, then he scuttled across the aisle and shook hands with a lay official of the parish, just in front of me. Like a wave which reaches its limits amidst the pebbles, this marked the culmination of his efforts and he retreated back to his lair.

"We dodged a bullet there," I confided to Clare.

During the sermon the priest, Father Philip, confided that Mass yesterday evening had been disrupted by a man who walked up to the altar, started swearing and disrobing, and claimed to be Jesus Christ. Apparently the services of burly parishioners - and possible the police - were required to restore normality.

The priest's take was focused on the virtues of taking your medication: I had no idea that such excitement occurred in sleepy Wells. I looked at the tramp again, this time in a wholly new light, excited by the possibilities.

House Pictures

2011-11-24T13:21:00.001Z

Here are some pictures of our house.

Our house from the road

The patio at the side

The back garden

Clare in the kitchen

The living room

The kitchen-diner

Bird-feeders in the front-garden

The owners on the couch

Wuthering Heights

2011-11-24T10:55:00.000Z

We saw "Wuthering Heights" (2011) on Tuesday at the Wells Film Centre. The poster below is an accurate depiction of how dreary and tedious the experience was.

Given the ever-present torrential rain, the deep mud, leaden skies and howling winds it was immediately apparent that this movie had not been sanctioned by the Yorkshire Tourist Board. What really kills it, however, is that Heathcliff is played by actors so passive, charmless and lacking in any kind of sexual charisma that no conceivable woman could have been attracted to him.

The director has tried to make up for the zero chemistry between the leading players by all kinds of erotic imagery and Freudian suggestiveness: the risible awfulness of this unsubtle manipulation is the only thing which saves the audience from descending into the deepest Yorkshire depression.

Yesterday I was in Bristol visiting my mother, who was keen to show off her new coat, hat and gloves. One picture shows fine wares from Lidl while the other features M&S (which is which?). Both stores are apparently engaged in deep price-cutting: times are indeed hard.

Today I'm going to have a rest after I've fixed the wretched kitchen spotlight (there's a dodgy connection) which Adrian repaired with bluetack but which promptly failed again two days later.

And I feel impelled to write something about the superb Walter Isaacson bio of Steve Jobs.

The Cat's Gozzy Tooth

2011-11-21T14:34:00.001Z

The days go by and the cat's gozzy tooth refuses to fall out.

The one good thing is that as he frightens the voles so much, he never comes close to catching any.

Meanwhile, Clare has decided to study Freud (this, I think, from watching a surfeit of "Waking the Dead" - the more I see of Peter Boyd, the Trevor Eve character, the more I think his personality is pretty much identical with that of Steve Jobs).

Clare reading Freud

Dr Freud was a sex-obsessed control freak: I've made sure she also has access to the kinder, gentler and altogether more profound Dr Carl Jung.

Mind Reading

2011-11-21T14:22:00.000Z

"Michael vectors the hidden camera to a wealthy-looking patron on his first course. A click on the joystick and the second screen lights up: this is the one that reads the client’s mind.

Mr. Rich-Guy seems happy enough according to the emotion-bar at the bottom of the display. It’s showing a lush, reassuring yellow with shades of soft green and pink. The main part of the monitor is interpreting the subject’s visual cortex: on the screen his mind’s eye view of the meal wobbles and occasionally morphs into something similar – the machine isn’t quite perfect. The prawn cocktail segues into a view of a tropical bay, a very long way from this rain-swept New York evening. The swirling yellows and greens show that this too is a pleasant association – the meal is still going well.

Michael wonders endlessly where his boss got all this stuff. As the lowest of the low in the restaurant hierarchy, he would never dream of asking though. From idle chat in the kitchen he’s discovered that the owner used to be in Military Intelligence. Somehow, some top-secret interrogation equipment managed to end up in his new venture. Behind the walls and above the false ceiling there are sensitive field detectors which can amplify the faintest swirls of an active brain."

Continue reading at sciencefiction.com.

It would be very difficult to detect brain activity at a distance - I think current experiments require the subject to be inside a scanner. I have no idea whether the signal strength is sufficient for cortical activity to be reconstructed even in principle from detectors behind a wall.

Adrian back to Canada

2011-11-18T08:36:00.000Z

By now Adrian should be at Sun Peaks, British Columbia, asleep after a 24 hour trip which started at Reading station yesterday in the morning rush-hour. Once Western Canada starts its day he'll be zooming around to get lift passes and other bits of documentation ... he could be teaching ski/snowboarding classes as early as tomorrow.

While Adrian was in the air, we were in Bristol yesterday paying an exorbitant £6 car park charge to shop in the Broadmead city centre complex. I now have some outdoor boots - comfortable as trainers and waterproof as only a Gore-Tex liner can make it.

Next we lost ourselves in the labyrinth which is IKEA and I emerged like some dusty refugee with a heavy yellow bag slung over my shoulder stashed with household goodies. At least the cushions weren't too much of a burden to carry...

Next, with my mother, we were off to Lewis's at Cribbs Causeway where Clare ordered four new rainbow-striped dining chairs, which may even arrive in time for Christmas. We were home by 4.30.

Has Greg Egan gone too far?

2011-11-14T15:09:00.000Z

"Once upon a time, one of our most noted authors of ultra-hard SF wrote a novel about a bunch of aliens living in the interior of an asteroid in close orbit around a black hole. The author, Greg Egan, was so incensed by one of the reviews of this book – by Adam Roberts at Strange Horizons – that he wrote a detailed rebuttal on his website (Anatomy of a Hatchet Job)."

Continue reading at sciencefiction.com.

This is another article which more repays careful reading than the oh-my-gosh appeal of an asteroid-impact piece. It segues from the style of literary criticism appropriate for science-heavy SF to the merits of exploring counterfactual physics. Mr Egan constantly stretches the link between the standard mechanisms of fiction and the conceptual intricacies of modern physics, inviting his literate fans to follow..

Wells Carnival in the rain

2011-11-12T13:25:00.000Z

It was raining cats and dogs yesterday evening as we walked down our road, clutching out bag of 20p coins and our umbrella, to see the Wells Carnival go by.

This is what a float looks like, as it drives out of the town up New Street.

Africa girl here has already endured three-quarters of an hour of steady downpour, but she's still twirling.

This Spanish dancer, jiggling to thunderous music, at least has some cover. The float stopped opposite us; nearby, the rain-soaked teens from The Blue School were soon gyrating in time on the pavement.

These girls were from a care-home, I think. Is that a toilet I see, with knickers around the ankles? ... A fine example of rustic humour.

Pole dancing from the care-home cleaners.

What's this about? No idea.

Another brilliantly-lit float advancing through the rain.

This is Way-Out-West, a tableau.

The girl trapped in the shop is part of the tableau.

Welcome to the sleazier end of of the Wild-West!

Conditions were atrocious and it's no surprise that many of the dancers looked bored out of their minds. Can you imagine gyrating for an hour to the repeated tune of "We are the Diddymen"? Plus all the rehearsals? Plainly you would go out of your mind - that stuff dripping down their chins wasn't rain, it was drool.

Anonymous (film)

2011-11-10T20:02:00.002Z

Well, what a busy day today! After a morning spent in arduous dialogue with BT (previous post) Clare and myself strolled down to the Wells Film Centre this afternoon to see "Anonymous".

The picture shows something you may have missed in your history lessons: specifically the 'Virgin' Queen Elizabeth 1st getting it on with the young Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, who unbeknownst to her is also her illegitimate son. Wow!

The results of this coupling will be to produce another, incestuous, illegitimate son for our Liz, the future Earl of Southampton. The doomed Earl of Essex, Southampton's dearest friend, is another of Liz's illegitimate progeny ... while Rafe Spall reprises his semi-psychopathic joker persona as an uncouth, vicious and on-the-make William Shakespeare.

No expense has been spared in making the film but despite high production values, it ultimately disappoints: not because of the far-fetched thesis but because it's hard to separate out the times and the characters.

There's so much time-jumping between the generations that it's impossible to work out on screen which illegitimate son is begetting which. Not that begetting takes up a lot of screen time, but the confusing flashback sequences do.

We walked back in intense discussion as to who was Edward de Vere's father (we never figured it out). Then we went to the Co-Op.

BT Broadband Blues

2011-11-10T19:35:00.001Z

At the end of October I received the following email from BT (excerpted):

Good news. We’re rolling out our faster broadband and we’ll be upgrading our network in your area on 31-Oct-11. This’ll make the things you do online quicker.

For the first ten days or so after your upgrade, your broadband might slow down or even stop now and again. That's normal and your speed will soon settle down. You can help it along by leaving your BT Home Hub on all the time and using your broadband as much as you can for this period.

BT's perception of incipient Good News was indeed prescient. All this month the Internet link has been randomly dropping, maybe three minutes downtime every couple of hours. More seriously, when I write my articles for sciencefiction.com I have to upload images to WordPress: mysteriously, their pop-up window for image upload stopped working.

Naturally my first thought was that this was a W7 laptop problem. I tried uploading with my business machine (W7 starter) and my old business machine (XP): nothing worked. Then I tried with my Vodafone 3G connection and the upload worked just fine. I had already checked that the problem was not with WordPress so it seemed clear that the failure lay with BT.

This morning I nerved myself for what I knew would be a tedious and difficult technical support call. The first ten minutes was spent trying to find a number. Like Amazon, BT make it extremely difficult to search out a technical help number. After five layers of IVR menus I eventually got through to the Indian call centre.

I explained that BT had put a new DSLAM or, as I believe it's called in BT-speak, an MSAN in my local exchange, probably upgrading to ADSL2+ and that I believed this upgrade was the root of the problem. I'm not sure the guy in India had a clue what I was talking about.

Clearly something which is not affecting general Internet access (layers 3 and 4) but is messing up session/application connectivity (layers 6/7) is going to be down to some kind of application-proxying appliance. I asked whether BT in its upgrade was perhaps installing new application-screening firewalls in response to the latest scare on adult content.

The BT guy was handicapped in that he had no access to network-upgrade data (how helpful is that?) but he dutifully took over my screen and we rehearsed together that the image-upload didn't work. Then he closed down the call saying he had no idea what was wrong.

I briefly tried the "Internet Chat" technical help facility, getting through to "Claire" with an initial message describing the problem. Nothing happened for a long while so I wandered off: when I returned the chat session had timed out with Claire's last response indicating that BT couldn't help with third-party issues such as Vodafone 3G.

Today, however, is the magical tenth day after the upgrade and this evening, while I was delving into the BT Home Hub firewall to see whether that could be the problem, I discovered that the problem had gone away.

So what's the answer? I think the BT engineers did indeed connect an appliance to the (upstream) link of their new DSLAM to monitor usage. And I think that this introduced some subtle effect that degraded the session link with the WordPress image-upload function. At close of business today the engineers took it away, and normal service was resumed.

Moral? There isn't one. Exasperation and wasted time? Off the scale.

A Christmas Wonderland

2011-11-08T17:52:00.010Z

The Almondsbury Garden Centre is already open for Christmas business - we lunched there today.

'Jane Austin' (sic)

I was taken by this black fur hat, which reminded me of the cat, so persuaded my mother to hold it up so that its label was clear. I imagine that Jane Austen would have spit in their eyes.

Just like we had in the States?

When we were in Virginia, we played kitsch by having an illuminated reindeer family in our front garden. I emailed Clare this photo and asked her whether she thought I should buy it. She emailed back: "No dear."

Santas and Beryl

Here's a bonus shot of my mother with the santas.

On our way back as we crossed the Mendips, close to the Castle of Comfort pub there was an almighty bang and the car pitched to the side. I stopped the car in the pub forecourt and Adrian and myself discovered that the driver's side front tyre was flat.

In the gathering gloom we searched for the jack (and eventually found it) and then were stymied by the locking wheel nut until we eventually found the tool for that. Thirty minutes later we had successfully changed the tyre and a few moments later Clare pulled up in the Saxo. We'd summoned her at the onset, when we weren't sure whether we'd be able to fix it, but our insurance policy wasn't needed in the end .

What heroism though! Clare had ransacked the house and shed looking for a jack (and failed), then she'd reversed down the drive in the dark without hitting the walls (big success). She thoroughly deserved the two chocolate bars we brought back for her and the two insect-and-berry bird food slabs!

Update Wednesday morning

I'm now £85 poorer but the tyre has been fixed by the excellent Wells Tyre Service. The problem was a tear in the sidewall, about half an inch from the tread. "Pothole," the man said, "Your wheel sank into a pothole and the rough edge punctured the tyre." Says something about the back roads across the Mendips.

After I came back I had my own 'Gorillas in the Mist' moment, as I precariously climbed the tree in the front garden to attach Clare's new 'insect and berry' suet-block feeder. It says on the packet, 'not for human consumption' and to be fair, the odour is a bit off ... must be the berries.

Live Forever

2011-11-07T17:34:00.000Z

I was rather dubious about this current piece, just published at sciencefiction.com. It's a complex argument requiring the reader to engage, not skim. Do I believe it myself? Sort of, although I'd like to hear what a pair of intellectually-minded twins thought about it.

"Petra was brought into my office. There is something about it being the last day of your life which modulates every emotion: Petra looked scared, resigned, even – against the odds – slightly hopeful – but most of all she just looked bone-achingly weary. I stopped the nervous adjustment of my robes, calmed myself and looked her in the eye with what I hoped was a friendly expression.

‘You didn’t ask to see me, Petra, but … it’s a facility our hosts here grant us. First of all tell me, are you a Christian?’

Petra shook her head. Young people seldom think deeply about religion in my experience, and all this had obviously happened far too suddenly for Petra to get around to revisiting her core beliefs. Well, that was partially why I was here.

‘So when they take you out at dawn tomorrow and shoot you through the heart, that’s it? A kick in the chest, a brief moment of pain followed by gathering blackness, and then you never get to wake again. Is that right?’"

Continue reading at sciencefiction.com.

Party Girl

2011-11-06T15:04:00.002Z

I found this photo of my mother, Beryl Seel, taken at Christmas time 1936 when she would have been thirteen and three-quarters.

I see a resemblance to one of the granddaughters.

The Mandolin is still around, I think. I practised guitar chords on its four strings when I was a similar age, before I bought my first guitar.

The Tramp in the Church

2011-11-06T12:54:00.000Z

I spotted him straightaway, as we walked to the back of the church this morning. Elderly, burley, hirsute and down-at-heel, the mad tramp was slumped on the rear pew where we normally like to sit. Clare seemed oblivious as she led the way into the penultimate pew, just in front of him. Poor idea - far too close. As we sat down I could hear him mumbling to himself behind me.

I recalled the last time he'd visited the church, months ago, when he'd sat in the pew in front of us (where we were sitting now in fact). He had slumped and twitched and talked to himself, and occasionally to others during the service, and then at the moment when the priest had asked the congregation to show the 'sign of peace' to each other he had taken his chance. Scuttling like a crab, he had moved into the aisle and with a bobbing gait and malicious smile had thrust his dirty, squalid hand at everyone he could reach. Horrified parishioners were obliged to shake hands with him and then rue the lack of wet-wipes. Luckily he didn't look behind him at that time, so we were spared.

As the service progressed, I was fixated on what I would do when he tried this trick again. Could I get away with facing him down with a stony glare and a muttered "I an NOT a Catholic," or would social pressure force me to take the malevolent hand? And what about Clare, could I protect her from this unhygienic moment? Not my problem, I decided.

The fateful moment arrived after the Lord's Prayer. I nerved myself - they say you never know how you'll behave under fire until the bullets are whizzing around you - and the moment passed. The mad tramp had not stirred and had not bothered anyone this time around.

I am profoundly atheist so church services that work with pleasant, slightly ageing, middle-class congregations and don't work at all with the unpleasant are not an issue for me at all. I wouldn't want to shake hands with an unkempt,unwashed and deranged tramp under any circumstances: I hardly feel I'm alone in this. But I suspect that Catholics feel that Jesus probably would have: it all adds fuel to that legendary Catholic guilt.

Fireworks Night

2011-11-05T20:17:00.001Z

In past years we went to the fireworks celebrations in a field close to our house in Penton Corner, near Andover. We'd fight the frost by bathing in the radiant heat of the bonfire, munching a burnt burger and quaffing beer out of a polystyrene mug.

Priddy was holding the equivalent event this evening. We drove up the 'king of the mountains' route of the Old Bristol Road and turned left towards Priddy. About a mile out we saw a line of cars parked on the verge and families walking on the road. "This is ridiculous," I snorted, "We're miles away!" I kept on driving and we were soon snared in gridlock.

Half an hour later we crawled past a half-burned-down bonfire and a further ten minutes later we escaped from the far side of Priddy - and headed off home.

It could have been worse (at least we weren't trapped until the last person had left ).

Contagion

2011-11-03T11:06:00.007Z

Clare and myself saw this movie yesterday afternoon but I'm almost too bored to write any kind of review.

It's not that the film itself was boring; it was mildly absorbing all the way through. The problem is that an exponentially-spreading virus, for which a vaccine will eventually be found after a lot of deaths, is not intrinsically very interesting. So you have to overlay it with 'people stories'.

There were quite a few: the hero-doctor who uses his privileged knowledge to help a relative; the evil conspiracy-theorist blogger who makes his millions with fraudulent 'cures'; the heroine-doctor (pictured above) who catches the disease; the immune husband whose dead wife had a fling with an ex; the daughter who's sick of being cooped up by her dad; the hoodies who raid the supermarkets, break into houses and kill. It's a long list of over-familiar tropes and we're not really engaged.

I look forwards to the Elizabethan swagger of "Anonymous" soon enough.

My previous post about the Greek Colonels making a comeback seems increasingly prescient. The media are reluctant to dwell on it, but in the 21st century an advanced capitalist country in Western Europe can indeed fall off a cliff.

God's Asteroid

2011-10-31T20:36:00.004Z

One of the best descriptions of what you would see ... and the effects of ... a large asteroid hitting the earth.

"A three mile wide, billion ton asteroid hits Europe. This unimaginable catastrophe actually happened five thousand years ago, and astonishingly, there is an ancient eyewitness account, as well as the aftermath described in The Bible.

The “Planisphere” tablet was discovered in the ruined library of the Assyrian royal palace at Nineveh (Iraq). It’s a copy of the night diary of a Sumerian astronomer containing drawings of the night sky. But stars were not the only thing the ancient astronomer observed in that pre-sunrise of 29th June in the year 3,123 BC.

Alan Bond and Mark Hempsell analyzed the Planisphere a sector at a time, decoding the star signs and Sumerian commentary by matching constellations and planets against state-of-the-art programs which can reproduce the night sky from any location and at any time in the last few thousands of years..."

Continue reading at sciencefiction.com.

The biblical reference is a bit populist but seems to work with the predominantly American audience on the site.

This morning we shopped at Glastonbury and Street as drizzle infiltrated everywhere from a bland, gray sky. Morrisons were selling octopus: ("quite popular, we had a chinese lady in who makes a sauce from their ink. I'm more of a cod and chips man myself"). We followed his lead.

This evening I went with Clare to the Mass for All Saints. This is the Catholic version of Halloween and we left a big bowl of chocolate bars on the house step with the legend "Help Yourself - One Each". On our return it seemed undisturbed: (last year we had two or three troupes visiting - some quite large). We had carefully chosen confectionary we would be quite happy with ... probably we're good now through to Christmas!

---

We had the tree surgeons around this morning. They trimmed stuff in the back garden and in the front, and had to cut down the big tree to the left of our driveway entrance, down by the road, as it was completely rotten with fungal infestation. Their work coincided with next door replacing the fence they have in common with us: the tree surgeons were originally contracted to trim undergrowth next door by our neighbours prior to the fence replacement.

Contract ends a little early - back in Wells

2011-10-29T08:52:00.000+01:00

No issues - as I've worked before with the client I was able to get the job done faster than they had budgeted. So the deliverable has been handed over after eight days rather than fifteen and I vacated the Reading flat yesterday.

In the evenings, after work, Alex and I could be found lounging in recliners under the glow of his John Lewis uplighters, discussing the affairs of the world. We mused on the condition of Greece: heavily indebted, ridiculously low productivity and falling farther behind Germany every day, the prisoner of powerful vested interests and corruption with no significant social forces to drive change.

What happens when the Germans eventually stop paying?

You could imagine that all sectors of Greek society decide to equitably take their pay cuts, pay their taxes, work longer hours (or show up) and retire much later ... or you could imagine that they will fight like dogs in a box to make sure that they get a disproportionate share from the now-merely-dripping tap. And when that happens we call it a breakdown of society. And the Greek Colonels will be back.

I wonder what the EU will do with a military dictatorship installed in one of its member countries? Send in the Bundeswehr?

Alex thought this eventuality had been under-explored in the media and urged me to write about it here: consider it done.

Terminal Decision

2011-10-26T18:00:00.000+01:00

"The princess was beautiful but willful. It was entirely in character that she should wake in the pre-dawn glimmer and leave her chamber unobserved, to walk barelegged in the dew. And it was there, in the old meadows surrounding the chateau, that they took her.

They had been incredibly clever as well as resourceful and, perhaps most importantly, they had been lucky. Our security teams had unaccountably failed to detect their dragonship, hidden with perfect care inside the husk of an abandoned church. The Princess Irena, true to her contrary self, had decided to mark her first day in the newly-conquered province of Aquila by a solitary early morning excursion."

Continue reading ...

This article has been a while in preparation. In the course of researching articles on future weapon systems for sciencefiction.com I looked into missile guidance systems and discovered that missiles normally use a hunt algorithm called 'proportional navigation'. This basically steers the missile directly at the target no matter how it moves to evade.

Dragonflies do something smarter: they move in such a way that no matter what their target does, the dragonfly always stays stationary in the target's visual field - the hunter doesn't move sideways against the background. The only effect is that the dragonfly naturally looms larger as it homes in. This is call 'motion camouflage' - how cute is that?

So the story wraps up this concept in a little interplanetary adventure where the planet is in a stellar cluster so that space is really, really bright, rather than dark as it is with us. So 'motion camouflage' is quite important as a dark object moving against a bright background will really stand out.

Sadly, the story seems to have passed most people by, judging by the number of 'likes' and tweets it got.

---

Tomorrow I'm coming up to the halfway point of the current IL2 security contract. Reading is the polar opposite of Wells, being working class, multi-ethnic and home to a small ecosystem of rat-faced, shifty men who hang around in the back streets.

The town centre additionally boasts of swaggering young blokes who seem convinced that by jangling their money loudly as they walk by and then asking if you can 'spare 50p' they are contributing to the fabric of a good civil society.

I slew my glance away and answer with a languid 'No....'.

An IL2 security contract

2011-10-22T21:28:00.002+01:00

Not much activity here recently as I'm busy with a client, conducting an IL2 security review. The work started on Wednesday (Oct 19th) and runs through to November 8th.

As a consequence I'm staying during the week with Alex in his Reading flat. We have established a schedule which finely intermeshes, both in the mornings as we each get ready for work, and in the evenings as we each make use of the Microwave within minutes of each other. Alex has settled on Waitrose one-person meals; I am set up with M&S after a trip to their fine outlet in Frome this morning.

While I'm making money, sciencefiction.com has four of my articles stacked up:

A little story on smart missiles
An asteroid impact effects piece - 'God's Asteroid'
A new take on Buddhist ideas of reincarnation
A thought about reviewing Greg Egan's current 'Orthogonal' trilogy.

However, my continuing excursion into differential geometry and GR is on the back-burner till mid-November.

The clocks go back next week-end. I thought Mr Cameron was going to stop all that nonsense. I hold out little hope for the new 80 mph motorway speed limit either. These may be little wins, but they make a difference and it lowers morale when they're so cheaply and easily abandoned!

The Vampire Mutation

2011-10-17T15:49:00.000+01:00

I spent the morning putting together a security audit pack and a bunch of document templates. I was meant to be travelling up to Reading this afternoon to stay at Alex's apartment, ready to start a new security project with a client tomorrow. Skype, however, is silent, there are no texts, emails or calls. The project is in suspension - not yet approved.

---

I wrote the latest article a few weeks back. There's a lively constituency at sciencefiction.com who obsess with vampires. It was a challenge: write a science feature about them (the vampires, not the fans!). I thought about a sub-species of humanity with a penchant for lapping ... and came up with this.

They said the passenger pigeons were dense enough to blacken the skies. They said the bison on the plains were more than the sand-grains on a beach. But these were as nothing compared to the human cattle that walk the earth today. Never have there been such herds: so pleasingly available, so docile, so very tame.

There have been those who would eat you, consume your flesh, the real life Hannibal Lectors. But that’s a stupid and self-defeating strategy: you humans didn’t get where you are today by tolerating predators. Such ‘cannibals’ are swiftly hunted down and don’t get to reproduce their kind.

You’re much, much worse at spotting social predators. The psychopaths betray your appealing altruism, bedazzle you with their empty charms, cajole favors with intimidating smiles, and never ever repay. They take your money, your virtue and sometimes even your lives. Yes, I think they must have been some of my forebears.

Continue reading.

"We enjoyed it so much ..."

2011-10-15T11:08:00.003+01:00

You enter the holiday apartment and idly pick up the comments book. You read entry after entry extolling the beauty of the surrounding countryside, the comforts of the apartment and what a wonderful time was had by all.

So here we were in the holiday cottage we were sharing with Mary and Gerry, my sister-in-law and her husband. The second day the boiler stopped working - we had no hot water for thirty six hours. Eventually the repair man arrived and power-cycled the boiler: miraculously it started working again. He scratched his head, "Maybe a relay's sticking?" On our last day it happened again.

We had been promised WiFi: there was no WiFi. I sat in the lounge with my smartphone watching bits trickle in from an erratic GPRS. If a cow moved in the adjoining field, the datalink collapsed.

The bathroom tap was so stiff that only the adult males in the house could move it (we had four children - Clare's nieces - staying over the weekend).

A previous occupant had managed to smash the shower door leaving shards of glass needles on the floor of the shower as my naked feet soon discovered.

Let me leave aside the fact that we slept next to the boiler, so that when it was working we cooked!

As we left we debated what to write. Into the book went the following words: "Wonderful accommodation and lovely countryside, many nearby sites of interest, we enjoyed it so much." In a separate note left for the landlord we itemised the points above. :-)

Actually we put all these issues behind us during our week there. We relaxed, visited Warwick Castle, Kenilworth Castle and the Black Country Living Museum and all in all had a great time. Some pictures of Clare and myself below.

Plus I got the Google sat-nav to work on my smartphone - brilliant!

The Debt (film)

2011-10-05T17:05:00.002+01:00

The Sunday Times gave it only two stars, saying it was neither thrilling nor intelligent: just more Holocaust-chic. Au contraire: this story of a botched Mossad operation to snatch a Nazi vivisectionist was both exciting and rather profound. Yes, we liked it.

We're off to Warwickshire for a brief holiday next week. I carefully checked the Vodafone coverage map to discover that our farmhouse is precisely located in a no coverage spot - we can only hope for a friendly diffraction fringe! In our absence, Alex, Adrian and the cat will be tending the house: I'm trying to work out which of them is the more carpet-safe!

Once back, I have a telecoms contract to work on, perhaps a sign that the economy is finally picking up, an extremely leading indicator.

Advance Decision

2011-10-03T20:06:00.001+01:00

Imagine it. You've had a terrible accident or a stroke, or you've declined into mindless dementia. You're kept alive by nursing staff and machines. If you could make a decision, you'd wish you were dead - your relatives plead with staff to turn the machines off and remove the feeding tubes. But the Judge says no.

There have been too many cases like this, but there is something you can do. Sign an "Advance Decision" stating what you want to happen should you ever end up like this. Get it signed and witnessed and arrange to have copies deposited with your relations and your GP. Here's the version I used * [download it as a Word document].

ADVANCE DECISION

To Health Care Professionals:

I, [YOUR NAME], of [YOUR ADDRESS], have the capacity to make the decisions set out in this document. I have carefully considered how I wish to be treated if, in the future, I lose the capacity to consent to medical treatment, or the ability effectively to communicate my refusal or consent.

Date of birth: [YOUR DOB]
NHS number: [YOUR NHS NUMBER]
National Insurance Number: [YOUR NI NUMBER]

REFUSAL OF TREATMENT
To avoid any doubt, and unless stated to the contrary below, I confirm that the following refusals of treatment are to apply even if my life is at risk or may be shortened by virtue of such refusal.

In the event that I am no longer competent to make decisions on my own behalf, these are the decisions I have made in advance. If I lack mental capacity and also have an advanced disseminated malignant disease, advanced degenerative disease of the nervous system (including MS, motor neurone disease and Parkinson’s disease), moderate or severe brain damage due to injury, stroke, disease or other cause, senile or pre-senile dementia, severe difficulty in breathing (dyspnoea) that cannot be cured, or any other condition of comparable gravity, I refuse any medical intervention aimed at prolonging or sustaining my life.

In the event of any of the above conditions applying, I refuse all life-prolonging treatments, including but not limited to: cardio-pulmonary resuscitation, artificial ventilation, specialised treatments for particular conditions such as chemotherapy or dialysis, antibiotics when given for a potentially life-threatening infection, and artificial hydration and nutrition. I also refuse all life-sustaining treatments including but not limited to therapies whose purpose is to maintain or replace a vital bodily function and without which death would most likely occur as a result of organ or system failure.

I recognise that I am unlikely specifically to have included all possible current or future treatments for whatever health condition may lead to the applicability of this AD. Nonetheless I wish to refuse them. Furthermore I am unable to anticipate all possible circumstances under which this AD might become applicable but believe that any such circumstances would be extremely unlikely to alter my decision had I anticipated them. I am very anxious that new treatments or unpredictable circumstances might be used by my healthcare team to argue that this AD is not applicable and not binding. I wish so far as I can to pre-empt any such arguments.

CONSENT TO TREATMENT
I do consent to any medical treatment to alleviate pain or distress (including any caused by lack of food or fluid) aimed at my comfort. I do consent to palliative treatment for incurable vomiting or feeling sick (but not for treating any underlying condition causing these symptoms). I maintain this request even in the event that it may shorten my life.

Upon my death I wish to donate all usable organs and I consent to any treatment which is designed to make this possible and to optimise the process.

I have deposited this advance decision with:

1. My GP: [GP NAME, GP ADDRESS]

Signed: ______________________ Date: __________________

--------------------------------------------

Witness 1

Witness Name : _________________________

Address: __________________________

I witness that this advance decision was signed or acknowledged in my presence.

Signature: _________________ Dated: _________________

Witness 2

Witness Name : _________________________

Address: __________________________

I witness that this advance decision was signed or acknowledged in my presence.

Signature: _________________ Dated: _________________

______

* Original text from this website.

A Decade On ...

2011-10-01T14:20:00.006+01:00

This was the photo Clare insisted on taking for framing on the mantelpiece, as both Alex and Adrian were here this morning. (They have both since left to see their relatives in Liverpool and thence on to a walking holiday in the Lake District).

The setting exactly mimics a similar couch potato shot she took on Christmas Eve 2001 in our house in Vienna, Virginia, USA (above) when again, the two boys were visiting. What a difference ten years makes! But not much to the cat experience!

Here's the next photo taken on that same Christmas Eve. Clare substituted for me on the couch and the cat is even more spooked.

Push time back another ten years, to 1990, and above we see Clare at a chateau in the Loire valley.

We're now back to the mid-year of 1980 and the garden of our damp flat in Slough, next to the canal. I was working as a computer programmer and Clare was managing the infant Alex, about half-way through her pregnancy with Adrian. We had been married two and a half years.

Paddling at Weston-super-Mare

2011-10-01T14:08:00.000+01:00

Some pictures of when Beryl Seel and Clare Youell braved the surging torrents of the north end of the beach at Weston-super-Mare. In the first shot you see them having a rest, soaking up the sun. Next they bravely enter the surf, exposing their very skins to the salt-water. Finally they return, cooler and somehow more centred.

We had a very nice day at the seaside yesterday.

A Breakfast Vole

2011-09-29T12:57:00.000+01:00

I was eating breakfast in the kitchen at half past eight this morning. It was very quiet - Adrian had long since left for work at the cheese factory and Clare was still asleep upstairs, as was the cat in the back bedroom. My eye was caught by a small furry ball ambling nonchalantly into the kitchen (below).

For a moment our eyes locked as I imagined what a tiring night the vole must have had being chased around the house and juggled by the cat. I slowly got up and unlocked the kitchen and patio doors to let the poor thing escape. When I returned to my cereal the vole had hidden somewhere.

Five spoonfuls later my curiosity took control. I wandered over to the computer equipment to see if I could find the poor thing. There it was, snuggled up on top of a warm power supply block. I poked it - it wouldn't move. So I leaned down and picked it up; it still didn't move a muscle. The vole was deposited on the grass outside, and was last seen scuttling into the bushes.

You may infer a certain degree of non-verisimilitude in the above images. To be honest, I was a little too occupied to play around with the camera, so this was what I believe is called in CSI-speak a 'reconstruction'?

A Trip to the Seaside

2011-09-28T19:29:00.005+01:00

It hit 25 degrees this afternoon with no wind and clear blue skies. We decided to explore the north end of the beach at Weston super Mare and take a look around the headland to Sand Bay.

The next two pictures are from the pub at Anchor Head looking back towards Weston beach.

After a cream-tea lunch and a brief sunbathe we were back home late afternoon.

Here's Adrian explaining the finer points of his high-spec digital camera to potential bird-photographer Clare. The feeders are all set up, hanging somewhat forlornly in the front garden. We just wait for the weather to signal to the birds that it's Autumn - time to feed artifically, little guys!

A cheap gibe from Clare - "Are you finding the maths too difficult?"

"Einstein's General Theory of Relativity - honestly, how hard could it be?"

In truth the book has stayed resolutely closed this last couple of days not due to the inherent difficulty of the maths or the rather dry material I'm currently ploughing through. A session just needs a couple of hours of focused concentration and ... yesterday we did a day-trip to Bristol and today it was the seaside. We're going to have three more hot days this year so expect no further progress in GR until next week.

Monday = Chores

2011-09-26T15:05:00.001+01:00

Despite the two posts already uploaded today - a review of 'The Black Madonna' and an article about those FTL neutrinos in Italy - I have not in fact spent the day writing. Those pieces were in fact written over the last three days. This morning I was actually hard at work sweeping out the kitchen, hall and downstairs toilet. Sounds relatively painless until you count the amount of furniture which has to be lifted onto tables or relocated outside - I felt like a removals man.

Next it's vacuuming. We have an ancient hoover thing - acquired from Alex - which weighs a ton and which tends to lock up on thick pile. I persuade myself it's valuable exercise as I attempt to push this through the bedrooms and the downstairs living room. All I know is that when they did this in the fields of old, they called it ploughing and used oxen.

With my brains scrambled by unaccustomed exercise, we walked into town to buy some bread rolls. Clare had repeatedly asked me, "Do you have money?" and a couple of my spare neurons indicated assent. In fact I had omitted to bring my wallet so we had to put the rolls back on the Co-op shelf and come home empty-handed. So it was soup and stale bread for lunch.

I have just done a pile of washing up and finally I can tell all to you here. This isn't work is it?

[To be fair, it's actually displacement activity from getting on with my General Relativity book].

Update: just had a chat with Rupert Taylor from Pro4 and as a consequence I have some more work to do on a security white paper. GR is going to have to wait.

Faster Than Light

2011-09-26T14:53:00.001+01:00

"Despite the hubbub – the journalists jostling for that final refill of wine, the smoke, the noise and confusion – I couldn’t help noticing how Professor Randall kept stroking the explosives pack strapped to her astonishing piece of equipment.

It was a balmy evening here at CERN, scene for one of the most momentous press conferences ever. They had decided to hold it on the Press Center Balcony, overlooking Lake Geneva. The final rays of the setting sun cast a pale fire upon the mountain tops, while in the deep indigo sky the first stars were coming into view.

‘Ladies and gentlemen of the press,’ Professor Randall began, ‘tonight you will see the most astonishing confirmation of superluminal communication, a journey which began with the discovery of neutrinos travelling faster than light here in CERN back in 2011. Over the years we have improved the equipment and I can announce today that we have achieved practically instantaneous communication over interplanetary distances.’"

Continue reading at sciencefiction.com.

---

This article sketches a scenario of faster-than-light communication and shows how it translates into 'backwards-in-time' communications. This doesn't lead to paradox - it's possible to construct the relevant spacetime diagram which I do in the story. But for the scenario as a whole to work, blatant violations of the second law of thermodynamics need to occur - on a par with watching a smashed egg on the floor reassemble and fly back to a pristine state on the kitchen table.

As has been noted by many authors, the direction of time is linked to the direction of increasing entropy.

Review of "The Black Madonna" by Peter Millar

2011-09-26T14:38:00.000+01:00

This is an Amazon Vine review of "The Black Madonna".

Palestinian archaeologist Nazreem Hashrawi is Sophie Neveu, the dynamic one of the pair who drives the plot along. South-African Marcus Frey is Robert Langdon, the academic who specialises in arcane historical lore and has been dragged into a mystery he barely comprehends. They are chased around London, England; Altötting, Germany; various locations in Spain; the French railway system; and finally back to London for the denouement. Rather than Opus Dei, their stereotypical antagonists include Islamic fundamentalists (led by an Osama Bin-Laden figure), American Evangelical Fundamentalists and various factions within the Catholic Church.

The subject of all this running around? The mysterious and thoroughly ancient `Black Madonna' unearthed by Nazreem in the Gaza Strip: each of the sects has their own reasons for wanting this seminal piece of `idolatry'. Oh, and there's an on-off sparkle of potential romance between Nazreem and Marcus. And did I mention that all this is occurring under the benign surveillance of the British Intelligence Services?

This is a well-executed `bad book'. Echoing Dan Brown, the writing is clunky, formulaic and over-adorned with cliché. It seems that every corner turned is an excuse for one of the characters to indulge themselves (and us) with an undigested chunk of historical exposition. I was prepared to be quite irritated by all this when I realised that author Peter Millar just doesn't care. I'm sure his writing style is totally tongue-in-cheek, the saving grace being that all the rushing around and clumsy plot twists do in fact engage the reader's attention; and with Nazreem Hashrawi, the author's dream girl becomes, in part, the reader's too.

So this is a somewhat enjoyable exercise in pastiche and will fill a long train journey more than adequately.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

2011-09-21T15:32:00.000+01:00

To the movies yesterday with Clare and my mother to see the John Le Carre adaptation.

Reviews have drawn attention to the gritty, dark rendering of the movie - seedy, run-down settings like a succession of under-funded secondary schools. The atmospherics are well done but there is a problem with plot-development: the four suspects are so thinly drawn that it's impossible to come up with a founded view as to which is the mole.

Smiley occasionally comes up with an insight but he never shares it with the audience, so there's little involvement with the search per se. Still, the ride is fun: probably more so if you didn't see the BBC TV series. Clare and myself knew the plot to death, though, so there were no surprises.
---
I've been working hard on my general relativity book this morning, chewing through one-forms and general tensors.

Super-Earths and Binary Suns

2011-09-19T21:45:00.000+01:00

My latest piece for sciencefiction.com, as suggested by editor Ze, is on newly-discovered planets "out there". Here's how it starts:

A planet orbits a faraway star. Although it’s light it tugs on its parent sun, so that sometimes the star is pulled slightly towards us, and sometimes pushed away. How can we tell? That tiny orbital-wiggle creates a slowly-oscillating Doppler shift in the frequency of the starlight we see.

It sounds like a tiny effect and it is, but HARPS (the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher) can measure stellar radial velocities to an accuracy of 1 meter per second – and that’s enough for some new discoveries. HARPS has just found 16 super-Earths, exoplanets with a mass not much higher than our own.

The most promising of the newcomers is the planet HD 85512 b, around 3.6 times the mass of the Earth. Its surface gravity is estimated to be around 1.4 g and its climate similar to the south of France, although some observers suggest it’s a trifle muggy. It’s the best exoplanet yet for the prospects of habitability and at a mere 36 light years away, it’s practically in our backyard. ... more.

I find that the documentary-style science narratives don't go down particularly well with the audience, as measured in "Likes". I have 500 - 1,000 words to play with and the most "liked pieces" tend, not surprisingly, to be about topics which plug into the topical interests of the readers and which have a story-telling element. But any dramatist could tell you that!
---
The weather has continued to be uniformly dreadful: warm enough but with gloomy overcast skies and frequent showers. We've been hibernating with just forays out to the shops. Last Friday was exceptional, as noted in recent posts, when we were chasing the Tour of Britain cycling race around our local area. Clare is generally getting stronger although she dips out in the afternoons.

Tour of Britain Stage 6

2011-09-16T15:53:00.003+01:00

We've spent most of today rushing around the byways of the Mendips, intersecting the course of the Tour of Britain. Midday found us sat on an old stone wall at the top of the Cheddar Gorge. About ten minutes before the race proper arrived, fourteen menacing police bikes flashed by with just a few seconds separating them. They were low and fast, with their blue lights flashing and the intent seemed to be to clear any obstacles. Afterwards there was a hush and no more traffic on the road.

Next came an announcement car, its loudspeaker telling us that there was a small leading group about a minute ahead of the main Peloton. Three silent, determined cyclists soon came into view, bookended by more motorbikes and team cars: how we clapped like mad!

After what seemed less than a minute, the main contingent arrived and we clapped some more. None of them took time to wave to us - I guess they had other things on their minds. After the stragglers quiet returned for a moment, but we walked back to our car, about a mile up the hill, the road was suddenly filled with thousands of amateur cyclists tracing the route of the Tour elite (but not quite so fast).

We immediately drove through Priddy to the top of the Old Bristol Road for our next Tour rendezvous (we could get no farther as the motorcycle cops were there, clearing the road). Soon enough an identical procession but this time I was snapping (below) not clapping.

I tried to get a shot of the TV relay helicopter but it was too far away.

After much reversing in the narrow road and having to avoid millions of cyclist we drove home the Ebbor Gorge/Wookey Hole way and strolled into Wells to see the finish. Sadly we were late by maybe five minutes - we could see the helicopter over the southern bypass as we were entering town.

We consoled ourselves with paninis and tea in Coffee 1.
---
UPDATE

We're on TV! The two of us captured from our TV screen at the top of the Old Bristol Road (ITV4 programme). This is the kind of thing they do in the Bourne films :-).

---
Here's a better picture of Clare, from August after her treatment was finished, but while she was still feeling pretty weak.

Metrozone Trilogy: Simon Morden

2011-09-15T20:17:00.003+01:00

It’s London, England after Armageddon. Europe has been nuked by Christian fundamentalists, Russia’s a criminal kleptocracy, and America is in the hands of the extreme religious right; Japan has copied Atlantis and has sunk beneath the waves. It seems that every last refugee in the world has found their way to London, every park remade as a container-favela while the streets are an impenetrable tide of the dispossessed, desperate, and merely criminal.

Samuil Petrovitch is a Russian doctoral student (high-energy physics) who dwells in the shanty town where Clapham Common used to be. It’s just another morning as he shuffles down the stairs, carefully so as not to catch anyone’s eye en-route to his desk at Imperial College. He has survived the mafia wars of St. Petersburg by not getting involved but that’s about to change.

By happenstance he’s at the scene of the attempted kidnapping of a young woman. Reacting fast, he helps her escape and is soon being pursued by the Ukrainian mob, the neo-Yakuzas, and Detective Inspector Chain of the Metropolitan Police. Luckily he has help – from an armored, tooled up Catholic nun. And did I mention that Petrovitch has a heart problem – it keeps stopping?

Continue reading at sciencefiction.com

Jane Eyre/alien parasites

2011-09-13T21:10:00.004+01:00

Clare, my mother and myself checked out "Jane Eyre" this afternoon. A competent piece of work and the actress playing Jane Eyre (Mia Wasikowska) is a star. Sadly, Mr Rochester is played with the emotional range of a wooden plank; his emotional relationship with Jane never veers far from indifference and carries no conviction on screen at all.

My latest piece on sciencefiction.com, alien parasite, was, I thought an equally competent piece of work. 'Funny', 'quirky' and 'surreal' would have been the adjectives I would have chosen. Sadly the readership did not agree with me and the piece appears to have sunk without trace.

Coming up I'll be looking at Greg Egan's new 'Orthogonal' trilogy, which explores a universe where the spacetime signature is (+,+,+,+). You'll need to stick around if you need to know more, although Egan has a starter pack here.

As a consequence I'm seriously digging into my General Relativity book (Schutz).

The Fate of Cheese

2011-09-10T12:32:00.001+01:00

Congratulations to Alex who next month will be working as a java developer in the IT department of a bank in Reading. New job, walking to work; what's not to like?

I was talking on the phone to my sister, mentioning that every afternoon when Adrian came home from his work in the cheese factory in deepest Somerset (very Archers!) we have the same conversation.

"How was work today?"

"OK."

"Any interesting events?"

(Thinks) ... "Not really."

and so on.

But yesterday was different. It turns out that he'd been given the job of scraping mould off the cheese. For a while I didn't understand exactly what he meant but eventually I got it. The cheese (cheddar, hard) comes in large slabs - several kilograms, and they often have some mould around the edges: apparently this is a normal part of the cheese-making process. But today there were a couple of palettes which were pretty far gone. Worst, apparently, is the rather disgusting liquid which runs off.

"You threw the rotten cheese away, I presume?"

"No, we cut off the mould and the cheese continues with the process."

"And then you throw the mould away?"

"No, that's valuable too. We package it up and it's used for further processing. It's what they use to make processed cheese - you know, like for cheeseburgers."

A gasp goes round the room as we all make a private vow never to touch processed cheese again.

--

Clare is making steady progress towards restoring her strength. Today she told me she can shower without using a stool to sit down on. She plans to make a further attempt to attend Mass this evening, before the predicted hurricane hits us tomorrow.

Movie 'One Day'

2011-09-06T20:36:00.002+01:00

We were originally going to see 'Apollo 18' and then I was going to write a piece about it for sciencefiction.com. Both Clare and my mother acquiesced to this plan with varying degrees of conviction.

But the reviews were transcendentally awful; 'mediocre' being a common adjective. So we took the quality route instead and this afternoon ventured to see 'One Day' at the Cribbs Causeway Vue.

None of us had read the book so we were able to view the film entirely upon its own merits, and a very moving film it is too. There is a problem compressing twenty-plus years, a year at a time, into a 108-minute show and certain trajectories were under-illuminated.

Emma went to London with a head full of dreams and was reduced to working as a waitress in, not a cocktail bar but a dive of a Mexican restaurant: it would have been good to have followed her fall. Any final redemption of leading-man Dexter was similarly trying hard to find space to explain itself.

Still there are enough twists, turns and surprises for this everyman's and everywoman's modern coming-of-age experience to ring horribly true. Go see it.

Three in a bed with Pillowmena

2011-09-05T14:12:00.000+01:00

Clare was having such a comfy time snoozing on the couch in the living room, to a whispering soundtrack from the TV. She put it down entirely to the fact she was supported on one side. This immediately initiated a cascade of ideas about bringing a similar solution to the bedchamber.

We discussed putting a slab of wood at the edge of her side (but how would she easily get out?) and then debated pully arrangments and sliding door technologies. Eventually she fastened upon a simpler, lower-tech solution.

I was initially suspicious of the 'three in a bed' idea. "I can see why you might like to sleep between two blokes, but what's in it for me?"

My doubts were extinguished when she announced that her companion would be 'Pillowmena', 'Pillowma' for short. That's her in red below.

While I don't get to sleep with Clare on one side and Pillowma on the other, it is recorded that she's a success, despite her lack of weight and tendency to slide if pushed.

---

Adrian got a call first thing this morning and is now back at the Cheese Factory in deepest Somerset for the next month.

---

My piece on "The Perils of Mind Uploading" now up at sciencefiction.com.

The Botanical Gardens

2011-08-31T17:42:00.000+01:00

Clare, Adrian, my mother and myself visited the University of Bristol Botanical Gardens lunchtime today. Here are some pictures, mostly taken in the tropical glasshouse.

The picture below was taken elsewhere; not sure what the plant is.

Afterwards we lunched in a coffee shop in The Mall, in fashionable Clifton Village.

Monstrous Moonshine

2011-08-30T12:41:00.000+01:00

In Stanisław Lem’s famous philosophical-SF novel, ‘His Master’s Voice’, an alien message is received from the stars. A Manhattan Project-style research establishment is set up to decode it, the world’s best minds from all disciplines are recruited - but the years pass while no progress is made. The conclusion is stark – whatever the message is, it’s just ... well, too difficult for humans ever to understand it, the aliens remain forever inaccessible in their esoteric strangeness.

Lem’s point is well-taken: the alien is likely to be more different from us than we can possibly imagine but we don’t need to wait for strange symbols from the sky. We have an existence proof both of extraordinary conceptual difficulty and astonishing personal idiosyncrasy right in front of us.

Let’s talk about Monstrous Moonshine.

Monstrous Moonshine is so incomprehensible that I can’t even give you a summary here – if you’re up for it there’s a note at the end. Like that message from space, the basic concepts are impossibly-hard to comprehend (except to a small handful of specialist mathematicians). The two leaders in research on the Monster and the Monstrous Moonshine conjectures were the famous Professor John Conway (also the inventor of the Game of Life) and the little-known Dr Simon Norton. While Professor Conway continues to work at Princeton University, Dr Norton has just been the subject of an amiable biography which I highlight below: he is a most unusual person.

Today in his late fifties, the genius Dr Norton is ‘unemployed and unemployable’. He owns a Victorian town houses fronting Jesus’ Green in Cambridge, England where he lives by himself in the basement surrounded by deeply-piled squalor and piles of bus-timetables. He dines exclusively on tinned mackerel and boiled rice.

Norton spends his days taking bus rides around the United Kingdom as part of his campaign to bolster public transport (he is fanatically anti-car). Occasionally he is invited to a Mathematical Research Colloquium where he blows away that small fraction of his listeners who can follow him with penetrating analysis of ‘The Monster’.

At age three and half, Simon’s IQ was rated at 178. A prodigy, he represented England three years in succession at the International Mathematics Olympiad where he scored a perfect 100% one year and 95% the next. While in his mid-teens at Eton he took a first class degree in mathematics with London University and then continued to Cambridge, where after his PhD he joined the Maths faculty, working with his doctoral supervisor Professor John Conway on the classification of simple finite groups.

His colleagues bewail the almost complete loss of Simon’s mathematical productivity since Conway left for America 25 years ago (‘the collapse of genius’) but Norton doesn’t see it that way at all: he has no sense that one part of his life is more or less important than any other: the crafting together of optimal bus routes is as interesting and fulfilling to him as the deepest problems of mathematics.

The interesting thing for me is the uniqueness of Dr Norton’s interior life: which is how I think Stanisław Lem imagined it would be with the alien.

------

The Hard Stuff

The Monster and Monstrous Moonshine are inaccessible unless you took Group Theory in your math MSc. If, however, you have some background then it is possible to get a sense of what it’s all about (if you’ve forgotten what a group is, check here).

It turns out that there are some special groups which can be used to create all possible groups, rather like the way prime numbers can be multiplied together to create all other numbers. These special groups are called the simple groups, and in the third quarter of the twentieth century it was found that they could be systematically classified. The multi-year international campaign to document the complete Atlas of Finite Groups was led by a five-man team at Cambridge University, headed by Professor John Conway (also the inventor of the Game of Life) and Dr Simon Norton, discussed above.

Wikipedia tells us that ‘The list of finite simple groups consists of 18 countably-infinite families, plus 26 sporadic groups that do not follow such a systematic pattern. The Monster group is the largest of these sporadic groups and contains all but six of the other sporadic groups as subquotients.’

Clear enough?

Reading on we discover that ‘The Monster’ is not just large; it’s enormous, with 808,017,424,794,512,875,886,459,904,961,710,757,005,754,368,000,000,000 elements. The Monster has a 196,883-dimensional representation, meaning that each element of the Monster can be expressed as a 196,883 by 196,883 matrix.

As they were coming to the end of their task, Conway and Norton were alerted to a strange coincidence between the 196,883-dimensional representation of ‘The Monster’ and the coefficients of the Fourier expansion of a particular modular function, j. They made some conjectures concerning this unlikely relationship which they dubbed ‘Monstrous Moonshine’ – (these were later proven by Fields Medallist Richard Ewen Borcherds in 1992 ‘using the no-ghost theorem from string theory and the theory of vertex operator algebras and generalized Kac-Moody superalgebras’).

Monstrous Moonshine has been the subject of several books. Symmetry and the Monster, by Mark Ronan, tells you a lot about elementary symmetry and the history of group theory, but nothing much about the topic under consideration; Finding Moonshine by the better-known Marcus Du Sautoy tells you quite a bit about elementary group theory and some biographical details of Professor Sautoy himself, but little of substance about the central mathematical topic.

Like I said, this stuff is inaccessible unless you’re a post-graduate mathematician specialising in the area. But see this great cartoon.

---

Originally written for sciencefiction.com but decided here was better.

The Castle of Comfort

2011-08-29T15:19:00.000+01:00

Alex has been here over the Bank Holiday so today Clare, Adrian, Alex and myself lunched at the Castle of Comfort pub, on the way to Cheddar. During this pleasant family outing we established that although Alex had sat through an hour of 'The Big Bang Machine' presented by Prof. Brian Cox this morning he didn't know that the programme was about the LHC, didn't know what the LHC had been designed for, and believed firmly that the objects being accelerated at the LHC were 'large hadrons'. Thank God we were not entertainly Prof. Cox to lunch!

Clare was looking a bit pale but otherwise in good spirits as she polished off her Lasagne with garlic bread. We skipped a post-meal walk in the woods in favour of retiring home for a rest, though.

The Case Against Manned Starflight

2011-08-29T15:11:00.001+01:00

The DARPA Hundred Year Starship program is holding a public symposium in Orlando, FL at the end of next month. The symposium will plan a century-long program to launch manned missions to the stars.

Let’s cut to the chase, shall we? In reality no human being will ever embark upon an interstellar journey. Forget those Star Trek images, those stardrive-powered caves of steel with their space-marines and highly-trained crew. Manned starflight is as likely as a human swimming unaided between Europe and America. It will never happen because it will never need to.

Continue reading at sciencefiction.com.

---

Other recent posts at sciencefiction.com.

* Review of Greg Egan's 'Zendegi'.

* Science feature on the evolution of humans and chimpanzees.

BigDog

2011-08-25T15:27:00.001+01:00

This has got to be the spookiest creation ...

... brought to you by Boston Dynamics for the US Military.

Another rainy Saturday

2011-08-20T18:14:00.000+01:00

Yesterday we were in Bristol for Clare's first Brachytherapy session (she has one more final treatment the end of next week). The treatment itself is painless but Clare seems to have an associated allergic reaction to something: it was the familiar histamine reaction but this time not a whole body rash but extreme sensitivity of the hands and ankles. Today the effects are beginning to recede.

Still, she's very tired and spends most of the day sleeping - 'like a dormouse,' she says, and given the weather she could be forgiven.

Ship of Fools?

2011-08-20T18:08:00.000+01:00

Part 1

Did you read the SF story where a future population is oppressed by ... well, an evil oppressor, and the time-travelling hero hands the Resistance the ultimate secret weapon, the U.S. Constitution? It may be one of the classic SF clichés but it speaks to a bedrock conviction of American culture: Democracy is Wonderful.

In truth it would be wonderful if the average voter wasn’t so incredibly ignorant:

Half of Americans don’t know that each state has two senators
Less than 40% know their representatives’ party affiliations
45 percent of adult apparently believe that Karl Marx’s communist principle “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” is actually part of the U.S. Constitution.

How on earth do we get sensible representatives, policies and decisions from this ocean of baleful ignorance? We know that most voters don’t understand micro- or macroeconomics and fail to appreciate the subtleties of foreign policy. Given the likely effects of their one vote, it’s even been argued that it’s rational for them not to invest much time in preparing for an act of so little practical consequence.

Thankfully, it might not be quite as bad as it appears.

An example: suppose the 160 million registered voters in North America have to vote for candidates Ms Right or Mr Wrong. If we have 160 million totally ignorant citizens, then Ms R and Mr W are each going to get around 80 million each and it’s a toss-up as to who will win. We can model this outcome by simply imagining that each voter has a coin and just flips it: Heads for Ms R and Tails for Mr W.

If we imagine running that vote over and over again, then 99% of the time the total number of votes cast for each candidate would each be within 17,000 of the magic balancing 80 million votes. That is, when we counted the number of votes for Ms Right (or Mr Wrong) then with 99% probability the number of votes she or he would receive would lie between 80 million minus 17,000 and 80 million + 17,000. This is the magic of statistics* and also a possible answer to our dilemma.

Suppose that there are 20,000 well-educated and politically-engaged people in the electorate (just 0.0125% of the 160 million voting population).

Suppose that Ms Right’s political supporters successfully persuade these 20,000 to vote the Right way. A result! Democracy has successfully delivered the goods, despite an electorate which scarcely deserves such good fortune. So Democracy works even with overwhelming public apathy and ignorance if there is tiny crowd of political sophisticates who take the trouble to research the issues and vote the right way.

But be cautious: is this a model which describes the actual political world we see around us? Sadly not: in point of fact the true situation is even worse than widespread and systemic ignorance. The population-at-large in fact exhibits perverse and self-defeating bias: the people systematically vote for candidates and policies which act against their own self-interests.

How and why this happens will be discussed in part 2 of this article below.

---

* Where did that come from?

We have a population n of 160 million. Each individual has a probability of p=0.5 to vote for Ms Right and an equal probability q=0.5 to vote for Mr Wrong. This is a standard binomial distribution with standard deviation √(npq) = 0.5 * √(160 million) = 6,325. Plus or minus 99% corresponds to +/- 2.57 standard deviations = +/- 16,250 which we round up to 17,000.

The idea that the average voter is ignorant of politics is based on the idea that the personal cost of staying current with political issues is quite high, while the chances of any one person’s vote making a difference to outcomes is miniscule. It is therefore rational to not bother and stay ignorant (the theory is called Rational Ignorance).

Part 2

In Part 1 we encountered the theory of Rational Ignorance, the idea that your one vote makes such a small difference that it isn’t worth your time and effort to stay current with political issues. We showed that if the overwhelming mass of people voted at random, democracy would still work if a small elite were sufficiently educated and motivated to study the issues and vote the right way.

But we all know that it just isn’t so. People do not vote randomly: they are strongly opinionated and actively engaged with the issues – despite not studying them. In ‘The Myth of the Rational Voter’, Bryan Caplan flags three areas where voters passionately rally to counterproductive policies which actively harm their own self-interests.

1. Anti-Market Bias

Despite the fact that capitalism is the most successful form of economic organization ever seen on the planet, most people are profoundly suspicious of it. Adam Smith’s famous observation about the trade of the businessman: ‘By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good,’ has never been believed by the general public.

The public’s instincts are to go with regulation, price subsidies and Government provision of essential goods and services, believing that market mechanisms are driven by private greed, keep prices sky-high, lead to shoddy output and don’t give a damn about customers (i.e. themselves).

Given a competitive market, the truth of the matter is almost completely the reverse, as people would realize if they compared their grocery stores to almost any Government department they deal with. But people don’t trust markets.

2. Anti-Foreign Bias

Left to themselves, many people would choose to erect impenetrable tariff walls at our borders and keep all foreign imports out, stopping those perfidious foreigners stealing our jobs.

Protectionism misses a revelation about the gains from trade which has been known for 250 years. In a simple example suppose an American worker can make 10 cars or 5 bushels of wheat in a given time, while a Mexican can make 1 car or two bushels of wheat in the same time. Mexico is a poorer country, and not as productive as America. Obviously there is no point trading with them.

Take one American auto worker and one American farmer. Together they make 10 cars and 5 bushels of wheat.

Take three Mexican auto workers and one Mexican farmer. Together they make 3 cars and 2 bushels of wheat.

Total: 13 cars and 7 bushels of wheat.

Now let them specialize and trade. The 2 Americans make cars, 20 of them while the four Mexicans make wheat, 8 bushels of it.

Total: 20 cars and 8 bushels of wheat. So there is a point in trading with Mexico.

The Law of Comparative Advantage encourages countries to specialize in what they’re good at and trade with others doing the same. The result is prosperity, even if your trade partners damage their own economies through protectionism. Alternatively, you could be North Korea.

Does the general public buy this argument? Not at all. They listen to steel workers, about to lose their jobs because steel-making in America is uncompetitive, and they rally to their defense. Keep cheap steel imports out! In doing so, they make all other American goods which incorporate steel more expensive for themselves and less competitive on the world market. But, hey, we saved the steel workers!

Or did we?

3. Make-Work Bias

The third area where public opinion gets it wrong is layoffs. Capitalism works, and we all get richer, by continually churning obsolete technologies in favor of newer, more productive ones. In the short-term workers in these declining industries lose their jobs; in the longer term they tend to get new and higher-paid jobs. Still, we hear more about those unfortunates who don’t.

In 1800 it took 95 out of every 100 Americans to work the land to feed the country. In 1900 it took 40, while today it takes just 3 in a 100. That was a lot of farmers let go. Do you see them hanging around the poor parts of town begging for handouts? There was a lot of pain in the wrenching transitions which saw an agricultural economy transition to a modern technological one. At every step of the way, compassionate people cried ‘stop!’ – fighting to freeze the status quo and avoid redundancies.

Yet who today would want to go back?

---

There is a common factor to these three biases. Humans are social creatures: we have empathy with others in our social group. Our emotions reward efforts for the common good and prompt us to help those suffering misfortune and not stand idly by: that’s how we evolved.

Capitalism in its most effective, competitive mode deliberately pits people against people and disrupts bedded-down patterns of life in favor of disruptive change. Locally it can damage lives even as it globally increases prosperity and opportunity. Our emotions don’t ‘get’ the way complex, holistic capitalism works and in our guts we don’t really approve. And when it comes to elections (where the act of voting is very distant from any personal economic consequences) we vote our feelings.

Economist Bryan Caplan calls this ‘Rational Irrationality’ and it explains a lot about modern politics, even the forced-hypocrisy of otherwise honest politicians who are forced to advance correct policies by stealth in the face of heated populist opposition.

---

Further Reading: The Myth of the Rational Voter, Bryan Caplan (2007), Princeton University Press.

---

Opinion Polls

As a bonus here’s a quick review of how opinion polls work. The pollsters ask, say, 1,000 people if they intend to vote for Ms R. Let’s suppose she’s languishing a little and the poll gives her 33% support. The standard deviation of this sample of voters is, as before, √(npq). We could use p=0.3, q=0.7 but it’s easier and more conservative just to stick with p=q=0.5 so that √(pq) = 0.5, its maximum value.

So one standard deviation σ is 0.5 * √(1,000) = 0.5 * 31.6 = 15.8.

The 95% confidence interval around 33% is +/- 1.96 standard deviations, 1.96 * 15.8 = 31. The pollsters express this as a percentage, 31/1,000 = 3.1% and they tell you that Ms R is currently polling at 33% with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1%.

They’ll be right nineteen times out of twenty.

---

[Note: this was originally going to be a couple of articles for sciencefiction.com but I think you'll agree that they're better here.]

The Mars Colony Disaster

2011-08-15T16:21:00.000+01:00

In October last year, NASA announced its ‘Hundred-Year Starship’ program designed to settle humans on other worlds, starting with Mars in the 2030s. It would be a one-way mission: the Mars colonists could never come home.

Writing in Scientific American (August, 2011, Letters) former astronaut Don Peterson listed the many serious problems with such a Mars Colony. He finished with a rhetorical flourish: “Most of all, why would anyone go?”

It took a while to think of a reason...

Continue reading.

---

Adrian's got a cold, Clare's bearing the weary load of 24 days radiotherapy (last day tomorrow) and as for me, well, I'm coughing a bit.

Two plus two equals what?

2011-08-14T12:35:00.001+01:00

In George Orwell’s totalitarian fable, ‘1984’, Party executive O’Brien is interrogating dissident Winston Smith under torture.

“Do you remember writing in your diary, ‘Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two equals four’?”

“Yes,” said Winston.

O’Brien held up his left hand, its back towards Winston, with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended.

“How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?”

“Four.”

“And if the Party says that it is not four but five – then how many?”

“Four.”

O’Brien turns up the voltage.

---

Do you believe, like Winston Smith, that 2 + 2 =4?

Proving this is not an easy task. It all depends on what '2', '4' and '+' actually are.

Start with an empty place and call the number of things there ‘0’. We call this the zero state. We could use any other symbol rather than ‘0’ if we chose.

Now we do an action which materialises an object at the empty place. Call the action s (s is going to stand for the word ‘successor’). The action s is naming what in mathematics or programming we would call a function. So we apply s to the initially empty place and end up with place containing one item, which we write s(0). Do it again and we get a place with two items, which we write s(s(0)).

So now we know what 2 is: it’s the result of applying the ‘successor’ function twice to an initial zero state, so we can say that when we write 2 we really mean s(s(0)).

What about ‘+’? This is a harder one, since you can add any two numbers together. How on earth can we define it?

Let’s add p and q together: p + q.

Rule 1: If p = 0, then p + q = 0 + q = q.

If p is not zero, then it must equal s(r) where r is a number which is one less than p. Now we write:

Rule 2: p + q = s(r) + q = r + s(q).

We made the left hand number one smaller and the right hand number one bigger and observed that the sum is just the same. These two rules are enough both to define ‘+’ and to prove that 2 + 2 = 4. Like this.

2 + 2
= s(s(0)) + s(s(0))
= s(0) + s(s(s(0))) – using Rule 2
= 0 + s(s(s(s(0)))) – using Rule 2
= s(s(s(s(0)))) – using Rule 1
= 4

If we tried to prove that 2 + 2 = 1 using the same technique we would surely fail, wouldn’t we?

Not necessarily: it depends on how we interpret s.

Up to now, s has stood for adding objects in succession at a place without limit. But suppose that we had a thermostat reading 0, 1, 2 with a dial which we could turn in a clockwise direction (the settings represent OFF, LOW and HIGH respectively). Applying the s function corresponds to moving the dial round by one notch so s(0) means 1 (‘LOW’) and s(s(0)) means 2 (‘HIGH’). s(s(s(0))) means 3 but we’ve gone in a complete circle so we’re back to 0 (‘OFF’) again.

What is 2 + 2? Well, as before, it’s s(s(s(s(0)))) but we now have the additional rule: s(s(s(0))) = 0, which means 3 = 0. So 2 + 2 = 1 in this interpretation, as we replace s(s(s(0))) by 0.

We can go further. If we interpret the s function as an operation which does nothing at all, then no matter how many times you apply it, you will always get 0. We can write this as the rule:

s(0) = 0.

Its implication is more clearly expressed, however, as 0 = 1 = 2 = 3 = 4 = 5 = ...

So 2 + 2 could equal anything.

Eventually Winston Smith did indeed learn to see exactly what the Party told him to see, and to honestly believe it. This is how a mathematically-trained Winston Smith could have kept more of his integrity and self-respect.

“I’m going to take O’Brien’s no finger up as the zero state. His act of raising an additional finger is going to be a representation of the s function; so four fingers corresponds to s(s(s(s(0)))). However, I choose to interpret zero or more raised fingers as the statement: The Party is Right!

“This means I’m imposing an additional rule, s(0) = 0.”

On this basis 0 = 1 = 2 = 3 = 4 = ... and Smith can honestly label O’Brien’s four fingers with any number the Party chooses. The Party wins an utterly vacuous victory.

---
The proof above that 2 + 2 = 4 (usually) may seem a small, whimsical thing but the technique provides an entry into the whole world of functional programming, our best hope of parallel programming the next generation of massively multi-core computers.

[This post was something I thought about for sciencefiction.com but I concluded it was too specialised.]

A few thoughts on rioting in the UK

2011-08-13T16:21:00.000+01:00

In 1992, after the acquittal of LAPD officers following the beating of Rodney King, Los Angeles burned for six days as criminal gangs looted and pillaged. The forces of law and order stood by, largely unable to cope. A week ago we saw an uncanny echo of these events in England, where after the fatal shooting of a black suspect by police, parts of London and a number of provincial cities including Manchester, Birmingham and even Oxford were trashed by criminal gangs. TV shots showed buildings aflame while looters ransacked electrical goods and sports shops. People defending their properties were killed.

Most citizens are naturally horrified. Were the perpetrators ‘scum’ or was this some kind of protest at a lack of jobs and opportunities? Should we bear down on the looters with retribution or was this a wake-up call that they need more help? Opinions are cheap and varied, but can science say anything useful.

Who are the looters?

In Los Angeles most of the trouble was caused by ethnic minority gangs. In the UK the media has tip-toed around the ethnic issue but inner-city gangs do appear to be the driving force, coordinated by the Blackberry Messaging System and Twitter. Commentators agree that we’re dealing with the urban criminal underclass, what some people called the bottom 5%.

Many studies have been carried out on criminal intelligence and personality. Low level gang crime is carried out be people who are the inverse of the white-collar professionals who form society’s elites. What are their relevant psychological characteristics?

As outlined previously, psychologists define personality along the five OCEAN dimensions: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism.

The kinds of traits which get you a high-status and well-paid job include being hardworking, diligent, honest, polite, cooperative and kind - and having a higher-than-average IQ. These traits correlate closely with high-scores on two of the above personality dimensions: Conscientiousness and Agreeableness; Intelligence also tends to correlate somewhat with Openness (to new thinking and experiences).

By contrast, gang members tend to have low IQ, be low on conscientiousness (i.e. impulsive) and low on agreeableness (they’re aggressive and lack empathy). Think of the riots as the revenge of the extreme left of the bell-curve.

These psychological characteristics of gang members tend to undermine the most straightforward solution to breaking up gang culture, namely getting them into employment. It’s a fixture of the TV studios to see leftish politicians stating that if only ‘the Government provided jobs’ then the problem would be solved. However, the stereotypical gang-member is the last person any rational employer would wish to hire – he (and it’s usually a ‘he’) is the employee from hell. Conversely, if crime does provide a pay-off, then it’s much more suited to the gang-member’s natural affinities than the discipline and structure of low-skilled work.

The inhabitants of the extreme left-hand side of the bell curve are a problem for every advanced society. The options are only cooption or containment. Since cooption, in the form of low-skilled jobs, is expensive, time-consuming and has diminishing marginal returns the default for most societies is containment. Low-levels of ongoing crime in the gang ghettos are tolerated and contained by specialist police units, while the rest of society keeps well away and gets on with its business. When the ghettos explode out, as they did last week, it forces everyone to rethink.

An Engagement Model

The British Government is taking the lessons of Los Angeles very seriously: ’Communities cannot "arrest their way out" of gang crime, the prime minister's new crime adviser, US "supercop" Bill Bratton, has warned.’ Bratton was formerly head of the LAPD, charged with putting it all back together again after the riots. He then achieved success in New York and is now advising David Cameron.

The carrot and stick approach will see Government agencies investing to create opportunities for ghetto children who are amenable to cooption, giving them access to training and jobs, and mentoring take-up. Those harder types who are essentially unemployable will be monitored much more closely and if they have to be locked away, so be it.

These steps will diminish the number of gang members and their social power but the gangs will not go away. The final step will be improved technology for identification of rioters and countermeasures. The already massive deployment of CCTV will be stepped up and if you have cash to invest in automation systems for incident analysis and facial recognition, now is a good time to buy.

Beam Weapons

2011-08-08T17:06:00.000+01:00

"In a previous article we discussed the use of relativistic kill weapons: impactors travelling at almost the speed of light delivering enormous amounts of kinetic energy to demolish their targets. But why go with a weapon that travels at almost the speed of light when you can use light itself as a weapon? Then the enemy will have no warning at all.

The United States has been developing laser weapons for years but current systems still require several seconds of target-lock before the thermal effects kick in. In a future warfare scenario we’re not so limited: let’s consider stellar-class beam weapons."

Continue reading at sciencefiction.com.

It's a Histamine Reaction

2011-08-08T17:04:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I noted that Clare had come out in a rash (looking like measles) which we attributed to the cumulative effects of the radiotherapy. Back at Taunton's Musgrove Park Hospital for today's treatment, nurse Jane took a look and pronounced that it was an allergic reaction - nothing to do with the x-rays.

She bleeped for a doctor but, hey, it's an NHS hospital: the last thing they have is spare doctors. Jane suggested we go to A&E but confided that it was currently a two and a half hour queue.

We elected instead to drop into the nurse-practioner hospital in Glastonbury on the way home, where after a five minute wait Clare was briskly diagnosed as having an allergic response and dosed with anti-histamine pills. Puffy and red, she's currently watching her favourite 'Waking the Dead' DVD on the couch and pining after Trevor Eve ...

The Monster

2011-08-07T16:37:00.001+01:00

"Alexander Masters has set himself two impossible problems. The subject of his biography, Dr Simon Phillips Norton, is to a first approximation, personality-free while the matter which has made Dr Norton biography-worthy is so arcane that no-one has been able to explain it to any circle wider than the elite mathematicians who actually work on it."

Continue reading at amazon.co.uk.

This was a pretty good biography of Dr Simon Norton and I also worked the material into an article on 'Monstrous Moonshine' for sciencefiction.com. It's on the stack for September.

The radiotherapy has finally, and cumulatively, caught up with Clare. She has a red 'sunburn' over most of her body - the magic of x-rays - and is feeling a lot more fatigued. I've taken my sister Elaine's advice and bought a Bottle Green cordial of Ginger and Elderberry to pep her up. Don't you think she looks a little like Mother Theresa?

I'm writing this breaking all the rules for electrical goods as a thunderstorm has just swept by leaving a desultory pattering of raindrops in its wake. The summer weather correlates with economic gloom: the Sunday Times today has a four-page pullout detailing minutely the anatomy of worldwide economic armageddon.

I read a few days ago that one in six of Dutch Protestant ministers of the church were either atheists or agnostics. It's all part of a 'radical re-interpretation of Christianity'. I like it - this is a church I could relate to. I'm currently working on a prayer for low-inflation and higher interest rates. Do you think they'd be interested?

Book Reviews

2011-08-04T21:00:00.000+01:00

A review of Charle Stross's SF novel Rule 34 here at sciencefiction.com.

A review of The Milkman in the Night by Andrey Kurkov here at Amazon (amazon vine review).

So that's two books reviewed and two to go: one a rather zany biography of Dr Simon Norton, mathematician and hunter of the Monster group; the other a thriller set in thirties Germany: "The Einstein Girl".

Clare's increasingly tired after days of radiotherapy. She's lost appetite and I've been put on notice that it's evening dinners for one from now on. We're off to that high-quality shop in Wells which serves pre-packaged oven-friendly meals tomorrow.

The Higgs Boson

2011-08-02T09:26:00.000+01:00

There was excitement at the European Physics Society conference in Grenoble, France last week as physicists gathered to review evidence for the detection of the Higgs particle. With the latest data, the LHC is finally returning on its investment while the Tevatron at Fermilab is bravely battling on before its imminent closure in September. But why is the Higgs particle so important?

The Standard Model of particle physics is the most successful and accurate theory ever created. Physicists such as Anthony Zee have lauded it as mankind’s greatest achievement, the pinnacle of human thought (Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell, p. 455). Yet it is not widely understood that the Standard Model predicts that all particles will be massless, and so travelling at the speed of light.

You will have noticed that this appears not to be the case ...

Continue reading.

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I posted the above article to sciencefiction.com - and then decided it was too technical for the audience. Lagrangians don't sit too well with Captain America and Torchwood. The editor was at pains to reassure me that there is a class of people 'out there' who quite like my science pieces. So we've gone with it. As I said in the comment:

"I spent years hearing about the Higgs particle and how it was 'very important' for our understanding of the universe. I was intensely irritated that no-one ever explained *why* it was important, or how it connected to those parts of quantum mechanics and relativity that I did understand.

Eventually I did some more work and got at least the framework sorted. Closure at last -- so I'm delighted to share :-)"

How Much Does Badger Culling Pay?

2011-07-29T13:33:00.000+01:00

I have now reached that point in my cold where my voice is hoarse and ragged; the point where people think you are very, very ill. In my experience the voice bit occurs just past the point where you actually feel worst: that must have been about 2.30 a.m. this morning when I was awakened by a relentless sore throat and impelled downstairs for a cup of green tea.

Three a.m. found me working on my latest science feature which deals with the recent excitement in finding the Higgs boson (will be published on Monday). I was expanding the bit where I deal with the shape of the Higgs potential and spontaneous symmetry-breaking when the cat-flap banged and in came Shadow. I kind of ignored him, working away as I was, until his nipping of my ankle could no longer be endured, at which point I went to get him some food.

On the kitchen floor, next to the cat-flap was a large furry vole, quite dead. I threw this natural delicacy out into the bushes and gave him some kitty junior chicken instead, which he wolfed down, if that's the right metaphor. I sometimes think that cat is spoiled.

Apparently the Government is going to invest in a widespread badger cull to avert bovine TB, alleged to cost farmers a fortune every year. The approach will be to have sharp-shooters lurking in the midnight countryside, dressed head-to-foot in camo with high-powered sniper rifles. The targets will, of course, be free-ranging badgers.

This got me thinking. Will they pay by the night or is it per-badger? Do they transport you to the area or must you make your own way? Is the kit provided or do you have to buy your own? So many questions.

I reminded Clare that I was a marksman on the Lee-Enfield 303 when I was in Army Cadets back in school, and I did pretty well on the longbow at a camp we attended once. Should be a shoo-in: I get to write during the day and cull during the night, with pay for both. What's not to like?

Excuse me, why are you all looking at me like that?

Review of 'Embassytown' by China Miéville

2011-07-28T16:08:00.000+01:00

Most authors deal in plots; China Miéville, by contrast, deals in settings. Perdido Street Station and the follow-up Bas-Lag novels gave us thaumaturgy and Victoriana; The City and the City was sociological science-fiction – the social construction of reality; in Embassytown, the exotic ingredient is language itself.

We are placed in the far-future, where the Terran origins of humanity have been almost entirely forgotten. The worlds of humanity – there are many – are ruled by different fiefdoms and connected by Immerships which traverse a dangerous, opaque and eternal subspace called the Immer (German: ‘always’), with a wildly-different connectivity from our normal spacetime.

The planet of Arieka is at the Immer frontier under the suzerainty of the distant planet Bremen. Arieka is inhabited by an intelligent alien race, the Ariekei, who resemble large winged insects or perhaps crabs. The native air is unbreathable for humans but the Ariekei (often called the Hosts) have used their bioengineering skills to create an enclave, the Embassytown of the title.

Continue reading ...

Bowley's Garage

2011-07-27T17:48:00.000+01:00

Very pleasant people at Bowley's Garage. The receptionist, Donna, has a Toyota Auris just like us.

We renewed our acquaintanceship with the Bowley team today as the rear lights cover had to be replaced on our Auris. A little problem Clare had in parking at the hospital in Taunton - the bays are quite narrow and we don't have a bumper at the right height to intersect the metal strip running along the back of the bays. I'm not let off, however, having scratched the car yesterday on my mother's gate when trying to get the car onto her drive. My error has cost us some touch-up painting (which we do ourselves, but not well); Bowley's are the better-off by £149: some sort of Toyota monopoly on the formed plastic light covers.

Did I mention that both Clare and myself have contracted colds? She has a sore throat while I'm more 'heady', whatever that means. Seems a strange correlation between visiting the hospital and acquiring these minor, but irritating infections.

Still, on the bright side at least the plumbing seems behind us, and it was even sunny this morning before it all clouded over again.

Don't Bring me Back!

2011-07-25T14:18:00.000+01:00

With DNA sequencing getting cheaper and cheaper, and virtual reality environments getting more and more lifelike there's a dangerous confluence round the corner ... which I explore here at sciencefiction.com.

Alex is back to work in London and Adrian is working as instructor at a summer camp in Suffolk so we have the place to ourselves. While Clare was at her daily radiotherapy at Taunton this morning I wrote a review of China Mieville's recent novel Embassytown which should appear at sciencefiction.com later this week. It's another big-idea novel, but a little colder and more emotionally-remote than usual, which I note has put some readers off.

I see results trickling in about possible Higgs boson detection at the LHC. My next mini-project is to write a small piece which tries to answer the question: 'Right, we found the Higgs - so what?'

Presents ...

2011-07-24T15:43:00.000+01:00

Flowers - thanks Cathy!

This chiming clock has given the house a new aural character, says Clare.

Of pipes and tax ...

2011-07-22T12:17:00.005+01:00

The skies are leaden and the rain comes down; the grass grows lush and can't be cut; Clare goes to Taunton for radiotherapy.

Yesterday I completed my self-assessment tax return for 2010-11 and was gratified to see that my own tax model was pretty close to what the Inland Revenue computer demanded. As usual, I was confused as to whether the IR would re-assess my July 31st Payment-on-Account for tax year 10/11, which had previously been set at 47 pence. I called them and they did not. So nothing to pay until January 2012.

That's a relief as the bill arrived this morning for the replacement water supply pipe under our front garden. This took two days of labour for two men, with the burrowing mole repeatedly getting stuck in rock (pictured: one of the men has dug a pit in our driveway to free the jammed device; its silver top is shown with the arrow).

Our total bill is in excess of £1,500.

My brother Adrian was lauding the 3G Kindle which his elder son bought him as a present. Great for those long coach journeys, easy to read in the sun (how would he know?); relatively cheap novels. I teeter on the edge of a decision: books can easily be shared and look nice on the book case. But Adrian points to seductive features: the Kindle can read to you in its mode as a female robot; the font size can be dynamically changed for easier reading.

This morning was devoted to paying bills, dealing with Bristol Water and uploading my next sciencefiction.com article which will be published Monday afternoon UK time. It's about the VR version of the multiverse concept, but told as a little fable. The style on sciencefiction.com seems to be settling down into a breezy, slightly tabloidy style and I'm happy to accommodate and learn the skills of this mode of writing.

Exopsychology

2011-07-18T14:26:00.000+01:00

I have been trying for ages to get the term "exopsychology" into popular circulation - in analogy to the existing term "exobiology". Naturally it's hard to develop a discipline (the psychology of aliens) when there is no subject matter.

Here's my latest attempt at sciencefiction.com.

As I write I hear the thump of the air-compressor of the company engaged to lay a new pipe from the main water supply in the road, up through our garden into the house. The old pipe is completely corroded.

The two workmen are digging a well in the flower bed, trying to retrieve their 'mole' which has got stuck in the subterranean rocks again. The mole is a long, metal, cyclindrical device with a piston for a head which makes the tunnel along which the new pipe will follow. I wish!

The weather is overcast and squally, and quite cool ... enough at any rate to force the heating on. Clare was down at Taunton this morning for radiotherapy and received information in the post about her brachytherapy next month at the Bristol Royal Infirmary.

I have to do my tax return this week. Might as well get all the gloom in place concurrently.

The pitfalls of writing

2011-07-13T10:35:00.003+01:00

I have two articles currently up at sciencefiction.com. The science feature is "Nuking Ourselves" and is a piece about the application of Bayesian Inference.

The other piece is a review of Dan Simmons' recent novel "Flashback". The editors have, for once, not made it a featured article so it languishes in obscurity and will soon vanish.

It's my own fault.

Simmons' novel is provocatively anti-PC. The message is unfashionably libertarian and has some harsh things to say about the third Abrahamic religion, at least in its most extreme form. This alone might make any editor nervous as my review naturally mentions this.

But that was not, I believe, my real crime. In the version I posted I was so keen to defend Simmons against his liberal critics (American use of liberal) that I fell into the trap of partisanship myself: I sounded like an advocate. Poor writing and poor reviewing.

As soon as I saw the downgrade, I looked at the piece with fresh eyes and immediately saw the issues. Naturally I attempted to fix the problems and I believe the version now posted is a whole sight better. Too late for fame though.

Clare went to her first radiotherapy session yesterday at Taunton hospital. The usual lengthy wait but the treatement itself was uneventful. She now has daily visits for a further 24 sessions + three sessions of brachytherapy at Bristol. Still, the end of treatment is in sight which does wonders for the spirits.

The replacement of our front garden water pipe, corroded beyond all recognition, is scheduled for early next week from an alternate supplier, Masters PipeLine Services Ltd, who marginally won the quote wars.
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Somebody wrote that there are few things more repulsive than the British Public in full moral fervour. And so to the News International/News of the World phone hacking scandal.

A world-weary author writes: all power corrupts, all institutions grow lazy and dishonest, the sun also rises. Every so often you need a bit of moral fury to impart enough energy to smack the institutions and individuals smartly. Let's not kid ourselves that anything uniquely unusual is going on here though.

And to Yates of the Yard my sympathies. The Met isn't a garden of roses - far from it - and very little of what they deal with is squeaky-clean. If Yates had tried to run a big investigation back in 2009 when he reviewed the evidence (in the absence of public outrage at that time), he would have been rapidly put back in his box by his superiors and told to concentrate on fighting terrorism. Can't win, can you.

The End of the Space Age

2011-07-05T19:17:00.000+01:00

The last shuttle goes up on Friday of this week. After that, no more manned flights on US platforms for an indefinite period. But really, where is there to go?

The Economist argued in its most recent edition (July 2nd) that we have at last reached the end of the space-age, defined as exploration, manned or otherwise, outside of geosynchronous orbit.

At sciencefiction.com I found it hard to disagree.

"So Beautiful"

2011-07-05T08:44:00.001+01:00

When I was a teenager I read a pulp science-fiction short story that ended with the whimsical sentence: "The girls were so beautiful that year."

Of course, there was a reason, and here is what it was.

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For all those following the story of our water leak (my future self, I guess) the status today is that the leak has been stopped and a blue plastic pipe now runs from the cut-off end of the existing supply pipe near the back door, along the side-path, round the back corner of the house and into our external tap in our back garden. This is the route by which we're currently supplied with water.

I'm awaiting a quote from Aquamain (I already have one from another company) to schedule a complete replacement of the pipe under our front garden. Clare foresees widespread devastation to the trees and flowers: we'll see.

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I'm currently reading Dan Simmon's latest, "Flashback", which paints a grim dystopian picture of 2030's America, structured through a noir murder mystery. A quick look at the Amazon reviews (two at one star) indicate he's lost his liberal constituency. I think it's great!

Aquamain and the pipe that's really a sieve

2011-06-30T15:10:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I was at Frenchay Hospital in Bristol for most of the day with my mother, who had an accident at home over the weekend. Thankfully no further treatment was required.

Just a small query: why don't they have WiFi in the waiting rooms?

This morning Aquamain came round to fix the leak in our water supply pipe just outside the house. They located the leak by injecting a mix of Nitrogen and Hydrogen into the pipe and detecting where it surfaced. After digging a big hole next to the path, they triumphantly cut out and exhibited the damaged segment. It looked like something you see from a diseased heart: all corrosion and a small hole like it had been pierced by a nail.

As soon as the water was switched back on three fountains erupted from an adjacent length of pipe: the whole length has succumbed to old-age from its fifty years of lying in the clay. So now we will have to have the whole lot yanked out and replaced by plastic. I doubt we'll have much, if any, change from a thousand pounds.

I wonder what news Friday will bring?