"How To Make A Big Bang" (review)

Jonathan Swift’s ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ came out in 1726 and was an immediate best-seller. Gulliver, a surgeon and master mariner, encountered a number of bizarre races on his travels: the tiny Lilliputians, the gigantic Brobdingnagians and the uncouth Yahoos. These weird, early science-fictional encounters were actually satires on the now long-forgotten politics of the day.

Time, therefore, for an update. In the Flambaum’s ‘How to Make a Big Bang: A Cosmic Journey’, the latter-day Gulliver is Alice (the ‘Wonderland’ reference is hardly accidental) and here is how the book starts ...

Continue reading at sciencefiction.com.

Back already!

We were driven back by the cold and returned home from Devon this evening.

Our home from home at Hidden Valley

After our one and only night in the tent above, an aeon spent cowering from the icy drafts and slowly sliding off the end of our air-bed (amazing what even a slight incline can do), Clare decided to call time.

Clare at Croyde Beach: a picture of frozen

We started the morning by driving down to Croyde, south of Woolacombe, and taking a walk along the coastal path. The picture above will give you a clue as to how balmy it was.

The author at Woolacombe: it's brightened up

By the afternoon we had moved on to Woolacoombe where we strolled in the improving weather. At last the sun!

Blonde, shades: could be the Bahamas!

We had not visited Woolacombe before and were amazed at its broad, deserted beach, so flat and long you could land a plane on it. We did not, however, venture onto Woolacombe International Airport, contenting ourselves with a brief cliff-top walk.

We drove back through the centre of Exmoor. Quite disappointing: most of it is farmed and fenced, and for miles the view from the road is obscured by picturesque but high hedging. There's a wild part just before you get to Simonsbath but Exmoor certainly isn't Dartmoor.

So cute (this morning after breakfast)

I swear he did this himself.

Camping in Devon

Here we are, camping at 'Hidden Valley' a few miles south of Ilfracombe. The temperature last night was around four degrees C. Naturally we are the only people here camping (there are warm, heated mobile homes and caravans).

We have plenty of bedding; the thing about sleeping in a refrigerator is not so much the chilled air, it's more that everything is difficult.

We asked for an electric point but failed to realise that a special connector is needed. So our extension cable is useless and we can't use the electric kettle (although Clare forgot the cups so we're redundantly useless).

Anyway, it's just past 8 am and I'm in the car, ostensibly charging my mobile phone upon which I write these words. The heater is firmly on.

"John Carter" (film)

Clare and myself went to see the new science-fiction film "John Carter", which is an all-too-faithful rendering of Edgar Rice Burroughs' first Barsoom novel.

Dave Taylor did the review over at sciencefiction.com and I added my thoughts in a comment at the end. I guess we're going to have to agree to disagree.

Patrick Moore goes on for ever!

In recent years Sir Patrick Moore (pictured below) has grown increasingly more immobile and, dare I say it, hard to understand. His sidekick, the youthful Chris Lintott, (pictured at bottom) has looked increasingly hungry to take over the show's top spot and give 'The Sky At Night' a much-needed revamp.

Sadly, news has reached me that Dr Lintott's long wait in the wings looks set to continue. After Dr Moore's eventual physical demise, the BBC plans to ask skilled animatronic engineers to create a replica version of Sir Patrick indistinguishable from the real thing. Advanced speech synthesis (which can already authentically mimic a person's conversation) will complete the effect.

Sorry about that, Chris - you'll still be needed to take those tedious plane flights to the conferences, but Sir Patrick is destined to anchor that show for ever!

If only I had been good at the guitar!

When I was at Bristol Grammar School I had a friend called Alan Maddocks who was brilliant at Blues guitar. I really, really wanted to be a lead guitarist and did play briefly in a band at Warwick University but I really wasn't that good (I joined the Socialist Society instead).

But Alan was good and he contacted me again recently. Here's a video of the band: he plays lead guitar and his solo is at 2:04.

A Wedding Party

We have been invited to a wedding party in April. Accompanying the card was this charming and honest poem.

A Talking Bore

Saw "A Dangerous Method" this afternoon. Lots of chat between Jung and Freud about the correct foundations of psychoanalysis, but it's all just jargon-ridden opinion signifying not very much.

This leaden dead-time is enlivened by Jung's involvement with Sabina Spielrein, one of his patients, who has a spanking fetish.

Watching Jung beating poor Keira Knightley across the bed was pretty amusing. The slap of the whip on artfully-occluded bare-flesh was embellished by our Keira/Sabina almost falling out of the thin white summer dress she was almost wearing. She has a great way with the facial grimace: it was hard to keep a straight face.

So that's 90 minutes we won't be getting back.

Interstellar Command: The Ansible

Brian Cox has had a rough time on the Internet: various influential science blogs have taken him to task for his BBC-2 Christmas show, where he explained quantum mechanics to a motley collection of celebs. His sin was to suggest that a slight change in electron energy levels in the studio (Brian rubbing a diamond) would cause instantaneous changes to electrons across the universe.

The level of personal abuse in physics blogs can be astonishingly high. This is an example of Sayre’s law – ‘academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low.’ The converse is Heinlein’s maxim that ‘an armed society is a polite society,’ but it's too soon to propose that we arm all physicists.

I've had a bit of a break writing for sciencefiction.com. I've been busy with my current client assignment and I wasn't sure the weekly science features were getting much purchase with the site's target audience. I'm now writing 'contributions' and book reviews.

Read the article discussing Brian Cox's talk over at sciencefiction.com.

Economics of Immigration

Most abilities of interest to employers: intelligence, conscientiousness, agreeableness, are normally distributed in the population. This means that once you’ve hired the brightest and the best, you’re into the diminishing marginal utility of the remaining labour force.

If the labour market is expanded with smart foreigners, then you can carry on recruiting the people you really want to. This is the business case for allowing immigration (at least of high-quality people).

Still, those left-hand-side-of-the-bell-curve people haven’t gone away. The may be semi-employable at best but they still need to be fed and housed. There are three possible responses to this conundrum.

a. Tax the economically-productive and use the proceeds to support the incompetent in their non-working state.

b. Restrict the immigration of competent people. Subsidise employers to take on less-employable UK people to compensate for their disutility (this corresponds to lowering their cost as seen by the employer). This works provided the UK person can actually do the job to some level of quality; it won’t work for the truly incompetent.

c. As option (b) but force employers to take on inferior-to-incompetent staff by legislation. Or the Government could be an employer of last-resort in some form of coercive workfare (note that this still involves ongoing taxpayer-funded transfer payments *).

None of these are good answers from the point of view of economic efficiency but what other choices do we really have?

Since no-one likes either running or using a business with sub-standard employees, the sad truth is that option (a) might even be best, provided all the paid-through-taxation unemployables don’t occupy their time by imposing further negative externalities on everyone else.

Perhaps that’s the reason why conventional wisdom is converging on option (b), to keep these people off the streets. The moral view, however, that it's actually better for them to be in some kind of work than hanging around in social exclusion does seem to carry some evolutionary psychological weight.
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* Because of the gap between what you have to pay to keep someone alive and the actual net value of what - in their incompetence - that person can actually produce. In a competitive market their wage might even be negative.