Squeaking into Basingstoke

At 12.30 p.m. under the leaden skies of a decaying anticyclone I squealed into Basingstoke.

For the first ten miles on the A303 from Andover, I fretted that the previous intermittent manic squeaking from beneath the car had decided to vanish - typical garage syndrome. However, on the outskirts of Basingstoke the revenant banshee scream was drawing glances from pedestrians and setting my teeth on edge.

This has been going on for months. Driving through France in June I had been panicking about some vital metal strut being severed by resonant sawing, but due to its wretched intermittency I refrained from going to the garage. Recently it's been getting worse, so here I am pulling up at the Toyota dealers, Inchcape of Basingstoke.

They're very pleasant people. I get offered a cup of coffee and while away the time talking to a salesman about the RAV4. This is Toyota's four-wheel drive version of the landrover which I have come to believe is essential for the rural winter rigours of our new home-to-be in Wales.

The answer, when it comes, is reassuring. Not "I'm sorry, we can't find anything wrong with your vehicle" but a rapid diagnosis that the rear brake pad was faulty and was binding. All the brakes have been checked and the necessary replacement made. And it's covered by the warranty so I pay nothing.

On the way back to Andover the Auris is handling like a gazelle. I wonder if this brake pad has been binding for months now, slugging performance and guzzling fuel?

The 'difficult' second viewing

Our house has now been on the market for just over two weeks, and this afternoon the fourth group to view are coming back for a second look.

V - 3 hours. We are solidly in the mindset of viewers: tiles are mopped, the Roomba selectively spot-cleans, wastebins are emptied.

V - 2 hours. Spiders. You clean them out and within a day they're back, their favourite haunt the room corners, up at the ceiling. Our biological fly-catchers are harvester spiders (pictured).


These creatures have the power of magic. Catch them up with a duster or the corner of a tissue and they will sit on the encumbrance as you sweep them away, only to immediately abandon ship on a silken rope and then they ... vanish. You look on the floor directly below - no sign. A few hours later and they'll be back in their eyries.

Anyway, for the time being, we're despidered.

V - a few minutes. We're warm, spacious, airy and light-filled. The toilets are pristine and we've turned off all forms of noisy electronic entertainment. We simply sit primly awaiting the doorbell, a tableau of middle-class decorum and restraint.

Wait, they're buying the house, not us!

The first rules of sales: there is no difference.

Elaine and my mother at the seaside

Last week my sister Elaine took my mother down to Torquay for a few days. They caught the best of the fine weather and here are some photos.

I like that 'sunglasses pushed up we're at Cannes' look

She's always liked the sea

Yep, it's cold! Omigod something just bit me!

Quite relaxing here

Quaker Town and Star Wars

Clare never met a nuclear weapon she liked so back in 1983, soon after we moved to Saffron Walden she joined the local CND. This was just after Ronald Reagan had made his speech about The Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) aka Star Wars and we were all agog about the new high frontier. What was it, and could it work?

I was a couple of years into my new job at Standard Telecommunication Laboratories, STL as it was universally known, working on formal methods for software specification. As the nearest thing anyone in Quaker Town knew as a scientist, I was invited to address the local CND on the subject of Star Wars.

I read up on the subject, misused STL resources to make OHP slides and dutifully turned up one evening at the local community centre to give my strictly factual talk. The twenty or so people in the audience confirmed my prejudices: a surfeit of beards, an aura of well-meaning and a quality of middle-class niceness suffused the room.

Undaunted I started my talk. Thousands of Soviet ICBMs launching from the steppes. At first stage ignition, SDI space-born infrared detectors would sound the alarm as orbiting Gigawatt radars initiated automatic tracking. Nuclear-powered X-Ray lasers would take out swathes of the missiles in their boost phase. The remaining Soviet rockets would soon be exo-atmospheric. Here Brilliant Pebbles would swing into action – orbital batteries of 40 kg mini-missiles accelerating into intercept trajectories. They would be augmented by Rail Guns: electromagnetic launchers firing terminally-guided kinetic-energy kill weapons accelerated at 10,000g to 24 miles per second.

Anything left would be taken out by the third wave: American ground-based antimissile missiles fired from silos in the Midwest. The Soviet first strike was defeated. America was unscathed and safe.

As I progressed through my illustrated talk, I was gauging the reactions of the audience. And I was amazed. They were panting, their mouths open, their eyes glistening. They were enthralled at this science-fiction Armageddon, this hi-tech battle space, this carnival of destruction. Pure war-porn.

After I finished, it took them a good five minutes to calm down, cool off, regain their dignity and recall that they were actually mean to be ... against all this stuff?

House sale update - "He's much to blame"

We've been on the market a couple of weeks so far and we've had four viewings but no offers.

V1 liked the house but their own had only been on the market a couple of weeks and as they had received no offers they were in no position to offer themselves.

V2 thought the house was a little big for them.

V3 had not yet put their own house on the market so were just looking.

V4 asked probing questions and thought the house was 'surprising' but we have yet to hear further.

So all-in-all a slow start in a less than vibrant market.
_____

We were in Basingstoke yesterday afternoon to see the Holcroft play "He's much to blame". It reminded me of 'Blackadder', adjusted for less wit and more raucousness. The setting is around 1790 in an English hotel where all the characters gather.

The plot relates to a young but penniless member of the gentry taken in by an English family in Italy. There he and the daughter of the house, Maria, fall in love while the absent-in-England brother falls for a society heiress called Lady Jane. The penniless one suddenly inherits a baronetcy and returns to England (abandoning Maria) to join high society and himself woo the Lady Jane.

You can see how it's all going to turn out. The schtick is that the personalities on display are either vain foppish hedonists, irresolute bores or irksomely conscientious, honour-bound boobies. Some happy medium is the playwright's take-home message.

The acting was excellent: all loud projection and knowing asides to the audience. The play was unfortunately all obviousness and stereotypes.

The new HIV vaccine:- some stats

From the BBC website:

-- 8,198 people took the placebo and 74 were infected with HIV during the trial.

-- 8,197 people took the vaccine and 51 were infected.

Now let's crunch some numbers.

Start with those people receiving the placebo, the unprotected ones. They suggest the probability of getting HIV during the course of the trial was p = 74/8,198 = 9/1,000.

A way of thinking about this is that each person had a dice with 111 sides, and they rolled it once during the trial. If it came up a '1' they were infected: any other number they were clear.

Now we consider the distribution of the total number of '1's obtained (i.e. the total number infected). It's a binomial distribution with number of trials n = 8,198, mean np = 74 and standard deviation σ = √(np) = √74 = 8.6.

Our null hypthesis is that the vaccine is useless, and so the fact that only 51 people were infected when using it was just the luck of the draw. How likely is that?

(74 - 51) = 23 = 23/8.6 std devs = 2.67 σ.

Turning to our tables of the normal distribution, the chances of getting this far out or beyond is only 0.38%.

So yes, they are definitely seeing something. But what?
_____

Now we look at the vaccinated population. Their probability of getting HIV appears to be p = 51/8,197 = 6.22/1,000.

But how sure can we be of this? Perhaps the vaccine is not so good but we got lucky? Or maybe the vaccine is super-good but we still had a bad result by chance?

The random variable here is the chances of getting ill given you had the vaccine. Let v be the number of people who were vaccinated and then got infected. In the trial v was 51.

Now we ask, in what range could v have varied so that within a 99% confidence interval the value 51 might have occurred?

This is the range v plus or minus 1.96 standard deviations - note that the standard deviation σ_v = √(np_v) = √v.

So we ask, for what values of v is it the case that:

1. v - 1.96 σ_v = 51

2. v + 1.96 σ_v = 51

It turns out that case 1: v= 67 and case 2: v= 39 as compared with the placebo group of 74.

So this is telling us that we can be 99% confident that after vaccination of 8,197 people, somewhere between 39 and 67 people could expect to be infected ... as against 74 infected without the vaccination. Pretty wide error bars!
_____

How much better is the vaccine than the placebo? The published report said 31.2% better. They got this from the calculation: (74 - 51)/74 = 31.2%.

Sounds good. However, with 99% confidence we can only say that the vaccine is somewhere between (74 - 67)/74 = 9% better and (74 - 39)/74 = 47% better.

So 31.2% better? Or somewhere between 9% and 47% better?

You decide what to do next!

River of Gods: supersymmetry

Just finished a couple of books linked in a curious way.

1. River of Gods - Ian McDonald

I came to this after reading Brasyl. McDonald is a very fine writer and this tale of future fissiparated India is richly inhabited by well-drawn characters including : the self-delusional gangster, the cyber-policeman and his unhappy wife, the perverted civil servant, the stand-up comic become CEO, various scientists and the nute. The link is provided by the desperate attempts of the three remaining "level-3 AIs" which are thousands of times smarter than humans to escape eradication.

The writing is literary brilliance, but the book feels to me overwritten. It's an effort to get through the dense metaphor, elaborate descriptive writing, atmospheric invocations of mood and just get on with the plot. Still, at 575 pages it's never less than a tour-de-force.

2. Nature's Blueprint - Dan Hooper

Subtitled "Supersymmetry and the search for a unified theory of matter and force", this was my attempt to penetrate the mystery of sypersymmetry. Not so much what it is - at some level a proposal to introduce a new set of particles - bosons get fermion partners and conversely. Since 'matter' is fermions and 'forces' are bosons' this is the promised unification.

But what I really wanted to know is why? What problem does supersymmetry solve? Here Dan Hooper is less forthcoming. The major motivation seems to be that the new particles allow the still-unseen Higgs boson to mass in the 100+ GeV range rather than 10¹⁵ GeV without supersymmetry. OK, that sort of makes sense. But Hooper never explained how supergravity worked, or the connection with string theory, so although I started out encouraged, by the end of this book I was deflated. It's well-written though, apart from the occasional bouts of puerile humour, and we do get some fresh anecdotes about Dirac.

The loose connection? The specifically-SF underpinnings of Ian McDonald's novel call upon the resources of the famous multiverse again (here different components of the landscape with different vacuum energies) and post-Witten "M-star theory" which purports to explain them.

We're off to Basingstoke later to see "He's much to blame", a 1798 comedy-satire in five acts.

How many multiverses?

Just up the road from us in Oxford there's an invitation-only workshop going on as I write this. It's about cosmology and the multiverse.

I've been following live blogging from one of the participants, Sean Carrol. Check out: day one here -- day two here -- day three here.

Turns out that there are quite a few multiverses:

1. The 'pocket universes' of eternal inflation.

2. The 10⁵⁰⁰ different false vacua of the landscape resulting from variant 6-dimension compactifications onto Calabi-Yau manifolds in string theory.

3. The 'many worlds' in the MWI of quantum mechanics (Everett, David Deutsch et al.).

I think it's possible, and maybe even desirable to believe in all three of the above at once!
_______

Here's the PDF briefing paper for the workshop.
_______

Update: Apparently this workshop is being funded by The Templeton Foundation. Explains the otherwise mysterious intrusion of The Deity into the proceedings. I feel sorry for the mandatory Philosopher of Theology present: the physicists seem to have hijacked it ...

Review: 500 days of Summer

This was our biggest demographic car-crash since we went to see Crossroads, a vehicle for Britney Spears (remember her?) where the rest of the audience was comprised of teenage girls. Why was the only showing of this film at 4.30 p.m. on a Saturday? That explains the almost empty cinema, but not that our fellow film-goers were girls a quarter of our age and their even younger brothers. I feel sure this is not the intended audience.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel

The New York Times review was excellent, applauding the rounded characterisation and real-life feel as Tom Hanson (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) meets Summer Finn (Zooey Deschanel) at the Greeting Card company where they both work. The pitch is that Tom is the romantic, looking for his soul mate while Summer is just interested in no-entanglement fun. The 500 days chart the parabolic trajectory of their relationship. After the final crash-and-burn Summer has found happiness (with someone else) while there are glimmers of hope for Tom.

Telling you this is not a spoiler, because it’s announced at the very start of the film. The tale is told non-linearly and the interest is not in what happens but in how. The acting is excellent: Tom is a smart but overly-passive introvert, who hardly ever takes the initiative; Summer is more dominant, extravert and altogether classier. It’s obvious to the older part of the audience that Summer is way out of Tom’s league and that the affair is doomed.

A slight problem, perhaps a little embarrassing to mention, is Zooey Deschanel’s age. Gordon-Levitt, playing Tom, is a young 28; Zooey is nearly 30 and a few lines are beginning to show around the eyes. Doesn’t alter the fact that she’s basically gorgeous, but her time for playing hot young chicks is fast running out.

500 days of Zooey is perceptive and occasionally cringe-inducing in its dissection of young love. Our young audience in Andover especially and vocally loved the cringe-stuff.

The roman glassblowers of Andover

These are two archaeologists who have learned to blow glassware the Roman way. They work out of Unit 1 Project Workshops, Lains Farm, Quarley, Andover, Hampshire SP11 8PX and there were ten of us visiting this morning, courtesy of Wessex Archaeology.

The roman-style kiln

Inside the kiln - this is where the molten glass resides

Using a modern "Glory Hole" kiln for working the glass

How not to do it

In the video, Mark shows what happens in "uncontrolled glass blowing". The resulting fragments were as thin and bendy as plastic.

We're off to the movies later.