Political Scientist

2011-06-18T03:31:00.003-02:00

Others bring problems...

...but I bring other, different, problems

An alternative to irradiating food, of course, would be to irradiate the manure instead. That, after all, is the source of the bacteria, and as the contact with radiation would be further removed from the food, you wouldn't have the either the Nuclear Dread associated with food irradiation, nor (perhaps?) would you have to mark the food as irradiated.

In this part of the world, we get the daily radiation readings as part of the NHK news forecast, as a result of the Misfortune earlier this year. Truly, we are living in the future.

2010-05-05T09:41:00.003-02:00

Laws of physics

Justin Paulette attempts special relativity, with mixed results

Justin Paulette is " an attorney practicing international law in northern Italy. He graduated from The Catholic University of America School of Law with an interdisciplinary concentration in law and religion and a specialized program of study certificate from the Comparative and International Law Institute.". Fortunately, these qualifications have equiped him to take on mountebanks like Stephen Hawking:

"I try not to talk about these things too often, but Stephen Hawking, speaking loosely and probably after knocking back one-too-many, has publicly suggested the possibility of time travel. He reaffirms that travel into the past is impossible, so there's no need to quibble on that point. However, he posits the potential to travel forward, relying on Einstein's theory that objects nearing the speed of light progress through time at a "relatively" slower rate than objects on Earth. That is, a person moving at 98% of the speed of light for 20 years would find the Earth had "aged" 7,500 years.

Yet this is not due to a traveler having stepped outside a "stream" of time and reinserting himself in an extant, "future" age already in place and waiting to be discovered. Rather, in accordance with static theories of time as a non-progressive measurement of "aging," it simply reveals the unified application of time's effect on various objects in a consistent manner, according to their relative conditions (i.e., speed). So, there is no future world (or infinite worlds) already in place, merely awaiting our arrival. Time is simply the observation of material entropy and the extinction of potential possibilities (i.e., thoughts and actions) through the free-willed choice of particular decisions during a single, ever-present moment.

Steve is so sloppy about these things sometimes." [Emphasis mine, the better to highlight the special]

Jonah Goldberg considers this an "interesting objection", which certainly testifies to the arguments quality.

Conceptual train-wreck aside, the claim that "a person moving at 98% of the speed of light for 20 years would find the Earth had "aged" 7,500 years." is presumably extrapolated from Hawking's " each day on the ship would be a year on Earth". I'm not sure I agree with this; for v=0.98c, isn't gamma=5? Suggestions welcome.

2010-04-03T10:11:00.002-02:00

"I wish that a carpenter had made the world instead"

It was on a Friday morning
That they took me from the cell
And I saw they had a carpenter
To crucify as well.
You can blame it on to Pilate,
You can blame it on the Jews
You can blame it on the Devil.
It’s God who I accuse.

“It’s God they ought to crucify
Instead of you and me,”
I said to the carpenter,
A-hanging on the tree.

You can blame it on to Adam,
You can blame it on to Eve.
You can blame it on the apple,
But that I can't believe.
It was God that made the Devil
And the woman and the man,
And there wouldn't be an apple
If it wasn't in the plan.

“It’s God they ought to crucify
Instead of you and me,”
I said to the carpenter,
A-hanging on the tree.

"Now Barabbas was a killer
And they let Barabbas go,
But you are being crucified
For nothing that I know,
And your God is up in Heaven
And He doesn't do a thing,
With a million angels watching
And they never move a wing."

“It’s God they ought to crucify
Instead of you and me,”
I said to the carpenter,
A-hanging on the tree.

“To hell with Jehovah"
To the carpenter I said
" I wish that a carpenter
Had made the world instead.
Goodbye and good luck to you;
Our ways will soon divide.
Remember me tomorrow
The man you hung beside.”

“It’s God they ought to crucify
Instead of you and me,”
I said to the carpenter,
A-hanging on the tree.

Sydney Carter

2010-01-21T07:12:00.004-02:00

The first rule of holes

Oliver Kamm and William B. Shockley

Quite a lot of special in the comment thread of this piece, but I think there are 2 points to address:

[1] OK writes:

"T Tsikas of Media Lens, excuse me? In what possible respect is William B. Shockley a racist? How is it racist to make an estimate of possible casualties in a conventional invasion? What is notorious about him? Did he steal the Nobel Prize from someone else?"

I expect the reason that William Shockley was described as a racist is because he was, in fact, a racist. It hardly takes away from his achievements, but it is still true. It is dealt with in every biography of Shockley I have read. One might even describe it as notorious.

[2] A commenter posts a link to the Economist obituary of Yamaguchi Tsutomu (link here, more here from Mainichi, which leads to OK's remarkable response:

"Paul Hutton, as you raised the issue of Tsutomu Yamaguchi - let me add that one of my historian correspondents has pointed out that, however much in bad taste it may sound, Yamaguchi's account of having seen both A-bombs cannot be right. Even if he'd been totally uninjured, there is no way he would have been able to travel the 290 miles by sea or the 310 miles by rail from Hiroshima to Nagasaki. That of course doesn't obviate the sufferings of the civilians of both cities." [enphasis mine].

I don't know if Mr. Kamm's correspondent is a historian; he is certainly not a geographer.

PREDICTION: You know, one day, when the last hibakusha has died, there will be an entire industry devoted to denying the Americans ever dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

2010-01-17T08:39:00.004-02:00

Sunday evening brain dump
Stream of consciousness

I have a paper to draft and a number of characters to learn before tomorrow, so clearly the best thing to be done is write twaddle for 20 minutes. I've have been unconscionably lazy today:

1. While dallying in a coffee shop after church, I saw 5 loudspeaker-festooned black-gloss vans full of Japanese fascists speeding down by Kamiyacho. They were going so fast I thought that the vast rising sun flags were going to be torn off.

Less than a minute later, a fire engine was speeding in the opposite direction, although I am sure this was just a coincidence.

2. Speaking of the far-Right, I am currently working my way through "国家の品格" ("The dignity of the nation") by Fujiwara Masahiko. It is well mad. A review may be forthcoming, combined with the Yasukuni Jinja post that has been promised.

3. In addition to getting Dignity of the Nation (thanks, James!) for Christmas, I also got Tony Judt's "Reappraisals" and A.N. Wilson's Victorians/After the Victorians/Our Times trilogy (thank you Gareth!). In "After the Victorians" he records this epic wind up:

"My husband" remarked Mrs Sumner, wife of the Warden of All Souls College, Oxford, when introduced to [Frederick, later Lord] Lindemann ('the Prof') "my husband always says that with a First in Greats you can get up science in a fortnight"(After the Victorians, page p.374)

Poor old Prof. Mind you, if you've read Most Secret War by RV Jones, you will recognise the attitude.

4. And on the subject of science, I have had a very pleasant time re-reading Andrew Hickey's series of hyperposts. Some excellent, thought-provoking writing here - I'm not a many-worlder myself (Bohmian mechanics FTW!), but this is just the sort of mind expanding stuff that science fiction can explore. I'm looking forward to AH's forthcoming zine, too.

5. Oh, and speaking of many worlds and it's enthusiasts, does anyone else think that equation 11 of Tegmark (2000) [1] is inconsistent with the claim that the brain is "too warm" for quantum computation to take place, and are in fact evidence that the brain is not warm enough? This isn't something I care about very much, and I certainly not familiar with the literature to offer constructive criticism on this point, but a coherence time proportional to a positive exponent of temperature strikes me as unusual to say the least. [There is a reason why experimentalists get through quite so much liquid helium...]

4. Friends of this blog PJ and LemmusLemmus have been very patiently educating me on statistics - I think I understand now.

5. And finally, my old uni mate MTPT has been interviewed on Charon QC's podcast. Well worth a listen.

[1] Tegmark Phys. Rev. E, 61 4194-4206 (2000). Link here, you can read an arXiv copy here.

2010-01-12T11:32:00.002-02:00

The monopoles OF DEATH

Q. Are physicists trying to keep transgressive papers off the arXiv by blacklisting heterodox researchers?

A. Not nearly hard enough.

Whilst readers are encouraged to enjoy the whole thing, p. 829-832 contains Section III B (entitled "Even worse than destroying the earth"), which has brightened up my evening no end. I assume this is the "brilliant review" of which the AEI's Dr. Kevin Hassett speaks so highly of here (link via Professor DeLong).

2010-01-04T02:15:00.007-02:00

Are earthquakes more likely on a Sunday?

In which the earth moves

I experienced my second earthquake last month (woke me up, as did the first one in 2008), so I was interested to read this paper (via Prof. Rabbett) from Pieter Vermeesch about statistical significance.

Question to the stats-mavens (you know who you are): don't you really have 7 hypotheses (e.g. Monday is the most common, Tuesday ...) which you've selected one (Sunday) after you've looked at your data. Doesn't this need to be accounted for?

From Vermeesch, P., 2009. Eos Trans. Am. Geophys. Union, 90 (47), p.443

2010-01-03T11:01:00.002-02:00

What about the International Students Society?

More things I don't understand

Today, I shall mostly be failing to understand Con Coughlin's statement:

Even though Abdulmutallab is not even a British citizen, he was still allowed to be elected president of the Islamic Society at University College London (UCL)... [source]

They are called student societies because their membership, and the officers drawn from that membership, are students. If Mr. Coughlin is unaware that non-citizens study at British Universities[1], it might be advisable for him to refrain from comment on university-related matters.

[1] And how many! About 30% of UCL students come from outside the UK. According to UCAS, "n the UK last year there were 1.8 million full-time undergraduate students in higher education, which included over 104,000 international students.". Definitionally, this doesn't account for graduate students.

[Via Malcolm Grant in THES who is excellent]

2010-01-02T08:44:00.004-02:00

Irresolution

Happy New Year! This is what I hope to be writing about this year ('*' indicates things that were promised last year, but not delivered, so this might be a vain hope)

Physics

Introduction to lasers

Why you should care about electron spin*

Quantum whats? Semiconductors at the nanoscale

Photonic crystals

Space based solar power - WITH LASERS

The QW solar cell

Research blogging - doping quantum dots

[Update the links]

What I Did On My Holidays

“What do you tell the dead when you lose?” - Yasukuni Jinja

Shinjuku metropolitan building and aging modernity

Book reviews

A review of Japanese-English dictionaries

Public service and notes to self

Hermite polynomials

Python practice

A note on SESAMs

Trolling

Random Dictator with Quota - the best form of PR

Why Physics should be more like Media Studies

The history of the LASER as a counter-example to the Libertarian model of scientific innovation

Penrose: the case for the defence*

2009-12-15T09:55:00.002-02:00

"How can I be silent? How can I rest?"

"When Enkidu whom I love is dust and I too shall die and be laid in the earth for ever?"

Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet 10

RIP, Enkidu. But what a beautiful obituary, and I think he was a very lucky cat to be loved so much.

2009-12-13T08:25:00.002-02:00

SET for Britian

Away day at the House of Commons?

Via my big sister, poster competition at HoC, being run by SET for Britain. I'm out the country, but it looks like a lot of fun. Happily, they've divided the competition into physical sciences, engineering, and bio-stuff. Deadline for abstracts is Monday 21st.

2009-12-05T11:40:00.003-02:00

These things are sent to try us

Or possibly just me

There is quite a lot of special in the comment threads at LibCon, but I think this is my favourite:

"To continue… physicists can’t agree whether energy travels in “waves” or “packets” (google qualtum mechanics if you are interested), so there are competing theories, and the technology doesn’t yet exists to falsify (or not) the theory of relativity, so it remains a theory until/unless falsified.
I make my point again – you cant’ have empirical “consensus”, 2+2 either = 4 or it does not. If someone could prove that it equalled 5, then it would equal 5, not by consenus but by empirical evidence"

More seriously, an excellent article by John B taking the fight to the people-who-self-identify-as-climate-sceptics own turf, by considering two opposing conspiracy theories. (If only the editors would restore the sarcastic footnotes, my joy would be complete...)

Would write more about this, but I'm off to disagree with a colleague about wave-particle duality, and must google "qualtum mechanics" first.

2009-11-30T06:08:00.002-02:00

THEY are tunnelling under Mr. Delingpole's house

Dark forces are at work

Mr. Delingpole suspects foul play:

What is going on at Google? I only ask because last night when I typed “Global Warming” into Google News the top item was Christopher Booker’s superb analysis of the Climategate scandal.
It’s still the most-read article of the Telegraph’s entire online operation – 430 comments and counting – yet mysteriously when you try the same search now it doesn’t even feature. Instead, the top-featured item is a blogger pushing Al Gore’s AGW agenda. Perhaps there’s nothing sinister in this. Perhaps some Google-savvy reader can enlighten me…..
UPDATE: Richard North has some interesting thoughts on this. He too suspects some sort of skullduggery.

There are forces at work on this climate of which we know nothing.

2009-11-26T06:45:00.002-02:00

Modern McCarthyism

Have you no decency, Mr. Monbiot?

I hope everyone who thought that while George Monbiot was a scientific illiterate, at least he was our scientific illiterate, are jolly well feeling ashamed of themselves.

It's no use pretending this isn't a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging. I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I'm dismayed and deeply shaken by them.
Yes, the messages were obtained illegally. Yes, all of us say things in emails that would be excruciating if made public. Yes, some of the comments have been taken out of context. But there are some messages that require no spin to make them look bad. There appears to be evidence here of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released, and even to destroy material that was subject to a freedom of information request.
Worse still, some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by climate sceptics, or to keep it out of a report by theIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign. Some of the data discussed in the emails should be re-analysed. -[source]

The idea, presumably, is that by throwing Jones under a bus, this will show the public that while there were a few bad apples, there is no problem now. This will not work: feeding crocodiles only makes them hungrier. This make-believe scandal is going to be spun into an attack on all climate science and every time the old nonsense gets warmed-up and served as left-overs ("Climate change stopped in 1998!"[cheap LOLZ]; "There's no such thing as the greenhouse effect!" [seriously: we're along way down the rabbit hole when people are pretending classical thermodynamics doesn't work]) people will think "Oh, wasn't there some fuss a while back when that bloke had to resign - scientists, eh, what do they know?". It's a masterstroke: the mere fact of having expertise means they don't have to take your opinion seriously. Brilliant. Horrifying, but brilliant.

A number of the more excitable brethren are describing the email hack as a "blue dress" moment. This is quite correct, only not in the way they mean it.

2009-11-23T07:08:00.003-02:00

Wonky logic

It is quite remarkable how many people think you can move from the premise:

"Someone said something nasty about a dead person in an email"

to the conclusion

"Thermodynamics is wrong, and changing the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will have no effect on the average temperature"

Whilst I have no expertise in climate change, I don't think physics works like that.

Relatedly, via PJ, this is composed entirely of win.

2009-10-13T11:52:00.001-02:00

Britain, 2009

"The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret." - [source]

2009-09-12T10:20:00.002-02:00

CiF belief bingo

Andrew Brown has created CommentIsFree-Belief bingo. This is an important achievement, as it will permit a suitably gifted programmer to create an ELIZA-style comment-bot. Will we be able to distinguish between the remarkably facile comments produced by - allegedly - real live CiFers, and an automated alternative?

This will certainly prove something, unless it proves something else.

2009-09-04T07:41:00.002-02:00

Another Anscombe

Something completely different

When I read the phrase Anscombe's quartets, I thought of the mighty GEM herself, but this is brilliant: 4 datasets with the same x,y mean and variance, the same regression line and the same correlation coefficient, but with completely different properties that are obvious as soon as you graph them. Suitably modified, this would make a lovely introduction to practical work for 1st year undergraduates: if nothing else, it might get them away from bunging the data into excel and plotting a regression line without graphing them first. Hmmmm.

[via Ben's miniblog]

2009-08-31T17:00:00.003-02:00

Or not

Ian Buruma attempts Japanese history, with mixed success

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you possibly the most ignorant paragraph to appear on comment is free, ever:

Even if the system were to become something like Japan's democracy in the 1920s, with two more or less conservative parties competing for power, this would still be preferable to a one-party state. Any opposition is better than none. It keeps the government on its toes.-[source]

I mean, really.

2009-08-30T14:05:00.002-02:00

Gosh

Landslide

It's hardly unexpected, but WOW:

Exit polls and early vote counting indicated the DPJ was heading to a victory much larger than the LDP's landslide win in the Lower House election four years ago, when Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's postal privatization plan gained widespread attention.
As the DPJ racked up seats to push it above the 241 needed for a Lower House majority--and even beyond the 296 seats won by the LDP in 2005--a who's who of prominent LDP lawmakers were going down in defeat.
Although Prime Minister Taro Aso won his seat in Fukuoka Prefecture, he indicated Sunday night he would step down as LDP president to take responsibility for the drubbing that many blame on the unpopular leader.
"We will have to accept the voice of the people that has produced such a severe result," Aso said.
The LDP now appears bereft of leaders. Party Secretary-General Hiroyuki Hosoda said he told Aso earlier Sunday that he and other top party executives would resign to take responsibility.
"We will seriously atone for our faults and prepare for the next election," he said.
The LDP came into the election in an unfamiliar spot: as the heavy underdog. Public opinion polls proved accurate, as the LDP was struggling to match the 113 seats the DPJ won when it was humiliated in the 2005 election.

So, a retread of 1993-4, or actual change? I liked this summary [via James Annan]:

One of the parties is led by an immensely wealthy grandson of a former conservative party prime minister, and the other is led by an immensely wealthy grandson of a former conservative party prime minister. One of these princelings 's tongue frequently gets tied in knots when he is trying to explain himself and the corruption of his colleagues, while the other's tongue frequently gets tied in knots when he is trying to explain himself and the corruption of his colleagues.

We'll be treated to a load of tribalist bollocks in the UK, of course, of both the "DPJ? Oh noes, teh leftisses and there socialism!!1!" and the "Democratic Party Japan = UK Labour Party = WIN!" varieties.

2009-08-29T09:45:00.002-02:00

Blast from the past

Toyama Kooichi rides again

Via Blood and Treasure, Toyama's speech from the 207 election for governor of Tokyo:

He came 8th, out of 14. And you thought Ishihara Shintaroo was colourful...

2009-08-27T09:07:00.003-02:00

"The thing's hollow - it goes on forever- and oh my God!"

It's full of hippies

Selections from the climate camp programme [link via LC]:

Interactive Theatre on Climate Justice

SM1, Sat, 14:30-16:00

2% of fear and desire. A fun but challenging interactive show that uses Augusto Boal's Cop in the Head techniques helps examine what stops people taking effective action on climate change.

Eco-Feminist Story Telling (Part 1)

Kids' Space, Mon, 10:30-11:30

We will read some eco-feminist stories for children, and then you will get a chance to create your own story! We will play ‘circle stories’ and each child will add to the collective story line-by-line. We will write down the story, and it can be illustrated and printed within a zine. We can make puppets and act out our story too!

DSEi 2009: 8th September, City of London. Destroy the Banks! Destroy the Investors! Destroy the Arms Trade

MM4, Sat, 14:30-16:00

This year's DSEi will be making the link between climate chage and the arms trade. Come to the workshop , find out more, get involved, and let's hold the investors accountable for the death and destruction they cause worldwide!

Everything you Need to Know to Occupy your University

Student Space, Sun, 10:30-11:30

Occupations are back in vogue and this participative workshop - run by a student involved in organising the Cardiff University occupation in February of this year- will give a you step by step guide to practical knowledge of what you need to do to successfully occupy your university.

If not Carbon Trading, then what?

MM4, Sun, 16:30-18:30

We know the European Trading Scheme is a disaster, and Kyoto was a joke. But is it possible to design a carbon descent framework which would guarantee equity as well as the necessary carbon reductions? If so, what would it look like? And what possible steps could an activist/campaigner take to get us closer to this ideal? Is it worth our precious time thinking about this nerdy stuff at all? This is a mini-plenary discussion with Charlie Kronick (Greenpeace’s senior climate advisor), Ruth Davies (head of climate change policy at RSPB), Oliver Tickell (architect of the "Kyoto 2" initiative), Niel Bowerman (advocate for Contraction & Convergence), and Shaun Chamberlin (advocate for Tradable Energy Quotas).

Copenhagen and Carbon Trading - where did it all go horribly wrong

MM3, Sat, 16:30-18:30

What is going to be discussed at the UN climate summit in Copenhagen in December? What is carbon trading, and why should we care? What role does the European Union play? Discussions on a new global climate agreement are shrouded in a cloud of acronyms and obscure market schemes. This workshop decodes what is at stake in Copenhagen, exposing how the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), sectoral carbon markets, and schemes aimed at Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) would exacerbate local social and environmental conflicts and incentivise land grabs whilst failing to tackle the climate crisis. It will then explore some alternatives needed to promote climate justice in the UK, the EU and beyond.

************

The thing I want to go to is the workshop on Nuclear Power, which is fairly and unbiasedly called "If Nuclear is the Answer, you're asking the wrong question".

2009-08-24T19:01:00.003-02:00

Promises, promises

The DPJ and LDP manifestos are here. More comment on this tomorrow.

Both parties are promising to ban "hereditary" Diet seats. "Hereditary", in this context, means seats that were held by by the candidates father[1] and then "inherited". The DJP don't say how this ban will be enforced, but the LDP say they will not "endorse[ment n]or support" candidates "within three degrees of kinship" of a retiring candidates, although only from the next general election.

Meanwhile, Yomiuri is reporting :

The Democratic Party of Japan has featured "three icons" of the party in its campaign for the Aug. 30 House of Representatives election to convince voters that the main opposition party is well equipped to take the reins of government.

The prominent coverage given to DPJ President Yukio Hatoyama, Secretary General Katsuya Okada and Acting President Naoto Kan--the latter two also have served as party leader--stands in stark contrast to the approach adopted by the Liberal Democratic Party, many of whose candidates hope to cash in on the popularity of Health, Labor and Welfare Minister and House of Councillor member Yoichi Masuzoe to boost their campaigns. - [source]

I don't think we're going to see anything comparable to the phenomenon that was Kazuhiko Yamauchi this time round, tho'.

[1] The actual Hereditaries, the Peerage, were abolished after the second world war, and the House of Peers replaced by the elected House of Councillors. The adoption of a bicameral rather than a unicameral legislature was one of Matsumoto's few successes in the face of GHQ's "advice".

2009-08-23T08:10:00.002-02:00

Wipeout for the other Liberal Democrats?

Election count-down

A week to go, and a DPJ victory seems almost certain:

The Democratic Party of Japan appears likely to sweep into power by securing over 300 seats in the Aug. 30 Lower House election, a Kyodo News survey showed Saturday.The ruling Liberal Democratic Party looks set to lose its grip on government and be reduced to slightly over 100 seats in the House of Representatives, down from the 300 it held heading into the campaign.

I had assumed the previous poll from July was an outlier, but this looks conclusive.

The Liberal Democratic Party has something to hold on to:

Of those surveyed, 36.3 percent said they have yet to decide which candidate or party to vote for in the single-seat districts, while 32.8 percent remain uncommitted in the proportional representation section. It is thus possible the overall situation could change suddenly ahead of election day.

but I don't think I'd be betting on it. It's remarkable - except for 1993, the LDP has been in power since 1955.

[I was going to write a post comparing DJP with the LDP manifestos, but I've been ill for the last few days. Hopefully, I shall be well enough to write it before the election]

2009-08-19T05:43:00.002-02:00

Tale from the White Hart

I used to love Arthur C. Clarke's short stories set in the White Hart.Not everyone cares for "club tales", and the stories are woefully deficient in monoliths; but Harry Purvis is a fun character, you get to meet lightly fictionalized versions of the UK SF writing establishment, and "Silence Please" must be the first suggestion of noise canceling technology.

I think in "Silence Please" the White Hart is described as being close to Kings and that if you cram your head out of the window in the gents you can see the river. Clarke also describes the pub as a fictionalized version of a pub called the "White Horse".

Which brings us to last night, when I was enjoying a most agreeable pint in a pub called the "The White Hart" which is close to Waterloo and the Kings physics department. There were no windows in the gents.

So - is it the right one? I think I shall pretend it is.

2009-08-10T20:18:00.004-02:00

Folk philosophy

Are you sure "dualism" means what you think it means?

The real problem about commenting on this is that we have yet to see the full proposals. The Lib Dem blogosphere, particularly the Libertarians, love to get terribly exercised at the prospect of banning things. It’s just not liberal! we are constantly reminded, or more precisely, it is Fundamentally Illiberal(complete with scary looking capitalisation). Personally however, I tend to take a more evidence-based approach before banging on about John fucking Mill (I think the Lib Dems should produce their ownGod Trumps inspired Liberal Trumps, with the Mill card always winning. It would save a lot of time). Philosophy is always reached for, psychology or sociology almost never. It is as if the last 100 years never happened. More to the point, it is as if dualism was never critiqued. Frankly, if we did all live in a state of complete seperation of mind and body, the libertarians would have a point. The fact that time and again we learn that environmental factors affect behaviour is a problem they have never come to terms with.- [source]

I don't have a view on banning "air-brushing", but I don't see how whether dualism or d'Holbachian materialism is correct can have any possible bearing on the necessity or efficacy of the proposed ban.

For bonus hilarity, the previous instalment of this row involved people who couldn't diagonalize a Hamiltonian expressing firmly-held opinions on the implications of quantum mechanics on "free will" and, remarkably, the amount of time physicists spend on different problems. Favourite comment:

"You ask for “proof” - well, how is thousands upon thousands of accumulated scientific knowledge? We live in a closed, causational universe (you could, again like a theist, argue for some kind of quantum-get-out-of-jail-free card but that don’t wash). That is what science, from Newton to Darwin to Einstein tells us. " - [source]

which was a surprise, as the last time the political blogosphere tried to dress up as David Deutsch, we were assured:

"Quantum mechanics screws with the whole concept of a personal god at such a fundamental level that even the most ardent religious apologists steer clear of arguing with the cosmologists and trying to take on the uncertainty principle.

They just ignore it and hope that everyone but a few physicists will go on thinking that quantum mechanics is way to difficult to bother trying to understand."

The things you learn on the internets!

2009-08-10T20:09:00.002-02:00

They're back!

Excellent news

After a long absence, Andrew Rilstone and Steven Poole are back. Excellent stuff.

[via Andrew Hickey]

2009-08-05T17:09:00.003-02:00

Robotic ramen

Noodles!

The Reuter's transcript describes the robot- produced dinner as ramen.

Of course, given it's in Nagoya, they should be serving misonikomi udon rather than ramen.

[Video from Singularity Hub, via Marginal Revolution]

2009-08-04T14:55:00.004-02:00

BYO satellite

"No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to burn up on re-entry"

Amateur satellites have been around for years, and there's a fairly active community of hams [via Alex]. But via the Register, I learn that "Interorbital systems" are offering to launch you a satellite (albeit one that'll burn up in a couple of weeks).

As the companies business model includes selling futures on moon rock, I'm a little bit sceptical. But on the other hand, it's $8,000 for your own satellite...

2009-07-28T11:06:00.003-02:00

I do not find this persuasive

Barbara Ellen reports

The Guardian:

How quaint that the Conservative party is planning to punish naughty children by taking away their mobiles. Labour is proving much more hardline: taking away the educational futures of tens of thousands of British teenagers, who will be denied university places this autumn.
This shortage of places, between 60,000 and 80,000, has been caused not only by cutbacks, and higher numbers of young applicants, but also by older applicants, "mature students", who have lost their jobs and want to "sit out the recession" at college. Well, fine, so long as the younger applicants get priority.
Admittedly, I am biased. I am one of Britain's beleaguered Pots (parents of teenagers) and this is a headache too far. Don't our young already have it tougher than recent generations? And, while I have nothing against mature students, surely they should be given places purely because they want to study. Otherwise, all we are doing is enabling the government to hide appalling unemployment figures.
It is almost reverse ageism - the young being bumped out of their rightful places so that universities can be employed as higher education catacombs for the fiscally dispossessed. Suspicion deepens when one hears of Brown's response to the crisis - the creation of a measly 10,000 places, with priority given to "maths, science and engineering".
Brilliant, except it would be surprising if there was a shortage of places in such technical subjects, though, if they had the relevant qualifications, these may be the sort of degrees mature, probably male, students would go for. What a coincidence.

I suspect there may be other reasons why the government may wish to give priority to "maths, science[,] and engineering" than to directly conspire to deprive Ellen's offspring of places reading sappier subjects. I'm not going to engage in fashionably smug sneering at "humanities graduates"[1], but stuff like this makes you wonder...

[1] Why is so much opprobrium directed at "media studies", BTW? Why is this subject derided in a way that related subjects like "political science", "history", and "english" aren't?

2009-07-27T15:24:00.002-02:00

Attention, legal beagles!

Could this happen in the UK?

Via Dr. Isis, this:

I am an assistant professor (about 3 years into starting my lab) at a research university. On Monday of this week, I received an email from a freedom of information act specialist saying that a secretary at another research university had requested a copy of my recently funded R01 and that I had 5 days to comply. I called the secretary (who was requesting for an anonymous physician) and explained to her that there was a ton of unpublished data and a research plan for the lab that I thought when writing was confidential. I then offered to send her the grant in its entirety without government involvement if she would have the physician send me an email promising to keep it confidential. I should point out that I am very good about sharing reagents and have given out my grants (funded R01, R21, R03 and foundation grants) to others with the agreement that they stay confidential. Two days after my phone call (and subsequent email), this secretary sent a very curt email saying that they "preferred to go through the freedom of information act."

The same bloke adds in comments:

"Also, it actually makes you wonder if the lab notebooks filled with data generated with NIH money are also subject to the FOIA."

Over here, the EPSRC publish a synopsis - usually a 1-3 paragraph lay summary of the research that you contribute with your proposal - on each successful application. Do the other RCs do the same?

2009-07-21T15:13:00.002-02:00

Everyone's a critic!

A 19th century "higher" critic

Via Phil, I learn that German biblical criticism has been challenging the bastions of other "historical" events:

If you watch programs about the moon landings, some show certain film clips near the start of the program and some show the same clips near the end. This shows that the producers of the programs are not interested in preserving truth, but just in getting across the message that suits their preconceived aims. They are therefore not to be trusted.
The release of Led Zepplin 1, the Beatles’ last performance, Yasser Arafat’s election, the Boeing 747’s maiden flight and Robin Knox-Johnston’s solo nonstop circumnavigation are not mentioned anywhere by any of the astronauts. These were major world events that happened in the months before the mission, so their non-inclusion shows that the astronauts’ lines are clearly fakes, read from a script.
Neil Armstrong’s accent sounds different sometimes,, which leads scholars to believe in the presence of a deutero-Armstrong who recorded the scenes while on the moon, and possibly a tritio-Armstrong for the scenes on the way back. That Neil Armstrong could actually sound a bit different at different times, is considered too improbable to countenance.
Man has always dreamed of walking on the moon. By making up this moon landing story, NASA were merely channelling stories they’d cherished for years, and passing on the truths they’d learned around the campfire. They felt the need to create a ‘moon-community’ who could pass down this myth they’d created, as it contained the truths by which they now lived their lives. This must be true, as any other explanation would require NASA to actually innovate and do something nobody had done before, ie land on the moon. Innovation involves doing things that haven’t been done before, and as we judge things by the standards of the past, we can never judge an historical event was the result of innovation. - [read the rest here]

[I suspect that 9, which reads differently to the others, was an interpolation by a redactor, which we will need to transcend to access the real proto-Greg text]

Ignore the wailing of "fundamentalists" (by which I mean people who disagree with me) who insist on the literal truth of the moon landings, a mere counjouring trick with stones: what really matters is that Armstrong walked on the moon in our hearts.

2009-07-19T14:24:00.002-02:00

This post should not be construed as supportive of Brian Haw

Will they be any better?

"Mr Cameron today told Sky News' Sunday Live a future Tory government would take steps to have it removed.

He said: "I am all in favour of free speech and the right to demonstrate and the right to protest.

"But I think there are moments when our Parliament Square does look like a pretty poor place, with shanty town tents and the rest of it.

"I am all for demonstrations, but my argument is `Enough is enough'."" - [source]

That isn't an argument, it's a tautology.

2009-07-16T04:29:00.003-02:00

How utterly vile

But leftists are TOO caring!

I think the best way to deal with unpleasant rubbish like this is just to file it away, and wheel it out when some halfwit tries to tell you how uncaring and "nasty" Tories are.

[via Ben]

2009-07-04T18:25:00.003-02:00

Should we teach maths like music?

"High School Geometry: the instrument of the devil"

Via Scott Aaronson, I read this glorious rant by mathemetician Paul Lockart about maths teaching in schools.

Now, I don't agree with most of it, and hope to discuss why in a future post, but it is such a pleasure to read a critique that isn't by a laudator temporis acti who took his O-levels in the 1970s and has been sulking about it ever since. This bit, in particular, is splendid:

"“The area of a triangle is equal to one-half its base times its height.” Students are asked to

memorize this formula and then “apply” it over and over in the “exercises.” Gone is the thrill,

the joy, even the pain and frustration of the creative act. There is not even a problem anymore.

The question has been asked and answered at the same time— there is nothing left for the

student to do.
"

Much as Stephen Fry is the stupid person's idea of what a clever person looks like, an exam that require the rote memorization of endless formulae before plugging in a series of random numbers is what some non-physicists think a physics paper should looks like.

2009-06-27T12:55:00.001-02:00

The difference between physics and economics

Graphiness

Straight lines, baby! There was no need to take 3 data points, or it might have spoilt the fit.

2009-06-22T18:53:00.001-02:00

Oh well, at least it wasn't bloody Widdecombe.

2009-06-21T10:41:00.003-02:00

Great minds think alike

And the pounds took care of themselves

Via Alex at the Fistful of Euros, I learn that John Graham-Cumming, Slayer of Spam, has had similar ideas regarding Benford's law. He has looked at the figures in the forms submitted by the chancellor, the prime minister, and Harriet Harman. The PM and HH expenses follow the distribution, but the chancellor's do not. There are rather more 3's and 4's than you would expect by chance. He has identified the source of these: the chancellor claims exactly £300 for food every month, and reqularly claims £45 for his telephone bill.

He also observes that Hazel Blears has submitted claims for whole number of pounds. Hmm.

Were I to fabricate my expenses, I -or at least, whichever of my sons was working for me full-time whilst also a full-time student - should be sure to add an appropriate and possibly random number of pennies to each of my more creative claims, if only to add an air of vermislitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative. [Benford's law probably wouldn't be able to pick up divergences south of the decimal point, as the distribution tends to uniform as the order of the digit increases]

On the other hand, you are allowed to round down in (some of) the boxes on your self-assesment, so it might well be legitimate to do so on an expenses form.

In any case, I think the best test is reciepted expenses vs. unreciepted expenses. As soon as we see some tabulation at the Guardian project, it'll be time to break out the Benford's.

2009-06-18T17:10:00.003-02:00

Benford's law and The Commons

A modest proposal

Have you ever tried to make up numbers? I mean, to write a series of random numbers on a bit of paper? It's a problem faced by fraudsters: how to fabricate a series of plausible data.

Consider the digits. I had always supposed that, in a given series of numbers, you'd expect the likelihood of a number starting with a 1, a 2, a3,..., or a 9 would be about equal (for a large enough sample of numbers) at ~11%.

I supposed erroneously.

Actually, for a surprisingly wide range of data types -from the lengths of rivers in an atlas to amounts of money in an account- numbers beginning with a '1' are much more common, appearing about 30% of the time. Numbers beginning with a '2' occur about 18% of the time, and higher digits with decreasing frequency. This is called Benford's law.

This remarkable result has been put to use in fraud detection, by using it to pick out suspicious sets of accounts for further investigation.

Now, there's a few caveats: it doesn't work for all data - sequentially assigned numbers like bank account numbers, for instance. However, the MPs expenses scandal (via the Guardian data blog) provides a natural test for this, as MPs expenses are all either:

(a) amounts over £250, which had to be supported by a receipt, or

(b) amounts under £250, which didn't.

Will both sets of figures follow Benford's law? Will neither? Or will most sets of expenses (a) follow the law, while the un-receipted expenses (b) won't? This might raise some interesting questions.

2009-06-14T21:31:00.009-02:00

Does my privilege look big in this?

It's not about you, either, it's about the facts

[UPDATE: PJ has some comments from a different perspective in the comments]

Laurie Penny, who wrote this fantastic article, has a post up defending Rowenna Davis' string of untruths that I discussed last week. I do not find it persuasive. She writes:

Dear white, straight guys: it’s not about you.

No, really, listen up. I have been stunned this week by the cybersquall that has erupted over Rowenna Davis’ Guardian article, entitled – although not by her – ‘Stupid White Heterosexual Male’. The article was well written, reasonable, and managed to make points about equality without getting personal, which is unsurprising, as Rowenna Davis is at the tender age of 24 one of the finest and most ethical journalists I’ve ever had the privilege to meet. But the piece got almost as many negative comments as Charlie Brooker’s denouncement of the BNP in the same paper got supportive ones – all because Davis had the temerity to suggest that perhaps white, heterosexual males might not actually need their own anti-discrimination officer at Oxford University of all places (45% private school students, almost entirely white and with a tenacious male bias in finals marks), especially not when Andrew Lowe’s policies included ‘to replace St Anne's college crèche with a finishing school, ban women from the library and save money by getting female students to serve food in halls instead of kitchen staff.’ - [source]

You can, and should, read the whole thing here. I was particularly impressed by the claim:

No, really. You might not think that you personally, sitting behind your computer, reading this rant and getting pissy, are part of the problem -but you are. The people who attacked Rowenna Davis’ on-the-money article with such bile and vitriol are part of the problem, even though many of those are the very same hands-up-harries who were the first to condemn the BNP.

Because there is a heartbeat’s space between the blind stupid rage of otherwise sensible people who felt hard done by reading that article and the creeping influence of right-wing policymakers in parliament. There is a heartbeat’s space between the growing tide of otherwise non-idiotic white male resentment in this country and the breathtakingly idiotic racist, homophobic and misogynistic logic with which we have just sent two far-right representatives to the European Parliament. And if you are not prepared to step up, own your privilege and be part of the solution, then, my darlings, you are going to become part of the problem.

Of course, I would have been more impressed to see some actual evidence for the claim - which brings us to the problem with both Davis' article and Penny's defense.

My objection to Davis article is not "because Davis had the temerity to suggest that perhaps white, heterosexual males might not actually need their own anti-discrimination officer at Oxford University of all places", but because Davis makes a number of statements that are untrue.

1) Davis claimed that Oxford admitted 5 black students last year. This is untrue. An underestimate by a factor of 9, the correct figure can be found in the document "Undergraduate Admissions Statistics 2008", page 5, table 5, [source]. Happily, Davis has corrected this claim, although the fact she thought it was remotely plausible raises profound, not to say disturbing, questions about her own privilege.

2) Davis claims that "The only thing harder than spotting the black kid in my college photo was trying to find a woman on my reading list.". This is untrue. You can readily falsify this for yourself by reading the politics department PPE reading list, as I thought - clearly rather optimistically - that Davis would have done. [In Davis 2007 article (about institutional sexism at Oxford) in the Times Higher Education supplement she claimed "trying to find a woman on my reading list was analogous to playing "Where's Wally"?" - [source]]

3) Davis claims "Class: Despite over 90% of the country being state educated, just 55% of Oxbridge students come from state schools. New figures suggest that these class divides are getting worse, not better. ". This is untrue. As I wrote in my original comments on Davis article, "it is instructive to compare the results from 2006(2007) ([source], page 3 table 1), when 47.1%(46.8%) came from state schools. Certainly in the short term, things seem to be improving. " . I also wrote "But 98.4% of candidates who are offered pre-qualification places achieve AAA ("Undergraduate admissions statistics 2008" page 4, table 3). As 28.6% of A grades are awarded to pupils at Independent Schools [source] and 33.8% of Oxford applicants come from Independent schools ("Undergraduate admissions statistics 2008",page 2, table 1), perhaps the over-representation is not entirely Oxford's fault.". I hope all numerate readers will appreciate why this is relevant.

These are matters of fact, rather that "privilege". The statements Davis has made do not correspond to reality. They are untrue. It matters not at all how white, male, privileged, disadvantaged or publicly-schooled the person who makes these statements is: they are untrue.

I move to statements who are not untrue, but are simply peculiar. They display a mixture of petty bigotry and misunderstanding of a university.

4a) Davis complains of "competitive tutorials". The whole reason/excuse for the college fee - the 3000 pounds a year extra that is lavished on Oxbridge students - is the tutorials system. Every other university in the country can't afford to provide two-to-one or one-on-one tuition , although some try by cannibalising their research budget. If Davis was so unsuited to the tutorial system - and I agree it is not for everyone, and I am agnostic on the question of whether it is the "best" system - there are 107 universities she could have attended. It is unfortunate to attend Oxford for 3 years and not realize that "competitive tutorials" are the nominal reason the taxpayer stumps up the additional three grand. Doubly so, to enter a privilege-ridden profession like journalism, where they'll be plenty of competition. No walk of life is a Caucus-race, and academics would be doing a disservice to their students by allowing them to believe that all must have prizes. Again, this is not unique to Oxford, or even university.

4b) I thought the statement "arrogant public schoolboys" was bigoted (try replacing the noun in that sentence and you'll see what I mean. Moreover, if the public schoolboy(s) in question were such idiots, thickos who glided into Oxford on the back of the privilege-fairy, they can't have been that hard to out-compete.

Can they?

I do not believe I have met Davis, but Penny describes her as "one of the finest and most ethical journalists I’ve ever had the privilege to meet". Accordingly, I am certain she will correct the untrue claims she has made on the website of a national newspaper. It is, of course, embarrasing to admit messing up, all the more so when 5 minutes on google combined with numeracy could have avoided the matter, but it is the honest and ethical thing to do. I am delighted to see see has made a step towards this by correcting the ludicrous error in point 1 above.

Point 4 is more tricky - it is not about facts, but opinions. I am aware that I must be viewing the situation with privilege-tinted spectacles. That said, so must Davis, Penny, and everyone else in the world.

There are two possibilities: either

(a) privilege obscures our view of the world so severely as to prevent us from make true judgements about it; or,

(b) privilege does not obscure our view of the world so severely as to prevent us making true judgements about it.

Suppose (a) is true: my inability to make judgements about the world must also preclude me from accepting the claim that my privilege obscures my view of the world : after all, that's what "being unable to make true judgements about the world" means. This applies not only to me, but Davis, Penny, and everybody else.

If we are not to lapse into solipsism, therefore, we must accept (b), that we can make statements about the world that are not obscured with privilege.

My initial response to Davis, in the form of an open letter, is here.

[Editted fur spolling]

2009-06-12T18:57:00.010-02:00

Fact-Checking Rowenna Davis

An open letter

Dear Ms. Davis,

I write with reference to your recent article on Comment is Free, entitled "Stupid White Heterosexual Male", in which you make a number of statements which are untrue. I am pleased to have the opportunity to correct them, and also to offer some collegial advise as to how you can avoid intellectual humiliation in the future.

Happily, you have corrected your most ridiculous error - a bizarre claim that Oxford admits only 5 black students, out by a factor of 9 [source - document "Undergraduate admissions statistics 2008" page 5, table 5].

(Indeed, your own source continues: "With more than four students applying for every place, competition is intense and the success rate among ethnic minority UK students is nearly 29%, compared with an overall average of 23.7%, but it remains below the hit rate of independent school candidates which is 29.4%.").

You write:

"The only thing harder than spotting the black kid in my college photo was trying to find a woman on my reading list."

Given you read PPE, you can't have tried very hard. You can read, perhaps for the first time, the Politics department's PPE reading list here for the first year exams. I can see Gutmann, Nancy Rosenblum, Catherine MacKinnon, Anne Stevens, Mary Volcansek, and Sheri Berman. Guinier (of course) is there, as is Fulbrook. The Philosophy reading list is inaccesible outside the university, but are you seriously claiming you were never advised to read Anscombe?

You write:

"I wonder if those voting for a white, heterosexual male rep have ever faced the reality of the figures. In case they're reading, I'll take the issues in turn. Class: Despite over 90% of the country being state educated, just 55% of Oxbridge students come from state schools. New figures suggest that these class divides are getting worse, not better. "

But 98.4% of candidates who are offered pre-qualification places achieve AAA ("Undergraduate admissions statistics 2008" page 4, table 3). As 28.6% of A grades are awarded to pupils at Independent Schools [source] and 33.8% of Oxford applicants come from Independent schools ("Undergraduate admissions statistics 2008",page 2, table 1), perhaps the over-representation is not entirely Oxford's fault.

Regarding the claim "class divides are getting worse, rather than better", it is instructive to compare the results from 2006(2007) ([source], page 3 table 1), when 47.1%(46.8%) came from state schools. Certainly in the short term, things seem to be improving.

Wisely, you turn from statistics to your own personal experience: "When I was studying there, I felt wedged between overly sexualized bops (college parties) and competitive tutorials with arrogant public school boys."

I am sorry to hear you have had a negative experience at Oxford. However:

Be honest now: did the sub-editor insert that definition of "bops"? Did you remember that the vast majority of readers won't know what the word means, and won't care? Anyway, the last bop I attended I saw a man dressed as a post-box dancing with a woman dressed as Richard Branson. I can say, without fear of contradiction, I have never felt less "overly sexualized".

As adults, and all students at Oxford are technically adults, we have control over what we wear, the company we keep, and the bops we attend. At any university, there are plenty of other things to do on a Saturday night.

Further, you complain of "competitive tutorials with arrogant public schoolboys". If you don't like arrogance, prolonged exposure to academics is ill-advised. I am sorry to see you judge a person by the school she attended, but more alarmed that you see "competitive tutorials" as a bad thing. I used to struggle with tutorials. My tutorial partner (as it happens, from a state school) was considerably cleverer that I am, and I always felt like the Red Queen, having to run faster and faster just to stand still. I certainly don't believe the tutorial system is the best possible system for everyone, but it certainly made me into a better physicist. The tutorial system is the reason it cost the taxpayer £3000 more each year for you to study PPE at Oxford rather than something useful elsewhere. You must have known this when you were applying. Had you not wanted this, there are 107 universities in the UK that aren't Oxford and Cambridge. If you found your tutorial partner disagreeable, even for the rather bigoted reason you give, in life and work we often have to put up - even be polite to! - people we dislike. This is not unique to Oxford, or even to university.

So where does this leave us?

There are some great stories to be written about tertiary education in the UK: you could talk about the difficulties of contract research staff, the funding of middle eastern studies departments or how physics is becoming the new classics. You could talk about those 107 universities that aren't Oxford and Cambridge.

It would also be nice if, from time to time, the debate on education could focus the vast majority who did not go to Oxbridge, or even the majority who didn't go to university. You could talk about what's happened to adult education and how to change it. You could talk basic qualifications, and about teaching reading, and about the way political groups manipulate the syllabus in subjects from biology to history.

If it is essential to discuss Oxbridge at such tedious length, why doesn't CiF run a series of articles on Oxford where people wrote that they had quite a nice time, really, didn't do enough work, made some good friends and generally grew up a bit. Just like any other university, except with older buildings and worse facilities.

Or, you could write another retread of the "Tales of Terror: Trapped Among the Poshes!" where the author complains that she was forced to meet people who went to a school that was funded differently to hers, and spoke with a different accent, and had tutors who expected her to think, and how the college drama society re-enacted Brideshead bloody Revisited 24 hours a day, and in general the sheer awfulness of attending one of the oldest universities in the world, having the taxpayer stump up an additional three grand a year more than your mate who went to London, having contact time and a student-teacher ratio other unis only dream of, and meeting clever, hard-working people from a completely different background to you. The horror, the horror.

The choice is yours.

I remain, yours sincerely,

A Stupid White Heterosexual Male

[Thanks to Ed and Duncan for the tip]

2009-06-12T11:50:00.002-02:00

"Is the BNP racist?"

Guess

Matt Wardman spells it out.

[via John B]

2009-06-09T20:51:00.006-02:00

Rot about I.Q. and voting

Not just wrong, but stupid

It's all very well our enemies being wrong and evil, but wouldn't it be great if they were stupid, too?

There's been a 4 way discussion going on over twitter between John Band, Mike Power , Joseph Edwards and Alex Gray regarding voter IQ. Mr. Gray informs us:

@mrpower A study done last year found that BNP voters had an average IQ of 98.4, the lowest. Greens, highest, had 108.3. - [Twitter here]

@mezza1959 Labour voters have an average IQ of 103. Fourth highest (Conservatives are third at 103.7, Lb Dems second at 108.2) - [Twitter here]

Those of us who prefer to have citations for our half-remembered pub-talk factoids will ask Mr. Google and find the actual paper: it is Deary, Batty, and Gale, "Childhood intelligence predicts voter turnout, voting preferences and political involvement in adulthood: The 1970 British Cohort Study", Intelligence 36, 548-555 (2008). If you have institutional access to Intelligence you can get it here, otherwise you can get it off the University of Edinburgh website here.

We will also note the correction (institutional access here, although the department is insufficiently proud of this to put it on its website. I wonder why.)

The first thing to note is that this is a study of child IQ (measured at age 10) of members of the 1970 cohort study. They were asked about their voting preferences at age of 34, and how they voted in the 2001 election. The results the paper headlines in the abstract are the intelligence-green party and intelligence-liberal democrats correlation; however, they note that the IQ-Green can be accounted for by occupational social class.

The figures which Mr. Gray quotes are drawn from Appendix Table 1 (p.554) although, alas, the means have been lost their associated standard deviations. (In fairness this press release is probably to blame). Let's reunite them (format mu(SD)):

Voted (2001) 104.0 (14.2)

Didn't vote 99.7 (14.1)

Supported in 2001 election

Con 103.7 (13.5)

Lab 103.0 (14.2)

Lib Dem 108.2 (14.4)

Scot Nat 102.2 (14.2)

Green 108.3 (12.9)

Brit Nat 101.1 (15.7)

UK Ind 99.7 (13.4)

Plaid C 102.5 (16.5)

Intended to vote 2004 election

Con 103.1 (13.9)

Lab 101.6 (14.6)

Lib Dem 106.9 (14.5)

Scot Nat 100.2 (12.8)

Green 107.1 (13.7)

Brit Nat 99.6 (13.5)

UK Ind 97.4 (12.2)

Plaid C 98.7 (17.0)

None 98.1 (13.4)

I invite readers to consider the means and standard deviations of these sub-groups, and make up their own minds as to the significance or otherwise of these result. Comments are particularly solicited from LemmusLemmus and PJ.

Those of us with longer memories will remember the time The Economist recycled a fake IQ/Red State Blue State correlation from an internet news group.

[For the avoidance of doubt: the BNP are fascist scum, certainly evil and probably stupid. However, I do not think this data set can bear the interpretation that Mr. Gray rests upon it. I am also less afraid of stupid fascists than clever fascists.]

2009-06-09T18:08:00.002-02:00

Tactical Voting?

A new toy

A brief note of tactical voting: while it is true that an extra 5000 votes for the Greens in the North West would have meant Nasty Nick wouldn't have been off to Brussels, it is also true that 2500 extra votes for UKIP would have had the same effect. I also note that if the Green voters had voted for the Lib Dems, UKIP, Labour, or the Tories would have had the same effect.

Over in Yorkshire and the Humber, it's a different story: the greens would need an additional 16,000 votes. However, only 11,000 extra to Labour would keep the fascists out. If your're really prepared to do "anything" to keep the Nazis out, Green is not obviously the way to do it.

You can check these calculations and have some psephological fun of your own with this automatic d'Hondt vote counter that I've put on a Google spreadsheet here.

I took the data from The Guardian's electoral maps. The spreadsheet is fairly easy to use: I've shown a couple of worked examples, and I've manually calculated the d'Hondt count for Yorkshire and the Humber to provide a check. Any bugs, please, to "a dot political dot scientist AttT gmail dot com", or to the comments section below. You are welcome to use it for any purpose you like, but if you found it useful, please would you let me know, or provide a link back to this post.

INSTRUCTIONS: You'll need to log on to Google Docs. Save a copy of the spreadsheet, so that you can manipulate in. All the data is in the first sheet ("Complete Voting Data"). Go to "Automatic d'Hondt counter" and clear the example data. Copy and paste the data you want to count in its place. After the calculation has gone through, you can read off the number of MPs the party has by going to the column marked "Round n" where n is the number of MPs the constituency returns. Happy counting!

[BTW, if you're interested in Nazi ecological policy, the classic study is "How Green were the Nazis?"]

2009-06-07T17:52:00.006-02:00

Bring back the Oxford and Cambridge MPs?

A new proposal from Left Outside

The title of my post is rather misleading: although before 1950 Oxford and Cambridge did used to return University MPs, they weren't elected by the students. The electorate was composed of holders of MAs, effectively a property qualification. Although abolished by an earlier incarnation of the Representation of the People Act, the seats didn't disappear until the 1950 general election.

Left Outside has an altogether more interesting idea:

But, I would like to delve a little deeper into the specifics of a new system. I would like see a change to the narrow geographical boundaries which mark out our constituencies. If a more proportional system is introduced, and lets hope it is, then I think it is time to reintroduce some quirkier features of our democracy. This is why I advocate a reintroduction of multi-member University Constituencies.
We are used to constituencies being constructed on a continuous geographical basis. For example and for no particular reason consider Newbury, Sedgefield, Dundee Westand Warrington North [1], these constituencies exist because they loosely represent the community which will elect that area’s MP. This is big bonus of the Constituency system, people are directly connected with their local representative. However, the cohesiveness of these seats also leads to them becoming safely Red, Blue or Yellow. This is bad for democracy because elections are then only really conducted in 150 marginal seats, and millions of votes cease to matter.
[...]
However, constituencies do not need a continuous area in order to be representative of those who would be its electors. There can be circumstances that link me more culturally, emotionally and politically with a call centre worker in France than a Tory Grandee in Sleaford and North Hykeham. As an ex-student, there are also very obvious reasons to believe that I have more in common with the people I eat with, drink with and study with across the country than the community I visited for 3 months out of every 12.
As a student, for 3 years (and sometimes more) half the young people in this country leave their homes and enter a new community that isn’t so much described by geography as by its “Studentness.”
These would be more representative in two main ways. First of all they would give students a say in the community to which they belong (should they choose to register there of course). Secondly, as a consequence of the reallocation of voters, local communities which the students have left will have a more equitably and fairer say in their own affairs. -[source]

I think a version of this might be very practical: but why stop at the Universities? Voters might very well have more in common with fellow union, church, or professional body members than they do with others who are merely geographically close. All constituencies will become "empires of the mind" - free associations of sovereign people. If we are really serious about abolishing the "tyranny of geography", this is the way to do it. However, we are left with a problem - most people don't have a single identity, they are former members of universities, workplaces, unions, Doctor Who appreciation societies, and so forth. In Dsquared's plan to replace the House of Lords with a House of Chiefs, everyone had to endorse one, and only one person as their Chief, subject to a threshold of e.g. 4000 signatures. I suggest you can belong to more than one constituency, provided (a) that number is less than, say, 20, and (b) you have a total of one vote, but you can divide it between the constituencies you belong (say, 1/3 to your union, 1/2 to your church, 1/6 to your university), (c) there is some threshold that a constituency needs to get a seat.

[I hope to discuss my favourite PR system, Random Dictator with Barrage, in a future post]

2009-06-04T14:47:00.003-02:00

Council elections

A mighty institution faces the electorate

I'm talking, of course, about the Institute of Physics. The postal ballot for IOP Council doesn't close until 20 July, but don't forget to vote!

More trivially, I hope UK readers remembered to vote yesterday. Between the IOP, the Euros, and Council elections - and possibly a Convocation, depending on whether the current mess is sorted out - I really feel I have shall have done my democratic duty this year. This is fortunate, as I shan't be able to vote in the election if it's after September.

2009-06-02T11:32:00.003-02:00

Electrobollocks

It is a form of pollution

The lads at HolfordWatch have a look at the Green party's policies. All good clean fun - and, from Neil in the comments to that piece, this little gem:

PL414. The Green Party deplores the intransigent attitude of the United Kingdom government to

the damaging biological effects to those living in close proximity to high voltage power cables, caused by the associated electromagnetic field. This constitutes an electrical pollution. Immediate action should be taken to ensure that no high voltage cables are sited near habitation and that those that are should be re-sited as soon as possible, recognising considerable urgency.

2009-06-02T11:04:00.003-02:00

Things that I do not understand

I leave the room for 5 minutes, and someone breaks logic

I have thought about this for several hours, and I still can't make sense of it.

We've just had a crowd of Nobel Laureates telling us all how urgent is the need to do something about climate change. And we've also just had a group of not scientists telling us that hundreds of thousands are already dying from the effects. That latter used some, umm, creative methods to reach that conclusion, for I was previously entirely unaware that earthquakes were indeed caused by climate change.
However, this leads to me to ponder a little on what Lord Stern told us. That was that we could sort this all out for the remarkably low price of 1-2% of GDP, spent year by year over the next few decades. Given the size of the UK economy this means some £14 billion to £28 billion a year. And we're also told that this amount should be used to correct the price system, so that matters currently external to the markets become internal to the pricing system. This so called Pigou taxation.
This makes sense, I have to say, as the amount of damage, by Lord Stern's figures again, done by Britain's emissions are again in this sort of range: £14 billion to £28 billion.
Now whether I actually swallow all of these numbers is a different matter, but let's take them at the logic of their proponents. We know the problem, we know how to solve it, we know how much the problem costs and we know how much the solution costs. Excellent.
But, but....well, how much are we already paying in such green taxes? That depends a little on exactly how you want to calculate what is a green tax but adding up landfill tax, air passenger duty, the petrol tax rises from the fuel duty escalator and so on we get to a figure of....£14 billion to £28 billion again. Which means that, by the logic of the Stern Review, we've actually already solved climate change.
No, not even I think that to be actually correct, as Lord Stern himself doesn't. For he keeps telling us that we must do much more, much more quickly, in order to solve the problem, as those Nobel Laureates were also telling us last week.
Which, sadly, leaves us with one inescapable conclusion. We're not going to crack this at that low cost of 1-2% of GDP per year over the decades. It's going to be much much more expensive than that: which means we really need to reopen the calculations of whether we want to stop climate change or would prefer to adapt to it.

I am being terminally stupid, or does this make no sense whatsoever? The conclusion is not inescapable, and it's all very well raising the money thru' taxation but presumably it needs to be spent on climate change mitigation efforts to actually do something about mitigating climate change. Presumably, the money is currently spent on other things.

Have I completely missed the point? If so, could someone explain it simply and in words of one syllable in the comments?

2009-05-31T13:04:00.001-02:00

Kissinger and the Pot Thief

Testing The Register's hypothesis

I think it was in "Years of Upheaval" that Henry Kissinger compared Le Duc Tho to a thief's defense council: his client didn't steal anything, it certainly wasn't a pot, and anyway it wasn't black. This (characteristically self-serving) anecdote came to mind on reading this article in The Register.

The UK's climate act is "all but certain to fail" and alternative approaches should be considered, according to a new study. The act commits the UK to cut its CO₂ emissions by a third in just 13 years, and by 80 per cent by 2050.
Roger Pielke Jr is a professor at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences and a visiting professor at University of Oxford's Said Business School who has accepted the case for cutting carbon emissions. However, in a new journal article he says the Act is unrealistic, setting symbolic and therefore meaningless targets instead of practical policy.

Sadly, The Register doesn't link to the actual paper, which you can read here.

I'm agnostic on the Climate Change Act (I simply don't have the economic background to have an informed view; it's a wise man who knows what he doesn't know) but Roger Pielke's name seemed awfully familiar. Perhaps it was from here:

"I honestly don't know what the proper test is"

or perhaps it was here or here .

Anyhoo, I think if we are going to be advised on meeting targets, it would be better if our advisers knew how to do a hypothesis tests.

2009-05-28T20:21:00.001-02:00

They said it was "too cheap to meter"

Oh no they didn't

Inspired by this excellent post from Neurosceptic, I thought I'd use Google News Archive to investigate the widespread untruth that proponents of nuclear power claimed it would be "too cheap to meter".

Here are the time lines for searches on "nuclear power" and "nuclear power" + "too cheap to meter"

In the first we can see the peaks for the Three Mile Island (1979) and Chernobyl (1986) disasters, and a steady increase from about 1995.

In the second, we can see a peak representing Lewis Strauss speech (and the aftermath of Eisenhower's "atoms for peace" speech) in 1954, a few more references during the 50s, and then a big gap until 1975, when the porky picks up popularity, although we can't see "I told you so" spikes associated with the two nuclear disasters mentioned above. There's a caveat to this - the timeline shows hits in the 1940s, although examination shows that they are from much more recent sources referring to events in the 40s. However, I think the distribution is still interesting.

[Sadly, one of the top hits on the second search is this from "Scientific controversies: case studies in the resolution and closure of disputes in science and technology", edited by Hugo Tristram Engelhardt and Arthur L. Caplan. The depressingly familiar quote is enlivened by a bogus citation: 'In December 1953, when President Eisenhower was promoting the Atomic Energy Act in his famous "atomic power for peace" speech before the United Nations General Assembly, he made his promise of electricity so abundant it would be "too cheap to meter" '. In the internet age, you can read Eisenhower's "atoms for peace" speech here, and use control-F to verify he said no such thing. I suspect the author is confusing the Atomic Energy Acts (the original 1946 McMahon act, and its subsequent modification in 1954) with the International Atomic Energy Agency that Eisenhower's speech eventually led to]

2009-05-27T16:52:00.001-02:00

Tilting at windmills

Wind turbines: grudge match

[New and irregular readers may like to read the Heresiarch's original post and my response]

Further to our discussion about wind turbines, the Heresriach has returned to the field of battle with this post. His previous railings against the "wastefulness and illogicality of investment in wind-power" aside, he now quotes from this article in The Times.

"Europe should scrap its support for wind energy as soon as possible to focus on far more efficient emerging forms of clean power generation including solar thermal energy, one of the world’s most distinguished scientists said yesterday.
Professor Jack Steinberger, a Nobel prize-winning director of the CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva, said that wind represented an illusory technology — a cul-de-sac that would prove uneconomic and a waste of resources in the battle against climate change.
“Wind is not the future,” he told the symposium of Nobel laureates at the Royal Society. Instead, he said, technologies such as solar thermal power — for which parabolic mirrors reflect the Sun’s rays to generate heat and electricity — represent a more promising way of supplanting fossil fuels. “I am certain that the energy of the future is going to be thermal solar,” he told The Times. “There is nothing comparable. The sooner we focus on it the better.”"

It is worth examining this in detail, because it illustrates the ignorance and misinformation about energy generation in general and wind power in particular.

Although Steinberger is best known for the discovery the muon neutrino, and got his Nobel for this achievement, he has a distinguished track record in particle physics. All the more disappointing, then, for him to come out with this sort of nonsense:

He said that intermittent energy sources, such as wind, required back-up power generation, which undermined their contribution to emissions reductions. In contrast, solar thermal power could generate heat energy that could reliably generate 24-hour electricity.

[To be fair, the lack of direct quotation demonstrates that this is a journalistic precis, as I can't see someone of Steinberger's stature saying anything so moronic. I suppose we should be greatful that it isn't Vitamin C , racism or telepathy . Does funny things to people, winning the Nobel prize]

1. A note to all wind skeptics: intoning "of course, the wind doesn't blow all the time" does not make you look profound, it makes you look silly. All power stations have a less than 100% capacity load, and every informed wind advocate is well aware of it. Not also that a capacity load of 33% (for UK offshore generation) does not mean that the wind isn't blowing 67% of the time: it means the turbine isn't operating at maximum capacity, which is not the same thing.

2. Even if there is no power storage whatsoever, and the wind stopped blowing everywhere, there would still be carbon savings from using wind: back up power generation doesn't have to work all the time, so even intermittent power plants can reduce CO2 emissions (John Band made this point on the original thread)

3. These apply to solar power as well as wind: solar won't work at night, but no grown-up is going to offer that as a citisism of solar.

From the article:

"Britain has made wind energy a priority in reducing carbon emissions by 34 per cent by 2020. The Government plans to build 33 gigawatts of offshore wind power by 2020, which the professional services organisation Ernst & Young estimates will cost more than £100 billion."

The Times does not supply a citation for this statement, perhaps because to do so would show that it isn't true. You can read the Ernst and Young report ("Renewable energy country attractiveness indices", Quarter 1-2 2008) here , and I quote from page 13:

"The lions share of the 2020 of 20% of energy generated from renewables target will have to be generated from wind, anticipated to be around 33GW of additional capacity. The plans will see an additional 4,000 onshore and 3,000 offshore wind turbines. It is expected the plans will cost the country around GB£100bn"

Right, so not all offshore and not more than £100 billion - isn't the Old Media fantastic?

However, now we have the accurate figure we can calculate the cost/GW of the plants. Wind power offers an additional 33GW at £100billion pounds (including the cost of connection to the grid): £3 billion /GW. The 3-3.5GW solar thermal project, claims Steinberger, will cost £20 billion (not including connection to or construction of a continent spanning undersea grid from North Africa to the UK): £5.7-6.7 billion /GW. The solar thermal plan costs about twice as much per GW.

As the Heresiarch is concerned about the amount of land covered by wind turbines, it seems odd he doesn't calculate the area covered by this proposed solution: let's have a quick go. Suppose the energy density that can be delivered by solar concentrators is 15 Wm-2, and the putative solar power station is to deliver 3GW. This implies it will cover an area of 200km2 ! To replace the 33GW from wind power requires a solar farm of 2200 km2 - rather bigger than London . That's quite a large power station to build in someone else's country, and I am unpersuaded that the solar concentrator farm is any more aesthetically appealing than a wind farm. In addition, wind farms don't occupy the entire area around them, which can be used for agriculture or tourism.

Now, this seems I'm a bit down on desert based solar - this is far from the case. David MacKay, who has thought about energy a lot longer and harder than I have, envisages 50 GW from solar in deserts in Plans N, L, and G (MacKay, Without Hot Air, page 208-210). Lomberg relies heavily on solar in deserts. However, there are technical challenges to exporting electricity across a continent sized distances, and you don't have to be a Little Englander to be concerned about relying on other countries for too much of our energy (problems we can see now with fossil fuels). And so we come to the Heresiarch's final argument:

"Claiming that his favoured model, solar thermal generation, was on the brink of a great advance, he said "Governments need to focus on this area right now". Continued investment in wind generation, he strongly implies, will actually harm long-term prospects for carbon-neutral power by diverting resources from where it would best be spent. Which is more or less what I said."

It's an argument I'm quite sympathetic to - although of course as a researcher, I'm all in favour of money being spent on research.

However, the flaw is that it's an argument that can be made at any time, and it is quite resilient to evidence - research always might through up something new, which always might be better than what has gone before. Any investment in alternative energy can be rejected on the grounds that spending the same amount on research will deliver a better solution at some unspecified point in the future.

As always, it's seldom an either-or choice: there is a great deal of alternative energy research, which is quite consistent with investing in wind power as well. As wind power is undoubtedly going to be part of the mix - MacKay's plans all include more than 4% wind power - it's sensible to get building now.

2009-05-25T12:14:00.001-02:00

Betz' law

The proof of the pudding

Musing on the wind turbine post below, it occured to me that the derivation of Betz' law could be made into a good class room exercise. All maths is GCSE level if you stick to graphical methods, though you can use calculus if the students have studied it to get an exact result. Some the algebra could be a bit tricky for school children - you need to use the difference of two squares twice.

Consider a wind turbine in the form of a disk, with area A. Wind traveling at a speed v1 hits the turbine, and leaves the turbine at speed v2.

Undisturbed wind flowing through the area of the turbine is 1/2 m v2. In one second, the mass of air flowing through the turbine is given by ρAv where ρ is the density of the air.

Accordingly, the power - kinetic energy per second - in the undisturbed wind is P0=1/2 ρAv3.

The wind speed through the turbine is (v1+v2)/2, the average of the the entrance and exit speeds.

The mass of air flowing in one second is ρA(v1+v2)/2

The power imparted to the turbine is the kinetic energy of the wind imparted to the wind turbine in one second, P1

The efficiency of the turbine, η, is given by the ratio of extracted power to the power in the undisturbed wind

We can use the difference of two squares [(A2 - B2) = (A+B)(A-B)] to re-write this as

We can write the efficiency as a function of the ratio R=v1/v2 :

We have two ways of proceeding: the first is to simply plot out η as a function of R, and see that the maximum occurs at just under 60% and for a ratio of about 1/3.

More rigorously, we can differentiate the efficiency with respect to R, and set the derivative equal to zero to calculate the value of R such that η is maximized.

While we could plug our a,b, and c coefficients into the quadratic formula, a more elegant approach is to factorize the quadratic by inspection to obtain:

Taking the positive root (as the negative root is unphysical), the maximum occurs when R=1/3, and the efficiency η=14/24 =0.58 (2 s.f.)

Questions:

What slightly dubious assumption has been invoked? Can you justify it?
Could you confirm this result with a dimensional analysis?
Any other suggestion in the comments.

2009-05-24T21:39:00.002-02:00

If it annoys you that much, why do you read it?

Horrified fascination

Yes, it's more scienciness from Greenpeace's "Nuclear Reaction":

"So much for nuclear’s promise of cheap electricity. Do you know they once said nuclear energy would be too cheap to be metered? Stop laughing, it’s true." - [source]

No, really, it isn't.

2009-05-23T14:28:00.005-02:00

The myth of Richard Pike

An embarrassment for both the RSC and The Register

Richard Pike, the former BP executive turned head of the Royal Society of Chemistry, has written what Andrew Orlowski in The Register describes as "a hard hitting contribution to Research Fortnight". Orlowski goes on to claim that

"Pike says the £250m tax boondoggle designed to induce us to buy electric cars would save less than 0.01 per cent of UK carbon emissions - yet represents a third of the nation's annual budget of the science and engineering funding council."

Before going on, I feel obliged to note this is an unfortunate way of phrasing this that might easily be misread. The EPSRC budget is ~£750million this year, whereas the putative electric car program the Pike and Orlowski decry costs £250 million in total over 5 years (from 2011, when the DoT expects suitable cars will be available). However, there's rather bit problem with this, specifically that the program doesn't cost £250 million and isn't there to induce us to buy electric cars.

Pike is appalled by "woolly thinking" (as am I, although by a rather different target), warning of "a potential waste of £250 million of public money to subsidise the purchase of over 50,000 vehicles."

Oh dear. With 30 seconds on Google we can locate the press release on the program here: the description is "Central to the strategy is an initiative to help put electric cars into the reach of ordinary motorists by providing help worth £2000 - £5000 towards buying the first electric and plug in hybrid cars when they hit the showrooms - which we expect from 2011 onwards." We can see where Pike gets his figure from, he's divided what he claims is the total cost (£250 million) by the upper limit per car (£5000) to obtain 50,000 subsidies.

Unfortunately for Pike's argument: "This funding is included in a £250 million scheme to deliver a green motoring transformation, part of the wider Government support to help consumers and businesses make the transition to low carbon.....The strategy also includes plans to provide £20 million for charging points and related infrastructure to help develop a network of 'electric car cities' throughout the UK and an expansion of an electric and ultra-low carbon car demonstration project on the UK's roads. This project will mean over 200 motorists [!!!] throughout the country will have the opportunity to drive a cutting-edge car and feedback the information needed to make greener motoring an everyday reality." [emphasis mine, and under the circumstances pretty important]

Clearly, this is a measure with a tiny budget, to monitor what electric car drivers use, coupled with a much more expensive -and very sensible- proposal to build infrastructure and charging points. Even this last costs only £20 million over 5 years, a tiny fraction of the DoT spend.

Right, so those figures are just Pike's fantasy, as indeed is the whole "0.01%" thing, should we be any more convinced by the eye-catching claim that the efficiency of the electric car is a "myth", as is their environmentally friendly appearance?

No, I think we should not. Pike claims that, while electric cars are 3-4 times more efficient than petrol cars, the distribution of electricity from the power plant is only 36% efficient, and claim thats "the energy advantage has effectively disappeared". O rly? Accepting arguendo the figures he offers from the academic report - of 20kWh/100km and 80kWh/100km for electric and petrol respectively, this implies that accounting for his 36% efficiency, the electric car still wins, clocking in at 56kWh/100km vs. 80kWh/100km.

What about carbon emissions? Grid electricity has a footprint of about 500 g per kWh (note we don't have to account for efficiency, as this is already built in to the carbon footprint), so 20kWh/100km implies a footprint of 100g CO2 per kilometer, comparing favourably with the UK average car 168g CO2 per kilometer (MacKay, Without Hot Air, p122, figure 20.9), unless we cherry-pick very small cars.

Note that electrification still wins, even with our present energy mix. As low carbon technologies are only going to make up a larger proportion the mix, the carbon emissions will continue to decrease. Surreally, Pike concedes that in nuclear France the carbon costs are close to zero (although a more intellectually rigorous author might have noted something about manufacture and the lithium supply).

Frankly, this is a massive FAIL for the RSC, and for the rest of us, a cautionary reminder both that an editorial in the house rag is not the same as a peer reviewed paper, and that The Register has real issues with energy policy.

2009-05-21T20:55:00.011-02:00

Hot air and wind

The importance of numeracy

I am disappointed to see the - usually interesting - Heresiarch write a profoundly mistaken and, frankly, ignorant post attacking wind power. Now, I don't like dirty hippies any more than the next reactionary, but this is daft:

Why wind? As a giant wind-farm opens in Scotland, it should be obvious that wind power is not the future of energy supply in Britain or anywhere else. Wind-turbines are expensive and inefficient, they ruin the landscape, they are noisy when they work (which isn't very often) and they kill birds. In Taiwan, noise pollution from a wind farm has been held responsible for the death of four hundred goats. The amount of electricity they generate, even now, is negligible. It is said that the vast new Eaglesham Moor plant could potentially power the whole of Glasgow - but that is only when it is operating at full capacity, which even in a country as windy as Scotland is not even half the time.

As David MacKay would say, what we need is fewer adjectives and more numbers. Let's find them:

(i) "Oh noes, teh poor birdies!" MacKay [Without Hot Air, p63-64] notes that in Denmark, where wind generates 9% [!] of the electricity, 30 thousand birds a year are killed by wind turbines - but 1,000,000 are killed by cars! In the UK, a remarkable 55 million birds are killed by cats, and a similar number by flying into windows. If you are concerned about windmills, you must be distraught about cars, cats and windows! Unless, of course, the bird loving is just window dressing.

(ii) "but the property values by which I mean the integrity of the landscape" Didcott power-station used to have an annual open day (this was something of a holiday treat). I used to love it, being in awe of such a mighty chunk of engineering - but I don't think you could call it "landscape-enhancing". Other things you couldn't call it were "cheap" or - Carnot cycles being what they are - "efficient".

(iii) "Which isn't often" We'll have a go at quantifing this in a bit, when we discuss the failings of James Lovelock.

(iv) The utterly surreal: "In Taiwan, noise pollution from a wind farm has been held responsible for the death of four hundred goats." Well, call me Dr. Picky, but I going to be politely sceptical about this remarkable claim. Martin at the Lay Scientist feels the same way, and is prepared to bet no fewer than two goats that the wind farms are innocent of the charge of goaticide.

(v) "The amount of electricity they generate, even now, is negligible." Albeit not as negligible as the amount of electricity now generated by the Heresiarch's chosen alternatives of tidal power and "tapping into the jet stream of the upper atmosphere"[sic].

(vi) A statement that speaks for itself: " Geothermal energy may be even better. This taps directly into the inexhaustible energy of the earth itself, and (technicalities aside) consists of little more than a hole in the ground. It has almost no environmental costs." I think it may be time for my long-planned "Introduction to Thermodynamics" series, which will presumably drive the remaining 3 readers of this blog. I think that's the only way I can explain all the problems with this statement, although if anyone else wants to have a go they could start with defining what we mean by hot rocks, where we can drill the hole, what the rate of thermal conduction thru' rock implies for the rate that heat can be extracted, complete with a parable about aquifiers and oil-wells to make concrete the abstract.

Poor MacKay is enlisted in support for Heresiarch's argument:

Even as the new plant opens, plans are announced to expand it still further (although it already covers 55 sq. km), while over in Shetland an even more elaborate wind-power scheme is attracting increasing opposition. A BBCreport quotes Professor David MacKay of Cambridge, who said that a "100-fold increase" in wind farms in Britain would be necessary to achieve the government target of a complete decarbonisation of our electricity supply system by 2030. The only other alternative to carbon generation he mentioned was nuclear power - itself an outdated and non-renewable technology that brings with it its own problems.

Actually, were the Heresiarch to read MacKay's excellent book Without Hot Air - which you can do for free online here - he'd find out that in ALL five scenarios that MacKay sketches out for a decarbonized Britain, wind power makes contributions from 4% (plan N, WHA pages 208-209) to 64% (plan G, WHA page 210). In the book, he discusses desert-based solar power and carbon-captured - "clean"- coal as well as nuclear.

The quotation from Lovelock is puzzling for two reasons: (i) the specific claim that turbines have an efficiency of 17%, which must be a simple misunderstanding, although there are less charitable explanations. Anyone with GCSE Maths can calculate the efficiency for a disk-like turbine as a function of wind-speed , and anyone with either a bit of calculus or EXCEL skilz can show the maximum efficiency of such a turbine is 59%. This is Betz' law, for goodness sake, it's been around for the best part of a century. Now, actual turbines will show a lower efficiency than this, being made of steel rather than algebra, but Mitsubishi quote efficiencies of 40%. Also note that the specific power of the wind increases with the cube of velocity, so you get much more available at higher windspeeds. (Nuclear advocates like Lovelock might also recall that a nuclear power station is just a kettle, albeit a nuclear powered one: it has turbines, too, to generate electricity. Any heat engine is going to be limited by some efficiency - the World Nuclear Association reckons you can get to 50% efficiency using super-critical water in the heat exchanger) (ii) I simply don't get his wider point. The idea that a turbine farm is sold as producing x MW of power, but only actually produce 0.17x MW in nonscence - everyone knows the difference between capacity (the peak power attainable by a turbine) and capacity load (the expectation value of the power, given local average wind speed) - at least, anyone offering opinions about energy policy should. Incidently, the capacity load of a windfarm in the UK of a good site is typically about 30%

(iii) Further, the idea you need to back up every MW of wind-power with fossil fuels is simply erroneous. Hydroelectric batteries, where surplus electricity is used to pump water uphill, and stored as gravitational potential energy, can and are used to even out the supply. As I say, the charitable explanation is that Lovelock - an extremely eminent man with something of a cult following - has not informed himself as well as his admirers might hope.

We finish off with a fact-free smear:

They make their supporters feel morally superior to their opponents, who can be dismissed as selfish Nimbys. The uglier the wind farms are, the more they ruin the environment, the better: for their very unattractiveness draws attention to the sacrifice that they represent. They are Gaia's temples. The clacking of their sails is like a prayer offered up to Nature to forgive our environmental sins. It's mad.

Greens may be fanatics, lunatics, anti-technology, cruel to children or bad in bed : but what has this to do with the merits and demerits of wind power? I also think persons with scientific pretentions ought to support remarkable claims - for example, that "the more [wind farms] ruin the the environment", the better Greens like them - with evidence. Also, if you're going to run with "T3h wind-farms r prayer-weel 4 Gaia worshippers" you'd be well advised not to quote so liberally from James Lovelock.

The Yorkshire Ranter has suggested the problem that macho techno types have with wind: it is "gay electricity". It isn't as hot as a decarbonised coal furnace, and it hasn't the appeal of mighty erections piercing the troposphere and riding the gulf stream like a cheap strumpet.

2009-05-21T08:45:00.002-02:00

Frequency shifting a laser pulse with an AO modulator EXTERNAL to a laser

Uninteresting to non-physicists

[This is a note to myself, because I'm bound to forget it otherwise]

Acoustic-optical (AO) modulators consist of a piezo-electric transducer - to convert an electrical signal into an acoustic wave - bonded to an optical material (like tellurium dioxide, fused silica etc) which caries the acoustic wave.

The use of an AO modulator I'm most familiar with is a controllable polarizer for optical orientation experiments. Optical orientation unpolarized light to generate spin-polarized carriers in a semiconductor (to "orient" them). Control over light polarization can be achieved with a suitable light source followed by a linear polarizer and either half-wave plate (linear pol) or a quarter wave plate (circular polarization). However, a side effect of using circularly polarized light to generate spin polarized excitons is that the electron spin couples via the hyperfine interaction to the nuclear spins, generating spin polarized nuclei. This can be a problem, as nuclear spins dephase/relax via dipole mechanisms which have much longer (relaxation T1 and coherence T2) lifetimes than electrons or holes. Carrier lifetimes in bulk III-V are usually less than 10ps compared with ~10s (!) for nuclei. This can wash out the effect you are trying to measure.

The way round this is to use an AO modulator, together with a half-wave plate, to flip the polarization very rapidly (~10kHz). This eliminates longer time effects like nuclear polarization.

The other use for AO modulators, that I've been finding out about recently, is to shift a laser pulse frequency, for example for heterodyne optical spectroscopy. The obvious way to do this would be to incorporate a modulator into the cavity and use the tunable dispersion or birefringence, perhaps together with another element to shift the wavelength of the laser. However, to do heterodyne spectroscopy, we need two (or more) coherent pulses of different frequency, so a laser pulse needs to emerge from the cavity unmolested, and then a beamsplitter(s) used to generate appropriate pulses. A pulse is then incident on an AO modulator, which is being modulated in the ultrasound region. This generates a series of compressions and rarefractions in the optical material, in effect a transient diffraction grating propagating thru' the modulator. The laser beam is refracted thru' the modulator, and deflected at some angle as expected from the diffraction grating. However, as the diffraction grating is propagating, it induces a Doppler shift in the frequency of the light (exactly as a mirror that was moving at a velocity that light was reflected off would, or as a car in a radar speeded trap does) shifting the light frequency to a higher (or lower) wavelength. You then have two coherent pulses as a different wavelengths! Clever, eh?

2009-05-19T10:17:00.003-02:00

Hiding in plain cite

"Nuclear Reaction": the gift that keeps on giving

The glorious thing about the internets is that you can follow up citations, and find out what someone isn't telling you. For example, take this post from Nuclear Reaction, which quotes a popular article in EnergyBiz by Dr Benjamin Sovacool.

One recent study published in the May issue of Energy Policy looked at major energy accidents from 1907 to 2007. The major accidents were defined as incidents that resulted in either death or more than $50,000 of property damage. The study identified 279 incidents totaling $41 billion in damages and 182,156 fatalities, with the number of accidents peaking in the decade between 1978 and 1987, which had more than 90 accidents. In terms of cost, nuclear plants ranked first with regard to their economic damage, accounting for damages equivalent to $16.6 billion, or 41 percent of all damages during the past century.
Contrary to the industry´s claim that nuclear facilities are safe, 63 major accidents have occurred at nuclear power plants. Twenty-nine accidents have occurred since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, and 71 percent of all nuclear accidents, that is, 45 out of 63, occurred in the United States, refuting the notion that severe accidents cannot happen within the country or that they have not happened since Chernobyl.
Using extremely conservative estimates, nuclear power accidents have also killed 4,100 people. The nuclear power accidents have involved meltdowns, explosions, fires, and loss of coolant, and have occurred during both normal operation and extreme, emergency conditions such as droughts and earthquakes.

Sounds scary. How odd that Greenpeace forgot to include the previous paragraph:

While responsible for less than 1 percent of total energy accidents, hydroelectric facilities claimed 94 percent of reported fatalities. looking at the gathered data, the total results on fatalities are highly dominated by one accident in which the shimantan dam failed in 1975 and 171,000 people perished.

Personally, I would have also noted that the number of people killed in coal mining accidents in China alone in 2005 was 5986, in excess of that for nuclear power in the entire period studied, in order to provide some context for the figure.

Unfortunately, Dr. Sovacool (or his editor) neglects to give the full citation, or even mention the paper is by him, but for the partial citation in the text you can deduce that it is Sovacool, "The costs of failure: a preliminary assessment of major energy accidents, 1907-2007", Energy Policy, Volume 36, Issue 5, p1802-1820 (2008) and is available here thru' Science Direct.

2009-05-19T09:08:00.003-02:00

Two more for the list

One from the US, one from the UK:

Vaccination (Not using) - People who do not have their children vaccinated should be prosecuted for domestic terrorism and child abuse. - [source]

SATs (UK) - The union's outgoing president, Bill Greenshields, said he was confident a boycott would be successful."We will end this child abuse," he said. - [source]

Both have been added to "In the future, everything will be child abuse for 15 minutes".

2009-05-17T14:45:00.002-02:00

More "burning holes with light" stuff
How I love it

The Amateur Transplants destroy an Easter egg by accident. I don't think there's any lensing going on - the plastic is flat - but the point closest to the light presents a smaller surface area to the sun, and therefore recieves a higher power/ unit area. [This is the same reason that you want to locate solar cells as close to the equator as possible]. The burn through looks cool, tho'.

[via Dr. Crippen]

2009-05-13T22:12:00.004-02:00

No, they did not.

Myths about nukes

An otherwise interesting paper is marred by this:

"Since then, Americans have dreamed of exotic nuclear
possibilities. Early advocates promised a future of electricity too
cheap to meter, an age of peace and plenty without high prices
and shortages where atomic energy provided the power needed to
desalinate water for the thirsty, irrigate deserts for the hungry,
and fuel interstellar travel deep into outer space.‘‘carbon-free electricity source’’ (1998). Patrick Moore, co-founder
of Greenpeace, has publicly stated that ‘‘nuclear energy is the only
non-greenhouse gas emitting energy source that can effectively
replace fossil fuels and satisfy global demand’’ (Environmental
News Service, 2005). The nuclear power company Areva (2007) "

From Sovacool, Energy Policy 36 (2008) 2940-2953, emphasis mine

I appreciate it would be jolly convenient for anti-nuclear campaigners if the sinister cigarette smoking nuke-men in rakish hats had let the politicians astray with a lot of fast talk about ~~monorails~~ energy which was "too cheap to meter", but -alas - it is Not True.

2009-05-11T16:47:00.001-02:00

The Daily Mash
On the expenses scandal

Emma Bradford, from Harrow, said: "I'd like to designate him as as my 'second MP', just for a couple of weeks, so that I can claim twelve grand to have him refurbished and then sell him to some really nasty Russian pimps."

Roy Hobbs, from Oldham, said: "I'd like to buy one of those four-slot Dualit toasters from John Lewis and spank him across the face with it so hard that I break both my wrists."

And Tom Logan, from Salford, added: "If you know that it's wrong now, then surely you knew it was wrong when you were spending my money doing up houses you bought with my money and then dodging capital gains tax even though you'd still have made a tidy profit and would, at least, have been able to return some of my money. You nauseatingly rancid lump of pox-ridden, cock-sucking pigshit." - [source]

2009-05-09T18:56:00.006-02:00

Less laughing and more thinking

Greenpeace FAIL

I would quite like to be a Green, but this sort of rampant stupidity is quite off putting:

Yesterday we brought you the fantastical tale of the Brazilian government announcing their ambition to build 50 new nuclear reactors by 2050. No sooner had the disbelieving laughter died down here at Nuclear Reaction, along came the World Nuclear Association (WNA) with an amazing fantasy of its own. Wait until you see this – it’s amazing. There are comedians who would kill for this ability to make people laugh…
In its Nuclear Century Outlook report, the WNA has an upper ‘outlook projection’ of 11,000 new nuclear reactors being built by the end of the century.
Read that again. The WNA can envisage a scenario in which 11,000 nuclear reactors will be built in the next 92 years.
That means starting to build this October 120 reactors a year…
…which is 10 reactors every month…
…which is one reactor every three days.

I suppose that's why washing lines are an impossible technology: after all, if a sweater takes two hours to dry, all my laundry will take weeks...

2009-05-02T07:05:00.002-02:00

No-one is righteous

Although plenty are self-righteous

6 in 10. 6 in 10.

There is a reason Paul teaches that those who say "Do evil, that good may come of it" are condemned (Romans 3:8).

No-one ever does evil for its own sake. The cackling Bond villain lives only in films. In the 80s, Private Eye did a spoof called "The Secret Diary of Colonel Gaddaffi", which consisted of "Monday: God up, GOD guided my breakfast, did something diabolical, went to bed. Tuesday: Got up. GOD guided my breakfast, did something diabolical..." and so on through out the week. All men in all places in all times who have committed abominable acts of wickedness didn't do it to laugh manically. They "pursue the good in a disordered way": they will the ends and ignore the means. "I was after a good end" and "I was following orders" didn't work at Nuremberg and will not work here.

6 in 10. The symbol of our faith is a torture device. How can people hear of a man half-drowned or another locked in a box with insects and think "Yes. Of this I approve. Now, I must hurry to Bible study".

[Statistic via Ben Goldacre]

2009-04-30T14:07:00.003-02:00

Viral marketing

Innovative

Spotted in the window of my local news-agent.

2009-04-24T18:28:00.002-02:00

Blinded by the Sun

Much better than the Mail

Two good bits of "setting fire to stuff with light and laughing manically" news:

[1] Meat cards make business cards from MEAT and LASERS.

[2] Google engineer Alan Davidson has got a huge Fresnel lens and has used it to melt stuff. All great fun. If they want to get more evenly done bacon, I'd get a copper heatsink and cook the bacon on that.

2009-04-21T17:05:00.004-02:00

And the prize for chutzpah goes to...

"Imperial Matters", the Imperial College alumni mag which a mate has just shown me. From

the Winter Edition:

New Identity for Imperial College Business School

In August 2008, the Business School at Imperial College London changed its name from Tanaka Business School to Imperial College Business School. The change was made to enphasise that the School is an integral part of the College by incorporating the Imperial College name directly into its title.
The renaming came after research suggested that its previous name was not strongly associated with Imperial College London. [Imperial Matters, Winter 08-09, 33, p.4]

I am little surprised "research" didn't show this, instead. Good save, PR guys!

2009-04-21T16:17:00.002-02:00

Fantastic

It's coming to get you

Via Chris Applegate, this is the Daily Mail's artistic impression of a solar storm:

We should also brace ourselves for an attack, not only of The Red Sun Of Death, but also of arguments that look like this:

It's the sun wot dun it! This means that we can keep on releasing CO_2 without any consequences whatsoever. Silly warmenists - they would have got away with it if it hadn't been for we meddling bloggers. Isn't it remarkable how someone with an O Level physics can totally pwn an entire scientific community?

Thank GOD I'm not a climate scientist - there no well-funded lobby, and no well-meaning half-wits, trying to pretend that gallium arsenide is a con to raise funding and that lasers are a liberal myth.

2009-04-13T12:32:00.002-02:00

Then she runneth...

¹The first day of the week cometh Mary Magdalene early, when it was yet dark, unto the sepulchre, and seeth the stone taken away from the sepulchre.

²Then she runneth, and cometh to Simon Peter, and to the other disciple, whom Jesus loved, and saith unto them, They have taken away the LORD out of the sepulchre, and we know not where they have laid him.

³Peter therefore went forth, and that other disciple, and came to the sepulchre.

⁴So they ran both together: and the other disciple did outrun Peter, and came first to the sepulchre.

⁵And he stooping down, and looking in, saw the linen clothes lying; yet went he not in.

⁶Then cometh Simon Peter following him, and went into the sepulchre, and seeth the linen clothes lie,

⁷And the napkin, that was about his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself.

⁸Then went in also that other disciple, which came first to the sepulchre, and he saw, and believed.

⁹For as yet they knew not the scripture, that he must rise again from the dead.

John 20:1-9

2009-04-11T16:51:00.002-02:00

Meh

Oh, Mr. Moffat...

Well, it was fun enough, I suppose, in its own way, but

1) "Oh, you are so kidding me" is EVERY BIT as irritating as "Oh, you have got to be kidding me"

2) Enough with the sodding applause, already. Really, this ruined the Christmas episode, and is increadibly self-indulgent and wanky.

3) Why did someone think that Malcolm was a good idea?

2009-04-10T17:31:00.003-02:00

"But why do you call it good Friday?"

A difficult question

But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. Isaiah 53:5

2009-03-21T16:07:00.003-02:00

An open letter to Jacqui Smith MP

From "a quondam lover of England"

From the Japan Times :

When recently I fell in love for the first time (at 40-something) — to an Englishman — I felt happiness overflowing. Career and caring for my elderly parents mean I cannot consider leaving Japan, but at least I would be able to get married in beautiful England.

Think again. Unromantic apparatchiks have taken over the U.K. To get married in England, even to an Englishman with his own property in England, I need a visa. (My husband-to-be comes from generations of English and Irish stock — and his grandmother was a Claypole, archetypically English, from the same family tree as Oliver Cromwell.)
I can visit the U.K. freely for business or pleasure for six months, but for a fleeting visit to get married I need a visa. We can get married in Japan, the U.S., Canada, France or Italy without a visa between us, so why is the U.K. different? Where is the reciprocity so beloved of diplomats?
My next surprise was that the U.K. no longer has visa officials in Japan whom I could approach. Visa applications have been outsourced to an Indian company owned by a Swiss travel concern, which then sends the form and passport to Manila for processing.
Was Japan consulted? How would Britons react if visas for Japan were handled in Russia or Mongolia?
First I had to fill in an online application. After standard information about age, address, marital status, etc., I had to supply my father's and mother's names, their dates and places of birth, whether I had a criminal record, had been deported from any country, or had been a terrorist or involved in war crimes or genocide.

Read the whole thing here.

2009-03-15T19:15:00.002-02:00

Words that do not inspire confidence

An occasional series

The laser – dubbed a weapon of mosquito destruction (WMD) – has been designed with the help of Lowell Wood, one of the astrophysicists who worked on the original Star Wars plan to shield America from nuclear attack.

[source, link via Liberal Conspiracy]

2009-03-12T17:11:00.003-02:00

Fusion Confusion

Extrapolation saves the nation

Hello, Google Groups uk.railway - thank you for reading this post about fusion, I hope that you enjoyed it. I'd like to pick up on a couple of responses:

A. I became a physicist for the money, the women, and the fast cars[1]. However, I think that there are plenty of us on RA salaries who would be quite surprised by:

"Meanwhile, gullible politicians will fork out more tens of billions of
pounds for the highly paid scientists who promise much but never deliver
anything except a greater number of ever-larger invoices. "

The comments section is available for those who wish to name all these "gullible politicians" who dish out largess - I want my share. Mr. Poulson is challenged by Recliner, and subsequently retreats from the claim:

"Perhaps it should be "overpaid" in view of their [lack of] results "

Those work-shy physicists, eh? They should get a job and go to college.

B. As I stated in the post,

"I don't hold a brief for fusion, but I think the assumption - that fusion is a fantasy and that the plasma jockeys are spending their grant money on slow horses and fast women - should probably re-examined."

I was merely comparing progress in the semiconductor industry - which no-one attacks - and the progress to date of fusion. The graph does not claim that "a commercial plant would have worked by 2005 ". It shows the rate of increase in the "triple product" - a figure of merit associated with nuclear fusion. Even were this achieved, there would still be issues with removing the products of fusion and the energy produced from the reaction.

C. As Jeremy Double notes, the gap between the discovery of nuclear fission and working civilian reactors was less than 30 years (Rutherford was sceptical about the possibility of nuclear power to his end...). The claim that it will take hundreds of year to commercialize to fusion seems to me to involve a strong assumption.

D. Does anyone have a source for the claim that fusion is 15/30/50 years away? It doesn't sound like something a scientist - however overpaid - would say. Is it just one self-publicist mouthing off? An over-zealous PR department? A campaign for funding? Or is it a media myth like "scientists in the 70s predicted a global ice age" or "nuclear industry baddies claimed they could produce electricity too cheap to meter"?

If it is one of the latter, let's kill it off now.

[1] I was disappointed.

2009-03-10T20:27:00.003-02:00

Quote of the day

Epitaph

It’s becoming apparent that there’s a divide between people who are quantitatively minded, and people who aren’t. I don’t think people in the latter category can understand quite how viscerally people in the former category react against the misuse of numbers.
Nobody likes being bullshitted. I think that’s universal. However, not everyone has a feeling for whether or not a numerical statement is bullshit. The numbers quoted by Amnesty are bullshit, that’s become quite clear. The difference is between those who think that the qualitative argument - that domestic violence is a big problem that particularly affect women - is all that matters, and those who think that the accuracy of the quantitative description of that problem also matters.
I can’t stay on the fence here. Quantitative accuracy matters. The modern world has been constructed by people who cared about the value of quantitative accuracy, from antibiotics to the contraceptive pill to the internet. If you take advantage of these things, you have no place bashing people who are obsessive about quantitative accuracy: your way of life depends on them.
And let’s be quite clear: when people who care about quantitative accuracy criticise your figures, it’s not because they oppose your political positon. It’s not because they’re your enemy. It’s because you’ve got your numbers wrong. Quantitvely-minded people care about this in the abstract, regardless of the political context. In doing so, they are upholding an important value that transcends politics. Truth matters, and nobody should be criticised for upholding that value. - [source]

That's the science writer Iain Coleman, who elegantly summarizes the divide over Amnesty International's problematic statistic.

2009-03-09T17:34:00.002-02:00

Thought experiment

But no entanglement

Pretend you've never heard of Hardy's paradox. Would this article make any sense at all?

The comments on the article are shear joy, too.

[via John Derbyshire]

2009-03-07T20:29:00.003-02:00

A disturbing thought

Which we shall not ponder too closely

I have known more people whose lives have been ruined by getting a Ph.D. in physics than by drugs.

[source]

2009-03-02T18:20:00.003-02:00

Myspace Kills

Will no-one think of the children?

[Following the Susan Greenfield's "rather indulgent" claims regarding social media, a guest post from my mate Ice-G]

A magnificent article from The Times :

"Social networking sites can provide a "constant reassurance – that you are listened to, recognised, and important". Greenfield continued. This was coupled with a distancing from the stress of face-to-face, real-life conversation, which were "far more perilous … occur in real time, with no opportunity to think up clever or witty responses" and "require a sensitivity to voice tone, body language and perhaps even to pheromones, those sneaky molecules that we release and which others smell subconsciously".

With only a few minor modifications it may be improved:

The Guardian can provide a "constant reassurance to academics – that they are listened to, recognised, and important". Greenfield continued. This is coupled with a distancing from the stress of the peer review process and real discourse with experts, which are "far more perilous as ones views may actually be challenged." Furthermore peer refereed publications "require a real sensitivity to evidence, a body of theory and most worryingly can sense bullshit, those sneaky molecules that I release and which others smell subconsciously".

Ice-G

2009-02-22T19:28:00.004-02:00

Fusion vs. Moore's law

The victor may surprise you

It is a commonplace that "fusion is the power source of the future, and always will be". It's fashionable to knock fusion, so it's time to wheel out a graph that you seldom see:

[This version is nicked from here, but anyone acquainted with plasma physicists has probably had it stuffed down their throat]

The "triple product" - of the temperature, the energy density, and the time for which they are achieved - has doubled every 1.8 years. The equivalent in the semicon industry - transistors per unit area - is shown for comparison.

Now, as a condensed matter/lasers bloke, I don't hold a brief for fusion, but I think the assumption - that fusion is a fantasy and that the plasma jockeys are spending their grant money on slow horses and fast women - should probably re-examined.

2009-02-21T20:32:00.003-02:00

Now, a proper conservative film

...is called "Confessions of a shopaholic"

The excellent LemmusLemmus has pointed out that a film being stupid need not preclude it being conservative. I quite agree. [He also takes apart the rest of that list, in a post that I highly recommend. When I am in a more coherent mood, I will write a piece discussing what happened to the relationship between the right and the military]

But until then, you should go and see "Confessions of a shopaholic". It is far better than its title would suggest, and IMHO has a far stronger claim to being on the conservative film list than "Red Dawn".

2009-02-17T21:51:00.002-02:00

"Red Dawn" is not a conservative film

It is a stupid film

It is said:

Red Dawn (1984): From the safe, familiar environment of a classroom, we watch countless parachutes drop from the sky and into the heart of America. Oh, no: invading Commies! Laugh if you want — many do — but Red Dawn has survived countless more acclaimed films because Father Time has always been our most reliable film critic. The essence of timelessness is more than beauty. It’s also truth, and the truth that America is a place and an idea worth fighting and dying for will not be denied, not under a pile of left-wing critiques or even Red Dawn’s own melodramatic flaws. Released at the midpoint of Reagan’s presidential showdown with the Soviet Union, this story of what was at stake in the Cold War endures.

Sed contra:

The opening of this film is breathtaking. I was literally left gasping for breath in amazement. I can't think of any other film that manages to cram as much military silliness into three minutes.
Your peaceful, remote American town is suddenly invaded by Soviet paratroopers. Why? Well, one might guess, because there's a war on. And that means if you see something rolling toward you, it's probably not the Welcome Wagon. So what do you do? Well, I didn't go to West Point, but my guess is the first few guys to land shed their chutes and set up a defensive perimeter for the rest of the troops.
Evidently Soviet doctrine was that as soon as you land, you run into the nearest town and start randomly shooting everything up. Because, even while chutes are still descending, there are Russkis in town doing just that. Taking out vital installations like, oh, a high school classroom and then, for good measure, firing a rocket propelled grenade down a hallway to take out what appears to be a blank, wood paneled wall. I could see if it was the school's trophy case or a bank of gym lockers or something, but a blank wall? Wait till they get the bill for the woodwork! That will teach the capitalist oppressors to mess with the glorious workers' paradise! Also, they blew up a school bus.
And why do you send in paratroopers? In the vast majority of real airborne invasions, the intent was to seize an airfield so follow-on troops and supplies could land, or capture a bridge to deny it to the enemy or prevent them from destroying it. So wouldn't it be nice to have at least some vague indication this town had military significance? Like a stream for a bridge to cross, or an airfield capable of handling more than a crop duster? But there has never been an airborne operation in history where the paratroopers dropped in just to seize a location just for the sake of seizing it. And who drops just a company of soldiers (which is about all we see dropping)? There have been small airborne operations where the force was small for secrecy. But that sort of went iz okna (out the window) when they jumped in broad daylight on the outskirts of town and started shooting.

If, for example, one were to define to Conservatism as a complete ignorance of military matters coupled with a tremendous enthusiasm for conducting them - and after the last 8 years, I can see why people might think that - then I suppose it is a conservative film.

How terribly sad.

2009-02-14T21:15:00.001-02:00

Daleks attack Balliol

Under the cover of snow

Chris Brooke has the scoop

2009-02-07T16:24:00.004-02:00

More MMR

The blogs swarm

The complete transcript is now available - Martin at the Lay Scientist has fisked part of it and linked to the rest. There's been plenty of coverage on the blogs - JDC of jdc325 has been all over this, as have the lads at Holfordwatch and Dr. T*.

Dr. Goldacre has had an off-the-record chat with LBC - but no joy.

I echo what I said in my previous post - polite emails to the advertisers are the order of the day.

****

UPDATE: Jon at Holfordwatch has been kind enough to share his collection of links and comments on the subject:

Dr Crippen of NHS BlogDoc: Jeni Barnett and LBC start the clean-up operation

Frank Swain of Science Punk: LBC sic lawyers on Ben Goldacre over criticism of MMR show

SJ Cockell of Fuzzier Logic: MMR scaremongerer sicks the legal dogs on Ben Goldacre

Podblack of Podblack Cat: Ben Goldacre - Will Not, Should Not, Be Silenced On Jeni Barnett.

jdc of jdc325: MMR Scaremongering From Jeni Barnett: LBC Use Legal Chill Tactics. Ugh.

Political Scientist: URGENT: The Joy of Law

Martin of The Lay Scientist: Jeni Barnett on MMR - The Complete Show.

Jason Brown of A Drunken Madman: More medical mendacity.

ES Armstrong of Scattergum: Jeni Barnett is an idiot.

Dr*T of Thinking is Dangerous: Is there a proper media lawyer in the house? Your country needs YOU.

Teek of consider, evaluate, act: Goldacre threatened with legal action over criticism of anti-MMR radio broadcast - UPDATED

Common Sense has updated the Measles graph for England and Wales.

Dr Rachie of The Sceptics' Book: What are LBC and Jeni Barnett afraid of?

Press Gazette: LBC in legal warning to Ben Goldacre over MMR blog post

Anthony Cox of Black Triangle: MMR and legal threats and The Today Programme's irresponsible MMR interview

Quackometer: Jeni Barnett and Irresponsible Broadcasting

MacSpider of Spider Comment: Jeni Barnett, LBC, stupidity and threats

Londonist: MMR, For Some Reason, Still Controversial

Michael Grayer of Non-Toxic: Many Many Rants… and not much evidence.

Julie Oakley of Julie's Pictures: Ben Goldacre – my hero! - an excellent outline drawing.

Cory Doctorow: SCIENTIST WHO CRITICISED DJ FOR VACCINATION SCARE TALK GETS COPYRIGHT THREAT and Boing Boing: Scientist who criticised DJ on LBC radio for vaccination scare talk get copyright threat

Tweet from Phil Plait.

On Medica mentions Ben Goldacre and Jeni Barnett: Highest number of measles cases in 2008

Tony Hatfield of Retired Ramblings: Ben Goldacre,Jeni Barnett, MMR and LBC's Heavy Legal Hand..!

Adam Bowie of The Ballad of Adam Bowie: Ben Goldacre and LBC

Media Watch: Bad Science v. Bad Lawyers

DavBlog: The "Controversy" That Won't Die

The Plummet Onions: Extremely bad science

Plashing Vole: parataxis: Jeni Barnett is an ill-informed loon and a danger to the public

No Rock and Roll Fun: Global radio menaces Ben Goldacre

Jacob Aron of Just A Theory: Ben Goldacre vs. Jeni Barnett: legal troubles over MMR scaremongering

Matt Wardman of The Wardman Wire: Ben Goldacre of Bad Science Threatened by Lawyers for LBC and Jeni Barnett

Judith Townsend of Journalism.co.uk: Goldacre on the 'intellectual property absolutists' - LBC's legal warning

Tom Reynolds of Random Acts of Reality: Bad Lawyering

PZ Myers of Pharyngula: Ben Goldacre and Jeni Barnett on LBC Radio

Bigger Pills: KO'd with a triple jab

Random Dumber Generator: Radio Station Fights Criticism With Copyright Claim

Orac: Help Ben Goldacre out...he's being sued again (We hope not, it depends on the nuance behind a takedown letter with "reserved rights".)

Phil Plait at Discover: UK in trouble? Measles, antivax garbage on the rise

Streisand is calling department at TechDirt: Radio Station Uses Copyright Claim To Try To Silence Bad Science Critic; Guess What Happens?

Nice shout-out by Greg of Lstrblg: The price we pay for the anti-vac movement

Miss Prism of a Somewhat Old But Capacious Handbag: Today's irresponsible tripe courtesy of Jeni Barnett

Texturbation has some strong views

Gareth Klose has some thoughtful questions: Is scientific tear-down fair use?

Electric Halibut wants to know: isn't MMR scaremongering all a bit 2007? Quite.

Matt Dalby of Santiago's Dead Wasp: legal bullying of bad science blog

Neil D of Harry's Place: Ben Goldacre receives legal warning

Witch Doctor asks: Jeni Who?

Paul Flynn asks: Spot the Ignoramus?

Bad Science Meets Bad Broadcasting

Solveda at Musings of a Phenomenologist: When MMR attacks (or LBC and Jeni Barnett, what were you thinking?)

The Skeptic's Field Guide: Help Ben Goldacre Beat Off This Artifice

Martial Arts Planet Forum: MMR, Jeni Barnett and Bad Science

Jon Bounds of The Bounder: Bad Science Needs Help or At Least Link Love

Verbal Gas Pedal of A Much More Exotic: The dangerous ignorance of Jeni Barnett harms children

Gary Marshall of Big Mouth Strikes Again: BadScience.net in MMR quack attack

Porcospino: Talk radio is bad for your health

The Jobbing Doctor: The Ben Goldacre Fan Club

Sceptics' Book reproduces a comment left by Ben Goldacre on Jeni Barnett's blog: What are LBC Radio and Jeni Barnett Afraid Of? and Damage Control for LBC's Jeni Barnett's MMR Rant Backfires Globally and on a Massive Scale

Infectious Diseases Dr Verity of Verity at Work: Alarm Bells, Lassa, Snow and the End of the MMR Scare

Quercus: MMR: As the actress said to the doctor...

Law Librarians mentions the kerfuffle: While I'm Here

Chris Ward of Terroir: Jeni Barnett Is An Idiot

Karl Haro von Mogel of The Inoculated Mind: Go Download This

Dr Grumble reveals why he will not agree to record an item for LBC radio again: LBC sharks

Daniel Onions of Phoebus Gins (what is not to love about those names) wonders if LBC are trying to deliberately stir this up: Jeni Barnett and Bad Science

Two Nil Blank Blank 20__ swears to Beelzebub that this kerfuffle has become London's Biggest Conversation

Mick of Bright Reason warns that you may lose IQ points if you choose to listen to the notorious MMR segment: Badscience, Jeni Barnett woo-woo and the Streisand Effect

John Connell of John Connell - The Blog: Send in the lawyers. John has listened to the broadcast. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he reports:

the call from the 'vicious nurse' was, in fact, a call from a rightfully angry health professional who had obviously had enough of listening to the incoherent babbling of Barnett and her self-evident ignorance of the subject upon which she had chosen to pontificate. The nurse in question was far from vicious - she simply put Barnett right with a few salient facts.

Quite.

Fish n Chimps of CMM News: Shock as Z-list Celeb Talks Out of Wrong Orifice

On the grounds that LBC is a commercial radio station that depends on advertising revenues, and on the even more tenuous grounds of this blog being about media monitoring, I present an example of a radio presenter firing off a rant that can physically harm or even kill children...
There's a strange wind blowing through British celeb media at the moment, with lynch mobs after Jonathan Ross, Russell Brand, Carol Thatcher and Jeremy Clarkson for referring or talking to people in an insulting manner. What Barnett has said is far, far worse because of its potential to encourage gullible or ill-informed parents to make a decision that they may well regret later.

Forgive the extended quotation but this is a very interesting take on current events in media-celeb land.

Jonathan of No Sleep 'Til Brooklands: Jeni Barnett and MMR. Jonathan is bemused at the cavalier sneering way in which Jeni dismisses Yasmin's recommendation that if she were looking for information about vaccination on the internet, then she might consult a reliable source such as the Department of Health rather than sources of error. Apparently, "The Dept. of Health frightens people".

Yeah, you don't wanna be running into the Department of Health down a dark alley. That pretty much sums up the standard of evidence Barnett is working from; throughout the whole show she relies on anecdotes, a ludicrously fuzzy understanding of science, a breathtaking array of logical fallacies and a lot of vague suspicions about the motives of people promoting MMR (a level of skepticism she apparently doesn't have towards, say, homeopaths who call in to deride vaccines despite making their living out of selling the alternative)

Cubik's Rube unusually has: A blog post on a Friday. He notes that even after she has realised that she should have been better prepared:

Jeni hasn't given up her impassioned defence of emotion and instinct over information and understanding.

Masks of Eris is finding that: World Sucks.

In UK, Ben Goldacre, a nice and sensible person, is again bothered by woo-woo people of unspeakable acephaliousness — and since they have no facts, and no talent for handling them even if they did, they use lawyers.

Professor David Colquhoun of dcscience: Jeni Barnett and LBC: dangers to public health. Like many others, Prof Colquhoun disagrees with Jeni's characterisation of her exchange with Yasmin as 'vicious':

The opinionated and ill-informed actress turned talk show host, Jeni Barnett, spent an hour or so endangering your children (and hers) with what most surely be one of the worst ever accounts of measles vaccination...

She was abominably rude to a well-informed nurse who phoned in to try to inject some sense into the conversation...

When will people learn that lawyers are not the proper way to settle matters of truth and falsehood.

As ever, vigorous sentiments, well-expressed.

Commonplace Book offers a lively and a propos quotation from Tim Minchin: Jeni Thick-ett.

In the current hysterical climate, where a comedian can be banned from the airwaves for three months for leaving crude answerphone messages to the grandfather of one of his conquests, or the daughter of an ex-Prime Minister can be sacked on the spot for a stupid comment made, off air, to a colleague, I am surprised that Barnett hasn't come in for more stick...

After reading [the transcripts], I was tempted to quote some [lines from Tim Minchin's fabulous Storm], specifically the lines:
Keeps firing off clichés with startling precision
Like a sniper using bollocks for ammunition

John at Sore Eyes has some reservations about the size of the chunk that Ben excerpted but fully agrees that LBC is being disproportionately heavy-handed: LBC are bullies, pass it on

Eastwood DC of Dread Tomato Addiction (you may want to read Mark Clifton's 1958 essay if you would like to understand the name) suggests: The first thing we do is kill all the lawyers

Skepacabra notes the latest heavy-handed legal reprimand: Ben Goldacre is Being...

Andres Guadamuz of Techno Llama offers a thoughtful and interesting legal opinion that is well-worth reading in full: Bad Science meets bad copyright.

Beyond the strict legalities of the case, one has to feel that Bad Science has done nothing ethically wrong, on the contrary, the reproduction of the clip serves the public interest. Those who espouse the blatantly damaging view that MMR should be trashed, and worse, use their public standing to further such myths, should be held accountable. It is typical of those with indefensible positions to use, misuse and abuse copyright law in order to stifle debate (Scientology anyone?) Copyright law serves a clear purpose to society, but when it is used to censor and remove contrary opinions then the public interest should prevail.

Gimpy has his own opinions on where some of the blame for Jeni Barnett's remarkable antivax rhetoric comes from: Jeni Barnett's MMR scaremongering - the role of homeopathy.

I will focus on a particular vice of mine. Homeopathy. While bloggers and others are justifiably getting angry at Jeni Barnett and the media over this issue I think it is important to look at professions that feed and grow strong on such public emanations of ignorance and doubt...

Barnett may believe she is just sharing her opinions with her listeners and giving a forum for a spectrum of views but she fails to realise or fails to care that the mistrust and disinformation broadcast across the radio waves by LBC is being absorbed by homeopaths, packaged into a bitter narrative of fear and mistrust of science based medicine, and sweetened with a sympathetic ear and a sugar pill. Homeopaths view such voices in the media as reinforcing their beliefs and giving them more confidence in their practices.

Anthony Cox of Black Triangle has done some follow-up: Transcripts of Jeni Barnett on MMR on LBC Radio and he tells us that the rumours of a Conspiracy? have already started.

Anti-vaccinators have exploited the internet for years. Websites, blogs, and forums are widely used by activists to promote their wrong-headed cause. However, when the pro-science pro-vaccine lobby use similar methods a common accusation is leveled at them. Here it is posted at JABS, the UK's leading anti-vaccine website.
There is no way all of this could have happened so quickly without Pharma backing.

Demotivated posters now offer a little something in the style of despair.com: Jeni Barnett and Measles Was Never That Bad Anyway. A rather sadder version of what is fast becoming the Jeni Barnett: Measles was never that bad anyway meme.

David of Cloud Soup ponders on a peculiarly british myth of MMR and autism: Jeni Barnett, MMR and Bad Science

Martin Stabe makes a glancing reference to the kerfuffle and states that it is to Jeni Barnett's credit that she defended herself and is allowing comments that disagree with her: Jeni Barnett: MMR and Me

Electric Halibut has now perused various transcripts of the infamous Jeni Barnett segment and come to the conclusion: there's a fine line between "finely tuned animal" and "weird"

Dr Crippen of NHS BlogDoc implores parents to get their children immunised: Jeni Barnett, MMR, Measles and Bad Science. Will she accept the challenge?

Chris Gerhard of The Dot in ...---... muses:You can't put it back in the box.

It seems the clever Lawyers at LBC have not really paid attention to how the web works. Specifically "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.". This post is part of that routing.

JHQ of Letting Off Steam has put up a response to the transcription of Jeni Barnett's phone exchange with Yasmin: Jeni Barnett, Antivaxxer.

Dr Petra has produced a very thoughtful piece that ranges across the issues of professionals working with people in media to explain their work and the actual dynamics of some of the exchanges in Jeni Barnett's LBC Radio MMR segment: Ever wondered why health professionals don't want to work with the media and the public are misinformed on medical issues?

There are major problems within journalism currently about the level of understanding of health and science issues by presenters, researchers and other media staff. While a minority appear to have a good grasp of what's going on and take time to read evidence and seek professional input, the majority of reporters are often poorly placed to understand and discuss complex and emotive health issues and lack the time, training and/or enthusiasm to get to grips with health or science evidence.

The result is a lot of opinion expressed as fact; endless hard-to-argue-with-rhetoric...

I think from reading [the transcript] it's pretty easy to see whose dialogue you could describe as 'vicious' – and it wouldn't be Yasmin.

Time and again myself and colleagues are invited onto TV or radio programmes or interviewed by print media journalists where we are interrupted, ignored, misunderstood, misquoted, ridiculed and quite often (as in the case of Yasmin above) deliberately insulted.

The Jobbing Doctor has produced British Medical Blogs 18 which is rather dominated by the issue of L'Affaire Ben Goldacre and Jeni Barnett. He tells a rather poignant story from his medical school days.

There has been a continuing unease that misguided colleagues and assorted quacks can, with a credulous and compliant media, start to cause significant damage to the health of children.

When Jobbing Doctor was a medical student, centuries ago, aeons ago, a young child with measles-induced brain damage was presented as a clinical case at his medical school. He had permanent brain damage as a direct result of SSPE (Subacute Sclerosing Pan-encephalitis), which is a direct result of Measles. This was a defining experience in Jobbing Doctor's career. He never forgot this.

The World Is a Lesson In Perspective urges people to donate by PayPal to Ben Goldacre.

If you like the London Bus Generator, go straight to Northern Doctor for another version of Jeni Barnett's very own meme: Raging across the blogosphere.

Phil Chamberlain of Taking Out the Trash writes: On dishing it out and taking it.

The difference with [Jeni Barnett] and other parents is that she is in a postion of authority and her programme sets the terms of debate for the public....

It's not good enough to be a little ignorant and a bit fluffy and think you're just helping confused parents take control. You need to take this stuff seriously or you need to go and find a job where you can't cause damage to other people.

There is, of course, a delightful Facebook Group: Defend Ben Goldacre from LBC

DBH of The Great DBH Rant has gone through the transcripts and concluded: Jeni Barnett Anti-Vaccination Drivel – Irresponsibility at its best. DBH wonders:

I wonder if she would want to get into any sort of intellectual debate about vaccinations when she doesn't have that button in front of her which allows her to switch off a caller. Since this unfortunate show has been on air and she was rightly criticized by bad science blogs left, right and centre, she has posted unrepentant posts on her own blog, depicting herself as a victim.

Richard Brennan refers to the dispute in his newsjiffy: Dr Ben Goldacre accused of copyright infringement by LBC 97.3 FM following MMR show blog posting.

Paul Flynn has had an opportunity to explore the transcripts and audio further since his last posting and he is taken aback: New nuke : old calamity.

Jeni Barnett is angry at the response to her broadcast and describes a nurse who rang in to disagree with her as "vicious". I listened to the exchange. The nurse was quiet, persuasive and courteous even though Jeni talked over her, cutting her off, and yelling at her with shrill irrational accusations.
The law must not be used to silence Ben Goldacre and the other voices of reason...
I hope to table an EDM about this disgraceful incident.

Peter Groves of IPso Jure takes time out from legal-beagling to highlight Dr Ben Goldacre as 'a person of many accomplishments' and to credit him as the originator of the fine expression, "intellectual property absolutists": IP news round up.

Simon HB of No Rock and Roll Fun is another blogger who has had more time to read through some of the transcripts, posts and follow-ups. He has posted his own follow-up: Global Radio: Jeni Barnett Defends Her Position.

The real question is why Global are sending legal threats to Ben Goldacre when, really, they should be calling in their presenter and asking why she thinks having procreated is some sort of excuse for taking a biased and wrong position on a programme where she should have been acting as a balanced moderator.

Guido of Guido Fawkes is pleased that: LBC Get Wiki Leaked.

Guido loves Wikileaks. They are like a risk management tool for bloggers.

The Milligan comments on parts of the transcripts: Jeni Barnett Spouting Pure, Unadulterated Ignorance About the MMR Vaccine. After much study and analysis, The Milligan concludes:

This ignorance is broadcast to a lot of people. The DoH doesn't frighten me, but the idiot Barnett scares me a lot. Thankfully my three kids have been vaccinated, and with every passing day, I vaccinate their minds against people like her.

2009-02-07T16:17:00.002-02:00

And the scores on the doors are...

A new twist on an old problem

Professor Geras at Normblog proposes a novel twist on the Monte Hall problem:

A new version of an old story. You're a participant in a game show and have three doors in front of you. Behind one door is a complete set of Wisden Cricketers' Almanack and behind each of the other two doors is a signed photograph of Mary Chapin Carpenter. Being a rational person, you naturally want the Wisdens. You choose a door - let's call it door A - and after you've done so, the game show host, before opening door A to let you see what you would have won, opens another door - say, C - to reveal one of the two unwanted signed photographs. He or she now offers you the following option: you can stick with door A and get whatever is behind it; or you can alter your initial choice and go for door B. Should you stick with A or go for B, or does it make no difference which you decide to do?

Norm correctly states that while intuition leads us to assume there is no difference, actually switching doors doubles our probability of winning.

He goes on to suggest a modification:

OK, so what puzzles me is this. Suppose that one evening there are two participants playing at the same time: you and me, rather than you alone. We both want the Wisdens. Neither of us wants a photo. Suppose, further, that things are so arranged that a door can be opened for you to see what's behind it, without my being able to, and that a door can be opened for me to see what's behind it, without your being able to. So we make our initial choices, and let's imagine - just to keep things simple - that we don't go for the same door. Let's say that I go for door A and you go for door B. Look again now at cases 1 and 2 above. The host can show both of us door C. And, if what I've said is right, it's in my interests to switch from door A to door B and it's in your interests to switch from door B to door A. If I stay with door A, I have only a 1 in 3 chance of getting the Wisdens, but if you go for door A, you have a 2 in 3 chance of getting the Wisdens. The same disparity, though in reverse, vis-à-vis door B. Does this mean that probability is agent-relative? Even if it does, I can't escape the air of paradox in the proposition that it's better for you to choose the door I'm abandoning, and better for me to choose the door you're abandoning - that we both improve our chances thereby. Any offers?

Well, here’s mine:

The original problem

Norm picks a door; any door. As the Wisdens is behind one of the 3 doors, the odds of Norm winning are 1/3. Accordingly, the probability of it being behind the other two is 2/3.

If Norm sticks with his door, his probability of winning the Wisdens is 1/3.

Now the host opens one of the doors, revealing the photo. [It is important to note he can always do this: regardless of which door Norm picks, at least one of the remaining two has a photo behind it.] If Norm swaps, this is effectively the same as being allowed to look in the other two, as he opens one and the host opens one. So his probability of winning is 2/3 if he swaps, as opposed to 1/3 if he does not.

Swapping doubles his chances.

The Norm Variation

In this scenario, both Norm picks a door, and I pick a door. Now, the host needs to open a door - but he cannot always do this.

Suppose both Norm and I both choose a door in front of photo: the door we have not picked has the Wisdens behind it, and the host cannot open this door to reveal a photo.

Ringing the changes

One way to adapt the problem is to generalise to the n-door case. In this instance, there are (n-1) photos, and 1 Wisdens. Suppose I pick a door at random, my chance of winning the Wisdens is 1/n. The host opens another door, displaying a photo, and offers me the chance to swap.

If I do not swap, my chance of winning remains at 1/n

If I do swap, my chance of winning can be calculated by noting that the probability of the Wisdens being behind one of the remaining n-2 doors is (1 - 1/n), and so the probability of the Wisdens being behind any given one of them is (n-1) / [(n)(n-2)]. Swapping leads to an improvement of the chances of winning by a factor of (n-1)/(n-2). [1]

Clearly, swapping is the correct strategy regardless of the number of doors, but the factor by which you improve your chances decreases with increasing number of doors, tending to 1 as the number of doors tends to infinity.

[1] Quick reality check: for n=3, these results imply not swapping leads to a Pr(Wisdens)=1/3, swapping to Pr(Wisdens)=2/3, an improvement factor of 2, as expected above.

[Edited fur spoling]

2009-02-05T22:08:00.004-02:00

URGENT

The Joy of Law

I had not heard of Jeni Barnett until this week, and I cannot thank Ben Goldacre for bringing her to my attention. Unfortunately, Dr. Goldacre posted on his blog a segment from Ms. Barnett's radio show in which:

To illustrate my grave concerns, I posted the relevant segment about MMR from her show, 44 minutes, which a reader kindly excerpted for me from the rest of the three hour programme. It is my view that Jeni Barnett torpedoes her reputation in that audio excerpt so effectively that little explanation is needed.

The lawyers have asked him to take it down.

(a) I think this should be disseminated as widely as possible. After all, if I have to know about Ms. Barnett's remarkably daft views on the MMR vaccine I see no reason why other people shouldn't.

(b) A transcript - suitably annotated to reflect the number, scale, and nature of Ms. Barnett's follies - is more likely to be regarded as a fair comment on a matter of public interest.

(c) Who advertises on LBC? I certainly would not feel comfortable buying a product from unethical companies that promote scaremongering. If someone has a list, perhaps a polite letter-writing campaign to the appropriate PR departments is in order?

2009-02-05T17:00:00.001-02:00

Marie Antoinette plays shepherdess

In Davos.

[via Ross Douthat]

2009-02-04T20:14:00.005-02:00

Dark Helmet

First up, Sir Terry Pratchett is a legend, and I've read all his books, including the ones nominally for children. The programme was both moving and watchable. He did an excellent piece for, IIRC, BBC Breakfast when he said that he wasn't sure it works, and discussed the importance of controlled testing. "It" is a therapeutic light helmet that, it is suggested, is beneficial for Alzheimer's sufferers.

The bloke pushing the helmet came across as a bit creepy, to be honest. I'm going to remain skeptical about the idea for the moment: there's been one study in mice (here, thanks to science based medicine), and an unpublished, non-controlled human study which formed the basis for a press release. Hmmmm.

As I'm not qualified to discuss the medical evidence, such as it is, I'll confine myself to the photonics [1]. I was a bit surprised by two aspects of the helmet: (i) the choice of wavelength and (ii) the sheer weight of thing.

(i) 1072nm (the wavelength from the mice study) is a bit of a funny wavelength to chose to generate with diodes. You could could get a nice neodymium:YAG laser (suitably attenuated), diode pumped straight from the mains at 1064nm (and maybe externally tune to push the wavelength out to the edge of the gain spectrum), I suppose, but diode-wise the wavelengths 1050nm-1260nm are in a bit of a wasteland. Plenty of diodes in the red-NIR (the AlGaAs/GaAs heterostructure laser was born to serve this range, and bulk GaAs has a band gap ~850nm at room temperature), you can hit the green-blue and even UV by making the jump from the zincblende to wurzite structure - with corresponding leap in bandgap - by putting some nitrogen into your device, and the telecoms wavelength region of 1.3micron (dispersion minimum of fibre) or 1.55micron (attenuation minimum of fibre) are well served (and correspondingly cheap), but the range in between? InAs/GaAs quantum wells, I suppose, might do it, or more exotically a quantum dot laser that either operates in an excited state or has been annealed to move the ground state to the appropriate energy; or perhaps an InP heterostructure? Could be pricey. I note the company already produces a hand held cold sore device that operates at this wavelength, so presumably they have access to a source of these diodes. The company sells it's device for £45 - I wonder how many diodes it contains?

(ii) for goodness sake, the thing left impressions on his skull, and had a least one bloody great cooling fan. It would be much more sensible to build a fibre-based system: generate the light on a box on the floor, generate all the waste heat there where it can be air cooled away. This would make wearing the helmet more comfortable, and make controlling experiments easier (you wouldn't know if the devise were switched on or not), and would allow a range of wavelengths to be tested. This would be important to find out what is going on, and if a cheaper kind of light source could be used. I know fibre isn't brilliant away from 1.3 and 1.55micron, but it only needs to travel a few meters.

Bottom line: we need more information, some double-blinded controlled experiments that can survive peer review - and a better helmet design.

[1] If you are a UK taxpayer, perhaps I could take this opportunity to thank you for funding me to study this stuff. I'm very grateful.

2009-02-04T12:42:00.004-02:00

Quantum theory disproves GOD!!!!??!!

The Physics Delusions of a science groupie

Unity offers a disproof of Christianity through the medium of, so help me, the uncertainty principle:

The NeoDarwinian synthesis, alone, may not absolutely rule out the existence of such a hypothetical supernatural agent but the combination of evolution and quantum mechanic, specifically Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle does.
The uncertainty principle precludes the possibility of any entity that is not ubiquitous in its knowledge, understanding and control of the universe right down to the sub atomic level generating the precise arrangement of random events necessary to arrive, after the space of either 14 billion or 4.5 billion years depending, on your preferred starting point, at the existence of a small blue-green planet orbiting a yellow star on which, at this precise moment, a human being is explaining precisely why the idea of non-interventionist god who takes a direct interest in the human race is entirely meaningless.
The uncertainty principle is the clincher in the sense that it places a clear limit on the nature of ‘god’ if one wishes to believe that such an supernatural entity exists. If we reject the creationist view that the earth, the universe and everything in it was created out of nothing in its more or less present state, give or take 6,000 years or so of wear and tear, then incredibly complex sequence of events necessary to get from the ‘creation’ of the universe via the Big Bang to where we are now can only have come about via either, from our point of view, an entirely fortuitous sequence of random events any one of which, had it spawned a different outcome, might mean that I wouldn’t be here to write this, and you wouldn’t be here to read it or because the entire universe and everything in it, to a subatomic level, is being directed but a truly omnipotent and omniscient supernatural agency.
Thanks to Heisenberg, there is no middle ground and no room for compromise. We must either have the god of Calvin and a universe in which nothing occurs but by the will of god, in which case we might as well forget all about any ideas of free will, moral agency and, if you believe in such things, salvation…
When we attribute prescience to God, we mean that all things always were, and ever continue, under his eye; that to his knowledge there is no past or future, but all things are present, and indeed so present, that it is not merely the idea of them that is before him (as those objects are which we retain in our memory), but that he truly sees and contemplates them as actually under his immediate inspection. This prescience extends to the whole circuit of the world, and to all creatures. By predestination we mean the eternal decree of God, by which he determined with himself whatever he wished to happen with regard to every man. All are not created on equal terms, but some are preordained to eternal life, others to eternal damnation; and, accordingly, as each has been created for one or other of these ends, we say that he has been predestinated to life or to death.
Institutes of Religion, Book III, Chapter XXI
…or we can, at best, argue for a wholly non-interventionist deist ‘god’ who takes no active role and, for all we can sure of, no interest in our tiny little corner of the universe, and if that is all there is by way of a supernatural agency moving on the face of the universe then why should we be the slightest bit concerned as to their motives, purpose or opinions.

Who knew?

The article is worth reading through, if only for this rather daring claim regarding Biblical manuscripts:

"They, on the other hand, have only a 1700 year old collection of Indo-European folk tales on which to base their belief in a universal supernatural agency, absolute morality and the suggestion both that the universe - all 4.2 x 10e69 cubic miles of it - has a defined purpose and that ourselves and miniscule area of it we occupy are somehow of central importance to this alleged purpose - a set of stories for which there is no more substantive corroborating evidence for the historical existence of almost all of its main protagonists, including Jesus, Moses and Abraham, than there is for the existence of Gandalf, Tom Sawyer and Luke Skywalker."

Fans of Unity's somewhat heterodox grasp of physics might also enjoy this further disproof of the existence of the GOD:

If god created the universe, who created god?
This is a question that run entirely contrary to theological belief but logically, it remains an entirely valid question to which there are only two possible answers.
The theological answer is, of course, no one - god simply exists; but then god must have come into being from nothing and that violates the first law of thermodynamics in its universal form as the law of conservation of energy. So as were seeking rational arguments here, that answer must be excluded.

It's easy to mock this stuff, but there should be Bonus Points awarded for the originality: after all, I don't think anyone has ever come up with an atheistic equivalent to Intelligent Design before.

[Via DK]

2009-02-02T11:44:00.005-02:00

Rilstonia

All Rilstone, all of the time

This is an excellent day for everyone who appreciates Andrew Rilstone, and anyone who has never heard of him but loves literary criticism about Dr. Who, CS Lewis, and JRR Tolkien.

Mr. Rilstone has put some of his writings online here.

If you're new to the Rilstone phenomenon, a good place to start is his retrospective on William Hartnell's Doctor and his initial reaction to New Who.

If you enjoy forensic analysis of media porkies, an account of a week spent reading the Express and a footnoted headline will not disappoint. Nor will the curious affair of Phillip Pullman and the lipstick.

On Christianity, Peculiar People and Fan Club will be of equal interest to evangelicals and atheists, and he shares my views of hymns with bloody actions. He also wrote the only sensible review of "Passion of the Christ" that I have seen.

2009-02-01T21:00:00.002-02:00

"Peer review is the worse system, apart from all the others"

Tales of horror in the Academy

LemmusLemmus reports on a couple of excellent "editors are bastards and wouldn't know a qualified reviewer from a half-wit" anecdotes:

You know, I suspected that particular reviewer had obtained his deep historical knowledge of the Ashkenazi Jews in the Middle Ages by watching "Fiddler on the Roof." That shows just how cynical I am. And then he confirmed it, when I asked him.

Everyone has one or two of these: share yours in the comments.

2009-01-30T19:41:00.003-02:00

Intellectual Consistency

About that champion of free speech...

The lawsuit against Mr. Wilders has been hailed in the Netherlands as a good thing for democracy. I am not so sure. It makes him look more important than he should be. In fact, the response of Dutch Muslims to his film last year was exemplary: most said nothing at all. And when a small Dutch Muslim TV station offered to broadcast the film, after all other stations had refused, the grand champion of free speech resolutely turned the offer down.

via The Watchers of Mr. Aaronovitch

2009-01-09T18:32:00.002-02:00

Pointless in Gaza

A question

Does anyone ever change his mind about the Arab-Israeli conflict?

2009-01-08T20:07:00.003-02:00

How lame am I?

Really quite seriously lame

So, about that New Years resolution to blog more often...

I'm going to cheat, by linking to people more clever than I am and basking in the reflected glory:

1. LemmusLemmus has turned a recent hospitalization into a thought-provoking and entertaining couple of posts.

2. Science blogger JDC asks why lies are worse than bullshit.

3. Andrew Hickey offers a very smart critique of libertarianism. He's also persuaded me to read Stephenson's new book (although I think he's mistaken to call Penrose "half-bright".)

4. Andrew Rilstone beats another "War on Christmas" myth to death.

5. PJ has a detailed and really important post regarding the relationship between incapacity benefit and mental health.

This year, I hope to be posting about the invention of the laser, more on memes, a defence of Roger Penrose, why "quantum cryptography" should really be called "quantum key distribution", speculation about why the The Economist's coverage of religion is so poor, and why you should care about electron spin.

Of course, given last years track record, I should write two of the above.

Happy New Year to everyone!

Edmund@Political Scientist

2008-11-26T20:43:00.003-02:00

The Toaster Timebomb

Will no-one think of the children?

From the Torygraph:

Nanoparticles can be one millionth the size of a grain of sand. They are used to build innovative materials currently used in 600 products worldwide, from socks to sunscreens and even food supplements.
However, little is known about the effects the tiny particles could have if they were to escape into the human body.
Now a powerful committee of experts is calling for more research into the health implications.
A two-year study by the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution warned there is the possibility to damage human health but emphasised that not enough research had been done.
Some nanoparticles display similar characteristics to asbestos.
Professor Sir John Lawton, chairman of the commission, warned that nanotechnology is in danger of becoming like genetically modified crops (GM), with science forging ahead without public understanding or trust.
"It's clearly very early in the development of these technologies, and at this stage we've found no evidence of nanomaterials causing harm to human health or the environment," he said.
"However, would we know if nanomaterials were causing harm? No we wouldn't. There's no evidence of harm, but a lot of that is because of a lack of evidence."
...
And laboratory research into carbon nanofibres used in clothing suggested they were "not too different" from asbestos fibres that cause lung cancer.
Sir John said he would not wear clothes made of nanofibres, although he would wear sunscreen that uses nanoparticles.

I wonder if I can be a journalist too? Hmm...

Used in around 30 million households, on products from bread to bagels, they can be a million times more useful than the entire British press corps. Manufacturers say these "toasters" are safe, but what if they were to escape? There is no evidence that they are dangerous, but according to the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, that may only be because very little research has been done into the subject.
"Would we know if toasters were causing harm? No we wouldn't," said the commission's chair, Sir John Lawton. Happily, Sir John Lawton has agreed to chair another commission: this, too, will fail to establish if toasters are causing harm, but it will pay off the remainder of his mortgage. After all, laboratory research into toasters revealed they were "not too different" to assault rifles.

2008-11-21T19:02:00.002-02:00

Doctored!

In which I am Full Of Win

Passed my viva yesterday. All over but the shouting/corrections.

2008-11-06T22:37:00.002-02:00

This is lovely

This has made me very happy, because it is lovely.

[Non-soppy posting will resume soon.]

2008-10-30T20:40:00.003-02:00

Fun with telephones

In lieu of a grown-up post about memes, that is forthcoming, dead honest guv

Well, all the clever and sophisticated kids are rolling their eyes about just how provincial and boring it all is, but I'm afraid I'm one of those squares who thinks the crime of making obscene phone calls is.... a crime.

I also note that assuming that someone is a member of a burlesque group called the "Satanic Sluts" constitutes licence to broadcast their sexual history on the TV, is functionally equivalent to the saloon bar slogan "phoar, with those short skirts and make-up, they're just asking for it, aren't they?".

I also note that to comment on the Brand/Ross affair on the BBC website, I must adhere to a comments policy that includes:

Keep your contributions civil, tasteful and relevant. Please:

No defamatory comments. A defamatory comment is one that is capable of damaging the reputation of a person or organisation. If successfully sued you could be held liable for considerable damages and costs.
Do not post messages that are unlawful, harassing, defamatory, abusive, threatening, harmful, obscene, profane, sexually oriented, homophobic or racially offensive.
No swearing. People of all ages read and contribute to Have Your Say. Please don't use profanities or other words which might offend them.
No inappropriate usernames (vulgar, offensive, etc).

It seems reasonable to expect those on the BBC to adhere to the same standard.

2008-10-22T13:30:00.004-02:00

Sodding 'memes'

A rant

Quick questions:

1) Are there any occasions when the word "meme" must be used, such that "idea", "model", "hope", "aspiration", "belief", "dream" and similar words cannot express the same notion,only with greater precision?

2) "Meme" rhymes with "gene", which makes it sound almost scientific. If memes were referred to as "magic idea fairies" or "midichlorians", would this make them any less believable?

and finally,

3) [The 'homeopathy' question] What evidence would lead you to reject the meme hypothesis?

2008-10-17T17:29:00.007-02:00

Mash-up madness!

In which we muse on the implications of new copyright policy of the American Physical Society

Whilst trying to check the maximum article length for Applied Physics Letters, I stumbled across this:

When you submit an article to an APS journal, we ask you to sign our copyright form. It transfers copyright for the article to APS, but keeps certain rights for you, the author. We have recently changed the form to add the right to make ‘‘derivative works’’ that reuse parts of the article in a new work.

This is rather exciting[1]: the APS has always given you the right to reprint figures for use in books, and for all co-authors to host a .pdf of papers on personal websites, this means you'll be able to use individual figures directly. [Also, it'll save the bother of clearing figures individually with APS, should you be writing a review chapter]

The editorial goes on to state that this will permit authors to create Wikipedia articles, which seems a bit passé, although I suppose it might raise the quality/quantity of the wikipedia physics articles.

[1] For a given value of "exciting", obviously...

2008-10-14T09:07:00.002-02:00

In honour of Paul Krugman

A fun paper for this years Nobel laureate in economics:

"The theory of Interstellar Trade"

My favourite bit is "This paper is, then, a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics", but figure II - a Minkowski diagram with really imaginary axes - is good, too.

[via John Band]