Looking Out To Sea

I think Helen’s dad will have to start making his Ruby Chutney in bigger batches. He should start his own business, it’s that good. It tastes fabulous with cheese on toast, made with a mature cheddar and some slices of crusty bloomer, slightly burned at the edges.

I would have taken a photo — really, it deserved a photo — but in the immortal words of teh kitteh, “i eated it”.

I have, so to speak, finished Climbing Mount Improbable. In the sense that I have read the book but also that I am at the peak of evolutionary fitness, because I am alive.

On my old blog I wrote about blind search as a hill-climbing metaphor. Richard Dawkins uses this same idea to describe how various features such as wings, eyes, colourful flowers and such could have evolved. The idea is just as I described:

Searching for things in computer science is often likened to climbing a hill, where the summit represents the goal, and every point on the landscape represents a candidate for this goal. The idea is that, without knowing where the summit is, one can get there by always walking up hill. Assuming an ideal (smooth) landscape one could get to the top of a hill blindfold. (Not recommended.)

Each step is just a simple adjustment, a tiny, unlooked-for variation in the population. This variation will mean the animal that has it is at a tiny advantage and may spread its genes wider than average. Thus we can get from nothing, to the human eye; or from a similar nothing, to the bird’s wing; or from nothing to the intricate ecosystem that is the fruit of the fig tree.

And like I stated in my other post, scaling a mountain blindfold is possible, but can lead to dead ends:

If we can’t see where we’re going then we can never be totally sure if we’re on a minor summit rather than the very top of the mountain. This is called a local maximum — every direction you walk goes down, but there is a direction which will eventually take you to a taller peak.

Unfortunately, evolution doesn’t have the advantage of predicting these problems. So if chance chooses a particular short-term solution which later leads to problems (like the blind spot in our own eyes) there is nothing to be done. There is no option to back-track and start again down a different route — only forward and up.

The book’s very interesting, and certainly very readable. One of the middle chapters on segmentation of insects was a bit tedious. I’m not sure if this is because he was explaining something obvious in great detail, or because it was obvious that the detail was being expended on a description of a computer program to demonstrate something obvious, which itself was obvious. The abstractions he described were rather uninteresting, to me at least. Maybe others would find them less apparent.

I would have preferred, instead, that the final chapter be longer, or even split into two. It had some extremely complex relationships laid out without much differentiation. Indeed there were two types of wasps described in this chapter, the ‘true’ fig wasp and the fake fig wasp, both called fig wasp. Some aliases and maybe a diagram of the relationships would have made this chapter much clearer. And possibly more interesting for it.

Overall I was surprised how short the book was. It only took me a few days to finish and I wasn’t devoting much time to it — I was ill and it was a busy Christmas, after all. I would still recommend The Selfish Gene over this any day.

I mentioned in a different post that I might have the need of a good bread recipe or two. It turns out the need is not so pressing, thanks to the unstoppable Delia Smith. We picked up the older edition of Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course for a few quid in a charity shop. Fantastic, bargain basement stuff. Also, it’s the old edition with her holding the egg (as in the photo on her Wikipedia page) rather than the 2nd edition with her in a red jumper.

It has a whole chapter on bread and yeasty products. I feel much happier now — Delia’ll see me right, I’m sure of it.

My mum gave us a Euro Chopper for Christmas. I don’t know why either. The packaging blurb includes:

Well known chef Arnold Morris of Arnold’s Gourmet Kitchen says, “What a time-saver The Euro Chopper is, especially for chopping onions, garlic or parsley. Makes the tastiest coleslaw you’ll ever eat in less than a minute.”

Who is Arnold Morris? Google searches reveal he is “well known” from appearing on shopping channels selling products as a representative of Arnold’s Gourmet Kitchen. So, well-known among a select group of invalids and bored housewives with Sky TV.

What is Arnold’s Gourmet Kitchen? I’m not sure, but if you search for that phrase, the only results are people on eBay and similar auction sites, selling… The Euro Chopper.

Today we’re back in Edinburgh, back in the flat. So, what’s been happening? What have we been up to?

Well, obviously, we’ve been up to Christmas, and it was good. This was the first time we’d ever had a Christmas which wasn’t like the ones we’d had when growing up. All the way through university we’d just pile off home and spent a fortnight or however long living with our parents again.

This time Helen and I have our own flat and it seemed right that we should do things differently. We weren’t willing to have Christmas in the flat — that would have been quiet and lonely, and ultimately too much like a long weekend with nothing to do but watch television and eat chocolates off the tree. (Not that I suggest tree-chocolates are a bad thing. Just that there’s often more to life.)

So, we needed to start a “new tradition”. Something that seemed equitable to both our parents but also meant we were doing it differently from before. In short, a grown up Christmas (gasp).

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I don’t know what happened last night, but I went to bed feeling dried out, bunged-up and generally not very happy, and woke up feeling generally human. Hurrah for the immune system.

Helen and I are staying in Dunbar an extra day because we have a lot of large items to transport back to the flat, which would be beyond impractical on the train. Shiny presents! Yay!

I’ve not updated in a few days because I can’t get my laptop to connect to the wireless setup here at Helen’s parents’ house. I know what the password is, but there seems to be some painful problem with DHCP and Network Manager, where the latter ignores the former. Either way, I haven’t been able to work around the problem so I’m using Helen’s laptop instead.

I am still full of the cold. Every day when I wake up I have to empty my head of snot anew. I bet you’re happy I told you that.

And while I’m on the topic of computing complaints, I’m annoyed at ISPs for obfuscating the settings they require to get email working. They seem to think a series of screenshots showing the configuration procedure on a 7-year-old version of Outlook Express would be useful. It is not. Even if they do provide a “at a glance” page of login requirements, they always euphemise the actual requirements, so that none of the settings match up with the hundreds of options in your mail client.

At the moment I’m listening to Alison Krauss and Robert Plant covering Tom Waits’ Trampled Rose. Very nice album.

The American Lung Association recommends that you do not have a hot toddy when you feel coldy:

Avoid coffee, tea or cola drinks that contain caffeine. Also avoid any drinks that contain alcohol. Caffeine and alcohol lead to dehydration, the opposite of what you want.

Quite frankly, if they think people are drinking these things for their curative properties, then they really are idiots.

• Whisky
• Hot water
• Honey
• Lemon juice
• Cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg

That’s much better…

Spoof science stories are a bit of a tradition in the BMJ for their Christmas edition. I only read the journal when I’m at Helen’s parents’ house but even I’ve managed to spot the light-hearted articles amongst the serious science.

Alas, I seem to be in the minority. The BBC, for example are reporting one man’s adventures on a unicycle as the gospel truth. This is obviously pretty sad. I wonder how soon they’ll pick up another article in this year’s Christmas edition, looking at how magical ability in the world of Harry Potter relates to genetics.

Two things strike me. First, there’s what the original article says in the BMJ. Essentially, the author took up unicycling and recorded the reactions of strangers in the street. Young males reacted aggressively towards him: either physically or verbally. Older men, women and children did not have this reaction.

The BBC reported this as “testosterone causes humour”, something which isn’t even supported by the original article. What it actually says is that testosterone causes aggression, which evolves from violence into mocking humour as people grow up. Admittedly this wasn’t the clearest part of the article, but anyone who took the slightest time to read the content rather than the conclusion would understand completely.

This is a rare insight into the process of mainstream science reporting. The science wasn’t real science, in any way. It was meant explicitly as humour. The study was made up. It seems the only person who didn’t understand this was the reporter. The author points out all the areas in which his method was deficient — but these caveats are not reported by the BBC.

Second to the BBC’s response to the original article, are other responses to the BBC. The bloggers at Feministing have taken the gist even further: “Unicycle-enthusiast professor claims men are funnier than women”. It would seem in the interests of a feminist blog to correct, rather than spread, such silly rumours. Last I read there was a small comment war going on there over whether or not it was real, and whether or not Feministing, being “only a blog” should have to examine such stories further before reporting on them.

My opinion, of course, is yes, for pity’s sake, yes. But giving the benefit of the doubt, how easy is that to do? The only source cited by the BBC is “he told the British Medical Journal”, a fleeting reference with no mention of what his submission was called, which edition you might find it in, or anything else.

• If you Google for sam shuster (no quotes) you find several things he’s written and reactions to the BBC’s story. The fourth one on the list has done a bit of research and suggests that Prof Shuster is a “wind-up merchant”. This is not the first time his writings have been outlandish and absurd, yet reported with a straight face by people who should know better.

• Searching for sam shuster bmj reveals a list of useful publications. The first result is the BMJ’s home page, which contains a link to the original article by Prof Shuster. Oh, how difficult that was.

• Looking further down the page, what do we find? The next one relevant to this story is the all-knowing Language Log, doing what it does best: pointing out that the BBC are a bunch of idiots. To quote: “The practice of running spoof stories in the BMJ Christmas issue is not exactly a secret. … Apparently, it’s an equally old tradition for the reporters and editors at BBC News to swallow such jokes hook, line and sinker.” Look to the bottom of the page for a terrifyingly comprehensive list of other people who can’t tell humour from real science.

It doesn’t take long to find the original article, which you can read in all its gently silly glory.

I’m further behind in my Christmas shopping than I wanted to be… there’s some stuff I am very happy with but other aspects are a bit lacking (or, in fact, completely lacking). I should really be out scouring the shops right this minute, but I have pounding headache and a dribbling nose so I don’t feel up to it. I was out earlier this afternoon and just couldn’t stay the course.

Where did my cold come from? Well, I’m blaming my work mate, Colin. He was off work last week but came to the work night out on Friday with symptoms galore.

But there’s nothing I can really do about that. Colds during winter are just something we have to get used to. I just hope I’ll be better by Christmas, if not tomorrow. This evening we’ll be preparing stuff for our visit to our parents’ houses on the twenty-fifth. There’s a few nice recipes we’re going to have a look at this evening.