Looking Out To Sea

I’ve nearly finished Marcus Chown’s “dispatches from the Front Line of Science” but it’s not holding up well. “Spectacular, stimulating … a substantial book that demands, then rewards attention” says The Herald, so they must have reviewed another book by the same name.

Despite the wide range of topics it could cover, it really only talks about physics and cosmology. It ignores the incredibly exciting field of biology and (as is always the case) chemistry doesn’t even get a look in. When was the last time you saw a popular science book about chemistry? And despite being about the “front line” of science it spends rather too long explaining the findings of 1930s logicians.

Anyway, Marcus Chown’s book is about physicsy things: quantum mechanics, gravity, speed of light, etc. It’s actually not really a book but a large collection of independent essays which have been edited together very badly. The same turns of phrase pop up several times to describe the same thing. This could be forgiven in separate articles, like a stand-up repeating some of their old material, but it just looks sloppy when presented as a single book. Imagine a collection of comedy sketches from a comedian’s career which show the same joke being repeated several times…

The lack of cohesion also means the reader gets patronised. Chapter 11 gives a brief description of the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, even though it had already been described in much greater detail in two earlier chapters. This happened all the time — out of nowhere introducing “exciting new ideas” that in fact had been done to death in several previous chapters. And because the author uses that breathless so-what-can-the-answer-be? tone — as if each chapter was part of a Choose Your Own Adventure book — the fake suspense felt really silly. You actually know what he is going to say, because he’s described it in a previous chapter.

I had just finished Six Easy Pieces (Richard Feynman, who else?) before starting this. Poor Marcus Chown didn’t have a chance, obviously. Even though Feynman’s book is about 50 years behind the times it was still more readable and more interesting. It was concise and particular about details. There were no hand-wavy statements (which I’ll come to in a bit) or fuzzy descriptions. But most importantly it stated clearly what we knew and what we didn’t know. Never Ending Days was so full of contradictory conjecture and science fiction predictions that it was hard to distill the science from among it.

And so I end up feeling unsure of what, if anything, is known. In fact, I don’t know if any of the statements in this book can be backed up by experiment — I just really don’t know. And the author certainly wasn’t going to tell me. Instead he seemed keen on letting Stephen Wolfram barge his way into every chapter to babble on about how he’d “solved science” or whatever it is he thinks he’s done. Every other chapter was an homage to the unparalleled genius, cutting wit and dashing good looks of the second coming of Stephen Wolfram. It gets tiresome pretty quickly.

I mentioned hand-waving above. The problem with popular science (especially when dealing with modern physics) is that any explanation will be a gross simplification, especially if there are no maths used in the explanation. And this book takes the job of explaining quantum mechanics, gravity, Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, Kolmogorov-Chaitin complexity and others without mathematics. So none of the explanations have any weight. They feel like “just so” stories rather than proper models of reality. But if some of the ideas contradict each other it’s impossible to know whether they are just mutually exclusive explanations or if the simplification has altered the idea. It’s even worse when an hypothesis is explained to have a problem, but the problem is not apparent otherwise because it’s been oversimplified. The most obvious example is Wolfram’s notion of complexity — does it gel with complexity as defined in the various sub-branches of information theory? From the explanation in this book it would have to be different but there’s no way of knowing how it does differ.

I’m really disappointed in this book. I was actually hoping for some proper new stuff, not a collection of idle conjectures. It seems all the popular science books that cover physics have given up on what we know and what we observe and just like to promote the newest, unverified ideas. Surely there’s space for science on the shelves?

Creative Commons photo courtesy of Tailspin Tommy.

I’m curious whether these memes have any basis in reality:

• Men have better visual/spatial reasoning than women.
• Women have better language skills than men.
• Men have better abstract reasoning skills than women.
• Women are better at multitasking than men.

I’ve googled lots but come up empty. Well, lots of people convinced of the truth of these statements but no-one with so much as a reference to follow up.

The women/language one is the only one I know a little about, in that the Daily Mail seems extraordinarily keen on repeating the pop-science myths which The Female Brain described — women talk more than men, etc.

Some information on the origins and veracity of these claims would be really interesting.

I’ve got to record what we did this week at BSL because Helen wasn’t there. And we’ve got homework so I thought I’d write it here so it’s easy to access.

Describing people and animals

We followed on from the previous week, doing more description of animals first, then of people after the break. It’s still really hard to picture what is distinctive about people. Same with animals — there’s always something that’s really stereotypical or indicative but it’s hard to come up with. Last week I was trying to describe a wolf but completely forgot about the “howling at the moon” behaviour, so nobody knew what I was talking about.

This week I managed to convey a goat pretty well, but it’s easier because not many animals butt heads and have long beards. That’s really goatish. I then elected to describe Johnny Rotten, which I thought would be pretty straight-forward. The first guess was Sid Vicious! Meh.

Still pretty difficult to describe without using topic words: to say “23” instead of “age 23” or “blonde” instead of “hair blonde”. It’s the same mindset that has people prefixing every sentence by pointing to themselves. In other words, English grammar.

Holiday

We spent the majority of the lesson covering arrangements for holidays — stuff you need to have, stuff you need to do, that kind of thing. Most of it airport-based, I suppose because it has the most scope for distinctive vocabulary. People use trains to get to work, but departure lounges and x-ray scanners are not day-to-day things.

Let me see, there was “waiting” and “queue” and “lounge” and “complain” and “argument”. You can tell we’ve all been to airports before, right? And “late” but also “early”, “sunglasses” and “midge repellent” and the names of a bunch of different countries.

The sign for Hawaii is good, because it’s like a little grass-skirted hula dance. For the record, Scotland is a stylised bagpipe sign, a sort of one-armed chicken flap. This is apparently called metonymy — referring to one thing by describing something that is related to it. English has this when we talk about “the crown” to mean the monarchy. This happens loads in sign language and is one of the things I really enjoy about it. Some of the examples I’ve seen have been very enlightening and evocative (though naturally I can’t think of any right now).

Homework

For next week we’ve to come up with a two-minute story describing “setting off on holiday”. Everything to the point where the plane takes off, except the decision-making process which is boring. So: packing, readying the house (cancelling milk, etc.), getting money/insurance, leaving for the airport. That should be more than enough for two minutes of presentation.

The same arguments — they seem to go round forever and ever. Jaron Lanier claims that open source software is inherently less innovative than closed-source software.

It’s sad to think that people have to make claims like these (without ever bothering to back them up) for ideological reasons. It’s like the people that claim Fairtrade coffee tastes horrible but Nestlé tastes great. Maybe we should do a taste test, since Nestlé even have a (single) Fairtrade-certified blend. Would that taste half-good? (On second thoughts, no. That would mean buying a whole bunch of their products, which ain’t gonna happen.)

I can understand that people have an emotional attachment to a particular way of doing things. Trying to rationalise those emotions doesn’t ever work though. That way leads to ever more convoluted reasoning and then you turn round and find that your firmly-held beliefs require you to not believe in some very self-evident truths. This is how people end up denying germ theory, through the gateway drug (!) of homeopathy.

Yeah. Don’t try to rationalise fuzzy feelings. It doesn’t work. It makes you look dumb.

I have an incredibly eighteen unfinished blog posts sitting on my computer and in WordPress, waiting for me to conclude… something. Probably that they’re useless and need to be completely rewritten, or that they’re completely out of date and shouldn’t even be published at all.

I will probably get more blogging done in the next week. Helen is going on holiday — skiing in France — and I’m staying here to enjoy the horizontal rain and furious umbrella-killing gusts that are typical of Edinburgh winters.

But I’ll be heading away to see my parents for the weekend, so probably no updates in the immediate future. But I must remember to take my CCNA book with me and do some studying.

On Wednesday night we saw 4 luni, 3 saptamani si 2 zile — ‘4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days’ — the story of a woman helping her friend get an illegal abortion in communist Romania in 1987.

I’m not sure what to say. I can’t really describe the great laughs you’ll have while watching. It’s a very numbing film. Don’t watch it for a first date?

Meanwhile, this is the 35th anniversary of the legalisation of abortion in the US, a law that the current crop of Republican candidates will be sure to repeal as part of their headlong rush to take the US back to the Middle Ages. Not that things are all rosy here — due to a strange quirk of jurisdiction our own abortion laws don’t apply to Northern Ireland. It’s still illegal to obtain an abortion there in most circumstances.

But if you want to see some gritty it’s-grim-oop-north drama about trying to get an abortion against the laws and norms of the society you live in, check out ‘4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days’.

Last week I got a copy of season three of Battlestar Galactica from a friend. We settled down on Friday night for some serious couch-potatoism. The first three episodes didn’t work. It turns out they had been written to the disk as approximately 1 Gb of zeroes. At least they would have compressed well!

So I ran over to MovieBank and rented the first disc of season two of 24. We’d been warned that it was a bit crap, but really I had no how silly it was going to get. We’ve also been told that it picks up from season three onwards. Can we get confirmation of this?

spoilers coming!

I mean, Kim gets threatened by a mountain lion! And kidnapped/held hostage on several occasions! How does she manage it? Can one person really be so incapable? I must admit to feeling very emotional when Jack had to tell his daughter he was about to die. And George Mason saying goodbye to his son too. It was a series for emotional goodbyes.

It was pretty disappointing that we were able to accurately predict nearly every twist (who didn’t see George Mason hiding out in the plane?). It did allow for some good banter between the two of us, betting at which point they would stop telegraphing the twist and actually execute it. It was also really silly the way that antagonists would be wheeled out one after another — as soon as George disappears, Tony becomes a grumpy boss, then Carrie appears to Tony can be a good guy again. Then division boss Chappelle appears so Carrie fades into the background. Sigh.

So, 24 drinking game would involve imbibing something whenever:

• You hear the CTU ringtone. (Or every time you hear me say “we’ve got those phones at work!”.)
• One character says to another “you have to trust me”.
• One character says to another “give me everything you’ve got on” some person.
• Someone says “what are you talking about?” when given news of a strange situation (“you’re daughter’s been arrested”, “I’m dying of radiation poisoning”).
• The CTU intelligence crew look at each other with suspicion… no, that would be too cruel, that’s all they ever do.

Choosing reading material for the bus is hard. I’ve been avoiding starting The Amber Spyglass again because it’s such a hefty book and we only have it in hardback. But lately I’ve been reading Ian Whitelaw’s fantastic little pocket guide to the history of measurement — A Measure of All Things.

It’s the kind of book that Edward Tufte would be incredibly proud of. Each double page is a topic in itself. The whole book is beautifully laid out and typeset. The ideas are elegantly and briefly explained — the history of the measures, the names of the units and where they come from, the evolution of the sizes of those units (because they haven’t been constant), and the gentle precipitation of a unified and universal unit of measurement based (mostly) on fundamental facts of the universe.

It’s best said by Lord Kelvin, as quoted at the beginning of the book:

I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be.

I spent last night trying to find a music player that would do what I wanted. I didn’t think I had extremely complex or demanding requirements.

1. A music library that can be loaded and queried quickly.
2. A music player that can cope with the standard Ogg Vorbis and MP3 files.
3. An organiser to sync the library (or a subset of it) with my portable MP3 player.

It seems number one is still beyond the abilities of most people who write these programs. Banshee reportedly has O(1) library loading in an experimental branch, but the remainder offer O(n). And n doesn’t have to get very large before you notice quite a slowdown. Exaile seems the best of the ones I tested, but really it’s just the least worst.

Everything I tested managed number two pretty well. But then, they’re music players, they should at least be able to play music files.

The third feature I want was a massive failure on all fronts. They all recognise my player as an external disk, but then they want to index the damn thing which takes forever. Rhythmbox actually hangs for some five minutes on startup (no UI response at all) until it’s finished loading all the tunes from my MP3 player — something I didn’t even ask it to do.

Exaile doesn’t actually hang while it’s indexing my player’s HD but it gives no indication that anything is happening. But five minutes later it pops back with a full list of everything on the disk. It won’t really let me sync though.

Banshee seems the best for syncing audio between different places. At least it seems to have the kind of options you’d need (manual updating, full automatic syncing). Shame it crashes stupendously when you hit the sync button, eh?

So I don’t have anything better than before. I use Exaile here because its library is pretty fast. I use Rhythmbox at work because it was the only one installed by default and it doesn’t demonstrate much slow-down with only two albums in the library. I have nothing to sync the contents of my on-computer library with my portable player. There are a bunch of separate applications that do this job for iPods but not for anything else, as far as I see. Pretty disappointing.

I’ve spent a fair bit of time thinking about Boggle, so it’s time to act! At this point all my readers are going to bail out, because I start putting code on screen. If you’re not afraid of a bit of Haskell, step on through.

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