Apothecary's Drawer Weblog

Dinosaur sighting in Topsham

2011-09-08T03:03:00.000+01:00

I see this van around town from time to time, and never manage to get a decent photo. Unless (though I seriously doubt it) this genuinely is a plumbing firm staffed by women in fetishy costume wielding flame-throwers, this ought to get some kind of prize for the most jaw-droppingly irrelevant and sexist logo I've seen for years. The sides of the van are the same.

- Ray

Accordion tattoo

2011-04-18T02:13:00.003+01:00

For those into such things and in the East Devon area, I highly recommend Glory Bound Tattoos, on Rolle Street in Exmouth. I'd had a couple of recommendations and seen their work online, so went to them for my new upper arm accordion tattoo (left - the dots are actually round when I'm not contorting to take a self-photo). The shop has a nice atmosphere and the staff were very friendly and efficient; they also didn't mind taking on a quite precise self-designed image.

I had the tattoo done as learning the bayan (type B chromatic button accordion) has turned out to be quite a milestone. Although I've dabbled in music for decades, this is the first instrument I've ever felt so completely comfortable with. The decision to get it - see JSBlog posts tagged "bayan" - was a leap of faith that has proved thoroughly worth the uncertainty.

As I said in my Facebook page:

So into my new Russian accordion (first instrument I've felt so in tune with and got good at so fast).

A spot of logic...

2011-03-04T00:50:00.000Z

I don't often post here, except stuff that is personal opinion that I don't want associated with my employers. Here's one.

Clare and I found on the street a folder of school/college course notes belonging to a student called Leigh Evans: no indication of the school. We want to return them.

Clare phoned the most likely, Exeter College, explained the situation, and asked if they had a Leigh Evans attending. The jobsworth who answered the phone said they couldn't possibly indicate a yes or no.

OK, this was slightly unexpected but understandable: Clare might be a weird stalker or a Terminator out to eliminate Leigh Evans, the future leader of the human resistance.

So what were we to do? They said we should send the folder to the college, and if the owner wasn't a student there, they'd send it back.

They appear not to have considered the logic of this. If they don't send it back, they'll have confirmed that Leigh Evans attends the college - exactly the information they said they couldn't indicate.

So how the hell do we get the folder back to its owner?

- Ray

Topsham Inns reviewed

2010-08-26T01:19:00.008+01:00

This review is now at JSBLog.

Topsham Ten (test)

2010-08-17T00:22:00.004+01:00

View Topsham Ten in a larger map

Luke Hanney very kindly sent me an annotated map of the "Topsham Ten" he created in Google Maps. Enjoy!

Tax

2010-04-23T00:22:00.004+01:00

I don't often write plain gripes, but I'll make an exception. I'm just doing my tax return: eurgh.

I have a theory about why tax remains so irksome. People who work in the tax system are those who are comfortable with that kind of Byzantine rule-based finance-y topic. This makes it impossible for them to empathise with the mind-numbing dullness - to the point where we'll procrastinate to the point of penalty - experienced by those of us who don't have that mindset/aptitude. They think failure to deal with tax is wilful laziness, because it would be for them. In fact many who go into the field of tax bureaucracy are probably borderline-autistic to have an aptitude in that area, which further worsens their ability to understand how anyone can feel differently about it. It also means that their regular attempts to simplify the interface to the system or make it friendlier - such as the hated Hector - are never enough, because they simply can't grasp how forbidding it is, how even the sight of that grey-blue plastic envelope saying Please open immediately invokes the exact opposite reaction of throwing the thing in a corner and letting it gather dust for a year. Even Adam Hart-Davis, who fronted the tax adverts, say the UK tax system is too complicated, especially for the self-employed.

As I said, I'm doing my bastard tax return.

On pseudohistories

2010-04-03T18:29:00.011+01:00

I just made it into the local paper with the Express & Echo story "Town 'guide' has residents fuming" concerning my spoof town guide Secret Topsham. Quoting:

One critic, who asked not to be named: "The whole thing is extremely distasteful. It is not in the spirit of Topsham people—we are not like that.

"On Saturday there was a couple visiting Topsham complete with a Secret Topsham quiz they had downloaded from the internet.

"The couple were upset when they realised they had been tricked—disgusted, I think, was the expression used."

A spot of context for those who've come here in response to that story. I maintain the official Topsham website topsham.org as well as the unofficial "Topsham Ten" page. I also run the weblog for the Devon History Society and co-maintain the Topsham Museum website. From this it should be abundantly clear that I think Topsham's a brilliant place, and that I'm also keen on history.

My short response is exactly as I was quoted in the paper (though I don't recall saying exactly those words): "It is really just taking a friendly poke by someone who loves the town at some of the more formal guides you see."

But of course it's more complex than that. Amateur local history, as an activity and genre - and I'm talking about everywhere, not just Topsham - has a number of foibles. It tends to enshrine concrete anecdote over the often fuzzy reality, and accept personal testimony uncritically. It seizes on the most tenuous connections to famous persons. It likes its history airbrushed: local persons are always worthy, social unrest and the grittiness of the historical past ignored. Like all histories, it reflects the social biases of its compilers (in the case of local history, usually older middle-class people). And it takes itself far too seriously.

Some of these I had in mind as applicable to Topsham. The Vivien Leigh connection, for instance, is an example of the 'famous person' syndrome; she never lived in Topsham, and the only connection is that she was married for five years to someone from the town. But these are far more widespead foibles characteristic of local guide pamphlets, websites and advertorial articles for many towns and villages, and Secret Topsham is satirising the 'local anecdote' format in general.

Anyone who feels "disgusted" after falling for a hoax or satire they found on the Internet should look to the origin of that feeling. This is all about cognitive dissonance, the discomfort that comes from taking on an idea, then having to radically revise it. It's easier to blame the originator than accept responsibility for believing something uncritically - despite it being well-known that the Internet is full of misinformation - then realising your mistake.

Secret Topsham is full of impossibilities, tall stories, joke names, an unlikely concentration of famous connections, and even a link to the famously fictious Dunchideock Treacle Mines. It's hard to see how anyone could believe it for more than a moment.

Addendum: further to discussions in the comments, I just found Granite State of Mind, Christian Wisecarver's lovely parody that transplants Jay-Z's Empire State of Mind to portray New Hampshire as a seething metropolis.

Effective meme

2010-03-18T23:45:00.005Z

I liked the recent news report of New Zealander Rudy Heeman's home-built WIG (wing-in-ground-effect) craft - see the Telegraph's New Zealand inventor creates 'flying hovercraft' and the WIG Page - which is an interesting class of vehicle with quite some promise for efficient rapid transport over lake terrain.

I liked less - for its implications about the news propagation process - the misnomer: some twit at some stage (I suspect it might have been someone at Sky News) decided it was called a "wing in ground effective" vehicle, and subsequent news outlets including the BBC (here and here) have brainlessly copied the error.

PS: Bravo. They changed it.

Friday Automata Blogging: It's coming!

2010-02-06T16:49:00.007Z

A good 50p's worth from the charity shop: a slightly malfunctioning Climbatron (it walks fine, but won't climb). Soundtrack courtesy of Jacques Tourneur's 1957 Night of the Demon (the same one quoted at the beginning of Kate Bush's Hounds of Love).

Nightwish

2010-01-29T00:24:00.007Z

I'm (kind of) sorry to say I'm acquiring a reputation among my friends for liking weird music (though I don't find it weird). I'm not sure what it means, but I keep on running into music and liking it, and finding it's Finnish. As I said elsewhere - see Finnish folk roots - the Finnish music scene appears to have a strong fusion element, a strong crossover between genres such as folk and pop and metal, that would be marginalised and viewed as a curiosity elsewhere. Anyhow, check our Nightwish, a Finnish metal band (see their official YouTube channel) who do excellent metal / folk / operatic /rock fusion. Examples: Over the hills and far away; Bless the Child, Ocean Soul, this rather brilliant cover of Phantom of the Opera, and Nemo.

PS: this is altogether rather interesting. I'm going to have to investigate symphonic metal.

Friday Automata Blogging: Hanging Around

2010-01-29T00:08:00.001Z

Friday Automata Blogging: The Birds

2010-01-23T18:24:00.008Z

Gone astray ...

2010-01-21T20:57:00.024Z

A sphere coloured by surface area in a ratio 1:φ. The red upper section subtends at the centre of the sphere Professor Greg Parker's Golden Solid Angle.

Oh, dear. Further to the previous post, I notice that Professor Greg Parker writes in Some more on the Golden Solid angle (continuing the topic of his request for natural instances of a solid angle of 1.52786*π steradians):

Some people in trying to help with a reply have gone astray with both the mathematics involved (which aren’t that complex) and the concept.

I assume this means me, as I've been the only one to comment so far. No, I haven't gone astray. My analysis produced exactly the same result as Greg's for gamma, his Golden Solid Angle (γ = 1.52786*π = 4.799913751 steradians) so nothing is wrong with that side of things.

What I have done, that he seems to dislike, is to analyse it in terms of a practical working way to identify the magic angle he's looking for. No-one, not even a specialist, can be expected to look at an object and say, "Aha, that's a solid angle of 1.52786*π steradians." His definition is perfectly accurate mathematically, but near-useless practically. We need a visualization for a rough guide, which I've provided (above), and a simple way to ascertain more accurately whether an object has that solid angle.

Here's an example. Do the white end caps of the pool ball (left) subtend a Golden Solid Angle at its centre?

There's no way to reach inside and apply some hypothetical ghostly solid-angle protractor, but what we can do is look at the cross-section (right - not too close, to avoid perspective distortion) find the centre O and the angle θ subtended by the edge of the end cap.

Then the solid angle subtended by the cap = 2*π*(1-cos(θ))

We can see it's about 55 degrees, so the solid angle is

2*π*(1-cos(55*π/180)) = 2.679298269 steradians

So, no, our pool ball end cap is too small for γ which is 4.799913751 steradians. As I said in the previous post, we're looking for an object where θ is about 76.345 degrees. The same kind of analysis would apply if we were looking at something other than a sphere, such as a cone-shaped plant or animal structure. There's no way to measure solid angle directly; you need to measure θ on a cross-section, then calculate the solid angle using 2*π*(1-cos(θ)).

The angle at the blunt end of some species of cone shell, incidentally, looks as if it might be near the required angle.

PS: Sorry about the problem with the comments; I switched them off while using this site to prototype another. Comments are now enabled (and I actually publish mine).

Update: Greg has posted an update More on the Golden Solid angle still disputing my view that's there's not likely to be significance in dividing a sphere's surface area in the ratio 1:φ. He writes:

Unfortunately this is quite incorrect! Go down one dimension to the Golden (planar) angle of roughly 137.5 degrees and you will find this angle appearing time and time again in the subject area of Phyllotaxis

Yeah, I know. But this is an essentially fallacious argument: that because something works in 2D, it will if generalised to a different dimension. It won't necessarily: an example in this very area is the Golden Rectangle, which has the nice property that if you chop a square off the end, you get a smaller Golden Rectangle. This property doesn't generalise to 3D; there is no cuboid where you can chop a cube off the end and get a smaller object geometrically similar to the original. Or another geometrical example: equilateral triangles tessellate on a plane thus; but regular tetrahedra can't tessellate 3D space.

There's no reason to assume a geometric property that depends on the specific properties of 2D packing will work in 3D.

Discovered or invented?

2010-01-19T14:23:00.017Z

A posting at Felix Grant's weblog The Growlery - Oh, that this too too solid angle... - just made me realise I've been astonishingly remiss. A considerable time ago, Simon & Schuster sent me a copy to review of Mario Livio's Is God A Mathematician? Ouch - it arrived right in the middle of panicking about my tax return and got buried under paperwork .. and it just resurfaced. I'll write about it, I promise! But first...

Felix is asking for response to Professor Greg Parker's The Golden Solid Angle – first written for publication 14th June 2007. The idea is this: imagine a sphere with a circular spot on it, like the 8-ball in pool. Greg - I'll use that for brevity as Felix does - proposes such a sphere where the spot has an area proportional to 1, and the remainder of the surface an area proportional to φ (phi aka the golden ratio) whose value is (1+√)/2 ... about 1.618034). This spot would subtend a solid angle Greg calls The Golden Solid Angle. He writes:

So I wrote a paper on “The Golden Solid Angle” for the Mathematical Gazette, which was in fact turned down as “although the result was new, just having a new result is not necessarily having something worthy of publication” – well that’s a new one for me! So wishing to stake my claim as the discoverer of the Golden Solid Angle (sent to the Mathematical Gazette on Thursday 14th June 2007) here’s the thing explained for the first time below.

This very much impinges on the subject of Is God A Mathematician?: Mario Livio - who has also written a book on the golden ratio - asks if mathematics is "discovered" or "invented". To cut to the chase - there's a review by Marianne Freiberger in Plus magazine - a bit of both.

π is a classic example of a "discovered" number. Apart from being the ratio of a circle's radius to its diameter, it's ubiquitous in mathematics, cropping up as the result of integrals, statistics, various forms of numerical series, and so on, that appear to have nothing to do with it. φ, on the other hand, Livio considers to be "invented". This is perhaps a harsh assessment, in that it does crop up in natural forms where the classic Fibonacci sequence generates it as a ratio. But it doesn't surface repeatedly in mathematics to the sheer extent of π. As the Plus magazine review puts it:

Much like the umbrella was invented in England and not the Sahara, so was the concept of the golden ratio invented by the Greeks, and not the Indians or Chinese. The Greeks' preoccupation with geometry brought them into frequent contact with this ratio, and so they needed a name for it — beyond that, there's nothing universal about this particular object.

There is, in addition, a long history of (having decided φ to be a significant number) slotting it into contexts that wouldn't naturally or mathematically produce it, then ascribing significance to them - e.g. a circle with diameter φ is the Golden Circle - and that is pretty unambiguously invention. And that brings me back to Greg's concept of the Golden Solid Angle (which divides the surface area of a sphere in the ratio 1:φ). I think it would be a "discovery" if it had surfaced unexpectedly from some analysis; but as it stands, it seems to be the result of an arbitrary choice to put φ in as a value - an invented situation that could just as easily have been a ratio of 1:π or 1:3 or 1:e. With definitely no insult intended to Greg's explorations of interesting mathematical relations, I can understand the Mathematical Gazette's "So what?" response.

Unless ... meaningful "discovered" occurrences of this Golden Solid Angle can be found. If you see a sighting in the wild or know a mathematical process (such as an optimisation) that makes an object with a Golden Solid Angle γ = 4.799926453, let Greg know.

A sphere whose surface is divided in that proportion will look like this:

Derivation, for those interested

It's easier to do the analysis in cross-section. We'll take a sphere of radius = 1 for convenience.

A sphere's surface area = 4*π*r^2 = 4*π in our case.

The surface area of the spherical cap = 2*π*(1-cos(θ))

We want the sphere's surface area divided in the proportion cap:remainder = 1:φ
which means the fractional areas of the cap and the rest are 1/(1+φ) and φ/(1+φ)
or in actual areas (4*π)/(1+φ) and (4*π*φ)/(1+φ)

Now we can equate the two expressions for area to get θ. For the cap:

2*π*(1-cos(θ)) = (4*π)/(1+φ)
1-cos(θ) = 2/(1+φ)
cos(θ) = 1 - 2/(1+φ) = (φ-1)/(φ+1)

θ = ACOS((φ-1)/(φ+1))

Plugging in φ = (1+sqrt(5))/2 we get

θ = ACOS(sqrt(5)-2) = apprx. 1.332478864 radians = apprx. 76.34541519 degrees

Just to confirm the result: this will give a surface area for the cap (and solid angle for the whole cap) of:

2*π*(1-COS(1.332478864)) = 4.799926453 = 1.527864042*π

which corresponds with Greg's result at Some more on the Golden Solid angle obtained by directly solving for surface area ratio (4*π-γ)/γ = 4*π/(4*π–γ)
which gives γ = 4.799926453

(While it's a little longer, I actually prefer my analysis in terms of θ because angle seen in cross-section is a parameter more readily understood than solid angle).

Unreal instruments

2010-01-05T11:25:00.004Z

Clare just got an e-mail that Mr Know-it-all instantly spotted as a hoax:

Read this first, then watch.

AMAZING!

Turn your sound on for this.

This is almost unbelievable. See how all of the balls wind up in catcher cones.

This incredible machine was built as a collaborative effort between the Robert M. Trammell Music Conservatory and the Sharon Wick School of Engineering at the University of Iowa ... Amazingly, 97% of the machines components came from John Deere Industries and Irrigation Equipment of Bancroft , Iowa ...Yes, farm equipment!

It took the team a combined 13,029 hours of set-up, alignment, calibration, and tuning before filming this video but as you can see it was WELL worth the effort. It is now on display in the Matthew Gerhard Alumni Hall at the University and is already slated to be donated to the Smithsonian.

The accompanying clip was in the fact the above, Pipe Dream, minus the onscreen credits, from the music animation specialists Animusic. I've expounded a bit more on their lovely works at JSBlog: see Self-playing harps.

Maybe I've watched too much computer animation, but I can't see how anyone could think this to be real for more than a moment. Nor did I realise how ubiquitous the e-mail is: enough to be mentioned on a number of debunking sites such as Snopes. Needless to say, the Robert M. Trammell Music Conservatory and the Sharon Wick School of Engineering at the University of Iowa do not exist. The discussion at The Blog of Phyz - Fooling our elders... - is enlightening if depressing; I know well the syndrome described, where the person who spots a hoax becomes cast as the bad guy:

The person who sends the hoax is regarded as a happy-go-lucky victim with a positive outlook on life, but the person who responds with the truth is regarded as a curmudgeonly killjoy.

The alternative, I suppose, is the recipient admitting being fooled. In this case, however, the hoax is doing down a remarkable piece of work, and by removing the credit may even count as video piracy. As the Hoaxslayer entry says:

There is no need to malign this fantastic animation by tacking on a foolish and totally fictitious cover story. Such clever work speaks for itself and needs no embellishment. Moreover, the real creators of the animation deserve credit for their genius. If you receive this email forward, please let the sender know the true origin of the "farm machine music" video.

Crab collars

2010-01-02T04:45:00.003Z

I just had to preserve this, recently posted on Wikipedia and not unnaturally speedy-deleted as a hoax.

Crab collars

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Overview

Collars have been recommended for people who have pet crabs of the following varieties:

Hermit (All Paguroidea varieties)
Halloween (Geocarcinus quadratus)
Japanese spider crabs (Macrocheira kaempferi)

Purpose

Many people don't consider the importance of collars for pet crabs. Some key reasons collar users are listed below:

Identification
Protection
Listed Medical Allergies
Contact Number / Return Address
Bling

Users have found peace of mind especially when having to ask their pets to be minded with the added support that a collar offers.

Fitting

Carefully clean the pet before attaching to help provide a close bond with the collar.
Ensure that the collar is attached firmly to the to the crab's largest Merus as to stop the pet from being able to detach the collar with a cheliped.
Do Not attach a collar to a main shell for Hermit varieties as the pet can simply remove itself from the housing. Special collars made for these varieties are to be attached to the Cephalothorax
Tighten the collar just enough so that it cannot move or twist.
Choose a colour that compliments your crab, the delicate social structure of crabs can greatly be affected due to favourtism and rejection.

Usage

A fitted collar can provide a great deal of fun outside of the confides of your tank or aquarium. Well exercised crabs are happy crabs
When swimming with your pet, ensure you take an extended lead to ensure maximum freedom. As crabs are predominately land crawlers they may stress do to prolonged or restricted underwater activity.
When requiring your pet to be cared for temporarily by a friend or relative, ensure your collar is up to date with details.

Christmas Dalek Blogging

2009-12-27T22:09:00.007Z

A scary thing seen in a window near here.

Friday Monster Blogging

2009-12-04T13:34:00.006Z

This is all the fault of my friends Felix and Dr. C., who made me waste time making this.

Transgendered spam

2009-10-27T09:08:00.007Z

A spam I'd like to share. Fairly common format: allegedly dying person offering a large sum of money for investment. A detail spotted amid various pious stuff:

Assalam Alaikum

I am mrs farhat ALI I was married to Late MUHAMMAD ALI the blessed memory who was an oil explorer in Kuwait for several years before he died , we were married for twelve years without a child.

He died after a brief illness which lasted for only four days.

...

Since his death, I have been battling with both terminal prostate cancer and fibroid problems

...

Regards,
mrs farhat Ali

Interesting combination of illnesses, Mrs Ali. With such confused internal plumbing, no wonder you couldn't have children.

Shift of attention

2009-10-22T12:02:00.000+01:00

You've probably noticed postings have been a bit sporadic lately. Everything's fine, but I've been spending more time working at the bookshop these days (more often than not, a couple of days a week) and that's strongly shaping my topics of interest.

I have very nice employers who let me blog, and otherwise compute, at work as long as the customers aren't neglected; so, for the moment, the focus of blogging action has shifted to JSBlog. It has the same eclectic intentions as the Apothecary's Drawer, but it's generally seeded by book-related observations. I'll post here anything involving my personal social/political views that I wouldn't want associated with the bookshop.

Check also the Devon History Society blog, which I also run. Same style again, but directed toward Devon history topics.

Ships and sexism

2009-10-22T12:00:00.009+01:00

Language Log recently reported the death of newspaper columnist William Safire. He's not so well known in UK, but in the USA and among language enthusiasts he'll be particularly remembered for his "On Language" column for the New York Times Magazine.

The obituaries from linguists have been generally positive; although he started from something of a "language peeve" basis, he moved from that stance over the years and commentators such as Benjamin Zimmer (see Remembering the Language Maven) recall him as a nice guy who was genuinely fascinated with language and ready to learn from descriptive linguistics. Some of his early columns, however, were less in tune with that field; he was strongly prescriptive and traditionalist about usages with inherent gender, and in the mid-1980s, Douglas Hofstadter wrote in his book Metamagical Themas that "Safire has without doubt been one of the most vocal opponents of nonsexist language reforms". By 1999, Safire had considerably mellowed, and his article Genderese: Looking for a masterful Webmistress? asked merely if reform toward nonsexists form was moving too fast, and even endorsed a number of gender-free forms such as "firefighter", "police officer" and "mail carrier" (see Gender shifts in the history of English Studies in English language, Anne Curzan, Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Bearing in mind, then, that it ceased to apply to the later Safire, it's still interesting to read as a historical piece Hofstadter's A Person Paper on Purity in Language, by William Satire. This satire takes arguments against nonsexist usage collected from Satire's columns of the time, and recasts them in an alternate world where there is no sexism, but an inherent racism that is reflected in language. It's a diatribe against, for instance, the "negrists" who object to the phrasing of the Declaration of Independence, "All whites are created equal". Anyhow, enjoy: A Person Paper on Purity in Language.

Case in point: the practice of calling ships "she". In 2002 - see 'She' is no longer a ship, The Telegraph - formally altered its house style to refer to ships as "it". I don't feel strongly one way or another about that: seafarers have a practical job that isn't going to be altered by what pronoun they use, and the origin apears to be a respectful animism based on a ship's life-preserving and nurturing role, the positive aspects of being a "she". However, I'm always irritated by a spinoff of this usage: the frequent appearance in coastal gift shops of teatowels and other merchandise that use the metaphor of a ship being a "she" as vehicle for a parade of demeaning stereotypes about women. For example:

It takes a lot of paint to keep her good-looking. It is not the initial expense that breaks you; it is the upkeep ... it takes an experienced man to handle her correctly; and without a man at the helm she is uncontrollable.

Try complaining. You'll get, variously, blank astonishment; claims that it's a harmless joke; accusations of having no sense of humour; failure to grasp that the objection is not to ships being called "she" but about the statements about women used to explore this metaphor; etc, etc. It's a small manifestation of sexism, but it's still quite astonishing how people even now are happy to acquiesce in the demeanment of one sex. I assume shops wouldn't display posters saying:

Women need lots of cosmetics to stay good-looking. They place a crippling financial burden on their male partners, though not on first acquaintance. They need controlling by a man or will go delinquent.

Why should it be acceptable when dressed up as a joking metaphor about a ship?

Fossil ink story - not so new

2009-08-25T02:55:00.001+01:00

After 150m years as a fossil, Belemnotheutis antiquus takes up its pen (Simon de Bruxelles, The Times, August 19, 2009) is one of many "fossil squid ink" stories in the papers recently: the nice tale of a Jurassic belemnite fossil found in Wiltshire whose ink was so well preserved that it could be reconstituted and used for a drawing.

But ... this story rang distinct bells from my geology undergrad days, so I backtracked with Google Books.

One may thus draw pictures or write letters with squid "ink" and a squid "pen." Most remarkable of all, this is even possible with the ink and pen of fossil squids which lived millions of years ago.
- Bulletin of the Charleston Museum (1907)

The ink is not readily decomposed; onthe contrary it is occasionally found fossil in the rocks along with the remains of the animal which produced it. So well has it been preserved that in one celebrated instance a naturalist drew the portrait of a fossil squid with the sepia derived from its fossil, but not fossilized ink-bag.
- p363, The standard natural history, Volume 1, John Sterling Kingsley, Friedrich von Hellwald, Elliott Coues, 1884

It was discovered by Dr Buckland that in many specimens of fossil cephalopods, called scientifically Geoteuthis, i.e. Earth Squid, the ink-bag remained in the animal untouched by its long sojourn within the earth, and even retaining its quality of rapid mxiture with water. A drawing was actually made by Sir F. Chantrey, with a portion of "sepia" taken from a fossil species, and the substance proved to be such excellent quality that an artist, to whom the sketch was shown, was desirous of learning the name of the colourman who prepared the tint.
- The illustrated natural history, Volume 3, John George Wood, 1863.

See Dr Buckland's Bridgewater Treatise, The Monthly Review, Volume 3, 1836, for Buckland's original account of the experiment, which was conducted in 1826. He probably got the idea from Elizabeth Philpot - a weathy Lyme Regis fossil collector who befriended the young Mary Anning - who also used the fossil sepia for drawings (see The Dragon Seekers: How an Extraordinary Circle of Fossilists Discovered the Dinosaurs and Paved the Way for Darwin, Christopher McGowan, Da Capo Press, 2002, ISBN 073820673). A similar drawing was done by Henry De la Beche in 1834. See below: it's even captioned "Painted with fossil sepia".

Click to enlarge: image by "Cetae", Photobucket

So, the current news story is less radical than it appears. It's still interesting, but it's a pity that its precursors aren't credited. I've no idea if they were in the original BGS press release.
- Ray

Re-colouring the past

2008-12-12T04:15:00.004Z

See Re-colouring the past for a post with links relating to the BBC's Colour Recovery Working Group. Featured in the Guardian and this week's Radio Times, the group has been doing some fascinating work recovering lost colour from old BBC material such as Dad's Army and Dr Who. Originally filmed in colour in PAL video format (material in this format was lost) the programmes were archived to 16mm monochrome film, but the telerecording process left a pattern of "chroma dots" on the mono movie that can be processed to recover colour information. Neat!

Bad Science: review

2008-11-19T22:09:00.005Z

Whether specifically applied to science or not, books that educate about rational thinking, and critique irrational/dishonest thinking and its practitioners, have a very long pedigree. Robert H Thouless' classic Straight and crooked thinking springs to mind, as do Darrell Huff's How to Lie with Statistics, Martin Gardner's Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science and Science : Good, Bad, and Bogus, and Michael Shermer's Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time.

There's always room for topical reanalysis, however, and this is the thrust of Ben Goldacre's Bad Science, the spinoff book from his Guardian column of the same name. It concentrates mostly on bad science in relation to UK-based medicine and health: partly because Goldacre is a UK doctor; partly because this is a major arena of conflict between science and what's pejoratively called "woo". The material will be familiar to regular readers, who probably follow the Bad Science website too. But the newspaper pieces are necessarily short, and easily read as a series of loosely connected "whack-a-mole" episodes. The book corrals the moles, so to speak, drawing together and analysing recurring themes so that (in the words of Sir Iain Chalmers, Founder of the Cochrane Library) you can "become a more effective bullshit detector".

A brief tour by chapter: 1) "Matter" (detox methods). 2) Brain Gym. 3) The Progenium X-Y Complex. 4) Homeopathy. 5) The Placebo Effect. 6) The Nonsense du Jour (primarily about claims of nutritionists). 7) Dr Gillian McKeith PhD. 8) 'Pill Solves Complex Social Problem' (the Durham fish oil trials). 9) Professor Patrick Holford. 10) Is Mainstream Medicine Evil? 11) How the Media Promote the Public Misunderstanding of Science. 12) Why Clever People Believe Stupid Things. 13) Bad Stats. 14) Health Scares. 15) The Media's MMR Hoax. 16) And another thing.

The first three chapters start with the fish-in-a-barrel stuff as an appetiser: claims containing factual errors that are trivially debunkable (e.g. "detox" methods that demonstrably make the stuff claimed to be extracted from the body, or Brain Gym's claim that "processed foods don't contain water"). Then Goldacre gets to "the meat", first using the currently controversial homeopathy as focus to introduce some core tools for deciding if a treatment works - blinding, randomisation, and meta-analysis - before moving on to an extensive discussion of the strength of the placebo effect.

The next three chapters move on to the claims of nutritionists, beginning with general problems - such as cherry-picked data, invalid extrapolation to humans from test-tube results, and outright invention - then analysing the claims of Gillian McKeith and (via the Durham fish oil trial) Patrick Holford as modern, contrasting examples (one theatrical, one scientific in style) of a long-standing type of media health guru. Goldacre is not exclusively batting for the mainstream medical side; chapter 10 covers the similar and varied ways the pharmaceutical industry massages data to promote particular drugs.

The final half a dozen chapters attempt to identify causes for the general mess, and Goldacre points to two factors. One is human cognition (as a side effect of cognitive mechanisms dazzlingly successful in rapid processing of our world, the human brain - however clever - simply is wired to be hopeless at analysing statistics and other complex data). The other is the media, where standard story formats such as "formula for the perfect <whatever>", "maverick against the system", "miracle cure" and "hidden scare" almost always misrepresent science. The Daily Mail’s "ongoing mission to divide all the inanimate objects in the world into those that cause or cure cancer" gets a mention, as does the spate of tabloid MRSA stories based on tests by a completely unreliable expert, the late Dr Chris Malyszewicz. Another media story, discussed in detail, is the recent MMR/autism scare, where such factors produced a national media-propagated health-endangering myth that persisted long after the peer debunking of Dr. Andrew Wakefield's minority view. The book finishes with an exhortation for scientists to get involved, and not to get suckered into media-distorted versions of their work.

I admit I'm a regular at the Bad Science forum, and long since sympathetic to Ben Goldacre's view of things; it's hard to see the book as has having much surface appeal to enthusiasts of alternative medicine. However, I strongly recommend it to those readers, as Goldacre's approach is not as antagonistic as might be expected. Unlike the black-and-white pro-science authors of many books of this sort, he's thoroughly open to finding territories in common. For instance, he views "detox" procedures as a manifestation of an ancient, human and positive form of psychological cleansing ritual, that only becomes scammy when pseudoscientific fixtures are bolted on. Likewise, he regards the placebo effect as powerful and positive; again, only wrong when used unethically. His strongest criticisms of alternative medical belief systems are in areas such as their general hostility to evidence-based procedure and critical self-appraisal, and the egregious habit of chilling factual criticism by legal threats (expect a future out-take, removed from the book pending now-settled legal action, on exactly this point in relation to Matthias Rath).

Lack of critical self-appraisal applies also, of course, to newspaper and television; Bad Science mentions, for instance, various media refusals to reevaluate their MRSA scare stories even when eminent microbiologists pointed out problems with the methods of Dr Malyszewicz. The media is the main villain of the piece, with its immense power to influence public perception, coupled with its entrenched capacity for failure to 'get' science (perhaps due to persistence of the syndrome of CP Snow's 'Two Cultures' - newspapers sideline their specialist science writers, so front page scientific/medical stories are written by non-scientists). The book's overall flavour is cheerfully acerbic, but shot through with a sympathy for the human condition. People, in Goldacre's view, are emphatically not stupid; but they make better decisions about their health when not wilfully misinformed. Bad Science attacks those misinformers, not the believers.

Bad Science, Ben Goldacre, Fourth Estate, 2008, ISBN-10: 0007240198 ISBN-13: 978-0007240197.

Addendum: comments are welcome, subject to a policy. Since we're talking about evidence-based practice, if you disagree with what Goldacre and/or the book says, provide evidence. Unsupported assertions that he's wrong (or conversely that those he criticises are right) don't add anything but verbiage to the issue, and will be binned. If you think this is unfair, tough: it's way better a deal than sceptics ever get from sites hosting the views of alternative therapists.
- Ray

Obama wins

2008-11-05T16:17:00.006Z

I don't normally mention politics, but I'm blown away by the news that Barack Obama has been elected president of the USA: see Obama wins historic US election. While he has downplayed the issue of his racial background, it can hardly be ignored. Whether he succeeded by his own actions (overcoming prejudices about it or by making it simply irrelevant) or by the American mindset having changed, his election is a radical milestone in American politics. Plus, as a Democrat and highly intelligent, he looks good news for the world in general. See the historical analysis from How Barack Obama defied history (Nick Bryant, BBC News, Washington).

Bessemer Saloon

2008-10-21T01:18:00.002+01:00

I've just been sent some brilliant photos of the swinging cabin of Sir Henry Bessemer's experimental Bessemer Saloon steamship. See Bessemer Saloon images at JSBlog.

Linkfarm

2008-10-06T13:11:00.002+01:00

I'm in the process of downsizing raygirvan.co.uk. The categorised link farm there is being moved to a set of backdated blog posts; you can access them via the Linkfarm links in the right sidebar here.

UFO capture

2008-09-18T23:55:00.003+01:00

Belatedly, I was just reading a very nice post at Kentaro Mori's sceptical blog Cetismo Aberto (see Google translation).

The post Vamos capturar OVNIs? E muito mais? (translation) features a very nice piece of motion capture software, UFOCaptureV2, that connects to an admittedly expensive webcam. One demo features flying birds seen from Kentaro Mori's window, but the especially nice part is its capacity for catching meteor trails and other natural phenomena without hours of tedious observation.

Cloud anaglyph

2008-09-03T22:53:00.002+01:00

If you have red/blue glasses, check out this cloud anaglyph (click image for larger version). There are a good many such images on the Web - for instance, here and here and here - but generally they're taken from aircraft. I managed to get the one above from a stereopair taken from the train a bit south of Westbury, Wiltshire: the train speed gave sufficient distance separation between shots without the clouds distorting too much over the time lapse.

A book story

2008-08-11T13:01:00.025+01:00

"Literature, from the very beginning, has had a single enemy, and that is the restriction of the expressed idea. It turns out, however, that freedom of expression sometimes presents a greater threat to an idea, because forbidden thoughts may circulate in secret, but what can be done when an important fact is lost in a flood of impostors, and the voice of truth becomes drowned out in an ungodly din? When that voice, though freely resounding, cannot be heard, because the technologies of information have led to a situation in which one can receive best the message of him who shouts the loudest, even when the most falsely?"

- Stanislav Lem: His Master's Voice

I borrowed this as one of the favourite quotations of Felix Grant at The Growlery, as it's especially pertinent to an interesting success story that's all over the papers in various forms at the moment: from the Mail on Sunday Author, 93, uses profits from first novel to buy massive house to spare friends misery of care home, or the Telegraph, First time author, 93, saves friends from care homes with book advance. This is the story of Lorna Page, who "has bought a five bedroom house for £310,000 after securing a significant advance for her thriller", A Dangerous Weakness, and plans to use the home to assist friends in getting out of care homes.

This is such a near-perfect news story - human interest, triumph against the odds, altruism in action, right-on social message - that it seems almost crafted to slip under the reality-check radar. It has a payload (a feelgood story) and shielding against critical analysis (only a nasty person would question the facts of a story of an old lady helping others out of unpleasant care homes).

However, I feel less nasty on seeing I'm not the only person to spot that the book is published by AuthorHouse: a print-on-demand self-publishing or author services publisher. Such publishers don't give advances. I suspected this would be the situation the moment I first saw the story in the Aug 9 Western Morning News: local press stories about unlikely first novelists almost invariably boil down to self-publishing in some form. So, to be blunt, it's vanity-published - which would make an advance, especially one significant enough to finance a new house, and becoming (as the Guardian story says) "suddenly prosperous on the advance and sales" extremely unusual. Elaboration of this point would be of interest; it doesn't appear in the June 26th PR Newswire press release. Somewhere, in the process of the press taking up this story, an exaggeration has crept in, and hardly a trivial one: portraying a self-published book of so far unknown prospects as a successful money-spinner.

The story seems to have spread worldwide; however, analysis of the logistics also has. See discussions of Tales of the Big Advance at Making Light. However, the exaggerated version trundles on, with papers recycling the same factoids, as in the Guardian's Michelle Hanson's If only Mavis had a Lorna Page with a big house to save her from the crushing doom of these homes (Tuesday, Aug 12 2008)

Three cheers for Lorna Page, aged 93, who has just written her first novel, a thriller, and with the proceeds has bought a large house

...This week Michele read Blackmoor, by Edward Hogan ... She watched World at War, UKTV History, day after day in dark glasses, with her new cataract-free eye

But presumably didn't read the freakin' Web, where aspects of this press coverage have been repeatedly questioned. Same goes also for Ros Coward, whose Guardian Comment is free piece, Lorna Page: the write stuff, also also assumes the truth of this success story.

Wednesday Aug 13: gold star to Christina Patterson of The Independent - Where poetry still has power - for going against the general adulation, and doing the proper journalistic thing of actually fact-checking: "Heart-warming stuff. Except that the book is published by AuthorHouse, a company in which the traditional flow of money for publication, from publisher to author, is reversed".

Skimming blog commentary, a frequent comment in defence of the mistake is that no harm has been done and someone may benefit. However, Issendai's Superhero Training Journal points out the downside: "Meanwhile, the story is suctioning common sense out of novice writers' heads as we speak".

Addendum: another gold star to BBC Radio 4's iPM for The 93 year-old and the big advance.... by Chris Vallance, who contacted Lorna Page's publicist and daughter-in-law, Cate Allen, who confirms that the bloggers were right about there being no advance.

Cate tells me that instead of receiving an advance, they paid a small sum to have the novel published, as is usually the case with self-publishing. They chose AuthorHouse because Cate is herself published there. They are hopeful that the book will make money, and that this will enable Lorna to help her elderly friends, but it is early days ... Cate also told me that some media reports "just made up facts" ... As for what she has been doing to correct errors in coverage, Cate says she now makes it clear to journalists how the story has been misreported, and she's encouraged Lorna to go online herself to set the record straight.

iPM is, unfortunately, just a slightly more official grade of blog, it's hard to say if this will filter through to mainstream news.

August 15: the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column likewise reports:

In common with most other papers we reported that 93-year-old Lorna Page, "suddenly prosperous on the advance and sales" of her novel A Dangerous Weakness (93-year-old novelist gives home to friends from care homes, page 5, August 11), had been able to buy a big detached house for herself and three of her friends. Aspiring writers (and housebuyers) should note that her publisher, AuthorHouse, is a self-publishing company whose website states: "For a modest financial investment you can choose what you want for your book."

This correction, of course, will have no effect on writers who haven't seen it, such as the compiler of the Observer's Quotes of the week, August 17 2008, or the Calcutta Telegraph's Till dreams do us part.

Granted, the whole saga is a storm in a teacup with no major consequences whether the distortion of the story takes root or not. However, I'm interested in it as an example of how mistakes can propagate via the press and blogosphere. The next time, it could just as easily concern something important.

Topology sighting

2008-07-11T13:18:00.002+01:00

A sighting of topology in the wild: I was interested to see this nice Möbius strip (aka Moebius Strip if you don't do umlauts) as a van logo. With this, and a company name integral.co.uk, I wonder if there's a closet mathematician behind the scenes.

Knots ... or not?

2008-07-06T19:57:00.011+01:00

Living in a town with a maritime history, I notice a lot of nautical memorabilia about. One that baffles me, however, is a wall display of knot examples I've seen in various places that looks like the one here. It's kind of interesting, but even more so when you look closely at the captions. The knots are called "Ships Knot, Grapnel Knot, Sapajou Knot, Timber Knot, Deck Knot, Carrick-Bend Knot, Simple Knot, Fist Knot, Flat Knot, Double-Timer Knot, Eight-Ring Knot, Chasis Knot, and Piscalory Knot".

The strange thing is that almost none of them appear to be the correct names. The creators have got the Carrick bend correct, but they call the figure-of-eight knot a "timber knot", the bowline a "chasis knot", the reef knot a "flat knot", the overhand knot (aka thumb knot) a "simple knot", the fisherman's knot a "piscalory knot" (which looks like a stab at "piscatory" = pertaining to fishing), and something similar to a capuchin knot (aka blood knot or multiple overhand knot) a "sapajou knot". The last is actually explicable; a sapajou is a monkey of the genus Cebus, also called capuchin monkey, although the capuchin knot - see Dunc's shed - is named for its use on the cord of a monk's robe.

I've no idea where these display boxes originate; I assume overseas, as one supplier mentions they're Fair Trade items. But I'd love to know exactly how these misnomers were cooked up. Machine translation? Complete invention? It's slightly odd that anyone with enough knowledge of English to invent plausible - even erudite in some cases - false names couldn't go to the trivial effort of finding the real ones.

Addendum: in a lovely example of the kind of ultra-specialised study that the Internet allows sharing, check out Noeud de Franciscain and Noeud de Capucin, in which Charles Hamel (aka Nautile), explores the confusion between two very similar knots, the Capuchin and Franciscan, with examples as depicted in paintings and statues. The same knot, used presumably for its property of creating a node in a cord while keeping it straight, was the basis of the Incan quipu (aka khipu), a data storage medium using knotted string, used for bureaucratic recording and communication: more on this at the Harvard University Khipu Database Project.

Nice vortex street

2008-06-22T12:39:00.003+01:00

From the Mail on Sunday and The Sun, some very nice pictures of von Karman vortex streets, a classic turbulence pattern in fluid dynamics formed when steady flow is disturbed by an narrow obstacle.

The newspapers both call the location "Isla Sorocco"; it's actually "Isla Socorro", which is correctly named at the photo agency Barcroft Media's gallery. Maybe a subeditor's hypercorrection based on subconscious association with "scirocco"?

Server outage

2008-04-21T22:20:00.005+01:00

If anyone's trying to contact me, sorry: a major server outage has taken out raygirvan.co.uk and a number of sites I maintain (hence the dead image links in this blog). It's possibly some kind of attack: in the hour before the server went down, I had 450+ e-mail bounce messages from various places that had received spam from Russian sites with the From: field forged to my address. I'm told things should be mended some time tomorrow.

Sorted: 22nd April

Rural photography - the shaping of aesthetics

2008-04-10T00:46:00.009+01:00

For your consideration, two photographs of Sun Hill allotments, Topsham. Which is better, and why? I don't suppose I'm alone in the impulse, when I took the first image, to change viewpoint and zoom in to avoid the heap of plastic compost bags. Yet this is an aesthetic decision that bears no relation to the reality of what was present at the scene, nor the utility of the bags (which are just as important to the gardener's work as the wooden stakes and sheds).
      I had cause to consider this on reading Rural myths, #12 and a theme issue of the defunct photographic journal Ten.8 that came by the bookshop where I work. Ten.8, founded by a group of Birmingham-based photographers and journalists including Derek Bishton, explored an alternative/activist agenda on photography in relation to areas such racism, unemployment and social unrest, along with an general brief of analysing the meaning of photography. Who photographs and what influences their topics? Who benefits from its display? And so on. If the Rural Myths issue is representative, even if you don't agree with the politics this is a thought-provoking approach and one unusual in photographic magazines, which largely focus on the nuts-and-bolts of hardware and technique, and, at most, practical issues of the rights and responsibilities of photographers.
      Rural Myths contains several essays on the same theme: how photography of rural scenes has been shaped, from the start, by the social and political agendas of those taking the pictures. For instance, John Taylor's "The imaginary landscape" looks at how 19th century photography portrayed as "natural" a landscape that was actually radically transformed by agriculture and, especially, how it omitted rural poverty; and Stevie Bezencenet's "Landscape - Image - Property" looks at how photography's view of landscape as a prompt for aesthetic pleasure almost never confronts the reality of the land as property. Terry Morden's "The Pastoral and the Pictorial" and Peter Dormer's "Fantasy Island" both look at how photographic conventions tie into maintaining a certain reactionary status quo about the countryside: as a place that is expected to remain picturesque for the benefit of viewing by those who don't work there.
      There are interesting asides about how conventions alter in relation to current opinion: for instance, how the 19th century's traditional artistic convention of offsetting salient features became modified by early 20th century didactic tourist publications into centralising objects of interest. It's somewhat embarrassing, as a photographer, to find yourself repeating the conventions described, such as the urge to eliminate modernity (as with those plastic bags), concentrating on the folksiest parts of town and country. It'd be naive to deny that such conventions work in the sense of pushing the right buttons - the "Englishness" of a scene like this appeals to me as much as anyone else, and I wouldn't have taken the picture if making the composition didn't have that effect on me quite intensely. But at least that self-knowledge might make me think a little more about breaking out of that script.
      This aesthetic I think runs deep in the English collective pysche; it applies not merely to photographing rural landscapes, but is also a factor in shaping policy about land use. Attitudes to rural land are not permanent fixtures; historically, parts of rural England were intensely industrialised, such as the mining districts of Cornwall and West Devon, Even the quintessentially rural Kent, the "Garden of Engand", contained the Kent Coalfield (which remains surprisingly little-known despite the last pit closing as recently as the late 1980s).
      A Kent coalfield would be inconceivable now, as would many other projects such as building a new railway tunnelling through spectacular coastal scenery, as Brunel did at Dawlish (see Coryton Cove and Shell Cove). We've moved now into an era where conservation is the dominant philosophy, where the aesthetic appearance of English rural landscape is a major factor in the debates over (I pick sites at random) polytunnels, windfarms and new towns. It's right to consider the local and regional impact of such developments, but Rural Myths is interesting in highlighting the role in such considerations of ingrained and sometimes simply untrue memes of what kind of landscape rural Britain was, is, and should be.

Secret Topsham

2008-04-01T14:32:00.001+01:00

Secret Topsham: a photographic tour of the lesser-known sights of Topsham, Devon, has been on my site for a while, but I decided to tidy up into a single document.

BT Broadband SMTP problems

2008-03-27T03:07:00.006Z

Last week I had a problem with my BT Broadband connection: despite my authentication settings being correct, their SMTP server suddenly wouldn't accept my own domain address in my e-mail From: field. Only the btinternet address would work. Since I'd not done anything, clearly they'd made some configuration change.
      This was a pain in the backside. I had either to switch to a btinternet address (which looks amateurish), tell e-mail recipients to ignore the From: address and reply to a different one (which also looks amateurish as well as being messy), or find another SMTP server (which would probably cost). BT Broadband's helpline was unable to help, and told me a) there was no way to configure to use my own address and b) they couldn't offer support for Pegasus Mail anyway.
      I Googled, and found their advice to be completely wrong. There is a fix. You log on to BT Yahoo! using your btinternet address and password (i.e. the ones you use for SMTP authentication) and go to Mail / Options / Mail Accounts. There you find the option to add non-BT e-mail addresses that you want to send from. Problem solved: now I can used my own domain address again.
      I don't know if this fix is generally known, but it's not exactly a positive sign that BT Broadband can't/won't tell you about it.

Addendum, March 28th: I find, at last, that this is acknowledged on the BT Yahoo! Service Status page:

BT Yahoo! SMTP Security Upgrade - March 2008
As part of ongoing security enhancements to BT Yahoo! email, we have upgraded the security to prevent emails from being sent from client applications (Microsoft Outlook, Thunderbird etc) when the "From" email address is not either a BT Yahoo! email address or a validated alternative email address. If you see an error 553 message, you will need to validate the email address from which you wish to send. Step by step instructions can be found at BT Yahoo! Mail Help.

Fair enough. But what baffled me, and many others, is that the relationship between BT Broadband access and BT Yahoo! wasn't made clear to me as a customer. Like many others, I was given the SMTP access details on signing up for broadband, but never realised that they also accessed BT Yahoo! webmail or that BT Yahoo! handled SMTP traffic for BT Broadband.

Addendum #2, March 31st: it is now becoming clear that this unnannounced security upgrade caused widespread problems among BT Broadband users. It'd be interesting to know how much money BT made from unnecessary calls to its helpline. See The Register: BT 'security upgrade' causes email headaches.

Anodised aluminium pot scam. The dirty ...

2008-03-25T19:43:00.004Z

Anyone who watches Catherine Tate will know Janice and Ray's catch-phrase about traders they view as selling overpriced products: "The dirty robbing bastards". This is peculiarly appropriate to a scam revealed by the debunking blog Depleted Cranium, which notes that The Tesla Purple Energy Shield Looks Firmiliar….
      When you read the description of this Tesla Shield from the vendor, Life Technology (of Drumcon, Lisbellaw, Enniskillen, County Fermanagh), the creativity perhaps deserves credit, for spinning such a woo yarn around a little widget of purple anodised aluminium. The price, however, is no joke: $199 for the basic version (and even more for variants) - quite a lot for something Depleted Cranium identifies unmistakably as a capsule keychain costing $2.95.
      Maybe someone could identify more precisely the Zeusite shield ("a high energy compressed matrix of precious and semi precious stones, precious and non precious conductive metals, and monatomic covalent mineral elements which are specifically chosen not only for their protective effects but also their subtle energy enhancement effects"). To me, it looks like a ceramic bead, for $99.95.
      The dirty robbing bastards. I wonder what the Northern Ireland Trading Standards would make of this?

Convex/Concave

2008-03-08T13:41:00.003Z

If you're in the Exeter area and interested in science/arts crossover, next week's Convex/Concave looks of interest. A free event on Wednesday 12 March 1.30pm - 8.30pm at Gallery Terracina, Exeter Quay, this is a "one-day public workshop bringing together artists and scientists from the South West to share practice and critique of each other's work in an engaging setting".
The third in an annual series of events under the banner Science in the Dock, Art in the Stocks, the focus of Convex/Concave seems to be on visual perception: looks fun, and controversial in places. As the ESRC press release says, "In one session Harry Collins, a professor of sociology at Cardiff University, will argue that science is fundamentally different from art, and so it is dangerous to allow the general public to make judgements about science, in the way that they do about art".
I can't much disagree with that: not because the public are stupid, but because they are primed with misinformation about science, particularly via the press's tendency to present conflict between major scientific consensus and small-minority views as equally balanced controversies.

Photographic rights and Exeter streets

2008-02-01T08:17:00.000Z

UK Photographers Rights is an excellent and authoritative short guide, written by a British lawyer, "to the main legal restrictions on the right to take photographs and the right to publish photographs that have been taken". Alternatively, UK Photographers Rights, A Guide at Tog's Blog ("the thoughts and ramblings of a bitter and twisted press-photographer") gives the same information more robustly.
      I found these while reading around a minor local controversy here in Exeter: recent disputes about rights to photography in the newly developed Princesshay shopping quarter (whose architecture is highly photogenic) and Guildhall Centre. As the Express & Echo reports, security staff have accosted photographers - "Cameraman told, don't take shots in Princesshay", "New concern over photos being taken in the city", and so on - but the site managers deny there being a ban, saying only that permission is necessary (the issues, they say, are "safety and welfare of visitors", and "quite serious security implications" of "visitors taking photographs of shop frontages and staff"). A further complication is that the problem applies to only some of the streets in the development, the canopied ones that were the subject of a Walkways Agreement - see Princesshay is public, but only up to a point.
      Legally, this can't be argued with: landowners have the right to restrict photography. But it makes no intuitive sense in this case. Princesshay incorporates pre-existing street layouts that to all practical purposes function as public thoroughfares. Visitors in particular (Exeter is a popular tourist destination) can hardly be expected to know the legal fine print behind use of a street.
      My main other thoughts concern the silly assumptions behind the restrictions on photography, if the rationale is security. Photographers carrying SLR-format cameras seem to have been singled out for their visibility. This completely ignores the reality that high quality camera phones are now ubiquitous: anyone with a mobile could be taking a photograph under pretence of texting. Such large scope for clandestine photography really makes it pointless to pick on people with a big geeky camera openly taking photos.

Of course, security concerns in a provincial shopping centre are rather small beer compared to those in London, where there are buildings of major national importance and a history of terrorism. That said, there is still a spectrum between realistic concern and officiousness. Searching Amateur Photographer magazine for "rights" finds various interesting articles stemming from readers' reports of being apprehended for photographing London landmarks, and AP has strongly campaigned for photographers' rights. The politician Austin Mitchell, himself a keen photographer, has been highly supportive.

Radiation in the home

2008-01-02T21:21:00.000Z

Via Bad Science, I saw recently a now-defunct funhigh.com blog post 10 Radioactive Products Used In Everyday Life!!!??, which showcased a selection of curious and dangerous products from days when we were more naive about radioactivity. Other examples are easy to find online: snake oil remedies such as Radithor (which famously killed Eben M Byers) and similar quack cures, commonly infusing water with radium.
Not all were actually radioactive; some such as Zoé, le soda atomique "which gives you infinite energy as with an atomic pile" just used terms associated with radiation for the cachet. The Radiation Cookery Book from around 1934 looks to be an example. It didn't involve cooking with radiation, just gas, but it's an example of a product from an era when the term wasn't considered bad PR as the name of a flagship range of British cookers (the first to feature "Regulo" thermostatic control - see the Radiation 'New World' H16 gas cooker c 1923).

Archaeology's Top 10 Discoveries of 2007

2007-12-31T13:31:00.000Z

From Archaeology Magazine: Top 10 Discoveries of 2007. There's much of interest here, but my personal favourite is Building the Great Pyramid, Giza, which reports the increasingly plausible theory of the French architect Jean-Pierre Houdin. As reported in How to build a pyramid, Houdin argues that the Great Pyramid was built using an internal spiralling ramp - thus - which ought to still exist inside the pyramid. It fits a number of observations, and is just so elegant that I hope it turns out to be true. There's further exposition, with pretty but hard-to-navigate VR models in 3D Life Player format, at Dassault Systemes.

Piddock - and an appendix

2007-12-31T00:33:00.149Z

This story is now at my main blog, JSBlog: check it out.

Dispersion in progress

2007-12-23T18:12:00.001Z

At The Growlery, Felix Grant writes on Measures of dispersion: the merits of shifting material from one's private hosting to public space. I've been discussing this with Felix since we agreed on the move to Blogger of a joint project, Difference of Opinion (a collaboration starting about a decade ago that was great fun to write, a series of musings on early and modern computing, with a definite steampunk edge).
As Felix says, there are partly selfish gains - someone else worries about bandwidth and site housekeeping. But such arrangements are also better for the user in providing facilities (flexible sorting and searching, for instance) that I wouldn't or couldn't code, along with known usability, good aesthetics and separation of content from style (you can change Blogger 'skins' very quickly, without disturbing the underlying content). For example, I just shifted JSBlog to Blogger; it needs slight work on synchronising the style of the blog and the main site, but it's already worth it for the great improvement in reader access to its archives.
This will be an ongoing project for early 2008. Generally I've allowed my own site to turn into a dusty attic that's not a very good advertisement for work I'm doing for others.

Palace launches new mouthpiece

2007-12-23T02:58:00.000Z

From the BBC: Queen launches YouTube channel. "Announcing the launch of the channel, a spokeswoman for Buckingham Palace said the Queen always keeps abreast with new ways of communicating with people".
Not exactly. One of the first things you find at www.youtube.com/theroyalchannel is that "Adding comments has been disabled for this video". Stick it on the Palace website, fine. But don't call it "communication" if it's one-way.

The Gömböc

2007-12-09T21:52:00.000Z

An interesting mathematical curiosity: the Gömböc (pronounced "gəmbəts"). This is an intriguing object, devised by Hungarian mathematicians Gábor Domokos and Péter Várkonyi, that has the property of self-righting to a single stable position despite being homogeneous, completely convex and not being obviously "flat" or "thin". (That is, this self-righting property is easy to obtain if you allow internal hollows or heavy inserts that skew the weight distribution, as in the Weebles or Balancing Ovoid toys - but not if the object doesn't curve inward, and is solid and the same material all the way through).
As with many other shapes with useful mechanical properties, this self-righting behaviour has already been achieved in nature in animals such as the Indian Star Tortoise. More on this at the Mathematical Intelligencer article Mono-monostatic bodies: the answer to Arnold's question (PDF).
A gömböc is, incidentally, Hungarian for a round thing, which may apply to dumplings or the sinister pork haggis in the Hungarian folktale A kis gömböc that hangs in a cottage attic and eats a family.

Compare the rattleback or celt, an object of no discernable application, but one also with unusual dynamic properties: in its case, a preferred direction of spin.

Potter Museum dispute ongoing

2007-12-07T03:35:00.000Z

An interesting item in yesterday's Western Morning News: Legal row looms over stuffed 'zoo'. Four years ago, the unique if macabre Potter collection of taxidermy went up for auction at Bonhams. At the time, there was considerable disappointment that the collection was separated - see my previous posts. Now the vendors, John and Wendy Watts of Jamaica Inn, Cornwall, are claiming against Bonhams, arguing that the latter were in breach of contractual obligations in ignoring a £1 million offer from Damien Hirst to buy the collection whole. While the practicalities of this may well boil down to finance - the Wattses are claiming £571,932, the difference between the £1 million they would have got and the £336,000 the auction raised - it nevertheless is still disappointing that the collection didn't stay together. This article on Walter Potter of Bramber, West Sussex, has plenty of background on the collection and a sampler of its exhibits, and links to much else besides.

A kind of magic?

2007-11-20T02:00:00.000Z

This has been widely blogged-about, but it is so worth reading that another recommendation won't do any harm. The Guardian has given Ben Goldacre a full-length article slot to outline the strong case against homeopathy: A kind of magic?:
      "Time after time, properly conducted scientific studies have proved that homeopathic remedies work no better than simple placebos. So why do so many sensible people swear by them? And why do homeopaths believe they are victims of a smear campaign? Ben Goldacre follows a trail of fudged statistics, bogus surveys and widespread self-deception".
      Homeopathy is, perhaps, easily understood in historical context. It seemed to work since it did essentially nothing in a period when mainstream treatments - bleeding, purging, blistering, etc - tended to be actively harmful. At the time, it may have had a kind of logic as a system devised before the germ theory of disease, and before the atomic theory that makes nonsense of its vast dilutions. But unlike mainstream medicine, it has failed to move on.
      As a recognisable placebo, there might be a role for it as a kind of supportive psychotherapy in harmless self-limiting conditions or the management of chronic conditions such as back pain that have a strong psychological component. But it is now, dangerously, being promoted in the Third World as useful against diseases such as HIV, and homeopaths in this country have been exposed as offering its non-functional remedies to protect travellers against tropical diseases (see Malaria advice 'risks lives'). Furthermore, it's a belief system that, unlike mainstream medicine, is not open to critical self-appraisal. One of its major organisations in the UK, the Society of Homeopaths, fails to respond in any rational way to criticisms, and even fails to act against members that flout its own regulations such as its dictum against claiming to cure named diseases.
      Medicine is not helped by the entrenchment of misguided treatments. Mainstream medicine is hardly innocent in in this respect: it has had its share of them in the past, and almost certainly still has them. But the mechanism is there for questioning and removing them. Homeopathy has none, and deserves to be buried for what it is: a 200-year-old medical wrong turning.

"Knowledge straight from the field" - Polish Sokal-style hoax

2007-11-08T19:52:00.001Z

Via Modne Bzdury via Bad Science, this looks interesting. A psychologist in Poland, Tomasz Witkowski, has announced how he conned Charaktery (a scientific monthly focusing on popularising psychology)with a Sokal-style hoax article about a fake psychotherapeutic method, written under the pseudonym Renata Aulagnier. Here's his original article, Wiedza prosto z pola (Knowledge straight from the field).
      I don't know Polish, so have had to get the drift by machine translation. Knowledge straight from the field leads with a postulated scenario: that a patient could be MRI-scanned to measure their morphogenetic field. If the morphogenetic resonance is out of kilter, the patient can be exposed to appropriate influences to correct it, such as listening to different kinds of music in various proportions, or going into a large crowd of people with the correct vibes (e.g. a theatre or a football stadium) to get into tune with their field. Thus psychotherapy could be achieved without lengthy analysis, disclosure of sexual secrets, etc.
      But this is not science fiction, the article says, and goes on to describe a "Strasbourg experiment" in which such a technology has been developed (the idea inspired by Carl Jung and Henri Bergson, the mathematics from Lacan - who "first discovered the possibility of employing mathematical topology in the analysis of the structures of intellectual diseases", and the mechanism from Sheldrake).
      Witkowski's motivation appears to have been disillusionment at the quality of peer review - despite it having various professorial-level academics on the editorial board, he argues that it's been playing to the popular market by publishing articles about topics like neuro-linguistic programming and morphogenetic resonance. As he describes here on his explanatory page, Witkowski's particular indictment of Charaktery is that not merely did the piece get past the editorial system, but the editors actually collaborated in expanding it with uncredited material from writings elsewhere about Rupert Sheldrake.
      This is currently all over the Polish blogosphere. As I said, I don't know Polish, but if anyone who does would care to translate, it looks rather an excellent yarn.

Faces of battle

2007-11-04T20:34:00.000Z

The Halo 3 "Believe" advertising reminded me of a line in Harry Harrison's Bill, the Galactic Hero, where as part of a recruitment campaign Bill is shown a propaganda film: "There was battle and death and glory though it was only the Chingers who died: troopers only suffered neat little wounds in their extremities that could be covered easily by small bandages".
      Unfortunately this sanitisation applies even to a deal of real-world war remembrance. However, this year the National Army Museum is launching on 10th November an exhibition, Faces of Battle (previewed here at the BBC website) focusing on the facially disfigured British servicemen in World War 1, and the pioneering work of the surgeon Harold Gillies.
      Without detracting from the better-known work of Archibald McIndoe, whose innovations were also in the previously neglected area of psychological recovery, World War 1 gave rise to many of the techniques for reconstructive surgery that became standard. Check out Project Facade, which features case studies of surgical progress on a number of injured veterans. But the reality was that many disfigured servicemen couldn't be helped, and even those that could often needed aesthetic disguise while surgery was ongoing. This led to equally innovative work in facial prosthetics, notably by the sculptors Anna Coleman Ladd and Francis Derwent Wood. The former worked for the American Red Cross in Paris; the latter established London General Hospital's Masks for Facial Disfigurement Department (called the "Tin Noses Shop"). See also Faces of War at Smithsonian Magazine.
      Such war-related facial trauma of course pre-dates the 20th century. The Centre of Ocular Reconstruction has a nice overview, Ocular and Maxillofacial Prosthetics: A Brief History. It mentions Monsieur Alphonse Louis, who was successfuly rehabilitated in the mid 1800s: there's a detailed study of his case at The gunner with the silver mask: observations on the management of severe maxillo-facial lesions over the last 160 years.
      Related trivia: the mathematician Gaston Julia was one of the veterans who lost his nose in World War 1. Unlike Tycho Brahe, who wore a prosthetic nose to cover the part lost in a duel, Julia simply wore a patch.

A terms & conditions taxonomy?

2007-11-03T16:11:00.000Z

Re the previous post: as discussed at Boing Boing, the NTK site is one of many sites with fairly strange terms and conditions. I've often wondered where websites get their terms and conditions. Ideally, they should be intelligently customised; it's not difficult to find solicitors who specialise in this area. But it looks to me as if many sites have terms that are Frankenstein creations stitched together from quite large chunks of boilerplate of who-knows-what origin.
      For instance, if you Google "6.2.1 use the Services to send junk email", you find hundreds of sites, of no discernable common origin, using the same Acceptable Use section in their terms and conditions. Another popular phraseology is "inherently unstable medium" "errors, omissions, interruptions".
      Sometimes, however, a taxonomy is possible to trace: some sites have the same conditions because they share company connections. For example, a number of domestic boiler sites related to the Dutch company Stelrad BV propagate the typo "Productielijn letters" (didn't anyone English read this and query it?). Another example is the phrase "no one may hyperlink", which is quite diagnostic of sites that have bought into the draconian boilerplate contract of the Mining Gold Corporation and Nevada Processing Center, Inc. Can site owners really think this is beneficial to their sites: threats of damages of $100,000 for linking to a site or even mentioning its URL?
      Even when not associated with that company, attempts to chill hyperlinking to a site is quite a common condition (see my previous post, Strange UK linking policies). Usually there's no discernable reason for this. Whyever should, for instance, the Westie Rescue Scheme UK or Brent Cross Shopping Centre require written permission to link to their sites? I can only assume they were badly advised, and didn't have anyone on hand to call bullshit on a pointless and counterproductive rule.

Chopin conscripted

2007-11-03T14:44:00.000Z

Apparently a frequently asked question: Chopin's Raindrop Prelude is the music for the XBox Halo 3 "Believe" commercial: I rather resent finding the combination impressive. The PR behind this advertising campaign has gone to amazing lengths in creating a backstory: that the diorama in the ad is a museum war memorial, complete with elderly veterans' accounts of the battle: see Halo3.com. Given this slant, I rather wonder if the ad's current arrival on UK television is rather cynically timed to the run-up to Remembrance Day.
On a slightly related note, there has been some puzzling on the blogosphere - see I'm in ur country, pollutin ur namespace at Oblomovka - as to what relation the cumbersomely Flash-heavy NTK site has to do with the Royal Armouries. Do they want to keep all the knives to themselves? No, of course not. Their Community page explains their commitment to a number of worthwhile initiatives for young people, of which No To Knives is one, related to teaching conflict resolution and reducing weapon-related crime.

3D street art

2007-10-26T02:23:00.000+01:00

Via Mind Hacks, Kurt Wenner's portfolio of street art, beautiful examples of tromp l'oeil paintings (I always think of them as "tromplewheels") in classical style painted on the ground or floor to give a strong illusion of depth - at least when viewed from a precise position. Julian Beever's works achieve the same effect, as do those of Die Strassenmaler, Manfred Stader and Edgar Müller. I think Wenner's are aesthetically the best, however.

Füssli Photochromes

2007-10-24T01:21:00.001+01:00

I'm not a fan of the Daily Mail, for its horrible right-wing Little England views, but occasionally its stance - which involves a general historical nostalgia for supposedly better times - produces interesting features, if you can stomach the constant axe-grinding. Check out its Revealed: Britain, 100 years ago - in living colour: comparisons of modern photographs with those of a century ago produced by the Photochrom process invented by the Swiss printer Orell Füssli. Nice pictures, but each comparison accompanied by the Daily Mail's dismal whinge about how things ain't what they used to be.
However ... being from that area, I especially like the Portsmouth harbour one. For a glance at the general area nowadays, check out my Spinnaker Tower photos, and compare with this interesting image of Gosport in 1960 at Wikimedia.
Füssli's Photochrom process (c. 1880) comprised a combination of monochrome photography with 10-colour lithography. The results were remarkable, as in this example of Neuschwanstein_Castle. There are many American examples - see The American Photochrom Archive. See also the Library of Congress Archive.

Format change

2007-10-07T14:35:00.001+01:00

Much as I distrust moving to a format where I don't fully understand the underlying coding, I decided to shift to one of Blogger's boilerplate formats because it's vastly easier to update and has nice archiving.

Pet Semetary

2007-10-06T13:57:00.000+01:00

Yesterday, we visited the dog cemetery on the Haldon Hills, near Exeter. Check out the new photo gallery in the sidebar. (Sorry about the fuzziness of some of the shots; it was very dark in the woods, I didn't have a tripod, and my last camera battery was running on empty so I couldn't use flash). More information at JSBlog.

On the subject of photography - see Beyond the visible #2 below - I decided to cut to the chase and get a Hoya R72 infra-red filter. It works fine with a Fuji Finepix 4900, and I'm delighted with the results, particularly the stunning range of tone it produces in landscapes. Check out, for instance, these shots of Monmouth Avenue and Holman Way in Topsham.

Cavan: remarkable landscape

2007-09-30T01:22:00.001+01:00

No connection with anything: but I was just browsing Google Earth (it's on Google Maps too). Check out County Cavan (switch to satellite view, zoom in, and explore the area to the west of the arrow). This is arguably the best, worldwide, example of glacial drumlin-and-lake topography: mile after mile of textured landscape made of neatly-packed hills (aka "basket-of-eggs topography"). As Drumlins and subglacial meltwater floods describes, the mechanism of formation is still a matter of speculation.

Bringing Up Baby ... and alcohol sniffing

2007-09-26T15:13:00.000+01:00

See Bringing Up Baby - theatre or bad science? and Smells of breathalyser myth at my new weblog Poor Pothecary. Bad Science topics will appear there in future.

Beyond the visible (#2)

2007-09-25T01:13:00.000+01:00

A couple of years back - see Beyond the visible - I enthused about various sites about infrared light and photography. I'm still enthusing: Andy Finney's Invisible Light is one of my favourites as a starter site: I hadn't previously seen his Surrey Landscapes or his DigiColour ... 'Pseudo-Colour' Digital Infrared images. I ran also into a Flickr set by Zach Stern, Toy Infrared Camera, made using a cheap digital camera home-adapted to infrared (he took out the IR filter and replaced it with Congo Blue gel).
I've neither the nerve nor skill to do that, but I do have a really grubby scraps of lighting gel. Just holding a few layers in front of the camera - Congo Blue with a thinner red overlay to cut out the blue transmission - despite the state of the gel and it being rather chilly so (I assume) not much infrared about, I got some very moody shots of the local churchyard - here and here. They're not as far into the infrafred as they might be, but are at least a proof of concept. I'm well aware a Hoya R72 filter works perfectly well with my camera, but experimentation appeals.
Bill Beaty's Science Hobbyist site, where I first ran into the idea of using Congo Blue filters - see Infrared goggles for under $10 - now has some photos of what the world looks like through these filters, which transmit only blue and infrared.

Photography ...

2007-09-20T14:09:00.000+01:00

I've just updated the Photo Gallery with my favourites of the last couple of months (rather summer-y topics). It's a good opportunity to recommend The Growlery, where Felix Grant (a friend from way back who I deal with a lot re mathematical/photographical mattters) tackles topics more philosophical than I normally care to engage with. The current post, The Eye Altering, is about the relationship of photography to the world: what the choice of taking a photograph represents to the photographer ("the fact of capturing, for long enough to wonder at it, a fragment of what life is").
I've lost the e-mail discussion I had with Felix, but his view reminds me a lot of the ideas expressed in William Gibson's poem Agrippa - introduced here at Gibson's official site. Agrippa interweaves autobiography with themes about growing to adulthood, memory, the irrevocable loss of the past through family deaths and other life-changing events and decisions - all viewed through the metaphor of photography, the "mechanism" in which "The shutter falls / Forever / Dividing that from this".
I'd be hard put to say what I get out of photography, except that it's probably more driven by a mix of personal aesthetics (I especially like scenes that present appealing pattern or complexity, such as this fern, spiderweb , staircase or cathedral ) and scenes that are emotionally striking, whether conventionally Grand Nature or appealing more personally (the final option being, I suppose, strength in evoking an "internal landscape" rooted in nostalgia relating to my small-town South Coast childhood and youth).

When science and journalism collide

2007-09-14T00:37:00.000+01:00

When science and journalism collide by Nick Higham covers an altercation connected with the opening of the British Association for the Advancement of Science's annual Science Festival at York: Professor Peter Hammond pulled out of a News 24 interview because he was angry about reportage of his work in various newspapers.
      Professor Hammond has developed a 3D facial scanning setup to aid the recognition of genetic disorders, some of which give characteristic facial features: as the BBC reported, 3D face scans spot gene syndromes. With conditions input so far, such as Down syndrome and Smith-Magenis Sydnrome, it manages 90% success rate. In forthcoming unpublished research, he is to describe the application to autism, having found evidence that children with autism spectrum disorders are more likely to have a certain pattern of forehead asymmetry.
      The Yorkshire Post, however, boiled this provisional result down to the categorical "a computerised face recognition system that can instantly diagnose autism and other genetically inherited diseases". He was not pleased with this, nor with other statements he said were misquotes.

It's nice to see analysis of such issues covered in a news outlet (in this case, the BBC website) as generally this is the kind of problem that scientists bitch about in forums, while the media rarely allows ideas self-critical of their coverage to be expressed. Nick Higham characterises the divide as:
      Scientists, operating in a culture which places enormous importance on accuracy and precision, can find reporters' occasional sloppiness infuriating. Equally, journalists often find scientists unworldly in their insistence on caveats and qualifications at every turn and their use of technical language, when reporters are desperately trying to simplify complex concepts and make them accessible to a general audience.
      That's not a bad description, although I'd put it more strongly. Journalism, to sell stories, most often wants formulaic statements of some categorical simple truth. "X causes autism". "Y cures cancer". "Scientists are baffled by Z".
      In the real world that scientists describe, there are rarely such black-and-white results. "A study which has yet to be replicated shows a slight correlation between X and autism but we don't know yet if it's a causative factor". "Y shows activity against cancer cells in culture, but we have no idea yet what it might do in the body". "Some scientists find Z interesting and unusual, but haven't investigated which of a variety of possibilities is the best hypothesis". This isn't unwordly but hard reality: experimental science produces results with a deal of uncertainty attached.
      Few scientists, I think, would object to simplifying their ideas for accessibility. There are some excellent publications that do exactly that, such as Plus magazine, with its delightfully clear features on applied mathematics. The problem is when journalists ignore the caveats and present a highly uncertain conclusion as clear-cut: this goes beyond simplifying, and into the territory of actively distorting it into a lie.
      There is a deeper problem, one that newspapers understandably are not likely to come clean to, that this distortion may be deliberate, Newspapers exist to sell themselves, and only report scientific truth to the extent that it doesn't conflict with this. They survive, largely, by printing what their readers already believe, and scientists are unlikely to get far in tackling this head-on. I've cited this before, but check out Covering Science: Why the Media So Seldom Get It Right.

Surf's up

2007-09-13T22:47:00.000+01:00

A couple of interesting surfing videos via MetaFilter: Glacier surfing in Alaska; and Evan killing it in the St. Lawrence: interesting for the physics, as neither surfer is surfing on conventional waves. The Alaska example is on a type of bore, a turbulent-fronted step wave when formed when a glacier 'calves' and a large chunk drops into the water. This one is impressive enough, but small fry compared to the devastating waves that a similar mechanism can produce: see the classic paper Giant Waves in Lituya Bay, Alaska, which describes the 1958 megatsunami, a wave nearly a mile high, produced when an earthquake triggered a landslide that dropped millions of tons of rock into the Gilbert Inlet.
The St Lawrence one is on a standing wave, a more or less stationary wave where the surfer stays in the same location while the water flows underneath. John Newgard's Standing Waves article has more about the physics and surfing of the latter.

Pink vs Blue: how much a social construct?

2007-08-25T15:19:00.000+01:00

A nice post from Ben Goldacre's Bad Science column - Out of the blue and in the pink - tackles the recent universally-reported story that "scientists have cracked the pink problem" (about a recent paper Biological components of sex differences in color preference by Anya C. Hurlbert and Yazhu Ling). The BBC's Why girls 'really do prefer pink' is characteristic.
      One problem with the reportage is its assumption that such a preference can be taken for granted, which Goldacre blows out of the water with a little research. We only have to go back to the early 20th century to find the pink/blue convention reversed, suggesting a strong cultural component. The Ladies' Home Journal wrote in 1918: "...the generally accepted rule is pink for the boy and blue for the girl. The reason is that pink being a more decided and stronger colour is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl".
      More detail at the Bad Science website - Pink, pink, pink, pink. Pink moan - which delves into another aspect of the story,. Particularly, the press filtered the contents of the original paper, which did appreciate the cultural aspects and tried to test that by using subjects from a different culture - into a 'just so' story that could easily be ridiculed for stating something perceived as obvious. The Guardian's Zoe Williams took the bait and did exactly that, in Stop this idiocy now.
      It highlights a general problem for anyone researching anything so well-known that it's an unquestioned truism. If you confirm it, it'll be ridiculed as a waste of money. If you disprove it, people will doubt the quality of the research.

Innumeracy again

2007-08-19T12:37:00.001+01:00

The Times yesterday had an interesting suite of articles by Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot, promoting their book The Tiger That Isn't: Seeing Through a World of Numbers, a spinoff from their Radio 4 More or less programme.
The common thrust of More or Less and the articles is critique of a general blindness to misuse of numbers, either by mistake or as deliberate obfuscation, by goverments and media. Go figure deals with mistakes in magnitude. For instance, a scary Telegraph story reported falsely that 1 in 5 men of 65 would die before reaching 67. The 1 in 5 was the figure for all men up to the age of 67, not those in that two-year slot.
The others are about counting and comparisons: how slack categorisation and insufficiently controlled comparison can produce false conclusions. Yob UK? But the sums don’t add up describes a survey that counted childhood rough-and-tumble toward being a "serious offender". It’s a fair cop: the comparison that wasn’t is about interpetation of a survey comparing recidivism in two groups of ex-offenders, where a major problem is the bias inherent in the groups having been selected by assessed probability of reoffending.

See also ABC News' long-standing Who's Counting column by the mathematician John Allen Paulos. In the UK, Ben Goldacre's Bad Science column in the Guardian commonly tackles similar issues over the interpretation of medical data.

Science brands

2007-08-09T20:36:00.000+01:00

Via Bad Science, Branded with science, a compilation of examples of scientists who have tattoos related to their subjects: DNA, dinosaurs, mathematics, etc. This is a topic at Carl Zimmer's interesting The Loom ("A blog about life, past and future"), one of many worth reading of the 60+ hosted at ScienceBlogs.

Dogs and alliums

2007-07-28T16:29:00.000+01:00

Department of dubious advice: yesterday before work I caught a portion of the BBC's Animal Rescue Live, which had a section on cookery for dogs. The resident expert stated that onions are toxic to dogs, but that garlic and leeks are OK, and even offered a recipe including the latter two (see Dog's Dinner).
      This does not look current best advice. Many other veterinarians advise that all allium species are toxic to dogs: check out Grapes, raisins and sultanas, and other foods toxic to dogs (PDF) and this peer-reviewed ASCPA toxicology brief, Allium species poisoning in dogs and cats (PDF).

Progress report: I e-mailed the BBC's Animal Rescue Live section about this straight away. FX: tumbleweed blows by. After getting no reply or action, I re-sent the comment through the BBC website's official complaint system on 30th August. On 8th Sept I got the reply:
      "This is to let you know that we have received your recent complaint and will respond as soon as possible, however I hope you understand that the
time taken to do so can depend on the nature of your complaint and the
number of other complaints we are currently dealing with. The BBC issues
public responses to issues which prompt large numbers of significant
complaints and these can be read on our website at: www.bbc.co.uk/complaints. We would be grateful if you would not reply to this email"
      I appreciate they have to prioritise - but I would have thought that verifying the safety of a recipe with ingredients potentially toxic to its consumer would actually be worth investigating pronto. Add this one to the list of examples of the BBC's deep resistance to investigating/correcting scientific errors.

28th September 2007 - result! Dog's Dinner is now a dead link.

Science photos

2007-07-24T17:28:00.000+01:00

A regular from the University of Cambridge Department of Engineering: the annual Photography Competition. Some are general photos: others are of pleasant microstructural landscapes. The Alumni entries, urban and other scenes with an engineering slant, are also very good. Check out the 2006, 2005 and 2004 archives for more.
Micrography used to fascinate me at university, when I had more or less unlimited access to a scanning electronic microscope; here are a couple of similar images I took of vapour-deposited haematite: #1 / #2.

The real Harry Potter?

2007-07-16T01:14:00.000+01:00

Interesting exercise: Shane's weblog at the Daily Telegraph has set the task to write proposed endings for the Harry Potter series. See Another task: write the ending of the final Harry Potter.
I've only one comment on Harry Potter (almost certainly not a new one) inspired by the sheer psychological implausibility of the Potter mythos. It's hard to believe that someone brought up by a foster-family who keep him in a broom cupboard would be so normal after such psychological abuse (and perhpas other abuse that is not mentioned). In that light, the scenario of being revealed to have special powers, and having a crucial role in great events, could well be interpreted as Potter's fabulation, a wish-fulfilment fantasy rather like Frederick Rolfe's fantasy of elevation to the Papacy in Hadrian the Seventh.
I've posted an ending to this effect at the Telegraph blog.

Stylish marriages

2007-07-12T22:04:00.000+01:00

Via MetaFilter, Khymos, Martin Lersch's website and blog, now about a year old, on the science of food and cooking. It takes its cue from the "molecular gastronomy" coined by Kurti and This, and popularised by Heston Blumenthal. The interesting aspect compared to many other sites on the topic is that it has more specifics and explanations, notably this list of pairings, which offers foods which ought to work together because they share a volatile flavouring molecule. The blog, nicely categorised, offers the recipes and results of many such pairing experiments, and this is the subject of an ongoing food blogging event, TGRWT ("They Really Go Well Together"). This is quite inspiring.

O?

2007-07-08T17:29:00.000+01:00

Yesterday, while looking for a Sudoku, I ran into a nice example of crap tabloid medical reportage, in the Daily Mirror article Brain bug beater. "Docs baffled as Phil comes through meningitis 8 times," it says. "MEDICAL miracle Phil Parry has baffled doctors by beating the deadly meningitis bug EIGHT times ... Tests have drawn a blank, although Phil believes his rare blood type O is a factor ... Phil's doctor thought he had flu when he first contracted lymphonic meningitis 14 years ago".
Now spot the mistakes. 1) Group O isn't rare; 44% of Britons have it (see the National Blood Service stats). Perhaps they mean O negative. 2) There's no such thing as lymphonic meningitis outside this Mirror article and a very similar story in the Birmingham Mail a few weeks back, Meningitis victim baffles doctors. I'm not a doctor and wouldn't presume to diagnose anyone over the Internet, but Google offers the suggestion that this might be the garbled name of a real condition called lymphocytic meningitis. Furthermore, the first few hits show there's a syndrome called "recurrent benign lymphocytic meningitis" associated with herpes simplex virus, which would fit the pattern and symptoms described in these news stories.
So, I suspect, there isn't a great mystery here, and we have a standard baffled-experts struggle-against-adversity story spun (via errors that could have been checked by a couple of minutes with Google) out of what's likely a reasonably-understood situation.

Smell the change

2007-07-08T16:52:00.000+01:00

As of 1st July, England became the largest nation in the world by population to have a complete ban on smoking in indoor public places. I never thought I'd say this, but I'm still going through a phase of half-regretting the change. I'm not a smoker, but I do like pubs and I feel a certain loss at the dismantling of a cultural fixture. Smoke, despite its clear downsides, has been part of the ambience of the English pub. Since the ban, the lighting seems harsher (without smoke's diffusion effect) and pubs smell of, well, either of nothing or faintly dirty. The change has made an alien environment.
      This, I'm well aware, is entirely misplaced nostalgia for a personal ambience that was achieved via health risk to me and the addiction of other people. It could be likened to - hypothetically - my enjoying opium dens (despite not smoking opium) because I like the decor, the chance to practice my Chinese, and the quality of the tea. Nevertheless, pubs are going to have to work on their atmosphere.
      One possibility could be to make pubs smell evocative in other ways than smoke, just as baking bread, coffee or beeswax furniture make a house smell appealing polish to potential buyers. A greater focus on food is one option that's already being explored, but it could also be done artificially. Companies such as ScentAir already have large portfolios of scents, with systems for delivering them into an airspace. Smell as Media, by Joseph 'Jofish' Kaye of the MIT Media Lab, is a nice overview of the wider technological possibilities.
      As explored in Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, smell is a primitive and powerful medium, and there's plenty about it on the Web. Best site I know on the subject: Professor Tim Jacob's University of Cardiff Smell Reserach Laboratory, with its Olfaction tutorial.
      You can't believe everything you read on smell, though. I mentioned this a while back but it bears repeating: Smell, science and the press (PDF). This 2004 editorial for the Current Science journal of the Indian Academy of Sciences tells how Nature Neuroscience was forced to publish a paper discrediting a theory hardly anyone in the neuroscience field believes, simply because of popular publicity. Luca Turin's claim that olfactory receptors respond not to molecule shapes but to "vibrations" - had been publicised via by a BBC documentary, A Code in the Nose, and Chandler Burr's book The Emperor of Scent. Only trouble is, it doesn't work: Putting a smell theory to the sniff test by Renee Twombly at Rockefeller University reports how the vibration theory failed to correctly predict how some chemicals would smell. Neverthless, the jury appears still out: while the vibration theory is still very much a minority view, the prevailing shape theory also has weaknesses. For example, some molecules of near-identical shapes smell very different.
      Whatever your view, Turin's recent article, Rational odorant design (PDF) is enlightening reading on the complexity of designing chemicals of a specific smell (Turin's company, Flexitral, is having some success in developing novel odorants, with a particular slant in finding substitutes for problematic standard ingredients - e.g ones such as citronellol now known to be allergenic).

British Isles from the ground

2007-06-21T02:05:00.001+01:00

Never before has it been so easy to see other places in the world without going there - though coverage is patchy. With plain scenic photography, photogenic locations tend to be overrepresented, and coverage in products such as Google Earth and Google Maps is dependent on whether it was interesting / profitable to photograph at whatever resolution, and whatever deals have been made to provide public data. For instance, on Google Maps such factors have left only the northern half of Topsham in aerial resolution, with the remaining half at satellite quality. Besides, the view from above may not be enlightening.
Geograph makes a nice addition to this field (and also a good example of a collaborative project). Sponsored by the Ordnance Survey, it seeks to collect photographs and information for every square kilometre of the UK and the Republic of Ireland - taken from the ground, geographically representative, and not just the pretty bits. There are still gaps (green on the coverage map) but it's remarkable how well it's going.

Not-so-mysterious alcohol powder

2007-06-08T16:44:00.002+01:00

From Reuters, and many other news outlets: Dutch students develop powdered alcohol. "The latest innovation in inebriation, called Booz2Go ... Top it up with water and you have a bubbly, lime-coloured and -flavoured drink with just 3 percent alcohol content ... We are aiming for the youth market. They are really more into it because you can compare it with Bacardi-mixed drinks, 20-year-old Harm van Elderen told Reuters" ... and so on.
Nothing to see, folks, move on. This idea crops up regularly. Previous (now defunct) incarnations have included a Japanese-originated product called Senba Alcohol Powder (archived), sold as a food additive, and a German one for the drinks market called SubYou, "ultimative Mixgetränke-Pulver mit Alkohol" (archived, and see Experts Warn About Powdered Alcohol). The main unexplained detail is how you can make ethanol, a volatile liquid, into a powder. United States Patent 3956508, Alcohol-containing dextrin powder, reveals the likely details. Alcohol can be adsorbed onto various materials such as lactose, starch or dextrin to make a dry powder that stays in that form as long it's kept in a hermetically sealed packet.
The usual claims for such substances is that they can get around licensing laws by not being liquid alcohol. Unlikely: if they became popular, any such loophole would be rapidly fixed (as happened wth SubYou in Germany, where a special tax was imposed).

Photo updates

2007-06-05T02:04:00.000+01:00

I've just added a few updates to my diary photos (the dates aren't accurate, just labels). I'm especially pleased with Scratchy the iguana, this AutoStitch™ panorama of Exeter Cathedral, and the new cygnets of Eb and Flo, the swans that nest at Topsham Quay.

Wi-Fi scaremongering

2007-05-26T12:39:00.001+01:00

Bad Science is very worth reading at the moment: Wi-Fi Wants To Kill Your Children reveals the background to a recent Panorama programme that purported to show reason for concern about electromagnetic radiation risks from the use of Wi-Fi networks in schools.
The school staff involved deserve a great deal of credit for showing the Panorama team the door as soon as they realised they were being set up to provide a scare story. There were problems in methodology that even the students spotted, as well as serious potential conflict of interest (the engineer brought along to make the measurements was Powerwatch's Alasdair Philips, a notable campaigner against Wi-Fi).
Other complaints include Panorama's citation of an expert voted by the Swedish Sceptics Misleader of the Year 2004 on the topic of health effects of electromagnetic fields; and its reference to 'electrosensitivity' based on anecdotal reportage of a single person, rather than than the many studies showing that sufferers from this syndrome can't actually tell whether they're being exposed to a field or not.

Best illusions

2007-05-18T00:54:00.000+01:00

Returning to a previous topic via a reminder at Bad Science, the winners of Best visual illusion of the year competition. They may appear a trivial amusement, but such illusions reveal significant information about how our visual processing system works. Michael Bach's 71 Optical Illusions & Visual Phenomena provides many illusions, along with references to associated research. I rather like his view that "optical illusion" is rather pejorative, as if it's exposing a malfunction of the visual system. Instead, he argues that they reveal the workings of hard-wired visual processing that is extremely effective under normal situations).
A case in point is the McCollough Effect: looking at some coloured grids induces the appearance of coloured fringes on otherwise similar monochrome grids. The remarkable feature is that unlike ordinary after-images, it lasts for up to a day. As described here - Chromatic chutes and ladders - one theory is that it's something to do with our visual mechanisms for handling edge detection and chromatic aberration, and that neuroransmitters are involved. The paper's author, Bryan Keenedy, writes: "It is unlikely that our visual systems, having evolved over millions of years, would engage in such petty games for the delight of misleading us. Instead, these 'mistaken' perceptions are likely the result of systems that, at other times, are employed to good effect". You can try it out at The McCollough Effect - An On-line Science Exhibit.
Yet another interesting effect is change blindness: you can see demos at the pages for J. Kevin O'Regan and the University of Illinois Visual Cognition Lab. Under various circumstances - for instance, very slow changes, temporary blanking or a distracting overlay - large changes in a scene can go unnoticed. The latter case has nasty implications for the safety of, say, head-up windscreen overlays.

Bad plant science

2007-04-21T13:08:00.000+01:00

The above images are the structures of nicotine (left) and solanine (right). Although they're both plant alkaloids, you don't need to be a chemist to see that they're very different.
      This is just a geeky observation arising via Bad Science, which mentions how Craig Sams, founder of Green & Black's chocolate, had a dig at Ben Goldacre in Natural Products magazine. Mr Sams is a believer in the macrobiotic dietary system, one of whose tenets is to avoid the Solanaceae (they call them "nightshade plants" to make it sound scarier) because of their alkaloid content. This rules out potatoes, tomatoes, peppers and aubergines.
      Whatever the merits of that view, I was interested to see Mr Sams' essay on the topic, From Tobacco to tabasco where he writes that "They all contain nicotine in some form, although it may be named solanine (potatoes), tomatine (tomatoes), alpha-solanine (aubergine) or solanadine (chillies and capsicums)". He has repeated this factoid - that nicotine and solanine etc are the same substance - several times elsewhere: for instance, in another Natural Products article, Do yourself a favour — go easy on the nightshades, he writes "Under current Novel Foods regulations, it is unlikely that nightshade-based foods would have been permitted to enter the food supply. That’s because they all contain the same glycoalkaloid — in tobacco it’s called nicotine, in potatoes solanine".
      Except this isn't the case, as is patently obvious from looking at the structures. You'd think the Chairman of the Soil Association and, by his own account, a keen hands-on gardener, would know better than to make such a daft factual error about plant chemistry.

Addenda
#1 I e-mailed Mr Sams. On 25th April he said: "Thanks for the information and link to images. I'm in Ireland but will rectify next week". He didn't.
#2 In response to a reminder, on 8th June he said: "Yes, I am amending this information. When you wrote to me I was in Ireland and shortly thereafter in Belize and am now addressing this issue. You are quite right on the chemistry".
It's now July 16th. Still no change.
#3 31st July: amended. Thanks.

Behind the names

2007-04-09T19:51:00.000+01:00

Via MetaFilter, one for the techie-linguistic trivia lovers: Curiosities of Biological Nomenclature. Did you know that the spiky club on a Stegosaur's tail is formally called a thagomizer, after a Gary Larson Far Side cartoon? That Dolly the cloned sheep was named after Dolly Parton, having been cloned from mammary cells? That there are creatures with strange Latin names such as "sick puppy", "creature from the black lagoon", "big dead lizard" and "Pretty Polly"?

Flight of the Phoenix

2007-04-08T22:39:00.000+01:00

It being a holiday weekend, it was inevitable that at least one old film would get an outing on British TV. This time it was the 1965 Flight of the Phoenix. The 2004 remake wasn't bad, but fell into the usual syndrome of embellishing the action with hordes of hostile tribesmen, huge sandstorms, a lethal electrical storm, female and ethnic characters in subordinate roles, and nick-of-time escape. Overall, I think the original, with its low-key claustrophobic atmosphere, is the better film.
I'd often wondered to what extent the cannibalised plane was real, and the story behind the obituary of Paul Mantz in the credits. This is all explained at the aviation crash history site Check-Six.com article The Final Flight of the "Phoenix". Check-Six.com makes interesting reading, focusing on the personal histories behind iconic crashes, and how they helped revise aviation practice: for instance, the discovery that it's possible to shoot yourself down in supersonic flight. Another, not mention on this site, is the case of Star Dust ("the plane that vanished") where a fatal miscalculation of descent path occurred through the then little-known phenomenon of the Jet Stream.

Musical homages

2007-03-31T15:49:00.000+01:00

I caught part of a cabaret evening at one of our local pubs yesterday. While Googling to remind myself of the origin of the Eric Carmen hit All By Myself (near the beginning of the second movement of Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor - mp3 from Musopen), I ran into Ostin Allegro's Pop meets the classics, a nice resource identifying classical sources behind popular music, wiht mp3 demos. Some of the 'possibles' are intriguing, such as the close similarity of a segment of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor to Fly me to the moon. Arnold Rypens has produced a (Dutch) book tracing the pedigrees of pop songs: more about it at the The Originals companion site. There's also a good listing at Wikipedia - List of popular songs based on classical music - minus samples but slightly larger in scope than the Ostin Allegro site, which limits itself to hits.

Smoky soap bubbles

2007-03-27T02:41:00.000+01:00

The trio of warning signs for risk of growing up to be a serial murderer are said to be bedwetting, arson and cruelty to animals. In contrast, the writers of the UK soap Coronation Street just came up with a very strange piece of criminal profiling in the current murder trial storyline. Deidre Barlow, reflecting on the wickedness of her murderer daughter Tracey Barlow, concluded that one of the early warning signs was that Tracey as a child liked to see soap bubbles filled with cigarette smoke rather than the ordinary kind.
I'm sure fans of the great Tom Noddy would disagree; smoke bubbles are a central part of his famous Bubble Guy act, as well as being a staple for many other bubble entertainers. One of his classic effects is using smoke to make visible the nearly cubic bubble formed when a bubble is blown at the core of an octahedral group of six. Nowadays, according to this interview, he wisely uses a non-tobacco cigarette and, as you might guess, the technology has generally moved on from human-blown smoke.
If you are as wicked as Tracey Barlow in finding smoke bubbles interesting (along with the many other beautiful effects achievable) check out the source of the above links, Keith Johnson's Soapbubbler.com, "The world's largest non-commercial, educationally oriented website dedicated to soap bubble creativity, play, brewing and performance". Keith is himself a bubble performer for the educational circuit - see BubbleArtist.com - and his take on smoke bubbles uses water-based, food grade cloud effects. (See the Gallery for other interesting effects, such as bubble towers supported by helium). Anyhow, enjoy his excellent bubble-related compendium: recipes, performers, science, and more.

Mediaeval Penrose tiling

2007-03-04T13:21:00.000Z

Felix Grant kindly sent me a reference to a widely reported forthcoming Science paper by Lu and Steinhardt: Decagonal and Quasi-crystalline Tilings in Medieval Islamic Architecture (PDF). Very nice: demonstration that ancient Islamic tilings - girih - achieved patterns such as Penrose tilings, outside the traditional 17 2D space groups that are now well-known to have been discovered by Islamic geometers.
These unusual tilings were not achieved by layout with straight-edge, but by a toolkit of geometric tiles. None of the reportage, however, mentions the connection with the traditional Moroccan cut-tile mosaic (zillij aka zalij), which uses exactly this system, extended to 300+ primitive tile shapes. See, for instance, Zillij in Fez, Jay Bonner's Islamic Geometric Patterns and, if you can find it, Zillij: Art of Moroccan Ceramics by S. Samar Damluji, Garnet Publishing, 1992. (The example image of typical zillij tiles is scanned from Symmetries of Islamic Geometrical Patterns by Syed Jan Abas and Amer Shaker Salman). Peter Lu explained via e-mail that it was left out due to length constraints, and lack of applicability to the quasicrystallinity angle. Anyway, it's a lovely topic.
Peter Lu's site is very worth visiting for links to his interesting work on cultural/scientific history, such as the first use of diamond polishing and the first use of precision compound machines.

Towers

2007-03-01T11:12:00.000Z

Scary or what? This is the view 100m down through the glass floor panel in the Spinnaker Tower in the Gunwharf Quay development at Portsmouth Harbour. (You have to take your shoes off to protect the glass). Last weekend we went to the Isle of Wight to visit my father and his family, and en route I went up the tower. While it's only a third the height of the somewhat similarly-designed Burj al Arab hotel in Dubai, it's seriously worth visiting as the highest public viewing point in the UK, with stunning views of the harbour from 100m+ up. More about its design and construction here.

Addendum: I know this has been done by many others before, but I've just uploaded a photo album, using the excellent JAlbum, of the images I took on the visit. Highlights include the extensive view over the Solent and Portsmouth Harbour, including HMS Warrior and HMS Victory, plus that glass floor (it was mortifying to find that children didn't seem to be bothered by it in the least, and were cheerfully running around on it as adults jittered their way across).

Smoke photographs

2007-01-07T18:44:00.000Z

When someone devises a nice visual effect, it's only a matter of time before it turns up in advertising. A while back I mentioned the beautiful colourised Smoke photographs at Graham Jeffery's Sensitive Light. His work inspired other artists such as Myla Kent and others at the Flickr ArtSmoke group. Now, I notice, the technique has been used for the print ads for Cancer Research UK's Smoke is poison campaign; their About the campaign page contains links to PDFs such as these for arsenic and benzene.

Lightning in a block

2006-12-29T20:15:00.000Z

Something pretty for the holidays: Lichtenberg Figures, branching fractals created by electrical discharge, whether from electron beam charging of an acrylic block or from natural lightning strikes (such as the 'lightning flowers' formed on human skin). They're named for their discoverer, an interesting and complex character: never beyond a minor scientific figure, he was nevertheless an influential but little-remembered philosopher, writer and satirist (not to mention the originator of A4 paper). See G. C. Lichtenberg: a "spy on humanity" and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg at Wikipedia.

Petri gardens

2006-12-18T03:02:00.000Z

Via MetaFilter, a nice gallery of Petri gardens. artistically embellished images of bacterial colonies in Petri dishes, by Professor Eshel Ben Jacob. his homepage has a brief explanation (PDF) of the science behind the art. More examples at the landscape architecture blog Pruned: see Gardens-in-a-Petri (which references this Yale page on fractal bacteria growth) and its sequels here and here.

Antikythera again

2006-11-29T23:57:00.000Z

Very nice! Nature has a new article, In search of lost time, about the latest on the ancient Greek astronomical computer, the Antikythera Mechanism. New work using x-ray tomography has produced more detailed insight into how it worked: see also the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project.

TRIZ stories

2006-11-21T13:42:00.000Z

A while back I mentioned TRIZ, a methodology developed largely in the former Soviet Union for formalising the invention process according to empirical rules. I just ran into a nice TRIZ site, Generator. Unfortunately the main explanatory page is in Russian, but the site is worth browsing for its vignettes about interesting inventions and problem solutions: for instance, use of laser projection to display a Poitiers cathedral in its historically painted state; the idea of using the Arctic as a natural refrigerator for strategic food stocks; communication security via Navajo code talkers; elegant ancient drainpipes that distribute outflow to avoid ground erosion; and so on. There's also a pleasant collection of folktales and anecdotes all with the motif of shrewd solution of a problem, as well as illustrating TRIZ principles. The Sufi stories of Mullah Nasruddin feature prominently.

Blatant self-promotion

2006-10-02T01:47:00.000+01:00

For any readers in the Exeter area: this week (Mon Oct 2nd to Sat Oct 7th) there's an exhibit of my photography in the foyer of Exeter Central Library. You can see a few examples on a temporary page here.

YouTube stream-of-consciousness

2006-09-29T20:41:00.000+01:00

Absolutely idle evening, skimming YouTube. Amid the dross, there's some very good stuff where you can just wander, following a theme. I'm a bit of a Bjork fan, so there's plenty of interest there, such as this live performance of Bachelorette backed by Haeckel's Kunstformen der Nature biological drawings (also used for this rather trippy musical animation). Talking of sea and music, one of my favourite music oldies is there: Martha and the Muffins' Echo Beach, whose wistful recollection of an idyllic beach - based on Toronto - reminds me of the characters' longing for Shell Beach in Dark City. On YouTube there's a scalp-tingling reworking of this movie as a music video using the perfectly-matched apocalyptic lyrics of Sonne ("Hier kommt die Sonne") by Rammstein. The latter's original video took a different but equally gothic theme, featuring the seven dwarves as miners in thrall to a gold-addicted Snow White. That'll do for now.

Stitch that!

2006-09-21T10:19:00.000+01:00

One for the the photographers: AutoStitch™: "the world's first fully automatic 2D image stitcher. Capable of stitching full view panoramas without any user input whatsoever".
It's amazing: it does exactly what it says on the tin. You just take overlapping photos from a single location, in no particular order, drop them into a directory, and the program stitches them. The algorithm, developed by Matthew Brown and David Lowe at the University of British Columbia, is already being incorporated into several commercial products (it's about 3 years old - see Forbes) - but the free no-frills Windows demo version ought to be better known. It's limited to a spherical projection and the use of AutoStitch must be credited: otherwise no restrictions or royalties apply.

Chinese human female car expert

2006-09-14T12:16:00.000+01:00

I shouldn't encourage spammers, but couldn't resist reading one headed "I am Ling Chinese Human Female UK Car Expert". Turns out be from a real contract car hire company in the north of England, Ling's Cars; it's worth visiting as the funniest and most creative sales website I've seen for a long time.

P.S. Pardon the lack of posts lately (very busy with a part-time day job at Joel Segal Books, whose website I just revamped, and other interests like photography and the Bad Science community).

Biomedical Image Awards

2006-07-20T11:46:00.000+01:00

Via Bad Science, check out the lovely images at the Biomedical Image Awards 2006. I especially like the colour-enhanced scanning electron micrographs like this stinging nettle leaf.

Picasa

2006-07-02T01:14:00.000+01:00

I'm sure it's well known among photographers by now, but if not, check out Picasa. This is the freeware (for non-commercial use, anyway) photo management program acquired by Google a couple of years ago. I've been getting heavily into photography lately, and keeping a growing image collection organised (e.g. searchable by keyword) rapidly becomes a necessity. Picasa also has a good toolkit of image processing tools and interesting stuff like a Blogger uplink and Web page export.

Kircher, "dude of wonders"

2006-06-29T19:10:00.000+01:00

While searching for background on the previous entry, I ran into the excellent Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society, a blog in honour of the Jesuit polymath that the Chronicle of Higher Education called Dude of Wonders. "Our interests extend to the wondrous, the curious, the singular, the esoteric, the arcane, and the sometimes hazy frontier between the plausible and the implausible".

Droste Effect revisited

2006-06-29T17:33:00.000+01:00

On the subject of recursive images, MetaFilter just cited Mathematical imagery by Jos Leys. I was especially interested in his Droste Effect gallery: images named after the infinite picture-within-picture design of Droste cocoa packaging. A while back (see this Sep 24 2003 posting) I mentioned the work of Lenstra et al at Leiden University in analysing pictures by Escher: Escher and the Droste effect. Jos has generalised on this, using a transformation in UltraFractal to convert plain images to Droste Effect. Here is the maths.

Spatial distribution of British surnames

2006-03-16T12:31:00.000Z

Genealogy normally makes me want to reach for my revolver, but a discussion of the topic at Ben Goldacre's Bad Science contained one gem: the Surname Profiler. This accesses a distribution map of surnames on mainland Britain, with the ability to search either by surname or a number of categories (e.g. occupational, Norman, Celtic). You can also compare 1881 and 1998 distributions. The results are fascinating: typically, surnames have spread due to social and physical mobility over the past century, but regional distributions of many names are still well-defined. For instance, compare Evans in 1881 and Evans in 1998: the name retains its Welsh base, but has diffused outward to much of southern England. The service is part of Spatial-literacy.org, a joint initiative by the University of Leicester, University College London and the University of Nottingham.

Phonographic phony

2006-02-25T02:22:00.000Z

Again pardon the absence. From the always excellent Language Log, run by linguistics professors: A phonographic phony and The House of Fame, the debunking of an urban legend dating back in essence to Charles Babbage and even Chaucer, the notion that ancient pottery has recorded the ambient sound at the instant of its making.

More vortices

2006-01-29T20:58:00.000Z

An anonymous correspondent kindly sends me occasional news of postings at an unusual website, ChamorroBible.org. On the one hand, it exists to promote a translation of the Bible into Chamorro, the indigenous language of Guam. On the other, it carries a striking range of National Geographic style photography: astronomical, geographical and aeronautical, with a special focus on wingtip vortices and transsonic condensation clouds. I can't decide if this latest one is beautiful or scary (it's probably both): three US Navy news photos of United States Marine Corps KC-130 Hercules Aircraft over in Iraq, firing salvos of flares as protection against surface-to-air missiles. The smoke trails, revealing the wingtip vortices, produce remarkable wing-like formations. There's a movie version at the Internet Archive.

San Francisco 1906

2006-01-29T00:03:00.000Z

There was a gripping historical dramatised documentary on Channel 4 this evening, made for the centenary of the The Great San Francisco Earthquake. Very scary: both for the event itself, likely to be repeated, and the subsequent cover-up that massively understated the death toll and spun the reportage to portray the event as a plain fire - even to the extent of retouching photos to emphasise fire damage (see Earthquake! The ST shakes out startling new data).
As the first major urban disaster to take place in the photographic era, it was the subject of some remarkable photographs, such as the Lawrence Captive Airship images and the classic pictures by Arnold Genthe. More at the US Geological Survey site and the Virtual Museum of the City of San Franciso, which has a variety of contemporary material on the The Great 1906 Earthquake And Fire, including eyewitness accounts.

Addendum: the George Lawrence page, incidentally, turns out to be on a very interesting site called (or by, I'm not sure) Robroy. Apart from a collection of material on George Lawrence, an early 20th century panoromic and kite photographer, it has sections including Kite Aerial Photography, U.S. Navy target kites and Francis Lister Hawks' Visit to Charles Babbage, the celebrated mathematician.