16 May 2009
People may complain about the BBC (I certainly do from time to time), but one of the joys of a public service broadcaster is that they can produce shows which would never survive the hurly-burly, lowest-common-denominator world of commercial broadcasting. The Radio 4 programme More or Less is one such programme. It's about numbers, mathematics and statistics, and — while mathematics is certainly not my strong point, and I view statistics as a necessary professional evil — I love the show. It is gloriously, defiantly geeky and it covers some pretty interesting topics in an accurate but accessible way.
The latest episode featured a reprise of an earlier feature about the song Pi by Kate Bush. In it, Kate sings the digits of Pi, but gets some of the digits wrong. At the 51st point after the decimal point, she sings '58231' rather than the correct '58209'. I can't say that I had noticed. I would also not put it past Kate to have done it deliberately, and that it's some kind of elaborate, arcane hidden message.
Anyway, a listener (they have great listeners, about whom more later) suggested the 'Kate Bush Conjecture'1: that while the series 58231 doesn't appear in the position at which she sang it, in a number which can be infinitely expanded, it should appear at some point. So they got a mathematician on, who said that it does indeed first appear at the 17,378th position after the decimal point. So, to adapt Eric Morecambe's statement to André Previn, she was singing all the right digits, but not necessarily in the right order.
Back to the More or Less listeners... The are wonderfully pedantic. There was the listener-suggested Kate Bush Conjecture, and another wrote in to take the presenter, Tim Harford, to task for his statement that the show has loyal listeners — how did he know his listeners were loyal? Did he have empirical data? It's like being in some kind of parallel universe where members of the public always question the accuracy and scientific support for everything they are told, and where there is no need for someone like Ben Goldacre to point such things out. Oh well, for half an hour a week, I can imagine such a Utopia.
1 Which incidentally would make a great title for an episode of The Big Bang Theory ↑
16 Mar 2009
I love wildlife documentaries. I grew up watching all the classic Attenborough natural history TV series, glued to the wonders he showed us, and desperate to find out more. I couldn't really tell you whether I watched them because I was obsessed with animals, or whether I was obsessed with animals because I watched the documentaries, but either way, both played a large part in my eventual decision to become a biologist1. I still enjoy them now, and I often learn new things from them. I do find that my acquired pedantry means that I wince at over-simplifications or anthropomorphism in the commentary, but the photography is better than ever.
Yellowstone -- the new BBC series which started last night -- is a great example. There were breathtaking shots of the landscape in winter: stars wheeling around frozen trees; the air itself seeming to sparkle in an ice storm; ice crystals forming on the rich brown hair of a bison; an extreme close up of the feet of a dipper, clutching smooth nodules of ice as bright water flowed below. All of these sights are things that you and I could probably not see, even if we were allowed into the closed park and could stand the -40deg;C temperatures. The camera compresses or extends time, so that we can see processes we're too slow or too impatient to perceive. We can get up close to animals behaving naturally, and see every hair and feather sharply and look into their eyes.
In one particularly painterly shot, we saw the long furrow produced by a bison moving through the virgin snow with a meandering track. The shot was framed so that the track originated in the bottom left with the exhausted and weak bison pausing at the top right of the frame. It was so eloquent about the life of a bison in deep winter than no words were necessary.
And yet there are words, and swirling, emotional, overblown music. The commentary wasn't as bad as on some documentaries I've seen recently, but I found myself wishing that the magical red button offered an option to view the pictures with only the ambient recorded sound: no commentary and no music. If there could be a further option for a discrete, on-demand caption giving the Latin and common name of any of the species featured, that would be the icing on the cake. As it is, I'm tempted to listen with the TV muted, but then I would have missed the beautiful sounds of wolves howling, the craak of the raven and the huffing breath of bison and elk.
1 After I decided that I couldn't be a vet because I was too soft and couldn't stand seeing animals in pain every day. ↑
03 Mar 2009
I'm a very keen user of Papers, the Mac software for collecting and organising a collection of journal articles and their associated PDF files. It never fails to impress colleagues when I pull it up and do a quick search to find some paper we've just been discussing. Now I won't even need to be in front of my computer to impress them, because Mekentosj have just released a version of Papers for the iPhone.
I've been playing with it for a few days now, and it's very well done. You can choose what you sync with your desktop version of Papers, so if you've got a huge collection, you don't have to fill your iPhone with it. I have a Smart Collection for my 'to be read' articles (which seems to grow by the day), so I've been syncing that. However, I might add a Smart Collection of my own papers too -- more about that later.
Most of the features available on the desktop version are available on the iPhone -- certainly all of those that make any sense on the platform are present. You can even use the search engines to find new articles and download the papers to read, which could be very handy. The PDF viewer works quite well, though there seems to be a little bug in the PDF viewer for third parties that means that some files are rendered with slightly blurry text, but I'm sure this will be fixed in time. I haven't found it a big problem with most files, and the convenience of being able to reduce my huge 'to be read' virtual pile in spare moments away from my computer overwhelms any minor issues with the display. You can also make notes on the paper, which are then synced back to the desktop.
I mentioned that I might keep a collection of my own papers on the iPhone. Why should I want to do that? Well, when you are viewing an article entry, you can choose to share the paper: either by email, or by sending it directly to nearby iPhone Papers users. I haven't had a chance to try out the latter, but I think that would be incredibly cool. Still, just being able to chat to someone at a conference or meeting about your work, then pull out your iPhone and send them a copy of the paper you're discussing, there and then, would be genuinely useful.
13 Jan 2009
I came across some spectacular photographs of the Aurora borealis on Astronomy North. I've been fascinated by the Aurora since I was a child, and it's a long-held ambition of mine to actually see it in person at some point (borealis or australis, I'm not fussy about my Auroras). I've been in Scotland a couple of times when there has been a brief display, but I missed it both times, which really annoyed me. I just know that if I booked a holiday specifically to view the Aurora, my visit would coincide with a freakishly Aurora-free period, so I'm relying on chance.
Ideally, I'd love to be somewhere out in the wilds of Norway at night, minding my own business, then find myself enveloped by shifting curtains of light completely unexpectedly. Judging by the photographs, being beside a large, still lake would be even better.
03 Jan 2009
I've really enjoyed this year's Royal Institution Christmas Lecture series -- 'Hi-tech Trek: The Quest for the Ultimate Computer', given by Prof. Chris Bishop. For readers outside the UK, this is an annual lecture series on some aspect of science, primarily intended for children. I've watched some of the lectures in other years, and they are sometimes a bit patchy. However, I thought that Chris Bishop did a fantastic job of explaining quite difficult concepts, accompanied by the requisite number of explosions, feats of dare-devilry and maths problems disguised as magic tricks, and yet he avoided the trap of patronising the audience.
As a lecturer myself (though at nothing like such an exalted level), I find it interesting watching other people give lectures, and I often hope to pick up some tips and tricks. The basis of every good lecture -- regardless of subject or the academic level of the audience -- is telling a compelling story. A true story of course, but if you don't engage the audience, you might as well be talking to yourself. I often think that what you're trying to do is to gently guide your audience so that they just about get to each point just before you do. If -- as an audience member -- you're not trying to answer the questions posed by the lecturer before they tell you what the answer is, they've lost you.
I think that this lecture series succeeded so well because Chris Bishop told a great story, and there was something for everything. Mr. Bsag has less knowledge of Computer Science than me (and less interest in it), but we both learned some new and interesting things. For example, I was astonished that the chip in a chip-and-PIN credit card has roughly 30 times the processing power and 100 times the memory of the landing guidance computer on board the Apollo 11 Lunar Module. What I find surprising is not how powerful chip-and-PIN chips are, but that they actually managed to land the module on the moon with such meagre computing resources. I know that it's a factoid, but it does bring home to you just how quickly computing power has increased.
I do wish that my undergraduates were as keen to participate, though: a great forest of arms went up each time he asked for a volunteer, and the helpers looked really chuffed with their role of pouring small yellow balls into a tank, or standing in front of a 3D camera. In one of the lectures, each audience member had a gift-wrapped pair of transparent polarising films. Bishop demonstrated how the light was alternately blocked and transmitted by the films as they were overlaid and one rotated 90#176; relative to the other. Judging by the gasps of delighted astonishment coming from the kids (and the fact that you could see them still playing with the films for the rest of the lecture), I think that their parents had probably wasted their money on Playstations and Wiis for Christmas.
07 Oct 2008
Last week I watched Valentine Warner's What to Eat Now seasonal cookery programme. In this episode, Valentine visited a biodynamic farmer, who explained some of the principles of biodynamic farming. The farmer -- whose name I forget, but who seemed a very nice, cheery sort of chap -- showed Valentine how he makes his compost heap. Since I started growing my own veg, I've become a bit of a compost nerd1, and I was whistling appreciatively at the sight of the lovely ingredients the farmer had on his heap. There was lots of greenery, including nettles which contain iron and other useful minerals, cow pats, straw and other goodies. It had the makings of wonderfully rich, nutrient-packed compost. And then he pulled out a box of containers and explained that he would put into a hole made in the heap a pinch of yarrow which had been stored in a stag's bladder for a year (it may have been some other internal organ, I forget) hung up in the air, and then buried for a year. Or something like that. I'm afraid that I'm not certain of the details, because my mind was being boggled, and I was watching carefully to see what Valentine's response would be. He was terribly polite, but said it sounded a bit "witchy".
Quite. My favourite fictional witches -- those in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels -- rarely do any actual magic. Instead, a large component of their work involves what they refer to as 'headology'. This is the practice of getting people to believe something so strongly that it becomes real for them. Headology is cousin to the placebo in modern medicine, though rather more diverse. Some witches, like Nanny Ogg, perfect a cosy, homely persona, so that women in labour are convinced that giving birth is the easiest and most straightforward thing in the world. Others, like Granny Weatherwax maintain such a terrifying demeanour that people stop being ill out of sheer fright. Some, like Eumenides Treason, construct a mythical reputation with a collection of dribbly candles, plastic skulls and stick-on facial warts bought from Boffo's Joke Shop. All of these elaborate practices are maintained to convince their clients to believe that a particular story is true and real. It's fictional of course, but I'm fairly sure that aspects of it would work in the real world, just as we know that the placebo effect exists.
You probably see where I'm going with this. Headology works because people have minds, and I'm certain that it would have no perceptible effect on beetroot. The compost was responsible for his great beetroot, and the "witchy" bits were entirely optional. The only person being worked on by the yarrow-in-stag's bladder routine is the farmer. It's a shame really, because there are lots of very sensible and scientifically robust practices in biodynamic farming, like looking after the soil well, and making great compost. But then they go and spend a lot of time and energy on something that must have no measurable effect on the quantity or quality of the crop. Of course, I've had limited exposure to biodynamic methods, so it could be that the farmer featured in the program was on the far fringe of the movement.
1 I know, along with all my other domains of nerdery... I'm a nerd of all trades and a master of none. ↑
11 Sep 2008
Like many other people, I was following the events surrounding the switching-on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN yesterday with great interest. The BBC has had some quite good coverage, particularly The Big Bang Machine, however I felt a bit frustrated with some of the explanations. On all of the coverage of the LHC we learned that:
And that's it. Everyone agrees that it's revolutionary, exciting stuff that will answer huge questions which have puzzled physicists for decades, but we don't get any more details other than the impressive statistics of the LHC.
Now, I know that the concepts invovled in particle physics aren't exactly accessible for non-physicists. Every time I have to explain what I do for a living to non-biologists, I thank my lucky stars that I'm not a particle physicist. The 'what' of my research is pretty easy to explain to non-experts, though the 'why' (as in 'why in the world would anybody be interested in that?') is still sometimes problematic. But surely there's some, non-patronising way to explain more details of the experiments involved? There are so many interesting questions to ask.
For example, they often showed the graphical representations of the tracks of the particles which would be recorded by ATLAS and the other experiments in LHC. They were very pretty, but I'm assuming that the physicists won't be just gazing at the screens going, "Whoa! Look at all the pretty patterns... Far out, man...", then going off to have their tea. They are data and they mean something important, but how are they interpreted? How will they recognise the Higgs boson if it appears, and how will they distinguish it from other particles? How will they know for sure if they don't find it: in other words, how can they be sure that the absence of the Higgs boson is a real absence and not because their accelerator isn't quite fast enough, for example?
And then there's the whole 'the LHC will create black holes which will destroy the Universe' thing. Though the BBC and some other media organisations tried to imply that it was idiotic scare-mongering and all the physicists say it really can't happen, they all managed to get the question in. If I was Stephen Hawking, I would add a loud claxon sound to my speech synthesiser (like the QI claxon in the General Ignorance round), and activate it (preferably with the words CREATE BLACK HOLES WHICH DESTROY UNIVERSE flashing in white text on a black background on a convenient huge screen) whenever a journalist asked me the question. Then I'd mentally deduct 30 points and just carry on.
14 Jun 2008
This is something I meant to post about ages ago, but forgot about. Via Denyerec, I read an article which suggested that going barefoot is healthier for your feet. It's a long article, but an interesting one, and confirms a suspicion I've had for a long time that shoes -- even sensible ones -- constrain your feet and make you walk in an unnatural way. The conclusion seemed to be that heavily padded shoes make people plant their heels down much harder than they would with bare feet, thus placing more stress on all the joints of the leg. With no heel or sole padding -- after a period of adjustment -- people walk in a more fluid, softer way, placing the heel gently and rolling smoothly from the heel to the forefoot. Walking without shoes can also improve stability by allowing you to sense the form of the substrate, adjusting your balance and grip with small changes in the shape of the foot and the force applied.
I enjoy going barefoot when I can, because I love the sensation of the variety of textures under my soles. However, the local pastime around our way seems to be smashing glass bottles, so I usually only go barefoot at home or in the garden. When I first went to Brazil, I was amazed by the guides going barefoot in the forest, given that there were so many thorny branches and spiky leaves on the ground. Most people in the rural areas go barefoot most of the time, and our guide said he preferred to do so in the forest because he could move quietly. He did indeed move silently, while the rest of us clumped and rustled along like a herd of heffalumps1 in our heavy boots, despite trying to walk quietly. His soles were as tough as leather from all the barefoot walking.
Denyerec linked to some 'barefoot' shoes made by Vibram called FiveFingers, which have an extremely thin, unpadded sole (just a thin layer of rubber to keep your feet clean and protect you from sharp stuff), and allow you to move each toe independently. They look intriguing, and I'd love to try a pair. I think that your feet would probably hurt like mad for a couple of days as they got used to the lack of padding and you changed the way you walked, then they'd feel wonderful. Has anybody got a pair? If so, what are they like?
1 I nearly wrote 'elephants', but elephants move almost silently, except when pushing trees over. ↑
10 May 2008
I've been trying to write another grant proposal recently (a seemingly Sisyphean task for academics), but I ended up a bit stuck. It was a collaborative idea that a colleague and I sketched out last year, but which -- for one reason or another -- ended up on the back-burner for a while. I was really struggling to pull it together. We had plenty of ideas, but I was having trouble rearranging and grouping them into a sensible structure and seeing gaps that needed to be filled. Finally, I decided to blow the dust of my copy of Tinderbox and try that.
I wish I'd done it earlier. I used to use Tinderbox a lot for writing notes and organising ideas1, but newer, shinier applications have come along, and I've gradually turned to them. But Tinderbox is still a great tool, and it really excels at visual brainstorming. If you open a map view, you can just hammer out short notes containing all your ideas, then group them into similar themes later. With a linear outliner (a view which Tinderbox also has), you end up worrying more about where stuff should fit than what the important ideas are.
Once I'd got all the ideas down, I made some adornments ('sticky notes' on the page to visually group notes), and started moving notes around, first into similar ideas, then dividing them into aims, questions, hypotheses, techniques and random things to remember. Once that was done, I moved back to the linear outline view, and tidied things up, fleshing out the outline a bit as I went. It was really effective, and almost fun2! While Tinderbox can export notes quite easily as text (or HTML or XML), I probably won't bother to do so in this case, because I was just using it as a tool for thinking rather than writing. I've started to write the final document with the Tinderbox outline view open to guide my writing, and it's working really well.
1 I even constructed, managed and wrote this weblog with it when I first started blogging. ↑
2 Something which can make grant writing even almost fun is a miraculous tool, in my opinion. ↑
26 Jan 2008
I took part in the RSPB Garden Birdwatch today, and spent an hour noting down the maximum number of each species of bird visiting the garden within the selected hour. As well as being quite fun, and a good way of encouraging people to notice the bird life going about its business in their gardens or local parks, it's also a scientific exercise, gathering important data about the temporal and geographic changes in species numbers. While there is inevitably a small amount of statistical noise introduced because the participants are mostly not scientists, the enormous number of participants and broad coverage of the UK would be impossible without the participation of the public, so it's a valuable exercise.
As I did my hour of observation, I was aware of a familiar non-scientific urge creeping in. Despite that fact that I know very well that a survey period in which few or no birds are observed is as scientifically valuable as one which huge numbers of birds are reported, you can't help feeling disappointed and frustrated -- if it's your garden -- when you get a pathetic avian turnout of a couple a few tits, two robins and a blackcap. I would never note down birds that weren't there (as a scientist, that would rank alongside armed robbery in severity), but that didn't stop me sitting there urging birds (in my mind) to come and visit the garden.
We get a good range of species visiting the garden, in reasonable numbers. Blue tits, great tits, coal tits, and small, bouncy puffball flocks of long tailed tits are regular visitors, along with a pair of robins, a pair of blackcaps (in the winter), blackbirds, dunnocks, wrens, chaffinches and occasional bullfinches. We also had groups of house sparrows (though sadly they seem to have reduced in numbers last year), the ubiquitous magpies and wood pigeons, and rare but startling visits from a sparrowhawk. Of course, that's a cumulative collection of birds, over the course of hours or days, and in any randomly selected hour, we would be unlikely to see more than a small sub-set of those species, which is why my observation hour was so disappointing.
I did see a sparrowhawk flying over the garden during the hour, but the instructions tell you (sternly) to count only those birds actually in your garden. Curses.
13 Jan 2008
On Saturday, we visited an exhibition at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham of Japanese woodblock prints by Utagawa Hiroshige. Being a printmaker himself, Mr. Bsag is very interested in any kind of prints, and I love Japanese art of all kinds. It was a great exhibition, with some really stunning pieces of work in it.
Most of the prints were the kinds of compositions that you tend to associate with Japanese art: the paper is usually oriented in 'portrait' format, and often very tall and thin, with a view from above of a distant landscape. Many contain fields or forests in the foreground, a body of water of some kind in the middle distance, and mountains in the background. They are precise and beautifully composed, often with diagonal lines leading your eyes back and forth across the paper from the bottom to the top.
However, some of the pieces were very unusual in composition, and I loved them for their boldness. Hiroshige often placed a very large object right in the foreground of the picture, letting our eye travel past it to see the background. So, for example, there is one print in which a wooden pillar forms the left edge of the image, with a large paper lantern in the top right, and we can see a street beyond. Another print of a plum tree has the trunk and blossom of the tree almost filling the very near foreground, and you can just glimpse people walking past in the background. Van Gogh was evidently also an admirer of this print, and produced a version of it in oils.
A few prints show scenes of the interiors of houses, or holiday gatherings beside the sea, and in them Hiroshige places people in the frame so that they are literally cut off by the edge of the painting. It gives the prints an intriguing feeling, as if you are missing some of the story, and makes you keen to find out what is going on. They feel strikingly modern.
I've never been to the Ikon before (despite living in Birmingham for 3 years now!), but I liked it a lot. It has an old façade (Edwardian or Victorian, I think), but a very open, modern interior. There's a glass lift inside a glass window on the outside of the building, so that you can look at the outside as you ride in the lift. There's also an audio installation in the lift by Martin Creed. 'Work #409' is a piece "For lift and choir of bass, tenor, alto and soprano voices", performed by Ex Cathedra. As the lift ascends, they sing an ascending scale, with a descending scale for the lift descent. We don't normally travel in lifts for just a couple of floors, but it was so much fun listening to the choir providing a soundtrack to our short journey that we went up and down a few times. If you try it yourselves, I recommend descending from floor 2 to the ground floor for the best sonic experience!
I was less keen on another piece which is on the glass wall next to the lift. I forgot to note who it was by, but it's called 'Imaginary Landscape' and is comprised of vinyl lettering on the window, with lines referencing objects or colours which do not exist. So there are lines pointing to invisible Herons (and their Latin name), or a particular shade of yellow. Like many conceptual pieces, I found that it was vaguely amusing for a couple of minutes, but once you'd got the joke, there wasn't much more to say about it.
However, it did make me think that art is the only field in which you could get away with that kind of thing. I was fantasising about submitting a manuscript to a journal with the headings printed for each section ('Methods and materials', 'Results' and so on), but no text beneath the headings, and an empty figure with an arrow referencing "Highly significant result which will change the course of biology". At the bottom would be the line:
I CAN HAZ NATUR PAYPR NOW?1
1 This is LOLCat language, in case you are wondering. ↑
22 Dec 2007
I've got a secret liking for Heston Blumenthal's 'In Search of Perfection' cookery show on TV. On the one hand, I'm somewhat appalled by his sheer profligacy with energy and ingredients in order to produce a very small quantity of fancy food. On the other hand, it's hard not to be drawn in by his enthusiasm, and by his scientific approach to creating what he regards as the perfect dish.
Given the season, it was inevitable that this week's programme was about creating the perfect Christmas meal. While most people feel pretty daring if they try cooking a goose for Christmas dinner, rather than the staid old turkey, Heston -- as usual -- took culinary daring to a new level. He was determined to have a first course (after the wafer that smelt of babies) containing gold, frankincense and myrrh, stubbornly refusing to accept (until the last minute) that myrrh actually tastes pretty awful, and is bitter as hell. Obviously he doesn't pay attention to the lyrics of Christmas carols. He reluctantly admitted defeat on that one, and whittled the myrrh twigs into teaspoons to stir the frankincense tea with, but you could tell that he felt it was cheating.
Each of his dishes seems to take about a week to complete, in 43 easy steps, some of which require vacuum pumps, liquid nitrogen or an edible, heat-proof gel that sounds distinctly unappetising. He must have a carbon footprint the size of China: he travelled to Siberia (which, incidentally, looked absolutely ravishing) for 2 pints of reindeer milk to make into ice cream, and many of the 43 easy steps for each dish seem to require boiling something for 5 hours.
The funniest part (though not for the geese involved, I'm sure) was his attempt to raise geese in a calm, stress-free environment, feeding them on pine needle-laced food to impart a Christmassy flavour to the meat. I'm sure he's right that meat from calm, unstressed animals tastes better, but I'm not so sure that chasing two geese around a field, holding them in a very awkward and unpractised manner, and then isolating them in an unfamiliar stable away from all their mates is the best way to produce a serene Anserine environment. When Heston 1 placed the goose in a very flimsy enclosure within the stable, it evidently presciently decided that Something Was Terribly Wrong, and immediately bust out of the enclosure to make a break for the safety of the field and its flock mates.
1 For some reason, he held his goose gingerly away from his body as if it was an unexploded bomb. ↑
29 Nov 2007
Quantum mechanics blows my mind.
No matter how many times someone patiently explains (usually with the help of ping-pong balls) that it is possible for atom-sized objects to exist in two places at the same time, or to be both a particle and wave at the same time, I end up saying, "Wha... Bu...?" and looking gormless. Inside my head, my inner Scotty1 yells into an intercom "The engines cannae take it, Cap'n! The dilithium crystals are gonnae blow!", while being showered with sparks from an overloading console. I think of myself as a relatively intelligent person, and I do a fair bit of thinking about abstract things most days, but I can't seem to get a mental hold on a theory that involves completely non-intuitive ideas that blow raspberries in the face of common sense. I do enjoy it though; it's the intellectual equivalent of riding on a really intense rollercoaster -- very scary, but rather exhilarating.
So I could sympathise completely with the look of terrified bewilderment on E's face as various physics professors tried to help him understand quantum mechanics in the documentary Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives. E (Mark Everett of the band Eels) was trying to find out about his father Hugh Everett III, who was the originator of the idea of parallel worlds (the 'many-worlds interpretation'). Hugh died when E was quite young, and it sounds like he didn't communicate much with his children when he was alive. E lost all of his immediate family within a relatively short space of time, so it's understandable that he has -- until now -- found it quite painful to think about. It was a wonderful documentary, both from the perspective of the science, and the personal journey E went on. After talking to friends and colleagues of his father, he ended up feeling like he knew Hugh a bit better, and seemed to be more at peace with his past.
One of the bits I enjoyed most was when E was listening to some dictaphone tapes his father recorded, which he had never heard before. He wasn't even sure that he would recognise Hugh's voice, because he died so many years ago, and spoke so seldom in the home. In the end, he did recognise his voice, and was amazed to hear him sounding so talkative and enthusiastic, while chatting with a colleague. E had already said that his father was quite tolerant of his adolescent drum practices, and sure enough, half way through the tape, a loud drum solo comes in the background, and we know exactly who is responsible.
1 What? You mean you don't have an irascible Scottish Starfleet engineer in your brain? Just me then... ↑
30 Oct 2007
There's a really cracking documentary about photography on BBC Four at the moment, called Genius of Photography. The first programme looked at the historical origins of different photographic methods, and the social and artistic changes that it brought about. Like all good documentaries, it told me some things I didn't know before, and made me think about photography in a slightly different way.
For example, they explained the process of making daguerreotypes, and showed some examples, both from the 19th Century and contemporary images. I knew the name, but had never really considered how they were made. You have to expose a mirror-polished silver plate coated with a layer of silver halide to light, and then you exhibit the original plate after developing and fixing the image. Daguerreotypes are really the antithesis of modern, digital photography. The equipment is expensive and cumbersome, the developing and fixing process is labour intensive, not to mention the fact that it involves mercury vapour, for added peril. It requires a lot of skill, and to cap it all, you can't reproduce the image: the plate is the image, and cannot be duplicated or printed. But boy, are they beautiful.
I'd only ever seen still images of daguerreotypes, but watching film of people holding them, and seeing the images from different angles, you get a much better impression of their almost three-dimensional appearance than you do from a still reproduction. They also showed some contemporary daguerreotypes (you can see some lovely examples by Jerry Spagnoli here) which were really stunning, with a beautiful tonal range and an odd feeling of intimacy. Perhaps it's partly their rarity, uniqueness and the craft that has to go into making them that makes them feel so special.
10 Oct 2007
It's the 50 year anniversary of the disastrous fire at the Windscale nuclear reactor, and there was an excellent documentary on BBC Two on Monday. I knew the basic story of the fire, but not the details, which -- it has to be said -- were fairly terrifying. It could easily have turned into a far more serious situation, but for the actions of staff at the site.
As they said in the documentary, because it was Britain's first nuclear reactor, they had no idea what to do when the fire broke out. The deputy general manager, Tom Tuohy, described climbing up on top of the pile, opening an inspection hatch and seeing a raging inferno inside the graphite core. I can't remember his exact words in the documentary, but he grinned and said something like, "I remember thinking, Blimey! What a mess." Classic British understatement strikes again... They took the brave step of running water through the pile, without knowing at the time whether it would put the fire out or cause a massive explosion. In the end, it did neither; the fire still burned because of the air blown through the pile which was also supposed to cool the uranium cartridges. Again, they had another terrible decision to make about whether to leave the fans running and risk spreading and feeding the fire, or turn them off and risk further overheating. They chose to turn the fans off, and luckily the fire went out.
The whole situation seemed to have been exacerbated by corners which were cut in the Government's rush to manufacture enough material to produce a H-bomb and convince the Americans that Britain was a genuine nuclear power, worthy of sharing their nuclear secrets. Parts of the aluminium cooling casings surrounding each uranium rod were trimmed to try to increase the output of plutonium, which probably contributed to the overheating problem. The safety measures also seemed laughable -- the workers were poking the cartridges out with old scaffolding poles at one point (reminiscent of something Homer Simpson would try to pull off), and they were only protected by flimsy looking plastic suits and rudimentary breathing apparatus. Macmillan's report covered up the poor decisions and pressure imposed by the Government, and blamed the fire on an "error of judgement", which was grossly unfair on all those who risked their lives to try to get the fire under control.