Reason

The ‘New Scientist’, 26 July, has a special feature on ‘7 Reasons why people hate reason’. There’s a lot to think about there and it seems wrong to pick on one point. Particularly when that point is made by Chris Frith, who is a neurologist and presumably knows a lot more about how our brains work than I do.

His article is headed ‘No one really uses reason’ and he says that “few of the active processes occurring in our brains ever impinge on our awareness”. An example is that, if we had to think about all the processes involved in picking up a glass of water, then we would go very thirsty.

OK so far. But then he goes on to say “important decisions involving many factors, such as buying a car, are better made if we don’t consciously think about them.” I can go along with that too but I wonder if it isn’t missing the point a bit. You see, I suspect that most car owners spend quite a bit of time thinking about what kind of car they might buy. And I think there is a lot of reason involved in that, based on reading about cars, asking people’s opinions, riding in other people’s cars, and so on. OK, when you walk into the showroom and make the decision you may be applying gut feeling, not reason. But I think that gut feeling is based on a stong foundation of reason. So people do use reason, more than they think.

Computer Diploma and ELQ Funding

In 2006 I started on ‘Undergraduate Diploma in Computing via the Internet’, a distance learning course run by the Oxford University Department for Continuing Education. It was a two year course, with regular assignments and two Summer Schools, each of which included a 3 hour written examination (phew!). People were taking part from all over, including the US, Germany, Hungary and Lithuania. I really enjoyed it and, no false modesty here, I did well. I went on to attempt, and have nearly finished, the Advanced Diploma. Only one year, with no Summer School, but no less challenging.

A while back, the Government decided to cease funding for students undertaking study for equivalent or lower level qualifications (ELQ). This means no support for courses where students already hold a higher qualification (This is support, not the whole fee. I still had to pay my contribution to the course – £900). We were told that this would probably kill off the course and were invited to sign an ePetition about it.

I was happy to sign but when I told H she wasn’t sympathetic. Why should people who already have a higher qualification be supported in getting another one? The government clearly agree. In their response to the petition they say: “There are six million adults who have A-Level equivalent qualifications but who have not yet gone onto degree level. It is right that they should be our first priority.”

I am happy to admit that I did the diploma as part of my personal “if you don’t use it you’ll lose it” campaign. But I was surprised how it has helped me in my current engineering consultancy work. It is a long time since I did my two degrees and the changes in computing have been so staggering massive since then that I couldeasily  argue it is part of my continuing professional development. I don’t think that everyone on the course had degrees, and I know that several of them were using the diploma to develop or change the direction of their career.

I really can’t now get my brain round what is the just decision. This country is so weak on professional qualifications that there is a view that all relevant education and training should be supported. (2000 word essay on the meaning of ‘relevant’ in the previous sentence, please.) And why should people who have a degree but want to change direction be discriminated against? If spending has to be prioritised, then is this decision not a very blunt instrument?

Frequency of misinformation

There is a useful article in the Observer Business & Media section today (20 July) on the use of electrical gear abroad. They tell you to check for damaged fittings and to use a reputable adaptor. Well worth doing. They note that some countries have different mains voltages. Yes, again sensible. They then tell you that mains frequency may be different, so your clock may run faster. Well, OK, but who has a synchronous clock nowadays?

But when they mention frequency, they helpfully tell you that this is “the speed of the current”. Oh, please. Frequency isn’t a speed, it’s a, well, it’s a frequency. If you really want to explain it you need to go into a bit more theory about alternating current. But why try to explain it at all? The article doesn’t try to explain voltage. In this case, frequency is just another electical parameter which you might need to check up on when abroad. You don’t need to know exactly what it is.

I suppose it doesn’t matter. But if they show that sort of lack of understanding then what confidence can you have in the rest of the article. In fact, the rest of the article is quite good (I think it might just be lifted out of an Electricity Safety Council document) but that’s only because I know enough about the subject.

This is just another example of a frightening general ignorance of all things technical. But I would have thought that journalists ought to know better. This is turning into a rant. I’ll stop now.

Moon landing hoax and other conspiracies

It’s funny how unexpected connections sometimes occur. The New Scientist of 12 July 2008 has an article about the series of robotic lunar explorations planned over the next few years. On 14 July the excellent Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker is weighing in against conspiracy theories.

The connection I have made is that these lunar orbiters and landers should eventually show whether men did really land on the moon back in the 1960s. (Of course, the conspiracy theorists may still argue that NASA have been busy in subsequent years send robot missions to scatter fabricated evidence of manned landings.)

Why do I care about the moon landing hoax claims so much? Why is it one of the things I think about when I am having a shower? I think it is because, in this particular conspiracy theory I see so much evidence of lack of understanding, of lack of ability to engage brains.

Now, I’ll come clean. I don’t actually know if men went to the moon. I’m not an expert in the field. But I was trained as a scientist, and I do know about critically evaluating evidence. Something I do know is that an individual item of data is worthless: it is no better than gossip. If you actually want to do something useful with data you have to set up a model of what you think is happening – an hypothesis. (Get the ’an’: pretentious or what?) Now, if all the data you have fits your hypothesis, and if the hypothesis is consistent with the accepted laws of physics, then you can reasonably call it a theory. You can then use that theory to advance knowledge, to make predictions, and so on.

It seems to me that the currently accepted hypothesis of what actually happened (Neil Amstrong, Buzz Aldrin, all that stuff) does fit all the observed data and is consistent with known physical laws. Conspiracy theorists would object at this point but I will come back to that. But I have never seen a complete and consistent hypothesis for what happened if men did not go to the moon. What actually did happen? Who knew about it? Did the astronauts ever enter the capsule? If not, how were they picked up? If they just went into earth orbit, then why did thousands of amateur astronomers not notice?

The conspiracy theorists just cherry pick individual bits of data. No. That’s too nice an image. The better image is of crows pecking at a carcase and tearing it into smaller and smaller pieces. The conspiracy theorists approach this in a picky way, concentrating on individual inexplicable (to them) observations. That way, they hope to drive thinking people into an never-ending circle of argument. As Charlie Brooker says “So, if my four-year-old nephew tells me there’s a magic leprechaun in the garden I have to spend a week meticulously peering underneath each individual blade of grass before I can tell him he’s wrong, do I?”

Let’s think about these ‘inexplicable observations’ a bit more. There are several different sorts. First, what I call ‘misunderstood physics’. For example, “there should only be one source of light on the moon (the sun) but the astronauts’ shadows point in different directions. So there must be more than one source of light and the whole thing must have been staged in a hanger in New Mexico”. (I exaggerate just a bit.) Now anyone who knows what ‘perspective’ means should know that parallel lines don’t always appear parallel – look at railway lines, or crepuscular rays (shafts of sunlit air cast by cloud shadows). So, even leaving aside the fact that the ground may not be uniformly sloping, you might expect the shadows not to be parallel. And think about it: if there was more than one source of light then each astronaut would have multiple shadows, wouldn’t he?.

Next there are the accidental (or wilful?) mis-reportings. I have seen it said that the flag planted by the astronauts flaps in the wind when there would not be wind on the moon. Now, again I am not an expert but the only time I have seen the flag flap on a video is when one of the guys is struggling to get it into the ground. I believe that one of the flags had a fold in it and I suppose that several still shots from different angles might give the impression of flapping. And hang on. If it was filmed in a hanger in New Mexico then where did the wind come from? Did they leave the door open?

The last category is the things that have a ‘NASA explanation’. For example: “if Neil Armstrong was the first man on the moon then who filmed him going down the ladder?” NASA explanation (so I believe): He reached out of the door, operated some sort of catch and a camera swing out on a boom. To me, that sounds reasonable but if you are coming from a conspiracy theory viewpoint then any NASA explanation will fall into the “they would say that, wouldn’t they” category. Mind you, if you stick a sanity check on that ladder one you are asking us to believe that all these clever conspirators decided it would look better if there was a shot of him descending the ladder and it was only when the scene had been released did they clap their hands to their heads and say “Gosh, we never thought that there wouldn’t be anyone there to hold the camera”.

In conclusion, don’t look at individual bits of data. Look at the whole picture. I’ve just said that, so I am allowed to contradict myself just one little bit. To me, the one piece of data that I would find very hard to explain if the moon landings were just a conspiracy is the behaviour of the dust. If you agitate dust on Earth it hangs in the air: blow on a dusty surface in a closed room or see the cloud of dust following the 7^th cavalry in a western. That is primarily caused by Brownian motion. On the moon, with no atmosphere, I would expect dust particles not to hang in the air. They should execute a perfect parabolic trajectory and fall straight back to earth – sorry, to the moon. Look at the videos of the astronauts driving around in their buggy and watch what happens to the dust.

Does this matter? Probably not. But people who peddle this sort of stuff without making any effort to understand what is really going on are people who elect world leaders or, heaven help us, may even stand for high office themselves. Am I just another scientist who thinks he knows it all? Well, maybe, Let’s see what the orbiters and landers show over the next few years.

Let’s get started

Some time around June 2008 I had this idea that I should start a blog. It seemed to me that I often had thoughts or read things that I might want to share with other people, and maybe get their comments – that might even show me that my thoughts were not worth much!

My idea was to concentrate on science, technology, computing and engineering – the things I know a bit about. Though that would not stop me wandering off into other things if I felt like it.

But I decided that content should come before technology, so perhaps I should just try writing down some thoughts for a few weeks before thinking about how to publish them (or even deciding not to bother).

So here goes…

30 June 2008: The Guardian has a story entitled ‘Physics teachers dying out in some state schools, report says’. (Bit prolix for the Guardian?) On the same day there is a special supplement ‘The Big Bang Machine’ celebrating the imminent turning on of the Large Hadron Collider at Cern. There’s a disjoint there. Physics is exciting. Yes, it really is. So why are we failing to enthuse the public, and a whole new generation for that matter? There are people who claim that the hadron collider could produce a black hole which would swallow up the world. Scientific opinion seems to think that an incredibly remote possibility. But if it did come about, what a way to go!

4 July 2008: I once read an article on creative writing which said that good authors must learn to murder their angels. I think what that means is that sometimes you write something which you think is so good that it blinds your critical faculties with the result that the text stays in the document way past the point when a more reasoned decision would have been to chop it out.

I am currently experiencing a similar effect with a project I am working on. I can’t give details, but the client wanted inspection solutions for a very difficult problem. We found a university group who had a possible solution and what had seemed impossible started to look workable. We were so proud of what we had achieved and we were working with the university to develop the technique. Just recently, we uncovered an effect which threatened the viability of the technique. Objectively, this was an angel we should have murdered but we were so pleased with what we had done that we hung on far longer than we should have, trying this and that half-baked way of trying to keep the project alive. I guess the most difficult thing is knowing just when to do the murder!

7 July 2008: Just watched the latest “Sky at Night”. Patrick Moore still presenting, and clearly still understanding what is going on, but he leaves most of it to the young guys now. It was about the Phoenix mission to the Mars polar regions. This stuff, and the Mars rovers, the orbiters, the Cassini probe orbiting Saturn and bringing back the most amazing pictures of Saturn’s moons, all of these totally blow my mind away. Why isn’t everyone excited about them. Lots of us are all too cynical, I guess.

The Mars pictures reminded me that the film “Capricorn 1” was on the box recently. The one about a faked manned mission to Mars. I read on one of the “Moon landing hoax conspiracy” websites that this film supported the claim that the moon landings were faked. Eh? I’m afraid I am very resistant to the claims of conspiracy theories. Mind you, that Iran/Contra thing was seen as a conspiracy theory when it was first exposed… But I am still not convinced by claims that the moon landings were faked. An acid test: say to a conspiracy theorist “OK, if the moon landings were faked then what actually happened”. You will get a thousand different explanations, most of them contradictory and changing when presented with additional data. (I’ve read that described as a ‘log rolling’ explanation. Think about that image.) And any scientist knows that an hypothesis which doesn’t fit all the data can never be a theory.

Hey, I’m way away from the Phoenix lander. I still think it is all brilliant. Anything that advances real knowledge can’t be otherwise.

9 July 2008: My partner works part-time at the local convenience store. Two of the weekly magazines they sell are “Carp Talk” and “Total Carp”. She says that every issue has a picture on the cover of a man holding a big fish. It’s very difficult to tell them apart (the magazine issues, not the men and the fish). I don’t know why I find that funny.

11 July 2008: Obituary in the paper today of David Caminer, who has died aged 92. He was the Director of the project to set up LEO – the Lyons electronic office – which was the first real business computer. It was based on the Cambridge University EDSAC. That must put him up there with the top computer visionaries (along with Tommy Flowers who is a pet hero of mine). In the 1970s Caminer managed one of the largest computer projects of the time, for the European Community. He got an OBE for finishing on time and within budget. Apparently, in his retirement he could never understand why so many big computer projects failed.

12 July 2008: I recently acquired an Ipod. This isn’t a case of “Former teenager, liable to relapse”. I didn’t actively seek it out. It just came as a gift when I subscribed to a DVD library. Not is it a very function-rich machine, as it is an Ipod Shuffle. It is the bottom of the line Ipod (and only 1GB to boot). To save on cost and size it doesn’t have a screen or any way of seeing what file you are going to play. Now, this is a perfect example of making a feature out of a limitation. It plays it’s files in a random order (Shuffle? Get it?) Wow. What an advantage. I guess it’s OK if you are happy to listen to songs in any old order. (Or if you just want a noise all the time and don’t care what it is. No, I didn’t say that. I’m beginning to sound like my father.) I suspect that any fairly serious rock band thinks about the order of tracks on an album. And a classical composer certainly thinks about the order of the movements in a symphony, for example.

An aside. When I was young I used to listen to a radio programme called “Your 100 Best Tunes”. I think it was on the Light Programme (Radio 2 to our younger readers). The host (Alan Keith?) was very found of playing single movements from symphonies. I’m not knocking the programme. It was my first introduction to classical music. But think about it. There’s poor old Tchaikovsky, for example. He had enough problems of his own but he worked away, writing his music, taking pains to get the right contrasts between movements and to introduce recapitulations of earlier themes. Then there is this radio presenter saying “and now we have the third movement of Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique Symphony”.

Back to the Ipod Shuffle. You can elect to play tracks (files? songs?) without the shuffle, and you can skip to the next TFS (that’s tracks or files or songs or whatever). But even the 1GB version can store 240 TFSs so you could spend all day trying to find the TFS you want. So shuffle is the only realistic option and I am only loading single movement classical pieces (along with Pink Floyd, Leonard Cohen, James Taylor, Youssou n’Dour and so on).

My very first computer was a Sinclair ZX81. That had 1kb of memory, although I added a 16k extension (the size of a pack of playing cards). That had Basic built in and you could insert Basic commands like LET, IF and PRINT by single key strokes. I think these just inserted tokens into the program. That would save space and remove the need to parse text. That’s another limitation which became a feature. I believe a lot of people felt very cheated when they moved to more advanced computers and had to type the whole of the commands (and risk mistyping them).

Well. That’s a start. Perhaps it is worth going on. So here is my first post.