Graduation with trains

To Plymouth yesterday for #2 son’s graduation. He kept us waiting – he is 33 years old – but he has done well and we are proud of him. No A Levels so after working in various hotels he did a foundation course at Plymouth and was then accepted on a degree course. A really nice touch at the ceremony was that, as the academic procession went out at the end, they formed up into two lines and applauded the new graduates as they walked out between them. Do people go to university too young? I think that the life skills he gained working in hotels really helped him in his degree course and in the job he now has. And it was nice to see my 6 week old grandson again.

I travelled down from Bristol by train and really enjoyed it, especially for coastal bit for which I think I need to thank Isambard Kingdon Brunel. I’m not a train nut but I like trains. It might run in the blood as my paternal grandfather was an engine driver on the Great Eastern Railway, based variously at Dereham, King’s Lynn and Wisbech. He drove for a bit on the Wisbech to Upwell tramway. (Think Toby the Tram Engine for any Thomas the Tank Engine fans.) My Grammar school was alongside the King’s Lynn to Hunstanton line and formed a barrier between us and the local Secondary Modern (Oh dear, room for bags of social comment there).

Now, there was a level crossing, complete with crossing keeper, where the line crossed the main road next to the school. There is a level crossing just as you come into Exeter (home of the Met Office) St Davids station. When we crossed it yesterday and I saw the people, bikes and cars waiting I had a sudden surge of nostalgia. I remember standing by the crossing near what was to be my future school and seeing the Royal Train carrying the body of George VI back from Sandringham. I was only 6 years old then so I am not sure if it is a real memory or just a story I grafted onto things I had been told later. But I am sure I was there.

I am sure that when I was 10 or so I used to cycle down to North Wootton station (the first one up the Hunstanton line) to watch the trains. It was a rather quiet station and I remember being invited up into the signal box at one point. Would you let kids do that now?

Well, we have gone from a small boy watching trains to his son getting a BSc in Internet Technologies and Applications, all in one blog post. You can’t say you don’t get breadth.

Coriolis, bath water and science

It’s an interesting paradox that, while science is based on observation, any good scientist (or indeed any thinking person) will know that you can’t always believe what you see. This came home to me a while ago when having a light-hearted conversation about which way the bath water swirls as it goes down the plug hole. “This is a real effect”, a colleague said, “I saw it when I was on holiday in Africa”. Now, I’ve never been to Africa but what she was describing, which I have had confirmed by other people, is a way of extracting money from tourists in African countries which lie on the Equator.

When a tour bus arrives in a town bisected by the equator, usually conveniently indicated by a white line down the middle of the main street, a man will appear holding a large tin can with a small hole in the bottom. Holding his finger underneath the can on the hole , he fills it with water and adds a few leaves or twigs on the surface to show movement of the water. Standing on one side of the equator, he releases his finger, the water flows out and everyone can see which way it swirls out of the can. He then repeats the exercise on the other side of the equator and, lo, the water goes the other way. My colleague was convinced this was a real effect. She had seen it with her own eyes.

Now, the physics going on here is the Coriolis effect. I read about it in the “Feynman Lectures on Physics” which some relatives, both librarians, gave me the Christmas before my A-levels (bless them). Since then, nobody has told me that this is wrong (the Coriolis force, I mean, not getting nice Christmas presents). On the surface of the Earth the force varies with latitude – it is zero at the equator and a maximum at the poles. I freely admit I have not done the sums but, given the size of the Earth, I just can’t believe that walking a few yards to the other side of the road is going to change the direction and size of the force enough to affect the movement of a bit of water. If you lookat the way that ocean currents and winds circulate on the Earth, there is not much rotation quite a long way either side of the equator.

So there are two possibilities here. Either this is some effect unknown to physics or it is a trick. Maybe the guy gives the water a bit of a twirl as he pours it into the can. Occams Razor, or even just common sense, tells us that the first explanation is more likely.

So is there a paradox here? A paradox beween relying on obervation and not always believing what you see? Not, I think, if you are doing the science properly. I have said before that an observation on its own is no better than gossip – you need to try to fit it to an hypothesis. The hypothesis here is based on the effect of the Coriolis force, as seen in weather and ocean currents. If, as I suspect, calculation would show that the force is miniscule in a can of water then we need to seek an explanation – we need more data. One possible, and rather sneaky, way of doing this would be to take the man and his can to another location where the ‘equator’ is marked out, unkown to him, a mile or so away from the real equator. I bet he would still demonstrate water going both ways, especially if there were tourists there to give him some money. This isn’t judging such people, by the way. Good luck to them. I would do the same thing if I had to live in the sort of poverty that most people in Africa experience.

Placebo

Busy, busy, busy. Trying to catch up. How does anyone have time to write a daily blog?

Catching up on the 23 August New Scientist with an article “The Power of Belief” about new work on the placebo effect. I guess we all know that you can get an effect by giving someone a sugar pill and telling them it will make them better. But this article suggests it is more complex than that. Even if a drug is active, the effect depends on whether the patient knows what the drug is supposed to do. To quote: “If you don’t tell people that they are getting in injection of morphine, you have to inject at least 12 milligrams to get a painkilling effect, whereas, if you tell them, far lower doses can make a difference.”

You can’t depend on your own experience here – it is too subjective and you never do the control experiment. But here is an observation which may or may not be relevant.

A few years ago I began to suffer from stiff knees, especially after driving for a while. I though it was just old age but H, who was probably getting fed up with me complaining, said I should take cod liver oil. I resisted for a bit but then saw an advertisement in a walking magazine offering a years supply of cod liver oil capsules plus, as a gift, a years supply of glucosamine sulphate. I started taking both every day (already I am altering two variables at once) and it did seem to have an effect. I carried on for over a year – even ordering a repeat dose – but then I went away for a week or so and forgot the pills. When I got back something else intervened and I never got back into the habit of taking the pills.

After a couple of months I realised that (a) I was not taking the pills and (b) I did not feel any worse. Now, two questions, probably never to be answered in any rigorous scientific way:

1. Did I feel better because I was expecting to, after starting on the pills?

2. Would I have felt worse when I stopped if it had been a conscious act, rather than stopping without thinking about it?