simulating manifestos

Want to check out the consequences of all the different parties’ election manifestos?  Run a simulation.

tl;dr: they all end in disaster.  Thank heavens governments never actually keep their manifesto pledges, in that case!


[via BoingBoing]

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another scam call

07468 781778 called.  When I mentioned the Telephone Preference Service, they argued with me that I couldn’t be registered, as they had my details from the national database.

Why do these people (1) argue with me that they know better than I do whether I’m registered with the TPS? (2) think that after such an argument I might then want to continue speaking to them?

I reported them to the ICO (as I didn’t engage in a long enough conversation to get the information needed to report them to the TPS).  Interestingly, one of the pieces of information the ICO requested from me was my telephone number (in addition to my email address), so they could call me if they needed more information.  I filled in the box as: “I don’t want telephone calls!”  Sigh.

representative representation

Interesting discussion of why allowing everyone to have a voice doesn't give everyone a voice.

Lazy democracy is like an open comments section – left unmoderated and unguided, the worst people take over 

We should have learned a long, long time ago that “Just let the public give their input” is a lazy, useless and above all dangerous way to make decisions. If you want democracy you have to put effort into designing a process that actually makes sure your voting population matches the relevant population and to keep the process from being captured by bad actors. If that’s too hard for you, then accept that democracy is too hard for you and find some other way to claim legitimacy for the decision you end up making.

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We've always been at war with Eastasia

This situation is completely despicable.  Not only is there no natural justice in this individual case, it is an example of the Orwellian practice of retrospective legislation.

Top academics will be increasingly reluctant to come to the UK, says Hirono, who is being forced to quit Britain despite her permanent post

As a commenter on my original g+ post rightly points out:

What makes this particularly boneheaded and vindictive is that Hirono already won one appeal against the original ruling, only for the Home Office to appeal against the appeal

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mmmm

Vennels Cafe, Durham – hidden away, but well worth the search.

The fresh Stilton scones are to die for!

The are not Vennels stilton scones.  But they are stilton scones.

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Where London stood

I like Shelley’s poem Ozymandias, but for all the wrong reasons.  I first came across it in Weber’s More Random Walks in Science.  In the article “Preparing scientific papers” by N. S. Haile (originally published in Nature), it is treated as a geology paper, with wonderful snarky referee comments such as:

I met a traveller² from an antique land³
Who said: Two⁴ vast⁵ and trunkless legs⁶ of stone⁷ ...

² Since this paper appears to be based on field observations by another geologist, we suggest joint authorship would be appropriate
⁴ This is the only quantitative statement!

and so on, then with a rewritten “improved” version, titled: Twin limb-like basalt columns (‘trunkless legs’) near Wadi Al-Fazar and their relationship to plate tectonics.

What I didn’t know then was that there is already another version, another poem with the same name and subject, by Horace Smith, written in friendly competition with Shelley.

I heard about that other version for the first time earlier this week, surfing some blog posts, and thought, “that’s interesting”, particularly with its post-apocalyptic science fictional ending (if somewhat risible “gigantic Leg”).

I heard about it a second time a day or so later, on a news item, and thought, “that’s a coincidence”.

I heard about it a third time today while reading a book, and thought, “FFS, enough with the Horace Smith version already!”

1329, and counting

I recently read Trade Secret, a science fiction novel, and noted in my review that it was the sequel to a book I had read 10 years previously, and all but forgotten.  There I say that part of the reason for not remembering may be due to the 480 fiction books and 185 non-fiction books I had read and reviewed in the meantime.

So how many books have I read and reviewed since I started my website nearly 20 years ago?  Well, running a quick query on my trusty database, it’s 900 fiction (not rounded!) and 425 non-fiction.

That’s a lot of books, and a lot of reviews.  (Well, some of the reviews are not exactly in-depth.)  I never thought when I started the website in order to learn HTML that I would still be keeping it up after all this time.  I find it a useful resource for making me think about the books I’ve read, and then later for reminding me about them (especially the non-fiction).

Forgetting a book I suppose is common.  What I find rather disconcerting is that on occassion I have reread one of my reviews that I wrote several years earlier, and not one single iota of recognition has sparked in my brain.  Ah well.

More worryingly, perhaps, is that I buy books faster than I read them, and currently have more than that total reviewed number on my unread stack.  That implies a further 20 years reading material, staring down at me from the shelves, even if I were to stop buying books today (I won’t; I can’t).  There’s so much more waiting to be forgotten!

it's a record!

Today was a beautiful sunny day.  And we generated 56.03 kWh with our solar PV, the highest daily production since we installed the system in January 2014.  It was a nearly perfect day, just two tiny cloud blips:

The horizontal time axis runs from 3:00am to 9:00pm GMT. The vertical axis runs from zero to 8kW. The orange regions indicate the minimum, lower quartile, median, upper quartile, and maximum generation at that time, over the month so far. The line indicates the actual generation at that time.

Interestingly, the second highest daily production wss 55.91 kWh, on 16 April 2014: one year and two days ago!

(We had a long power cut on 24 April 2014, which explains the zero minimum line.)

spring

A tree just down the road from us:

I think spring has arrived!

book review: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
online. 2015

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I started reading HPMoR online nearly a year ago. Today, the last chapter, 122, was posted, and the grand saga concludes.

The premise is simple: What if you changed Harry, but all the other characters remained the same? The big change is that here Harry is an intelligent rational scientist (there are some other, but more minor, changes). And that makes all the difference: Harry the rationalist, confronted with magic!

It starts out a little weak, as Yudkowsky gets to grips with the writing process. It gets funny, as Harry gets to grips with the fact that magic exists, and that it works. It gets interesting when Harry’s rationality gets him sorted into Ravenclaw, and as he decides to bring Draco Malfoy under rationality’s wing. It gets clever when the Professor for Defence Against the Dark Arts starts teaching the students how to fight with magic. It gets dark when an appalled Harry discovers Azkabhan. And it gets devastating when [well, that’s enough spoilers for now].

When I finished reading online, I downloaded the pdf version. All 2007 pages of it. (Neal Stephenson, eat your heart out!) That much material, dense with foreshadowings, references, and allusions, read over several months, meant there were things I forgot, and things I didn’t spot. No matter, there's a whole TVTropes sub-site, to suck up another significant portion of my life.

The main story is only (only!) 1969 pages. There are also a few pages of mostly hilarious omake (extras), including some cut scenes and alternative scenes, and some scenes from alternative fictional worlds the rational approach is applies to (including Lord of The Rings, Narnia, Anita Blake (ahem), Twilight, Moby Dick, Alice, and, of course, Hamlet).

The key point, beyond being rational, is the characters Harry and Voldemort have very similar responses to the concept of death, but with one critical distinction (who’s death) which leads to their very different actions. I discovered after I started reading that Yudkowsky is a transhumanist, which certainly explains some of the underlying themes; it crucially makes for a reason for everyone to care about the Philosopher’s Stone.

As well as all the rationality, and plot divergences, there is general poking fun at some of the sillier bits of the original, particularly the scoring system in Quidditch. Overall, this is a fantastic read, particularly if you are a nerd with pretensions of rationalism. I really enjoyed it.

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For all my book reviews, see my main website.

over-personalised communication

It’s general election time in the UK, so we are getting bombarded with pamphlets from all the parties.

I found the latest one to drop through the letterbox to be startlingly over-specific.

Nice, though rather surprising, to know this candidate is securing an entire country’s future just for little old me.  But I think maybe there are other people who need the future secured for them, too, and probably moreso?  How about securing Britain’s future for everyone?

Okay, I know this isn’t actually just about me (yes, really!).  But I find it a really weird phrasing.

sparrowhawk

A sparrowhawk in our garden.  Magnificent!  Although not so much so for the pigeon it is feasting on.  It spent a while chowing down, then flew off with the remains of the carcass in its talons.  All that now remains is a pile of pale feathers.

book review: An Urchin in the Storm

Stephen Jay Gould.
An Urchin in the Storm.
Norton. 1987

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This is a collection of some of Gould’s essays from The New York Review of Books. They are “essays” rather than reviews: Gould calls them commentaries on the books themselves. That is, rather than review each book itself for style, coverage, or whatever, Gould writes an essay on the subject matter of the book, and on how well the book itself addresses that context. Since the books are mostly about evolution and geology, Gould is very well placed to perform this exercise. On reading Gould’s own essays, we learn more about the subject matter than we learn about the reviewed book; in some cases we possibly learn more about the subject matter than we would do so reading the book in question.

There is no bibliographic information provided on the original essays publication dates. However, there is a statement in the colophon about the accompanying drawings, which are dated 1963–1987. So the essays themselves are 30–50 years old, and we need to be aware that what we have learned is potentially somewhat out of date.

Not everything is dated, however. In his essay on Evelyn Fox Keller’s biography of Barbara McClintock, A Feeling for the Organism, he notes:

[p164.] … her contempt for what academic departments call “good citizenship”—primarily a euphemism for submission to myriad, meaningless hours of soul-sapping committee work

Despite its age, many of the more philosophical points are timeless. In his essay on Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin’s Not in Our Genes, which discusses the nature-nurture debate and the need for holistic thinking, Gould opines:

[pp153-4.]   Dialectical thinking should be taken more seriously by Western scholars, not discarded because some nations of the second world have constructed a cardboard version as an official political doctrine. The issues that it raises are, in another form, the crucial questions of reductionism versus holism, now so much under discussion throughout biology (where reductionist accounts have reached their limits and further progress demands new approaches to process existing data, not only an accumulation of more information).
   When presented as guidelines for a philosophy of change, not as dogmatic precepts true by fiat, the three classical laws of dialectics embody a holistic vision that views change as interaction among components of complete systems, and sees the components themselves not as a priori entities, but as both products of and inputs to the system. Thus the law of “interpenetrating opposites” records the inextricable interdependence of components: the “transformation of quantity to quality” defends a systems-based view of change that translates incremental inputs into alterations of state; and the “negation of negation” describes the direction given to history because complex systems cannot revert exactly to previous states. 

The writing is intellectual, punchy rather than precious, and Gould lavishes praise and heaps scorn where it is due. He enjoys skewering Capra’s holism credentials in The Turning Point:

[p224.]   Consider the peculiarity of that last sentence: “the subatomic particles-and therefore, ultimately, all parts of the universe…” The self-styled holist and antireductionist is finally caught in his own parochialism after all. He has followed the oldest of reductionist strategies. As it is with the structure of physics, queen of the sciences, so must it be, by extrapolation, with all of nature. You don’t exit from this Cartesian trap by advocating holism at the lowest level. The very assertion that this lowest level, whatever its nature, represents the essence of reality, is the ultimate reductionist argument.

Again, on Capra:

[p225-6.]   I thought that Capra and I would be kindred spirits, since we maintain a similar commitment to a holistic and hierarchical perspective. Yet I found myself getting more and more annoyed with his book, with its facile analogies, its distrust of reason, its invocation of fashionable notions. In some respects, I feel closer to rational Cartesians (at least we have a common basis for disagreement) than to Capra’s California brand of ecology. I guess I’m just a New York holist. 

However, he reserves his most withering scorn for his penultimate essay, on Jeremy Rifkin’s Algeny (a word coined to mean the modern alchemy of genes):

[p230.]   I regard Algeny as a cleverly constructed tract of anti-intellectual propaganda masquerading as scholarship. Among books promoted as serious intellectual statements by important thinkers, I don’t think I have ever read a shoddier work. Damned shame, too, because the deep issue is troubling and I do not disagree with Rifkin’s basic plea for respecting the integrity of evolutionary lineages. But devious means compromise good ends, and we shall have to save Rifkin’s humane conclusion from his own lamentable tactics.

It’s not all scorn, it’s just that scorn is so quotable! There is interesting biology and geology (although some out of date), good writing, and trenchantly stated opinions. All in a series of bite sized chapters suitable for intermittent reading. Read for how to write essay-style reviews, even if not for the reviews themselves.

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For all my book reviews, see my main website.

sequestering carbon, several books at a time XLIV

The latest batch.  These were either bought at EasterCon, given away at EasterCon, or delivered while we were at EasterCon.

a new way to proofread

I often suggest to my students they should read their prose work aloud, to help spot clumsy phrasing.  I'd never thought of suggesting text-to-speech, though. Don’t proof-read: proof-listen.

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no time machine needed

I saw this email header today:

LAST WEEK - submit paper on XXX

I’ll need a time machine to do that, I thought.  Oh…

It’s a real problem that “last” can mean either “previous” or “final”.

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it's not alive!

surface tension + evaporation = movement

A puzzling observation, pursued through hundreds of experiments, has led Stanford researchers to a simple yet profound discovery: Under certain circumstances, droplets of fluid will move like performers in a dance choreographed by molecular physics.

[via BoingBoing]

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EasterCon Monday

Final mushroom-soaked breakfast, final day at this year’s EasterCon.

First up, a panel on Faeries: The not-so-nice creatures at the bottom of the garden.  In particular, fairies were originally quite nasty, but “tweeification” (it’s a word now!) has made them smaller and somehow less threatening.  Or is it the fae themselves corrupting out image of them, so they can get closer?  Is it them persuading us to replace iron with plastic?  Barrie knew a lot of historical folklore: he had Tinkerbelle as a murderous little thing, and Disney kept a lot of that.  But the fair folk are not evil as such: they just have a completely different moral code, incomprehensible to us, which they stick to rigorously.  This makes them hard to deal with.  “I wish the goblins would take my baby brother.”  So why do you get so upset when the goblins help you out by fulfilling your wish?

This year’s George Hay Memorial Lecture, To the stars and beyond – making the most of what we have, was presented by Anna Croft, on green chemistry.  “Chemistry: the science of things that are taken for granted.”  We will have limited resources on other worlds, and will have to make the most of what we have.  We are starting to do that now.  Fossil fuels are the basis of a $3tn chemical industry, irrespective of the fuel economy.  We need to replace volatile organic solvents.  There is a lot of interesting progress with using carbon dioxide in its supercritical phase, where it has both liquid properties of a solvent and gas properties so it can permeate into small spaces; it leaves no toxic residues and is recyclable.  The other big advance is ionic liquid solvents.  These are non-volatile, non-flammable, and there are over a million different types, compared to ~200 organic solvents. Some are switchable, between miscible and non-miscible forms, so no distillation is required. Then there’s 3D printing with dissolved Yak wool keratin…

We ended on a high note: a panel called Not For The Squeamish.  It wasn’t for the squeamish. Dr Bob talked about her work watching dead animals rot for a living, taking living things and turning them into fossils; the smell of rotting squid can’t be removed from glassware, even after an industrial acid dishwash.  Necrotising fasciitis smells very bad.  “Gangrene has a very distinctive smell and taste: I’ve tasted my own gangrene.”  “You win!”  Seanan McGuire (in her Mira Grant persona) just wanted to listen to doctors talk about dead stuff.  Nevertheless, she told us about the “six perfect poopers” in the US: they have never had a course of antibiotics or gastric infection, and they are vegan (so have never eaten antibiotics in meat), a great source for fecal transplants.  They want to sample the Amish, who eat meat, but without antibiotics.  A slightly less squicky factoid: archaeologists fall into two groups when they find unexpected bodies: they either faint or run away; or go oooh! and steal the skulls.

So, another great EasterCon ends.  Time to check out and drive home.  The hotel was straightforward to find; escape was not so easy.  I took a wrong turn, and was inexorably funneled into Heathrow’s short stay car park.  However, once exited from that maze, the route was straightforward, and the M25 less clogged than on Friday.  Next year, Manchester.

EasterCon Sunday

Another mushroom-rich breakfast, another day at the EasterCon.

In Quintic Equations: Symmetry and Tragedy, Nicholas Jackson gave one of his famous talks on mathematics and mathematicians.  Here he went through the history of the roots of polynomials, where everyone seems to die tragically early, culminating in, but not restricted to, Abel  (26) and Galois (20).  The surface moral might be “don’t work on polynomials!”, but the deeper moral, from the ridiculous and tragic stories around the discoverers of the cubic and quartic solutions, is “competition is a really really bad way of discovering new knowledge”.  (I suggested: we want to stand on the shoulders of giants, not cut them off at their knees.) University funders, take note.

Next, Sarita Robinson discussed The Psychology of Dr Who.  She linked regeneration and teenage psychology, given the violence of the associated emotional and physical changes. Teens exhibit poor judgement and risk taking, because their brains are still developing: they find it difficult to keep track of multiple thoughts and consequences, and difficult to access critical memories and emotions for informed decision making.  She also discussed the qualities needed in a companion: not neurotic (capable of doing more than screaming!), extrovert, trusting, and open to new experiences.

Then we had the remaining Guest of Honour sessions.  Herr Döktor was interviewed about the steampunk gadgets he crafts.  And then Seanan McGuire ran a Q&A session.  It had all the usual things: how to pronounce her other name (Mirr-ah, not MY-ra); frogs; how to kill everyone on the planet with a designer virus; newts; how one of her Maine Coon cats snuck into her luggage, which she didn’t discover until on the plane.  I was laughing so hard I couldn’t breath. “I am exaggerating for effect, but probably not as much as you think.”

In The Day They Launched a Woodpecker, Jerry Stone told many anecdotes of the early days of rocketry, with clips.  (No woodpeckers were harmed during this talk.)

Mancunicon won the bid for EasterCon 2016 (wow, it’s seventeen years since the last EasterCon in Manchester; it feels like only yesterday!), and Pasgon in Cardiff for 2017.  We bought memberships.  We also bought pre-supporting memberships for the Helsinki bid for WorldCon 2017.  I’d love to go to Helsinki for a WolrdCon!

The day concluded with an item on the recent Hugo Award nominations. “A political act needs to be met with a political response.”

EasterCon Saturday

Saturday, and the first full day of Dysprosium 2015, the 66th British National Science Fiction. After enjoying a breakfast replete with mushrooms, the first item we attended was Liam Proven on Retro Computing.  This was billed as a repeat of the heavily oversubscribed item at LonCon, where it was a panel.  Liam apologised that he was the only one to turn up for this, and that he hadn’t really prepared, and then proceeded to wax lyrical about old hardware, languages, operating systems, and virtual machines for the next hour.  His main point: what we have today is faster improved versions of the cheap and cheerful 1980s solutions, not better versions of the then-impractical but actually much superior solutions.  We’ve gone up a blind alley.  (I blame it all on Moore's Law, myself.)

Next was a panel on Unseen London, which had a focus on underground railways, rivers, sewers, and other tunnels, some known, some forgotten.  All I can say is some people (not only on the panel) have a ridiculously deep esoteric knowledge of the most marvelous things.

Helen Pennington, plant biologist, gave a talk on How Crazy are Biologists and what do we really do?.  (Essentially, pipette clear liquids into other clear liquids.)  I learned lots of fascinating things about plants and fungi, and implementing 4 bit computers in cockroaches. After the main talk, there was a brilliant Q&A session.  For me, the best bit was how to destroy the world with super-rabies zombie children (you had to be there).

The first of the Guest of Honour sessions was from Caroline Mullen, and her life in fandom. This was a pre-prepared read talk, and was fascinating (I use that word a lot: I go to SF cons specifically to be fascinated!).  Caroline says her talk will be published at some point, which is great, as I get to read it again.  This was followed by Jim Butcher’s Guest of Honour slot, where he was interviewed by Charles Stross.  As well as his Dresden Files books, he talked about another series, Codex Alera, which he wrote as a bet: you can’t take this cliched idea, the Lost Roman Legion, and write something good with it.  Since he’s written and published six books in the series, he reckons he’s won the bet.

After a late lunch/early dinner (regular mealtimes are impossible at cons) we went along to the BSFA lecture, an annual event where a speaker from the Arts and Humanities is invited along to tell us something interesting (fascinating, even).  These are usually a highlight of the Eastercon, and this year was no exception.  Simon Trafford talked on: “Runar munt þu finna”: why sing pop in dead languages?  The dead languages tend to be either Latin (old folk, ethereal goth), often used to summon some form of spiritual otherness (with the language shrouding the lyrics’ Christian origins, or even their complete lack of meaning), or dead vernaculars (folk metal, pagan metal), often used to invoke a barbaric warlike golden age.  So it was that in 1973 Steeleye Span had the honour of recording the first Latin song to chart; Gaudete: Latin with a distinct folk accent.  One interesting point he made was that a lot of these sort of bands blend medieval with world musics, which is a dubious orientalising practice, because the other is be equated with medieval  His talk was interspersed with lots of musical clips, and much hilarity.

Next was a talk by Brenna Hassett on TrowelBlazers: Women trailblazers in archaeology, geology and palaeontology.  There are many famous male archaeologists, but they were accompanied but women whose stories we don’t know nearly so well: Margaret Murray, Gertrude Caton-Thompson, Kathleen Kenyon, Dorothy Garrod, are some of the better know, but there are many more.  Not only that, these women weren’t a few isolated anomolies: there were several women-only digs.  The TrowelBlazers project is documenting their history and contribution.

The final event of the evening was a concert.  Playing Rapunzel supported Talis Kimberley and friends.  Seanan McGuire was supposed to perform, but had a bad voice, so merely provided hilarious introductions and commentary.

EasterCon Friday

We left home at 10 am to drive to Dysprosium 2015, the 66th British National Science Fiction Convention (‘Eastercon’), in the Park Inn Hotel near Heathrow.  After admiring parts of the M25 from our stationary car for a while, we finally arrived at the hotel close to 1pm.  The hotel was easy to find; a parking space less so.  After driving around the entire car park, we finally squeezed into a space that was right outside the Aviator Suite, where many of the programme events were happening.  Fortunately the opening ceremony wasn’t scheduled until 1:45, so we had time to check in and grab something to drink.

Then it was down to serious sitting on chairs, listening to panels and talks.  First was a panel on The Things We Learned From Pratchett: An exploration of fantasy, storytelling and ethics.  (LonCon was dominated by Iain M. Banks; this Eastercon by Terry Pratchett.  I hope this isn’t going to be a new trend.)  The panelists talked about his professionalism in his relationship to his fans; how Discworld series is a collection of subseries; how the structure of the books is a “classic screwball comedy” where events domino; and how there are inconsistencies in his world, but that doesn't matter.

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Human Spaceflight, SpaceKate gave a quick overview of the history of spaceflight, with several interesting anecdotes.

The panel on Cryptids (a species unknown to science, or believed extinct) covered both the panelists’ own inventions, and “real world cryptids”, from mythical (BigFoot) to real (recent discoveries of new species large mammals, as well as insects, amphibians, and funguses). One panellist didn’t want Bigfoot disproved, as belief in its existence is a valuable conservation tool!  Cryptids are urbanising: they used to live in the wilderness, but that’s running out, so they are moving into our towns, just like foxes. Seanan McGuire recommended Warren Fahy’s Fragment, as like Jurassic Park with mantis shrimp: “If you want a fun book about tearing people apart, it’s brilliant!”  But as the panel noted, many real species are being driven to extinction: “We people the wilderness with the monsters we want, while we are exterminating the real wonders.”

The Ultimate Urban Fantasy Panel followed on neatly from all this talk of Cryptids.  Now the unknown species are wizards, elves, fairies, and whatnot.  There was a discussion of how urban fantasy is different from paranormal romance: it was claimed that urban fantasy focuses more on the world-building, paranormal romance focuses on the relationships (although I suspect the real difference is “urban fantasy is stuff I like; paranormal romance is stuff I don’t like”).  A jet-lagged Jim Butcher described how he’d come to write the Dresden Files.  He had been writing a lot, but his writing professor didn’t like any of it (Roger Zelazny claimed that every writer learns by writing a million words of crap).  So he set out to prove her wrong, by writing something that conformed to all the practices she advocated.  He wrote a couple of chapters, and she said it was saleable!  So he sat down and planned out a 20 book series…

We rounded the evening off with a performance of John Robertson’s The Dark Room, a combination of stand up comedy and text based adventure where all routes (seemingly) end in DEATH.  Hilarious!

sequestering carbon, several books at a time XLIII

The latest batch:

And now off to the Eastercon, where Jim Butcher is a Guest of Honour.

spot the connection

What do Data’s cat and Hell’s dog have in common?

They’re both called “Spot”!

The name “Cerberus” is a Latinised version of the Greek Kerberos. The etymology of this name prior to Greek is disputed. It has been claimed to be related to the Sanskrit word सर्वरा sarvarā, used as an epithet of one of the dogs of Yama, from a Proto-Indo-European word *k̑érberos, meaning “spotted”  [wikipedia]

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Jo Walton does it again!

Jo Walton with yet another brilliant April post at Tor.

Henry V, Part 2

Her film review of Oscar! three Aprils ago was also pitch perfect.

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