Showing posts with label Sort of science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sort of science. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 20, 2013
Interfering buses
The staff in the library are convinced that some passing buses or heavy lorries cause the computer system to have temporary conniptions; the boffins in the IT department pooh-pooh this idea.
So now the report in The Times of 2 March, explaining how the new Francis Crick biomedical research institute I the centre of London has had to be specially shielded from electromagnetic fields which can play havoc with equipment, sources of such interference include passing buses, provides a source of great satisfaction.
Links
Electromagnetic Interference Sources and Their Most Significant Effects
Study to Predict the Electromagnetic Interference for a typical house in 2010
Francis Crick Institute
Related posts
Is north up or down?
Knowing where you stand
Magnets & morals
Why we lose precious data
On the buses
Wednesday, February 20, 2013
The science of rubbish collection
The modern vehicles which are now used to empty our black wheelie bins are even more clever than I knew.
I got the opportunity to see them at work close up while I was standing at the bus stop this morning,
The hoist operates on some sort of weight sensor – the binmen have only to push the bins on to the bit at the bottom which looks like short prongs of a forklift truck & up they go, over & tip.
But as the process of lowering them back to the ground begins, the machine senses if a bin is not completely empty, tips it again & gives it a good shake until it is. All untouched by human hand.
All that thought & ingenuity put into coping with stuff for which we carelessly have no use for any more.
I got the opportunity to see them at work close up while I was standing at the bus stop this morning,
The hoist operates on some sort of weight sensor – the binmen have only to push the bins on to the bit at the bottom which looks like short prongs of a forklift truck & up they go, over & tip.
But as the process of lowering them back to the ground begins, the machine senses if a bin is not completely empty, tips it again & gives it a good shake until it is. All untouched by human hand.
All that thought & ingenuity put into coping with stuff for which we carelessly have no use for any more.
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Kalibration
All the talk about ‘traces’ of horse DNA in beefburgers reminded me of the puzzle of Kaliber.
This is a brand of ‘alcohol-free’ lager (made by Guinness) which, unlike many similar products, actually has an acceptable taste. But I was puzzled about why it could be bought only from licensed premises.
I was told that it was because it started out as normal strength lager, from which the alcohol was then removed. But the process meant that, by law, it had to be treated the same as other ‘brewed’ liquors.
The label declared the alcohol content to be less than 0.05 per cent. What continued to puzzle me however was that a version of shandy – popular from my childhood days & still then widely available, though it seems now to have disappeared from the supermarkets - contained more alcohol but was sold alongside cola & other soft drinks, with no licensing restrictions at all.
A toxicologist friend who worked in the area of food safety told me that the declared alcohol content meant that it was below the limit of detection but that, in order to comply with the relevant regulations, they had allowed for the possibility that there might be traces left over from the production process.
But then why, a few years later, was Billy Connolly allowed to advertise it on the telly with the assurance that it contained absolutely no alcohol at all?
Link
YouTube: Kaliber Ad
This is a brand of ‘alcohol-free’ lager (made by Guinness) which, unlike many similar products, actually has an acceptable taste. But I was puzzled about why it could be bought only from licensed premises.
I was told that it was because it started out as normal strength lager, from which the alcohol was then removed. But the process meant that, by law, it had to be treated the same as other ‘brewed’ liquors.
The label declared the alcohol content to be less than 0.05 per cent. What continued to puzzle me however was that a version of shandy – popular from my childhood days & still then widely available, though it seems now to have disappeared from the supermarkets - contained more alcohol but was sold alongside cola & other soft drinks, with no licensing restrictions at all.
A toxicologist friend who worked in the area of food safety told me that the declared alcohol content meant that it was below the limit of detection but that, in order to comply with the relevant regulations, they had allowed for the possibility that there might be traces left over from the production process.
But then why, a few years later, was Billy Connolly allowed to advertise it on the telly with the assurance that it contained absolutely no alcohol at all?
Link
YouTube: Kaliber Ad
Thursday, January 17, 2013
Meme multiplied
In it Bush considers what kind of work physicists, in particular, should concentrate on once the killing is over. In his opinion the most pressing need is to be able to control & have access to the world’s great mass of information which was threatening to overwhelm man’s capacity to find & absorb. To this end should be harnessed the latest inventions & methods of mass production, for “The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.”
A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.
It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.Although that sounds like the PC/work station we have come to know & love, it depends instead on punched cards, calculating machines, valves, microfilm, photo cells. The computer as we know it seems beyond his imaginings at that stage.
If the user wishes to consult a certain book, he taps its code on the keyboard, and the title page of the book promptly appears before him, projected onto one of his viewing positions.
The old systems of indexing information made retrieval more difficult than it needed to be; in the new world selection by association could be mechanized, so that it should be possible to beat the mind in the speed of resurrecting information from storage.
- A girl stroked its keys …
- A girl strokes its keys languidly …
- … a whole roomful of girls armed with simple key board punches
- The impulses which flow in the arm nerves of a typist convey to her fingers the translated information which reaches her eye or ear
Still, it is good to live in the age of the new profession “of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.”
Vannevar Bush: As We May Think
Vannevar Bush: Hypertext
The Man Behind The Scenes Of The Atomic Bomb
Vannevar Bush & Memex: the world’s first web published book
[PDF]Vannevar Bush By Jerome B. Wiesner
The Hedgehog asked the Fox
Related posts
Qwerty 1
Schrodinger’s other life
Bonny babies
Male embrace
Saturday, December 01, 2012
Schrodinger's other life
I have just started to read Piergiorgio Odifreddi’s book The Mathematical Century: The 30 Greatest Problems of the Last 100 Years.
In one sense I suppose the subtitle proves that mathematicians live in a world of their own – others might think wars, & the gyrations of the economy presented greater problems to normal, ordinary people. But then across eternal time & space the problems of mathematics which have been solved, or which remain unsolved, will have more resonance than mere worldly concerns.
It is an encouragingly slim volume, with helpful diagrams but few unfamiliar symbols or equations.
It also has a Foreword by Freeman Dyson which is complimentary even though he is inclined to regard Odifreddi as a European who is too Cartesian, not empirical enough, & therefore too serious, insufficiently appreciative of the illogical leaps which sometimes mark progress in the history of mathematics, what Dyson calls ‘the jokes of nature’.
One such joke is i, the entirely imaginary square root of -1. Schrodinger put i into his famous quantum equation of 1926, thus proving – to his & everyone else’s surprise – that nature works with complex, not real or natural numbers.
What brought me up short was that Dyson goes on to retail an anecdote about the reaction of Schrodinger’s then girlfriend: ‘Hey, you never even thought when you began that so much sensible stuff would come out of it’
Whether her comment shows a surprising mathematical ability, or simply emotional intelligence, must remain a matter for conjecture. The girl was 14 years old at the time.
14! With concern about historic child abuse (a very elastic term) being rife in this country at the moment one wonders how this relationship was regarded in 1926. Did he marry her?
The mathematical/scientific biographies seem silent on Scrodinger’s personal & emotional life, but I found a review on the Telegraph’s website of John Gribbin’s biography of Schrodinger which was published earlier this year, but which I don’t remember seeing anything about at the time.
According to the reviewer Nicholas Blincoe, ‘Gribbin does not shy away from Schrödinger’s sex life’, which was that of a serial seducer.
Schrodinger had an especially adventurous time in Dublin. He seduced one woman who packed Red Cross parcels alongside his existing mistress, (and mother of his illegitimate daughter); he also got a well-known actress pregnant and had to be warned off a friend’s 12-year-old niece.
He later described his 17 years in Dublin as the happiest of his life.
And it was of course, during this time that, at the height of WW2, he published What Is Life? with some help to put it into idiomatic English, suitable for delivery as public lectures to a general audience. A book which is cited by Maurice Wilkins & Francis Crick, among others, as having inspired them to switch, post WW2, from destructive physics to the more life-affirming world of genetics.
So, given that retrospective punishment is now being called for over incidents of child abuse which are now being exposed, is anyone going to propose that the name of Schrodinger be expunged from the records, that he be stripped of all honours, on grounds of his paedophile tendencies?
If so, who will inherit the cat?
Related post
In one sense I suppose the subtitle proves that mathematicians live in a world of their own – others might think wars, & the gyrations of the economy presented greater problems to normal, ordinary people. But then across eternal time & space the problems of mathematics which have been solved, or which remain unsolved, will have more resonance than mere worldly concerns.
It is an encouragingly slim volume, with helpful diagrams but few unfamiliar symbols or equations.
It also has a Foreword by Freeman Dyson which is complimentary even though he is inclined to regard Odifreddi as a European who is too Cartesian, not empirical enough, & therefore too serious, insufficiently appreciative of the illogical leaps which sometimes mark progress in the history of mathematics, what Dyson calls ‘the jokes of nature’.
One such joke is i, the entirely imaginary square root of -1. Schrodinger put i into his famous quantum equation of 1926, thus proving – to his & everyone else’s surprise – that nature works with complex, not real or natural numbers.
What brought me up short was that Dyson goes on to retail an anecdote about the reaction of Schrodinger’s then girlfriend: ‘Hey, you never even thought when you began that so much sensible stuff would come out of it’
Whether her comment shows a surprising mathematical ability, or simply emotional intelligence, must remain a matter for conjecture. The girl was 14 years old at the time.
14! With concern about historic child abuse (a very elastic term) being rife in this country at the moment one wonders how this relationship was regarded in 1926. Did he marry her?
The mathematical/scientific biographies seem silent on Scrodinger’s personal & emotional life, but I found a review on the Telegraph’s website of John Gribbin’s biography of Schrodinger which was published earlier this year, but which I don’t remember seeing anything about at the time.
According to the reviewer Nicholas Blincoe, ‘Gribbin does not shy away from Schrödinger’s sex life’, which was that of a serial seducer.
Schrodinger had an especially adventurous time in Dublin. He seduced one woman who packed Red Cross parcels alongside his existing mistress, (and mother of his illegitimate daughter); he also got a well-known actress pregnant and had to be warned off a friend’s 12-year-old niece.
He later described his 17 years in Dublin as the happiest of his life.
And it was of course, during this time that, at the height of WW2, he published What Is Life? with some help to put it into idiomatic English, suitable for delivery as public lectures to a general audience. A book which is cited by Maurice Wilkins & Francis Crick, among others, as having inspired them to switch, post WW2, from destructive physics to the more life-affirming world of genetics.
So, given that retrospective punishment is now being called for over incidents of child abuse which are now being exposed, is anyone going to propose that the name of Schrodinger be expunged from the records, that he be stripped of all honours, on grounds of his paedophile tendencies?
If so, who will inherit the cat?
Links
Related post
Sunday, November 25, 2012
Fit for a purpose
“CMS and ATLAS have taken all their Higgs data and performed a fit …”
Oh dear! I misread that at first to mean ‘had a fit’ as in “A mortal crisis; a bodily state (whether painful or not) that betokens death” or “A paroxysm, or one of the recurrent attacks, of a periodic or constitutional ailment”.
The strain of searching for Higgs Boson, of trying to decide if there are enough sigmas in the results, must finally have become too much, I thought.
But no it is just another episode in the story from the Collider blog - Higgs couplings to fermions and massive vector bosons
I understand next to nothing of this stuff, but I still love reading it.
Link
Oh dear! I misread that at first to mean ‘had a fit’ as in “A mortal crisis; a bodily state (whether painful or not) that betokens death” or “A paroxysm, or one of the recurrent attacks, of a periodic or constitutional ailment”.
The strain of searching for Higgs Boson, of trying to decide if there are enough sigmas in the results, must finally have become too much, I thought.
But no it is just another episode in the story from the Collider blog - Higgs couplings to fermions and massive vector bosons
I understand next to nothing of this stuff, but I still love reading it.
Link
Friday, March 23, 2012
Science speaks
Nevil Shute had an interesting view of how to ensure that civil servants stand up to difficult ministers: make sure that they are not totally dependent on their salary to ensure the financial wellbeing of their wives & children.
Of course in that particular example the unfortunate politician (Baron Thomson of Cardington, Secretary of State for Air) paid for his obduracy with his life.
I do not imagine that the House of Lords Select Committee on Science & Technology had any such fate in mind for any existing or future Minister of the Crown when they recently set their minds to working out how to improve the effectiveness of Chief Scientific Advisers within government departments.
I cannot work out if the noble scientists are feeling particularly unloved & underappreciated, or if they are attempting something of a coup d’état – do what Simon The Science says, or else. Or maybe they just want to create jobs for the boys (& girls).
In order to make sure that science is given its due weight in government policy they are recommending the appointment of persons of ‘standing and authority within the scientific community, nationally and internationally’ to posts which are part-time (but at least three days a week) and for a period of three years (with the possibility of renewal). That is one post in each of 15 Departments of State.
For the avoidance of doubt, their Lordships take “science” to include the social sciences, as well as the natural and physical sciences and engineering, though not, apparently, economics & statistics which have their separate professions within the civil service.
But standing will not be enough. The scientific advisers will also need the ability to:
• engage in effective dialogue with internal and external stakeholders, including academia, industry and the wider public;
• work in and manage a multi-disciplinary team;
• evaluate evidence and to weigh up conflicting evidence from a wide range of disciplines;
as well as understanding of the policy environment & the techniques of project delivery.
Since It is considered unlikely that any scientist who has spent a whole career in the civil service would possess these qualities, recruitment must be from outside. One wonders what effect this might have on recruitment, retention & morale of those who know that the top job is for ever closed to them.
The Committee also recommend that a Chief Scientific Adviser should have a right of direct access to departmental ministers to ensure that they can challenge effectively at the highest level. This means that CSAs should ‘be able to see ministers at the prompting of the CSA and as often as judged necessary by the CSA’.
This strikes me as the kind of right which, if invoked on the basis of a formal clause in the CSA’s written contract, will signal that the battle is already lost. The aim should be to work oneself into the position where people ask (wanting genuinely to know) ‘What does Simon think about this?’ & rather than provoking the response ‘What does he want to shout at me about this time?’
To be in a position to dictate policy one has first to engage in politics. The right decisions do not just fall out of mathematical models or randomised experiments – would it were that easy. But those who do understand this evidence have an important role – to advise & to warn the decision makers about the likely consequences.
Politics is about the distribution of power – Esperanza Spalding on Front Row 22 March.
“ … in a wealthy country with relatively low taxation & much inherited income, a proportion of the high officials will be independent of their job, & the standard of administration will probably be high.Shute was involved with the design & construction of the R100, in a strange kind of government sponsored public/private competition to build the first British airship capable of inter-continental travel, which project also collapsed after the disastrous crash of the R101. He thought the tragedy was caused, in large part, by decisions driven by political expediency, insufficiently challenged by the engineers who worked for the government.
I do not know the financial condition of the high officials in the Air Ministry at the time of the R101 disaster. I suspect, however, that an investigation would reveal that it was England’s bad luck that at that time none of them had any substantial private means. At rock bottom, that to me is probably the fundamental cause of the tragedy."Nevil Shute: Slide Rule: An autobiography
Of course in that particular example the unfortunate politician (Baron Thomson of Cardington, Secretary of State for Air) paid for his obduracy with his life.
I do not imagine that the House of Lords Select Committee on Science & Technology had any such fate in mind for any existing or future Minister of the Crown when they recently set their minds to working out how to improve the effectiveness of Chief Scientific Advisers within government departments.
I cannot work out if the noble scientists are feeling particularly unloved & underappreciated, or if they are attempting something of a coup d’état – do what Simon The Science says, or else. Or maybe they just want to create jobs for the boys (& girls).
In order to make sure that science is given its due weight in government policy they are recommending the appointment of persons of ‘standing and authority within the scientific community, nationally and internationally’ to posts which are part-time (but at least three days a week) and for a period of three years (with the possibility of renewal). That is one post in each of 15 Departments of State.
For the avoidance of doubt, their Lordships take “science” to include the social sciences, as well as the natural and physical sciences and engineering, though not, apparently, economics & statistics which have their separate professions within the civil service.
But standing will not be enough. The scientific advisers will also need the ability to:
• engage in effective dialogue with internal and external stakeholders, including academia, industry and the wider public;
• work in and manage a multi-disciplinary team;
• evaluate evidence and to weigh up conflicting evidence from a wide range of disciplines;
as well as understanding of the policy environment & the techniques of project delivery.
Since It is considered unlikely that any scientist who has spent a whole career in the civil service would possess these qualities, recruitment must be from outside. One wonders what effect this might have on recruitment, retention & morale of those who know that the top job is for ever closed to them.
The Committee also recommend that a Chief Scientific Adviser should have a right of direct access to departmental ministers to ensure that they can challenge effectively at the highest level. This means that CSAs should ‘be able to see ministers at the prompting of the CSA and as often as judged necessary by the CSA’.
This strikes me as the kind of right which, if invoked on the basis of a formal clause in the CSA’s written contract, will signal that the battle is already lost. The aim should be to work oneself into the position where people ask (wanting genuinely to know) ‘What does Simon think about this?’ & rather than provoking the response ‘What does he want to shout at me about this time?’
To be in a position to dictate policy one has first to engage in politics. The right decisions do not just fall out of mathematical models or randomised experiments – would it were that easy. But those who do understand this evidence have an important role – to advise & to warn the decision makers about the likely consequences.
Politics is about the distribution of power – Esperanza Spalding on Front Row 22 March.
Links
House of Lords Science and Technology Committee - Fourth Report: The role and functions of departmental Chief Scientific Advisers
Nevil Shute: Slide Rule
Airship Heritage Trust: R 100 - G - FAAV
Bedford Borough Council: Airship R100 and R101
The life cycle of physicists
Related posts
Civil service
Parliamentary privilege
The revenge of the machine
Threat or promise?
Politicizing Nature
Burger mystery
House of Lords Science and Technology Committee - Fourth Report: The role and functions of departmental Chief Scientific Advisers
Nevil Shute: Slide Rule
Airship Heritage Trust: R 100 - G - FAAV
Bedford Borough Council: Airship R100 and R101
The life cycle of physicists
Related posts
Civil service
Parliamentary privilege
The revenge of the machine
Threat or promise?
Politicizing Nature
Burger mystery
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Snuffing it
I have found another use for bottled Guinness.
The label on a large scented candle stresses the need to snuff, not blow it out. Quite why, I am unsure.
But in the interests of empirical investigation I thought I would experiment to find out.
I don’t have a candle snuffer. Casting around for something suitable with which to improvise, I thought of the cap from a bottle of Guinness – it’s not a cone but if I put it right down over the flame it should do the trick.
Like magic. In fact you don’t have to push it right down to the surface of the candle, just placing it over the top of the flame will work instantly.
I feel ridiculously pleased about this discovery.
The label on a large scented candle stresses the need to snuff, not blow it out. Quite why, I am unsure.
But in the interests of empirical investigation I thought I would experiment to find out.
I don’t have a candle snuffer. Casting around for something suitable with which to improvise, I thought of the cap from a bottle of Guinness – it’s not a cone but if I put it right down over the flame it should do the trick.
Like magic. In fact you don’t have to push it right down to the surface of the candle, just placing it over the top of the flame will work instantly.
I feel ridiculously pleased about this discovery.
Friday, December 16, 2011
Star bosons
William Waldegrave wrote a column in Wednesday’s Times in which he reminisced about the day he issued a challenge to physicists to provide him with an explanation of the Higgs Boson which would fit on one side of a sheet of A4 paper.
One fact new to me was that he had promised a bottle of vintage champagne to the winner, & in the event found himself having to fork out for five bottles when the panel of eminent physicists, who judged the entries, decided that that number were equally outstanding.
Waldegrave regarded as ‘the most fun’ the explanation which used the analogy of the effect a certain female prime minister would have when she entered a crowded room, gaining mass as others gathered round her.
Not so very coincidentally, at about the same time as The Times was hitting the streets or the ether, Radio 5 Live’s Up All Night was talking to a physicist in America about the latest news from CERN. Asked if he could provide a simple explanation of the Higgs Boson the physicist said there was one – regretfully he was unable to say who had first come up with it – which clearly impressed presenter Giles Dilnot mightily.
It was of course the same as William Waldegrave’s ‘fun’ version, except that in the American adaptation the person capable of having such an effect is a female rock star.
Which reminded me in turn of a studio discussion I heard some years ago – also probably on 5 Live. The subject was Hugh Grant, then going through one of his less than happy periods.
Somebody stuck up for him: Whatever you think, he is one of those special people – when he’s in the room everybody else wants to be near him, they all move in his direction.
I wondered if, subconsciously at least, the speaker was thinking of particle physics as they said that?
One fact new to me was that he had promised a bottle of vintage champagne to the winner, & in the event found himself having to fork out for five bottles when the panel of eminent physicists, who judged the entries, decided that that number were equally outstanding.
Waldegrave regarded as ‘the most fun’ the explanation which used the analogy of the effect a certain female prime minister would have when she entered a crowded room, gaining mass as others gathered round her.
Not so very coincidentally, at about the same time as The Times was hitting the streets or the ether, Radio 5 Live’s Up All Night was talking to a physicist in America about the latest news from CERN. Asked if he could provide a simple explanation of the Higgs Boson the physicist said there was one – regretfully he was unable to say who had first come up with it – which clearly impressed presenter Giles Dilnot mightily.
It was of course the same as William Waldegrave’s ‘fun’ version, except that in the American adaptation the person capable of having such an effect is a female rock star.
Which reminded me in turn of a studio discussion I heard some years ago – also probably on 5 Live. The subject was Hugh Grant, then going through one of his less than happy periods.
Somebody stuck up for him: Whatever you think, he is one of those special people – when he’s in the room everybody else wants to be near him, they all move in his direction.
I wondered if, subconsciously at least, the speaker was thinking of particle physics as they said that?
Monday, October 31, 2011
Intellectual exercise
Zipf’s law – something else I was introduced to by Is That A Fish In Your Ear, the stimulating book about translation by David Bellos.
But it sounded vaguely familiar, rang some sort of bell – 80/20, negative exponential, something like that?
Google found me a paper which looked within my scope: Power Laws, Pareto distributions & Zipf’s law, not too mathematical, well written, by an author with a wide range – city populations, earthquakes, wars, moon craters, book sales, incomes …
Well that was just the first page, but now that I have (slightly belatedly) realised that my laptop came complete with a preloaded Adobe reader I have had the luxury of being able to download such documents to read at my leisure at home, without having to use up some of my precious time online or pay for a printout.
And so it came about that last Sunday, usually a time spent sorting out & tidying up & catching up, I found myself exercising intellectual muscles I had almost forgotten that I had, rather than the straightforwardly interesting read I was expecting.
In fact the experience left me pondering whether some of the difficulty was just me or whether reading from a screen really does call on previously un- or little-used cognitive functions or abilities that we all have to develop.
I have long been aware that I simply cannot properly assimilate densely argued textual information when reading with my head up. Is this because I have spent more than 60 years reading with my head down, from paper(s) which are spread over a flat horizontal desk, or resting on my knee, or propped up against the marmalade on the breakfast table?
Does it have something to do with the fact that reading is often closely associated with writing, recording notes or the results of calculations by hand, which of course involves watching what my hand is doing?
Would I find it easier to read with my head up if I had, after all, learned to touch type when I was young?
I remember turning green with envy one day in the microfilm room of the university library; there was I, labouring to make manuscript notes from the (printed Parliamentary Papers) on the screen, while at an adjacent desk sat a (male, not all that young, probably American) person, fingers flying over the laptop as he gazed steadfastly, transcribing direct to disc the old, handwritten manuscript document on his screen.
But then expert secretaries & typists will tell you that they produce fast, accurate scripts without knowing anything about or absorbing the content at all. So perhaps the American had to go away & read the document to find out what it said, while I had already a good idea of how the new information fitted in with the rest of my research.
Musicians, when they need a score, for the most part read with their heads down. The exception may be players of an upright piano, church organ, or in a marching band; organists however must simultaneously do other complicated things – changing stops & playing pedals with their feet. Marching bands must also master the art of keeping in step.
I cannot think of any circumstance, at least since the invention of the book, when humans were regularly required to absorb complex information while reading with their heads up – nothing longer than a nameboard, sign or inscription – no more than the 64 letters & spaces of the on-screen subtitle, less than allowed in a Tweet. Of course the sheer weight of a book made it impractical to hold it up to read, & why go to the bother of building a vertical rest when the simpler horizontal surface of a table or the slightly raked one of a lectern would do.
So the question is whether reading ‘better’ with your head down is learned, or physiologically innate.
The sheer bulk of early desk top computers & work stations did not allow for anything other than the head-up position, unless there were specially adapted desks. Thank heavens for laptops.
But reading anything other than a relatively straightforward narrative is not easy if you can see only one small section at a time. Anything more complex …
This particular paper on power laws makes things more complicated by being printed over two columns per page – presumably to meet the requirements of a print journal. Then there is the conventional academic furniture of footnotes (at the foot of each page) & bibliographic references (at the back) plus multiple graphs & mathematical equations to consult. A recipe for giddiness, when you cannot even mark your place by holding your finger between the pages.
While it is true that clever people have invented ways of making this easier to do on screen (hovering mice?) & some of them may be available on my lap top. I just haven’t yet got that far up the learning curve.
It is also true that over time we as authors & originators too will think of different methods of organising, presenting & conveying information.
For one thing most written texts, in the form to which we have grown accustomed to them, contain a great deal of redundancy in terms of the quantity of hard information encoded therein. Yes, there is a lot of soft information, about the character of the writer etc, but a lot could be removed without damage to the main points. And form always affects content, so there is an inevitable degree of self-editing by an author to fit the space available.
Then there is the question of the thousand word picture, &, increasingly, animations.
I was particularly attracted to this paper about power laws because it contains a whole section on the mechanisms which may give rise to such distributions in either natural or man made systems. Some of these involve complex physics.
In my opinion users & analysts of statistics often fail to pay enough attention to the processes which generated them, & therefore assume over-simple structures of causation.
In the present case, when it came to these more complicated processes with even more diagrams, I longed for some animations instead. But until that day, there is really no alternative to printing out the pages so that I can spread them out to look at.
Still, at least I was able to assess the worth of the expenditure before I opened my purse.
I have so far been coy about the authorship & provenance of this paper. That is because the version which I originally downloaded appeared to be a complete orphan – no author's name, no title (of either parent institution or publication) & no date, though it is clearly post-2003 (UK traffic statistics for that year are quoted, which show that motorway speeds peak at 5mph above the current limit of 70).
Another Google search however revealed that it is Power laws, Pareto distributions and Zipf’s law by M. E. J. Newman, Department of Physics and Center for the Study of Complex Systems, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, published in Contemporary Physics, Vol. 46, No. 5, September–October 2005, 323 – 351
PS the first time I ever heard of the 80/20 rule (expressed in those very terms) was in the 1980s in relation to GP appointments, 80% of which were said to be with 20% of the patients on his list.
But it sounded vaguely familiar, rang some sort of bell – 80/20, negative exponential, something like that?
Google found me a paper which looked within my scope: Power Laws, Pareto distributions & Zipf’s law, not too mathematical, well written, by an author with a wide range – city populations, earthquakes, wars, moon craters, book sales, incomes …
Well that was just the first page, but now that I have (slightly belatedly) realised that my laptop came complete with a preloaded Adobe reader I have had the luxury of being able to download such documents to read at my leisure at home, without having to use up some of my precious time online or pay for a printout.
And so it came about that last Sunday, usually a time spent sorting out & tidying up & catching up, I found myself exercising intellectual muscles I had almost forgotten that I had, rather than the straightforwardly interesting read I was expecting.
In fact the experience left me pondering whether some of the difficulty was just me or whether reading from a screen really does call on previously un- or little-used cognitive functions or abilities that we all have to develop.
I have long been aware that I simply cannot properly assimilate densely argued textual information when reading with my head up. Is this because I have spent more than 60 years reading with my head down, from paper(s) which are spread over a flat horizontal desk, or resting on my knee, or propped up against the marmalade on the breakfast table?
Does it have something to do with the fact that reading is often closely associated with writing, recording notes or the results of calculations by hand, which of course involves watching what my hand is doing?
Would I find it easier to read with my head up if I had, after all, learned to touch type when I was young?
I remember turning green with envy one day in the microfilm room of the university library; there was I, labouring to make manuscript notes from the (printed Parliamentary Papers) on the screen, while at an adjacent desk sat a (male, not all that young, probably American) person, fingers flying over the laptop as he gazed steadfastly, transcribing direct to disc the old, handwritten manuscript document on his screen.
But then expert secretaries & typists will tell you that they produce fast, accurate scripts without knowing anything about or absorbing the content at all. So perhaps the American had to go away & read the document to find out what it said, while I had already a good idea of how the new information fitted in with the rest of my research.
Musicians, when they need a score, for the most part read with their heads down. The exception may be players of an upright piano, church organ, or in a marching band; organists however must simultaneously do other complicated things – changing stops & playing pedals with their feet. Marching bands must also master the art of keeping in step.
I cannot think of any circumstance, at least since the invention of the book, when humans were regularly required to absorb complex information while reading with their heads up – nothing longer than a nameboard, sign or inscription – no more than the 64 letters & spaces of the on-screen subtitle, less than allowed in a Tweet. Of course the sheer weight of a book made it impractical to hold it up to read, & why go to the bother of building a vertical rest when the simpler horizontal surface of a table or the slightly raked one of a lectern would do.
So the question is whether reading ‘better’ with your head down is learned, or physiologically innate.
The sheer bulk of early desk top computers & work stations did not allow for anything other than the head-up position, unless there were specially adapted desks. Thank heavens for laptops.
But reading anything other than a relatively straightforward narrative is not easy if you can see only one small section at a time. Anything more complex …
This particular paper on power laws makes things more complicated by being printed over two columns per page – presumably to meet the requirements of a print journal. Then there is the conventional academic furniture of footnotes (at the foot of each page) & bibliographic references (at the back) plus multiple graphs & mathematical equations to consult. A recipe for giddiness, when you cannot even mark your place by holding your finger between the pages.
While it is true that clever people have invented ways of making this easier to do on screen (hovering mice?) & some of them may be available on my lap top. I just haven’t yet got that far up the learning curve.
It is also true that over time we as authors & originators too will think of different methods of organising, presenting & conveying information.
For one thing most written texts, in the form to which we have grown accustomed to them, contain a great deal of redundancy in terms of the quantity of hard information encoded therein. Yes, there is a lot of soft information, about the character of the writer etc, but a lot could be removed without damage to the main points. And form always affects content, so there is an inevitable degree of self-editing by an author to fit the space available.
Then there is the question of the thousand word picture, &, increasingly, animations.
I was particularly attracted to this paper about power laws because it contains a whole section on the mechanisms which may give rise to such distributions in either natural or man made systems. Some of these involve complex physics.
In my opinion users & analysts of statistics often fail to pay enough attention to the processes which generated them, & therefore assume over-simple structures of causation.
In the present case, when it came to these more complicated processes with even more diagrams, I longed for some animations instead. But until that day, there is really no alternative to printing out the pages so that I can spread them out to look at.
Still, at least I was able to assess the worth of the expenditure before I opened my purse.
I have so far been coy about the authorship & provenance of this paper. That is because the version which I originally downloaded appeared to be a complete orphan – no author's name, no title (of either parent institution or publication) & no date, though it is clearly post-2003 (UK traffic statistics for that year are quoted, which show that motorway speeds peak at 5mph above the current limit of 70).
Another Google search however revealed that it is Power laws, Pareto distributions and Zipf’s law by M. E. J. Newman, Department of Physics and Center for the Study of Complex Systems, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, published in Contemporary Physics, Vol. 46, No. 5, September–October 2005, 323 – 351
PS the first time I ever heard of the 80/20 rule (expressed in those very terms) was in the 1980s in relation to GP appointments, 80% of which were said to be with 20% of the patients on his list.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Hand to mouth intelligence
By another happy coincidence the result of a study of teenagers IQ was published just as I finished reading the David Bellos book about translation – Is That A Fish In Your Ear?
The admittedly small study by scientists at UCL overturns received wisdom by showing that IQ is not fixed by the time you get to adolescence; a number of the children studied showed a very distinct improvement.
Even the researchers wondered if some sort of measurement error might be to blame – until they noticed a correlation with scans which showed changes in the areas of the brain associated with speech & hand movements.
No suggestion – yet – of causal correlation.
Having given short shrift to the idea that it is grammar that makes language, Bellos asks What is it that unambiguously identifies some set of sounds made by humans as a language?
Bellos points to the strange connections between mouth & hand. ”There is no language in the world that is ever spoken aloud without accompanying hand movements … the greater the effort of concentration on live speech, the more the speaker needs to move their hands … try watching conference interpreters behind their glass screens.”
Speaking is not the same thing as reading aloud from a written text.
Television newscasters keep their hands on or under the desk or just shuffle papers – because they are only pretending to talk to you – in fact reading a teleprompt. A lecturer who moves his hands is almost certainly adlibbing, one who keeps his hands to his sides or grips the desk is reading a script.
Conversely, delicate finger-work of a non-linguistic kind almost always prompts movement of the lips. Watch someone threading a needle – hardly anyone can do it without pursing or twisting their mouths. [Does the same thing apply to someone who is struggling to see the eye of the needle & the end of the thread?]
Bellos goes on to point to the other important activity which links hand to mouth: eating.
Speaking & eating use almost all the same muscles.
Facility with language is an important component of IQ in its cognitive sense. The close relationship with eating raises intriguing questions about the relationship of diet to IQ, as much in the textures of food (involving different kinds of exercise for those muscles) as in its biochemical composition, & in the manner of its eating (hand, knife & fork, chopsticks).
For infants & young children, whose muscular control is not fully developed, eating & speaking at the same time can be quite dangerous. A child who is nervous about eating solid foods may be slow to develop. A relaxed & happy child eating with the family may learn from more than just the social & linguistic interaction.
But what, specifically, might happen to teenagers to enable them to make up lost ground?
The admittedly small study by scientists at UCL overturns received wisdom by showing that IQ is not fixed by the time you get to adolescence; a number of the children studied showed a very distinct improvement.
Even the researchers wondered if some sort of measurement error might be to blame – until they noticed a correlation with scans which showed changes in the areas of the brain associated with speech & hand movements.
No suggestion – yet – of causal correlation.
Having given short shrift to the idea that it is grammar that makes language, Bellos asks What is it that unambiguously identifies some set of sounds made by humans as a language?
Bellos points to the strange connections between mouth & hand. ”There is no language in the world that is ever spoken aloud without accompanying hand movements … the greater the effort of concentration on live speech, the more the speaker needs to move their hands … try watching conference interpreters behind their glass screens.”
Speaking is not the same thing as reading aloud from a written text.
Television newscasters keep their hands on or under the desk or just shuffle papers – because they are only pretending to talk to you – in fact reading a teleprompt. A lecturer who moves his hands is almost certainly adlibbing, one who keeps his hands to his sides or grips the desk is reading a script.
Conversely, delicate finger-work of a non-linguistic kind almost always prompts movement of the lips. Watch someone threading a needle – hardly anyone can do it without pursing or twisting their mouths. [Does the same thing apply to someone who is struggling to see the eye of the needle & the end of the thread?]
Bellos goes on to point to the other important activity which links hand to mouth: eating.
Speaking & eating use almost all the same muscles.
Facility with language is an important component of IQ in its cognitive sense. The close relationship with eating raises intriguing questions about the relationship of diet to IQ, as much in the textures of food (involving different kinds of exercise for those muscles) as in its biochemical composition, & in the manner of its eating (hand, knife & fork, chopsticks).
For infants & young children, whose muscular control is not fully developed, eating & speaking at the same time can be quite dangerous. A child who is nervous about eating solid foods may be slow to develop. A relaxed & happy child eating with the family may learn from more than just the social & linguistic interaction.
But what, specifically, might happen to teenagers to enable them to make up lost ground?
Saturday, October 22, 2011
Species
According to a paper by Michael Hammer, et al. in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reported in The Times 6 September 2011, interbreeding between our ancestors & other ancient human species was common until about 40k years ago.
Chris Skinner, human origins scientist, Natural History Museum commented:
Chris Skinner, human origins scientist, Natural History Museum commented:
This paper helps to cement the view that the line dividing our ancestors from their closest relatives is blurred rather than distinct. It makes you question species definitions.
Species are categories that humans create based on underlying biology, but mammals, including humans, don’t play along. Bonobos & chimps hybridise today, & this [paper] shows that in the past we were much the same
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Parentality
The first guest on Jim Al-Khalili’s new Radio 4 series The Life Scientific, Sir Paul Nurse, told of how he had discovered, in his 50s, that the people he thought were his parents were in fact his grandparents, & that his sister was his mother.
Sadly, not that rare a story, though it is perhaps unusual to find out so late. I am slightly surprised to learn that, until he applied for a Green Card, he had never been asked to provide a copy of his full birth certificate rather than just the shortened one which does not name the parents, or reveal that the father is unkown.
The real irony here though is that Sir Paul is a geneticist who had the facts of his own genetic inheritance concealed from him.
I found myself pondering how, or whether, the facts about the parentage of a child in a similar situation might be established by the scientific methods of today, or at any time in the past.
Imagine, for example, that small children & their putative parents had been recruited into medical studies involving patterns of inheritance in each year 1950, 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010.
In 1950 there might not have been much other than ABO blood groups to reveal that the child could not possibly be the offspring of one, or other, or both of the 'parents'.
In 2010 DNA could definitely rule out the paternity of the grandfather, but could it exclude, with certainty, the grandmother’s maternity?
Sadly, not that rare a story, though it is perhaps unusual to find out so late. I am slightly surprised to learn that, until he applied for a Green Card, he had never been asked to provide a copy of his full birth certificate rather than just the shortened one which does not name the parents, or reveal that the father is unkown.
The real irony here though is that Sir Paul is a geneticist who had the facts of his own genetic inheritance concealed from him.
I found myself pondering how, or whether, the facts about the parentage of a child in a similar situation might be established by the scientific methods of today, or at any time in the past.
Imagine, for example, that small children & their putative parents had been recruited into medical studies involving patterns of inheritance in each year 1950, 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010.
In 1950 there might not have been much other than ABO blood groups to reveal that the child could not possibly be the offspring of one, or other, or both of the 'parents'.
In 2010 DNA could definitely rule out the paternity of the grandfather, but could it exclude, with certainty, the grandmother’s maternity?
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Teenage Palaeontology
“In palaeontology there is a period known as the ‘boring billion’ during which not a lot happened”
Now there’s a sentence for you. It comes from Tom Whipple’s review of Richard Fortey’s book Survivors which is about organisms (such as cockroaches) that have mysteriously survived the eons without either evolving or becoming extinct.
Sounds a lot more restful than our age of roller coaster billions & trillions, forms of money & credit & financial instruments that appear & disappear in units of time no human can comprehend & yet have a terrifying ability to turn into monsters which destroy whole areas of life as we knew it only a few short years ago.
Mind you, I expect that there really was an awful lot going on even during those boring billions, if only we could look at them in the right way & from the proper perspective. In that respect palaeontologists are like teenagers, so wrapped up in their own concerns that the wonderful world of their parents is simply oh so b-o-r-i-n-g.
Now there’s a sentence for you. It comes from Tom Whipple’s review of Richard Fortey’s book Survivors which is about organisms (such as cockroaches) that have mysteriously survived the eons without either evolving or becoming extinct.
Sounds a lot more restful than our age of roller coaster billions & trillions, forms of money & credit & financial instruments that appear & disappear in units of time no human can comprehend & yet have a terrifying ability to turn into monsters which destroy whole areas of life as we knew it only a few short years ago.
Mind you, I expect that there really was an awful lot going on even during those boring billions, if only we could look at them in the right way & from the proper perspective. In that respect palaeontologists are like teenagers, so wrapped up in their own concerns that the wonderful world of their parents is simply oh so b-o-r-i-n-g.
Friday, September 23, 2011
Citissimum
I do so hope that the idea that some things really can go faster than the speed of light is true.
It will just make everything so interesting – not least hearing scientists struggling to take it on board & defend their craft against those who say ‘Well, if you were wrong about that why should we believe anything you say?’
Dangerous too, of course. We have enough political & economic problems right now that are caused, in part at least, by lack of, or loss of, confidence in experts.
I remember Melvyn Bragg suddenly asking his physicist guests, right at the end of one of his In Our Time programmes, to suppose that the ‘nothing can go faster’ claim turned out to be untrue. As the programme faded I distinctly heard Jocelyn Burnell say that communication between twins at a distance could be one real possibility.
It will just make everything so interesting – not least hearing scientists struggling to take it on board & defend their craft against those who say ‘Well, if you were wrong about that why should we believe anything you say?’
Dangerous too, of course. We have enough political & economic problems right now that are caused, in part at least, by lack of, or loss of, confidence in experts.
I remember Melvyn Bragg suddenly asking his physicist guests, right at the end of one of his In Our Time programmes, to suppose that the ‘nothing can go faster’ claim turned out to be untrue. As the programme faded I distinctly heard Jocelyn Burnell say that communication between twins at a distance could be one real possibility.
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Tea drinking, pinkies & bells
Sunday afternoon tidying up, came across a copy of Times 2 for December 2010 which had escaped recycling.
An interesting article by Heston Blumenthal on how ‘our linguistic heritage is testament to how central food is to existence’, how our language is peppered with things which derive from cuisine, & how food terminology has crept into our language as an indicator of class in words such as upper crust.
Of which he found plenty of examples to quote without even needing to mention one linguistic fact that we all learned in primary school history – that we use French words for meat but Anglo Saxon words for animals because the poor serfs & villeins never got to eat the meat from the animals they tended for the cruel Norman overlords.
I was more sceptical of his claim for the origin of the much-mocked Hyacinth Bucket habit of raising your little finger on the hand which holds the china cup from which you drink your tea – supposedly a hangover from the Tudor custom of using your little finger in place of the yet-to-be-invented table fork. Obviously this then had to be kept well clear to avoid spreading gravy all over your hand & clothes.
My own inverted-snob attitude to this habit was transformed instantly one evening about twenty years ago during a visit to the Loughborough bell foundry.
Apart from a sort of overhead crane which had been installed to hoist the bells, the technology & working conditions seemed virtually unchanged from Victorian times. The metal for the bells was melted in a huge vat which then had to be diligently stirred, by hand, using an implement which reminded me of a posser. We were told that a new apprentice would be put to this task without being told of the importance of raising you’re your little finger on the dominant hand; the result, one very tired & aching arm, in fact it was impossible to keep going for the required amount of time.
Try it for yourself – raise & lower your arm rapidly with all your fingers curled round an imaginary pole handle, then just experience the relief of doing it with your little finger stuck out.
I thought of all my female forebears toiling with the washing in the dolly tub – of course they learned to stick their little finger out.
And, when drinking tea on Sunday from the precious best china tea set – of course they raised their little finger – the handles were often pretty small anyway, maybe room for only one finger, making it all too easy to let slip, especially if your arm got overtired while lifting it.
An interesting article by Heston Blumenthal on how ‘our linguistic heritage is testament to how central food is to existence’, how our language is peppered with things which derive from cuisine, & how food terminology has crept into our language as an indicator of class in words such as upper crust.
Of which he found plenty of examples to quote without even needing to mention one linguistic fact that we all learned in primary school history – that we use French words for meat but Anglo Saxon words for animals because the poor serfs & villeins never got to eat the meat from the animals they tended for the cruel Norman overlords.
I was more sceptical of his claim for the origin of the much-mocked Hyacinth Bucket habit of raising your little finger on the hand which holds the china cup from which you drink your tea – supposedly a hangover from the Tudor custom of using your little finger in place of the yet-to-be-invented table fork. Obviously this then had to be kept well clear to avoid spreading gravy all over your hand & clothes.
My own inverted-snob attitude to this habit was transformed instantly one evening about twenty years ago during a visit to the Loughborough bell foundry.
Apart from a sort of overhead crane which had been installed to hoist the bells, the technology & working conditions seemed virtually unchanged from Victorian times. The metal for the bells was melted in a huge vat which then had to be diligently stirred, by hand, using an implement which reminded me of a posser. We were told that a new apprentice would be put to this task without being told of the importance of raising you’re your little finger on the dominant hand; the result, one very tired & aching arm, in fact it was impossible to keep going for the required amount of time.
Try it for yourself – raise & lower your arm rapidly with all your fingers curled round an imaginary pole handle, then just experience the relief of doing it with your little finger stuck out.
I thought of all my female forebears toiling with the washing in the dolly tub – of course they learned to stick their little finger out.
And, when drinking tea on Sunday from the precious best china tea set – of course they raised their little finger – the handles were often pretty small anyway, maybe room for only one finger, making it all too easy to let slip, especially if your arm got overtired while lifting it.
Monday, September 19, 2011
Getting rid of the scum
“Soap consists of the sodium salts of fatty acids derived from naturally occurring fats & oils. These react with calcium ions present in hard water to precipitate out. This solid, combined with the emulsified dirt, forms the familiar ‘scum’.That elegantly succinct explanation was delivered in a letter to the editor of The Times from Professor Alan Swanwick of Dronsfield, Derbyshire in response to a moan about shower gels by Matthew Parris in his column of 8 September.
Gels are synthetic detergents made from the sodium salts of sulfates or benzene sulfonates, which in turn are derived from petroleum products. They have the advantage that their calcium salts are soluble, & thus do not lead to scum production.
I am sure it would be possible to synthesise a sulfonate product that has the consistency of soap but without the scum-forming properties …
But would manufacturers want to market such a product, given the attractiveness (to them) of their gels & shampoos that so quickly end up down the shower drain?”
And it brought back so many memories for one who is old enough to remember the days before 1954 when synthetic detergents did not figure in our world.
That was also a world where, if you were lucky enough to live in the right part of the country, soft water came out of the household taps. Soap made suds, calcium salts did not precipitate out & the emulsified dirt & flakes of skin did not combine with them to form repulsive quantities of scum but floated off down the drain with the foamy bubbles.
You did however need to use very hot water & elbow grease to make sure that all the non-metaphorical grease was removed from the washing up. And hair was rarely truly gleaming because soap-based shampoos, combined with water that was a lot cooler than that used for washing saucepans & dishes, failed to remove all the natural oils from the surface of the hair.
The difference was really borne in on us when we left the soft north for a holiday in London in the 1950s, staying in Earls Court, where just washing your hands or cleaning your teeth were upsetting because of the scum. What made matters even worse was that both little sister & I caught nits, & so had to endure all the washing & tooth combing necessary for their eradication.
Hair washing & dish washing were the first jobs for which detergents were welcomed into our house – soap powder, in the guise of Persil, was still firmly superior for clothes washing, judged by the whiteness & softness of the result, in the opinion of decent housewives such as my grandmother.
Varieties of jewel-coloured, perfumed shampoo came from Woolworths in small plastic sachets, less than 2” square, from which you had to snip off the corner. In theory each sachet contained enough for one washing, but if you were economical you could make it last for two, as long as the sachet was stored carefully upright. That is four applications of shampoo, one to wash the scalp, then rinse & reapply shampoo this time concentrating on the hair. At first that meant using some your pocket money for this luxury only once a fortnight, since hair washing night (like bath night) came round only once a week. If you did not want to use your pocket money you could revert to the old fashioned soap based family shampoo provided by the housekeeping, which smelled terrible. No contest for a teenage girl.
You could also, if you wished, emulate a film star & have bubble baths, but most of us preferred, except of course for very special dances & dates, to rely on more economical old fashioned bath salts - a staple for birthday & Christmas presents - which provided merely perfumed water.
Later, life as a London student, & shared bathrooms meant that the pleasure of a relaxing bath was marred by the need to clean the bath properly – with scouring powder – when you were done, to remove the disgusting grey tide mark. And I learned that the melanin in dark skins was present even in the surface layer, which has the effect of making the tide mark the shade of pale cocoa, rather than the grey of 'white' skin.
Black skins are particularly prone to drying out in cold northern climes, which meant that skin was more easily shedded in the bath & even men had to use moisturisers (usually Johnson’s baby products). One of those facts of life which, I was both saddened & touched to hear years later, in a programme on Channel 4, was yet another cause of not always friendly ribbing in the dressing room for pioneering black footballers in the 1970s.
Almost fifty years later & the affluent bathroom is well supplied with sulfonate products which largely do away with these problems.
Which is just as well really, since it is a rare public water supply which, in this country, provides water soft enough to obviate scum.
Soft water, once such a source of pride – & which gave us the cotton industry - is now seen as a problem for human health &, in its extreme form as acid rain, a threat to the very planet.
There was a respectable theory that soft water was implicated in heart disease, particularly among men; natural soft water is most likely to be found in those areas which take their supply from upland rainwater sources – especially the gritstone & granite moorlands & hills of Wales, northern England & Scotland – as opposed to the underground aquifers of the chalkier south.
Despite the fact that drinking even mildly acidic liquids from vessels made of lead could cause poisoning was known from Roman times - & is attributed by some as the cause of the Fall of the Roman Empire – lead was commonly used to provide the pipework for the modern water supplies which, otherwise, did so much to improve the health & longevity of the population. In Glasgow, where there was particular pride in the soft pure water of Loch Katrine & the renowned quality of their engineering, citizens were proud of their real Rolls-Royce of a system which carried water from the Loch along a lead-lined aqueduct, to be stored in lead tanks in the roof from which it could be fed by gravity to the tenement flats below.
It was believed that concentrations of lead dissolved in the water would be extremely unlikely ever to rise to the level which could cause frank poisoning, & that any risk could be avoided by advising consumers in soft water areas always to run some of the water off whenever, for example first thing in the morning, it had been standing in the pipes for any length of time.
Water providers were under a statutory obligation to ensure that they supplied water which was safe for human consumption. From around 1950, as alternatives to lead for piping became more widely & easily available, the use of lead pipes for domestic plumbing was banned, though there was no concerted attempt to enforce the removal of lead pipes from all existing homes.
By the 1970s however concerns about environmental lead poisoning were rising – not least because of the increased emissions of lead from petrol - & European & WHO standards for the maximum permissible concentrations of lead in drinking water were being tightened; worry now focused particularly on the effect that levels of lead previously considered ‘low’ could have on children.
The near universal use of of sulfanate products for all household & personal washing helped to make it acceptable for all domestic water supplies to be treated with enough calcium or other ions to reduce the acidity of water & minimse its ability to dissolve lead from the plumbing system, without provoking widespread protest about scum.
Now in place of scum we can worry about limescale instead. Not to worry, there are manufacturers ready willing & able to provide you with a product to deal with that too. Result all round.
Personally I prefer to rely on lemon or lime juice.
Links
ISCHAEMIC HEART-DISEASE IN A HARD-WATER AND IN A SOFT-WATER AREA
[pdf]SOFT WATER AND ISCHAEMIC HEART DISEASE A STUDY OF TWO TOWNS IN NORTHERN IRELAND
British Regional Heart Study: geographic variations in cardiovascular mortality, and the role of water quality
Related posts
Imperial Leather
Water carriers of the developed world
ISCHAEMIC HEART-DISEASE IN A HARD-WATER AND IN A SOFT-WATER AREA
[pdf]SOFT WATER AND ISCHAEMIC HEART DISEASE A STUDY OF TWO TOWNS IN NORTHERN IRELAND
British Regional Heart Study: geographic variations in cardiovascular mortality, and the role of water quality
Related posts
Imperial Leather
Water carriers of the developed world
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Feeling sour
How can you find out exactly what people eat?
You can ask them questions – either about current or past eating habits – with obvious problems of recall, wishful thinking & being economical with the truth.
You can ask them to keep detailed food diaries for a period of time.
Someone could keep them under observation & keep detailed records.
You can feed them controlled amounts of foods (& watch to see that they are eaten).
You can use a technique called duplicate diet – where duplicate meals are prepared & taken away for laboratory analysis (after adjustment for amounts not actually eaten). Expensive, even wasteful.
Then there is the problem of how to determine the scientific composition of the food as eaten & of how it was grown, prepared & cooked. Which foods were combined with which. How, when & where they were eaten.
These are just the problems you face before you even get down to analysis of the results & worry, for example, about the finer mathematical details of statistical significance. A problem which was once described as like trying to clear a badly overgrown garden with nothing but a scalpel.
Which is why I always approach claims about what is, or is not, good for you, with a degree of polite scepticism & a ‘tell me more.’
I grew up in a time when there was always salt on the table – some people seemed to add an awful lot to the food on their plate– I never wanted to, the food I was given was salty enough for me.
In fact a lot of things I don’t eat at all, given any choice in the matter: anchovies (you never know); smoked bacon; any flavoured crisps; blue cheese; marmite sandwiches (drinks & stews are different – salt even needs to be added, sometimes too a little hot pepper sauce); smoked meats.
I generally don’t use salt when cooking vegetables – not even potatoes – unless they are old or tired.
I always buy unsalted butter.
Salt is however essential for making palatable anything with wheat flour – pasta, pastry, gravy & sauces, bread. It was great a few years ago when many manufactures started to use soya flour as an alternative thickening agent for sauces & salads – the taste was so much nicer – but that disappeared because no-one could guarantee that no imported soya flour was free of (whisper) genetic modification.
The recent argument about whether a recent Cochrane Collaboration review really did call into question the long standing medical advice that we should, all of us, for the sake of our health & hearts, cut down on the amount of salt that we eat, & the unedifying spat that it caused, reminded me of that other great way in which salt is invaluable: to reduce sourness. I was stirred into seeing if Dr Google could help me find the answer to a long-standing puzzle - Why does adding salt to pineapple make it sweet?
I found the information I seek on the Ask an Expert section of the ABC Science website. It comes in two parts – one psychological, one chemical.
Although I accept that perception is important, I am sure that there is more ‘real’ stuff going on in this magic process, which I was introduced to in the West Indies.
The local pineapples were not all that sweet even under the best ripening conditions– they came taller, thinner, paler & a lot less orange than Malayan or South African pineapple with which we were then more familiar in England - & could often be just unacceptably sour. But peel them, slice them, spread them on a large plate, sprinkle with salt, cover & leave in the fridge overnight & hey presto! Sweet juicy pineapple to eat next day.
A food scientist explains that when the sodium chloride dissolves into the pineapple it will break apart into sodium and chloride ions, the sodium ion will then react with the malic and citric acids present in the pineapple to form neutral sodium salts, thus removing the sour taste from the mouth.
Up until the 1980s it was generally advisable to salt aubergine slices & leave then to stand for at least an hour to remove some of the bitter juices - & I remember being taught how to make a delicious Spanish dish by the cook who worked for the French family I used to stay with. This involved leaving the salted aubergine slices spread on a covered plate in the fridge for 2-3 days, draining the juices regularly (can’t remember if you applied more salt as well). The result was almost like dried aubergine slices which were turned into a beautiful accompaniment to lamb, cooked liberally with onion, herbs & oil.
Back in England I always meant to try the salt trick with sour fruits such as rhubarb & gooseberries – childhood experience taught me that sugar was never enough to make them palatable, though oodles of custard might be enough to make them go down – but never quite got around to it. There is little need for such tricks these days – aubergines, rhubarb, gooseberries along with so many other fruits & vegetables now seem to be bred for blandness.
I do wonder though if the pressure that is on food processors & manufacturers to reduce salt content could, in some cases, have the unintended consequence of making someone like me actually add salt to the food on their plate.
Reductions that have already taken place mean that I am in the novel position of needing to sometimes add salt to processed ready meals or soups. The pasta can be unbearable & tomato based dishes (including soups such as minestrone or bean & tomato) just too sour.
You can ask them questions – either about current or past eating habits – with obvious problems of recall, wishful thinking & being economical with the truth.
You can ask them to keep detailed food diaries for a period of time.
Someone could keep them under observation & keep detailed records.
You can feed them controlled amounts of foods (& watch to see that they are eaten).
You can use a technique called duplicate diet – where duplicate meals are prepared & taken away for laboratory analysis (after adjustment for amounts not actually eaten). Expensive, even wasteful.
Then there is the problem of how to determine the scientific composition of the food as eaten & of how it was grown, prepared & cooked. Which foods were combined with which. How, when & where they were eaten.
These are just the problems you face before you even get down to analysis of the results & worry, for example, about the finer mathematical details of statistical significance. A problem which was once described as like trying to clear a badly overgrown garden with nothing but a scalpel.
Which is why I always approach claims about what is, or is not, good for you, with a degree of polite scepticism & a ‘tell me more.’
I grew up in a time when there was always salt on the table – some people seemed to add an awful lot to the food on their plate– I never wanted to, the food I was given was salty enough for me.
In fact a lot of things I don’t eat at all, given any choice in the matter: anchovies (you never know); smoked bacon; any flavoured crisps; blue cheese; marmite sandwiches (drinks & stews are different – salt even needs to be added, sometimes too a little hot pepper sauce); smoked meats.
I generally don’t use salt when cooking vegetables – not even potatoes – unless they are old or tired.
I always buy unsalted butter.
Salt is however essential for making palatable anything with wheat flour – pasta, pastry, gravy & sauces, bread. It was great a few years ago when many manufactures started to use soya flour as an alternative thickening agent for sauces & salads – the taste was so much nicer – but that disappeared because no-one could guarantee that no imported soya flour was free of (whisper) genetic modification.
The recent argument about whether a recent Cochrane Collaboration review really did call into question the long standing medical advice that we should, all of us, for the sake of our health & hearts, cut down on the amount of salt that we eat, & the unedifying spat that it caused, reminded me of that other great way in which salt is invaluable: to reduce sourness. I was stirred into seeing if Dr Google could help me find the answer to a long-standing puzzle - Why does adding salt to pineapple make it sweet?
I found the information I seek on the Ask an Expert section of the ABC Science website. It comes in two parts – one psychological, one chemical.
Although I accept that perception is important, I am sure that there is more ‘real’ stuff going on in this magic process, which I was introduced to in the West Indies.
The local pineapples were not all that sweet even under the best ripening conditions– they came taller, thinner, paler & a lot less orange than Malayan or South African pineapple with which we were then more familiar in England - & could often be just unacceptably sour. But peel them, slice them, spread them on a large plate, sprinkle with salt, cover & leave in the fridge overnight & hey presto! Sweet juicy pineapple to eat next day.
A food scientist explains that when the sodium chloride dissolves into the pineapple it will break apart into sodium and chloride ions, the sodium ion will then react with the malic and citric acids present in the pineapple to form neutral sodium salts, thus removing the sour taste from the mouth.
Up until the 1980s it was generally advisable to salt aubergine slices & leave then to stand for at least an hour to remove some of the bitter juices - & I remember being taught how to make a delicious Spanish dish by the cook who worked for the French family I used to stay with. This involved leaving the salted aubergine slices spread on a covered plate in the fridge for 2-3 days, draining the juices regularly (can’t remember if you applied more salt as well). The result was almost like dried aubergine slices which were turned into a beautiful accompaniment to lamb, cooked liberally with onion, herbs & oil.
Back in England I always meant to try the salt trick with sour fruits such as rhubarb & gooseberries – childhood experience taught me that sugar was never enough to make them palatable, though oodles of custard might be enough to make them go down – but never quite got around to it. There is little need for such tricks these days – aubergines, rhubarb, gooseberries along with so many other fruits & vegetables now seem to be bred for blandness.
I do wonder though if the pressure that is on food processors & manufacturers to reduce salt content could, in some cases, have the unintended consequence of making someone like me actually add salt to the food on their plate.
Reductions that have already taken place mean that I am in the novel position of needing to sometimes add salt to processed ready meals or soups. The pasta can be unbearable & tomato based dishes (including soups such as minestrone or bean & tomato) just too sour.
Friday, May 27, 2011
Last FM
It wasn’t just Blogger that was having problems recently – I could not get Last FM either.
Check headphones – OK
Check Radio Vlaanderen – no joy there either.
I just put it down to one of those things – maybe a problem with the library system.
Blogger has, a far as I know, been a bit cagey about the precise nature of their problem, but Last FM have been disarmingly frank
The technical detail is over my head, but it was very illuminating to read about the difference in emphasis, & technical challenge between start-ups which focus on making things work, and reliability which comes later, costs money, and adds complexity to systems – something government ministers might take note of the next time they dream of a vast all-singing, all-dancing computer project.
And after all that, Last FM’s problem was just dust.
They should get a mother-in-law with white gloves to come& run her fingers over all the surfaces.
Check headphones – OK
Check Radio Vlaanderen – no joy there either.
I just put it down to one of those things – maybe a problem with the library system.
Blogger has, a far as I know, been a bit cagey about the precise nature of their problem, but Last FM have been disarmingly frank
The technical detail is over my head, but it was very illuminating to read about the difference in emphasis, & technical challenge between start-ups which focus on making things work, and reliability which comes later, costs money, and adds complexity to systems – something government ministers might take note of the next time they dream of a vast all-singing, all-dancing computer project.
And after all that, Last FM’s problem was just dust.
They should get a mother-in-law with white gloves to come& run her fingers over all the surfaces.
Friday, January 28, 2011
Science on the radio
Gwyneth Williams, Controller of BBC Radio 4, has announced plans for a new regular programme to be broadcast at 9 am each Tuesday which will cover science & working scientists across the whole range, including engineering.
I am really looking forward to it. Radio 4 has struggled to find the right tone for programmes devoted to science, veering from the over-enthusiastic to patronising to hushed reverence. However Andrew Marr, who is not afraid to mix science into Start The Week & Bridget Kendall on World Service Forum have shown it can be done well for the intelligent listener without a science degree. Scientists have also provided some of the highlights of Desert Island Discs & over on Radio 5’s Up All Night Rhod Sharp does confident interviews with scientists who are up in the daylight in Australia or America.
I hope Jim Al-Khalili agrees to present it – apart from anything else he has a fine radio voice.
I am really looking forward to it. Radio 4 has struggled to find the right tone for programmes devoted to science, veering from the over-enthusiastic to patronising to hushed reverence. However Andrew Marr, who is not afraid to mix science into Start The Week & Bridget Kendall on World Service Forum have shown it can be done well for the intelligent listener without a science degree. Scientists have also provided some of the highlights of Desert Island Discs & over on Radio 5’s Up All Night Rhod Sharp does confident interviews with scientists who are up in the daylight in Australia or America.
I hope Jim Al-Khalili agrees to present it – apart from anything else he has a fine radio voice.
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