Blackadder lives

So, we're going to spend our way out of recession by commissioning lots of new nuclear weapons and battleships. Or, rather, the Government is, using our money. Brilliant, Darling! Even more cunning would be to conjure up a convenient new war so that we'd have to build even more of them. Watch out Iran (or maybe Iceland, or even Zimbabwe.) You may be about to pay dearly for the U.K.'s economic recovery.

Still, looking on the bright side, it would provide lots of new youth employment. Just a pity I'm slightly on the old side to be going over the top myself.

Figures of authority

Today's figure of authority is 500,000,000,000. The UK authorities tell us that this is the number of pounds required to rescue our banks from meltdown. The authorities in America decided that their figure was 700 billion, which (in dollars) is about the same amount. That sounds low to me; presuming that American banks are bigger than UK banks, you'd think they'd be in a bigger mess. But then, what do I know? Perhaps the US authorities pitched their guess low to avoid reaching the dreaded trillion dollar figure.

Albert Einstein said: "To punish me for my contempt for authority, Fate has made me an authority." Luckily, fate has spared me that punishment. I'm not an authority on anything. But I know what an asset bubble is, and that's what these multi-billion figures are about. An asset bubble is what happens when enough people agree to delude themselves that something is worth more than it really is. That something could be property, a dotcom company, or - 300 years ago - stock in the South Sea Company. A bit like believing you own (or could own, if only you could climb onto the first rung of the beanstalk) a goose that lays golden eggs. The delusion is complete when everyone believes that this asset can continue, magically, to rise in value.

You'd think that the authorities, who now pronounce on the bursting of this latest bubble, and who dream up these multi-billion figures they claim will be needed to clean up the mess, would have seen this one coming. I did. But the same authorities, only 9 months ago at the end of 2007, were reassuring us that, although our property wasn't doubling in value quite as rapidly as it had been, they were sure that 2008 would see, at worst, a gentle levelling-off of house prices. The goose might take a rest, but it wasn't about to expire.

So, either these authorities are as gullible as the rest of us, and really believe in these tooth fairy economics, or they know very well that it's a scam, but conspire to keep us deluded while laughing all the way to the bank.

I was going to end with another Einstein quote, but... what did he know about economics? By the way, a little bird tells me that, if you can actually prise some of your hard-earned cash away from the bank, the next big thing may well be something called Reality Cheques and other forms of Disappointment Futures.

Catastrophic numbers

Interesting, then, to be in at the end of Capitalism. If I'd been asked, I'd have guessed it might have staggered on for another decade or so, but... what do I know?

A few months before he died, in 1988, Richard Feynman said:

"You know, there are about a hundred billion stars in a galaxy - ten to the eleventh power. That used to be considered a huge number. We used to call numbers like that 'astronomical numbers.' Today it's less than the national debt. We ought to call them 'economical numbers.'"

Twenty years later, talk of trillions of dollars is common. That's a thousand billion dollars, the number of stars in ten galaxies. Maybe these ought to be called 'catastrophic numbers'.

Things fall apart, the Centrino cannot hold

Catastrophe in the forest. My laptop's frites. Well, almost. I can run it in emergency mode, with Windows operating at the very end of the autistic spectrum. Like an autistic Spectrum in fact.

This is quite a problem. I know I wanted to get away from it all for a while, but I didn't intend to cut myself off completely from what passes for civilisation. That's what it feels like though, with no access to the world-wide interweb.

So, I'll struggle on for a bit, but I may have to tactically withdraw (pardon my French) and regroup. Watch this space. It may be some time before another post.

Chapeau!

After many years of visiting France, and living here for two years, probably the most important advice I'd offer to prospective travellers in this fair land would be to avoid at all costs any foodstuffs contained in tins. Even if the contents of the tin, like the one I opened last night, are described as Filets de Poulet a la Normande at ses Petits Legumes, you can be sure that, after warming them through, you'll be left with an insipid vegetable broth, not dissimilar to Cuppa Soup, and some lumps of meat that could easily have originated in the same process that created my self-inflating camping mattress.

So, a big chapeau, I say, to the welcome global presence of McDonald's and its wonderful range of good, hearty food. Personally I'd recommend a tasty Croque McDo' and a portion of frites. And, after eating your fill of delicious food without a hint of escargot or the dreaded fromage de tete (a personal favourite of Anth Ginn), catch up with your email and keep your blog up-to-date with their generous free WIFI.

The only thing they don't do is decent cakes, but there's always that brilliant patisserie on the way home. That's where I'm going now. Here's today's pic from the forest:

Online again

Sitting in La France Cafe, downtown F'bleau, marvelling at the wonders of WIFI. On the other hand, it's costing several Euros per hour for parking, plus 3 Euros per coffee while I'm writing this. I think I'll have to start composing posts offline and just connecting occasionally. Thus far, from the comfort of my camping chair outside my tent I've enjoyed the company of rabbits, woodpeckers, jays, red squirrels and, most fun to watch of all, little baby crows, pecking around at ground level under the watchful eye of their mum. It's been raining comme les chats et les chiens, so not much in the way of climbing so far. As soon as the sun comes out though...

Anyway, I'm signing off now before I spend all my money. A plus tard.

Lost in France

Occasional will be even more occasional for a while. I'm off to sling my hammock between a couple of trees in a French forest; I may be some time. Contact with the outside world will be courtesy of the strangely named Boingo, a roaming WIFI hotspot provider. So we'll see how it goes. I might be more prolific on my Facebook page. Meanwhile, from the days when racial stereotyping wasn't quite so frowned upon, this is good fun:

Lost and found

Here's a little story with a happy ending, for a change. I lost my car keys yesterday. Well, to be accurate, it wasn't me who lost them, the real culprit knows who she is, but anyway, the keys were lost. Not a disaster on the scale of global financial meltdown, or the turmoil in Tibet, or Heather Mills' divorce problems, but inconvenient, and potentially costly. Keys aren't just keys these days, they're full of electronic wizardry, and expensive to replace, so we reported the loss to the police. Just a few hours later, on the same day, they phoned us to say they'd got them! Now I don't know how many officers they'd assigned to the case. Maybe they have sniffer dogs specially trained to locate them, or perhaps there was some of that DNA magic involved. Whatever, it was a remarkable piece of detective work, and I hope it goes some way in countering the negative press the police sometimes get these days.

Incidentally, I mentioned Heather Mills above. I'm not very much interested in her private life, but I notice that Mills has now joined the ranks of those, like Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles, who have become the acceptable subjects for jokes involving disability. It's a funny thing, humour.

And farewell then, Arthur C. Clarke, who once said "Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software." I hadn't realised that Clarke was an advisor on the 1950's Eagle comic's Dan Dare stories, some of my earliest reading. I imagine that many young boys were, like me, greatly influenced by him.

I've put a new widget in the side-panel. It links to some free songs at Calabash Music, a good World Music site, where I first heard the Belizean music of Andy Palacio, who also died recently. The video below shows him, with the wonderful Garifuna Collective, performing the title track from their album Watina.

Review Of The Year

A mixed year, I'd say, 2007. Ups and downs in unequal measure. Here are some of my annual awards.

Political Coup Of The Year: a closely fought contest that should have been won by elegant French President Nicolas Sarkozy for capturing the heart of delightful Italian-born chanteuse Carla Bruni (whose solo album Quelqu'un M'A Dit is one of my favourites).A masterstroke (perhaps literally), but Sarkozy's swapping of one ex-model for a newer one backfired with the French public, and his popularity ratings have taken a hit. So, instead, the award goes to King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand who, for some reason, decided to re-invent himself one morning in a fetchingly pink shirt and jacket.So impressed were his subjects that they too adopted the new style. Pink shirts became the season's must-have item, and crowds mobbed shops selling them.

The Have you tried switching it off and on? award goes to the documentation for my copy of Cakewalk's Sonar music production software. In the Troubleshooting section it offers the following helpful advice about the 6 available settings of the Mixing Latency control: "The default setting is 64 KB. Yours may work better with 128, 32, or 16. If those values don't help, try 256, 512, or move on to another remedy."

I was going to award the Reasons to be Cheerful prize to Barack Obama for his vision of an America embracing change and hope rather fear and belligerence. But the worrying possibility that voters might choose a man (Huckabee) who believes that the earth was created 6000 years ago, by an extraterrestrial creator... well, let's wait and see. The award goes instead to the BBC's Sky At Night program, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year. I watched the first program of 2008 last night. It's particularly cheering that there's no mention of podcasts, blogs or forward-slash dot nonsense. There's a newsletter, but you have to send a stamped and self-addressed envelope to Patrick's back garden observatory...

Rant Of The Year: no contest, really. Another BBC production, if you haven't heard Marcus Brigstocke's thoughts on religion from Radio 4's The Now Show, have a listen (audio only) at YouTube.

That's it for now, except for the Stairlift To Heaven award which, of course, goes to Led Zeppelin. Age shall not weary them...

Happy New Year

Universal disasters

Poor old blog's been a bit neglected of late, so it's about time for some more witty and incisive posts. I've been busy converting my website to deliver its media content with Microsoft's new Silverlight platform rather than, as previously, with Flash. Not a trivial matter - in its current release, Silverlight programming involves an untidy mix of HTML, Javascript and XML - but worth it, for me, because Microsoft is offering several gigabytes of free streamed media hosting. I've been nibbling into this to serve up the audio on my sounds page.

So, what's been happening while I've been away? Well, not a brilliant week for English football, quelle surprise. My memories of half a century of World Cups and European Championships are of variations on the theme of "England can still theoretically qualify if..." involving unlikely combinations of Sweden beating Italy by at least 8 goals and Portugal invading Scotland. Bring back Glenn ("I have a number of alternatives, and each one gives me something different") Hoddle, I say. And Eileen.

Not the best of weeks at HM Customs and Revenue, either. The coverage I've seen about the lost CDs seems to me to miss the real point. It was obviously daft to entrust such sensitive data to Mr Postie, but the problem apparently arose because HMCR couldn't create a filtered dataset (i.e. the limited data as requested by the National Audit Office, with no banking or address information) without commissioning expensive, additional work from Capgemini (who manage HMCR's IT systems, at an estimated 10-year cost of £8bn). This raises many questions. Firstly, why has HMCR handed Capgemini such control over the database that HMCR can't even do its own simple queries on the data? And how could it possibly be an expensive operation for Capgemini to service such a request? How much work can be involved in something that should be as simple as changing a command that extracts all data from a database ('SELECT * FROM ...' in SQL, a standard database query language) to a filtered extraction ('SELECT Name, NumberOfChildren etc FROM ...' in SQL)? And if it isn't as simple as that, why not?

Anyway, football and security failures hardly matter if a report in this week's New Scientist is to be believed. Under the less than reassuring headline "Have we just sealed the universe's fate?" we're told that the future of the entire universe may now be at risk, as a result of our enquiring too deeply into its workings. According to a paper by Lawrence Krauss (who I mentioned in a previous post for his criticism of Richard Dawkins as being too emotive in his atheism) and James Dent, we have looked upon that which it would have been better not to have looked upon. As if the destruction of our own planet wasn't enough, it seems that we may have inadvertently tipped the universe into a state where it is more likely to spontaneously vanish. Which would be a bit of a shock, and a disappointment, for its inhabitants.

There is, apparently, something called the quantum Zeno effect; whenever we observe or measure something at the quantum level, we reset a clock in the observed system that controls when it is likely to decay into another state. So when, in 1998, we measured the light from distant supernovae explosions, thus gaining evidence of the existence of dark energy, little did we imagine that we might, in doing so, have reset the clock in the universe's false vacuum back to a point where it is less likely to survive. The end of the universe, and to think I used to be scared of Boltzmann Brains!

It's very hard to think logically about this, and other arguments along the same anthropocentric lines ("the universe only exists when we observe it", etc). For example, what would have happened if, in the experiment to measure the supernovae light, a fly had landed on the telescope lens and intercepted the light with its multisegmented eye? Would the fly's 'observation' of the light have the same disastrous consequences? Or, suppose that the experiment had been outsourced to Capgemini, who saved the results on a database but then didn't allow the scientists access to it? Could we still be said to 'know' about dark energy, thereby risking the survival of the universe? Perhaps we can take comfort from the Many Worlds model, which says that, if a wave-function collapses with one result, e.g. the disappearance of the universe, it will also produce a parallel result in which the universe doesn't disappear. And, via the anthropocentric principle, that non-disappearing universe will be the one in which we find ourselves.

It's all very confusing. Thank goodness for the simple pleasures of the beach, even if it's a little chilly at this time of year. More later, if we're still here...

Can you keep a secret?

An interesting article by Henry Porter in Sunday's Observer. He writes about how, hidden in all the froth of electioneering and policy stealing, the government has quietly introduced the extended Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA). Alongside its ID Card plans and CCTV surveillance, this act increases the government's Stasi-like control over our privacy. Under the act, the police and security services can tap any British communication channel, including post, telephone lines and internet accounts; the phone companies and ISPs are required to keep track of every electronic move we make.

So, can you still keep a secret? Well, you can, but, if you insist, you may have to be prepared to spend some time in prison for it. Part III of the Act, in force from the 1st October, gives the Government and its agents the power to demand that you hand over the keys to any encrypted data they find on your computer. Refusal to comply can result in a prison sentence of up to 5 years.

On my computer there is an encrypted folder where I keep all sorts of stuff - none of it illegal - such as my internet banking details. This is encrypted so securely that it is, in practice, unreadable unless you know the key I used when creating it. This key isn't written down anywhere; it only exists in my head. Or, perhaps more accurately, it exists only as a memory in my brain, and can only be accessed by a thought from that brain. Under RIPA Part III, it becomes an offence for me to have such a memory and not to disclose it when ordered under what is called a Section 49 Notice. The thought police have arrived.

Of course, if the disclosure of such a key were to prevent a terrorist incident, it wouldn't seem such a bad piece of lesligation, and this, along with the usual "nothing to hide, nothing to fear", is how the Government justifies it. However, the same law can be applied in a range of suspected crimes, including financial ones, although the maximum sentence for non-terrorism related thought-withholding offences is only 2 years.

It's all very worrying. As Liberty director Shami Chakrabarti says: "This underlines the uncomfortable fact that the British public are the most spied upon people in the Western world."

That's Life

I've never had particularly strong feelings either way about Esther Ranzen, harmlessly entertaining us of a Sunday evening, exposing the dodgy double-glazing salesmen, and Cyril Fletcher with his allegedly humurous odes. Until today, that is. Don't ask why I was watching the ad-breaks on daytime TV this afternoon; it's a long story, but there she was, microphone in hand, with a studio audience just like the old days, urging anyone with a slightly stiff neck, possibly after a nasty incident at work that they'd almost forgotten about, to phone the Accident Advice Helpline immediately. Their claim would be handled by a team of lawyers dedicated to ensuring that their convalescence would be lucrative.

This advert is bad on so many levels. All concerned should be ashamed of themselves for assuming that "people's champion" Esther Ranzen would lend credibility to a business that is... well, let's just say questionable. Ranzen joins my Hall of Shame for people lessened, in my eyes, by taking the adman's dollar. She'll be joining, among others: Jane Fonda (see this Dead Ringers parody of her Anti-Ageing Cream ad), Penelope Cruz (another Dead Ringers target, and, parodying himself, the once-legendary Rolf Harris.

It's enough to make you weep. As is (but in a different way) the following video - Gillian Welch and David Rawlings performing the title track from the wonderful "Time (The Revelator)".



I was going to say something about the sale of 4.4 billion pounds-worth of EuroFighter Typhoons to Saudi Arabia, but I think that's probably a subject best left alone. I'm sure the people of the Middle East will be sleeping easier in their beds tonight. All I'll say is that those Typhoons fly over here sometimes, tearing the air as they hurtle down the estuary and out over Cardigan Bay. An impressive display of sight and sound. If I had a spare $50 million or so I'd have one myself.

Flogging a dead horse

No, not the latest Ebay scam, just me banging on about the sensational reporting of science again.

I wasn't the only person blogging about so-called Boltzman Brains (see, for example, John Ratcliff's blog), and they are the subject of continuing correspondence in New Scientist. Here are two more examples of what I was talking about. Both are research findings reported in New Scientist, although it should be said that in both cases the articles included a less sensational interpretation of the results than that implied by the headline, suggesting that the reader should have a large pinch of salt to hand while reading them. However, the experiments were also widely reported, salt-free, in other media.

In an article in the 18th August issue, headlined "Light seems to defy its own speed limit" [my emphasis], New Scientist reported an experiment by Günter Nimtz and Alfons Stahlhofen which they (the experimenters) say shows faster-than-light-speed (superluminary) travel. When the experiment was reported later on BBC radio's 5Live, it had become a "scientists say time-travel is possible" story. It's not easy to describe the experiment without a diagram (there's one at Wikipedia here), but the superluminary claim is made because light appears to be travelling via paths of different lengths to arrive at a detector in the same time. Hence the light taking the longer path must have travelled faster than the light on the shorter path, which is assumed to be travelling at light speed. The important point is the nature of the extra distance that the light on the longer path is supposed to travel. This 'distance' was inserted into the path as a 1 metre long opaque barrier. The only way for light to penetrate such a barrier is by an effect called quantum tunnelling, whereby, as a consequence of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, a photon has a (slim) chance of disappearing from one end of the barrier and reappearing at the other. This effect has been known about for 80 years, and isn't just theoretical (it's how transistors work). In the experiment, the time between the disappearance and reappearance didn't significantly contribute to the overall journey time for the light, hence the claims for superluminarity: the light going through the barrier travelled 1 metre further, in the same time, as the unimpeded light.

I'm a scientific layman and so not qualified to criticise the experiment (others are - see, for example, this from Chris Lee at Ars Technica). The results speak for themselves, but interpretations differ. Nimtz boldly says: "For the time being this is the only violation [of special relativity] that I know of". But then he made similar assertions nearly 8 years ago (see this paper from 2000, where he described a very similar experiment and claimed that "Photonic tunnelling violates Einstein causality"). Now where did I put that salt?

The second example of cosmic hype is in an article I read in the current (8th September) issue of New Scientist. A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away... well, half a billion light years away, and the galaxy is called Markarian 501... anyway, the galaxy flared up, sending out a burst of gamma rays (very high frequency light) across intergalactic space until, half a billion years later, it eventually arrived here and was detected by the aptly-named MAGIC gamma-ray telescope on La Palma in the Canary Islands. That, in itself, is amazing; observing an event today that took place in Mkn501 at about the time that the Coelacanth first appeared on Earth. However, on examining the received signal, the MAGIC team saw that it could be interpreted as showing the high frequency component of the signal arriving 4 minutes behind the lower frequency components. Four minutes in half a billion years might seem close enough for jazz, but, if this interpretation of the measurements were shown to be feasible, (although, of course, it could just be that the higher frequencies were emitted later in the Mkn501 event, or that there could be another, simpler, explanation for the delay), it would pose some serious difficulties for Special Relativity, which says that (and explains why) all the components of the signal should arrive together (light of whatever frequency travels at the same speed). Not only would SR be violated by such a result, it would also (so the researchers say) throw a spanner into the works of the string theorists.

Again, I'm only a layman and not qualified to comment on the science of this. For a more informed view, see Peter Woit's blog entry here. (Woit is a critic of String Theory, mentioned in my previous post). However, even to the layman, it's interesting that, in both these cases, it seems as if a scientific version of cultural relativism is at work, and that Relativity is seen as a valid target, one among many theories, and ripe for toppling. Which strictly it is, of course; I know that any theory can be disproved, but Relativity has passed all its tests with flying colours so far. It seems to me that both sets of researchers have forgotten that one of the guiding principles of science is (or should be) Occam's Razor: "Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity". In other words, consider the simplest explanation first. Otherwise... well, watch out for my forthcoming paper: "Were MAGIC delays caused by a mischievous Boltzmann Brain?".

Not this, not that

Good old New Scientist magazine. I've read almost every issue since my school days, and it's one of the joys of my life. It does occasionally veer towards the somewhat loopy (see this criticism by SF writer GregEgan), but it can't be easy producing a weekly magazine that has to contain at least one article per issue of cosmological significance. When I say I've read every issue, I do tend to skip quite lightly over any article with a first sentence containing the word may, such as: "Scientists may have discovered...", because almost inevitably there'll be a letter the next week from an expert in the field explaining why they've discovered no such thing. I remember one article, many years ago, that was very excited about an experiment which, if true and repeatable, would have demonstrated the action of mind-over-matter, showing someone influencing the sequence in which a series of light-bulbs lit up, the sequence being otherwise controlled by the random decay of radioactive atoms. I waited in vain for the laws of physics to be rewritten.

The latest example of this seems to me to be the front-page article in the 18th August issue claiming that "cosmologists are afraid - very afraid" of something called Boltzmann Brains. These are supposed to be a consequence of the non-emptiness of empty space. The quantum vacuum is seething with virtual particles and, given enough space and time, these particles may configure themselves into a spooky conscious entity - a Boltzmann Brain.

Are you worried yet? It gets scarier (if you're a cosmologist with nothing more immediate to worry about). They are concerned that, in an inflationary universe (such as ours appears to be), there will be enough time (i.e. a few trillion years), for these entities to outnumber evolved consciousnesses (i.e. us), and then where would we be? The laws of physics depend on us being the typical observers of the universe, not these disembodied "brains" that would probably have a rather different take on what makes things tick.

Incidentally, for what it's worth, my take on the accelerating expansion of the universe, which physicists ascribe to the presence of "dark energy", is a bit different. My view is that the accelerated expansion is a result of an attractive force from whatever it is that our universe is surrounded by and is expanding into. You read it here first!

Anyway, I wouldn't lose too much sleep over Boltzmann Brains. This is a variation of the argument that, in an infinite universe, anything can (and therefore will, eventually) happen. Given enough monkeys with enough typewriters, paper and time... lo and behold, one of them will produce the complete works of Shakespeare. Well, no they won't. There aren't enough atoms in the universe to make enough monkeys to create, by chance, even something as modest as this blog posting.

I have to be a bit careful mocking the infinite-monkey argument. Creationists deploy similar statistical arguments to "prove" that life could not have arisen purely by chance. Fortunately, Richard Dawkins, in his book The Blind Watchmaker, effectively demolishes this case for intelligent design. The monkeys produce strings of letters, and evolutionary pressure and a genetic mechanism select and preserve these (not a so-called intelligent designer).

Dawkins, incidentally, comes in for some criticism in the latest issue of New Scientist, taken to task by Lawrence Krauss for being too emotive in his latest "Proud to be Atheist" campaign. My only criticism of Dawkins is for not using humour more effectively. In his latest TV series (Enemies of Reason, Channel 4) he misses some golden opportunity to make more fun of his subjects. He lets the various astrologers and crystal healers off very lightly. And wasn't he tempted to ask the homeopath whether, in the case of a really really bad headache, he should take some water with that homeopathic "remedy" to further dilute it and make it even stronger?

Speaking of TV, is anyone else as annoyed as I am by BBC2's weather report format? Who decided that it would be a good idea to overlay the map with an opaque stencil of the channel logo, thus sacrificing screen estate and creating quite a disconcerting effect when the map moves underneath it? Talk about style over content...

You may have noticed that Song For The Day has disappeared from the sidebar. It'll be back soon, bigger and better.

This and that

Sad to hear the news of Tony Wilson's death the other day. I'm sure other people are paying due tribute to him, so I'll just put a track by one of my favourite Factory bands in the sidebar. It's Bordeaux Sequence by The Durutti Column, from 1988. I'm sure they won't mind...

I've been neglecting this blog of late, having been busy getting my new website online. It's up now, in all its glory. Along the way I've learnt a bit about CSS design, and the problems of cross-browser compatibility. Also learnt that the convention that many programmers (including me) adopt, when giving names to things, of concatenating words but giving each one an initial capital letter has, itself, a name. So that 'PreviousMonthSales' is described as being CamelCased (as opposed to lower- or upper-cased). For obvious reasons I suppose, but it was NewsToMe; maybe it would be better described as caMel cased.

Also been keeping up with a very interesting discussion in New Scientist concerning the existence (or possibly not) of free will. This is based on experimental evidence from the quantum behaviour of entangled photons, seen from viewpoints where Special Relativity comes into play, in particular SR's blurring of the order in which things happen. This would normally be a discussion held in the darker reaches of sci.physics.quantum.cranks etc. I wouldn't feel qualified to join in in either forum, but I will say that, although I accept the physicist's assertions about time - that is that moving clocks run slow and that if moving clocks do, then so do moving people, and their DNA - nevertheless all this talk of relative time leaves a sense of something being not quite right.

What I'd like to understand is, given that twin A, who journeys into space and back while their twin sibling B... oh, all right, lets call them Sam and Amanda, and assume that Sam travels into space as part of a Big Brother task, while Amanda remains behind in the house, moving as little as is possible for a nineteen-year old. So, when the twins are eventually reunited (phew!), they find to their surprise ("I love it!") that Sam is, to a degree dependant on for how long and at what speed she travelled, younger than her sister.

So far so good; this is the same phemonenon that permits normally short-lived elementary particles to eke out their lifespans when they appear to us as fast-moving particles arriving from outer space. The paradox only arises if one mistakenly imagines that the twins' histories over the period of Sam's journey is symmetrical (which isn't the case, because only Sam experienced the acceleration when her spaceship turned round and headed back to Earth). When Einstein first described the effect he didn't see any paradox in it; rather, he presented it as a necessary, although curious, consequence of SR. However, this begs the question as to, in what sense, the reunited twins are still 'synchronised'. They are said to occupy differing locations in 'space-time' and yet they do not appear to each other to shimmer (except rather pinkly) in a Star Trek transporter kind of way. When they speak to each other they don't have to wait for an intervening passage of time for the sound from one sister to 'catch up' with the other. Apart from their differing ages, nothing has changed. They will agree on whether or not an eviction has taken place.

All very strange. Perhaps the twins are forever entangled, having at one point in space-time been together, and are destined forever to remain so, in spite of any cosmic journeys they may take separately. I don't know.

Meanwhile, I snapped this lovely ice-rainbow from my window the other evening:

Black and white

The saddest thing I read last week was an article in New Scientist about the environmental damage being caused by AIDS in Africa, particularly in Malawi. I spent several very happy years in Malawi; it's a country of spectacular mountains, lovely beaches and friendly people. It was known then (and, I see, still is) as The Warm Heart Of Africa. Now, as if the direct human consequences of AIDS on people wasn't bad enough, the country's natural resources are threatened. The conservation workers and National Park staff are dying, and people who can't afford conventional treatment for AIDS are over-exploiting medicinal plants. And, in some areas, the forests are suffering as a result of the relentless demand for coffins.

While I was pondering on the unfairness of all this, happening in the country where my children went to school, there was an item on the news about the Beckams' arrival in Beverly Hills. And there, in all its staggering extravagence, was Victoria's new Bentley, being delivered on a trailer, resplendent with its monogrammed wheel rims. A gift, apparently, from charming neighbour Tom Cruise. That'll be the Cultinental model, then.

Gosh, it's a world of contrasts. Anyway, there's some appropriate Malawian music in the sidebar. It's a warning about AIDS from the Kasambwe Brothers. For more music from the still warm heart of Africa, visit Pamtondo.

The Politics of Gravity

Not a classic helping of I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue last night, but worth it if only for Jeremy Hardy singing the words from Radiohead's Creep to the tune of Grandma We Love You, and Tim Brooke-Taylor's alternative opening sentence for the Da Vinci Code: "Leonardo awoke with a sneeze, and realised he had a code."

I was reminded last week that it's now four years since Research Councils UK, the "strategic partnership" of the UK’s seven Research Councils, announced that the Councils intended to solve, within a few years, the problem of "What is gravity?"

The Save British Science campaign group said, in evidence to the Select Committee scrutinising the activities of RCUK: "It is absurd to propose that officials in Swindon can dictate that where Newton and Einstein reached the barrier of their genius, the Research Councils will nevertheless "solve" the question "What is gravity?" within the next few years. Whatever theoretical and experimental breakthroughs are taking place at the moment, it remains an extraordinary claim."

Not that being situated in Swindon is a bar to greatness (although Swindon's website only lists Billie Piper, Diana Dors and Melinda Messenger as being famous people from that town). But a little modesty would have been appropriate. Isaac Newton himself wrote: "I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."

Anyway, I'm wondering how the Research Councils are getting on. I've just checked the website, and there's no indication there that an answer is imminent. I think we should be told, though; gravity is a weighty matter.

Here comes the flood

For those of you who've still got electricity as the flood waters rise, have a look at this video on YouTube.

Another week...

...and nearly time for another Prime Minister. I nearly missed it, what with my homepages problem, and trying to make sense of the news (to me) that the closest living relative of the hippopotamus isn't, as I'd always thought, the pig, but the whale.

So, a new PM (almost). He hasn't quite captured the public imagination yet, but it's early days, and he follows in a long tradition of uninspiring British PMs. Think of Sir Alec Douglas-Home and the like. I don't quite see why how he got his reputation for prudence, though. In 2003, when asked how much, as Chancellor, he was prepared to spend on Iraq, he replied: "As much as it takes". Well, that'll be about £7 billion so far then; how prudent is that?

[Just had to break off for this week's I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue. Very funny, as ever. Humph: "I've just noticed I came out with odd socks on... they're shaped like underpants."]

Is there something of the hippo about Gordon? How graceful is he under-water? I was in Ethiopia once, with my family, on a trip to see some hippos. The young boys who were (for want of a better word) guiding us, tried to provide us with more exciting views of the hippos, which were peacefully submerged, by throwing stones at them. I imagine that, in similar circumstances, Gordon Brown could get very angry. So I'll leave him alone... for now.

There's a new song in the sidebar. It's a live version of Blossom by Ryan Adams, recorded at the North Charleston Performing Arts Center.

Technical note (again)

Oh what a tangled web... I just realised that my homepages problem also broke the links in the side panel Song For The Day. This is now fixed and, looking on the bright side, I've now got the space for a few more songs.