Brian Clegg's Blog, page 23

I'm delighted to be appearing again at Swindon's Festival of Tomorrow. This year I've a fun talk based on the book Lightning Often Strikes Twice, taking place on Saturday 18 February at 10.45am in the Egg Theatre at Swindon's Deanery Academy.

We'll be exploring common misperceptions in science from the the title behaviour of lightning to toast falling butter side down, the suicidal behaviour of lemmings, the confusing nature of food packaging and far more. You'll even take part in a long-running science experiment.

Book here - you need to 'Reserve a spot' for the day, then add tickets for the talk. £2 for adults, under 18 free!

The full Festival is on over two days - you can get the big picture here.

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Wow. This is the most original modern murder mystery novel I've read in a long time. When I opened it and found that the text was primarily made up of page after page of emails, my heart sank. Admittedly epistolary novels are hardly something new, dating back to the very first entries in the field, but while some can be delightful (one of my favourite Gene Wolfe books, The Sorcerer's House , for example), some can be heavy going. I shouldn't have worried, though - these emails, primarily between members of the Fairway Players amateur dramatics group - tell a story beautifully and extremely engagingly.

The title is a double reference - much of the book is concerned with an appeal to raise money for a novel medical treatment for the granddaughter of the am dram group's leaders, the Haywards. However, the whole thing is framed as a collection of evidence that is being assessed by a pair of young legal associates, whose boss wants them to view the documents dispassionately to test the grounds for an appeal for a sentence of murder that was passed on one of the central characters in the email exchange.

Once we get past the murder itself, there are two additional sets of information passed to our intrepid investigators, Olufemi and Charlotte, before they finally reach the same conclusion as their boss. I really can't remember when I've devoured a book with such enthusiasm - it is both extremely clever in format and beautifully structured - Janice Hallett has done a wonderful job.

I only have two very small moans. One is that a critical factor towards the end depends on something that has pretty much been scientifically dismissed now. The other is that towards the end of the book we spend a fair amount of time in discussions between Olufemi and Charlotte as they try to work out what happened. Although occasional 'The What's Up' interventions dictated by their boss who doesn't get the technology are amusing, I found these sections lacked the engagement and drive of the email exchanges. They were significantly harder to follow (not helped by the WhatsApp parts being printed in black on grey, which made them hard to read).

However, I must stress those are small moans indeed. I've come late to this book, which was published in 2021, but I find it hard to believe I'll read a murder mystery to match it this year.

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Every now and then someone points out that you could power all the UK's needs, or even all of Europe with solar panels located in a relatively small area of North Africa. Of course, there is a technical problem with this - getting the electrical energy all the way to its destination. The preferred solution tends to be HVDC - high voltage direct current.

Traditionally, we've used AC (alternating current) to transmit power, because it's easy to switch voltages of AC using transformers. High voltage is desirable for long distance transmission, because this reduces the amount of current required to carry the same amount of energy, and the lower the current, the less that is lost to heat. However, now it is far more practical to convert DC to AC, HVDC has become important because it can reduce both the cost of the transmission process and the energy loss. It is now used for many of the interconnectors that allow electricity to flow between countries.

Perhaps more obvious than the selection of HVDC is the reason for suggesting North Africa, as the nearest region for Europe that has such high levels of sun exposure combined with a lot of unused/otherwise unusable open space.

I've always been concerned that this approach is naive. The science might now be feasible, but the politics has always been worrying. Energy supply is crucial to modern civilisation - and it would be unwise to place a large proportion of our electricity generation in the hands of another country. 

This concern has, in the past, been represented as xenophobic, but over the years, the nations that supply one source of energy - oil - have demonstrated time and again how they can use their near-monopoly to political gain. And now, the impact of the war in Ukraine on energy supplies to Europe and the associated costs of disruption (which include some countries re-opening coal-fired power stations - horrendous from an environmental viewpoint) has demonstrated just how important it is that countries generate as much of their energy themselves as they can.

What always seemed to some degree an impractical suggestion has now, I would suggest, been shown to be a totally irresponsible concept. If anyone is still suggesting it, they need to think again.

Image: HVDC power lines in North Dakota by Wtshymanski from Wikipedia

This has been a Green Heretic production.

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As someone with a good number of published books, I couldn't help be fascinated by Louise Willder's exploration of everything there is to know about book blurbs (and quite a lot about how books are presented that isn't about blurbs). But the good news is that you don't have to be in the business to find this chunky little hardback enjoyable. Willder has apparently written over 5,000 book blurbs (the bits on the back or dustcover flap that tell you about the book) and both knows the topic inside out and also delights in it.

We discover the difficulties of getting a whole book across in a couple of hundred words without resorting to gushing praise, how humour can entice the reader in, how blurbs differ from country to country and far more. As suggested above, Willder also brings in things like cover design, titles and subtitles, front cover text, review extracts and even opening lines (and page 69) as examples of other ways a potential reader might be persuaded to first lift a book off the shelf and then get it as far as the till. I've only recently got back to going into physical bookshops after the depths of the Covid pandemic, and it was brought home to me far more than usual as a result, how much the experience of picking books off the shelf and looking at the cover and back is so different from perusing a book website (and how much more enjoyable).

This is, then, an easy sell - though it's hard to fault the number of entertaining snippets, whether from history, books themselves or the experiences of other blurbists that Willder crams in. This is a book to savour. Having said that, I'm not sure it's a book that is best read from cover to cover as I did, because after a while it can feel a little samey. The book is dividing into many short sections (though it's not an A to Z in the conventional sense, despite the subtitle), and I suspect it would be perfect as a loo book, or for short train journeys, taking it in a chunk at a time. 

Funnily, one of the few times I didn't agree with Willder was reflected in the title of the book itself. She is positive about puns as a way of winning over a book buyer, where I find them a bit cringe-inducing. They also sometimes require a particular cultural awareness. I didn't realise the book's title was a pun - I just thought it was rather clumsy. I had vaguely heard of the US TV show 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' - but not sufficiently for it to immediately spring to mind when adding the book to my Christmas list. However, that's a minor point - this is a delicious little book, if more a box of chocolates to be consumed with breaks than a plate of steak and chips to enjoy as a single entity.

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One of the best things about being given books as presents is that you get to read things that you would never buy for yourself and make interesting discoveries. That was the case for me with The Path of Peace - on one level it's a travel book, featuring the author walking (approximately) along what was the First World War's Western Front, from France's border with Switzerland up to Belgium - but there's more to it. We not only get an awful lot of detail about aspects of the First World War that are likely to be unfamiliar to most readers (certainly me), we also get to share in a romantic dream.

The whole thing is hung on a letter written by a young British Second Lieutenant from the trenches in Northern France in 1915, shortly before he was killed. Douglas Gillespie, somewhat oddly writing to his old school headmaster, expresses a wish that 'when peace comes, our government might combine with the French government to make one long Avenue between the lines from the Vosges to the sea...' - this would be a 'Via Sacra' which would provide a pilgrimage route to enable the inhabitants of Western Europe to 'think and learn what war means.' Inspired by this, our author Anthony Seldon, who had recently lost his wife and reached a turning point in his career, set up a charity (which would close in 2022 to be replaced by a commercial venture) to work towards an end-to-end 1,000 kilometre 'hike and bike' trail called the Western Front Way. Seldon's walk, at the centre of this book, was in part a means of raising publicity for the venture.

As a travel writer, Seldon is not particularly effective - he is much more a historian, which means that there is no doubt that the reader gets a strong feel for what both soldiers and civilians along the Front experienced between 1914 and 1918. Early in the book Seldon comments 'I had noticed as a teacher how gripped my students were by the First World War - far more so than they were by the Second.' I can't say this reflects my own experience - when I was at school, the Second World War was far more prominent and engaging as a historical subject - but Seldon's passion for the horrific events of the period comes through strongly and I learned a huge amount. The repeated sets of details of numbers killed, atrocities and more certainly hammer the point home, though over time it can feel a little repetitive. 

I did struggle a little to identify with Seldon's upper middle class, academic, establishment worldview. He notes that he was head of two public schools and then ran a 'small university' which his father had helped set up in 1976. Apart from his teaching and administrative work, his establishment credentials included being director for the National Shakespeare company, name dropping Boris Johnson as a contact and easy access to national newspapers and TV channels. (And, inevitably, he owns a house in France.) His walk had echoes of the exploits of nineteenth century explorers - not only did he undertake it when most of us weren't travelling because of the Covid pandemic, it seemed to involve very vague planning, carrying no paper maps, and the mad inspiration of not taking any spare clothing to reduce the weight of stuff to carry.

As for the realism of the idea of establishing the Western Front Way as a long distance footpath/cycle path, Seldon's struggles to avoid busy roads and to stay anywhere near the multiple lines of the front for stretches at a time, combined with the sheer scale of the project, made it feel unlikely ever to be fully achieved. The good news is it now seems well-established on the Belgian section, though. It was also notable that several times Seldon tells us how few people visited the various monuments and sites he came across - it does suggest that it is perhaps too late for this to be a project that will ever capture the imagination of massed pilgrims.

However, whether or not the romantic dream is achievable, the book is both informative and occasionally able to hit the emotional spot. I might not share Seldon's passion, but I can appreciate it and feel the importance that this walk traces a line that has a deep connection to the personal history of many European families. It gives the opportunity to think a little about the rights and wrongs of war and peace. And because of that, at a time when there is again war in Europe, I'm glad I read it.

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I've been blogging for quite a few years, and mostly I've been allowed to get on with it and say my piece. Even on Twitter, I've never managed to raise anyone's ire, other than a fellow author who decided one of my reviews was not nice. (You can see the review here if you wish.) But I did once receive a cease and desist order for a blog post which was an interesting experience I think it's worth sharing.

Back in 2009 (yes, I've really been at it this long) I received an interesting piece of traditional mail. It came in a green envelope, hand written with a second class stamp. Inside it was a cutting from a newspaper with a scribbled post-it note from a 'J' saying (s)he thought I would be interested.

I was a bit suspicious and noticed that the 'handwritten' envelope and post-it note were actually printed in a handwriting font. Yes, the whole thing was an advert - very clever, if decidedly sneaky. They had even made the edge of the 'cutting' frayed. I wrote this up on this blog, half admiring, half dubious about the approach. Soon the comments started to flow in, and this became by far the most viewed post, even beating the perennial favourite Why I hate opera .

Lots of other people received the same mailing. Many thanked me for pointing out that it was a mailshot. After a while, a commenter noted that there was an ASA ruling against this advert, which I linked to. Surely this meant that the dodgy mailings would have to stop. But no, the comments kept coming in, some furious at the deception. Those 'cuttings' were still being sent out. It seemed the ASA had no teeth to back up its stop order.

At this point, I got a Fed Ex package from San Diego in America. It was a 'cease and desist' order from a US law firm. I had a choice. I could do as requested and take down the blog post, or I could stand up to the bullying. I would have loved to have been another Simon Singh and to have done what was right as he did when chiropractors took him to court. There is no doubt that I was in the right - but any further legal process could have been very expensive, and just being in the right doesn't necessarily win in court. I didn't have Simon's financial clout, so I took down the blog post.
What's interesting now is looking back on the cease and desist letter 13 years later. Wow, did my blog post cause deep suffering for the poor person sending out those letters. Apparently I was guilty of defamation of character, fraud, malicious conduct, harassment, intentional infliction of emotional distress, trademark infringement, copyright infringement, tortuous interference with X's business practices, interference with prospective business advantage, solicitation of X's clients and prospects, and unfair competition and business practices.
Some of these claims are laughable - but who wants to be tied up with legal tangles? As well as sending my a copy of my blog post, the legal firm attached 20 pages of comments - only underlining how many people had either been deceived by this mailshot or thought that it was despicable. 
Perhaps surprisingly the person behind all this is still in business - so I can't name him, nor is it probably wise to name the law firm capable of coming up with such a bizarre set of accusations. But it just go to show that free speech is something of an illusion when someone has enough money to bring in the lawyers.

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There has been a lot on social media recently about the remarkable AI 'writer' ChatGPT. Many of my contacts are either academics or writers - and in both fields there has been concern about the ability of such AI software to interfere with their work. 
As far as academics are concerned, the software arguably calls into doubt the value of the essay as means of assessing student knowledge (particularly the short exam-style essay, which some universities still allow to be submitted online). And some writers have worried that their jobs are at risk if, for example, a news outlet can get ChatGPT to knock up a story for free.

My assessment is that the software is extremely impressive - but it has limitations that are likely to continue for a long time. Even with these limitations, it certainly could make inroads into student essays and poorly churned out journalism, but is unlikely to be a significant threat if some degree of insight or fact checking is required.

Let's take a look at a couple of specifics. I first asked ChatGPT:

Why can't I send a message using quantum entanglement?

Its response was as follows:

Quantum entanglement is a phenomenon that occurs when two particles become linked, such that the state of one particle is dependent on the state of the other. This means that if the state of one particle is known, the state of the other particle can be determined instantly, regardless of the distance between the two particles. While this phenomenon has been demonstrated in a laboratory setting, it is not currently possible to use it for sending messages. This is because the particles that are entangled must be in close proximity in order to become linked, and the entanglement is easily disrupted by outside influences. As a result, it is not possible to use quantum entanglement to transmit information over long distances.

This is deeply wrong, after the first couple of basic background sentences. Entanglement has been used outside the lab ever since 2004 when Anton Zeilinger did his demonstrations making use of the sewers of Vienna, and has now been achieved using the Chinese Micius satellite between orbit and the ground. Close proximity is not the issue. The actual reason is that entanglement can only share totally random data - there is no way to impose a message on it. This doesn't mean it's useless - it can be used to share (desirably random) encryption keys - but it's useless for instant messaging.

I then tried a topic that would be familiar to any science journalist:

Why was the name of the James Webb telescope controversial?

This was my third attempt at phrasing the question, as the first two times I got a reply on why the telescope itself wasn't controversial, rather than any insight into the name. But once I got the question right I was rewarded with this answer:

I'm sorry, but I am not aware of any controversy surrounding the naming of the James Webb Space Telescope. The telescope is named after James Webb, who served as the second administrator of NASA from 1961 to 1968. Webb played a key role in the development of the agency's human spaceflight program, including the Apollo missions that landed astronauts on the moon. The telescope was named in his honor to recognize his contributions to NASA and space exploration. I apologize if my earlier response was not clear or if I misunderstood your question. Please let me know if you have any further questions or concerns.

However, in reality there is a distinct controversy about the name, both because naming a scientific instrument after an administrator seems dubious, but also because of concerns about aspects of behaviour in Webb's NASA. This was a non-answer as far as the question was concerned.

Finally, for amusement, I picked up on another of ChatGPT's accomplishments - writing poems of the 'so bad it's quite good' nature. (Certainly, no poets are worried about being put out of work.) I asked

Can you write a sonnet about quantum entanglement?

And this was ChatGPT's response:

Sure, here is a sonnet about quantum entanglement:

In the strange world of the quantum realm
Where particles dance and shimmer with glee
A curious phenomenon occurs, it seems
Two particles become as one, you see

Entangled, they are linked together
Their states intertwined, never to part
No matter the distance, they’ll stay tethered
A bond that can never be broken by heart

Their fates are intertwined, forever more
One particle knows what the other will do
No matter how far apart they may roam
Their connection remains true and true

Quantum entanglement, a marvel to behold
A mystery of the universe, to be told.

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I enjoyed this book, but feel it has a relatively narrow audience that would have the same connection to it, hence the three star rating. Robin Ince is quite clearly addicted to buying books with an almost random enthusiasm, and this book is arguably more about that addiction than about the hundred bookstore tour he did that is the hook the book is hung on.

My personal taste in books overlaps to some degree with Ince's - we both bought copies of Alan Frank's Horror Movies early in our book buying lives (sadly I don't seem to still have my copy, though I do have some equivalent titles on science fiction films, vampire movies and more). We both are likely to find, say, the Maleus Malificorum resting alongside a book on quantum physics next to an Edwardian hardback copy of Bessie Marchant's The Girl Captives on our shelves. I very much enjoyed the selection of books Ince discovers on his travels (often in charity shops as well as proper bookshops), and added a couple to my 'look out for' list as a result. However, I was less impressed by the framing travel aspect of the book.

Rather than having the entertainment of a Bill Bryson or Stuart Maconie title, to be honest the travel side of the book was a touch tedious, lacking in interesting stories. Perhaps part of the problem was the need to hurtle round so many locations - it might have been better to have included fewer and given us more depth. I was also a bit disappointed that the two shops where I've also done talks (festivals tend to be more my thing) weren't actually the venues of his events at all - the shops themselves hardly got a mention.

Nonetheless, the book appealed to me in rather a similar way to those books like Horror Movies - it took me back to my youth when I used to really like working through titles that were probably more strictly reference books (I've even been known to read a Pevsner end to end). Like them, it was sometimes a slog getting through Bibliomaniac, but there was a satisfaction in completing it. In this, there seems to be a distinct difference with Ince himself. He loves books, but sometimes seems indifferent to reading them, preferring to dip in or even leave them on the shelf for some future, probably non-existent exploration.

It's a curiosity, then. It won't appeal to everyone, not even everyone interested in books (especially if you restrict yourself to Literature with a capital L). But it is both interesting as giving an insight into a fairly odd character in Ince himself (someone I was aware of, but hadn't really come across directly, and tend to confuse with Tim Minchin for some reason) and in the unlikely books he uncovers.

See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here You can order Bibliomaniac from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com and Bookshop.org - or, of course, from one of the wonderful independent shops Ince talks about, including my local (not visited in Bibliomaniac) Bert's Books.
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This time of year I tend to read a much wider range of  books, so expect some random reviews. But one thing that will always feature over Christmas is a mystery - whether it's revisiting M. R. James ghost stories for the nth time, or a Christmas-themed murder mystery. This book certainly fits the bill with its deliberate reference to Agatha Christie's title, and Christmas thrown in.

The setting is somewhat less exotic than the Orient Express - here it's the sleeper train from London to Fort William - but there's the same opportunity for a tight band of suspects and there's the convenience of a train that gets derailed in a snowstorm, isolating the suspects and the detective - in this case a newly retired Met detective inspector, heading up to Scotland because her daughter's about to give birth.

Where this differs a lot from Christie is the impact of modern technology. So the detective, Roz Parker, is agonisingly kept up with the complications of her daughter's delivery, and the (first) victim is a social media influencer, which is an important factor in the storyline. We get a nice locked room mystery and increasing rebellion from the (mostly unpleasant) set of train passengers to fill out the action.

The book isn't bad, but apart from a couple of central characters, I found it difficult to get a picture of some of the others (there are four students, practising for an unlikely sounding cross between University Challenge and Big Brother, for example, who I had real trouble making anything other than ciphers in my mind). The side story of Roz's life didn't really add to the main thread of the mystery plotting, and the prose could sometimes try a bit too hard.

For example, there are some strained similes - there's a midwife 'whose low, reassuring tones flowed like the warm water that filled a birthing pool'. Like many real passengers, Roz notices the glimpsed lives of people as the train passes their houses, but as she 'became aware of thousands of parallel lives', she feels that 'Like every small part of the train, each life was integral. Essential.' Really? This observation is then extended to wildly misunderstand Schrödinger's cat with the thought that 'Each box of a window with its blinds or curtains could contain an atrocity. Schrödinger's casement.' 

I lived with this - it was never hugely intrusive, but the thing that finalised my mixed feelings about the book was the ending. There's an interesting twist at the end - but the reaction to that twist is to totally lose any sense of justice being done. It just felt wrong.

This was an entertaining enough story, with plenty happening and a couple of effective characters, but it could have been a lot better.

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Until relatively recently, I rather looked down my nose at Agatha Christie, but having now read the likes of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Five Little Pigs , I've realised there's a lot more to her writing than comes across in TV and film adaptations, so I recently picked up a copy of The Thirteen Problems from my local(ish) independent bookshop and was not disappointed.

This is the very first book to feature Miss Marple, but rather than providing a single, book-length mystery, this 1932 title includes 13 short stories. The premise is that six people are gathered in a house and each tells a story of a mysterious happening in their past, challenging the others to solve the mystery. The guests somewhat reluctantly include the initial host's elderly aunt Miss Marple, who ends up solving every mystery. (This is then repeated at a dinner party, plus an individual consultation, to make up the total of thirteen.)

What I found fascinating as a big Sherlock Holmes fan was that, whether deliberately or not, this does feel almost like a set of Holmes stories - but with the detective as different from Holmes as it's possible to be. Like the Holmes shorts, these stories give us an engaging mystery and its solution in relatively few pages. And the primarily first person narratives, as each person tells their story, plus a certain period style, is reminiscent of Dr Watson's narration of the Holmes stories.

There's a good mix of mysteries, including one with an intriguing timeline twist. The writing isn't as engaging perhaps as can be the case with the best of Christie's writing, but it's good enough - and there's an enjoyable challenge in trying to spot what really happened (I did occasionally, but not too often).

All in all, an excellent bouquet of mystery tales.

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