Too Big to Know? So What?

The other day someone pointed out an article for me by David Weinberger which appeared in The Atlantic, plugging his new book Too Big to Know. It was a strangely breathless article, but I'm not sure that Weinberger's point is a very interesting one. Essentially, he seems to be saying that we have been developing data sets that are so vast they are beyond what people - with our limited brains and short life-spans - can possibly analyse and understand without the aid of computers. What's more, when we let our computers loose on these huge data sets, the derivation of any new knowledge they come up with (usually by running computer models or simulations on the data) is not accessible to us. To understand why the weather bureau's model predicts a 40% chance of rain in South-East England today would take teams of humans years to calculate by hand using the same rules and the same data. To all intents and purposes, these models might as well be black boxes. Worse than this, there are programs that can derive new mathematical and physical laws and relationships - new knowledge whose creation is forever shrouded in mystery because the cost of understanding how it was discovered is astronomically high for unaided humans. 

While some gasp at the epistemological implications right along with Weinberger, my own reaction is one of puzzlement. After all, isn't this and hasn't it always been how nearly all knowledge comes to us?

At one level, we have been hugely successful at seeing the underlying patterns of the world, without the aid of computers - General and Special Relativity, and the Standard Model reduce everything to a handful of very simple equations and constants. On another level, we have the complexity of chemistry, biology, fluid dynamics, and so on, which, while following the rules of basic physics, have lots of interacting parts that we can only model statistically. That the predictions of some of these statistical models can only be made if they are based on huge data sets and worked out by big, fast computers, doesn't fill me with the same kind of trepidation with which it seems to fill Weinberger. Even the fact that the predictions of many such models are acutely sensitive to their initial conditions is hardly cause for concern (unless you're planning a camping trip and need an accurate weather report).

It's true that the models themselves can be generated or learned by second-order systems and that we do not necessarily have any meaningful way of knowing how they work (something researchers in neural networks have been grappling with for several decades already). But that isn't a particular cause for anxiety either. Such models are in principle analysable, if we should ever want to do that (which, I suggest, removes any hint of scariness). Generally, it is not important to know how a model does its job, as long as we are confident about how it was constructed and have verified its behaviour against the data. If we want to verify their outputs or increase our confidence in what the models are doing, we can always set up a second, third, or nth model to cross-check the first or poll their outputs. (Weather models tend to be run over and over and their results combined, for instance.) The thing is, these models tend to be of systems that do not have the scientific significance of E=mc^2, although they may have ample practical significance for campers and drug companies. 

I used to work in artificial intelligence and I made a particular study of a field called "argumentation". It's all about how and why we find arguments convincing - like a modern Rhetoric. The early pioneers of expert systems understood well the issue this article raises. If you run a system with more than a handful of rules, it quickly gets to the point where you can no longer understand or predict the outputs - not without a disproportionately huge effort to delve into the workings. So they tried to devise schemes for expert system to explain their own reasoning (which boiled down to traces of rule activation - presented with varying degrees of clarity). I worked on some particularly massive rule-based systems and I can attest to the fact that presenting a conclusion is not enough - people need more - but presenting the machine's reasoning is a very difficult task.

However, I believe it is doable. People just haven't put much work into it yet.

There is an example of a massively parallel supercomputer of immense power but which is virtually a black box as far as the question of how it reached its outputs are concerned. In fact there are many such examples. One of the best was Albert Einstein. This processor came up with some astonishing physical laws by a process that nobody understands even a hundred years after they were derived. However, the Einstein processor was able to explain its reasoning and the derivation of its laws in a way that satisfied everyone who was able to understand (and the rest of us have been happy to take their word for it). I've read a few books on relativity now and I must say, the fact that I don't know how Einstein derived it from what was known at the time doesn't bother me at all. The rules are logical, consistent, match the evidence, and (having been shown the way) are derivable by other, similarly-endowed processors.

Certainly machine-derived knowledge raises questions in epistemology and ontology. Does it mean something different to know a physical law derived by a machine, for example, especially where the reasoning processes involved are hidden from us? My argument, already stated, is that it doesn't. In fact, it is similar in all important ways.

The question of how much we can trust machine-derived knowledge is a different kettle of fish. Here, I'm happy to use all the usual methods of improving my confidence - particularly the Gold Standard, empirical testing.

There is a possibility that knowledge could be derived by machine that is so far beyond our human understanding that only other machines of similar capabilities could peer-review it, or understand how to devise and run empirical tests, or interpret the results of such tests. When that day comes, we are put in the position that most of us are in now vis-a-vis the great scientists. Bohr, Pauli, Heisenberg, Einstein and the rest may have been able to understand and devise tests for each others' discoveries in quantum mechanics, but most of humanity could not. To us, it is entirely a matter of trust - even of faith.

It's like the climate change "debate". Here the science is simple enough that any intelligent layman can follow it. You could replicate John Tyndall's experiment that first measured the greenhouse effect in your own kitchen with some pipes and jars and rubber tubing. Yet still, for the majority (especially GOP politicians), it is all incomprehensible scientific mumbo jumbo. They can't grasp the principles. They can't separate out the scientific claims from the denialist obfuscation. They are so far from being able to judge the validity of what the scientific community is telling them, that they can have no confidence in what they are hearing - leaving them free to dismiss it as "scare-mongering" or a left-wing conspiracy to increase government regulation of our lives, or any bizarre rationale they can come up with.

One day, even the brightest of us will probably be in that position, when the machines have taken it all to a new level, way beyond our understanding. Will we look like simple-minded denialists to them when we question what seems to us to be the unfounded gibberish they will be spouting? I think so. Or maybe, being so much cleverer than us, the machines will be rather better than human scientists at explaining what they mean and why they're saying such outrageous things.  

Asset-Stripping

What kind of rubbish is this? An online newspaper I read just published an article about an article in a print newspaper called The Australian. Since when was quoting another news outlet's opinions considered news?

The piece in The Australian - a newspaper famous here for being a mouthpiece of the Rupert Murdoch view of life and a front-runner in his stable's race to the bottom -  was about how low the planned Chinese carbon tax would be and how high the Australian one is and how "out of step" with the world our carbon tax is.

And what a surprise, a Murdoch-owned newspaper doesn't like Australia's carbon tax. Big deal. Murdoch and his cronies in the mining, coal and oil industries can spout off all they like, his opinions are hardly news any more and I'm sick of hearing them over and over from all the newspapers and TV and radio stations he owns.

The fact is, China's move to a carbon tax (however low they've started) is the most important and significant event since the Kyoto treaty was signed. It's a major triumph and I'm sure Australia's dramatic recent move had an influence. The whingers at the Australian should remember that China has already made big steps towards becoming a 21st Century, clean economy. This is another one.

If the West wants to keep up, we need to force our old industries to change - and fast. They won't do it themselves. These old, polluting dinosaurs will drag Australia down to Third World status if we let them. And when they've asset-stripped Australia, they'll move on to their next victim.

Nerfreader: Giveaway: TimeSplash by Graham Storrs!

Nerfreader: Giveaway: TimeSplash by Graham Storrs! The audiobook of my time travel thriller, TimeSplash is being given away free at Nerfreader. Three copies of the audiobook are up for grabs, plus, as a bonus, there is a short story prequel to the novel, read by me, for each winner.

Just saying.

Reviews By Martha's Bookshelf: Giveaway Three Audiobooks of Timesplash & Prequel!...

Reviews By Martha's Bookshelf: Giveaway Three Audiobooks of Timesplash & Prequel!...: A month or so ago I posted a review of a good audiobook, Timesplash ! The author, Graham Storrs, has written a prequel, in the form of a s...

I Know What is Wrong With The World - and there is no way to fix it

I can sum up everything that is wrong with the world in three words:

People Are Stupid.

We like to think we are the pinnacle of evolution (in itself a stupid misconception of how evolution works) and that our vast intelligence separates up from the animals (sorry, stupid mistake, the other animals, I mean), but the fact is that we're not all that bright. We have a few advantages over, say primates, language and better memories for example, but research suggests that when it comes to sheer reasoning ability, we're not all that much brighter than chimps. I don't want to get into an IQ debate here, but let's assume there's some correlation between general intelligence and IQ. The average is around 100 (it varies from group to group and culture to culture - mainly because we're too stupid to devise a sensible test where the average is always 100 for every place and time).

Give or take a couple of standard deviations, most of us - like 96% of us - have that IQ. And it's abysmally low. It's the IQ of the kind of person who reads Murdoch newspapers, the IQ of the kind of person who watches soaps (even if it's the slick US cop show or medical show type and you think it's somehow better than Home and Away), and the kind of person who believes in the supernatural ("well, there has to be something more than this, doesn't there, science can't explain everything").

If you're still reading, it probably means you think you're not one of the stupid people I'm talking about. Well, you're wrong. Here's a little test to show just how stupid you are. 

• Q1 Can you solve world poverty? 
• Q2 Can you stop war? 
• Q3 Can you stop the persecution of minorities?
• Q4 Can you devise an economic system that treats everybody fairly?

The answers to all those questions are "No". I can think of dozens, probably hundreds of other questions that you would have to say no to, too. The fact is, we are all, even the very brightest among us, deeply and unutterably stupid. We can't solve the world's problems because we're too thick. We've been trying throughout recorded history (and presumably long before then) and we have failed. Failed dismally. Failed in a way that should be excruciatingly embarrassing to all of us. Let's face it, we're a bunch of chimps with cars and cell phones and we haven't got a clue.

And that's why there is no way to fix the world; we just haven't got the brains. We might as well give up, go back to the trees and scratch our arses until we're extinct.

Oh, hang on, we can't do that, can we? We stupidly cut down all the trees.

Now how did he get here?

    

Yasmin needs brain surgery but can't afford it

It is a sad and terrible indictment of the society in which we live that a woman like Yasmin McKillop might die because she can't afford the surgery that could save her life. Yasmin is a young woman, a nurse who cares for old people at my local hospital. She's one of those lovely people you take to immediately. She is married to my friend James, who is blind, and they have two young boys. And now, Yasmin has a brain tumour. The prognosis from surgeons at the public hospitals here is very poor, but there is a surgeon in Sydney who believes he can save her, if she can find sixty thousand dollars for the operation.

On a nurse's wage and James' invalidity benefits, Yasmin has no house to sell, no savings to draw on. Her family are just ordinary, working people. That kind of money is so far beyond the reach of normal people that it must seem completely hopeless to her family and friends.

In desperation, her sister, Mia, has launched an appeal. Mia is not a media-savvy campaigner with far-reaching networks into the circles where money like this is easily found. She's just a young woman who lives and works in a small, country town who loves her sister and is doing all she can for her. She has put up a Facebook page. She is talking to local people and local businesses - in Stanthorpe, one of the poorest towns in the whole of Australia. That's why we need to do something to help Mia raise that money and save her sister.

I know most of the people who read my blog are writers and working people too. I doubt we could raise that much money between us, but we can raise some, and there are plenty of other ways we can help. This is what I would like each of you to do.

1. Visit Mia's Facebook page and donate something to the appeal - even if it is only $5 - the price of a cup of coffee. The link is also at the bottom of this post.

2. Use the Facebook and Tweet this links at the top of this post to spread the word to your social networks. You can also Digg the post, or use StumbleUpon or any other sharing tools you like. Do whatever you can to help Mia get the message out to the world that Yasmin needs help.

3. Mention the appeal on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, MySpace, Twitter, and anywhere else you have an audience.

4. Write a blog post on your own blog - even if it is just one sentence with a link to Mia's appeal page, it might just help.

5. If you know a journalist, mention Yasmin's plight to them. A 'human interest' story like this might just be something they, or a colleague, are looking for. If the story made it into a State or national newspaper, or was mentioned on a popular radio or TV show, it would take the appeal to a level where anything is possible. Even if you don't live in Australia, mention it anyway. Generosity doesn't stop at national borders.

6. Write a letter and send it to your local newspaper, your local radio station, your local Rotary Club, anywhere you can think of where people might be willing to help.

I'm sorry to ask. I'm sorry to live in a society where I have to ask. Please help Yasmin and her family. Please do whatever you can.

The link to the appeal is http://www.facebook.com/Yasmin.Aid?sk=info

What Does it Mean to Believe in Reality?

I tend to say things like "I believe in reality and nothing else." Possibly seeing the world "reality" as a potential chink in the armour of my belief system, someone asked me recently to define what I mean by it. You know, it's a hard question, and I can only think of long answers to it.

Basically, like Samuel Johnson, I'm a rock kicker, not a solipsist (that Occam's Razor thing again). Once you take the step of believing in an external reality, it seems the sensible thing is to accept what your senses tell you. After that, to know more than what you personally experience, you need to start accepting what other people tell you they have seen and felt. And the only way to separate true from bogus (or mistaken) accounts, is to rely on the scientific method. Observations need to be replicable, theories need to be clearly and transparently related to observation by solid argumentation, and experiment must always trump theory (when enough evidence exists). On top of that, coherence and mutual support among theories is nice to have too.

Within the vast arena of our ignorance and the tiny capacity of our intellect, this leaves much to wonder and marvel at in the world. So much, in fact, that I wonder why anyone needs magic at all. When, from what we know and the arguments that sustain it, we can suppose that the whole universe might be a holographic projection from the surface of a cosmic sphere, one hardly needs the rather mundane imaginings of religious fantasists to excite one's sense of wonder.

My Predictions for the Future

Just a quick note to give you a couple of predictions about the future. Here they are:

1. The Rapture will not happen tomorrow (as predicted by the Christians).
2. The world will not end in 2012 (as predicted by the Mayans).
3. No prediction from any religious text, or any ancient text whatsoever about the end of the world will ever be correct.

I will absolutely stand by these predictions and will happily put money on any or all of them.

Just a note about prediction #3. Telling me that Nostradamus predicted Napoleon, or whatever, doesn't count. It's easy to interpret vague nonsense to mean anything you like after the fact. What I want to see are real, solid predictions about the future. Like the Rapture prediction.

And, on prediction #1, all those guys who are waiting to be taken up to heaven tomorrow, are going to feel really embarrassed on Sunday, and not a bit let down. Please don't laugh at them too much as they make their way, red faced, to church.

A Word From Our Sponsors

There are a couple of short stories of mine appearing soon in anthologies and I'd like you to look out for them, please. Since I almost never try to flog my books here, I thought you might forgive me. Two of these anthologies ('Hope' and 'Nothing But Floweres') I donated stories to for free because they are being sold to benefit good causes.

In Situ – a spec fic anthology from Dagan Books, ed. Carrie Cuinn. It contains my story “Salvage”. Expected publication date is 15th May – pre-order it via Goodreads.

Hope – a spec fic anthology from Kayelle Press, ed. Sasha Beattie, with a great cast of Aussie writers. It contains my story “The God on the Mountain”. Expected publication date is “real soon now”! I am especially stoked that two of the other contributors are friends who shared the QWC/Hachette retreat with me in May 2008 – the event that I believe kicked off my professional writing career.

Nothing But Flowers: Tales of Post Apocalyptic Love from eMergent Press, ed. Jodi Cleghorn. It contains my story “Two Fools in Love” – the first time I ever sat down to write a love story and actually did it. This is already available as an ebook but should hit the streets as a paperback any second now.

If you've ever wondered what kind of stuff I write, here are three great chances to find out. You also get the chance to read load of other great stories and, in two out of three cases, to contribute something to a good cause.

Osama Bin Laden is Dead

So what?

Here are a few early thoughts on what it might mean that the "world's most wanted man" has finally been tracked down and executed.

1. You live by the sword, you die by the sword. Bin Laden was waging war. Sometimes wars don't go the way you'd like them to and, even when you're a big-shot general, sitting safely in your stronghold, well away from the fighting, sometimes the enemy gets to you and kills you. Them's the breaks. Bin Laden dropped a plane on the Pentagon. The Pentagon dropped a Navy Seals team on Abbottabad.

2. It's made many Americans very happy. Let's face it, Americans went nuts after 9/11. They thrashed about in a frenzy of outrage, fear and frustration. They invaded Iraq for Pete's sake! How crazy was that? Yet the fear was the worst bit of it. Americans became obsessed with the idea that their enemies could reach out and get them and it terrified them. It was shocking and horrible. It went against everything they believed about their superiority and invulnerability. And much of that fear was focused on Osama Bin Laden. He was the one who had hurt them. He was the one who, for ten whole years, dodged their best efforts to wreak their vengeance. So, of course, now he's dead, some of that sense of dread and impotence has been lifted. No wonder they're dancing in the streets.

3. With any luck, President Obama will enjoy a 'halo effect' from being the president in office when Bin Laden was shot. Yes, many American's think he's a Muslim, and a socialist, and a foreigner, but now they also know he's the guy who brought down the Boogey Man. American conservatives probably have a much lower chance now of winning the election next year. This is a very good thing, especially considering the absolute clowns who have been suggested as GOP candidates - like Palin and Trump. If killing Bin Laden gets Obama a second term, at least some genuine good will have come of it.

4. Stock markets - especially the American ones - rose for a short while there. They've fallen back again, of course, but hopefully that little blip will show everyone how ludicrous the whole stock trading system has become. When our global economy depends on idiots who spend higher on stocks because some terrorist fly has been swatted, we really need to take a long hard look at what is going on in the free market economy.

There Ought To Be A Law Against It

They should make it illegal to talk crap. I can't think of any other way to stop the flood of bullshit that threatens to drown out all sensible discourse. It should be a crime to say or write anything for public consumption that is provably wrong at the time it was said.

The irritating and most visible manifestation of the untrue rubbish people spout is in advertising. I don't just mean ads that say processed food X is "wholesome" or  indistinguishable from real food, I mean the lying nonsense about the beneficial powers of inert food supplements, or magnetic mattresses, or "quantum energised" crystals. All that New Age quackery, all that techno-babble, all that distortion and half-truth designed to mislead!

It gets beyond mere irritation when you hear garbage spoken by politicians. Many of them (particularly on the right wing) talk about medical issues, about welfare reform, about incentives, about wars on drugs, about the criminal justice system, about education and about tax reform, as if we haven't had a century of psychological studies, sociological studies, criminology, medical science, and anthropology. The evidence is all there if they had the wit to grasp it. Yet they go on, year after year telling us the answer is more police on the streets, stiffer sentences, getting back to the three Rs, sacking civil servants, etc., etc., etc.. I know politicians are just ordinary people with monster egos, and most of them don't have the intelligence to read research reports (from actual scientists, I mean, not from "think tanks"!) but if there were criminal penalties for being caught saying untrue things in public, maybe they would actually start to care about what they say.

And, of course, politicians lying to the public (wilfully or out of ignorance) can do real harm. It can blight lives and hobble whole societies. It can kill. But the people with the real power, who can do most harm, are the corporations and their various mouthpieces. We've seen endless examples of how the tobacco companies lied about the harm they cause, how the oil, coal and gas companies have lied about global warming (and pollution in general), and how the big news media corporations lie to ensure the political outcomes they favour. Yet there are no penalties. The Big Tobacco spokesperson may be responsible for thousands of deaths, but they are not tried for mass murder. The Big Oil CEO who sponsors obfuscatory research that may lead to hundreds dying in floods and droughts, doesn't face jail time, nor do the scientists who take his money and publish his papers. And the Big Pharma PR guys who tell the doctors lies about their products, are not being prosecuted wither, and nor are the doctors who sign their names to academic papers written by those same PR guys.

We live in a world where solid scientific evidence is ignored or actively disparaged, just so that people can sell you things, or feather their nest in some other way. It is a world where religious groups are allowed to teach anti-science courses which are nothing but insupportable nonsense - presumably so that young people aren't exposed to ideas or rational thinking or something equally horrible. There seems to be nothing anyone can do about all this lying and misleading and distortion and outright fraud. Or nothing anyone is willing to do. After all, the lawmakers are among the worst offenders.

Yet if there is anything there should be a law against, this is it.

Graham Storrs to Sign With The Book Harvest Literary Agency

Remember what  my 2010 end of year report said was the one thing 2011 would be all about? Or when I tried to find a single word to describe my hopes for 2011?

Yes, this was going to be the year that I got myself a literary agent, someone who would represent my work to the big-league publishers, someone who would promote me in circles I simply cannot reach, someone who would talke my writing career to a new professional level. Well, just two months into the year, I have found that agent. We haven't quite signed the contract yet, but I am very, very pleased to let you know that brand new, Sydney-based literary agency The Book Harvest has agreed to represent me, particularly, that Ineke Prochazka, is my go-to guy at the agency.

You might think that signing with an agency that hasn't made a single sale yet is a bit of a risk. You may also remember that I recently turned down an offer from another agent because I didn't think they could do enough for me, even though they did have an actual track record of sales. Well, yes, of course it's a risk, but Book Harvest has two very important things going for it.

The first is that the agency is positioning itself at the top of the food chain, aiming to sell to the big-name publishers. Events may prove that they couldn't make it, but their ambitions and mine line up nicely and the idea of being paired with a new agency has always appealed to me. We're both hungry for this and we're both going to go flat out to make it happen.

The second is Ineke Prochazka herself. She comes highly recommended by someone whose judgement I trust, she's got a background in the retail side of the book business (the side of the business, in my view, that it is absolutely vital to be across these days), and, in my dealings with her so far, she seems like a nice and approachable person, someone I'll be happy to do business with.

Of course, that contract isn't signed yet and there's many a slip, etc., but I am very pleased with how this is going so far and hope to get the paperwork out of the way very soon.

Wish me luck!

Scammers and the Gift of Sociopathy

Wifie has just been scammed by a company she got involved with online. It's an American company that ran a print ad in an Australian women's magazine offering a free trial of their product for the price of the postage. She paid the $7 postage with our credit card and the product duly arrived in the post. Then, when the credit card bill arrived, we saw the company had taken over $200 on top of the postage.

Wifie started emailing them demanding her money back. They ignored her. That was a month ago and we'd pretty much decided to let it go and write it down to experience. Then this month's credit card statement arrived and they'd done it again, taken another $200. This time Wifie spoke to the credit card company. (I had to speak to them too because Australian banks don't have the concept of joint and several liability on credit cards like everywhere else on the planet and our "joint" credit card is in my name!) She wanted them to block that particular company from ever drawing money from our account again.

You'd think this would be easy, since all they were ever authorised to draw was $7. But no. We had to cancel our credit card and start a new account. Can you believe that? So we now have no credit card and a wait of 10 business days before the new one is available!

The good news is that the bank hopes to be able to reimburse us the $400 we lost. I'm not sure why they would do that (unless there is an insurance included in our fees that I haven't noticed) but who am I to argue? Possibly it is because they feel guilty that they run a dodgy financial system where people with your credit card number can steal your money, but that would be strangely altruistic of them. As far as I can see, we got scammed and it's largely our own fault for trusting an unknown company with our credit card number. Maybe that's it? I suppose the banks want us to trust potential crooks, because then we will buy more stuff online. Well, it looks like another $400 may now have to be added to everybody's bank fees next year.

Nice smile, Mr. Madoff.

Wouldn't it be nice though, to be so completely heartless and soul-dead that you could just take other people's money if you felt like it? Wouldn't it be nice not to care about how much effort it took your victims to earn that money, how hard it had been for them to save the amout you stole, what they might have to go without because of your greed, or how upset they might feel because of what you did to them? I think sick, heartless bastards must be the happiest people in the world. Their brains, crippled by the lack of a normal conscience, are incapable of feeling all the usual concerns, the empathy and the compassion that bother the rest of us, leaving them able to laugh at and enjoy the unhappiness they cause. They don't even mind being despised, in all likelihood. What a gift sociopathy must be to these lucky people.

One Word #reverb10

December 1 One Word.

Encapsulate the year 2010 in one word. Explain why you’re choosing that word. Now, imagine it’s one year from today, what would you like the word to be that captures 2011 for you?
(Author: Gwen Bell)

2010 – Publisher

2010 was the year I achieved a lifelong ambition and had my first novel published. TimeSplash - a rollicking sci-fi romp set in the near future - was by no means the first novel I'd ever written. More like the tenth! But it was the first to make it into print. My publisher (oh how sweet those words are!) Lyrical Press, brought the book out in a range of ebook editions in February this year. It was a moment of triumph, of course, but also a moment of relief. You know what it's like when you tick off these huge milestones in your life. You did it. You made it. For evermore, your achievement will stand. No-one can take it away.

In recent weeks, I've signed with a second publisher (the very exciting, Big Bad Media) to produce an audiobook of TimeSplash (read by the fabulous Emma Newman no less!) and, probably, in a yet-to-be-finalised bit of company pair-bonding, to bring the book out in print with eMergent Publishing (an honest-to-God Aussie publisher no less!)

What a year! Definitely one to remember. I learned a lot and got to know some great people.

2011 – Agent

If you've been reading my writing blog, you'll know that I've been trying to find an agent for some weeks now. I actually found one last week and, after an epiphany, or psychotic episode (the way it felt, it could have been either) I turned them down, hoping to find a better agent.

You see, the agent I want is one that can take my career to stratospheric levels. Don't get me wrong, the publishers I'm working with now are terrific. The energy and enthusiasm is outstanding and I'm sure we're going to do great things together. It's just that, in the long run, I'd like to crank this all up a great many notches. Maybe BBM and eMergent are the people I will do that with. And that would be truly outstanding! But I'm no spring chicken (except in my general demeanour and level of maturity) and if I want to get on that NYT best-seller list, I need to get my arse in gear and start doing what it takes.

So the agent thing is my Plan B strategy for getting there. Because, sadly, to get on that list, it helps enormously to have been published by a top-of-the-heap publisher, and, equally sadly, the only way to get your manuscripts in front of such publishers is through an agent - and a good one at that. And that means reseraching and querying. Success at finding an agent in 2011 is my target then. Watch this space.


Thanks to Merrilee for pointing me to this project.

Review: The Artificial Ape: How Technology Changed the Course of Human Evolution by Timothy Taylor

(This review first appeared in The New York Journal of Books on 23rd August, 2010.)

The Artificial Ape is a book with a plausible idea, but that is all it has. If you are looking for a convincing argument that “technology changed the course of human evolution” or even some compelling evidence, this is not the book for you. However, if you like informed speculation about humanity’s prehistoric past and you enjoy surveys and summaries of this immensely long and fascinating period, The Artificial Ape will keep you turning the pages.

Taylor is a well-known and popular archeo-anthropologist and is beginning to make himself a name for controversial speculation. His Prehistory of Sex takes us back 8 million years and The Buried Soul makes some startling claims about how widespread cannibalism and vampirism were in prehistory. The Artificial Ape follows in this tradition.

Taylor’s main contention is that tool use in early hominins was a necessary step to allow us to develop our large brains. In particular, he speculates that the invention of the baby sling must have occurred about two million years ago (although there is no actual evidence). This would have allowed a hairless ape with an upright gait—and thus a restricted pelvic gap—to give birth to increasingly immature babies, ones that could not cling to their mothers and would need to be carried, thus allowing the brain to continue to grow and develop outside the womb. As Taylor puts it, turning ourselves into artificial marsupials.

He makes much of the fact that tool use in hominins began about 2.5 million years ago, long before signs of accelerated skull-size began to be seen in the fossil record (after 2 million years ago). It is a puzzle that stone tools were being made and used before Homo ergaster and then Homo erectus began to develop their larger brains, and it is this puzzle that Taylor’s hypothesis attempts to tackle.

Taylor also points to the fact that an ape with an upright gait has a much shorter intestine than one on all fours. This means that not only meat eating but cooking may have been essential precursors to the development of bipedalism, simply because of the difficulty of finding sufficient nourishment from a vegetarian and raw meat diet with a short gut, at a time when we would have been extremely active and burning calories at a rate rarely seen in humans today.

Interestingly, recent evidence, published after the book was released, pushes the date for tool use and meat eating back to perhaps 3.4 million years—the pre-Homo days of Australipithecus afarensis. This find gives Taylor a 1.4 million year gap to explain before brain sizes begin to increase. But it does provide more time for full bipedalism to evolve after tools for butchering meat are first seen.

Given the paucity of the evidence, much of what Taylor proposes must be taken with a pinch of salt. For example, hominin skulls are quite plentiful across the last two million years, but there are only a dozen or so before that time. The graph of brain capacity against time that he presents is quite compelling but it would not need many new data points in the pre-2 million years’ range for it to look very different. More critically for the argument, there are just three hominin pelvises that have been found covering a period of almost 3.5 million years. While they approximately match the required changes in morphology for an ape specializing increasingly in bipedalism and immature neonates, it is very little to base an argument on.

So the book is disappointing in that, having made its surprising but apparently reasonable claim, it then provides scant evidence and only weak arguments in support of it. It is disappointing in other ways, too. It contains long and frequent digressions into areas of human cultural evolution that are not strongly connected to the main argument and which tend to dilute and confuse the message.

While fascinating in their own right, Taylor’s discussion of neolithic art and culture do not contribute much. Similarly, his extended discussion of why Tasmanian aborigines had apparently “regressed” to a level of tool use and a style of living not far removed from that of chimpanzees, while a very useful antidote to Victorian condemnation of and dismay at their lifestyle (which still persists in a mild form in academic circles today), does not strengthen his argument appreciably.

Some discussion as to why other hominids (the great apes) have not taken the same evolutionary path as humans, despite the strong probability that they were as proficient with tools as our distant ancestors were, would have been worthwhile. It is likely that chimpanzees have been using tools for as long as us, yet it has not led either to bipedalism or to increased brain size. The same problem arises with birds. Modern studies show extremely surprising sophistication of tool use in crows and other species of bird, yet we do not see the same evolutionary tie to tool use that Taylor suggests for ourselves. Birds have not become “artificial avians.” Why not?

And the same problem arises with dolphins, which also use tools. Bird brains also raise the interesting problem for Taylor’s hypothesis that their brains are notoriously small. Claiming that tool use (technology) enables increases in brain size, in the face of a crow’s tiny brain, begs the question as to whether the evolution of technologies and brains is causally linked at all. It would have been useful if Taylor had addressed some of these issues.

The Artificial Ape is a good read. It is full of interesting and provocative ideas and information. Yet, while it is interesting and its main idea is appealing, in the end, it fails to make its case.

The Great Puzzle of Why the Sun Rose This Morning: Part 2

You may remember I wrote a couple of months ago about a strange conundrum regarding time. I mentioned this post on a number of lists I belong to, hoping that someone with a better grasp of physics than I would be able to explain it to me. I got many, many responses but, sadly, not one seemed to understand what the issue was and the great majority assumed I just needed a quick primer in special relativity (and then proceeded to give me one, often in a most garbled and peculiar way.) Most people were genuinely interested and tried to be helpful. However, one idiot, on a list I didn't even post to, became quite abusive and accused me of inventing a load of nonsense about relativity in order to make more sales of my book! (Now, how would that work, exactly?) He also threw in a garbled account of special relativity, just to be sure I understood what a genius he was.

It was quite a depressing experience all round.

I have been reading more on the subject since then and I think I have actually found the answer. Gratifyingly enough, the answer is almost exactly the one I came up with. In the language of relativity it is couched in much different terms, however, but I believe it amounts to the same thing.

The conundrum is this: even though time passes at different rates for different frames of reference, we do not experience objects moving in and out of existence as our relative positions in time change. I gave the example of the Sun, which, having a much larger mass than the Earth, should be aging ever so slightly more slowly. In fact, over the 4.5 billion year life of the solar system. the Earth should be 71 years older than the Sun. So why aren't we in the Sun's future? Why is the Sun here with us in this moment in time?

The answer, I suggested, was that we do, in fact, all move at the same rate through time, which would mean that time dilation is something analagous to the way the frequency of light changes depending on the relative velocity of its source. As it turns out, I shouldn't have been talking about space and time separately but about spacetime. Because, as it happens, we are all moving at exactly the same rate through spacetime. When we use spacetime metrics instead of the metrics of space and time, it appears that everything in the Universe is moving at exactly the same rate. That light has a constant velocity is a corollary of this. Light having no mass, there is no time dimension to its motion in spacetime, it must therefore always appear to be moving through space at the maximum velocity possible. Time dilation, under this view, is simply an effect of the projection onto space and time of a spacetime 'velocity' for objects having significant relative speed or mass (or acceleration). All the space and time components as well as mass/acceleration are traded off against one another to maintain a constant spacetime motion. Time can therefore appear to be 'red shifted', in the terminology I made up, for exactly the same geometrical reasons that light appears to be.

And we're all together here and now in spacetime. That's why the Sun keeps coming up in the morning!

Aren't you glad I got that sorted out?

Review: Why Does E=mc2? (And Why Should We Care?) by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw

(This review first appeared in the New York Journal of Books on 13th July 2010.)

Why Does E=mc2? is one of those questions that educated non-physicists must have been asking themselves for over a hundred years, ever since Albert Einstein derived the equation back in 1905. Now, in this easy-to-read little book from Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw, we have the answer. The authors are both professors of physics at Manchester University, and Brian Cox is also a well-known TV personality—well known enough to warrant a jacket blurb from Stephen Fry.

The book begins with the traditional approach to explaining the slowing of clocks for observers in motion relative to one another, by examining the geometry of a light beam bouncing up and down in a moving vehicle. The authors demonstrate just how easy it is to get to Einstein’s time dilation formula using nothing more than Pythagoras’ Theorem and the knowledge that the speed of light is capped. But they don’t leave it there. In the first half of the book they consider two more approaches that lead us to the same conclusion. 

Along the way, they very cleverly introduce all the ideas we will need to get to the world’s most famous equation, E=mc². What is more, they focus on the most puzzling part: the question of what c, the speed of light, is doing in there. Very early on, they introduce c as a scaling factor so that we can talk about “distances” in spacetime. Later, by various means, they explain why c has to be the maximum speed that anything can travel. It is a small triumph of the book that Cox and Forshaw make the attempt to show the logical necessity of there being a universal speed limit, and that their arguments are presented so clearly.

Yet, as with any book of this size tackling a subject so enormous, it is not long before the authors start asking us to take things on trust, undermining the comprehensibility of their presentation. The first big one is when they introduce Maxwell’s equations and ask us to believe they demand that the rate of propagation of an electromagnetic field be constant for all observers. Then comes the work of mathematician Emmy Noether and her demonstration that invariance leads to the conservation of quantities. 

These, and many others introduced later, are tough ideas and hard to swallow. The authors introduce them to provide alternative ways into the understanding of relativity and that famous equation. It is to their credit that they do not always hide the complexity nor the long history of ideas behind relativity, but it would have been better, perhaps, to have spent a few more pages on some of these notions. It is also to their credit that they make the case, as Feynman and others have done before them, that, at some level, the weirdness of the universe just has to be accepted, and the only test of physical theories that matters a damn is whether they are supported by actual observation and experiment.

And there would have been many pages to spare for additional background and explanation if, near the end, the book had not wandered into obscure and largely unrelated areas as it tackled a broad-brush description of the Standard Model in an attempt to explain what mass is. It was inevitable that some particle physics had to be discussed and that this would lead to discussions of quantum theory. After all, the book’s sub-title is And Why Should We Care? and the reasons given largely involve nuclear power, chemistry, and cosmology—all of which are helped by discussions at a subatomic level. Perhaps also Brian Cox’s involvement at CERN (he heads a project there to upgrade the ATLAS and CMS detectors for the Large Hadron Collider) meant that a discussion of the Higgs particle was inevitable. Nevertheless, this, and the very brief glimpse of general relativity right at the end, seemed to detract from the clarity and force of the earlier exposition.

It is a curious book that tackles several of the most difficult ideas in modern science in the tone of a friendly, almost patronizing, high-school teacher, trying to ensure that the slow kids manage to keep up with the rest of the class. The tone and the endless asides (did you know that the Sun converts 600 million tonnes of hydrogen into helium every second?) can become a bit wearing, but Cox and Forshaw have to be praised for their unwavering insistence that their subject is accessible to anyone at all who will stay with them and think about it.

In an age when most lay people throw up their hands at the mention of relativity or quantum theory, when religious creation stories and New Age mysticism offer a far simpler, less challenging route for the intellectually overwhelmed, it is hugely important that ordinary people see that physics is not just for the egg-heads, that it can be understood, and that there is a grand beauty in what it reveals about our world. Cox and Forshaw have made an important contribution in this area, one that will help school science teachers as much as it will their students.

Time, Relativity, Time Travel, and the Great Puzzle of Why the Sun Rose This Morning

There's something wrong with my notion of time.

I used to think it was all subjective - by which I meant relative to one's frame of reference, as general relativity tells us. I am more than happy to accept all the experimental evidence that says moving very fast, or being near a large mass, will slow down the passage of time relative to an observer outside your frame of reference. There is so much evidence for general relativity that it would be ludicrous not to accept it. Yet a simple observation of my own tells me that there must be more to the story than that.

And this is it: the Sun rose this morning. I know that because I saw it.

The problem is that it should not have done. The Sun should not be there at all. The Sun and the Earth were formed at about the same time, some 4.5 billion years ago. However, the mass of the Sun is about 330,000 times that of the Earth. Relatively speaking, time will run a bit more slowly for the Sun than for the Earth. But, after 4.5 billion years, all those nanosecond differences will add up. Yet Earth and Sun seem to be here together. We have both arrived at today at the same time.

So my notion of time - and/or my notion of what general relativity is saying - must be wrong. In fact, the same goes for special relativity too. I cannot account for why anything moving fast relative to me doesn't just wink out of existence. Because its time is slowed down, I should move into its future, it should move into my past, and we should not be able to perceive each other in our respective presents. After all, I know from experience that I cannot see the future, or the past.

So, okay, the fact that relative gravitational potential, or acceleration, or velocity, affects the rate at which time passes for different 'observers' seems to have nothing to do with the way time is actually passing for us all. I can live with that. In fact, I've seen something very like it somewhere else. The speed of light is quite similar. This is a constant and, all intuition aside, light travels at the same velocity (c) relative to you, whatever speed and direction you are travelling relative to its source. What does happen to light, though, is that its frequency shifts. If you are approaching a source of light very fast, it still hits you at exactly c but its frequency is shifted higher - towards the blue end of the spectrum. If you are racing away from the source, light still catches you at exactly c, but now its freuency is lower - shifted towards the red end of the spectrum.

What if time behaves like light? What if the rate of passage of time is also constant? Then, whatever we were doing in the Universe, time would always affect us the same way. But, accelerations, gravitational fields, and relative velocities lead to us perceiving a shift in something equivalent to the frequency of time. Let's call it time's 'colour'. A high gravitational potential, shifts time's colour towards the red end of its spectrum.

This notion (although it explains my problem with time) is an intuitively difficult one because what we normally think of as time - that thing that measures the intervals between ticks of a clock - isn't really time at all. It is just the colour of time. Real time, the thing that has its colour shifted and which ensures the continued coexistence of everything in the present, must be something else. Maybe we should call it 'persistence' or (to borrow a word from H. G. Wells) 'duration'?

So time is a kind of universal persistence and what I used think was time is just the colour of this persistence.

Am I happy now? No, not really. For a start, shifting the colour of persistence is analogous to shifting the colour of light (and is effected in exactly the same ways). So, by the same analogy, there can be no time travel. Shifting the colour of light does not affect its speed. The rate of persistence will be constant regardless of relativistic effects on its colour. You can age less (or more) than other things in the Universe by manipulating your speed, acceleration, or proximity to mass, but you do not change your place in persistence with respect to the rest of the Universe. That's why fast things do not blink out of existence for me. We are persisting at the same rate, even though we are aging at different rates. (Even dragging the exit of a wormhole around at near light-speed won't do the trick any more, because entrance and exit persist at the same rate, the exit may end up younger than the entrance but they will still be there at the same point in persistence at the end of it all!)

Are there any physicists out there who can tell me why all this is wrong and also explain why I saw the Sun this morning?

Review: Epitaph Road by David Patneaude

(This review first appeared in the New York Journal of Books on 12th May, 2010)

Epitaph Road is the latest in a string of successful young adult novels by David Patneaude. In 2067 a world reeling from recent nuclear brinkmanship between the USA and China is suddenly devastated by a virus that kills almost every male person on the planet. Only those males at sea or in remote places survive.

Thirty years later, the world is populated and dominated by women. There are a few more males, but strict birth control laws ensure that the male population cannot rise above 5%. It is a world free of much petty crime and war but one in which the remaining males are subjugated and controlled, and the women in power have all the vices that political elites have always had. 

Kellen Winters is fourteen in 2097, the son of one of the few survivors of the plague they called Elisha’s Bear. He lives with his absentee mother, an important person in the new North American government, and dreams of leaving one day to join his father, who lives as a “loner” among male “throwbacks” on a kind of reservation. He is preparing for his citizenship exams and coping with the oppression and subjugation that is the role of all males, when he and two female classmates stumble on some information that leads them to delve into the origins of the plague that changed the world and which still recurs from time to time. What they uncover sends them on a journey to find his father and warn him about a potential new outbreak. But powerful forces don’t want Kellen to reach the throwbacks, and police and other agencies are searching for him as he and his friends stumble upon another shocking and deadly secret. 

Epitaph Road is a straightforward adventure story in which a group of youngsters fight the forces of an oppressive and hypocritical adult world. It has good pacing, is nicely written, and the adventure runs its course as it should to its proper ending. Yet it is a most unsatisfying story, with two major flaws that spoiled it for me.

The first is the aftermath of the plague. Almost overnight, half the population of the world dies. And it is the male half, the half that hogs most of the power, dominates all industries except the lower-paid service industries, and has a near stranglehold in areas such as engineering, construction, power, transportation, communications, and so on. Yet, the world carries on, civilization carries on as if nothing has happened. The supply of electricity keeps flowing, the farms and food distribution keeps going, the communications networks stay up, the domestic water and sewage networks still operate, and billions of bodies are buried. There is no mass starvation; no millions dying in that first, unheated winter; no disease; no cessation of oil supplies; no massive shortage of doctors. Within a handful of years, countries have merged, a new world political order is established, new education systems are put in place, and massive social change is underway. You might think that, possibly by 2067, there is sexual equality and the work and power disparities of today no longer exist, but according to the story, that is not the case. If anything, male dominance is worse by then.

With a pinch of suspended disbelief, you might get past this issue, but it is the kind of “world building” problem that leaves me very uncomfortable. Worse, however, is the fact that the bulk of the story is set in 2097—almost a hundred years from now—but no technology seems to have advanced beyond today’s level. True, the desktop computers have touch screens, the smartphones are called “e-sponders,” and electric cars are commonplace (although the throwback men still drive old petrol cars), but there are no new technologies.  

The idea that civilization could progress for 90 years without radical new technologies appearing is just incredible. Even if we suppose that technical innovation ended in 2067 when the men died, we should still expect fifty more years’ worth. For example, the Internet is just twenty years old as you read this. It was barely known to the world at large before 1995. Yet the Web and texting (a technology which is about the same age as the Web) are supposedly still the technologies in use by kids in Epitaph Road, eighty-seven years from now. 

This is such a massive failure of the imagination, and introduces such a jarring credibility problem, that the question has to be asked: Why didn’t Patneaude set the book in the present? Without more than this minimal nod in the direction of world building, this is not science fiction. So why not make the date 2007 instead of 2097 and let this become an alternative history novel? 

It is a young adult novel, and is intended for children, but that is no excuse for not treating his readership with more respect. The description and development of the book’s main characters, their complex feelings and motivations, is well up to scratch, the plot is simple and easily anticipated but nicely executed and suited to the genre. However, the book is badly let down by the credibility of a major plot element and the complete failure to present a believable future world.

Review: Cro-Magnon by Brian Fagan

(This review first appeared in The New York Journal of Books on 2nd May 2010.)

By any standards, Brian Fagan is a leading authority on archaeology, and, with 46 books on the subject to his credit, he is among the world’s leading popularizers of the field. In Cro-Magnon, he gives us an easily digested round-up of what is known about the pre-history of modern humans in Europe.

Fagan presents an essentially chronological account, starting with the Neanderthals who were already present in Europe when modern humans arrived, and taking a brief detour to look at the evolution of hominins in Africa. From the arrival of Cro-Magnons around 45,000 years ago until the spread of farming in Europe, about 8,000 years ago, the book traces the movements and developing cultures of these people who were the first homo sapiens to settle the continent. It has a good index and an extensive list of further reading in the Notes section.

If you live in Europe, or are of European descent, then the Cro-Magnons were almost certainly your direct ancestors. Fagan digests and presents for us the extremely complex evidence that reveals population movements and social conditions, without burdening us with details or much controversy. This evidence is mostly archaeological—the bones, human and animal, that were left behind, the stone tools, the excavations, and the paintings and carvings. But he also makes much use of climatological data, studies of modern and recent stone-age peoples, and recent genetic studies, again, sparing us the arguments and supplying only the conclusions.

Fagan works in a field that is massively interpretative. Controversies abound—especially in the assessment of purely social, spiritual, or linguistic aspects of ancient peoples. Yet this reviewer thinks it is a strength of his approach that he delivers what he feels is the most likely interpretation, given a broad, eclectic, yet conservative, summary of the data from many disciplines, merely indicating where there may still be some disagreement among experts. It allows him to present an extended and coherent narrative that makes sense of the whole story of Cro-Magnon settlement in Europe.

And the way he tells it, it was a long, hard struggle. Europe, for most of the time that Cro-Magnons carved out a place there, was a bitterly cold, hostile environment, more akin to Northern Siberia or Canada than to the temperate land we know today. Frozen tundra and barren steppes were what greeted those first immigrants. Yet the Neanderthals had survived there for nearly 200,000 years when we arrived. It is typical of Fagan’s non-controversial approach that he doesn’t indulge in lurid speculation about how modern humans drove the Neanderthals to extinction. It was a slow and gradual process that took place over many thousands of years. In Fagan’s view the Neanderthals simply continued to live their lives as they always had, only with Cro-Magnons hunting the same territories, times just grew harder, until their already-marginal existence was gradually pushed beyond the brink.

Yet, while the absence of detail such as the minutiae of debates about dating and statistical analyses allows Fagan to present the bigger picture with bold strokes, it also leaves you wondering about some of his assertions. He is, for example, very firm on what was men’s work and what was women’s work. How much of that is in the actual evidence, and how much is imported from modern anthropological studies, or even modern prejudices?  And the speculations about whether Neanderthals danced seem fanciful and based on slender evidence (which appears, from what is said, also to be consistent with the hypothesis that they wrestled).

And it isn’t as if there was no room for more detail or more discussion. The book proceeds at the painfully slow pace of a modern TV documentary, with considerable repetition and often tedious dramatizations of life in the late Ice Age. The material in the book could have been presented in perhaps a quarter of the number of pages if not for the slow, repetitious style. 

The book proceeds at a measured pace, to put it kindly, and, while clearly written, the language used is often clichéd and itself repetitive. (There were several points where I thought if I read the words “bestiary” or “tool kit” one more time, I would throw the book down and jump on it.) Which is disappointing because there are sections—like the discussion of Cro-Magnon art near the end—where Fagan writes with fascination and insight. If the whole book had been like that, it would have been such a joy to read. As it was, the book provides a clear, pain-free summary of what is known about the earliest Europeans—it just happens to be a bit slow.

It is a sign of the rate of change in this field that, even as Cro-Magnon comes to press, DNA analysis of a finger bone found in a southern Siberian cave suggests that a third hominin species may have co-existed with Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals in that region. How would the presence of another human line affect the conclusions in Cro-Magnon? Only future editions will tell.