Acceptable passions

About ten years ago the then Regional Development Agency, Yorkshire Forward, launched a scheme to promote urban renaissance. The basic premise was that if the local authority set up a body to consult locals about the future of the town then they would stand a chance of getting Yorkshire Forward funding to put at least some of the schemes which emerged into place. The lure of cash was enough to bring about the formation of what was called Scarborough's Urban Renaissance. Led by a Town Team, originally composed of a selection of the great and good but later by whoever turned up, and supported by Action Groups for things like Arts and Culture, Urban Space and Tourism, we went to work on a Masterplan for the town with our discussions led by, and then turned into pretty plans, a Dutch group of urban designers. All very cosmopolitan.

Now I knew that the original idea for urban renaissance had come from the architect Richard Rogers. His fundamental hypothesis was that improving the urban environment makes a town a more attractive place to bring not only yourself but your business and your money. He was also clear that one of the major failings of UK towns and cities, as opposed to those in more progressive parts of Europe, was the way in which we'd allowed motor cars to dominate much of our public space. In short, we needed to make our towns and cities much more attractive for walkers and cyclists.

This was clearly not on the agenda of the conventional late middle aged men who tend to lead such bodies. What they were really interested in was using the renaissance process as a way to bring forward a few major projects which were already in the pipeline. To get around this I set up another action group, this time dedicated to walking, cycling and public transport. initially this was called the Walking and Cycling Action Group but later it became the Active Transport Group.

We did manage to get a few things done. For example, with support from the local health service we produced and distributed 10,000 copies a map showing all the areas which were within 15 minutes modestly paced walk of the town centre, and I became a member of the grandly titled Renaissance Executive. This body was made up of precisely the same sort of people as were parachuted into the original Town Team and served as the executive body of the new democratic Town Team. In other words, the old power structure couldn't help but reassert itself.

Because we're a relatively small town, but with a strong sense of identity and a tradition of civic engagement, Scarborough's Renaissance began to be seen as a model for similar schemes elsewhere. So much so that a few years later Yorkshire Forward decided to show off the renaissance process with an exhibition to be held in the town and all the action groups were given a deadline to produce a power point display of their work.

As far as I know, we were the only group to produce a display on time and ours took the theme of Active Transport. It began by explaining what it was and why it was beneficial and went on to look at examples from the town of both good and bad practice and ended up with a case study illustrating the institutional barriers that we faced when trying to implement one particular project (the provision of a simple poster telling visitors and residents which bus left from which stop).

Our display was rejected on the grounds that was was wanted was "promotion not education" and they replaced it by a series of generic slides showing people walking or cycling.

I remained Chair of the Action Group but felt that I had no choice but to resign from the Executive. And here's where we get to the point of this post. A few months after my resignation I spoke to a friend who had been there when my resignation was announced. It seems that a good number of them had been pleased because it was obvious that I must have been building a power base..

I can't imagine that you haven't noticed by now that I can become quite passionate about things that I think can make a difference. The first thing I realised from this affair is that people find it difficult to believe that other people might have motives that differ from their own. The second thing was that passion about anything other than money is suspicious.

In an earlier post "When winners write the rules" I considered the way in which the cynical view that all of our behaviour is ultimately self serving and competitive has been imposed upon us by the self declared winners.

Because this is an honestly held belief it means that anyone who "pretends" that they have other motives is bound to be being deceitful and is therefore not to be trusted.

Metagenetics

Putting words in the mouth of the enthusiastic northern Fast Show character "in't life brilliant".

Once you've got a self replicating molecule that can almost always make perfect copies of itself but, importantly, once in a while makes a little mistake, a sea of ingredients for the molecule to play with and a great deal of time, out pops a sentient being that can try to make sense of how it all happened. Brilliant. Oh ..... plus you need a reliable long term source of energy.

Using four letters to write a string of 3 letter codes that instruct a cell how to function; to know what to make and when to make it; to know which cells to get on with and which to shun; to know, in short, how to build a body that can sustain itself. At least for a while....

Each of the words simply tells the machinery in the cell to add a particular amino acid to a chain. Put those particular words in a mouse and they do the same thing that they'd do in a human, a banana or a bacterium  It's a bit like having a bit of computer code that does the same thing in a Sinclair ZX81 as it would in Tianhe - 2 ; though not as fast or as often.

Each of us, and all of the various life forms that surround us, are simply solutions to the same question. Does this sequence of words produce a self sustaining organism?

Now of course, the environment that an organism finds itself in has an effect on its chances of survival.  Put most bacteria somewhere really hot, like a hydrothermal vent, and they won't stand a chance, but some will (or they might if the new temperature wasn't too far from the one they'd grown used to). 

Organisms are able to adapt to their circumstances but they can only do this by changing and they can only change if the instructions change; if every now and then they make a mistake; i.e if they mutate.

A couple of thousand million years after life first appeared on Earth a new way of bringing about change emerged. Sex. Take two closely related organisms, ones which have almost the same set of instructions and then shuffle the pack so that some instructions are inherited from one parent and some from another. You can now get change, and the possibility of adaptation to changed circumstances, without waiting for a chance mutation. Brilliant.

It also turns out that some organisms, in particular bacteria, are able to directly swap bits of code with each other, and some some bits of code, viruses, don't contain enough information to construct an entire organism but simply get themselves copied by an organism that already exists. 

What I find wonderful is that the variety of life that we see around us, including ourselves, all has a common origin and all makes use of basically the same set of instructions.  Despite ever changing conditions this process has kept the Earth fairly well populated with life for over 3000 million years but, in the process, over 99% of the species that ever existed have now become extinct.

What we know from the paleontological record is that after a big environmental change the number of species dips and that it then takes a while for new species to evolve and fill in the gaps.  The speed at which we're changing the environment means that, for a while at least, life will be less diverse than it has been for a very long time.

But at least our children's children will have all those wonderful Attenborough videos to remind them what's temporarily been lost. Most of them seem to be living life through a screen anyway.

Postscript: This post was going to be in response to the UK Environment Minister's recent comments on Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) but I really can't be bothered to say much other than beware of big business and take each case by the each. The big issue is probably land management rather than GMOs per se.

Playing on the moon

One of the more easily stated mysteries of physics is the apparent identity of an object's gravitational mass (as measured by its weight) and its inertial mass (which represents its reluctance to change its state of motion). The most obvious way in which this identity manifests itself is the way in which (if other forces such as air resistance are taken into account) all objects fall at the same rate. For moon landing sceptics one of the hardest things to fake would have been the Apollo 15 feather and hammer drop. i.e. for this to happen doubling the inertial mass of an object must give it twice the weight. 

This might also remind you of Galileo's famous experiment at the Leaning Tower of Pisa, though whether or not he actually did this is debatable and the technical difficulties of judging whether or not two different sized cannonballs actually hit the ground at the same time (let alone were dropped at precisely the same time) mean that the outcome would never have been more than indicative. i.e. consistent with the hypothesis but not actual proof. More likely it was a way of illustrating the outcome of a thought experiment. 

Suppose you make the quite reasonable assumption that heavy objects fall faster than lighter ones. After all, this is consistent with our everyday experience. Then think of a heavy object that just happens to be made of two parts connected by a string. Then suppose that one part is heavier than the other. Using our assumption its clear that the heavy part will try to fall faster than the light part and therefore pull on the connecting string. Similarly the light part will try to slow down the heavy part. The end result of all this is that combined body will fall more slowly than the heavy part on its own. But the combined body is heavier than the heavy part alone so the hypothesis that heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects can't be true after all. Our assumption has led to a contradiction. In philosophy this type of argument goes under the glorious title of "reductio ad absurdam".

Now when my boys were little we used to watch the same videos again and again. The most popular were those involving steam engines, with a particularly fine one about the railway works in Swindon, and re-runs of a childrens' programme called Playdays and published alongside the programme was a simple magazine called, you guessed it, Playdays. To my surprise one of the editions carried an item on gravity. 

Now the magazine made the usual mistake of describing astronauts in orbit as weightless (i.e. not experiencing a force from gravity). Of course, since it's gravity that's holding the astronauts in orbit, otherwise they'd just head off in a straight line into space, they're not really weightless, it just seems that way because everything else around them is moving in the same way. I could pass this over without feeling the need to comment but the bit that got me going was the following. There's a picture of an astronaut on the moon accompanied by the following caption. "There isn't any gravity on the moon, that's why the astronauts wear heavy suits to hold them down". Two incorrect facts linked by a contradiction; well done.

In a slightly enraged state I wrote to the magazine pointing out the error and expressing surprise that no-one involved in the magazine's production, from sub-editors to type setters, had noticed the absurdity of the statement. Several weeks later I got what can only be described as a snotty letter in response which basically accused me of being rude and intolerant.

There's a fine line in science between getting complex things more or less right and simplifying them to the point where they no longer make sense. I think what most disturbed me about this, albeit minor, issue was the sheer unthinkingness of it. At its heart, science is about coming up with theories about the world that are then subject to the test of reality. It involves thinking about the world in a critical way and if your ideas don't match reality then they're quite simply wrong.

A friend and I produce course materials for Further Education colleges on environmental themes. We squabble as we do this. I want to aim at the more able students, on the grounds that most people miss a lot of what's being said anyway and they'll ignore the extra bits I want to put in, he argues for simplicity. Because he's the one that sells the courses I tend to give in and what we end up with is something that's as simple as possible but still just about true.

What really annoyed me about the Playdays nonsense was the lack of respect that it showed to the little people who were its expected audience, and it still does.

So, whilst there are some ways in which I am intolerant I think that they were the ones that were rude.

Postscript: The original title of this blog was "Cultural Inertia" and it was going to include ideas such as cognitive dissonance, memes, social identity theory and the second replicator. But when I started writing it I found myself talking about physical inertia and even a brief walk with the dog didn't help me to find a coherent way back on track. I did, however, remember the Playdays man on the moon.

Facts and enthusiasm aren't enough

In 2000 I set up an educational charity with the grand title Next Generation Now. This preceded all the next generation mobile phone stuff and my business card justified the name thus. "Our challenge is to learn to live within our ecological means. We believe that global solutions begin in local action and that we need to act for the next generation now" To complete the picture the business cards were printed on what is quite obviously, and quite deliberately obviously, the back of an old corn flake packet.

The charity bumbled along for quite a few years. We held meetings with invited speakers on topics ranging from sustainable fisheries to carbon stores in upland peat. We tried to influence local politics through candidate question times and we used our charitable status to fund projects ranging from workshops to show how to mend your bike through to propaganda to encourage people to walk for short journeys. 

But over time the level of engagement began to fall off until, a few years ago, the apparent success of a number of transition town initiatives elsewhere prompted some local Greens to set up another body "Sustainable Scarborough". This too began with a flurry of enthusiasm, though I have to admit not a lot of real activity, but it was clear that it was covering much the same territory as Next Generation Now. Thinking that perhaps now the zeitgiest was with us and that the sense of being part of a wider movement, instead of just a small local organisation, would encourage more people to get involved, I decided that it would be simplest to amalgamate the groups.

Given that Next Generation Now was already a registered charity, and that it actually takes quite a lot of work to get registered, I thought that the simplest solution would be to hold a Next Generation Now AGM at which the officers roles could be taken over by the leadership of Sustainable Scarborough and they could then simply apply to the Charities Commission for a name change. This is what happened.

Now, the early days of Sustainable Scarborough also coincided with the era when the internet went local. No more budget for letters sent by mail, instead it could be assumed that everyone had access to e-mail. This meant that whenever the Chair of the Group spotted something of interest on the web he'd send us the links. For a month or so there were two or three of these a day. I think the assumption was that if only we had full possession of the facts then we'd act upon them. 

Needless to say he burnt himself out and, because there weren't any quick wins, the organisation quickly became defunct. This isn't to say that all those people who came to the early meetings of Sustainable Scarborough with its talk of action groups on this topic or the other were insincere just that they woefully underestimated what it takes to bring about radical social change and were quickly disheartened.

Before I set up Next Generation Now a friend who was then the Chair of the local Council for Voluntary Services said that the most important thing for getting things done was persistence. Having taken this advice to heart I'm slightly disappointed that I didn't stay in a position where I could keep things going. But the paradox is that the establishment of an organisation, or a project, is only really complete when you can stand back and let it get on by itself. So I allowed my relief at giving up the responsibility to overcome my better judgement about the likely outcome.

Football in space

I had a plan for this post which ran something like this. 

Astronomers look at light from distant stars and galaxies. The challenge has always been to gather as much light as they can, hence bigger and bigger telescopes, and then to make as much use of it as possible. Now, whilst your eye can pick up about one photon in ten a decent photographic plate can manage two and a modern Charge Couple Device (CCD)  picks up eight. So the CCD is now the detector of choice.

I then intended to look at one of the not so obvious consequences of the use of CCDs, the growing popularity of football. Or rather, the growing business of football. With CCDs in cameras it's possible to do close up shots of distant action in relatively low levels of light. This means that the flicks, tricks and sly little kicks that were once only visible to spectators on the touchline can now be seen by all and mulled over exhaustively by the pundits.

Now I would have gone on to say that here was a surprising example of the influence of astronomy on popular culture but it turns out, with only a little research, that I would have been wrong. When the CCD was developed the initial idea was that it would be used, eventually, in some sort of "picture-phone" and not for astronomy.  So a story that I've told numerous students in the past, to try to demonstrate that basic science can bring about unexpected changes elsewhere, turns out to be false. Ah well...

But, the thing that brought this story to mind was the third anniversary of the death of an old friend John Wilson and my coincidental discovery of a picture of his dog, Stellar.

Stellar

John told me that I was the first to guess why he'd given her this name. When an astronomer looks at a photographic plate it's usually at the negative. So the stars appear as black patches on a white background. Hence the name.

Among John's many interests, he was a devout Manchester City fan and, as the owner of Oxford's premier cycle shop, was also a keen cyclist (why is it that cyclists are always "keen"?). Both of these sports have had huge injections of cash, at least at the top, through revenue from television and the main reason for this was the development of the CCD.

That he never got to see Manchester City win the English Premier League, or Bradley Wiggins win the Tour de France, are just two of the many opportunities that were lost when his life was cut short. 

In memoriam

When winners write the rules

If you disturb an eco-system then it will adapt to the changed circumstances. Some species will move elsewhere others will become extinct and after a while a new equilibrium will establish itself. The two things that are unusual about the current anthropogenic changes are that they're happening extremely rapidly, over centuries rather than millenia, and that the dominant species involved in these changes is broadly aware of what it's doing. 

Now, whilst there's lots of interesting environmental and ecological science out there, I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that the real thing we need to understand is why, despite knowing about our dramatic environmental impact, we seem incapable of doing anything serious about it. Instead of geo-physics and ecology we're getting into psychology, sociology, politics and anthropology.

A few days ago I was asked to sign an online petition calling on David Cameron to "Wake up" to Climate Change. I couldn't help responding 

"Unfortunately he's not asleep. He knows damn well that the City is banking on us not taking significant action and money always comes first
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/apr/19/carbon-bubble-financial-crash-crisis"

As a once upon a time physicist, I can't help trying to boil things down to a few basic principles. One of the simplest of these is that as long as we view ourselves as inevitably competitive then there is no way of avoiding the tragedy of the commons. Suppose, on the one hand, that in a competitive world you've spent $25million on a trawler with an expected lifetime of 20 years. The only way you're going to get your money back is by catching fish. If, after 20 years, there aren't any fish left then so what. You've recovered your investment, made a profit, and can simply invest it in something else. On the other, if you're in a fishing community that depends on the long term survival of fish stocks then this is clearly not the best way to make use of your resources, financial or otherwise.

I couldn't possibly deny that there are lots of competitive people. (Though a great deal of effort has gone into developing a credible theory of group selection that can account for our altruistic tendencies.) It's also clear that once you've entered into competition that there will be losers as well as winners. Indeed, so ingrained is our sense that being competitive is the natural human condition that the term "loser" has acquired its pejorative force. 

Now, one of the tacitly assumed "rules" of competition is that it ought to be fair. However, in the great "game of life", to maintain the metaphor, its quite obvious that the rules aren't at all fair. There's no way that the poor female child of an unemployed single parent in a developing country has anything like the same chances of "succeeding" as the wealthy public school educated son of a stockbroker. (See how I've employed the physicists trick of taking an extremely extreme example to prove a general point) When Tony Blair made the absurdly premature declaration that we live in a meritocracy it struck me that the main purpose of this was to boost his own ego. After all, he'd clearly succeeded and would prefer to regard this as positive reflection of his own intrinsic worth rather than just good luck.

Politics and business are competitive activities. Caring for children, the sick, the elderly or the environment aren't. Just because our politicians, bankers and businessmen tend, by the nature of what they do, to be competitive this doesn't mean that this is the most important human attribute or the one that will see us safely through the next 100 years.

Like the annoying child who shouts out "race you to the next lamp post" when they're the only one that wants to race and they're already half way there, we've allowed the "winners" to declare that we're in a race. 

Postscript: A couple of recent programmes on the BBC have reminded me of the truly great (i.e no hyperbole) Richard Feynmann. As far as I can see, he did what he did not because he was in competition with anyone else but simply because he was curious. 

Circling the circle again

In "Circle to Circle" I described a simple mountain bike ride around Scarborough. Last week I found myself going around the route again but this time not on a dedicated mountain bike but on a slick tyred hybrid, albeit one with good brakes, and found that it was all perfectly do-able even the steep descent down the Holbeck Hotel landslip into South Bay.

I also took with me an old Kodak digital camera that I found in a drawer and, despite getting hopelessly confused about the settings, took at least one decent photograph.

Quite why The Mere is so quiet I'll never know

I also took a rather better picture than last time of what would have been the day trippers' first view of Scarborough as they emerged onto Londesborough Road from the old Excursion Station.

This house has yet to be divided into flats

Up in Scotland they get a Haar (a fog that's pulled off the cold sea by warm air rising inland) We call ours a Fret and it sometimes means that a bright warm day a couple of miles inland is a chilly damp one at the coast. 

The Fret has almost completely lifted from South Bay

To be honest, I didn't make it all the way around because I found myself chatting to Steve Crawford, the most visible member of the town's surfing community, about proposals to put rock armour in front of the sea wall at the Spa, and I still had to get to the shops to buy something in for tea. 

It's a life....

Sudoku

I haven't written many posts lately; though this doesn't mean that the ideas aren't slowly stacking up just that as the days approach their longest I can't bear to be stuck indoors. However, one of the many pieces of paper on what passes for my desk has a list of connected titles that I will get around to writing up before too long.

As a preamble to these here's a little confessional. I've acquired a mild Sudoku habit. Every day, after my morning tea, a cup of coffee and a quick glance at the rest of the paper (the Guardian for those who find guessing difficult) I do the Sudoku. It doesn't take very long, usually about 10 to 15 minutes and I'm more inclined to make mistakes with the easy or moderate ones than with hard ones. I suspect that this is because they don't involve quite as much cross checking.

When the game first became popular I refused to get involved in actually doing the puzzles. Instead I tried to go straight to Meta-Sudoku and think about things like the number of possible solutions and the different strategies that might be employed to solve them. I was particularly disdainful of Carol Vorderman's reported approach which was to pencil in into each square all the numbers that it could possibly be and then as these were eliminated rub them out to be left with the final solution. A fine approach for a machine to adopt, but a bit clumsy for a real alive analogue person.

The one problem that still eluded me, however, was coming up with an answer to the simply stated problem of how many possible distinct 9 x 9 puzzles can.there be. One approach to this was to think about simpler versions. Even our dog could solve the one by one puzzle since it's just a single square with the number 1 in it. On a flight from London to Tangier I figured out how many possible solutions there were to the 4 x 4 version (which just uses the numbers 1 to 4), though I have to admit I've forgotten the answer and can't be bothered to recreate the reasoning. Several times I've thought that I've figured an approach to the 9 x 9 version that would help but I've always run up against intractable problems. As for the hexadecimal version (with a 16 by 16 square and the symbols A, B, C, D, E, F and G in addition to the numerals 1 to 9) I'll leave that until I've sorted the 9 x 9.

Meanwhile, I started doing the actual puzzles and am now hooked. However, what this pursuit has in common with most of the other things that I do is that, whilst there is an element of personal challenge, it isn't something that I do in competition with anyone else. I might, for example, be thought to be the sort of person that would play chess but I don't. Not long after starting a game my attention wanders and I do something silly. I'm just not happy being in direct competition with someone else. Whether it's because I've no desire to win or am so afraid of losing that I avoid it by not really taking part, I just don't know and can't work out how to decide.

Whether this absence of a competitive streak, or reluctance to get drawn into competition, means that I've done less with my life than might have been the case then I can only say that yes it might. However, having declared this personal foible, I can't help but think that the metaphor of life as a competition has gone to far and that as long as our political class is dominated by the competitive, which for structural reasons is likely to be the case, then we're unlikely to come up with sensible solutions to the problem of maintaining civilized lives on a planet with finite resources.

To be continued....