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Showing posts from September, 2022

The Capture (Series 1) - BBC iPlayer

Though hugely flawed in some ways, The Capture proved to be one of the most gripping TV shows I’ve watched in a while, thanks to the regular invocation of clever twists that make the viewer think ‘How is that possible?’ The focus throughout is video surveillance - specifically how, and if, it can be misleading or tampered with to make something that didn’t really happen appear to be the case. I’m specifically reviewing the first series - I haven’t started the second yet, but will give it its own review. The focus initially is a soldier accused of killing someone without the need to do so in Afghanistan. (This was why I didn’t watch the series when it first came out as I tend to avoid military topics.) But although the soldier in question becomes a major character throughout, it isn’t really his story. It was clever and did more than entertain, really giving the viewer an opportunity to think about the underlying moral dilemma (the details will have to wait until after the spoiler aler...

The mnemonic trap

As an author, it's not uncommon to get emails or letters correcting something in one of my books. Sometimes these corrections are useful, at other times, the correspondent misses the point. But I recently had one from Ronja Denzler that was not only correct, but also highlighted something really interesting about mnemonics. These phrases to remember something can be genuinely handy - most of us can still recall those for rainbow colours or planets (often still incorporating Pluto) from school, while I distinctly remember a woman called Ivy Watts from my physics class. But the most elegant are the numerical mnemonics, where the numbers of letters in each word represents a digit. This form reaches its zenith in the mnemonics for pi - so much so that the art of producing these has its own, distinctly tortured, name of 'piphology'. When I wrote Introducing Infinity - a graphic guide  in collaboration with the excellent illustrator Oliver Pugh, I asked if he could use a fuller v...

Don't knock our queues

Photo courtesy of Eva Amsen I was somewhat bemused by a thought piece by James O'Malley suggesting that we've got it all wrong with our pride in Britain's ability to put on a good queue, as exemplified by the queue for the late Queen's lying in state. O'Malley tells us 'It’s also a completely bonkers, wrong-headed way to think about Britain. When we see a queue, we should feel embarrassed.' The reason for this, he suggests, is that a queue means that we aren't being dealt with efficiently - our precious time is being wasted. He goes on to say 'when we see a queue we should want to celebrate it - we should want to eliminate it.' As someone who worked in Operational Research, and who has done quite a lot of work with queuing theory, I would respectfully suggest that he is wrong. Not in the suggestion that we should want to minimise queuing - of course no one wants to waste their time. But outside of a fantasy world we have to consider the reality ...

When will the Green Party go green on energy?

I despair of the Green Party here in the UK. They are still pumping out the same old knee-jerk reaction of the ex-hippies to nuclear power. It's as if they didn't realise how important climate change was. It's not just one item in a green buffet of options. It's the big one.  We need massive change to deal with the climate emergency - and that includes moving to a mix of energy generation that doesn't produce greenhouse gasses. Yes, there must be plenty of wind and solar (and ideally wave/tide too) - but we also need generation that doesn't depend on the weather and sun - for which nuclear is the obvious option. Caroline Lucas of the Green Party put out this tweet on 1 September 2022, and I don't know where to start. Of course, a new nuclear plant is not 'the solution to the cost of living crisis' (though nuclear energy is a lot cheaper than the current price of gas). It's part of the long-term solution we desperately need to put in place to comp...

The Gap in the Curtain - John Buchan ***

John Buchan is best known for his thriller The 39 Steps , filmed melodramatically by Alfred Hitchcock in 1935. The Gap in the Curtain is another period piece, first published in 1932, but it is anything but a conventional thriller. It's sometimes presented as science fiction, but it would more reasonably be described as fantasy: although the events it covers are supposedly triggered by the work of a scientist, the mechanism is pure fantasy. We begin at a country house party, where a random selection of toffs are encouraged to take part in an experiment by the mysterious Professor Moe. By obsessing over a particular section of the Times newspaper for a while (plus the administration of a mystery drug), seven participants are set up to have a second's glance at a small section of the newspaper from one year in the future. In practice, two of the experimental subjects, including the narrator, don't undertake the final part, so five people are given a brief glimpse of the futu...

Americast vs The News Agents

Interesting things are afoot in the world of UK news podcasts. The former presenters of the BBC's best podcast, Americast, have shifted to rival Global and have gone from a weekly-ish podcast to weekdaily one as The News Agents. Meanwhile, the BBC has just broadcast the first of a rebooted Americast. And the good news is, both are excellent. Let's start with Americast. There was a real danger that when the original leads Emily Maitlis and Jon Sopel left that we would end up with a pale imitation, as happened when the Top Gear team departed. (Admittedly that was under more dubious circumstances - I don't think either Maitlis or Sopel punched anyone.) However, rather than replace the originals with amateurs, the BBC has been clever here. They've kept the solid, American third leg of the programme, Anthony Zurcher, and replaced the duo with a pair of BBC big hitters, Justin Webb and Sarah Smith.  Going on the first episode (which was confusingly launched on the Newscast po...

The strange case of the French bottom of erotic principle

Way back in the early 90s, I attended a lecture by the Austrian-born computing pioneer Hermann Hauser, one of the pair behind Acorn computers, the maker of the BBC micro. In his talk, Hauser was describing the difficulty of computers understanding a language like English, illustrating this with a pair of phrases:      Time flies like an arrow      Fruit flies like an apple Hauser pointed our the difficulties of machine translation, as long as computers had no understanding of the underlying language and context. For a computer, it would be natural to interpret those phrases the same way. As it happens, machine translation has moved on by taking a totally different direction - it still doesn't understand language, but by using vast amounts of data, it has become quite strong on context. A few years after this lecture, I received an email which brought Hauser's point back to me. At the time, machine translation was in its infancy. The email was distinctly int...