To Mr Romney . . .

From Twitter:

@BigBigBen: Mitt, I just don't think you were fully prepared. Yours, London 2012

(Not that I'm supporting the 'Nolympics', you understand!)

Small note:  With thanks to one of my Facebook friends who probably prefers not to be named.

Sunday Selection 8

Continuing a new series where there is little additional content from me, but I simply share a few items, new and old, that have pleased me this week.  As almost every week, I see items on the web that I find interesting, amazing or  or amusing.  This disjointed ramble might be on any of my normal topics - or on other topics entirely.  My thanks go to the friends who helped me to find them.

First: An interview with Bertrand Russell.  It is not very long but it is his message to the people of the future.

Podcast of the week: Skeptics with a K, episode 78.  You might love or hate the style of this podcast, but I'm a keen listener.  The three presenters from the Merseyside Skeptics Society have a certain laddish charm and they have a knack for finding interesting topics.  Sometimes they start into a story that appears somewhat tangential (as in the surprisingly disgusting one about clearing out a cupboard in this episode), but don't give up too early!  They always conclude with an interesting learning point.  In this episode they also celebrate the legal difficulties that are being experienced by homeopaths in UK this year, and I was glad to hear that 2 of the 3 presenters were also not great fans of the Olympics.

Quote of the week: 
“When Muslim parents hate their host culture so much that they will kill a child who seems to embrace it, then they are guilty of intolerance – the kind that non-Muslims are wary of showing, lest they be branded racist, or bigoted.” 
Wow! Something sensible from Cristina Odone, in the Telegraph

Tweet of the week:
If the Bible was a good morality guide, we'd not need the Declaration of Human Rights. Humanity: Higher morals than God since 1948. #Atheism from @CrispySea

Atheist news of the week:  How Christopher Hitchens fell out with Gore Vidal

Exciting science of the week: The landing of Curiosity, the new rover on Mars was much more exciting than anything that the Olympics had to offer.  Amazingly, this picture was snapped by another satellite that was orbiting Mars.

Curiosity snapped on its chute, descending to Mars.

See the pictures that it is collecting every day at this link.  I'm sure that there is a lot of good stuff to come from this amazing project!

And finally . . .

Favourite places: Mars (Is this cheating?) 

This image, from here, shows how Curiosity landed there this week.

Curiosity's surprising landing on Mars (from here).

Home of the Olympic

Something Surprising is not quite an Olympic-free zone, but the Olympic that I like to talk about is the ship, not the games.  These photos were taken this week in the city which normally claims to be the birth place of the famous ship Titanic and her sisters.

It is obvious why they choose Titanic in their claims, and yet neglect the names of its two, more successful, sister ships Olympic and Britannic, but I feel that it is a shame in many ways.  Britannic was lost in the First World War, (as I mentioned in a post 'Ironic - and her sister ships' a few months ago) but Olympic was a great success for the White Star Line.

But, as they like to say in Belfast, "there was nothing wrong with Titanic when she left here". 

So here is the huge dry dock, The Thompson Graving Dock, that was built in Belfast for the Olympic Class liners.  Construction was completed in 1911, just in time after great difficulty due to the soft ground.  The ships fitted rather snugly into this space, being just 5 feet shorter than the available length!

Titanic (and Olympic)'s dry dock.

See the size of the people near the far end of the floor of the dock - they give a real impression of the scale of this surprising engineering monument.

The view from the floor of Titanic's dry dock.

It is an impressive site, newly opened to the public this year.  Even more impressive is the claim that the pumps (originally steam powered) could empty this huge volume in just 100 minutes (albeit with the ships in place to displace most of the water, but still impressive).

Titanic's dock - two of the three pumps to empty the dock.

I've been visiting Belfast for 30 years an often wondered exactly where Titanic was built.  At last that area of the city is being opened again.

Do go to see it if you can (even though their web site is singularly unhelpful and contains pages where the text has never been added)!

38 degrees to start an avalanche

Did you now that 38 degrees is said to be the critical angle at which a bank of snow can become an avalanche?

38 Degrees - help start an avalanche!

38 Degrees is also the name of a campaigning organisation with over 1 million members, working across party-political divides for just causes. As they say in their FAQ page:

Is 38 Degrees connected to a political party?
Definitely not. We are not connected with any political parties, and are funded by donations from members. Our independence means that we can campaign on issues that we feel passionately about and that we decide on together. We are driven by issues and outcomes, and judge all politicians by the same standards.

I like that!

I'm one of the million members and I regularly take part in their campaigns and make donations towards their costs.  I look at it as being worth so much more than putting a donation into the collection plate at church every Sunday!  (I haven't been doing that for several years now - and even when I did do it I tended to think that it was going to the wrong causes!)

Donations come from all over the UK to support their work.  Do they make a real difference?  It is hard to measure success, but I would like to think that they punch above their weight in UK.

Nolympic tax dodges!

One of their successful recent campaigns was against the tax dodging options open to the companies who sponsor the Olympic Games.  The UK public have already paid much too much to fund this financial 'black hole'.  Our campaign has shamed the CEOs of most of those companies into a positively ethical position.

If you are in UK, why not sign up for their e-mails, and have YOUR say!

St Swithun's sign for the 'Nolympics'

We have had an unusually wet summer in England - so far.  Yes - even for England it has been wet, ever since the fateful day when the local authorities and water companies announced that we needed to have a hose-pipe ban -  or for American readers, that's a hose ban.

Since April, we have had the wettest drought on record.  Now as the Olympic games approaches, people around me have actually started hoping that yesterday's weather might be a good sign.  Yes really!

The reason is that yesterday was St Swithun's Day.  There is an tradition in olde-England that if it rains on St Swithun's Day it will rain for 40 days, and if not, then the weather will be much drier. 

I can't speak for the rest of the country, but here in my part of rural Oxfordshire it did not rain.  That is not to say that we had clear skies.  We saw the sun sometimes, but at a few times throughput the day it looked very much as though it was going to pour with rain.

As for me - I don't mind whether it rains through the Olympics or not.  I'm so disgusted at the amount of money squandered on them that I am past caring now.

Rumour has it, that for the amount spent by the UK government on the Olympics, they could have afforded to send everyone in the country to the Bahamas for a two-week holiday. I'm quite sure which option I would have preferred, but nobody asked me for my opinion.

Looking on the bright side:

• It is the rain that makes England green - I'm happy with that.
• The cultural benefits of the Olympics are apparently worth the cost.  Yeah - right!

Of course there is a technical term for this old wives tale, as has been shown by the observation that it rained for much of the day today.

Bo***cks!

The incomprehensible Higgs!

For the last week, friends have been asking me about the seemingly incomprehensible Higgs revelation and what it means.  I've tried to admit to them that I really don't know enough to contemplate understanding the issues involved.  I have asked colleagues at work who are much better physicists than I ever aspire to be.  "What do you make of all this Higgs business?"  Most of them are in the same state as me, and feeling equally guilty about it.  Most agree that the scientists at CERN have been unusually unsuccessful at explaining why so much money has been spent on their project.

As it happens, I don't think £10 billion is a lot of money (on the grand scheme of things, compared with banks, oil rigs and the 'Nolymics') and I don't think it has been spent unwisely either.  So - I'll have a go at explaining the topic of the Higgs with my usual kitchen analogies.  They work very well when trying to explain fusion to non-technical people.  Wish me luck!  Its not that I'm superstitious, you understand!  It is just outside my normal area of experience to try to explain this topic.  Depending on how this goes, I might update it to incorporate other helpful analogies and metaphors that you, my dear readers, might provide.

Initially I'm going to cheat and plagiarise a little.  (Perhaps I should say 'quote' rather than 'plagiarise'?)  In 1993, the UK Science Minister, William Waldegrave, issued a challenge to physicists to answer the question 'What is the Higgs boson, and why do we want to find it?' on one side of a single sheet of paper. The winning entry starts like this . . .

"Imagine a cocktail party of political party workers who are uniformly distributed across the floor, all talking to their nearest neighbours. The ex-Prime Minister enters and crosses the room. All of the workers in her neighbourhood are strongly attracted to her and cluster round her. As she moves she attracts the people she comes close to, while the ones she has left return to their even spacing. Because of the knot of people always clustered around her she acquires a greater mass than normal, that is she has more momentum for the same speed of movement across the room. Once moving she is hard to stop, and once stopped she is harder to get moving again because the clustering process has to be restarted."

I think I need to take one step back.  What is mass?  Non-scientists find this difficult.  In terms of kitchen physics, mass is weight.**  In the analogy above, you can see that Mrs Thatcher effectively gains weight from the cluster of people around her.  Being 'heavier' it is harder to get her moving again if she stops, just as a wheel barrow full of gravel is harder to move than an empty barrow.  (Sorry for moving from the kitchen to the garden!)

Those clustering people do not represent the Higgs boson - the so-called 'God particle'.  We'll come to that later.  They represent something called the 'Higgs field'.  Now I need to explain what a field is.  In kitchen terms I can do that by asking what happens when you drop something.  It falls to the floor because of the Earth's gravitational field.  It is something intangible but undeniable.  Stop believing in this field at your peril.  Without the gravitational field that attracts you to the Earth you would float off into space.  If you ignore it you'll be surprised when you fall and hurt yourself.  The force of gravity comes from the interaction of mass with the gravitational field.  (Sorry - I have to use the word mass here instead of weight, but if you don't know the difference please ignore that.)

Since this is a difficult concept and I promised kitchen physics, cast your mind to fridge magnets.  Magnetism is the result of another field.  Magnets attract or repel each other because of a magnetic field.  No particles are involved.  The North pole of a magnet attracts South poles (and fridges) but repels other North poles.  We have all played with magnets and been amazed by the powerful effects of a magnetic field.  So without realising it, we intuitively know what a field feels like.

A few decades ago, Peter Higgs and a few others realised that mass (or 'weight') could actually be explained if there was another kind of field in the universe.  This field has been called the 'Higgs Field'.  Nobody knew whether it existed or not.  It was just a really good explanation of the observable facts.  The big question was whether it could be shown to exist.

The way that this can be demonstrated is by looking for a particle that is associated with the Higgs field.

Tomorrow - Why is the 'God particle' relevant to me?  I'll try to explain where the Higgs particle comes into the picture.

Meanwhile perhaps someone can tell me what this has to do with God?  The biggest mystery to me is the source and rationale for the ridiculous name "The God Particle".


**Actually, strictly speaking, what we think of as a weight of 1kg is really the force that the earth's gravitational field exerts on a mass of 1kg.  But that's just scientific pedantry to show to other semi-scientists like me that I know!

Build the Enterprise

Frustrated by the lack of manned space exploration during my adult life, I was delighted to come across a web site called "Build the Enterprise".

Someone called "Dan" has spent a huge amount of time on this, producing not only a visually pleasing web site, but a pretty well-reasoned business and engineering analysis of what it would take to put a craft resembling Star Trek's USS Enterprise into operation.

As he says:

Personally, I have found working as an engineer to be very rewarding. The work is interesting, the pay is good, your co-workers are bright and enthusiastic, and the unemployment rate in engineering typically runs under 3% – far below the national average for all workers. For these reasons I hope that some young people find a bit of inspiration in this website, and that this might even help motivate some to study engineering in college.

and in spite of the frustrations of working life and having to deal with unenthusiastic and over-bureaucratic managers, in general I would agree with him.

Just build the Enterprise!  (Credit unknown)

OK - they haven't quite perfected all the details of warp drive yet, but I think they can be forgiven for that.

They claim that this whole project could be completed in just 20 years, at the very reasonable price of US$1 trillion.  At the end of that time the ship would be able to carry a crew of 1000 people on voyages around the solar system.

To quote from the page about the mass and cost of the ship:


For researching, developing, constructing, testing, and supplying the USS Enterprise, along with putting in place the infrastructure on earth and in space needed to support the Enterprise, the cost goal for the Gen1 Enterprise is this: it will cost no more than $1 trillion spent over twenty years.

The Enterprise will be built entirely in space. Thus each component must be launched from earth. This is expensive, and around 35% of the Gen1 Enterprise program budget will be to pay for heavy lifter launch costs (when including both non-recurring costs and recurring costs). These launches will transport not only the Enterprise components into space but also test hardware, Enterprise supplies, and various items needed for space infrastructure.

At the bottom of this webpage is a table showing the detailed cost goals for all components, supplies, infrastructure, and heavy lifter launches for deploying the Gen1 Enterprise. Also included are detailed mass goals for everything making up the operational Enterprise spaceship. But before going into these details, first the overall mass of the ship and its most basic systems needs more discussion.
For the overall wet mass of the Gen1 spaceship Enterprise, a goal is needed. For setting this goal, it’s desirable to be able to tie the goal to some reference point, to something concrete and easy to keep in mind. So we will set the goal as this: Its wet mass (meaning that when the propellant tanks are fully filled) will be no more than the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise back here on earth which weighs 187 million pounds (84,822 metric tons).

The 187 million pound goal may seem arbitrary, but this is not really so. Early roll-ups for estimating the Gen1 Enterprise’s mass were coming in around 200 million pounds. The amount of propellant needed was nearly 100 million pounds of this. As a goal it is very desirable to reduce the amount of propellant needed as a percentage of total ship wet mass because this saves cost and ship mass. Also, reducing propellant as a percentage of the total ship mass frees up room in the mass budget for other ship components. This desire to reduce propellant as a percentage of the ship’s mass creates a program goal for engines to use propellant more efficiently meaning that each engine should have a much higher high specific impulse than typical ion propulsion engines today. So after removing some propellant from a 200 million pound ship mass, 187 million pounds seems like a reasonable goal.

To gain some perspective on a mass of 187 million pounds, consider that a Saturn 5 rocket had a wet mass before launch of 6.6 million pounds. Thus the Gen1 Enterprise will have a wet mass equivalent to 28 Saturn 5 rockets. This is quite large, but it’s also comprehendible [sic]. The Enterprise is a big ship, and if its mass is the same as 28 Saturn 5 rockets, that seems about right.

Good luck to the Enterprise.  Can I book a ticket please? Wouldn't a project like this be just the sort of thing that could encourage an upsurge in the economy and make humanity believe in itself again?

I for one would trade in the Olympic games for the next 20 years as a contribution towards it!

Olympic strikes

Was there Olympic hysteria in 1912? No no!  I'm not talking about the Olympic games!  I'm talking about RMS Olympic, the older sister of the Titanic.

Just imagine the situation 100 years ago.  The whole world was still reeling in shock after the loss of the 'unsinkable' Titanic, and White Star Line had made no secret of the fact that Titanic was the second of its Olympic Class liners.  There is no way that anyone boarding Olympic would have done so without a measure of concern for their own safety.

Olympic and Titanic - sister ships

White Star Line was obviously aware of this too.  When Olympic arrived back in England they hurriedly arranged for an additional 40 lifeboats to be provided in case of another disaster.  Good for them!  Except this did not actually satisfy everyone.

Strike reported in New York Times, 25th April 1912

The reason for the dis-satisfaction was that these additional lifeboats were not brand-new seaworthy craft like those that were already in place.  In reality it would not have been possible to procure so many, let alone immediately to fit the ship out to launch them swiftly.  In fact these new lifeboats were hurriedly purchased, second-hand, collapsible, and in some cases rotten and nonfunctional.  The men who worked in the engine rooms of the ship were not convinced that they added sufficiently to their safety and the sent a delegation to the owners.

On 25 April a deputation of strikers witnessed a test of four of the collapsible boats. Only one was unseaworthy and they said that they were prepared to recommend the men to return to work if it was replaced.  However, 54 of them were arrested when they left the ship, and charged with mutiny!  The court found them guilty but imposed no punishment and most of them returned to work in time for the ship to sail on 15th May.

Less than 5 months later, the ship was withdrawn from service for a refit, which included fitting 64 'proper' lifeboats and improving the double hull.  When she re-entered service with a gross tonnage of 46,359 tons, she was again the largest ocean liner in the world - at least for a few months!

At least in 1912, Olympic hysteria achieved something useful!  It won't be the same in 2012.

Nolympic hysteria and fusion funding

Am I allowed to use the word "Olympic"?

It would seem that the organisers of the £11 billion sporting extravaganza would like to reserve the word for their own use and prevent anyone else from using it or the well known five circled symbol.  And as was mentioned on the BBC's surprisingly satirical TV show, 'Have I got News for You', someone had described the Olympic Games as "the 11 billion, tax funded advertising campaign for some of the world's worst companies".  (I don't know which companies they meant though!  Perhaps I will find out when all the advertising starts in earnest!)

Naturally there must have been businesses in London which already used the Olympic theme in their names, and I have no idea how they have been treated.  The whole event was billed as an opportunity to improve the economic climate for business.  It was going to bring prosperity to an area that has been run down for decades.  So, just imagine the pettiness of a legal challenge to a small cafe called Cafe Olympic.  Fortunately the owner managed an inexpensive solution to the problem by painting out the O.

Cafe Lympic's new improved look
(61 West Ham Lane, Stratford
London, E15 4PH)

It is now only three months to the beginning of the the Olympic farce, but more importantly it is only four months until it is all over.

I for one will have to adopt an avoidance strategy.  I'm not interested in the competition and to be honest I think it is an outrageous waste of a lot of money.  The £11 billion is just the cost to UK to build the facilities.  How much more has it cost to train the athletes around the world?  We shouldn't just include the successful competitors.  For every one of them there must be 50 who failed.  Then the costs of transport to London are hardly likely to be trivial.  The real costs of the whole event are massively higher than anyone ever mentions.  Estimates of £25 billion are not hard to find.  Isn't it interesting to compare this with the original estimate of £2.37 billion.

Illegal use of the Olympic symbol.
At least someone in Beijing had a sense of humour!

I'm not saying that sporting events do not have any social value.  Even I can recognise that many people enjoy partaking in sport, and an even greater number enjoy being inactive armchair experts.  But I do object to the fact that for a few weeks the whole world will appear to revolve around an event that will bore me silly.  Even more than that I feel strongly about another thing.

Is it worth the cost?  Most people will say that it obviously is, and they will point out the benefits to society and global international relations.  Think of all the jobs created in arranging for the games and think of the legacy in an area of London that needed to be improved.  (Notice one thing that is not included in the legacy - new technology!)

But . . .

Think of another project that costs the same amount of money.  The ITER fusion reactor that is being built by international cooperation (in possibly the most inefficient way conceivable!) will cost about £11 billion, give or take say 30%.  Just as many jobs will be created, but these are jobs that will teach scientists and engineers things that will actually be useful for the world.  Think of the legacy that a working fusion reactor would represent - clean and reliable carbon-free energy, virtually for ever!  The value of ITER is so much greater to humanity than the value of the Olympics, and yet there is only one of it, and it has taken decades to get the project off the ground because of . . . the cost!  Not because of lack of technology!

Yet somehow ITER is referred to as a 'black hole' and the Olympics is not.

Where is the logic in that?

Small note: I don't suppose there is any point in proposing that the next three Olympic events are postponed, and the money spent building machines to compete with ITER in order to get the most efficient possible power source for the future.  You could probably build two devices for the cost of each Olympics if you did it efficiently.  Competition, after all, brings out the best in the market.  We are always being told that by those conservatives who object so strongly to spending money, unless they spend it on a sporting event.