St. Michael’s Mount
I’ve been thinking of Cornwall this morning. I must need a holiday. Fortunately I will be on holiday after today.
The opinions of experts in science and other subjects
Throughout my life, I have noticed many people who dismiss innovation, and scientists are no exception. Here are a few I have found by experts in a variety of fields, to convince you not to be disheartened if your ideas and innovations are dismissed by others. Remember, each of these people was an expert in the field they were pronouncing upon.
“Everything that can be invented, has been invented” - Charles Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899.
“England has plenty of small boys to run messages” - William Preece, Chief Engineer British Post Office, on Bell’s invention of the telephone, 1878.
“A completely idiotic idea” - William Preece, Chief Engineer British Post Office, on Edison’s experiments into incandescent filaments (the lightbulb).
“Such startling announcements as these should be deprecated as being unworthy of science and mischievous to its true progress” - Sir William Siemens, on Edison’s light bulb
“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home” - Ken Olson, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation.
“We will never make a 32 bit operating system” - Bill Gates.
“Radio has no future” - Lord Kelvin, president of the Royal Society, 1897.
“There is practically no chance communications space satellites will be used to provide better telephone, telegraph, television, or radio service inside the United States” - T. Craven, FCC Commissioner, 1961.
“Space travel is utter bilge” - Richard Woolley, Astronomer Royal, 1956.
“Space travel is bunk” - Sir Harold Spencer Jones, former Astronomer Royal, 1957.
“Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible” - Lord Kelvin, 1895.
“The energy produced by the breaking down of the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine.”- Ernest Rutherford.
“There is no likelihood that man can ever tap the power of the atom. The glib supposition of utilizing atomic energy when our coal has run out is a completely unscientific Utopian dream, a childish bug-a-boo.” - Robert Millikan, Nobel Laureate, 1928.
“X-rays will prove to be a hoax” - Lord Kelvin, 1883.
“They will never try to steal the phonograph because it has no commercial value” - Thomas Edison, 1880s.
“Fooling around with alternating current is just a waste of time. Nobody will use it, ever.”- Thomas Edison.
“Rail travel at high speed is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia” - Dionysys Larder, professor of natural philosophy, University College London.
“The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote…. Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.” - Albert Michelson, 1894
“There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now; All that remains is more and more precise measurement” - Lord Kelvin
“It will be years - not in my time - before a woman will become Prime Minister” - Margaret Thatcher, first woman Prime Minister.
“Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote” - Grover Cleveland, US President, 1905.
“Man will not fly for 50 years” - Wilbur Wright, 1901.
“There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.” - Albert Einstein.
“Who the hell wants to hear actors talk? - H.M. Warner, Warner Brothers
On the other side…
“If I had thought about it, I wouldn’t have done the experiment. The literature was full of examples that said you couldn’t do this.” - Spencer Silver, inventor of the ‘Post-It’ adhesive.
The nature of fact
The other day at work during an afternoon coffee break, the conversation moved round to the question of how many people you could fit onto the Isle of Wight. There was much heated opinion, with opponents maintaining firmly on one side that you could easily fit the entire population of the world onto that small-but-perfectly-formed island off the South Coast, whilst others just as stridently claiming that you couldn’t; there was no consensus. The topic then shifted onto how many people had ever lived: the oft-quoted statement was made that half the people who had ever lived were alive today, and supported by most people in the room. I wasn’t sure about this, having heard somewhere before that the dead outnumber the living by six to one. I decided to find out something about both of these asserted ‘facts’.
Like any proper scientist should, I did my own calculations about the Isle of Wight. First, an assumption: when trying to fit onto the Isle of Wight, people can’t just stand on each other’s shoulders or anything like that; after all, if you could stand on the shoulders of someone below you, could fit the entire world’s population onto an area the size of a paving stone. That would be a pointless calculation: so there’s only one layer of people. But how much surface area does one person need? I assumed something like 50cm x 30cm: some people are smaller, some bigger, but it’s probably about right (use a tape-measure on yourself to try it out!). Next, what is the surface area of the Isle of Wight? Obviously, I got the information from Wikipedia (answer: 380 sq.km) like I did for the world’s population (6.6 billion). It’s then trivial to work out that you can fit about 2.5 billion people onto the island. We could assume everyone is thin (unlikely these days with our obesity epidemic), and say they need 40cm x 20cm instead. Nope, still not enough space on the island though: only 4.75 billion can fit if you assume they’re this smaller size.
So it isn’t true that the world’s population can fit onto the Isle of Wight. However, you could have fitted everyone who was alive in 1950: the population was only 2.5 billion back then - maybe that’s when this statement was originally made…. But, you can now still easily fit the population of the UK into the 380 sq.km on this island; but I don’t think they could all get onto the pier at Ryde.
What about the next statement, that half of all the people who have ever lived are alive today? Unfortunately, this is also not true: according to an article by the Population Research Bureau, it’s a hard estimate to make (I was a bit lazy so I didn’t do that one myself!), but the total number who have ever lived is way over 25 billion, maybe much more (the PRB suggest 120 billion, which is a lot of people - but see below). So, maybe interestingly, the dead do greatly outnumber the living.
The above two examples are maybe not that interesting in themselves, but they illustrate something often seen, both today and presumably much in the past: that there are plenty of commonly-believed things that just aren’t true. Arguing about people fitting onto the Isle of Wight or how many people have ever lived sounds inconsequential in itself, but there are plenty of so-called facts that have important repercussions in the way people go about their lives.
An important example of damaging misunderstanding is a statement I often hear whenever religion is talked about - particularly about Christianity, and I guess more and more it’s said in when Islam is mentioned. I have lost count of the number of people who, almost as a knee-jerk reaction to hearing the word ‘religion’, state baldly that ‘wars about religion have killed more people than anything else’, or words to that effect. Now, regardless of whether you practice some sort of religion or whether you are an atheist, one should at least try to see whether this statement is true before subscribing to it.
So we ask the question: ‘Is it true?’ Is it true that wars, or other conflicts that are religiously-based, have caused more deaths than any other conflict? I wondered about this question, and I wonder still - but I offer the following information at least which may dent the above assertion. We have reasonable grounds to think that the major wars of the 20th Century, with their ‘advantages’ of mechanisation and modern mass-killing weaponry, have allowed enormous numbers of people to be killed, both on the field and in strategic offensives. It is also generally accepted that more deaths were caused in those 20th-century conflicts than in any previous period in history, in part simply due to there being larger populations of people available to take part in that conflict. For example, The First World War is said to be responsible for the deaths of nine million people, the Second for the deaths of 60 million.
We should also consider the Russian Revolution. Whilst not a ‘war’ between two nations, the Russian Revolution was responsible for the deaths of perhaps more than 2 million people, either killed or from starvation. After that, the Great Purge instigated by Stalin’s regime against its own citizens resulted in at least 1.2 million deaths, and surely many more that have not been documented. Some historians estimate that overall, Stalin was responsible for over 20 million deaths (for example, Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror: A Re-Assessment).
On to Mao and China: the Revolution/Civil War, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution - jointly, another testament to the 20th Century. We have death tolls of maybe 2.5 million during the civil war, over 25 million due to the famine brought about partly by the Great Leap Forward, and perhaps more than two million during the Cultural Revolution (although some people dispute these numbers vigorously).
That’s probably enough numbers. But there are some things to note about what’s presented above. Firstly, none of these conflicts have anything whatsoever to do with religion. They were all motivated by strong belief systems of course, but one thing they have in common with each other is that they were all secular movements. World War One was primarily a struggle about imperial power, WW2 a misguided notion about the ethnic superiority of a so-called nation, and the Soviet and Chinese movements were self-consciously anti-religious. Of course, cynics could say that these latter movements were manipulated by the power-seeking aspirations of a few lucky (and obviously able) people - Hitler, Stalin and Mao - but it would be a stretch, to say the least, to suggest for example that Hitler had a Christian frame of mind when he was persecuting and ultimately attempting to eliminate the Jews. So when people say that most deaths from conflict are caused by religion, they are wrong. It isn’t true.
So why are statements of this sort believed uncritically, often without any sort of thought at all? One can think of many such ‘facts’: received wisdom which turns out to be nothing of the sort. Joel Best has written about this phenomenon, which he has termed the ‘mutant statistic’. Simply put, a statement is believed without bothering to think about what it means, if two things about that statement are true:
- It requires a bit of consideration to find out if it is true or not.
- It reinforces a pre-existing prejudice in the mind of the hearer.
The original statement - above about religious wars being the cause of most deaths - is a perfect example of this. Firstly, it’s quite hard to work out how many people were killed in historical wars, sometimes in part due to the storytellers who documented those battles embellishing those stories to make them sound better; perversely, it sounds better to say some knight ‘killed ten thousand Moors’ than that he only did in a couple. Secondly, we are apt to see the past as being necessarily more primitive, and therefore more superstitious, than us ‘modern folk’. A past filled with pixies and magic must mean that all wars then were motivated by such considerations; the fact that most religions today were born in that ‘primitive’ past just adds weight to the prejudice.
If this is not convincing, Joel Best presents another example which shows how false (and with study, idiotic) statements are accepted at face value by both the media and the public. An article by Sautter in 1995 in a well-known journal made the statement ‘Every year since 1950, the number of American children gunned down has doubled’. Sounds scary, doesn’t it? After all, everyone knows that gun crime is an increasing problem not just in America but over the Western and wider world. The media report lots of scary stories about how guns are used in crime: I saw one myself just last night. And this sort of statement is so scary it’s used by campaigners to bolster their efforts to curb gun ownership, for example here and here. But, it isn’t true. As Best illustrates, imagine if only 1 child was shot dead in 1950. Then double it each year, 2,4,8,16,32,64…. By 1994 you would have 17.6 trillion children shot dead each year - just in America! That’s a lot, about 150 times more people than have ever lived, in fact. As we started out, a little thought (and maths) shows that the statement is actually not just false, but complete rubbish.
So, when you hear or see statements of ‘fact’, ask yourselves three questions. First, is it true? Second, how do they know? But, most importantly, what are they actually saying? You’ll find that under this simple method of cross-examination, many of the things you read in the paper, or hear people say, dissolve and are either patently false or - worse - meaningless. I’ll leave you with an exercise to illustrate this:
‘Eskimos have thirty different words for snow.‘
If you got this far, thanks for reading: I hope you found it interesting.
Free ways to view DWG/DXF files
I often have to view engineering drawings as part of my project work, and interact with engineers who use AutoCAD. To view these drawings, the typical method used by many people in our office is to ask the engineers to create PDFs of their drawings, which are then sent over. This isn’t TOO bad a solution, but it does of course mean that you have to nicely ask the engineer who’s made the drawing to convert it to a PDF. But what if you don’t know which drawing you want? I also sometimes want to look through our engineering database of drawings, most of which aren’t converted to PDF by default. I also want to measure dimensions - well, they are engineering drawings after all - and you can’t do that easily on a PDF. And in this case, I’m working on Windows XP: you MacOSX users will have to work out your own solution.
What I need of course is AutoCAD, you might think! But I don’t need to edit any files, just to view and measure DWG or DXF files. I had a look around, and found the following free alternatives. However, I’d be interested to hear from anyone who has a better option.
- AutoDesk Design Review. This lets you view and measure DWF files (a sort of published DWG/DXF format). However, it does not let you view DWG/DXF files directly. You have to convert them first using DWG True View (which takes a while to do, which sort of defeats the point of the exercise), and after you do it seems that the units can get ‘lost’: I was unable to measure dimensions accurately on the drawings I converted, i.e. to the mm accuracy I need. Not an acceptable solution. Annoyingly, although DWG True View lets you view DWG and DXF files, it doesn’t let you measure them.
- Brava Viewer. This is pretty good - there is no direct pickup of the units, so you have to do a calibration from an existing measurement on the drawing.
- Volo View. This would be the ideal program. Unfortunately it’s just been superceded by AutoDesk Design Review, so download it while you can.
Ok, that’s it! I hope that’s been useful.
All about synchronising calendars
I thought I would write a short post about my experiences with synchronising amongst several calendars. I want to manage my work appointments and home life with as little conflict as possible: my work appointments in particular change sometimes daily, and so I need a way to know whether I can accept these changes without stopping personal appointments. Handling a paper diary is therefore out of the question - I can’t be doing with crossing out and re-writing everything, especially given that my work diary is nearly all handled in MS Outlook; MS Outlook is of course used in many work environments.
While I was teaching a few years ago I used to used to sync my diary to a Handspring Visor, and then switched to Windows Smartphones of various flavours. This still works very well for checking my diary when away from my desk (i.e. 8 hours a day). I did also try PocketPC for a while, but gave up there - the ability to enter events more easily on the touchscreen are outweighed by the need to carry two devices, and also to synchronise them. I find that battery life on PocketPCs are unacceptably small - I have to carry a charger - unlike on a Smartphone where I can go 2-3 days without charging.
Anyway, back to synchronising. Other people of course want to know if I’m free or busy, particularly my wife who wants to know for example if I can get away from work on certain days. Because of this, I made a Google Calendar account, and used gSyncit to keep everything synchronised. Great: Outlook and gCal show the same information, and gSyncit is pretty cheap ($9.99 last time I looked).
Recently though I find I am away from my normal computer, but want to enter appointments. Entering appointments on a Smartphone is just about doable, and is the only method when not next to a computer. I also use a Mac laptop at home (I have to use Windows XP at work), so it would be nice to be able to see and enter appointments on everything. Finally, it would be good to log into an online account somewhere and enter appointments, and to be able to keep all my contacts in sync as well.
I looked around for ways to accomplish this feat, and initially looked at SpanningSync: however, I was put off by the price and the fact that it only does syncing of calendars (and not contacts). Then I found the solution: Plaxo. The latest version allows you to sync to multiple services, and handles all your contacts. I have installed the sync programs on my work XP box and my Mac home machine, and it also still syncs to Google Calendar. Perfect! And it’s free as well - presumably because of their strategic partnerships.
Of course, I did have an initial hiccup, basically because I already syncing via another method (gSyncit): this resulted in a circular condition which resulted in duplications and hanging during syncing. The tip to avoiding this is to remove all other relationships, and to set Plaxo as the ‘central’ synchronising point - i.e. set up a synchronisation point from Plaxo to all the other services, rather than having a daisy-chain of dependencies. I have done it this way and it works really well: I can now see all my contacts and diary on my home computer, which has already proved really handy. I hope this experience proves useful to you.
Postscript: of course, you can sync Plaxo to multiple Mac. Also, I can get my calendar and contacts on my iPod - who needs an iPhone?
Testing your network speed
Speedtest.net is a really handy site for measuring the speed of your internet connection.
Some other ones are hosted at:
At work, the network is pretty fast - what you would expect from our site, which has probably the fastest connection pipe in the UK (one of the main SuperJANET5 nodes), although the speed to the office is limited by local routers.
At home, I have paid for an NTL 4MB connection, so it’s gratifying that 4MB is basically what I get:
Touch of Evil
So, I decided to rent Touch of Evil from Amazon, one of my three this month, having read that it is one of the greats from the history of film-making, despite having been a B-flick of sorts (although it won awards at the time in Europe). I agree with everyone that the cinematography is fantastic: the lighting is very special, and the way Welles positions the characters and moves them around the frame is wonderful. But at the moment I can’t get over how muddled the plot and dialogue are: I just found it very annoying not being able to hear what everyone is saying. Maybe I need to give it another chance.
One movie I won’t be giving another chance is Jaws 2, the other movie I watched this week. Total rubbish. It seems as though they simply took cut scenes from the first movie and put them together randomly: simply terrible, despite Rod Sheider’s noble efforts. It turns out to be quite easy to tell a good director from a bad one; Spielberg’s effort actually has plot development and and dramatic tension. Don’t bother with the sequel, watch the first one again.
Some Bach highlights
So, a few weeks ago my mother told me she had some music vouchers - more than she could really spend at her favourite local music store in Muswell Hill. ‘What would you like?’, she asked. I replied that I quite liked Bach, and thought nothing more about it.
About a week later, some Bach arrived. Actually, it ALL arrived: everything Mr. J.S. ever wrote. I have therefore been working my way through the 155 CDs in the rather large presentation box (a box which says ‘Bach Edition, Complete Works/Gesamtwerk/L’Oeuvre Integrale’), and have been listening to quite a bit I have never head before. Since a lot of people like Bach, I thought I would list my favourites in Mr. J.S.’s work, in no particular order other than the order I listened to them and then wrote them down. I’ve included the usual BWV numbers, and the version I heard (i.e. the artists, and instrument if appropriate). Some of the pieces are ‘classics’, whilst the others I just like; I hope you like them too.
- French Suite No.2 C Moll (BWV 813) - Harpsichord, Joseph Payne
- French Suite No. 4 Es Dur (BWV 815) - Harpsichord, Joseph Payne
- Toccata E Moll (BWV 914) - Harpsichord, Menno Van Delft
- Suite for Lute E Moll (BWV 996), Gigue - Jakob Lindberg
- Suite for Lute C Moll (BWV 997), Sarabande - Jakob Lindberg
- St. Matthew Passion (BWV 244): ‘Kommt, ihr Toechter’, ‘Ich will hier bei dir stehen’, ‘So ist mein Jesus nun gefangen’ - Emma Kirkby et al. with the Choirs of King’s and Jesus College, and the Brandenburg Consort, conducted by Stephen Cleobury. This is a very good version, with good pace.
- Concerto for Oboe, Violin, Strings and B.C. D Moll (BWV 1060) - the whole piece is very good. Unfortunately, I can’t recommend a recording of this one. Both of mine are poor!
I will almost certainly add more to this list later. I am still listening to the CDs.
Our new home on the web
Welcome to Hywel and Donna’s new home on the web. We think Poppy lives here too, but she doesn’t make much noise. There’ll be more here later, but until then, you can find out why the website is called Corycia here.