Talk

This week, the shocking private emails of a group of senior scientists were leaked after one of the scientists placed his laptop in the line-of-sight of the dozen or so nosy people who were sat behind him at a rather dull public lecture in London.*

Secreted in a back corner of the lecture theatre, Charles Quackenbush strains to hear the next facile question tumble and stumble in "uhms" and "ahs" from the eager humanities student in the front row. He briefly exchanges a look with a fellow from the department (the wednesday evening public lectures are always a source of great amusement for the department's old boys) before returning to his emails, leaving Sir Frederick to try explaining again the very basics of natural selection to the sociologists of science.

Dear Charles, Just to confirm, as per our earlier conversation, that the recording will be Thursday at nine -- my BA will meet you in BH reception. Could you send your press photo for the listings? I don't think we have one on file. Melvin.

Charles taps out a quick content-free response about "looking forward to it", and drags in a file from close at hand. Archives the email.

Dear Prof Charles Quackenbush, I am a MA Science Communication student at City Univ--

Are you sure you want to delete this email? OK Cancel

And then another new arrival; the latest episode in the great ongoing saga that was tearing the department in two. A short episode.

chaz, those are mighty hateful hurtful words. i can't believe you would say such things about collins, after that nice book he wrote about me and science not being incompatible. cheers, God.

Charles frowns, looks up and glances over to his right. At the far end of the row Professor Goddard Z Bumsted O'Higgins leans forward and grins at him, iPhone in hand. Charles doesn't stop frowning. Hits reply, but he's too slow. There's already another new entry. Its author, Professor Elisabeth Penelope Ditherley de Pelet, a row in front to the left, is now staring, stern face and unfocused eyes illuminated by the light from her netbook, at another of Sir Frederick's amusingly captioned slides of his golden retriever.

Shut up, Bumsted, the grown-ups are trying to talk here. Charles, I'm afraid your argument is utter utter cock. It would be by *not* inviting Collins to speak that the university would look like it had the agenda. Obviously you're free to publicly say whatever you like about the guy, but the fourth best university in the world can't snub the head of the NIH without anybody noticing. You know how these things work. When people of his standing announce that they're coming to town, an invitation is expected from us. If you succeed in blocking this, the headline will be "fundamentalist atheists go out of their way to be rude," and I couldn't blame anybody for running it--

Charles thinks about replying with "yawn", and yawns.

--frankly, I'd have thought you'd have more important things to be doing than preaching to the rest of the department. You can't have failed to hear the *gossip*, even stuck in your own fantasy land? -Betty x

Charles frowns some more. Sends a blank email to Goddard, subject "what's the gossip?" Continues through the dregs of his inbox.

Dear valued reader, We are pleased to announce that there is still time to register your place at the first annual International Conference of Gastropodcomparative-systematicsemiquantitativetemporalnuclearmisinteractomics, to be held in Las Vegas, 18-21 March 2010...

Charles hits the spam button.

heheh. betty's post-doc has been telling everyone what she walked in on in the darkroom the other day. your students were in there, *kissing*. from what i've heard, they've been doing a lot of that lately. heh. they're probably in there *now*. I say, though, old chap, I'd have thought you'd have been wanting to put a stop to that sort of thing? cheers, God

The colour drains from Charles and his hands begin to shake with horror. Kissing. How awful. Charles had read that kissing could lead to friendship and a social life, even marriage, or children. Charles couldn't afford for his people to be rushing around all over the place having children. There was science to be attended to, and they were already behind on delivering it.

Charles stares at Sir Frederick's "science kitteh" slide, tapping his feet manically, wondering desperately what he can do to contain the situation. Eventually, the solution comes to him.

Hi All, I stand by everything I've said and will still vote in the 'no' camp, but I have no interest in wasting any more of my time arguing with those of you who apparently don't care for reality, rationalism or academic integrity. Invite him if you like. *I* will make sure that I am well out of it. There's an interesting looking conference in Las Vegas that weekend. I think I might take the whole lab. A good dry conference should get those students back in line. Regards, Chaz.

 * Obviously, any resemblance to real people, events, or email exchanges is entirely coincidental.

Open doors other side

Charles Quackenbush stands at the far end of the platform, away from the crowds around the shelter at the platform steps; positioned well over the tactile paving and the yellow line.

"The train now approaching platform... one... is the... oh nine... oh four... service to... London Victoria... calling at... Herne Hill... Brixton... and... London Victoria."

The rails begin to sing their high-pitched wail. Charles takes a deep breath and closes his eyes. The rain rolls down his cheeks.

And the train pulls up, beside him, past him, coming to a stop twenty seconds later with Charles stood, eyes still closed, beside the final set of doors. The doors open, and the eyes open, and Charles doesn't really have much choice but to step on board. He'll just have to get off at the next stop and try again.

"Any unchecked tickets please," comes an abrupt shout. "Good morning, sir, could I see your ticket, please?" Charles, of course, has not purchased a ticket. His intention had not been to go anywhere today. At least, not via Herne Hill. He pays the penalty fare and is given his ticket.

Charles steps off the train with the few dozen passengers changing to the Blackfriars line, and casually wonders across the platform as the Victoria train continues on its way. On the Blackfriars platform, the electronic display scrolls a long list of destinations for the train through to Bedford, the reflected lights creating a psychedelic show on a warped and battered advertising display case.

"I'm sorry to announce that the... oh nine... twelve... service to... Bedford... is delayed by approximately... nine... minutes."

Two empty paper coffee cups are caught by the wind. They roll around in circles, catch on the corner and break dance through the eddies, colliding, bouncing violently apart, and hurl themselves from the platform edge. Charles sits on a cold metal bench and stares through the rain, across the track, over the scruffy scrub of the embankment, and out to the twin beige concrete tower blocks looming over them from across the road. "Open doors other side," reads a helpful sign placed high on the chain-link fence between the tracks and bank.

"Open doors other side," thinks Charles. The doors are open for the post-doc on the other side of the lab, whose experiments work, whose papers get published in Cell and Nature, whose smile charms committees and conference rooms. The doors were always open for the guy he lived with during his PhD, who, despite his obvious brilliance, never bothered looking for a post-doc position but within a year of graduating had already accumulated an MBA and a small but cool hi-tech company. Or his friends at Oxford -- the lawyers and bankers; and his friends from school, who had travelled the world, published novels, and were already sending children of their own to the same school. And here was Charles, at the end of a second post-doc, penniless -- personally and professionally -- and not a datum that any sane person would want to publish. His career was over. They would make him take the walk of shame.

"I'm sorry to announce that the... oh nine... twelve... service to... Bedford... is delayed by approximately... seventeen... minutes."

Charles sighs and sits back in the seat, folding his arms and tilting his head. And he sees it. The damp mouldy rope, hanging from the station canopy; one end tied securely around a beam, the other looped and slipknotted . Why? What purpose could such a thing serve? Charles stares at it for a few minutes, wondering how strong it might be. The estimated time of arrival on the electronic display revises itself. Charles hadn't considered this method. Hadn't done his research. It couldn't be a bad way, though, could it?

Charles stands purposefully, steps up onto the bench and balances with one foot on the arm rest. He reaches out and grabs at the rope. A few of the fifty-or-so people on the platform notice the performance, and wander quietly and casually away, so as not to see the finale. Charles places the loop around his neck, takes a deep breath, and steps onto nothing. He swings forward, out over the coffee cups and cracked tactile paving and faded yellow line. The rope creaks, the beam cracks, and Charles falls, pursued by the station canopy onto the tracks, knocking his head on the lip of the platform and rolling onto the dead third rail. Somebody on the platform looks up from their newspaper and screams. A distant voice rings out,

"I'm sorry to announce that the... oh nine... twelve... service to... Bedford... has been cancelled."

Charles lies on the track for a while, panting, while the stars fade. His eyes focus on a solitary white flower in the fence. Bind weed climbing the wire links. His phone rings, and he sits up with effort, loosening the rope that still hangs from his neck. There are some "yeses" and "of courses" and "thank yous" from Charles, and the occasional dizzy and vacant nod. An offer. Not science. Something about writing and publishing and online media; a startup doing something new, something interesting, perhaps. Not science, but an offer; an invitation to do the walk with purpose and a destination and his head held as high as a head could be. A fresh breeze blows down the tracks, drying his face. He nods to himself, and smiles.

Charles slowly rises to kneel, rubbing his neck and knees and brushing dirt from his damp clothes. He pulls himself up onto the crowded platform with some effort; the broken section of station canopy clattering after him. He stands there, staring blankly at the arrival of the oh-nine twenty-seven. Steps aboard, still lost in his thoughts, and squeezes himself in, with his feet awkwardly arranged around somebody's briefcase, and his face shoved into the armpit of a Metro-reading old man. Then he snaps back into the world as lightning strikes a concrete tower and thunder cracks. The train slows. "Apologies for this delay, ladies and gentlemen. Due to a broken train at Farringdon we are being held in a queue outside Elephant and Castle."

Charles takes a deep breath of armpit, turns around, and starts pounding on the doors.

In which London can be a not fun place to live sometimes

I wrote to my constituency MP. I've never done that before. I don't know if it's a useful thing to do, but it was fun. I guess it's slightly less pointless than voting.

Dear Tessa Jowell,

Given the evidently excessive use of force by the police during the "G20" protests at Bank three weeks ago -- not just from individual officers, but from the basic design of the police operation -- I am moved to add my voice to those who have expressed concern regarding police accountability, and specifically regarding provisions in the recent Counter Terrorism Act, which I understand you voted for.

Many -- most -- of the details of that day which have so far emerged are only available to us because the crowd was packed with press photographers, because London is populated by many tens of thousands of hobbyist photographers, and, most of all, because of the now ubiquitous cameraphone. This event highlights not just the need for police accountability, but the fact that it is ordinary members of the public who make police accountability possible. Any development which obstructs, or which could be used to obstruct, ordinary members of the public who find it their duty to record abuse of police power would be very disturbing.

I do not especially fear that the Counter Terrorism Act will lead to gross miscarriages of justice against professional or amateur photographers -- that is possible, but I suspect unlikely. Rather, the provisions in the act, by adding further complexity and uncertainty about what is and is not legal, enable the petty miscarriages of justice that have become rife and which make the police an intimidating presence in this city today. The cost of this law is the photojournalist who is obstructed from an important public-interest story while detained "under suspicion", the ordinary members of the public, and even tourists, who are stop-and-searched for engaging in their hobby (as I was in Crystal Palace park last year), and the photographer who simply gives up because the fun has been taking out of being creative.

Those costs must of course be balanced against the need to prevent terrorism. Since you voted in favour of the Counter Terrorism Act, I would be very interested to hear your own views on how the terrorism-fighting benefits of the photography provisions weigh against the costs, as well as the government's reasoning behind the provisions. How will these provisions help the police and prosecution service in catching and keeping us safe from terrorists? What evidence is there that these provisions would have helped to prevent past terrorist attacks, or to prosecute individuals who got away with committing atrocities?

I would perhaps not agree unconditionally with Benjamin Franklin's views on trading freedom and safety. But I must demand that we pay a fair price for the genuine article. In this case, as with many other laws supposed to protect us from terrorism, I am far from convinced that enough has been done to ensure that the prices will remain low and that we will receive the goods. I look forward to hearing your views on this law.

Yours,

Joe

Grant Museum of Zoology

Creativity and science

Somebody said something rather odd the other day. It was in response to the observation that I know a great many scientists and mathematicians who are also amateur photographers. Their suggestion was that photography was a good way to express one's creative side.

Now, there are a few dozen photographs in my collection that I'm particularly happy with. They are technically competent and have a modicum of aesthetic value. But if they demonstrate creativity is is of the most trivial variety, and in pitiful quanta. That is not to say that photography can not be creative; only that amateur photographers rarely display any significant quantity of it. We create images that have been created before, follow formulas and fashions, and imitate each other's styles. And so what. Amateur anything -- painting, poetry, music and sport -- is about having fun, not about creating world changing work.

Science, on the other hand, has everything to do with creativity. A scientist's job is to replace a package of ignorance with a package of knowledge. Scientists do not create facts -- a task so simple that it is left to the science-fiction writers. Rather, the facts are already there, waiting to be discovered. The task of the scientist is to create the hypothesis -- to ask the question so out-there that nobody has ever thought to ask it before -- and to create the experiment that will test it.

The achievement of Watson and Crick -- determining the structure of DNA -- is often derided by those who rightly wish to celebrate the achievements of Rosalind Franklin. Franklin performed many of the difficult experiments whose results were crucial for determining the structure of DNA. According to some, Franklin was doing clever physics and chemistry while Watson and Crick were playing around with toy molecules. Watson and Crick did eventually get the structure by building a model, with a small amount of trial and error involved.

In reality, Watson and Crick got to the model by being creative. They created ideas and hypotheses from data such as x-ray crystallography and knowledge like nucleotide ratios and properties. They had the creative idea to have the toy molecules built and to cut out the tedious and time consuming experimental work that would be required to fill the remaining gaps by simply trying out variations until they found the one that worked.

Nobelist Harry Kroto does not feel like a great scientist because he doesn't know everything. He enjoys science, but thinks that all he is any good at is designing logos and posters. Harry: your designs are, ah... nice. But your science is where you are creative. And that is why you are a great scientist.

Bugger knowing everything. What fun would science be then?

Blog review: Question Darwin

I recently posted on the phenomenon of British creationism, and my belief that it is not nearly as widespread and organised as the creationists would like us to believe. So it was fun this evening to come across a genuine British creationist blogger, while researching, of all things, the pub quiz I'm co-organising. The blog and associated website "Question Darwin" are written by eccentric Hampshire GP Stephen Hayes, aka "Dissenter": born again while at university, and introduced to creationism by, you guessed it, an engineer.

I strongly recommend the website for starters. It tries to imitate the classics, but I feel that the text formatting was just a little too uniform and consistent. Certainly there were bizarre outbursts of bold, underline, large font, and all caps, but I would have preferred to see more colours, comic sans, and centre-align. Similarly, the background colour is a good choice, but the lack of distracting repeating background motif is a school-boy error, and I could see no evidence of animated GIFs. Fortunately the blog makes up this disappointment, as, even under the constraints imposed by Blogspot, Hayes manages to make a classic pig's ear of bold, italics, and any other formatting he can find a button for.

Hayes is publishing his site, of course, because the evidence which falsifies Darwin is being suppressed. A powerful elite are controlling the dissemination of the lies of evolutionism: chiefly the humanists and liberal media. Classic conspiracy theory stuff.

"But wait, it can't be a conspiracy theory!"

Why not?

"Because, er, the media don't give any time to Creationists, so, you know..."

Uhm, wait, what?

"Well think about it! If it were only a conspiracy theory, you'd hear about it in the media, like you do MMR and 9/11truthers. But Darwin dissent has been suppressed in the media. So there must be a real conspiracy!"

Uhuh. Chief amongst the godless liberal humanist reptilians media institutions are the notoriously biased University Challenge and Thought For The Day. Damn you TFTD and your dissent suppression.

In The Guardian this week, Stephen Moss suggested that the creationist movement in the UK is different to that in the US. But the difference is merely one of scale: the British creationists would like an animatronic theme park, but are not nearly capable of building one. In almost all other respects, the movements are the same: in their motivation, their style, and their arguments. But the difference in scale does mean one other difference: US creationists argue in order to influence politicians and schoolboards; British creationists have a hard enough time just trying to persuade their constituency of other Christians.

So Hayes is defending God from the liberal humanists who are destroying society, and is taking the usual route of poking holes in evolution -- or at least trying give the perception of having done so -- and concluding that a magic man done it. To achieve this task, he is lightly repackaging American creationism for the British Christian. The website is striking in its lack of creativity. There's "Darwinism" here and "evolutionist" bogeymen there. Sometimes there's even "Darwinistic evolutionism." "Molecules to man" gets a prominent spot on the front page, and, of course, most of the site seems to be about perceived flaws in Darwin's character. Often, though, Hayes cuts out the hard writing work altogether, and just copypastes other people's work verbatim. Never mind how bat-shit insane the piece is.

It would be superfluous to count and list mistakes, or to systematically link them to the index of creationist claims. That the site is yet another rehash of tired old errors goes without saying. But there were a couple of amusing ones that I had never come across before. I think my favourite occurred in a long and confused rant about Darwin stealing the idea of natural selection from Edward Blythe (an argument apparently based entirely upon a quote from Blythe in which, er, he doesn't introduce natural selection). It is asserted that "... years later, Wallace refused to go to Darwin's funural [sic]." That Wallace was one of Darwin's pallbearers^[1] shows just how fundamental the lack of either intellectual honesty or the most basic of fact-checking is.

In summary, Question Darwin presents little novelty in terms of creationist claims or style of argument. But the blog is certainly fun for its up-to-date combination of rambling ineptness with surreal anti-BBC rants. The overall incompetence is medium, malice is moderate, and humour high. All things considered, I give it two Timecubes out of five.

Kook rating:

Photoshop is cheating!

“I only use a camera like I use a toothbrush. It does the job.”

- Don McCullin

All of the photographs on this website and my flickr stream are Photoshopped. I adjust the contrast, fine tune the white balance, and tweak the sharpness. I clone stamp out dust blots and power lines. I apply graded layer masks to create dramatic skies that did not really exist. I am quite happy to share this fact. Some people, for reasons best known to themselves, would think this a shameful admission.

I can not explain those people who consider the use of Photoshop to be a form of "cheating", except to speculate that they must be cretins. Perhaps they think that once a photograph has been through Photoshop adjustments, it is not a true representation of the scene that was shot. It is not what they saw. They must think that cameras themselves are objective instruments. Well, since when has any photograph looked like what you saw? You have a camera that takes photographs that match your eye for depth of field, sharpness, colour perception, focal length, field of view, distortion, and tonal range? A fascinating machine that must be, but what a boring range of images it must take.

Cameras are not objective. Their construction determines dozens of deviations from the world as we see it, and photographers take advantage of these to picture the world as the human eye could never see it. The human eye has no telephoto, no macro, no panorama. Cameras can do noir , with monochrome and grain, or vivid sunlit landscapes in colours that we do not see. Add a tripod and they can do long exposures of dark details and flowing water, or ultra-fast exposures of bullets frozen in the air. Add filters and they can see polarised light or the infrared spectrum. Add lensing and they can see particles in an accelerator, or galaxies thirteen billion years in the past. No Photoshop needed.

Perhaps it's not that cameras are objective, it's just that photographers should not need to use Photoshop. They should be able to get the right image using their skill in handling the camera. A good photographer should be able to create the right image by intelligent use of aperture and shutter speed, filters and lighting. Using Photoshop is an admission that one failed to use the camera properly. Like Ansel Adams didn't fiddle with his pictures in the darkroom. Like photographers haven't been dodging and burning, cropping and airbrushing for more than a century. Photoshopping isn't new. It's just easier and better than it was.

In the right hands, a cheap Russian film camera can take some nice photos (nice photos that look nothing like the world as we see it,incidentally). A great musician can make a cheap acoustic guitar produce beautiful music. But what a boring world it would be if every photo was made with a Lomo, and every piece of music played on an Argos guitar. Where would rock and roll be if quality amplifiers were considered "cheating"? Imagine if film and television techniques were considered to be cheating, and that a talented director should be able to produce a good drama just by putting a stationary camera in the perspective of an audience member at the theatre. Imagine if Watson and Crick's model was a cheat, because good scientists should be able to figure out structures just by pondering on x-ray crystallography pictures?*

Why would anybody who wished to produce something of quality refuse to use the tools available to them?

 * oh, wait, some people think this, too.

The Big Busk

Photographs from London's Big Busk are here.