Imperial Physics Interview / Religion Debate

Two relatively bloggable things happened yesterday so I’ll make some attempt to reconstruct them here in words.

Imperial Physics Interview

I think I’ll do what Farhan did last year in the spirit of open source (kinda) and say something about my interview.

I arrived at 12:30 in time for the tour after just about managing to find the mysterious room 306 (hidden in a sort of conference room). There was someone who had made it all the way from Poland for this and various people who had made arduous journeys from all over the country, so I almost felt guilty about having had such an easy trip – 20 minutes on the No 10 down HSK. We got given a general walk round and free lunch (always a good thing) and were even (jokingly) offered a pint by the tour guide before our interviews!

The 12 of us with interviews that day were split up into three groups of four – I was interviewed with the three others applying for the four-year ‘Physics with Theoretical Physics’ course. We were first all sat together and had the course run past us – it all sounds pretty awesome with ‘complex analysis’ and ‘mathematical analysis’ both being taught in the first year (GL said once the sign of a good maths course is mathematical analysis being taught in the first year). We all went off for a quick (free) tea session in the lunching area (I was hoping to catch some of the ion trapping people from my work experience but they had probably by then left) during which we discussed relativity and space-time diagrams and the concept of ‘now’ which was pretty interesting.

Then we were all sat outside the room and were called in individually for interview. I was the last (a consequence of alphabetical ordering) and the people who went before me seemed to find it OK – one said she had to sketch ’some graph’ and explain ’something physics-ey’ and everyone seemed to have got two questions – so I didn’t think it would be too bad.

So I went in and immediately saw a Newton’s cradle sitting on the desk in front of my interviewer. Her research interest was quantum gravity and was being shadowed by someone who was interested in explosions and generally breaking things Mythbusters style, which is cool. She didn’t mention my personal statement at all and just asked me why I wanted to do physics (as opposed to maths) and why I wanted to go to Imperial. I said I liked being able to see concepts happen in real life, to which she pointed out relativity isn’t exactly the average real life situation. I said something about being able to touch and feel and see stuff in action, and applying maths to stuff and seeing it work, which she seemed satisfied with – ‘I know exactly what you mean’.

She then gestured towards the pad of paper and asked me to differentiate 2^x. Following standard procedure I just rearranged it into e^xln2 and differentiated that, though I didn’t / forgot to turn (ln2)e^xln2 back into (ln2)2^x at the end. She seemed happy and said ‘yup that’s right’ then asked me whether I knew what the thing on the desk was. I successfully identified it as a Newton’s cradle and explained that each collision is elastic and that this results in the inboud ball stopping and the next one going forwards with the same velocity as the inbound one, etc, with some support from a fumbling demonstration.

She then asked me a question about a ping pong ball and a golf ball being dropped such that the former is directly over the latter from 1m, and she asked me how high the ping pong ball would bounce. I invoked the coefficient of restitution and said let the velocity at the bottom be v. Golf ball bounces, goes up with v. Ping pong ball bounces against this, goes up with 3v. Invoking conservation of energy twice the answer came out to be 9m – which was right, apparently. That’s quite high…

She then asked me how long it takes a photon to get from when the universe became transparent to now. I looked confused and for some reason tried to resist the temptation to ask ‘from whose frame of reference?’, though it turned out that’s what the question was asking. I drew a space-time diagram and made a pretty dreadful estimate of the age of the universe [my estimate turned out to be about the age of the earth; note to self: learn some of these numbers sometime...] and asked for clarification on the question. She said it was a trick question and said it’s about frames of reference, at which point I realised it was indeed a relativity question and said ‘zero’ with a slightly botched-up explanation using t = yt’ [note to self: try to remember which side y is on!]. I guess I should have drawn the thing with the axes changing angle on the space-time diagram but nvm…

At the end she said she can’t tell me whether I have an offer and if so it will be with an A* (I *think* I heard that correctly, and it’s possible ‘further maths’ was mentioned in the same sentence – so that was a bit of a surprise). Apparently the school wrote me a good reference, which is good.

EDIT: should probably also say offers/rejections in several weeks

It was all over by 5pm as promised so I had some time to kill before the religion debate at 6:45 (next part of this topically bimodal post).

Intelligence Squared Debate: Religion

More specifically the motion was “The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world”. Matthew, Theo and I, the proud founders of the SPS Sceptic Society, were once again reunited to watch Christopher Hitchens (Writer, broadcaster and polemicist, author of the bestselling book “God is not Great”) and Stephen Fry (Actor, author, comedian and television presenter) debate against Archbishop John Onaiyekan (Roman Catholic Archbishop of Abuja, Nigeria) and Rt Hon Ann Widdecombe (Conservative MP and Catholic convert) (descriptions taken from the I² page). As always I tried to write some notes – here they are in pretty condensed form. {curly brackets} indicate words external to what the speaker said, e.g. comments. I’ve also abbreviated names slightly, and nothing is word-for-word

1st speaker: Archbishop – For

• General stuff about his father and him and all his family being Catholic {Matthew suggested this sounded like the start of a sermon}
• Questioned what sort of ‘force’ the debate was about. He thinks the ‘force’ is a spiritual message, spread around the world, and the force is what this message teaches etc.
• Comments about the sheer size of the ‘force’
• Said that if you ask anyone in Nigeria they’ll tell you the Catholic church is a force for good {according to WJB if you ask 80% of people in Europe they’ll tell you that only GM food has DNA…}
• Quotes statistics about what {I would describe as satisfied customers}
• {Actually I have to say, it did sound like a sermon}

2nd speaker: Hitchens {to much applause!} – Against

• Started with some witty banter
• Said the opposition should have started with a list of apologies {to much applause}
• Started listing crimes against humanity the Catholic Church has committed {a couple were incorrect I think, and also the debate is the present – lots of his examples were from centuries ago. Still valid though, as we will see later}
• Child abuse – the church tried to excuse itself for it instead of apologising
• Said something about antisemitism {lots of audience tuts}
• Religion goes against the method of free thinking and scepticism
• Quote’s Stephen Fry’s situation {Fry turned out to be a really strong speaker because of this later}
• Talked about the ’sale’ of remuneration – paying for people to pray for you
• {I thought Hitchens would be stronger – he was, of course, as always pretty harsh and blunt, but he wasn’t as fired up as he was in some of his previous debates}

3rd speaker: MP – For

• Claims Hitchens misrepresented the Catholic Church {sarcastic applause from Hitchens!}
• Picked up on Hitchens talking about the past, not present
• Picked up on antisemitism thing
• Quotes WWII – helping Jews
• Quotes christians having to renounce faith to join SS {considering Nazism was pretty anti-christian anyways I don’t think this is a particularly valid point}
• Torture – last time’s standards were different so everyone was guilty, not just the church {Fry and the audience tear this apart later}
• Talks about child abuse – church ‘powerless’ to do anything, magistrates etc. also at fault
• Charity – $Bns given to charity {I wonder how much this is in comparison with the church’s wealth…}
• Hope argument – church gives hope to people
• she said ‘I knew condoms would come up’ – tried to make a joke of it {general audience tuts, someone shouted “how dare you laugh at that!”}

4th speaker: Fry – Against

• Started completely differently from Hitchens – said he’s fine with people believing and seeking enlightenment etc. – shows no hostility towards them
• Attacked MP’s point about past vs present – MP basically said ‘history is not important, so let’s forget about it’
• Talked about purgatory, people paying to bypass purgatory / go to heaven; referenced South Park’s version of purgatory (!)
• Quotes ‘outside the church, there is no salvation’ being used to excuse horrific deeds
• Church commands people to be ignorant, prevents them thinking for themselves
• Catholic Church deems itself the only owner of the truth and bullies people into believing
• Current Pope on child abuse: “We do not have the power of a nation” <- yes you do
• Commented on women’s equality
• Apparently the pope wrote a letter / made an announcement to child-abusing priests: [paraphrasing] “do not talk to the police, keep it secret, talk to me instead”. Pope claimed solution is to stop “homosexuals from entering the church”
• {either Hitchens or Fry made this following point} The church ’sentenced’ one child-abusing priest to ‘a lifetime of prayer’ instead of several months / years in prison
• Church doesn’t need to exacerbate existing gay stigma
• Stephen Fry said: “I find it ridiculous that I am being called a perv by such extraordinarily sexually dysfunctional people” {*huge* applause + laugh, proposition looking really pissed off}
• Pope spread false lie that condoms makes AIDS spreading worse – instead of making useful suggestions
• church obsessed with sex. Comparison with food – church equivalent of anorexic and obese {more huge audience support}
• Proposed solution: pope gives back all of Vatican’s wealth to those from whom the church has stolen {even more audience cheer}

Before the debate the audience had pre-voted thus:
FOR: 678
AGAINST: 1102
ABS: 346

Questions

• Catholic Church broke 5 UN conventions on child abuse – should not be allowed to get away with this
• To Archbishop: Q “which Catholic policy are you most ashamed of?” A “I am ashamed of none of them”
• To proposition: “do you need the Vatican’s wealth?”
• To proposition on torture: “even though the standards of the time are xyz, isn’t the truth of the Church doctrine ‘eternal’?”. Church had changed mind on slavery for example. Seems like church in constant state of limbo. MP says “limbo = ’second light’” – {only huge audience groan in entire debate}

Conclusions

Stephen Fry

• MP groaning: “I knew condoms etc would be brought up” – a bit like a burglar groaning in court “I knew my burglary would be brought up” {audience cheer}
• Constantly wasted opportunity for Catholic church to do something by giving away lots of its wealth – until then, not force for good

MP

• Reason for people having children in Nigeria is they need someone to look after them when they are old {relevance?}
• Says no statistical evidence for condoms preventing AIDS {so pope justified in spreading lies?? Theo and I agree she’s crazy}

Hitchens

• Thoughtcrime argument – catholic church essentially enforcing regime of thoughtcrime

Archbishop

• Basically said history doesn’t matter again {even though point previously successfully rebutted by Fry}
• Said he cares about his own relatives and he is happy for them to be Catholic etc. {urgh. There were two parents who fed their baby a litre of salt to punish it. I’m sure they cared about their kid, they just didn’t know giving it salt would be a bad idea. This point isn’t really valid.}

After the debate the results were thus:

FOR: 268
AGAINST: 1862
ABS: 334 {I think – it might have been 34. Can’t check by adding up since audience size was changing throughout debate}

Stephen Fry was a ridiculously strong speaker in this – even stronger than Hitchens, and despite my weak preconception that the Catholic church wasn’t doing much good, after this debate I am now quite convinced that it’s, if anything, a force for evil. Fry shouted twice (or even thrice) in that – he really is passionate about this topic.

Other highlights include us spotting Derren Brown in the audience and a priest in the audience standing up and totally siding with Stephen Fry.

EDIT: whenever I mention the ‘church’ I mean the Catholic church, just to avoid any confusion. As Fry pointed out, he has nothing against Quakers, for example.

John Polkinghorne at St Paul’s

John Polkinghorne's signature on The God Delusion

On Friday, Halley Soc welcomed Dr John Polkinghorne to St Paul’s to talk on how science and religion work together. Lest this post turn into an enormous dissertation I will attempt to digress as little as possible from what he said, and merely restate some of his main arguments (the things that I wrote down) and explain why I think he’s wrong. All quotations are paraphrased since I didn’t write down every word he said. Apologies if I’ve misinterpreted some of the things he said.

He began by stating that religion is a search for truth, and that both science and religion rely to an extent on belief:

Both science and religion are a search for truth, and both rely on motivated belief

In my opinion, while science is a genuine search for truth, religion is in many cases the opposite. Looking at evidence, God seems to be no more than a convenient gap-filler for what humans do not know. When Pasteur turned up, disease was no longer a manifestation of God’s wrath but merely the action of millions of tiny microbes, and was treated with medicine instead of prayer. On the subject of belief, while science relies on believing measurements made by humans and machines, religion relies mostly on what a book full of contradictions is interpreted to say – which seems to be just about everything.

He subsequently said something about religion being a human version of science:

Science treats humans as objects. Humans are obviously not objects, thus need something else: religion

I think humans are objects. Just because we classify ourselves as intelligent life with complex emotions, we are governed by exactly the same laws as everything else. Emotions are simply manifestations of neurones firing and hormones and chemicals being released in the body (I’m no biologist but I’m pretty sure it’s something along those lines). However complicated the brain is, I believe there’s nothing to separate the mind from the brain than a different paradigm – fundamentally the mind is a function of the state of the brain. Humans are objects after all. Saying they are different things are a bit like saying the Newtonian paradigm contradicts the Hamiltonian one.

He used this argument to create an argument about beauty, specifically music:

When we hear music, we hear its beauty, and can appreciate that. This implies there is something other than science, and we call this other thing God

As above, beauty and emotions relating to it are merely functions of the brain, abstractions relating to certain neurones firing. Beauty is not an inherent part of the universe – we merely interpret it to be.

He then said that science and religion help each other:

Science helps religion by telling the world how the world works, about truth

‘Truth’ is the exact word he used (I wrote it down enclosed in quotation marks). If science tells religion the truth, his first statement must be false: religion can’t be told the truth and come up with it at the same time. More importantly and indeed disturbingly, he insists that religion can explain evolution:

God made the world so that creatures can evolve: rather than making homo sapiens with five fingers he created a world in which life can make itself. Life evolved from a ready-made world

Apparently it is more likely that we are living in a computer simulation than in a ‘real’ world (c.f. several New Scientist articles). So God is a computer programmer with a genetic algorithm. In a way I can believe that, after reading the articles. There’s still no justification for practising religion though – merely believing in a probability of there being a form of ‘god’, and only tenuously.

He then said Newton is proof of God:

Evolution cannot explain Isaac Newton: there is absolutely no evolutionary benefit for humans to be able to understand the cosmos

I think he’s made a mistake here. Of course there’s no evolutionary benefit for the ability to understand the universe and invent calculus, just as there’s no evolutionary benefit for a dolphin to be able to jump through hoops (I’m not intentionally comparing Newton to a dolphin). What allowed Newton to discover his laws was his intelligence and a high degree of intuition, undeniably qualities beneficial to an animal; qualities which enable it to survive better.

He fell back again to a beauty argument:

Science and Maths are beautiful: Mathematical equations and the way everything fits together is just so beautiful that it cannot exist without God. Quoting Wigner, ‘Mathematics is so unreasonably effective’. God must have made it that way

Personally I think there are three good reasons why science and maths yield such beautiful equations. The first is statistics. It is statistically likely that there will exist some beautiful equations, and some not so beautiful ones. Beautiful ones include e^iπ+1=0. Not so beautiful ones include the quadratic formula, or indeed the quartic formula. The second reason is that science and maths are based on very simple rules which can themselves be described as beautiful. Simplicity of certain solutions and results stem from the fact that the basis is fundamentally simple – there are many hidden fundamental underlying patterns interspersed throughout the sciences, which means you tend to end up with something quite nice. The third reason is that aesthetics are a human invention. Beauty doesn’t really exist – humans just assign that quality to certain things. So saying beauty proves god is circular: “God made man to invent beauty to prove God”.

The last part of his talk involved a well-known argument for intelligent design:

Life as we know it can’t exist without the parameters of our universe.

I have all sorts of objections to this and could get into the anthropic principle and keep going forever. He said ‘life as we know it’, citing specifically carbon-based life. He also said if those parameters were tweaked just slightly, we couldn’t exist. It’s possible though that a radical change in one or more of the parameters might still yield intelligent life. Who knows, that life might not even need photons.

Someone asked a question about the multiverse theory, a popular method to get round this problem. He replied that this is too speculative an idea. I asked whether he thought, if the idea of multiple universes (a part of many theories such as M-theory and the many-worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics) was too speculative, that God is too speculative. He said something about there being evidence for God and none for multiple universes. I asked him what he thought of David Deutsch’s idea that quantum computing is evidence for the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics as the computing power is too great to come from one universe. His reply:

I think it’s perverse for David Deutsch to say such a thing. All you need is the Copenhagen interpretation

So multiple universes are ridiculous to even consider, but God is; and spooky action at a distance is fine?

Many things he said contradict things I believe and conclusions I have come up with. I remain no more convinced that religion is worth practising and that God exists. Furthermore, after all this argument why theology in general is maybe a good idea, he became specifically Anglican, a branch of religion that requires him to believe all sorts of ridiculous assertions made by the bible. He said he has his reasons but wasn’t prepared to delve into them with the little time that he had. My suspicion is that he and I will never agree. But to commemorate the occasion (a famous person coming to St Paul’s), I managed to get his signature on my copy of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion in which he is (probably) referred to as a crackpot (image is at top of post, and on my Flickr photostream). Score…

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A word on email hoaxes and Mediafire

I was actually surprised both my parents were taken in by this one. This PDF file was being circulated all over ‘the tubes’ via email and both my parents fell for it and advised me to spam my contact list. I have no intention of going through the whole thing pointing out at every paragraph why it’s a hoax – it seems so obvious anyway – but this website does it fairly well for a similar email hoax. However I will say one thing which I think is highly important: please please *please* for all of you out there reading this who don’t already know/do:

If you see the words:

PLEASE FORWARD THIS WARNING AMONG ALL YOUR CONTACTS

especially if they are in block capitals, think twice before obeying automatically and unthinkingly! It is unbelievably annoying to receive chain emails, and even if you don’t think such inbox annoyances are remotely vexatious, your friends may differ with you: you are effectively spamming them.

If you already knew that, sorry for the rant – I get rather emotional about such things. If ever in doubt, it’s probably worth checking what hoaxslayer has to say.

Meanwhile, onto Mediafire, the file sharing service I’m hosting the PDF on: it is *very* good. Before I discovered it I was using Bittorrent and Rapidshare to transfer large files which were inconvenient at best. Mediafire is, of course, free. It’s ad-supported, but that can be corrected for with a decent ad blocker like Adblock Plus. in terms of user-friendliness, the interface is beautifully animated (whether that’s good or not I’ll leave you to decide) and clear to use, and the site is extremely fast. It offers unlimited storage, unlimited up/down traffic, unlimited bandwidth, and features no annoying countdown like Rapidshare or Megauploads before free users can start downloading. The only limitations are the lack of hotlinking and 100MB file size limit for free users.

Summary for the sake of clarity:

Awesomeness
1. The interface is beautifully animated (whether that’s good or not I’ll leave you to decide) and clear to use
2. Site runs extremely fast
3. Unlimited storage
4. Unlimited up/down traffic
5. Unlimited Bandwidth
6. It features no annoying countdown like Rapidshare or Megauploads before free users can start downloading

Limitations
1. The site is ad-supported, but that can be corrected for with a decent ad blocker like Adblock Plus
2. No hotlinking
3. 100MB file size limit

That’s it folks, those are my recommendations for the day: don’t be fooled by hoaxes and use Mediafire

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A Sceptical Take on the Financial Crisis

By no means am I denying that the world is in some pretty deep financial you-know-what. But from where I’m seeing things – mostly from my computer in London – there appear to be several potential misconceptions about the entire crisis about how it began, how it will end, the people involved in it and how bad it is. I’ll admit that I don’t read the FT every day. However from the few financial RSS feeds I’m subscribed to and the occasional article I read in the Economist or Moneyweek, I keep feeling instinctively compelled to draw conclusions which I don’t think necessarily ring true and increasingly feel the need to stop and wonder whether the journalism I’m being fed really represents what is going on out there in the real business world. I’ve always been advised not to believe what I read, so here’s me questioning it.

Doom Prophets aren’t all geniuses

Newsnight (BBC), Squawk Box (CNBC) and various other financial and news programmes seem incredibly fond of bringing in various great geniuses who supposedly predicted this crisis for interviews. I have no doubt that there are people out there with a far superior understanding of the market than even the most experienced bankers, and that indeed some of them did predict this crisis. However with a new doom prophet appearing on CNBC practically every week I begin to wonder whether some of these people just got lucky. While it may seem ridiculous to suggest that someone who predicted such an apparently surprising turn of events did so purely out of luck, it is a fact that every economic system ever devised has had problems with it which would result in some amount of instability, be these problems due to imbalance of power or wealth, or some cyclic boom/bust sequence. If such a perfect system did exist which somehow balanced fairness with economic efficiency and stability and utilitarian (or otherwise) happiness (or utility, if you like), it would surely be in place somewhere, if not everywhere in the world. The so-called doomsayers therefore only have to pick one of these problems and hope to be proven correct. Since there is a limited number of obvious problems which can lead to a disaster, when that disaster happens, chances are that there will be a substantial handful of people who hadn’t a clue what they were doing yet still managed to predict it. I reiterate my previous disclaimer: I’m not saying every doom prophet was playing dice with his predictions; I’m merely pointing out that with such a large base of doomsayers, it’s statistically probable that when something happens someone will have got it right.

It’s not -that- bad

Reading the news and scrolling through the business section of the BBC website (or looking at the RSS feed), I can’t help but notice the frequency of articles containing painful details of firms laying of thousands more workers, or taking severe losses, or going into administration – the list goes on (almost) ad infinitum… There was an interesting post on Lifehacker a while back about information overload due to the financial crisis. As media become increasingly efficient at broadcasting the only type of news that customers love: bad news, the average citizen becomes increasingly over-alarmed at increasingly over-dramatised situations. My mum for example has an interesting impression of the world: she advised me not to respond to a snowball thrown at me for fear that if I throw a snowball back the original thrower in question would pull out a gun and shoot me. This I hope is an extreme example and I’m more than sure the crisis is dead serious. However the amount of dystopian news/journalism flooding into my brain through my eyes and ears every day does seem to suggest the picture isn’t quite as black and white as the BBC says it is.

Maths works!

I was actually quite outraged when I woke up one morning to hear Nick Ferrari denouncing Mathematics as the cause of the financial crisis and going on proudly to broadcast to London’s Biggest Conversation his ineptitude at all things numerical. Of course I had heard of how financial mathematical models had failed to take into account risk as they should have done. However from what I see of comments on financial articles, statisticians appear to have become even more unpopular than CEOs, and I cannot sit back and accept this. I believe it’s not the Maths that was at fault. The models that were created were perfect considering the assumptions made by the quantitative analysts and theorists who dreamt them up in the first place. If all the assumptions made were true, a perfectly-constructed mathematical model would have always provided the best answer possible. In fact, even the people who came up with the models, on the whole, aren’t to blame in my opinion. They were forced by the complexity of the problem to make certain assumptions. With the market so chaotic, what option did they have but to model it as a basically stochastic system? The people who really are at fault are the ones who chose, with incomplete knowledge of the Mathematics, to act upon the results of it. Michael Hintze, head of CQS, apparently once said something to the effect that ‘Maths is a great place to start but a terrible one to end’. I couldn’t agree more: Mathematics functions under the general rule: Garbage In, Garbage Out. It will work perfectly given perfect data. But owing to the incomplete nature of information in the market, it simply cannot be relied on as much as those who did rely on it thought it could. So rather than complaining about how Maths has failed the world, Nick should have been complaining about how it was abused to the point of disaster.

We won’t do this again, promise

There are occasional optimists who claim that the situation we’re all in at present is good for the world in the long run. The line of argument often quoted is something like ‘we will learn from this’ and so ‘the world will become a better place’. The idea is that market failure and economic disaster may be averted in future owing to great revelations during this slight blip. There was a person last year who came to talk at St Paul’s who pointed out that ‘better’ is a very subjective word when it comes to technology. He used the example of sending a man to the moon. Back in 1969 it took an 8-bit computer, some pretty good theory and some enthusiasm on the part of a NASA team to beat the Russians to send a man to the moon. According to the speaker (apologies as I have forgotten the name) the red tape that would need to be dealt with in order to send a man to the moon now would be impenetrable and it would be highly unlikely for NASA to fund a trip to the moon. There are also several advantages of CRT screens over LCD screens which have been lost such as wide viewing angles and low latency. Omnipresent surveillance is also a direct result of improved technology although some would argue the Labour government has more to do with that. The speaker’s argument was that rather than progressing linearly, some things get better and some worse as technology advances, and progress can be seen more as a rotation than a step forwards. I suspect the same happens with Economics. Bloomberg was a huge hit, yet it has made trading so much more complicated and made it so much harder to make money against a semi-automated market brimming with information. Whether that is a step forwards or backwards is up to you to decide. Returning to learning lessons, the government can’t be everywhere at once and watchdogs and regulators won’t be able to prevent the inevitable cycle of boom and bust which seems to be a feature built into Capitalism. After all, since when has man learnt lessons from his mistakes?

Will the world ever learn?

So to conclude, all I’m saying is that I think the truth is somewhat different to what most people interpret from what they read in the Financial Times LEX Column. As Moneyweek exaggerated, generally speaking there is no such thing as a ‘good investor’, merely a lucky one. Mathematicians cannot and should not be held responsible for misuse of their work, and the future will not necessarily be a better place because everyone has somehow learnt lessons. We will probably not learn enough from this, or any, crash/recession/depression/[whatever state of badness it is now] to avert all possible future crises. I guess the moral of the story is not to believe everything you read. Or perhaps simply to read less into what you read. Or perhaps simply to read less!

Blackle

I’ve found this slightly ridiculous site and think it’s important to point out the significance of the error the creators made.

Blackle is, in short, a black version of google.com. With the amount of traffic Google receives, the amount of energy used displaying its search results is phenomenal and according to research done by the creators of Blackle, by displaying a black instead of a white background on Google, the world could save 750 MWh/year (=86KW). So, let’s take a closer look at this idea.

The underlying assumption is that black screens use less energy than white ones. I agree fully that this may have been true in the retro days of CRT screens: fewer electrons will need to be fired at the front of the screen so less electricity will be required. Unfortunately CRTs are somewhat backward and our world is very much a flat panel place nowadays. There are two types of flat panel: LCD and plasma displays. LCD stands for Liquid Crystal Display and the principle is actually really quite beautiful.

A liquid crystal can be seen as a polarising tube: when light is shone down one end it gets polarised. However this tube is composed of several layers like a lot of very flat cylinders concatenated end-to-end, each with a polarising slit. In its natural state the crystal (tube) is twisted so that each layer is slightly out of line with the adjacent ones. Imagine looking at a slinky end-on then twisting it. When light is shone on one end of this twisted liquid crystal, the first layer polarises it. The second layer then blocks some of this light because it is polarised in a slightly different orientation and allows some through, re-polarising it. This is repeated for all the layers of the crystal and eventually some light gets through. The last layer’s polarisation is orthogonal to that of the first layer.

When electricity is passed through this crystal however, it straightens out and becomes an untwisted polarising cylinder which just polarises light like a normal polarising sheet.

To construct an LCD screen, a sheet containing an array of cells made of these crystals is placed in front of a sheet of normal polarising material. A backlight is placed behind both these sheets. An electronic grid allows electricity to be passed through any cell independently of all the others. In the un-electrified state, all the liquid crystals are arranged so that the polarisation of the back face (next to the polarising sheet) is in line with that of the polarising sheet (say, vertically) and of course the crystal is twisted 90 degrees so the front is polarised horizontally. This way, light from the backlight can get through both sheets since the back of the crystal is aligned with the sheet and light can get from the back to the front of the crystal. However the front of the crystal is fixed in orientation so when the sheet is electrified and all the crystals untwist, the back of the crystals end up horizontal. Now the crystal acts like a second polarising sheet but in an orthogonal direction to the first sheet. No light gets through and the screen is black.

So, what does that mean? No electricity needs to pass through the crystal to display a white screen but every single cell (pixel) needs current passing through it to display a black screen. The assumption was false for LCD monitors, which in 2006 accounted for 80% of all computer monitors.

The other flatscreen technology is plasma displays which physically illuminate each pixel with a separate light source (some sort of LED I’d imagine). These I think do conserve energy when displaying a black screen.

So the website, at the user end of things, actually does the opposite of the stated intention for 80% of computer monitors. To make things worse, the functionality of this site is much lower than Google. Since it’s a Google custom search, the site only has the Google features available to Google affiliates and lacks things like Google cache, translator, webapps etc.

Enough about the frontend – now for the backend. The site must receive tens of thousands of hits every day, and must therefore need some quite meaty servers to deal with the traffic. Let’s say it requires a server that draws 500W (including cooling), an average power consumption for a server. According to the internet archives, Blackle has been around since the beginning of 2007. Over 2 years this server would have burnt through 8.8MWh. The site advertises it has saved a total of about 1MWh. Blackle has in fact caused the world to use an extra US household’s year’s supply of energy. Oops. In fact, even if the server drew 60W (ridiculously low), it would still have used 1.05MWh to date, and the creators would have actually increased world energy consumption by 50KWh.

So yet again someone with good intentions has done the wrong thing. Far from solving the world’s energy crisis, the creators of Blackle have created something which is inconvenient to use and actually does the opposite of what it was originally supposed to do. It is, I wholeheartedly agree, a brilliant and novel idea, but sadly one which doesn’t work at all.

Sceptic Soc: The Lipid Hypothesis

Today Sceptic Soc, our humble society, joined forces with MedSoc to welcome Petro Dobromylskyj to our hallowed [concrete] halls to talk about his scepticism about cholesterol (In fact the reason for MedSoc’s involvement was entirely to attract numbers, and the entire business of inviting the speaker and organising lunch was skilfully organised by Theo, two posters were engineered by James and I set about the fun task of propaganda and publicity). I actually wasn’t expecting much – basing my predictions on the homeopathy speaker we had last time I was fully expecting the proceedings to consist predominantly of Biology teachers hurling intellectual abuse at an unfortunate speaker. In fact, it all went pretty well.

For starters, Theo got the guy’s name right when introducing him: generally considered a good start. Dobromylskyj rapidly launched into a concise list of reasons (consisting of a single element) why he would be unable to expand on the theory part of his talk: time. With the committee feeling slightly guilty, he pressed on, and what he had to say was not only impressive, but actually quite convincing.

Firstly, about his background, it’s clear from his blog that he isn’t just some nutter who simply believes what he wants to believe, hoping that backing from a non-insignificant scientific community justifies his beliefs. All of the posts I skimmed over seemed scientific in nature, although my background in Biology consists mostly of unhappy memories of unwillingly making posters, edible models and various other ‘fun’ activities in the wee hours of the morning for Dr Burnett’s homeworks, so anything more than an iGCSE answer and/or colourful A3 poster is beyond me. He’s also highly qualified: he has a BSc in physiology and a veterinary degree. Alone this doesn’t count for much – a highly qualified professor can still be wrong, taking Steven Hawking’s professor as an example (a documentary-drama had him make a mistake so it must be true…) – however it was clear from our conversation with him over lunch that he was extremely learned and well-read in this area, and I think he really takes this belief seriously and scientifically, thus with good ground. Put a different way: I hadn’t a clue what he was on about so I assume it’s correct. Theo seemed to understand and agree at any rate.

His talk was mostly statistical and he attempted to explain to us the mechanisms of some of the flawed experiments which support the lipid hypothesis. Most of his arguments were statistical – much like the entire global warming debate, the data is actually incredibly dubious: fat intake can have both a positive and negative correlation with cardiovascular events depending on the set of countries considered. He pointed out some graphing mistakes – particularly the case in which the graph was an ‘arbitrary unit’ against frequency graph. On replotting it as a correct cholesterol v frequency density graph the correlation appeared … somewhat less convincing.

Apart from criticising bad statistics he also attempted to explain why the experiments were flawed. I say ‘attempted’ because time was short and proper explanations like the ones he gave involving biological molecules tend to get lost on me. Admittedly therefore I can’t really say very much intelligently about this apart from the fact that most of the studies utilised methods of artificially changing cholesterol levels which themselves affected so many other factors that it is impossible to isolate the effects of the change in cholesterol levels. He then finished up with proposing some alternative correlations – links with stress levels, sugar levels, age, lifestyle, etc.

Although my unbiological ramblings don’t do Mr Dobromylskyj any justice, his talk was actually one of the most mind-changing talks I have ever attended, and it really changed my views on the subject dramatically. When I was putting up posters in the library, upon interrogation I suggested to the librarian that the man was a nutter and he wouldn’t have any reasoning behind these ideas. In fact, I now have a completely different view of cholesterol and the lipid hypothesis. The statistics just don’t seem to stand up to close scrutiny and the obvious and therefore often over-simplistic and often quoted graph of cholesterol levels against heart attack rate just doesn’t quite seem so obviously true any more. Dobromylskyj has successfully convinced me that a large part of the lipid hypothesis is built on poorly designed experiments whose results are further twisted by equally poorly conceived statistics. With the media consistently blowing small experimental fluctuations out of proportion and into ‘fact’, the theory ends up looking like a poorly spun web of lies. I still think there must be some truth to it – he even indirectly acknowledged some sort of correlation since a fatty diet is correlated with a sugary one (think along the lines of weak willpower) – so I shan’t be pigging out on lard anytime soon; but this episode really did get me thinking along new and different lines. Thanks, Theo, for organising this.

Next up on Sceptic Soc: a religious person will come and try to justify God … if and only if we can sort out a date (I have a horrible feeling I told James to tell the speaker it’ll be next week) and be organised enough to make it happen in 7 days – a situation which is highly unlikely and which would falsify my so-far-accurate null hypothesis that we are incompetent at organising.

My Stance on Global Warming

I’ve just chanced upon Will’s ‘vlog’ post (it was a video embedded into a blog post – what else am I to call it?). It’s a bit old – I take time to chance upon things. So, the world is coming to an end because we are selfish and excessive in our use of energy. Apparently.

Officially, I like to refer to myself as a sceptic and positivist – I follow the doctrine that speculation on ultimate causes or origins is futile and believe in the system of obtaining knowledge through systematic doubt and continual testing. Thus my stance on global warming is neither that of the maniac eco-warrior nor that of the inexorable cynic. However whatever the case it’s always important to take a multifaceted analysis of any situation and think outside the box (to use the old cliché), instead of dogmatically pursuing a mere single thread which exists as a relatively insignificant decoration on a thick quilt of intrinsically interwoven issues.

An aspect of the entire oil and global warming debate which is often overlooked or perhaps deliberately ignored is the economic and political aspect of it. If you think about it, nowadays oil is equivalent to power. This is very much an economic phenomenon projected onto the plane of political power in which Middle-eastern countries and Russia are at liberty to exploit their massive amounts of black gold, an unfortunate precedent which can be and in fact is unashamedly translated into a disproportionate amount of undeserved political influence. I’m sure I’m not alone in my (personal, biased and subjective) dislike of the idea of all this scarcity power being in the hands of the countries which happen to have all this oil and gas; I’d hate to see America and Britain on their knees begging Putin (we all know he’s still wearing the trousers over there) or some militant religious extremist group for a few barrels of oil. In other words this political leverage is all about the scarcity power of oil. This constitutes my primary reason for supporting a long-term move to abandon oil and other fossil fuels as a source of energy: oil is a commodity on which the world is increasingly reliant and whose natural residence is apparently countries which unnervingly frequently end up in political turmoil (I think it’s fair to say) so my personal opinion is that it seems after a little consideration a fairly bad idea to build the world up around it. I’m therefore a great fan of alternative, particularly renewable ways of producing power which don’t involve the use of such a messily obtained substance.

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Returning to the argument considered by most eco-warriors, I think Will is in part absolutely right (please ignore my seemingly nonsensical juxtaposition of words) about the warming aspect of, global, err, warming – whether it be us or pixies or cosmological factors who/which are at fault, there exists quite unequivocally a problem and it undeniably requires attention. However, personally undecided about the verity of the claims about the anthropogenity (neologism I believe, but a good one) of global warming, I’d argue an engineering solution rather than a human / social / lifestyle one is needed here – a protective rather than preventative solution. The Earth’s atmosphere is simply so complex that few people can claim to understand its workings in any great detail, let alone work towards an accurate model of cause and effect; by my logic it follows intuitively that any attempt to tackle a perceived cause may well be in vain if not deleterious (for example the questionable proposal of filling the atmosphere with sulphur dioxide) – far more propitious a solution would be simply to be pragmatic and do what we know we can do: consider methods of protection against predicted conditions which can themselves be more reliably extrapolated than an attempt of analysis on dubious and often erroneous data.

In fact, even if it were true that humans were the cause of the earth’s positive temperature gradient (against time), I’d be willing to bet that any attempt to reverse the trend would be futile, be it too little, too late, or both. A single word sums up the impossibility of the task of reducing Carbon emissions: China. As some may know, I blame China for many things, including milk, red tape and Communism; in this case though I feel it would be unjustified to blame her, even if her factories were indeed the cause of such future strife and suffering. Allow me to elucidate my uncharacteristically sympathetic attitude towards the developing world. I’m one of those cynics who believe the world, or at least the majority of it – certainly the influential parts of it – are driven by two main wants: money and power. In addition, everyone knows that just about everything runs off electricty. No business could function without it: transport, computers, buildings and manufacturing all slurp up vast quantities of electricity. So if money is everything and everything is electricity, there’s a lot to be said for electricity in money terms. China was blessed with unfair amounts of coal naturally available to the country, making coal a cheap source of energy. Chinese businesses (probably with the help of the government) merely exploited this by building coal power stations en masse, something the West would undoubtedly have done in the past, and which it would probably still do today. We got damn close with ‘drill baby drill’. China’s population situation is also geared towards high energy consumption: it doesn’t take a great leap of faith to conclude that 1.3 billion people squashed into 9.6 million square kilometres will require more than a few wind farms to power, and at the time China began developing at its unprecedented and scarily rapid rate (around when I was born) nuclear power was still very much an experiment and the world was still reeling from Chernobyl; the only way to supply power affordably to such a large population with so little space was to use cheap and cheerful methods: fossil fuels. So is it fair to blame China for making use of her natural resources partially out of necessity? I certainly don’t think so.

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So returning to the problem of global warming, it seems unlikely that China will wilfully do anything about her carbon emissions. Meanwhile, even if both the UK and US manage the 2050 target (I’m sure it used to be 2012…), the effect will be minimal, to say the least, even if it is true that global warming is our fault. My argument about protection rather than prevention seems to make sense.

So why don’t I join environment committee? In fact, there are several reasons, but the main problem for me is that the committee stands for something which I don’t: working off the assumption that global warming is by definition anthropogenic, it seems to work primarily to reduce Carbon emissions, a measure which I consider ineffective at best, and simply wrong at worst, and the fact that some of its aims happen to coincide with my personal ambitions for the world, e.g. renewable power, isn’t enough to convince me to join. Regardless, I still wish them luck in whatever they do; I’m good friends with one of the main figures in the society and am confident that he has good intentions and indirectly or otherwise yearns for a future unreliant on oil, and therefore also on the Middle East.

Hitchens v Dawkins

It may strike one as a strange pair to pit against each other: the two are leading religious sceptics, battling shoulder to shoulder against the forces of stupidity, misunderstanding and retardation of scientific progress – they generally tend to be on the same side. However I feel their styles when debating are very different and it’s worth making some comparisons. I’ve known about Dawkins and his struggle against insanity for a long time; I’ve read his books (well, got about half way through one of them to be precise) and watched some of his debates (specifically the one against Lennox) and have quite a good picture of him. I thought he was alone in this world until someone told me about Christopher Hitchens, another religious sceptic with similar aims, and have only recently taken the initiative to watch his debate with Boteach. The two debates contrasted starkly.

For one, the opponents were very different in nature. Dawkins had the misfortune to be debating against an apologist, a supposedly religious person who seems to have no real convictions about anything. Lennox was perfectly happy (I seem to remember) to agree the bible is … dubious in nature. Lennox is an adamant supporter of science. I seem to remember the two energetically agreeing with each other on some things, particularly where the acceptance of Science came in. Boteach on the other hand was amazing. The sheer incorrectness of his arguments amazed me. The fact that he was bold enough to make such ungrounded assertions in public amazed me – it was almost embarrassing to watch! Boteach is a creationist: in other words, he is an anti-scientist. His arguments about evolution were so warped, jaded and universally and categorically wrong that it made me cringe to have to listen. He also seemed to rest half his arguments on the fact that religion is a more palatable concept. What utter rubbish, and what joy it brought me to watch a master pick it apart in as pseudo-polite yet also gleefully rude manner as Hitchens. It also made Hitchens’ life a lot easier – picking apart arguments made by a jittering idiot is always easy. Believe me, I do it myself, though not quite as well.

The key difference between the two debates I think is the sceptics’ method of argument. Dawkins brought much science into it: he tried to use his knowledge of biology and physics to construct clear and rigorous scientific assertions to back up his arguments. I suspect it didn’t work so well for that debate – Lennox’s scientific leaning helped him get round the problem of having a stereotypical-religious-nutter image and he was able to discuss the science intelligently and make non-stupid points, part of the whole apologist guise. He also knew when to agree with Dawkins and which religious anti-science arguments to avoid (the ones which are clearly wrong such as those that attempt to dispute evolution). Dawkins’ book also draws heavily on current and past scientific research and his arguments are constructed intelligently from there. Hitchens on the other hand almost ignored science in his debate against Boteach. After all, as he said right at the beginning, he thinks it is so utterly clear religion is false that it’s pointless arguing over its verity; why bring in science? Instead he concentrated his energy on trying to prove why religion is pernicious, why be believes religion is actively harmful to the world and why it is outrightly contrary to everything human progress holds dear. Perhaps this is a better way of debating: the average religious nutter (Boteach included) will try desperately in an attempt to seem intelligent to find some loophole in science that creates a crack of uncertainty in which God may reside and at the same time dig for himself one heck of a hole in which to reside himself. Hitchens knew Boteach was going to make a stupid argument about science – why not let him introduce the incorrect pseudo-science and watch the show?

Another difference, certainly taking those two debates as examples, was the ‘niceness’ of our two heroes. Dawkins really did his best to be nice. He spoke fairly kindly about Lennox, was considerate when making arguments making an effort to confine his counter-arguments to the topic rather than making the other look like a fool. I was almost ashamed that he was too apologetic – he didn’t seem assertive enough. Lennox grabbed the wrong end of the stick when it came to faith – he completely misinterpreted the concept of what faith means and asked Dawkins whether he has faith in his wife, of which Dawkins really didn’t make much of a meal. Hitchens on the other hand was outrightly nasty right from the beginning, making the ensuing exchanges so much more interesting. He began with such a delightfully contemptuous tone that Boteach was enraged to the point of incoherence (maybe his incoherence was due to something else, who knows), and had such an obviously disgusted attitude towards religion that I really believe his anti-belief rubbed off on the audience. Even the title of his book, ‘the Missionary Position’, reflects the hilariously contemptuous nature of his methods of setting out arguments. His tone and hatred are truly in tune with mine (well, maybe not hatred) of religion. I really don’t see any reason to be polite about such things, and Hitchens really has the right idea as far as I’m concerned.

Overall I think I personally prefer Hitchen’s way of debating: loud and clear. Both clearly believe religion is pernicious, and quite rightly too. It’s damaging both mentally, physically and economically … but that’s for another blog post. Dawkins however attempts to intellectualise arguments too much. It is impossible to debate a true religious nutter by employing reasoning – the opponent simply will not understand. If he is convinced enough about the existence of God to debate against a sceptic he clearly has no concept of logic and as an utter inability to follow logical thoughts and mathematically accurate arguments, so why bother? But either way, I wish them both the best of luck in their anti-religion campaigns. Whatever the case, religion is wrong, stupid, pernicious, but above all, funny, and I’m glad both have picked up on the last one.