Tag Archives: Technology

Scatter, Adapt, and Remember – Annalee Newitz ****

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I’m not a natural audience for books about surviving disasters (even though I wrote the Global Warming Survival Kit). I can’t stand disaster movies, because I can’t take the newitzpragmatic ‘Oh well, some survive,’ viewpoint as I watch millions perish. So I thought that I would find this book, with its subtitle How Humans will survive a mass extinction somewhat unappetising – but I was wrong.

The Earth has gone through a number of mass extinctions, where a fair percentage of living species have been killed off. The most famous is the one that mostly took out the dinosaurs around 65 million years ago, but there have been others and, Annalee Newitz points out, if we want to see the long term survival of the human race, we need to be able to make it through one, should it turn up, whether caused by climate change, pandemics, a supervolcano or an asteroid.

What Newitz does surprisingly well here is weave together what are really around four different books, all in one compact volume. We start of with palaeontology, looking back over previous mass extinctions, getting a better understanding of what happened, what survived and how it survived. From here we segue into human pre-history and history, drawing lessons from the plight of the Neanderthal and the impact of plague and other pandemics. After this, in a transitional section we see the examples of the three techniques in the book’s title – scattering in the Jewish disaspora, adaptation in cyanobacteria (and how we could use it) and remembering on the part of the gray whale, before taking another transition into a more science-fiction driven view.

Newitz starts by pointing out the potential lessons to be learned from the SF writing of Octavia Butler who is apparently ‘one of the 20th century’s greatest science fiction writers’, which I was a bit surprised by as I read a lot of science fiction and I’ve never heard of her. The segue here is into the shakiest part of the book where it dabbles in futurology. This broadly divides into relatively short term survival approaches and longer term diaspora into space.

One of the reasons this is the weakest part of the book is that Newitz offers us castle-in-the-air solutions with no obvious way (and certainly no hint) of how to get there from where we are now. So she says we will need underground cities if we need to survive some kinds of impact, while we would be helped by building green cities that merge biology and construction… but it’s not clear how we would ever get started on such major, long term projects. She doesn’t address the reality that humans are very bad at taking the long view.

I was, though, pleasantly surprised by this book, particularly the first half. This is genuinely interesting and thought provoking, up to and including the Octavia Butler section. And though it goes a little downhill after that, it never fails to be readable and interesting – just a little far fetched. So congratulations to Newitz on taking the rare long view – and in having optimism for our ability to survive what the universe can throw at us.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Network Geeks – Brian E. Carpenter ***

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There is a series of TV adverts in the UK that have managed to embed their tagline into common usage. The ads are for a type of varnish, and that tagline is ‘It does what it says Screenshot_13_05_2013_10_05on the tin.’ There is a real problem when a book doesn’t do what it says on the tin – you get cognitive dissonance, expecting one thing and discovering another. That’s what happened when I opened up Network Geeks.

The subtitle promises ‘how they built the internet.’ Now this is a topic I’m fascinated by. I really enjoyed the book Where Wizards Stay Up Late, which details the story of the origins of the internet, but that’s quite old now, and I assumed this would give a modern day take from the viewpoint of an internet dominated society. What you get inside is totally different, and that’s a shock.

In trendy music terms, this book is a mashup. It really has three separate themes, only linked by the author, Brian Carpenter. One is an autobiography – so we get a fair amount of Carpenter’s family history, going back a good few generations. It’s not badly written, but probably of limited interest to anyone outside Carpenter’s family. Secondly – and this is the best bit – we have a considerable account of Carpenter’s work at CERN. He worked there twice and if you are into the developed of distributed computing (as I am) there is some really interesting material here, as CERN was both groundbreaking and yet isolated from the mainstream. Apart from anything else in this technical memoir part of the book I had distinct tugs of nostalgia as I had a great time working on DEC equipment, which regularly rears its head, while in the OR department of British Airways.

So far, so good – but we are yet to encounter anything that really has to do with the supposed topic of the book. This comes into the third part of the mashup, featured in the introductory section (which is part of the reason it is such a shock when the book suddenly goes into autobiographical mode) and towards the end. But this isn’t really about ‘how the built the Internet’ at all. It is about ‘how their committees made endless bureaucratic decisions about the architecture and protocols of the internet and how the architecture and protocols developed.’ To be honest, that is a rather less exciting, and certainly a lot more specialist field.

The problem is, unless you are really into the nitty gritty of how the committees that control the internet work, this probably isn’t for you. Carpenter falls into a few writing traps in naming far too many people we aren’t really interested in, using endless acronyms we don’t really care about and giving much too much detail on the minutiae to the extent that we lose the big picture. Here’s a not atypical snippet to get a feel: ‘Internet standards, originally endorsed by DARPA, came from the IETF by 1991, and certainly not from the ITU or the ISO, the twin homes of CLNP. On the other hand, CLNP was officially defined and had already been picked up for the next version of DECnet, a significant factor in the minicomputer market then served by the Internet.’

It’s not that this is a bad book – it just doesn’t do what it says on the tin, and I can only recommend it for the rather narrow audience for whom this kind of thing is meat and drink.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Creation – Adam Rutherford *****

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It is not often that a book jumps out at you as being fresh, original and excellent within minutes of starting to read it – but this was definitely the case with Adam Rutherford’s creationduoCreation. It is about both the biological origins of life and how we are artificially changing the nature of life with synthetic biology.

I have read plenty of books on basic biology, but Rutherford triumphs uniquely by giving us a clear exploration of the nature of life, breaking it down to its simplest components and seeing how these could have come into being. This goes far beyond the old ‘organic soup plus lightning’ concepts and takes us across that most difficult of jumps from a collection of organic compounds to something that has a living function.

To be honest, that would be enough on its own, but Rutherford also gives us an excellent and eye-opening look at how we are modifying and constructing life, from Craig Ventner’s synthetic bacterium, through ‘programmed’ bacteria to the practical applications of modified life. This synthetic biology is much more than the basics of genetic engineering and is totally fascinating, perhaps even more so than the ‘origin of life’ part.

What’s more, Rutherford has a breezy approachable writing style that never intimidates and manages to making information entertaining – no mean feat. Just occasionally he overdoes the bonhomie, particularly in his asides in footnotes. I was particularly unhappy with one about Fred Hoyle. Rutherford was rightly pointing out what a big mistake Hoyle made with his 747 from a scrapyard analogy, but Rutherford gets his history of science all wrong by demonstrating Hoyle’s iconoclastic ‘vocally rejecting mainstream ideas’ by saying ‘He disputed the universe’s origin being the result of the Big Bang, which is the overwhelming scientific consensus view.’

The problem with this is that at the time Big Bang was a seriously flawed theory, and arguably Hoyle et al’s alternative Steady State theory was better – Big Bang was certainly not the overwhelming consensus view. It was only later data, combined with a much hacked about and improved Big Bang theory that made it become that. To put it as Rutherford does totally misrepresents the significance of Hoyle’s theory at the time.

The other moan I have is the way the book is put together (I don’t think this applies to the US or Kindle versions). The two parts of the book, exploring the origins of life and looking at the synthetic future, are in two totally separate halves, begun at opposite ends of the book, one printed inverted to the other. This implies the two sections are independent and can be read in any order – but they aren’t. This is obvious as the introduction of the forward looking section has several references to reading the other section for detail. It should, without doubt, be read ‘origin of life’ first then ‘future of life.’ The flip book format is a silly gimmick that detracts from the outstanding quality of this book.

Without doubt one of the most important popular science books of 2013 and highly recommended.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Project Sunshine – Steve McKevitt & Tony Ryan ****

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The authors of this important book recognize that energy is the fundamental limiter for human existence and coupled with getting food production right, producing enough clean energy is the most essential step required to keep the world as we know it Screenshot_25_03_2013_13_54going.

It’s a slightly meandering book, taking in population growth, cosmology, world history, fossil fuels, renewables and more. The conclusions are powerful and inevitable. Forget the hydrogen infrastructure beloved of Arnie and Top Gear – it’s expensive and impractical. Yes to wind and all those other good things, but for at least 30 years we need a major increase in nuclear (with particular investment in fusion) combined with a rapidly increasing dependence on solar. This needs to be assembled alongside with effective ways of storing energy, which are more likely to be chemical (e.g. producing methanol from air-based carbon, then burning it) than as batteries.

So a great, really important message, but I found quite a lot of the book irritatingly slow, with far too much history that didn’t really contribute a lot to the argument. There was also a touch of the ‘Gore syndrome ‘ – Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth was largely good, but it was let down badly by a couple of factual errors.

All pop science books have a few errors, but when you lay down the law in a polemic fashion you need to be perfect with you core arguments. This book twice makes the plonking statement that ‘all our energy comes from the Sun’. This is blatantly not true, as the book makes plain in describing nuclear, geothermal and tidal energy – none if them dependent on sunlight.

There is also a real mess in the pages dealing with cosmology with some highly dubious numbers on inflation, and a total mix up between dark matter and energy – not crucial but irritating, making me wonder if the authors should have stuck to the science they knew. Overall, though, a very powerful and important title that all politicians should have on their shelves.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Frankenstein’s Cat – Emily Anthes ****

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In my experience, more scientists like dogs than cats (a dangerous assertion, I admit), which is why, perhaps, a cat ended up on the receiving end of the most famous thought experiment in history, Schrödinger’s Cat. Although the cat in Emily Anthes’ title obviously owes its existence to its hypothetical quantum cousin, though, this isn’t a book about thought experiments, but the real things. From fluorescent fish to cyborg animals, this is the story of what we are really doing – or planning to do – to modify nature.

For me, Anthes gets the balance just right in the book (though that ‘Frankenstein’ in the title is totally misleading in this respect). There are real moral issues to be considered in what we do to animals for our own benefit, but provided we take animal welfare into account, there is really no reason why we shouldn’t modify animals for our purposes. After all, we’ve been doing it for millennia through selective breeding – this is just a matter of doing it much more quickly and effectively.

Anthes covers all sorts of possibilities, and is at her best when she’s dealing with the everyday life side of the experience. So, for instance, her opening story of the fluorescent Glo-fish (despite headlines beloved of tabloid editors, they don’t glow in the dark, they re-emit light at a different frequency) is totally fascinating in part because of the legal challenges faced by the entrepreneurs looking to bring the fish to market (something that still isn’t legal, for instance, in the EU).

Making pets more interesting to look at may be fairly trivial (though as Anthes points out, it is surely more humane to make happy, healthy glowing fish than it is to distort goldfish into weird shapes so they have pop-eyes, as selective breeders have done for years), but we also meet much more useful possibilities in pharming – animals that have been modified so, for instance, their milk contains medically important proteins. Inevitably some animal rights types will moan, but surely it’s easier to justify keeping goats to produce medicine (in a normal and pleasant enough goaty life) than keeping rabbits as pets in cages (for instance).

Then we get to the real heavy stuff – implants that turn animals into controllable devices. Here, rightly, the moral discussion comes very much to the fore. However, where the animals in questions are insects, as many of them are, most of us have relatively few qualms. I’d certainly rather an insect was wired up as a drone than was used for entertainment in I’m a Celebrity Get me Out of Here. Again, it’s the entrepreneurs that fascinate – specifically a pair that sell a ‘control your own cockroach’ kit to turn a cockroach into a remote controlled object and learn a bit about neuroscience along the way.

Just occasionally I found the interest levels dropping a bit, and the way the book is pitched is just a little too casual for me with not quite enough science. But this is a very important area that is not going to go away and that we all ought to be thinking about. The way we have handled GM crops has been disastrous, resulting in the pathetic scene of supposedly humanitarian organizations preventing the use of crops that could help millions of people survive. We need to do better with modified animals – and this book is a good eye opener on the possibilities and the debates we will face. Recommended.

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Review by Brian Clegg

R & D is War – Clifford L. Spiro ****

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Industrial research and development is arguably the cinderella of science and technology, yet without it we wouldn’t have all the remarkable stuff we use  - from high tech gadgets to apparently trivial pieces of technology like a light bulb.

Clifford Spiro (who, if his author photo is anything to go by, is the Bruce Willis of R&D) gives us an engaging insider’s view of the realities of industrial R&D, working on a range of product areas in his career from coal technology through light bulbs to artificial diamonds. It isn’t an easy road – time and again there’s a struggle with a difficult problem, a solution is produced… and then not used. Just occasionally, though it’s a multi-million dollar winner. Spiro gives us real, coal face experience of the power of R&D, the difficulties of getting it right and the practicalities of using the scientific method in the real world, without the academic’s ivory tower protection.

When it works well, this book works really well. It features good story telling – the reader wants to find out what happens next. Spiro has a light, colloquial tone and brings the R&D environment alive. The downside is that he can be a bit summary – there is an element of ‘with a single bound he was free’ from some of the problem solving and I would like to have seen a bit more of the science explained – and I’m not sure there’s a lot of value in his end-of-chapter words of wisdom for doing R&D well. It’s when we’re getting good narrative of the R&D guys versus the challenge of, say, preventing a light bulb exploding that this becomes a great read, not as a business primer.

This is a self-published book, with the usual drawbacks, though it is very classy considering. The cover design is excellent and the text is reasonably edited. Where it is let down a little is in layout – like many self-published books the text itself is too dense, making it heavy on the eye, and for some reason all the m-dashes (a long hyphen used as a sentence break – like this) have no spaces before them, which looks odd. It’s certainly not enough to put me off recommending this book.

Were it not for the topic I would probably only give the book three stars, as it it does need some work on that summary nature – but there is so little written about R&D, and the stories are so interesting when at their best that I have had to give it four.

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Review by Brian Clegg

The Logician and the Engineer – Paul J. Nahin ***

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For its target readership this is an excellent book – and I have to say as someone outside that market I really enjoyed some parts – but the fact remains it is aimed at a pretty narrow segment. There’s even a little section at the front of the book that effectively says ‘read this to see if you can cope with the rest.’

The bits I found particularly appealing were a few introductory logic problems (though I’m not sure I agreed with all  the conclusions) and the pocket biographies of mathematician George Boole and information engineer Claude Shannon. However, while technically qualified to deal with the other parts of the book, in truth I couldn’t be bothered – it was too much like hard work.

For bits of it I would have to wade through far too much grunt maths, and for other bits would have had to think far too hard about electronic circuits and the logic circuits beloved of basement dwellers on computer science courses. (Or was it just my university that confined the computer scientists to the basement?)

I think the author makes the mistake that many academics make when trying to write for a broader audience: they carry through too much of the textbook, and find that the aspects that often encourage people to remember things in that context (often because they involve repetitious grunt work) actually prevent popular science readers from getting the message. It’s a shame, because the subjects are interesting, but unless you are the kind of person who designs logic circuits for fun, this is probably not the book you’d want to see.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Turing: Pioneer of the Information Age – B. Jack Copeland *****

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Alan Turing is a name that has grown in stature over the years. When I first got interested in computers all you really heard about was the Turing test – the idea of testing if a computer could think by having a conversation by teletype and seeing if you could tell if there was a computer or a human at the other end. Then came the revelations of the amazing code breaking work at Bletchley Park. Now, though, we know that Turing was much more than this, the single person who most deserves to be called the father of the computer (we allow Babbage to be grandfather).

All this and much more comes through in B. Jack Copeland’s superb biography of Turing. It’s not surprising this book (and its competitors) is on sale now. 2012 is the hundredth anniversary of Turing’s birth. And it is a timely reminder of just how important Turing was to the development of the the technology that is at the heart of much of our everyday lives (including the iPad I’m typing this on today).

If I had to find fault at all with this book, it can be a little summary in some aspects of Turing’s private life – but I suspect this reflects the lack of information from a very private man. However if, like me, you’re a bit of a computer geek it would be impossible not to be fascinated by the description of his ideas and the technology that was developed from them, beautifully written by Copeland. I’ve read plenty before about Enigma, but the section on this was still interesting, and the Tunny material (a later, more sophisticated German coding device, to crack which the Colossus computer was developed) was all new to me.

Similarly, I hadn’t realised how many firsts belong in the UK rather than the US. I knew Turing’s work led to the first stored program electronic computer – the first true computer in a modern sense – but I hadn’t realised, for instance that Turing was the first to write the code for computer generated music, with the first computer music in the world produced using that code in Manchester (contrary to the myths you are likely to see online).

Although some of the personal life information is a little sketchy, Copeland really delivers on Turing’s death. I had always accepted the story that he committed suicide with a poisoned apple as a result of the ‘chemical castration’ he chose as an alternative to prison for admitting homosexual acts. Copeland tears this myth to pieces. Turing had endured the hormone treatment with amusement – and it had finished a year before his death. By then he was fully recovered. He appears to have been happy and positive at the time of his death. He left a part-eaten apple by his bed every night. And he was experimenting on electroplating in a room adjacent to his bedroom – using a solution that gave off hydrogen cyanide. The postmortem was very poor, without testing whether the cyanide that killed him had been ingested or inhaled. The evidence seems strong that Turing’s death was an unfortunate accident, not the tragic suicide that is usually portrayed.

In the end I can strongly recommend that anyone with an interest in computing should rush out and buy a copy of this book. Well written, fascinating and overthrowing a number of myths, it’s a must-have.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Robots (Discover Science) – Clive Gifford ***

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What we have here is a colourful, approachable easy-to-read collection of mini-articles on different types of robots. Each two page spread covers a topic and typically has three examples of the robot in question. So, for instance, we’ve got sections on robot arms, robot insects and robots in space.

The illustrations are clear, big and colourful, but in the end a little dull. And that’s the only problem with the book as a whole. It is a perfectly reasonable catalogue of different kinds of robot, but in the end they get rather samey, and there’s no story to it, no chronology, nothing to give it much to keep you reading.

At the back are a couple of ‘fun and easy projects’ – making a ‘robot arm’, acting like a robot and making a sub-Blue Peter robot model. The content is fine, with the possible exception of the domestic robots spread, where we see a very unlikely robot waiter, but we don’t see the only domestic robots that have sold in any numbers – vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers (perhaps because they look rather boring). But it’s just not a book I can get excited about. And somehow, having been brought up on Robby the robot, K9, R2D2 and C3PO (daleks are not robots, please note Mr Gifford) this was something of a disappointment.

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Review by Jo Reed

Techno Sport – Brian Clegg

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Anyone who knows me will be aware that I am as enamoured with sport as the next geek, which is to say not at all. I have attended one football match, just to see what it’s like, and I have no intention of going again. The Olympics will pass me by as an irritating disruption of the TV schedule and an even more irritating financial burden on the country. Yet the subject of using technology to enhance sporting prowess is one that interests me immensely, because like my book Upgrade Me it is all about using human inventiveness to go beyond the built-in capabilities of the body.

In Upgrade Me I identify five primary ways we have used technology to produce a kind of artificial evolution. They are in lengthening our lifespan, making ourselves more attractive to other members of our species, increasing physical capabilities, enhancing the brain and making physical repairs to the body. While there are some inputs science and technology for sport have made to this last category, it’s in increasing physical capabilities that most work has been done.

There is a constant battle in sport that goes on between those who develop technologies and the governing bodies. Someone comes up with a way to enhance sporting ability and the governing body bans it for giving an unfair advantage. (Strangely this happens most often in Formula 1, a sport that is inherently about technology.) This battle between the rules and new ideas seems totally arbitrary, and needs a major rethink in approach.

Take nanotechnology, something that has played an increasing role in sport. A simple example was the introduction of Lycra. This artificial fibre which has interesting properties at the nano-level that give it unusual stretchiness, was introduced in the 1950s as a replacement for rubber in corsetry. But it really took off when the French Olympic ski team used Lycra to give sleekness to their ski suits in the 1968 Olympics, and became an absolute essential for swimmers from the 1972 Olympics on, spreading to many other sports.

This doesn’t seem to have offended the powers that be. Nor does the use of a nano-technology liquid repellent coating like that created by UK Sport and P2i for use in cycling and sailing. By repelling liquids, the nano-coating prevents sporting equipment from taking on extra weight from absorbed liquids. Yet at the same time, Speedo’s LZR Racer bodysuit, which helped produce 168 world records with a combination of water repellent nano particles and special panels to trap air, was banned by the international swimming association Fina for giving competitors unfair advantage until it was totally redesigned.

This kind of inconsistency highlights the strange bias of sporting achievement. The way we undertake competitive sport is not designed to show how well an individual pushes themselves against their basic capabilities, how hard they have worked, what a star they are – instead our sporting ability traditionally largely depends on genetic input. It wouldn’t matter how much effort I put into making myself a runner, I would never be able to compete effectively at county level, let alone in national or international competitions. It’s the luck of the draw. I’m not a runner, and I never will be.

If we really wanted a “fair” race, everyone would be handicapped according to their natural ability, and only what they achieve through extra effort would be rewarded – but of course that’s never going to happen. What sports bodies who ban a technology are saying is that it is okay to have an athlete’s ability decided by random factors, but not by planned effort on their part. This surely isn’t right: it’s the effort, the creativity that we should celebrate. Rather than worry about the technologies, it would be better to find some method of handicapping to natural ability and make sure the technology is available to all.

Of course there will always be limits. There will remain concerns about doping – though I would argue that enhancement through stuff you consume is fine as long as it has no negative effects on the body. That’s all that a sports dietician does, after all. It’s interesting that there is a session at this year’s Euroscience Open Forum session in Dublin on ‘building a better athlete’ that looks at ways receptor binding agents can mimic positive effects of doping agents like steroids without the negative impact. If there is a way to enhance ability, without side effects, why not use it?

The attitudes of governing bodies illustrate, I suspect, the total arbitrariness of sporting rules. The marathon is the ultimate example – the bizarre distance of 26 miles and 385 yards doesn’t reflect the original run in Greek history it is supposed to honour. The 385 yards was added in 1908 when the Olympic race was run in Windsor, at the request of the royal family to bring the start into view of the royal nursery, and the race has stayed that length ever since.

There is something very sad about the obsession with doing things simply because they stretch human beings to the limit. This is what leads to attempts to trek across the North or South Pole on foot, or to climb Everest without oxygen. To any sensible onlooker, it’s stupidity. There is no scientific benefit. There is no discovery. It’s little more than risky posturing.

Those who design great treks across vast wastes would laugh at a challenge of standing on one foot for as long as you can, or hopping around London with a paper bag over your head – yet each has exactly the same benefit as their achievements: it tests the limit of human endurance. We should see these ‘great feats’ for what they are. A way of showing off that has no more value than standing on one foot.

It’s time we had a total rethink of the way sporting rules are applied. Accept the fact that the restrictions are totally arbitrary – if a technology works and it is safe, make it available to all, but we should use that technology to enhance our capabilities. It’s the single most definitive feature that makes us human.