Its contents will, when I get a moment, be moved across to andrewsteele.co.uk.

In the meantime, those desperate for a regular dose of rambling should check out Statto’s ’Blog at andrewsteele.co.uk/blog. It will have a slightly different format to this one, hopefully being updated daily-ish with a short summary of some arbitrarily-chosen aspect of that 24 hours.

All the stuff usually consigned to this ’blog will be re-homed to various places around andrewsteele.co.uk (perhaps under ‘Magazine’ or something, suggestions welcome) when I get chance, ultimately leading to this subdomain being decommissioned.

You can catch the RSS feed for all updates at andrewsteele.co.uk at andrewsteele.co.uk/feed/rss.xml. It’s currently a bit unexciting, but I hope that that will change shortly.

Any exciting bugs, do let me know. I’m working on the appalling rendering in Internet Explorer…

Enjoy!

The news: infrequently-updated topical satire site KTAB News has been mentioned on the Beeb!!! Get over there and marvel at the passing mention of our being “widely well-regarded”.

Watch this space for what will hopefully not be very long and the ’blog should be re-homed and then, hopefully actually updated sometimes. Indeed, if I go through with my current plan, perhaps even daily…

Hope also that this impromptu praise of our satirical creation leads to further updates over there, too.

Inhabiting my mind is like having the constant company of an overly exuberant office joker who finds forced entertainment in the World’s quotidian minutiae. Luckily, this annoying persona has the restraint to only present himself in my mind or when there’s no-one else around, and so the rest of the population are thankfully spared my impromptu, incoherently improvised songs about the merits of orange juice.

If my demeanour does not worsen over this bank holiday weekend, I might be forced to seek out misfortune in order to euthanise my invisible alter-ego. He’s really starting to piss me off. In fact, it may be his ironic swansong that his own jolly observations and antics are his downfall. Thank God for psychological negative feedback.

My cheerfulness has been unfortunately exacerbated because I’ve had a pretty good week at work. I’ve been landed with the quite techie task of constructing a top-secret Google Earth KMZ layer for a comarketing effort, and learning the geographical and 3D modelling XML and then writing PHP scripts to assemble them for a large dataset has been pretty interesting. I shall shortly not be in breach of my non-disclosure agreement by providing a link to my handiwork, so watch this space.

S2006 also went down pretty well, as JTA has noted, and it was recorded in high levels of detail this as every year. When I get home and have access to a computer with Photoshop and such, I shall see to it that the pictures/video/audio make it online.

Otherwise, little to report. If anyone’s got any bad news, I’d be grateful if they could send it this way. More on a fairly irregular basis at some unspecified point.

I discovered to my cost the other day that wearing trainers to work is a mistake. For some reason, they seem to react unfavourably with some of the office furniture (probably the carpet) and I end up charged up with static electricity. Every time I open one of the metal-handled doors, therefore, I got a painful electric shock.

I have since resolved never to wear my trainers to work again; not a problem, as Google’s casual dress code permits sandals, which for some reason seem not to charge me up. However, every time I reach towards the door, I recoil momentarily with Pavlovian terror. An eerie, instinctive, visceral fear of touching the handle grips me and I am momentarily paralysed, unable to pass through the door until I can build up the courage to touch it.

The strength of this unwillingness is surprisingly strong, and I find my total inability to perform the utterly harmless (now I’ve ditched the trainers), everyday act of door-opening completely hilarious.

Thus, the other thing I’ve discovered to my cost is that someone who laughs every time he opens a door induces an array of strange looks from his coworkers.

London

Coming to London has been something of a culture shock.

On Saturday 15^th July, I worked a fifteen hour day at Newport Show, my local agricultural show, where I sold plants grown by my parents. Newport Show exudes parochial charm; it’s the homeliest of the locations at which we ply our green wares because not only is it under five miles from our house, but also because pretty much every resident of Newport seems duty-bound to attend.

Consequently, one spends one’s day talking to an array of acquaintances in between the usual sale of plants, evoking a nostalgic small-town atmosphere in anyone aware that he will be renouncing it for London the next day.

When I did just that, therefore, the contrast was stark. London, with its integrated public transport network, gave me a bewildering number of routes to get to work, and an even more confusing number of ways to pay for it. I eventually opted for one of the rather clever Oyster cards.

As well as being smart, however, this small piece of microchip-endowed plastic is scary, because with a single wave over a small, yellow, rubbery pad, you get apparently limitless access to a World of public transport opportunity. It just doesn’t feel like you’re spending money.

The other feature of this bustling metropolis is the sheer weight of people. No combination of mitigating factors (“it’s the end of the line”, “it’s Sunday”, “it’s the evening”, et cetera) ever seem to dilute the crowds here below a level significantly in excess of my rural market town expectations.

However, my attitudes have clearly adapted quickly to this new environment; having attended a party in Monmouth at the weekend, a walk down a street in Newport (Gwent, this time, not my home town) brought a strangely Londoner-esque disappointment at the swathe of closed shops. This is the 24-hour society of the 21^st century…so why isn’t everywhere open like it would be here?!

Google

Coming to Google has been something of a culture shock.

I’ve never worked in a business larger than a Maize Maze combined with farm shop back home, and consequently the air-conditioned corporate environment, resplendent with ergonomic chairs, bean bags and smart orange juicing machine is slightly beyond my experience.

The confusion is compounded by the fact that the Google ambience is a far cry from my stereotype of City business, which a large number of companies seem to have left behind in the 1980s. I can get away with wearing shorts to work most days, and have only been called upon to wear a shirt and trousers (no tie, of course) on the one day so far that I have had a meeting with an important client. The ad agency at which this meeting was held did not adhere to any such rigorous dress code even under these circumstances.

There’s also free food everywhere, and a large atrium filled with bean bags, cushions and other odd seating and general lazing apparatus.

As for work, I’m in marketing—yet another culture shock—which has so far comprised analysis of advertising performance, investigating a long list of locations on Google Maps and Google Earth to assess their suitability for use in a forthcoming promotion, and building a Google Maps mash-up for my parents by way of investigating the product (the Google Maps API, which allows webmasters and bloggers to create smart web-based, highly customisable maps just by copying and pasting JavaScript) that it will be one of my projects to promote.

The conclusion

My aim over the course of the next six weeks (having already completed a week of my seven interning) is to work out whether I would like to spend some, most, all, or none of the rest of my life working in London and raking in vast quantities of cash, either for Google or otherwise.

Having never lived in London or worked in a corporate setting before, I have no idea whether or not either will be desirable.

A week and a day in, I’m probably closer to an answer than I have been before…but not close enough that I feel capable of writing anything coherent about it.

This test continues.

A rethink of this position was forced with the advent of evolutionary theory. Almost all scientists now consider evolution an adequate explanation of how ordered complexity can arise from disordered rubbish, so instead of postulating that life itself was amazing, it was necessary instead to make the fact that the Universe has conditions appropriate for evolution to occur the unlikely, and thus God-requiring, stage.

This could well be fair enough. There are plenty of ‘fundamental constants’, as they are called, which, were they a tiny bit different, would not allow life to occur. A favourite is the so-called fine structure constant, α, which is a measure of the strength of the electromagnetic interaction. It is actually defined as the speed of an electron orbiting in a hydrogen atom divided by the speed of light, and this is what makes it appealing: it is a speed divided by a speed, so whatever units you choose, the answer will be the same number. Its value is 0.00729735…, more often written as 1/137.

Now, changing this by a fraction could mean that atoms were no longer bound together, an obvious disaster for life as we know it, or it could mean that the nuclear fusion which powers the Sun zips along a little too fast and life wouldn’t have time to evolve. In fact, changing it by anywhere from a small to a huge amount could have all manner of drastic repercussions at every scale in the Universe. Some bizarre form of life might be able to evolve, but it’s more likely that none would emerge at all. So why has it got that exact, rather convenient value?

There are tens of physical constants to which a similar logic can be applied. Knock the strength of gravity, alter how big the Big Bang was, change how much matter there is in the Universe or make the strong nuclear force a little less strong, and the chain of inevitable changes to the laws of physics would make any life untenable.

So, the chances of a life-supporting universe arising randomly are pretty slim.

Consider, on the other hand, the chances of life arising if there is a God who, for some reason, desires life. We need not question the nature of Him or His motives for the moment, merely that he wants life, and is capable of making a universe which can sustain it. What are the chances of life under this new regime? Unless he’s pretty cack-handed, close to one.

Say you told me that you had a coin with a one on one side and a six on the other and a six-sided die, and then told me that by either rolling the die or tossing the coin, you had just obtained a six. As a betting man I would put my money on you having used the coin to get that six, because fifty-fifty is much more to my taste than a meagre seventeen percent.

Scaling up the analogy, we have a one-sided coin (the pretty much certainty of life arising in a universe created by a life-loving God) versus a die with more sides than the human imagination can conceive, one for every single universe which can’t sustain life.

Therefore, to a pretty good approximation, God exists. Or rather, the probability of our having been created by something other than a life-desiring God is so small that it cannot be conceived by the human imagination.

Is there any further reason to be sceptical about God’s existence, beyond that inconceivably small fragment of possibility that he doesn’t?

Unfortunately, yes. The problem is that applying probabilistic arguments in this case is pretty much meaningless, because we have no idea what the likelihood of the options enumerated above really is.

To return to my coin and die, guessing the coin is all very well, unless you’re a running a scam and only ever use the die. Despite it being more likely to be the coin if you choose which to use at random, using each one half of the time, you don’t have to use the coin much less often for it to start becoming favourable to guess the die. Thus, if God’s existence is impossible or unlikely by a similar amount to a life-friendly universe arising by pure chance, the playing field starts to be levelled somewhat.

The other problem with this argument is that it is somewhat philosophically unsatisfying. All you know if you believe the probabilistic interpretation is that there is a God who likes creating life, and you have no idea of any other characteristics of His, from omnibenevolence to even his continued existence to this day.

So, the God versus atheism battle persists unresolved…but the teleological argument is strangely compelling, don’t you think?

The title, I Wish I Was A Punk Rocker (With Flowers In My Hair), heralds a catalogue of muddled analogy, and the lyrics deliver, with Thom’s chorus in the first thirty seconds celebrating the “’77 and ’69 revolution[s]” in the same breath. One might hope that Thom would have an insightful link between the hippy-led culmination of a decade of sexual liberation and the iconoclastic rise of anti-establishment independent music. Unfortunately, she doesn’t seem to have even bothered to consider it.

Quite beside the irksome anachronism of equating flower power with punk rock, the lyrics manage to irritate on a second level through their saccharine-coated simplistic vocabulary and rhyme schemes, peppered with lyrical triumphs such as “when the head of state didn’t play guitar / not everybody drove a car” more reminiscent of cringe-worthy primary school poetry than chart-topping songwriting.

The acoustic style is minimalist, with semi-spoken lyrics over light percussion providing a gentle folk feel to the track. The music video seems to supplement this small ensemble with a silent guitar, strummed in time with the tambourine, but seemingly emitting no sound of its own. That someone who claims to want to be a punk rocker have a sound so meek when compared to the aggressively noisy genre she supposedly idolises stinks of profiteering hypocrisy. The unintentional irony is only overblown by her lyrics’ twee celebration of bygone days, a stark contrast to punk’s purposely offensive rejection of its contemporary moral and social norms.

The hippies can be scarcely happier than the Sex Pistols, with the free-loving message of universal peace being unthinkingly conflated with that of crass anarchists in the next decade. To even try to draw parallels between these revolutions indicates a respect for and knowledge of neither.

What Thom’s fans may laud as an ironic blending of incongruous aesthetics is in fact a lyrically weak and ideologically confused piece of sell-out nostalgia. With words little more than a bullet-point inventory of sixties and seventies stereotypes and a tune scarcely worthy of being so named, I Wish I Was A Punk Rocker disappoints at every juncture. If, that is, you were expecting anything.

Sid Vicious must be rolling in his heroin-induced early grave. Perhaps Sandi Thom’s thus far unspectacular imitation of punk rockers will improve to the point where she follows him there.

I do not intend to frequently make ’blog posts deconstructing popular music… I imagine every week’s number one is, give or take, this bad. However, this one was noteworthy both in having come to my attention at all and through the level of venom it inspired in me. Here’s to me never being subjected to a music channel again.

“It’s such a treat to win—it is a genuine surprise,” he told the BBC News website.

“Many people take electricity for granted, but there’s electricity everywhere: there’s electricity in our brains; there’s electricity in our planet; there’s electricity powering our civilisation; the Sun burns by electricity.

“With the book, I wanted to open up the door and show what’s actually there.”

(from Electric book wins science prize, BBC News)

Let’s read that again.

“It’s such a treat to win—it is a genuine surprise,” he told the BBC News website. “Many people take electricity for granted, but there’s electricity everywhere: there’s electricity in our brains; there’s electricity in our planet; there’s electricity powering our civilisation; the Sun burns by electricity. “With the book, I wanted to open up the door and show what’s actually there.” (from Electric book wins science prize, BBC News)

Now, I can think of no conceivable way in which it is possible to say that the Sun burns “by electricity”.

The Sun is powered by nuclear fusion, which is a process where small nuclei bash together and stick, making larger nuclei and emitting energy in the process. The nucleus is the small, highly massive positively-charged lump at the centre of an atom and, in fact, electrostatic repulsion slows down the process significantly because like charges repel and thus two positive nuclei need far more energy to get close enough together to stick than they otherwise would.

There is one practical upshot of this: without the reduction in rate of reaction brought about by the reduced probability of a collision happening, stars would burn far, far faster and presumably ‘life as we know it would not exist’, or some other such suitably grandiose conclusion. Judging by the rubbish in the blurb about what would happen if electricity entirely ceased to exist, this may well be his point. However, it is both a ridiculously tenuous way of connecting stars to electricity, and utterly fatuous, in that of course the Universe would be different if you entirely removed one of its four fundamental forces.

It’s rather like saying “cars are powered by friction”: friction does do a number of important jobs for the motor industry, allowing tyres to grip the road and giving brakes the ability to slow them down, but to claim that it was what powered the car is patently ridiculous. It is even true that cars as we know them would not exist without friction, and perhaps an interesting (if pointless) scientific discussion might ensue around the point, but a lot of eyebrows would be raised if you condensed this notion into the crude phrase “cars are powered by friction” and then told that to the BBC.

Thus, it is true (but not very catchy) to say that “the rate of solar nuclear reactions is significantly modulated by electrostatic repulsion”, and perhaps even tenuously go on to say that this is an important fact, but “the Sun burns by electricity” is semi-sensical science made into an empty sound bite which is utterly unscientific.

Science certainly does need simplifying if it’s to be engaging to people who haven’t had years of formal training. However, I don’t think that the winner of a popular science prize should be turning interesting and comprehensible science into horribly misleading dumbed-down nonsense.

Chair of judges Nick Ross said “This book is wonderfully accessible—it’s a huge canvas but it reads like a novel, with twists and turns that would make a fiction writer happy to have been so inventive; and opens up a universe of facts that would scarcely be credible in an imaginary tale.”

I just hope that his book really is more than scarcely credible having read this rather too inventive sound bite.

She popped into the Deanery, proceeded to preside over the doling out of posh nosh to lucky sods who won tickets in Hall (”Lunch with Liz”), and then had a whistle-stop tour of Christ Church Cathedral before zooming off in the Queenmobile (a rather nice number-plate-less Bentley given to her as a gift by Bentley).

Other activities in the Queen’s Oxford visit included opening the redeveloped Oxford Castle (a castle and prison converted into shops and a hotel), visiting the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and opening the University of Oxford Rothermere American Institute Garden.

So, photos. Click for larger images. If you’re interested in really big copies of any of the below, please leave a comment.

A crowd of schoolchildren practise their patriotic flag-waving as Queen Time approaches.

Dean Christopher Lewis: “Do you think that’s her?”

Dean and Queen share an in-joke as he introduces her to Belinda Jack and Edwin Simpson, Christ Church’s Junior and Senior Censors.

The Queen-Dean team walk from Deanery to Hall.

The Queen and the Dean say hello to the cute small kids from Christ Church Cathedral School.

Her Majesty moments after accepting a small bouquet from a child.

Though it’s often hard to tell from photographs and video of her, Queen Elizabeth II’s preferred gait is the goose-step.

The Queen would make an excellent window-cleaner with the practised wrist action from her frequent waving.

Everybody say “bye bye, your majesty.”

The Queen grins broadly as she gets ready to hot-foot it in the Queenmobile.

It’s been going for nearly five billion years and will probably burn for about as long again. It rises every day and delivers nearly 200 petawatts (200 thousand trillion watts) of power to the Earth. A swimming pool full of ²³⁵U could power a city for a century—the Sun delivers that much energy direct to the surface of the Earth in less than twenty minutes.

But don’t rush out and vote for the Green Party in today’s local elections just yet. There are a few little problems with a sunny utopia powered by photovoltaic cells:

1. The Earth is very big, which means all those petawatts of sunlight are rather spread out. The actual insolation (the climate physicists’ name for sunlight power per unit area) at our present distance from the Sun is a mere 1400Wm⁻²—so a square metre of solar cells delivers about 1400W, meaning that you need a 2 × 1 metre solar panel to power a kettle. Just one kettle.
2. Things get in the way of the sunlight. By the time you consider the atmosphere absorbing incoming rays, clouds reflecting them back and the Earth getting in the way (an obtuse way of referring to ‘night time’), the average insolation drops to more like 250Wm⁻². So you need a 4 × 3 metre panel to power a kettle. Just one kettle.
3. Solar cells are by no means 100% efficient. Some of the best are ‘monocrystalline’ silicon cells (so named because they are made from a single perfect crystal), which convert some 24% of incoming light power into electrical power when made carefully in the lab. However, these cells are so expensive and difficult to produce that they actually use more energy being made than they could conceivably generate in their lifetime. As such, cheaper ‘amorphous’ silicon (basically sand) is used, giving an efficiency of some 5–7% in production models. So you need a 15 × 16 metre panel to power a kettle. Just one kettle. 15 × 16 metres. That’s huge.

I wouldn’t use this as an all-encompassing argument against solar power, but it’s pretty compelling evidence that it can’t form too huge a part of our power portfolio. I admit most kettles aren’t boiled 24/7, but there is some rationale behind the analogy.

Firstly, boiling a kettle isn’t something which we can reduce the power consumption of by very much. Water takes 4200 joules of energy per kilogram to heat it up by one degree, regardless of how efficient your kettle design is. So, if we want to continue having tea, coffee and hot chocolate, regardless of chosen heating method, it’s going to cost a fixed, fairly large quantity of energy.

Secondly, it’s a reasonable order of magnitude estimate to put power consumption into context; it’s about equivalent to thirty light bulbs, a microwave plus a TV, or a few computers, so these are the kinds of areas of solar cells we’d need to power something in the region of a household.

So, is nuclear all that remains? If wind farms are a bit dodgy and solar cells similarly inefficient, what have we got left?

Well, I’m going to be a bit more sensible than the Green Party, but maintain that we do need a more balanced diet in our electricity-making methods. I read a report recently suggesting that the World hasn’t got enough uranium left to support the next generation of nuclear power plants anyway…it’s time to start hedging our bets.

The main point of this entry, as with my post on nuclear power, is a call to trust the physicists and ignore easily-misled common sense: knee-jerk environmentalism and thoughtless consumption, which appear to be the ideologies into which society is currently polarised, are both probably some way off the mark.

Despite my call to trust physicists and beware of the claims of solar cell fanatics, however, I do think that we need to err a lot more towards the knee-jerk environmentalists’ standpoint if we don’t want our planet to be a pressure cooker in a few centuries.

This feat will not be replicated for 100 years, by which time Halley’s comet will have returned, there will have been another solar eclipse on the UK mainland and I, in all probability, will be dead.

Revel in this consecutive chronological spectacle while it lasts! You’ve got precisely one second, which will already be gone by the time you read this.

Ah, well; such is the transient nature of time, human existence and our arbitrary timekeeping and calendrical systems.

One of the most famous apocryphal tales concerns little George and a cherry tree:

When George…was about six years old, he was made the wealthy master of a hatchet! of which, like most little boys, he was immoderately fond, and was constantly going about chopping everything that came in his way. One day, in the garden, where he often amused himself hacking his mother’s pea-sticks, he unluckily tried the edge of his hatchet on the body of a beautiful young English cherry-tree, which he barked so terribly, that I don’t believe the tree ever got the better of it. The next morning the old gentleman, finding out what had befallen his tree, which, by the by, was a great favourite, came into the house; and with much warmth asked for the mischievous author, declaring at the same time, that he would not have taken five guineas for his tree. Nobody could tell him anything about it. Presently George and his hatchet made their appearance. “George,” said his father, “do you know who killed that beautiful little cherry tree yonder in the garden?” This was a tough question; and George staggered under it for a moment; but quickly recovered himself: and looking at his father, with the sweet face of youth brightened with the inexpressible charm of all-conquering truth, he bravely cried out, “I can’t tell a lie, Pa; you know I can’t tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet.”—”Run to my arms, you dearest boy,” cried his father in transports, “run to my arms; glad am I, George, that you killed my tree; for you have paid me for it a thousand fold. Such an act of heroism in my son is more worth than a thousand trees, though blossomed with silver, and their fruits of purest gold.”

Now, call me a cold-blooded 21^st-century cynic, but surely this isn’t a morality tale depicting an upstanding child, but the inevitable, pragmatic, calculated confession of a bark-stripper cornered cherry-red-handed?

Picture the scene: your father is steaming with rage, and you, fresh from some rudimentary tree-surgery around the garden, walk in, hatchet in hand, looking just as obsessed with finding something new to chop with it as you have for the last three days. Raging dad then pops the cherry tree question.

You “stagger under it for a moment”, considering that, aside from being covered in shards of cherry bark, you couldn’t really look more guilty. Has the young Washington got a lot of choice?

If we also take as truth his statement that he “can’t tell a lie” (if that was a lie, then we know that he can tell a lie and then we’ll be in dodgy logic puzzle territory and be forced to interrogate him with complicated many-negative questions which we can’t because it’s a made-up story and he’s dead), then his decision to tell daddy is even more cynical: not only does he already look guilty as Hell, but a poor attempt to cover it up with some slap-dash lying will only worsen matters, and to tidy things up he’ll have to go on a mad hatchet-on-human rampage to eliminate the witnesses and thus evade punishment, which I’m willing to speculate is below even our evidently depraved pres-to-be.

So all Parson Weems seems to have illustrated that tactical lack of deceit is within young Washy’s repertoire.

Kids: telling the truth can sometimes be a useful means to an end.