Alex Cull

Still Blogging

2009-09-26T12:40:00.000-07:00

Yes, believe it or not, I'm still blogging! A while ago I set up a number of blogs on different sites and copied the same material to each one. This has become a bit tiresome, so I've decided to go with Wordpress for the time being. I may well come back to Blogger at some point, as I like it too, but we'll see...

In the meantime, the blogging continues here: http://alexjc38.wordpress.com

Henrik Svensmark and Nigel Calder: The Chilling Stars

2009-02-15T04:19:00.000-08:00

That man-made carbon dioxide is causing the Earth to overheat, and there is an urgent need to reduce levels of this trace gas in the atmosphere, is something that national governments all over the world, NGOs, the UN, environmental groups and corporations have been impressing on each and every one of us, over the last two decades.

But what if carbon dioxide was largely irrelevant when it came to determining global temperatures? And what if there was some other factor that controlled the planetary thermostat? This is what the authors of The Chilling Stars are attempting to demonstrate in this extremely readable and controversial book.

Henrik Svensmark is a physicist at the Danish National Space Center, and Nigel Calder is an experienced science writer, and former editor of New Scientist magazine. The hypothesis they present is a direct challenge to the supremacy of AGW, or Anthropogenic Global Warming.

I will not be able to do justice to the theory in this short review, but here it is, in a nutshell. Our Galaxy is teeming with stars, many of which end their days in colossal stellar explosions. These detonations create vast amounts of cosmic radiation, which are floods of charged particles (mostly protons.) When these particles encounter the Earth's atmosphere, they tend (according to this theory) to seed clouds, especially low-level clouds below the 3000-metre mark.

The more cosmic rays there are, the cloudier the Earth gets, and thus the cooler it becomes. However, if something (for example, the Sun's magnetic field) acts to shield the Earth from cosmic rays, the fewer low-level clouds there are and the warmer Earth becomes.

Over the billions of years since the planet was formed, it has veered from one extreme to the other. At times it has been in a torrid "hothouse" state, with no ice at the poles and with sea levels much higher than they are now. At other times, however, the planet has been in an "icehouse" condition - or even a "Snowball Earth" state, with ice sheets reaching down as far as the Equator. We are currently in an icehouse phase, incidentally.

There have been numerous cooling events, as revealed by "ice-rafting", where ice sheets have transported northern grit south for great distances and deposited it on the Atlantic sea-bed. The authors link these episodes to times when the cosmic-ray flux was higher, as shown by varying traces of radioactive beryllium-10 in ice cores extracted in Greenland and Antarctica.

Also mentioned is the work of Israeli astrophysicist Nir Shaviv, who has correlated variations in the cosmic-ray flux to the solar system's orbit around the centre of the Galaxy and its passage through the Galaxy's four great spiral arms. In these crowded stellar neighbourhoods (such as the Orion Arm, which is where we currently are) there are more cosmic rays and thus the Earth tends to become cooler.

There is much to fascinate in this book. As well as physics and astronomy, it invokes Medieval and Roman history, describing times when high Alpine passes, such as the Schnidejoch, were accessible in the warmer conditions, as well as a later period called the Little Ice Age, when reduced solar activity (as revealed by lower numbers of observed sunspots) led to a cooling. The book also touches on paleontology, discussing the possibility that birds and feathered dinosaurs evolved as a response to a cooling event in the Early Cretaceous Era.

(My favourite image from The Chilling Stars is that of our solar system leaping exuberantly in and out of the galactic plane, like a playful dolphin, as it completes journeys lasting hundreds of millions of years around the Galaxy's core.)

Is Svensmark's hypothesis a convincing alternative to Anthropogenic Global Warming? The SKY cloud-chamber experiment at the Danish National Space Center in 2005 went some way to demonstrate a link between cosmic rays and cloud formation.

Its successor will be the CLOUD experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, which I understand is scheduled for 2010. Perhaps success at CERN will turn the tide in Svensmark's favour?

The jury is still out, I think, although for several reasons, I tend to rate Svensmark's hypothesis over AGW. The main reason I do so is that it is able to explain the connection between sunspot activity (or lack thereof) and cold episodes in history, such as the Maunder Minimum. Also, I find AGW not generally all that convincing, in the face of the mid 20th-century cool period, when atmospheric CO2 was shooting up but temperatures dipped (as has also happened in the last few years.)

However, whether or not Svensmark and Calder are vindicated in 2010, they have produced a very fine and thought-provoking book of popular science, which has stirred up controversy and ruffled a few feathers, and at the same time has inspired a sense of wonder in open-minded readers all over the world.

© Alex Cull, 15th February 2009

(I've also posted this on Helium.com and Planet Bookworm.)

'Tis the Season for Regifting

2009-01-11T04:21:00.000-08:00

"Regifting" is an interesting word, but let's be honest, it's a euphemism; basically, regifting is the offloading of an unwanted present onto some other poor unwitting soul. It's similar to indulging in a modestly unsavoury personal habit; most of us have done it, but few will admit to the fact. Regifting is the mechanism whereby such items as novelty underwear, toy donkeys wearing sombreros, or neckties with mooning Santas on them circulate perpetually and invisibly through the economy - a bit like the black market in that respect, but with the crucial difference that the black market is always in something that people actually want.

So why does it happen, and can it be stopped? More importantly, should we be doing it anyway? To regift or not to regift, that is the question. And like Hamlet, I will dither; my answer is yes and no, depending on the circumstances.

If your only alternative is to throw the offending item away, I would say yes: regift it, bearing in mind the well-known environmental mantra with three Rs - Re-use, Recycle and the other one that I always forget. We are continually being told the world is running out of holes in the ground in which to bury unwanted stuff; although this may not be strictly true, it does seem thrifty and sensible to squeeze more use out of something rather than lay it to rest for eternity in landfill. Even if that something is just a horrible scarf with pictures of tap-dancing cartoon chipmunks on it.

But you may find better things to do with that scarf than pass it on to an unsuspecting relative as a last-minute birthday gift. Before I get to that, however, I want to ask the question: why is this madness happening in the first place?

The short answer to that question is: society. Don't get me wrong, I love our 21st-century consumer culture; it has brought with it fantastic wealth and abundance. After all, without it we wouldn't be equipped with personal computers - I would probably not be writing this article, you would not be reading it, and none of us would have as much free time to devote to these activities. But coupled with well-established gift-giving traditions and festivals, such as Christmas, the global consumer culture has also become something of a monster, spewing a vast torrent of stuff our way and pressurising us to buy it, just so that we can observe the ritual of passing it on to friends and loved ones.

There is a spectrum of desirability. Some gifts, such as iPods and PlayStations, are at one end, and at the other end are objects such as luminous garden gnomes. Like life forms in an ecosystem, they all have their allotted niches.

So what could give a plastic garden gnome an evolutionary advantage over an iPod? Price is one factor: iPods are relatively expensive, gnomes are cheap. And there's the fallibility of human judgement. Look - it glows in the dark, Aunt Harriet will love it! No, foolish consumer, take it from me: she won't. Alas, too late - the damage is done, and yet another regifting cycle has just been spawned.

Anyway, I digress. Can it be stopped? Yes it certainly can. This chain can be broken by the simple act of making sure an item goes to someone who will want it. There are charity shops which exist partly for this very purpose. And there is the excellent Freecycle network, which is basically a no-cost dating service for people and items of junk. One person's tat is another person's treasure trove, and in a vast global community there are a near-infinite number of perfect matches to be made. I'm a great fan of Freecycle; many an old belonging of mine has passed on to a happy and (I hope) permanent home, this way. And let me emphasise - it's free, hence the name; that should appeal to you, if you're anything like me.

The other way to stamp out the horror of regifting is to make sure you give items that people won't want to ditch at the first opportunity. Some obvious strategies are to give someone something they've specifically said they wanted - a box set of Eurovision Song Contest DVDs, for instance; whatever floats their boat. Or something very personal - a beautifully framed copy of their Tractor Salesman of the Year 1985 award certificate. Now that's perfectly unregiftable.

On the other hand, in a tribute to our fine consumer society, you could always give something that can be consumed, i.e., eaten or drunk. A bottle of rather splendid single malt whisky, perhaps. Or a box of luxury Belgian truffles. These are things that always seem to go down well, and which don't tend to be regifted, strangely enough.

However, if you do happen to receive a bottle of single malt whisky or a box of luxury truffles and feel the old regifting urge, don't despair; you can always send them on to me.

© Alex Cull, 4th January 2009

(Never having watched Seinfeld, I had no idea what "regifting" was, until I read about it on Helium.com. After that, of course I just had to write my own article on the subject.)

Michael Crichton: Jurassic Park

2008-12-27T13:15:00.000-08:00

It's difficult these days to fully appreciate the impact of Jurassic Park, the novel. We've watched the movies, bought the merchandise, played the computer games and been exposed to over a decade and a half of advertising and media hype, so no wonder it's a little hard to recapture the freshness and audacity of Michael Crichton's original concept. But I think it well worth the try.

Humans and dinosaurs are a potent mixture, as novelists and moviemakers have always known. We have the brains; they have the brawn. Humans have the technology; dinosaurs have size, grace, ferocity, speed and power, not to mention voracious appetites. The problem has always been to get the two together in the same era. Humans are from the Cenozoic, dinosaurs are from the Mesozoic and never the twain should meet, in normal circumstances.

Previous to Jurassic Park, there were two main ways to get around this impasse. You either had to find a remote spot on the planet where dinosaurs might have survived until recent times (a plateau in South America, a lost continent in the Pacific, a cavern somewhere under the Earth's crust) or you had to invent time travel in order to send humans back to the Age of Reptiles.

There are problems with these two methods. Since the Victorian era it has become increasingly difficult to find a hard-to-reach spot where an animal the size of a brachiosaurus could lurk undiscovered. And time travel brings with it a whole parcel of paradoxes, hurdles and conundrums which every author who attempts it needs to address.

At a stroke, Crichton dispenses with these. Instead, he invokes an emerging technology which has become ever more potent and convincing in recent times - genetic engineering. His scientists recreate dinosaur DNA from fragments preserved inside mosquitoes caught in prehistoric amber. Pow! It's an absolutely brilliant idea, and still gives me goose bumps when I think about it.

But there's more to the book than that. What we also get is the splendid idea of a dinosaur theme park (as opposed to a mere lab somewhere) and the trademark Michael Crichton slide from order into chaos, all wrapped up in a fast-moving and highly readable thriller. It even has decent characters, in particular the acerbic and eccentric Dr Ian Malcolm, who alone would have made Jurassic Park a cut above your average airport paperback.

What I also especially relish is Crichton's message, not that technology is bad or that progress is evil, but that we can easily become overconfident and fail to see that which our mindset has excluded. A telling scene is the one in which the operators of the park realise - very late in the day - that they have relied too much on the computer system they have installed to count the dinosaurs. The lesson is clear - make incorrect assumptions and however sophisticated your software might be, you will have set yourself up for a fall. Climate modellers, please take note.

Should we try to resurrect the dinosaurs? My head says there are more important things to aim for, but my heart says: absolutely! Dinosaurs, mammoths, the dodo, the aepyornis - yes, bring them back and create comfortable and interesting habitats for them to live in (better not put them all in the same one, though.) I would pay good money to go and see a live T.rex, hopefully before he sees me.

But before we venture down that road, I think we should make sure that we take the lessons of Jurassic Park to heart. There is a fine line between confidence and hubris, which we would do well not to cross. And although we have devised immensely powerful computing machines, they are not (yet) gods or oracles but tools, basically, which are liable to be misused by the unwise and incompetent.

I was sorry to hear about the death of Michael Crichton last month. Although he never wrote anything quite as amazing as Jurassic Park in the years since 1990, a new Crichton novel was always something to look forward to. I will miss him.

And to anyone who has enjoyed the movies, eaten the popcorn and played with the action figures but has not yet read this book, I most heartily recommend it.

© Alex Cull, 27th December 2008

(Another Planet Bookworm review.)

Stuck in a Rut

2008-12-25T18:45:00.000-08:00

It can happen to any of us. One moment you’re working contentedly away, doing what you do every day to earn a wage and bring home the bacon (or the tofu, if your family have gone vegetarian.) The next moment - something has changed. Maybe it’s the realisation that you’ve been in this job for eleven years without promotion. Or that everyone seems to have received training on the new instant messaging software – except you. Or that your line manager is the same age as your daughter. (Or perhaps even worse, she actually is your daughter.)

Whatever the reason, the outcome is this: the knowledge that your career has stalled in its tracks, has faltered, and that this faltering has been going on for some time. Like a horse and cart trundling down the same stretch of country lane every day of the year, you find that the wheels of your career have worn such a deep groove in the surface of the road that it would seem almost impossible to change direction, and that you are in danger of getting bogged down for good.

In other words, you have become stuck in a rut.

I’m about to tell you that this is not always a bad thing to happen. But it’s difficult to think that way, if you’re sitting there at the reins of your cart, despondent. What you need to do – really what everyone could benefit from doing, whether they feel they’re a success or not – is to step down from the cart, take a stroll, sit for a while on a small hill some distance off. In other words, develop some detachment. Take a few moments to survey the scene (the horse won’t mind, he’ll use this opportunity to chomp some grass.) Take stock.

To those of us still working in the old-fashioned sort of corporation, with its established hierarchy and all its multifarious layers, branches and twigs of management (which can - when displayed in an org chart – uncannily resemble a very complex organic molecule) getting stuck can feel depressing, frustrating, scary even. We’re supposed to be forging onward and ever upward, climbing the corporate ladder vigorously, rung by hard-won rung. Either vertically (from grovelling tea-boy up to supreme leader) or sort of diagonally, by moving sideways to another department or another company and then upwards again - a bit like moving up the board in a game of snakes and ladders (without landing on a snake, of course; I mean, that just wouldn’t do.)

You keep the momentum up, because if you didn’t keep moving, progressing and evolving within the career niche you inhabit, then – gasp – something might be horribly wrong with you. Maybe you hadn’t got what it took, after all. Maybe you were just not cut out for success, or you didn’t have enough of the right stuff. Pick your cliché. Even in this informal age, it’s still possible to fall under the spell of all the rules and the rituals and the roadmaps of the workplace. Caught up in the daily grind, when is it ever a good time to stop, appraise your work-life and start asking yourself the important questions?

This is where getting stuck in a rut comes in. It can be a golden opportunity. (Or possibly a silver one, or bronze at the very least, depending on how well you use it.)

In Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) they have a saying: there is no failure, only feedback. And this is true (with the proviso that you have to survive or otherwise be in a position to benefit from the feedback – this might not apply to situations involving snapped bungee cords or loaded revolvers.) Another way of putting it is: failure happens, but if you change your frame of reference, it can become crucial feedback enabling you to change course and achieve a different kind of success. And before you start thinking that “different kind of success” is just a polite way of saying “pig with lipstick”, read on.

Actually, if you consider it, failure is not really the problem. If you had messed up utterly and got slung out of school, college, fame academy, corporation, or whatever institution it was that you were in, either one of two things would probably have happened.

One – you would have known beyond all doubt that this was not your mission in life. This would have enabled you to advance a step closer to your true mission, with the slate wiped clean.

Or two – you would have become all fired up to persevere and prove your critics wrong. This is what happens when the Elvis Presleys, Marilyn Monroes and Thomas Edisons of this world show what they’re made of. “Never in a million years will you amount to anything as a (singer/actor/inventor/board game designer.)” “Oh yes, I will. I’ll show you and everyone else too, that I am simply the best, so shove that in your pipe!” (Maybe not in those very words, you understand.)

But you don’t even have to first be a ghastly flop to find your true calling, although, as I say, it probably helps. The fact that you’re stuck in a rut means that, ironically, you have been all too good at some sort of activity - creating pivot tables in Microsoft Excel, for example - that isn’t really part of your life’s mission.

Being mediocre, adequate or even good at one thing, doesn’t mean you can’t be even better at something else. However - here’s the crux - you need to find out what this elusive “something else” is. And I can’t help you there. Or maybe I can, but that will have to wait for a whole different essay.

Someone who illustrated this well was Albert Einstein. He was a good clerk in the Swiss patent office between 1902 and 1909, apparently competent and well-liked - they even promoted him. Then, of course, he decided to go off and become a world-famous professor of physics. But the day job suited him just fine, while he was there – he did patent office stuff during the day, and thought deep thoughts about matter and energy in his free time.

And this conveniently brings me to my next point. Who says you have to go mad, throw away your sensible job in the circus and run away to be an accountant (or even vice-versa)? Why should it need to be an either/or proposition, when a both/and proposition could be just as doable, and probably more lucrative too? Be a trapeze artist by night and study for your accountancy exam by day.

You don’t need to be a super-genius to make this work. But it takes discipline, energy and focus (which, as a trapeze artist, you should know, really.)

Where was I? Ah, yes. To summarise, getting stuck in a rut can help you, as per the following points:

1) It provides a much-needed opportunity to stand back, break the spell, develop some detachment and take stock.

2) The realisation of failure or mediocrity can provide a springboard for success as something else entirely. Dick as a world statesman – not that wonderful; Dick as a sheep farmer – runaway success. Jane as a sheep farmer – dull; Jane as President – winner!

3) Or lead you to the knowledge that you could have a second string to your bow, and develop a parallel career. Have both security and fulfilment; by day, a humble supermarket shelf-stacker, by night – drag artiste extraordinaire! But you need to be self-organised for that.

4) There isn’t actually a 4). But this is perhaps as good a place as any to reflect that now, more than ever before, the world of work is rife with uncertainty, in flux and undergoing transformation. Job titles exist now that never before existed in the entire history of employment. More and more people are dispensing with jobs altogether and doing things like making a fortune selling stuff online, and not caring that it creates huge gaps in their CV, or that they’ve spent the whole of Tuesday in their pyjamas. Could this be you?

To summarise the summary, getting stuck doesn’t have to be the end of the world, career-wise. And even if it is the end of the world, it could signal the creation of a brand new world, or even an entire new solar system, all there just for you to discover.

Returning to my original horse-and-cart metaphor (which I’ve grown quite fond of, by the way), after you have wandered off to gain some detachment and perspective, you will need to wander back and pick up the reins again, to put your insights to the test. And you may find, to your surprise and delight, that what you thought was a boring, rutty old country lane - has just become a crossroads.

(After the success of my Thank You piece, I thought I'd write another article for the Jobs & Careers section of Helium.com. And now this one seems to be doing rather well too. So... expect a few more career-related essays and reviews from me in the New Year.)

Kenneth Grahame: The Wind in the Willows

2008-12-14T06:18:00.000-08:00

For me, The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame is one of those childhood books (like The Hobbit, like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) that were not so much well-loved books – although they were and are, of course – than they were a vital part of my inner life, as personal as the memories of dreams.

It was an interesting and worthwhile experience, therefore, to re-read Willows this year, as an adult. There were some things I had never forgotten – the escapades of Toad, Mole’s rediscovery of his riverbank home, and also the Wild Wood. There were also details I had forgotten but were brought splendidly back to life, upon re-reading the book. And there were things, curious things, that I had never really noticed before, but now strike me as intriguing and strange.

The story itself is very simple, and a summary might be: Mole meets Rat, Mole and Rat meet Badger, Mole, Rat and Badger then get involved in Toad’s misadventures and help him to recapture his ancestral home. And that’s basically it, apart from a few chapters where odd, unconnected things happen. It’s a bit like a river, really; meandering along, slow here, then fast, then a bit slow again, nothing too complicated. Take away the saga of Toad, and there wouldn’t, narrative-wise, be very much left.

But that doesn’t matter. Grahame’s delightful characters carry the show: timid yet plucky Mole, cheerful Rat, gruff and sensible Badger and of course the incomparably impulsive, irresponsible, lovable, larger-than-life Toad of Toad Hall. Their interactions and conversations are a joy to read. And the world they inhabit is also a joy, a sort of cosy, rural, sunlit Edwardian riverscape that never existed in the “real world” but nevertheless does exist, in the imaginations of those who have read and loved this book.

Many things are just as I remembered them. As a child, I found the Wild Wood scary, and this episode still has a sinister, unsettling charge to it. Sitting in my warm room in front of the computer, I can read it with equanimity; outdoors in the wintry dark, this is the sort of stuff than can come back to haunt. And Badger’s house – you know, if I ever became single again, this is the kind of place I would like to inhabit, a bachelor’s comfortable, snug, fire-lit den, preferably underground, with lots of passages and well-stocked larders and, of course, a stout door to keep the Wild Wood out...

There are other aspects of the book of which, as a child, I was completely oblivious. Like the fact that the characters could be said to lead rather privileged lives, defending the interests of the landed gentry against a horde of bolshie upstarts and lower-class types. Or that the characters are also talking animals, who dress and behave like humans, but exist in a world where there are also animals (such as horses) who look and behave just like animals, and humans who are humans but who are also somehow the same size as the animals (how else could Toad disguise himself convincingly as a washerwoman?)

However, it's best not to expend too much analytical thought on all that, for it matters not a whit. The story exists outside normal time, space and historical realities, and it abides by dream-logic, which is perfectly fine, and logic enough for the story’s purposes.

There are a couple of strange things, though, not noticed much when I was reading it as a child, but which now stand out. The abandoned underground city, with its vaults and pillars and pavements, which is connected by passageways to Badger’s home. And the unearthly but benevolent Presence encountered by Mole and Rat, when they go searching for the missing Little Portly (Chapter VII, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.) Lost cities and pagan gods, what can it all mean? Well, I’m not sure if I’ll ever know, but again there’s nothing to lose sleep over. The reader’s sense of wonder is engaged, and that’s the thing that matters.

The Wind in the Willows was first published in October 1908, almost exactly a hundred years ago, and since then it has not lost a fraction of its ability to entertain and enchant.

Happy centenary, old friend.

(I posted this review last month on Planet Bookworm, and thought I'd better add it to my blog before the end of 2008. How time has flown.)

The Writing on the Wall for Writing?

2008-11-22T13:12:00.000-08:00

Is written text doomed to die out? At first glance, this might seem to be a real possibility. Fewer people are reading books and newspapers; on the other hand, digital media are proliferating like crazy, providing us with ever more available streaming audio and video. Will we eventually arrive at a future without writing?

I think not. It is obvious to me that writing has always been a core part of who we are. It is how we have made our mark on the world, as humans. And it would take extraordinary measures, as I will explain, to exterminate written text forever.

However, it would be easy to feel pessimistic these days, in the Western world at least. A 2006 survey from the from the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the US found that the number of 17 year olds who were non-readers more than doubled, from 9 to 19 percent, over a 20-year period - just one of an array of disappointing results, which have provoked much comment both in the States and abroad. In the UK, which is where I'm from, a general impression seems to be that people are reading fewer books and spending more time with their TVs, computers and games consoles. Does anyone actually sit down and read mammoth novels like War and Peace or Moby Dick nowadays? Would Leo Tolstoy or Herman Melville even find publishers, were they first-time authors writing in the 21st century?

Everything is faster, briefer, punchier and more visual now. Who wants to plough through a whole textbook, when Google is a couple of clicks away? Who dusts off their fountain pen and writes a long letter when an e-mail, phone call or text will suffice? Who has time to read long bedtime stories to their kids, when ultra-condensed 1-minute versions are available? We live in an age of rapid-fire commercials, sound bites, podcasts and even SMS-style digests of classics like Homer's Iliad ("Muse, wot hapnd wiv Achilles?")

Could there come a time when none of us actually read or write anything? In 2070, perhaps all communication will be verbal or visual, with ubiquitous machines serving as intermediaries and digital storehouses of knowledge. Even technical documents could be reduced to images on screens, much like sophisticated versions of today's instructions for assembling flat-packed furniture. Is this our future?

In the short term, certainly not. Although folks are not poring through as many books as they used to, they are now reading with alacrity the thousands of online articles and blogs that the world wide web spawns every month. And they are writing, too! Not with pens but with keyboards, not on paper but on the myriads of social networking websites that have sprung up like mushrooms during the last five years.

Also I find it very difficult to believe that manual writing will disappear - for mundane but vital tasks such as scribbling a shopping list or jotting down a phone number, there is currently no real substitute. And although a piece of paper can be burned, torn up or thrown away, it can never be deleted, hacked into or scrambled by a computer virus. Paper files, notebooks and legal pads thus have a certain comforting solidity, and this will surely be true for some time to come.

No, there is only one scenario I can think of, which might doom the written word. Computers might become intelligent by a magnitude so great that they will be in a position to take effective control of human affairs; the general scenario has been explored many times in science fiction, for instance by writer Vernor Vinge (who first started to use the term "the Singularity" for this stupendous turn of events.)

If super-intelligent computers ruled the world and were seeking ways to perpetuate their power over us, one strategy would surely be to deny humans the ability to read and write (and thus receive and transmit "dangerous" ideas.) New generations of humans might become little more than biological servitors for the machines - sturdy, dextrous, easy to manufacture, illiterate and in total ignorance of the past glory of their race.

(There is also the chance that alien invaders would do something similar. However, to keep it simple I'm ignoring that situation for the purposes of this article - we have no firm evidence that aliens exist, but we know that computers do.)

It is an extreme possibility, of course, and might never actually come about. Even if cyber-minds became fantastically clever and advanced, there is no guarantee, of course, that they would acquire an urge to seize power at the same time. I would like to think that human writing will survive the rise of the machines.

Now maybe you are wondering whether I've forgotten about other bad things that could happen. Civilisation faces possible threats from sources other than power-mad computers, after all; a giant meteorite could strike the Earth, or a supervolcano might erupt. There is a theory that between 70 and 75 thousand years ago, a supervolcanic event at Toba in Indonesia pushed humanity towards the brink of extinction; there is nothing to stop something like that occurring again.

But I contend that as long as humanity did survive such a truly global catastrophe, writing would survive too. I think this becomes clear when we look at the origins of written text.

At its most basic, writing is making marks on a surface. You can use something sharp to scratch your marks, or use a staining liquid, such as ink or paint. The earliest known mathematical artefact is a 37,000 year-old piece of bone (a baboon's fibula, to be precise) found in Border Cave, South Africa - basically a series of 29 notches which mark the Moon's phases. Look at later developments such as Roman numerals, or the Chinese characters that represent numbers, and you will still find one scratch for 1, two scratches for 2, three scratches for 3 and so on; what could be more fundamental?

Consider the letters that make up our modern alphabets, for instance the letter "a". You can trace its lineage back via the Greek "alpha" and then to the Hebrew "aleph", which derives from a hieroglyph of a bull's head. Going back as far as the last Ice Age, we find beautiful paintings of bulls on the cave walls at Lascaux, and surely there was a chain of development - from lifelike pictures to the more stylised pictograms, from works of art to symbols and abstractions.

This is also very apparent with Chinese words - the two letters which mean "qiche" or "car" are "qi" ("steam" or "energy") and "che" ("carriage"), which can then be broken down into more basic representations - steam rising from a rice bowl and a cart with wheels revolving on an axle. Just as the latest version of Microsoft Windows can be traced back to its origins in MS-DOS, all our sophisticated modern lexicons are underpinned by simpler and far more ancient codes.

Should something truly disastrous happen to the human race, the few survivors would probably have to devote all their energies into scavenging and staying alive; their descendants might well be illiterate, unable to decipher the strange squiggles adorning the rusted, crumbling wreckage of civilisation all around them. Future generations might ultimately forget their past and grow to resemble the hunter-gatherers our hominid ancestors became, many millennia ago.

But as long as they still had human brains, eyes and hands, this would not matter. Someone somewhere would begin to keep count by carving notches in a branch or a bone. Someone else would make hand-prints in wet clay on a cave wall and start to experiment... And then, slowly but surely, writing would return to the world.

(An article I posted on Helium.com earlier.)

Brian Fagan: The Little Ice Age

2008-09-10T04:35:00.000-07:00

In Europe, until about the end of the 13th century AD, the climate appears to have been consistently mild and warm. Harvests were good, and in Britain and Scandinavia, farmers were able to cultivate land at altitudes where they cannot today. However, by the early 1300s, things were about to change for the worse, and within a century or so, a Little Ice Age would be under way.

Before reading this book, I had only a vague notion of what the Little Ice Age was. I knew about the Frost Fairs that took place on the ice-covered surface of the Thames, and about 1816, the "Year Without a Summer", but not much more than that.

This is why I have enjoyed reading Brian Fagan's The Little Ice Age. It is a beautifully informative and detailed account of what happened to weather patterns from the 1300s onwards, and what the consequences were for civilisation. The author, who is a writer and lecturer on archaeology, focusses mostly on Europe and the Northern Hemisphere; however, this is not to say that other parts of the world were not affected - there is evidence from Peru, Antarctica and the Pacific which supports the notion that radical climate shifts were taking place. But it is from Europe especially that we have a wealth of written documentation from those times.

So what was the Little Ice Age? It was a period in history that stretched very roughly from the early 14th century to the early or mid 19th, and it was when unpredictable climatic extremes (especially harsh winters and cool summers) were much more common than they have been since.

Fagan describes some fascinating and sobering episodes in history, from the monstrous hailstorms that crushed crops and killed livestock in Europe and floods that drowned thousands, to the ominous advance of glaciers in the Alps, that in one instance led to the Bishop of Geneva being called upon to enlist God's help in holding back the ice.

Regarding possible causes for these extremes, the author draws attention to the link between sunspots and climate, with his descriptions of the various Grand Minima which occurred during the Little Ice Age - times when there were few or no sunspots, and when there were unusually cold conditions. If you have watched the film Girl with a Pearl Earring, you will have noticed scenes of canals in Delft, Holland, which would have been icebound at times during the Maunder Minimum, a period of reduced sunspots and freezing northern winters between about 1645 and 1715. (Incidentally, as I write this, I note that this year - 2008 - there have been a great number of months virtually free of sunspots, unusual even in a time of solar minimum.)

The author mentions, by the way, a delightfully quirky example of scientific research, in the form of Hans Neuberger's study of the sky in paintings, which shows the rise and fall of cloudy conditions in the heavens over Europe from 1400 to 1967. This is particularly intriguing, in the light of recent speculation linking cloud cover with climate change.

Although Fagan is careful not to assert that well-known historical events were directly caused by the climate, it would definitely have been a factor in many cases. Would Napoleon's retreat from Moscow have been the same without the severe winter of 1812? Would Washington have made different decisions at Valley Forge if things had been more comfortable for his army in the freezing December of 1777? The possible ramifications are difficult to ignore.

The maritime activities of Europeans that led to the discovery of the New World centuries earlier were also influenced by the climate - even as the Norse colonies in Greenland became untenable due to the cold, the migrations of herring and cod in the Atlantic were drawing English and Basque fishing boats ever further afield, and helped to fuel rumours of a vast new landmass to the west.

What conclusions have I drawn from this book? Firstly, that warm is generally better than cold (outside the tropics, at least.) Warmth means an extended growing season and mild winters. Cold means failed harvests, more winter deaths and glaciers encroaching on human settlements.

Secondly, that the climate is a complex and barely-understood thing. Ocean currents, winds, precipitation, cloud cover, changes to flora and fauna - all these cannot really be summed up by a single set of measurements. It was never the case that there were uniformly low global temperatures during the Little Ice Age, just as it was not the case that there were uniformly high global temperatures during the 20th century (this begs the question of whether there can truly be a global temperature, anyway.)

Thirdly, being a subsistence farmer is not generally a good idea. In the good years you will get by, and you will have enough to survive one failed harvest, maybe two. But if there are more than two bad years in a row, you will be in trouble. It was a series of poor wheat harvests in France that contributed to the unrest which fuelled the French Revolution. On the other hand, increased knowledge and innovation will help you - it was an agricultural revolution in the Netherlands and England which led farmers to diversify and practise crop rotation, lowering the risk of famine.

I highly recommend this book. Although the author does stand by the hypothesis that man-made carbon dioxide produced by industrialisation (and, he states, also by agriculture and land clearance) is causing global warming - something of which I am not convinced - and that this is potentially a bad thing, he also presents enough historical evidence in The Little Ice Age to support other conclusions - that the sun's magnetic processes (as indicated by sunspot activity) may well have profound and far-reaching effects on the climate and that far from being a period of bucolic peace and plenty, the centuries before the mid-1800s featured a long-running display of climatic chaos that puts our current era into stark perspective.

If I had to choose between the mild warming of the late 20th century and the unpredictable frosts and storms of the Maunder Minimum, I would prefer the warming any day.

© Alex Cull, 7th September 2008

(This is a book review I posted on Planet Bookworm earlier this month.)

Thank You

2008-08-13T04:39:00.001-07:00

Remember when you were about seven years old and it was your birthday, and you had presents - some from your Mummy and Daddy and others from remoter, more distant personages such as aunties and uncles, or even a great-aunt?

And then perhaps your Mum made you sit down and write letters to each of your aunties and uncles to say thank you for the present you had had from her or him, even if it was a pair of hand-knitted socks, and not the train set, Barbie or samurai sword you had really wanted.

And there you sat, with paper and pencil in front of you, feeling vaguely resentful (even though you ought to have been bubbling with gratitude) and were unable to think of a single thing to write, beyond the obvious "Thank you for the nice socks."

Yes, surely I'm exaggerating just a mite. But I did have to write thank-you letters and it did feel like a very onerous chore at the time, from my childish perspective. I don't have to do this any more, of course, firstly because I'm now a grown-up, and secondly because there aren't exactly truckloads of birthday presents arriving for me these days.

Being a grown-up has its advantages because, despite a dearth of items in shiny wrapping paper, life usually provides plenty of other things to be very thankful to others for. There are parties, gatherings, concerts, courses, seminars, evening classes, get-togethers, trips, outings, and probably lots of other reasons to go out, brush up on skills, enrich one's mind and, last but not least, enjoy doing so and feel grateful towards the people who have devoted time, money and effort to make these events happen.

Now I'm wondering what you think I'll be writing next. Maybe how glad I am that I'm not compelled to say thank you to anyone any more, now I'm over 40? Actually, no. The opposite, in fact - thank-you letters are an excellent idea, and I have put together the following list of reasons why I've changed my mind in the years since childhood.

1) Technology has moved along since the 1970s - we now (most of us) have access to e-mail. It's fast, it's cheap, it's convenient - no more pencils and notepaper. (Although in fact a hand-written letter can have an especially positive impact, as it shows that you have been willing to go to some trouble.)

2) Expressing gratitude makes you happier! At this point I could have searched for some appropriate piece of research from the field of positive psychology to back this up, but have been prevented by sheer laziness. However, this is an easy one to test for yourself - go out of your way to say thank you to someone, then pay attention to your feelings.

3) Expressing gratitude makes the other person feel happier too. You feel good, he or she feels good, and in this way positive feelings insidiously spread out through the world, from person to person. A bit like a virus, but far nicer.

4) Following on from 3), doing something positive for others creates good karma for you. Or so the Eastern sages say. Even if you don't believe in karma, you have nothing to lose by covering this particular base.

5) A thank-you note can give the other person valuable feedback. And it doesn't even have to always be positive feedback. If there is anything the organiser could have done to improve a course, seminar or music recital, let them know; it will help them to make the next one even better. A good way to do this is in the form of a classic "sandwich" - one morsel of negative feedback between two healthy slices of positive feedback. The negative point will be something specific (e.g. "the room was a bit too warm"), so make sure that the positive items are specific as well.

6) Making contact by habitually sending a note of thanks provides you with a supply of weak ties.

Now you might have read my last point and thought - weak ties? What on earth are they, and why would I want them?

You will surely have heard of something called "six degrees of separation", a.k.a. the Kevin Bacon game; basically the assertion that any person in the world can be linked to any other person via about six steps, whether it be Kevin Bacon linked to any other movie actor or you linked to a Mongolian botanist or Chilean penguin herder. It's a small and highly interconnected world, after all. And the reason for the world's astounding wealth of interconnectedness? The existence of weak ties.

Strong ties are those that exist in any family, workplace or close-knit community. If you made a list of everyone you knew, many or most of these would be people you see and interact with every day. You would be on your mother's, brother's and next-door neighbour's lists, let's say, and they would be on yours. The same names would keep on cropping up, with everyone knowing everyone else, essentially. If these strong links were all we had, the world would be divided up into myriads of self-contained and isolated communities, with no-one speaking to strangers, and the entire six-degree thing just would not work.

But the world is not like that. The vast majority of us also have weak ties - a second cousin twice removed, a childhood friend we seldom see nowadays, an occasional penpal, someone with whom we shared a classroom or apartment or social circle years ago. And it is through these far-flung, sometimes almost random connections that the whole wide world is sewn together. (For a lucid explanation of Stanley Milgram's and Mark Granovetter's studies of networks - which is where all this talk of weak and strong ties comes from - I recommend a very good book called Small World by Mark Buchanan.)

Every time we network, we build up a portfolio of weak ties. And these can be extremely useful. After all, which do you think is more likely, that you get wind of a job opportunity from your close colleague or from an acquaintance who works in the same industry and with whom you have developed a relationship over the course of several workshops and e-mail exchanges? I'd put my money on the acquaintance.

So - saying thanks can be a good networking opportunity. It would be cynical to treat it only as such, however, and after all there is no guarantee that any monetary or career advantage will come from a contact added to your network in this way. Which is why I have stressed the psychological benefits of expressing gratitude, as they are a lot more certain. As with many other kinds of networking activities, the trick (if it can be called that) is to do this for its own sake, and for the pleasure it brings, rather than getting hung up on the payoff.

The only slight downside I've found? Reflecting on the fact that the seven-year-old me had not somehow known all this when dutifully penning his thank-you letters upon the receipt of birthday gifts, all those years ago. It would have made the task immeasurably lighter.

(Yes, it's another article for Helium.com.)

CS Lewis: Out of the Silent Planet

2008-07-14T09:49:00.000-07:00

(Warning - the following review may have a few spoilers for those who have not read this excellent SF classic yet.)

I first read Out of the Silent Planet when I was a student, over twenty years ago, and it made a huge impression on me at the time. I've re-read it since, a couple of times, the most recent occasion being earlier this summer, and one curious thing I've found is that the book appears to have shrunk, over the last two decades. Not in a literal sense, obviously, as the number of words probably hasn't changed, but what I mean is that the events of the story seem to take place over a much shorter time frame than before. What seemed like a tale of numerous adventures, journeys and encounters across the exotic surface of Mars now appears briefer, far more condensed.

And my point? It is that so much depends on our perceptions. The book hasn't changed, but I have. And fundamentally this is one of the things the book is all about - a perceptual shift.

Out of the Silent Planet is on one level a voyage to another world, and CS Lewis was going in 1938 where authors such as HG Wells and Jules Verne had already ventured. The hard science part is barely there; for instance the space ship, into which Ransom is bundled by his kidnappers Weston and Devine, and which transports the trio to another planet, is powered by processes that are never described. (This, in itself, is not a failing, in my opinion. HG Wells invented a fictitious material - Cavorite - to get his adventurers to the Moon, and Jules Verne simply fired his space travellers out of a giant cannon.) Malacandra is a dying world, like so many other early visions of Mars, a place where life arose before it did on Earth and is now in a state of decline; not a particularly new idea.

No, what sets Out of the Silent Planet apart is what happens to middle-aged professor Elwin Ransom - and by extension to the rest of us, because despite his academic background, Ransom is a type of Everyman figure. Abducted by his old school acquaintance Devine and the sinister Weston, Ransom is taken across the gulf of space to Malacandra, where the others have established a base, consisting of a rudimentary hut. Why are they doing this? So that Ransom can be delivered up as a kind of human sacrifice, in return for Malacandrian gold.

In the absence of any real information, he is understandably terrified at what might be about to happen to him at the hands of the menacing natives, the sorns or séroni. He breaks away, and starts to flee across the confusing landscape of this alien world. And this is where his transformation starts.

I don't want to reveal much more about the story, for fear of ruining it completely for readers who haven't yet had the pleasure. But I have some observations about aspects of the novel where Lewis's writing seems psychologically true to life.

Firstly, as Ransom runs for his life across the surface of Malacandra, he experiences the landscape as a confusing blur of strange colours and shapes, as the vegetation is utterly unfamiliar to him and the creatures even more so. The total sense of disorientation is convincing, because we tend to see the world as a collection of familiar constructs. We don't see an expanse of rugged brown stuff crowned by masses of flat greenish tendrils; we see an oak tree, because "oak tree" is a discrete concept we are familiar with.

In a similar way, people who are blind from birth and who later become able to see, find the visual world a perplexing mass of colours and shapes until they learn to perceive things. It is also reminiscent of the (probably apocryphal) stories of native Americans unable to see Columbus's sailing ships, as they were completely outside their experience. Perception is something that we learn; it is a human skill, like language.

In time, Ransom meets the Malacandrians, and eventually he rejoins his fellow travellers from Thulcandra, the Silent Planet (Earth.) On the outside, he is little different to how he was before. But on the inside...

We experience culture shock when we are taken out of our familiar surroundings and placed in a foreign land, with foreign people. Everything seems wrong, strange, even threatening. There are degrees of foreignness - for the average native English person, Paris is foreign but manageably so, Istanbul is somewhat further along the scale and a Mongolian yurt must be at some sort of apex of pure foreignness for those used to suburban streets, corner shops and Victorian terraces.

Now place the same English person on Malacandra, with its séroni, hrossa and pfifltriggi! And yet we adapt. Although Ransom never quite loses his instinctive feelings of apprehension when dealing with the spindly, feathered séroni, he arrives at the knowledge that these are neither monstrosities nor bizarre talking animals but hnau, or rational beings. They have undergone a radical transformation in his mind.

Weston and Devine also undergo a transformation. For where there is culture shock, there is also reverse culture shock. The familiar becomes strange and by living in foreign parts we become assimilated by foreignness, which gives us the freedom to see our native culture with fresh eyes. That also goes for our fellow natives. At first Ransom is unable to see his erstwhile kidnappers; having become accustomed to Malacandra, he is aware of a couple of approaching bipedal oddities covered in strange growths, and it takes him a while to realise these are humans.

I haven't even begun to scratch the surface of his book; there's just so much more. I haven't mentioned Lewis's Christianity, his depiction of a world where three kinds of sentient life form live in harmony and his ridiculing of imperialism - this review could easily have been ten times its current length. Suffice it to say that Out of the Silent Planet occupies a special place in my heart; although I tend to resonate more with the writings of HG Wells, there is something about Lewis's vision of a universe inhabited by benevolent spirits (eldil) and rational beings that touches me - would that even a part of it were true.

© Alex Cull, 9th July 2008

(This is a book review I posted on Planet Bookworm earlier this month.)

The Fear of Death

2008-07-14T09:33:00.000-07:00

“The fear of death”. How often do we hear this phrase? Why is it that we fear death so much, and how does this fear manifest itself?

Two distinct kinds of fear spring to mind, one related to our animal origins and the other a human fear that is bound up with the very nature of consciousness. I will briefly explore both.

First, our animal heritage. When a cat or a mouse or a human are faced with an impending threat to life and limb, a number of specific physical reactions kick in.

Adrenaline floods through the body, causing the heart rate to speed up like crazy. Simultaneously the bronchial passages dilate and the lungs draw in larger volumes of air, all the better to grab more oxygen. The result? A rush of oxygenated, glucose-rich blood thundering through the arteries, on its way to the skeletal muscles, which is where it will be needed if we want to take immediate action. Some blood vessels constrict, others dilate, in order to channel resources efficiently.

What else happens? The senses become extremely selective and we experience tunnel vision and auditory exclusion (tunnel hearing). Weird things also happen to our sense of time passing (the technical word for this distortion is tachipsychia). At the same time, other processes, such as digestion, salivation and sex are placed on hold.

When these changes happen, we are driven to do one of two things – fight or run for our lives, hence the name of this response, “fight or flight”, first identified by physiologist Walter Cannon in 1915. Depending on the situation, it can propel us down to the very depths of panic or up to the highest levels of heroism, should our children, for instance, be trapped in a burning house. This fear is part of our animal heritage which comes into play when our lives, and those of our loved ones, are physically threatened.

But there is another fear of death, which is (as far as anyone knows) peculiar to human beings.

This has also been called an existential crisis, and fundamentally, it is a fear of annihilation, of ceasing to be. We tend to identify with our conscious mind or ego, and the thought of no more “I” after death can be intolerable and terrifying. It is also difficult to imagine. How can “I” stop existing? How can there be a world without “me” in it?

This kind of crisis or panic can affect us when we are in a vulnerable state, after a loved one has died, perhaps, or when we become elderly or are suffering from a life-threatening illness, such as cancer. It can leave us feeling anxious, isolated, unbearably lonely.

Just as small children can be fearful and resist falling asleep, so adults can be fearful and resist the ultimate sleep.

Is there a cure for it?

The traditional way in which humans have armoured themselves against the fear of death is through religion. Most of the world’s religions postulate an afterlife, a way in which a person can survive death, either as an individual spirit or a fragment returning to the great ocean of spirit, which we commonly call God.

But there are so many religions, each with its version of Heaven, Paradise, Nirvana or Elysium, and each with its various sects. Which one to choose? And can any of them prove beyond reasonable doubt that we do survive the deaths of our bodies? Speaking for myself, the answer to the last question is no.

There is also the materialist world view, i.e. that when the body dies, the atoms of which it is composed go their separate ways and that is it. No spirit, no soul, no God and no afterlife.

A materialist might argue that we can survive, in a fashion. We can live on in our children and grandchildren, and we can do good deeds in the world, so that our descendants have a better life than we did.

However, a moment’s thought will dispel this hope. If we are nought but atoms, then so are our children and our grandchildren. All the future generations who will inherit the goodness we create, will in turn become dust and be lost forever. And this will go on until the universe ends, or humanity becomes extinct, or perhaps if science enables us to prolong our lives indefinitely, which might not even be possible.

So is the situation hopeless? Perhaps not, but the answer might lie at the edges of current knowledge, not at its heart.

We have known for a long time that people in the grip of a life-threatening illness or accident sometimes experience an NDE or “near-death experience”. There are quite a few parts to this experience, and it varies, but here are some common elements. For instance, persons at the brink of death may find themselves floating or levitating, and looking down at their own (completely inert) bodies.

They might also have strong feelings of serenity and joy. Light also seems to be an important factor; they may move through a tunnel of light and enter a realm that appears to be aglow with a light that seems to be a spiritual, rather than physical, phenomenon. They may also meet previously-deceased relatives, undergo a detailed review of their lives to date, and encounter a being who resembles a deity, before returning to their physical bodies.

It is very difficult (some might say impossible) to prove that any of this is real. What would it take to prove, to a die-hard sceptic, that we survive physical death? One of the closest accounts we have to a demonstration that we exist independently of our mortal bodies, is the experience of singer-songwriter Pam Reynolds, who in 1991 underwent an operation, during which, for a while, she was clinically dead, with no blood flowing through her brain and no brain-wave activity.

Later, she is said to have given accurate descriptions of the medical procedures she had undergone, which were corroborated by the hospital staff, and it is very difficult to see how she could have sensed or known about these procedures, in the condition she was in.

So, do this and other accounts of NDEs provide proof that we survive, beyond all reasonable doubt? Well, no they don’t. But they are very interesting and consistent, nonetheless. Science has not been able to validate them (and maybe it will always be thus) but neither has it been able to disprove or debunk them, completely.

And there is more. People who have experienced them also find that their fear of dying has diminished, or has disappeared altogether. There was a study carried out in the Netherlands of survivors of cardiac arrest, which was published in the medical journal The Lancet in 2001. This study confirmed that people who had an NDE also had a significant increase in a belief in an afterlife, and a decrease in their fear of death, compared with those people who had not had the experience.

This is not proof that we each have a spirit or soul essence that survives the dissolution of our physical bodies, but it is an indication, perhaps, a sign, a ray of hope. It is difficult to see how a mere hallucination or dream, however vivid, could predictably have such a life-changing effect.

It will have no bearing on the purely physical response we have to the prospect of death. When immediate danger comes, our animal nature will always prompt us to fight or flee. But when we are lying alone in the dark at three in the morning, anxiously contemplating our mortality, then it may well provide some solace.

Perhaps the NDE phenomenon is the best antidote we can reasonably expect to have, for the fear of death.

Alex Cull, 2nd June 2008

(Another article I posted on Helium.com earlier this year.)

David Whitehouse: The Sun

2008-06-28T12:46:00.000-07:00

The Sun has always had pride of place in our little corner of the universe, and also an almost indescribably important role in our religions, myths and art. In recent centuries, scientists have discovered much that is fascinating about the Sun but have barely started to understand what makes it behave in the way it does.

The Sun: A Biography is a very ambitious book, in which astronomer David Whitehouse attempts to set down the history of the Sun and our perennial obsession with it. Does he succeed? I think he certainly does; The Sun is not a textbook and is written
for the general reader, but Whitehouse brings the subject marvellously to life and in no way dumbs it down for us non-scientists.

Despite the chapters dealing with solid subjects such as radiation, magnetism and optics, it is difficult not to feel, after reading this book, that the gigantic object that dominates the solar system is some sort of gargantuan living creature with its quirks, appetites and mysterious moods.

Whitehouse traces the history of solar astronomy back to its prehistoric origins and places like Sliabh na Caillighe (or the "Hill of the Witch") at Loughcrew in Ireland, where an eclipse was recorded in 3340 BC. He brings us up to date with the SolarMax and Soho satellites and then takes us into the remote future, when our descendants may one day have to deal with the necessity of moving the Earth's orbit further out to avoid death by fire as the Sun starts to expand.

Along the way, we meet the people who, over the centuries, have watched the Sun and made records and theories of solar phenomena in manuscripts, books and treatises. And there are some notable figures, from Newton, who made a reasonable estimate of the Sun's mass, to Galileo, who observed the Sun directly through a telescope at sunset and was lucky not to injure his eyesight, to Sir Arthur Eddington, whose fussy appearance belied a brilliant mind, and whose observations confirmed Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.

My favourite character is the eccentric Norwegian scientist Kristian Birkeland, who in 1906 demonstrated that particles from the Sun cause vast electric currents flowing around the Earth and create the aurorae. He was also the inventor of the
electromagnetic rail-gun and was partial to wearing a fez and pointy red leather slippers.

But what this book demonstrates is that no one individual ever solves more than a fraction of the Sun's riddles. It is always a joint effort, with scientists continually building on the knowledge of their peers and of those who went before them. It is as if the Sun is a vast jigsaw puzzle, with an astronomer finding a piece here, a physicist finding a piece there, and gradually a big picture taking
shape.

The puzzle is still incomplete, though, especially in the mysterious area of sunspots, first depicted in a drawing from 1128 AD, and studied by men whose names are still associated with sunspot cycles and grand minima (when sunspots have all but vanished from the solar disc) - Schwabe, Sporer, Wolf and Maunder.

We still have a lot to learn about sunspots and are indebted to American solar physicist Jack Eddy, who rediscovered Edward Maunder's observations which had been neglected and half-forgotten for fifty years. These strange, transient phenomena may well hold the key to the way the Sun affects the Earth's great climate shifts.

The book covers vast territories of time and space, touching on many diverse and interesting subjects, from solar sails to Stradivarius violins (which may owe some of their uniqueness to the quality of maple and spruce wood during the Little Ice Age.) Social history is here too, for instance in the story of astronomer Annie Jump Cannon who devised the spectral classifications of stars that we still use today, but was not formally recognised by the academic establishment until just two years before her retirement in 1938.

There is just so much here to enjoy - physics, history, astronomy, biography, poetry by Shelley and Tennyson, plus David Whitehouse's own very accessible prose. If you are a non-scientist but, like me, are greatly interested in science and the universe around us, I think you will find The Sun: A Biography a wonderful, even inspiring read.

And you might just find your attitude towards that great big yellow thing in the sky has subtly and forever changed.

© Alex Cull, 6th June, 2008

(This is a book review I posted on Planet Bookworm early in June 2008.)

On Being an Introvert

2008-06-23T12:00:00.000-07:00

Imagine being in a large minority group (roughly 20-30% of the total population) who are physically indistinguishable from the majority. Imagine that you are somehow unaware of this fact but are just conscious that you relate to people and to your surroundings differently, and are worried there may be "something the matter" with you.

And then imagine - but you may not have to, in fact. You may actually be someone like this. I know I am. I'm talking about being an introvert.

Ever since Carl Jung first coined these terms in the early 20th century (and especially since the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator was developed in the 1940s) introversion and extraversion have been used to describe two psychological polarities, which both come with a variety of traits and personal preferences.

We introverts are generally said to be more concerned with our inner world of thoughts and feelings than we are with the external world. We tend to enjoy our own company, feel frazzled after excessive socialising, and need to "recharge" by being alone for a while. We may prefer a few close friendships to a multitude of shallower relationships.

Extraverts, on the other hand, tend to be more attuned to the physical world around them, might dislike being alone, and thrive on plentiful interaction with others.

There is some scientific evidence to support this divide; for instance, a 1999 study found that patterns of blood flow in the brain differed according to whether the person tested was basically an introvert or an extravert. There are also theories (such as the "Big Five") which suggest that people are scattered along a continuum, with a few people at the absolute extremes and "ambiverts" occupying the centre.

If we introverts are generally in a minority, then, what sort of challenges do we face? Are we less successful than extraverts? Are we poorer? Are we less happy?

I would argue that our main challenge is not directly to do with money, status, success or happiness.

It's true that an extravert is generally more vocal (for example in classrooms and business meetings) and tends to receive more attention from teachers, when in school, and managers, when at work. But an introvert is generally more patient, methodical and diplomatic - being able to engage your brain before opening your mouth to speak, is also a definite advantage. Career-wise, I'd say it was pretty much a level playing field.

There is a high proportion of introverts who are also gifted, including such people as Albert Einstein and Bill Gates. Being an introvert is clearly no barrier to academic or financial success.

Are we happy? Some studies relate extraversion and a full social calendar to happiness, but I'm wondering whether this has just as much to do with self-awareness (or the lack of it) as it does with actual emotions. "Are you happy?" might elicit different answers from introverts and extraverts, just as the answers to "Are these two boxes green?" might depend on whether that person was colour blind or not. I would generally describe myself both as an introvert and as a very happy person, so perhaps that's my bias showing.

No, I think the main challenge we have is linked to the fact that since the concepts of introversion and extraversion entered general public usage, these words have gathered meanings and connotations that were originally absent.

Consider the word "introverted", when used in the media to describe someone. What sort of attributes might that person have? Chances are, the intention is to depict him or her as being a loner, socially awkward, not functioning well in society. Incidentally, there are words relating to extraversion which definitely have a positive bias (especially in Anglo-Saxon cultures), such as "outgoing", which implies that person is pleasantly sociable and well-adjusted, also "gregarious" and "lively". Compare these with "quiet", "shy", "solitary".

A "lively" person is surely a happy member of society. But a "quiet" person? Hmm... There might be a problem here.

It seems to me that when a word is generally used, it often reflects the attitude of the majority. Just as a "black" day is a bad one, a "quiet" person sounds like someone who could be troubled, shy or insecure. This is understandable, if you consider that an extravert with deep problems might well be subdued and uncommunicative.

Being "quiet" thus has certain connotations, in most people's minds. "Not talking? What's wrong?"

It is clear to me why an introvert growing up in an extravert-oriented world, without being aware of the whole introversion/extraversion issue, would feel like a fish in the wrong pond. He or she might be labelled "shy", because extraverts sometimes have difficulty understanding the important difference between shyness and introversion (a shy person avoids social contact out of fear, an introvert might do so out of personal preference.)

He or she would be seen, not as a normal introvert but essentially as a failed extravert.

This was basically me as a child. My school reports always labelled me as "quiet" (although I actually did quite well, academically.) I grew to think of myself as shy, self-conscious, rather inadequate socially. It has only been recently, as a middle-aged person, that I have become much more comfortable with who I am, and have accepted the fact that although I often enjoy the company of others, I need time alone to recover and renew myself, and there is nothing "the matter" with me because of that.

My message to fellow introverts who are still struggling to come to terms with yourselves is this. Know who you are. Listen to your inner nature, and instead of assuming that there is something wrong with you, learn to accept and love yourself unconditionally. Play to your strengths. And change the way you see yourself, not as an ugly duckling - but as a fledgling swan.

Alex Cull, 15th February 2008

(Another article for Helium.com, doing fairly well in the ratings at the moment.)

Money and Depression

2008-06-16T05:07:00.000-07:00

Is money (or the lack of it) invariably linked with depression? Well, although money issues can certainly be a factor when a person becomes depressed, I would argue that this is not always the case, and that depression can often have little or nothing to do with money - or its absence.

First, there's a strong link between major or clinical depression and heredity. Depression runs in families, as does bipolar disorder, so if your parents had a history of clinical depression, chances are that you (whether you are a princess or a pauper) will have inherited a vulnerability to that condition. It's simply a possibility, not a certainty, and it's to do with your genes and not the condition of your wallet.

This leaves the range of mild to acute depression that most people experience from time to time but is not devastating enough, normally, to warrant medical attention. You probably know what I'm talking about, feelings ranging from a mild case of the "blues" right up to persistent sadness, muffled anger or a pervasive sense that life has no meaning.

It's true that difficulties with money can lead to depression. A survey in the UK by the National Depression Campaign found that 88% of people rated money problems as a likely cause, 1% more than the number of people that linked depression to a death or illness in the family. And that was back in 1999. With the credit crunch and spiralling personal debt often in the news in recent times, I would not be surprised to find this percentage even higher now. It's no wonder that for many people finances seem to be inextricably linked to anxiety and gloom.

And yet... Even without studies and surveys, common sense tells us that money troubles are not the only reason why people get depressed. Despondency often sets in when we feel helpless and unable to avoid the setbacks life sends us. Thus a bullied schoolchild, a harassed employee, a convict in an overcrowded gaol, a bereaved husband or wife and a long-term invalid all may well suffer depression as a result of adverse life conditions.

Each of them might succumb to despair and helplessness, but it would have little or nothing to do with the state of his or her bank balance, and a lot more to do with relationships and physical circumstances.

So much, then, for depression caused by not having enough money. Could it be that having too much of it is also a problem?

The Happy Planet Index, introduced in 2006 by the New Economics Foundation, makes for some interesting (if controversial) reading. Basically, it is a ranking of the world's nations, based on happiness rather than GDP, and, for what it's worth, some of the world's poorer countries have high scores the top three are Vanuatu, Columbia and Costa Rica - while the wealthiest nations such as Japan and the US come in at 95 and 150, respectively. While these scores are not purely measurements of people's levels of happiness, as they are partly based on environmentalists' ideas of sustainability, they are nevertheless intriguing.

Is it possible, then, that being rich, or indeed living in a rich country, can tend to make you depressed?

There is some truth in that. Economist Richard Easterlin proposed in 1974 that once people have attained a certain level of financial security, their happiness does not grow in proportion to any future increases in wealth. In other words, if I have one loaf of bread I am a lot happier than if I had none at all, but if I become richer and can afford to buy two, three or four loaves, there is no great gain in happiness with each addition.

The pleasures of the consumer society also seem to be fleeting. "Hedonic adaptation" sets in, which means that the thrill of acquiring a new widescreen TV, iPod or Mercedes-Benz diminishes swiftly, as the object of desire becomes merely another thing to be stored, insured and worried about. It can make us happy only for a brief moment, and after that, we always need to strive for the next acquisition, the next temporary pleasure.

This might be why "retail therapy" only works for a while. The excitement of buying something new gives way to the muted pleasure of ownership, then perhaps to ennui and depression once more, paving the way for another repeat of the cycle.

But is the root cause of this problem money, or is it the absence of something else?

It seems to me that we are happiest when we have a purpose in life, and there are quite a few attributes and activities that can help us keep us engaged and have a meaningful existence. Positive psychologist Martin Seligman has broadly identified some of these, including being sociable, married, self-disciplined and having religious convictions. From personal experience, I have also found that creative tasks, and any absorbing activity be it gardening, writing, playing tennis, doing volunteer work - that generates what is now called "flow", can add meaning and purpose to my life.

I suggest that it is not so much that affluence is the causeof depression, but that we have a need for meaning in our lives that money simply cannot, by its very nature, fulfil entirely. Like the man in the story, who searched for his keys under the bright streetlamp, rather than in his dark house where he had lost them, we are simply looking in the wrong place.

(I would add that being an entrepreneur and building a business are meaningful activities in themselves, which can bestow an authentic sense of purpose. The hunger to fill an inner void by acquiring money and material possessions is not the same thing, in my opinion.)

So, back to the question as to whether money and depression are invariably linked, I would answer that they are not. Our genes may give us (just) a tendency to clinical depression, no matter if we are rich or poor. Lack of money might help to make us depressed, but then so might a lot of other things, such as bad relationships or failing health.

Lastly, those of us who live in affluent societies have a choice, either to remain on the hedonic treadmill and become disappointed and depressed when money and consumer goods do not deliver all they promised or to look within ourselves, find out what fires us up and fills us with purpose, and forge a meaningful life for ourselves.

That's the thought I would like to leave you with. When we are depressed, life seems hopeless and without meaning, but once we make a decision to find a purpose, a reason to go on living, things change. Something shifts within us, and the grey hand of depression begins to loosen its hold.

And that would seem to be true, whether we are rich, poor, or somewhere in between.

Alex Cull, 5th March 2008

(This was another article I submitted to Helium.com, adding my two cents to the debate: "Is money invariably linked with depression?" Obviously these two things are not invariably linked but there we are.)

In Praise of Laziness

2008-06-13T04:27:00.000-07:00

Laziness has had a bad press. How many times did your parents or teachers ever encourage you to be lazy? I'm guessing - not even once. Hard-working, diligent, obedient, alert, beady-eyed and bushy-tailed - yes. But lazy? I don't think so. "Lazy" is in the same class as "idle", "negligent", "shiftless" and generally "useless". Laziness is not even close to godliness, but in perilous proximity to the other place. Lazy is bad.

But is it really? Annoying contrarian that I often am, I beg to differ. You see, lazy is good. Lazy can be constructive. In fact, laziness is one of the principles upon which our great Western civilisation is founded.

Let me explain.

We used to be hunter-gatherers, organised in small troupes or tribes, roaming the savannah in our search for edible roots and any wildlife slow enough to be skewered by a well-thrown spear. Life was harsh, on the whole, but we had quite a bit of time left over for the fun stuff - cave art, story-telling, myth-making, that sort of thing.

But then came agriculture, and the rise of great kingdoms and empires. And with these came a lot of hard work and some seriously repetitive chores. Planting and sowing, hewing wood, smelting iron, butchering and baking. Things of beauty were created too - cathedrals, sailing ships, illuminated manuscripts, suits of armour - but these were relatively few and far between, slow to produce and still involved lots of hard, repetitive work; it was unavoidable.

But then came the Industrial Revolution, which started sometime in the 18th century and has never really ended. There are plenty of inventions, such as the movable-type printing press, which pre-date this period, but with the innovations of steam-power, electricity, radio and the internal combustion engine, everything suddenly became better, faster, more widely available and multiplied a thousandfold.

Which takes us to where we are now, in the early twenty-first century. Our technological civilisation is a colossus. It spans oceans and continents, and has sent messages and machines hurtling across the gulf of space. And these are still the early days - barring a giant meteorite impact or a supervolcano explosion, it is set to expand ever further. Who knows what it - and we - will become, as the third millennium unfolds?

And all this has been achieved largely through - laziness? You probably don't believe me, at this point. But read on.

Now I know what some of you are thinking. Laziness is hardly a virtue, surely. Idle people loafing around, achieving nothing, allowing dirt and decay to flourish. How can that be good? I would answer that by saying that laziness is different from idleness, sloth and neglect. Idleness is goofing off, kicking back, taking a break - important in its own right, but not what I'm writing about. Sloth is slowness and sluggishness, the sort of thing I experience on a Sunday morning before my first cup of strong filter coffee. Neglect is abandoning a task altogether, like letting a teenager's bedroom deteriorate into a slough of despond. They're not the same.

Anyway. Think about the way you live your life. Do you own or use a motor vehicle? Four centuries ago, a person like you would have probably walked everywhere. Rich folks had horses, farmers had oxen, maybe a few super-wealthy people had carriages or palanquins. But most used Shanks's pony.

Do you have a washing machine or vacuum cleaner? Over a century ago you would have had to wash all your clothes by hand, then wring them out or drag them through a mangle. You would have swept your home with a broom. Before electric-power, gas-power and steam-power, most processes would have been carried out using hand-power, foot-power, elbow-power and shoulder-power.

Walking to the market and back, scrubbing the dirt out of your britches with a tub of water and a block of soap, writing a book with a goose quill and a roll of parchment all take a lot of hard work. There are few short cuts. Life in the old days would have been tough and labour-intensive, definitely not for the lazy.

The innovations that make our lives relatively effortless today, came about because someone at some point set out to find a way to do something in a more efficient way, achieving better results in a fraction of the time. In other words, working smarter rather than harder. A mechanical typewriter is a good example of this - you can produce a document much faster than someone writing longhand, and be effortlessly neat as well.

An electric typewriter is better, as you don't have to spend much energy pounding the keys. And a computer is better still, as you can copy and paste, proof-read and check the spelling without having to commit anything to paper. Pure laziness! The machine does most of the donkey-work, granting you hours of precious freedom to use as you wish.

Now do you see what I mean? That our wonderful technological civilisation is built upon laziness - creative, innovative, revolutionary, brilliant laziness?

Of course it doesn't mean that our lives are perfect. Automation is generally good, but it has also led to fast food, junk mail, spam and computer viruses. And while we have, on the whole, more free time, it doesn't follow that we use that free time wisely. But we have the choice. I can spend tonight enriching my mind and attending an evening class - or I can slump like an amoeba on my living room sofa and watch dreadful reality TV. It's all up to me. Laziness gives me the freedom to make such choices.

And there are still plenty of things done the good old-fashioned way. Hand-made clothes, bespoke shoes, home-cooked meals, all the things that are lovingly crafted, rather than churned out from an assembly line. But the point is: we are able to appreciate all the special hand-made, home-cooked stuff precisely because we don't have to make it or do it all the time.

Now there are some who say that our laziness in the West is leading inevitably to over-consumption, waste and a disdainful attitude to our world. I would say: don't under-estimate our adaptability and problem-solving skills. Our ability to reach smart solutions to the setbacks we always encounter is legendary and probably limitless. Today we are burning gasoline in our cars. Tomorrow we may be burning clean hydrogen. The day after tomorrow? Atomic fusion, or zero-point energy from the quantum vacuum, perhaps. Our civilisation never stands still. Whatever appears to be a problem today can be turned into a marvellous opportunity for progress tomorrow.

And there are also some who say we should go back to the old ways. Forgo powered flight and motor transport. Walk everywhere or use bicycles. Become subsistence farmers. I would say: riding bicycles and growing your own vegetables are good things to do! But don't forget - we generally enjoy doing them because we don't have to do them all the time. If we were totally dependent on our own leg-power and on the spinach harvest in our back gardens, it would be a different story indeed.

There are millions of people in the world who still have to walk miles down dirt roads every day to collect firewood and drinking water, then return to their village to light cooking fires, pound millet for hours and generally struggle against poverty and disease to feed themselves and their children. Are they happy with their lot? Perhaps many of them are, but I cannot help feeling that most would rather have a little less toil and a little (or maybe much more!) creative Western laziness in their lives.

Alex Cull, 4th June 2008

(This is an article I had originally planned to submit to Helium.com but it completely outgrew the title I had wanted to match it with - "How you know if you're a lazy person" or something similar.)