Fake news, reality and free will

Good grief! It’s been six months since I lasted posted. Well so what, I’ve had other things to do, I don’t do it for a living and I only write when I can think of something to say. But, hey, if I’m going to have a blog I might as well try to keep up with it.

To be honest, one of the things on my mind had been a bad case of cognitive dissonance following the UK referendum on EU membership last June. I’m still struggling to come to terms with the result – and the result of the US election hasn’t helped. And I’m writing this just before the result of the first round of the French Presidential election, so heaven help us.

One of the things which emerged from the US election has been the concept of ‘fake news’. I’ve found quite a useful ‘debunking handbook’ about how to address myths.* That cheered me up a bit but then I realised that it’s very hard to change people’s minds about anything because they tend to wrap themselves in information (true or false) supporting their views and surround themselves with like-minded friends and colleagues. Now, I read a newspaper which takes the same view on the referendum result as me, my three kids, several friends and a group of former work colleagues I go walking with all agree with me. My wife (and her ex-husband) take the opposite view but her three kids agree with me.

So am I surrounding myself with like-minded opinions and avoiding the contrary views? Am I failing my scientific training which demands I take only evidence-based decisions? I have been spending a lot of time and brain power on this and I still am holding fast. If anything, the thing which has had the biggest impact on me is the depth of hostility expressed by the supporters of the result of the referendum against those who dare to question it. And I still think that referendums are a crap way of deciding anything.

A different, but related, experience has been reading Yuval Noah Harari’s two books Sapiens and Homo Deus. I’m about 2/3 of the way through the second. He has an amazing insight: you don’t always agree with him but he makes you think about things – pure brain candy. Homo Deus – A Brief History of Tomorrow is perhaps the most challenging. He argues that there is nothing special about humans (which I have long believed), that there is no such thing as a soul (again, which I have no argument with) but also – and I need to do some re-reading and thinking here – that there is no such thing as free will. If I understand the argument, any decisions we make  – the high road or the low road, fight or flight – are ultimately decided by the purely random firing of some neurone in our brains.

I think I could accept that when it comes to the instant of the decision but surely there is a whole load of life experience stored up in our brains which provides a context to any decision. Surely, someone who has spent their whole life exploring and seeking out new and difficult experiences won’t suddenly take a low road rather than a high one just because of some random electrical event in their brain?

But that’s not to criticise Harari’s books. They are brilliant and I would recommend them to anyone.

*  Cook, J., Lewandowsky, S. (2011), The Debunking Handbook. St. Lucia, Australia: University of Queensland. November 5. ISBN 978-0-646-56812-6. [http://sks.to/debunk]

I’m Not Dead Yet

Hmm, my last post sounded a bit self-pitying. Well, since then we spent 18 days away in the camper van in North and Mid-Wales, walking every day, including an ascent of Snowdon by the Snowdon Ranger path, other hill-walking and some very interesting coastal walks.

I survived all that so there can’t be much wrong with me. I’ll carry on looking after myself, and taking the tablets, but I won’t worry (not that I was worrying, really).

Life is still busy and interesting. Retirement is quite hard work. The current project is investigating the possibility of getting a younger rescue dog to keep our current 7-year old company (and to provide a succession, though I never say that in the dog’s hearing).

Another project, still in the thinking-about stage, is to set up an automatic weather station. Initial research suggests that I might find difficulty in getting a suitable location in our rather small garden. I’ll report back on that one.

Where did I go?

I’m back after a ridiculously long absence. I’m not very good at this blogging lark. If I relied on getting paid for it I’d be in Carey Street by now.

There’s no real reason for the inaction. It’s just that a lot’s been going on: a trip to Australia to see grandchildren, the result of the EU referendum (maybe more on that another time), the odd trip away and a minor health scare. I’ll go for the last of those for now.

Early in May I had a one-hour spell of double vision. I rang my doctor’s surgery and (bless the NHS) a doctor rang back within about 20 minutes. She suggested a visit to Emergency (it was getting a bit late).

The hospital visit went OK, if sitting around for a fair time could ever be OK. But the emergency doctor was good. The risk was that I had had a transient ischaemic attack (TIA) sometimes called a ‘mini-stroke’. He did a lot of tests, including getting a CAT scan, and concluded that I probably had not had the TIA. But he suggested an MRI scan just to be sure. And the quickest way to get an MRI scan was to refer me to a TIA clinic.

So three days later I was lying in an MRI scanner – very noisy, a bit claustrophobic but not as bad as some have said. I then had further tests – blood pressure, etc, and doppler ultrasound on  my neck to check the good flow in the arteries to my brain. Having spent a lot of my working life involved in industrial non-destructive testing, that was interesting.

Then another wait before seeing the consultant. The basic result was that they had found no trace of a TIA but that the standard protocol is to assume I did have one and to mitigate any risk factors. Well, we had to scrape the bottom of the barrel a bit to find any of those. I don’t smoke, I’m not overweight, I eat well, I don’t drink excessively and I exercise a reasonable amount (mostly walking the dog). And I am already on statins to control my cloresterol. So all she could come up with was daily aspirin and something to control my blood pressure (which wasn’t dangerously high but they like to keep it under control to mitigate risk). She also wanted me to wear a heart monitor for a week – I did that and haven’t heard anything since I returned it.

Well, that’s all been going on. I haven’t had any recurrence of the double vision and I feel fine. The only change I have noticed is that the aspirin really does seem to be ‘thinning my blood’, what ever that means. The slightest scratch and I bleed a lot more freely than previously. But that’s quite bearable, not in the Russian Royal family category.

This sounds like a long and boring ramble about my medical condition. But there is a more serious side. None of the tests showed anything wrong with me. The only basis for suspecting a TIA was my description of the period of double vision. A lot of fuss about nothing? Well, as my GP said, do you want to risk spending the rest of your life in a wheel chair, or worse? I can live with a few pills.

Clouds and Cosines

There’s been something in The Guardian lately about putting solar panels on south-facing church roofs. Sounds possible – churches conventionally are aligned east-west. But a letter today pointed out that it is not that simple. Someone has to fund the initial installation and that will usually fall to the congregation. There will be a pay-back period of course but a small congregation may not be able to fund the capital outlay.

Some can afford it, of course. There was another letter reporting a 9.8KW (sic) project which cost £20,000 and has been feeding into the grid, earning feed-in tariff and presumably reducing the church’s electricity bill since 2012. That ‘KW’, rather than ‘kW’ grated a bit with me but not half as much as yet another letter which talked about their ‘3.99kWh system’. Even leaving aside the almost certain spurious accuracy (why not ‘4’?) it exposed yet again the inability of people to recognise the difference between ‘kW’ and ‘kWh’. Try this analogy: imagine a hosepipe with water coming out of it. The rate it comes out is analogous to kW. Now use it to fill a bucket. The contents of the bucket is analogous to kWh.

Yea, OK, I’m being a snobby pedant, and meeting my grumpy expectations. But if you are going to quote figures then at least get the units right.

The final letter was more amusing: A church in Liverpool had applied to install solar panels on the roof. This was refused, since the south side is visible from the road; but they were free to put them on the north side (which they didn’t).

Of course, these quoted kW ratings won’t be achieved all the time. It depends on the cosine of the angle between the direction of the sun and the normal to the panel, and that varies during with the date and during the day. It also depends on cloud cover – looking at the daily output of my inverter suggests that clouds are really a killer for solar output.

You see, solar output depends on clouds and cosines.

A Good Weekend

Just before the Easter weekend, we took the camper van (with the dog) over to Norfolk to join some friends for a bell ringing weekend. We went over a bit earlier and decided to stop in the Chilterns, mainly because we had not spent any time there.

We had two lovely walks: beech woods…

Beech woods …

bluebells…

… and bluebells

and more Red Kites than you could shake a stick at (I didn’t get a picture of those). Those birds have adapted amazingly to the area and they are so unafraid of humans – one landed just a few feet away from H to pick up some nesting material. The weather was very good on the whole, although surprising in parts – a hot sunny day turned into a hail storm at one point. A bonus was attending to ring at Wallingford, and renewing an old friendship.

Further en route, we stayed over with a college friend – another pleasant evening.

We joined the other ringers, including H’s daughter. The dog went mad when he saw her. It was a good day though tinged with some unease: there are so many churches in Norfolk, all historic, beautiful and – mostly – quite large. But they usually have very small congregations, share a priest with several other churches and often are in need of repair. I really don’t know how the Church of England can cope. I used to be worried about the shortage of bell ringers; now I worry a bit about a shortage of beautiful churches to ring in. But that needs a much more detailed discussion – perhaps for some other time.

On Easter Sunday we visited the town where I was born and brought up – to find the town full of runners for the Great East Anglian Run. Avoiding the runners, we took the ferry across the river and walked out along the sea banks around The Wash. We returned after all the runners had gone home in time to ring at the one church I had missed in my bell ringing youth because some idiot had rendered the bells unringable by putting some heating apparatus in the tower. That has been cleared out now and the bells restored to use.

After a last night in a useful lay-by on the way home we joined some of our local ringers for yet another ringing outing. A good weekend, and little to feel grumpy about.

Is Mac a Solution to Windows 10

I have blogged before about my problems with Windows 10 but I may have a solution…

I have used Windows for years now, mainly because all the organisations I worked with use Windows. But I have been a dabbler in other systems. I have played with Linux (I have a Raspberry Pi which I am still trying to find time to experiment with), I have an iPad and an Android phone. I also have a Mac Mini. The last was bought three or four years ago out of interest when I was feeling a bit rich. I also bought a wireless keyboard and trackpad but not a monitor – it was plugged into an HDMI socket on the TV and the idea was to use it for iPlayer and for looking at photos. But it was sadly underused.

I am finishing up my last work-related project in c aouple of months and I think I will keep my crippled Windows 10 PC, with its Start Menu problem, limping on until then. After that I am finally fully retired and free to do what I like. I know Microsoft Office, especially Outlook, so well that I am reluctant to give them up but then I realised that I can download them to the Mac under my Office 365 subscription. So we have the beginnings of a solution.

So far, I have fished the Mac Mini out from under the TV and installed it with the HDMI monitor I brought originally for the Raspberry Pi. I have also done a full software update (something I had been neglecting), including upgrading OSX to El Capitan – nice picture.

Now we’ll see how it goes. The only risk I can see is that I might turn into a Mac bore.

Windows 10 Strikes Again

Back in November 2015 I posted ‘Windows 10 on my mind’. This described the problems I had after accepting the upgrade from Windows 7, which resulted in a loss of the Start menu. The solutions offered by Windows Answers just made things worse. Eventually I solved the problem by junking the computer and buying a new one with 64 bit Windows 10 pre-installed. I think I was accepting that maybe there was some feature of my 5 or 6 year old computer which was incompatible with Windows 10.

That seemed to work OK although some of the more ‘helpful’ features of Windows 10 annoyed me. I do wish that modern operating systems had a ‘classic’ option which gave computer-literate users the option just to get on with what they want to do without interference.

Anyway, all was fine until 10 April 2016 when the same problem recurred. Now I don’t have hard evidence for this but the fact that the same problem has arisen on two quite different computers suggests that the source of the problem is with Microsoft. OK, I am the only other common factor but I am not doing anything that digs deeply into the innards of the software.

I can use the computer but it is crippled by the fault. I can do a lot of things with a right-click on the start button but I can’t access the list of applications (being grumpy, I hate calling them ‘apps’). and I can’t search for them because the search button isn’t working either. Fortunately, the ones I use regularly have icons on the desktop or in the task bar. The icon in the system tray tells me I have notifications but nothing happens when I click that.

The worst thing is that I have been using OneDrive for data files and that has vanished from File Explorer – even the local copy of OneDrive. Fortunately, I can access OneDrive from my Windows 7 laptop – which I have no intention of ever upgrading to Windows 10.

I don’t know what to do now, apart from waiting for Microsoft to fix it. I need to do more research – a quick check suggested that there was a temporary fix involving logging on in safe mode. But there was also a suggestion that Microsoft were aware of the problem but didn’t have a solution. I also found a patronising comment (not from Microsoft) that the vast majority of users do not have the problem. That’s a bit like being told that 95% of the population have mobile phone coverage when you are in trouble on a mountain and can’t get a signal.

I have a couple of important projects I need to finish so, even with a crippled computer, I am reluctant to try any fixes until those projects are out of the way.

I am quite happy to call myself ‘grumpy’. I keep on finding  instances which totally justify it.

Electric Wheels – Solar Charging?

New Scientist has a letter in its edition of 12 March 2016 from someone claiming he can charge his electric vehicle almost entirely from solar power. He may or may not be right – he did not give many details. I have replied. I don’t know whether or not it will get printed but, to get it off my chest, my letter is as follows:

The letter from Mr Lynch on the use of solar power to charge the batteries of his electric vehicle is interesting but lacks detail. We don’t know the details of his vehicle and its energy demands, we don’t know the rating of his domestic array or the one which he is fortunate enough to have access to at his place of employment and we don’t have details of his method of charging the vehicle from a battery charged by solar panels during the day.
My domestic installation, which is not untypical, has eight panels rated at 2 kW. That is a maximum output, of course. The output varies with the time of the year, the time of the day and, most dramatically, the cloud cover. A useful metric here is the generated energy in any one day. The average generation on each of the 31 days centred on the 2015 Summer Solstice was 9.24 kWh with a range of 2.22 – 13.18 kWh; the equivalent figures for the Winter Solstice were 1.08 kWh and 0.00 – 4.18 kWh. A typical charge on my Nissan Leaf is about 10 kWh. These figures suggest that I need to do a lot more than “top up from the grid a little in December and January” and that I don’t have a “huge surplus” in summer.
There is also the charging profile to consider. I know the cost of the Li-ion battery pack in my vehicle and I am happy to accept every option suggested by Nissan to prolong the life of it – for both economic and environmental reasons. One of these is options to charge only to 80% on a normal basis, the other is the way the charge rate drops as the charge proceeds – both my home charging unit and the Ecotricity units at motorway services provide these capabilities. I don’t understand how you could achieve this just by connecting to a battery that has been charged during the day from solar panels.
Looking around me as I drive the electric car, particularly on motorways, has brought home to me the massive environmental challenges from fossil-fuelled vehicles. In “Sustainable Energy – without the hot air” David MacKay calculates that a typical car driver uses about 40 kWh of fossil energy a day. The grid can help here, with its averaging effect over all types on generation. For example, if I charge my car on a sunny day, when overall demand on the grid is low and generation from coal and gas power stations is minimised, I can reasonably claim that a high proportion of the energy I use is from low emission sources such as my solar panels, solar farms, wind and base load nuclear.

Electric Wheels

My lifestyle will be changing tomorrow. I’ve never been a petrol-head but the internal combustion engine has been part of my life ever since I passed my driving test nearly 53 years ago. The family vehicle for the last six years has been an Alfa Romeo Brera. It’s a lovely car which I’ve enjoyed driving. Driving is usually a rubbish experience nowadays so you might as well do in in something which is fun to drive. Four or five years ago we bought an elderly camper van and that was a very rewarding lifestyle change, especially for the dog who enjoys it even more than we do.

The Alfa was getting a bit long in the tooth, the back seat was very cramped for the odd occasions when we gave people lifts and my grandchildren complained about having to get in through the wide, heavy doors. My wife started saying “you’ll have to get an ordinary car next time”. Oh dear.

Then we started thinking about how we use vehicles. We use the camper van for holidays and for carting around large objects while the Alfa is rarely used for long journeys. My son started the rot when he described being taken out in his boss’s new Tesla. I had a look at one in a showroom and decided that the only thing wrong with it was that we didn’t have £80k to spare. But when I look under the bonnet of the Alfa (or the camper van, to be fair) and see all the oil, water and petrol systems, and think about how a reciprocating engine works, and the clutch, and the gearbox, then the simplicity of an electric car looks rather attractive.

What started as a bit of a joke turned into something more serious. We have the camper van for long journeys and the thought of being able to cope with a range of 80-100 miles began to look possible, especially with the increasing number of charging points.

A bit of research suggested that a Nissan Leaf was the one to go for, at least currently. So a couple of weeks ago we visited the local dealer – ‘just for a look’. Well, you know what happened – we pick one up tomorrow.

The car was already in the garage so I don’t understand the delay. Mind you, I’ve never understood motor dealers. But it did give us chance to get a 7.2kW home charging point fitted. Tomorrow is 29 February, a day when I understand that people are supposed to do things out of the ordinary. Well, there you are.

We’ll see how things go and I’ll post again about the experience, with some facts and figures on running costs, range and so on.

We are trading in the Alfa and we did not want to leave too much petrol in it. Yesterday it beeped and said ‘Limited cruising range’. I normally get twitchy then but the wife pointed out that probably means about 60 miles. As she said, “get used to it”.

Einstein was right, and wrong

February 11 2016. Great excitement today. My daily check on the NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day revealed only an announcement that the picture would appear after 11:00 EST (that’s 4 o’clock in the afternoon for us Brits) after the announcement of results from the LIGO observatory. We now know (and it was widely anticipated) that this was the first detection of gravitational waves. These were first predicted in a paper published by Einstein in 1915 – 100 years ago, what a PR achievement!

The irony of this is that the signals detected have been attributed to the collision between two black holes. But Einstein did not accept the idea of black holes.

While I claim to be a scientist, my scientific knowledge isn’t strong enough to understand fully all the wrinkles of this (pun not intended – gravitational waves can be seen as wrinkles in space-time). But I do find myself intensely excited about this.

But then I see all the conflicts and starvation in the world and I have to wonder if we are getting things rightly in proportion. A cynic might want to know how much the LIGO experiment has cost and how  many mouths you could feed for that. I’ve wrestled with this a bit and I still come down on the side of LIGO and anything that increases our knowledge of the universe we live in. If we stop asking questions like that we will cease to be human. I have struggled to understand TS Eliot but I wonder if his words in ‘Little Gidding’ are relevant here:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Another thought might be: “If we can do all these wonderful scientific things, why can’t we solve problems on our own earth?”. I can’t answer that but it might be worth remembering that all the scientists who discovered gravitation waves were all working together to achieve the same goal.