At the weekend I went on a cycle tour to Warsash and back:

• Friday: Cambridge to Warsash, 220 km (137 miles)
• Sunday: Warsash to Staines, 107 km (67 miles)
• Monday: Staines to Cambridge, 131 km (81 miles)

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Like some of my friends, I’ve having trouble deciding who to vote for in the European elections. I agree in general terms with the European policies of both the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party. I’m leaning Green at the moment: I like the Green Party manifesto more than the Liberal Democrats manifesto (with exceptions, some of which I note below), mainly because of its greater detail and specificity.

The tactical voting considerations are also quite strong: it’s not likely that the Lib Dems can get a second seat in the East of England constituency (they’d need at least another 10% or so over their 2005 result) whereas the Greens might be able to get one seat (they might only need another 5% or so). However, there are some arguments the other way.

For the Liberal Democrats:

• My Westminster MP, David Howarth, seems pretty good. He’s sound on several issues I care about (civil liberties, identity cards, climate change), he wrote decent replies to my letters, and he seems to be innocent of corruption. So I think the party deserves some kind of reward for his hard work.

Against the Greens:

• I strongly object to their proposal for “An immediate halt to xenotransplantation, genetic manipulation and cloning of animals” [manifesto, page 28].

• I don’t think their energy policy adds up: they plan “to campaign for an end to nuclear power throughout Europe, and against any new nuclear plants”, and they say that “current coal station schemes must be cancelled” [manifesto, page 11]. But that’s going to leave a big gap between energy generation and consumption, and I don’t believe that their proposals for renewable energy and increased efficiency are sufficient to fill the gap in time (based on the analysis in Sustainable Energy by David MacKay).

• I don’t like their association with animal rights extremists. Their candidate Rupert Read is a “frequent participant in demos over the years at places such as Huntingdon Life Sciences”. I don’t approve of guilt by association, but some of the anti-HLS protesters are really vile people and that’s hard to set aside emotionally.

• I don’t like their plan for the NHS to pay for complementary and alternative medicine [§HE300].

However, that’s a fairly small list of objections, and it’s not likely that the Greens will actually have the power to implement any of the things I object to. So maybe I should vote for Mr Read despite my worries.

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The Peter Burkinshaw thing reminded me of this e-mail exchange I had a few years ago with “Dr. Phill Edwards” of the BNP.

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From: gareth.rees@pobox.com
To: pressoffice@bnp.org.uk
Subject: RE: Mixed-race marriages
Date: Fri, 11 Jun 2004 22:43:53 +0100

I see from your web site <http://www.bnp.org.uk/faq.html#mixedrace> that you are against mixed-race relationships. Is your view a matter of conscience or do you propose to legislate to ban or restrict mixed-race relationships? I couldn't find the answer on your web site.

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From: pressoffice@bnp.org.uk
To: gareth.rees@pobox.com
Subject: RE: Mixed-race marriages
Date: Sat, 12 Jun 2004 04:43:24 -0400

Our web site makes it clear why we don't approve of race mixing. We would not ban or legislate against them but we would ban the promotion of mixed race liasons and allow people to make their own choice without being persuaded that it's "cool" to have black/white partnerships. Adverts, soaps, TV dramas always show a positive picture of mixed race liasons (as they do with queers) and, of course, anyone who disaproves in public is immediately condemned as a "racist" (or "homophobe"). Apart from the obvious problem in multiracial Britain of chance encounters by people from different races, I believe that if people are allowed to make up their own minds, uncluttered by media conditioning, they will choose "partners" from their own racial group. It's a matter of evolutionary biology.

Dr Phill Edwards BNP National Press Officer

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From: gareth.rees@pobox.com
To: pressoffice@bnp.org.uk
Subject: Re: Mixed-race marriages
Date: Sat, 12 Jun 2004 15:56:17 +0100

Thank you for your reply. I have a couple of questions.

You propose to legislate against the promotion of mixed-race relationships in television programmes and in television advertising?

Do I understand you correctly? What about newspapers, magazines and other printed materials? What about plays?

For example, under your proposed legislation, would it be permissible to stage a play of Othello? To show a movie of Othello on television? To publish the text of the play in print?

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From: pressoffice@bnp.org.uk
To: gareth.rees@pobox.com
Subject: Re: Mixed-race marriages
Date: Sat, 12 Jun 2004 15:29:23 -0400

I'm sure you are aware that at the present time there are a number of quangos which regulate adverts (ASA), print (PCC), content of TV soaps, plays etc - so there is legislation currently in place to regulate these outlets. We would increase this to prevent the promotion of inter racial liaisons and the activities of queers using the existing laws. After all, if the regulators currently allow offensive material to be printed, broadcast etc then we would improve the situation. We would also remove restrictions on what can and cannot be said in order to allow free and open debate about topics which are now censored eg the desirability or not of multiculturalism and multiracialism. There would be exemptions when appropriate eg Othello. Me - I would like to see the Black and White Minstrel show back on the BBC. Fox (the BBC boss who pulled it) said it was the most popular TV show at the time yet it had to go. So much for the rights of the native white people of the UK

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The Cambridge Cycling Campaign asked all the candidates standing in the local elections for their views on issues that are important to people who cycle in Cambridge.

Here are the answers given by Peter Burkinshaw, standing for the UK Independence Party in East Chesterton ward:

CCC: Question 1. There is a major shortage of cycle parking all around the city. Cycle theft is over 10% of all reported crime in the County. Do you have any suggestions for locations for cycle parking? Would you be willing to see a very small proportion of on-street car parking being replaced by on-street cycle parking in your ward? How will you progress towards a situation where every resident and every worker in each ward can keep a bike safe?

Burkinshaw: No

CCC: Question 2. Do you support our view that traffic policing (including fining of cyclists without lights or using pedestrian-only pavements) should become a greater police priority?

Burkinshaw: No

CCC: Question 3. We believe that 20mph should be the norm for local streets in residential areas (as distinct from main connecting roads). 20mph would: greatly encourage walking and cycling; improve the quality of life in an area for residents; and would not delay car journeys significantly (because only the start/end of a journey would be affected). Do you agree that 20mph should become the norm for local streets in Cambridge and surrounding villages?

Burkinshaw: No

CCC: Question 4. If the County Council's proposed Congestion Charge goes ahead, it is likely that the associated up-front money that would be received from the government to support prior improvements to public transport and cycling would be of the order of some £500m spread over five years. This is roughly ten times the amount the County currently receives for transport. If the scheme goes ahead, what would be your priorities for use of this up-front money?

Burkinshaw: To reduce the Council tax

CCC: Question 5. The Haling Way / Penny Ferry path is part of a national cycle route. Its entranceway is currently being remodelled, at considerable cost. We believe that a diagonal entrance into the path should have been created, rather than the current ‘wiggle’ round a blind corner and use of the pavement. This has not been done because it would involve removal of a few more car parking spaces. Do you feel that this cycle route should have a proper entrance for cyclists, even if it means the loss of three or four parking spaces?

Burkinshaw: No

CCC: Question 6. Do you have any other general cycling-related comments or points? And what support have you given for cycling and walking, or sustainable transport more generally, in the past?

Burkinshaw: Provision for cyclists is already adequate. Please remember that motorists are the people who pay to use the roads whereas cyclists are "freeloaders". They are entitled to use the roads but not disproportionately. If everyone cycled, as you suggest, there would be no roads to ride on.

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It seems to be the season for punctures. On Saturday I was cycling into town when I spotted a cyclist standing disconsolately by the road, staring at his back wheel. So I stopped and fixed his puncture for him.

Then on Sunday I went out with the touring group of the Cambridge Cycling Club. We were supposed to be going to Grafham Water, but we had two punctures, so we ran out of time and had to come back. And then we had another two punctures on the way back.

Puncture 1. Between Bourn and Caxton

Puncture 2. In Great Gransden

Puncture 3. In Papworth Everard

Puncture 4. In Longstanton

Couldn't have happened on a nicer day, though.

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The 2009 Étape Caledonia: cyclists waiting for the road to be cleared. Photo by Colin Frame. (Licence: CC-by-nc-sa.)

Here is a cri de coeur from Matt Polaine:

Thanks to the feeble government attempts to encourage an increase in cycling, road layouts, both old and new, continue to be peppered with lethal designs for cyclists, the police continue to be indifferent to reports of road rage or just plain terrible driving towards cyclists and one often has to really push for a prosecution. Even if a prosecution does find its way to the courts, the judges take ‘Sorry Mate I Didn’t See You’ as a water-tight excuse for ploughing into a cycling group, on a straight road, in daylight. [...] This hate of cyclists extends to whole UK towns now.

I don’t necessarily endorse everything in Polaine’s rant, but that’s not really the point—it’s the feeling of being a member of a minority under siege that he’s expressing, and it’s one that I share from time to time. On a sunny weekend, cycling is so enjoyable that it would be easy to forget about all the unpleasantness if you weren’t reminded of it every day in the news.

The story of the sabotage of the 2009 Étape Caledonia is really quite extraordinary. The Étape Caledonia was the first British cyclosportive to be held on roads closed to traffic. The Independent reported:

An audacious act of sabotage threw one of Britain's biggest cycle races into chaos yesterday when a protester, presumably angered by road closures for the annual 3,500-cyclist Etape Caledonia, scattered the road with grey carpet tacks, puncturing hundreds of tyres. [...] The sabotage throws into doubt the ability of the UK cycling organisations to host the type of closed-road events common on the continent.

The same day that the Étape Caledonia was sabotaged, several roads in the centre of Manchester were closed for the Great Manchester Run. As far as I know no-one attempted to injure Haile Gebrselassie or any of the other runners.

So what kind of antisocial thug would take out his frustrations at the road closure by cold-bloodedly attempting to injure the 3,500 particpants in the cyclosportive? Here’s the Daily Record:

Alex Grosset, 62, was arrested at his home in the early hours of yesterday morning. He is expected to appear before Perth Sheriff Court today to face reckless conduct charges relating to thedisruption of the Etape Caledonia event through Perthshire on Sunday. Grosset is the chairman of the Rannoch and Tummel Community Council and a member of the local Rotary club.

So this pillar of the community considers the lives of cyclists to be so worthless that it was reasonable to risk them to make a political protest.

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In other news, Boris Johnson (Mayor of London), Andrew Adonis (a Minister of State in the Department for Transport), and some others, were nearly killed by a reckless lorry driver. Now I disagree with Mr Johnson on nearly every political issue, but I still wouldn’t like to see him hurt by a heavy goods vehicle. The incident was captured on a private security camera monitoring the Dunbar Wharf development:

Nic Price (aka “Beatnic”) was an eye-witness:

The mayor and an entourage—about 10 cyclists or so—were looking at options for a new cycle route - as a curious fellow cyclist I tagged along as I was on my way in to work in Canary Wharf following the same route. The back doors of the lorry flew open as it overtook us and the bolt on the right-hand door picked up a parked car through its front windscreen and swung it round at head-height, brushing past a few of the cyclists and then landing it back on all four wheels a little further down the road.

I think every cyclist will recognize something here: there’s a kind of psychological compulsion to overtake cyclists that affects a (luckily very small) minority of drivers. This compulsion leads drivers to make extraordinary efforts to get ahead of cyclists even when it can’t possibly do them any good, such as racing to overtake when coming up to a queue of stationary vehicles, or to a traffic light that’s red. Combined with narrow streets this compulsion can be deadly, as these drivers make desperate attempts to overtake cyclists when approaching a gap that’s too narrow for both of them.

What can we do? We could identify these drivers and ban them—but I think that as a society we’re clearly not willing to do this. Something we could try instead would be to redesign roads so that drivers of motor vehicles no longer feel compelled to make these dangerous manoeuvres. That means taking out width restrictions, central reservations, and the kind of on-road parking that you can see in the video, and using the space so gained to put in wide cycle lanes or separated cycle paths. It’s the kind of project that’s esily within the powers of an advanced industrial society like ours. If the Dutch can do it, then so can we.

But we’d have to have politicians who valued the lives of cyclists more than their own driving convenience, unlike the councillor for Rannoch and Tummel. And I don’t see how to get there from here.

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Since the weather was so nice on Sunday, I went on this ride with the CCC in the morning (that's me in black in the photo), and then on this ride with the CTC in the afternoon. I failed to eat enough lunch, and even more foolishly failed to carry any food with me, so I completely ran out of glycogen on the climb up to Barley in Hertfordshire. Fortunately the Chequers pub was serving food and after a bowl of crumble and custard I had enough energy to make it to tea in Litlington. Just over 100 miles for the day (including three ascents of Chapel Hill near Barrington!), but I need to improve my eating skills.

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The starlings in the neighbourhood are fledging at the moment. The fledgelings are still rather poor fliers—they make short flights from the perch where their parents are waiting and then turn around and go back. When the parents look for things to eat, the fledgelings follow them around and pester them for food. There are only about four or five families, but they are very noisy.

The blackbirds in the pyracantha by the door have not yet flown the nest, but it can’t be long now. There are two chicks, but they are rather camera-shy. In the photo I think you can just about see the beak and eye of the one on the left, but the one on the right is head-down.

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Charlie Brooker writes about the BNP’s party political broadcast:

But there's more to the advert's failure than its hideous use of colour schemes. Every aspect of it is bad. The framing is bad. The sound is bad. The script is bad. For all their talk about representing the Great British Worker, when it comes to promotional material, the BNP can't even represent the most basic British craftsmanship.

Is this a dangerous approach to be taking? If one of your arguments against the BNP is that they are rubbish at making television commercials, then on that day that the BNP have enough money to make something a bit more professional, you end up looking a bit refuted.

On the other hand, if you appear to be taking them seriously, you end up loaning them a bit of your credibility, at least as some kind of worthy opponent. So maybe the best rhetorical strategy is ridicule?

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Private Eye often chooses to criticize someone by contrasting their pious words with their shameful deeds, or their words at one time with their words at another. For example, from this week:

“Sir Fred Goodwin should not be counting on being £650,000 a year better off. It’s a huge amount of money for nothing. The Prime Minister has said it is not acceptable and the government will take action. [...] Sir Fred should not be counting on this. It might be enforceable in a court of law this contract but it's not enforceable in the court of public opinion and that's where the Government steps in.” — Harriet Harman, interviewed on BBC, 1 March

“People have claimed in good faith under the system. MPs make the claim under the system and it’s for the House of Commons fees office to decide whether it comes within the rules. MPs make their claims under the rules and the money is paid out only if they are satisfied that the claim is within the rules.” — Harriet Harman, interviewed on BBC, 8 May

It makes for effective satirical comment to have the accused condemn themselves with their own words. But when the tactic is used week after week it starts to give the impression that the fault being criticized is purely the hypocrisy of saying one thing and doing another, and if only the person had got their story straight they would have been fine.

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In light of the following figures from the National Audit Office's report Improving road safety for pedestrians and cyclists in Great Britain —

(suggesting that on average cycling is about 20% safer than walking a similar distance in the UK) — why do you think they picked a cover photo in which the cyclist is wearing a helmet but none of the pedestrians appear to be wearing any protective equipment?

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The National Audit Office has just published a report for the Department for Transport, Improving road safety for pedestrians and cyclists in Great Britain.

Here are the headline figures:

The most obvious problem with this report is the persistent confusion between absolute casualties, and casualties normalized by population and by distance travelled. In some cases I simply can’t tell which is meant, for example on page 10:

“The Department has targets to reduce by 2010 the numbers of people killed or seriously injured by 40 per cent, of children aged 0 to 15 by 50 per cent and slight injury rates per 100 million vehicle kilometres by 10 per cent compared with the average between 1994 and 1998.

Which of these three targets are absolute and which normalized to population and distance? I haven’t a clue. This matters because effective strategies are going to differ according to which measure is being targeted. If the target is simply to reduce the absolute number of casualties from cycling, the simplest approach would be to ban cycling altogether: the target would be achieved automatically. If such a ban proved politically impossible, then making cycling substantially more inconvenient (for example by imposing a registration scheme or other tax) would probably have a similar effect. But can this really be the kind of “safety” that the Department for Transport has in mind?

This confusion between absolute and proportional numbers comes to the fore in the section on international comparisons, where this claim is made:

“The United Kingdom was fourth highest out of 14 European nations in 2006 for the least number of cyclist deaths per head of population.” [page 12]

And backed up by this table on page 36:

This seems to me to be a really misleading table to include in the report. Because these numbers are not normalized to distance travelled, the table is primarily telling you about the amount of cycling in each country, not the relative safety of cycling in that country. People in the UK hardly cycle at all—the report estimates an average of 39 miles per year per person—so it is not surprising that the number of fatalities is low too.

And where are the Netherlands? Using the figures from 2007 (see below) of 147 fatalities and a population of 16.3 million, I get a figure of 9.0 fatalities per million population. So why aren’t the Netherlands in there between Belgium and Estonia? (This could be because the Netherlands were dilatory in reporting road casualty figures for 2006 to the European Road Safety Observatory—in ESRO’s Annual Statistical Report 2008 the latest figures for the Netherlands are from 2003. But it would have still been fairer to include the most recent datum from that country, with a note about what year it’s from.)

The appropriate table would have shown the data normalized by distance travelled. Here’s my best attempt to generate such a table:

Sources:

• Number of cyclist fatalities — European Commission. EU energy and transport in figures, 2009.

• km cycled per person per day — Figure 2 of John Pucher and Ralph Buehler (2008). “Making cycling irresistible: lessons from the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany”. Transport Reviews 28:4:495—528. DOI: 10.1080/01441640701806612.

  I’m not particularly happy with using these statistics because they are so out of date, but they are the best I can find for the moment. If you know of a better or more up to date source, please let me know. Pucher and Buehler source them from EU energy and transport in figures, 2000, and that’s not online. More recent issues of the same publication which are online don’t report this statistic. (However, the estimate for the UK — 0.2 km per person per day — is a good match for the National Audit Office’s figure of 0.17, so maybe they are not too bad.)

  Update: I e-mailed John Pucher to ask if he knew of more recent statistics for distances walked or cycled in the EU countries, and he wrote back, “The [European Commission] no longer publishes those estimates of distances walked and cycled, unfortunately. So the only alternative is to to get the info from individual countries, which we did for [the Netherlands], [Denmark], Germany, UK and USA, but it's too much work to do it for all countries.”

• 2007 population — Eurostat. European Union: Total Population.

You can see that the normalized figures are not nearly so flattering to the UK. Is this just plain incompetence, or a deliberate attempt to mislead?

So much for the statistical side of the report. What about the recommendations?

Well, I was going to tell you about them, but I fell asleep. There’s absolutely nothing concrete to get a grip on, nothing that will result in any action, nothing that will make any actual difference to someone cycling or walking. Here are some highlights (page 7):

• The Department [for Transport] should set targets that report separately the numbers of people killed and those seriously injured

• The Department should complete by Autumn 2009 [...] its work on assessing the usefulness of Hospital Episodes Statistics

• The Department should assess whether and how it can use other data [...] to improve the reporting of trends in road safety.

• The Department should allow a lead time before projects commence so that local highway authorities can undertake sufficient consultations

• The Department should require local highway authorities to adhere to prescribed evaluation standards.

• The Department needs to develop an explicit strategy which [...] develops key indicators to assess how well it works with other bodies

Most of the recommendations are completely non-actionable — “considering”, “engaging”, “educating” and “influencing” are the key verbs — and the report admits that the Department’s education campaigns have unmeasurable results (“there is no direct evidence of the contribution that the Think! campaign has made to reducing casualties”).

So thank you, National Audit Office. Next time I get run down by a bus, I will remember how you recommended that the Department for Transport develop an explicit strategy for developing key indicators for assessing how well it works with other bodies.

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Manifold: Time by Stephen Baxter (Voyager, 2000).

Reid Malenfant is a maverick billionaire who is determined to launch a manned space mission to mine the asteroid belt. The bureaucrats of NASA and crazy anti-space environmentalists try to thwart him with their weapons of red tape and government regulation, but Malenfant is too mavericky for them, and launches his hastily thrown-together rocket in the nick of time—with Malenfant aboard, of course—leaving the bureaucrats standing helpless by the launch pad.

The standard set of space advocacy soundbites pile up as Malenfant pitches his plans to investors—“If we succeed [in colonizing space], we will live forever. The alternative is extinction.”—“[A solar] system’s resources ... are useless for any other purpose, and are therefore economically free to us.”—“A metallic-type near-Earth object would be worth, conservatively, trillions in today’s market.”—“If you reach a C-type, a carbonaceous chondrite, full of water and organic compounds, you can ... throw bags of water and food and plastics back to Earth orbit, where they would be worth billions in saved launch costs.”—“Because of NASA’s safety controls and qual[ity] standards it takes years and millions of dollars to prepare your payload for flight.”

It’s hard for me to tell to what extent Baxter means this to be taken seriously. The maverick space entrepreneur who could easily conquer space if it weren’t for those pesky pen-pushers at NASA is such a cliché that surely no-one can now play it straight? The fallacies of space advocacy are sufficiently shopworn that an intelligent writer of science fiction with a background in science or engineering should have no trouble seeing through them. Later in the book all Malenfant’s plans come to ruin, so maybe the idea is to undermine these clichés by showing their failure? On the other hand, the early sections of the book are told with such a poker face that there’s no indication that the author has any kind of ironic or satirical attitude to this material. Indeed, he says in an interview that he never writes in ironic mode:

Basically I try not to employ irony, allusive or recursive or otherwise, just as I try to keep out of the forefront of my mind all the levels of metaphor that come with any piece of fiction. I try to get fully immersed in the fiction; I'm not interested in writing elaborate jokes. I'm just trying to tell as compelling and honest a story as I can, with the tools I have at my disposal.

The annoyance factor, already at dangerous levels, goes off the scale when one of the characters introduces the Doomsday argument. I’ll summarize the argument here:

1. Suppose that you have an a priori estimate for the distribution of the number of humans who will ever live.

2. Suppose further that you are a random sample uniformly selected from all the humans who will ever live.

3. Note that you are about the 60 billionth human to live.

4. You can use (2) and (3), plus Bayes’ theorem, to refine your estimate of the distribution in (1). Plugging in plausible distributions for (1), we find that (as Wikipedia puts it) “it is unlikely that more than 1.2 trillion humans will ever live.”

The argument as stated is logically correct: if all the assumptions were true then the conclusion would follow. But assumption (2) is wrong, so the conclusion does not in fact follow. So the main rhetorical trick in presenting the argument is to obfuscate the role of assumption (2), either by skipping it or by making an analogy with a statistical situation in which the sample is genuinely random. Baxter neatly pulls off the latter bait-and-switch by making an analogy with picking balls from a box. Note the phrase I’ve emphasized in the first paragraph.

Cornelius reached under the table and produced a wooden box, sealed up. It had a single grooved outlet, with a wooden lever alongside. ‘In this box there are a number of balls. One of them has your name on it, Malenfant; the rest are blank. If you press the lever you will retrieve the balls one at a time, and you may inspect them. The retrieval will be truly random.

‘I won't give you the opportunity to inspect the box, save to draw out the balls with the lever. But I promise you there are either ten balls in here—or a thousand. Now. Would you hazard which is the true number, ten or a thousand?’

‘Nope. Not without evidence.’

‘Very wise. Please, pull the lever.’

Malenfant drummed his fingers on the tabletop. Then he pressed the lever. A small black marble popped into the slot. Malenfant inspected it; it was blank. Emma could see there was easily room for a thousand such balls in the box, if need be.

Malenfant scowled and pressed the lever again.

His name was on the third ball he produced.

‘There are ten balls in the box,’ said Malenfant immediately. [page 45]

Why is this so annoying? It’s interesting to think this through, because I don’t normally object to science fiction that uses wrong ideas or incorrect science (nearly all of the genre). But suspension of disbelief can’t be compelled, so there needs to be some concession to the fact that the science is wrong. For example, Greg Egan’s novel Quarantine uses the idea that human consciousness causes the collapse of quantum superposition. This was a genuine piece of speculative quantum physics—the idea was discussed by physicist Eugene Wigner in his 1961 essay “Remarks on the Mind-Body Question”—but I think it’s safe to say that no serious physicist believes it now, and certainly Egan doesn’t. So the novel has some work to do in getting the reader to the point where suspension of disbelief is possible, and Egan accomplishes this by describing a series of observations and experiments whose results can only plausibly be explained in terms of the effect of human consciousness on quantum superposition. So when the novel asks us to consider the “consciousness causes collapse” theory, there’s a narrative payoff: never mind that it’s nonsense in the real world, in the word of Quarantine it provides an explanation for a series of mysterious events. So the reader is primed to suspend disbelief and rewarded for that suspension.

At least, it worked for me. There are clearly personal differences in the kind of nonsense that readers are willing to entertain. For example, nickbarnes stopped believing in Egan’s novel Schild’s Ladder at the introduction of the idea that the phase transition to the fictional “novo-vacuum” of the novel should propagate at half the speed of light. This didn’t bother me; having swallowed the novel’s idea of the laws of physics being explained by transformations of an underlying graph, the idea that some effect could propagate along the graph at a rational fraction of the speed of light wasn’t much of a gnat to strain at. But for another reader it was. So Egan could have improved his novel for at least one reader by taking more care to justify this piece of fictional physics.

But back to Time. The use of the Doomsday argument annoyed me because Baxter makes no attempt to justify the argument within the fictional world of the novel. The argument could be made plausible within a science-fictional context by showing us a series of anthropic experiments that ratify the randomness assumption, or by hand-waving some science-fictional rationale for it. But there’s nothing like that; the argument is just dropped in there with no clue as to its status within the fiction. There’s no narrative payoff from accepting it. So are we meant to interpret it as a truth of the invented world? Or as evidence of the craziness or untrustworthiness of the character who makes the argument and the credulity of the (many) characters in the novel who are convinced by it? Or could Baxter even believe it himself? Reviewer Dave Langford was so troubled by the last of these theories that he contacted Baxter to check! “I was relieved to learn (by personal enquiry) that Baxter himself doesn't take the argument seriously”.

However, the space entrepreneurship and the Doomsday argument plots soon drop out of the novel as the space travellers find a magic portal which gives them a package tour of a far future in which human civilization survives alone in a decaying universe. This is potentially a powerful vision, of intelligent life struggling to gather enough energy to power its existence while everything runs down to the ultimate heat death:

‘... the smallest, longest-lived dwarf [star]s can last for maybe a hundred billion years, a lot longer than the sun. But the interstellar medium is a finite resource. Sooner or later there will be no more new stars. And eventually, one by one, all the stars will die. All that will remain will be stellar remnants, neutron stars and black holes and white dwarfs, slowly cooling.’ He smiled, analytic. ‘Think of it. All that rich, complex dust and gas we saw before, locked up in the cooling corpses of dead stars ... And then, this.’ Cornelius pointed. ‘The wreck of the Galaxy. Some of the dying stars have evaporated out of the Galaxy. The rest are collapsing into the great black holes—those blisters you see in the disc ... Those stars are small and cold. Designed for longevity. Their worlds must be huddled close—probably gravitationally locked, keeping one face in the light, one in the dark...’ [pages 197–199]

It could be a powerful vision—but it’s presented by Cornelius, the same character who tried to fool us with the Doomsday argument. So it loses much of its force by being narrated by such an untrustworthy (and annoying) character.

In parallel with the deep futorology, Time develops a plot about superintelligent children who begin to be born to ordinary parents. These children inspire fear and hatred in the general population, and they are taken away from their families and concentrated in orphanages. In what looks like a reference to the stolen generations of native Australians, the viewpoint children are taken to an institution in Australia where they are brutalized and starved. This strand of the story is an indictment of our xenophobia and fear of strangers, right? Except that it turns out that these children are planning the destruction of the universe. So is the idea that it was right to fear and distrust them? What’s going on here?

There’s a clear pattern in all these problems: Baxter completely lacks control over his material in this novel. He has potentially powerful themes and ideas, but handles them so inconsistently that they lose all their power. The novel starts as if it’s a story of ambitious space entrepreneurship—but it comes to nothing because the universe ends. Is this Baxter satirically undermining a science fictional cliché? Or is it just that he likes to write about space entrepreneurs? He puts the powerful central vision of the future of humanity in the mouth of a character whose credibility he has destroyed via the Doomsday nonsense. Is this meant to undermine the vision, to show how little faith we can put in this kind of futurology? The brutal treatment of the cuckoo children appears at first to be an impassioned criticism of xenophobia, but then the effect is completely undermined as the children turn out in fact to be a threat to the survival of the human race. Baxter’s depressing view of humanity as wasteful, fearful and violent is one for which you can find plenty of ammunition in the real world. But result is an incoherent book: you can’t have half your plot driven by “oh no! humanity must be saved from extinction!” and the other half driven by “humanity is too vile and stupid to be worth saving”.

Baxter needs to think a bit harder about what kind of aesthetic effect he’s trying to achieve, and then to deploy his considerable resources of invention and speculation so that they all face in the same direction.

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This is a commentary on Adam Roberts’ review of Greg Egan’s novel Incandescence in Strange Horizons (2008-06-06). There are some spoilers for the novel.

Roberts teaches English literature at the University of London, writes and reviews science fiction, and blogs at the Valve and elsewhere. He’s very insightful about the use of language, for example in this hilarious satirical review of Neal Stephenson’s novel Anathem. However, in his review of Incandescence he appears to declare a lack of interest in science itself:

[I] was less intrigued by Zak and Roi’s interminable toing and froing with stones and springs inside the Splinter, to which adheres the odour of fourth-form school physics labs.

(I’m interpreting “odour” as a signifier of disgust here; cf. George Orwell’s essay “Such, such were the joys”.)

This lack of interest makes his review very unsatisfactory. In particular, I think it leads him to misidentify the main subject of the novel as being “finding stuff out”, that is, the process of scientific discovery:

[The characters] come across as ciphers through which Egan rehearses the process by which scientists undertake experiment after experiment in order to move closer to the truth.

It seems to me that the main subject of the book is the general theory of relativity itself, not just the process of its discovery, and the process by which Egan’s characters discover the theory is of interest because of its complete difference from Einstein’s discovery, not because it’s a “rehearsal” of similarity.

Egan’s novel is deliberately constructed so as to the dramatize the theory of general relativity, by contriving a situation in which accurate understanding of the theory makes the difference between life and death for a whole civilization. It’s also a demonstration of the universality of physical laws. Einstein’s discovery of general relativity was driven by mathematical hypothesis (what theory do we get if we assume the equivalence of accelerating and gravitational frames of reference?) and only verified by painstaking observation after it was formulated, once people knew what to look for. But in Incandescence, the characters, living in a much more curved region of spacetime than our own, are driven to discover general relativity by direct observation of the dynamics of orbits. Completely different contexts of discovery lead to the same underlying physics.

Everything else in the novel forms the supporting framework for this dramatization, and the difficulty of making it work at all requires Egan to write in the ways that Roberts so dislikes. Because the material is complicated, it’s necessary for the text to be “dry” (but it’s not “unengaging” if you’re interested in the subject). Because there’s so much theory to cover, it’s necessary for the other elements of the story to be streamlined and simplified, hence the flat characterization. Because the setup is so very contrived (civilization in orbit closely around a black hole; civilization discovers gravitation from first principles in a very short time), there needs to be a backstory explaining how it came to pass.

This is why Roberts’ remark that the “novel as a whole feels like a neat-oh short-story idea that has been stretched” is so wrong: Egan barely manages to compress his material into the novel as it is. (Compare with Gravitation by Misner, Thorne and Wheeler, which is 1,215 pages long!)

Roberts’ failure to appreciate what the novel is about leads him to flail about looking for details to criticize, and this results in a couple of embarrassing appeals to grammatical shibboleths:

It’s a shame that Egan seems innocent of the proper use of the subjunctive mood (“if this world was a bacterial graveyard ...” p. 102) or the inelegance of ending sentences with prepositions (“...the abundance that she was used to” p. 40)

Both of these constructions are perfectly fine in modern informal English. Indeed, even according to the traditional rules for “if” clauses, the subjunctive is supposed to be reserved for cases where the supposition is counterfactual (see The American Heritage Book of English Usage). Egan’s use is correct according to this rule, since the character is supposing the world in question to be a bacterial graveyard. Of course, in real English usage this rule is not observed, as the AHBEU goes on to point out. And see Mark Liberman on sentence-final prepositions.

However, most of Roberts’ other criticisms are in fact perfectly justified—Egan’s characters really are weak, the dialogue is very dry, there really is a lot of infodumping—but I think they show a lack of insight into what Egan is trying to do. These criticisms would be spot-on when analyzing a novel about character or human relationships but they completely miss the target here. Egan is not writing about character or human relationships, he’s writing about the laws of physics.

Of course Roberts cannot be made to enjoy fiction about the laws of physics: if he found the subject boring in fourth form he’s going to find it boring now. So why did he attempt a review of a book that he was so unsuited to appreciate? I guess that this is just the kind of mismatch that happens all the time in reviewing (sometimes the mismatch is deliberate, to stir up controversy, but I think most often it’s accidental, and that’s probably the case here).

In my own review of Incandescence (2008-08-25) I dismissed the whole question of character and plot in Egan’s work:

Egan has little interest in the idea that science fiction is about exploring human responses to changes in technology and society: his characters are often post-human or non-human, and rarely particularly engaging or sympathetic [...] After all, there are plenty of other authors writing about 20th-century people in space.

But now I wonder if there might be some way to bridge the gap? The visible construction lines in Incandescence suggest that such a book is presently beyond the powers of the genre, but maybe now that Egan has blazed the trail other writers may be able to follow?

Greg Egan wrote his own response to Roberts’ review, “Anatomy of a hatchet job” (2009-03-09) which makes some similar points to mine, but is perhaps a bit unwise in the strength of its rhetoric. I doubt that Roberts set out deliberately to write a hatchet job; his review is probably a genuine attempt to engage with the novel that’s gone astray.

I think Egan can have faith in his core readership to understand what he’s trying to achieve, so he does not need worry too much about reviewers who don’t quite get it. Instead, he could use this kind of review as a clue as to how to broaden his appeal (if that is indeed something he is interested in). Maybe Roberts is out of reach, at least for the moment, but I’m sure that there’s a wider readership that could be turned on to his kind of fictional exploration of science, given an appropriate sweetening of character, language, and plot.

But I would miss the stark, spare, rigour of Incandescence.

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1. Introduction

I’ve been enjoying thinking about the programming questions on stackoverflow.com, but I mostly haven’t been writing answers. Partly it’s that if I’m going to invest some time and effort in writing up some commentary, I’d like it to appear under my name and on my site. But mostly it’s because my answer would usually be of the form, “well it all depends on what you’re trying to achieve and what your requirements are” and no-one wants to hear that kind of answer.

Anyway, this article is an answer to this question:

What is the best method to detect ball-to-ball collision? Do I just have an O(n²) loop that iterates over each ball and checks every other ball to see if it's radius overlaps?

Well, Simucal, it all depends on what you’re trying to achieve and what your requirements are. What kind of trade-off do you want to make between physical accuracy and speed of computation? The more accurate you want to make the physics simulation, the longer it will take to compute the collisions (and the more work it will take to program) and so the fewer objects you can simulate before running into framerate slowdown.

I’ll start out with a simple but inaccurate approach in section 2, mention briefly how to make it run fast in section 3, describe how to get more accuracy using Minokwski sums in section 4, and put the whole thing together in section 5.

I’ll write positions, motions, and velocities as vectors, so everything I write here applied to the 3-dimensional case as well as the 2-dimensional case. In three dimensions the problem is one of finding collisions between spheres rather than circles, but the maths is identical.

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A salt barn in Roanoke, Virginia.

I’ve seen a lot of complaints this week about local and national government’s lack of preparedness for snow in southern England. These complaints are right: our public infrastructure is woefully unprepared for this kind of severe weather.

However, I’d like to see a bit more analysis of the cost of being prepared. To be as well prepared as Winnepeg or Moscow, or even as Edinburgh, we’d need to invest in these kind of things:

• better heated points on rail tracks;
• ice-resistant road surfacing;
• larger salt stockpiles;
• more salt barns to keep the stockpiles in;
• more snow ploughs;
• a part-time snow plough organization;
• remote snow-sensing equipment on roads and bridges.

All of which would have an ongoing maintenance cost even in years when there was no snow. I don’t have a personal opinion to whether the trade-off would be worth it. I didn’t suffer any inconvenience from the weather myself, but I know that lots of people did, and I don’t want to take the attitude of I’m-all-right-Jack: I’m happy for my taxes to go to pay for improved infrastructure for other people. But I do think it would be nice to see some estimates of the actual costs.

However, the main point I want to make, is that the government’s lack of preparedness is only reflecting a wider lack of preparedness among the general population (a lack of preparedness which I share).

• Hardly anyone has snow tyres on their car or bicycle. (I’ve been cycling on snow with my ordinary slick tyres, which is possible with care but risky.)
• Few people have moved their cars to off-street parking, to allow snow ploughs to get down the street, and to reduce the risk of drivers skidding and hitting them.
• Few people (at least on my street) have cleared the snow from the pavement in front of their house. (In many snowy parts of the world, this is a public duty, with fines for non-performance.)
• Hardly anyone has a snow shovel in their garage. (I had to clear the snow using a spade, which is much more laborious.)
• Many people are trying to walk on snow and ice in unsuitable shoes.

So if we are going to be prepared in future, it’s not just a matter we can leave to government, we all have things to do.

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If, like me, you often write documents directly in HTML or XHTML, then you probably find that it’s hard to write correct markup. There are lots of mistakes that are easy to make and hard to notice, such as failing to write the close tag for an element, omitting compulsory attributes like the alt attribute on img elements or forgetting to encode ampersands in a URL.

Of course, you are not obliged to care about the correctness of your markup. If you only mean the result to be readable by humans then it probably doesn’t matter if there are a few errors. Web browsers are very good at handling tag soup and displaying a plausible result. But if you want to do automated processing on your documents, or care about other people’s ability to do automated processing on your documents (for example, people using screen readers) it helps if they are valid. Or you might just care about the quality of your work.

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