Donald Noble’s Site

Not music—but geology.

I’ve been watching BBC Scotland’s recent series Men of Rock on iPlayer. Presented by Iain Stewart, it covers the history of geology, and how we have come to learn about the past, through the landscape of Scotland.

Overall an excellent series, with a lot of really interesting facts, even for someone who knows a bit about geology. There is also some fantastic aerial footage of Scottish hills and glens, although someone in the production team obviously though that people’s attentions spans were too short just to show straight footage, so after 10-15 seconds, the footages annoyingly speeds up for a couple of seconds.

The show has quite a strong Scottish slant: it is about the Scottish landscape, presented by a Scot, and talks about many people who lived and worked in Scotland. I know much of modern geology has it’s roots in Scotland, but I’m sure there were many other important discoveries elsewhere that are glossed over in the programme. That said, it was produced by BBC Scotland.

The first programme deals with the age of the Earth, and how James Hutton came to realise the Earth was much older than was believed at the time. Iain visits the northwest coast, where one finds Lewisian Gneiss, and explains the mind-blowing fact that these visible rocks in Scotland are 2.7–3 billion years old. Which is about 2/3 the age of Planet Earth, a fact that I already knew. What I hadn’t really thought about, and wasn’t covered in the programme, is that this is a fifth of the age of the Universe!

Volcanism and continental drift were covered in the second part of the series. It explains how, through the study of fossilised trilobites, we know that Scotland was once part of what is now North America, and during the Caledonian orogeny it crashed into England. So Scotland really is a different country!

The third and final episode deals with glaciers and ice ages, and how we now know there have been 10 major glacial periods over the past million years, which is quite an amazing fact. Although I find it even more amazing that we can know this. Iain explains how James Croll, a janitor at Anderson College, developed his theory of ice ages based on the eccentric orbit of the Earth around the Sun, which was further developed by a Serbian who’s name they bear—the Milankovitch cycles. I had heard of the janitor Croll, but hadn’t realised that it was he who had come up with the basis of the Milankovitch cycles.

The series ends with projections of the next ice age, in about 40–50,000 years from now. But there is absolutely no mention of any human influence in future climate, and what this might do. Perhaps that was seen as too controversial, but I sincerely hope not. I suspect that it was just seen as too complicated, and would leave an unrelated unanswered question at the end of the series. But that is what life, and science in particular, is about—unanswered questions.

Just to clarify things, this is a book about exposing bad science, not that Dr Goldacre is a bad scientist. And as there is only one of him, it would be difficult to construct a suitable double-blind placebo-controlled randomised trial to find out whether he is… anyway, I digress. I’ve just finished reading the aforementioned book, and can highly recommend it.

The book can probably be summarised with one quotation:

The most important take home message with diet and health is that anyone who ever expresses anything with certainty is basically wrong, because the evidence for cause and effect in this area is almost always weak and circumstantial

I would argue that this can be generalised further. Anyone who expresses anything with certainty is wrong, because the truth is almost always more complicated, far from certain, and subject to a multitude of caveats.

This book leads you through the process of science, with some amusing, and many scary anecdotes. Scary, in that it is difficult to comprehend that people think and act in the ways described.

As with a lot of popular science books, personally, I would have liked Ben to have gone a little deeper into the maths and statistics¹. And judging by the tone of the book, so might he. However, I appreciate that his publishers probably disagree — thinking that mathematical formulae scare people. Maybe they do — but I want to argue for them.

The concluding chapters go into the detail of the MRSA scare and the MMR hoax, and the misleading, biased, and in cases false media coverage thereof. What is written in newspapers is not necessarily the truth, and certainly not if it is in the “comment” section. Reading this book will also make me question the “experts” quoted in the media, especially where there are no references, evidence, or links to back up their opinion. One must remember, that it is only their opinion, unless they can back up their claims with evidence.

If this doesn’t convince you that you need to read this book, there is a chapter avaiable to read — for free — on Ben’s badscience.net website which gives a flavour, although perhaps not the best introduction, to the book.

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¹ Specifically, I think that some further discussion of statistical significance would have been interesting. Especially from someone like Ben who has a good working knowledge of the topic, but isn’t a pure statistician.

For a slightly different take on the year past, I have been looking back over all the data visualisation links I have posted on twitter — there has been quite a number of really interesting ways to try and show off the big (and not so big) numbers making the headlines.

Perhaps not the most visually appealing implementation, but placing an area in the news over somewhere familiar really helps to give a sense of scale — sometimes smaller, more usually bigger, than I’d expected. It would have been good to see the BBC’s ‘Dimensions’ website at the time of the BP Deepwater Horizon spill, rather than after the fact; but it is still interesting nevertheless.

The updated graph of CO₂ emissions from Eyjafjallajoekull versus the aviation industry doesn’t look anywhere near as impressive as the original — due to the initial estimate being low by a factor of 20 — but it is still interesting that the emissions saved due to the grounded flights were probably greater than those from the volcano.

Not a visualisation, but a post on cartographic clarity, however I found it interesting. Why Google maps are more ‘readable’ than competitors. Less is more when it comes to mapmaking. I had never consciously thought about it, but that post makes a lot of sense to me.

Facebook privacy was in the (tech) news pretty much every other week this year, and there are a couple of interesting ways to look at the complexities of their options: The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook (via flowingdata.com) and the New York Times graph of the Bewildering Tangle of Options for Facebook Privacy

Perhaps the most aesthetically pleasing data visualisations I’ve seen this year are from
Eric Fischer, with his set of maps for geotagged photos uploaded by Locals and Tourists to several major cities worldwide.

Perhaps during 2011 I will try to produce some visualisations of my own…

I had been wondering (as one does at this time of year!), how many presents in total are in the song “12 days of Christmas”.

At first glance, it would appear to be 1+2+3+…+11+12 = 78; but that does not account for all the repeated additional gifts on subsequent days.

So in actual fact, it is 1 + (2+1) + (3+2+1) + … + (12+11+10+…2+1), which can be rearranged as 12×1 + 11×2 + 10×3 + 9×4 + 8×5 + 7×6 + 6×7 + 5×8 + 4×9 + 3×10 + 2×11 + 1×12. Noting the symmetry of 12×1 + 1×12 etc. this can be further simplified to 2x(12+22+30+36+40+42) = 364. One for every day of the year except Christmas, as the eminent mathematician, Marcus du Sautoy noted in his slightly different method of summing the presents.

Of course, on a much lighter note, there is always Frank Kelly’s Christmas Countdown — what it might be like to receive the aforementioned gifts!

Now that I have a half hour commute to and from work, I am spending more time listening to podcasts. Usually music on the morning on my way to work, and either music, comedy, or popular science on my return (when I am somewhat more awake).

In addition to the Electronic Explorations podcast I mentioned previously, I have also started listening to the Bleep.com podcast and the Mogwai Rock Action podcast — both of these shows cover a wide range of musical genres, with some very interesting new music.

My walk home is usually accompanied by the sounds of BBC Radio 4:

• Friday Night Comedy shows
• More or Less — current affairs through statistics and maths (more interesting than that sounds, honestly)
• The Infinite Monkey Cage — science & comedy mixed together

Or the random ramblings of John Gruber and Dan Benjamin on The Talk Show