Wet wet wet

A practical post today. Yesterday, my Daewoo DH-6100P HDD/DVD recorder would not eject a disc. It would try to play the thing but get caught up in a weird loop of cogitation. I tried restarting the machine but that only meant it came on again thinking, "Ooh, a disc" and hit the loop before getting to the stage where it would let me eject. What a clever bit of design.

Googling, Jimlad on AvForums had had the same problem, and I dared to follow his method of taking the bastard thing apart. A little to my amazement, that proved easy enough and the thing is now working. The Dr got to watch the end of Season One of Poldark and of Being Human before the latter's 2.1. Hooray!

I am always in frustrated awe of those who can actually make and fix things. And it's even more enraging when people who can do things don't.

Some 18 months ago, I spent about more than a month and a lot of money getting my bathroom fixed so it wouldn't leak on the people downstairs. It didn't work, and last September we were dribbling again. The Man - my sister's handy significant other - poked about a bit, muttered about cowboys and made a temporary fix.

Today he was back again to do things more finally. We thought we'd remove a couple of rows of tiles, let the dampness dry out over the next few days (we'll be using washing facilities at the gym and a mate's house), then reseal it all double-strength.

Only it never proves that simple. Anything we probe in this house reveals amazing corners cut - as we discovered weeks into living here with our boiler. The tiles round the shower turn out to have been fixed to a painted wall. The paint appears glossy and plastic, so water will run off it, but that also means its like the tiles have been fixed to glass. You put your finger under one tile, and the whole wall comes away.


Water has wormed its way through to this slick patch, and leaked right through the plasterboard into the wall behind. This means an interior wall with damp, which is something of a bad thing. We'll set heaters on the wet bits and try and get it sorted. We'll also need more tiles.


And, just to add to the joys, on the adjacent wall, the bottom tiles came off to reveal a dark hole. The shower mechanism and pipes turns out to be hidden behind a false wall that loses us maybe four or five inches of bathroom - enough extra space to allow us to fit a bath, though we can't afford anything nearly so fancy. It's all tided up now - the Man is very good - but I find even sat here in the next room tapping away that the darkness is looming.

Geek heaven

So, that holiday in Florida then, in which I learned many top facts about the history of the NASA space programme. You have been warned.

First, I demonstrated my own unsuitability as a spaceman by missing my flight. I read 13.00 as 3 pm, and arrived at Gatwick at ten-to-twelve thinking I was heroically early. Saw my error the moment I looked at the departures board, and hot-footed it over to the Virgin Atlantic desk, who thought I’d still have time to make my flight. They then vanished for 15 minutes, trying to work out if I could be fast-tracked through security. Answer came there none.

The airport was extremely busy, it being half term. And the longer I waited the more obvious it was I wouldn’t be jetting off that afternoon. Got put on the same flight the next day at no extra charge, which seemed a pretty good compromise. Schlepped my luggage back home.

The flight the next day was packed, mostly with families spending half-term at Disney. They ran about and squealed. I read a couple of hundred pages of Anathem (still not finished it yet; it’s huge!) and watched Star Trek, the first ten minutes of Ice Age 3 – a world of unfunny whenever the characters spoke – and something else so dull I can't even remember. Didn’t sleep; I never do on planes, and my knees were pressed against the seat in front so I could never get comfy.

Arrived in Orlando eight hours later feeling itchy and stinky, and then spent an hour getting through customs. A nice man wanted to go through all my luggage, and was suspicious of the various Dr Who books I’d brought for the convention’s charity auction. But then he looked up the details of Hurricane Who on his computer, lit up that it was something to do with Torchwood, and let me go.

J and J were waiting to collect me, and with this delay were a little concerned that I might have got it wrong again. We drove to the hotel in Celebration, and after a shower and a change of clothes, I emerged in time for dinner at a place down the road. American food is often big and meaty, which can leave you feeling a bit like a blocked sink. But we found a splendid Japanese place where a man cooked noodles and juggled knives on the table in front of us, and I stocked up on lots of veg. A world of tired after the journey, I think I spent most of the meal just grinning.

On the Wednesday, a party of us made our way to Universal Studios, where we did the usual rides. Think the 3D simulator Simpsons was probably best. There was bar and meal in the evening, with more chums arriving ever moment.

On Thursday, K magnificently drove me out to Kennedy Space Center, while our chums gambolled off to Disney. We stopped off for provisions on the way; the only British papers available were the Sun, Express and Mail.

After an hour’s drive, we reached the edge of the vast swamp that is the Space Center, and I went into geek overdrive. There was an IMAX show and things to gawp at first, and I poddled about in a state of bliss.

The IMAX show included footage of a fake Moon landing, NASA happy to laugh at the conspiracy theory. There was also a tribute to those who’d died pioneering space travel which included the names of cosmonauts, given equal billing with the Apollo 1 astronauts and Challenger and Colombia. It wasn’t quite the Corporate NASA I’d been expecting – less flag-waving and triumphalist than a lot of coverage of this stuff.

We then clambered aboard our bus for the Then and Now tour through the beach-side missile launch sites that first put Americans into space – basically, those bits covered by The Right Stuff. We drove past the warehouses and hangers where things really happened, and where the film was really filmed.

Many on the tour had been in the area the previous day to see the launch of the Ares 1-x rocket – which I’d missed, dammit. There was much talk of the launch being like the good old days before the Space Shuttle (which Ares is replacing), when rockets rattled windows 20 miles away. I had to be content with spying the Shuttle Atlantis out on the pad, six miles away on the horizon. Cor.

We stopped off at the site of some of the early Mercury launches, and got to poke round inside the squat little buildings no more than 500 feet from the launch pad. Nowadays, the boffins sit three miles from a launch, but in the days of DC current, they couldn’t be further away. Even today, a rocket launch will rattle your windows 25-30 miles away, so this small, cramped bunker crammed with chain-smoking boffins would have been very noisy.

The squat little buildings have huge, heavy blast doors and 15 layers of laminate glass so thick the view outside is greenish. The wall-to-wall computers are bulky to cope with the rattling of a launch. They managed just 528 bytes, and I liked the built-in ashtrays. When there were software problems, they'd use a manual typewriter to rewrite the code and feed it in on spool tape.

Our guide was nicely open about the origins of American rocketry, showing us a rare example of a V2 engine while explaining what rockets like that had done to south London. He himself raised the dubious morality in pardoning the former Nazi Werhner von Braun; again, this wasn’t the kind of corporate history I’d quite expected. NASA seemed keen to challenge their own history, to ask the difficult questions.

In fact, it didn’t feel very on-message for what’s clearly a highly secure military base. Our map of the launch sites shows its original purpose as a missile base, and the garden – or graveyard – of old rockets was curtly unapologetic about the ballistic and nuclear capability.

The missile base on Florida's Cape Canaveral was chosen for three reasons: the generally good weather; on a “bad day” the launches would fall into the ocean not into populated areas; and it's relatively close to the equator, which means less effort to get into space because of the speed of the Earth's rotation.

As we stepped out on to the tarmac of Pad 34 the weather hit 94 degrees. The heat pressed against me as I walked round the tall concrete structure remaining, and the plaque to the Apollo 1 fire. We were warned not to step off the tarmac because of the alligators in the undergrowth. In fact, when the space shuttles come into land, it’s someone’s job to clear off the alligators sunbathing on the runway. All we saw today was a giant tortoise.

The tour finished with a visit to a Saturn V rocket – the ones that launched the Apollo missions – and some other cool stuff. We gaped at the vastness of this great firework and took pictures, then had to get back to the car and our evening’s commitments.

First there was the Cricketer’s Arms, where there was London Pride on tap. Drank myself into a happy corner, and woke up Friday not at all well. Still, manfully, made my first panel – where adrenalin and Alka Seltzer saw off the hangover.

The convention was good fun, and I didn’t do too badly at Just A Minute – though New Fans are so new they didn’t get a reference to the Curse of Fenric which deserved a massive laugh. Our efforts were apparently recorded for a podcast, God help you.

Saturday morning, we had a talk from Russell Romanella, Director of the International Space Station and Spacecraft Processing at Kennedy Space Center, which was a further world of geek joy. When Kennedy made his famous speech about getting to the Moon within the decade on 25 May 1961, the US only had 15 minutes experience in space – Alan Shepherd having become the first American in space just three weeks before. It’s a balls out moment for Kennedy; either we divert everything into doing this thing, or we don’t bother at all.

The talk was also up to date, with discussion of the Ares launch from just that week, and what the Augustine report to President Obama might mean for NASA’s current targets.

There were more panels and signings and being talked to, and I got to see Toby Hadoke's Moths Ate My Doctor Who Scarf for the sixth time.

Between my commitments, there were goth ducks and geckos to gawp at, and a pool to escape into. As always, talked rubbish, made new friends and molested the old ones.

After one last morning in the pool, I headed for the airport on Monday afternoon. Bloke next to me on the plane thought Moon was “rubbish”, but seemed quite taken by General Infantryman Joe. (Isn't that a dull name for a hero?)

Back to freezing cold London on Tuesday morning. There’s little more dispiriting than changing trains at East Croydon, especially when the train is cancelled and you have to wait an hour. So I fell into a taxi and home.

Slowly recovered from jetlag and the inevitable con lurgie. On Thursday went to posh singing in St Mary’s Undercroft, the chapel down below Westminster Hall in the Palace of Westminster. The Pugintastic furnishing and some of the tunes seemed a little arch-Catholic: an odd way to celebrate Guy Fawkes’ night. But the detailed programme included top facts.

On Saturday, there were more fireworks, this time in view of Alexandra Palace (from the Dr Who episode The Idiot’s Lantern, no less). We risked clambering out on to a chum’s roof to see the display, then clambered back in to drink too much and watch X-Factor.

Now steeped in work again: pitching for things, organising things, getting on with the writing. And hoping Virgin will fix my telly input in time for Doctor Who on Sunday. Will blog about Dirk Bogarde next.

So close you must be there

Busy writing up my talk for tomorrow evening in Greenwich on the use and abuse of science in Doctor Who.

Meanwhile, m'colleague Mark Morris has also announced the line-up for Cinema Futura, a book in which distinguished celebs - and me - gush about their favourite sci-fi movies.

I'm doing Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965), in which Peter Cushing, Roy Castle, Jennie Linden and Roberta Tovey travel by TARDIS to the petrified jungles of Skaro, where they meet... Well, I don't want to spoil it.

I love the Dalek movies, and previously wrote about them at length for Doctor Who Magazine. Those articles were, you'll be thrilled to hear, my first ever freelance gigs.

Mark's also ensnared me into the Morley Literature Festival next month; we'll be appearing with Robert Shearman and Mark Michalowski at Morley Library from 6 p.m. on Wednesday, 14 October, to discuss our Doctor Who writing and stuff.

(I'll also be in Manchester on Sunday, 11 October with a whole bunch more Doctor Who writers.)

“Have a go to see what happens”

Blood and Guts – A History of Surgery is a fascinating, gruesome, layman-friendly book, packed with anecdotes and horror stories. Author Richard Hollingham, following Michael Mosley's TV series, takes us from Galen's treatment of gladiators in the Second Century AD, through Vesalius and Paré in the Sixteenth Century to 2006, where Stuart Carter was freed from paralysis by Parkinson's disease through the use of electrical brain implants.

Hollingham argues there were four obstacles to successful surgery: surgeons needed to understand the workings of the body (usually through dissection of dead bodies); they had to learn from the experience methodically; they had to bypass the pain of an operation (by inventing anaesthetic); and they had to prevent infection.

So we follow the haltering steps towards achieving these goals, such as the discovery of chloroform and carbolic soap. We also see some of the cul-de-sacs we've since backed out of – usually the result of surgeons insisting they know best rather than looking at the evidence.

Hollingham is also hot on the statistics – no two patients are the same, so operations are judged not on a single win or lose, but the percentage of success when trying the same procedures time and again. Before the discovering of carbolic soap, infection was fought by operating quickly; Liston could remove a leg in 30 seconds.

“The morality rate from Robert Liston's operations was remarkably good. Between 1835 and 1840 he conducted sixty-six amputations. Ten of his patients died – a death rate of around one in six. About a mile away at St Bartholomew's Hoispitals, surgeons were sending one ion four patients tot he mortuary, or 'dead house', where the all too frequent post-mortems took place.”

Richard Hollingham, Blood and Guts, p. 38.

Yet Hollingham is also quick to show that the medical heroes are also all-too human.

“Jealous rivals would whisper that Liston was so quick that he once accidentally amputated the penis of an amputee ... The most worrying incident for his students occurred during an amputation when Liston accidentally amputated an assistant's fingers. The outcome of this operation was horrific: the patient died of infection, as did the assistant, and an observer died of shock. It was the only operation in surgical history with a 300 per cent mortality rate.”

Ibid., pp. 41-2.

All to often the effort is, “Well, we don't know, but we'll try this...”, and slowly, over the centuries, that philosophy has benefited us all.

The two world wars meant the raw material with which to make extraordinary advance in grafts and the treatment of burns. There are harrowing stories of the multitude of operations suffered by men without faces – and there are also harrowing photos. This is really not a book for the squeamish. But I'm less squeamish of blood and guts per se as unnecessary pain and procedures...

There's some terrifying stuff about lobotomies. The 1941 operation on Rosemary Kennedy (sister of future President John F.) left her,

“a very different person. Slow and emotionless, she was hardly able to move or speak. Although she eventually learnt to walk again, she was left permanently disabled and ended up in a residential institution in Wisconsin ... Freeman never said a word about the case. It was in his best interests not to publish the details of any high-profile failures.”

Ibid., pp. 279-80.

Walter Freeman refined and developed the lobotomy, after it had first been performed in 1935 by Portuguese surgeon Egas Moniz. By 1946 Freeman was now offering a new refinement, the “transorbital” lobotomy. The “transorbital” bit is where they shoved an ice-pick up through your eye socket to detach bits of your brain. It was a shockingly quick procedure, and doctors were quick to recommend it, too.

“Freeman ... personally performed about three and a half thousand lobotomies, and trained doctors across the world. In total, it is thought that around one hundred thousand people were lobotomized.”

Ibid., p. 283.

The case of Howard Dully, an eleven-year-old boy who wasn't getting on with his step-mum, is like something out of a fairy tale. Her evidence for why the wayward child should receive the treatment included that “he daydreamed and scowled if the TV was tuned to some programme other than the one he liked,” (p. 285). Using “orbitoclasts” - a step up from ice picks – Freeman operated on the boy on 16 December 1960.

“Howard has spent most of his life coming to terms with what happened to him. He suffered problems with work, relationships and money. He drifted in and out of jobs and in and out of jail. Gradually, he was able to piece his life back together. Today he holds down a job as a bus driver. There is absolutely nothing about him to suggest that he has two black holes in his brain. What saved him from going completely off the rails was probably his youth. Howard's young brain was able to rebuild neural pathways and compensate for the damage Freeman inflicted.”

p. 287.

Yet Freeman is not portrayed as monster, for all he “operated on a total on nineteen children, including a four-year-old,” and he ignored criticism and the new drugs that “did much the same thing only without the danger or permanence of surgery,” (p. 287). Hollingham lays as much blame on the authorities who let Freeman continue working “when the procedure was discredited and opposed by almost the entire medical establishment,” (p. 288).

“But it is difficult to reconcile the image of a monster with the kind and gentle doctor his patients encountered. When the lobotomy was conceived it seemed to provide the only treatment for chronic mental illness. It certainly transformed some people's lives for the better.”

p. 288.

In fact, Freeman spent the last five years of his live travelling “some fifty thousand miles” tracking down former patients to see how they had fared.

“To the end of his life he believed in what he had done, and he believed he was right.”

p. 289.

Hollingham says “Freeman's greatest failure of judgement was not knowing when to stop,” (p. 288), but that sits uncomfortably with what follows. In the 1950s, the US intelligence agency were “toying” with “brainwashing individuals, invariably communists”. In 1967, psychiatrist Frank Ervin and neurosurgeon Vernon Mark's proposal in “the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association” to prevent urban riots by subduing black rioters with brain implants (one of Ervin's medical students, Michael Chricton, later wrote The Terminal Man). In 1972, psychiatrist Robert Heath proposed using “brain implants to 'cure' homosexuality,” (all p. 293).

And yet Hollingham doesn't talk about one of the biggest areas of surgery today – and one of the most morally problematic. Cosmetic surgery is booming, yet its only mention in the book is the cautionary tale of Gladys Deacon, a beautiful lady in 1903 who wanted a more beautiful nose. The hot paraffin wax surgeons injected her face turned her into a “freakish waxworks dummy” (p. 222).

Nor is there much on the philosophy of surgery – the Hippocratic oath, the impact of the National Health Service on surgeons (who insisted, when it began, that they kept their private work) and the role of the private sector today. Perhaps the NHS bits would be too parochial for a book that tries to cover the global history of surgery (and its covered anyway in NHS plc), but who pays for surgery – and for surgeon's mistakes – would have lifted this fascinating pop-history into something more profound.

(No, I've not yet read Bad Science.)

Some links

Hooray for the Internet and its fascinating contents. The paperback edition of Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science includes an extraordinary new chapter on “vitamin pill salesman Matthias Rath”, also posted on the Internet for free:

Sadly I was unable to write about him at the time that book was initially published, as he was suing my ass in the High Court … It is a very serious story about the dangers of pseudoscience, as I hope you’ll see, and it was also a pretty unpleasant episode, not just for me, but also for the many other people he’s tried to sue, including Medecins Sans Frontieres and more. If you’re ever looking for a warning sign that you’re on the wrong side of an argument, suing Medecins Sans Frontieres is probably a pretty good clue."

Ben Goldacre, “The doctor will sue you now”, or “Matthias Rath – steal this chaper”, BadScience.net, 9 April 2009.

I’ve not got or read the book yet but have heard many Good Things and have followed Ben’s column in the Guardian for eons. Hope to get it for my birthday, when I’ve got through my Christmas books. Ben was also on Newswipe last night discussing press coverage of MMR.

Must admit I’d thought that old news; but it’s why we need to continue to be vigilant. And Graham Linehan has posted on the jaw-dropping behaviour from The Daily Mail in having it both ways on the HPV vaccine.

Graham has also posted the most wonderful link to a transcript of a story conference between Lucas, Spielberg and Kasdan in the early, murky days of Raiders of the Last Ark. Just WOW.

On page 97 we learn that “slimy pirates” Kinglsey Shacklebolt and Presuming Ed were going to be Lithuanian. Which is my tortuous link to this:

“Who imagined that in 2009, the world's governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy - backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China - is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labeling as "one of the great menace of our times" have an extraordinary story to tell -- and some justice on their side.”

Johann Hari, “You are being lied to about pirates”, The Huffington Post 12 April 2009.

And on a much more silly level, Alex alerted me to the existence of this rude Doctor Who Easter egg. And I, of course, responded with this.

The stone age (i.e. 10 years ago)

Ooh, I’ve known Nimbos for 10 years. There should be a celebration. But he’ll have to settle for a blog post instead.

Nimbos and I both worked together at a mail order wine company, though in different parts of the building. A customer asked me when he could expect some wine he’d bought in advance of its bottling, and I was directed to Nimbos as the Man Who’d Know.

While Nimbos buzzed through the green-screen database for the answers, I noticed the keys on his desk. And the distinctive, anchor-shaped key ring.

“I know that object,” I said. And he knew I was quoting from Earthshock.

(At an academic thing last month, the Dr outed another fan by spotting the same TARDIS key on his watch-chain. He took great delight in showing it was attached to a Doctor Who fob watch.)

I invited Nimbos to the pub where Doctor Who fans still meet on the first Thursday of each month (I think; I haven’t been in ages). And he invited me to another colleague’s house to watch the first 30-second trailer for The Phantom Menace, which said colleague had spent all night downloading.

Hang on a sec… “Green-screen database”? All night downloading a 30-second trailer?

Such geekery reminds me how much things have changed, and how little the young folk will believe us. In early 1999, the mail order wine company was just daring to consider having its own website – fearing damage to the exemplary reputation it had built up over the phone.

Around the same time came the promise of new Doctor Who on cassette – Big Finish would produce as much as one whole new story every couple of months. How would we ever keep up? CD versions were only available by special mail order. If I remember the press coverage correctly, producer Gary Russell (who I’d met very briefly the previous year) didn’t think audio-drama on CD would catch on, because tape let you stop and start easily.

Doctor Who Magazine #280 (cover dated 28 July 1999), ran a short article on the small number of Doctor Who sites on the internet. And new Doctor Who on the telly seemed so unthinkable the front cover tells fans to watch Buffy of Babylon 5.

At the risk of getting all Yorkshire, things were even more primitive when the Doctor had last been on the telly. In 1996, I was one of only a handful to use the small room of computers in the Fylde building – and there were serious discussions about whether they should allow students to submit typed essays. As news broke of the Paul McGann TV Movie, my friend D. in Scotland worried I’d miss out, so printed and snail-mailed the latest Who gossip from Shannon Patrick Sullivan’s news page.

The Twits

My chum Peter Anghelides is newly blogging, and today has a post about Twitter. I don’t get Twitter. At least, I don’t get what it would do for me.

If I was Stephen Fry, for example, off chasing kakapos round the world and generally being exciting, I can see how a microblog mechanism would be a great way of keeping in with ordinary mortals. On Facebook I get how status updates let you keep in with your friends and relations without all the arduous bother of speaking to them.

And I get that Twitter and Yammer and all these clever things make it easy to address the world in snippets. But the problem is the same one as with any media: what interesting thing will you say?

#Simon is wearing grey socks today
#Simon has drunk three cups of hot water this afternoon, in a Richer Sounds mug
#Simon hopes the moth-man got rid of the moths
#Simon will type this then catch the train home
#Simon is boring himself

At least with blogging you can try to explain and connect and illuminate. (No really, that’s what I think this blog is for, even if I’m only explaining, connecting and illuminating the bleeding obvious to myself.)

But then I’ve also struggled for the last month to come up with that list of 25 interesting things about me which even the Dr has filled out on Facebook. I’m stuck on about 11. It’s probably why I make stuff up for a living.

Wondrous persons like Stephen Fry – and Peter – evangelise twitter. So I watch on baffled but willing to be persuaded. Can someone please explain?

(I like how Peter’s blog lists his written achievements. I should sort something like that for here and do away with that whacking long list in my right-hand navigation.)

Technological marvels

Here are some things I've been sent in the last few days.

The Dr sends this Gigapan of Obama inaugaration, where you can zoom almost right up his nostrils.

Peter sends this video of people falling off mountains without parachutes which laughs in the face of The Spy Who Loved Me, but I suspect might be in a future Bond film.

Jonny has been blogging every day of this year, but reminds me it's no longer secret.

And, as if science cannot create anything more wondrous, there's a Lego Admiral Ackbar and a Boba Fett hoodie! (I saw the latter for real last weekend, as modelled by my new pal Ha-vee-air Gree-joe Marks-watch.)

First past the post

Home from sunny Spain to grey and cold London, though we're told we should be thankful that it is not raining. Shall endeavour to write up where and which we got up to, but am a little pressed for time...

Plenty of post awaited us, including additional presents for the Dr's birthday. The cat seems to have found her a Sony PRS-505 e-book reader which is loading up plenty of dead people now.

I've got my copies of Doctor Who & How the Doctor Changed My Life, plus a glut of emails from the authors who are all justifiably packed with squee. You can also see the latest Benny play there, too. Hoorah!

Scott forwarded me this interesting article on "real" writing as opposed to that wretched, TV tie-in stuff. And a few people have sent sample chapters and scripts and stuff they want me looking over. But the sizeable amount of work I got done in Spain needs writing up more pressingly...

Got lots to do tomorrow then to Cardiff on Friday for the weekend. Will endeavour, where time allows, to wave a tentacle from here.

Service provider

"We notice things that don't work. We don't notice things that do. We notice computers, we don't notice pennies. We notice e-book readers, we don't notice books."

Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt, p. 110.

This morning, the computer didn't want to work. Which was a bit of a bother because I'd quite a lot of work to finish off and not a whole lot of time in which to do it. I unplugged things and plugged them back in again. I tried to fiddle with settings. Over the course of an hour and a half I turned the thing off and on and off again.

After some cathartic swearing I decided to have breakfast. Episode 3 of The War Machines might also calm me down. I turned on the telly. The sound came out okay but the picture remained frozen. I tried changing the channel. A pop-up box informed me that the channel wasn't available. It did the same whatever channel I chose.

"A-hah!" I thought, using my brain. "This will be a problem of the Virgin Media telly/broadband/telephone wossname. I shall give them a ring."

Only, of course the phone wasn't working.

At half eleven I got through on my mobile to a helpful chap called Gerald. He asked the usual questions - had I turned the thing off and on again, had I unplugged a few bits. I readied myself for the inevitable minutiae of tests and efforts, ratcheting up the cost of the call. But instead he said, "Sounds like I better send one of our technicians round."

"Hooray," I thought - though you can't tell from reading this off the screen that I did so with heavy sarcasm. What was the betting that it'd take a week or six, or that the one day the technician could turn up is when I'm in Spain. (I'm going to Spain at the end of next week, by the way.)

But no. The bloke was round within 20 minutes. And he'd already stopped off on the way at the thingie in the street where all our wires meet up. He lugged round the back of the telly to check it was rebooting properly, then had some fun with the computer.

Yes, there'd been a problem, he explained as he mucked about with wires. Not as bad as the citizens of BR6 who were all without broadband. Or a housing estate he'd been at that morning whose cables had all been cut. But a problem of the set up not coping with all the electric goodness I send back and forth. I wasn't plugged into the right bit, so he moved me up a notch. Or something.

The computer should have been fine from then on, but the ZyXel wireless gadget didn't want to play ball. We had a fun time unplugging different things in turn, then restarting the computer. And by about 1 pm it just decided to work.

"Blimey," I thought. "How efficient and friendly." I rang up expecting the usual Turing test where someone tries their best just to get rid of you. When really what I wanted was a Man to turn up and make everything okay. And Virgin Media did exactly that.

"Hooray," I thought. "Now I can get down to some graft." And the doorbell rang. Codename Moose wanted to borrow some books...

Anyway. The Virgin man made me so happy I knocked through my chores quite easily. I now have a bit more than an 80,000-word draft of something that's not yet been announced. A bit of tinkering over the weekend and then I can be delivered.

Bit apprehensive of turning the machine off and running out to play in the night. What if the system falls over again? Will the Man pop round as quick on a Saturday? And since this sort of service is - in my experience - little short of miraculous, should I ask him to bring a DVD of the Massacre with him?

Atlatl and Jodrell Bank

The Dr came home from work last night with a fun top fact. Woomera - the Australian home to the British rocketships during the 1950s and 60s, and famous for looking right through the Vogan demolition fleet in the first episode of Hitchhiker - is named after device the Eora people there used for lobbing things.

How marvellous. It's like called Cape Canaveral "Trebuchet" or "Firework".

Housekeeping

A couple of additions to the lay out of this 'ere blog. There's now a great long list on the right of other blogists what I read. At least, the ones I can remember I read. Shout if I've forgotten you.

And also, there is now a Nothing Tra La La? blog page on Facebook. Sign up and join merriment.

XO2

I'm not usually hot and sweaty for technological nubbins, but phwoar! check out the news about the X02.

I've been following the One Laptop Per Child project for ever and am a bit surprised I've not blogged about it before. The prototype model of the chunky green thing even came with a yellow crank handle. How can that not be cool?

The BBC news story is especially exciting because the laptops are going to be released to us greedy Westerners:

Prof Negroponte announced the resumption of the Get-One-Give-One programme to allow people in wealthy nations to buy two XO laptops and donate one to a child in a developing country.

The programme will be open to people in North America and Europe and start in August or September.

So he was Captain Birdseye all the time!

Sir Arthur C Clarke, who died yesterday, is probably best remembered for getting his physics right. This is the bloke who, for a bit of a lark, worked out the height at which something in orbit above the Earth would match the planet’s speed of rotation. He did this long before there were such things as satellites, where being in what’s essentially a fixed position over the Earth is quite useful. And, rather sweetly, he worked it out as a fun mental exercise in a sci-fi magazine.

His Space Odyssey stories (2001; 2010; 2061; 3001) are also grounded in the latest discoveries from NASA’s missions into the void, accurately spelling out the time spent travelling between planets and describing the correct mineral constitution of moons. Many of the obituaries have stressed the link between his stories and his contributions to proper, real science.

Thing is, I’ve always preferred science-fiction to be more about the fiction. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that the science isn’t important (or just that I’m not very good at it). But sci-fi is period drama, only not set in the past. The props and costumes conjure an atmosphere and lend flavour to the story but it’s the story that’s got to be the focus.

Think about the period drama on telly. It doesn’t wholly matter if your stiff-collared actors don’t shout into their candlestick telephones, or if a set designer’s decided that those phones look nicer without thick cabling like an elephant’s trunk. You don’t actively try to get it wrong and you should do your research. But period drama can easily get bogged down in the tedious detail of etiquette and sci-fi is at its most ponderous when dumping information about how its world works. Much better to get back to the gun-shoots and explosions.

Sir Arthur’s stories are often actually very good at doing just that. Like the very best writers, you don’t always notice the research that’s gone in to the engaging story. His early novel, Childhood’s End, is better known amongst my peers by two of its best rip-offs – Quatermass and the Pit and Doctor Who and the Daemons. It takes the central conceit of Joseph Campbell’s rather sloppy The Hero With 1,000 Faces – that all mankind’s religions and cultures are off-shoots of the same basic stories – and adds a twist – because early man was mentored by an alien.

The book pre-empts a lot of sci-fi of the 60s and 70s (and songs by Pink Floyd and Bowie) with it’s dawning of a new age for the teenagers which the old folk cannot dig. But its real joy is what theorists of sci-fi have sometimes called the “conceptual breakthrough”. This is the jaw-dropping, gosh-wow bit in good sci-fi where the author has spun the whole story on a massive change in your perspective. Oh blimey, you realise, our 10,000 year-old ideologies are all based on a spaceman with horns.

It leaves the reader open-mouthed like the dupe at the end of an episode of TV’s Mission: Impossible, all the sound effects and scenery revealed as a clever conjuring trick. It’s those big-concept surprises that make sci-fi so addictive.

(There’s a similar phrase from Iain M Banks’ Excession which is not entirely the same thing. An “outside context problem” – like what the Spanish were to the Mayas with their exploding fire sticks – is more total bafflement. A conceptual breakthrough is, even if just to the reader, a momentous revelation.)

Some more examples of the best conceptual breakthroughs. There’s one at the end of Planet of the Apes when Charlton Heston finds a statue on a beach. There’s one at the end of Soylent Green when Charlton Heston finds out what the special foodstuff means to people. You can see the pattern – most top sci-fi hinges on one brilliant reveal.

The four in 2001: A Space Odyssey make up the structure of the film. An alien artefact teaches the apes; an alien artefact awaits us on the Moon; Dave’s beaten HAL and goes to meet the alien artefact; and, er, something about a huge space-baby. Everything else hangs off those freaky moments. It’s not just the physics that have been got right, either; the effects are amazing; the scale constantly enormous with tiny humans in the foreground. And, quite brilliantly, the humans twitter on about nothing in particular, minuscule and mundane. It is only the observing us that finds it wondrous.

But a really good example of the importance of gosh-wow over the numbers is a short story which, annoyingly, Neil Gaiman also linked to in his Clarke post. Unlike Neil, I didn’t meet Sir Arthur but I did once have his telephone number – and that was on a copy of The Nine Billion Names of God.

Spoilers follow so click the link, read the story and come back here after for my paltry thoughts.

Done that?

Right.

How’s that for a gosh-wow ending? Can’t you see Jim Phelps just escaping in his van, his props and costumes abandoned at your feet? And yet, when I first read it, a learned chum who was much more into sci-fi for the physics had a Different View.

For him, the great brilliance of the lack of fuss in that closing line was that that’s not how physics works. The stars are millions of billions of light years away – from us and from each other. It’s not just that you shout “Go!” and they wink off one by one. They’ll have been winking off for millions of years, all in a fiendishly complex and intricate order and just so that – to a computer programmer watching from the Earth – they seem to be extinguishing one by one.

The Clever Thing, said this learned colleague, was that the stars had been going out for millions of years, it just so happened that the time taken by the light of those destructions to register on Earth all rather neatly coincided – the implication being that it is not coincidence. So the programmer, his machine and its result have all been long-expected. This, he said, proved a mechanical universe operating like clockwork; the man-made computer just a machine in a machine. He didn’t agree with my gosh-wow reading at all, that the computer was rendered nothing to the magic truth of God. And we argued long into the night.

I’m not sure what this not-entirely-interesting anecdote might mean. But I’m rather sad I missed the chance to ever share it with Sir Arthur.

Knowledge or certainty?

It was reading Prime Witness that finally prompted me to make an effort with the Ascent of Man. It’s the third of BBC 2’s decades-old, prestigious, full-colour documentaries, following on from Civilisation (a history of western art) and America. And it endeavours to be something quite unlikely: a history of science without all the boring bits.

This is not an easy proposition. Civilisation and America had both involved pointing the camera at pretty objects and landmarks. The Ascent of Man DVD has a single special feature, in which then-Controller of BBC 2 David Attenborough explains that these were easy ways for the Beeb to flog colour telly. You just had to get some respectable presenter to put the glossy shots in order.

Yet science is less about pretty objects and more about ideas and theory. It is not, as Attenborough admitted, ideally suited to moving pictures as distributed by cathode ray. To solve this knotty conundrum, they commissioned the polymath Jacob Bronowski.

His answer was to cover not just what we think of “science” – laboratory experiments in biology, chemistry and physics – but the broader development of thought, art and articulation. As he says late on in the series, “science” is just another word for “knowledge”. This, then, is the history of how we’ve sussed stuff out.

His examples span art and science, poetry and performance and music. There’s stuff about the way churches were built – physically and politically. And he’s good at adding in funny stories and anecdotes about great scientists he has himself known. At one point he says that “all science is analogy” (– which I wished I’d heard when I wrote The Pirate Loop).

To begin, he asks a deceptively simple question: what makes mankind different from other animals. Bronowski’s contention, in the pre-credit tease of episode one, is that while we have discovered the remains of other species, only humanity leaves behind it the remains of things it has made. We do not merely best fit the circumstances of the world around us, we adapt and shape the landscape, use tools to bend it to our will.

The current reckoning is that about 250,000 years ago, the development of skull and brain in Homo erectus enabled the kind of abstract thought needed to shape and use stone tools. The scion of erectus who most embraced the fashionable new Stone Age were a new species, Homo sapiens – that’s us.

As Bronowski argues, for the great majority of our existence as a species, we’ve been wandering about willy-nilly, foraging after undomesticated animals. Bronowski himself visited the Bakhtiari in Iran, to show how the hand-to-mouth existence following and living off the herd means that there’s little space for innovation or thought outside the box.

Some 10,000 years ago or so, people began to put down roots. Bronowski visits the ruin of Jericho to show how the development of common wheat, fresh-running water and such modern technology as walls completely changed human perspective of what could be done with any day. Rather than disputing the Old Testament, as we might expect from a champion of science, he uses the accounts given in the handed-down stories to add credence to his archaeological proof. The harvest, he argues, meant busy times working in the fields and fighting off those who would steal the resulting bounty, but it also left man free to think and talk and try stuff.

It takes two whole episodes to reach this point, establishing the conditions for history and science as we come to know them. A mere 4,000 or so years after man settles down (i.e. 6,000-ish years ago), he invents two things that will again change life quite utterly – bronze and writing.

It’s the breadth of Bronowski’s knowledge and insight that makes this such a compelling series. He links up all kinds of different ideas in ways that are often surprising. For example, we watch a katana being forged in the traditional method, the metal slow-fired and folded, then fired and folded again. Bronowski shows how this method makes a sword that’s both durable and sharp; as if (his analogy) mixing the desired properties of rubber and of glass. This, he explains, was the both cognitive and alchemical leap that – prior to iron and a bit of carbon making steel – mixed tin and copper as bronze and so got mankind out of the stone age.

It’s no coincidence that this is also the dawn of recorded history – and I’ve heard before the idea that Bishop Ussher’s calculation gives not the date the world was made, but a good approximation of when humans first began to record it. 23 October, 4004 BCE is a rough guess of when pre-history gave way to people keeping records and diaries. The written word enables man to pass on his learning to subsequent generations, so they need not waste time puzzling it out for themselves. In so doing it creates the potential for scientists to climb on to each other’s shoulders.

Once man is mixing alloys and writing, the series comes into its own. Each of the subsequent episodes explores a particular scientific construction – Newton’s mathematics, for example, or heredity and evolution. As part of Attenborough’s brief to provide colourful, arresting images, Bronowski travels the whole world, weaving together all kinds of cultures and stories into his over-all thesis. The images are indelible: a baby being born; a small child taking its first steps; nomadic peoples living the same existence that was humanity’s lot 10,000 years ago.

The music and poetry of the periods in discussion are mixed with wild-eyed modern stuff by Pink Floyd and Dudley Simpson. (I tried to describe Deadly Dudley to the Dr – as an Australian Sir Didymus off of Labyrinth.) Droo fans will also enjoy Brian Hodgson’s trippy sound effects. Surely that’s not the noise that molecules make but some kind of Cyberman gun. The state-of-the-art computer graphics would have been better realised by Kevin Davies and sheets of acetate.

As the series goes on, it becomes evident that Bronowski has an ethical agenda, a morality of science. One episode deals with how the church secretly acknowledged but publicly suppressed Galileo’s observed proofs of Copernicus. The theme returns again and again: Mendel’s studies of heredity being burned by his monastic order, the Nazis burning whole demographic groups.

It’s the best argument I’ve heard to counter the old line that Nazism and the holocaust is what happens when you give free reign to scientists and atheists.

"[It] was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.”

Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man, p. 374.

In the broadcast (rather than book) version, he speaks of “despotic belief”, and does so as he steps into the ponds at Auschwitz where members of his own family were butchered. It’s utterly compelling television, more so as the summation of that episode’s whole thesis, that we can never know anything entirely.

That episode, “11. Knowledge or certainty”, is particularly brilliant in explaining the limits of our perception and so of our knowledge. It begins with a blind women feeling the face of an elderly fellow, and telling us what she thinks of him. We then see an artist’s various scribbly impressions of the same man, broad brushstrokes exploring his features.

Bronowski uses this model to explain the limits of our eye sight – “visible” light is only a tiny section of the range of wavelengths. So we run through images of the same man through radio waves, infra red, visible light, ultra violet and x-ray, each filter offering new information and perspective. The last shows us what our eye-sight did not – that’s he’s missing most of his teeth. Yet we still don’t know who or what this elderly man really is.

Bronowski explores gaps in knowledge, and how scientists fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s so they’d be able to keep on asking questions. He speaks of the necessary integrity of science, of people striving for truth that dares confront ideology. The principle of uncertainty established by those fleeing German scientists does not mean that we know nothing, but that we know to build in allowances. The analogy Bronowksi uses is from engineering; a threshold of tolerance.

Scientific thought and discovery thrives where there is tolerance of new ideas and a respect for that integrity. It is not science but dogma when awkward questions are persona non grata. It made me think of Agent Zigzag, and the bureaucracy of the Nazi secret service, where no one could admit to the failings in the system so nothing could be done to fix them.

The episode finishes not, as in the book, with Bronowski putting his hands into the water where the ash of thousands of dead people lie. Rather we return to the old man we’d seen at the beginning. We have seen him through all the wavelengths of light and by touch and extrapolation. But we start to know him, to gain insight into who he might be, when the picture fades to one taken much earlier. When a younger version of him stares forlornly, wan and undernourished, in the striped uniform of the same concentration camp.

It is the sudden spark of cognition, of understanding, that makes it so moving. That episode - not just that scene - is one of the most intelligent and powerful things I've ever seen on telly.

The final episode, filmed mostly in Bronowski’s Californian home, ties up the many disparate threads into a thesis about our future. He talks of teaching in schools and the dangers of ignoring scientific discovery – of downplaying evolution, of not facing uncomfortable truths. Bronowski himself speaks of the end of Western civilisation 50 years from when he’s speaking – or, of the curriculum babies born now will be studying at A-level. The Ascent of Man might continue elsewhere, he says, but the Western – or, more accurately, the English-speaking – claim on it will be a footnote in another culture’s history. By not facing history and not exploring the present, we write ourselves out of the future.

I wonder what he’d make of now. And would a series like this be possible today? Matthew Collings’ recent update of Civilisation only ran for four episodes, which the Dr says is indicative of modern telly’s impatience. I think it may also be that a lot of what he’s addressing and showing onscreen is more readily available to us; a sizeable number of those watching Civilisation back in 1969 would not have seen much of the stuff on it before.

I think there’s a market for a new history of science, one that does not ignore the controversies where evidence meets belief. One that perhaps takes its cue from Bill Bryson’s tolerant and plain English Brief History of Everything (which I see’s been re-released in a lavish and illustrated version, proving again that these difficult theories and ideas can be visualised).

One that asks the simple questions behind all science of tolerance and integrity… Why is it like that? Oh really? It’s an interesting idea, but can you prove it?

Bread crumbs

O. gets cross if I don't blog too often, and I also find it useful to know where I have been. So:

On Saturday the Dr took me to Bristol as a belated and post-book birthday treatoid. We went to the Break the Chains exhibition, bought some mighty aspirin and taxied to B's house in Montpelier. After some tea and Pimms and Thandie Newton dying on stage for Lyverf, we fell into a pub and met O. and other chums. Good Moroccan food followed, and then we wussed out about 10 to head back to the posh hotel.

Swam in the morning, watched by classical Roman heads (most of them the same one) and ambling back from breakfast grinned at a blonde I sort of thought I knew. It was Jackie Tyler.

Slow train back to the smoke in the afternoon, where the dull ache of my jaw made reading and scribbling arduous. The Dr could not resist falling into Monsoon at Paddington, and then we trekked from one end of the station to the other in search of the Hammersmith and City line. Blimey, travelling at weekends is hard bloody work.

Arrived at the studio about 4 for the last bits and pick-ups of The Final Amendment - the last studio day under my producership. Dished out contracts and cheques to the exemplary cast (who will be announced in due course), and even got the Dr in a booth to play a small role as the producer's totty.

Had brought some fizz to mark the occasion, and we also fell into the pub. Monsterously slow bus back to Victoria because of the works outside Harvey Nichols, but m'self and m'colleague Joe Lidster discussed Who Are The Baddies and the beer inside me helped.

The Dr suggested we try to get through the first four Harry Potter films in time for the seeing the fifth one this Saturday (we're taking Codename and Mrs Moose because it's easier than thinking of a birthday present). Stuck on the first one on Sunday night and was boggled by how young are the children. It's a bit hit and miss in places, but a rather fun, easy entry to Hogwarts. Did Film 2 yesterday, and we're also three chapters from the end of Book 6 - me glad to get past the need to do rasping when reading out Dumbledore's bits. Impressed by all the complexities of plot and character, and how nicely Big Things are set up.

Am sat next to Pyschonomy today at work, who has been telling me about the madly sci-fi delights to come with Surface. The traditional discussion of Macs versus PCs, but I hold that Microsoft would not be nearly such the necessary evil if their sales teams were just not so pushy. The actual stuff the techno-bods are welding together are usually pretty splendid.

Have notes to write up about Orwell's essays, and stuff about song lyrics and explaining things in sci-fi. Will endeavour to get to them soon, and reboot the regular updates. But all the things I put off to finish the behemoth are coming back to bite me. Got things to write and pitch and finish. And, yes Dr, I will tidy the office.

Doctor Who and the Computers

Hello. There used to be a great, long 5,000-word post sat here but someone has asked if they can publish it, and I get money if I take it down from the Internet. This is ironic considering what the thing is about. But I have done so while it all gets negotiated. If the publishing happens I'll post a link here, if it doesn't I'll put the post back as it was.

Simon, 8 December 2008.