Anti-Dystopian Future History

The Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson

The standard model for climate change fiction is a narrative of calamity piling up, or of living among calamity. The fact that our system for living, one we support time and time again through our democracy, embeds us as part of the problem (some, admittedly, much more than others) seems to make divergence from a path to this calamity difficult to imagine.

But mapping out how this divergence could occur - scientifically, technologically, socioeconomically, ethically, and even spiritually - is Robinson's aim here. The central, eponymous concept is the creation, under the Paris Agreement, of a Ministry for the Future, a UN body focused on representing future generations and non-human residents of Earth. In Robinson's telling, this Ministry uses its limited budget in a precisely targeted way, finding the physical and - especially - the financial fulcrums where small changes can exact large gains.

But that's the philosophical backdrop. The novel itself opens with, appropriately for the subgenre, a calamitous near-future heatwave in continental India that, over a few days, kills tens of millions of people. This event unsettles the global order, with India's Hindu nationalist political class toppled, and solar radiation management (SRM) geoengineering unilaterally undertaken by the nation. It also motivates its characters, providing a clear view of the peril for the Ministry's head, Mary Murphy, and fuelling the rage of Frank May, an aid worker survivor of the heatwave. Their paths become entangled as the novel progresses over several decades, but much of the novel is a tapestry woven from parallel stories. These are told both by other inhabitants of the imperiled world and, fancifully, from the perspective of inanimate objects like a photon, a carbon atom and the Market.

While the overarching focus is climate change, as the novel progresses this broadens to encompass two key facets of this: refugees and biodiversity. Many of the strands, and especially those of Frank, deal with the trials, traumas and then resolutions of people forced to migrate directly by climate change, or indirectly because of its downstream societal impacts. In Robinson’s 21st century, after decades of strife, the world ultimately adopts a system explicitly modelled on the Nansen Passport scheme from the early 20th century. In parallel, he creates a Half-Earth movement that slowly but steadily drives societies to cede half of the Earth’s land area to nature, consolidating existing communities in cities, and allowing wildlife to recover in the wake of their retreat.

Wearing my Earth scientist hat, it’s refreshing, if ever so slightly uncomfortable, to read a climate change novel in which science doesn't play the dominant role in its resolution. It’s clearly important in framing the problem, and in monitoring its resolution, but the most successful drivers come from the economic and societal changes that the Ministry (and other bodies) engineer. Markets are tamed and repurposed via a carbon currency, financial transparency is hard-wired via a blockchain that destroys secrecy and corruption, and social media is democratised to put its power back into the hands of its users. And, as readers of his Mars trilogy of novels will attest, Robinson puts a lot of imaginative effort into how exactly these socioeconomic forces might be realised - arguably a little too much effort in some particularly dry segments.

An aspect I found intriguing, and liable to cause Robinson some trouble, is the novel's attitude to geoengineering. As mentioned already, SRM geoengineering plays an early and successful role in the novel, although it's clearly labelled as a temporary, placeholder fix in the narrative. But the novel also runs with icesheet management geoengineering, essentially pumping out the meltwater that lubricates icesheet collapse, and touches briefly on a novel (to me) mode of "staining" the waters of the Arctic Ocean to decrease its warming. These are all presented as successful needs-must approaches - a view of the potential role of geoengineering that I share myself, but a likely contentious one for environmentally-inclined fellow-travellers. For many, the moral hazard argument against geoengineering (sometimes even against just contemplating it) is simply unsurpassable. On a not-dissimilar note, Robinson doesn't shy away from issues of population, particularly where demographic transition in his imagined future brings benefits. Again, liable to upset some in the environmental movement who - with some justification - are ideologically opposed to contemplating this facet of Earth's problems.

Notwithstanding all of the foregoing positives, the novel isn't without its weaknesses. Principally in the character of Frank, whose role in the narrative is just too muddy - particularly so given he's introduced in such a pivotal way, and then precipitates a fateful run-in with Mary. But his arc quickly runs out of steam, and he becomes an ill-defined foil to Mary's more prominent narrative. More generally, the episodic nature of the novel - which has many "ecological sci-fi" precedents, including Brunner's Stand On Zanzibar and Brin's Earth - has a habit here of introducing then dropping threads that were just getting interesting. For instance, the whole "black ops" wing of the Ministry tantalisingly appears and then disappointingly evaporates, lost, seemingly, in a crush of competing threads. Plus, as already noted, Robinson's excitable fleshing out of some of his socioeconomic solutions can be tinder-dry at times.

But the ambition and scale of the novel absolves it of all of these problems. It’s easily the most realistic “climate positive” novel I’ve read. It may sound stupid out of context, but it’s quite the thing to read of atmospheric CO2 not just peaking but actually dropping, and dropping fast (5 ppm per year) by the end of the novel. I had to stop when I read that, as continual CO2 rise is just a simple, lifelong fact. But it’s not exactly a happy-clappy utopian novel, where the penny suddenly drops for everyone and we all start behaving sensibly. Instead, it's much more of an anti-dystopian tale, in which the planetary handbrake turn that’s executed is actually the result of the slow accumulation of multiple credible steps. So this feeds into a sense of realism and, for me at least, a more genuine positivity about the future.

I should conclude by noting that I finished reading it in the same week as I watched the darkly satirical Don’t Look Up. While that’s an excellent howl of a movie, one that doesn’t offer anything by way of a solution (or really intend to), this is much closer to the real deal. But the contrast between them was enjoyable to savour. I’ll be recommending it to my Earth science colleagues, but I think it’d be an enjoyable and informative read for anyone. If - characteristically for Robinson - a long one.

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Stray observations:

• I thought it was only me who was imagining something like the Half-Earth movement. Obviously not. It’s not a concept that I’ve seen written down before, but it seemed like a pretty good idea to me - and clearly to Robinson too. Of course, long-term I’d like to see a Whole-Earth movement in which we abandon the Earth to do interesting things elsewhere, leaving our cradle free for successor species … 
• Much like the Mars trilogy, Robinson has a nice section near the end where a major character takes a trip that allows the world that he’s built-up to shine. Here, more so than in the Mars triology, this feels necessary - like it shows what our efforts could achieve if we do the right thing, both by the Earth and by those living in it who are less fortunate than ourselves. In a literature dominated by abundant dystopias, giving a vision of how things could be different hit the spot for me. Ditto, as already mentioned, the novel’s late turnaround point when atmospheric pCO2 starts decreasing. 
• Another intriguing suggestion of Robinson’s is that advances in computing, AI and automation (none of which seem unreasonable) favour a kind of “Red Plenty” economics. Essentially, the market is (I think) streamlined and out-guessed by computing systems to the point that its purported efficiencies are unnecessary. It’s the portion of the novel where it feels closest to utopian thinking, but there’s still at least a veneer of realism. 
• It’s kind-of funny to contrast how David Brin’s corresponding stab at the future, Earth, treats the Swiss compared to here. For Robinson, they’re kind-of a beacon of sanity - albeit one with flaws - whereas Brin just made them the bad guys, what with their secret banking and mountains of gold. (Admittedly, he does claim that he did it for the surprise value.) 
• As an oceanographer, I can’t let the novel’s passing reference to the ocean that I’ve reproduced below go unmentioned. While it’s negative about the prospects for us doing anything to help the ocean, I can’t say that I disagree. Absorbing so much heat and CO2, it’s been extensively perturbed, and on a scale that we’d struggle to redress. So I’d agree with Robinson that probably the best we can do is stop making things worse, and allow it to just recover on its own.

• I mentioned the strange position of Frank in the novel before, but the late and completely unnecessary introduction of a potential romantic partner for Mary is another strange misstep. It’s brief, and just a small part of the “Earth is healing” segment near the end, but it’s pretty glaringly incongruous in a novel that’s otherwise quite disinterested in its characters’ emotional lives.

Galactic Central Point

Galactic Center Companion, Gregory Benford

It was many years ago, and over many years, that I read the six Galactic Centre novels that form the subject for this compact “study guide”. But despite the passage of time, Benford's galaxy-spanning tale of humanity's struggles against implacably superior “mechanicals”, largely set in the vicinity of the “Eater” at the Milky Way's centre, still sticks in my mind. 

In part background from Benford on his thinking behind his series, in part reviews of the full series by critics, and in part actual scientific work by Benford on the Galactic Centre. But the main reason to recommend is the new (to me, anyway) short stories set within it. Especially “A Hunger For The Infinite”, which revisits my favourite of Benford's creations, the Mantis, a mechanical intelligence that both persecutes the humans it meets while drawing artistic inspiration from them. 

I really rather enjoy Benford's penchant for imagining how non-humans might see the world, and it's nice to be reminded of how far his Galactic Centre series takes this. Particularly in the very strange ecosystems and intelligences around the Centre's dominating black hole. Benford takes the opportunity presented by the new stories here to flesh his ideas on these out a little further than the mech-focused novels could. 

Overall, this companion probably isn't much good for newcomers to his works, but for those familiar with them, it serves as a nice reminder of its pleasures, while offering up a few new nibbles to refresh the taste buds.

Stuff Matters

Stuff Matters, Mark Miodownik

Another fab pick by @mrbsemporium - this time a non-fiction volume on the seemingly arcane subject of materials science. Using a photograph of the author drinking coffee on a roof terrace, it's a brilliant tale of 10 materials that we utterly take for granted in our modern lives. While it touches on the underlying science in places, it never comes close to being too heavy. And you leave it feeling much cleverer about the world around us.

Success and "failure" of Arrival

We finally caught the increasingly non-recent science fiction "thinker" (and 2017 Oscar nominee) Arrival. While I'd whole-heartedly recommend it for fans of the genre, nit-picker that I am, I have a few reservations as well. So this is less a review, more a niggle. Needless to say, spoilers ahead for those who've not made the journey so far.

First, what it gets right. Build-up is great, with only fleeting glimpses of the alien spaceships until the big reveal in a beautiful, cloud-wreathed valley in Montana. Their unworldliness begins with their design, as largely featureless geometric shapes, and is nicely underscored by the short distance they effortlessly "hover" above the Earth's surface. The aliens themselves are also handled well, if a little too much like squid, both in general appearance and in their use of extruded "ink". Making their audio extraneous for communication (an early misstep by their interrogators), and their language written yet initially indecipherable as communication works really well. And I liked what ultimately came to be their "gift" and why they made it, although it's mentioned so fleetingly that many may miss it.

What mostly-works but slightly-doesn't is that the film is one of those that makes more sense when you reflect on it afterwards. That's a good thing in my book, but I can well imagine that most people will leave this film utterly perplexed by what they've just seen. It's all there to make sense of it, but it's presented rather subtly at times, and often in an order that requires reflection to make sense of. For instance, a central conceit of the film (and a very clever one) is that Sapir-Whorf is true at a deep and fundamental level, but it's quite gently introduced to the viewer at a point where its relevance is opaque. And the consequence of this is illustrated by out-of-order glimpses of a child in what appear at first to be past memories, but which turn out latterly to be something else. However, the viewer is slightly misled by the presentation of some of this material upfront, seemingly as backstory, when it would arguably make more sense to introduce it latterly (narratively, perhaps, but maybe not emotionally).

My only "proper" reservation is, as ever, time travel - technically, I guess it's not exactly time travel, but, well, ... It's nowhere near as blunt as Interstellar (a film I forgave on a second viewing), but messing with the space-time continuum is a sure-fire way of getting my hackles raised. Especially here, where the film has its cake and eats it by allowing agency and then kind-of suggesting fatalism. However, it is still one of the cleverest uses of time-bending in film, so despite my hackles, I'm much more forgiving here.

Notwithstanding the foregoing, it really is one of the smartest science fiction films in recent years (or decades, even), presenting the sort of deep ideas that, while not uncommon in literary science fiction, rarely make it off the page. It does all of this gently and subtly without any of the distracting pace and action routinely misused in conventional "science fiction" films. And it does it while blending a human story of love and loss in with the central MacGuffin. Two thumbs up for sure.

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P.S. I should just add that, with their relationship with time, the aliens reminded me of my favourite aliens, the Invaders of John Varley's novels. Although the Invaders still win because of their disinterest / disdain in humanity.

Is it just me, or are there a lot of dead celebrities at the moment?

If nothing else, 2016 is shaping up as a bumper year for dead celebrities. At the moment, it feels like you can't listen to the radio or turn on the television without hearing of the death of some luminary. It probably started with Bowie. Unexpected both because of his relatively slight age (69) as well as his then-recent album release. But since then a litany of famous figures have popped their clogs. Earlier this week, we had a double whammy, with Ronnie Corbett and Zaha Hadid joining the choir invisible on the same day.

So, is this a real thing? Or is it just my perception and bad memory that make it feel like there are a lot more famous dead people right about now? And leaving aside this first order question by assuming the affirmative, what could explain the seeming upswing in reported mortality of musicians, artists, comedians, architects, and so on?

There is obviously a sensible, analytical route to the answer based on careful study of media reporting of expired stars in previous years. But I'm too lazy for that, so am going to stick to baseless speculation and armchair argument. To wit, I'm assuming that I'm right about the numbers - and why wouldn't I do that? - and focusing instead on what's behind it all. Or what could be behind it all if I'm honest.

The simplest explanation is that, as time passes, we should expect to hear of more celebrity deaths simply because the human population of Earth - and, presumably, that of human celebrities (we don't know any alien ones yet) - is still very much on the up.

A more conspiratorial explanation is that the contrasting costs of proper journalism and lazy, echo chamber journalism, mean that when filling a news schedule, the temptation is focus on easily-assembled items on dead famous people. Go to the clips archive, ring a few of their upset friends, job done. However, I'm going to discount this one since - being a BBC fanboy - I'm pretty sure that this can't cover all the bases (although I'm still suspicious of how the media picks topics to cover).

A further explanation - and my favourite - is that the dominant factor is that we now have many more celebrities per head of population than we did in the past, and that we should expect this to occur. Essentially, with the advents of mass publishing, radio, cinema, television and now the internet, there are now far more routes by which everyday people can be elevated to the realms of celebrity. That is, to have some sort of following beyond that of the people they know and interact with (let's not get sniffy about "celebrity"). And then, ipso facto, the population of people in the public consciousness - and that of their obituaries - will inevitably rise.

In essence, this is a corollary of Andy Warhol's famous / infamous statement concerning "15 minutes of fame".

Of course, all of this is wholly based on idle speculation on my part, and I certainly won't be following it up to work out how wrong I am - and why would I do that? But I am still interesting in knowing if this really is "a thing", or if it really is "just me".

The BBC respondeth ...

Further to an earlier rant, I actually got a response from the BBC. And one where they actually half-agreed with me - which is more than I got when I complained about the excreable ''The Great Global Warming Swindle''. As they say, it's true that the BBC does "stick to the script" on climate change almost all of the time, but they overlook how damaging it is to go "off piste". Both to general public understanding of the non-debate that is climate science (actually, there's no shortage of debate - just not of the baseless "sceptic" sort), and to their reputation as factual broadcasters. Yes, there's a superficial sense in which it's "balanced" to present climate sceptic views, but only when the nature of that balance is plain. One doesn't see many science programmes that counter geologists with creationists, or medical scientists with HIV-deniers, or even historians with holocaust-deniers, but somehow climate change is fair game for this sort of treatment - despite both its science base and its potentially disastrous implications the world over. Anyhow, this is what they had to say ...

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Dear Andrew

Reference CAS-3433921-5SPGSZ

Thanks for contacting us about What’s the Point of...The Met Office? broadcast on 5 August.

In What's the Point of ...?, Daily Mail columnist Quentin Letts questions the continued relevance of British traditions and institutions, with an irreverent approach offering alternatives to well-established views. There is a long tradition on Radio 4 of columnists having licence to explore controversial subjects from a personal viewpoint and the light hearted tone of this series allows Quentin Letts to question even the most admired of organisations. Nevertheless we accept that in this episode about the Met Office, while there are legitimate questions to be raised about the accuracy of long-term predictions over the past 10-15 years and funding, the programme should have been more clear about where the balance of the argument currently lies on climate change and, in particular, would have benefitted from clarifying that the Met Office’s underlying views are in line with the scientific consensus.

The omission on these points is regrettable. Climate change is a recurrent theme on Radio 4 programmes and more mainstream views have been, and will continue to be, properly reflected in our output - for example, the following day’s BBC Inside Science included an interview referring to how the release of carbon dioxide may have had a significant effect on the atmosphere and this week’s Fry’s English Delight on weather also reflects the scientific consensus.

We do appreciate this feedback and your concerns have been sent to the programme team, and senior BBC management via our daily report, which means they have been seen by the right people.

Thank you for taking the time to bring this matter to our attention and giving us the opportunity to review it.

Kind regards

Ciaran Hanna

BBC Complaints www.bbc.co.uk/complaints

Yours, Seething in Southampton ...

While I've come to expect misrepresentation of science from the likes of Channel 4, the BBC is typically the sanest of media commentators. So it was something of a surprise when one of their long-running (but, hitherto, unlistened to by me) programmes took unwarranted pot shots at that bastion of UK climate science, the Met Office. The programme, "What is the point of ...?", ostensibly takes to task long-standing and seemingly venerable institutions, with the aim of cutting to the core of whether they're out of touch or even a nuisance. While there are many reasons to ponder how the Met Office fits into the modern world, what the programme served up did nothing to address this. Cue a "Seething from Southampton" shot across the BBC's bows ...

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Dear Sir or Madam,

I am writing to complain about the Radio 4 broadcast “What is the Point of the Met Office?” (5th August 2015).

As a long-standing part of the British establishment, one whose work features in both our daily lives (the weather) and the longer-term fate of the Earth (climate change), the Met Office is ripe for an evaluation of both its role and its performance in this role, and I tuned in to the programme hoping for such an appraisal. However, rather than investigating how well the Met Office actually performs in its role (e.g. how accurate it is, whether this accuracy has improved with time, is this level of accuracy cost-effective), the programme makers instead chose the lazy journalism route of setting “climate sceptic” cranks onto meek and mild Met Office spokespeople.

We first had an amateur meteorologist who, while noting the complexity of climate science, seemed inexplicably interested in replacing computers with humans in matters of weather prediction. Next up was Piers Corbyn, brother of the currently newsworthy Jeremy, a fellow of the not-showing-my-working school of weather prediction, and a long-term opponent of non-sunspot-related climate change. This was all topped off by the Rt. Hon. Peter Lilley, spouting as fact the ridiculous claim that climate change stopped in 2004 – something that would come as a surprise to all of the jobbing scientists far outside the Met Office who make it their job to measure and analyse the Earth’s climate.

There are plenty of reasons to wonder whether a large, centralised and bureaucratic “weather service” still has a place in the modern world, but these simply weren’t touched on in this programme. When privatisation was raised, it was less in the context of whether it could actually work, and more in the service of a threat to rein in the Met Office’s climate projection work. But rather than investigate whether said projections were outlandish as claimed, the programme boiled down to the usual climate sceptic bluster which any fact-checker could easily have punctured. Did it not, for instance, even occur to the programme makers to check whether the Met Office’s climate projections lie outside the range of those of their international peer organisations? (They don’t – as recent IPCC reports show.)

By way of summary, “What is the Point of ‘What is the Point of …?’” was my final thought about this programme. This edition was my first time with this programme, and will doubtless be my last. A listener hitherto unaware of what the Met Office did, or how well it did it, would most likely exit the programme with the view that it (a) blows money on seemingly expensive computers, and (b) produces extreme “doomsday” predictions to justify its continued existence. As such, it left me thinking that, if one can’t trust the programme on institutions which deal with scientific matters that can easily be fact-checked, how can one possibly trust it on those where the arguments for and against are more qualitative and open to interpretation.

Yours faithfully ...

Please note: For full disclosure, while I do not work at or for the Met Office, my work as a professional oceanographer does involve periodic collaboration with fellow researchers there, including with climate projection.

Eater

It's time again to clear out the pile of finished books from the side of the bed. Let's see if I can do this quickly-and-concisely rather than ponderously-and-never ...

First up, Eater by one of my favourite science fiction writers from the 1990s, Gregory Benford. By way of summary: astronomers are surprised to detect what turns out to be a small black hole entering the solar system, but even more surprised when it communicates a desire for conversation with the Earth. But dreams of a scientific bonanza from this ancient galactic traveller quickly turn sour as its requests for information turn into demands for much more.

What to say? Well, a great premise ruined by clumsy execution and an excruciatingly bad ménage à trois. Though borrowing liberally from Fred Hoyle's classic novel The Black Cloud (a previous read), it heads off in its own interesting directions before becoming bogged down in some painfully bad "relationship" nonsense between the central astronomer characters. As the novel progresses it also relegates the Eater, which was shaping up to be the most interesting character by a country mile, into a cartoon villain whose hinted subtleties get completely lost in a ridiculous plot where humanity, well on its way to getting humbled by the cosmos, inexplicably and implausibly turns the tables. The only interesting bits are those where the Eater philosophises away, but this is but a faint echo of Benford's alien intelligences from his Galactic Center Saga. There, he did a creditable job of making believable the thoughts of beings on a scale epically removed from humans. Here, his efforts to do the same are simply wasted when interspersed by the thoughts of beings that seem cribbed from a bad "young adult" novel.

Disappointing from someone such as Benford.

Existence (or something like it)

More than 20 years ago, David Brin wrote his gargantuan, world-encompassing novel, Earth. Similarly to John Brunner's classic novel, Stand On Zanzibar, its central plot was revealed only gradually, built up step-by-step from the perspective of dozens of characters, each with a different view of the world they live in. It took on just about every environmental theme going from climate change to overpopulation to extinction, then threw in space stations, errant micro black holes and the Tunguska event, and a smattering of technological forecasts, including a then-prescient treatment of the world wide web. Epically long, it was also epic in its scale and ambition, and it more or less worked, culminating in an genuinely impressive climax in which the Gaia hypothesis was made flesh.

Flash forward to today, and Brin has written Existence, which is easily as large, and again builds its world from the bottom-up, fragmenting its narrative across a cast that includes - among others - an elderly astronaut now on orbital clean-up detail, a mischievous science fiction writer, a climate-displaced Chinese scavenger and a trust-fund baby with a penchant for illegal space flight. This time, while environmental matters still hover at the edges, the main focus lies with humanity's lonely position in the cosmos. This apparent loneliness doesn't last many pages into the novel, when an unexpected find in Earth orbit answers the question "are we alone?" firmly in the negative. Or seemingly so, at any rate. But the answer comes with caveats, and as the novel progresses it becomes clear that the answer is also plural.

As I was refreshing my memory and writing the above, I was struck how much the two novels share - at least in summary. What they don't share is that while Earth's epic page-count makes it an engrossing page-turner, Existence's comparable length makes it a gruelling chore. In part, I think one of the reasons is that all of Earth's scattered narratives serve the whole: an all-encompassing treatment of environmentalism. By contrast, Existence is much less coherent, and serves up amateur rocketry, (virtual) space aliens, muddled extropian thinking, uplifting animals and settings or situations that, while interesting on their own, read as disconnected in the novel. For instance, the wealth contrast between the scavenging lifestyle of Bin and the super-entitled, playboy adventures of Hacker makes sense at first in world-building, but Brin really doesn't do anything with it. And, by the end, this sort of detail has been completely left behind.

As a result, while Existence is sporadically interesting and enjoyable, it is ultimately a tedious read. Were it about half its length - a feat of editing that wouldn't be as difficult to achieve as one might imagine - its sins would be much more forgiveable. As it stands, Existence is only intermittently clever, and while it has some interesting ideas, it spaces them widely within a plodding millstone of a book. If I turn to Brin again, it will only be when his page count drops to the vicinity of 300.

When not to pardon

In the news today there's an item about a group of worthies (and they are genuinely worthy) trying to get the government to posthumously pardon the computing pioneer Alan Turing. Infamously, and in spite of his sterling war record, he was prosecuted for "gross indecency" in 1952 (basically, he was gay), and that this - possibly via the "medical" treatment he received for his "condition" - led to his suicide a few years later, when he was only 41. Anyway, this isn't the first time that a call has been made to have his conviction quashed, but it got me thinking about it again.

While his conviction is both outrageous and bizarre to me, and while I can understand the motivation to have this ridiculous mark against his name removed, I can also see that it - arguably - serves a purpose. Namely, by needlessly slurring the name of one of our brightest and best, it provides us with a helpful reminder of our nation's less than civilised past (and recent past at that). Our history, particularly that in close proximity to WW2, is frequently lauded as some sort of Golden Age, usually to service particular political ends. Details, such as this conviction, that reveal it to be little of the sort are a helpful corrective that lets us (and future generations) gauge history more accurately and less self-aggrandisingly.

Admittedly, there's a sense in which none of this actually matters. Turing is long dead, and no sensible person would view his conviction as anything other than homophobic folly. And revoking it would not likely expunge from the history books the fact that, regardless of his brilliance, he was persecuted to suicide by a bigoted state apparatus. But I'd still argue that, for us to correctly perceive history and our antecedents - both for good and for ill - we should be careful about retrospectively imposing the values of our age, however well-intentioned.

Information, Schminformation

We (well, I - C was mostly wishing it over) watched the concluding part of Jim Al-Khalili's latest BBC series last night. Part of a two-episode series on "disorder and order", it focused on the concept of information, and how this has gone from marks on Bronze Age clay tablets through to precisely-coded beams of light in present-day computers. It also - though fleetingly - tried to convey the notion that information (properly understood) is a physical reality. Al-Khalili was more than a little hazy on this aspect of "information", but with only an hour to play with on BBC4, I can understand that, and he was disarmingly honest with the audience about taking a "leap of faith" on this point.

However, what I still struggle to understand - or, frankly, believe - is this idea that information (properly understood) is a genuine part of the "fabric of reality". Much as with its sibling concept, entropy, I can't shake the feeling that, while useful concepts that effectively book-keep and help quantify systems, neither information nor entropy have a deep physical basis. Instead, they both seem to me to be diagnosed "features" of systems that can be used as either metrics of these systems, or as a means of understanding how they change. From the perspective of deeper reality (were it to have one; perhaps it does?), neither is fundamental.

To be fair to Al-Khalili, he did get down to the quantity of energy that would be required for Maxwell's Demon to do its job, and how this consideration both resolved the entropy-violating aspect of the thought experiment, and tied energy to information (specifically the deletion of this information). But he did so in a rather skimpy, flighty way that was far from convincing. His get-out was, as mentioned above, the confines of a television programme (... this margin is too narrow to contain ...), but I wasn't convinced that he'd ever quite get around to it even if gifted with Brian Cox levels of air-time.

All that said, if I'm being honest, it's probably (= almost certainly?) just a glaring gap in my education that prevents me from seeing what all of these brilliant information theorists take for granted. Although, I'd certainly appreciate them making somewhat more of an effort to help me clear the hurdle of my incomprehension. My overwhelming feeling whenever I bump up against information on this subject (which, basically, is just in magazines and on TV) is that it's the Emperor's New Clothes all over again. While I should know better, I can't help suspecting that it's simply a fashion in physics driven by its unquestionably vast utility. But reality (at least in my head) it is not.

Laying out my view of the world (informed by analogy with own questionably-real work), I think of matter and energy as state variables in some common currency. Swapping between them is fine. Giving them a position in space and time (or even spacetime) is also fine. And certain configurations of them - e.g. a ball dropped from height; a precision-built machine - can certainly be said to represent more or less entropy or information. But there's nowhere in this cartoon-ish scheme for these latter concepts to actually live and breathe. Instead, they're helpful diagnostics that can be used to say something profound about arrangements of matter or energy, but they simply don't belong at the same level as more concrete facets of reality.

But, as I say, I'm deeply ignorant on these topics, so perhaps I'm simply not seeing the wood for the trees.

Reconsidering religion

The AV Club has an interesting article in it today entitled "Reconsidering religion" in which its writers discuss pieces of art (literature, music, cinema, television) that gave them second thoughts about the religion in which they'd been raised. The list contains items that I might have expected, such as Kurt Vonnegut, but also some more unexpected or even off-the-wall suggestions including Heinlein (perhaps not so off-the-wall really), the Housemartins, and even the Bible itself (actually, scratch that - that's probably obvious).

The article also got me thinking, as I'm sure was intended, about whether I could pin down something that did the same in my own life. For me, this would have been somewhere in the window between summer 1988 and summer 1989 - I can't tie it down any better than that, but I know that these two periods bookend my own switch. Memory aside, that this block of time is a little hazy also stems from there being no "Eureka!" moment. Rather, a process that began in summer 1988 gradually accumulated enough scepticism (or whatever the quantum of doubt is) to tip me into open atheism by summer 1989. Good scientist that I pretend to be, I formally describe myself today as agnostic, but the only theological possibilities that I consider plausible (however infinitesimally) are so far removed from mainstream religions that, to all intents and purposes, I've gone the whole way.

Anyway, when I've reflected on this subject in the past, the piece of art that most floats to the top is Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. Strange, because it's both a long way short of their best film, The Life of Brian, and it doesn't share that film's very obvious ecclesiastical sensibilities and musings. However, it is loaded throughout with snubs to established religions, and it does present a rather prosaic - if unarguable - "meaning of life" at the end (and it doesn't hurt, additionally, to have the Galaxy Song). So though it didn't exactly "convert" me, I know that it made me think that there might just be more to existence than sitting in a Carnoustie church. I guess I must have been a bit more impressionable in those days.

I don't think that it really did more than accelerate the rot that took hold when I read The Blind Watchmaker during my summer holidays in 1988 (of which, reading this was also a symptom rather than a cause), but I know it was one of the drivers that got me thinking, and I know where that all ended up by 1989. So, thanks Monty Python. Thanks a bunch. ;-)

ROAMing with MEDUSA

Finished (well, printed) my poster for next week's international Planet Under Pressure conference today. It makes use of my recent (and surprisingly quite successful) simulation of MEDUSA-2.0 under RCP 8.5 forcing from one of the UKMO's IPCC runs. After a bit of a graceless start - largely down to disequilibrium caused by the carbon cycle's initial condition - MEDUSA managed to knuckle down and start behaving itself by the middle of the 20th century, and became nicely acidified by year 2100. The run has one acidification feedback in it (calcium carbonate production), so there were some moderately interesting points to pull out of the run in the end. EKP has spotted a few features of the run's Arctic performance that she's not especially happy about, but we might be stuck with those because of the forcing we're wedded to. We had enough trouble getting that to give us sensible ocean circulation, so I'm not confident about finessing NEMO's physical performance.

Just the actual conference to look forwards to now. It promises to be one of those strange marriages between science and politics, so I'm not holding my breath. But, as such, it'll at least be quite different from the usual run of the mill. There are a number of big political names down to speak or to host, but given the lack of urgency with which the body politic deals with environmental concerns, it may just be more talking the talk.

Anyway, given that I may be returning to no job after the conference, my lofty scoffing might be entirely academic. It'll be difficult to be quite so environmentally scrupulous if I find myself sans employment.

Metrics of redundancy

The end is nigh. Almost. Earlier this week we received our classifications as either support or "leading" scientists, as well as the appropriate pro forma that accompanies this diagnosis. I'm in the latter (though most of what I do is grunt-work) so my fate dangles uncomfortably on my publication record and the clawing in of cash. The former is a perfectly acceptable metric to judge a scientist on, the latter, while not terrible, can miss the point a bit in our organisation since we're largely supported by core funding that (largely) obviates the need to apply for cold hard cash. Needless to say, while I have been flailing about unsuccessfully for money, it hasn't been a priority for me.

Anyway, as part of this pro forma I've been cobbling together stuff on my less-than-stellar publication record. The Web of Knowledge has a subsection to help with this so yesterday I set myself up with a profile and linked together my ISI-recognised list of papers. This lets me calculate something called the "h-index" for myself (14, apparently), and produce a whole load of faintly interesting graphs about my work.

This one shows how I'm accumulating citations since I burst onto the "scene" back in 1998 (Lamarck and prions). At first glance it looks pretty good. But even a cursory second glance makes it look like I've peaked - and am possibly on the way back down! :-)

This second one shows where I'm being cited, or, rather, what keywords are associated with the places I'm being cited. Interesting that oceanography comes in second, but I guess that some of the journals I'm published in (e.g. GBC) aren't strictly ocean-only. I've no idea why my work is quite so appealing to geology, but I'll take citations wherever I can get them. Especially at this point!

Anyway, our pro forma summaries have to be in by the 12th March (perfect timing given I'm off on holiday until then), and then the judging process begins. D-Day for our fates is the 28th March (again, perfect, since I'm at a conference then). Just in time for Easter and the resurrection of "the departed" into glorious new careers. It's going to be a bad month whether I survive or not.

Redundancy blues

As of about two weeks ago, our institute has been staring down the barrel of some mandatory staff cuts. We've been expecting these for the better part of three years - most, in fact, of the time that I've been formally employed on the "government" side of things. But the scale of the cuts are larger than I think most of us expected (and all of those who I've spoken with). Of approximately 150 staff, around 35 are expected to be lost, around about one quarter.

The actual staff lost will be determined through a ranking exercise that will see about 60 staff (40% of the total) offered redundancy, with a view to reaching the desired target of 35 without resorting to compulsory redundancy. Which seems a reasonably sensible strategy except for certain provisions in the terms of voluntary/compulsory redundancy that differ between staff hired at different times. After about 1998, staff have been hired on terms that significantly favour the acceptance of voluntary redundancy over sitting it out and being made compulsorily redundant. So those staff, myself included, that were recruited "more recently" have something of an incentive to jump before being pushed.

Whether I'm one of those caught up in the downsizing (a euphemism I've actually yet to hear used in this specific context) is yet to be clear. The ranking criteria emphasise quantitative metrics such as papers, grants and the h-index, which, on the face of it, are important aspects of the modern scientist's life. But there are subjective elements to the weighting, and there may be further fudge factors yet to reveal themselves. While my publication record is far from stellar, I think that I do OK, more so in recent years than when I was slogging it out as a post-doc programmer. My grant record, however, is bad - though in part this stems from me being pointed in other directions.

Overall, with about 40% of staff getting an invitation to consider an alternative career, and with a strong impetus to accept said invitation should it be presented to me, I'm very far from feeling safe. Either way, life in my institute is going to look and feel very different in a few months time. Those who survive seem liable to be "gifted" new tasks whose previous "owners" are no longer around. So I'll either be busy looking for a new career (and it will be a career - niches for oceanographers are too thin on the ground), or busy picking up the pieces of tasks left incomplete by the purge.

Hence the blues.

Hawking dodging

Just heard Stephen Hawking answering questions for Radio 4's Today programme. In one he was asked whether there was a time (presumably pre-big bang) when there was nothing. Annoyingly, he answered in that traditional and unhelpful way, namely that since time as we experience it started with the big bang, it makes no sense to talk of "before" then. Thanks Stephen. He went on to illustrate his answer with the (also traditional) example of what's south of the South Pole, that is, nothing. How about he actually try to address the spirit of the question, namely discuss wider physical theories concerning pre-big bang "time" and extra-universe "space"? As it happens, he went on to answer another question with reference to multiple universes, but he was happy to answer this initial question with a trite put-down about the obvious limits of time.

It reminds me of when biologists, often eminent ones, respond dismissively to the suggestion that we are descended from chimpanzees by pointing out that both chimpanzees and humans are descended from an extinct precursor species. While, yes, this is obviously true, it obscures what the questioner was asking, namely were our ancestors hairy tree-dwellers, to which the answer is clearly yes. And they probably didn't look wildly different to chimpanzees to the untrained eye either.

NOCS Christmas Quiz 2011

NOCS Christmas Quiz 2011, a photo by Dr Yool on Flickr.

One of the traditions that's grown up in NOCS in the past few years is the annual Christmas Quiz. And it's one that I've grudgingly commented on previously (here and here) when we've almost won but have fallen at the final hurdle.

Anyway, today was Christmas Quiz 2011, and while it didn't really feel like it during the quiz - in fact, we had a couple of pretty dodgy rounds - change was a-coming.

Despite what should have been a pretty middling score, 43 out of a possible 60, our team, Duncan Who [*], found itself in a three-way tie-break with last year's winners and a team captained by my student, HC.

And, bizarrely, the result depended on a question about, of all things, the radius of the planet Neptune Uranus. Ordinarily, this should have been a walk-over for me, but my pitch, 12,000 km, was much lower than that settled upon by my astronomically-minded team-mates (Simon and Joel), 30,000 km.

Fortunately (or was it destiny?), our rivals shot way too high, both guessing a radius 10 times that of the Earth, when the actual answer is a little less than 25,000 km. So, at last, long-denied triumph was ours to savour. And a prize of £100 - though we donated that straight back to the charity supported by the quiz (in a move subsequently questioned by the most tight-fisted members of our team!).

What a great start to my birthday weekend. But have I perhaps started a little too high? :-)

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[*] Our team name, which may yet earn us unwelcome attention, refers to the recent appointment of a distinguished scientist - whose name may, or may not, be Duncan - to the head of our funding agency. An appointment that involved a bit of leap-frogging over our centre's director ... and usual quiz MC. Alas, a conflict of schedules meant that our friend, and former team member, RMA, got the job of hosting.

FTL - WTF?

Have I, like, totally missed something glaringly obvious in front of me? All this stuff (= attention in the popular press) about faster-than-light neutrinos seems to focus solely on its implications for the plausibility of time-travel (e.g. see today's offending item in the Grauniad). In an absolutely rigid, no-exceptions-allowed interpretation of GR, I can see why this might seem half-reasonable, but doesn't (the mainstream reading of) QM already point to FTL modes of "communication" between entangled particles? I appreciate, of course, that there are multiple interpretations of QM on this (and every other) point, but even leaving this aside, there appears to be no shortage of alternative explanations for this unexpected neutrino behaviour, none of which seem to involve time-travel. Then again, why engage with these ideas and be forced to have to explain them, when you can just fall back on a wildly implausible alternative that, thanks to decades of science fiction (d'oh!), requires no explanation whatsoever.

Cephalopod fantasy

A bit of a gear-change this time. A not-uncommon refrain at Strange News is me railing against the ghettoisation of science fiction by the gods of mainstream fiction. Nonetheless, at the same time my default stance is to look hypocritically downwards over the broad fantasy genre that usually shares the bookshelves with SF. As Margaret Atwood recently discussed, where fantasy ends and science fiction begins is not entirely unambiguous (though the presence of dwarves/elves is usually a pretty definitive sign), so it's not as if I'm on solid ground in my prejudices. Anyhow, to step down from my soapbox and embrace (if only for one book) a personal bête noire, I turned to a UK author, China Miéville, and his recent apocalyptic novel Kraken.

(For full disclosure: this isn't as big a step/concession as I'm making out. The novel is centred around my favourite invertebrate group, and begins in the sumptuous setting of a former employer.)

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Billy Harrow, a curator at the Natural History Museum in London, is not having a good week. While conducting a public tour of the specimen collection he discovers that its prize entry, a 8.6 m Architeuthis that Billy himself curated, has completely vanished. Worse, a new "specimen" has appeared among the assembled preservation jars: a man folded neatly, if tightly, into a glass vessel. But Billy's troubles are only just beginning. The disappearance of one bottled animal, coupled with the appearance of another, attracts the attention of Baron and Collingwood, members of a specialist, and secretive, police unit that deals with less-than-natural occurrences. They reveal to Billy the existence of a Kraken cult that reveres the giant squid, a member of which, Dane Parnell, is also NHM staff. But Dane and his fellow worshippers aren't the only third parties interested in iconic giant molluscs, nor are they even remotely the most outlandish. Before long, Billy finds himself on a journey through a London that he barely recognises, where ancient spirits live in statues, where squirrels are unionised, and where the sea itself is a god.

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Wow. While it would be fair to say that this novel hasn't won me over to fantasy, I was pretty entertained, and regularly astonished, by the imagination on display. It starts like a completely conventional, if somewhat bizarre, mystery story with a missing cephalopod for its McGuffin, but after only a few pages the more fantastical elements begin to creep in. By the end of the novel, it's wall-to-wall deviation-from-reality. What was most impressive was how consistently Miéville ups the ante on with his outlandish occurrences. At first, his Kraken cult alone seemed pretty off-the-wall, but this was trumped time and time again, with the late appearance of the Sea as an active force as a particular high point in outlandishness.

My favourite of Miéville's creations was probably Wati, an Egyptian spirit who was originally confined to a statue on a pharoh's whim, but is now free to roam all statues, including, enjoyably strangely, a Captain Kirk action figure. What made him even more appealing was that this otherworldliness was then combined with a more mundane role as a union leader, initially drawn into the action because of a strikebreaking squirrel. I also really liked the disrespectful, and slightly sultry, telepathic police officer, Collingwood, whose feigned disinterest and sharp, text-speak insults really brightened things up. Though I did think that, after giving her a great entrance, Miéville didn't really use her anywhere near enough in the latter two thirds of the book.

There's a "But" in all this, however. One that applies to all of the fantasy that I can remember reading, including classics like LotR. Namely that the underlying rules to which the novel is working are either flexible or completely absent. Characters die but can be brought back; inescapable situations suddenly have secret backdoors; mundane objects are revealed as powerful table-turners. Essentially, deus ex machina is the defining feature of the genre. After a certain point, the fun drains away when you realise that the corner into which the author has just painted his characters is probably something that can be (will be) got around with a few deft strokes of the pen. And, conversely, it can create situations where the reader might not unreasonably expect a reversal that never actually comes.

Here, Miéville gets passed this - in a way - by being so imaginative in his "cheating". I never really got anything like that sinking feeling I had in LotR when the Dead Men of Dunharrow were plucked out of thin air to turn the final battle in The Return of the King. While science fiction has its fair share of deus ex machina, it usually tries to play more fairly within its own rules, and often bends over backwards to retrospectively explain any "gods" that appear to have popped out from beneath the sofa cushions. Which, I guess, is why I prefer it as a fantastical genre: the real world conforms to rules, so I expect it of my fiction too. The wholesale abandonment of this in fantasy is what irks me, at least in part because I suspect that it's just lazy writing. A skilful author might very well construct an emotionally resonant scene in which the reader fears for characters they've come to love, but it seems slapdash when that's resolved by a cheap sleight of hand.

Anyway, the upshot of all this is that, while I have my reservations, I really enjoyed Kraken. I don't know that I'll be visiting Miéville's fantasies again any time soon, but it's difficult not to recommend any novel so consistently innovative in its creations, especially one in which a cephalopod plays such a pivotal role.

"Least Concern"

Today's Featured Picture over at Wikipedia shows a giraffe grazing, and discusses adaptations for consuming spiky plants. Not knowing an awful lot about giraffes, but wondering how they were doing extinction-wise, I moseyed on over to the article on them and was duly reassured that they are classified by the IUCN as "Least Concern". However, sticking around to read up on "the tallest of all extant land-living animal species", I discovered that, across the entirety of Africa, there are fewer giraffes (of all species combined) than there are people living in Southampton. In fact, given the uncertainties involved in counting them, there could be considerably fewer.

All of which got me thinking about how the classification of "Least Concern" seems, at best, pretty relative (i.e. of least concern compared to most other species), and may give an overly rosy view of their status to skim-readers such as (usually) myself. I can't establish from Wikipedia how many giraffes were roaming Africa, say, 10,000 years ago, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't an order of magnitude more (for loose comparison, I did discover that there were ~300,000 African Bush Elephants when I was born, but there are only 10,000 now). That said, and knowing next to nothing about it, I would imagine that population viability is probably pretty good at the ~100,000 level (hence, presumably, "Least Concern").

Leaving that genetic aspect aside, given that land-use changes (i.e. more for humans, less for everything else) show no sign of altering direction at any point in the foreseeable (and not-so-foreseeable) future, I seriously doubt that the current giraffe population level is even faintly secure. To be fair, the term "Least Concern" is accurate: relative to many other species, giraffes are not immediately on their way out so, yes, we should be less concerned about them. But given this low population plus likely future change, and given that humans (7,000,000,000 and counting) are also formally classified as "Least Concern", it doesn't strike me as a helpful categorisation.