I first saw Contact at a small cinema in eastern Australia when I was 14. I remember that it appealed to me because of Robert Zemeckis, still one of my favourite directors, as well as the obvious charms of Jodie Foster, but the film completely blew me away - far more than I was expecting. I’ve seen it many times since, and pick up on more with each screening, but one particular scene has stuck with me from that first time. During the last act Ellie Arroway looks through her spacecraft window to see the Milky Way. And it’s wondrous. The filmmakers got it just right, and I remember my breath catching at the awe-inspiring sight. The movie ends with the words ‘For Carl’, which I didn’t understand at the time.

A year or two later I came across the novel, which expands upon the film’s many themes and adds much more scientific detail. I found it a fascinating read, and was intrigued by the short biography of its author, a scientist called Carl Sagan. Who was this guy? Since when did scientists write fiction? And not just any old fiction, but stories of aliens and messages from other planets! Isn’t that scientific heresy?

His name turned up from time to time as I grew up, until I became properly interested in science at 19 and suddenly he was everywhere. It seemed that in the US he was responsible for inspiring a whole generation of scientists in a tv show called Cosmos. I felt like I’d missed out. If the show ever made it to the UK, I’d never seen it mentioned. I’d never seen his books on the shelves either, yet again and again I came across the same sentiment: read The Demon-Haunted World.

Not really available in the UK, the book languished on my wishlist for a while. I finally picked it up at a Kansas bookstore in 2004. I was reading it when ambushed by an evangelist in a Yosemite laundrette - I figured it would have been a betrayal not to fight back - and finished it on the flight home as everybody around me slept. Carl Sagan’s widow, Ann Druyan, recently told an interviewer that The Demon-Haunted World was written as Carl underwent three bone-marrow transplants. The host was audibly shocked, and it’s easy to see why. It’s a remarkable piece of work.

The Demon-Haunted World is an impassioned plea for reason, for the inherent virtue of truth and the power of skepticism. Along the way he demolishes, politely and eloquently, tales of alien abduction, ghosts, telepathy and other popular fictions. But more importantly The Demon-Haunted World is an ode to wonder. Carl Sagan was primarily an astronomer, and more than anybody I’ve read he manages to evoke in words a fraction of the feeling you get when looking at the stars. His enthusiasm for life oozes from every page:

The blueprints, detailed instructions and job orders for building you from scratch would fill about 1,000 encyclopedia volumes if written out in English. Yet every cell in your body has a set of these encyclopedias. A quasar is so far away that the light we see from it began its intergalactic voyage before the Earth was formed. Every person on Earth is descended from the same not-quite-human ancestors in Easy Africa a few million years ago, making us all cousins.

Whenever I think about any of these discoveries, I feel a tingle of exhilaration. My heart races. I can’t help it. Science is an astonishment and a delight. Every time a spacecraft flies by a new world, I find myself amazed. Planetary scientists ask themselves: “Oh, is that the way it is? Why didn’t we think of that?” But nature is always more subtle, more intricate, more elegant than we are able to imagine. Given our manifest human limitations, what is surprising is that we have been able to penetrate so far into the secrets of Nature.

Ellie represents us all when she gazes into the galaxy. Contact the novel ends with the discovery of a message encoded in the digits of pi, not because Carl believed in a higher power but to blast open by an order of magnitude the wonder we could appreciate. Imagine if we discovered evidence that the base laws of nature had been deliberately constructed - it doesn’t mean we have to start worshipping anything, it means that we get to explore further than we ever thought possible. It’s akin to Hubble realising the smudges in his telescope were not fuzzy stars but entire galaxies. Reality just squared itself. Googoled itself, perhaps.

But coupled with this celebration of the universe is a fierce adoration of our own experience. Like Richard Feynman, Carl despised the idea that explanation reduces wonder. Even if we can one day fully explain a mother’s love for her child, it’s still love and no less beautiful for it. More so, in fact, because we can look in awe at its workings.

This is what Carl Sagan means to me. To talk of awe and love is considered almost childish in the current climate, and cynicism and pessimism often rule the day. I’ve seen nobody who stood more firmly and brightly against it. One of the final sentences of Contact always brings me to tears:

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

Carl died ten years ago today, and this post was written as part of the the memorial Blog-a-thon. Thanks, Carl.

Self-publishing website Lulu.com are offering NaNoWriMo winners one free bound copy of their novel. Unlike last year this applies to international customers too, and includes postage. I appreciate they get free advertising from it, but it strikes me as a kind thing to do and I’ll certainly take them up on it. Last year I ordered a couple of copies of my 2005 novel and they came out very well; the binding and paper quality were excellent, and the only (technical) flaws were of my own making since you have to format it yourself.

I tend to go off celebrities who cheat on their partners. It’s probably unfair, especially in the case of tabloid revelations, but it’s an instinctive thing. Nevertheless, it has to be said that goddamn Mark Ramprakash can dance:

Of course, it helps that Karen is superb - it’s her kick at ‘now I’ve got you in my sights’ that does it for me. Just sensational. Matt’s good, but if Mark pulls off something like this in Saturday’s final he’ll be in a whole other league.

Edit: first sentence changed after half an hour’s reflection.

Did anybody see ‘The Trouble With Atheism’? I’ve got it recorded, and shall try to watch it in the next few days. Any good points, or just celestial teapots and straw-men?

I was listening to Escape Pod while driving home this evening. It’s a short science-fiction podcast, and the story was ‘Margin of Error‘. It began with:

Paula came back in a blaze of glory.

Isn’t that a wonderful first line? There are so many possibilities, especially with sci-fi premises. It immediately grabbed my attention, although my mind was buzzing so much from tonight’s practice dance session that I couldn’t concentrate, so I switched to music after a couple of minutes. This was entirely to do with me and no reflection on the story! It started very well, and I’ll look forward to hearing the rest

I spent Friday evening blowing up balloons. Many, many balloons.

The pictured Nod and I were helping arrange a surprise birthday party for our friend Ben, and decided balloons were the way to go. We started off with twenty, but it quickly became clear this was waaaay too few and one late-night trip to Sainsbury’s later we had packets containing another eighty. Surprisingly few explosions ensued, and at around 0030 we finished and came up with the notion of moving them all upstairs, with the intention of pushing them down on top of Ben the next day. Moving 103 balloons upstairs is not, it turns out, as easy as you’d think. After a couple of ad hoc schemes failed we finally moved them two at a time, and they were loaded into the spare room.

Seven hours later I left the flat for the main party event: go-karting. Ben had been told to be up and ready to be picked up from Oxford at some ridiculous time of the morning, and was then taken to the go-karting centre where we all met. I think it came as a complete surprise.

I’d never been go-karting before, and had a great time. We changed into jumpsuits, which to be honest made me feel more like a teletubby than Damon Hill, and were assigned a car before a ten-lap practice session. We were ranked according to fastest individual laps, then went straight into a thirty-five lap race. During this time Ben, in his desperation to get past the clearly superior driver, twice sent me spinning into the barriers resulting in large red lights flashing and the ‘marshals’ having to push me back into position. In the end I let Ben win by more than one lap, it being his birthday and all
When you’re only twenty centimetres away from racetrack the acceleration is quite something, and it took us a while to work out the best methods of controlling the car. We were helped by young-Londoner-Simon, who figured it out very quickly and rocketed past everybody within a couple of laps; it was quite the spur.

After a short break we had another 35-lap race, in which I came 4th after taking various corners with a little too much gusto. Ben won again. In the overall rankings he was first, young-Londoner-Simon second and me third, and there was a short podium session to celebrate this. Everybody had aches and pains afterwards, whether it was through banging an elbow on the petrol tank or just the strain of the heavy steering wheels, but I think we all agreed it was worth it.

Then it was back to Nod’s, where we unleashed the balloons upon Ben:

and spent two hours attacking him with them:

It seemed like the thing to do.

Various of us had to head off early to get ready for the Christmas Ball (I slept well that night), which was an unfortunate quirk of timing, but I’m pretty sure Ben had a good time. It was certainly one of the more action-packed mornings this year. Of course Nod now has a house full of balloons, which must present a challenge if he doesn’t want to annoy the neighbours by bursting them…

Not bitter at all about Emma getting voted off Strictly Come Dancing. Obviously. Who could possibly be annoyed by little-old-lady ‘ooh, isn’t he nice and hasn’t he improved’ trumping sheer dancing talent? It’s not like it’s meant to be a dancing competition or anything. Grrrrrr. Like the Strictly Come Blogger says, next week should by all rights be a walkover for Mark. From this I extrapolate that the public can’t be trusted with anything.

I went to my dance teachers’ Christmas Ball this evening, and had a great time apart from one unfortunate worry. There was a demonstration couple that I’d seen before, when the 14-year-old girl’s performance inspired a post on uncontrollable thoughts. She and her partner will be known as Jailbait (now 15, apparently) and Boy for the rest of this post. They were excellent dancers, but last time I became uncomfortable when she stood half a metre away from me in a dress that barely covered her very much grown-up figure, swaying and shimmying in a rather adult way. It just wasn’t fun. This time, knowing they’d be performing, I made sure to sit away from the edge of the dancefloor to avoid the situation happening again. Hah.

Again they were excellent, but during their rumba routine she came out of a turn, locked eyes with me, held my gaze for a couple of seconds then gave a very slow, sultry wink. Obviously this was part of the routine and I just happened to be in her eyeline, and the friends I was with thought this was terribly funny. As did I: the extra distance made me far more comfortable with the whole thing, and the irony was entertaining¹. We laughed about it and carried on dancing for the rest of the evening. Then, as we were leaving, a few people were chatting to Jailbait and Boy and I for some reason remarked “thanks for the wink, it made my day.” I obviously meant it as a friendly compliment of their dancing and wasn’t actually serious, but as I drove home I realised there are at minimum 15,000 ways in which it could be misinterpreted. It wasn’t meant to be creepy. I don’t think I said it in a weird manner and am fairly sure she reacted with a smile, but I’ve overthought it and can’t remember properly now. Argh.

This is hopefully just late-night paranoia and will seem ok tomorrow, but it’s one of those moments I really wish I could take back.

1. it was also the first time anybody’s ever winked sexily at me for any reason at all, so was a new experience [↩]

Thanks to Ed for pointing out a BBC article on the supposed health risks of wireless networks. Some guy goes on about their ‘transmitting a microwave into your brain’, then says:

“I see no evidence to suggest they could be harmful, but it takes an enormous amount of evidence to prove anything. I don’t understand the medical side very well but I do understand the technical side - that of frequency and power. That’s why I decided against installing a wireless network.”

Isn’t that a truly great quote? It’s broken in so many ways! The inventive use of ‘but’; the second sentence cancelling out what it’s trying to suggest; the definitive non sequitur at the end. Inspired.

Others claim they immediately started having headaches after a wireless network was enabled. Every time this is mentioned it’s difficult not to notice that knowledge of the wireless network came before the headaches, never the other way around. It’s very much like people who claim to suffer from ‘electrical sensitivity’, but can’t replicate it under controlled conditions. It all has an air of woo that has apparently turned up with with the introduction of many technologies, such as the original radio transmissions, or ozone from laser printers, or radiation from the first computers. It seems that once these things become commonplace the symptoms disappear.

After giving plenty of time to anecdotes, the article ends with a spokesman for the Health Protection Agency:

“In classrooms, a typical exposure is at 20 millionths of the guideline levels, whereas a mobile phone is 50% of guidelines,” says Dr Michael Clark, science spokesman for the Health Protection Agency.

“Twenty minutes on a mobile phone call is equivalent to a year in that classroom. It’s a completely different level of exposure. These are non-ionising radio waves. They’re not X-rays, or gamma rays, or ultra violet. It’s completely different in energy terms. I’m looking outside now and that’s electromagnetic radiation - visible light. Radio energies are a million times less energetic than ultraviolet light.”

The HPA finds no evidence of health risks, even for people using wifi-enabled laptops on their, um, laps. The World Health Organisation agrees. As the spokesman said, the average power density from using a mobile phone is much greater, but there seems to be no reasonable basis for thinking they cause harm either. As far as I can tell, even the evidence from the most extreme what-would-happen-if-we-glued-twenty-mobile-phones-to-a-baby’s-head-for-a-month studies is inconclusive. I think it’s fair to put this kind of low-frequency EMF radiation way down the scale of things to worry about.

A Flickr easter egg adds festive imagery to any photographs with notes containing the text “ho ho ho hat” or “ho ho ho beard”. Clearly, there would be no point doing such a thing to fellow blogmeeters. Via BoingBoing.

Does anyone else find that after watching Torchwood they think in a welsh accent? Just me? Never mind then.

The National Secular Society says:

Former Today editor Rod Liddle is set to launch a broadside against atheism in a programme for Channel 4 entitled The Trouble with Atheism – which will be broadcast on 18 December. Mr Liddle says he will demonstrate how similar atheism is to religion.

Sounds interesting. However, this is the guy who recently wrote, in the course of a Spectator interview with Richard Dawkins:

Which brings me to the difficult stuff — and Darwinism. It is a creed to which Dawkins cleaves with the fervour of the fundamentalist, the true believer. And it is the real chink in his armour. For example, because Darwin showed us that life forms progress from the simple to the complex over hundreds of thousands of years of gradual modification, it therefore follows (according to Dawkins) that there cannot have been a divine being present before the amoebae swam in those soupy oceans at Earth’s toddler stage — because he would have had to be more complex than those organisms which followed him. And that doesn’t fit with the theory.

What? Aside from the dubious characterisation (which is contradicted by the next paragraph anyway) I don’t think anyone’s ever argued that a deity couldn’t have existed at the primordial soup stage because it would have been more complex than that which followed it. That’s a strange argument, and there are indeed multiple problems with it. I’ve never heard it suggested that evolution actively disproves deities, it’s more that evolution provides an explanation for probably the largest evidence for the existence of a deity, namely that the natural world looks like it’s been designed. A deity becomes superfluous, so why believe in one? It’s possible he’s simplifying a superficially similar argument to do with the rather large question of the beginning of the universe, but that’s still to do with the probability of an inherently complex deity versus a simple process, not that it wouldn’t be possible due to increasing evolutionary complexity (not that evolution necessarily makes beings more complex, anyway).

Mr Liddle seems to have misunderstood the issues to the extent that he thinks the entire basis for disbelieving in a god hinges upon Darwin’s theory being entirely correct:

But what if the theory, in its entirety, doesn’t hold — as Dawkins concedes might be possible? Even now, a century and a half after Darwin wrote The Origin of Species, the notion of gradual, cumulative change in every case is being challenged (most recently by the evo-devo school, which believes that sudden change can occur within species within a single generation). Like all scientific theories, Darwinism will be amended — perhaps beyond recognition. Perhaps it will be discarded entirely. Either way, disavowing a divine being because it doesn’t quite fit in with another here-today-gone-tomorrow theory seems a tad peremptory. The question Dawkins can never satisfactorily answer is: what if Darwin was wrong? And yet, as a scientist, he must be aware that the likelihood is that Darwin was wrong here or there. In which case, where does that leave his philosophical argument?

“[T]he notion of gradual, cumulative change in every case is being challenged”? Ok, maybe, but it’s a long way from overturning current theory, and there’s more to evolution than just gradual changes. I don’t know all that much about the evo-devo school, but I’m pretty sure it still works on the basis of natural selection, no matter how large the generational mutations. But even if Darwin (and modern theory) somehow turned out to be wrong, it would make little difference to atheistic arguments because they’re not built upon evolution in the way Mr Liddle thinks. Sure, you’d have to find another explanation for the life’s complexity, but it would have to explain the vast amount of evidence showing ‘evolutionary’ lineages, and there’s no reason to immediately turn to a deity for this.

You also can’t just say that because scientific theories are continually revised - or ‘here-today-gone-tomorrow’ if you like - anything that follows from them (which the non-existence of god doesn’t anyway) is unreliable. That’s getting it backwards. The point is that predictions can be tested, and the theory is altered, supported or even discarded accordingly. By revising theories science hones in on the truth, and that’s very different from the “things change therefore there’s no point making predictions” attitude that Mr Liddle suggests. If all the evidence fits with a theory, it’s perfectly reasonable to come to tentative conclusions based upon it.

The whole article is really quite odd. I’ll watch the atheism show, but if it’s anything like the above I don’t hold out much hope.

Update on 19/12: I’ll update this when I’ve actually watched the show, but anybody looking for responses could do worse than see here (and not just because somebody in the comments linked to me), here and the comment thread here.

Last year I bought a demure little Christmas tree for my flat. It fitted the table well, and sat just in front of the window without bothering anybody. I planned to get something similar this year.

Um. They didn’t have any.

Is big. It’s not all that clear on the photo, but it spills over the sides rather a lot. If you try to watch tv from one side of the sofa you get a face full of bauble. On the upside, it’s visible from the street
I also managed to break a set of lights. They flared and went out after I turned the plug on, despite working fine before. I thought the point of parallel cables was for that not to happen? I’m sure that was what they told me in GCSE physics…

I’ve had complaints about the advent calendar being late today. Sorry about that. I’m feeling pretty awful with what’s hopefully the worst of a cold, and only remembered the calendar just as I was going to sleep last night. At which point the last thing I felt like doing was being awake any longer. I had something of a lie-in this morning, too. Bleurgh. Gonna go have a bath of lemsip.

Incidentally, some kind blogger linked to me pointing out that advent calendars are only for kids, and presumably I should be terribly ashamed, or something. I haven’t had many people take the time to tell me I’m childish since, oddly enough, school. How odd. Nevertheless, I consider myself well and truly corrected, and shall go on a growing up course at the earliest opportunity.

We finished the seven week American Smooth course this evening, and it was definitely worth the 45-minute drive over to Worcester. The end result is a ballroom-spanning routine made up of four separate ‘groups’, each of which could individually be inserted into a standard waltz at opportune moments. If the floor isn’t too crowded, we *might* try it out at the Christmas Ball this Saturday. I don’t want to get in the way of regular waltzers, though, so we’d have to pick our moment.

It was also very useful to see a different approach towards basic stance and posture. Our teachers do a good job, but another perspective always helps. For example, the Smooth teacher emphasised that heel leads are very important in the ballroom dances, which we didn’t know as our regular class always concentrates on the movements of the steps rather than how to step itself.

I was hoping the course might end with a lift, but they must be leaving them to the ‘improvers’ Smooth class in the new year, which unfortunately is on the same night as our regular dance class. However, Monday nights will change to the beginners Argentine Tango! Quite tempted by that. At professional level, it looks like this:

Oh, my.