Yes, it’s a deliberately sceptic-baiting title. The plan is: it winds people up, they point out how I’m wrong and I learn something.

I’ve not completely mad though. Obviously not all psychic readings are true. It would take an enormous talent to ignore reality that has shown many readings to be false or fraudulent. If I could do that I’d have a golden future in politics. No, I’m only arguing the true ones are true.

Even that sounds odd. By definition the true readings are true. Isn’t it a bit difficult to believe that any readings are true if, like me, you don’t believe in psychic powers? Surely that’s going to need a weaselly approach to ‘truth’? I prefer to say simple, but you can call weasel in the comment box below if you like.

The idea has been forming since I went on an Applied Cold Reading course. Applied Cold Reading works best if you can get things wrong, but sometimes it happens that you fail to get things wrong.* String a few of these fails together and your subject is stunned by how much you got right. Now you and I know that we were aiming for misses, but to your subject that doesn’t matter. You were right. That’s what she knows. The fact that you were right by accident or chance is irrelevant. You were right.

And now you’re in trouble because she’ll expect you to keep being right. But that’s your problem.
Read more on “Psychic Readings are True” »

I’ve known about this book for a while, but the title put me off reading it. It sounds too smug to me, and while there are reasons for reclassifying Pluto I don’t think it’s something astronomers could be smug about. Planet was not a term invented by astronomers, it came from popular culture in the ancient world. I’m also wary of how useful a rigid definition of planet is. The terrestrial planets are clearly not like the Gas Giants, and perhaps you could even distinguish between Gas Giants and Ice Giants. The definition for dwarf planet is terrible, and how can a dwarf planet not be a planet. Finally Mike Brown discovered Xena, which he argued could be the tenth planet, but I can recall there were a rash of planets discovered. Wasn’t Sedna supposed to be bigger than Pluto too? Then there was Eris and Dynomia too. So I wasn’t expecting to read much beyond the first chapter.

So first up, I still think it’s a bad title. Not because it’s smug, but because the book is the opposite. It’s warm, endearing and very human. The author is also extremely well-placed to write the book because there was indeed a rash of planets discovered, and he was the guy who assembled the team responsible for them, including Quaoar, Sedna, Xena and the moon Gabrielle which are now officially named Eris and Dysnomia. Basically if it’s a distant body in the solar system that I’ve heard of, it’s likely that Mike Brown discovered it.

This could have so easily been a book purely about number-crunching, programming and extremely faint dots on photographic slides. He’s also included a lot about his family life, especially the birth of his daughter. A quick skim of the reviews on Amazon show that some people hate this. They have an opinion that Science is pure logic devoid of emotion. I blame Spock. In contrast I think it’s very important. It shows how science is a human activity. The removal of Pluto from the planets wasn’t done in isolation, it was part of a very human desire to explore.

The importance of humanity’s relationship to planets comes through very early. More or less straight away he points out that people recognised planets long before they had professional astronomers. He also notices that there’s very little evidence of planetshock the first time a planet was discovered since ancient times. If you’d asked me before I read this book I would have said it was Uranus that was the first planet discovered since antiquity in 1781. I would have been wrong.

Though planets were so deeply embedded into many aspects of everyday life, there is no recording of the public reaction to the first and most significant shock to the word planet. In the sixteenth century the idea began to spread that the sun, rather than the earth, was at the center of the universe and that the earth and the planets revolved around it. Suddenly, the wanderers were in disarray. Instead of the sun and the moon and the other planets revolving around the earth, five of them (the planets) went around one of them (the sun), while the seventh (the moon) went around the earth. The earth, like five of the wanderers, also went around the sun.

Once you have a heliocentric system Earth has to be a planet. I’m kicking myself for not realising that. With hindsight it’s obvious, though you can see why the discovery of Earth as a planet wasn’t a big trauma in itself. He also tackles the minor planets like Ceres and Pallas and their quiet demotion into asteroids.

None of this is done with a sense of “how stupid people were for not knowing this”. Instead I get a sense that Mike Brown believes that people were using the word planet in a way that was useful to them at the time. Likewise with more recent astronomers he’s happy to give credit to their work. Where he has been able to go further he’s acknowledged that he has had the benefit of living at a time with techniques like computer analysis that weren’t available to earlier astronomers. At one point he argues that Clyde Tombaugh could have seen Eris, were it not for Eris being at the far point of its orbit.

He also tackles the controversy over the discovery of Haumea. At the time I got the vague impression that a slow team of astronomers had missed a planet in their data and, when it was publicly released, another team analysed the data and found it. Neither side of the dispute claim that’s what happened, so I was utterly wrong there. Mike Brown explains why he delayed announcing the discovery of Haumea. At the top of the post I said Sedna was bigger than Pluto. It isn’t. Its much more shiny, and that’s why it was thought to be bigger. Mike Brown’s team were taking nine months from discovery to publication and it was when the codename for the planet was released that it was discoverable in a Google search on some telescope logs. This also explains why Xena was rush announced and partly my confusion over exactly what was and was not discovered.

The book closes with the vote in Prague to say there are eight planets in the solar system. From what I heard of the meeting the event was chaotic, so he does an excellent job finding a narrative to follow. It also explains the awful ‘dwarf planet’ term. The first vote was to demote Pluto to a ‘dwarf planet’ which is not a planet. It makes no sense until he then says there was an amendment to call the 8 planets ‘classical planets’, which is another awful term. If that second vote had passed then Pluto would have been smuggled back as a planet. So the reason we have ‘dwarf planets’ that are not planets is a botched job at a compromise.

He also argues that the definition of a planet itself doesn’t matter that much. The definition, he argues, isn’t about what is a planet, more an explanation of why Pluto isn’t a planet – even if it’s a bad explanation. Instead he argues that concepts are more important rather than definitions that wannabe lawyers can wrestle with.

The language is accessible. You’re not going to be able to discover your own planet after reading this book, but you’ll have a better impression of what life is like when researching. For example there’s this:

Looking at vastly more sky than anyone else had ever looked at for large objects out in the Kuiper belt was so immensely exciting that I could hardly contain myself. I knew that there would be big discoveries, and having new pictures come in night after night after night with only a break for the full moon kept everything at a constant peak. I talked to my friends about new planets. I thought about names for new planets. I gave lectures about the possibility of new planets. I did everything I could, except find new planets.

I think that failure to make any progress on what you’re sure is an exciting project is familiar to most researchers.

With the IAU’s poor handling of Pluto, it’s easy to see how this could have been a dreadful book. I still think the title is going to put a lot of people off. Is it really going to appeal to Plutophiles? That’s a shame because inside the covers is one of the most likeable books I’ve read for a long while. It’s definitely worth a read when the paperback comes out.

You can read some of the book in excerpts at Mike Brown’s blog.

There’s a kerfuffle over a new translation of the Bible into Jamaican Patois that has helped throw what bothers me about the British Prime Minister, David Cameron’s, embrace of Christian values into sharp relief.

David Cameron has recently given a speech celebrating the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible. Some of this I like. For example:

…[T]he King James Bible has bequeathed a body of language that permeates every aspect of our culture and heritage from everyday phrases to our greatest works of literature, music and art. We live and breathe the language of the King James Bible, sometimes without even realising it.

It depends on how pedantic you want to be about this to say how true it is. There’s evidence that some common phrases attributed to the KJV are much older in some variants. Likewise I was going to give The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak Matthew 26:41 and Mark 14:38 as an example of something very biblical that often appears in secular speech, but if you follow those links you’ll see I’ve modernised it a bit. For example in Mark the phrase is actually: The spirit truly is ready, but the flesh is weak.. Now you’d have to be an utter curmudgeon to deny that the King James Bible popularised the phrase, but equally translations move on because languages move on.

David Cameron picks another evocative phrase:

One of my favourites is the line “For now we see through a glass, darkly.” It is a brilliant summation of the profound sense that there is more to life, that we are imperfect, that we get things wrong, that we should strive to see beyond our own perspective. The key word is darkly – profoundly loaded, with many shades of meaning. I feel the power is lost in some more literal translations.

The New International Version says: “Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror”

The Good News Bible: “What we see now is like a dim image in a mirror”

They feel not just a bit less special but dry and cold, and don’t quite have the same magic and meaning.

The criticism of the Jamaican Bible is perhaps the opposite. Bishop Alvin Bailey, at the Portmore Holiness Church of God near Kingston, says: “I don’t think the Patois words can effectively communicate what the English words have communicated. Even those (Patois) words that we would want to use to fully explain what was in the original, are words that are vulgar.”

I’m not sure this is a fair criticism. Here’s the same verse in three translations See if you can guess which one is the KJV verse.

1. My lover tried to unlatch the door, and my heart thrilled within me.
2. My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my heart was moved for him.
3. My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him.

The passage is from the Song of Solomon 5:4.* One translation is – I’ll grant you – profoundly loaded, perhaps imparting a meaning that isn’t immediately obvious from the two other ‘literal’ translations. But I also think in modern terms it might be considered vulgar. When you look at what is in the Bible, I’m stuck wondering what vulgarity Patois inflicts that isn’t already there. I think something overlooked is the power of a translation.

I thought the first full translation of the Bible in the British Isles was William Morgan’s Welsh Bible, used to turn the Welsh away from Catholicism. I was wrong. A quick skim through Wikipedia shows me the Bishops’ Bible beat it by twenty years, and while the Geneva Bible wasn’t actually translated into English in the British Isles, it’s still an immensely important translation in the history of England. In these cases translation is a political and often rebellious act. The Geneva Bible was a Protestant translation and gave them a Bible with which to fight the Latin of Catholicism. The Bishops’ Bible was officially sanctioned so it’s hard to call it rebellious, but even so it was a Protestant Bible at a time when England was an enemy of strong Catholic power in Europe.

Translating a Bible into Jamaican Patois is a subtle, but strong, statement that current Christian authority has failed, at least to some degree. So what does a supporting an established translation against new versions mean? In the UK the government is sending an official Bible with a foreword by political heavyweight⁺ Michael Gove. The media concentrated on the predictable complaint by the National Secular Society and atheists, but even Christians are aware that official religions can take dissent badly. The pretence is that ethics are derived from the Bible, but as Conservapedia is showing, people make Bibles to suit their ethics.

While I can see there are aesthetic merits to various translations, in this case elevating one translation and disparaging others carries a big political payload, even if the judgement is aesthetic. It might be possible to turn the book of Habakkuk into a thrilling page turner, but it would probably involve some extremely loose translation. But is any church leader likely to say: “My favourite book is Jeffrey Archer’s translation of Habakkuk. It’s hugely inaccurate, but it’s gripping from start to end!”? It seems unlikely you can divorce aesthetics from truth unless you live in what Kelvin Holdsworth called a theologically neutral society.

Photo: Joshua 18, Abandoned Bible by Patrick Feller. Licenced under a Creative Commons BY licence.

* It’s well worth reading the biblical commentary for classic lines like: By the “door” is meant the door of her heart, which was in a great measure shut against Christ, through the prevalence of corruption; and the “hole” in it shows that it was not entirely shut up…

+ Or paperweight if you prefer.

I saw a shooting star last night as it streaked across a sky full of stars. I kid you not! You could look up and see thousands of stars. Now, astronomy mavens might not be too impressed by that. Many people can see stars as dim as magnitude six in a dark sky, lucky people can see dimmer stars. There accounts for around 6000 visible naked-eye stars. But for many of us that’s simply not true.

I used to live in a suburb of Derby. When I moved to Powys I noticed there were more stars in the sky. A lot more. So many I was tempted to buy a telescope. The next 30 days were clouded out, so that killed that idea, but on the days when stars are visible they’re stunningly impressive. There is a way to quantify how impressive the night sky is that you can help with next year.

When I was in Derby I took part in GLOBE at Night. It’s a survey that asks you to describe what you can see. The version I took part in asked people to say which stars they could see in Orion, the image on the right. It’s a good choice because the belt makes it easy to identify. I could see those. I could also see Betelguese (top-left), Bellatrix (top-right) and Rigel (bottom-right). If I squinted and stared hard I could imagine I could see Saiph (bottom-left), but really I couldn’t. There was a sodium glow of dank yellow reaching up into the sky like lurid phlegm-coloured fog. It was the first time I’d realised how bad the local light pollution was. In contrast, I can’t account for every star in the photo shown, partly because as your eye dark-adapts you see more stars. However, this image is a very good impression of what I saw. I had no trouble at all seeing Orion‘s belt. It didn’t look like a figure of gems on a velvet background. Instead the major stars looked like gems over a background where someone had sneezed diamond dust.

It’s possible this long-term cold I’ve had since September is affecting me more than I think.

The difference isn’t just in quantity. A dark sky makes a big difference to the quality of the sky. I thought I knew my way around the night sky pretty well. Last night I could see Orion out of my window, but took a little while to find Taurus. Again, a good amateur astronomer might find this funny. Taurus should be unmissable. Even more so when you have a dark sky, making the stars even easier to see. In the Northern hemisphere you look a little way to the right and you’ll see the horns of Taurus the bull live a V shape. Aldebaran sits at the top of one of the horns. This V is made of bright stars, it’s the most visible part of the constellation, it is striking. But when you have a properly dark sky it’s striking among a whole load of other stars. In Derby Taurus was to the right of Orion. In Powys it still is, but this time there’s an awful lot of stars in between them. It’s easier to find your when around the night sky when you can only see the prominent stars. Here, it’s almost like the sky has developed a glittering interference pattern.

I know that light pollution has been a topic of pain for astronomers for decades. In my head I can fully understand it as a quantitive argument. Dark skies = more stars. That might not be enough for a powerful emotive argument. Imagine you live somewhere where the night sky is rubbish. Reducing light pollution isn’t such a big deal. It just means more rubbish looking stars. I also wonder if heavy light pollution, which is worst nearest the horizon, helps distance people from the Cosmos. Banishing the visible stars to the highest parts of the sky emphasise the separation between earthly life and the rest of the universe. A dark sky shows that where you are is the place where the Earth meets the Sky. Below you soil, above only the unimaginable heights to the edge of the universe, and you smack in the middle.

That feels different and it’s something you can’t reproduce in a planetarium.

Photo: Orion by Eduardo Mariño. Licenced under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA licence.

As a coda, I remember reading about the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew in Astronomy magazine. After the power had been cut the night sky was exposed. People phoned up local universities, planetaria and observatories to ask what the lights in the sky were. At the time I lived in the country, so I found the idea that people could be puzzled by stars hilarious. Having lived in a city now, and knowing that many people have never lived anywhere else I have a lot more empathy. Imagine living through a hurricane and then, for the first time in your life, the universe arrives on your doorstep. No wonder you’d want to phone someone to check it’s normal.

I finally got around to getting The Pericles Commission by Gary Corby this week. is it any good? If the suspense is too much for you, Gary’s a nice bloke, so if it were rubbish I wouldn’t mention I’ve read it. The reason I left off buying it for so long was that I was waiting for the paperback. In the end the Kindle price dropped to the paperback, so I got that version. I’ll also be buying the sequel The Ionia Sanction, possibly not till the price drops with the paperback for that too, but then again it might be a Christmas treat instead.

The book is based on a real event. Ephialtes established the Athenian democracy (if you ignore Cleisthenes), and then was killed a few days after by xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (I just realised, this would be a big spoiler). This, as Gary Corby points out in his author’s note, is in a few lines of the Constitution of the Athenians – which we’ll say was written by Aristotle because a discussion of the authorship would be tedious, inconclusive and utterly irrelevant to the point.

The book opens quickly.

A dead man fell from the sky, landing at my feet with a thud. I stopped and stood there like a fool, astonished to see him lying where I was about to step. He lay facedown in the dirt, arms spread wide, with an arrow protruding out his back. He’d been shot through the heart.

It was obvious he was dead, but I knelt down and touched him anyway, perhaps because I needed to assure myself that he was real. The body was warm to my touch. The blood that stained my fingertips, from where I had touched his wound, was slippery and wet but already beginning to dry in the heat, and the small cloud of dust his fall had raised made my nose itch as it settled.

It doesn’t normally rain corpses, so where had this one come from? I looked up. There was a ledge above me, and another to the left. The one directly above was the Rock of the Areopagus, home to the council chambers of our elder statesmen. The other to the left, but much farther away, was the Acropolis. There was no doubt about it; this man had fallen from the political heights.

Read more on “The Pericles Commission by Gary Corby” »

I took a weekend off to attend a course in London on Applied Cold Reading. The course was given by Ian Rowland, who might be familiar to some readers as ‘Ian who from where?’, for everyone else he’s the author of The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading.

The Full Facts Book is mainly about Cold Reading in a psychic context. There are lots of people who can tell you how cold reading works in a psychic context. It relies on Barnum statements, statements that feel personal but they’re true for everyone. I don’t find that a satisfying explanation. I get the impression that the Barnum effect works best on gullible people. I know a few people who take psychics seriously and they’re all far less gullible than me. Another reason it’s a poor explanation is that there aren’t many people with a father called Brian, with dark hair, who’s missing fingers from his left hand.
Read more on “Applied Cold Reading” »

The short version of this post is that Astronomy in the Upper Palaeolithic? by Hayden & Villeneuve is a great paper. If you’re interested in astronomy in hunter-gatherer societies you should read it. I’m going to disagree with some parts of the paper below, but if Hayden & Villeneuve are wrong about some things, then it’s for interesting reasons. And it’s by no means certain that I’m right to disagree about the things that I do.

The archaeology of astronomy is contentious at the best of times, but the Palaeolithic is a particularly difficult period to study, because the remains are so fragmentary and few in number. So to put this in context we need to know when the Upper Palaeolithic is.

You’re probably familiar with the Three Age System, Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages. In this system in Europe the Stone Age ends roughly between 4000 and 2500 BCE depending on where you are and exactly where you want to draw the line. Everything before this is a long time period so you can split it up further. The Neolithic is a period when people settle down and become farmers, it starts between 8000 and 4000 BCE in Europe depending on where you are. The south-east of Europe adopts farming much sooner than the people in the north-west. The Palaeolithic, if you ignore all sorts of subtleties is the period before that. To narrow down things further the Palaeolithic is sub-divided into three sections, Lower, Middle and Upper. Again, roughly speaking, the Lower Palaeolithic is the time of early humans, the Middle is the time of Neanderthals roughly 300,000 BCE to 35,000 BCE, and the Upper Palaeolithic is the period after that with Homo Sapiens.

This gives the astronomical readers a rough idea of when we’re talking about. Archaeological readers could very easily pick holes in more or less everything I’ve said about the dates. One important reason we’ll get to later is that when we use terms like Bronze Age or Palaeolithic, we’re not directly talking about a specific time, we’re talking about the technology we find that’s associated with a specific time. So some ‘periods’ make no sense outside of Europe. If you live somewhere where Obsidian was much easier to get than Bronze, then it’s possible local people never bothered with a Bronze Age.

Hayden & Villeneuve realise that evidence from the Upper Palaeolithic is scant, but they also recognise that the Upper Palaeolithic is not just a time, but it’s tied to a place. What they’re interested in is whether or not ethnographies of modern hunter-gatherer societies can give us information about possible uses for astronomy. You can’t simply say that modern hunter-gatherers from now were exactly like hunter-gatherers twenty thousand years ago, but you can see if tackling astronomical problems produces debris similar to what archaeologists find. You can also see if there are common features in astronomy around the world from hunter-gatherers. If you can see hunter-gatherer astronomy in action then you have clues why hunter-gatherers used astronomy in the past and that can produce work a lot more interesting than “there’s marks on this bone, people could be counting moon phases.”
Read more on “The earliest astronomers?” »

So, there’s these sunstones that some people think Vikings could have used to navigate to America. It’s possible though the evidence is weak.

A few months back there was a paper where the physics was sound but the historical context was lacking. Today the news is a new paper, A depolarizer as a possible precise sunstone for Viking navigation by polarized skylight. My problem with the earlier paper was that while the physics made sense, there was no real attempt at historical context. This paper is different.

The argument is this:

1. If you place something with a small hole in front of the Alderney sunstone two areas of light appear.
2. By getting the areas to the same brightness you can work out where the sun is.
3. That might have been useful in Elizabethan times because cannons can deflect magnetic compasses.
4. But we’ve not checked any historical records to see how Tudor sailors coped with that, nor if our made-up hole thing has any historical evidence for it
5. Because sunstones means Vikings! VIKINGS I TELL YOU!

Now, if you’re interested in the optics of calcite, this is a good paper – but why would you be interested in the optics of calcite? The only obvious reason I can think of is historical. And a paper that tackles a historical problem by pretty much ignoring the historical period your artefact comes from seems to me to be eccentric.

Anyway, if you were sailing in northern latitudes and you couldn’t see the sun due to mist, but the light was bright enough for polarisation to be detectable, then you could use this device to locate the direction of the sun. The sunstones would have to be better polarisers than the filters I use for my camera, because I can’t detect any noticeable polarisation in the overcast sky today. Once you have a direction, with no time or altitude for the observation, what are you going to do with that?

The coverage I’ve seen at the Guardian and at the BBC, is credited to two good science journalists, yet neither has contacted a Tudor or Viking historian for their opinion. This baffles me.

Update 3rd Nov 2011: Wired / ScienceNow do report that no sunstone has been found with a Viking shipwreck or settlement. They also have an independent expert commenting on the possibilities of Tudor navigation. Unfortunately it’s a biologist on the difficulty of sighting from a Viking ship.

Is there something clever about the paper I’ve overlooked?

Photo: Viking Line by Eoghan O’Lionnain. Licenced under a Creative Commons BY-SA licence.

I’ve been thinking over the Project Barnum debate, as seen on Jourdemayne‘s blog. It’s a good example of how two intelligent people sincerely trying to work out what is best can disagree. Following allegations against Sally Morgan, should psychic events be banned from theatres? Jourdemayne argues no and Michael Marshall says yes.

I agree with Jourdemayne, but not with how she gets there. Read more on “Barnum and Bunkum” »

There’s an interesting story on the BBC News website: Teaching ‘better at school than university’ – survey

When asked to compare teaching at school and university, less than one-in-five privately educated pupils favoured their university tutoring. Almost two-thirds declared that the teaching they had at school had been better.

The results are not a surprise. I took A-levels (pre-university exams) twice. The first time I was taught maths, chemistry and physics and I learned about chemistry and physics.

The second time was a few years later for Economics and Law evening classes. Here I was taught what I needed to know to pass the exams. In the case of Law, there were always four questions in Paper II, Homicide, Tort, Contract and Constitutional law. You needed to answer two of four, so the evening class only covered Homicide and Tort. I do not have a rounded legal education, but the college was not graded on my education it was graded on the results I got. Behind trained for the exam was a huge success and I scored more UCAS points on my one year evening class courses than in my two year standard courses.

Every year for over twenty years the number and quality of A-level passes has gone up. The arguments are usually over whether or not the exams are getting easier, or the pupils better. What is less often noted is that schools are graded and compared against their neighbours on their pass rate. Unsurprisingly they’ve become more and more ruthless about train pupils to pass an exam because that’s what matters, not whether or not they understand why they’re doing what they’re doing.
Read more on “Teaching Apples and Oranges” »