Collaborating with Aliens

Alun Politics, Science, The Past 4 Comments , , , ,

UFO behind Delphi

Alun Salt / Flickr

The Treas­ury of the Atheni­ans at Delphi. Noth­ing to see here.

I’ve been kick­ing around an idea for a paper for a couple of years. Every so often Stephen Hawk­ing will announce that con­tact with an extra-terrestrial civil­isa­tion would be a Very Bad Thing. There­fore silence, or as close to it as pos­sible is a good idea. It’s not just Stephen Hawk­ing, many other people agree. Hawk­ing makes the point that con­tact from Europe to other regions hasn’t gone well for the nat­ives since 1492. I think this is a bet­ter argu­ment than “Ali­ens are scary”, but I think he’s using the wrong ana­logy. There is room for a paper that takes another view. There’s a couple of reas­ons I haven’t pushed on with it.

The main reason is that I’ve not been clear about where the paper could be pub­lished. Ok, Hawk­ing hasn’t pub­lished his belief as a paper either, but he’s a fam­ous phys­i­cist. Fam­ous phys­i­cists are pre­sumed not only to be experts on Phys­ics, but all sci­ences, pseudos­ciences, etc. I can’t claim this expert­ise. If I’m going to say any­thing mean­ing­ful I should at least have it scru­tin­ised. This is the second prob­lem. It would be weird if my pos­i­tion were unequi­voc­ally cor­rect, par­tic­u­larly as we have no data at all on extra-terrestrial con­tact — unless you con­sider the Mars nano-bacteria that were announced and then dis­missed as a trial run. I could rely on review­ers to pick up obvi­ous errors or blind spots, but there’s surely a bet­ter way to fix prob­lems before sub­mit­ting to a journal with some collaboration.

I am part of a group of people who were apply­ing to have a blog hos­ted some­where. I think that’s very likely to not hap­pen. I’ve been quiet here, partly because of a broken arm and partly with a pile up of work that I need to sort through because it’s been delayed by my arm. It’s a shame because the site has a big audi­ence, but maybe not too big a shame as this site has a qual­ity audi­ence. What I’m inter­ested in now is if a col­lab­or­at­ive or even massively col­lab­or­at­ive paper could be writ­ten and how could it work.

Before even dis­cuss­ing tools there’s an issue over dir­ec­tion. As I said at the start, I think Stephen Hawk­ing is wrong. You might think he’s right. He may even be right even if the method he got there was wrong. One of the inspir­a­tions for this approach is Timothy Gowers’ col­lab­or­at­ive approach to solv­ing math­em­at­ical prob­lems. He pulled together a group of people to tackle a prob­lem for a couple of years that he alone could not solve. The prob­lem was solved in seven weeks by a method that came as a sur­prise to him. I can see how that can demon­strably work. In the case of this paper, the sample is zero, and the res­ult is (expec­ted to be) a counter-opinion. Without a real­ity check is it pos­sible to write such a paper with open collaboration?

Alan Cann has used another method. He put up a paper for open peer review. I think it was a clever idea and I could do the same. My worry here is that some of the ana­lo­gies will be out­side my period and I think there could be very good and insight­ful com­ments from people who say, “No, you’ve got this wrong. You should be look­ing at…” In my opin­ion this makes the paper bet­ter and it’s worth author credit. If you give the per­son credit then to an extent you tor­pedo the claim that the paper is pre-reviewed because to some extent it’s self-reviewed.

I’m try­ing to think of a work­able solu­tion, and you’re wel­come to tell me I’m wrong about this too.

I think I should put up the first draft of the paper, prob­ably on Google Docs. I prefer Dok­uWiki, but leav­ing it open for com­ments and edit­ing could leave it wrecked. For the people who leave sub­stan­tial com­ments which can be pos­it­ive or neg­at­ive, but also indic­ate a dir­ec­tion to go for­ward with the paper, I offer co-authorship. I close the paper from pub­lic view and we write and re-write until it’s ready to go to a journal that’s either OA or happy to have an arXiv pre-print up. The gamble here is that enough people will see the call to review the first draft that it gen­er­ates a sens­ible amount of feed­back to improve it.

Ideally, I’d like to have a sys­tem that can re-used so that I can use it for gen­eral his­tory or archae­ology papers as well as odd ones like this. The reason for choos­ing this topic as the test sub­ject is that it’s doesn’t mat­ter that much to me if it gets massively delayed and it will very neatly high­light some areas where I am emphat­ic­ally not an expert and that col­lab­or­a­tion could be useful.

If your Stonehenge theory is nonsense, is mine rational because it’s not yours?

Alun Politics, Science, The Past 25 Comments , ,

Revellers at the solstice in Stonehenge

Sound at Stonehenge

I’m cur­rently work­ing with a group of blog­gers on a site to be launched some­where in the next few months. I’m not sure where yet. One of the fea­tures of the site is an informal rule that we won’t com­ment on news till at least seven days have passed from mak­ing the head­lines. There’s a couple of reas­ons for this.

We’re all busy. Chas­ing the news is work and takes time. If we get stopped before we can fin­ish it could be a while before we pick up the story again. In the mean­time hot news has become old cold news and the key points have already been said a dozen times by every­one else. The post gets spiked and the time is wasted. Inten­tion­ally plan­ning for a longer cycle changes how you approach a story and gives you not just the story to ana­lyse but also the reac­tion too. In the case of the Stone­henge acous­tics story the reac­tion is more inter­est­ing than the base story itself.

As a reminder Stephen Waller presen­ted a talk at a meet­ing of Amer­ican Asso­ci­ation for the Advance­ment of Sci­ence in Van­couver. In it he pro­posed that the design of Stone­henge was related to aud­it­ory inter­fer­ence pat­terns between the sound of two flutes being played. Andy Burnham points out the obvi­ous prob­lem in his com­ment.

“Waller rigged two flutes to an air pump so they played the same note con­tinu­ously” OK, fine, so how on earth is this rel­ev­ant to the prac­tic­al­it­ies of an ancient soci­ety? In order to get strong, static can­cel­la­tions in the sound you would need equal and unvary­ing sound pres­sure levels from each instru­ment, and for the sources to be from the same two points in space. How pre­cisely would two flute play­ers do this in prac­tice without an air pump? ie hav­ing to take breaths and carry on this trick for any length of time. This is utter nonsense.

Andy Burnham is pretty much gold in this thread. In reac­tion to the idea this sound could be achieved by cir­cu­lar breath­ing, he also adds:

I don’t thin cir­cu­lar breath­ing is the answer — it’s pretty dif­fi­cult on low res­ist­ance wind instru­ments such as the flute. Didgeri­doos and such­like won’t exhibit this effect — you need a high fre­quency pure tone — as close to a sine wave as pos­sible — ie a flute. Bag­pipes wouldn’t work either, unless someone inven­ted some sort of ‘flute bag­pipes’. A reedy bag­pipe sound is rich in har­mon­ics. The har­monic fre­quen­cies from the two instru­ments won’t cre­ate stand­ing wave can­cel­la­tions in the same places in space as the fun­da­mental tones, so you won’t get same strong can­cel­la­tion effect. And as I said you also need two fixed amp­litudes and closely fixed point sources for the effect to work.

Sound is a dif­fi­cult sub­ject for archae­olo­gists. Flutes or pipes seem likely, as to drums, but the closest pre­his­toric musical instru­ments, that I know archae­olo­gists have found, are lurs from Den­mark. These date to around the 8th cen­tury BC and sur­vived because they were bronze, not organic mater­ial like wood or bone. You can see them in the logo for Lurpak but­ter. It’s been a while since I’ve read about this, so I’d be sur­prised if there weren’t now some­thing older known. There are a couple of can­did­ates for bone flutes that are older, this is the most prom­ising arte­fact, but I don’t know how widely accep­ted they are yet.

Even though there’s scant evid­ence for music in the Neo­lithic and Bronze Age Brit­ish Isles, it’s an odd leap to say it didn’t exist. Music in some form seems to be a con­stant in human soci­ety, so this is where a min­im­al­ist approach breaks down. But it’s not just musical instru­ments that are miss­ing. I sus­pect a lot of Stone­henge is miss­ing too.
Bits of it have broken off and it’s easy to spot where stones were miss­ing but refilling these gaps, as many recon­struc­tions do, doesn’t go far enough for me. The stones are the skel­eton of Stone­henge. We don’t know if they were the whole body. We do know that the skel­eton was a lot of work. The hard sar­sen stones are craf­ted like wood, with tenon and mor­tice joints. Archae­olo­gists cur­rently believe that the blue­stones were trans­por­ted from far Wales. In light of this what else would have been at a liv­ing Stonehenge?

If you visit places of wor­ship in mod­ern times, there’s a bit more than stone. There’s wooden seats, often dec­or­ated rather than plain. The walls are painted, win­dows often dec­or­ated. It’s not unusual to find holy books n plush vel­vet cush­ions and tex­tiles dyed in strik­ing col­ours draw­ing the eye here and there. We also know tex­tiles were used in Neo­lithic and Bronze Age times. So after the thou­sands of man-hours shap­ing the stones, how likely is it that Gareth turned to Shane and said: “That’s that done. No point in wast­ing time dec­or­at­ing it with tartans or drapes. That’ll just be tedi­ous and gaudy.”?

Once you add tex­tiles into Stone­henge the acous­tic and visual prop­er­ties change. There are many argu­ments that “If you look out of this gap you can see this star,” but you can’t if Blodwyn’s nifty eth­nic rug is in the way. As sci­ent­ists archae­olo­gists need a min­im­al­ist model of Stone­henge as a found­a­tion to build on, but this min­im­al­ist model is an unfin­ished work. It’s a tool to build an idea of what Stone­henge looked like on. If you’re going to say that it’s the fin­ished model and we don’t need tex­tiles, then all recon­struc­tions should show any­one there naked because there’s no evid­ence for the clothes people wore there either.

As Andy Burnham poin­ted out, Steven Waller’s approach misses the prac­tical use of Stone­henge by ancient peoples, and in this case adding people into the past makes Waller’s pro­posal either unwork­able or an aston­ish­ing Jenga tower of spe­cial plead­ing. It’s safe to say I’m uncon­vinced, but I’ve not been too impressed with some of the reac­tions to the story either. “Crank’ seemed a com­mon opin­ion, If Steven Waller were a crank then by present­ing his work at a sci­entific con­fer­ence he’s still closer to pro­fes­sional prac­tice than archae­olo­gists who issue a press release now before a talk in a few months time.

In fact a browse of his web­site shows he’s not likely to be a crank, just ter­ribly unaware of the dif­fer­ences in approach between US and UK prehistory.

The bulk of his work is on rock art at Amer­ican pet­ro­glyph sites. The acous­tics of rock art in the US is a new field, but pro­du­cing some inter­est­ing res­ults. Some archae­olo­gists are find­ing archae­oacous­tics much more intriguing than, to pick a ran­dom example, archae­oastro­nomy. But Amer­ican pre­his­tory is dif­fer­ent to Brit­ish pre­his­tory. They have a richer rock art record, espe­cially in the south­w­est. They also have eth­no­graphic records and research that can help con­nect mean­ing to sym­bols. It’s not per­fect, and I’d like to debunk one inter­pret­a­tion of a site this sum­mer, but it’s very very dif­fer­ent to the lim­ited things we can say about rock art here. It means that Waller’s Amer­ican work can rely on cul­tural inform­a­tion that we simply don’t have here. What is accep­ted by US archae­olo­gists about US sites is extremely spec­u­lat­ive when applied to UK sites.

Very few people have com­men­ted on work around archae­oacous­tics in gen­eral in rela­tion to this story. A few com­menters have men­tioned Deveraux’s work, but mainly the thrust has been this story must be debunked. I don’t think for a moment archae­olo­gists have con­sciously decided the out­sider must be expelled, but I won­der if an eager­ness to por­tray this as non­sense indic­ates some­thing more. Sub­con­sciously does reject­ing Waller as non­sense and the oppos­ite of what you do men­tally reaf­firm that your own the­or­ies must there­fore by default be sound reasoning?

For some­thing more pos­it­ive about how sound can be explored in archae­ology, Alan Boyle has writ­ten an inter­est­ing piece on MSNBC’s Cos­mic Log.

What lies beneath Achill-henge?

Alun Politics, The Past 1 Comment , , ,

Achill-henge

Achill-henge. Photo by Seequinn

It’s good to see Achill-henge being picked up by the BBC. This is a story that’s been around for a while. I think RTÉ’s video report is access­ible world­wide. The BBC just has a webpage that’s an intro­duc­tion to the story. You can also listen to the radio pro­gramme (world­wide I think) with the rel­ev­ant seg­ment at 6m04s.

It’s not a bad story, but from an archae­olo­gical point of view it misses the most inter­est­ing things. Firstly build­ing this ertsatz archae­olo­gical site may have dam­aged a real site. Usu­ally before con­struc­tion there will be test digs to check the con­struc­tion won’t des­troy some­thing of his­tor­ical import­ance. Achill is an extremely sens­it­ive archae­olo­gical site. There’s a long run­ning field school there because it has such a rich archae­olo­gical record. If you’re a fan of pre­his­toric remains, it seems a bit mad to risk des­troy­ing one to make a copy.

The second thing is the tem­plate chosen for the site. It’s Stone­henge. It’s a shoddy Stone­henge as any­one who’s been there could tell you, but it’s clearly a ring of tri­lithons. You don’t get those in Ire­land. There’s a romantic ideal that the pre­his­toric Brit­ish Isles were all Celtic but, as we learn more about sites, it’s becom­ing clear that there are dis­tinct­ive dif­fer­ences in tra­di­tions around the islands.

Tomnaverie Stone Circle

Tomnav­erie Stone Circle. Photo by Cameron Diack

This is Tomnav­erie Recum­bent Stone Circle. The recum­bent bit is the low stone in the middle, flanked by two tall stones. There’s plenty of stone circles like this around Aber­deen­shire, but you don’t get so many of them any­where else. There is a pos­sible astro­nom­ical align­ment. These circles tend to be set up so that the sum­mer full moon appears to roll across the top of the recum­bent stone every 18 years or so, due to the way the Moon’s orbit wobbles.

Drombeg Stone Circle

Drombeg Recum­bent Stone Circle. Photo by Todd Slagter

This is Drombeg Recum­bent Stone Circle. It’s com­pact and tidy, but the tallest stones are on the oppos­ite side to the recum­bent stone. This is more typ­ical of Irish circles. The tall stones can be seen as a delib­er­ate a portal for entry. The astro­nom­ical align­ments are dif­fer­ent for Irish circles. They tend to be facing south-westish and this could be an align­ment to winter sol­stice sunset.

Even though they look sim­ilar, these stone circles could be telling us very dif­fer­ent things about belief. If we trust the pat­terns emer­ging from study­ing groups of monu­ments, not just the ones we like, then they’re almost oppos­ites. The key event in Scot­land seems to hap­pen with the Moon in sum­mer. In Ire­land they’re look­ing to the Sun in winter.

There’s an ongo­ing argu­ment about whether sum­mer sun­rise or winter sun­set was more import­ant at Stone­henge. I favour winter sun­set, but to some extent this is just as reflect­ive of how you view pre­his­toric life as it is about the data. In addi­tion there’s plenty of evid­ence show­ing that Stone­henge was repeatedly remod­elled, includ­ing a pos­sible shift from lunar to solar alignments.

In any event whatever the tra­di­tion was at Stone­henge it’s a massive leap to think what happened there was reflect­ive of beliefs across the Irish Sea. Stone­henge is so embed­ded as an iconic brand for pre­his­toric archae­ology in the Brit­ish Isles, that Brit­ish pre­his­tory is now col­on­ising per­cep­tions of what a pre­his­toric Ire­land would look like.

I don’t know to what extent that’s a good thing. Mod­ern states are recent inven­tions, and some archae­olo­gists will cringe at the idea of a pre­his­toric Ire­land or UK. Recog­nising mod­ern bound­ar­ies don’t apply to the past is a sens­ible fea­ture. At the same time an appeal­ing com­mon past does risk los­ing some of what makes places loc­ally distinctive.

Pho­tos:
Achill-henge. Photo by Seequin. Licenced under a Cre­at­ive Com­mons BY-NC licence.
Tomnav­erie Stone Circle. Photo by Cameron Diack. Licenced under a Cre­at­ive Com­mons BY-NC-ND licence.
Drombeg Stone Circle. Photo by Todd Slagter. Licenced under a Cre­at­ive Com­mons BY licence.

Thony Christie on Hevelius

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If you have any interest in the his­tory of astro­nomy you should be fol­low­ing The Renais­sance Math­em­aticus blog and this post, The last great naked eye astro­nomer, is a per­fect example of why. This is a post about Johannes Hev­elius who has to be one of the most fam­ous unheard of astro­nomers ever.

That doesn’t make sense I know. There are a lot of people who haven’t heard of Hev­elius, but if you have heard of Hev­elius, then the idea that people haven’t heard of him seems non­sense because his work is every­where in astronomy.

Scutum constellation in the Uranographia

Scu­tum in the Urano­graphia by Hev­elius. Source: Wikipedia.

Everyone’s happy that most con­stel­la­tions are ancient, but what is less well-known is that not every star was in a con­stel­la­tion. There were gaps between con­stel­la­tions filled with faint and bor­ing stars. These were called αμορφοι amorphoi or unformed stars by the Greeks. This is no good if you want to do sci­ence, because things like comets don’t stick to the inter­est­ing parts of the sky. That’s why map­ping was so import­ant in the Renais­sance. In the case of Hev­elius, his maps were so use­ful that he formed seven con­stel­la­tions that stay with us to this day.

I’ll admit con­stel­la­tions like Lacerta or Vulpec­ula aren’t fam­ous con­stel­la­tions, but he was work­ing with the haps between con­stel­la­tions. The fact that his charts were made of con­stel­la­tions vis­ible in Europe shows he was work­ing in a highly com­pet­it­ive space.

It’s easy to take this kind of work for gran­ted. The out­put can be seen as an uncon­tested fact, but Thony’s post put’s Hevelius’s work into the con­text of its time includ­ing the often intense sci­entific rivalry between astro­nomer defend­ing per­sonal and national status.

The also shows that while with hind­sight it seems obvi­ous that tele­scopes would bring more accur­ate meas­ure­ments, at any given time in his­tory it’s not always obvi­ous that new tech­no­logy is The Next Big Thing, it could be a dis­trac­tion or Expens­ive Dead End.

What’s the difference between archaeology and grave-robbing?

Alun Politics, The Past No Comments , , ,

HMS Victory sinking by Peter Monamy

Loss of HMS Vic­tory, 4 Octo­ber 1744 by Peter Monamy

The HMS Vic­tory (not that one) is set to be recovered accord­ing to the BBC and many other sites. You could say speed. Archae­ology is an enorm­ously inef­fi­cient of rob­bing graves. These days archae­olo­gists can take years to study one bar­row (an earth mound mark­ing a burial) while in the 18th cen­tury aris­to­crats used to go on pic­nics and have the work­men open up one or two in an after­noon for gold.

There is a deeper reason.

Archae­olo­gists are so slow because they want to say some­thing about the people who live there. There’s a great Paul Bahn line: Archae­ology is not about find­ing things, it’s about find­ing things out. Obvi­ously find­ing things out is easier if you find arte­facts with people and that’s why sud­den dis­asters are great from an archae­olo­gical point of view.

It doesn’t stop a dis­aster site effect­ively being a grave. If you’re genu­inely inter­ested in find­ing out about people, it’s would be odd if you didn’t give a damn about their grave. Dig­ging up a site is effect­ively des­troy­ing it.* If you’re going to do that you’ll want to go slowly and make sure that the story you can tell about this person’s life is a bet­ter memorial than the one he or she already has.

The news stor­ies this week­end are all about find­ing the ship, along with a brief men­tion of the up to £500 mil­lion value of gold on board. What they don’t men­tion is that the UK gov­ern­ment has sanc­tioned the recov­ery in exchange for 20% of that. Is the gov­ern­ment more inter­ested in the treas­ure, or has it developed a keen interest in archae­ology so that, as Lord Ling­field says: “We hope it will give a unique insight into the world of the mid-18th cen­tury Royal Navy.”

The answer can be found in this story from Octo­ber 2011 in the Daily Mail.

Odys­sey said yes­ter­day the UK gov­ern­ment was ‘des­per­ately look­ing for new sources of income’ and was urging it to find more Brit­ish wrecks. It is also invest­ig­at­ing HMS Sus­sex, lost off Gibral­tar with 10 tons of gold in 1694, and HMS Vic­tory, a pre­cursor to Nelson’s flagship.

There are thou­sands of deser­ted medi­eval vil­lages in the UK. In the 21st cen­tury the biggest defence any buri­als in them have have against feed­ing bankers is that the fin­an­cial pay­off of crack­ing them open is too low.

*Not hyper­bolae. It’s recog­nised by pro­fes­sional archae­olo­gists then if you dig up some­thing it’s not going to be there for someone else to dig. +Kris Hirst col­lects quotes on her site, and a great one from Kent Flan­nery is: “Arche­ology is the only branch of anthro­po­logy where we kill our inform­ants in the pro­cess of study­ing them.”

A post that ori­gin­ally appeared on Google+.

One small slip for man, one giant mistake for space heritage?

Alun Politics, Science, The Past No Comments

There’s a check­list from the Apollo XIII mis­sion owned(?) by Jim Lov­ell. It’s an inter­est­ing puzzle from an astro-heritage point of view and some­thing I’ve not given any thought to at all. In fact there’s two puzzles. One is legal own­er­ship and the other is what her­it­age value does it have and neither ques­tion is con­nec­ted much. The only con­nec­tion I see is that if there is no her­it­age value then people won’t get worked up too much about the ownership.

Jim Lovell reading a newspaper story about the Apollo 13 mission

Jim Lov­ell dis­cov­ers he got back to Earth safely thanks to the Hon­olulu Star-Bulletin. Photo: NASA.

I get the impres­sion NASA would have been within their rights to claim own­er­ship, but if they allowed astro­nauts to keep memen­tos, then that’s their mis­take. I’m sur­prised that a check­list with cru­cial cal­cu­la­tions was dis­carded from a failed mis­sion, but I don’t know the exact cir­cum­stances of how Jim Lov­ell got to keep it, but it seems NASA wasn’t that her­it­age aware at the time.

At the same time I don’t know what her­it­age value it has. Her­it­age value isn’t the same as his­tor­ical or archae­olo­gical value. While the cal­cu­la­tions are his­tor­ic­ally import­ant, is the paper that holds them neces­sary to under­stand the his­tory of the trip?

What I can see is that there’s a big emo­tional hit with the arte­fact. See­ing the authen­tic arte­fact puts you vicari­ously in a pos­i­tion of being in deep trouble in deep space. The emo­tional value is noth­ing to be sneered at. It’s part of being human and it’s going to play a part in dis­cus­sions whether you dir­ectly address it or not. A sens­ible con­clu­sion is going to have to deal with the emo­tional and exper­i­en­tial side of the checklist.

For those who think the answer is obvi­ous, this is tax-payer fun­ded mater­ial there­fore the tax-payer owns it, here’s another puzzle. Sup­pose an Apollo astro­naut gets paid to endorse Moon Juice a new fizzy sugar-laden drink. The only reason he is get­ting the job is because tax-payers fun­ded him to go to the moon. Does that mean that the tax-payers should get the fee and not the astro­naut? It’s not an exact ana­logy, this is a mater­ial arte­fact. Yet if it’s an arte­fact that was going to be dis­carded by NASA it wrong for an astro­naut to own it, or is it a bet­ter solu­tion that nobody owns it? Should Mitchell’s cam­era have been left on the Moon where no one could access it?

I don’t see an obvi­ous answer that sat­is­fies every­one. Another good piece by +Amy Shira Teitel.

A post that ori­gin­ally appeared on Google+.

HDR and Reality

Alun Digital Academia, The Past No Comments ,

A com­ment on this link HDR: Love it or or Leave it? pos­ted by +Matt Shal­vatis.
The Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank

The Lov­ell Tele­scope at Jodrell Bank

This has been on my ‘to-blog-about’ list for years. On the one side there’s the artistic effect, which you can debate. I get the impres­sion HDR is a per­sonal taste, so telling people it’s the right or wrong way seems point­less to me. In my view my early HDR stuff was poor. In par­tic­u­lar it was often over-saturated so I could see what was hap­pen­ing (I have odd col­our vis­ion). These days if I can can do some­thing I want without HDR I will, and I find adjust­ing the white and black points is often enough for what I want, but when it isn’t a light touch in Pho­to­matix can make a big and subtle difference

The other side is that it can have prac­tical uses in some­thing like archae­ology. I have seen too many pho­tos of pitch-black church interi­ors. HDR can provide a much bet­ter impres­sion of what the human eye sees than the lim­ited dynamic range of a cam­era because you can expose the shot for a wider range of light and shadow. The altern­at­ive is to bring a massive light­ing rig along with you, and that’s not practical.

I know some people think this is bad because it’s manip­u­lat­ing the pho­to­graph and there­fore not a ‘true record’. They’re right it isn’t ‘true’. But the auto func­tion on a cam­era isn’t neut­ral. It makes its own judge­ments on what the set­tings should be. The dif­fer­ence is that these set­tings are often hid­den from the user when they’re made, so it’s harder to see what assump­tions are being built in. Just because you can’t see the manip­u­la­tion of set­tings hap­pen­ing doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.

I don’t ever see the same angst about real­ity in archae­olo­gical illus­tra­tion though. I think a lot of archae­olo­gists will laugh if you say the cam­era never lies, but I think there’s a bias to believ­ing that cam­eras can be neut­ral. Maybe with pho­tos look­ing so much closer to real­ity we sub­con­sciously insist devi­ations from real­ity are flaws not art.

A post that ori­gin­ally appeared on Google+.

How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming by Mike Brown

Alun Science, The Past 1 Comment , , ,

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.

Can only a secular society appreciate the Words of God?

Alun Politics, The Past 1 Comment , , , ,

The Bible

The Bible. Photo by Patrick Feller.

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.

The Pericles Commission by Gary Corby

Alun Life, The Past No Comments ,

The Pericles Commission CoverI 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.

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