Still haven’t finished the videos for HTTLAM. I have laryngitis so can’t do the voiceover.

Anyhow, leaving that aside, David Mitchell (curmudgeon from Peep Show) wrote an excellent attack on the the Government’s replacement for the RAE, the REF. See it at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/27/david-mitchell-pointless-studies-survey.

He makes a number of good points, I particularly liked

Research which will obviously make money if it comes off will always find private funding and so should not be prioritised for public money. In fact, it’s the very place that public money should never go – it’d be like spending the Arts Council budget on profit-making pantos instead of opera or pouring the licence fee into Quiz Call rather than BBC Four. 

The website Bookseer allows you to enter the name and author of a book to give you a recommendation for a related book to read. Of course I entered HTTLAM and got quite a good list. 

The website just uses Amazon and LibraryThing to generate its suggestions. Unfortunately, LibraryThing gives “Nada” as a suggestion for HTTLAM.

As I mentioned in the previous post I am considering a new book in geometry. I’ve recently been thinking about what got me into geometry (and mathematics) more generally. One early memory of the weird world of mathematics comes from Doctor Who. When I was about 10 my older brother borrowed the Making of Doctor Who from his school’s library. I already had a copy of the 1976 revised edition which featured Tom Baker on the cover but this was the original book from 1972. My recollection was that the original had some strange parts that were omitted in the revised edition. One of them was about geometry and how on a sphere you can make a triangle in which all three angles are 90 degrees and hence their sum is not 180 degrees as you would expect. Was my memory correct? To find out I ordered a copy from the second hand online bookstore Abebooks. And it arrived this week. I scanned the cover as you can see below.  

 I quickly flicked through the book and was surprised to find that the text was rather sparse. It wasn’t the book dense with information that I remembered. But the triangle made of right angles was there, almost exactly as I remembered, the only difference was that it does not have the right angle symbols of my memory. (If you download the scan, then you can read the actual text.)

The book contains a mixture of information about making Doctor Who and fictional reports from the program, for example the Doctor’s trial by the Time Lords. It also contains a short chapter by a reverend on God and science fiction which I have no recollection of. What I did recall correctly was that the Time Lords all had names made of mathematical symbols. These symbols had intrigued me at the age of ten. I wanted to know what they meant. I felt that there was a hidden world of mathematics out there which I wanted to find.  Unfortunately what they taught me at school was pretty much along the lines of “Here is a quadratic equation. This is how you solve it. This a simultaneous equation. This is how you solve it.”

The interesting stuff such as the triangle with three right angles was never explained.  In fact, a couple of years after I read the Making of Doctor Who I showed my science teacher the idea. I even got a small bouncy ball and drew on it with a felt tip to prove to her that it could be done. She just kept telling me that it wasn’t a triangle because it was on a sphere. She didn’t get the point that if the ball was big enough, say the size of a planet such as the Earth, then we would see the lines as straight and the angles as right angles.

Anyhow, it wasn’t until I started doing A level Mathematics that I found that hidden world of mathematics. I was amazed at the idea of differentiation. It was such a great, simple idea that I was kicking myself for not having invented it. And then we did the square root of -1! That was fantastic. Finally we were in the hidden world that I had hoped to find when I read the Making of Doctor Who at the age of ten.

I’ve recently finished reading Bad Science by Ben Goldacre.  The author has been a champion of common sense and science in his column for the Guardian and his blog. The book is mostly a collection of the stories that have featured in his blog such as Gillian McKeith, MRSA, MMR, homeopathy and so will be familiar to his regular readers.

I am big fan of Goldacre’s work so I don’t want to criticize. But. And fortunately it’s not a big but. But, the book could be improved by tougher editing. There were a number of repetitions of explanation and people mentioned without explanation of who they are. A graph on media stories is labelled media stones. I’ll let that go given the problems with the pics in my book and the fact that it wasn’t as big a howler as the graph in the third part of Marcus du Sautoy’s The Story of Maths on BBC4 last week. Also the penultimate chapter claims that it is the last chapter. These should have been spotted by the author or a diligent editor. 

Right. That’s that out of the way. Despite all that it is very good book. It is highly readable and well-argued.  Also, he made a point on dumbing down right at the end which I will return to at a later time (hopefully). If you know anyone who is interested in science, particularly the science of medicine, but is not an expert, then this is for them. Arts graduates working in the media should be forced to read it!

I am currently taking a break from reading the proofs of How to Think Like a Mathematician. I have almost finished, which is just as well as I have to send them back this week.

Anyhow, various films are on the horizon. The worrying news is that there is a re-make of The Day the Earth Stood Still coming.  The original film of my childhood memory is great. I’m not sure it would look so good now, but I’m willing to wager it will be superior to the remake. 

Also coming is Watchmen. Ever since the graphic novel (i.e., comic) was released in the late 80s we have been promised that a film was imminent; it’s been imminent for literally half my life. There is a last ditch attempt by Fox to stop Warner Bros releasing it but I suspect it will appear this time – it’s been filmed, CGI has been applied, etc.  I’m willing to wager it will be better than the Day the Earth Stood Still remake but that’s not saying much. As the director’s previous film was 300 – which I liked but didn’t think I would – it will probably be visually excellent but the execution of the story will be flat.

Many have doubted the existence of Bigfoot, the giant ape-like creature that lives in the dense wooded areas of the USA. Many have asked, If this creature exists, then why have we never found any remains? But now critics have been silenced by the convincing evidence provided by two men who have found some remains in Georgia. You can read the full story in the New York Times article. 

Surprisingly, Bigfoot has the same face as one of those gorilla masks you can get at novelty shop. Despite the fact that this is an obvious forgery (why on earth did they think throwing some fake guts onto it would make it more convincing?) the picture does look very creepy. I think this is because it looks like they killed someone in a gorilla costume and then hid him in a freezer. Very, very creepy.

When I was in Boston I watched a great TV programme on Bigfoot. The film-makers weren’t very harsh in their questioning; credence was given to any passing idiot. One eye-witness’s story was that he had seen Bigfoot at close quarters: “It was about the size of a bear when it stands on its hind legs. Its fur was a brown colour, you know, just like a bear. And it had huge teeth, you know, like a bear…”

Erm, well that would be a bear then, wouldn’t it?

It seems that some lager-drinking southerners from the Conservative party think that various cities in  the north of England should effectively be closed and their inhabitants moved down south for a better life. Today the Guardian newspaper ran an article In praise of the north by various writers saying how great the North is. My only complaint is that the first writer says that The Fall predicted that the North will rise again. The truth is a little more complicated. The lyrics to The North Will Rise Again are like most Fall lyrics – an almost impenetrable thicket of words, but they do seem to suggest that ME Smith doesn’t believe the NWRA.  Maybe the writer should have chosen Leave the Capitol, an anti-London song, or the mighty Hit the North, which was a Northern anthem twenty years back and had Fall fans throughout the UK shrieking “manacled to the city, manacled to the city.”