White stuff

Tuesday morning in Flagstaff, after two feet of snow fell on Monday.

Exams, and the stupid arbitrariness of it all

Yesterday I was having a conversation on Facebook about education, which is a subject I can get quite worked up about. I was also talking to a friend about meeting the Queen, and between these two things it reminded me of a short piece I wrote some years ago for my occasional column in the Guardian. This piece didn’t get published in the end but I did a search and found I still had it. It’s of no significance but I thought I’d post it here, now that we live in a world where we all run our own newspapers. It also covers up for the fact that I don’t have much to blog about at the moment, since I have my head down coding a simulation of an array of magnetic compasses  (don’t even ask!)

A few months ago I was invited to Buckingham Palace, to a reception for British pioneers. Clearly my invitation was the result of a major clerical cock-up, since all my fellow guests were pop legends, heroic explorers or Nobel laureates. But I went along anyway, feeling pretty awkward and out of place in my best Debenhams suit. It was quite an evening.

Thirty minutes after it finished I was back in my comfort zone: sitting next to a homeless guy on Paddington station, munching a burger. As the ketchup dribbled down my tie I suddenly found myself feeling rather serene, as if a great weight had lifted off my shoulders. The moment passed, yet for a brief instant I actually felt rather chuffed with myself. It’s true that I don’t have a proper job and I’ve spent most of my life teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, but heck: I’d just been to Buckingham Palace for the second time in three years. I guessed I must be doing alright at long last.

The other day I was asked to address a conference of head teachers on the subject of provision for gifted and talented children. I don’t know why, since I’m not an expert on education. I wondered if perhaps I’d been invited because I was once a gifted child myself, so I dug out some of my old school reports to see what sort of a prodigal genius I’d been. ‘Incurably lazy’, seemed to be the general opinion. ‘Indecipherably scruffy’ was the verdict on my great works of scientific literature. ‘Could do better’, they said.

In my day we had a two-tier exam system. Those who were smart enough to tie their own shoelaces took GCEs, while the cannon fodder took CSEs. My school put me in for CSEs, and only allowed me to take GCEs as well when my parents agreed to pay the costs. I have never been so insulted in all my life as the day that I sat down to take my Physics CSE and discovered I was expected to label the parts of a light bulb. I ask you! ‘Filament.’ ‘Brass bit.’ ‘Glass bit.’ Surely they were just winding me up? Not long before, I’d invented and prototyped a new kind of fuel cell in my lunch breaks, but were the examiners interested? Did they want to hear about my ideas for what would one day become known as complexity theory? No, they wanted to make certain I was fit to change a bloody light bulb.

In the event I got straight grade ones in CSE and did passably well at GCE, given that I’d been taught the wrong syllabus. But it takes a seriously long time to get over such a blow to one’s self-confidence. Thirty years, in fact.

Partly as a result of this I now find myself in an odd but interesting borderland. On the one hand I’m lucky enough to know some incredibly gifted and talented people who are rich, successful and famous. At the same time I’m privileged to know a good number of equally gifted minds who, by their own admission, are not. I won’t name names, but there is a whole host of people who write to me regularly and engage in passionate and highly sophisticated conversation on some aspect of complexity theory, artificial intelligence or moral philosophy, who I know for sure work in relatively menial jobs and hardly ever get invited to sip whisky with the royal family. What’s the difference between these two groups of people? Nothing that I can see. Luck, perhaps.

Exams are supposed to be there to assess intellectual potential, and perhaps they serve the purpose for those well-balanced, middling-to-bright children who often erroneously get labelled as talented. But when it comes to detecting the oddballs with minds radical enough to make a real difference to human progress, exams seem to fare no better than US airport security, shortly after 9/11. At the very moment that I was being subjected to endless body searches and tests of my political appropriateness in Chicago Midway, a guy at Chicago O’Hare was casually stepping onto a plane armed with three large steak knives and a stun gun. So much for screening.

So what do we do about it? Well let me tell you: I haven’t a clue. Drop the whole stupid exam thing altogether and stop wasting children’s time? Start testing pupils in order to find out if they’re ready to learn something, rather than waiting until afterwards to see if we’ve failed them? Don’t ask me, I’m uneducated, but somebody needs to do something.

As I sat on the bench at Paddington station I couldn’t stop myself letting out a small ironic chuckle at the arbitrariness of it all. Two seconds later, the homeless guy sitting next to me did exactly the same thing.

 

LLLeonids… Brr!

Like a fool I got up in the middle of last night and drove out to Lake Mary to watch the Leonids. I have to say, nature could have gone to a bit more effort – they weren’t at their best. Nevertheless I saw 37 meteors in two hours, although at least five of these weren’t Leonids because they came from a wildly different direction, were much slower and had longer tracks. The Leonids themselves were short, sharp and tended to have a blue-green ionization track, but I’ve seen far brighter and better meteors.

The stars however were stunning! I could have read a book by starlight on this wonderful moonless night. Nowhere in the US could have had better viewing conditions than Flagstaff. I could see quite a few nebulae and clusters with the naked eye, and the Orion nebula had a distinct mauve tint.

The Milky Way looking towards Flagstaff

Only three meteors were kind enough to step in front of my camera – this was the best of the three (the other two I didn’t even see with the naked eye):

All the good ones hid away from my lens!

In this animated GIF you should be able to see a bit of space junk I captured by accident. I don’t think it was a satellite because it was very dim and wasn’t on a polar orbit. Each frame is a 30-second exposure, so it certainly wasn’t a meteor. The big blob bottom-left is Mars and the cluster above it I’m pretty sure is M44.

Floating junk or a small and oddly orbiting satellite

It was all very beautiful, but the air was 17 degrees below freezing and so when I started to lose my third toe to frostbite I decided to call it a night. By then it was about 3.30am, mountain time, and I bet you anything the best meteors were just waiting in the wings for me to turn my back!

37 meteors was pretty nice, and not far from the forecast frequency, although it wasn’t quite as good as the 1,000 or more per minute seen in 1833, which must have been stunning. It reminded me very much of the night my son was born. I’d gone to the hospital with Ann in the ambulance – blue flashing lights across the lonely hills to Chesterfield, about 10 miles from where we lived. After Chris had been born it was too late at night to find a taxi (even if I could have afforded one), so I had little choice but to hike home across the Pennines. Once I got to the last streetlight it was like walking into a black wall. I couldn’t see anything at all and had to feel my way with my feet for the next half hour. But by the time I was on top of the fells, the stars were on full form and a meteor shower guided me home as if I was in a scene from the Bible! A memorable night.

An aircraft heads for the Milky Way

A note found floating on a pond

“…So what exactly was this superlative achievement of evolution? What was it that finally separated us from the animals and made us who we are — ducks?

Wings are not unique to us, of course, and have even evolved several times, although primitive versions of real wings – the ones that would ultimately culminate in duck wings – seem to have emerged in the early Oligocene.  But the important anatomical features that set us apart from mere animals – the qualities that make us so special – apparently didn’t evolve until much more recently. Our elegant webbed feet, for instance, are key to our dominance of the water’s surface, and our aquiline beaks enabled us to spend less time underwater looking for food, giving us the leisure to develop philosophy and mathematics. The latest DNA analysis suggests that these features are quite recent and true ducks actually split off only a few million years ago from our primitive canard cousins. This discovery is somewhat humbling, and provides yet another nail in the coffin for the unscientific but still widely held belief that we were created uniquely by Daffy, in His image, and given dominion over the fishes of the sea. This is no longer a tenable hypothesis and most educated ducks today recognize that we did in fact evolve from more primitive animals and have achieved our position at the very top of the evolutionary tree only comparatively recently in geological terms.

We ducks are beautifully adapted to our world. Other species sometimes have some interesting adaptations too, of course: snakes have lost their limbs and so can perform a rudimentary swimming motion, while certain primates have even lost their feathers (in mammals these are known as “hair” and lack significant waterproofing qualities) and hence had to evolve unnaturally bloated brains in order that they can keep themselves warm by seeking shelter. Nevertheless, nothing could be prized more highly than our beautiful voices, which are, without question, unique across the animal kingdom. Canardologists have been able to show that certain other, closely related species to ourselves, are capable of superficially similar utterances, but it is very clear that these are not true quacks. To the untrained ear they resemble quacking but they clearly lack genuine syntax and scientists regard them as at best a kind of squawk. Quacking is not possible without our highly evolved beaks, and some theorists even hold that our ability to quack is a consequence of strange quantum-mechanical interactions within the pecten on the edges of our beaks, which could not be replicated, either in nature or in misguided attempts to create Artificial Quacking, known as AQ [see Vaucanson, 1738].

The many races of ducks on our waters today are, of course, one species,  and we must celebrate our differences whilst recognizing our common heritage. To our shame it was not until 1967 that Mandarins were legally recognized as ducks at all by Mallard society, but the time has come to put aside these superficial differences. Coots and Moorhens are merely primitive cousins but the presence of our elegant beaks and our stunning voices should be enough to qualify the rest of us as equal members of Anatidae. Today our attention must be focused on more pressing issues: our profligate over-fishing in particular threatens the food chain and hence the entire planet. We need to become better stewards, or else our lakes and streams may one day become dry, worthless land and we will have to return full-time to the air, like our primitive ancestors.”