Bad Science by Ben Goldacre

Bad Science is effectively the book of the blog by the lovely Ben Goldacre*. Throughout the book Ben deconstructs sloppy journalism and abuses of scientific language, roughly in order of how angry Ben gets about them. So we start with relatively harmless bollocks like detoxing and face cream, moving on to Homeopathy and Nutritionism. Then we look at the ethics of pharmaceutical companies and finally media heath scares and hoaxes like MMR. On the way there are some excellent explanations of the placebo effect, and of probability and statistics, which strike many people as counter-intuitive. And some amusing ranting at Ben's favourite awful poo lady**.

There is also a bonus chapter available from the internet, which deals with a particularly unpleasant man who has been trying to flog vitamin pills to Africa as a cure for AIDS. This was left out of earlier editions of the book, due to the filthy villain attempting to sue our Ben.

I particularly liked the final chapter in which he complains bitterly about the quality of science journalism. Ben points out that there must be loads of people with degrees in science subjects who have gone on to work in unrelated fields (yes! Yes! Here I am, Ben!) and yet whenever we get any science on in the media it has to be dumbed down so the lowest common denominator crapwits who couldn't differentiate e^x with respect to x can understand it. Where's my science, eh, world? Is it in the same place as all the trousers that actually come up to your waist have gone?

To the roll call of “cargo cult science” (things that like to use sciencey-sounding language but completely lack the rigour of the genuine article) I would like to add psychology and economics. In fact I think it would greatly benefit the world if economics were renamed “guesswork”.


*I think I have a bit of an intellectual crush on him. I'm not interested in the contents of his trousers, but I do love him a bit. If he ever wants a platonic groupie, he knows where I am!

**Amoungst other hilarious claims, Gillian believes that "foul-smelling stools" are a sign of ill health. This especially amused me; McKeith literally thinks her shit don't smell.

Back to the Golden Age...

What, in these difficult times, could be more cost-effective than reading second hand books?* This month I have been using second hand books to return to the “Golden Age” of science fiction, the 40s and 50s, when stories were relentlessly optimistic and everyone was looking forward to a shiny new world of spaceships, robot slaves and scantily-clad alien princesses. Unfortunately, I’ve been reading Kurt Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury, who rather bucked the trend for mindless optimism.

The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut

I bought my copy of The Sirens of Titan from a shelf of second hand books in Lillypool cafe in the Mendips for 10p. What a bargain! You don’t half get a lot of satire for your money.

Winston Niles Rumfoord is an aristocratic space adventurer who, together with his dog, Kazak, was sucked into a chrono-synclastic infundibulum in between earth and Mars. This means that he now exists as a waveform, rather than a person (appearing in human form only where the orbit of a planet intersects an antinode of his wave) and has knowledge of past and future. At first it appears that he has used this knowledge to toy with the lives of other people, including his wife and the rather reprehensible millionaire playboy Malachi Constant. Rumfoord engineers a war between Mars (whose population he builds from kidnapped Earthlings) and uses the resulting soul-searching to found The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent with the strap line “Take care of each other and the Almighty will take care of himself”.

When the action moves to Titan, we learn that the master manipulator is himself a puppet of aliens from the planet Tralfamadore: A Tralfamadorean robot called Salo has crashed there while taking a message from one side of the universe to another and his spacecraft requires a spare part. The whole evolution of life and intelligence on Earth was engineered by his home world just in order to provide him with a specially-shaped piece of metal to continue his journey. After being goaded by Rumfoord, Salo peeks at the message he’s being carrying to find that it is... a single dot.

Although funny and wittily told, this has to be one of the blackest comedies I’ve ever read: no one has any free will, millions die for a faked-up religion and the ultimate reason for human existence turns out to be completely feeble! A fine book, but if you only read one Vonnegut book in your life, make it "Slaughterhouse Five".

The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury

The Illustrated Man is a collection of short stories. Bradbury seems to me to write at the intersection of SF, fantasy and horror, but these stories are pretty much traditional science fiction. What makes Ray different from many of his contemporaries (and therefore more readable to the Bookclub of One) is that he has a realistically low opinion of human nature. This means he is unable to subscribe to a gleaming, hi-tec utopia; he knows what we'd really do with technology.

Two of my favourite stories were "The Velt" and "Zero Hour". In "The Velt" a couple use a sort of virtual reality theatre to educate and entertain their children and are subsequently murdered by the selfish, empathy-free brats they have spawned. In "Zero Hour" all the children in a small town become obsessed with a make-believe game called "invasion", which turns out not to be make-believe at all. The kids are being used as a fifth column for aliens and they've sold out humanity in return for being allowed to stay up an extra hour. I think I like these stories because I find children spooky and unfinished. You might think yours are cute, but when I look at them, I see those twins from The Shining or the little girl from F.E.A.R.

The absolute stand-out story for me, though, was The Concrete Mixer. A Martian invasion fleet arrives on Earth to a rapturous welcome. While the Martians thought they were conquerors, the Earth men see new consumers and new markets. The invaders are soon addicted to a life of booze, cars, pointless sex, indolence and useless spending. Their culture is plundered to make crappy Hollywood films which Earth sells back to them, their bodies are poisoned and their spirits are crushed. O God, I'm living in that particuar distopia right now!

*Other than going to the library. Or stealing books. Or reading over other people’s shoulders on public transport. Or downloading free ebooks and giving yourself a headache trying to read them. Or just shamelessly standing there in Waterstones, reading the whole thing in spite of the tutting (particularly effective for graphic novels, that method, as they are both pricey and quick to read). Now that I think about it, there are quite a few better sources of cheap books than the second hand market, but let’s celebrate it anyway. We’ll cover stealing another time.

Storm Front by Jim Butcher

Well, this book fits squarely into the "Enjoyable Tosh" category and could even be a contender for my "Airport novel of the year" award.

It's the first book of the "Dresden Files", the cases of Harry Dresden a sort of wizard private detective. At first I was a little disappointed as I was hoping for something like Terry Pratchet or Douglas Adams but Mr Butcher takes his fantasy very seriously. The first chapter has a reference to wizards being "subtle and quick to anger" and I would rather read the kind of book that warns you not to meddle in the affairs of wizards as they are subtle and will piss on your computer. It took a while to come to terms with a po-faced book that thought vampires were a subject I should take seriously, I gradually began to really enjoy it. "Storm Front" worked for me as a pageturner. Eventually, I was so into it I got caught in the work canteen reading this silly book about a wizard. You just have to enjoy the magical special effects and ignore the clunking noises coming from the plot. One website described it as "Harry Potter for adults" - I think that's a fair description and I leave it to the reader to decide whether it's complimentary or not!

If you find yourself in an airport, and this is the only thing you kind find in English, relax and buy it, it's mostly harmless.

A quick poke about the internet showed me that "The Dresden Files" has become a TV series on SciFi. I look forward to finding out whether it is watchable when it comes to freeview (sometime around 2020, I guess).

My favourite quote:
"My name is Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden. Conjure by it at your own risk,"

Molesworth Books by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle

I complained so bitterly about how long and slow-moving "The Dream of Scipio" was that E (you remember E, disapproves of Derren Brown, that one) loaned me her two Molesworth books "Whizz for Atomms" and "Back in the Jug Agane" to cheer me up.

Molesworth is a pupil in the 3rd form at St Custards boarding school (you can use the magic of the Interweb to take a virtual tour round St Custards here ) and the books are not so much stories as short vignettes of school life. In common with "Transpotting", "A Clockwork Orange" and I can haz cheezburger, the Molesworth books are spelled phonetically and written in dialect. By someone who can't spell. This means that it takes a while to get into them. And I'm still not sure what some of the 1950s slang means. The trade mark style of these books makes it tempting to have a punt at mimicry so here are my school days at St Custards Grammar School For Girls:

The scene is the form room of 10b. The gurls are engayged in activities befitting yung wimmen cosmo quizzis, makeup, finding the bits abowt (HEM-HEM) in Shirley Conran books and givving each other annerreksya, ect, ect. But soft! (posh prose) here come their form teacher. Miss Batley teech ART and kno nothing. She woud not recognise the gerund if it started nesting in the art cupboard and drinking the poster paint. (Mrs Roebuck the latin teacher kno all about the gerund and gerundives. She also make us stand by our desks and sa "Salway magistra" like we were at Mallory Towers chiz chiz chiz! ). "Hullo clouds, hullo sky," sa Miss Batley, "Hullo Personal and soshal education worksheets, hullo anti smoeking leaflets ect ect". Miss Batley's antismoeking leaflets do more for the tabacco industry than smoeking beegles. 10b adopt the 1000 yard stair of trormatised veterans when will the torment end ect ect. And still it continue! Now we must do roll pla and try to sell each other drugs but hav scientist found a drug which fry the mind like personal and sowshal edukation? They hav not.

The Dream of Scipio - Iain Pears

My God, this is one of those books that is just too bloody clever for its own good! One quote on the cover said it was “Illumined by a fizzing passion for the recondite”. What does that even mean?

My first disappointment was that the book is not about Scipio at all, nor is it even about the original “Dream of Scipio” written by Cicero. It interweaves 3 different stories of men from different periods in history. Each of them lives near Avignon at a time when it seems that civilisation itself is under threat and faces difficult moral dilemmas.

Manlius is a Roman of patrician class, living in Gaul at the time when it is falling to the Goths (insert your own joke about black nail varnish here). The empire can't protect its territories, the slaves needed to work in the fields keep running off to join the enemy and the Christian Church has started taking over a lot of the functions of the old state. Manlius's philosophy teacher Sophia persuades him to leave his estate, bribe his way to a Bishop's job and start using his expensive education in strategy and diplomacy to do what good he can, rather than sitting in his villa reading poetry as his world falls apart.

Olivier is a medieval poet whose patron is a cardinal at the court of Pope Clement. In between delivering the cardinals letters, he tracks down ancient manuscripts makes copies and tries to preserve them. He finds a piece called “The Dream of Scipio” written by Manlius. This interests him because he can scarcely understand it and those bits he can understand seem heretical, yet it was written by a bishop. He asks advice from a Jewish scholar and falls in love with his beautiful assistant – at a time when the black death comes to Avignon and the Jews are being used as scapegoats.

Julien Barneuve is a scholar who served in the trenches of the first world war. It was this experience which led him to his belief that civilisation is to be preserved at all costs. It also leads him to retreat from the world and channel his energies into academic studies. Both Manlius and Olivier are known to him. He puts years of work into attempting to unravel the meaning of Manlius's “Dream of Scipio” and he knows Olivier as a medieval poet famous for murdering his lover and having his hands and tongue removed as punishment. Julien's lover is a Jewish artist, and yet when France falls to the Germans he takes a job with the Vichy regime in order to prevent the country descending into chaos and barbarism.

One of my major complaints about the book is that it switches between stories far too frequently. I feel like I've barely found my feet in one time, when I'm whisked off to another. This makes reading hard work. The ending was very strong (though pretty depressing), but I would have edited out most of the middle of the book, were it up to me!

I enjoyed the reversals in the final act: Manlius is corrupted by power, betrays his friend and signs tracts of land over to the barbarians, allegedly to keep the peace. Olivier, whom the reader is led to despise as murderer and ignorant medieval clod, comes good. We finally see that he sacrificed his reputation as well as his life to save his girlfriend and tutor. Julien the Vichy official immolates himself, his house and his life's work and his funeral pyre serves as a beacon to warn his friend in the resistance. Julien goes a bit crazed in the end and starts to believe that while throughout his life he has striven to preserve “civilization” through academic studies and through collaborating, he was utterly wrong. He comes to think of the Holocaust as the end product of thousands of years of progress; it required administrators, industrialists, government, police and international co-operation to make it happen. It required philosophers and theologists to prepare the ground and set up justifications. Julien's last act is therefore to destroy as much knowledge and learning as he can.

The book gives us a sort of potted history of European anti-semitism, as well as telling the reader far more than he or she ever wanted to know about Neoplatonism. The central question of the book, however, is whether it is ever right to side with evil men, in order to ameliorate their actions. By the end, Iain Pears seems pretty clear that it isn't.

The argument which dupes Julien into working for the Vichy government is that someone else will do it if he doesn't, and they'd be harsher. For my money, this argument is completely fallacious and you've my permission to punch anyone who tries to use it on you. It is no more than the trick of rhetoric known as the false dichotomy. Consider: the only thing in the whole world you can really control is your own actions therefore you have a straightforward choice between agreeing to do evil and not. The consequences of not agreeing cannot be known in advance – maybe the next candidate will refuse too. My view also passes the simple ethical test passed down to me by my mum: “What if everybody behaved like that?”. If everybody behaved my way in these circumstances, evil jobs could only be done by completely amoral people, and though some exist, they are pretty rare. “The evil done by men of good will is worst of all”. If you don't believe me, go and see Watchmen when it comes out.

To my mind civilisation is not about arcane knowledge or a classical education. It's not necessarily even about the rule of law. The word literally means the habit of living in cities, and all we really need to carry on doing that is the ability to rub along with each other without violence. Politeness, consideration and cooperation are what makes us civilised not cultivated tastes for the high arts or spending our time in contemplation. The nice thing about my way of seeing this is that each and every one of us can either do our bit to keep civilisation going or hasten its demise through our own behaviour. It's up to you. Now go out there and save the world!

The Complete DR and Quinch by Alan Moore and Alan Davis

D.R. and Quinch are a pair of alien delinquents from the future whose anarchic exploits featured in 2000AD. In the course of this compilation they destroy the Earth, start a war, send DR's new girlfriend bonkers and make a blockbuster movie. A very great number of things are blown up along the way. I think my favourite part was when they are locked in a miitary stockade with a deranged war veteran and come up with an intricate escape plan involving a bar of soap carved into a gun shape and a lump of plastic explosive made to look like soap.

The book was borrowed from my friend G.P. who gave the impression of being a bit disappointed with it because it wasn't as clever as the other Alan Moore comics in his collection. I feel much more forgiving towards it. Firstly it is early work, and secondly you have to bear in mind the readership of 2000AD: boys between 10 and 14. Also, I think I just like seeing two dumb kids stick it to authority. This is definitely a book to watch out for if you have children - you don't want the little buggers reading this, they'll be beyond taming!

By the end, I could, like, totally hear DR's distinctive speech patterns in my head, man. It was, like, totally amazing.

Favourite line: "A kiss on the hand may be quite continental, but tactical thermonuclear weaponry is a guy's best friend."

The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer

Since New Year, I have mostly been reading this book, which I found in a second hand bookshop during the holidays.

I had 2 major reservations about starting it. The first was that since Germaine herself is ferociously clever, I might not understand it. My second worry was that I might become enraged at the injustices meted out to my gender, and take them out on my husband – a man who spends a LOT more time picking up after me than oppressing me. I needn't have worried about a lack of comprehension – book is very readable, full of humour and swearing. I like swearing; it is both big and clever.

The thrust of her argument is that women have been denied their sexuality: expected to say no, act coy and prefer Romance. The oppressed woman only has sex for the benefit of her man; as a reward for putting the bins out or something. This is no way to live!

Germaine is damning of “feminine wiles”, dishonest and manipulative behaviour. She exhorts us women not to live vicariously – nagging partners and children to achieve on our behalf – but to work out what we want to put our energy into doing it. ( This advice does come with a warning that this is likely to involve other people's disapproval and/or leaving a trail of destruction in your wake.) She rejects the idea of fighting against men: fighting is never a solution (it's a male perversion, apparently) and men are not the enemy. They are trapped by stereotyped gender roles just like we are. I'd say that's fair.

From my point of view it feels as if at lot has changed and the book has rather been overtaken by events – but how typical is my own experience? For example, I have been able to resist conforming to someone else's ideas of beauty pretty easily, but in hundreds of cheapo “documentaries” my fellow females are paying someone to cut into their tits, inject toxins to paralyse their faces, hoover the fat out of their ass or break and reset their noses in order to make themselves acceptable to men. Are they statistical anomalies or am I?

Then there is the world of work. I never felt that I suffered from prejudice, despite working in a male-dominated profession (I'm a software engineer). If anything being the only woman around made me stand out and has helped slightly. Rather than being paranoid that they will all be put out of work, men seem to be rather pleased by the idea that there are women out there somewhere who are amused by geek humour. At the bottom end of the market, the casualisation of labour and the invention of the McJob has meant that dead end roles can now be inflicted on men as well as women. Despite all this there is still a 17% pay gap (according to this month's BCS magazine). Companies have a legal duty not to pay men more than women, but when most companies – including my own employer – encourage a culture of secrecy around paychecks, it is impossible to tell whether they are playing by the rules.

I find myself disagreeing with Germaine over sex and marriage. She advocates not marrying and claims it is a prison. She argues that women chain themselves through marriage to unsuitable men in return for security then spend their lives acting as unpaid housekeeper. In my own marriage, my husband does not provide me with either physical of financial security (I have Kung Fu and an education for those) and I don't give him babies or housework. I hope and believe that we just live together 'cos we like one another. Marriage is also one of the areas where the book seems especially dated – Germaine claims that divorce is just too costly to allow women to break free from miserable situations. I've never tried getting divorced, but plenty of people seem to be managing it.

Just when I'd nearly convinced myself that gender equality was one of last century's debates, the following suddenly occurred to me: If there was another war that required conscription, can you imagine women being drafted? I can't. And yet, if we have the same rights as men, shouldn't we have the same duties? Why would it be unthinkable to send a child's mother off to war, but it's OK to deprive them of a father? Even though I've no desire to kill anyone or be shot at, I can't help thinking that the current state of affairs is terribly unfair on men and should therefore be changed.

And then there's still the Cult of Motherhood. Annoyingly enough, it is possible to carve out a life for yourself enjoying the same freedoms as men, but if you should give birth, it's all over and you are expected to sacrifice yourself for the good of your children. Suddenly a woman is expected to let her career languish, and to give up any hobbies she enjoys. Once you have children, any shreds of personality you might want to retain are just selfishness which must be purged from your soul. It is this attitude which has caused me to choose not to ever have children. Consider this: if raising children were really so chuffing fulfilling, why aren't men clamouring to do it?

One of my attitudes has changed as result of this book. I'm pretty much convinced by the argument that if you don't have a puritanical view of sex and see it as intrinsically evil, why would there be such a thing as having too many partners? What other consenting adults are getting up to is absolutely none of my business and I resolve to not to think of anyone as slutty. I should never joked to one friend that she was at risk of being added to the list of well-known ports.

My copy of the book comes with a mystery attached: One of the pages is missing having been ripped out. Why? In anger? But there’s plenty of swearing and polemic spread throughout the book. I like to image that somewhere, long ago a poor excuse for a husband came home one day to find that all trace of his wife had gone with no explanation other than a single page from “The Female Eunuch” stuck to the fridge door. That definitely makes the most satisfying story.