Introducing The Souvenir Society, an idea I have never had the nerve to implement, but if there are any readers out there wanting to make a start ... .

The idea is that the society collects souvenirs. Not commercial rubbish. They must be things that are not for sale, are of little intrinsic value, can be replaced with little inconvenience by whoever you got it from, and which are completely characteristic of the place you visit. Start with monogrammed ashtrays from pubs and restaurants. Move up to stationary saying 'From the desk of ...' from the Prime Minister or President of your choice. Or their nameplates from major summit conferences. Flags from outside UN headquarters, the Barleymont EC headquarters building (or a sample of the asbestos from the walls that makes the place uninhabitable) would be good. Taking The Mona Lisa from the Louvre is clearly a violation of the rules, but how about the rope that hangs in front of it?

Nuclear power stations offer unusual opportunities and challenges, now that they are open for public tours as part of their image-making campaigns. A few kilograms of unenriched Uranium is not actually very dangerous and in today's' world alarmingly easy to replace, and it packs into a surprisingly small volume,. But someone might get the wrong idea if you are caught. Anyway a large sign saying 'Sellafield: trespassers will be lucky to get out intact' would be much more characteristic.

The most ambitious one I have thought of so far is 50,000 cubic feet of helium from inside the Goodyear Blimp, but no doubt you can have your own ideas.

The key to success is in the rules. This must not be mere theft or vandalism. It must be part of a genuine tourist visit, bringing back something that will remind you afterwards of the place and time, and not just because you had to escape the police by driving at 95mph across the border with a three hundred feet of stairwell from the Eiffel Tower bolted to the roof of your car. Perhaps the ultimate would be bringing back a few cubic centimeters of Genuine Lunar Vacuum (but only if you had collected it yourself).

Anyone want to be membership secretary?

I have been wondering why I have been working so hard. Why everyone seems to work so hard. It cannot solely be that we are all avaricious capitalist swine. Why do half the people I meet seem to take it as read that professionals work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week? Why has "Get up or get out" become a truism of career development rather than a rather silly Wall Street catch-phrase?

Your correspondent has the answer.

Well, I have a few bits of an inkling of an answer, anyway.

The problem is at least in part people like me. Bright people who, like people everywhere, find it easier to criticise what someone else is doing that to do it ourselves. When our culture was relative poor, and people relatively isolated, you either ploughed the fields and scattered, or died. The only viable way of making a living was to make something, transport something, or sell something.

However the growth of communication and cultural wealth means that there comes into being a fourth type of person - the optimizer. They do not make, transport or sell anything, but rather try to get other people to make, transport or sell stuff more efficiently. The optimizer creams off some of the extra profit resulting, and so keeps themselves in business. Typical examples are banks and time-and-motion 'experts'. But companies like telephone banking and insurance groups are also founded by optimizers. They do not produce anything (not even insurance or banking) - they just find a quicker, cheaper or better way of taking it from supplier to demander.

With this fourth level of activity comes the need for a fifth - information providers. A limited amount of information has always been useful, but now you need to know a whole lot of stuff about market projections and what your competitors are doing so that you can decide (or rather, the optimizers can decide) whether you could be doing it better. The two, optimizer and information provider, are combined in the consultant, i.e. me.

Ah, you cry, but do these people not do something useful? Sometimes they do. But there is a limit to how much optimizing you can do. After fine tuning a business to the last 10%, is fine tuning to its final 1% worthwhile? To 0.1%? The answer is almost always 'no'. But the optimizers have to continually promise improvement (otherwise they are out of a job), so they invent new ways of optimizing, and push them. And they also invent secondary ways of optimizing things, optimising the optimization process. And that can go on for ever.

Most of the ways are rubbish, of course. Thus 'Business Process Re-engineering' has actually proven in many cases to make businesses less efficient, not more, but its sounds great and so many consultancy companies sold it. Re-insurance sounded good to insurance companies who found that they had bitten off more than they could chew, but it spiralled out of control in the Lloyds insurance market in London until half the market was re-insuring itself in circles, producing nothing. Investment is meant to optimize the distribution of resources, allowing rich people with nothing to do with their money to invest it in poor companies that need it. But it generates endless secondary investment systems, where the investor is investing not in a company, but in other investors. And they invest in other investors, and they invest in other investors. If you are lucky the people who were actually going to use the money to make or transport or sell something get a small bit at the end.

Is this inevitable? Yes - it is classic parasitism. Mechanisms that are essential for society are abrogated by organisms for short-term, purely selfish motives. One could reasonably argue that Nick Leeson, the Barings trader in derivative something-or-others whose rampant dishonesty brought the bank down, is the stock market's answer to the HIV particle.

But what has this to do with work? Well, all these parasitic optimizers compete with the few remaining members of society who actually do something. They have to work very hard at it. Because they do not produce anything tangible, they have to work extra hard to convince people that 'business process re-engineering', which sounds like a load of horse-shit, is actually a fantastic way to make your company more profitable. So they get to work incredibly long hours, write masses or reports. This does not only apply to bankers and investment analysts, of course. Whole strata of middle management can take off into self-referential realms of optimizing behaviour, and because they are no longer concerned with what their company is meant to be doing, but only with producing speculations about how to do it better, they become incredibly productive. In terms of paper and reports, anyway. The few remaining workers have to work even harder to keep up, and to generate real wealth to support all these people.

All this work, all this activity, is purely self-generated. If we did not do it we would not need to do it.

What is the cure? There isn't one. Biology has shown that the only way to fight parasites is to put lots and lots of energy into it - make secondary metabolites, build an immune system, grow scales and horns and hair. There is no way that we could eliminate the optimizers and their supporting providers of 'competitive intelligence', 'market analysis' and so on without expending even more energy. The only cure is to go back to the Neolithic, as mentioned above.

I will have to think of a more cheerful topic for the next Batcave.

I have been considering that butterfly. You know, the one which can cause hurricanes in Bermuda by flapping its wings in the Amazon. Chaos theory, in fact, and being untrammelled by any understanding of it at all, I have come to some remarkable conclusions. Listen carefully. The CIA will not let me say this twice.

The butterfly-hurricane thing is based on a fundamental property of "chaotic" systems. Their end state is determined by their starting state. But a tiny variation in their starting state can cause huge variation in the end result. If you could start the weather systems in exactly the same state this evening as they were yesterday evening, then the weather would be identical, even down to that irritating shower at 3.37 that got your washing wet. But you can never start from exactly the same place, and the tiniest discrepancy makes a huge difference. This tiny displacement of a few cubic microns of air here causes a breeze to blow subtly differently there, which means that this delicately balanced air mass over there does, or does not, form a tiny cloud which is the nucleus of a minor storm there which deflects the jet stream just a few meters way, way over there ... and so on until the hurricane hits Bermuda.

But, consider this. If the tiniest variation in the starting conditions causes such huge differences in the result, then huge differences in the result must have been caused by tiny differences in starting conditions. (Yes, I know it seems a trifle obvious, but I prefer obvious arguments.) Cosmologists have used the chaos argument this way round to great effect. Apparently, tiny differences in the starting conditions of the universe have substantial effects on the universe now - like, whether it is still there. They can deduce the curvature of space-time in the first millisecond of the universe to one part in 1018 , simply because the Universe is not 10 feet across or filled with strawberry Jello.

I suggest we do the same thing with the weather. Running the weather prediction software forwards in time produces ever more inaccurate predictions, as the uncertainties in our measurement of what the world is today have ever greater and greater effects on our predictions for tomorrow. But running it backwards would be much easier. We can measure temperature, pressure, rainfall etc. today with moderate accuracy. Running the software backwards will allow us to sort through the number of possible yesterdays that gave rise to todayÕs weather. Almost all of them will give rise to Hurricanes in Bermondsey, never mind Bermuda, so we can rule them out. The few that are left, only differing from the others in the last decimal point, must be what the weather was like yesterday.

Using this extraordinarily accurate model (checked against what the weather actually was like yesterday) we can predict the day before, and so on. As we predict backwards chaos theory proves that our model will get ever more accurate. We can predict to 100s of decimal places what the wind speed at the top of the Eiffel tower at 11.37 on November 17th 1972 was, because if it was even the slightest fraction different then the next ice age would probably have arrived my now, or falls of frogs would have covered Bermuda instead of hurricanes.

But this is no idle exercise. We could, for example, predict the air flow and pressure patterns over downtown Dallas on November 22nd 1963. We could say precisely how the natural patterns were disturbed by the passage on a certain number of high velocity bullets, how many there were and where they were fired from. We could say how many people were standing on a certain grassy knoll, and if our model had a unit grid size small enough, take a good bash at mapping their faces. If their nose had been less than the size it was, after all, then, pace Professor Henry Higgins, hurricanes would be happening in Hazlemere and Hartlepool every alternate Tuesday.

For a large fee and a guarantee of protection, I am willing to refrain from expanding this theory any further.

(This one is really techie.)

This arose out of a discussion on a fancy cloning technology. Would it work, someone asked? Well, I am sure that it would clone something, I said. But, remembering those cosmids back in my PhD days, it was anyone’s guess as to what it cloned. The power of phage growth to find and amplify self-replicating objects is so vast that you can always clone something, but often it turns out to be junk.

While the discussion moved on to ... well, the usual sort of consultant things ... most of my mind pondered. Just how powerful was a phage cloning or PCR technology? Could it really clone anything? After five minutes of shareholder value and cash flow forecasting I suddenly came to life again and announced to a baffled table that I had worked out how to use PCR to make a time machine.

Here is how it works. You design a modular, microminiaturized system of mechanical bits. Simple parts, like levers, racks, pins, wires etc. You also design a system of enzymes, membranes, nanotechnology widgets etc. that will build a machine from those simple elements. (This is simpler than designing life from scratch - the assembler mechanism does not have to be able to assemble itself as well. You do that.) You code how they assemble a machine by a piece of DNA that is held in one of those bits. The end of the DNA is complementary to your PCR primers. By reading the DNA all the other enzymes, nanotechnology etc. can assemble a specific machine.

You then throw in a pool of random DNAs, and amplify. If one of them happens to encode a functional time machine, then that will be amplified together with everything else, but, unlike everything else, will travel back in time to contaminate your starting material. So it will be present at the start in unusually large amounts. So there will be more of it than of any other DNA at the end of the PCR cycle, so that there will me more time machines travelling back and contaminating the starting material ... and so on. In fact, as soon as you start up the thermal cycler, if there was any DNA that could code for a time machine in there, then the tube will instantly fill up with tiny time machines.

The nanotechnology part poses a problem for me rushing into the lab. and trying this. But we do not need nanotechnology! After all, if we want to move something we construct pistons and levers and wheels and roads and stuff, but nature goes another route, constructing chemical machines out of acto-myosin. Why not have a chemical time machine? So, iteration 2 of this experiment uses phage display, and the same logic as above. You start out with random DNA inserted into a phage vector, and end up with time-travelling viruses.

But I do not think that this will work. No, really, we have to be realistic about these things. Because if it could, every virus in the biosphere would be able to travel in time, and they obviously cannot. Also, using viral vectors for cloning would be almost impossible, because the one random re-arrangement which made a time-virus would immediately contaminate every library. (Of course, I might have been lucky with my PhD gene library, which displayed Mysterious Amplified Clones ... I wonder if I still have them in the fridge?)

No, I think we need to go further into the molecular realm and look at catalytic RNA. RNA can have effector as well as information-carrying function - it can catalyse reactions. Why not catalyse time travel too? We could have a nucleic-acid amplifying reaction, and start out with no target nucleic acid. If any time-travelling nucleic acid was made, then it would travel back in time and form the template for its own synthesis. (If none was made, then it would not, and out reaction would simply produce no result.) The advantage here is that you can start with a zero concentration of DNA of any length ... if a time machine takes 17kb of DNA to make (some 6 megadaltons or about half a million atoms), that is no problem. We need to start our reaction with every possible 17kb-mer in a random mix in order to have the correct molecule to amplify, but we only need zero molecules of them, because the correct one will be selected out of the virtual pool and travel back in time to prime its own amplification. This could, in fact, be quite a low cost experiment.

The evidence is that you can run PCR reactions with primers but no target in for 20 - 30 cycles and get a ‘clean’ result, so this probably does not work for DNA. But it does work for RNA! Remember Q-beta? Q-beta is an RNA phage whose replicase accurately copies the Q-beta’s RNA genome. Q-beta replicase can be tempted to replicate all sorts of other RNA, of course. But it can even be tempted to replicate RNA when there is no RNA there. You can incubate the enzyme with nucleoside triphosphates and absolutely no RNA at all, and after a while some RNA starts to appear. And it always has the same sequence - this is not the enzyme just assembling junk. In short, Q-beta replicase is a time-machine synthetase.

This has two interesting implications. The first is, obviously, for the origin of life, especially given the current belief in an ‘RNA world’ as the progenitor of modern biochemistry. The second is that we should look again at Q-beta, from a point of view of quantum cosmology. After all the talk of rotating black holes and relativistic cosmic strings as the basis of time machines, it is quite refreshing to think that biotechnology could do the whole thing at room temperature in a flask of salty water.

I got this idea while watching half of a film starring Burt Reynolds - Hooper or Hopper or something - about a ageing film stunt man.

The minimal plot revolved around the fact that, after a career of crashing things, Hooper (or Hopper) was feeling his age and considering retirement (after, of course, that one last, magnificent stunt). Ah, how easy the ways of the stunt man, only worrying about how to smash up a car or two. How I would love such a life, were it not for being rather nervous of heights, scared of being hurt, appalingly short sighted and with second-long reflexes. I needed a sort of intellectual version, stunt brains rather that stunt brawn. Then I had it. Stunt Brains Inc.! Now read on.

Do your unfashionable opinions need to be aired? Do you want to establish priority for that radical theory before you are really sure of the ground? Do you want to prod your opponents without being seen to be vindictive? Then you need  - Stunt Brains (R)

Stunt Brains (R) have the intellectual stunt-man for every occasion. We can provide bland mid-American accents with forgetably handsome faces to propose your ideas about the return to a barter economy on prime-time TV. If it is adopted by the Federal Researve Bank, you can refer to your employees or associates, and step into the limelight. We can publish your ideas about how the dinosuars were killed off by an invasion from Mars under names which you can subsequently claim are misprints of yours. We can provide speakers for workshops and discussions groups who will plant your concepts for a cream-cake cure for cancer and then mumble their names inaudibly for the official record. Stunt Brains (R) can field a range of official spokespersons for press conferences of your breakthrough in Tepid Fusion research, and have over 420 genuine foundations which can announce your unusual ideas on the origin of belly-button fluff as the work of 'one of our researchers', leaving the way open for you to claim affiliation to the International Interdisciplinary Institute or the Centre for Human Studies when your ideas are taken up by your colleagues.

Stunt Brains (R) also have a selective newsletter for those testing concepts, and a Web page for publishing those unusually interesting ideas. Put them into the public domain under our name: claim them back if they fly, watch from a safe distance if they crash.

We can also offer an entirely objective referee service for your concepts. Unlike the academic back-biting you have been used to, this service will help you develop the best way to put your idea across at any level, from a full article in Science or Nature to a paragraph in the National Enquirer, taking full advantage of Stunt Brains (R)' unique services.

We offer full anonymity, and a guarentee not to criticise on your ideas, no matter how unusual. Remember - no leap of faith is too great for ... Stunt Brains (R) !

One of the curses of my new job is having to commute from Cambridge into London two or three (or four or five ...) days a week. Commuting must be good for something. One of the things I find it good for is primate behaviour research. I have found, for example, than commuters do not read books.

This started with an observation last November - lots of people on the tube were starting books. Lots of them, reading the first few pages of books. None of them reading the end. Surely just coincidence?

Think again.

I started collecting statistics. I observed all the people on the trains that I saw reading books, and wrote down how far someone was through a book. I could not tell whether they were on page 276 out of 327, but I could estimate what proportion of the book they had read - 30%, 70% etc. Only real books count - manuals and computer books don't, as people do not read them linearly. Magazines etc. don't count, mainly because it is impossible to tell whether someone is on page 7 out of 13, or page 9. But a meaty bit of Tom Clancy or Dostoevsky or molecular biology or something, I got quite good at estimating how far on the readers had got. Of course, I had to note all the books being read in a carriage, to get a valid sample. This lead to much craning and staring, and in any other country in the world I would probably have been shot. In England, of course, no-one comments.

Anyway, here are some numbers, collected into suitable bins. I note what month I made the observation in, and a summary of the fraction of the book read. These bin sizes are selected so that my collection categories (which tend to run in decades) do not bias the results too much.

(The 'total' statistic is not significant, as it reflects only how many times I travelled into London and how many times I had a piece of paper to hand to write numbers on, and whether I went to sleep instead.)

And, sure enough, about half the people on the train are starting books, and hardly any are finishing them. Chi squared result on testing that people should be randomly reading the first, second or third third of their books = 30.185 (9 degrees of freedom, p<0.005). There is no real bias between the train going into London in the morning and going out in the evening (Chi squared = 1.05, p>0.2), nor is there any apparent bias towards more front-end-book readers in January as opposed to December. This skuppers the only reasonable theory, that people start reading books in the morning and have not finished them by the evening, or that people start reading books after Christmas and have not finished them by the summer when I write this. This leaves the only possible explanation that people actually only read the first 1/3 of books on average.

The implications of this for the authors among you need not be spelled out. For the publishers, think on this. You can build a short story into a block-buster saga simply by adding 200 blank pages on the end. Half your readers will not notice, and you can simply give the other half their money back, claiming a printing error.

I look forward to seeing this in W.H.Smiths.

June 1997

Conspiracy Theory Part ¨ ¨

UK radio now provides a wide choice of listening. As well as the national stations (four or five BBC ones plus Classic FM) there is a profusion of regional stations each covering the area of a UK county or two (US = shopping mall). Some of these are local BBC stations, and so tend to a certain similarity, but many are commercially run, and fiercely regional and independent.

Or are they?

I came across the curious effect driving around Cambridge (as I try to do as infrequently as possible). My Dear Lady Wife might leave the radio tuned to Q103, the Cambridge independent radio. If they started to play a really superlative example of the death of the art of composition - "I am a moron" by Tone-Deaf Timmy for example - I would in exasperation switch to one of the other small number of stations our car radio will remember, only to find that they are playing the same damn tune. This happened too often to be a co-incidence, and so driving back from Nottingham one day in January I tested the statistics.

Starting in Leicestershire with a radio station I did not catch the name of, and then progressing to the reception areas of Northants-96, Hereward Radio, Q103 and Chiltern-FM, I found throughout the evening that every time I switched from one station to another they were either playing some local station-identifying jingle, or playing the same song.

But this was not the strange bit. You could explain them playing the same song if, for example, they all borrowed the records off each other, or had a bulk deal with the record companies. You could explian them playing them at the same time if they had a common feed from a music stream into which they dropped their own jingles. But what they did was play them in the same order, but out of synch by as much as 60 seconds. "Another juvenile song about sex" by Winnie Whiner would grind to a halt, there would be a short jingle for Northants-96, and "I have the brains of a rat" by Mike Model would come on. Exasperated I would push the button for Q103. Winnie Whiner would wail and moan for a few seconds, a cute jingle for Q103 would come on, and then Mike Model would start to demonstrate his mental accomplishments. I would hit the buttons again, and Winnie would once more say ' ....lurve yooooooo' to the sounds of synthesisers being tortured to death, Chiltern-FM would anounce itself briefly, and Mr. Model would grunt his way into his time-slot. I discovered Hereward Radio was part of this sinister conspiracy by waiting until something distinctive was on Chiltern-FM and then scanning for other stations playing the same thing.

It went on for the 45 minutes I conducted the experiment, interrupted by local news, adverts and jingles. Say 10 songs. What is the probability that four (five including the Leicester one) radio stations chose the same songs to play in the same order for all that time?$

So, either we postulate that local radio DJs are cloned from one person with the musical taste of a seagull and the imagination of a cow (a not unreasonable proposition, apart from doubts about why anyone would want to do such a thing ...) or that they have all been programmed by mysterious forces to play not merely the same records, but at the same times. At 9.15 am they all spontaneously think "I know, I will play 'Juvenile sex' by Winnie Whiner and then 'Rat' by Model and then 'A lobotomy, please, anything is better than this' by Nearly Everyone and then ..." and then go on to play them as if they were completely independent. Slight variations in the lengths of jingles, adverts etc. mean that at the end of a 60 minute programming slot they are slightly out of synch.

That leaves two unanswered questions. What is causing this, and why? The what is easy. If ever anyone is likely to be subject of powerful mind-altering rays it is someone with very little mind to start with who choses to sit directly in the beam of a microwave transmitter, and what do you see sprouting out of every radio station in the country? I rest my case. The 'Why' is more problematical. I discount the record industry on the grounds that a) they would only need their records played incessantly, not always in the same order, and b) it is too obvious.

No, I think the Estate of Carl Sagan in behind it all.

I mean, what did he do with all the money from the books, and the TV series, and now the royalties from the movie? He could not get the government to transmit messages to the stars, so he changed course and in his dying days build a complex mind control network to turn the whole UK private radio industry into a synchronised transmitter to broadcast messages to far-off planets. You could probably work out, if you knew the location of the transmitters, exactly which star he was aiming at from the delays between songs, all carefully programmed so that the fifth planet of Tau Ceti received a perfectly formed and focused wavefront of Mike Model's latest offering.

Pity Classic FM was not around when he died, really. They could have had something worth listening to.

________________________________________________________________________

$ You did not seriously think I could resist, did you? More precisely, I check one station, and then check the other three to see if they are playing the same thing. If they all are, then I check the next song, and then check the other stations and so on. Assuming there is a playlist of 20 songs (rather generous given the brain-blanking repetition of pop radio), and, because they all sound the same, they are played at random, and assuming that the stations try not to play the same song in any one 45 minute interval, then the chance I get to the end of 10 songs without the series being broken is 1/3.3.1036 , - one in three hundred million billion billion billion, ie not very much.

The world contains less that 20,000 people.

More and more I find people I have met before coming back from completely different directions. This has lead to a curious and no doubt quite spurious calculation.

For example, I keep a file of the letters of reference I write for ex-students, to save time in case they want a repeat reference, and to make sure my lies are consistent. Looking over these I recently, I found that not one but two (out of 15 or 20) are from people who have subsequently come to Merlin with business propositions. One of our scientific advisory board members recently referred me to Igor Aleksander on a technical matter. Not only had I quite independently contacted him when writing 'Artificial Intelligence from A to Z' with Jenny Raggett some 10 years ago (on the advice of Piers Burnett), but I found that one of his neural net group had written to me to ask for a reference for one of my final year project students. A member of one of our company’s scientific board correctly identified the rather odd things on my college tie as heraldic pelicans – he was at the same college as me, although many years before.

In August one of the founders of a company called QT genetics contacted Merlin asking for funds with the immortal line ‘You may not remember me, but ...’. But I did – he was the only guy to consistently come top (ahead of me, chiz chiz) in our A-level biology class at school (I beat him in chemistry, though.) Bear in mind that there are alleged to be about 600,000 births a year in the UK – the chances of this are not large.

Is this solely because I move in a restricted world of biotech meeting rooms? No, because on November I was waiting for a train on Kings Cross tube station (Piccadilly line, noted for its crowds) and a guy I worked with at PA when we were both working in Cambridge said ‘Aren’t you ...’. If London really did contain 6 million people, what are the chances of meeting one on the mass transit system who I had met before?

The jackpot example, though, was in July when Eddie at Rothschilds arranged a dinner with Jonathan Weber, one of the Rothschilds (and now Merlin) scientific advisory board. As soon as he came in he said 'Bains, eh? I knew a Bains at school'. Turns out he went to the same prep school as I did, 35 years ago. Bloody hell! Either he did some pretty damn impressive homework, or he has an amazing memory to discover this at all. I could not remember a single thing about him.

From this and similar data, one may readily calculate the population of the world. This is exactly akin to the 'release and recapture' methods used by ecologists. You capture an collection of animals (voles, rats, professors, whatever), tag them, and release them. Some time later you capture some more. How many of them are tagged? Statistically this tells you the fraction of the population represented by your original sample. It is exactly analagous to meeting someone at (say) a New Year's party and then meeting them three months later in a business meeting (and frantically trying to remember why they look familiar). If the world contains 6 billion people the chances of this are fantastically small, but if the world actually contains three people then it is nearly a certainty that you will bump into them more than once.

This does not work if you keep track of the collected animals, of course, by radio transponders or regular letters. If I re-contact Professor X (or Vole Y) because I met them before, then that is not an independent sampling.

Given that, we can calculate the population of my universe. My complete letters file, address book, and contact database, etc lists about 1000 people who are more than casual contacts (ie excluding the people with whom I exchange a business card in a meeting and then forget all about). These are people I have exchanged letters with, or long e-mail exchanges, and in nearly all cases met. 26 of them I have met through two quite independent routes at least twice, from which we can calculate the population of the world, and the answer is (rather surprisingly) that the population of the world is 17,083 people. Sampling bias means that this probably does not include children and the retired, although I could well believe that we have had in excess of eighteen thousand children in our house some weekends.

This also predicts that, given an average family size of 2.2 children, I should have also met slightly more than 1 person who is the brother or sister of someone else who I have met for a completely different reason. In fact this has happened twice: stand up Andy and Rod, and Mike and Adrian. So, strong statistical validation there on a sample of two.

(I confess to being slightly unsure whether this should be 1.1097 people or 59.4 people. Well, this was never going to be published in Nature anyway. No doubt numerate friends will now all write in and tell me all the other places my sums are wrong.)

There are a whole lot of other co-incidences, which I am not sure how I should include in the calculations. For example, I have met professionally two people called David Stewart, two people called Dr. Phillip Stanley, and two called R. van der Meer. Also one called Paul Schaap and one called Paul Sharpe. And several called John Taylor (or Tailor), but that is the most common name in England (more common than John Smith, despite common belief) so that is probably not statistically meaningful.

This either proves a) the world really does contain only 17,000-odd people, and the rest are holograms (smelly, hard-elbowed holograms on the underground, but no more real for that) or b) I am become a boring old fart, so set in my ways that I never meet anyone new any more. I leave this choice as an exercise for the reader.

{Warning. This may not appeal to anyone who is not a Buffy-watching chemist.}

We are moderate fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I say 'moderate' because we do not have the complete series on tape, do not go to the conventions, do not have Sarah Michelle Gellar's biography off by heart and so on. But we watch fairly enthusiastically, despite one inconsistancy that has puzzled us (well, me) for some time.

(Yes, I am applying logic to film and TV fantasy again. Tiresome, isn't it?)

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I should explain, is an American TV series about the eponymous Buffy, her friends, her life in high school and (now) college, and her night-time job fighting the forces of darkness. There is a spin-off series called Angel, about one of those forces of darkness who turned good, there is lots of gymnastic fighting and punching and kicking, in every episode of Buffy Gellar gets to look all girly and trembly-lipped at the camera at least once, and in every episode of Angel David B gets to take his shirt off to reveal a frankly amazing set of muscle delineations. The one-liners are good too. So, a top-range soap opera, combining what passes for Wildean whit in the 21st century, lots of bodies, and a nice, simple plotline about ever escalating forces of evil trying to take over the world.

In the first series, the vampires were numerous, only came out clothed in rags at the dead of night, and were dispatched with a minimum of screaming by the traditional method: five minutes desperate hand-to-hand fighting followed by a stake through the heart. But as the series developed, several of the vampires had characters placed on them by the plot-writers, and consequently became much better dressed, got better lines, and started to get better lighting. So much so that Spike and Angel can now walk around indoors during the hours of daylight without any trouble.

Which leads to a troubling conundrum. When vampires are exposed to sunlight (as anyone who has watched From Dusk to Dawn knows perfectly well), they burst into flames and explode. Thus it is in Buffy. I always thought this was chemical photosensitivity, and we can think of some perfectly sensible-sounding reasons why this would necessarily be so.

For example, humans achieve high levels of energy output by combining otherwise pretty stable molecules with oxygen to create rapid, vigorous chemistry for running, thinking, and eating more pizza. But vampires have no heartbeat, no way to get oxygen to the muscles (and brain, in the case of those with good lines).

So their biochemistry is radically altered to run on, say, TNT, which can give the same energy output but without O2. Most the nitrophenols are light-sensitive, so expose a vampire to enough UV and their biochemical reactions got into chain reaction and, whammo!. The incessant need for blood, and fresh blood at that, is probably because they need the reduced metabolites and antioxidants to damp down the spontaneous detonation of their own metabolism even in the dark. Note that where a vampire usually bites its victim, they would get the carotid veins, rather than arteries - they are after oxygen-free blood, all nicely reduced and ready to soak up those superoxide radicals.

(Apropos this chemistry, it has never made sense to me that Buffy does not actually use TNT to stop vampires. I know they have superhuman strength and recuperative powers, but being blown into tiny pieces would probably give even the toughest supernatural entity pause. But I digress.)

But even in series 1 of Buffy, we see Angel stalking the local nightclub, with UV striplights going full tilt, and nary a whiff of smoke. Indeed, ordinary strip-lights put out quite a bit of UV. So it is not UV per se that is out vampire-ignitor.

What about the sheer intensity of light? No, searchlights seem OK, but the diffuse sunlight of a cloudy day means barbecue time.

Maybe it is something in sunlight itself? The spectral distribution, the NIR content? Well, Angel seems pretty healthy in diffuse, reflected sunlight, even reflected off concrete and sand which reflect just about everything. So that is not it.

Basically, it is starting to look as if the reasons vampires explode in sunlight is that they are just so terminally cool that they would rather die than have suntans spoil their black-and-pale image.

But no, wait! There is one thing that scattered light does not have, but regular sunlight even diffused by clouds does, and that is polarization! Maybe it is polarised light that is the problem?

This leads to a whole new line of speculation, which also explains why you cannot see vampires in mirrors. What if, instead of TNT, vampires ran on perfectly ordinary biochemistry, but under huge steric strain? Their molecules are all violently twisted by the forces of darkness. Now, normal light will simply bounce off them, but circularly polarised light will interact specifically with those misshapen molecules and put additional strain on them, tweaking them past the point at which they are stable and converting them to a lot of free-flying atoms. Same effect as TNT, but different chemistry. (It must be circularly polarised light, as otherwise vampires would be fine outside if they kept at 90 degrees to the plane of polarisation, ie if they fell over.) This also explains how a vampire can turn a human into another vampire without requiring several kilos of sodium nitrate. Simply twist neck, bite, twist molecules, and you are off.

So circularly polarised light falling on vampires sets them off, but what of light reflected off them? This will be polarised all to hell and back. Light reflected off glass also picks in a polarization due to differential reflection - you can use stacked sheets of glass as polaroid sunglasses if you do not mind the 10kg weight and the inch-thick steel frames. So what about the highly twisted light coming off a vampire? I will have to check the geometry next time I meet one, but I suspect that if the light is polarised just right a mirror will reflect it pretty poorly, or maybe not at all. Vampire's inability to check their looks over in the shop before buying that really cool set of black, skin-tight jeans is not supernatural, it is just basic optics.

With two such devastatingly conclusive pieces of evidence in our floppy leather coat pocket, we can suggest two new strategies for Buffy and her friends.

Why wait for the sun? Lasers emit polarised light. No more wooden stake, hand-to-hand nonsense. A laser rifle at 500 meters will pick them off, just using the laser spot alone. I reckon all the vampires killed in the first three series could have been dispatched in a single episode with a passive, laser-based IR burglar detector system, and Buffy would never have had to get out of bed.

But that would not be much fun. Any other systematic circular perturbation of the hellish molecules should do the trick. Whirl a vampire round sufficiently fast, and they should go off. I would suggest the Walzers at a fairground. Strap 'em in and watch 'em blow! It would also be a good test for prospective fathers-in-law to run on their dear one's intended. Less fatal that a stake through the heart, and it could, under extreme circumstances, even be considered fun.

Look out for this plot twist in Series 17 of Buffy, together with how to kill demons with the sharpened feet of a Zimmer frame made entirely of (chiral) cellulose.

I have discovered that I have a new talent, nay, a secret identity. Most days I am William Bains, quiet, egocentric entrepreneur, but, on cold autumn mornings between 7am and 8am on the Northbound platform of our local train station I turn into ....

Electric Weirdo Man!

Yes, wherever there are evildoers on Northbound platform, providing the weather is cold and dry, Electric Weirdo Man will leap to the rescue, giving the bad guys mild but slightly surprising electric shocks! Ever since Electric Weirdo Man bounded from the waiting room, his unforgettable costume of bicycle helmet and trousers tucked into his socks, and shapeless woolly flapping in the cool October air, our station has been entirely free of major bank robberies, violent kidnappings, and international terrorist incidents.

It's another victory for ... Electric Weirdo Man!

A short word of explanation. While I was sill employed I used to take the early train up to Cambridge with my children and our bicycles. We found one morning, when the air was a dry 8oC or so, light breeze, scattered cloud, that one of them had become oddly charged. Running a finger lightly over the back of another's hand gave a strong tingling, like a continuously firing, weak static charge. I tried it - I was even more charged. It was as if I had a miniature rotary sander or a very small van der Graaf generator on the ends of my fingers. It only worked on the station platform, and in those weather conditions. "How weird!" they said, and so was born the name of Electric Wierdo Man, and the rest is (almost entirely uneventful) history.

One boring explanation for this effect is that we were picking up AC from the overhead power cables for the trains. But that seems rather dull. What if it really was a super-power, akin to the X-men, but just not so impressive as the ability to call up storms or have fire streaming from your eyes?

The X-men derive their super-powers not from being from another planet like Superman or from technology like Batman, but from mutations. But, logically, one would not expect such complex and powerful phenotypes to spring full-grown into the gene pool. Fins did not evolve into feet in one generation, but by gradual change, small steps, each generation slightly less finnish and more footy than the last. So one would expect super-powers to be pretty un-super at the start. Evolution starts small, and builds on successes.

So, I prefer the explanation that Electric Weirdo Man is the next very small step in human evolution. Hundreds of generations from now, my descendents will be able to throw quite large sparks around on the Northbound platform, in all sorts of weather, and cause quite substantial static several miles down the line. A million years hence they will have combined with Always chose the shortest queue at Tesco Woman and Aroma Kid (able to make odd smells at will - no, wait, that has already evolved ....), to build a being of almost God-like powers.

Of course, if other current trends continue they will also be fantastically short-sighted, have near lethal asthma, eczema, arthritis, flat feet, bad backs, depression and alcoholism, and be so obese that they will classify not as mammals but as geography.

What a strange world. I leave the vision to my writer friends.

Really childproof drug bottles

Once upon a time, medicines came in little brown bottles, with attractive coloured pills in them, and many a child was poisoned as a result, mistaking them for sweets. Now, medicines come in child-proof bottles, with lids that only an adult can open.

Do they bollocks! The lids require some strength to open, but no more that could be exerted by an enraged four-year-old, after aligning little arrows or knobs or marks, leaning and twisting in the correct order and so on. Any half-way bored child will simply lean, twist, turn, shove and pull in all combinations until the thing is opened. Richard amazed my father by finding his way past child-proof locks at the age of three, simply by trying everything. That is why children are better with video recorders, computer games than adults are. They have lots of time, and they are not afraid of breaking it.

(This is not just my assertion - a video equipment manufacturer studied this early in 2001, reporting just this conclusion on the news. They had hoped that children had the secret of easier-to-operate equipment. Well, they do: it is to have lots of time and a conviction that, if you break it, Daddy will pay for a repair.)

The people who cannot get into child-proof bottles of aspirin are people with arthritis, whose fingers cannot grip the cap. Or someone with a blinding headache who cannot see with the instructions or the tiny little arrows they are meant to line up before pushing on the opposite side of the lid. Bloody hell, I thought one day in August, enraged by one of these inventions of Satan and a rather severe hangover, these are actually patient-proof medicines.

After I had chewed my way through the base of the bottle and got enough aspirin to think rationally, I wondered what a child-proof bottle would actually be like.

A hugely tight cap is the obvious one, but this assumes that you use a pipe wrench to put the top back on as well as take it off, unless you postulate motorised bottle tops. Anyway, many 10-year-olds are as strong as some adults. And it still does not allow the arthritic to get in.

More complicated caps might seem attractive. Rather than 'lean and push' or 'align arrows and flip', you could have 'align country (on cap) with capital city (on bottle)' or 'point arrow on bottle to the number which is its exact square on the cap' or 'rotate, push, pull, flip and turn in alphabetical order'. But this would still fall prey to the 'try everything at random' approach, and many adults would be incapable of following the instructions.

No, neither strength nor intelligence are the answer. You want something that is genuinely unique to adults,. There are two options.

The first is a sex hormone-sensitive lid. Such bottles would explode open whenever teenage boys walked by, while the post-menopausal would find themselves denied all medical help. But it would do for young family use. However that requires a lot of sensor and motor power in the cap, and would probably cost more to develop than the medicines inside the bottle.

No, I prefer money. The one thing that adults have and juveniles do not is economic power, so you make a cap which only opens if you put a £10 note in, which it then keeps. Every aspirin therefore costs you £10 in hard cash. When the bottle of 50 is empty, you send it off to Glaxo, who send you back a refilled bottle and a £495 cheque.

You have to set the price at the right level, of course, as otherwise a teenager wanting relief from their headache will find it cheaper to buy street heroin instead, with unfortunate effects.

I can think of nothing wrong with this scheme, except the possibility of a sudden rise in un-drug related crime, with impoverished youths stealing empty drug bottles for the money.

The Huntsman's Return

Autumn 2005

The hunting ban in England and Wales seems vaguely objectionable to me, at least in part because a government that is happy to kill humans in the Middle East should not be so holier-than-thou about killing foxes in the Midlands. And it is so easy to rip things up, much harder to rebuilt them, even if they are expensive, pointless and rather dangerous. So is bathing in the sea, getting laid in Ibiza, and beer.

But there are lots of hunting still allowed. Fishing (ramming a hook into the mouth of a living fish and then dragging it through the water for up to an hour) is fine. So apparently is hunting with birds. Hawking and so on. Probably because it is all historical and medieval, and rich people don't do it in silly clothes.

Which lead a friend and me to come up with an excellent idea. Hunting foxes with ostriches. An ostrich can easily keep up with a horse or fox, its kick can crack the skull of a human, never mind canine vermin, and they are very obviously not hounds. Of course, they are fantastically stupid, and you might have to attach a flashing yellow light to the top of the fox to get the animals to chase it. But I am sure they could be trained. After all, pigeons were trained to carry messages across the trenches in the world wars, parrots can be trained to make complex meaningless noises on command ("Polly wants a cracker" cannot possibly mean 'Polly wants a cracker' in parrot). Pavlovian training for Ostriches to a) follow the guy blowing the horn and b) lick the s*** out of foxes should be quite do-able. With the added advantage that when the old bird got a bit past its best in the pack, you could eat it.

I can see this as a grand new British tradition, the sight of the huntsmen in Pink, tearing across the autumn fields of Warwickshire on their motorbikes (riding horses having been declared discriminatory against the horse, because the horse does not get an equal opportunity to ride the human), 'View Hallo'-ing after a pack of ostriches in full squawk after the fox.

Di' ya ken John Peel with his coat so grey Its been covered in bird shit from break of the day John Peel's foolish fowl have all lost their prey So it's fried ostrich steak in the morning

.

You read it here first.

Summer 2008

I have been pondering this question.

"Why is slo-mo cool?"

When the hero of an action movie and his/her gang-members stride into the climactic battle of good with evil, they almost inevitably stride in slow motion. (The Bourne Ultimatum is an exception, where they seem to speed the movie up so you cannot see anything at all.) The Matrix exemplifies the slow-motion-hero-is-cool theme. Keanu Reeves is not inherently a very bright or cool or interesting person, but put a big leather coat on him and play back the film at 1/4 speed and ... hot damn! I gave myself a boxed set of Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns for Christmas, and although not filmed in slow motion (Leone could probably not afford the technology) Clint moves as if in slow motion at all the critical scenes. And soundlessly, which is another good feature of the slo-mo scenes: no speech. Adverts for everything from cars to toothpaste have also realised that slo-mo is cool. A car driving through a puddle is just - a car driving through a puddle. A car driving through in slow motion is, for some reason, cooler.

I have an answer to this, but it is not one I like because it means that I will forever be un-cool unless I choose to be very ill.

What is cool? 'Not you' say my dear offspring, and they are right - cool relates to your social group, and means the person who is admired for their social status, as signalled by their clothes, speech, walk, friends, food, car, music, music player, everything. 'Cool' means 'top of the social hierarchy'. Above all, cool means 'I don't have to try to impress you, you have to try to impress me', even though of course they do try, very hard.

What is un-cool about the imitator who tries to join the social group? They can mimic the clothes, speech, walk and so on, and everyone laughs, because they are busy trying to do it. (Think Woody Allan, think the fat programmer in Jurassic Park who is trying to look cool and relaxed as he runs off to screw his employers). The cool guy just has to glance at someone. The un-cool pretender has to attract attention, wave their arms, babble. Babbling is definitively uncool.

In fact, what really distinguishes cool from un-cool is lack of motion of any sort. When the cool, dominant, alpha male wants everyone to leave the room with them, they get up and walk across the room, in their own time. They do not question the sure and certain knowledge that everyone else will get up and follow them. They do not talk about it. They do not even look round. They are cool: of course everyone else is following them. Woody Allan says 'So, OK, I guess we had better be going, OK guys? I mean it is getting late and we don't want to miss the movie,...' and rushes back and forth between the door and the group he is trying to move. And everyone laughs. Har har har look at him pretending that anyone is paying any attention. Think of Samuel Jackson in the apartment scene in Pulp Fiction. "Oh, I'm sorry, did I break your concentration?" He has just shot a guy, and he just stands there, while the subdominant (and soon to be dead) boy quivers. He has just killed someone and he scarcely twitches. Most people would at least look round to see if the guy was dead.

In slightly less bloodthirsty mode, I remember a conversation with several eminent molecular biologists in 1991 about ... well, it does not matter. (No, I cannot remember, but it was related to sequencing by hydridization). There half a dozen of us were arguing in increasingly agitated tones about whatever it was. There was a pause. "Well, I think there is something in that." said Ed Southern laconically, and suddenly all the excited posturing of the rest of the group looked like just that, and Ed had established that he was actually the top dog there. I am sure that was not his intent - after all, he was the top dog there. But that is the point. Top dogs just say, quietly, what they want to say, do, quietly, what they want to do. They do not need to argue or wave or jump up and down. They can just focus on the goal they wish to attain, and then attain it.

In short, cool is goal-focused behaviour. You decide to go from A to B, you do it. There is no extraneous movement. There is no extraneous talk. You want to light a small cigar before blowing someone's brains out? You light the cigar, you blow their brains out. There is no extraneous movement at all. That is what you are going to do. The thought that anyone will fail to fall into your plans does not even enter your head. It certainly should not enter theirs. Confidence just oozes from them.

Now, it is not possible for real people to be that cool. When you walk out of a room, you will glance round. You will adjust your coat. You will hesitate slightly, or make any one of a hundred little intention movements that say 'I hope everyone is following me', which everyone will pick up on. You want to imitate Clint with the cigar, you will drop the first match, or check the gun is loose in your holster first, or your right hand will twitch once or twice towards your Magnum 45 as you light up (sorry, mixing movies here). If you walk slowly down a street, it is incredibly hard not to glance around to size up the terrain and the people around you, check out your social as well as physical environment. (Men do this in particular - the first thing a man will do when walking into a room is glance round at everyone else there, into the corners, through open doors and windows. It is programmed in, guys. Women focus on who they are coming to see. This is why women are cooler than men.) So you cannot be ultimately cool in the real world.

But - you can make it look that way. You can tell someone "Walk really fast towards the camera. As fast as you can without running. Big strides. Go!" and off they will go, totally focused, not glancing aside or taking little pause steps or fiddling with their cuffs because, heck, they do not have time and they will fall over. But when you play it back at ½ speed, it looks as if they are walking slowly, but with utter confidence and concentration. They stroll down the street in slow, ground eating paces, no pauses or glances to the side, as if they simple know that the rest of the world is falling into place behind them. (Of course, being 6 foot tall and impossibly good-looking helps too.) They radiate cool.

So, the Bains Theory of Cool. Cool is the lack of activity that appears to come from the total confidence that everyone is falling in with your idea of how the world should be arranged. Uncool is the gibbering idiot who is obviously trying to convince everyone else.

That is why slo-mo is cool.

This is why it is possible for old people to be, if not formally cool, at least damn stylish. Clint, again, Sean Connery. Cool is not about looks, or youth (although as the young set themselves up as the arbiters of cool those are major components of real-world cool.) Cool is about the focus that comes from confidence.

It does mean that I am destined to be forever un-cool - manically waving my arms about and babbling at people. But it suggests an interesting pharmacological approach to cool.

What would a 'cool drug' look like? Basically, it would damp down extraneous motion, without completely immobilising you. (People under general anaesthesia are definitely not cool.) So you want something that will delay those impulses by a few fractions of a second, either through central pharmacology or peripheral neuromuscular blockade. Interestingly, central pharmacology suggests we dose people with whatever they use to treat Tourettes, and one of the things that Tourettes' sufferers find helpful is smoking, and, yes, smoking has always been considered cool, which suggests that nicotinic agonists would be a good way to go. Nicotinic agonists have been suggested by serious people for treating Tourettes, so this is not as silly as it sounds. (Other drugs suggested include everything from anti-psychotics to botulinus toxin, which suggests the most common approach to treating Tourettes is to completely immobilise the patient).

Things that slow neuromuscular response are harder - just a tad too much and you fall over paralysed - but how about just making the joints stiff? A TNF-a agonist would do it (and have the added benefit of pushing your temperature up to 103oF, making you feel completely spaced out). Or you could catch influenza - hmm, maybe not. Oddly, being very thin is also meant to be cool, and I suspect that this is not all to do with how clothes hang off you as if you were a coat-hanger. It is also starvation-induced euphoria, and the economy of motion that only the truly hungry achieve as their bodies conserve every calorie.

So, anorexia and smoking. Is this a price worth paying for being cool? Personally, I have my doubts - I will just continue to live on-line and remain as un-cool as it is possible to be in real life.

Spring 2009.

I have ranted about the British state here before, and events of the last few months have not made me happier with the way we are mis-governed. My problem remains. What the f*** can we do about it? Voting is about as useful as writing letters to Santa. Blowing things up just justifies yet another piece of repressive legislation. (There was a report in the Royston Crow in December 2008 that Cambridgeshire County Council had used the Anti-Terror laws [Specifically RIPA - allegedly passed to enable the police to monitor organised international criminals and terrorist networks ] to prosecute a newsagent for employing paper boys [young people employed to deliver newspapers, not cellulose lifeforms] without work permits. As predicted at the time, 'anti-terror' laws are basically 'anti-people' laws, to be used on everyone whenever convenient and with complete disregard to whether they are 'terrorists' or not. Blowing things up will give the state an excuse to tighten the thumbscrews even further.)

Emigrating is very attractive if you are willing to leave family, friends, countryside, beer and so on behind (I am - my wife is not, and I am not pissed off enough to leave my wife!).

And then it came to me.

The current Government is desperate for cash. Despite the fairy stories of their success in 'handling' the crisis that the government's spin doctors have placed in British newspapers, Brown's economic actions and policies are seen as inept at best in the rest of the world. Gordon Brown has committed every man, woman and child in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to a debt of £22,000. That is quite apart from their own, personal debt on credit cards, mortgages, lease arrangements and so on, which Mr. Brown is begging us to increase by spending cash we do not have this Christmas. This will come home to roost as confidence in the pound collapses and the currency falls to £1=$1 or worse. So he needs cash.

So let's give him some. Let's organize a management buy-out. We can do an MBO of (say) East Anglia, or the Cornish peninsula, or Scotland. For £10 trillion we could buy Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and Cambridgeshire off the UK. [The number is hard to estimate, as the government is very stingy about saying where it gets its money from, but total state revenue in the UK is about £700bn, the Anglia population is around 6M out of 61M, so on a pro rata basis Anglia contributes around £70bn, which has an NPV (6% discount rate) of ~£8 trillion over the next 20 years]. I am sure the Chinese would fund it. People would retain their houses, farms etc (we are not talking about nationalizing here) - they would just have a new government. The resulting country would have wind farms, a nuclear power station, one of the better water systems in the country, farms, ports, several excellent hospitals, and an airport. Oh, and a University or two. And (and this is a big plus) no major international financial centre. There would be substantial emigration from Anglia (as we might call it) when we fired 90% of the pointless bureaucracy that a decade of Labour government has made us pay for, and the bureaucrats discovered that they are useless and unemployable. Smoking would be re-introduced in pubs, making it a tourist Mecca for central England. A proper rail network would be re-introduced, railway management given back to people who knew what trains were, hospital management would be handed back to people who knew medicine, economic management to people who can add up. Some sensible policies on waste disposal and recycling would be introduced (like mandatory prison sentences for illegal dumping). The planning laws (zoning laws in American) would actually be enforced. In 2020 we would have a higher GDP than the rest of England, London included, and actually be a nice place to live.

The only downside is that the increasingly repressive labour regime in the rest of the UK would instigate border controls and keep us waiting at the A1M roundabout for six hours every time we went to Scotland.

Anyone up for creating a web site to start the Lets Buy Anglia movement?

July 2011

This speculation fermented by a discussion about a young man doing his GCSEs[1], and good luck to him. Well, at the time he was finishing GCSEs, so there was not much point wishing him good luck really. Or was there?

Think about it. ‘Luck’ is not ‘work hard’ or ‘be clever’ or anything like that. It is not ‘I have bribed the examiner’ or ‘I have stolen the paper in advance, here it is’. It is not in fact anything tangible. When you wish someone ‘luck’ you are not saying “The following acts will have a causal impact on the outcome of the events we are discussing.” In part you are not saying that because normal people surprisingly rarely talk like that, but mainly because the whole point of ‘luck’ is that it is something over which you have no influence. It is acausal, and as such not limited by such tedious things as the speed of light or the laws of thermodynamics. In principle, then, I could wish the examinee ‘good luck’ at any time in his exams, and the wishing would be just as effective. Indeed, I could wish him luck well after the exams have finished. So I wished him good luck.

But we can go further. Why limit oneself to after they have finished? I could wish my grandchildren luck in their exams, even though I have no grandchildren and by the time they are 16 exams will have been replaced by something incomprehensible and internetty. Even better, one could wish for good luck not just after alea jacta est, but after alea had landed and everyone had seen you threw a double one and ended up sliding down a snake. One could go up to car crash victims and say “Good luck!” and, if luck works at all, they should retrospectively have better luck and therefore not be in the crash in the first place. I encourage you to try this. I am confident that the difference in injury level between you and the car crash victim will be substantially reduced as a result.

Of course, one has to be careful about this. The car crash you carelessly prevented by wishing the driver good luck might have kept a homicidal maniac off the streets, which would be very bad luck for someone. Maybe the reason that saying “Good Luck!” does not obviously work is luck conflict. Nearly every member of the human race wishes ‘good luck’, and so, on the ‘what everyone believes must be right’ thesis that underlies so much of theology, luck must exist and be a powerful force indeed. But it does not very often have a dramatic effect, because people throughout space and time, including in our far past and future, have carelessly wished for things that are lucky for them but unlucky for us.

So we can solve this problem. We have the technology! All we need to do is set up a Good Luck clearing house on the internet, with microphones in every street corner scanning for the words “Good luck!” in the local language. A complex algorithm will then match the various luck-wishes with each other and the probably outcome, and people would be fined for careless Luck-wishing.

The technology is readily extendable to other areas of human belief. Take prayer, for example. Francis Galton famously did a statistical study on the efficacy of prayer, and concluded that the large number of prayers said for the health of the royal family (and for the local minister, local worthies and so on) had no effect on their health. But of course not! Galton was studying historical records from 1758 – 1843 [2], during which time England (in its various forms) fought 43 wars against France, the Austrian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, Russia, almost all the states that ended up being Germany and Italy, Holland, Sweden, Afghanistan (plus ca change…), various bits of India, a couple of states in Africa, and the Chinese Empire. Oh, and the American colonies (lost those). At any one time at least three entire countries were praying for Britain and all its leaders to drop dead. It is amazing, really, that any member of the British Royal Family made it past their tenth birthday. Obviously without global collaboration, prayer will not work.

And so – ePray. a social networking business with a difference, coordinating wishes and prayers through trading, global surveillance and suitable financial incentives. A boon to society, and final and conclusive proof of the benefit of “Good Luck!”

Ah, but we can go even further! Why should the effect of wishes and prayers be confined to Earth? Acausal, faster than light, the prayers of the Zxigoopids of Gortle should be able to affect Earth as well as Gorlte, and visa versa. So we could pray, desire and fervently wish that stars across the sky should go nova, just for the pretty lights they make. The ones that did not blow up, annihilating any planets around them, would be thus be proven to harbour intelligent life whose counter-wishes – to wake up in the morning at a temperature below the boiling point of carbon – would have neutralised ours.

With good luck, we can look forward to the ePray-SETI collaboration proving the universe to be full of intelligent life.

What are the chances you can catch a disease off an alien?

What would it take for that old SciFi classic of ‘alien disease infects human’ to come true? I wondered this while watching Babylon Five (Series 2, cannot remember the episode title), when the SomeThingOrOther aliens were being struck down by a plague, and it jumped species to the WhatEverYouCallThem aliens, and everyone was wondering if it would jump some more to humans. And their was a great wailing and gnashing of teeth until Dr McCoy (no, it is the other one in Babylon Five, isn’t it?) found the magic wibble machine that made everyone better, except for the aliens, who all died.

But in reality, how likely is this to happen? And then it occurred to me – we have the data to answer this! Not a lot of data, but some.

A few diseases have jumped from other animals to humans. I am not talking about things like TB that naturally affect several species. I am talking about H1N1 flu, that appeared in chickens and then jumped to man. Lassa Fever, Swine flu. And of course AIDS. The case of AIDS is interesting. It jumped from apes (possibly monkeys) to humans at least twice, from a population of a few hundred thousand monkeys to (let us say) a population of 100 million rural Africans. Bird flu, by contrast, apparently only jumped once between a population of billions of chickens living alongside a billion people. Swine flu is probably intermediate – less pigs, but similar numbers of humans, SARS jumped from Palm Civets to humans. WTF is a Palm Civet? Something that there are quite a lot of in Asia, apparently.

Now, there is a pattern here. We catch of diseases from each other with absurd ease. Just ask any schoolteacher. Say you catch a disease from another human once a month, out of (say) 20,000 people who thoughtlessly cough all over you in public. We catch diseases from great apes at (let’s say) one event decade per 50,000 apes x 100 million people. But it takes 1 billion chickens to cough over 1 billion humans for decades to spread one disease. Palm Civets are inbetween. Hah – the rate of disease jumping and how long ago our species went their separate, evolutionary ways are related! Other humans – 10,000 years ago, apes 10 million years, chickens 300 million years and so on. (This is why we do not catch plant viruses that often …) Playing with Excel (and blame Sara Seager for my newly acquired tendency to write equations), we find that, roughly,

So we can calculate as follows: if an equal number of humans and aliens all coughed over each other in a crowded space station, how many of them would there have to be to have an odds-on chance of one of them catching a disease from another within the timeframe of a 5-year run of a TV series, given that their last common ancestor was the creation of atoms sometime around 13.8 billion years ago? Turns out that would require 800 billion aliens and 800 billion humans. If each had an average weight of 80 kg, they would make a ball about 8½ kilometers across. Just imagine the smell in the middle …. .  Definitely would not fit into Babylon Five, or the Starship Enterprise.

Overall, then, not that likely: catching alien diseases is one terrible threat that we do not have to worry about that much. On that uncharacteristically optimistic note of good news, I say farewell for another BB. 

Just how important in this?

I seem to get much inspiration from the TV news. Today (late July 2010) a set of Churchill's dentures is being auctioned. “So just how important is this item?” asks the news person of the auctioneer, after expounding on how Churchill had the top plate specifically engineered to preserve his speech impediment, as he thought that it was vital to the war effort to have the same, highly distinctive voice. This before TV, of course, when most people only knew him through radio.

An interesting question. Just how important are a set of Churchill's dentures? 0.5? 17.6? This is a quantitative question – it deserves a quantitative answer. I turned off the TV before the auctioneer could give the inevitable, and enormously unsatisfying, answer “Oh, this is very important ….”

One can measure importance by how much effect something has on you. I think one could come up with a reasonable scale, like the Richter scale for earthquakes or the Beaufort scale for wind (both of which are logarithmic in terms of impact). For example, if we chose a 0-10 scale, we might say:-

and so on. The Chinese Premier dying comes in at about 1 (putting cheap tee-shirts at risk), millions of Chinese peasants dying in an earthquake comes in on 0.25 (a few moment's distraction on the news).

Thinking about this more, though, one can be further quantified by asking what fraction of my remaining life does something materially alter? Onrushing bus – terminally alters all of it. Diagnosis of cancer – pretty much all of it. Chinese earthquake story, 10 minutes of TV watching. And so on. We will define I as Importance, a measure from 0 to 10 of the amount of  QuALY I lose as a result of something happening.

I is not additive (neither are Richter magnitudes). But they are multiplicative, as are the probabilities of things happening of course, which has a pleasing aspect – the importance and of two unlikely things happening together is therefore the sum of their individual importances, and the chance is the product of their chances.

Of course, this only applies to me. What about you? Well, it depends on how similar or closely associated you are with me, and here we bring in Kevin Bacon, who, as we all know, is separated from any random person on the planet by six steps. (Not sure this applies to Chinese peasant or Peruvian llama farmers, but it will do for the moment). So we can work out what the I is for the most affected person, and I for the least affected person, and then network theory will tell us how connected the average person is to both, and hence what the importance will be to them, and so define a Proximity-Adjusted Just-How-Important-ness scale corrected for proximity.  So – the Bains PAJIT scale (Proximity-Adjusted Just-how Important is iT). Me being run over by a bus has minimal effect on nearly everyone, for example, no matter how distressing it is for me, and so has a rather low PAJIT. And of course there are global and local PAJITs. The UK PAJIT of me being run over by a bus is marginally higher than the Chinese PAJIT.

I expect to see this universally taken up, and next time part of Winston Churchill comes up for auction and the newsperson asks the auctioneer 'so just how important is three feet of Winston's pickled colon?' the man will be able to answer with confidence “2.3” This will be a great improvement. Won't it? Indeed, it will be a Very Important Improvement. Indeed, one of the highest PAJITs calculated will be that for – PAJIT.

Dark matter is tourists

Yes, the return of Batcave. This one is pretty technical, comes from spending too much time discussing the physics of Interstellar with serious physicists and so on, but persevere, dear reader, if nothing else it might help your insomnia.

I was at a summit/workshop for people in the pensions industry. It was astonishing. The 50 or so people in the room between them managed about 100 billion pounds in assets, but they were surprised, even stunned, by my description of changes in life expectancy over the last 100 years, and some modest (OK, wildly speculative) extrapolations of those changes into the future.

The gist of my talk was that average age at death has been increasing steadily since ~1920 for adult, middle-class type people, and there was no reason to think that it was going to stop. This can therefore be extrapolated to when someone dying in 2100 is born, and depending on the model you use this could be 2020, 2000 or 1965. Wow. Yes, you over there, and you, (not me) might live that long.

But that is not the really cool bit. Well, it is, but the really cool bit are other extrapolations. If this goes on, how long before we live long enough for an astrobiologist like me to travel to the nearest star? Well, rather depends how fast you travel, of course - if we could travel at 20% the speed of light then a PhD in astrobiology today could set off for Alpha Centauri and get back in time for their retirement party. So how fast is travel?

That turns out to be a more complicated extrapolation, as 'top speed' has gone down as well as up. Consider Concorde vs the Airbus 380. The returning Apollo astronauts vs the ISS. But pondering this, it occurred to me that an Airbus 380 is a lot bigger than Concorde. Maybe we put ever larger amounts of energy into transport, but we make different decisions in different epochs as to whether we chose to move a small number of people very fast (Concorde, Apollo) or a larger number of people more slowly (380, ISS), depending on tedious things like economics. So what if we plot the energy of transport with time?

So I am doing that, and bear in mind that this is a work in progress, but here is a plot of UK and Soviet military planes by energy [(max speed)2*take-off mass] vs time. It is quite amazingly regular. I am bringing this up to date with commercial planes, rockets etc., so watch this space. Shipping I expect to follow the same pattern. Tea clippers were as fast as a modern container ship, but much, much smaller. And so on.

But here is the cool bit. This is an order of magnitude increase in the energy in a single vehicle every decade. What if it goes on like this? Unlike the aging curve, there is no reason to suspect a limit. Or is there? How much energy is there to put into travel? If we go faster and faster, by the year 2200 a billion tonne aircraft will be able to go at 99% of the speed of light. I am not sure the Saudi oil reserves will take that sort of consumption. By 2350 a spacecraft the mass of the Earth will cruise from ... well, it is not quite clear where it will cruise from and to, but it will do it at 98% lightspeed. Or to put it another way. if current trends continue, the entire mass of the solar system will be converted to energy and used to move tourists around by about the year 2500.

If one takes the premise of astrobiology seriously, then we are not the only intelligent, Airbus-380-building beings in existence. All it would take is for one other intelligent, jumbo-jet- building, tourist-industry-running civilization to have arisen in our galaxy in, say, the past ten million years ago, and by now virtually all the mass of the galaxy would be tied up in relativistic travelers hurtling around at a hairsbreadth of the speed of light, watching bad movies and eating pre-packaged food and wondering when they were going to get to the galactic core for all the fun nightlife they hear goes on there. The same is true of any galaxy, of course. The same must logically apply to the whole universe, if we really believe that there is a possibility that life could arise elsewhere.

And the evidence is there, ladies and gentlebeings! We look into the night sky, and we see galaxies rotating as if they are permeated by unseen masses which the astronomers, superficial, unimaginative creatures that they are, call 'dark matter' and postulate must be dark particles of some sort. They speculate on the properties of these particles based on the calculation that they are mostly confined to galaxies. But we know better! They are the relativistic spaceships of a trans-galactic tourist industry at full throttle, arcing round for a quick trip to the Duty Free in the Orion nebula before a weekend break (relatavistic time - 50,000 years in our rest frame) in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. The lights in the sky may be stars, but the darkness is tourists. Let's hope accidents are not too frequent. A collision at such speeds would cause not just a regrettable loss of life but a regrettable loss of everything within several trillion kilometers.

When does longevity come into this? Well, unlike normal air travel, speeding up and slowing down does take a while unless you want your passengers to be delivered to the sun-kissed beaches of Tau Ceti III as jam. We are talking cruise ships here rather than day hops to Titan.

One could even consider that Dark Energy, that unknowable force that is expanding the Universe, is the tourist industry pushing out into new markets, but that is just silly. Let's stick to the facts, entities of all genders, stick out our thumbs in true Hitchhiker mode, and hope that the passing HyperMegaSuperJumbo brakes before trying to pick us up.

Google TTI. A modest proposal.

I love time travel movies. Seeing how the writers untangle, side-step or just ignore the inherent illogicality of the concept. How many paradoxes can you cram into one movie without ever drawing squiggly lines on a bit of paper labelled "now" and "past".

Now, clearly time travel is not easy, as otherwise it would be happening all the time. Flight is easy, and all sorts of animals do it. Nuclear weapons are fairly hard. Time travel is apparently at least as hard as building an atom bomb. But it might have happened. (Yes, the past tense - a time machine from the future landing in the past has happened. A time machine from the future landing in the future is of no interest to us until we get to the future at the boring old 60 seconds/minute rate.)

So how do we detect time travellers? Setting up our detectors for tachyon pulses or chronaton particles or whatever is no answer because, even if such things exist, we cannot detect them. (But - see Greg Benford's unsurpassed "Timescape"). We need a way of detecting time travellers that is independent of the way that their time machine works. And such a way now exists.

A second interest for many years has been the biology of aging, and what to do about it. Getting old sucks. Your brain slows down, your joints seize up, your ... well, other stuff stops working so well. I used to laugh at jet-lag. Now I moan at it, for 48 hours. Hangovers were things that lasted until lunchtime, now they last until the next day. And so on.

Are there people to whom this does not happen? There are novels about such an idea. Heinlein's "Time enough for love", or (much better in my view) Poul Anderson's "Boat of a million years". But writing a novel about a spontaneously immortal human does not mean that they exist. If they did exist, they have taken some considerable care to hide that fact. There is probably a good reason for this. Only the gods are immortal, and if you cannot prove you are a god by, e.g. throwing thunderbolts, turning into a bull or a shower of coins, or at very least flying, then you are demon or something and your unnatural life should be ended on the top of the next solstice bonfire. Same thing applies today, except substitute "Pharmaceutical research facility" for "solstice bonfire".

So, if such people exist, we must detect them despite them not wanting to be detected. And a way to do that exists now. Luckily, it is the same way as you use to detect time travellers.

Implausibly, it was suggested by an episode of Dr. Who. A minor plot point was that a WW-I bullet was being removed from the contemporary leg of (I think) Jack Harkness. How did it get there? Clearly someone had shot him with a WW-I vintage Brown Bess loaded, for no obvious reason, with authentic WW-I ammunition. But then someone finds a photograph of the trenches in WW-I where Captain Jack Harkness is clearly there, looking young and gorgeous, despite it being 90+ years ago. Clearly he has travelled in time. Or is immortal. Or (I think in this case) both.

Now, the implausibility of this is not that you have a time travelling immortal getting shot in the trenches. Well, OK, it might be, but that is not the plot improbability. The point is that you would have to spend several decades searching all the WW-I photography footage to find that photo, and in the show it happened in about 10 minutes. But this is where modern technology and the Google Time Traveller/Immortals project comes in.

What we are going to do is this. We are going to scan every photograph on the internet. Every one. Every historical archive, every uploaded family history picture, every newspaper report on historic events. We are going to scan every frame of every newsreel. We are going to look at every face captured on film, tape or disc since films, tapes or discs existed.

We are going to include every selfie on Facebook, all those trillions of them.

And then we are going to find all the faces in them, and compare them. This modest little computational task should be no more than a few thousand times what Google does now to index the entire internet.

There is a good chance that everyone alive today in the Western world can be found on dozens of online pictures if you look hard enough. So we look for their face appearing as it does today but 20, 30, 50, 100 years ago. How does Jack Harkness appear in 1916 and in 2005? The only explanation must be time travel or immortality.

Now, there will be a certain number of false positive hits. Say a few million. It will be implausible to track down a few million people and demand to see their birth certificate (they could have forged one, anyway, or assumed a false identity, or be Barak Obama.) But we do not have to say "this person is a time traveller". Not yet. All we have to say is that time travellers exist. Like the proof of the Higgs boson, our proof will be a blip on the curve of similarity of faces, a few comparisons more out of billions. This is why we need everything. The statistics mean that if we do enough comparisons even a very small difference will be significant.

Our control group will be comparing faces of people in the same photograph. Clearly it is unlikely that time travellers will pose for a photograph with themselves. It is quite possible ("Let's all meet up in the year 3000" etc), but that would be a tad obvious and we already know that time travellers are not obvious. People who do pose for photographs are families, and they do look alike, so a great control group will be how similar do people look like who are in the same picture at the same time. We compare this to people from different photos at the same time (higher chance of the same person being in two photos), and different photos from different times.

I think the output will look something like this

Robust and conclusive proof of the existence of natural immortals and/or time travellers will thereby be presented.

(Actually, there is a practical application of this. When our police say "we have identified this man from CCTV footage", the CCTV footage is usually so blurred and grainy that you cannot see if the 'person' is human, let alone their identity. This study would give robust statistical backing for saying whether a CCTV or other image is actually significantly like the suspect in the bank robbery/terrorist atrocity. But how dull is that?)

Google could then put up the 'hit' images on a site, and like the Galaxy Zoo project the general public could wade in and decide which were genuine hits and which were not. "Oh, look, there is Uncle Joe - no, but he can't be, that picture is from 1762. Uncle Joe, are you an immortal or a time traveller? Just where is your birth certificate?" This might cause a certain friction with a million or so Uncle Joes, but it will be worth it.

After all, knowing that something can have been done is half the way to being about to have done it.

WB 2016

Shup all the drogs!

Our current project at MIT is finding jolly exciting science things by looking at the chemistry of life. But not what the chemistry of life is. No, we are looking at what the chemistry of life is not, and so far this has proven amazingly fruitful, if you are interested in phosphine, which I now am. It is even relevant to Five Alarm Bio, which is slightly weird, and is a small step for a man towards his dream of founding an astrobiology start-up.

But phosphine is not today’s topic, boys and girls. Today’s topic is something else that is not. Words that are not words.

It is obvious looking at the translations of warning messages on trains, buses, libraries that English is a compact language. It takes twice as many words to say ‘the emergency exit is at the end of the coach, dumb-ass’ in Spanish as in English . But it is not nearly as compact as it might be. There are a whole lot of short words that are not used, and could replace long ones. For example, we have English words for dig, dog and dug. Dag is obscure but a proper word. But deg is not used at all. Why is deg not an English word? We have with drag, dreg and drug, but not drog . We have cat/khat, kit, cot and cut, but not ket/cet. Cart, curt, court, but not Kyrt. And so on.

A few patterns are almost completely populated – gnat, net, neat, nit, night, not, nut, newt  (and that series tells you all you need to know about English spelling.) It is missing nate. What might nate mean? The thing that innate things are in, obviously, leading one to speculate what outnate skills are. But I digress.

If we really wanted a compact, efficient language, we would replace words like ‘compact’ and ‘efficient’ and ‘language’  with deg and shup and cet.

Now, there may be pronunciation reasons for some of these gaps, but I suspect not all. I think there are little lacunae (or drogs as we shall now call them, for compactness’ sake) in the language just waiting for a meaning to fill them. Consider ’bit’. A perfectly sensible word meaning, well, a bit. You know. Not a lot. ‘Bit’ has been hijacked by those nerds to mean something terribly technical. So ‘bit’ now has a techie connotation. When someone decided that ‘autonomous software agent’ was rather  a mouthful for Daily Mail readers and called it a ’bot’ instead, it fit into the drog left between bat, bet, bit and but, it fitted with ‘bit’ in being sort of techie, and so ‘bot’ meaning “Mark Zuckerberg’s tube to hoover up the contents of your wallet” is established.

(By contrast ‘app’ is just made upp.)

You can do the same with consonant patterns. Bog, cog, dog, fog, gog, hog etc.. But I think that running the variants on the vowels is more distinct, in part because there are only eight or so of them .

So my key to a really good viral meme is at least in part to find a name for it that fills a drog between two words with related connotations. It must not sound like the word it is replacing. For example, I could have called drogs ‘gops’, but then you would just think I had mistyped ‘gaps’.  

This seems a perfect task for automation, and I will leave it to the more technical among you to do that. I confidently look forward to the day when wid pag rin by shup all the drogs!

Lost? Let us help.

This was an Idea I came up with a while ago while discussing tattoos, specifically the tattoo that a friend was planning to get. She wanted to put the Pioneer plaque ‘how to get to Earth’ image on her upper arm. Why? I asked. I mean, quite apart from “why spend several very expensive very painful hours getting needles stuck into you when you could just put on a T-shirt with the pattern on”. Basically, it looked cool. OK, fair enough. Better than having the name of your current boyfriend or the latest band permanently inked into your skin. But it set me thinking. In reality, why would anyone have that tattooed onto them? And then it occurred to me. In case they were lost!

Not lost in the sense of “I have lost GPS signal, I cannot find the A1308”. Not lost in the sense of “I am in the Mall aged five and cannot find my mummy”. No, lost in the sense of “I was abducted by aliens and dropped off on the planet Zog 20,000 light years from Earth and everyone here communicates by waggling their ears, and I have no idea at all how to even explain what I mean by ‘home’”.

And so the concept – a Medalert bracelet for abductees. It contains the basic information that will allow the Zoggites to work out who you are, where you come from, and to get you back there more or less alive and more or less in one piece.

What would it include? The Pioneer pulsar map, obviously. Also something saying  ‘I am based on water’, so they do not give you a nice relaxing bath in liquid fluorine.  Something saying “I breath oxygen at 20kPa pressure”, so they do not suggest you stand on the surface of an asteroid and hitch-hike. Keep me between 280 and 310 Kelvin. (You could have a wider temperature range, but then you have to work out a way of describing clothes …). Some sort of limits on radiation (none <300nm, please).  Gravity? I don’t think that is needed – no planet with a surface gravity of over 3g is going to be compatible with a water-based life-form. As a default, they keep you in free fall.

Food is more complex, I would just give the formula for glycine and say ‘feed me this’ – that and water would keep you going for a couple of weeks. Why glycine? It provides nitrogen for amino acids, a carbon skeleton that can be fed into gluconeogenesis via 3-PG for sugars and fats, and is achiral so they cannot feed you the wrong enantiomer. After a while you will start to get every vitamin and mineral deficiency known to man. All at once. Bone loss will occur too, but not until you are dead from lack of essential amino acids, so don’t worry about that. But for a few weeks, you will be fine! .

We are assuming that the aliens have hyper-relatavistic starships, Of course we are, you cry, how foolish to even suggest that we would even consider anything else. Because if they do not, then it will take you 50,000 years to get home from Planet Zog, and vitamin deficiencies are not your main problem.

So we do this as a bracelet? It could come off. (“Observe, Groonick, the creature has some sort of slave restraint on one of its larger projections.” “How terrible! Let us remove it, and then give the creature a nice relaxing bath in liquid fluorine.”) A tattoo? Well, it would be a large and complicated tattoo, and how would they tell that is not just your natural colouring or some sort of mating signal (“Phworr!  Look at the biochemical symbols on her”) No, I think some sort of cutaneous implant, made of something that is obviously a different material from you, and clearly visible to the outside so aliens who image in ultrasonics or ear-waggling can detect it.  Basically, we are talking ultra-techy piercings. I see this as being the new fashion accessory for the ultimately weird yet trendy. Are you alien abduction ready?

I welcome any suggestions of things to add to this absolutely essential accessory.