Joe's Jottings

Early on in my consulting career – late 1980s, early 1990s – I did a lot of work for a public sector organisation.  I worked on a number of projects – this was in the days when IT consultants could still be generalists, applying their skills to whatever was needed – and tended to specialise on development of a few database applications that were centrally based and accessed over a (pre-Internet) wide area network, held together by leased lines, private cabling, etc.

All in all, a fantastic environment in which to hone your skills.  Actually, in many respects I was rather spoilt by this client – and by my first job out of university – they both gave me a rather distorted view of working life!  For a while we experienced some rather ‘odd’ problems on some of the applications running over the wide area network.  Despite our best efforts, we couldn’t actually ground the problems – we checked software, hardware, cabling, the works.  Eventually, and half jokingly, a colleague and I (both of us radio amateurs) decided that the problems were being some how caused by sun spots….

Unsurprisingly, this caused gales of laughter in the office, but as far as we were concerned there was an element of logic in our proposal.  We knew that sun spots and solar activity in general had an effect on the earth’s ionosphere, and that in the past bad solar storms had knocked out telephone and communication systems.  Indeed, in the pre-Internet, pre-computer days of 1859 a major solar storm had caused incredible effects, even causing telegraph wires to carry electrical currents when all the batteries were disconnected!

This information did little to convince people around the office, so we simply did what any other self respecting techie would do; turn things off and on, replace a few network cards and bridges, tighten connections and tweak software.  And the odd errors stopped, and we stopped worrying about it.

But over teh years I’ve thought about those gremlins on numerous occasions, and it now appears that we may have been right after all.  According to this article, solar storms can cause mystery glitches in communication and computer systems. 

It may be that the next time we get a big solar storm or Coronal Mass Ejection – when a massive plume of plasma and charged particles is thrown from teh sun out in to space – the impact will be much more than a few gremlins in the works.  Some have suggested that a storm similar to that of 1859 might cause massive damage to the electrical and communications systems of the world; indeed, some real pessimists have suggested that a BIG solar event might put us back in to the pre-electronics age for decades.

Let’s hope we don’t get it…

I’m a science geek – always have been, always will be.  When I was a kid I had microscopes, telescopes, chemistry sets – anything that allowed me to do experiments.  By the time I went to secondary school I was already pretty practically inclined in the laboratory, having done quite a few of the experiments that I was expected to do at school in the garden shed at home.  Fortunately I managed to avoid explosions, poisoning, fire and accidentally opening portals to other universes a la Fringe.  I appreciate that i was lucky in having parents and an aunt and uncle who actively supported my interest in matters scientific.

Articles like this from the BBC, noting that there is inadequate experimental science done in schools, sadden me greatly.  In the early 1980s I was involved with writing computer software for schools.  It was suggested back then that ‘virtual labs’ could replace some of the practical work carried out, saving money, reducing the need for equipment and also offering health and safety advantages.  I was quite a supporter of this idea for a while – thankfully some of my colleagues talked me out of it.  They were wise enough to realise that so much of science education is the tactile, the experiential – the smells, sounds and sights of experimentation. 

It’s easy to think that there is little value in repeating ‘classic’ experiments – after all, the answer is already known!  However, the importance is in understanding what theories the experimental results supports and in learning how to actually do an experiment – the theory and practice of the scientific method.   And there’s enormous value to be obtained in experiments when, despite care and attention, the results aren’t what’s expected – that is when true scientific investigation can begin at any age.

Unless we do something to re-discover the rich practical experiences offered to science pupils 20 or 30 years ago, it’s inevitable that the standing of this country in terms of research and industry will falter.  We cannot built a modern scientific and technological economy based purely n the ‘soft science’ that seems to be offered in today’s classrooms.  Whilst it’s useful to be able to debate the pros and cons of social policies on scientific issues, it’s equally important to be able to identify fallacies in scientific arguments, and perhaps even put together simple experiments to demonstrate complex issues – after all, ‘hands on’ experiences tend to cement learning.

A breathtaking example of how simple, practical science brings home concepts was given by the late Richard Feynman during the enquiry in to the explosion that destroyed the Challenger space shuttle.  In a simple experiment involving ice water and a piece of rubber, he showed that at low temperatures the rubber (which was the material used as O ring seals on the booster rockets of the Challenger) became hard and distinctly un-rubbery, and was no longer fit for purpose.  He cut through months of bullshit in 5 minutes, in an experiment of elegant simplicity and with a little showmanship.  The perfect demonstration of scientific principles applied to solving a major engineering disaster.

My own contribution to trying to make science a more practical business for both school and home is a new web site I’m starting up called Hands On Science.  It’s hopefully going to be full of experiments and demonstrations that can be done with the minimum of equipment but that demonstrate in an interesting way many scientific principles.  It’s only just started up, but I’d welcome comments over the weeks to come – and ideas!

Although this little gem of a story happened in the US, I have no doubt that given a few more months it’s likely to happen here.  Well…I don’t know…at least the Yanks encourage science and technology enough to actually organise things like science fairs…  However, back to the story.  Smart kid builds a motion detector from some electronic bits and puts it in a bottle.  Bottle is picked up, sensor triggers.  Cool.  Good future ahead of a bright kid like that – some technical education, quite possible a Gates or Jobs of the next generation…

That would be what I would be saying were I not living in Stupid World, where the kid’s teacher called in the FBI and the bomb squad, put the whole place on lockdown and suggested the kid and his parents needed counselling.  Hello?  WHO needs counselling?  If this is the standard of management that is present in US schools then God help them.  At a time when we need to encourage bright thinkers and hopefully generate a new generation of technologists, scientists and educators that can get us out of our current hole, this dimwit sets in motion a series of events that will probably encourage the kid to never show initiative again and stick to playing X-Box games and watching TV until he can graduate to drinking beer, playing X-Box games and watching TV.

Tragic.

I was like this as a kid – fortunately with one exception I had support from my teachers, and always had support (or at least quiet acceptance!) from parents, aunts and uncles and in latter years my wife!  I built radios, movement sensors and any number of electronic gadgets.  I accidentally jammed local TV sets whilst working on a radio control gadget, generated more smells than I could shake a stick at and learnt more about science and technology in my own time than I probably did at school.

Today, with what appears to be terror hysteria in the US and ‘Elf and Safety’ silliness in the UK it’s increasingly difficult for proper ‘hands on’ science education to be done.  We really should be working hard to encourage this sort of practical approach to science and technology, both in in schools, colleges and via technical hobbies such as the practical approach fostered by amateur radio, robotics, astronomy, etc.   Unfortunately the UK does not seem to be doing this through educational policy.   This item from a few years ago points out exactly what is wrong with modern science education in the UK – it’s too wishy-washy and based around social awareness and ‘scientific literacy’ whilst moving away from teaching separate science subjects and encouraging education in the ‘basics’ of science – the scientific method, practical lab work, etc.

Whilst the literacy and social awareness issues are important, it’s critical that they are secondary  to a scientific education that prepares our future scientists and technologists by educating them in basic, practical science and technology, so that they can approach the more advanced stuff from a position of having firm foundations.  I hear all the voices saying that it’s important to engage students with science; but there is absolutely no point at all in engaging students in a watered down, multi-media based representation of some of the most practical and critically important subjects around.