Lavoisier: Chemist, Biologist, Economist

Recently I read Vivian Grey’s biography of Lavoisier. Although a fine book, it left me wanting more Lavoisier, so I turned to Jean-Pierre Poirier’s more substantial biography: “Lavoisier: Chemist, Biologist, Economist”. Related is my blog post on the French Académie des Sciences, of which Lavoisier was a long term member, and senior, member.

This is a much longer, denser book than that of Grey, with commonality of subject it’s unsurprising that the areas covered are similar. However, Poirier spends relatively more time discussing Lavoisier’s activities as a senior civil servant and as an economist.

The striking thing is the collection of roles that Lavoisier had: senior member of Ferme Générale (commissioned Paris wall), director of the Académie, director of the Gunpowder and Saltpeter Administration, owner and manager of his own (agricultural) farms. It’s difficult to imagine a modern equivalent, the governor of the Bank of England running a research lab? Or perhaps an MP with a minor ministerial post, running a business and a research lab? In practical terms he did experimental work for a few hours each morning and evening (6-9am, 7-10pm) and on Saturdays - having a number of assistants working with him. 

Lavoisier was wealthy, inheriting $1.8million* from relatives as an 11 year old he joined the Ferme Générale with an initial downpayment of about $3million. However, this provided an income of something like $2.4-4.8 million a year. On a trip to Strasbourg as a 24 year old, he spent $20,000 on books – which you have to respect. As the collector of taxes levied on the majority but not the nobility or clergy, the Ferme Générale was one of the institutions in the firing line when the Revolution came. Wealthy financiers, such as Lavoisier, bought stakes in these private companies, provided exclusive rights by the King, and made enormous rates of return (15-20%), at the same time serving the Kings needs rather poorly.

As for his activities in chemistry, Poirier provides a a good background to the developments going on at the time. Beyond what I have read before, it’s clear that Lavoisier does not make any of the first discoveries of for example, oxygen, carbon dioxide or nitrogen, nor of the understanding that combustion results in weight gain. But what he does do is build a coherent theory that brings all of these things together and overthrows the phlogiston theory of combustion. With Guyton de Morveau he develops a new, systematic, way of naming chemicals which is still used today and, as a side effect, embeds his ideas about combustion. It’s from this work that the first list of elements is produced. Furthermore, Lavoisier sees the applications of the idea of oxidation in explaining “chemical combustion” as entirely appropriate for understanding “biological combustion” or respiration. In a sense he sets the scheme for biochemistry which does not come to life for nearly 100 years, for want of better experimental methodology.

It’s interesting that gases are arguably the most difficult materials to work with yet it is their study, in particular understanding the components of air, which leads to an understanding of elements, and the “new chemistry”. Perhaps this is because gases are their own abstraction, there is nothing to see only things to measure.

The book also gives a useful insight into the French Revolution for someone who would not read the history for its own sake. The heart of the Revolution was a taxation system that exempted the nobility and the clergy from paying anything, and a large state debt from supporting the American War of Independence. Spending appears to have been decided by the nobility, or even just the King, with little regard as to how the money was raised. At one point Paris considered an aqueduct to bring in fresh water to all its citizens, but then decided that rebuilding the opera house was more important! The Revolution was a rather more drawn out than I appreciated with Lavoisier at the heart of the ongoing transformation at the time of his execution during the Terror, only to be lauded once again a couple of years later as Robbespierre fell from power and was executed in his turn.

On economics: Lavoisier was one of the directors of the French Discount Bank, during the Revolution he was involved in plans for a constitutional monarchy and amongst the ideas he brought forward was for what would essentially be an “Office for National Statistics”. The aim being to collect data on production and so forth across the economy in support of economic policy. This fits in with the mineral survey work he carried at the very beginning of his career and also on his work in “experimental farming”. Economic policy at the time alternating between protectionism (no wheat exports) and free-markets (wheat exports allowed), with many arguing that agriculture was the only economically productive activity.

It’s tempting to see Lavoisier’s scientific and economic programmes being linked via the idea of accounting: in chemistry the counting of amounts of material into and out of a reaction and in economics counting the cash into and out of the economy. 

Definitely a book I would recommend! It’s remarkable just how busy Lavoisier was in a range of areas, and the book also provides a handy insight into the French Revolution for those more interested in science. I wondering whether Benjamin Franklin should be my next target.

Footnote 

*These are equivalences to 1996 dollars, provided in the book, they should be treated with caution.

The naming of things

This post is a response to one of the points Rebekah Higgit makes over at “Whewell’s Ghost” on “Dos and Don’ts of history of science”. It’s all about scientists:

1) Do not ever call anyone a scientist who would not have recognised the term. The word was not coined until the 1830s (by William Whewell himself) but a) he meant something rather different by it and b) the word was not actually used until the 1870s. If we use the term to describe anyone before this date we risk loading their views, status, career, ambitions and work with associations that just do not exist before this date.I may know what I mean if it slips out in my description of an 18th-century astronomy, but the person listening to me will hear all sorts of other things. It too easily glides over points such as the fact that individuals probably did something else to make their living, or were personally wealthy. Science was not a career, or a vocation. I could give many further examples, and expand this rule into to using actors’ categories elsewhere, but this is the fundamental point. Not only did the word not, essentially, exist pre-1870 but there was no equivalent and no such idea. Awkward as it can sometimes be, man of science, natural philosopher, mathematician, astronomer, physician, naturalist or whatever should always be used instead.

I disagree with this. I should point out that I don’t consider this a Marmite* argument: the point Rebekah makes is not unreasonable and arguing serves to reinforce the point she is making. That the lives of “scientists” in the past were very different from the lives of most modern “scientists” is an entirely fair point, and is perhaps what the history of science is all about.

Since Rebekah is a professional historian of science, I feel my best approach is to argue this point on linguistic and scientific grounds, since I am a scientist not a historian. The OED says a scientist is:

1. A person with expert knowledge of a science; a person using scientific methods.

it goes on to describe its coining via almost joking discussions over the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1834 to Whewell’s use in 1840.

Precluding the use of the word “scientist” from application to people living before it was introduced seems to rather limit our options – how far must this sanitisation of language extend? Our use of words evolves in time. There are parallels here with Maxwell’s equations: in the mathematical language of his time his equations were clumsy and verbose, in more modern notation they are much more compact (and to overuse a word “elegant”). Working scientists don’t use Maxwell’s original notation, they use the modern notation because it captures the essential elements of the original work but is easier to use.

In my view the heart of the issue is the way in which we define scientists, to me being a scientist is defined operationally: by what I do in applying the scientific method, and by inference what people did in the past. Rather than socially or economically: what I have been trained to do or what people would pay me to do. I would still be a scientist if I were not paid for it, and hadn’t been trained. In both cases I might be poorer, but in different senses of the word!

There is also a point about communication here too: using a word for which you and your colleagues hold a specialist, narrow meaning may be “correct” but not help with communication. Knowing that your definition and the definition your audience hold is different is important but does not mean you should hold your definition sacrosanct – I face the same issue communicating my specialist area of science.

Perhaps the issue here is that Rebekah takes scientist to mean “modern professional scientist” whilst my definition is more catholic.

This does lead to the question: should I describe myself as a historian?

*Appropriate here since I work for the company that makes Marmite.

L’Académie des Sciences

I’ve written a number of times on the Royal Society, Britain’s leading and oldest learned society, often via the medium of book reviews but also through a bit of data wrangling. This post concerns the Académie des Sciences, the French equivalent of the Royal Society. It has gone through several evolutions, and is has been one of five academies inside the Institut de France since its founding in 1795. As a physical scientist the names of many members of the Académie are familiar to me; names such as Coulomb, Lagrange, Laplace, Lavoisier, Fourier, Fresnel, Poisson, Biot, Cassini, Carnot …    

The reason I’m interested in scientific societies is that, as a practitioner, I know they are part of the way science works – they are the conduit by which scientists* interact within a country and how they interact between countries. They are a guide to who’s hot and who’s not in science at a particular moment in time, with provisos for the politics of the time. As I have remarked before much of the “history” taught to scientists comes in the form of Decorative Anecdotes of Famous Scientists, this is my attempt to go beyond that narrow view.

The Académie des Sciences was founded in France in 1666 only a few years after the Royal Society which formally started in 1660. It appears to have grown from the group of correspondents and visitors to Marin Mersenne. In contrast to the Royal Society it was set up as a branch of government, directed by Jean-Baptiste Colbert who had proposed the idea to Louis XIV. The early Academy ran without any statutes until 1699 when it gained the Royal label. The Academy was based on two broad divisions of what were then described as mathematical sciences (astronomy, mathematics and physics) and “physical” sciences (anatomy, botany, zoology and chemistry) within these divisions were elected a number of academicians, and others of different grades. Numbers were strictly limited: in 1699 there were 70 members and even now there are only 236. Unlike the Royal Society, funded by member subscriptions, the Academy was funded by government – giving a number of generous pensions to senior academicians to conduct their scientific work.

The Academy avoided discussion of politics and religion, echoing the founding principles of the Royal Society, and was explicit in making links to foreign academics giving them the formal status of correspondent. This political neutrality was sustained through the French Revolution: although the Academy was dissolved for a few years at the height of the Terror and was subsequently reformed with essentially the same membership as before the revolution. Furthermore work on revising the French system of weights and measures carried on through the Revolution.

The Scholarly Societies Project has an overview of publications by- and about the Academy. The earliest scientific papers of the Academy appear in “Journal des Sçavans”, which commenced publication in 1665, shortly before the “Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society” and therefore the earliest scientific journal published in Europe. From 1699 a sequence of work is published in “Histoire de l'Académie royale des sciences” until 1797.  Finally “Comptes Rendus Hebdomadaires des Séances de l'Académie des Sciences” has been published since 1835. Most of which are freely available as full-text digitized editions at Gallica (the French National Library).

The British government established the Longitude Prize in 1714, by act of parliament, to award the inventor of a simple and practical method for determining the longitude at sea. Subsequently Rouillé de Meslay invested a similar prize for the Academy, which commenced in 1720. This sequence of Academy prizes was awarded yearly to answer particular questions and alternated between subjects in the physical sciences and subjects in navigation and commerce. Those in commerce and navigation revolved around shipping: with questions on anchors, masts, marine currents and so forth. These prizes were open to all, not just members of the Academy. Subsequently the Academy became a clearing house for a whole range of prizes, these are described in more detail in “Les fondations de prix à l'Académie des sciences : 1714-1880” by E. Maindron.

In summary, although similar in their principles of supporting science, scientific communication and providing scientific support to the state and commerce the Royal Society and the Académie des Sciences differ in their internal structure and relationship with the state. The Academy being more closely aligned and funded by the state, certainly in formal terms, and rather more limited in its membership.

In common with the Royal Society the membership records of the Académie are available to play with and in common with the Royal Society they are in the form of PDF files which are a real pain to convert back into nicely structured data. I could engage in a lengthy rant on the inequities of locking up nice data in a nasty read-only format but I won’t!

Footnotes

• Image is “Colbert présente à Louis XIV les membres de l'Académie Royale des Sciences crée en 1667” by Testelin Henri (1616-1695)
• *Yes, Becky, I know you don’t want me to use “scientist” in reference to people living before the term was first coined in the 19th century ;-)

References

MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive is the best English language resource I’ve found on the Académie des Sciences. Winners of the Grand Prix can also be found on this site.

The elephant in the room

In my last blog post I wrote about the AV referendum and party political self-interest. Before that I wrote about AV, preference and how parties hold their internal elections.

In this post I will just explain the chart at the top of the page.

It shows the number of parliamentary seats each of the three main national parties gained in the UK 2010 General Election under first-past-the-post (FPTP) – these are the blue bars. The red bars show the number of seats each party would expect to gain under Alternative Vote (AV), based on a mock election involving 13,000 people. Finally the yellow bars show the number of seats which would be obtained under a proportional system.

The proportional system, where the number of seats is proportional to the number of votes gained nationwide, is what I would call “fair”.

Labour and Tory parties both benefit significantly under the current FPTP system and proposed AV systems.

Self-interest and electoral perversions

In this post I will argue that all of the political parties are arguing the case for AV in their own self-interest, this is very obviously what they are doing and admitting such will make a change.

I’d like to start with the electoral system as it stands today:

Two things are going on at an a general election: there are “local” elections in 650 constituencies which determine which individual represents each constituency in parliament and then there is the government formed as the result of this set of elections. Once elected to parliament MP’s represent their constituents interests but vote largely as whipped by their political party.

First past the post (FPTP) and Alternative Vote (AV) are both algorithms for determining local representation: they make no deliberate effort to make the output of a collection of constituencies proportional to the proportion of votes cast for a particular party across the country. The degree to which they give proportionality is dependent on the spatial distribution of voters for each party across the country and the locations in which electoral boundaries are drawn¹. The current distribution of party support is not far off the point where it can give completely perverse results with the Liberal Democrats gaining the largest fraction of the popular vote and the fewest parliamentary seats and Labour gaining the smallest fraction of the popular vote and the largest number of parliamentary seats².

The FPTP system acts to supress the formation of more than two political parties, this is known as Duverger's law. You can see this in action in the UK, with the separation of the SDP from Labour in the early 1980’s, gaining a large fraction of the popular vote: approaching that of Labour, but nothing like the same number of seats³.

Best estimates for AV in a UK general election are that the Liberal Democrats will gain seats in a Westminster election and Labour and the Tories will lose some, it isn’t particularly clear who will lose most.

So moving on to the self-interest of parties:

The Liberal Democrats are in favour of AV because they will get more seats, this is OK because they will still have far fewer seats than their proportion of the vote should allow.

The Tories are against AV because they believe that they will lose seats to the Liberal Democrats for the same share of the vote, and that Labour-Liberal Democrat coalitions are more likely than Tory-Liberal Democrat coalitions. Wait! What?

Labour is split on AV, this is because some believe that Labour-Liberal Democrat coalitions are more likely than Tory-Liberal Democrat coalitions, and the Tories could be basically locked out of power for ever. Others in Labour, on the left of the party, believe that the Socialist utopia should be pure and that coalition is anathema and so oppose AV.

UKIP is in favour of AV because they believe that they will be first preference for a number of people who vote Tory tactically and second preference for a number of Tories. Their visibility will rise, even if it doesn’t lead to much increase in seats.

The Greens are in favour of AV because they believe they will pick up second preferences from Liberal Democrats and Labour.Their visibility will rise, even if it doesn’t lead to increased seats.

The BNP is against AV because it judges that it will not pick up second preferences from anyone. It decreases the likelihood of them gaining seats even if it increases the visibility of the party. The BNP is entirely visible already but for the wrong reasons.

Oddly those on either side of the debate are able to draw on arguments that match the self-interest of their parties. What is the non-aligned voter to make of this?

Footnotes

1. Oxford is a nice example of this: across the two Oxford parliamentary seats (Oxford East and Oxford West and Abdingon) the number of votes for the three main parties are (LibDem: 41087, Tory: 33633, Lab: 27937. The two constituencies return a Labour and a Tory MP.
2. Don’t believe me? Put Tory: 33.2%, Labour: 27.2%, LibDem: 27.7% Other: 11.9% into this BBC seat calculator. The actual result was Tory: 36.1%, Labour: 29.0%, LibDem: 23.0% Other: 11.9%
3. The 1983 General Election. Vote share: Tory: 42.4% Labour: 27.6% SDP+Liberal Alliance: 25.4% Number of seats: Tory: 397 Labour: 209 SDP+Liberal Alliance: 23.
4. Given 1-3, on what basis is it that we claim to live in a democracy?

Yes to AV!

Alongside the local elections on the 5th May, we will all have an opportunity to vote in a referendum on voting reform*. The choice is between keeping the current system, First Past the Post (FPTP) or switching to the Alternative Vote (AV) system.

The Liberal Democrats use Single Transferrable Vote (STV) to elect their leaders. Labour uses straightforward AV. The Tories use a system to elect their leader which is substantially equivalent to AV: a ballot is taken with all candidates standing; if more than two candidates are standing then the last placed candidate is knocked-out and the ballot is repeated – this process is continued until only two candidates remain. In this two candidate election the candidate with most votes wins. The Tories could have used a straightforward FPTP system, but they didn’t: if they had then David Davies, not David Cameron, would have won the 2005 leadership election.

AV is substantially similar to this process of successive ballots but rather than a sequence of ballots, a single ballot is held with voters ranking candidates by preference. In common with the Tory system, the last candidate is eliminated after the first ballot but rather than return to the electorate for another round of voting the second preferences of the people who voted for the loser are inspected and votes redistributed accordingly. This process is repeated until one candidate has more than 50% of the votes.

The Tory leadership election is not identical to AV because the electorate can switch votes between rounds, whilst in an AV election the rankings are chosen and frozen at the time of the first (and only) ballot. With electorates of tens of thousands the Tory leadership system could not be used for parliamentary constituencies without substantially increased cost and time taken to conduct the election, I will assert that it would produce the same result as AV.

These political sophisticates have rejected FPTP as a method of choosing who represents them, why do so many of them not support the same for us?

AV will not bring great changes to our elections, the majority of constituencies would return the same MP under AV as they currently do under FPTP. The benefit of AV over FPTP is that tactical voting, where you attempt to encode your preferences with a single X by second guessing who everyone else will vote for, becomes largely irrelevant.

We are not being given a choice between FPTP and an ideal electoral system, we are not being asked whether AV is a perfect system for voting, we are being given a choice between FPTP and Alternative Vote. Personally I would prefer a system of proportional representation, but that isn’t on offer.

In the absence of a better choice I will vote “Yes to AV”!

*The BBC have apparently banned themselves from describing the choice of AV over FPTP as “reform”

Book Review: The Chemist Who Lost His Head

Following on from “The Measure of All Things” my interest in Antoine Lavoisier was roused, so I went off to get a biography: “The Chemist who lost his head: The Story of Antoine Laurent Lavoisier” by Vivian Grey. This turns out to be a slim volume for the younger reader, in fact my copy appears to arrive via the Jenks East Middle School in Tulsa. As a consequence I’ve read it’s 100 or so pages in under 24 hours - that said it seems to me a fine introduction.
Antoine Lavoisier lived 1743-1794. He came from a bourgeoisie family, the son of a lawyer, and originally training as a lawyer. Subsequently he took up an education in a range of sciences. As a young man, in 1768, he bought into the Ferme Générale which was to provide him with a good income but led to his demise during the French Revolution. The Ferme Générale was the system by which the French government collected tax, essentially outsourcing the process to a private company. Taxes were collected from the so-called “Third Estate”, those who were not landed gentry or clergy. Grey indicates that Lavoisier was a benign influence at the Ferme Generale, introducing a system of pensions for farmers and doing research into improved farming methods. Through the company he met his future wife, Marie Anne Pierrette Paulz, daughter to the director of the Ferme – Antoine and Marie married in 1771 when she was 14 and he 28. 
Lavoisier started his scientific career with a geological survey of France, which he conducted as an assistant to Jean Etienne Guettard between 1763 and 1767. This work was to be terminated by the King, but was completed by Guettard with Antoine Grimoald Monnet although Lavoisier was not credited. There seems to be some parallel here with William Smith’s geological map of the UK produced in 1815.
Through his geological activities Lavoisier became familiar with the mineral gypsum, found in abundance around Paris. He undertook a detailed study of gypsum which sets the theme for his future chemical research: making careful measurements of the weight of material before and after heating or exposure to water. He discovered that gypsum is hydrated: when heated it gives off water, when the dehydrated powder (now called plaster of Paris) is re-hydrated it forms a hard plaster. He wrote this work up and presented it to the Académie des Sciences – the French equivalent of the Royal Society, on which I have written repeatedly.
He was to present several papers to the Académie before being elected a member of this very elite group at the age of twenty-five, half the age of the next youngest member. Once a member he contributed to many committees advising on things such as street lighting, fire hydrants and other areas of civic interest, the Académie was directly funded by the King and more explicitly tasked with advising the government than the Royal Society was. Lavoisier was also involved in the foundation of the new metric system of measurement, which was the subject of “The Measure of All Things”. Lavoisier became one of four commissioners of gunpowder – an important role at the time. During his life he would have had contact with Joseph Banks – a long term president of the Royal Society, and also Benjamin Franklin – scientist and also United States Ambassador to France.
From a purely scientific point of view Lavoisier is best known for his work in chemistry: his approach of stoichiometry – the precise measurement of the mass of reactants in chemical reactions led to his theory of combustion which ultimately replaced the phlogiston theory. It is this replacement of phlogiston theory with the idea of oxidization that forms the foundation of Kuhn’s “paradigm shift” idea, so Lavoisier has a lot to answer for! 
The portrait of Antoine and Marie Laviosier at the top of the page is by Jacques-Louis David painted ca. 1788. It strikes me as quite an intimate portrait with Marie pressed against Antoine, looking directly at the viewer whilst her husband looks at her. Marie played a significant part in the work of Lavoisier, as well as recording experiments and drawing apparatus (something that takes good understanding to do well), and assisting with correspondence and translation  she was also responsible for publishing Mémoires de Chimie after his death. She was a skilled scientist in her own right. The equipment on the table and floor can be identified: on the floor is a portable hydrometer and a glass vessel for weighing gases. On the table are a mercury gasometer, and a glass vessel container mercury – likely illustrating the properties of oxygen and nitrogen in air. 
Antoine Lavoisier was executed in 1794, for his part in the Ferme Générale. His execution is attributed, at least in part to the ire of Jean-Paul Marat, who Lavoisier had earlier blocked from membership of the Académie des Sciences. It seems Lavoisier had been warned by friends that his life was in danger but appeared to think his membership of the Académie des Sciences would protect him. Ironically Jacques-Louis David also painted “The Death of Marat”.
100 pages on Lavoisier was not enough for me, I’m going for “Lavoisier” by Jean-Pierre Poirier next – some fraction of which appears to be available online, but I’m going for a paper copy. 

Obsession

This is a short story about obsession: with a map, four books and some numbers.

My last blog post was on Ken Alder's book "The Measure of All Things" on the surveying of the meridian across France, through Paris, in order to provide a definition for a new unit of measure, the metre, during the period of the French Revolution. Reading this book I noticed lots of place names being mentioned, and indeed the core of the whole process of surveying is turning up at places and measuring the angles to other places in a process of triangulation.

To me places imply maps, and whilst I was reading I popped a few of the places into Google Maps but this was unsatisfactory to me. Delambre and Mechain, the surveyors of the meridian, had been to many places. I wanted to see where they all were. Ken Alder has gone a little way towards this in providing a map: you can see it on his website but it's an unsatisfying thing: very few of the places are named and you can't zoom into it.

In my investigations for the last blog post, I discovered the full text of the report of the surveying mission, "Base du système métrique décimal", was available online and flicking through it I found a table of all 115 triangles used in determining the meridian. So a plan is formed: enter the names of the stations forming the 115 triangles into a three column spreadsheet; determine the latitude and longitude of each of these stations using the Google Maps API; write these locations out into a KML file which can be viewed in Google Maps or Google Earth.

The problem is that place names are not unique and things have changed in the last 200 years. I have spent hours transcribing the tables and hunting down names of obscure places in rural France, hacking away with Python and loved every minute of it. Cassini's earlier map of France is available online but the navigation is rather clumsy so I didn't use it. Although now I come to writing this I see someone else has made a better job of it.

Beside three entries in the tables of triangles are the words: "Ce triangle est inutile" - "This triangle is useless". Instantly I have a direct bond with Delambre, who wrote those words 200 years ago -  I know that feeling: in my loft is a sequence of about 20 lab books I used through my academic career and I know that besides an (unfortunately large) number of results the word "Bollocks!" is scrawled for very similar reasons.

The scheme with the the Google Maps API is that your program provides a place name "Chester, UK", for example, and the API provides you with the latitude and longitude of the point requested. Sometimes this doesn't work, either because there are several places with the same name or the placename is not in the database.

I did have a genuine Eureka moment: after several hours trying to find missing places on the map I had a bath and whilst there I had an idea: Google Earth supports overlay images on its maps. At the back of the "Base du système métrique décimal" there is a set of images showing where the stations are as a set of simple line diagrams. Surely I could overlay the images from Base onto Google Earth and find the missing stations? I didn't leap straight from the bath, but I did stay up overlaying images onto maps deep into the night. It turns out the diagrams are not at all bad for finding missing stations. This manual fiddling to sort out errant stations is intellectually unsatisfying but some things it's just quicker to do by hand!

You can see the results of my fiddling by loading this KML file into Google Earth, if you're really keen this is a zip file containing the image overlays from "Base du système métrique décimal" - they match up pretty well given they are photocopies of diagrams subject to limitations in the original drawing and distortion by scanning.

What have I learned in this process?

• I've learnt that although it's possible to make dictionaries of dictionaries in Python it is not straightforward to pickle them.
• I've enjoyed exploring the quiet corners of France on Google Maps
• I've had a bit more practice using OneNote, Paint .Net, Python and Google Earth so when the next interesting thing comes along I'll have a head start.
• Handling French accents in Python is a bit beyond my wrangling skills.

You've hopefully learnt something of the immutable mind of a scientist!


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Book review: The Measure of All Things

“The Measure of All Things“ by Ken Alder tells the story of Pierre Méchain and Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre’s efforts to survey the line of constant longitude (or meridian) between Dunkerque and Barcelona through Paris, starting amidst the French Revolution in 1792.

The survey of the meridian was part of a scheme to introduce a new, unified system of measures. The idea was to fix the length of the new unit, the metre, as 1/10,000,000th of the distance between the North Pole and the equator on a meridian passing through Paris.

At the time France used an estimated 250,000 different measures across the country with each parish having it’s own (uncalibrated) weights and measures with different measures for different types of material i.e. a “yard” of cotton was different from a “yard” of silk, and different if you were buying wholesale or selling to end users. These measures had evolved over time to suit local needs, but acted to supress trade between communities. Most nations found themselves in a similar situation.

Although the process of measuring the meridian started under the ancien regime, it continued in revolutionary France as a scheme that united the country. The names associated with the scheme: Laplace, Legrendre, Lavoisier, Cassini, Condorcet, leading lights of the Academie des Sciences, are still well known to scientists today.

Such surveying measurements are made by triangulation, a strip of triangles is surveyed along the line of interest. This involves precisely measuring the angles between each each vertex of the triangles in succession: given the three angles of a triangle and the length of one side of the triangle the lengths of the other two sides can be calculated. It’s actually only necessary to measure the length of one side on one triangle on the ground. Once you’ve done that you can use the previously determined lengths for successive triangles. All of France had been surveyed under the direction of César-François Cassini in 1740-80, the meridian survey used a subset of these sites measured at higher precision thanks to the newly invented Borda repeating circle. As well as this triangulation survey a measure of latitude was made at points along the meridian by examining the stars.
The book captures well the feeling of experimental measurement: the obsession with getting things to match up via different routes; the sick feeling when you realise you’ve made a mistake perhaps never to be reversed; the frustration at staring at pages of scribbles trying to find the mistake; the pleasure in things adding up.

Méchain and Delambre split up to measure the meridian in two sections: Delambre taking the northern section from Dunkerque to Rodez and Méchain the section from Rodez to Barcelona. Méchain delayed endlessly throughout the project, trusting little measurement to his accompanying team. Early on in the process, at Barcelona, he believed he had made a terrible error in measurement, but was unable to check whilst Spain and France were at war. He was wracked by doubt for the following years, only handing over doctored notes with great reluctance at the very end of the project. He was to die not long after the initial measurements were completed, leaving his original notes for Delambre to sift through.

At the time the measurements were originally made the understanding of experimental uncertainty, precision and accuracy were poorly developed. Driven in part by the meridian project and similar survey work by Gauss in Germany, statistical methods for handling experimental error more rigorously were developed not long afterwards. I wrote a little about this back here. Satellite surveying methods show that the error in the measurement by Méchain and Delambre is equivalent to 0.2 millimetres in a metre or 0.02%.

In the end the Earth turns out not to be a great object on which to base a measurement system: although it’s pretty uniform it isn’t really uniform and this limits the accuracy of your units. The alternative proposed at the time was to base the metre on a pendulum: it was to have the length necessary to produce a pendulum of period 2 seconds. This is also ultimately based on properties of the Earth since the second was defined as a certain fraction of the day (the time the Earth takes to rotate on its axis) and the local gravity which varies slightly from place to place, as Maskelyne demonstrated. 

Following the Revolution, France adopted, for a short time, a decimal system of time as well as metric units but these soon lapsed. However, the new metric units were taken up across the world over the following years - often this was during unification following war and upheaval.

The definition of the basic units used in science is still an active area. The definition of the metre has not relied on a unique physical object since 1960, rather it is defined by a process: the distance light travels in a small moment of time. However, the kilogram is still defined by a physical object but this may end soon with some exquisitely crafted silicon spheres.

I must admit to being a bit wary of this book in the first instance, how interesting can it be to measure the length of a line? However, it turns out I like to read history through the medium of science and the book provides an insight into France at the Revolution. Furthermore measuring the length of a line is interesting, or it is to a physicist like me.

Thanks to @beckyfh for recommending it!

Footnotes
1. The full-text of the three volume “Base du système métrique décimal" written by Delambre is available online. The back of the second volume contains summary tables of all the triangles and a diagram showing their locations.
2. The author’s website.
3. Some locations in Google Maps.

Book review: The Ascent of Money

This blog post is my review and notes on “The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World” by Niall Ferguson. It’s a thematic run through the key elements of our current global finance system which ends with subprime mortgages and the present day.

Money, tokens representing value, started with the clay tablets of Mesopotamia as “promissory notes” for goods some 4000 years ago. For a very long time the basis of all money was precious metals such as gold and silver, it’s only been in the last 40 years or so that the link to gold has been broken for major currencies. The Spanish were burnt by metal coin when they started extensive mining for silver in South America – devaluing the coin in Europe through excess supply.

Fibonacci helped to introduce Hindu-Arabic numerals to Europe in 1202 through his book, Liber Abaci, which contained commercial calculations including currency and interest rates. Many of the early bankers were Jewish, they were legally restricted from taking part in many sorts of commerce and, through usury laws, the Christians were unable to lend but Jews could (their usury laws restricting lending to other Jews). Banking really took off with the Medici family during the 15th century, originally they dealt in foreign currency but diversified and, critically, became big. Size was important, because large size reduces risk.

Banking innovation then moved north from Italy with three innovations: the Amsterdam Exchange Bank (1609) introduced a standard currency, the Stockholm Banco (1657) started lending and then the Bank of England (1694) started issuing notes which meant there was no need for an account with the bank.

This is followed by the issuing of government bonds, these are essentially the way governments raise debt. Bonds have a face value – and an annual percentage return on their face value but the price at which they are sold in the market may vary. They were initially used by governments to raise money for wars. Rothschild bank made it’s money in this way in the early 19th century. Bonds are seen as very secure investments, but governments do default – most recently the Russia government in 1998.

The final innovation was the limited-liability company, a way by which individuals could band together to undertake longer term projects without risking everything (they only risked the value of their shares). The first of these was the Dutch East India Company founded in 1602 – formed to conduct the spice trade with the Far East (a risky and expensive business). In theory the directors and shareholders hold the company to account but in practice the value of the company shares on the stock market is the real control.

The first great stock market bubble was the Mississippi Company in France and was led by a Scotsman, John Law. Along with with control of the company he also exerted considerable control over the Banque Royale – the French national bank. The result was a system of share sales which spiralled completely out of control with the central bank making almost daily changes in its rules to enable the sale of more shares in the Mississippi company or to support their price. Ultimately the whole system crashed in 1720; Ferguson argues that this led in part to the French Revolution since the whole performance put the French off exciting financial innovations which could have lead to a more stable system.

Ferguson identifies five stages to a speculative bubble:

1. Displacement – something changes which leads to a new economic opportunity.
2. Euphoria – prices start to spiral upwards.
3. Mania – first time buyers rush in and fall prey to swindlers.
4. Distress – insiders realise the game is up and start to leave.
5. Revulsion – everyone else realises the game is up and try too leave too. The bubble bursts.

The depressing thing is that people have been dutifully following these five steps for nearly 300 years!

Next up is insurance, and scientific developments in statistics make an appearance. Ferguson focuses on the Scottish Widows insurance scheme, set up in 1744, to pay pensions to the widows of Scottish clergymen. Although he introduces a wide range of statistical developments including work by Pascal, Bernoulli's (Jacob and Daniel), de Moivre and Bayes it seems to me the key development were the mortality tables compiled by John Graunt in 1662.

The presence of numerate scientists should not be seen as a panacea though, the Black-Scholes equation for pricing options looks like a piece of thermodynamics: Merton and Scholes won a Nobel Prize for it (Black missed out having died) nevertheless over-enthusiastic application of this equation lead to a fairly serious crash.

Ferguson comments that we are currently in a second round of globalisation, prior to the First World War financial markets were already fairly globalised although quite often under circumstances of colonisation. The outbreak of war necessitated a substantial increase in government support and intervention in the markets and after the war difficult economic circumstances made it easy to continue with this.

It’s interesting to note that the idea of the property owning democracy grew out of the New Deal in the US in the 1930’s prior to that time only 40% of householders in the US were homeowners – the figure now approaches 70%. The same has happened in the UK, although somewhat later with fewer than half of people homeowners in 1970 and a level of approximately 70% now. In a sense the subprime mortgage lending that led to the recent recession is the final playing out of this policy. Ferguson is clearly not too enamoured of the property-owning democracy – seeing it as an over-concentration on a single asset class.

I found this a nice background to understanding economics, it shows how various financial innovations were introduced and how they can contribute to a successful economy. It also highlights how the misuse of such innovations can lead to financial disaster, and does so with depressing frequency. The chronology through the book is not very clear, I suspect he expands on particular instances that best illustrate his point rather focusing on first introduction. Although it has extensive notes and indexes, it could do with a glossary.

Inordinately fond of bottles...

J.B.S. Haldane, when asked “What has the study of biology taught you about the Creator, Dr. Haldane?”, he replied:
“I’m not sure, but He seems to be inordinately fond of beetles.”

The National Museum of Science & Industry (NMSI) has recently released a catalogue of its collection in easily readable form, you can get it here. The data includes descriptions, types of object, date made, materials, sizes, and place made - although not all objects have data for all these items. Their intention was to give people an opportunity to use the data, now who would do such a thing?

The data comes in four 16mb CSV files plus a couple of other smaller ones covering the media library (pictures) and a small "events" library. I've focussed on the main catalogue. You can load these files individually into Microsoft Excel, each one has about 65536 rows so they're a bit of a pain to use, alternatively you can upload them to a SQL database. This turns out to be exceedingly whizzy! I wrote a few blog posts about SQL a while back as I learnt about it and this is my first serious attempt to use it. Essentially SQL allows you to ask nearly human language looking questions of big datasets, like this:

USE sciencemuseum;
SELECT collection,
       COUNT(collection)
FROM   sciencemuseum.objects
GROUP  BY collection
ORDER  BY COUNT(collection) DESC
LIMIT  0, 11000; 


This gets you a list of all the collections inside the Science Museums catalogue (there are 162) and tells you how many objects are in each of these collections. Collections have names like "SRM - Acoustics" and "NRM - Railway Timepieces", the NMSI incorporates the National Railway Museum (NRM), and the National Media Museum (NMEM) as well as the Science Museum (SCM) - hence the first three letters of the collection name. I took the collection data and fed it into Many Eyes to make a bubble chart:


The size of the bubble shows you how many objects are in a particular collection, you can see a majority of the major collections are medical related.

So what's in these collections? As well as longer descriptions, many objects are classified into a more limited number of types. This bubble chart shows the number of objects of each type:


This is where we learn that the Science Museum is inordinately fond of bottles (or jars, or specimen jars, or albarello's or "shop rounds"). There are also a lot of prints and posters, from the National Railway Museum. This highlights a limitation to this type of approach: the fact that there are many of an object tells you little. It perhaps tells you how pervasive medicine has been in science - it is the visible face of science and has been for many years.

I have also plotted when the objects in the collection were made:

This turns out to be slightly tricky since over the years different curators have had different ideas about how *exactly* to describe the date when an object was made. Unsurprisingly in the 19th century they probably didn't consider that a computer would be able to process 200,000 records in 1/4 second but simultaneously be unable to understand that circa 1680, c. 1680, c1680, ca 1680 and ca. 1680 actually all mean the same thing. This shows a number of objects in the first few centuries AD, followed by a long break and gradual rise after 1600 - the period of the Scientific Revolution. The pace picks up once again at the beginning of the 19th century.

I also made a crack at plotting where all the objects originating in the UK came from, on PC this is a live Google Map and is zoomable, beneath the red bubbles are disks sized in proportion to the number of objects from that location:

From this I learnt that there was a Pilkingtons factory in St Asaph, and a man in Chirk made railway models. To me this is the value of programming, the compilers of the catalogue made decisions as to what they included but once in my hands I can look into the catalogue according to my interests. I can explore in my own way, if I were a better programmer I could perhaps present you with a slick interface to do the same.

Finally for this post, I tried to plot when the objects arrived at the museum, this was a bit tricky: for about 60% of the objects the object reference number for objects contains the year as the first four characters so I just have the data for these:

The Science Museum started in 1857, the enormous spike in 1889 is due to the acquisition of the collection of Sir John Percy on his death, I discovered this on the the Science Museum website. Actually, I'd like to commend the whole Science Museum site to you, it's very nice.

I visited the Science Museum a number of times in my childhood, I must admit to preferring it to the Natural History Museum, which seemed to be overwhelming large. The only record I have of these visits is this picture of a German Exchange visit to the museum, in 1985:

I must admit to not being a big fan of museums and galleries, they make my feet ache and I can't find what I'm looking for or I don't know what I'm looking for, and there never seems to be enough information on the things I'm looking at. This adventure into the data is my way of visiting a museum, I think I'll spend a bit more time in wandering around the museum.

I had an alternative title for people who had never heard of J.B.S. Haldane: "It's full of jars"

Footnote
If the Many Eyes visualisation above don't work, you can see them in different formats from my profile page.

Book review: Doomsday Men by P.D. Smith

My next book review is on Doomsday Men: The Real Dr Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon by P.D. Smith. I arrived at this book via the comments on my earlier post about the Manhattan Project, the Allied project to develop the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the Second World War. I also wrote about science fiction, which is relevant to this book too.

Doomsday Men brings context to the Manhattan Project, it shows the early imagining of what radioactivity could bring in terms of weapons of war, it shows science fiction writers foreseeing the applications, politicians considering the practical use of weapons of mass destruction and scientists working towards them. Alongside atomic weapons the potential for war from the air had been well considered before it was implemented.

The book starts with the conception of a genuine doomsday superweapon, that’s to say one that would wipe out all life on earth. This had been a theme of science fiction in the past, but in the early 1950’s it became plausible. Essentially the trick is to set off a fusion explosion in the presence of a large quantity of a particular element, cobalt, which would pick up neutrons becoming intensely radioactive whilst being vapourised and cast up into the atmosphere to settle the world over providing a lethal dose of radiation. The amount of cobalt required is about 10,000 tonnes which is only a cube with sides 10 metres long. There’s an open question as to whether the dust would be distributed uniformly enough to wipe out all life.

Leo Szilard is a central character through the book, along with fellow Hungarians John Von Neumann, Eugene Wigner and Edward Teller, known collectively as the Hungarian Quartet. They arrived in the US, fleeing anti-Semitism in Europe and were to play an important part in the development of nuclear weapons. It’s very striking the number of European Jews who migrated to the US in the period after the First World War, including Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi. In the first instance many of them were keen to help in the development of nuclear weapons as a response to Hitler’s rise in Germany: a state they believed had both the technical ability to make such weapons and, with Hitler, the will to use them in war. Towards the end of the Second World War many of them felt less enthusiastic about their use against the Japanese, despite Japan’s hideous development and use of biological weapons against the Chinese in the 1930’s. Following the war, Von Neumann and particularly Teller continued to be involved in further developments now driven by anti-Communism sentiments. 

The route to the doomsday weapon started with the discovery of radioactivity towards the end of the 19th century, and in particular the discovery of radium by Pierre and Marie Curie at the turn of the century. Around 1902 Frederick Soddy and Sir William Crookes both highlighted the huge amounts of energy was bound up in matter. Crookes saying: “one gram could raise the entire fleet of the British Navy several thousand fleet in the sky”. By 1913 H.G. Wells had very explicitly written about a nuclear weapon in “A World Set Free”. The use of chemical weapons, tanks and aeroplanes in war had all been imagined well before they were used too. Clearly there are big technical issues to address in going from a science fiction idea to a real system in battle, but the point here is that these ideas had serious public currency well before they were realised: there could be no “we’ll keep this quiet and no-one will think of it”. In a sense the key theme of the book is the interweaving of fiction with fact through the first half of the 20th century.

It was during the First World War that “scientific” superweapons started to be used, and the importance of science in waging war started to be recognised explicitly. Fritz Haber, a chemist, Nobel prize-winner for his commercial synthesis of ammonia, contemporary of Einstein, was instrumental in bringing chemical weapons to war, he was a German nationalist and felt the development of such weapons a duty to his country. He seemed quite enthusiastic about his work, writing:

“Chlorine: easy to liquefy, disastrous to the human organism, very cheap, mind you! Phosgene: ten times as strong as chlorine. Mustard gas: the best fighting gas of all”.

Once the Germans had used chemical weapons the British and French quickly developed their own. Research and manufacture of chemical weapons was to involve up to 75,000 people by the end of the war – this is about half the number involved in the Manhattan Project. A minority of scientists considered chemical warfare as a blessing compared to the conventional equivalent, for many others it was utterly abhorrent. The military had mixed feelings. Chemical weapons were banned by a variety of treaties, practically they seemed something of a double-edged sword with the first British use of chlorine at Loos causing 2000 casualties on their own side which perhaps explains why they’ve been so rarely used since. With the rise of Nazism Haber, a Jew, was to flee Germany and die shortly thereafter.

The First World War also saw the foundation of the British Board of Invention and Research in 1916, tasked with finding science to fight wars – it sought ideas from the public, one of the which was to train cormorants to peck out the mortar between bricks!

Biological weapons were to be developed by the Japanese whilst at war in China during the 1930’s and the Second World War, in an effort led by Shiro Ishii. During this period thousands were to die through his work, many in a range of human experiments to match those carried out by the Nazi doctors. Following the Second World War Ishii was given immunity from prosecution in order that the US could obtain information on biological weapons from him.

So chemistry and biology produced rather unpleasant weapons but they could not be described as decisive: for that you need physicists.

Szilard was first to realise (in 1933) that an atomic bomb might be made via a chain reaction: the fission of an atomic nucleus producing two or more neutrons which would drive further fission. He made some effort to keep the idea secret, at least from the Germans, via a patent held by the British Admirality. This was a very unusual move for a scientist in an area of pure science. In 1939 he was to visit Roosevelt with Einstein to warn him of the potential for an atomic bomb and the possibility that the Germans would make one. Ultimately this contact led to the Manhattan Project and the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki: killing at least 200,000 people.

One of the recurring themes in fiction was the idea of a scientist discovering the doomsday weapon and then holding the world to ransom for peace with the new “system of the world”: a world government led by scientists and technocrats. This sort of idea is better described as left-wing rather than right-wing. And I can say, as a scientist, that it has a certain appeal! Perhaps this explains something of why scientists are more often perceived as left-wing rather than right-wing.

Doomsday Men ends with the story of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film “Dr Strangelove: or How I stopped worrying and learned to love the Bomb”. The title character appears to have been based on a combination of Teller, von Neumann and perhaps Werner von Braun – the German rocket scientist captured by the Americans who went on to found the US space programme.

Overall a rather good read: providing good context to the Manhattan Project and the Cold War, and the importance of science fiction in seeing into the future.

Footnote: one of the drawbacks of reading on a Kindle: I reached the end rather unexpectedly since the footnotes, bibliography, and index take up a third of the book!

Far, far away

This week I have journeyed into the heart of darkness.

Actually it was my company's IT outsourcing system. I work for a very big company: it has about 150,000 employees spread across the world. I work in north west England amongst other things I look after a little unit which uses a particular piece of bespoke software, the unit involves seven people in an office a couple of hundred metres from where I sit at work. The tale of our new bespoke software is long and tortuous and I won't go into it here but to relate my adventures in getting the test version of the software copied onto the live system today.

The servers on which this software resides are located in North Wales (15 miles away) and a spot down the road about 8 miles away. The outsourcing of our IT services means that the manager for this process is located in the Netherlands, and the person actually doing the process, Supriya, is in India. I can tell she is in India because she has an Indian phone number. Her e-mail signature says her "office base" is in North Wales, it must be a bit inconvenient having your "office base" in North Wales, a location I suspect Supriya has never visited, and a phone in India. Do my company think I am some sort of dribbling BNP little Englander who would dissolve in rage if I thought I was dealing with someone in India? I regularly work with people from China, France and even the US, trying to obfuscate where someone works is frankly patronising and offensive - particularly if you do it so ineptly.

I've spoken to Supriya before - she's a friendly and helpful lass but she doesn't half ask some odd questions: "Could I confirm that Ireland was not going to be impacted by the change I had requested?". "Had I notified NL service mfgpro(users)?" Just to be clear: I have no idea how Ireland might be affected or who the "NL service mfgpro(users)" are, these aren't recognised code words for me. I clearly provided the right answer in these cases because I was informed that both Ireland and the Benelux countries had given their approval. But the fear arises in my mind: I've not cleared things with the Austro-Hungarian Empire - could I have inadvertently started World War III? This is yet to be determined.

The process doesn't go entirely smoothly, largely because Supriya is too polite to tell me that the procedure she'd been asked to carry out throws up some errors. I can't help because I'm not given permissions to see the servers where the software resides, Supriya has a difficult time because she has no absolutely idea what the software does. However, with the help of  James, who wrote the software, based in Manchester but whose boss is in Sunderland we do manage to get everything sorted out by the end of the day (or about 10pm in Supriya's time zone).

This is not an isolated incident: receipts for my travel claims are sent to Iron Mountain (a company just outside Birmingham) where they are converted to electronic form before being sent to Manila (I can't help thinking this may have been due to a misunderstanding involving envelopes) and paid via India. In a fit of tidiness I once decided to get a stash of 6 computers removed from a desk in my office: they'd been left by a sequence of unnamed, and now forgotten contractors. I received endless fractious e-mails from a centre in Bulgaria, belonging to the leasing company, demanding to know who all these computers belonged to, or why I appeared to be in possession of 6 computers.

The old way of doing things involved a prescriptive system of doing stuff where you filled in a form and it went through a process and something got done. But actually it didn't, actually you learnt who was going to do what you wanted, went over for a little chat whereby you found out what incantation you needed to inject into the system in order to get your job squared with the system whilst they got on and did the job. Outsourcing frequently loses this human contact, in fact it purposefully eliminates it.

An Ethical Foreign Policy

Saddam Hussein helped me to understand the role of the UN and the nation state when he gassed the inhabitants of the Iraqi town of Helabja in 1988. I was 18, and it was the first time I ever saw a dead body on TV. The attack killed something like 5,000 people and injured many more. The reaction of my own country, the UK, it’s allies and the UN was muted and in some quarters seemed to involve trying to blame the Iranians, with whom Iraq was at war.

Then the realisation struck: the UN pretty much leaves you to your own devices within your own borders because to do otherwise would seriously worry its member states. Fancy mandating the interference of a league of nations into your country’s affairs? Because once the principle is established then quite a large fraction of the members of the UN could find calls for interference within their borders. And if you think that sort of response is just for nasty countries like Russia and China, then observe the British response to European Court of Human Rights judgements against it.

Another formative event for me was the end of the first Gulf War: after Iraqi forces had been ejected from the recently invaded Kuwait. The Allied forces were heading towards Baghdad, the Iraqi people were rising up against their leader. And then we stopped and I remember John Major giving a press conference saying, when asked about supporting the Iraqis against their leader, “I don’t remember asking them to revolt” or words to that effect. Surely this, more than any other, was a time to act ethically, to depose the tyrant rather than pop him back in his box with the people of Iraq, a bulwark against our greater Satan: Iran. Invade another country: very bad, but do what you want inside your own borders.

A motivating factor for this post is the wave of revolutions across North Africa and the Middle East in Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, and Libya triggered, it seems by poor economic circumstances, and perhaps the success of other democratic revolutions. Largely these are countries with whom we’ve been happy to do business, Tunisia and Egypt are even popular tourist destinations.

Libya has been ruled by Gaddafi for the last 42 years, he has always seemed to be genuinely quite bonkers and was a great enemy of the UK for a number of years (supporting the IRA, and responsible for the shooting of Yvonne Fletcher outside the Libyan embassy). More recently he has been back in favour but now he’s back out of favour again. Who can keep up with all these changes? His return to favour in 2004 was stimulated by his renunciation of “weapons of mass destruction” and support for the “War on Terror”. It’s interesting that in his recent speech he tried to hit that button again to regain support from his old allies in the West.

Egypt has long been a friend of the West, largely because it has taken the lead amongst Arab nations in maintaining diplomatic relationship with Israel. For this we conveniently ignore its not particularly good democratic and human rights record. Now the people have managed to oust Hosni Mubarak it turns out that as a nation we weren’t all that keen – who knew? It must be more than a little galling to the opposition in Egypt that we’re willing to show how much we support them just when that support is no longer needed.

Mixed in with all this is David Cameron is off to the Middle East for an arms fair; we’re often told that the weapons, tear gas, rubber bullets that we sell to nations will definitely not be used to suppress their own populations. Quite why we should think this is even remotely plausible I don’t understand. Did the nice dictator promise not to use them against his own population? What else is he going to do with them?

It would be nice to think we could run a foreign policy whereby we didn’t support people who weren’t very nice and in fact actively sought their removal from office perhaps by more widespread use of travel restrictions and financial embargoes on the leadership, as we seem to be heading with Libya now.

Working out which countries are nice and which are nasty shouldn’t be too hard: we could use the Democracy Index, perhaps the Press Freedom Index, or even the use of the death penalty as a proxy. Indices such as this are always going to be a bit subjective but the same cast appear at the bottom again and again.

I can’t help thinking that across the world people of many nations remember; they remember who we supported and who we didn’t. We in Britain remember, just look at our media regarding Germany, and that was over 60 years ago. Just think what the people of other countries will remember in the years to come.

Photographs, videos and GPS

This post is in part a memory aid but it may be interesting to other amateur photographers, and organisational obsessives.

My scheme for holidays and walks out is to take cameras (Canon 400D, Casio Exilim EX-S10), sometimes a video camera (Canon Legaria FS200) and a Garmin GPS 60 which I use to provide information for geotagging photos rather than navigation, although I once used it as an altimeter to find the top of a cloud covered Lake District mountain. Geotagging is the process of labelling a camera image with the location at which it was taken.

I save images as JPEG, I should probably use RAW format on the SLR but the workflow is more complicated and I rarely do anything particularly advanced with images after I’ve taken them other than cropping, straightening and a little fiddling with contrast. Once home I save all the images from a trip to a directory whose name is as follows:

Z:\My Pictures\[year]\[sequence number] – [description] – [date]

So for my recent skiing trip:

Z:\My Pictures\2011\003 - Hinterglemm – 29jan11

I leave the image file names unaltered. Padding the sequence number with zeroes helps with sorting. The idea of this is that I can easily find photos of a particular trip just using the “natural” ordering of the file system, I don’t rely on 3rd party software and I’m fairly safe from the file system playing sneaky tricks with creation dates. The Z: drive on my system is network attached storage, so it can be accessed from both my desktop and laptop computers. I back this up to the D: drive on my desktop PC using Syncback and I also copy it periodically to a portable drive which I keep at work. Syncback synchronises the files in two directories, I use this in preference to “proper” backup because it doesn’t leave my files in a big blob of an opaque backup format (I got burnt by this when using NTbackup in the past). The drawback is that I can’t go back to a snapshot in time but I’ve never felt the need to do this.

In addition to the images, I also save the GPS file in GPX format to the directory, this is downloaded and converted using Mapsource which is Garmin’s interfacing software. GPX is a format based on XML so is easy to read programmatically and even by humans. I do little inside Mapsource other than converting, and for a multi-session trip, stitching all the tracks together into a single file. Another handy tool in this area is GPSBabel which converts GPS data between a multitude of formats.

I use Picasa for photo viewing and labelling: it’s free, it has basic editing functions, it allows labelling and geotagging of photos in a fairly open manner and it does interesting stuff like face recognition too. As well as all this it links to Google’s web albums, so I can share photos, and it talks nicely to Google Earth.

Both geotagging and labelling images use EXIF (Exchangeable image file format) this is a way of adding metadata to images; nice because it’s a standard and the data goes in the image file so can’t get lost. EXIFtool is a very useful command-line tool for reading and writing EXIF data, and it can be integrated into your own programs. Software like Picasa, and websites such as Flickr are EXIF aware so data saved in this format can be visible in a range of applications. 

It is possible to geotag photos manually with Picasa via Google Earth but I’ve collected a GPS track so this is not necessary. There are free software packages to do this but I’ve written my own for fun. The process is fairly simple: the GPS track has a timestamp associated with each location point and the photos from the camera each have a timestamp. All the geotagging software has to do is find the GPS point with the timestamp closest to that of the photo and write that location data to the image file in the appropriate EXIF fashion. The only real difficulty is matching up the offset between image time and GPS time - for this I take a picture of my GPS which shows what time it thinks it is and label this “GPS”.

In fact I usually label photos after they have been geotagged: photos can be exported from Picasa as a Google Earth compatible KMZ file and then upload into Google Earth along with the GPS track in GPX format making it possible to see where you were when you took the photo, which makes labelling easier.

I use www.gpsvizualiser.com to create images of GPS tracks on top of satellite images, this is a bit more flexible than just using Google Earth, I must admit to being a bit bewildered with the range of options available here. Below is an example where height is coded with colour.

As I go around I sometimes take sets of images to make a panorama. The final step is to stitch together these multiple images to make single, panoramic views, I now use Microsoft Image Composite Editor to do this, it preserves the EXIF data of the input image and does a nice auto-crop. My geotagging program flags up images that were taken close together in time as prospective panoramic images. The image below is a simple to image panoramic view (from Hinterglemm)

I mentioned video in the title: at the moment I’m still a little bemused by video. I use the same directory structure for storing videos as I do for pictures but I haven’t found album software I’m happy with or a reliable way of labelling footage – Picasa seems promising although the playback quality is a bit poor. ffmpeg looks like a handy programming tool. Any suggestions welcome!

Book Review: For all the tea in China

I’ve been on a bit of a reading spree: next up is “For all the tea in China” by Sarah Rose. This is the story of Robert Fortune and his trips to China in the mid-nineteenth century to obtain tea plants and the secret of tea manufacture for the East India Company to use in India.

Robert Fortune (1812-1880) was a botanist with a modest background. Starting his working life at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, he later became Curator of the Chelsea Physic Garden. These were relatively poorly paid posts, however there were few such positions to support a professional botanist without their own means of support. He made several substantial visits to the Far East, funded by the Horticultural Society of London and the British East India Company. He died a wealthy man in large part through the wide range of plant introductions he had made, as well as through sales of artefacts he had acquired in the Far East. The list of introductions is well worth a skim through for the modern gardener:

The East India Company had been given a monopoly of trade to the Far East in 1600, through this monopoly they had built a lucrative trade in silk and tea from China, as well as effectively running India. The trades from China were matched with trades into China of opium from India, by the middle of the 19th century addiction to opium was a significant problem in China. The volume of trade it brought made the East India Company a very significant contributor to British government income (of order 10%). Although there are now many global corporations, the East India Company was one of the first and in many ways most powerful. The company was ultimately to lose its dominance following the Indian Mutiny in 1858, and was finally wound up in 1874. The mutiny was likely the cumulation of a long process since the monopoly that the East India Company enjoyed was not popular with free-marketeers who were starting to come to the fore.

At the time of Fortune's first trip to China in 1845 the English had long been drinking tea imported from China, in exchange for opium grown in India. The English drank both green and black teas, although unlike the Chinese they added milk and sugar (obtained from another British colonial outpost). The Chinese were keen to keep the secret of both the tea plant, and its manufacture into tea leaves for making tea. Whilst the British, in particular the East India Company were keen to get these secrets believing (correctly) that tea would grow well in Himalayan India and would make a good profit. Some tea was already being grown in the Assam district of India but is was derived from inferior Chinese plants. The tea plant is Camellia sinensis a close relative of the decorative camellias of which Fortune also introduced some species.

Before Fortune's first visit to China it had not even been established that black tea and green tea came from the same plant, but were processed differently. His trips required considerable subterfuge: Westerners had only recently been allowed into anywhere other than a limited number of ports in China, as a result of the first Opium War and Fortune's activities went considerably beyond what was allowed even under these revised regulations. One of Fortune's discoveries was that green tea had been coloured by the Chinese for the export market using Prussian Blue (which is toxic) and gypsum. Following a couple of false starts he was eventually able to transport a large number of highest quality tea plant seedlings to Darjeeling in India, as well as providing skilled tea makers and extensive notes on the tea making process.

The key to Fortune's success in shipping out tea plants from China were Wardian cases, these are essentially sealed glass environments containing soil and some water. Plants, or more importantly, troublesome seeds could be sealed into these containers and as long as they remained sealed, and given some light there would be a good chance of their biological cargo surviving a lengthy sea journey through a range of climates. Prior to this discovery long distance transplantations were tricky. Nowadays we see Kew Gardens as largely a place of leisure, but in the 19th century it was very much at the heart of the Empire in terms of facilitating the movement of plants around the world for commercial reasons. This type of activity was also an early interest of the Royal Society.

It's difficult not to draw parallels between the state sanctioned opium trade which the United Kingdom used to support, and its current attitude to drug smuggling. Nor between the industrial espionage of the East India Company in the 19th century, and the current issues with the Chinese approach to intellectual property.

I found the sections of the book reporting Fortune's travels a bit unfulfilling: they seemed to be a sequence of travel anecdotes involving the mischief caused by his Chinese servants - this style does affect other parts of the books. However, more generally the book made me curious to know more about the East India Company, the Opium Wars and so forth and I felt I'd learnt something about the introduction of tea to India.

I'm tempted by Fortune's book: Three years' wanderings in the Northern Provinces of China