Author Archives: John J. Williamson

The bedroom tax (Owen Jones)

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Here’s a good article by Owen Jones (author of the book Chavs, which is also great) about a policy which is a nice encapsulation of the Tory approach to austerity. The approach is divide and conquer. 

Background

The mean income in the UK is around £26,000 a year, but the distribution is skewed, so that the median is around £21,000. That means that 50% of incomes are less than £21,000 — in an important sense, the median is a better indicator because it tells you the income than which half the country (enough to, if it came to it, win a fight) earns less. The reason the mean (what we usually mean by “average”) doesn’t coincide with the median is because a small number of extremely high incomes (therefore a skewed, not symmetrical income distribution) drag the mean upwards.

Those incomes at the stretched, high side of the distribution belong to e.g. people who benefit from, rather than get outraged by, Vodafone and Starbucks-style tax dodges; people who, no matter how hard the recession hits them in relative terms can still pay accountants and lawyers to work out how best shield them from it. Not people for whom the recession might mean making a short step across the line into eviction, poverty, hunger, and switching the heating off (by the way: imagine the pure existential panic of that situation and then imagine having the time and the wherewithal to conduct a systematic campaign of “scrounging” that is in any sense morally equivalent with high-stakes corporate tax-dodging — the implicit conflation of these two cases is damaging and ridiculous).

£21,000 is not a lot, especially to support any dependents, and remember it’s not 50% of the country carefully but happily making do at £21,000 — that’s the most that anyone in the poorest half of our population earns. The people presently deciding to inflict further damage to the budgets of benefit claimants of all kinds and, now, those in social housing, comprise a cabinet of millionaires who cannot possibly be acquainted first-hand with a world in which £14 a week less (five paninis, or two DVDs, or three hours worth of petrol) is a disaster rather than a triviality.

Divide and conquer

The bedroom tax will work by reducing the benefits received by social housing tenants whose houses contain an unoccupied bedroom. The idea is, very literally, to force people to move out – if the tax was not enough to make that happen, money would still be saved on the benefits bill, but the other main goal — to free up housing for larger families — wouldn’t be fulfilled.

Similarly to the cuts in unemployment benefit, the policy aims to effect a change by the infliction of financial hardship (get people into work by making being on benefits even more fucking horrible than it already is/get housing freed up by making it impossible for people to stay in their homes). How do millionaires get away with doing this to such a large section of the population?

The answer is summed up in one phrase: “scroungers and strivers”. This is rhetoric directed by those at the top of the socio-economic ladder to make those at the bottom think their neighbours are responsible for their problems — not economic mismanagement, financial incompetence, an endemic lack of growth, but a disabled guy next door who, come to think of it, you’re sure could hold down a job if he was more of a “striver”. It’s the same instinct that lies behind the right-wing’s insatiable obsession with immigrants, who are a natural choice for this sort of treatment. The only way for a massively privileged elite to — democratically — inflict such hardship on roughly half of their voters is if those who are hit worst by it feel isolated and those who are hit less think the solution is to drive an undeserving underclass of “scroungers” (with spare bedrooms!) deeper into poverty. This is economic sado-masochism: it requires the destruction of solidarity and the sowing of contempt and mistrust between people who are in the same socio-economic class. The boundaries and divisions therefore have to be made along other available or invented lines of distinction: race, religion, or, as now, some imagined dichotomy between stoic, working class heroism and feckless, cynical worklessness. This is the essence of right-wing politics generally, and it is coldly embodied in the Government’s rhetoric and policies. The bedroom tax is the latest and most brazen example.

[Postscript]

On a tangent: The amount of benefit fraudulently claimed is dwarfed by the amount that goes unclaimed because of people’s pride or ignorance of their own eligibility. If you want to fix the economy by getting people to somehow “do benefits properly”, you’d better be careful — if benefit fraud disappeared overnight and everybody claimed only (but fully) what they were entitled to, the bill would skyrocket.

Research publication — The effects of polydispersity and metastability on crystal growth kinetics

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Mike Evans and I have just published our second article together, in the Royal Society of Chemistry’s interdisciplinary journal Soft Matter. It concerns a simulation study of crystal growth in the presence of two common complicating factors: i) Polydispersity (particles are non-identical) and ii) Metastability (in addition to the crystal growth, non-equilibrium gas-liquid separation is taking place). The result is the “boiled-egg” growth mechanism, which we model with theory and simulation, and whose effects on growth depend on a subtle interplay between the two factors I just mentioned, which remains to be further explored. The work is of generic relevance to many situations, but particular examples include e.g. protein crystallisation, photonic crystal growth, colloid-polymer mixtures. There are looooooads of nice pictures in this one.

  • The advance online article is here.
  • A pre-print which I will shortly update with the final small changes we made before publication (freely accessible to everyone but with less pretty formatting and editing etc.) is here.

Enjoy!

 

Earplugs

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Like any musician, in almost any genre or setting, I’m sometimes in the presence of very high volumes. Over the years I’ve gone on and off earplugs and used various different types, but for the last few years have been consistently using some custom-moulded ones which have taken out all the worrying, annoyance, and inconvenience that can be associated with using or not using earplugs. This post is a quick mixture of passed-on hearing-related folk knowledge from my dad, who’s a medical doctor (though I make no claim as to the exact accuracy of any physiological details here..!), and physicsy insights related to why earplugs do or do not work well and why they’re needed.

Why?

Here are some compelling reasons to use earplugs, some of which most of us are aware of, and some that make you go ‘ahh’:

  • Hearing damage can result from loud sounds, obviously.
  • Hearing damage is permanent — temporary whistling or ringing is the sound of some cilia dying (tiny hairs which receive vibrations and pass the signal towards the brain), and they don’t come alive again.
  • Hearing attenuation can be temporary — exposure to loud sound causes muscles in the ear to adapt to it so that it “seems” less loud (imagine if the sensation you get when you initially walk into a noisy club remained all night! This is why it doesn’t). Damage is still being done though, so this isn’t a good thing. 
  • Higher frequency sounds are lost earlier when hearing is damaged. This makes things sound less clear, since the high frequencies provide e.g. the sibilance that helps us to distinguish consonants. Turning up the volume of a sound results in increased perceived presence (stronger high frequencies), so we turn up louder to get the same clarity => more damage.

Earplug problems

  • Earplugs come in all different types. In the simplest case, the principle is basically to stuff something solid into the ear to block sounds out to some extent.
  • Just in the same way as your neighbour’s wall reduces high frequencies but lets bass come through more (that’s why you can’t hear the voices on their TV well), simple earplugs reduce high frequencies more strongly than low ones. This is why earplugs can make things sound “unclear” and why musicians often hate using them.
  • An ill-fitting or one-size-fits-all earplug might actually be counterproductive — it reduces overall loudness but the tiny gaps and misfittings can allow (predominantly high frequency) sound to come through unaffected. The reduced loudness means the ear does less to “defend itself”, but the damaging high frequencies are still allowed through. This is also why wearing sunglasses without UV shielding is bad — the eye does not “think” it’s receiving bright light so the pupils don’t contract much, but the UV light is still getting through and doing its damage.

Custom-moulded earplugs

The breakthrough for me (and recently for a friend, the excellent guitarist Mike Chisnall) came with custom-moulded earplugs. These consist of a casing made of something like silicone, which is moulded to precisely fit into the ear. This is good already, because the little gaps which could allow high “hissing” sounds through don’t exist. The really good thing is that these moulds are made to act as housings for a specially-designed filter.

These filters come in a number of strengths and, most importantly, have an essentially “flat” attenuation — all the frequencies are affected equally, rather than the high frequencies being lost the most, as with simpler plugs. The effect is then more like just “turning down” the outside world, rather than sticking a cushion on your ear and muffling the sound. Especially for musicians, this is vitally important because it means the detail of what you’re hearing remains, and the temptation to remove the plugs disappears. The poor performance of cheap/free earplugs is damaging to our ears in more than one way: 1) We remove them. 2) We tar the whole category “earplugs” with this brush, and don’t bother investigating better options.

Something Mike and I both note about using the custom plugs is that you also feel somehow more calm while playing. Compare the feeling when you come offstage normally, with ringing in your ears and a background “hum” as blood rushes around the vessels near your ears. With good plugs, you end up playing better, being able to focus more on e.g. reading or song structures or technique, while still being aware of everything that’s going on. It’s very Zen.

Conclusion

One of the most disheartening things as a musician is to play with bad monitoring, so for many people, imposing this on yourself by stuffing some foam in your ear seems like madness. However, the sensible part of all of us knows that this can’t go on indefinitely. Even in jazz and classical settings, ear damage will result after a while if protection isn’t used. When you hear a snare being hit and it seems to hurt, but then later on or in the mix of the performance you don’t notice it, that’s not your ear winning, it’s just being beaten into submission.

The point of this post is to highlight the fact that a solution is available which preserves the clarity of sound which musicians want. A custom-moulded plug with even a weak filter will help considerably and delay the onset of volume-induced hearing loss, and will almost always retain more than enough detail for you to be able to play sensitively to the context and to enjoy your performance. Custom-moulded plugs are expensive, but for the average professional working musician, the cost is not more than a few gigs’ pay. And they’re a tax-deductible expense too.

Please, please, please try them — the most damaging false dichotomy a musician faces in respect of hearing is that it’s either horrible foam or rubber earplugs or nothing. That’s simply not true, and the benefits of finding out why are more than worth the cost.

Say, where can I get these incredible earplugs?

The custom-moulding aspect means it’s not just a matter of ordering online. Instead, you go to your local high-street audiologist shop (somewhere that sells hearing aids, basically) and enquire. They will do a hearing test and take the mould, and supply you with the filters to go into the earplugs once they’re made. The strengths available are normally 9dB, 15dB, and 25dB (lower number = less attenuation = more sound gets through). I got 25 initially but found it made things too quiet, so went down to 15 which allowed more detail through and was suitable for my usual gigs (jazz or loud-ish function/pop, but not really rock or metal). It’s a nice idea to get more than one pair or filters (say a 9 and a 15, for my purposes), since they last forever and can be easily swapped as needed. The actual moulds can gradually perish over very long times, but mine have lasted 5 years easily so far.

Also – the mouldings can also be used as housings for in-ear monitors. You just take out the filter and stick the monitor in.

Fluid simulation code walkthrough

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As part of coming to the end of my PhD project, I need to leave the computer simulation code I’ve written (a Kinetic Monte Carlo algorithm for square-well/hard sphere particles) in a state which at least theoretically allows it to be used by someone else. So, I’ve written a brief manual/walkthrough (below) which contains just the detail needed to run a simple simulation of gas-liquid separation.

simulation_manual (click to download)

Requirements:

  • A Mac, ideally, with a C/C++ compiler installed (I use gcc — from within Xcode preferences, install the command-line tools).
  • Basic familiarity with the Mac terminal.
  • OVITO for making pictures/videos of the simulation, which is the best bit.

The manual completely walks through downloading, building, running and visualising the simulation, and might be a nice way to spend half an hour. Enjoy!

Everyday things vaguely to do with physics: 3 — sun on a field

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On holiday in France, me and my family were walking along a road through a field of smooth mud/dirt. The sun was coming from the right hand side. Looking to the left hand side, the field looked a sort of clay-y orangey tan. Looking to the right, it looked dark brown. When we came to another road that was parallel to the original one, the field that had been on our right and looked dark brown was now on our left, looking orangey tan instead.

An observer in the middle of a field whose surface is slightly rough

This seemed a bit weird, because the field was very smooth and there weren’t any trees or buildings casting shadows. What (I think) explains it is that the surface of the field, although smooth-looking, was slightly rough, being made of dirt. So, on a scale of a few inches, the field’s surface had little peaks and troughs, as shown in the diagram. When the observer is looking in the direction that the sun comes from, this means that lots of tiny bits of the field are in shadow, caused by raised and depressed bits of dirt, as shown in the inset.

Because it had been made quite smooth, we couldn’t really see the actual texture of the field, but the overall reduction in the amount of sunlight reaching us from it made it look dark when viewed in this way, even though the whole field was ‘really’ the same colour. The field, viewed from the right direction, is ‘in shadow’, but on a very small length scale. The relative difference in perceived colour or brightness when you look in each direction must be related somehow to the density and characteristic size of the peaks and troughs in the field’s surface. Fun bit of maths to do?

Everyday things vaguely to do with physics: 2 — defrosting

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Here’s probably quite a well-known trick, but one that has a nice physics-y explanation. Defrosting things to cook can take quite a lot of time depending what they are, requiring forward planning, leaving the thing out overnight, etc. Failing that, there’s the option of defrosting in a microwave, which can have mixed results (e.g. the outside of a thing semi-cooks in a horrible way while the inside stays frozen), and can be dangerous for things like meat because it results in large parts being very slightly, germ-growingly warm for a long time without getting hot enough to kill any germs.

A nice way of getting around this is to put whatever’s being defrosted in a bowl full of cold water. Liquid water is much better than air at conducting heat energy away from (or in this case, towards) something else. So, even though the water is no warmer than the air around it — and in fact can’t get warmer than room temperature, reducing the chances of germs growing — the thing defrosts much more quickly than it would otherwise.

This works especially well for things like vacuum-packed frozen chicken breasts or other meats, where the thing being defrosted can be in more or less direct contact with the water, without any insulating layer of air around it. Happy defrosting and subsequent cooking!

Everyday things vaguely to do with physics: 1 — bags

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(Skip to the bottom for the bit after the intro)

Hello. In the course of a day we encounter lots of little tasks that need doing, observations of things which are so trifling they barely merit the word ‘observation’, and so on. This is pretty broad (!!), but hopefully what I mean will become more obvious soon. It occurred to me that lots of these things have often very very basic (and sometimes less basic but still interesting) physics behind them. Not cutting edge physics by any means, and sometimes barely even physics, just a sort of physics-leaning bit of common sense.

I’m sort of talking about the reason why the sky is blue but much more mundane. Perhaps a pretty good example is my post about how to stop the cable from 9-volt adaptors from breaking by distributing the stress around a larger region of the cable (here).

So I’m going to write posts about these things whenever they occur to me, just for somewhere to put them. Here’s the first one:

Bags

When I go shopping and get asked if I need help with packing, I manfully decline. But until I clocked this one I actually did need help, just to open the stupid bags. I’d seen people lick their fingers and then seem to have no difficulty doing it, so I imitated them but still couldn’t manage it. Where was I going wrong? I was just licking one finger. If the other one’s still dry and slippery (like mine usually are), the two faces of the bag just move together, sliding over the dry finger and not coming apart. So now I lick both my fingers and the bag doesn’t stand a chance. Erm.

There’s no way to really end a post like this……………. HAPPY BAG OPENING FOLKS!!

Upright piano busking

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Here’s a clip of York piano player Karl Mullen playing some boogie-woogie. I’ve played at the Phoenix jam in York a few times with him and he’s great — really clever and inventive language in a jazz setting. This is something else completely though, and even includes a bit of Bohemian Rhapsody at the end. Quality busking.

Highlight is the camerawoman suggesting they give Karl some money to buy his lunch — I think he’s doing alright in this respect thankfully. At some point I need to find and re-post an article I once wrote about the conflation of busking with begging and destitution.

Research paper: The effects of polydispersity and metastability on crystal growth

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I’ve just uploaded a preprint of a new paper me and my supervisor are writing to arXiv. It’s a freely-available repository research in loads of different areas which people use to make research available before and while its in peer review for a journal.

This one is to do with crystal growth in soft condensed matter. That includes colloidal crystals and closely related things such as proteins, which must be crystallised in order to study their structure in biological/medical research. The broad question of ‘What’s the best way to grow a crystal?’ is relevant in a lot of scenarios, especially given that one is often quite free to vary the conditions in the system to optimise growth; for instance the interactions in a e.g. colloidal suspension can be easily tuned by adding other species such as polymer coils into the solution.

The dynamics of phase transitions, i.e. how systems do or do not actually reach their true equilibrium state, is an important consideration in applying thermodynamics to soft matter. In this paper, we simulate crystal growth (as shown in the video here) in the presence of metastable gas-liquid separation, which may be encouraged or avoided by tuning the interaction potential in a system, and polydispersity, which usually cannot be avoided in soft matter. There’s a variety of nice visualisations showing the effects of these two factors on the crystal growth dynamics, and we find that they can interact in a complex and previously unknown way. The simulation findings are related to existing experimental data and to theoretical considerations. Here’s the link:

The effect of metastability and polydispersity on crystal growth kinetics

This work, in early form, was the subject of a recent internal seminar in the Soft Matter Group at Leeds. I’ve uploaded the slides and an audio recording from the seminar.