Book review: "Saints of the Shadow Bible", by Ian Rankin

After two off-beat tomes, Ian Rankin has dragged his famous anti-hero, John Rebus, out of retirement and back into CID. Demoted from Detective-Inspector to Detective-Sergeant, his old colleague and foil Siobhan is now his boss.

The two friends are called out to the site of a late-night car crash near Edinburgh airport. No-one died, and the female driver is soon released from hospital. But Rebus thinks the woman was a passenger. So how did she get into the driver's seat, and who was the driver? When it turns out she is the girlfriend of the son of Scotland's Justice Minister, a train of events starts that might cost Rebus more than his job.

For Rebus has a past. Thirty years earlier, whilst a Detective Constable in a long-closed police station, he had joined a group of detectives who called themselves Saints of the Shadow Bible. Times were different then, corners cut, and past sins soon start impinging on the present.

This is really a return to form for Rankin. Fox, the main character in two non-Rebus books, is facing a shift in career back into CID and comes across as a much more sympathetic and well-drawn character. The Scottish Referendum debate gets more than a passing mention, with the major suspects coming from both sides of the debate. The book is of its place and of its time, fully embedded within the Edinburgh Rankin loves.

The plot is fast paced and, as ever from Rankin, the characters are well drawn. Best of all, he has kept musical references down to a minimum.

I would give this book four out of five stars.

William Lowe

William Lowe has died aged 72. You may not have heard of him, but you will have heard of the product he developed.

In 1980 Lowe was working for IBM in Florida. Seeing a gap in the market, he persuaded IBM management to let a small team of a dozen people create a personal computer. He thought it was vital for the team to be free of the rigorous controls and corporate culture the company mandated for projects.

IBM reluctantly agreed. The company had tried twice before to make a personal computer, and each project had ended in failure. Lowe's small tiger team succeeded in creating what is now known as the IBM PC.

For speed, they decide to buy an operating system, eventually settling on one from a small company run by a certain Bill Gates. For speed, they decided to use components from companies outside of IBM, such as Intel's 8088 processor. Lowe also decided that the new computer would have an open architecture, allowing the user to expand it. Again, this was contrary to IBM practice.

These decisions made it feasible for other companies to make computers that ran the same software, enabling the entire IBM PC-compatible industry. In my mind Lowe's decision to break away from IBM corporate culture was one of the defining moments in the computer industry. In this, he was far more influential than even Steve Jobs.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24725678

RIP.

Open government.

A good friend of ours died earlier in the year. For various reasons we wanted to attend his inquest, so shortly after his death I phoned Cambridgeshire coroner's office. They told me that it would be a number of months before the inquest would be held, and that I should check their webpage frequently.

http://www.cambridgeshire.gov.uk/community/bmd/deaths/coroner-and-inquests.htm

I did as requested, but there were problems. Sometimes the webpage would display inquest times and dates weeks in advance, with many separate inquests on the list. At others times it would display ones that had already happened, and only update a day or two before new ones were due. This meant that I was having to check the webpage more or less daily, a task aided by a little script I wrote to trawl the relevant page.

About a month ago I realised the webpage had not been updated for a while. I phoned up the coroner's office, who told me that our friend's inquest was due for the 30th of October.

I checked again today, and the webpage has still had not been updated. The inquest is to be in Wisbech, and to prevent Sencan taking a day off work for no reason, I wanted to make sure that it was still on.

Instead of checking on the webpage, I was forced to make another phone call.

It should be a simple task to ensure that a webpage is kept up to date with the latest information on when inquests are going to be held. Even better would be to allow people to lodge a request for information about when an inquest is due, and email them when a date is set.

This may sound like a whinge, and it is. However concern over missing the inquest has added a tiny bit more stress and annoyance at a very sad time for us.

A marathon effort

About two and a half years ago, Sencan took up running as a hobby. There were several runners in her new company, and there were some good running routes around the village. Initially she trained for a local 10K run, and since then has done a number of 5K, 10K and half-marathons.

Sencan at two miles

She started off by barely being able to run, yet can now routinely run fifteen or more miles on a Saturday morning. Her transformation from a lady who believed she could not run, to a bona fide runner, has been interesting, inspiring, and at times amusing. There has been little blood (and most of that from Chris, her running partner), but rather a large amount of sweat and not a few tears. Some of these are from me as I cycle behind her, shouting encouragement and carefully-considered insults on her longer runs.

There has been a large learning curve - she has had to learn how to look after her feet, the correct clothes to wear, and how to get enough food and hydration during a long run. Training schedules off the Internet were combined with great advice from friends. Initially 5K felt like a long distance to her; then 10K became achievable. Over the last eighteen months half-marathons have become a norm, and earlier in the year she decided that it was time to step up to the big one.

On Sunday, she set off on the first marathon with Chris. I dropped her off at York University and walked to the cathedral to catch her two miles into her run. A few hours later, I was waiting to see her at the end. She completed the run in a little over five and a half hours, with enough energy to walk back to the hotel and go out for a meal in the evening.

I'm really proud of her. The only question is where she runs her next marathon - I doubt she'll wait a year for the next York event. Wherever it is, I'll be there waiting for her at the end ...

Sencan at the end of the marathon

Wow

Some superb bike skills by Danny MacAskill:

Absolutely incredible. And yes, he really did it.

More spectacular stunts can be seen on his website at:
http://www.dannymacaskill.co.uk/

Hyperloop

I have long been a fan of Elon Musk, the Internet entrepreneur who has made the difficult jump into hardware with his successful SpaceX company, which sends cargo (and soon passengers) to the International Space Station.

He also co-founded Tesla, the company that proved that electric cars can be sporty.

But SpaceX is just an iteration on existing technology: that is not to denigrate what they have done, but at the end of the day it is just a long tube of fuel sitting on top of rocket motors, just as all rockets have been since Sputnik 1 first orbited the earth. And Tesla also uses proven technology, albeit in a novel way.

It is therefore with interest that I note that Mr Musk and his team have come up with the Hyperloop, a solution for mass transit between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

The Hyperloop is a tube running between the two cities. A partial vacuum is maintained in the tube whilst a linear induction motor fires off a pod containing passengers (and in some designs cars) through it. The partial air pressure is sucked in at the front of the pod, compressed, and used to levitate the pod on a cushion of air (so-called 'air bearings'). Occasional linear induction motors continue to accelerate the pod to account for the small amount of friction and aerodynamic drag; for most of the time the pod coasts. One pod can be fired off every 30 seconds, and they travel at high subsonic speeds (to a maximum of 760 MPH).

The tube is supported on pylons above ground, and is covered with solar panels which will provide the power for the system. The pods contain batteries that run the compressors that provide the lift air.

The whole scheme is described in the following link:
http://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/hyperloop_alpha-20130812.pdf

I have read the paper, and the following issues come to mind. None of these are necessarily game changers, but will need addressing:

• Crashworthiness: The energies involved at high-subsonic travel are immense. What happens if a component breaks off and is left in the tube to be hit by the next vehicle? Or if the vehicle makes contacts with the sides somehow, imparting great energies to the tube and pod? Even a 5 gram nut has significant energy when hit at over 700 MPH.
• Evacuation: If there is a problem and people need to evacuate, how does that happen? Remember, the tube is sealed and in a partial vacuum. And as the tube is intended to be supported on pylons above ground, how do passengers get from the tube to the ground?
• Life support: the air pressure within the tube (i.e. outside the pod) will be harmful to human life. The pods will have to maintain a pressure that we can survive in, and all hatches and seals will have to be foolproof. They have addressed this in the document, but I'm not sure they have the whole answer, especially with hatches and seals that will have to be repeatedly used over a period of days, months or years. Will the air inside the pod be at normal sea-level atmospheric pressure, or reduced as in aircraft?
• Claustrophobia: the passenger-only vehicle appears rather cramped. Claustrophobia may be a significant problem for many passengers - airplanes are bad enough for some people. This effect may be worsened by G-forces, which will be considerably more than is the case for high-speed rail.
• Breakdowns: With one pod every 30 seconds, what happens if one breaks down mid-tube and away from one of the accelerator areas? The paper says there will be deployable wheels that can be driven along using electric motors; this is not only extra complexity, but the power required may be significant if a long way away from an accelerator area. In addition, there is no mention of gradients. If the tube has a significant gradient, the amount of energy required to take a pod up slope will be large. And what happens if the emergency wheel system fails?
• Construction: in the paper, I fear the team underestimate the costs and complexities of construction. They have designed the route on Google Earth to follow existing transport corridors where possible (for example Interstates). This takes no account of ground conditions: if the line passes through an area of soft or difficult ground, the costs of constructing the pylons will grow significantly. As the route will be passing through an area that can exhibit significant seismic activity, the pylon foundations will have to be designed to cope with liquefaction and other effects.
• Braking and signalling: If a car does stop, how do the others get messages to stop? What sort of signalling system will be used, and how fail-safe will it be? The proposed system of braking is simply referred to as 'emergency mechanical braking system' What is this, and how does it work?
• Pointwork: One of the deal breakers with Maglev systems is pointwork. With one pod leaving every 30 seconds, there will be many pods at the stations unloading and loading. The paper suggest that there may be branch lines to other cities in the area. How are the pods transferred to different tubes or tracks at the stations (or indeed into depots or maintenance areas)? If this is done in tubes, you will need moving tubes and/or walls, preferably whilst keeping a low pressure vacuum. Not an easy task.
• Charging: the on-board batteries will need charging every few journeys. How is this done during intensive usage of the pods?
• Fire: all mechanical and electrical systems suffer from the risk of fire, and those risks need managing. Being in a sealed pod with a fire, and a vacuum outside, is not necessarily healthy. In addition, there are the risks of smoke for other pods further down the line. Fire and smoke management are very costly in similar tube-like systems such as the Channel Tunnel, which has a service tunnel and refuges at regular intervals.

I could be wrong about all of this, and could end up sounding like Doctor Dionysius Lardner who in the 1830s said the following:

Rail travel at high speed is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia.

On a positive note: engineering-wise, it is perfectly feasible to construct a partially-evacuated tube that is supported by pylons. The propulsion system also appears feasible at first glance, as is the air-cushion support mechanism. Engineering difficulties will happen, but if you throw enough money at it, it should work.

However, getting such a system to work reliably and safely is a whole different matter, and I am unsure that anywhere near enough thought has been put into this.

Another view on the Hyperloop's feasibility is at the Ambivalent Engineer blog. The costings are explored at the New York Times. The New Statesman is sceptical.

And the Daily Mash has its own take on the Hyperloop....

Another coastal walker

In what has to be a bumper season for coastal walkers, there is another name to add to the roll of honour.

In 2012 Jez Nemeth started walking the entire coast of Britain, which he estimates will take five years. Unusually (and rather spectacularly) he is filming the entire coast path and recording people's connections to the coast as he goes.

His website detailing his exploits can be found at www.coast-line.co.uk, whilst an example film can be found at www.coast-line.co.uk/2012/12/04/film-41/

His site also includes a list of people walking the Welsh Coast Path, which includes many names not shown below.

Good luck to Jez, and I look forward to feelings of nostalgia as I watch his videos.