Babbage

THE iPhone has not only overturned the cellphone industry, but the portable game market too. Its popularity has forced today's giants, Sony and Nintendo, to change in order to survive. 

In the case of Sony, it means combining its portable Playstation console, called PSP, with a cellphone. The result, announced on February 13th by Sony Ericsson, was the Xperia Play. It will hit American stores first, in March. Sony will provide a platform for users to download and play selected PlayStation games by the end of the year. Sony will also release a new portable gadget called NGP (Next Generation Portable), with 3G wireless service this year. 

The company may argue that it planned to do these things anyway—and surely it did have such plans in a filing cabinet somewhere. But the fire under their workbenches was Apple's runaway success, particularly with the iPad, which poses an even greater threat to game device makers than the iPhones' small screens.

Nintendo has been scrambling to catch up too. When the iPad was released Nintendo's boss, Satoshi Iwata, dismissed it as a direct rival. And he maintained his nonchalance last month when he welcomed Sony's NGP as a catalyst to spur the market. The worry, however, is that the market may enjoy those rivals devices more than his. Nintendo's response, to be launched on February 26th, is the Nintendo 3DS. It is provides 3D images visible to the naked eye, avoiding the need to wear cheesy glasses.

Moreover a gaggle of other competitors are eyeing the field, including Samsung's Galaxy tablet and smartphones, and even Panasonic, which is testing an online portable game device in America. Together, all this means today's gaming powerhouses are facing enemies on all sides. But they certainly have experience in getting past hostile environments to reach the next round.

ALGAE have been infesting the ether of late. One television commercial features a buff faux boffin strolling around a virtual lab, waxing eloquent about their promise for greener energy. "Fuel", a documentary, hails them as a biotech alternative to ethanol and traditional fuel sources. Even the American Navy has been in the news for commissioning Solazyme, a producer of algae-based biofules, to provide the juice for some of its ships.

The company initially focused on algae-based biodiesel but has since diversified into jet fuel and cosmetics—and food. In 2009 its chemists began a series of experiments to see how algal derivatives fare in the kitchen. Not bad, it turns out. Algae flour—something of a misnomer given its mushy, moist texture—can be used to make cookies, honey mustard and even a milk substitute, replacing butter, vegetable oils and eggs and removing the need for processed sugar and preservatives. Nutritionally, this translates into fewer calories, a healthy dose of the ever popular antioxidants, some salubrious micronutrients, as well as oodles of dietary fibre which makes these easier for the body to absorb.

Crucially, cookies still taste like cookies and not, as some may fret, sushi—at least to Babbage's tastebuds. (He does not know whether the sentiment was shared by Barbara Boxer, a Democratic Senator pictured right cagily sampling an algal flour cookie.) Little wonder, then, that in November 2010 Solazyme teamed up with Roquette, the second largest starch supplier in Europe and the fourth largest in the world, to bring this new superfood to the market.

This may yet prove a tough sell. For a start, consumers will need some convincing before they nibble on the stuff that many associate with the muck on the walls of fish tanks. Pitching algae as an alternative cooking ingredient or health food will doubtless appeal to some foodie fashionistas, for a while at least. But this strategy may deter more discerning types who dismiss any such notions as passing fancies.

In fact, algae might be easier to deploy at an earlier stage of the food-production cycle. Nick Baily of the Belgrave Trust, a New York-based firm that helps individuals and companies to offset their carbon footprints, estimates that as much as 40% of food-related footprints (which account for about a fifth of the total in Britain) is attributable to the petrochemical fertilisers used in producing foodstuffs. Replacing such dirty fertilisers with the lighter-footed algae-derived sort may make a sizeable dent in carbon emissions, and spur environmentally conscious consumers to plump for foods grown using the technology. The cost of such algal alternatives will need to drop before they become widely used in agriculture. But at least farmers are more inured to dealing with muck than are food faddists.

LESS than a year ago Babbage wrote an article, entitled “Clouds under the hammer”, in The Economist discussing whether computing capacity would become a tradable commodity. In the conclusion he sided with the sceptics, arguing that “virtual machines”—the main unit of measurement in cloud computing—would increasingly move about, but mostly within clouds controlled by a single company (“private clouds”) or trusted federations of “public clouds” (where anyone can buy capacity).

One of the people quoted in the article, Reuven Cohen, the founder of Enomaly, a maker of software that allows firms to build public clouds, was more optimistic. He has now proven that he was right: today Enomaly will launch SpotCloud, the world’s first spot market for cloud computing.

Fundamentally, SpotCloud works like other spot markets (for more screen shots click here). Firms with excess computing capacity—operators of data centres, cloud providers, hosting firms—put it up for sale. Others, who have a short-term need for some number-crunching, can bid for it. Enomaly takes a cut of between 10% and 30% depending on the size of the deal. But there is an important difference: SpotCloud is what Enomaly calls an “opaque market”, meaning that the firms offering capacity do not have to reveal their identity. Thus selling computing services for cheap on SpotCloud does not cannibalise regular offerings.

Technically, the service is also not entirely what one would expect. Enomaly did not build a big central infrastructure—because the bandwidth demands “would have killed us”, in the words of Mr Cohen: files of virtual machines are very large. Instead, the firm works with Google App Engine, itself a cloud-computing provider, which gives Enomaly access to a decentralised global system. The buyer’s virtual machines files are parked on App Engine before being send to a seller’s servers. Buyers can also define in which country or even city they want their virtual machines to run.

SpotCloud has been up and running since November in a closed trial—and has already attracted a lot of supply. It often comes from unexpected corners of the computing universe. For instance, an entertainment company has offered capacity on 4,000 servers that would otherwise sit unused (probably in a lull between making animated movies). In other cases, says Mr Reuven, firms offer the capacity of old servers, which otherwise would be thrown away at some point.

The big question is whether there is also enough demand. Again, Mr Cohen is optimistic, and sees many ways in which Enomaly’s market place could be used: getting non-critical computing tasks done quickly and cheaply, testing new websites and quickly adding computing capacity in certain regions. But he also warns that SpotCloud is not for those who want long-term computing needs satisfied with the service-level guaranteed. Instead, it is for those who need capacity quickly and do not much care if the computing task has to be restarted if something goes wrong.

Mr Babbage stated that upon the first occasion he was disturbed by the noise of the defendant's organ, and he went out and requested him to cease playing, and to go away...The people in his neighbourhood encouraged the organ-men. He could not, he said, walk along the streets now without being insulted by persons living in the neighbourhood...Mr Babbage was engaged on works of great scientific importance, and of a nature which his persecutors could not understand.—Street Music in the Metropolis (London, 1864)

CHARLES Babbage, this blog's namesake, disliked the street noise of London prevalent in the 1860s, a couple of decades after this newspaper was founded. He was joined in public campaigns to squelch the discord that kept knowledge workers from maintaining focus by Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle and Richard Doyle, among others. (Walter Bagehot's opinions on noise are unknown.) His antipathy was a watchword in his day. And now it is immortalised in cartoon form, along with alternative history versions of several of his inventions.

The present Babbage came across 2D Goggles some months ago, a rousing episodic comic of Ada King, Lady Lovelace (née Byron)  and the eponymous Mr Babbage fighting the oral depredations of "The Organist", a foul besmircher of mental clarity. Lady Lovelace and Mr Babbage did collaborate, but their work together unfortunately fell short of incorporating sewers, monkeys and difference engines the size of buildings. "The Organist" has a backbone of facts over which artist Sydney Padua has built her fancy. This adventure recently concluded, with Lady Lovelace and Mr Babbage coming out smelling like roses (not monkeys). "It really is true that Babbage had this obsessive battle with the street musicians," says Ms Padua. "There are tons of documents. It was a byword. Any time anybody wrote a popular article about music in the 1860s, they had to mention Babbage."

Ms Padua, a Canadian animator who lives in London, created 2D Goggles for Ada Lovelace Day, an annual event to celebrate and encourage women in subjects dear to this blog: science, technology, engineering and maths. As Lady Lovelace died aged 36, Ms Padua says "I just did the comic as a joke, and the punchline of the joke is that she didn't die. They built a difference engine and fought crime." That first sequence was vivid enough to cause readers to ask for more, expecting an entire tale.

Ms Padua has read Mr Babbage extensively, examining work contemporary to his time available through Google Books, which is also the source of the book quoted at the start of this post. She notes that, as part of a project to build Mr Babbage's Analytical Engine, a more advanced computer than his Difference Engine, an effort is simultaneously underway to digitise Mr Babbage's personal papers. (A donation drive for the effort, Plan 28, ended without reaching its goal on February 1st. John Graham-Cumming, the man behind the programme, plans to proceed regardless. You may recognise Mr Graham-Cumming's name from his successful petition to rehabilitate Alan Turing, which resulted in a public apology by the then Prime Minister, Gordon Brown.)

Ms Padua's portrayal of Lady Lovelace's obsession with and expertise in maths is likewise rooted in history. Lady Lovelace was the only legitimate child of George Gordon, Lord Byron, though she was raised apart from him and he died when she was nine. Her mother had her tutored rigorously in maths in an effort to keep rationality to the fore, and her father's madness in abeyance. Lady Lovelace's genius in maths had many admirers. "You couldn't make up this thing about Lovelace being brought up with this mathematical regimen because otherwise she'd go mad," Ms Padua says. Lady Lovelace is often credited with having written the first credible computer program.

2D Goggles is a side project for Ms Padua, who works on both computer- and hand-animated films for her living. Her Babbage/Lovelace comics use a rough drawing style intentionally. She employs both paper and computer tablet to create them. She says that the heavy subcultural interest in steampunk—the expression of computational functions in the design and mechanical aesthetics of the 19th century—derives from the same motivation. "The thing about steampunk that's really attractive is that technology is so abstract now. You push a button, and it goes into the box, and it doesn't make a noise. It's very abstract. It doesn't satisfy the monkey brain."

Ms Padua has so far written several stories of derring-do in addition to the Organist, including a visit from Her Majesty (Victoria, that is), interested in the mechanical device to which she had given patronage. More is to come. "If I did all the stories I would like to do, it would probably take me about 15 years," says Ms Padua.

The artist is happy to foster additional awareness of both the stars of her comic. Common knowledge of them is limited, despite their crucial roles on the path to functional computers. "You can draw them, and in a sense bring them back to life," she says. She notes of Mr Babbage that "he should be much more famous than he is. He needs better PR." We are trying...

EVERY journalist loves a scoop. Lawyers are starting to love them too. They are hoping to use a 1918 decision from America's Supreme Court, stemming from an argument over war coverage between William Randolph Hearst (pictured above), a press baron, and the Associated Press, to protect the business models of traditional publishers against internet-based rivals. The case gives legal protection to "hot news", ostensibly to encourage news gathering. Although the facts of the original case concern telegraphs, the issues go to the heart of today's internet news business, the efficiency of markets and freedom of speech. 

During the closing stages of the first world war Mr Hearst's International News Service (INS) was banned from Allied-controlled telegraph lines for what was seen as over-excited reporting of British losses ("Zeppelins set London ablaze!"). Unable to transmit its own news back from the front, INS started rewriting Associated Press (AP) dispatches instead. AP sued, and INS responded that AP had no case under copyright because it had rewritten the dispatches. Facts are not protected by copyright—only the expression of them in a specific piece of text. 

Eventually a majority of the Supreme Court came to agree with AP. Justice Mahlon Pitney, writing the majority opinion, rejected the idea that there might be any intellectual-property protection for news itself. "It is not to be supposed that the framers of the Constitution...intended to confer upon one who might happen to be the first to report a historic event the exclusive right for any period to spread the knowledge of it," he argued. But he couldn't let go his conviction that INS wasn't playing fair, and that the rules of fair competition needed to be upheld. So he argued that the gathering of news did create a "quasi property right", and although that right should not constrain the newspaper-buying public, it should prevent a commercial competitor from using AP's news for its own gain. 

In dissent, Justice Louis Brandeis argued that Justice Pitney should have just swallowed his moral indignation. "To appropriate and use for profit, knowledge and ideas produced by other men, without making compensation or even acknowledgment, may be inconsistent with a finer sense of propriety; but, with the exceptions indicated above, the law has heretofore sanctioned the practice," he argued. To create a new property right would just make a mess unless it could be clearly defined and enforced—and Justice Pitney's quasi-right for news seemed to do neither. Nearly a hundred years later, the courts are starting to test Justice Brandeis's point.

The case now reviving interest in this antique dispute concerns a tiny website called Theflyonthewall.com. Its business was republishing share tips made by investment banks. The banks sued, and in the summer of 2010 they won. A court ruled that Theflyonthewall was unfairly appropriating some of the value created by the banks in researching and writing the reports, and required the site to wait for at least two hours before republishing them. Theflyonthewall, in turn, has had its case taken up by some of the Internet's big guns—including Google, Twitter and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an internet lobby group. They supported the website's appeal to the Second Circuit Court, and made arguments on its behalf to the court. Now they are anxiously awaiting the results of that appeal, which could appear anytime in the next few weeks. 

The Second Circuit is authoritative in intellectual property. It set the stage for the suit against Theflyonthewall in a 1997 decision which overturned an injunction granted to the National Basketball Association, preventing Motorola, a maker of telecoms gear, from broadcasting game scores over its pagers. In that case the Second Circuit ruled that specific criteria had to be met for the hot-news doctrine to apply. The information in question must be expensive to gather and time sensitive. One party must be free-riding directly on another's expenditure, and the two must be in direct competition. Finally, the free-riding must significantly reduce the incentive to gather information, and so threaten its quality or existence. The NBA failed those tests, but Theflyonthewall passed. 

At the appeal, the Second Circuit was asked to reconsider whether Theflyonthewall should have triggered the hot-news rules–and, in particular, whether a information website could really be considered to be in direct competition with an investment bank. But, more interestingly, it was also asked to look again at the criteria for applying the hot-news doctrine in light of the new questions thrown up the internet. Are bloggers, for example, in direct competition with newspapers? Does Google free-ride or provide free marketing and distribution? How do you define the value of information, and what restrictions, if any, would enable a supplier to capture that value? Is there a public interest in the news being as widely disseminated as possible, and would that interest differ between, say, a share recommendation and the news that Port au Prince has been flattened by an earthquake?

Even in the realm of more-or-less traditional news outlets, there would seem to be a lot of information sharing that would have to be carefully parsed if the hot-news doctrine were to be consistently applied. Jonathan Stray, an Associated Press journalist working with Harvard's Nieman Foundation, analysed the 121 unique articles thrown up by Google News concerning a school of Chinese hackers that penetrated Google, for example. His best reckoning was that only 13 contained original reporting. 

Google's representative at the Theflyonthewall appeal argued that the internet makes the whole concept of hot news outdated. Breaking news goes from being unknown to widely known so quickly that there is no longer any chance to misappropriate its value. The EFF argued that more and faster information flow was generally a good thing. In the numerous collisions between intellectual-property law and the First Amendment since the hot-news doctrine was created, free speech has usually trumped property. So the EFF particularly urges the Second Circuit to test the hot-news criteria against this evolved body of First Amendment law.

At the end of the day the real test of the hot-news doctrine will be that posed sceptically by Justice Brandeis. Whatever the Second Circuit decides in its forthcoming ruling, can it be enforced simply and efficiently?

NEW friends are hard to come by. This Babbage is married, has passed 40 and finds small children clustered at his bedside each morning. Marriage and parenthood create new social circles, but also bind one more closely into them. Until the children are grown, there is not much spare time for a parent to pursue new activities and have the time needed for the acquaintance that deepens into friendship. Indeed, even old friends may feel neglected along the way.

Yet Babbage has new chums, to his surprise, arising from his obsession with Twitter. Your correspondent's online career stretches back to 1980 and the CompuServe dial-up service, where a live forum known as the CB (Citizens Band) Simulator allowed real-time chat at 110 bits per second. The notion was that it resembled the kind of conversation possible over CB radios, which were popular at the time.

Of the same vintage were bulletin board systems (BBSes), into which you could make a connection to post messages in discussion groups, and also download software. The most sophisticated had multiple phone lines available at once, allowing chat among those simultaneously connected. Babbage participated in all that, and in each subsequent development in live and asynchronous online community, from Bitnet Relay via The Well, Internet Relay Chat and Instant Messaging to the current belle of the ball, Twitter.

And yet, he writes abashedly, he never made what one might call true friends solely online during those three decades of chatter. Acquaintances, yes. Well wishers, colleagues, enemies, boors and even slightly disturbing fans. And such means have strengthened or maintained ties formed in the world of handshakes, hugs and tears. But there was never a connection that started with electrons and led to the consumption of fermented and distilled beverages, and that interchange of pure nonsense, deep thoughts, shared experience and common loss which underpins a strong tie. Never, at least, until Twitter.

Despite—and perhaps because of—the trivial and by necessity shortened discourse on Twitter, several friendships have blossomed, recently confirmed in person. That description may sound a bit bloodless, but Babbage turns his steely eye upon his own soul and motives, not just those of others.

Twitter enables the sort of chitchat impossible among strangers on email or instant messaging, and outside the scope of Facebook. Facebook's boss, Mark Zuckerberg, often describes his service as a way to connect with friends you already have. Facebook creates circles upon circles of acquaintance, but most conversation is among those already known to each other.

Twitter, however, is a different beast. The asymmetry of follower and followee creates a different rhythm, allowing the possibility of falling into conversation with an unknown someone without invading his or her space. It is a simple matter to ignore or block those who you find uninteresting. And people you know and trust outside the electronic realm lead you to their friends, colleagues and family. Likewise, you may be on the receiving end of tendrils of acquaintance. The shared set of relationships and communication among those you know vets new people for you and you for them.

Tweaks made to Twitter a few months ago that make a real-time stream generally available—instead of the retrieval of periodic updates—have blurred the lines between synchronous communications like chat and asynchronous methods such as email and forum commenting. Direct messaging on Twitter, a one-to-one method that may take place only between two parties who mutually follow each other, provides a trimmed-down email analogue without the weightiness and effort associated with handling yet more messages. Continuous speech is more or less possible without the overhead and commitment of a chat room or an instant-message session.

Babbage tends towards gregariousness, online or off, and struck up Twitter conversations with several friends of friends in the past year. He found himself communicating at first through "mentions" on Twitter—the @name convention that allows you to point a reply or message in the public stream at someone—but then moved into direct messages, instant messaging and email. Those he grew to know best also blog and use Facebook. Over the course of months, he learned quite a bit about his newfound mates, cheering on their successes, sympathising over their straits and introducing them to new people. With a little trepidation, he finally met a few such people in person.

While Tweet-ups, a mashup of tweet and meetup, are common, those typically involved likeminded groups of people who have met or continue conversations online. In my case, the meetings were at Macworld 2011, in San Francisco—the annual convocation of the Apple community and we reporters thereof. One hates to ruin a good thing. Would Babbage fail to live up to the expectations of his new frequent correspondents—or they to his? Does Twitter's distilling process remove the chaff and leave so much wheat as to provide a mistaken impression of personality and mutual interest?

Babbage happily reports the results of his accidental experiment: those who are genuine in 140 characters are equally so over meals and laughter. Twitter is not a guarantee of friendly compatibility, but your correspondent found it an awfully close match.

IT IS remarkable how risk-conscious people have become, especially on the road. Sure, some motoring maniacs will always push their luck, causing mayhem for themselves and others—and everyone makes mistakes from time to time, gets distracted, becomes impatient and is, perhaps, not as mindful of other road users as he ought to be. Nevertheless, the statistics for traffic accidents, at least in developed parts of the world, reveal a heartening downward trend.

In the United States, for instance, the latest figures from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) show that 33,808 people died on American roads in 2009—the lowest level since 1950. That is still way too many personal tragedies. Even so, it represents a 9.7% decline from the figure in 2008, which was itself 9.7% lower than 2007's. The absolute number of fatalities may grab the headlines, but the more relevant statistic—the fatality rate per 100m vehicle-miles travelled—has also been inching steadily down over the past half century. In 2009, the American rate had fallen to 1.13 deaths per 100m vehicle-miles. Only Britain, Denmark, Japan, The Netherlands and Sweden fared better. For that, traffic authorities everywhere can thank the wholesale introduction of safety-belts and air-bags, as well as tougher drunk-driving laws.

As could be expected, the recession has played its part in reducing the deathly toll on the road—especially among the most vulnerable group, 16- to 24-year-olds. They have suffered most from unemployment and hence have been exposed to fewer hazards on the road. The worry is that there could be a rebound in fatalities once the recovery gets seriously underway and the young resume their reckless driving habits.

While horrifying, traffic accidents are far from being mankind’s greatest scourge. Around the world, they account for 1.2m deaths a year, compared with the 35m people who die from non-communicable illnesses such as cardiovascular disease, cancer and diabetes (5.4m of which are caused by smoking alone). According to the World Health Organisation, some 25m people all told have died in road accidents since horseless carriages took to the streets (the first such fatal accident occurred in London in 1896). That is the same as the number of people who have died over the past 30 years from AIDS.

The irony is that, while the roads are safer than ever, motorists have become more safety conscious. Back in the early 1970s, when your correspondent built a car for himself, he considered its backbone frame—made of pressed-steel sections braced with steel tubing—as state-of-the-art as far as crashworthiness was concerned. With the engine and transmission amidships, the front third of the vehicle was effectively a dedicated crumple zone. Likewise, the rear had strategically placed structural members designed to collapse on impact and mop up excess kinetic energy if shunted from behind. An added virtue was that, being a mere 1,450lb (660kg), the car had very little inertia to overcome relative to most other vehicles on the road, and thus tended to be shovelled down the highway intact when hit from behind (as has happened twice) rather than being crumpled on impact.

Today, though, he considers his beloved 39-year-old car a death trap, and won’t allow his wife or daughter to drive it or ride with him. The reason is not that he thinks it dangerous to drive. Over the decades he has upgraded—on a machine that was inherently safe to start with—the brakes, the tyres and the suspension, and made the frame torsionally even stiffer. As a result, the vehicle now has far more primary safety (the agility, stability and stopping power needed to avoid accidents) than the vast majority of modern cars.

The problem is the vehicle’s secondary safety—the ability to save occupants’ lives if the car is, despite all its primary safety, actually involved in a crash. While the car's original seat belts have been replaced with four-point harnesses, it still has no air-bags, nor any side-intrusion protection. Viewed from the side, its occupants sit within a fragile eggshell of fibreglass. Tee-boned at a crossing, they would be instant spam in a can.

Continue reading "The Difference Engine: Safety first" >>

IT IS easy to equate CERN with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the multi-billion dollar device that sits in a 27 km loop underneath the Franco-Swiss country side and has come to symbolise mankind's scientific and technological prowess. But CERN is not just the LHC. There is plenty of unrelated, often quirky physics going on there, sometimes relying on surprisingly frugal methods. Finally, there are the scientists themselves. True, they spend most of their waking hours immersed in work. Yet, despite rumours to the contrary, they are, in fact, human. Below, a series of photographs capturing some of the lesser known aspects of life at Europe's main particle-physics laboratory.

PS For more in-depth reporting from CERN, read here and here.

SPOOKED by the spike in oil prices in 2008 and warily eyeing the latest spurt in fuel charges, airlines have noted that the costs of not going green are growing. In particular, they fret about the painful levies on carbon-spouting planes to be imposed under the European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). From 2012 all airlines operating in the EU will be expected to cut emissions to 3% below the average annual figure for the period between 2004 and 2006, and by a further 2 percentage points in 2013. Although most emissions allowances up to the cap will be allocated to airlines for free, 15% will have to be acquired in auctions. Any further emissions will require trading in additional permits.

Little wonder, then, that the queue of carriers hopping on the biofuel bandwagon is growing. Lufthansa, Ryanair and Easyjet are only the latest reported to be seeking a deal with Solena, an American producer of aviation biofuels. At the start of January it emerged that Qantas, the Australian flag carrier, will work with the same company to build a commercial-scale aviation biofuel plant on the outskirts of Sydney. Solena is already building a similar plant in London, which is scheduled to produce around 70m litres (16m gallons) of biofuel a year from 2014. Burning this instead of the equivalent amount of kerosene would reduce BA's carbon emissions by about 2% a year, as much as is produced annually by all flights going in and out of London's (admittedly small) City Airport.

The reason for Solena's sudden popularity is that by making biofuels from waste, the company has dodged some of the problems that have bedevilled production of crop-based varieties. These include inadequate supplies of biomass to meet even today's demand, and the related worries about how the push for more such crops may encourage land-clearance and lead to rising food prices. To illustrate the point, Greenpeace, an environmental lobby group, calculated that a test flight by Virgin Atlantic in 2008 that powered one engine of a Boeing 747-400 with a 20% biofuel mix of babassu oil and coconut oil used the equivalent of 150,000 coconuts. If all four engines were powered by biofuels alone, 3m coconuts would have been required, leading the group to dismiss the exercise as a “high altitude greenwash”.

Then there is the long list of exacting technical and commercial specifications aviation biofuels will need to meet. They must pack a lot of energy into a small volume, remain liquid at -50°C, come in chemically identical form all over the world, mix well with existing fuels, and improve, or at least match, those fuels' efficiency. All that without requiring any serious tweaks to existing aircraft.

One-off tests of “drop-in” biofuels, ie, ones that can be mixed with standard kerosene, have been conducted successfully by airlines, including Qatar Airways, Continental, United, Air New Zealand and Japan Airlines. Lufthansa has gone further. In November 2010 it announced plans to carry out a six-month trial of the longer-term effects of biofuels on aircraft engines. Beginning in April, one engine on an Airbus A321 plying the route between Hamburg and Frankfurt route will run on a 50-50 mix of biofuel and kerosene. 

Until more such tests have been carried out successfully, the 50-50 mix is all that certifying agencies will permit, so a wholly plant-derived aviation fuel remains a distant prospect. However, now that the ETS and other considerations have registered on the International Air Transport Association's (IATA's) radar, that industrial lobby group reckons biofuels could account for 6% of all aircraft fuel by 2020, reducing carbon emissions by over 4%, or more than 20m tonnes, from current levels.

The technology does not come cheap. IATA predicts that an investment of $10 billion-15 billion will be needed to reach the 2020 target. The plants in London and Sydney are expected to cost $300m apiece. However, for an industry that is coming to see biofuels as a hedge against tighter environmental regulation, rising fuel costs and damage to reputation, it may be a price worth paying.

FROM the street, CERN, Europe's main nuclear-research laboratory straddling the Franco-Swiss border just outside Geneva, differs little from a typical university campus. Buildings, some timeworn, others spanking new, none more than a few storeys tall, are scattered amid a warren of narrow, tree-lined alleys whose names read like a "Who's Who" of particle physics.

Every boffin to have left a mark on the field seems to be here, beginning with Democritus, one of the first ancient Greek thinkers to argue that all matter is composed of tiny, indivisible particles. This blog's patron managed to secure a spot, too, as did Marie Curie, her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie and Chien-Shiung Wu, the only women on the list of 57. Babbage and his female companions feature on road signs within striking distance of the cafeteria which, around lunchtime, bustles with the usual cross section of the academic milieu, from dreadlocked youths to buttoned-down doyens. Women do remain in the minority, though not to the extent the street directory would imply.

However, the preponderance of men is not the only hint that this is no ordinary college canteen. For a start, there is a conspicuous, and somewhat disconcerting, absence of lunchtime banter. All discussions seemed to concern the niceties of advanced physics or engineering, and as such drew a blank from your eavesdropping correspondent, despite his undergraduate dalliance with the exact sciences. Even the flat-screen televisions on the walls, rather than offering the typical fare of sports or 24-hour news, continuously roll through status reports for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's most powerful particle accelerator and CERN's flagship project.

At the moment all the charts are flatlining as the LHC reaches the end of its annual maintenance. This meant that The Economist was allowed to descend into its innards, off limits to outsiders when the thing is fired up and bunches of protons whiz in opposite directions around a 27 km circular tunnel running 50 to 175 metres beneath the countryside, before colliding at within a whisker of the speed of light. Physicists hope that the ensuing orgy of creative destruction produces fleeting, exotic particles that will help them to understand the nature of reality, no less.

As goals go, it is hard to sound more grandiose. However, on witnessing the epic scale of the venture, it all suddenly rings far less hollow. At four points along its circumference the LHC tunnel crosses vast experimental halls, each housing arrays of sensors enclosed in a huge horizontal barrel. Standing before the largest of the lot, aptly named ATLAS, one cannot help but gasp in awe. Even Andrew Lankford, the deputy spokesman for the ATLAS collaboration who accompanied your correspondent, confessed to sharing the sentiment. Like most of the 3,000 or so physicists who work on the experiment, he rarely gets the chance actually to behold it. 

And there is much to behold (see above, and note the figure in an orange hardhat at the bottom of the picture for scale). The device stretches 46 metres long and 25 metres tall, equivalent to an eight-storey building, and weighs 7,000 tonnes. Despite its colossal size, this is a precision instrument fitted with some of the niftiest sensors ever devised by man, connected to 100m separate electronic channels. Directly above it, a wide vertical shaft, impressive in its own right, rises 100 metres to a factory-like facility. As it happens, this is just across the road from the CERN campus. It takes no less than 20 minutes to drive (almost in a straight line and with no traffic to speak of) from there to another industrial-scale plant at the opposite end of the LHC loop—another indication of the project's sheer size. Set in the middle of an otherwise empty field with no other buildings in sight, this is the home of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) which, just like ATLAS, rests at the bottom of a shaft around 100 metres below the surface.

At first blush, there is nothing compact about it (see right). However, Guido Tonelli, the spokesman for the experiment, kindly explained that the name has to do with the fact that though only about half the size of ATLAS, CMS weighs almost twice as much. (Dr Lankford had joked that if ATLAS put out to sea it would float; CMS, meanwhile, would sink like a lead weight.) That is because CMS is built around a huge magnet capable of producing a magnetic field 100,000 times stronger than the Earth's. This permits precise measurements of the momentum of any charged particle emerging from a collision, even highly energetic ones that zip through weaker magnetic fields without the slightest deviation, making them difficult to identify. However, confining the field requires wrapping the magnet in layers of heavy steel which accounts for most of the detector's mind-boggling mass of 12,500 tonnes.

Dr Tonelli hopes that this design will give CMS the edge it needs to be the first to spot something new and interesting, like a trail left by the elusive Higgs boson, which is thought to give all other known particles their mass, and whose discovery is the LHC's most publicised goal. CERN is at pains to stress that before either CMS or ATLAS can claim victory, any sightings will need to be confirmed by the other. Since even LHC experiments face budgetary constraints, each collaboration had to decide which bits of kit to splurge on and where to scrimp and save. They opted for different trade-offs, and consequently adopted different technical solutions. This ought to lend further credence to any results replicated using the rival detector.

In effect, this makes ATLAS and CMS mutually indispensable. Still, neither Dr Lankford nor Dr Tonelli makes any attempt to hide the fact that the race is on and both teams are in it to win. Despite lunchtime evidence to the contrary, it seems the sporting spirit is not wholly lost on physicists.

PS For more on Babbage's sojourn at CERN, read on and take a look at the slideshow.

"KETTLING" is a term used in Britain to describe the confinement by the police of demonstrators in a small area. Once trapped, the demonstrators are kept there until they're too cold, hungry and tired to carry on with their protest. The technique has been in use for over a decade, but it hit the news most recently when the police used it against university and secondary-school students complaining about government plans to triple university-tuition fees. Supporters of the tactic say it is necessary to prevent the sort of vandalism and violence seen on November 10th, when protestors managed to trash the Conservative Party's headquarters at Millbank. Opponents say it amounts to a repression of the legitimate right to protest.

Given that most protestors won't march into an obvious trap, the success of the tactic depends on an information imbalance between the police and the protestors. Police commanders have a birds-eye view of the situation, allowing them to funnel protestors down particular streets and then close them off before the marchers can react. At another protest on December 9th a few enterprising techies created a Google map of central London that could be updated in real time to show marchers the positions of the police and thus help them avoid getting trapped.

Now a group of students from Univesity College London have taken that idea and turned it into a fully-fledged web app called Sukey (for readers perplexed by the name, remember that the phenomenon is called "kettling", and if you still don't get it, Google a nursery rhyme called "Polly, put the kettle on"). The app runs in the web browser of modern smartphones, and the idea is to allow users to update a map of the protest route in real time, showing the location of policemen, trouble spots and any streets that have been blocked off. Demonstrators can also send and receive updates via text messages.

The project's website says that the primary purpose of the app is to keep peaceful protesters safe, which I'm sure is part of the motivation behind it, but it also looks like a great way for marchers to outwit the police. The app will go live on January 29th, when another round of protests against the new tuition fees is planned. The police are, presumably, aware of Sukey's existence. For those worried about using it, the developers insist that they have built in enough security to enable users to remain anonymous. It is possible that the police may try to subvert the app by feeding it false information. It will be interesting to see whether they can make kettling work this time around, or whether they try an entirely different tactic altogether.

THE least news from or about Apple ricochets around the twitterverse and blogosphere in seconds. The ne plus ultra of tiny bits was Thursday's bombshell that the firm has changed the type of screw it uses to secure its iPhone 4 case, followed by endless double entendres. iFixIt breathlessly announced the swapout using terms typically reserved for fiery sermons. iFixIt happens to sell a $10 screwdriver for this new screw style, along with replacement parts and tool kits that allow ordinary people to repair iPhones and other Apple products. The firm also provides free online illustrated instructions and videos.

In the past, Apple used a standard Phillips-head (cross-shaped) screw. The new screw has five scalloped indentations. iFixIt says Apple calls it a "pentalobular" head, apparently, in internal repair documents. iFixIt says that Apple is not only using this obscure style for new iPhone 4 shipments, but also that employees in Apple Stores who disassemble iPhones for repair replace the Phillips-head screws with pentalobes. However, it is not difficult to remove such screws. Commenters on items that blossomed across the internet about the villainous pentalobe—surely, one of Superman's foes—note that other styles of screwdriver can also unlock the mysteries within the mobile phone. It is not unusual for a computer maker to use unusual screws. Torx, a six-pointed pattern harder to strip at tiny sizes than a Phillips, was once the style of choice.

iFixIt posits Apple's motivation for the change thus:

This screw head clearly has one purpose: to keep you out. Otherwise, Apple would use it throughout each device. Instead, they only use it at the bulwark—on the outside case of your iPhone and MacBook Air, and protecting the battery on the Pro—so they can keep you out of your own hardware.

This is accurate, if incomplete. Apple has two complementary goals, the first of which the company would probably deny if it had not declined to comment on screws to Babbage. Setting the bar to disassembly higher allows Apple to make money from battery replacements. But a parallel goal is clearly to keep users from being their own worst enemies by tinkering destructively. In either case, Apple is not preventing repair. It merely discourages it, and iFixIt has already leapt over that hurdle.

Apple makes a good living selling battery replacements, and that is hardly a secret. The firm's MacBook Air and MacBook Pro unibody models, as well as all iOS devices, lack batteries designed to be removed by purchasers. Apple says that to increase the amount of charge a battery can hold, its design is not amenable to the kind of compromises needed to allow cells to be swapped easily. Fair enough. But that is not the whole story. Apple's iPhone 4 battery is designed to handle 400 full power cycles before its capacity diminishes to 80% of the original. For those who exhaust their iPhone battery across a normal working day, that is not much more than a year of typical usage. Given that an iPhone may last for years, the mobile battery will almost certainly need to be replaced.

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