Planning a book with a spreadsheet

The first thing to be said is that any factual book involves huge amounts of research and planning, and you will invariably wish you'd made a note of something you saw, six months ago. And if you did, where did I put that notebook, and if I have found it, where, oh where is that note in the many, many pages of crabbed illegibility?  That is why I transcribe my notes into machine-readable form, as soon as possible after I leave the library or whatever, but it still needs to be organised.

The second thing is that, having dabbled around with fiction, managing the facts doesn't seem to be any easier there, either.

Here's a way to keep track.  I have used it many times, though this account is based on some of the work for a book I haven't written yet. Let's just say that a small part of the context is Australian and centred on the goldfields, it's mainly historical, and this sample is wildly misleading, because many of the lines were added from other researches. Don't waste your time guessing!

The spreadsheet format shown here is one that I have developed over a long period of time. The key thing to note is that you can sort by three columns at once, so I can sort by ch (chapter), then within that by pt (part) and then by no (number).

So how did it come about? The answer is that I got my grounding as a writer as a student journalist, working on honi soit, the University of Sydney newspaper. Back then, each paragraph was typed on an octavo (roughly A5 size) sheet of newsprint paper, double-spaced. As the sub-editor went through these, pages might be removed, switched in order or marked up in various ways.

Some years back, I heard of a sporting journalist at The Sun in Sydney (I think) who had been using the first-ever spreadsheet, Visicalc, to write news stories. As I pondered why, it hit me that he was using this as a way of juggling paragraphs, just by numbering in another column and using the SORT function. If you want to insert a paragraph between number 4 and number 5, your new para is given the number 4.5—and now you should be able to see what got me started.

There was more to it, though, once I had the general idea. At other times in the planning, I might wish to bring together everything that happened on a given date or in a given year, or at a given place. At another time, I might need to review all of the items relating to (say) theft. Right now, most of those are still linked together in this example, because part 40 of what is chapter 7 for now is mainly about crime. Later on, some of the pieces will be switched to other chapters or parts, just by changing a couple of values and sorting again.

Then there was the advantage that I could store the exact reference for later back-tracking, but there are also all of the other tabs that you can see down at the bottom of the screen-shot. I store all of my references, along with where I heard about them, where they are located, and comments about their usefulness. I also store all of the bits, which is why there is a tab labelled "discards".

One of my basic rules is that nothing is ever ditched, because I have regretted such decisions far too many times. Even if something is no use in the current book, it may come in handy later, like most of the lines that currently sit in this planning sheet.

As a rule, the spreadsheet starts at least six months to two years before I start writing the book. I have a rough chapter structure laid down, and I work within that, but most of the time, that will change entirely during the writing.

I have been trying my hand at historical fiction, and the results are less than satisfactory at this stage, mainly because I need more historical detail than I can track down, so the project is on hold. The plots for the eight planned books are all in spreadsheets, but I also have a record of the characters recorded under 12 headings: surname, Fname, Details, born, eyes, hair, height, weight, education, character, characteristics, accent. Each entry also records which books each character appears in, which helps to remind me of who has been where and done what, because the series required me to write across all eight titles at once.

So if you want to write, maybe you can do worse than learn how to subvert the spreadsheet and use it in a way that it was never intended to be used. You don't have to do it that way, but if your mind works like mine, you may find it remarkably convenient.

In the next three blogs, I will go into some rather hair-raising detail.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

This is the first of a series of four blogs about getting lazy-smart, using computers, and they all reflect my background as a hacker from a time when hacker was an honourable occupation. The precursor to this was a three-part series which began with Effective Science Writing, Part 1.

These are the others, and they will, in due course, be made into links:

Practical use of macros and spreadsheets;

Macro tricks in Word, part 1; and

Macro tricks in Word, part 2.

Effective Science Writing, Part 3.

This follows on from Effective Science Writing, Part 2.  That follows on from Effective Science Writing, Part 1, as you probably guessed.  It might be a good idea to start there!

Understanding your readers.

You need to know what your readers expect, which means knowing what they are likely to understand.

Most readers know little of other countries' idioms, so you need to "fit in" and make your writing appear to come from one of them. I have learned that Americans have only heard of one civil war, so where we might write "the US Civil War", they just say and write "the Civil War". Every audience has its own peculiarities.

Think about the age of the audience, the strength of interest and type of interest that they will bring to their reading. Are the readers going to understand what it means to think like a scientist? Will they know that science is often puzzling, going against intuition?

For example, if we just examined the world in our lifetimes, we might say that species don't vary, because we can't see it happening. To explain evolution, we have to make people understand that our intuitive ideas are often wrong.

Point number 8: know your public. (If you don't, they probably won't want to know about you!)

How to know what information is reliable.

You need to choose your source and reference material carefully. There are many traps out there for somebody working on the fringes of journalism, because they are usually decent, honest, reliable people who don't tell lies. There are also frauds who try to sell fake stuff, there are PR people and bloggers whose job is to make pollution look good, politicians who prefer to muzzle the truth out of ignorance or greed.

With experience, you will learn where the charlatans are. For some years, I would not read anything coming out of the US Office of Naval Research, because the stories they released were not only boring and misleading, but every six months or so, the flacks there would release a few old stories again, hoping nobody would notice. I assumed they had a monthly target for press releases, and met that target by recycling. I met their dishonesty by ignoring them.

There were other US colleges with no real research to report, who kept on churning out bland rubbish. This is why, whenever possible, you should find and read the abstract of the paper online, and if you are going to write about it, you should email the lead author or the nominated contact person, and ask for a PDF of the paper. That gives you a chance to form your own opinion.

When I am scoping and planning a book, I will use Wikipedia as a starting point, but I know the traps: I use Wikipedia as a place to find things I should look into. There will always be rubbish there, but the quality stuff is building fast, as more and more people add original material and the sources. To see the sort of thing I mean, I contributed original material to the entries on the Silex Piano and the 1812 New Madrid Earthquake. In each case, I chanced upon original material that no search would have uncovered, and added it.

All I would say is: approach Wikipedia (and everything on the web) with caution. Use those sources wisely!!  (I wish a recent editor of mine would heed that advice: she changed the spellings of the names of two Australian movies to match the wrong spellings that she found in Wikipedia!)

Point number 9: trust nobody. (At least until you have double-checked what they say.)

Being open to revision.

Know as you begin that most of your first draft will be changed, either by you or by your editor. All writers are egotists, and the better you are as a writer, the more people will notice that (to be polite) you have a high regard for yourself. That usually shows up as a high regard for what you write. Anybody who can't see how good your writing is can be safely ignored, right?

Wrong. You are being your own worst enemy, because you are up too close to the issues, you care too much about things, but you simply can't make a judgement. The copy editor who questions your work is a friend, not an enemy.

There is another aspect: when we re-read what we have written, we see what we expect to see. All sorts of typos, spelling mistakes and bad grammar can slip past us. One method that I favour is to use software that converts my prose into an mp3 file that I can listen to while I am reading the text. The software I use is quite cheap, as it was designed for use by people with poor vision. You can find and buy it on the Internet: it is called TextAloud.

Against my better judgement, I was persuaded a few years ago to write a history of a World War II military campaign. I was asked to write it so teenagers could understand the complexities of a three-month series of battles on the Kokoda Track. As it happened, the general commanding the Australian army was a coward, a bully, a fool and a crook. My book rapidly turned into a brief of the evidence to prosecute that general. It didn't fit the brief I had been given.

I had a chat with the publisher, we agreed that the manuscript was rubbish, I ditched that draft, went back to my notes and wrote a second draft that told a human story and became a prize-winner. The first draft would never have won anything.

Point number 10: trust your editor. (Editors have a different view, and can often see what you can't.)

Where to publish.

This is the one area where I won't be of much assistance. As I have indicated, I have my networks, my contacts, and a solid reputation for always delivering as specified, on or before the deadline. That helps, but there's another issue that is even more important.

Remember what I said about listening to your copy editor?

Here is a secret: editors talk to each other about writers, and they sometimes recommend an author to a publisher, based on knowing their track record. I rather suspect that some of my most valuable deals would have been missed if the editors knew me as a difficult character who refused to make changes in the text.

That is why you never refuse an offer, because you never know which one will give you the contacts you desperately need. The same applies to the poorly-paid writing jobs that are offered by magazines published for schools. Most of these have a regular turnover of staff, in part because those magazines go out of business, but also because the editorial staff are always looking for better work. And when they move on, they take the email addresses of productive and helpful writers with them.

The short answer as I see it: it isn't what you know, it's who you know, so you need to work hard to make yourself known. And always get the work in ahead of deadline!!!

I have rarely succeeded with a "cold call" where I come in as an unknown and pitch an idea, but it sometimes works. Most magazines offer a list of staff names, and sometimes emails. If they don't provide emails, you can sometimes work them out. Suppose you want to publish in The Magazine, and you know that the email addresses will all be in the form <something@themagazine.co.in>, there will be a few email addresses floating around out there on the web.

You need to be tricky and Google <"@themagazine.co.in"> (with the quotes but not the angle brackets) or <email AND "@themagazine.co.in">. With luck, this will harvest you enough email addresses to show you how the IT staff at The Magazine generate email addresses for the employees.

(This also works when an airline like Virgin Australia refuses to pay a promised refund because the call centre says wrongly that the refund has been paid, there is no other phone number and no published email address for the CEO.)

(Note: the paragraph above is an example of the sort of indulgence that tempts clever people and clever writers. Under normal circumstances, I would have deleted it, but I left it in as a warning. While both true and correct, it is smug and doesn't tell the reader anything important. Be ruthless!)

So, once you have a name and an email, send a short email to the editor's assistant: one paragraph on your qualifications and achievements, a second paragraph listing one to three proposed topics, and asking if they would like to see a full outline or a draft. If you get no answer, try emailing the editor instead, but don't mention the earlier email.

I began my writing life expecting to write books and magazine articles. I was lucky enough to find a second strength: the writing of crisp 2250-word essays (the chapter was in effect, two such essays back to back). Then I found myself hired to write science news by a publisher whom I approached about an entirely different project. Luck was definitely a part of it, but persistence also played a part.

The printed book is probably dying, slowly, and magazines and newspapers are disappearing, but there is still a place for crisp prose that carries a message, interests the reader and ends cleanly.

Point number 11: it does no harm to approach an editor with a proposal. (Try to keep it down to one page of 12-point type with your name and contact details at the top, one paragraph about you, one paragraph about the content of the article you wish to write, and a few sentences about why you are well-equipped to write the article.)

Point number 12: good luck, and welcome to a noble profession. (I wrote that, just after writing the introduction—but I hope you guessed that!)

Coming attractions:


The other thing I need to do before I get too old and silly is share a few of my tricks of the trade.  Most of these are buried in my web site, so I have started to disinter them so I can offer them here.  Look for the following in the near future: when they go up, I will change these labels to make them links.

Planning a book with a spreadsheet;

Practical use of macros and spreadsheets;

Macro tricks in Word, part 1; and

Macro tricks in Word, part 2.

Effective Science Writing, Part 2

This follows on from Effective Science Writing, Part 1. It is completed in Part 3.

Creating a beginning.

I never consciously sit down and wonder how I am going to begin a piece. I suppose there must be a point where I think of my start, but usually, the beginning emerges from the real facts that made me think of writing a piece.

The start is important, and fiction writers know this. They work endlessly over the first page, trying to create the perfect hook that will keep the reader hanging on while they do the necessary foundation work. Pick up any best-seller, read the first page, and look for the hook. It will be there, and you need a hook as well.

I think I mainly use one of these tricks:

• The plain news piece. This is fairly ordinary, and also fairly common. You simply write up a discussion of what a scientist somewhere has reported and then explain why it is important. You will always need a bit of polishing up, but you can set the scene first, and then cut to the new discovery.

• The direct question. This is a fairly straightforward situation where you ask the reader if he or she has ever considered why something is important.

• The indirect question (I was showing a trigger plant to a friend who asked . . .)

• The completely irrelevant anecdote that suddenly becomes relevant later on in the piece, or even at the very end. This one works well when you are a bit older, and have the experience to think of an anecdote you can use.

• The atmospheric, a trick piece where you set the scene and then work your way in from there. This is a subset of the irrelevant anecdote, but it can work very well.

No, I'm not going to do it all for you. As a science communicator, you are an essayist, and the only way to learn your craft is to study with the masters. Here, I have to confess myself ignorant of good role models from the sub-continent, so I will suggest a method to use if you are writing in English. I leave it to you to undertake the translation of this into a more local method, but I am sure that it can be done.

I can recommend Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt for writers of the past. In more recent times, there are Walter Murdoch (and Australian, and the uncle of Rupert Murdoch, but don't hold that against him!), J. B. Priestley, George Orwell. Or you may prefer to look at the science essayists like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Martin Gardner, Stephen Jay Gould, Sir Peter Medawar, Oliver Sacks, Lewis Thomas, Lewis Wolpert—and J. B. S. Haldane, who alone among those on this list, had an Indian connection.

You can also search more widely, looking online at the intelligent pieces written for the New Yorker or The Guardian. Or you might try an Australian radio program called Ockham's Razor (one to which I sometimes contribute). This draws mainly Australian contributors, but it also gathers speakers from all around the world. They must all speak for 15 minutes, less a top and tail, about 2000 words, and the quality is patchy but often reaches sublime levels.

I suggest that you gather a collection of perhaps 60 pieces that you really like, and 15 or 20 pieces that leave you uninterested. Then analyse these, as if you were a forger of bank notes. Make lists of the methods used, the tricks of the trade, the flourishes, and rate them. :Look at the low-rating ones, and if you think they are useless, remove them from the list.

Once you have your methods, you can make a deliberate choice of the tricks you will use in a piece. In this way, you will make these tricks part of your tool-kit, and before long, you will use them naturally.

Point number 4: know before you start how you plan to begin. (Once you have done that, you will probably know how you are going to end.)

When to write the ending.

I like to start with a good idea of how I will end a piece. If I don't quite know what that will be when I begin, I try to have an ending in place by the time my first draft is 40% complete. By that time, I will have most of the key points set down, but I will probably be starting to ramble.

Recently, I have been writing a set of children's books, each of about 1500 words, each one to have 17 "openings", with a picture on one page, and text on the other. I write the first six opening to get the story line set, then I write the ending, which is often two or three openings in length, then I fill in the middle section.

About a third of the time, I will later change my first ending to a better one, but at least I didn't waver and wobble.

Point number 5: know as quickly as you can how you plan to end—and before you start writing is best. (Only then will you know where you are going.)

Keeping a full record of ideas, information and sources.

From time to time, even the most focused writer is going to falter, wondering just what brilliant idea was supposed to be going there, or just where that idea came from. That is the reason why I started storing everything in a spreadsheet, about ten years ago.

Mow I know what spreadsheets are supposed to be for, but I heard a story of an old Sydney sporting journalist who used to write news stories in Visicalc. And I realised that he was doing one paragraph to a cell, and then using numbers in another column to sort the cells. It's something that journalists used to do in the days of typewriters and hot metal typesetting, when we used copy paper and double-spaced our paragraphs on that.

I realised that I could do a lot more, because you can sort on three different columns, so I started adding three columns on the left: chapter, part and number, as well as whatever datum I had found and its exact source.

But I hadn't finished yet: I could sort at other times by date, or place or topic, and compare items from different places and then sort again and move everything back into sorted chapters.

The example here is from an incomplete research database for a study of gold rushes and gold lust, around the world. The text in column F already totals more than 120,000 words, twice the length of the book I plan to write.

From time to time, I spot something interesting but not for the book in hand: labelling it chapter 99 pushes it to the very bottom, and because I always use the same layout, I can quickly scoop up those odd bits and move them into a more relevant spreadsheet at some later time.

The thing about my spreadsheet system is that it works like a large number of filing cards that I can shuffle in a variety of ways. I can sort all the entries by year or date, or by the place where they happened. This helps me to see patterns that I might otherwise miss.

Point number 6: plan and record from the very start, because there will always be one vital point that your editor will query or doubt. (Good record-keeping saves time and avoids headaches.)

Setting down a plan and applying it.

Some 3000 words into writing this chapter, I took a break and slept. I awoke in the early morning with a fairly well-formed outline for a general-market book with a strong science bias. Even before my first cup of tea, I noted down six chapter headings, and a few things to chase up. Now I can get on with this, knowing that I won't lose those ideas.

The plan is your helper, not a tyrant. As I work through this in Microsoft Word, I have the Document Map open, and every so often, I type a paragraph that I realise is more relevant to one of the other sections. When that happens, I move it. I have already shifted many of the headings, added a new one and merged two others, but I am still "following the plan".

Point number 7: always have a plan. (Starting to write without a plan is like trying to explore Norway without a map or compass. It may be interesting—until you fall into a fiord!)

This will continue in Effective Science Writing, Part 3.

Effective Science Writing, Part 1

This began as a pro bono chapter for an Indian publication, Effective Science Writing, edited by Pramila Majumdar and Biman Basu, published by CSIR-North East Institute of Science and Technology, Jorhat, Assam, India.  I have adapted it slightly, and broken it into three parts.

I had a brief of sorts to write my chapter. In it, I was asked to discuss these topics:

• Understanding your readers;
• Searching for stories and;
• Where to publish;

I was also asked to add other important ideas. I decided to deal with these as well:

• Fitting science into unlikely places;
• Setting down a plan and applying it;
• Keeping a full record of ideas, information and sources;
• Being open to revision;
• When to write the ending;
• How to know what information is reliable;
• Why you should always listen to your editor;
• The importance of networking.

I wrote this introduction some days before I started writing the main text, and I copied the points above from my notebook, ten minutes after I scribbled them down. The final product would probably be very different, but I planned to leave this introduction unedited. That may be the most important thing I do here, because it shows how I think and how I work.

Note that I used a paper notebook and an old-fashioned pen for my first sketch of this chapter. I always scribble some rough notes, and I will come back to that later, but it is important for the reader to realise that I am almost totally reliant on computers for my productivity.

My first step, at this point, was to take those 11 points and paste them in below this introduction, using the same order as above. I formatted them (in MS Word) as headings. I added full stops at the end, then opened up some space between them so I could start inserting text in blue italics. The blue text works like the scaffolding on a building site, and all those blue bits will be demolished and removed at the end.

This is the end of the introduction that was not be revised. After this paragraph, everything could be (quite certainly will be) revised and changed as I work my way into my thinking. From past experience, I know it will be!

Why communicate science?

I do it because I love and admire science. I hope I can help reduce the amount of stupidity in the world by helping readers to understand the role of science and technology in their lives. I want to show people how to assess the claims of flat-earthers, perpetual motion eccentrics, medical frauds, climate change deniers, opponents of evolution and other charlatans. Some of the frauds are confused, others want to make money by confusing people, but they can all be rejected by people who understand science. I don't try to beat the frauds, I try to make people more able to see what the crooks are doing.

I want to make my readers immune to unfounded fear, while being able to assess the very real risks that can emerge from some kinds of science and technology. I want them to see the opportunities of new science and technology, I want them to be able and willing to grab those chances and use science and technology to help other humans. I want them to know how to learn from previous mistakes.

There was a famous World War I French general, called Marshal Foch, who began every planning meeting by reminding his staff that the key objective was to defeat the enemy. Only then, knowing that, would they start their meeting. Before I start to write, I sit down and ask myself whether I plan to help people understand, or if I want to win hearts and minds, or to fascinate them—or maybe I just want to amuse my readers. Most of the time, all of those will be in the mix, but I need to know what I hope to do.

Point number 1: aside from earning a living, what are you going to do with the story you are sitting down to write? What changes will it make? (I hope that this chapter will help people focus more closely as they write about science.)

Searching for stories.

There are excellent sources around for science writers, because most researchers out there want to be famous. Finding material is never the problem, but keeping your head above the flood and finding the right material can be a real challenge. Behind all those researchers hoping for fame, there are public relations people, pushing easy angles that lazy journalists can use. By all means read them, but never trust a press release as a major source!

Many press releases seem to promise a better way to do something, but the most common line is a cure for <the common cold; multiple sclerosis; cancer or some other disease>. Lots of new drugs might one day lead to an approach that may generate a molecule that might attack an obscure cancer, way off in the future. Most of the time, the discovery will go nowhere, but a PR person will dress this up as an amazing, absolutely certain cancer cure.

Remember that most discoveries are interesting and offer a story to tell, but only a few discoveries are breakthroughs. Remember also that there are things a science publicist might do or say that no professional science communicator would do or say. The publicist and the communicator both want people to go "wow!" but only one of them wants that to be a reaction to the science.

Press releases can be useful, if you know who to trust. Between 1998 and 2005, I churned out 30,000 words of science news each month. It was a treadmill, but an easy one, because I had all sorts of people alerting me about interesting stuff. I began with Eurekalert and Newswise, where I signed up for lists of the press releases that were placed on those two databases each day.

The best part of that is that both Newswise and Eurekalert are free. The first is some sort of consortium, the second is run by AAAS, the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  The second best part is that this search can look back at all of the stories containing a key word, so you can see how else a topic has been in the news.

The third best part is that you can work out who are the good feeds with information that you can use. I had a good personal relationship for some years with the American Geophysical Union, and could get copies of the actual published papers, so I could read at least the abstract and conclusion, while skimming over the discussion. When I found a good source, I would ask them to put me on their mailing list, and set of one my email filters to sort those emails into a special priority box.

Mind you, that was before Twitter. These days, you just need to select who you will follow with some care, and then the world's news will come to your door. I don't use Twitter that much, because I mainly do books these days, but I still follow Newswise, Carl Zimmer, ConversationEDU, Guardian Science and tedtalks.

Sometimes, a story will find you—and those ones are often the best. Many years ago, I was looking at a law that was proposed by two Frenchmen, Dulong and Petit, a rule of thumb that ties atomic weight to the specific heat of an element. I though that was rather clever, went back to their original work, and started converting the data into modern units. Then I pulled down a chemical data book, and found some odd discrepancies, and realised that I had uncovered a fraud that had been unnoticed for 165 years.

Later, I found that a couple of other people had noticed the fraud at about the same time, but by then, I had done a little radio program on it and got myself known. I have never looked back.

Point number 2: there is never any shortage of material to work with, and there is a story in almost everything, if you look at it the right way. (I have drawn almost entirely on experience to write this piece, but I also chatted with a couple of friends who are in the same game.)

Fitting science into unlikely places.

Many years ago, I was one of a group of bushwalking science teachers. We often took some of our students along with us on day walks, and we always managed to find a few interesting bits of geology or biology to show them. Then one of my friends bought a brilliant book called Science As You Go, and we realised that we could bring in chemistry, physics and even astronomy, even in the wilderness. That was how I learned to look for the science in almost anything.

I like bringing out the science behind curious things like the way seagulls follow behind the ferry that I ride to and from Sydney; or the science behind sand that squeaks when you walk on it, or the reason why poisons work as they do; or even how an orb-weaver spider makes its web, and why it always makes it across the garden path I need to walk along each morning. One of these days, I am going to write an essay on this quote from one of J.B.S. Haldane's essays, 'On Being the Right Size', from Possible Worlds.

You can drop a mouse down a thousand-foot mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft.  A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes.

Maybe I won't, though I would love to. What I do know is that a comment like that makes a science piece truly memorable. If people smile about it for a few days, they are thinking about it, and that principle is lodged in their minds forever.

Science communicators should avoid trying to be comedians, but the occasional memorable line makes the reader recall, relish, and roll over the facts that lie beneath it. The best place for that wry or clever comment is usually at the end of the piece.

One of my zoology lecturers once told us "a female whale evaginates her teat and the calf clings on while she pumps out six to eight gallons of milk in as many seconds." That was interesting, but what made it stick in my mind, 45 years later, was his extra comment that "if the calf doesn't hang on, it gets a face full of milk".

Point number 3: there is always a place for humour in a piece, but it should be humour that serves some purpose other than making people think you are a nice person. (I am prepared to bet that half of my readers will tell somebody either the Haldane quote or the amazing whale fact.)

This will continue in Effective Science Writing, Part 2 and then in Effective Science Writing, Part 3.

About those convicts

My time, at the moment, is mainly given over to Australian history, but because the convict topic is done to death, I have had little to say about it. I have, however, been thinking about transportation, the convict system, and its effects.

Four fastidious Britons emoting over the convict stain and the
Australian lack of human genetic diversity.

Britons of a certain appalling sort, usually lower-middle-class oiks or the toffy-nosed inbred offspring of the degenerate aristocracy, find it amusing to taunt Australians on their first encounter about their "convict taint".

I blame the English education system for letting them out in such a state of ignorance, because, as you will see, the story is far more nuanced than the simplistic notion of wicked felons and good "free" people.

Today, Australians are proud of their convict ancestors especially when the ancestors are clearly not wicked villains, and one of the convicts I want to look at was no villain.

There have always been two views about the convicts. One side agreed with "Major" James Mudie who wrote The Felonry of New South Wales and was horsewhipped for it.   Mudie said all convicts were evil and would never improve. Today, people often claim that the convicts, especially their own ancestors, were "transported for stealing a loaf of bread". Mudie was neither an officer nor a gentleman, and he richly deserved his come-uppance.

(For details, see 'New Publication', Australasian Chronicle, November 21, 1840, p.2, : for a commentary (which farewells Mudie in an unfriendly way), see 'The Breakfast Table', Australasian Chronicle, January 12, 1841, p.2,  There appear to have been no newspaper articles that supported him.)

The truth about the convicts is somewhere in the middle: some convicts were total villains, some were complete victims. In other words, there were good convicts and bad ones. There were also good and bad "free" people. Out of 245 marines (soldiers) who reached Australia, Judge-Advocate David Collins mentions four marines who received 200 lashes for manslaughter in 1788   and six marines who were hanged for robbing the colony's food stores in 1789.   And those were the ones supposed to enforce the law!

(For details of these bad good guys:  David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, pages 75 and 83 in the online edition.  In the print edition, the pages are 38 and 49.)

On January 10, 1787, two Elizabeths were tried at the Old Bailey. Elizabeth Hayward was 13 or 14 when she left England. She was the youngest female convict on the first fleet, sentenced to be transported for seven years. The charge was stealing a gown worth 4 shillings, a bonnet worth 2 shillings and a cloak worth 1 shilling. Hayward was an apprentice, accused of taking the items from her master, Thomas Crofts, and pawning them.

(Elizabeth Hayward's case: Old Bailey Online. Use your search function or look for case 219 or Reference Number: t17870110-60. Her sentence is listed separately, almost at the end.)

At some time between June 1 and June 10, 1787, Arthur Bowes Smyth, the assistant surgeon on the convict transport Lady Penrhyn, wrote a list of the convicts in his journal. He wrote that "Elizabeth Haward" was 13. Three pages earlier, he had listed Elizabeth Beckford was 70, but a month or so later, he gave her age as 82.

(Beckford's age: see Arthur Bowes Smyth, Journal of Arthur Bowes Smyth, 1787 March 22-1789 August 8, page 17.)

Elizabeth Beckford was charged with stealing twelve pounds weight of Gloucester cheese, value 4 shillings (40 cents in today's money, but worth a great deal more in 1787). The cheese belonged to Henry Austen, and she was sentenced to be transported for seven years. The report says "The prisoner was taken instantly with the cheese", meaning she was caught on the spot.

Elizabeth Beckford's case: see Old Bailey Online. Use your browser's search function or look for case 226 or Reference Number: t17870110-67. Her sentence is listed separately, almost at the end.

The two women were thieves, but before we judge them harshly, young people used to be apprenticed at about the age of 12. They got almost no pay, and usually, their families had to pay the master a fee called a premium. An apprenticeship usually lasted five years or more, and for the first couple of years, the apprentice was often made to do servant work like sweeping and cleaning, work that had little to do with the trade they were supposed to be learning. Apprentices lived in the master's house, and were fed by the master, but there was little joy in the life of an apprentice.

There was no joy at all for older people. There was no aged pension, and an old man or woman with no family and no savings had little choice but to steal, or to go into the workhouse. There, the inmates would be fed horribly, treated worse, and exposed to all sorts of diseases.

Workhouses still existed in 1904, when an Australian poet named Jennings Carmichael died after her husband deserted her. Her three sons were placed in an English workhouse until Australians found out about them in 1909, and took up a collection to pay the boys' fares back to Australia.

(See Jennings Carmichael: Her Children in a Workhouse, The Argus, April 16, 1910, p. 4,  and see other articles in Trove which are tagged 'Jennings Carmichael'. You will see the tag when you go to the link above: click on the tag, and at last count, 103 other articles will be listed: it seems we volunteers who do the tagging have been busy).

So perhaps we should not blame the two Elizabeths too much for stealing. They may have had their reasons. The gaols of Britain were filled with deadly diseases like tuberculosis, spread by coughing and "gaol fever" (we call it typhus today) which was spread by lice. Whatever their reason, the two Elizabeths gratefully accepted their fates and both were shipped out in the Lady Penrhyn, which carried women convicts and a few of the children of women convicts.

On January 10, 1787, 15 women appeared at the Old Bailey and were sentenced to be transported. One year later, on January 10, 1788, the women in Lady Penrhyn were cowering under the fury of a storm off the NSW coast, having been at sea since the previous May. Perhaps they began to regret their decision, but they reached Botany Bay about ten days later.

Elizabeth Beckford wasn't there by then. On the night of July 11–12 1787, she died, and it was then that Smyth wrote in his journal that she was 82.

(Beckford's death: Arthur Bowes Smyth, Journal of Arthur Bowes Smyth, 1787 March 22-1789 August 8, page 30. )

Elizabeth Hayward was not the youngest on board. The convicts' children listed by Smyth as being on board Lady Penrhyn were William Tilley (6 weeks), Mary Mullins (3), Mary Fowles (4), Jane Jones (8) and John Harrison, aged 15.

Elizabeth Hayward was flogged in Sydney for insolence, soon after arriving. She later went to Norfolk Island, and she received another flogging there. (Norfolk Island later became a terrible place, where only the worst convicts were sent, but it was used to grow food for the main colony and it was more pleasant when she was there.)

She may have died in 1830, but she left Norfolk Island in 1813 as the wife of Joseph Lowe along with two of her children. An Elizabeth Lowe died at Launceston, and was buried at St John's, Launceston 29 October 1836, "aged 66", which is about six years too young—but that may be our last trace of the youngest woman convict. If so, she got a good life in the end.

Most of the people sentenced to become First Fleeters on January 10, 1787 accepted their sentences, and so gave their later descendants something to boast about, but one did not. Samuel Burt had been found guilty of forgery, and in those days, forgery was a hanging offence, a capital crime, as the lawyers called it.

Mysteriously (until you know the background), the government wanted him to accept a pardon and serve seven years "to the Eastern coast of New South Wales, or some one or other of the islands adjacent" (or as ordinary folk understood it, to Botany Bay).

Equally mysteriously (until you know the background), the prisoner preferred to be hanged, and here is how the discussion went in court, at the end of the day's proceedings. Notice how politely but firmly, Samuel Burt told the Court (that means the judge) that he wanted to die.

Prisoner:        My Lord, I thank your Lordship; but in the present case, I have an unquestionable right to my own opinion, and as death would be preferable to me, I am determined to persevere in applying for the execution of my sentence.

Court:              You should be aware that if the King's mercy is rejected and abused, when you come to a better temper of mind, which the fear of death will certainly produce, you may have then no opportunity of applying for that mercy which you now refuse.

Prisoner:        I am still determined to persevere in the same opinion.

Court:             I shall remand you to prison, and give you till the first day of next session to consider of it, and if you then refuse his Majesty's pardon, you may expect immediate execution.

Prisoner.        Very well my Lord. 

The background explains all the peculiarity. The young lady Samuel loved did not love him, and refused to marry him. Maybe this was because Samuel was an apprentice gold-beater, and apprentices were not allowed to marry until they had "served their time" and completed their apprenticeship. Samuel decided that he would sooner die, but he must have felt it wrong to commit suicide. From the way he spoke, he was a clever young man, and he found another way to become dead.

He forged a bank draft for 100 pounds, which was a great deal of money back then, and went to a bank where he was well-known, and cashed it. The bank suspected that the draft was forged, but gave him the money as they knew him. He then sent his master the following letter:

"Sir, I take this opportunity of informing you, that I have this morning forged on your banker, for the sum of an hundred pounds; I am ready and willing to resign myself into the hands of justice, life is a burden to me, and as I have forfeited it to the laws of my country, I am ready and willing to resign into the hands of him that gave it me." S. Burt, July 17th, 1786.  

Later, the full story came out.   After that day, Samuel went back to gaol to think. It seems that the young lady had a change of heart, and agreed to marry him, but after he had agreed to accept transportation in the Second Fleet, she visited him in gaol, where she caught gaol fever and died, but by then, Samuel's case had been sorted out, and he had to go to New South Wales.

The Scarborough had transported convicts as part of the First Fleet, and now it was ready to go again, with Burt among the inmates. During the voyage, a plot was hatched among the convicts to over-power the guards, take over the ship and escape. Burt gathered the details and reported to the ship's officers who squashed the plan.

Arriving safely in Sydney, Burt was made a storeman, and was so reliable that on January 31, 1794, he won an unconditional pardon, When the colony's Judge-Advocate, David Collins noted this, he mentioned that Burt's actions on the Scarborough were "at the risk of his own life".  

I wonder if perhaps Burt took that risk deliberately, hoping once again, that he might die? Still, he got here, he lived, he worked hard, and he was pardoned. He received a grant of 16 acres of land at Bulanaming (near Newtown in Sydney's inner western suburbs today) on January 8, 1794, but after that, this interesting Second Fleeter seems to disappear. If he has descendants today, they probably regret not being able to claim descent from a "First Fleeter".

Burt References

Samuel Burt's case: Old Bailey Online, , or you can find an easier-to-read version by going to the search page  then searching for Samuel Burt by name and choosing the supplementary material for January 10, 1787.

Samuel Burt's trial: Old Bailey Online 19 July, 1786, case Number 591

Burt's aftermath: The article is headed 'Samuel Burt' and appears in The Times (of London), 19 October, 1790, p. 4, column 1. The same story was reprinted in The Caledonian Mercury, No. 10787, October 25, 1790, p. 2.

Collins on Burt: David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, volume I, p. 294. (286 in the printed edition)


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This blog covers quite a few different things, so I tag each post. I also blog about history, and I am currently writing a series of books called Not your usual... and the first two have been accepted by Five Mile Press, The offcuts appear here with the tag Not Your Usual... . For a taste of Australian tall tales, try the tags Speewah or Crooked Mick.   For a miscellany of oddities, try the tag temporary obsessions. And language is covered under the tags Descants and Curiosities, while stuff about small life is under Wee beasties.

Water dragons and sundews

Tuesdays, all going well, I am out and about at the sanctuary at North Head. Sometimes I do Fridays, and one week I did both, but it's good to get out and potter.  Right at the moment, work is a bit stressful as we bring home a giant book project in half the normal time, but when I can, I go out to play.

I have taken on a project, trying to get spores of a fern called Gleichenia to "germinate".  I will say more on this later, if and when I get some success, but I will be trying two methods: one is a traditional method using a piece of brick in water in a covered ice-cream container.

The other is a method I developed about 40 years ago, using what I call mud agar.  I get some mud, put it in water, boil it thoroughly to get the life forms out of it, decant, boil again and add 1.5% agar-agar, then plate this out into Petri dishes.  The plates are then scattered with spores and left in light, misted with water every day or two—but I will come back to that.

The main thing is to get spores, and as I don't know much about this fern and when it forms spores, I am dabbling around, taking samples and trying things out.  I am very much a dabbler at heart, so that's fine by me.

The fern grows mainly in swampy places, so we have three main sites where I can sample.  Yesterday, I set out to sample the two nearest sites, one near a drain and one near a swamp.

The drain paid off, but as I was leaving, I saw a large and apparently very dead water dragon. I reached down and moved its tail. The body was desiccated, dark, smeared with mud, but it seemed to be otherwise intact.  I decided to rescue the corpse, just in case one of the volunteers was looking at stomach contents, but mainly so I could attempt to rescue the skeleton.

As I grasped the tail, the dragon came to and ran about half a metre, fetching up in the long grass and glaring at me.

It then remained there peacefully enough, and allowed me to take several shots. Then we nodded to each other, and I went on my way, heading for the swamp.

Bu the way, the shot at the top is a juvenile water dragon that had taken up a sunny wall in one of the nursery houses.

As you can gather from these shots, the water dragons are remarkably patient with pesky human beings.

Off, though, to the swamp. Most of the walking tracks are on steel mesh, which allows things to grow without being trodden on.

The mesh also allows people to penetrate the swamp without getting muddy, seeing things that would otherwise be hidden, but as I noticed, and as you can see on the left, you need to keep your eyes peeled! Those plants are about 30mm (a bit over an inch) across.

These little plants are sundews, Drosera sp., and almost certainly Drosera spatulata, which, when I were a lad, was always mis-spelled as Drosera spathulata. Apparently D. spatulata is correct.

The members of the Drosera genus are all carnivorous plants, or to be precise, they are insectivorous plants which catch insects in the sticky "dew" on their hairs. The "dew" is sticky, so it traps insects, but more to the point, it contains proteolytic enzymes, and the leaves respond to the taste of "soup" by curling over, as you can see in the 3 o'clock position in the close-up shot.

This curling brings more enzymes in contact with the victim, breaking it down faster.  Bits of meat and even cheese will bring the same response.

Some years ago, I taught in a school quite close to North Head, and one day, I told some of my students that as a special treat, I would take them out to see some carnivorous plants that I had found near the cricket nets.

One kid who was usually completely out of it in class got all excited, but it turned out later that he thought I had said "cannabis plants". All the same, he fed some of them with scraps of meat and went back to visit them later. All sorts of people can get interested, if somebody takes the time to show and share!

I was under the impression that the sundews were confined to the eastern states, but when I was out at Wave Rock a year or two back, doing some desultory research, I found this specimen at the base of the granite. The coin is 2 cm (0.8 inch) across.

So for my friend Woofie Wotsit, here's proof that I do indeed acknowledge Westralian plants.

This is the natural result of being the son and husband of two Cottesloe girls!

And if you haven't heard of Wave Rock, here it is: that's one of the said Cottesloe girls in the shot. Chris wasn't pretending to surf, just seeing how easy the slope was to walk up backwards, but it was too good a shot to miss. The rock is granite, the streaking is from algae, and it's about 400 km east (ish) of Perth.  Just Google Wave Rock!

Footnote:

It seems  that I visited sundews once before. I had forgotten that!

The opening of a Hakea

There are two Hakea species in this 1917 line drawing. They are identified as Hakea acicularis (now Hakea sericea) and Hakea dactyloides.  The source is Florence Sulman's The Wildflowers of New South Wales, though the drawings are the work of "Miss D. Watkins". I have nothing on Miss Watkins yet, though a lady of that name taught at the Sydney Teachers' College when I did my teacher training.  I don't think there's a link, though.

Hakea sericea is known as needlebush, but a few of the species merit the name just as much, including H. teretifolia and H. gibbosa, which is the species I have used in the pictures below, because it came to hand on a bushwalk.

Hakea is a genus well-adapted to fire, with its woody fruits that open, right after a fire, or after a branch dies. To simulate this, I took two fruits from a tree in a dense patch and left them in an open Petri dish on my desk.

The time series speaks for itself:

Notice how the seeds have come loose, here. In the open air, they would probably blow away about now.

And finally, here are the loose seeds, and on the left, the empty fruit:

These seeds would lend themselves to all sorts of science projects: testing how far the winged seeds fall from a tree, whether they blow along the ground, how well the seeds germinate and more.


The unrelated she-oaks (Allocasuarina) also have woody fruits that protect the seeds from fire, and to do most kinds of Banksia, which are in the same family as the Hakea. The "gumnut" of the Eucalyptus is also woody and protects the seeds, buy I have never seen if they are winged or not.  That's fine as far as I am concerned: I always like to leave a few open ends.

duodenum

Duodenum: Wikimedia Commons image

When we count in English, there are two peculiar numbers, following the number 10, numbers which fail to follow the standard '-teen' naming system that follows after that. But while we have our irregular and inconsistent 'eleven' and 'twelve', Latin offers no such illogical nonsense, giving us a regular undecim, duodecim, tredecim . . . for 11 and 12 and 13.

The Latin form of 12 turns up in some unexpected places. For example, in music, a duodene is a group of twelve notes, though even the specialist musical references are unlikely to reveal this, for it is a forgotten idea, yet even people who have no idea where the duodenum is, will know that a duodenal ulcer is no fun at all. Luckily, though, we have just one duodenum, not twelve of them, to ulcerate.

In fact, the duodenum is a short section of the small intestine, immediately after the stomach, having a length of about twelve fingers' breadth, or in medical Latin, duodenum digitorum. The duodenum becomes the jejunum which takes its name from the Latin word for 'fasting', which seems a strange name to give any part of the gut, but there you have it.

After the jejunum comes the ileum, which opens into the caecum, at which point we have reached the large intestine, and strayed back into English body bits for a moment.

The Greek word for 12 was dodeka, so we also run into terms like 'dodecagon', and 'dodecahedron'. The dodecagon is in the same series as the more familiar pentagon and hexagon, but having 12 sides, while a dodecahedron is in the same grouping as a tetrahedron, a solid with 12 faces and 12 angles.

The dodecahedron may be a regular figure, composed of 12 identical regular pentagons, or it may be a figure of great interest to the crystallographer, the rhombic dodecahedron.

This was first commented on by the astronomer and mathematician Johann Kepler in a moment when he left the planets alone, and it is the form that squashable spheres take up when they are packed closely together. This has twelve faces, each of which is a 'squashed square', or rhombus, each rhombus having two angles of 109.5 degrees, and two of 70.5 degrees.

The regular dodecahedron makes a reasonable approximation of a sphere, when it is made of stretching material like leather or felt and stuffed with rags or inflated with air under pressure, but it is hardly good enough for making a soccer ball. A neatly made regular dodecahedron can be used in games of chance where you need to roll a value between 1 and 12 with equal probabilities (with two cubical dice, the middle numbers, 6, 7 and 8, turn up far more often than extreme values like 2 and 12, and there is no way at all to throw a 1).

We are all familiar with decimal number systems, based on the powers of 10, and most people know about binary numbers, based on 2, because they are widely used in computers, and some people will know about hexadecimal numbers, also used in computing, and based on the value 16. A few historians of computing may be familiar with octal numbers, based on 8, because computer output in the early days was sometimes given by three lights, counting from 0 to 7.

Those of us who know our number systems really well are probably the only ones familiar with duodecimal numbers based on 12. In this sort of system, the numbers are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A, B, 10, where '10' means one complete set of twelve and no units. This system has sometimes been urged by the technically competent, because a 12-piece set can be divided in more ways.

That may make sense to technicians today, but why would the Romans bother? In part, it seems, for the same reason. The Romans found it convenient to divide things into twelfths, because then you could share evenly between 2, 3, 4 or 6 people.

And as we have seen, the Romans even had a special word for a twelfth part, uncia, which gave us our words for both inch and ounce. And don't laugh — the fact that our numbers don't really start a new cycle till 13 indicates that our own ancestors must have had a similar view.

A note to myself: somewhere, I have a "net" for making rhombic dodecahedra out of paper. This is a set of 12 rhombi with the correct angles, and small tabs to glue the bits together.  When I find it, I will scan it and put it on the web with a link here.

Trusting statistics, part 3

Remember this one? Now it's about to become relevant!

In part 2, I suggested that statistics are best regarded as convenient ways of wrapping a large amount of information up into a small volume.  A sort of short-hand condensation of an unwieldy mess of bits and pieces.

And one of the handiest of these short-hand describers is the correlation coefficient, a measure of how two variables change at the same time, the one with the other.

Now here I'll have to get technical for a moment.  You can calculate a correlation coefficient for any two variables, things like number of cigarettes smoked, and probability of getting cancer.  The correlation coefficient is a simple number which can suggest how closely related two sets of measurements really are.

It works like this: if the variables match perfectly, rising and falling in perfect step, the correlation coefficient comes in with a value of one.  But if there's a perfect mismatch, where the more you smoke, the smaller your chance of surviving, then you get a value of minus one.

With no match at all, no relationship, you get a value somewhere around zero.  But consider this: if you have a whole lot of tennis balls bouncing around together, quite randomly, some of them will move together, just by chance.  No cause, nothing in it at all, just a chance matching up.  And random variables can match up in the same way, just by chance.  And sometimes, that matching-up may have no meaning at all.

So this is why we have tests of significance.  We calculate the probability of getting a given correlation by chance, and we only accept the fairly improbable values, the ones that are unlikely to be caused by mere chance.  In the example above, you will see r=0.9971 (p<0.0001), where r is the correlation coefficient, and p is the probability of getting such a result by chance.  This result was highly improbable, so I guess that proves the case, huh?

Nope.

The trouble is, all sorts of improbable things do happen by chance.  Winning the lottery is improbable, although the lotteries people won't like me saying that.  But though it's highly improbable, it happens every day, to somebody.  With enough tries, even the most improbable things happen.

So here's why you should look around for some plausible link between the variables, some reason why one of the variables might cause the other.  But even then, the lack of a link proves very little either way.  There may be an independent linking variable.

Suppose smoking was a habit which most beer drinkers had, suppose most beer drinkers ate beer nuts, and just suppose that some beer nuts were infected with a fungus which produces aflatoxins that cause slow cancers which can, some time later, cause secondary lung cancers.

In this case, we'd get a correlation between smoking and lung cancer which still didn't mean smoking actually caused lung cancer.  And that's the sort of grim hope which keeps those drug pushers, the tobacco czars going, anyhow.  It also keeps the smokers puffing away at their cancer sticks.

It shouldn't, of course, for people have thrown huge stacks of variables into computers before this.  The only answer which keeps coming out is a direct and incontrovertible link between smoking and cancer.  The logic is there, when you consider what the cigarettes contain, and how the amount of smoking correlates with the incidence of cancer.  It's an open and shut case.

I'm convinced, and I hope you are too.  Still, just to tantalise the smokers, I'd like to tell you about some of the improbable things I once got out of the computer.  They aren't really what you might call damned lies, and they are only marginally describable as statistics, but they show you what can happen if you let the computer out for a run without a tight lead.

Rabat, Morocco: just one stork per tower or chimney.

Now anybody who's been around statistics for any time at all knows the folk-lore of the trade, the old faithful standbys, like the price of rum in Havana being highly correlated with the salaries of Presbyterian ministers in Massachusetts, and the Dutch (or sometimes it's Danish) family size which correlates very well with the number of storks' nests on the roof.

More kids in the house, more storks on the roof.  Funny, isn't it?  Not really.  We just haven't sorted through all of the factors yet.

The Presbyterian rum example is the result of correlating two variables which have increased with inflation over many years.  You could probably do the same with the cost of meat and the average salary of a vegetarian, but that wouldn't prove anything much either.

In the case of the storks on the roof, large families have larger houses, and larger houses in cold climates usually have more chimneys, and chimneys are what storks nest on.  So naturally enough, larger families have more storks on the roof.  With this information, the observed effect is easy to explain, isn't it?

There are others, though, where the explanation is less easy.  Did you know, for example, that Hungarian coal gas production correlates very highly with Albanian phosphate usage?  Or that South African paperboard production matches the value of Chilean exports, almost exactly?

Or did you know the number of iron ingots shipped annually from Pennsylvania to California between 1900 and 1970 correlates almost perfectly with the number of registered prostitutes in Buenos Aires in the same period?  No, I thought you mightn't.

These examples are probably just a few more cases of two items with similar natural growth, linked in some way to the world economy, or else they must be simple coincidences.  There are some cases, though,  where, no matter how you try to explain it, there doesn't seem to be any conceivable causal link.  Not a direct one, anyhow.

There might be indirect causes linking two things, like my hypothetical beer nuts.  These cases are worth exploring, if only as sources of ideas for further investigation, or as cures for insomnia.  It beats the hell out of calculating the cube root of 17 to three decimal places in the wee small hours, my own favourite soporific.

Now let's see if I can frighten you off listening to the radio, that insomniac's stand-by [that's a hint that this was once a radio script].  Many years ago, in a now-forgotten source, I read there was a very high correlation between the number of wireless receiver licences in Britain, and the number of admissions to British mental institutions.

At the time, I noted this with a wan smile, and turned to the next taxing calculation exercise, for in those far-off days, all correlation coefficients had to be laboriously hand-calculated.  It really was a long time ago when I read about this effect.

It struck me, just recently, while wearing my scientist hat, that radio stations pump a lot of energy into the atmosphere.  In America, the average five-year-old lives in a house which, over the child's life to the age of five, has received enough radio energy to lift the family car a kilometre into the air.  That's a lot of energy.

Suppose, just suppose, that all this radiation caused some kind of brain damage in some people.  Not all of them necessarily, just a susceptible few.  Then, as you get more licences for wireless receivers in Britain, so the BBC builds more transmitters and more powerful transmitters, and more people will be affected.  And so it is my sad duty to ask you all: are the electronic media really out to rot your brains?  Will cable TV save us all?

Presented in this form, it's a contrived and, I hope, unconvincing argument.  Not that it matters much, even switching off right now won't stop the radiation coming into your home, so lie back and enjoy it while you can!  My purpose in citing these examples is to show you how statistics can be misused to spread alarm and despondency.  But why bother?

Well, just a few years ago, problems like this were rare.  As I mentioned, calculating just one correlation coefficient was hard yakka in the bad old days.  Calculating the several hundred correlation coefficients you would need to get one really improbable lulu was virtually impossible, so fear and alarm seldom arose.

That was before the day of the personal computer and the hand calculator.  Now you can churn out the correlation coefficients faster than you can cram the figures in, with absolutely no cerebral process being involved.

As never before, we need to be warned to approach statistics with, not a grain, but a shovelful, of salt.  The statistic which can be generated without cerebration is likely also to be considered without cerebration.  Which brings me, slowly but inexorably to the strange matter of the podiatrists, the public telephones, and the births.

Seated one night at the keyboard, I was weary and ill at ease.  I had lost one of those essential connectors which link the parts of one's computer.  Then I found the lost cord, connected up my computer, and fed it a huge dose of random data.

Well, not completely random, just, well, deliberately different.  I told it about the rattiest things I could dredge up, all sorts of odds and sods from a statistical year-book that just happened to be lying around.  In all, I found twenty ridiculously and obviously unrelated things, so there were one hundred and ninety correlation coefficients to sift through.  That seemed about right for what I was trying to do.

When I was done, I pressed button B, switched on the printer, and sat back to wait for the computer to churn out the results of its labours.  The first few lines of print-out gave me no comfort, then I got a good'n, then nothing again, then a real beauty, and so it went.

At the end, I looked over the results.  I saw that NSW podiatrists' registrations showed a correlation of minus point nine eight with the number of South Australian public telephones, and minus point nine six with the Tasmanian birth rate.  The Tasmanian birth rate in turn correlated plus point nine four with the South Australian public phones. All highly improbable!

And proving nothing: I had done enough tests to get at least a few unlikely results, and I was choosing things that were all likely to vary over the years. so I looked at the figures with a sober eye (no, don't ask about the other one, it was having the night off).

Well of course the podiatrists and phones part is easy.  Quite clearly, New South Wales podiatrists are moving to South Australia and metamorphosing into public phone boxes.

Or maybe they're going to Tasmania to have their babies, or maybe Tasmanians can only fall pregnant in South Australian public phone booths.

Or maybe codswallop grows in computers which are treated unkindly.  As I said in the first part, figures can't lie, but liars can figure.

I would trust statistics any day, so long as I can find out where they came from, and I'd even trust statisticians, so long as I knew they knew their own limitations.  Most of the professional ones do know their limitations: it's the amateurs who are dangerous.

I'd even use statistics to choose the safest hospital to go to, if I had to go.  But I'd still rather not go to hospital in the first place.

After all, statistics show clearly that more people die in the average hospital than in the average home.

This would have made more sense if you started with Part 1 and Part 2.  You did?  Well done!