James Vincent - Five Way Interview

James Vincent is a senior reporter from the Verge, the Vox Media site devoted to technology and society. He has also written for the London Review of Books, Financial Times, and Wired. He lives in London. His new book is Beyond Measure on the hidden history of measurement.

Why science?

I don't really think I write 'science.' Rather, I hope what I do is an amalgamation of science, history, sociology, and any other narrative or factual ingredients I feel like tossing into the pot. I say this not with the intention of giving myself any special precedence either, it's just that I think it's impossible to write about science without straying into these other categories. The world is an amalgamation: horrifically tangled, dense, and interconnected. Science is the name we give to one of many methods of unpicking the whole.

Why this book?

Because I have that childish instinct to look for the category above the category, like hands grasping a pole, one on top the other, top the other, top the other, until you're grabbing air. Measurement is just one of those meta-categories that defines and shapes a whole lot of intellectual effort and so I found myself drawn. And, more importantly I guess, I knew I'd enjoy writing it — and I did.

How do you feel about random journalistic metrics such as ’three Empire State Buildings’, ’six London buses’ or ‘a Manhattan/Wales in area’?

I love them. They're imaginative and pragmatic: a beautiful combination. I remember reading an article about a satellite being launched on some exploratory mission into the depths of the solar system and the journalist described the probe as 'about the size of a washing machine.' Isn't that perfect? Isn't it beautiful? To imagine your washing machine drifting into space — a little domestic voyager, far from home, working its way through a final spin cycle perhaps. To me, these sorts of random metrics are best enjoyed as unintentional metaphors: transferring the property of one entity onto another. And that means there's poetry in them.

What’s next?

Another book and — I hope — a better one. I always hope to improve. It'll be similarly meta and likely a little more mad.

What’s exciting you at the moment?

This morning I've been listening to Charly Antolini, a Swiss jazz drummer, particularly his album Super Knock Out. The first track, which you can listen to on YouTube here gives you a flavour. I don't know much about jazz, but I love the intensity of focus that listening to Antolini's drumming creates.

Image © Lynn Rothwell

Interview by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a digest free here

Comments

David Spiegelhalter Five Way interview

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter FRS OBE is Emeritus Professor of Statistics in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge. He was previously Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication and has presented the BBC4 documentaries Tails you Win: the Science of Chance, the award-winning Climate Change by Numbers. His bestselling book, The Art of Statistics , was published in March 2019. He was knighted in 2014 for services to medical statistics, was President of the Royal Statistical Society (2017-2018), and became a Non-Executive Director of the UK Statistics Authority in 2020. His latest book is The Art of Uncertainty . Why probability? because I have been fascinated by the idea of probability, and what it might be, for over 50 years. Why is the ‘P’ word missing from the title? That's a good question. Partly so as not to make it sound like a technical book, but also because I did not want to give the impression that it was yet another book

The Genetic Book of the Dead: Richard Dawkins ****

When someone came up with the title for this book they were probably thinking deep cultural echoes - I suspect I'm not the only Robert Rankin fan in whom it raised a smile instead, thinking of The Suburban Book of the Dead . That aside, this is a glossy and engaging book showing how physical makeup (phenotype), behaviour and more tell us about the past, with the messenger being (inevitably, this being Richard Dawkins) the genes. Worthy of comment straight away are the illustrations - this is one of the best illustrated science books I've ever come across. Generally illustrations are either an afterthought, or the book is heavily illustrated and the text is really just an accompaniment to the pictures. Here the full colour images tie in directly to the text. They are not asides, but are 'read' with the text by placing them strategically so the picture is directly with the text that refers to it. Many are photographs, though some are effective paintings by Jana Lenzová. T

Everything is Predictable - Tom Chivers *****

There's a stereotype of computer users: Mac users are creative and cool, while PC users are businesslike and unimaginative. Less well-known is that the world of statistics has an equivalent division. Bayesians are the Mac users of the stats world, where frequentists are the PC people. This book sets out to show why Bayesians are not just cool, but also mostly right. Tom Chivers does an excellent job of giving us some historical background, then dives into two key aspects of the use of statistics. These are in science, where the standard approach is frequentist and Bayes only creeps into a few specific applications, such as the accuracy of medical tests, and in decision theory where Bayes is dominant. If this all sounds very dry and unexciting, it's quite the reverse. I admit, I love probability and statistics, and I am something of a closet Bayesian*), but Chivers' light and entertaining style means that what could have been the mathematical equivalent of debating angels on

Search This Blog