It's very rare I pause the book I'm reading because another one has come out - but when it's a new Janice Hallett I really have no choice. And it was well worth the interruption. As we've come to expect from Hallett, the book is made up of forms of communication - in this case texts, WhatsApp group messages and emails, plus transcription of some police recordings. At first sight this is a simple crime setup. We are introduced to Sue and Mal Eastwood who are relatively new at running a pub - central to the story is their pub quiz, where we get introduced to a whole cast of characters in the regular teams before a sinister new team joins and wipes the floor with everyone else. Things are shaken up when a body is discovered nearby. However, being Hallett, there are also some huge twists along the way. We quickly find out about links to a major kidnapping case in the past involving key characters... and things get more and more twisty from there. As someone who write murder...

REVISIT SERIES -  An updated post from September 2015 Roger Bacon is a misty figure in the history of science. Over the years, this thirteenth century friar has been portrayed as a mystic, magician, scientist ahead of his time and second rate collector of other people's ideas. It doesn't help that he often gets confused with his unrelated (as far as we are aware) Elizabethan namesake Francis Bacon. But it is in part because of the messy way that Roger has been reported over the years (even starring in a play by one of Shakespeare's contemporaries) that he is a fascinating subject. My book on Bacon and his science  has an intentionally provocative subtitle. I ought to make it clear that in many ways he clearly wasn't the first scientist. Apart from the impossibility of coming up with a 'first' and the argument that you couldn't have a scientist before the word was coined (a terrible argument to my mind - you might as well say there weren't dinosaurs befor...

REVISIT SERIES -  An updated post from August 2015 I was interested to note a debacle started by  a dated US list  of top 100 science fiction and fantasy books. We'll come back to this furore over the suggestion that many of these books were 'shockingly offensive' in a moment, but first a couple of comments about the list itself. To me it seems a category error to conflate fantasy and science fiction - where most of their SF choices seemed sensible, I wouldn't have included over 50 per cent of the fantasy, which makes me suspect that there should be two separate lists. If we just concentrate on the SF books, there were inevitably some ridiculous omissions. No John Wyndham, for instance (probably reflecting this being a US list). No Alfred Bester, James Blish, Fred Pohl, Cyril Kornbluth or (if you want to be more obscure) no E. F. Russell. However it wasn't a bad list overall - no one will ever agree with everything in such a collection. So what about the  moaning ar...

As a writer I have (unsurprisingly) something of a bias towards the written word. I hate getting information from videos because they are so slow at putting stuff across - when I've had to do an online course with videos, I always use the transcript instead if available and get through it in half the time. I'm just not very visually oriented. But that said, I can of course see the benefit of graphics as a way of putting across a piece of information where words can be clumsy. When I help students and academics with their papers I always ask them to ensure that a figure, or diagram or chart adds something to the text. They should never be there simply because they feel they need one. However, when it comes to packaging it seems that graphic designers sometimes rule the roost and the result can be a mangling of the message. Take the graphic above. We've got two boxes - one red with a slash through it. That's obviously the 'don't do this' box. And the other is ...

When researching my book Brainjacking on the science of human use of story to inform, influence and manipulate, I came across an intriguing article in The Times . 'AI will read your mind sooner than you think' blared the headline on Rhys Blakely's piece. He describes the interpretation of signals from electrodes in the brain, processed by AI to help a disabled person be more independent, which is fascinating. But we are then told 'But what about the rest of us? Would you allow a computer direct access to your thoughts? The question isn't as far fetched as it once was.' Hype or accurate observation? Blakely describes an experiment at UC Berkeley where subjects were played music - with the help of AI it was possible for listeners to identify the music from processed brain signals, and even pick out some of the words. I looked into the detail of this experiment for the book. Firstly, given that introduction, you might think this involved detecting your brain activ...

REVISIT SERIES -  An updated post from August 2015 Recently I was berated on Facebook for appealing to authority. As it may not be obvious to everyone why this was a put down (as the picture makes clear it was), I thought it might be worth looking at the problem with authority in science - and why I wasn't actually falling for this failing. Arguably the biggest issue with Ancient Greek science, an approach that spread its way through most of the medieval period, was the dependence on authority. Just as we still do in law cases, most classical natural philosophy was decided by argument rather than by experiment or analysis. If someone repeatedly won the argument on a topic they were regarded as an authority and in some cases - Aristotle is the most obvious example - considered a source of wisdom on pretty well everything as a result. Hence the infamous suggestion that women had fewer teeth than men because Aristotle said it was so, and no one bothered to check. (Actually I am sure p...