The problem with much of our approach to the environment is that it's driven by fuzzy feelings, rather than logic and connected thinking. This has come up recently in respect to missing links in the renewable energy grid, but can also be seen in our approach to electric vehicles, the knee-jerk environmental reaction to nuclear, the way environmentalists embrace organic food and much more. Way back, I wrote a book called Ecologic to try to address this lack of clear thinking. It won a prize, but didn't have much impact other than getting me labelled a ' green heretic ', which I have accepted as a badge of honour. Sadly, though, bringing logic to green issues continues to be a problem. The example that brought this to mind was the news that the massive Scottish Seagreen offshore wind plant has only been able to provide one third of its potential capacity this year - it sold 1.2 million gWh to the grid, where it could have provided 3.7 gWh. The reason for the disparity i...

Watching the mildly entertaining Man on the Inside on Netflix, I was struck by a painful mirror image of the bad old days. In the series Ted Danson plays a bored, retired engineering professor who takes on a job as an undercover investigator for a PI to investigate a theft in a retirement home. We get some stereotype old people behaviour, but also some embarrassingly hypocritical sexism. I'll come back to that in a moment, but to put it into context, I've also recently been rewatching the excellent 2006/7 TV series Life on Mars . In the show, the 2006 detective Sam Tyler played by John Simm hallucinates himself into a 1970s Manchester police team after a brain injury, working under the wonderfully unreconstructed Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister). Something Tyler constantly attempts to battle is the casual sexism of the male detectives, which (allegedly) had changed significantly by 2006. Now back to Man on the Inside (made in 2024, not the distant past). Two female inhabitants of...

As a fan of Sherlock Holmes on the lookout for a Christmas mystery, this seemed an ideal purchase - and it's not bad. But it's not great either. There have been some excellent modern Holmes ventures - think, for example, of Anthony Horowitz's House of Silk , and even more so his brilliant Moriarty . And on the whole Tim Major makes a reasonable effort of fitting with the characters as we know them - but there are two issues with the way the book's written. To give it some context, this is a story featuring Irene Adler (who the TV show Sherlock demonstrated well was ideal for taking Holmes in something of a new direction), who is setting Holmes a series of puzzles, starting with an odd sounding vocal performance which he studies at some length as sheet music. All the puzzles, it appears, are to be thefts with no theft - perhaps the cleverest these involves a stolen painting that never existed. And there is some entertainment as Holmes and Watson attempt to get a grip on...

Nothing seems to suit Christmas reading better than either ghost stories or Christmas-set novels. For some this means a fluffy romance in the snow, but for those of us with darker preferences, it's hard to beat a good Christmas murder. An annual event for me over the last few years has been getting the excellent series of classic murderous Christmas short stories pulled together by Cecily Gayford, starting with the 2016 Murder under the Christmas Tree . This featured seasonal output from the likes of Margery Allingham, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ellis Peters and Dorothy L. Sayers, laced with a few more modern authors such as Ian Rankin and Val McDermid, in some shiny Christmassy twisty tales. I actually thought while purchasing this year's addition 'Surely she is going to run out of classic stories soon' - and sadly, to a degree, Gayford has. The first half of Murder by Candlelight is up to the usual standard with some good seasonal tales from the likes of Catherine Aird, Car...

REVISIT SERIES -  An edited post from December 2014 Over the years, magicians like Harry Houdini and James Randi have shown time and again that they have ideal skills for spotting and debunking fraudulent claims of magical abilities and mental powers. In the Telegraph newspaper, though, Will Storr had a go at 'debunking the king of the debunkers', demonstrating that Randi himself, now 87 (according to his article, or 86 according to Wikipedia), was not all he seemed. [Randi died in 2020.] For me, this was a wonderful example of entirely missing the point. Storr made three main accusations. That Randi has at some point been doubtful about the science behind climate change, that he was intolerant to drug users and that he had lied about replicating Rupert Sheldrake's dog experiments, in which Sheldrake claims to have shown that at dog was able to predict when its owner would return home. The first two, frankly, are hardly worth considering as they are classic type errors. Bei...

Back in 2016 I belatedly reviewed Neal Stephenson's 1992 novel Snow Crash - it seemed a good time to revisit and dive into it a little more than was possible in a straightforward review. Back then I commented 'If you like the kind of science fiction that hits you between the eyes and flings you into a high-octane cyber-world, particularly if you have an IT background, this is a masterpiece.' That certainly holds true of the first half. Perhaps the closest parallel here is the 2010 Christopher Nolan film, Inception .  Both are scintillatingly delightful, but tail off at the end. The movie, still one of my favourites, loses it somewhat when it turns into a sub-Bond action movie and then ends oddly. By contrast, Snow Crash gets distinctly bogged down by an interminable section where main character Hiro is doing the metaverse equivalent of library work on a convoluted theory that combines the Babel story and some Chariots of the Gods - like uber-speculation, which becomes som...