Being a lifeline

I see Who Wants to be a Millionaire is back on the TV. Leaving aside the obvious appeal of winning a million, the most interesting aspect of this show, making it subtly different from a straight general knowledge quiz, is the ability to play lifelines - 50:50 (dropping two wrong answers), ask the audience and phone a friend. That third option particularly causes some interest. What's going on at the other end of the line? Is that person locked in a room away from the internet to avoid cheating?

I can reveal all - I have been a phone-a-friend.

I have to admit it's a stressful thing to do, in some ways more stressful than appearing on the show itself. You receive a call from the studios telling you that your friend is going into the chair. You are asked not to use anything to look things up - but that's as far as the security goes. In practice, I was seated in front of a computer because I was using the phone in my office, but I had no intention of using it. And you are asked to sound surprised when Chris Tarrant calls. A bit hokey, that bit, but hey.

You are then asked to wait for a call. If the phone rings, to leave it for a set number of rings before answering. And the waiting begins. It really was one of the most tense 20 minutes of my life. Eventually, the phone rang. I left it the requisite number of rings. 'Here we go,' I thought. But instead of Chris Tarrant's voice, it was the producer. 'It's okay, they've finished,' he said. 'You can stand down.'

It was, perhaps, strangest of all to watch Celebrity Who Wants to be a Millionaire about six weeks later and see the period of time I was hanging on the phone. They did phone a friend - but not me. It wasn't a science question, which I suspect I was being held for. The sad thing is, the person they rang didn't know the right answer (it was about the meaning of palindrome) and I did. But such is life.

Underground, overground, cycling free

We're in the process of having a good clear out before moving house. My natural inclination (being tight) is to stick things we don't want on eBay, but there are some items that would require too much effort to make saleable, yet still really aren't ready for the skip.

We had four children's bikes of various sizes. They'd all been in the garage for a good few years, so needed a bit of TLC - cleaning, tyre checking, chain cleaning and the like. Not really good enough for eBay. But help was at hand with Swindon Freecycle.

This is a cunning plan that (I think) originated in the US. You advertise items you don't want on a local online bulletin board. People come and take them away. The unwanted goods get used, rather than scrapped - it's great for the environment, and someone gets something for free. Genuinely everyone wins.

I'd been aware of this for a while, but this was the first time I'd tried it - and it was stunningly effective. Within 5 hours of listing the bikes, they'd gone. And I don't mean we'd had an email from someone who might want them - they had physically left the premises. Brilliant!

So next time you're considering sending something that's usable or do-up-able to landfill, give a consideration to Freecycle. Our local Swindon one is here - otherwise, head over to the Freecycle website and put in your town name. Uncle Bulgaria would be proud.

Petty people

Mostly the British are very generous people, but what is it about turning in their drives? Are they worried the tarmac will wear out?

Weird. At least it says 'please'.

Organ donors

Tradition is a big thing in a small village - but it doesn't always have the right answer. I want to illustrate this with the strange case of the village organ.

Our village church, pictured here, is ancient (though a mere whippersnapper compared to some of its neighbours as it's only six or seven hundred years old), and in it, as is often the case with British village churches, sits a battered and indifferent organ (see below). It's in serious need of overhaul, and the community is in the process of raising £30,000 to give it a serious working over. Fine and good and an excellent display of community spirit. But I would question whether it really should be done up.

Tradition says 'Of course, it must! Churches always have organs!' Well, yes. Though the vast majority of this church's life it won't have done. Until Victorian times, only the big churches and cathedrals had organs - villages like ours would have got along nicely with a village band of whatever instruments came to hand. (Funnily, the modern 'worship group', so despised by the traditionalist, is probably closer to this tradition than an organ.)

In fact, I'm not against having an organ. It's one of the few instruments that one person can play and really fill a building like that - and it sounds right. But what I do doubt is whether it's worth refurbing a never-particularly-brilliant pipe organ. I would at least give serious consideration to spending the money on a decent modern electronic church organ. These aren't like the things granny had in the parlour - they make a serious noise, indistiguishable by most from the real thing, and for that kind of money you'd get one with much more range than our current organ (which can't, for instance, manage that wedding favourite Widor's Toccata), a much wider selection of stops and much less ongoing maintenance. (Tuning? Pah!) It could be fitted in the existing cabinet, keeping the pretty pipes and all.

I could be wrong. But no one asked me, so I thought I'd say anyway.

Why isn't wireless music taking off?

I am totally baffled by the British public.

I did consider leaving that as my entire post. It has a certain succinctness to it - but perhaps it's a little obscure without more detail. What I don't understand is why wireless music isn't more popular. These days you can buy a neat little box to go with your stereo. A couple of mystical passes and a wireless network, and this little box will let your stereo play every single track you've got squirrelled away on your PC - in my case the equivalent of around 300 CDs. You can pick and choose as you like from your collection, or use a playlist for (say) randomly selected Christmas music or music for dinner parties.

It's easy, painless - and you just won't want to go back to CDs once you've done it. Yet rather than taking off, these devices seem, if anything, to be scarcer now than they were a year ago. Pinnacle which sold the device I use (the one in the picture) is pulling out of the market. You can find a dozen or so devices on Amazon, but there are really only a couple of brands. And instead of becoming cheaper - we should be seeing sub £50 devices by now - they are, if anything, dearer.

I have a suspicion of an answer to my own question. Whenever I propose a piece on wireless technology to the various lifestyle magazines I write for, they always say 'Ooh, it's a bit leading edge, isn't it?' or 'Much too techie hardcore for us.' Yet my wife hates trailing cables and surely can't be alone in loving the wireless connection. And lots of people have wireless internet in the home these days.

One other problem is that most of the manufacturers that are out there have been stupidly proprietary. They each have their own bit of server software to run on the computer to feed the music to their boxes. Pinnacle was much more sensible about this - they used software that comes with the PC, so you don't have to install anything... but then it's Pinnacle that are giving up.

It's so depressing. It works! It's brilliant! Do it. Now.

The early inhabitants of our garden

We live on the edge of the Wiltshire downs, and these days, apart from birds and creepy crawlies (you can tell I'm not a biologist), the living things we see out there are mostly rabbits (the photo was taken a few days ago, from the window), occasional foxes and very occasional badgers.

However, this chalk escarpment was, of course, once under water, and when we had to dig rather a long way into the chalk some while ago it was difficult to move for fossils of ancient sea creatures. Unfortunately, being chalk, many of them were broken, but I wanted to share a couple of the best preserved.

I'm not sure if I like the sense of continuity, or I'm slightly unnerved by the idea of these things swimming around outside my study window...

The importance of historical context

I've just reviewed a book with the catchy title The Selfish Genius by Fern Elsdon-Baker. (The book's name is a play on Richard Dawkins' most famous book, The Selfish Gene - Elsdon-Baker makes it clear she considers him neither selfish nor a genius.)

The book neatly exposes the limitations of Dawkins' particular version of evolution and the negative effect his attacks on other people's beliefs has on science communication. (For another review of the book, and an example of how Dawkins' fanatical followers are rather like religious fundamentalists in the comments it received, see Dawkins' website.)

Now, generally speaking, I rather like the book - but it does at one point forget the importance of historical context, even though context is essential if you are to understand science. To be fair, the error seems to be Wittgenstein's as much as Elsdon-Baker's.

She is describing the way a sudden change of view in science (the process that Kuhn gave that really irritating label, a paradigm shift) involves a transformation in the way of looking at things, not necessarily a huge change in the underlying data:

A famous anecdote about Wittgenstein illustrates this quite well. Wittgenstein apparently once asked one of his students why people would ever have thought the sun went round the earth, rather than the other way around. The pupil reportedly answered 'Because it look as if the sun goes round the earth,' to which Wittgenstein posed the question 'And how would it look if the earth went around the sun?' Of course the answer is that it would look exactly the same.

No it wouldn't. This totally misunderstands the situation. The student was right. But the reason that early civilizations thought the sun went around the earth was because of the earth's rotation, not because of its movement around its orbit. They thought the sun went around the earth once a day. Later on, as early science developed and it become obvious there was a more subtle motion that could equally have been interpreted as the earth going around the sun or the sun around the earth, the mindset was already there from that early model that the earth was fixed and the sun moved around.

With that context, there's no 'of course' about it. Context might not be everything, but it helps a lot.

Mine's a pint

These days I'm more inclined to go for a meal to a pub that does good food, rather than a restaurant. One of the main reasons for this is the matter of beer. I believe that a good glass of draught bitter is better with a fair number of foods - red meat, game, pies, sausages, offal - than pretty well any wine. Yet most restaurants simply don't serve decent beer. There are a number of reasons for this:

1. Snobbery. It's considered beneath them to serve beer. I blame William the Conqueror - when the Normans invaded they introduced a class differential between wine and beer that has stuck to this day. And, of course, many restaurants have a continental European influence, and their idea of beer is lager (which itself is fine with many foods, but not in the same league).
2. Ignorance. Your average wine waiter hasn't a clue about decent draught beers, and certainly wouldn't know how to keep one. Your best hope in most restaurants is a good bottled beer. But with bitter, the difference between a bottled beer and the stuff from a barrel is like the difference between wine from a box and wine from a bottle. These people, who sensibly wouldn't give a wine box room, are serving the equivalent in beer.
3. Mark up. My suspicion is that this is the big one. Even in a seriously over-priced restaurant, it's hard to charge more than about £4 for a pint of beer. Wine can range from maybe £10 to £500 a bottle. Are they going to provide beer if they can get away without it? Nope.

Don't get me wrong. I'm very fond of wine. But any restaurant would be the better for hosting a good draught bitter.

Why would I want clothes taking photos?

I sometimes despair of the science and technology breakthroughs we get reported on the news. The latest to hit the BBC is that new smart fabric can detect the wavelengths and direction of the light falling on it. So immediately we get 'clothes could one day take snaps of everything occuring around them.'

This kind of thing is often partly the fault of the university press office, which churns out releases intended to catch the eye of the media, and may well have made this claim, but equally we have to raise an eyebrow at a broadcaster like the BBC. This isn't factual reporting.

The fact is, this is some interesting work, that could (probably in the rather distant future) have applications, particularly around the coordination of arrays of nanodevices. But the chances are that those applications won't be clothes that take photographs (the very thought of underwear taking snaps fills me with horror). It's a huge leap, and not necessarily a sensible one.

Yes, we need to make science writing interesting - but not by using fantasy.

Probably the best press release in the world

I've seen a lot of press releases in my time, from IT companies, consumer organizations and publishers. Frankly, most of them are really dull. (The press releases, not the companies. Well...) They try to convey a sense of excitement, but they have a staid format, and often fail to engage.

So occasionally PR companies will try something rather different to grab the attention. Some of these 'rather different's have clearly been very expensive - flash, pop-up constructions and other strange fabrications. But the best press release I've ever received was just whipped off on a standard colour printer.

Why do I think it's so special? First, it's personalized. Yes, I know this can be a bit Reader's Digest. You, Brian Clegg of Grotbottom Villas have been selected from many thousands of people to receive this press release... but here the personalization works. Second it's a different format. Not that tired old press release look. And finally it gets its message across with some humour, and in a way that encourages you to read it - which can't be bad.

I can remember nine years on what it was about (an event by Microsoft on dealing with forged products). I think the PR agency was Text100 - forgive me if it was your (different) agency. What's perhaps most remarkable is that nearly a decade later, such excellent press releases are still a rarity. Remarkable and - if you're in the business of issuing releases - a wonderful opportunity.

Being a geek has its just rewards

When I was at school I was a bit of a swot, I admit it. Now, usually, this doesn't result in immediate rewards. The geeks in the science club might be the heroes of some teen TV shows (have you noticed, cheerleaders are always evil?), but in reality life isn't like that. But just once... I want to take you back many years to when I was about 13.

It was an English class, I think. At the end, the teacher held us back. 'I need a couple of people to write letters for me,' he said. No response. Eventually I and one other did volunteer. 'What a mug,' I'm sure I heard someone mutter. Yet seconds later, they would all have their hands up, begging to take our places.

'You see,' said the English teacher, 'two Swedish girls have written to the school asking for penfriends in England. So these two will be writing to them.' No, really.

And so it began. It was a strange pen-friendship (this was before emails, children). Rather bizarrely we both quite liked science and stamps, but Ann Oldman of Skelefteå otherwise lived in a very different world. We were the same age, but they seemed... a bit more advanced over there. Not to mention having a habit of putting crowns of candles on their heads, something we rarely did in Rochdale.

It lasted a couple of years. We never met, but I still fondly remember receiving those letters - and occasionally wonder what happened to Ann Oldman.

(Science Geek t-shirts available here.)

Will eBay win the battle of the monsters?

There was a time when Japan produced a string of monster movies featuring Godzilla battling various other monsters (Godzilla versus Mothra, Godzilla versus Ghidorah, even Godzilla versus King Kong). An email I received yesterday from eBay reminded me of the beginning of one of these epic battles, with eBay as Godzilla lining up to fight the evil designer brands.

eBay, we are told, was set up to empower the people (no, really), 'But that idea is now under threat from certain brand owners and manufacturers who are trying to turn back the clock and block the sale of their products on online marketplaces and other websites across the EU.'

Apparently these brands - and it's not just luxury items, but manufacturers of children's toys, electronic equipment, lawnmowers and pushchairs - argue they are trying to stop their products being sold on eBay to prevent the sale of counterfeits, but according to the big E, only 0.15% of listings last year were 'detected or reported as potentially counterfeit.'

While that statistic is itself a touch questionable, I do agree with eBay that this isn't about protecting against counterfeit, but an attempt to block the resale of products to keep prices artificially high. I didn't imagine I'd ever find myself siding with eBay, which can behave in an autocratic and bizarre fashion. For example, they prevented me from selling copies of my mystery party ebook Organizing a Murder because I was breaching copyright (whose?) I don't approve of people selling fakes and copies, but I do defend people's right to resell items they've bought legitimately, whether new or secondhand, and whatever its faults, eBay is a good way to do this.

So, in case you're interested, they have a petition, calling for an amendment to EU policy law. I won't include a link here, just on the off-chance there was something dubious about the email I was sent, but anyone with an eBay account should have a message in their inbox with details.