What colour is an electron?

What colour is a beam of blue light?

Not long ago I facetiously commented on Facebook that electrons were pink. The next day, an X-ray crystallographer asked me 'As someone with a physics background, what colour would you say an electron is?' I almost fell off my chair. But once I started to think about it, it's a really interesting question - and one that might be worth first approaching by asking another apparently silly question.

What colour is a beam of blue light? The answer certainly doesn't have to be blue. Before I explain why, let's put relativity out of bounds. Once you start moving, colours are moveable feasts - think blue/red shift. But I'm envisaging a much simpler situation. I show you a beam of blue light and ask you what colour it is. I can guarantee you would not answer 'blue'.

To avoid distraction, what I will do is shine the blue light down a cylinder with a black interior, turn the lights off in the room and open a door on the side of the cylinder so you can see the light passing through. What would you see? Nothing. Because in one sense you can't see light. Obviously this sounds bonkers. Light is all we do see. But the point is that when we see that we see light we mean something totally different to seeing, say, a postbox. When I say I see a postbox, what I mean is that the light from, say, the sun, hits the postbox, is re-emitted by the box towards my eyes, and I see the box. So 'seeing' usually means detecting the light that hits an object and comes back towards us. This just doesn't happen with light. Light passes right through a beam of light - it doesn't reflect off it. So we don't see a light beam sideways on.

You may at this point be thinking, 'but what about laser beams and spotlight beams and such? You see those sideways on.' And as the picture above demonstrates, you do. But only because the beam is hitting something in its path - dust, water vapour or smoke, for instance - and some of the photons are being scattered off their path towards your eyes. Otherwise there would be nothing to see.

So bearing this in mind, let's go back to 'What colour is an electron?' My initial thought in response to the crystallographer was that it doesn't have a colour as you could either consider it a dimensionless point or a spread out, fuzzy quantum collection of probabilities, and in both cases the concept of colour is meaningless. But he had something different in mind.

He said that physicists usually think of electrons as blue (perhaps as a result of the Čerenkov radiation given off by electrons in nuclear power plants), and tend to think of positively charged things as red, which is the opposite of the convention he used. He was just talking about arbitrary conventions. But now that I come back to the concept given the insight from 'What colour is a beam of blue light?' I think that maybe there is a real answer.

When we see a postbox as red, what is happening is that the box is absorbing photons from the sun with a range of energies corresponding to the whole visual spectrum (and beyond). Much of the energy from the photons simply goes into increasing the energy of the atoms in the box (effectively warming it up a little), but some of the energy is re-emitted as photons, preferentially in the red range, so we see the box as red. 'What colour is a postbox?' really means 'What energy range of photons are re-emitted by the box?'

Specifically, the particles responsible for that re-emitting are electrons. When light hits an object, the electrons around the atoms in the object absorb the light energy, jumping up one or more levels. The light that comes back off the object, enabling us to see it, is the result of those electrons dropping back down in energy, releasing a new photon or photons. So arguably the colour of the electron is the colour of the light it re-emits. This varies depending on the electron's state - so  you could argue that the real answer to 'What colour is an electron?' is not 'It doesn't have a colour,' but rather 'An electron is a bit like a chameleon. It has different colours depending on the state and situation it is in.'

There's nothing like a silly question to get the brain in action.

Image from Wikipedia

Thinking on your feet when the ground is rolling under them

Here's another guest post from Richard Sutton, who introduces himself: From San Rafael, California on a windy January in 1952, it's been a wild ride. My folks never settled down until long after I'd moved to a cabin I built on a commune in Oregon, but I couldn't sit still -- the wanderlust was in my blood. After college,  I hitchhiked to New York City in 1973. There I met my wife on Canal Street and finally found a home.

I learned my first craft post-college, spending 20-plus years in the trenches of NYC advertising and publicity as a graphic designer, marker-pen-jockey, art director and copy writer. I served the needs of a wide range of clients from corporate multinationals to non-profits and small retail businesses. I now limit my design and marketing work to book covers and collateral marketing for authors. Somewhere in there I began writing fiction and short stories and began trading in authentic American Indian arts. My first novel, The Red Gate, was released in 2009 and three more have followed. The most recent, Troll, is a fictional look at the origins of racism and fear of outsiders in a pre-historic setting.

GUEST POST

A number of years past, I was struggling to design a web presence for our family business. It was 1995, and despite my more than twenty years of commercial communications design cred, it was eluding me. Each time I’d lay the elements upon the new page, something would draw my attention and once I returned, it resembled a heap of blocks after a child’s tantrum. Images, blocks of text, graphs and charts, lying in an uncertain, unrestrained heap at the bottom of a seemingly endless page.

I browsed hundreds of sites. Many were rough piles, just like my work. The few with order and sense, were composed mostly of images with little information. I would click away on each image, but none were linked to anything, so I wondered what the point was. Possibly, it was the frustration of these displays of color and form with no underlying meaning that led me to a realization.

Like all designers whose work occurred upon some form of printed page, the only thing we knew was producing communications to be seen in two dimensions. Flat. Linear. Page-wise. These static examples viewed on a screen were an attempt to utilize the existing, rudimentary tools in the html codes, to create sophisticated displays in a new environment. They were two-dimensional thinking stuck in cyber space. Nothing I had learned up to this point prepared me to think in more than two dimensions at once when designing communications tools such as advertising, etc. I had grown up in the universe of magazines, newspapers and books. Package design, even when properly die-cut and assembled, was still created in two dimensional thought space. Up until then, a message would be found, essentially in one place. Digested and absorbed in the same place it was conveyed. A single meal. One-stop.

The world-wide-web (as we thought of it then) required a new way of thinking about presenting information. A technology – print – that had served admirably for hundreds of years, was being eclipsed by something still evolving. It was hard to get a grip on its expanding form, let alone the language that described how it worked.

I slowly learned to use basic html coding, which seemed to reinvent itself every few months. Thus, my good old tool-kit, which contained the most modern forms of really archaic devices, was no longer of value.  Messages were now evolving, adapting things. One-stop was no longer enough. It was more about how long you could hold someone’s attention while introducing new concepts tied into the original message, even if it took them outside and off your point of origin. Effective web communications needed to go somewhere and bring the reader along with it. Designers had multiple dimensions to consider, now: multiple venues at once. Showtime took on a completely new and terrifying meaning as it wasn’t just your own lines or even your own set that could trip you up.

The parameters of what could be done online changed as fast as new technology was introduced. Keeping current became impossible for me, so I learned to stay conversational with the last “current edge”.

Which is where I have remained. I turned away from implementing the newest bells and whistles in my work, to sticking with the primary goals and messages to reach the market segment. One thing I’ve learned to do which before seemed counter-productive, is to view competitors and other connected interest sites as where the edge of my own sites lie. A message I might want to share now has a really wide, tall, deep range of places it can connect with and be reinforced with.

Oddly enough though, the market is not keeping up with the expansion of the message. No. Now, because of the way visit and selection data is fed into huge databases, the most effective marketing is to the narrowest possible slice of market. I’ve learned – and it hasn’t been easy – that I don’t want everyone to see my message at all. No, I only want to make contact with those niches of potential market that are most likely to respond positively. It makes the process so much more meticulous and consigns the “touchy-feely” part of marketing design into little, narrow file folders with very specific titles.

When I began to write fiction for eventual publication, it got even harder to figure out which hat to wear for the job. The marketing of books, especially, has become a much more scientific, data-driven process than it was in the ”Golden Age” of Publishing and Advertising, even as recently as the 1990s. As the means to get a story to its readers have evolved and morphed into a distinctly different process than the publicity plans of the ancients, even the material conveyed has changed. Now a novel, running 450 pages in print on paper, can be delivered to a reader for zero actual cost, beyond the bandwidth needed to transmit the data. No paper, no ink. No warehousing. No shipping. No returns… well few returns.

Today, most marketing efforts for books consist of finding the most receptive slice of market, then making sure that the product is set there in plain sight, as invitingly as possible, including in most cases, sampling before buying as well as interconnected referral networking. Back in the day when I was just getting on my feet as a designer, if you could set up the back page to get them to turn the book over again and open it, you had succeeded.  What an amazing change. If you want to remain thinking on your feet now, you’d better grow several additional ones, as two just won’t cut it anymore. I’m learning the dance, but the steps are complicated!

Find out more about Richard's books at his website.

Infinite musings

Infinity, as no end of people keep telling me since I wrote A Brief History of Infinity is a big subject, so I like to revisit it now and again. One of the joys of doing my talk on infinity, a real favourite of mine, is the way people's minds are duly boggled by the idea that there can be something bigger than infinity. And what's more, you can prove it without a single equation.

Thanks to the great German mathematician Georg Cantor we can establish this painlessly. The first step is to discover the concept of cardinality in set theory. A set is just a collection of things, and set theory is the maths that describes the workings of such collections, and from which all the basics of arithmetic can be derived. Cardinality is a measure of the size of the set, and the important thing to be aware of is that if we can pair off items in two sets so they are in one-to-one correspondence, those sets have the same cardinality - they are the same size.

Take a simple example - legs on my dog, Goldie, and the horsemen of the Apocalypse. I can pair of one leg with each of the horsemen. At the end of the process there are no horsemen or legs unpaired. So I can say the legs and the horsemen have the same cardinality. The clever thing about this is I can do it even if I have no idea how many legs or horsemen there are. (I do. It's four. But I don't have to know.)

So let's move on to infinity. The simplest infinite set is just the integers - the counting numbers. Now if I have another infinite set - for instance all the rational fractions - and I can pair off the items in the set with the integers then the two sets have the same cardinality - they are the same 'size' of infinity. And you can do this with the rational fractions. But not all sets of numbers are this accommodating.

Think of the set of every number between 0 and 1. Every single decimal number. This is also an infinite set, but has it the same cardinality as the integers? If I can set up a simple list of the numbers, it has.

So lets imagine that list, going:

0
...
0.5
...
1

and let's imagine writing out the first few numbers. I can't really do this in order, as after zero we will have

0.000000.... all the way to infinity 1
0.000000.... all the way to infinity 2
...

which is rather difficult to write out, so we'll scramble the list and come up with something like this:

0.21584032048303404035930…
0.92939212493373921239446…
0.52030202578403024842231…
0.65873032294825193482488…
0.15740302049304958102733…
0.33335939320293919290111…

Now I'm going to add 1 to the first decimal place of the first number, the second decimal place of the second number and so on all the way through. (If it's 9, I'll change it to 0.) So we go from

0.21584032048303404035930…
0.92939212493373921239446…
0.52030202578403024842231…
0.65873032294825193482488…
0.15740302049304958102733…
0.33335939320293919290111…

to

0.31584032048303404035930…
0.93939212493373921239446…
0.52130202578403024842231…
0.65883032294825193482488…
0.15741302049304958102733…
0.33335039320293919290111…

Now let's pull out those incremented values to see this number:

0.331810...

This is a very interesting number. It's not the first number in the original list, as it differs in the first decimal place. It's not the second number in the list, as it differs in the second decimal place. And so on, all the way through. What we've done here is produce a number that isn't in the list. It actually isn't possible to have a simple list of every number between 0 and 1 - we can't match all the numbers off one-by-one with the integers. The set of numbers between 0 and 1 has a different cardinality to the infinity of the integers - it's bigger.

Enjoy letting your mind boggle at that. This is why infinity is such fun...

Carolling merrily

It's that time of year when you can't go into a shop without being pounded with Christmas music, and if you are in a choir you will no doubt be polishing up the Christmas favourites.

I have heard people moan about Christmas music - and, yes, the shops overdo it - but I have to confess I love it for a few weeks. I shouldn't, being a picky person, because the weird thing is we don't tend to listen to Christmas music at Christmas. Technically speaking it's Advent at the moment and Christmas starts on December 25, lasting for the traditional 12 days. But in reality, Boxing Day (26 December for those of a non-British persuasion) feels about the last day you want to hear Christmas music. I've certainly had enough by then.

Christmas music divides into three chunks, and my favourite is the least well-known. Firstly we've 'Christmas songs'. The ones you mostly hear in the shops. Everything from 'Let it Snow' to 'Jingle Bells' via 'Rudolph, the Red Nosed Reindeer' for the oldies (did you know the reindeer were only added to the mythos as a result of Clement Clarke Moore's 1823 classic poem 'A Visit from St Nicholas', better known as 'The Night Before Christmas'?) and all those Christmas 'greats' the pop world has foisted on us from 'I Wish it Could be Christmas Every Day' (no, you don't, it would be very boring) to 'Stop the Cavalry' (what?) many of which are ridiculous, though I do confess to a special affection for 'Fairytale of New York.'

Second up are traditional Christmas carols. They broadly split between the really traditional ones - a surprising number of which (Including 'In Dulci Jubilo', 'Unto Us is Born a Son', the tune of 'Good King Wenceslas' and the surprise Steeleye Span hit, 'Gaudete!') come from the 1582 Finnish collection Piae Cantiones - and the Victorian standards like 'Once in Royal' and 'Hark the Herald'.

But the type of Christmas music that really hits me in the gut is the modern carols written for choirs to sing. Some of these are miniature musical masterpieces. Some are well know like the 'Carol of the Bells' used in Home Alone, others relatively obscure but beloved by the choirs who find them rewarding hard work: they can be truly gorgeous. Here's a few of my favourites in no particular order that I'd recommend having a listen to:

• Bethlehem Down - Peter Warlock (see my earlier post on how this was written to buy beer)
• Remember O Thou Man - Arthur Oldham
• Adam Lay Y Bounden - Boris Ord
• A Spotless Rose - Herbert Howells
• The Oxen - Jonathon Rathbone (ok, probably technically a song rather than a carol, but a cracking setting of the Hardy poem)

The Oldham piece, which is my favourite, isn't on YouTube, but here's 'The Oxen' - 2 minutes of sheer gorgeousness. Take a moment from your busy day and have a wallow.

Image from Wikipedia

Sceptics need open minds

Like most people with a scientific background it would probably be fair to call me a sceptic, in the sense that I like to see evidence before accepting something. Science and scepticism go hand in hand - think of the Royal Society motto 'nullius in verba' which the Society translates as 'take nobody's word for it.' Or to put it another way, in one of my favourite modern versions, 'data is not the plural of anecdote.' However, all too many sceptics (including some prominent scientists) misunderstand this and turn these into 'without (controlled) evidence this is not true' and 'anecdote has no value' - both of these are incorrect.

What we've got here is a logical error. These people are going from 'without evidence we can't say it's true', which is good scepticism to 'without evidence it is false'. And while it's true that anecdotes have no value in deciding whether or not a hypothesis is true, they are valuable in flagging up the existence of something worth investigating. 'There's no smoke without fire' is obvious tosh, but 'there's no smoke without a cause' isn't.

I bring this up because of a rather sad interview suffered by the excellent paranormal researcher and sceptic, Hayley Stevens. She was attacked in the interview for not simply denying the existence of paranormal phenomena, with the implication that she was leading people astray and that she couldn't be a sceptic if she didn't simply deny and move on.

This is a bit like saying we should deny the existence of UFOs. But of course UFOs exist. We don't know what every object spotted in the sky is, so some of them are by definition unidentified flying objects. This is a perfectly good sceptical view. If we assume UFOs are alien spacecraft, however, that's very different. Then a sceptic should rightly raise a doubting eyebrow. There is no good evidence for alien visitors, and it is extremely unlikely from all we know about the universe and physics. So without such evidence, the starting point has to be that UFOs have perfectly normal terrestrial explanations (or they are weather/astronomical effects). But it is not scepticism to issue a blanket denial that UFOs exist and to criticise those who dare take an interest in them - that is simply stupid.

This is why I felt that it was okay to write my book about the science of the paranormal, Extra Sensory. It is not in any sense a wide-eyed vindication of telepathy or telekinesis. But to simply state that such things don't exist without examining the evidence is just as unscientific as to believe everything you hear from those who have 'witnessed' such events. Scepticism says we certainly shouldn't believe in something without having good evidence - but to take a stand based on not even looking at the evidence is nothing more than superstition.

Which is not good science or good scepticism.

How a publisher meets his authors

Another guest post by Mark Lloyd. Mark was born in 1972 in the small town of Naas, Co.Kildare in Ireland. He studied at Trinity College Dublin where he was allowed to  escape with a BA (Mod) in Computer Science, Linguistics and French.His poetry has been published in Revival Literary Journal, Microphone On! And Boyne Berries. He is a founding member of The Limerick Writers’ Centre, Limerick, Ireland and a member of the Literature Pillar of Limerick City of Culture 2014.
He founded Pillar International Publishing in 2012, named after his grandfather’s erstwhile company Pillar Publishing Dublin.

Pillar International Publishing, though focusing on edgy and absurd humour, has also published several poetry collections, including Heartscald by Alphie McCourt and I Live in Michael Hartnett (featuring a piece by the late Seamus Heaney). In humorous fiction and non-fiction, Pillar have published works by Rhys Hughes, Robin Walker and Thaddeus Lovecraft. Pillar, in 2014, will publish works by Tony Philpott and Helena Close, amongst others and will introduce Pillar Vintage, an imprint that will re-issue 1940’s fiction and non-fiction.

GUEST POST

There are two books that an author will rarely be told to read but should. Alas they are not published by me.

• The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod
• In Praise of Slow by Carl Honoré 

The first teaches the importance of proximity and the second the depth of richness offered by time.

Many years ago I ran a small children’s charity that rolled its stone up the hill every morning in its own inimitable style. We received a great deal of funding from one large state body. We received it every year. Not because our mission was that much more compelling than others but because the people who apportioned the money knew that they would meet me every day in the corridor and every lunch-time in the café. We shared a building. They were not aware that this was a deciding factor in their determinations … but it undoubtedly was.

Dragging ourselves forward to the here and now, two of my writers are with me because of very similar reasons. Don’t get me wrong, their writing is marvellous, bordering on spectacular, but they probably would not have been as appealing to me, as interesting to me, had there not been a compelling and regular point in time where our connections would cross.

The first writer I meet online and in person. I holiday in the same small seaside village. We both support Arsenal. The second writer is connected to me through an online community and through Facebook. We both know that in any given day our paths may cross. Compelling reasons to be interested in each other.

Publishing is about personalities, about relationships. If you recognise this, and you act upon it, then you are more likely to succeed.

Go to networking events. Say hello! Join Facebook groups. Say Hi! Attend workshops and festivals. Invest in people. In return, they will invest in you.

Which leads me to my second point. Time. Writing and relationships grow richer with time. Don’t rush it.

For balance, I also think struggling writers should read:

• Rum Humour Rum Humor by Thaddeus Lovecraft
• Last Orders at the Changamire Arms by Robin Walker

And

• The Young Dictator by Rhys Hughes

…because I published them. (See Pillar's website for more on these books.)

Masterly suspense

If I am honest, I'm not a great fan of books with a disaster, 'end of civilisation as we know it' scenario. In my teens I hoovered up vast quantities of these from War of the Worlds to Day of the Triffids, and absolutely loved them in my typical teen enjoyment of misery, but as I've grown older I have become increasingly fond of it all ending happily ever after. I think my problem with disaster books (and films) is the cavalier way that millions are slaughtered by the author. We are expected to feel connected to the main character, who usually miraculously survived, but I am always kept at a cold distance, because I am so sad for everyone else, the bit part players who are killed off for the sake of the scenario.

This meant I was a little nervous coming to Kate Kelly's young adult novel Red Rock, as this is 'cli fi' - fiction based on the world being transformed by climate change, and on the whole that's a pretty disaster-laden scenario. I needn't have worried - although the backdrop is of civilisation crumbling in the face of climate change, the storyline is pure action thriller with plenty of mystery and suspense, which soon distracted me from any concern about the fate of the world.

The main character, Danni, is beset by a host of problems, left on her own (or at least with a stranger) in an attempt to escape capture and understand more about the mysterious object (not unlike the one in the hands on the cover) given to her by her dying aunt. The tension rarely gives up for long - this is one of those excellent stories where the reader accompanies the MC on a race against time and the odds.

If I have any complaint it's an unusual one for me - there is not quite enough description. I felt this particularly when Danni visits both Oxford and Cambridge, cities I am very familiar with, yet I was never given enough to know where she was. Particularly irritating was the way she has find the library of a Cambridge college, but we aren't told which. But any frustration from this is washed away as the action pounds on.

Particularly good for a young adult novel is the way that there is a 'bad' character who turns out to not be all bad. For those familiar with that epic of Australian art, Neighbours (what can I say? my children made me watch it), I've always been rather impressed by the character Paul Robinson, who despite being a long-running baddy is at the same time very caring for those who are close to him, and has moments of genuine thoughtfulness to season the self-centred, grasping ruthlessness. Similarly, Red Rock has a character (I won't give it away by saying who) who betrays a friend but then more than makes up for it.

The other surprise was that I rather liked the climate change backdrop. It is never heavily laid on, but both the sad remains of Cambridge, under water when the tide is in, and the casual decay of coastal towns is beautifully handled. It is never trowelled on, but really gives a feel for the depressing reality of a future where climate change is unchecked.

Overall a book that works both as a good, page-turning thriller and one that makes you think.

For crying out loud!

'Buy organic! It's ever so mainstream.'

'Such has been the trajectory of some of his most cherished causes that decades after lending support to, say, organic farming and alternative medicines, such matters are accepted as mainstream today.' Andrew Roberts on Prince Charles in the Sunday Telegraph via the i's News Matrix

I'm sorry? Does Mr Roberts write the above about Prince Charles with a straight face? If so, he should be ashamed of himself. As should Prince Charles if it's true that his influence has made this stuff more mainstream. Luckily, though, I think that Mr Roberts is at least in part wrong, because the forces of reason are, to some extent holding out against Prince Charles' self-proclaimed attack on the logical and analytical approach of the Enlightenment.

Is organic farming mainstream? I suppose you could say it is in the sense you will find it in the supermarkets, though interestingly it seems to be getting less and less shelf room, which presumably indicates that customers are getting fed up of paying a significant premium for organics. After all, from most supermarkets' viewpoint, organic food is just a way of getting people to pay more for what is essentially the same product. The same view is also true of at least some organic farmers - I have certainly talked to a fair number who went organic because they saw a way of earning more for their produce, not because they backed some sort of spiritual Royal campaign. And good for them - I'm not suggesting they were cynical, merely sensible.

However, the reason people buy organic food is frankly often as fuzzy as the reason they, for instance, would prefer to shop at Waitrose rather than Asda. Not because what the two shops sell is often any different, but because Waitrose gives you that nice warm glow of middle class belonging, where Asda leaves you mixing with more of the common herd. They won't admit to that, of course. They will tell you there are two reasons for going organic - because of health benefits and welfare concerns. Or even to be green.

On welfare, it is certainly true that in the UK, organic animal welfare is very good. There is no reason why it should be any better than a good free range non-organic farm, but at least you have some degree of checking on that welfare done by the Soil Association, or equivalent bodies. (You have to be very careful about imported goods labelled organic, as in a lot of countries there is a lot less checking - if any at all - before that premium 'organic' label is applied.) There is one negative aspect on welfare, which is that the Soil Association encourages farmers not to treat sick animals using homeopathic remedies, so sick animals often have worse welfare on organic farms, but on the whole the regime is good.

The health aspect from eating organic is less sound. There has repeatedly proved to be no taste or nutrient benefits from organic farming. I have always deeply respected Helen Browning, a local organic farmer and bigwig in the Soil Association, who once told me 'The only health benefit we claim for our organic meat is that it is more healthy than eating a bag of doughnuts.' And as I have shown elsewhere the claim sometimes made about organic food having health benefits due to a lack of 'poisons' like pesticide residues is totally spurious.

As for being green, making sure your food is grown locally is the greenest thing you can do, rather than worrying about it being organic. Organic farming methods are usually worse for the environment in carbon emissions, though better in releasing less nitrogen-based pollution. There's not really a lot to be said either way.

As for Prince Charles' other obsession with alternative medicine I hope it is fair to say that this still isn't mainstream. Hope because much of what he champions is such a load of tosh. Two specific examples - as I've previously discussed, a 'tincture' claiming to detox is a load of bull excrement that would work wonders on any organic farm. And as for Charles' favourite, homeopathy, it's hard to think of a way of getting money out of customers that is less dependent on any kind of logic. Again, I don't need to revisit the detail, but I would refer you back to the lack of danger in taking a homeopathic overdose and a proposal for a new more efficient way to produce homeopathic pills.

Thankfully, then, it seems that Prince Charles' 'trajectory' has yet to drag the majority of us back into the dark ages. But it's always worth keeping an eye out just in case. The forces of unreason are ever amongst us.

Image from Wikipedia

Dipping a toe in the fiction world

I have long had this suspicion that somehow you aren't a real writer unless you've written some fiction. Clearly this is ridiculous - and yet it's a beguiling feeling.

The first ever book I wrote was a novel (a thankfully now lost turgid science fiction epic, written on the train on the way to school), and I have written at least half a dozen more, which haven't seen the light of day, but I would say are part of my learning to be a writer.

Now, though, I am glad to say, I have a real work of fiction that makes me proud and is published. (I should say I'm already proud of some published short fiction, like my short story in Nature.) It's called Xenostorm: Rising and it's aimed at the young adult market, which is theoretically 11 to 14ish, but in practice is popular with adults too - think Harry Potter in this respect.

This is science fiction, but not in an intrusive spaceships and ray guns way - it is SF that happens to apparently ordinary teenagers with extraordinary results that could transform the world in a shocking way.

The book is available as paperback and ebook from its website, where you will also find details of the Xenostorm game, a fun online puzzle game. At risk of sounding corny, the book should be a great stocking filler for young adult readers.

To give you a taster, here's the opening chapter:

One

DAVY FORCED a path through the streams of pedestrians flooding down London’s Cromwell Road.

Across the wide street loomed the Natural History Museum, a Victorian forest of pillars and carved beasts thronging around its twin towers. Already visible ahead was the tall town house with his flat on the third floor. Davy’s home – at least for the next few months.

He stopped to unwrap a stick of gum and stared at the plain white house.

When, he thought, had they ever lived anywhere longer than a year? 

Now Davy was in London. Before that Kent, then France and South America. It sounded exciting. But it wasn’t so great when you lived it. Davy had never belonged anywhere. His parents said that their jobs were to blame, but that seemed an excuse. There were plenty of journalists and scientists who didn’t drag their children from place to place. It was almost as if they were frightened of settling down.

Why couldn’t they have stayed on the farm? That was really home.

Davy’s first seven years had been spent on an isolated farmstead, up on the high Pennine moors of Northern England. A cold, wild, wet place – yet one that always felt solid and reliable.

That was how it should be, he thought. Seven years without moving on. There was a dog, Jasper, and everything. It was normal, comfortable. They were a proper family then.

He threw his gum wrapper at a bin by the road’s edge. It fell short, dropping to the pavement.

No one would notice. London was like that. You could be invisible. If only it was the same at school.

For Davy, walking through the school gates with their twisted crowns of barbed wire was a daily ordeal. He knew that somewhere the bullies would be waiting. It was only if he managed to find his best friend Raul first that he would be safe. Then they would leave him alone.

It’d be hopeless without Raul, he thought. There’d be no way to make it through the day. But everyone liked Raul – even the bullies.

Just ahead of Davy a girl collecting for charity stood in the middle of the pavement, chatting to an elderly man. He saw her at the last moment and swerved to avoid a collision. When he looked back over his shoulder, she winked at him, a pretty girl with long black hair. Davy felt a warm flush of embarrassment and looked away at the pavement ahead.

If mum knew about the bullying she’d say ‘Just tell a teacher,’ but it didn’t happen to her. She didn’t know what it was like.

Davy’s mother was the solid one of the family. The person he and his father turned to when things went wrong. A physicist, she wasn’t anything like the stereotype mad scientist. She was good with people, always making friends quickly. But she wasn’t right about everything. She thought anyone could be reasoned with, even a bully.

Why was he a target? It’s not like he was a nerd. He fitted in. Not fat. Average height, almost. Alright, there was his hair, you always got snide remarks about red hair, but not like this.

‘School sucks.'

Oh great, thought Davy, I said it aloud.

He glared at the passers-by, daring them to laugh, but they ignored him.

His iPod reached the end of the track. He slipped it out to skip the next song, that rubbish one with the boring chorus.

He touched the control.

Pain! 

What’s happening? Stop it! Please, someone stop it!

A wave of pure agony blasted through Davy’s skull. It was like a dentist’s drill ripping into his brain. Pressure soared in his head. Jagged bursts of excruciating pain tore down his neck. More and more the pressure built behind his eyes, so much they would surely burst.

Clutching his forehead, Davy dropped to the pavement.

... read on in XENOSTORM: Rising.

Shields up, Mac users

I'm virus proof on my Mac! Oops...

Even though I am now a Mac user, I have to admit that, as a species, they have their problems. Specifically, they have always had a tendency to be smug. Infuriatingly so.

Perhaps the biggest example of this, bigger still than their certainty that their machines had more style and flair, or were better at arty things, was the assurance that computer viruses were not a problem for them. They sneered at the poor PC user, scrambling to update their anti-virus every year. They sniggered behind their hands as friends computers succumbed to worms and trojans. Because, on the whole, Macs were virus proof. Not because they were so technically sophisticated, but because they were simply too small a market to make it worth virus writers targeting them.

However, though Macs still have a relatively small market share, it has steadily grown. And guess what? Viruses are out there. What's more, since hardly any Macs are protected against them, they are easy pickings.

I've taken the plunge and installed AV software. I haven't done a scientific survey or anything, but I've gone for Sophos. There are a couple of reasons for this. I have an affection for the company as they helped me out free of charge a number of times in the early days of PCs at British Airways. Their software has never been the slickest, but it has always had an industrial strength feel to it. The other reason, frankly, is that it is free. Eat that, PC users.

How has the experience been? Pretty good. The initial scan was a bit of a nightmare - it ground to a halt a couple of times and I had to restart it, but eventually I got the 6 million files (gulp) scanned. But since then, in background mode it has been trundling away nicely, occasionally spotting nasties in my emails and generally being a good egg.

If you are a Mac user and want to give it a try you can find it here. I would recommend giving it a thought. The world, it is a-changeing.

I ought to stress there are other products, this isn't a comprehensive test and (sadly) Sophos are not paying me anything to say this.

Elements of Excellence

I very much enjoyed Mark Forsyth's fluffy but inspiring earlier books on words, notably The Etymologicon, and his new title The Elements of Eloquence is equally enjoyable (and anything but a hard read). But it is also a book that makes you stop in your tracks. Because this stuff really matters.

Forsyth has revealed a startling truth that should have been obvious - in all those hours spent in English lessons we aren't taught how to write well. Yet there is a way to do this that has been around since the time of the ancient Greeks and that was, until it went out of fashion, a major part of the school curriculum - rhetoric.

Now, if you told me a couple of weeks ago that I would wax lyrical about a book on rhetoric, I would not have believed you. 'Rhetoric' just sounds really dull. As a subject, it sounds as if it would make politics look engaging. Yet, as Forsyth so ably demonstrates, rhetoric is simply the key tools and techniques of getting something across in words in a way that will catch the attention and engage the reader. Although originally aimed primarily at speeches, these techniques are equally important for the written word.

A couple of hundred years ago children were taught rhetoric - now we have to pick it up by osmosis as our English teachers rabbit on about 'what the author was feeling when she wrote this' or 'what the author really means.' How much more valuable to teach us 'what techniques and tricks the author is using to reel the reader in.'

Admittedly the whole field could do with a bit of a work over. If their science was anything to go by, I can't believe the ancient Greeks had the last word on rhetoric - there are probably key tools and techniques they weren't aware of. And the current terminology is horrendous. Forsyth points out that experts can't agree on what the rhetorical terms mean - but even if they could, many of them are obscure Greek words that are almost impossible to remember. If we were to teach rhetoric again, I'm sure we could come up with more memorable terms than aposiopesis, polysyndeton and epizeuxis (to name but three). But the fact remains that rhetoric is a treasury that most modern writers have never consciously explored - and our writing life would be much richer if they had. It's a brilliant conceit to do this, Mr Forsyth.

Is the book perfect? No. I find Forsyth's writing style a little too jovial and jokey, while some of the approaches he uses (cramming paragraphs full of the rhetorical technique covered by that chapter, and ending each chapter with an example of the next technique, for instance) are irritatingly clever-clever. For me, some of his examples of hendiadys just don't make sense (though to be fair, he says you can never really be sure this technique has been used.) But I can forgive anything for a book that has educated me more about the use of English than several years in English classes at school.

if writing were building construction, grammar and vocabulary would give us the raw materials and the basic skills to assemble them, but rhetoric provides the abilities of the architect. To write without an awareness of these tools and techniques is like expecting a bricklayer to create a cathedral. Anyone with the faintest interest in writing, or the English language, should be rushing out and buy this book.

You can see more at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.

The Smartwatch Files

O yippee-do-dah, Sony has brought out another smartwatch. And further surprises, Samsung's smart watch sales are pitiful. Still my beating heart, and pass the smelling salts. (Whatever happened to smelling salts?)

In case you haven't come across them, a smartwatch is the wrist-worn equivalent of a smartphone, though the screen is, of course, much smaller. I can see why people get excited about smartwatches. They are truly reminiscent of all that 1950s scifi. Once you've got a videophone on your wrist, all you need is a flying car and a laser gun and you are truly equipped for the twenty-first century. But the reality is rather different.

Firstly, all the evidence is that wearing watches is going out of fashion. Remaking them as a smartwatch seems a bit like the way the gas companies responded to the introduction of the electric light by bringing out a better gas jet. They were already dead, but they didn't realize it. I'm not saying watches will disappear. There are still plenty of old fogies like me who love them, and they will always have a niche appeal. But lots of people in my daughters' generation simply don't wear watches.

Then there's the matter of functionality. It's amazing what you can get in a watch-sized bit of electronics, but it is not going to be the equivalent of a phone. Firstly, at a time when phone screens are getting bigger and bigger, you are talking about taking the screen down to a tiny fraction of the size. But also it would be an immense challenge to get all the gubbins of a smartphone into that form factor.

So in reality, smartwatches are actually dumbwatches. Rather than have the functionality themselves, they pretty well universally tie into a smartphone using Bluetooth. So you have to carry the phone anyway. And that being the case, what would you rather do using that tiny screen on your wrist? After all, bear in mind that as much as 90% of smartphone use has nothing to do with making calls. I can't see myself typing a text on a smartwatch screen, or consulting a map, or looking up something on Google, or watching a Youtube video, or updating Facebook. It is inevitably going to be very limited by scale. You are left with a very expensive remote control for a device that really isn't hard to handle.

Will this stop manufacturers churning them out? Not for a while. Because anyone who hasn't got one will still be tempted by that Dick Tracy appeal, and the gadget lovers amongst us will lash out for one. But after that... would they buy a second smartwatch once the novelty has worn off? I think not.