Those of you who enjoy spotting the science errors in Dan Brown's books will be pleased to know that I've read his latest, The Lost Symbol so you don't have to (see at amazon.co.uk: The Lost Symbol /amazon.com: The Lost Symbol) . If you aren't familiar with this sport, Dan Brown's books regularly depend on science for their plots - but often get it entertainingly wrong. My all time favourite is Digital Fortress (see at amazon.co.uk: Digital Fortress /amazon.com: Digital Fortress ). The entire plot of this book depends on something that Brown  has his characters repeat over and over - it is impossible to create an unbreakable cipher. Unfortunately, not only is it possible, they have been around for nearly 100 years, so poor research there, Dan. Angels and Demons is also replete with poor science (see at amazon.co.uk: Angels and Demons /amazon.com: Angels & Demons ). What makes this book (and successors) particularly entertaining is that Brown starts the bo

I'm not what you'd call an outspoken feminist, but one thing that does get up my nose is the old fashioned style of addressing an envelope to a woman with her husband's name, but with 'Mrs' in front. So 'Fiona Smith' becomes 'Mrs Robert Smith'. I've two objections to this. One is that I can't help but imagine Robert Smith in twinset and pearls, very Monty Python, but not at all as intended by the writer. Second, it really does smack of ownership, in a very unpleasant way. Please stop it. Now.

Regular readers will be aware that I'm fond of choral music, especially Tudor, Elizabethan and twentieth century. Over the last couple of weeks I have been listening to more Classic FM than usual, because they play a lot of Christmas music, and as a result I have been exposed to something called ' Howard Goodall's Enchanted Voices .' To me, comparing this music to a good choir singing great choral music like Byrd, Sheppard, Howells or Leighton is just liking comparing cheese strings to a good mature cheddar or a magnificent stilton. Let's see why. Cheese strings are highly packaged - and so is Enchanted Voices. It's not really clear whether this is the name of a group or a sound - it's just a package, really. Cheese strings are processed cheese - this is processed singing. It's either has artifical reverb added, or it's recorded in an acoustic that sounds very artificial. And then cheese strings have a very limited texture and a single trick of

As it's Christmas Eve in the workhouse ( literary reference ), for fans of Goldie I just wanted to show you how she looked when she was a little younger. And even younger still (I'm not sure which one she is):

As Christmas approaches I'm spending quite a lot of time in the car (sometimes enjoying stunning snow-frosted landscapes, but that's a different story). At this time of year I confess I listen to Classic FM a bit, as I enjoy the Christmas music. But something is driving me away - an advert voiced by one Gloria Hunniford. Our Gloria is advertising Benecol , a range of products containing plant stanol which apparently partially blocks the intake of cholesterol in the diet with the useful effect of lowering cholesterol levels. I have no particular problem with the product (though I've a suspicion that you would need quite a lot of it to have a similar effect to the cholesterol lowering medication you can get from your doctor) - but I am really irritated by the way the advert begins. 'A while ago,' says Gloria, 'I used to have high cholesterol' (or words to that effect). The important thing is that she says 'A while ago I used to have...' Now that&

I gather from this excellent blog post by Matt Brown (whose photo I have nicked) that the Royal Institution in London is in financial difficulties. This is really sad news. The RI is a wonderful facility, especially since its fancy makeover, and does excellent work. I have had the honour of speaking there a couple of times, and there are few things more scary for a speaker than an RI introduction, when standing at the desk where Faraday did demonstrations, your audience is told that 'n of the elements were discovered here, they have had x Nobel Prize winners... and now Brian Clegg is going to speak to you.' Gulp. Some argue, and I'm afraid that I would agree, that the current director Susan Greenfield has not done a great job. I certainly feel that the RI could be handled differently. With hindsight, spending £20 million on a refurbishment programme was probably not wise (though I guess a fair amount of this came from grants). Personally, I would suggest that those in

Yes, folks, it's element podcast time again. My latest addition to the Royal Society of Chemistry 's series of podcasts Chemistry in its Element is live and it's all about Einsteinium, element 99. It might seem obvious that an element would be named after Einstein... but there's no newtonium, so being a scientific superstar isn't enough. So why does element 99 have this name? And why is it so, well, useless? Take a listen , or select it in from the list of my element podcasts below:                                             Powered by Podbean.com               

According to some research results which I obtained via the highly dubious route that someone mentioned them on Twitter - i.e. I have no idea whether this is true or not - over a recent period in some country or other (see, it's detailed research), 0 children were injured by chemistry sets while 600 were injured by Wendy houses. You might be inclined to deduce that Wendy houses are much more dangerous than chemistry sets, but I think it's more likely that no one gets given chemistry sets any more. I can't remember when I last saw one in the shops. And that's sad. Chemistry sets were wonderful. You could make interesting colours, smells - if you were lucky, minor explosions. And I suppose that's the problem. In our elf and safety conscious world, chemistry sets were watered down so much that in the end they just weren't worth having. I suspect they took out all the good bits and left you with little more than bicarbonate and vinegar. Now even in my day, chemistry

Until Edwardian times, the freak show was a standard part of the entertainment scene. Not, admittedly, a high class part - but perfectly respectable. Since then we moved away from the freak show on the intellectual argument that it is degrading for those involved. But you don't make an entertainment that appeals to the gut lose its appeal by intellectualizing. And this is clearly something Simon Cowell understands as he has had a huge influence on bringing the freak show to prime time TV. Cowell's X-Factor and Britain's Got Talent (or US spin-offs American Idol and America's Got Talent ) are primarily freak shows. You can argue (and no doubt Cowell would) that they're talent shows, and the beautiful performers who made it to last weekend's X-Factor final were anything but freaks, but this misunderstands the nature of the freak show. It was always important to put any freakiness alongside beauty and talent - the freak show is very much about contrast, about bea

Whatever your religious persuasion (and even if you tick the 'atheist' box) it's hard to deny that many Christmas carols are evocative and beautiful. One of my favourites is Peter Warlock's haunting Bethlehem Down . In a recent survey of the great and good in church music it came up as one of the top carols, and I'll be doing it with my little choir this Christmas, just as I sang it with Selwyn College, Cambridge chapel choir many moons ago. Music apart, the best thing about Bethlehem Down is the story of how it came to be written. According to Bruce Blunt, who wrote the words, in 1927 Warlock and Blunt 'were extremely hard up, and in the hopes of being able to get suitably drunk at Christmas conceived the idea of collaborating on another carol which should be published in a daily paper.' The carol was completed in a few days and sent off to the Daily Telegraph , which reproduced it on Christmas Eve, funding an 'immortal carouse' according to Blunt.

I'm not usually a great fan of common sense. That sounds wrong, but what I mean is that what's often labelled 'common sense' is more an example of letting feelings push facts out of the way. However, I do wonder if it's sensible when I hear of officials sticking with the letter of the law and not applying... yes, well, common sense. I gather in the recent furore over Mclaren buggies trapping children's fingers , the Trading Standards line is that they comply with European regulations, so there's nothing that Trading Standards can do. When it's a product where the manfacturer has been forced to provide a fix to all customers in the US, when it's quite clear that there is a risk that can easily be overcome, why should Trading Standards hide behind European regulations? Surely they should be able to say 'Yes, there's a problem. Fix it.' My only brush with Trading Standards was not particularly helpful. I called into an unfamiliar petrol stat

Exciting news for Swindon. It seems that we are to be twinned with Walt Disney World in Florida. No, really. The whole concept of town twinning a bizarre one. As far as I can see the only purposes of town twinning, are a) so you can put up a sign with the names of the towns you are twinned with and b) so town/city officials can have jollies where they go off on official visits of the other place. If you live in a city of world renown like Bath, you get to twin with somewhere exciting and well known. Swindon is currently twinned with Salzgitter in Germany, Ocotal in Nicaragua and Torun in Poland. You might think that the Disney people have slightly lost the plot. Surely a more appropriate place to twin with would be somewhere with a fairy tale castle, like Windsor? (Or even better Neuschwandstein in Germany.) But no - apparently we were chosen because someone won it as a prize in a competition. This should have meant that there was no sense of local pride out of it. It was a competitio

'Gino and the Rat' sounds like a good title for an age 4-8 story book, but followers of celeb events in the UK will realize immediately that we are dealing instead with an incident important enough to make it onto the main news bulletins. Rumour started spreading yesterday that TV chef and winner of I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here Gino d'Acampo was in jail for the terrible crime of killing a rat. Immediately the political correctness hackles rose. After all, rats are vermin. Killing a rat is our right - and in his case he killed it to eat it, so it's doubly okay. When the initial panic settled down it turned out that the effervescent Gino was not in jail at all, but on his way back home to the UK. However the Australian authorities were considering charges. Still enough to get those hackles up? I'm not sure. In fact, once you look beyond the over-reaction, it's a good spotlight to throw on the nature of reality TV shows. On the one hand, what d'Acamp

When out on the road in sunny Swindon I quite often pass busses carrying the inscription SORRY NOT IN SERVICE . I feel a strong urge to scream at said bus 'No you are not. You are not sorry at all. A bus can't be sorry, it's inanimate.' I get the same irrational urge to talk to technology at the railway station. Over the tannoy we hear 'I'm sorry to announce that that the 3.17 to Upper Wombleton has been cancelled. I apologize to passengers for any inconvenience.' No you don't. You can't apologize, you are are a recording. If I talked to a bus or a loudspeaker as if it were a person then I would rightfully be taken away for a little care and recuperation. So, equally, we ought to scrap any technology with pretensions of consciousness. Until someone really builds HAL 9000 , and we have technology with a personality, it should stay that way. Resist the urge, please, companies. Your equipment isn't sorry - don't make it tell me that it is.

Over on Nature Network there has been a burst of activity on a blog post I made last year . In the post you can see the collaborative effort that generated a piece of scientific Christmas verse a line at a time. It's rather riddled with in-jokes - but such was the passion at the time I think it's worth repeating this masterpiece of line-by-line writing. Here's an audio version (thanks to Graham Steel for the effects). And here's the pome itself: ’Twas the night before Christmas and all through the lab Not a Gilson was stirring, not even one jab. On the bench, ’twixt a novel by Jennifer Rohn And the paper rejected by Henry’s iPhone Lay a leg, still trembling and covered in gore And Frankenstein sighed ‘I can’t take this no more’. He exclaimed panic struck, as he took in the scene, of horrendous results from NN’s latest meme. ‘having one extra leg wasn’t part of the plan to create a new species, anatomized man’. And then out of the blue, ‘twas a bump in

About once a year, or a little less frequently, Goldie our golden retriever gets an ear infection. Apparently, despite the big ear flaps and lots of hairy protection, a grass seed or something else irritating gets into one of her ears and the result is irritation, brown gunk and scratching. It's cleared up quite quickly by a combination of a wash and antibiotic drops. But now here's the thing. The ear drops used to carry the instruction 'put four or five drops in the ear'. As an instruction, this sucks. It's entirely possible to do this with human ear drops, as you can start the drop off well clear of the ear and aim it down the appropriate orifice (assuming the patient has their head tilted). But not only is it difficult to get a dog to tip her head on its side, dripping from above results in an ear drop that sits on the protective fur at the entrance to the ear. You can't drip into it - you have to insert the nozzle in the ear, which means you can't see a

Following up on yesterday's post on Eadweard Muybridge , when I was writing the book I discovered that I had totally the wrong idea of how we see a film as moving images. I was all prepared to write about 'persistence of vision' - in fact I did so in the first version of the manuscript. I was not alone in this mistake. You can still find plenty of websites and books that talk about persistence of vision - How Stuff Works , for instance, says 'Movies work because of persistence of vision , the fact that a human eye retains an image for about one-twentieth of a second after seeing it.' But if I'd left it in, I would have been writing a load of rubbish. The idea of persistence of vision, first put forward around the same time as the emergence of the movie industry, depended on the assumption that some sort of after-image remained in the brain long enough to overcome the blank gap while the picture was changing to the next one, and that the two slightly different

Eadweard Muybridge gets a truly bad deal in the history books. Significantly before the Lumiere brothers were in action, Muybridge was projecting moving pictures. He even built the world's first purpose built cinema for the Chicago World's Fair. Yet he often fails to be given the laurels for his work. The argument is that his technology was not the same as the one that would eventually be used. 'Real' movies consisted of a string of images on a length of celluloid, each taken through the same lens a few moments after its predecessor. Muybridge's moving pictures were taken using a sequence of still cameras, producing at best a few seconds of movement. There is no doubt that Muybridge's technology was something of a dead end - but that shouldn't detract from his importance as the father of moving pictures. No one argues about Babbage being called the father of computing, yet his technology was just as detached from the one that was finally used as was Muyb

As a non-fiction author it's always with some trepidation that I offer advice to fiction writers, but I can't help passing on a lesson I observed the other day. I was watching the Joss Whedon show Angel on DVD with my daughter - she was too young to watch it first time around - and couldn't help be awed by some clever work in the writing. For those not familiar with Angel , the running big bad through all five seasons was a law firm called Wolfram and Hart. Sounds a convincing name for a law firm. But at the end of the second season - two years into the show - we learn that the company had its origins in three mystical creatures, the wolf, the ram and the hart. Now if Whedon had chosen to reveal this in the first few weeks, it would have been of passing interest. 'Yes, that's clever,' we might have thought... and moved on. But because we had been given time for the name Wolfram and Hart to become part of the fabric of Angel reality, the revelation was much more

Every now and then I like to try something different - I've just launched in beta (i.e. it works, but might have one or two glitches) a little online game called Xenostorm . It involves travelling around the virtual world, solving cryptic clues to reveal evidence about a strange creature that threatens the future of humanity. The game is free to play (though there is the opportunity to be a 'benefactor') and I hope will be enjoyable. Why not take a look when you've a few minutes to spare? All feedback welcome - either as a comment, or drop me an email at info@xenostorm.com

Every now and then there's an outbreak of distaste from almost everyone who writes about being an author on the subject of vanity publishing. Most recently this blew up when the big US romance publisher Harlequin announced it was coming out with a vanity imprint. Such was the reaction that within a week they had decided that, though they'd still go ahead, they would take their name off the imprint. Just to clarify terminology, we're talking about a way of getting books published where the author pays to be published. There are broadly two approaches to this. The more respectable is self publishing. This could be anything from using Lulu.com to setting up your own deal with a printer etc. When you self publish, you take on the costs of producing the book, print as many copies as you like and try to sell them yourself. There are a number of good reasons for self publishing. It might be to produce a special book for friends and family, or to sell as part of your business

Political correctness gets an unfairly bad press (probably mostly thanks to the likes of the Daily Mail ). In part, this is because it's easy to forget just what things were like before PC. Take a look at a comedy TV show of the 60s, full of racist or sexist jokes, and it is absolutely cringemaking. We have moved on a long way, and political correctness has helped shape our thinking. It's also true that when disgusted of Tonbridge Wells complains about political correctness, the 'news' story (s)he is reacting to is often fiction. Infamously, Birmingham is supposed to have once banned Christmas from the city, insisting that the 'neutral' Winterval be used instead of Christmas in any council activities. This is just baloney. The city ran a winter festival, called Winterval, but this had nothing to do with Christmas, and didn't replace the Christmas celebrations, which ran as usual. However, the danger with political correctness is when it comes up against logi

This is a time of year when music impinges on everyday life rather more than usual. Christmas music is everywhere, and even the most bah humbug atheist (with the possible exception of the Grouch himself, Richard Dawkins) may well admit to a secret enjoyment of belting out a few Christmas favourites, or hearing a children's choir mangle Silent Night . It's also the time of year when record producers go into overdrive, promoting CDs for people who don't buy music the rest of the year, but know that a CD is an excellent present ( almost as good as a book. Have you thought of a science book as a Christmas present? See the Popular Science website for great book and gift ideas. {sound of slapping} Sorry about that. Normal service will now be resumed ) This is a time when the moaners and bleaters who tell us that the CD is dead have to have brief second thoughts, because no one wants to unwrap an MP3 file on Christmas morning. However, one thing about the adverts for CDs that squ

Every now and then, Swindon, for all its negative connotations does something that makes it interesting. We had the Mondex (electronic cash) trial here. Swindon proudly decided to get rid of speed cameras, to cheers from Top Gear . And now Swindon has announced that there will soon be public WiFi available throughout the borough (thanks to Paul Tuck for bringing this to my attention). I'm going in to Radio Wiltshire this morning to discuss this - because there has been some talk (I was told by an organization called Powerwatch, though I haven't seen it) of Swindon's action putting us at risk. Because of the 'radiation' from the WiFi transmitters. This is what I describe in Ecologic as a bogeyman, where fear of something nasty that doesn't really exist gets people in a panic. And one of the classic ways of inciting a bogeyman is to use terms like 'radiation' - which sounds scary. Technically WiFi is radiation - electromagnetic radiation - just as is

As you may have gathered, I love technology, and sometimes I think it's important to celebrate technology - even when it is, to all intents and purposes useless. Such an example of useless technology has recently been introduced to me by the inestimable Dr Henry Gee aka Cromercrox . It's Google's latest toy, Latitude . It's a little application you run on a suitable mobile phone which puts your current location on a map. And this can be seen by friends who you authorize to see it, either on their computer or their phone. So, for example, in the picture alongside you can see where I was three days ago, on a visit to my daughter's orthodontist. It's totally useless for two reasons. One is that (certainly with an iPhone) it only pinpoints your location when you ask it to. So it's rarely going to be really where you are. And the other is that there isn't a lot of reason to find out where someone else is anyway, unless you are meeting up when you will probabl

Here's a sheep and goats question. What's the first thing that comes into your head when I say 'Physics'? If it's 'Wow, exciting stuff!' go to the top of the class. If it's 'Boring!', please stay after school. Actually school probably has a lot to do with this impression. Physics shouldn't be boring. It's how the universe works, after all. But all that stuff with ray diagrams and force equals mass times acceleration can get a trifle tedious, I admit. So I'm quite pleased with my latest little book, Instant Egghead Guide: Physics . Rather than start with the dull Victorian stuff it starts where we should start - with the real essentials (and the fun bits) like quantum theory and relativity. The book has 100 bite-size sections on a wide range of physics topics, each with a little 'cocktail party tidbit' (sorry, prudish US spelling) to liven it up. If you'd like to find out a bit more, see its page at my website or at Amazon

On a regular basis we hear how social networking sites like Facebook are destroying the universe. Apparently, because of them we will soon cease to be able to interact with anyone in person, shortly followed by the withering of the ability to speak. Or some such thing. I tend to take these tirades with a pinch of salt. It's true that it's easy to waste a lot of time on such websites, but I'm not sure it's any worse for you than vegetating in front of the TV watching I'm a Celebrity, get me out of Strictly Come X-Factor , and certainly if you're in a job where you spend a lot of time alone, like being a writer, Facebook, Twitter and the like offer a lifeline of social involvement that simply wouldn't be there otherwise. The latest moan is that teenagers are spending too much time in their rooms because of social networking sites. Now, come on. This is hazy memory syndrome. Do the people who proclaim the end of civilization caused by these absent teenagers

I've just heard a deep philosophical conundrum on Heart FM . No, really. Their men have been growing moustaches for some charity event , and one of them (Jez of the Wiltshire breakfast show) has added a goatee to look less of a prat. The argument that then raged was had he still grown a moustache, or once you add a goatee, is it just part of a beard? I said it was deep. This put me in a philosophical frame of mind, which accordingly got me a touch riled up when I receiv ed this advert from the Performing Rights Society , the UK group that collects royalties for composers and the like when their music is performed. Now, I'm all in favour of the PRS. It's the musical equivalent of PLR , the wonderful organization that collects money for authors when books are borrowed from libraries. Composers should get their dues when their music is performed. But the reason this ad got me riled is that it seems to be sneakiness employed in a good cause. At first sight there's nothing

Last week I blogged about my trip to Almere in the Netherlands to speak on Ecologic at an event called Ecocities: systems and alternatives , organized by the International New Town Institute . Now, thanks to the wonders of technology, I've got a video of the evening. In the unlikely event you want to see me in action, there are a series of small images below the main video window - you can hear my bit by clicking on the Brian Clegg/author of Ecologic button.

There's a fascinating article in New Scientist about the shortcomings of GDP as the measure of a country's economic success or failure. From the green perspective, GDP is fundamentally flawed, simply because it doesn't have a green perspective. It takes no account of the impact on the environment of a country's actions, giving no benefit to undertaking measures to save the planet. But even without this inherent short-termism, there are some downright weird things in there. There are silly book-keeping measures (people who own houses are considered to pay themselves rent to live there), there is no value whatsoever given to state services like the provisions of the NHS or education services, and the measure fails to reflect the actual meaning of expenditure. The article gives a good example that having your roads gridlocked increases your GDP, because it takes into account the spending on the fuel that gets wasted, but doesn't take into account the time wasted and g

I am not a Labour Party supporter - as a wishy-washy liberal (even if I do tend to read the Times rather than the Guardian) with the surname Clegg, I don't have much choice, really. But I do want to express sympathy for Gordon Brown over the whole Sun/Jacqui Janes letter furore. Given the demands on his time, I think Gordon Brown should be patted on the back for hand writing letters of condolence - and if he makes a few spelling mistakes, so what? I have every sympathy for Jacqui Janes as a grieving mother, but I do think two questions in all the blame game over whether it's the Sun or Gordon Brown at fault don't seem to be answered. How come an ordinary person like Ms Janes records her phone calls? This seems a very strange act. And how did the recording get to the Sun? Were they tapping her phone? Or the Prime Minister's phone? If so, the Sun should be in a lot more trouble than it is. If not, it's hard not to question the motives of whoever supplied the recor

In all the furore about banks - bonuses, extra loans, mergers and de-mergers - one thing seems to have quietly been forgotten. The demise of Bradford and Bingley. One sunny day it simply disappeared from public hands, grabbed by the government to save it from collapse. And since then, hardly a peep has been heard. At the moment an administrator has announced he is considering just how much (if anything) it was worth at the time of its grab, so the shareholders can be recompensed (if at all). But surely this shouldn't take more than an afternoon with Excel? It seems to be taking about a year to work out, and that's not good enough. I have to confess a slight interest - I am a Bradford and Bingley shareholder. In fact, it's worse than that. Just before I bought the shares (only a few pounds worth, I hasten to add), one of the other banks had plummeted on the stock exchange, then bounced back about 40 per cent in a few hours. When B&B plummeted also I thought 'Aha! A c

At the station on Tuesday I picked up a copy of the Evening Standard ('Enin Stannit!'), now a shadow of its former self as it has gone free. In it was a list of 'the 20 people who keep London leading the world' - their idea of the capital's 'top 20 influentials'. It consisted of 6 politicians, a banker, a policeman, 6 business people, a handful of vaguely arty types and two pop stars. No journalists or TV people. No scientists or educators. No sports people. But it did have Dizzee Rascal, so it must be okay, and 'down with it', mustn't it? The article pointed us to the web for the whole top 1,000 , which at least filled in a number of my missing categories. Notably, though, there were still no scientists, and the only educators were in schools. All such lists are open to debate - but with this one, the whole premise is bizarre. Surely, to begin with, the entire cabinet should be in top list, not just three MPs. Can you really expect me to believ

Listening to the news last night I heard that someone (I think it was the German nation) was being accused of Islamophobia. The word worried me. Could you really have a phobia about a religion? According to my dictionary, a phobia is an 'extreme or irrational fear'. The sort of thing that has people cowering in the corner of a room, screaming, when they see a spider, or becoming dizzy and unstable when at a great height. Were they really claiming that the German nation reaction this way to a religion? There are a number of responses to a religion that tend to get the 'phobic' label. There is hatred of a particular type of people, simply because of their belief. This is a despicable and sad response, but hardly a phobia. Then there is dislike of the religion itself. There is nothing wrong with this, unless you take it to extremes as Richard Dawkins does. It's perfectly reasonable to dislike a religion, just as much as you might dislike a political party. Most s

I'm just back from a visit to Almere in the Netherlands. For those not familiar with the place, it's a new town (pronounced roughly Ahl-meer-uh), about 30 minutes train ride from Amsterdam. I was there to give a short talk based on Ecologic as part of a lecture evening on sustainability and eco-cities. As no great fan of flying (and it would have seemed a touch hypocritical, given the topic) I went by train. On the whole the train travel worked very well, though I was amazed that I couldn't book a through ticket online, and ended up having to book with three separate agencies to get a train from Swindon to Almere. It also reflected badly on British rail pricing. To get from Swindon to London (80 miles) cost £109. From London to Brussels (193 miles) £88. and from Brussels to Almere (137 miles) £71. (All prices are for return journeys, and distances are by road, but give a reasonable indication.) There's still something special about standing on St Pancras International s

I occasionally drive my wife's VW Golf Plus, and I'm always impressed by the cleverness that has been employed in little subtleties that make the driving experience so much better. For example, the irritating warning beep when the front seat passenger hasn't put their seatbelt on only starts once you start driving. My favourite little clevernesses are around the windscreen wipers. I love the way that, if you've got the wipers on and go into reverse it automatically starts the rear wiper. And best of all is the way that the wipers go from continuous to intermittant when you stop, then go back to continuous when you set off again. I almost want to keep stopping and starting, Homer Simpson like, just to experience it. But there's one little cleverness around the wipers that doesn't work. If you wash the windscreen, it automatically does a burst of wiping to clear it. Fine - most cars do. But then, a few seconds, later, it does an extra single wipe, presumably inten

As fireworks bubble and squeak around us, and some really dodgy shops selling fireworks appear on the backstreets like fungus sprouting on a rotting tree, I am reminded of the most entertaining firework display I was ever involved in arranging. It was, to be honest, a practical joke. When I was at university I was involved in a whole string of practical jokes. Not the 'silly prank that irritates a person' kind, but entertaining ones that ranged from the simplicity of placing a rubber pigeon (we couldn't get a seagull) in the chapel stalls above the Master's seat on Sea Sunday to the amazing pageantry of the fake Immersion of the High Professor ritual I have blogged about previously . The firework stunt was like a military operation. At 1 in the morning on 5 November, a series of dark clothed pairs of individuals snuck out into the Old Court of Selwyn College (pictured). One of the pair had a bag of fireworks, each fitted with a timed fuse. The other had a bottle of wate

'Do you want to go clothes shopping?' she said. No. Let's be clear about this, I never want to go clothes shopping. I don't mean this in some idle threat fashion - my ideal would be never to go clothes shopping again. Ever. I'm reminded of an ex-colleague at BA who years ago pointed out that the way a shampoo was being sold - it's so gentle you can use it every day - only appealed to one part of the market. He wanted a shampoo that was so good at its job that you only had to use it once a month. Frequency of use was, to him, not a benefit but a curse. Washing your hair, he argued, was a complete waste of valuable time. Similarly, the clothes shopping market is split. There are those who enjoy it and those who don't. (It may be one of those male/female brain things, who knows? Note this isn't the same as male/female - a percentage of women have 'male' brains and vice versa.) As far as I am concerned my ideal wardrobe would be one with as limited

A couple of days ago a film crew descended on my house to record an interview on quantum theory. Well, if I'm honest (I was talking about storytelling yesterday) it was two students with a video camera. And in practice, both these statements are deceptive. The first sounds all professional, slick and well prepared. The second sounds haphazard and amateurish. I must admit, when Jane Weavis from Royal Holloway in London got in touch about doing the interview for her Physics and Science Communication course I was a touch doubtful. But hey, she was prepared to come all the way out to sunny Swindon (I'm not sure if she realized quite how far it was), so surely I could spare a half hour, however uninspiring it might turn out to be. Jane turned up with a media studies mate in tow as camera person, we got set up and, I have to say it was one of the slickest and best prepared interviews I've done. So often with a professional broadcaster they haven't really got a clue what my b

I was a little depressed to hear on the radio the other day that we now have a ' storytelling laureate ' (Taffy Thomas, pictured) because, I'm afraid, I just don't get on with storytelling. Before I have to duck a few bricks I ought to explain. I know some enthusiastic storytellers, and they're good at it. I don't mean people who excel at gossip, I mean those who practice the ancient art of oral storytelling. We are a storytelling species - it comes naturally to us - and for many thousands of years the only storytelling form was oral. And it still works fine for an audience of children, but for some (and I stress some ) adults, myself included, it just doesn't make the grade. When compared with reading a book, I think storytelling is a bit like going back to a typewriter after you've been used to a good computer. It sort of does the job, but nowhere near as well. The thing is, I'm a very fast reader. I hurtle through books, taking things in at breakn

I spent six hours in Newbury on Saturday. It was an interesting affair - publisher Tim Hirst had got together twelve authors to set up stalls in Newbury's Kennet Centre (the picture is where we were located, but before the authors were inserted). The idea was that all the shoppers would come in and see those lovely signed books and buy them as Christmas presents. It managed to be a failure and a success at the same time - but certainly a worthwhile experiment. The fai lure part was that none of us really sold many books. The sad truth is, most of the people going into the Kennet Centre of a Saturday weren't book buyers and had zero interest. I think the concept would work in the right location, with the right people - but this wasn't it. The success was the opportunity to meet the stallholders. It was great, for example, to meet up with John Brindley , with whom I once shared an agent, but who I'd never met. And at the table next to me was Anneke Wills , one time Doct