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...