Author J. D. Salinger has died - and like any death, it's a sadness. But I couldn't help getting mildly irritated by the eulogy on Salinger's work I heard on the radio this morning. If we are to believe what I heard, teenagers were rushing out, buying The Catcher in the Rye with the sort of enthusiasm they would now buy a new Harry Potter, because here was literature they could identify with. Tosh. What really happened is that English teachers found a book which they thought would go down well with the kids but was still real literature, and it was down to them that it achieved its current untouchable status. Don't get me wrong - English teachers do a brilliant and difficult job. Much 'great literature' is hard work to read. You have to get your students past the barrier of the arty or dated writing to see there is actually some good stuff in there. But there's no doubt Catcher in the Rye was their idea of an engaging teenage read, rather than a real t...

I had the pleasure yesterday of accompanying Radio Wiltshire's Mark O'Donnell to the Fox Talbot museum at Lacock Abbey in beautiful rural Wiltshire. It was a great day for it - crisp, light sun, hardly anyone around. We were recording the first of a series of little pieces on Wiltshire science and technology. At the museum, we met up with curator Roger Watson to do a three way chat on the significance of Fox Talbot 's work. (Or Talbot as Mr Watson called him - it seems Fox wasn't part of his surname. But having said that, William Henry did sign himself 'Fox Talbot' sometimes, so there's some justification for using both.) It was fascinating - apart from anything else, it's not every visit to a museum that you get the best bits pointed out personally by the curator. He was particularly proud of a new acquisition, Fox Talbot's spectacles. From them, they have been able to deduce that he had good sight in one eye, but very poor sight in the other. ...

When I was at university I had a tendency to buy random books just because they looked interesting (this was before the web, remember - it was a sort of physical version of StumbleUpon ). One of my favourite purchases was a guidebook to the UK called England on $10 a Day . Leaving aside the cheapness, which even then was impressive, I just loved the idea of seeing my country through slightly alien eyes - and I was not disappointed. What's not to love about a guidebook that treats Scotland as part of England? Ninety percent of the book is on the south of England, but as a Lancastrian I couldn't help but be delighted with its different approaches to the East and the West. The North West it eulogises about. The North East? 'Unless you enjoy untamed scenery and perhaps a visit to an ancient city or two, such as York or Lincoln, then this huge hunk of north-eastern England may hold little interest for you.' Quite. It's difficult to find a specific quote that evoke...

I pretty regularly get emails from academics. They're easy to spot - they are the ones that look terrible. Here's a simple email from a normal person: Hi Fred, Could you let me have the latest figures on Losing Your Head , please. Also: Do this Do that And do the other Best regards, Brian Clegg Follow Brian at http://www.twitter.com/brianclegg    And here's the same email from an academic: Hi Fred, Could you let me have the latest figures on Losing Your Head, please. Also: * Do this * Do that * And do the other Best regards, Brian Clegg Follow Brian at http://www.twitter.com/brianclegg Can you spot the difference? The academic version looks terrible because it's plain text. There's no formatting, no fonts, no layout - it's rubbish. Once upon a time there was an excuse for this. Academics were using very early email systems that didn't have the bells and whistles. It's a bit like the way that many years ago I use...

In an age of relaxing in front of the TV, we sometimes forget there's a big world out there. I just wanted to draw attention to the events listing page at www.popularscience.co.uk - this page on the popular science book review site is dedicated to public talks given by science writers and scientists. I confess I have a personal interest. Apart from the fact that I edit the website, I have got a couple of my talks listed there. But apart from me, expounding on the murdering pioneer of moving pictures, infinity and ecologic, you will also come across a professor from Arizona State University on exterrestrial life, an Oxford professor on the realities of nuclear power, a superb writer on the science of music, a TV scientist on weird inventions and more. About half the events are in London, but you'll also find talks going on in Oxford, Hove, Norwich, Bolton and Moulton, so quite a spread across the country. Go on, give your brain a treat. Let it have an outing and explore t...

As I seem to spend most of my spare time driving teenagers around, I get exposed quite a lot to stations on the wireless playing the music of popular beat combos. In these parts there are really only three options - BBC Radio Wiltshire, Heart FM and BBC Radio 1. Radio Wiltshire we can dismiss straight away, as they aim at an older audience. So here's the thing. Neither Radio 1 nor Heart really make the grade, so we end up with the teenagers irritatingly flipping between the two with goldfish attention span regularity. This cannot go on. One of them needs to pull their musical socks up before I am driven round the bend. The problem with Heart is that their music buying budget is about 10p and their taste is fixed in the 1980s. So often we suffer 80s disco monstrosities. When they do pick up something new, they play it over and over. And they only really like it if, like Charlene Spiteri's Xanadu, it is indistinguishable from an old track. (Actually, I think the play the Oliv...

It shouldn't really be a surprise that scientists can be funny. A fair number of comedians come from a scientific or medical background, after all. Yet, on the whole, scientists have the image of being po-faced and incapable of getting a joke, perhaps because of a tendency to over-analyze. (Oops, I've started to analyze this. Stop me.) One group in particular has tried to counter this image. It's a company called Biocompare which offers a comparison website that's not for insurance or electrical goods but for the kind of goodies life scientists (biologists to you and me) need. They have compiled a top ten of funny videos produced by the life sciences industry as a form of viral advertising (let's face it, if life scientists can't do viral ads, who can?) You can see all 10 here , but to get a flavour, here's one of my personal favourites.

Mine was the first generation to turn against the daily delivered newspaper. When I was a lad pretty well everyone had a newspaper every day. But I have never had one delivered. For me a newspaper is something to buy as and when, to enjoy as a special treat but not a daily source of news. The TV news, and latterly the internet, has always provided the updates I needed, well ahead of the papers. Why would I subscribe to yesterday's news on a regular basis? I know lots of people do still get newspapers regularly, but I would be very surprised if people my age and younger aren't much less likely to have a paper pushed through the door than the generation before. With a more recent generation, I think something similar is happening with wristwatches. My children don't wear watches. It's not that we've deprived them - they have had several, but they just don't bother with them. Apart from the general convenience of ask-an-adult, a lot of this has to do with mobil...

When ebooks were first devised the publishers panicked. The buzzword on everyone's lips was 'disintermediation' - the idea that with ebooks writers could sell direct to their readers, so would no longer need publishers or bookshops. In practice it didn't work out like this. Okay, Stephen King managed to sell quite a lot of ebooks direct, but for the rest of us there was a serious problem. Let's say you've written a great ebook, how do you get the people who would love to buy it to notice it? How do you get them to the point of clicking the 'Buy Now' button? It's real needle-in-a-haystack country. I've got a range of ebooks on sale, and here's my top tips for getting them in front of people. Make use of free secondary sites - you will, of course, be selling your ebook from your own website or blog, but look for other places you can put up an ebook for sale without it costing you anything. One example is Lulu - although best known for produ...

Every now and then, during an interview on the radio or TV, I'll find myself yelling at the interviewer, 'Why aren't you asking the obvious question?' It seems to me that there is such a killer point to make, yet they fail to do so. I had such a frustrating moment this morning, during an interview with Michael Gove (pictured), the Conservative spokesman on children, schools and families. Now admittedly Michael Gove is one of those individuals who single handedly makes me not want to vote Conservative, even if I was in complete agreement with all their policies, but even so he was begging to be asked that killer question. Gove was telling us that we need to get better teachers - can't disagree with that - and the way to do it is to increase the standing of the profession. I can't disagree with that either, as long as it's not the only measure. However, when asked about paying teachers more, Gove said that no, no, this wasn't the answer, you don't...

No, really, I hate plumbing. It is horrible. I don't mind electrics - wires don't leak. But plumbing seems designed to find ways for water to get out and cause disasters. About a week ago one of our daughters' friends was in the shower at our house... and water started coming through the ceiling below. After getting a plumber out (luckily on a maintenance contract, so no callout), it turns out the pipes are fine, but there are cracks in the grout that the water was getting through. One week later, the same friend is round. Scared to use the shower, she uses a bath... and water started coming through the ceiling below. Rapid ripping of the front off the bath showed that the water was coming from the control for the bath plug, which had come loose, allowing water running down the bath side from a showerhead to escape. Arggh. So two lessons. One, avoid plumbing if at all possible. Wash in a river. Two, if you want your plumbing tested, we can recommend someone to come ro...

On my Organizing A Murder website I have various types of murder mystery party kits. A particular favourite are the downloadable party kits . They have the big advantage of immediacy for a last minute event, and you can print out the instructions, clues and the like as and how you want. You might not have a glossy box or a DVD of third rate actors giving hints, but there's a lot to be said for the medium. What's more you can be much more flexible. Boxed sets pretty well always force you to have an 8 person party - the downloadable kits allow for anything between 6 and 33 players, depending on the game. (Not to mention the Organizing a Murder book of 12 events that can have any number of players.) But all good things have their downside. Cream cakes bring podginess. Alcohol makes you unhealthy. And selling via the internet puts your business in the hands of an internet hosting company. The people who make most of the downloadable games I sell had their server go down last we...

Due to one of those random, pleasantly serendipitous moments of web browing afforded by the Google Reader's facility that shows you more items you might be interested in, I yesterday came across the excellent cartoon below on climate change. I really don't want to say anything else - the cartoon says it all for me. See more comics from Calamities of Nature

Here we go with another element. My latest addition to the Royal Society of Chemistry 's series of podcasts Chemistry in its Element is live and it's all about Neptunium, element 93. We’re so familiar with uranium and plutonium that it’s easy to miss that they are named after the seventh and ninth planets of the solar system. (At least, Pluto was the ninth planet until it was stripped of its status in 2006.) Between those planets sits Neptune, and the gap between the two elements leaves a space for their relatively unsung cousin, neptunium – element number 93 in the periodic table. Take a listen , or select it in from the list of my element podcasts below:                                             Powered by Podbean.com                 

I was delighted to get a contact last year from an artist called Cordelia Spalding , who has produced a range of work that was in part inspired by reading A Brief History of Infinity . Cordelia has an exhibition of her Museum of Infinities running from 15th to 20th and 22nd to 27th of February in the Forum at the Millennium Library in Norwich. If you're in that part of the world it's well worth dropping in and taking a look. As an added bonus (I hope), I will be there on Friday 26 February, giving a talk on the Brief History of Infinity in the Fusion space from 12.30pm. It's free of charge - just turn up and enjoy.

You tell me. What are personalized numberplates all about? What are they for? I really don't get it. Once upon a time they were the preserve of celebrities and the local mayor. That I can kind of understand. These are people with a burning need to say 'Look, here I am!' But now they're as unlikely to house a celebrity as is a stretched limo. I can just about understand the people who spell out their name or initials. But there are two classes of personalized plate I don't get. First there's the people who just spell out anything that can be made with a number plate. ST04TOK, for instance, to say 'STOAT OK!' (You have to look at the 4 at a slight angle.) Why would anyone want to say 'stoat ok'? Is this car driven by a stoat? Who knows. Even more bizarre are the personalized plates that refer to the type of car - Jaguar XKR owners seem particularly prone to having numberplates with XKR in them. Why? The car doesn't care. It isn't a pe...

As someone who has written about infinity (and good fun it is too), I quite often pick up on big numbers. Regular commenter on this blog Ian Campbell kindly pointed out to me a piece on the BBC news site about the number pi being determined to 2.7 trillion digits . Many people will be wondering, 'what's the point?' The news article gives an excuse, but really this is justification after the fact. You might as well say that you can justify trainspotting because it provides useful statistics on train movements. Calculating pi to n digits is the trainspotting of the mathematical world. It's not particularly clever - anyone can do it given a simple algorithm and enough time - and it has no great value. It's just something to tick off. However, I don't want to put down Fabrice Bellard. There is no doubt it's an achievement. Why should everything in science and maths have a use? What's the use of a poem or a painting? Let him get on with it, I say. And g...

Now Appearing is snowed in. We will be back when we can dig ourselves out.

I was walking past a row of houses yesterday which, unusually, were numbered sequentially, because there was no 'other side of the street.' This made it blatantly obvious that the numbering went 11,12,14,15... there was no number 13. I gather this is fairly common now, but I'm not sure why. The house I lived in until age 11 was number 13 (Birch Road, to be precise) and a good time was had by all. As far as I'm aware it is still there and hasn't been struck by lightning. If superstition really is so important to house buyers, I'm surprised builders get away with the gap. The composer Gustav Mahler famously didn't have a symphony labelled number 9 as he thought this was doomed to be his last symphony - so he went from the eighth to the tenth (admittedly via a piece that had the word 'symphonie' in its title)... and promptly died before he could finish it. There's a distinct suspicion that house number 14 is really number 13 when 13 is missing. ...

There has been a lot of fuss in the press about 'Climategate' - the leaking of a large number of emails from the University of East Anglia . Those who dispute manmade climate change claim these emails show that UoEA has been covering up results that show that there's no such thing as climate change. This is rubbish. The emails made no suggestion that there wasn't manmade climate change. All they showed was an enthusiasm to shoot down opposing papers - normal academic fare - and a reluctance to give out data to all and sundry as a result of repeated Freedom of Information requests. My initial response to the latter was some sympathy for the UoEA people. When you are trying to get on with a job, it must be irritating to have repeated FoI requests, requiring time and effort to fulfil. However, there is an underlying issue. Science progresses by sharing data. It's never enough for one source to say they've seen a result - it needs be verified and repeated else...

We just took Goldie for a walk round a nearby lake (Mouldon Hill, for Swindonists), which was looking rather glorious with blue skies and a thin dusting of snow. The lake itself was particularly appealing - frozen over with a white snowcoat on top. There were a couple of swans attempting ice skating, but looking more like geriatrics in ill-fitting shoes as they eased their way across the ice. But no ducks. Not a duck in sight. I can only assume they're either frozen in or (more likely) sheltering in the bushes. A shame really. After the ice skating swans I would have enjoyed seeing a snowboarding duck.