In my previous post I looked at why I don't like the way organic food makes dubious claims for its products. In this I want to uncover the way its rules are based more on magic than sense. There is no doubt that organics had a flaky origin, based more on mysticism than any real understanding of agriculture. In itself this isn't disastrous. Medicine's history is also flaky, based more on mysticism than any real understanding of how the body works, and we've shaken that off (mostly). But organics has kept too much of its mystical past, buried in the rules and regulations that organic farmers have to follow. Here are four examples. The EU tried to ban the fungicide copper sulphate, which is known to be more environmentally damaging than many alternatives. The ban was postponed because of lobbying by organic groups – they like copper sulphate because it’s traditional . All too often organic standards are not about what's best, but about what we've always don...

CAM - complementary and alternative medicine - is taking quite a battering at the moment. The forces of rationality have seen a UK parliament committee recommend that we don't waste NHS money on homeopathy , while the chiropracters have seen their attempt to use libel law to suppress criticism by Simon Singh collapse . At the same time, Prince Charles' foundation to try to impose alternative medicine on the health service is in trouble . So perhaps this isn't the best time to liken organic food to complementary and alternative medicine. But I think it's something we ought to do. This isn't a direct comparison. Organic food is usually good food, where CAM is not good medicine. But the organic movement uses many of the approaches of the alternative bunch, to its detriment. In this post and the next I want to look at two ways organics parallels CAM - in the second I will be looking at the way it depends on magic rather than science. In this first post, I want to l...

Way back in November I pointed out that my home town of Swindon was rolling out free public WiFi across the borough, which I thought was rather neat. It meant I had to speak up against those who were convinced they would not be able to go out of the house without it frying their brains - but it seemed really handy. Not only would it be a benefit when you're out and about in Swindon, it should also help areas that don't have cable and have very poor internet connections through the telephone network. Since then I hadn't heard anything more - but revelations were to start rolling when I attended a Swindon version of Question Time for candidates for the two parliamentary seats. It seems there have been big delays in rolling out the access. And worse, the Conservative-led council seems to have got itself in a real mess. Going against any common sense, they apparently awarded the contract for what was a major undertaking to a small, new company - and even loaned the compan...

Why won't you find me in any of the world's 50 best restaurants? Because I'm too tight. But that apart, when I heard on the radio this morning that the 2010 'World's 50 best restaurants' award winner had been announced, I couldn't help think 'SO WHAT?' Yes, I thought it in capitals. (The awards' website is here , but seems a bit flaky - there's a little bit about it from the BBC here .) Part of the problem I have with this award is that the chances are high I will never experience anything in the list. I certainly won't find myself at the #1 restaurant, Noma in Copenhagen , and I'm highly unlikely ever to cross the threshold of Britain's top spot, which is Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck at Bray coming in at a respectable #3. Compare this with an awards ceremony that's faintly interesting like the Oscars or one of the book prizes. It's highly likely that I will experience at least some of the contenders there. That...

I apologise if you've come to this post expecting to see those 50 ways listed out - you won't, but read on, you will still find it worthwhile. I've been sent for review a copy of the book, 50 Ways to Make Google love your Website (see at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com ). It's an intriguing prospect. Google remains the dominant force for driving business to a website. I've just taken a quick look on the stats of where visitors to this blog came from and out of the top 20 sources, sixteen are Google searches. (The others were one Bing search (go Microsoft!), my website , my Twitter feed and someone else's site - thanks for the link!) Most of us know that Google uses a complex algorithm for deciding how to rank pages in its search results, and we all want to get higher in that listing, because we know that if you aren't in the top few, chances are you won't get clicked on. (I'm pleased to say I'm winning the "brian clegg" search at t...

It's not long since I last mentioned feng shui , but it's pure coincidence that it has come up twice in my general attempt to stress the rational over the irrational - consider it a cluster . As before, it has become a topic because it has intruded into my life without me asking, in this case in the form of the advert from Facebook pictured on the right. I have to confess, the advertising on Facebook can be particularly pathetic. It tries hard to make use of information gleaned from your profile, but does so in such a hamfisted way that it make you chuckle, rather than rush to click through. So you (or rather I, because you aren't so ancient) will get an advert saying, SPECIAL OFFER FOR 54-YEAR-OLD PEOPLE! Yeah, right. And there isn't a bit of code that reads something like 'Print SPECIAL OFFER FOR {Field: age}-YEAR-OLD PEOPLE!' Any road up, this morning up popped the offending ad you see here and it set off a small burst off fireworks in my brain (not a goo...

There are times I love my job - never more so than yesterday, when I was doing some work for my next book but one, on the subject of time machines. I was thinking specifically about travelling into the future. (One thing all fictional time machines get wrong is that the mechanism for going forwards and backwards is identical. In a real time machine you need to use totally different approaches to go forwards and backwards.) In principle travelling forwards in time is a piece of cake. Everyone can do it. I've managed to travel over 50 years into the future. A day at a time. Unfortunately, unless you also discover a means to totally stop ageing, this isn't a helpful way to return to the future if you've zipped back a couple of hundred years into the past, let alone get to the year 800,000 as the movie poster promises. The rate of a second per second is just too slow. It may be possible to use biological means - effectively to sleep through the time - but this has lots of p...

Well, it has been sunny here for several days in a row now, so any time soon we can expect a hosepipe ban. The idea of a water shortage is crazy when you think about it. Looked at from space, the defining feature of the Earth, when compared with the other planets in our solar system, is water. Our world is blue with the stuff. In round figures there are 1.4 billion cubic kilometres of water on the Earth. This is such a huge amount, it’s difficult to get your head around. A single cubic kilometre (think of it, a cube of water, each side a kilometre long) is 1,000,000,000,000 litres of water. Divide the amount of water in the world by the number of people and we end up with 0.2 cubic kilometres of water each. More precisely, 212,100,000,000 litres for everyone. If you stack that up in litre containers, the pile would be around 10 million kilometres high. With a reasonable consumption of 5 litres per person per day, the water in the world there shouldn't be a shortage for 116,219,...

Brain training improves your ability... to do brain training. There has been a huge market for software that aims to claims to improve our cognitive ability by 'training' the brain to be more effective. Apparently Dr Something-or-other's Brain Trainy Thing (I may not have got the title quite right) is the most popular game on the Nintendo DS in the UK. I have always found something slightly sinister about this kind of software. First there's the pseudo-medical/scientific implication of it being Dr Something-or-other's. The only products I'm used to being labelled Doctor Something's are quack medicine, sandals and bovver boots. Then there's the idea that by doing some basic maths and a few puzzles you can somehow train your brain. To be fair, going on the research recently carried out , it does train your brain - but only to do this particular application. It makes you better at playing this game. The 'training' isn't transferable to othe...

Yesterday I visited the future, sort of. I gave a talk at Nottingham Science City . When I first heard about this it brought to mind something out of a futuristic movie of the 20's or 30's - perhaps Metropolis or Things to Come (as in the picture). But the reality is rather different. Apparently there are six cities in the UK that were designated ' science cities ' in 2005 - Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and York. It's a little difficult to pin down just what having the status of a science city implies. I assume it involves giving them some funding to perform the kind of roles the group engages in - nuturing the city's role in science, stimulating interest in science and converting scientific innovation into business. They have been having a series of talks on the science of mitigating climate change, and I was there with my Ecologic hat on to impart some words of wisdom on greenwash and other potential problems in the way of dealin...

I love fantasy books - but I'm not very fond of those tomes set in strange worlds inhabited by elves, dwarves and orcs. (Depite my wording, I make an exception for The Lord of the Rings , which is unique.) What I really love is fantasy set in the real world - where something isn't quite right. It can develop into wholesale mayhem, including many of those elements of swords and sorcery, but it's strongly anchored in the world as we know it. For me, this makes the story much more exciting. You might think the master of this kind of writing is Neil Gaiman - and he is my second favourite writer in the genre. But there's one man who is Obi Wan to Gaiman's Skywalker. That's Gene Wolfe . If I'm honest, I'm not a fan of all his books. He writes books set on other worlds, like the hugely popular Book of the New Sun series, which really don't interest me. But his short stories are great - and when he does a real world fantasy, it is absolutely stunning...

We had a little expedition last night to Windsor to see Fascinating Aïda , and as ever they were brilliant. It must be getting on for 20 years since we first saw this unique singing group, and the experience gets funnier every time. It's rather hard to describe their style, but if you imagine a cross between Tom Lehrer and Victoria Wood, but more musically adept and ruder, you'd be getting fairly close. Rather than go on and on about what was in it, I've a couple of clips from YouTube of songs they did last night - the only problem is that this is with an earlier soprano (the other two are the same), and the new one is significantly better. That makes little difference in this first number, however, as the soprano is definitely not the star. I can't show you my favourite part of last night's show, which was a supposed middle European (Romanian?) song cycle, rendered with all the seriousness of such arty music, but on topics like Heather Mills and Polish plumbe...

Apologies to non-UK readers - this is a bit of a domestic topic. We've had a couple of days to ponder the leaders' debate, which by general acclaim was 'won' by Nick Clegg for the Liberal Democrats . He certainly came across better than either of the others, especially in his acceptance that we need to do more than fiddle around with imaginary efficiency savings to get out of the financial mess we're in. He also, I think, came across as more genuine - which shouldn't matter, but does in this media-driven world. As a result of this, a number of people may be thinking of voting Liberal Democrat - and if you are, please do. I think it's an excellent idea. But if you mention this, you will immediately get supporters of other parties muttering about a wasted vote, and how you should vote tactically to keep the worse of the other two parties out, rather than support the Lib Dems who can't possibly win. This is rubbish. Not that they can't possibly win ...

In my youth we used to dig out the old 78 records that were once my grandparents and play them with fascination. A particular favourite was Frank Crumit, whose humorous songs seemed hilarious to a five-year-old. I think he sang My Grandfather's Clock and one about a fish that swam (and it swam) right over the dam. But one song became embedded in family sayings. (Will this happen with Coldplay? I can't see it, somehow.) The song in question is the Pig Song . The main character is drunk, and slips into a gutter, where he is soon joined by a pig. (Funnily, I remember a line about 'not a mutter did he utter, as he slipped into the gutter' which doesn't seem to exist.) The classic lines from this, much repeated through my growing up, said by a passing lady of our man in the gutter with the pig are: "You can tell a man that boozes by the company he chooses,"  Then the pig got up and slowly walked away. They are words that became a sort of mantra, wheneve...

Just occasionally I do a post that is moaning about publishers. Now don't get me wrong, I love 'em. They're great people, and they pay the bills. But as a business, publishing is positively stone age. I've mentioned before how incredibly slow their accounting systems are. But there's another problem. The reports you receive from a publisher on your books are absolutely rubbish. They don't tell you what you want to know. Take the absolute core piece of information. How many copies of your book have sold. Guess what? They don't tell you this. All they tell you is the net outgoing of books in the last six months. First it's not the number of books that have gone out in that period, it's the number minus any returns. Second there's no running total. The only way to figure out how many you have sold is to add up the numbers off all the separate royalty statements. If you have had a book out several years, this is a real chore. The first thing a n...

Whether you love scientists or loathe them (as a science writer, I admit to a certain fondness) - or even if you are a scientist - you have to admit that they have a tendency to take themselves too seriously . On this first National Wind-up-a-scientist Day, I think we all have a duty to find some little way to tease a boffin. This isn't cruelty. No scientists will be hurt in the making of this day. The idea, rather, as we were always told at school, is that if someone takes themselves too seriously, the best thing to do is apply a little humour. It does the trick every time - and they'll thank you for it when they realize that this makes them seem more human to the rest of us. So what can you do? The opportunities are vast. Consider for instance: Telling a scientist their biggest rival has had a break through Moan about what a waste of money the Large Hadron Collider is Ask them if they've heard that the government is now requiring all biology courses at university t...

We quite often get certain newspapers slagging off scientists for changing their minds, or for daring to get things wrong. At the same time, those who dislike the theory of evolution criticize it because it's 'only a theory.' After all, surely science is about discovering absolute truths? I'm not sure how we do it, but we really need to redress the balance on just what science is. I think part of the problem is our tendency to use terms like 'natural laws' or to make statements about scientific ideas like the Big Bang as if they were proven fact. Although he is disliked by many modern philosophers of science, there is a lot to be said for the views of Karl Popper . He typified the scientific method as being one of falsification. He argued we can never prove a scientific theory right, but we can prove one wrong - so a lot of science should be about chipping away at theories, looking for flaws. If we are honest and grown up about it, science is a best guess ...

In response to a tweet from the inestimable Marcus Chown (the power of Twitter!), I've recently read Philip Pullman's new book The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ . It's rather a fancy little hardback with gold lettering and one of those dinky little ribbons to keep your place as you read, though in practice it's short enough to get through in one go. The premise is simple - it's a retelling of the story of Jesus. The central conceit is that Jesus was in fact twins, the saintly Jesus and the more worrying and pragmatic Christ. It's Jesus we read about in the Bible - Christ was there in the background, changing the story where necessary to ensure it turns out the way he wants, which is to fulfil his vision of a church that will carry the message of Jesus into the future. To make this happen, Christ is prepared to make things up and manipulate events to reinforce the message. So far, so good. That central concept of Jesus being a twin isn't quit...

There are some things about life that definitely change as we get older - and I've just discovered one that's really rather taken me by surprise. One of my daughters had watched the movie Paranormal Activity . We had the DVD for an extra day, and she said 'Oh, you must watch it! It's really scary.' Now there was a time when this would have been just up my street. I've never liked gory films, but horror films like this, that scare but don't involve people being ripped to pieces, I've always loved. So I was all set for a pleasureably scary evening. But then I thought, 'Hang on, do I really want this?' And when it comes down to it, if it is genuinely scary, what would I be getting out of it? The thought of being left a terrified wreck by this movie, or wanting to keep the lights on all night (as I admit I did after the Exorcist many years ago) wasn't appealing. So there we have it. I don't want to be scared any more. Dr Who seems t...

Every now and then I like to take a mild pop at what is sometimes described in blogging circles as 'woo'. Not everyone likes this term, but it quite appeals to me. It refers to something based on superstition or bad science that is sort of all... well, 'Woooo!' (To be pronounced in ghost-like manner.) I was saddened, if not totally surprised to hear our local commercial radio station Heart FM talking the other day about Feng Shui as if it were fact, rather than woo. Some local 'expert' had volunteered to sort out one of the presenters' love life by rearranging his bedroom (no, really). There was no real attempt to suggest that this was not a likely method to make anything happen. So I went into Mr Angry mode and sent an email of to Heart. To his credit I got a swift reply from Mark Franklin, the programme controller for Heart Wiltshire. He said: The whole purpose of the piece was not to give [Feng Shui] any validity. The team spoke of Feng Shui a few...

I don't want to be accused of being tight or anything (I'm from Lancashire, not Yorkshire) - but I do like to save money. I've recently acquired something called a Bite card, which if you regularly travel by rail is wonderful. It's free to get, and gives you 20% off at food/drink outlets on UK stations. Okay, you have to buy food and drink - but I nearly always do when I travel by train, and 20% is pretty good, when compared with the kind of interest that's around at the moment. You can sign up for a Bite card here . I ought to say I get no benefit out of mentioning this - I just think they're genuinely handy and wanted to spread the word. It's not perfect - you can't use it, for instance, in the Krispy Kreme shop at Paddington (shame!), but it does cover all the major outlets that you find at most stations.

In my book Ecologic I describe the concept of an ecological bogeyman. This is either something that sounds scary but isn't, or that sounds good but doesn't deliver. It's something where words fool us into thinking something is better or worse than it really is. A classic example is the way advertisers use the word 'natural', which instantly generates warm, cuddly feelings, even though in practice nature is rarely warm or cuddly. A bogeyman that regularly looms up is the word 'biodegradable.' It sounds good and green, so it must be good for the planet, right? And the parent company of New Scientist magazine have fallen right into its trap. The Feedback section of the latest issue explains that New Scientist is wrapped in a biodegradable form of plastic. This will apparently 'degrade when subject to environmental conditions to produce water, carbon dioxide and biomass.' The biomass will probably then degrade further giving off methane. So now, p...

I very much enjoy Jonathan Creek , David Renwick's comedy drama in which designer of magical illusions Jonathan comes up with solutions to seemingly impossible crimes. I mean, it's Alan Davies, how can you not like it? Just occasionally, though, it's irritating because the writer gets it horribly wrong - and that was the case in last night's special, The Judas Tree . One of the mysteries Creek solves is a Victorian puzzle where a man is seemingly murdered without a means. He is told he will die at a certain time. At the appointed hour he is sitting on a deserted lawn in plain sight. He checks his pocket watch - it's the time. And he dies. From the bushes far away, the Egyptian 'witch' who has cursed him screams - she says she saw death arrive. Nothing has touched him, nor has anything he consumed been poisoned. So far, so good. The solution that Creek comes up with is that the man's pocket watch had been pumped full of hydrogen cyanide and sealed. T...

Rant warning: the contents of this post could sound like something produced by UKIP. I wish to make it clear that I do not in any way support or endorse that political party. In fact it gives me the creeps. Once upon a time, the signs for a steep hill on British roads displayed the gradient in a simple, easy-to-understand form. If the hill went up, say, one yard for every three yards forward it said '1 in 3'. Then some bureaucrat came along and decided that it would be a good idea to state the slope as a percentage. So now the sign for (say) a 1 in 10 slope says 10% (I think). That 'I think' is because the percentage-based slope is so unnatural. There are two ways we conventionally measure slopes. Either on X/Y coordiates (as in 1 in 4) or using degrees - say at a 15° angle. We don't measure them in percentages. It's easy to visualize a 1 in 3 slope, or a 30 degree angle. Much less obvious what a 33.333 recurring percent slope is. And what's a 100% slope...

There are times when I despair at the ability of human beings to assume that just because we've done things a certain way for a long time it must be correct. Thanks to Michael Brooks (right) for pointing out a very sad case of an MP who has demonstrated all too well that he shouldn't have anything to do with running the country. The man's name is David Tredinnick (left), who is the Conservative MP for Bosworth in Leicestershire. This was a man whose parliamentary expenses included the purchase of some astrology software. Hmm. According to the Leicester Mercury , Mr Tredinnick had this to say in response to David Brooks (who is standing against Tredinnick as an independent candidate): There is a danger that so-called scientists are so set in their ways that they are unable to consider alternative viewpoints. Systems of healthcare in India and China have linked medicine and astronomy for centuries. Are we really just dismissing their views? It's difficult to kn...