There's a certain brand of journalism that consists of taking a press release from a company, jazzing it up a bit and using it as an article. It happens a lot, because it's very easy to do. I like to think I'm not susceptible to it, but one company that seems uniquely capable of pushing my 'Ooh, that looks interesting' button is Electrolux. It's bizarre when you think about it, because it's not a brand I would associate with innovation - yet they keep coming up with these press campaigns on innovative subjects. We've already had the (totally unfeasible, but joyful) kitchen appliances of 2099 and the 2050 hi-tech cooking surface . Now there's something very much of today - vacuum cleaners made from sea debris. The idea is simple. According to QI (ahem), the biggest rubbish dump in the world is in the ocean - there is currently a vast amount of plastic debris sloshing about in our seas. Electrolux is planning to harvest plastic from six ocean locati...

Last week I was watching an old QI . (Yes, again. I do other things as well, honestly.) One of the topics covered was Jack Johnson an American boxer from the olden days who was famous for hitting someone, or whatever it is that boxers get famous for. My main interest at the time was 'That name rings a bell,' but I put it to one side. About 20 minutes later I had to drive off to ferry someone around in standard parental fashion. Radio 4 came on. And they were talking about... Jack Johnson. Spooky! Well, that's the conclusion that fake mystics would like us to draw. In fact this is a lovely example of what's clumsily referred to as 'confirmation bias.' The point is that every day there are thousands of things you register mentally that don't have a match for something else. We don't notice these. It's just the very occasional one where there's a coincidental second event that stands out and gets us excited. Those who want to deceive us about t...

This post is part of a response to an article by Simon Jenkins in the Guardian on Thursday. This follows a string of comment columns from Jenkins attacking science. Technically speaking, this should be a spoof article attacking science in the style of Jenkins, but while it parallels some aspects of Jenkins' column, it didn't turn out that way. You can see more details of the response here . All over London there are "mammoths of tripe." Costing hundreds of millions of pounds, these are "newspaper offices" whose editors pay large sums of money to "interesting" and "cutting edge" columnists. Ask not the value of the tripe these individuals pour out. The columnists jeers at the idea of value. These are outpourings of bile that are justified by the writer's faith rather than any appeal to reason. No one does it better than self-professed mathematics expert (" I studied advanced maths to 16 ") Simon Jenkins. Week after week ...

I'm a great fan of QI , but there are some subjects their question writers (and Stephen Fry) just don't get - one of which is probability. I was watching an old edition on Dave last night (as you do when there's nothing else on) and this question came up (approximately: I'm relating it from memory): If you toss a coin what is the chance of getting heads? Someone answered 50:50 and off went that irritating klaxon. No, said Stephen Fry. When a human being tosses a coin, the face that is up when you toss it has a slightly better chance of winning. If the head's up, it's 51:49. Yes, but it their aim to be clever, they have totally missed the point. They didn't ask If you toss a coin in the heads up position what is the chance of getting heads? Because of the way they asked the question there's a 50% chance you started heads up and a 50% chance you started tails up. So there's a 50% chance of it being 51:49 and a 50% chance of it being 49:51. En...

It's easy to come up with a knee-jerk reaction that labels information you don't like as a 'stereotype' hence dismissable. But can something that is factually accurate be a stereotype? According to my trusty dictionary, a stereotype is 'A preconceived and oversimplified idea of the characteristics which typify a person, situation, etc.'. Although it is not explicit, I would suggest 'preconceived and oversimplified' implies being factually inaccurate. As soon as we accuse someone of assuming a stereotype to be true, the suggestion is that they aren't reporting facts but rather some biassed idea that doesn't reflect reality. I was fascinated, therefore to see this assertion on the Geek Feminism blog : It looks like a visit to Fermilab has no impact on boys’ gender stereotypes about scientists, but it has a strong impact on challenging girls’ gender stereotypes about scientists. For girls, there was a 58% increase in female scientist repres...

Ever since my time at British Airways I have been very interested in customer service. I even wrote a rather nice book about it . A lot of customer service can be trained, but I've always wondered how much a company's nature comes through in the way its employees treat the public. Sometimes this seems to be true. If you take supermarkets, I've always found Tesco customer service rather cold and couldn't-care. This is typified by an experience when I once found a bank note on the floor in a Tesco store. I took it to the customer service desk, and the attitude was basically 'Why didn't you keep it? You are wasting my time because I now have to deal with this.' Sainsbury's, by comparison, while brisk, tends to be rather better. I once went to the customer service desk there because I had left a washing powder box on the rack under a trolley and forgot to pay for it. When I voluntarily took it back, they were effusive about how good it was of me. Howev...

I'm a big fan of Douglas Adams' work, though I don't believe he ever quite achieved the same manic wonder with his books that he did with the original Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio scripts. I am less certain, though, about his obsession with Apple computers as it gave his ideas on technology a gloss where style was more important than substance. Specifically in one of his books (I think one of the Dirk Gently books, but I can't be bothered to check), one of his main (if dead) characters is an entrepreneur who makes his money out of add-on software for spreadsheets that turns the financial data into music. Somehow you can spot bad company results by discords or some such guff. You really have to be blinded by the technology to really imagine accountants responding well to a package that only runs on Apple and that turns your finances into electropop or Stockhausen. The reason I bring this up is a BBC report (genuine, unlike my news from the USND at Hoo...

From the BBC Science Correspondent Scientists at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople announced today that they have discovered a relationship between a relatively unusual form of the gene Pax2t and the urge to be an author. In a state-wide trial it was established that a variant of this so far unremarkable gene makes it impossible for an individual not to write. The gene is also responsible for our tendency to 'nest build' which has led to the suggestion that for authors, books are in a very real way their children. It is hoped that with further research it will be possible to develop drugs to target the gene and correct the mutation. Okay, you guessed, it's not true. The university so far best known for its discovery of P.D.Q. Bach has not come up with a 'writer's gene', though it's interesting to speculate whether the urge to write is a mutation that really ought to be corrected. What does appear to be the case is that many writers are ...

My parents always took a newspaper. When I was young it was the Manchester Guardian, for instance, though their reading matter drifted more right wing with old age. It was absolutely assumed when I was at school that one would take a paper - there was even discussion about the merits of different rags as a part of setting us up for life. But I never have. Don't get me wrong, I buy newspapers, but on an ad-hoc basis. If I've got a bit of time to spare, as a treat. Actual news I get from the TV and the interweb. In fact I think it's time we examined just what news is , and how best to get it. Just as it's being suggested that banks are split into two parts - the high street, basic banking functions and the speculative, risky actions, perhaps it's time we more explicitly divided our consumption of news. Part of it is reporting on what's happened (or in the case of Radio 4's Today Programme , speculating about what will happen later today). Part is opinion. ...

Until I went to work in the British Airways OR ( Operational Research ) department, my use of keyboards was pretty limited, but once there I was spending all day programming various models. I was never formally taught to touch-type, but I just picked it up by habit. It's one of those strange abilities, because if you ask me where an X is on the keyboard, I couldn't tell you. But if I have to type 'X' I can do it without looking. And that's just as well - because my keyboard is showing distinct signs of heavy usage. Specifically, quite a lot of the letters are starting to wear off. Because I do touch type, it's not a problem for me - but it's quite amusing when someone asks to borrow my computer. First they are thrown by the ergonomic keyboard, where two parts are split into separate blocks, at an angle to each other with a biggish gap in between. I began using these about 10 years ago, when I started to suffer from wrist pains after typing and find the...

Freedom is a funny thing. We all like to be free to do what we want, but it usually comes with the rider 'provided it doesn't harm/distress/etc other people.' Possibly even 'As long as it doesn't scare the horses.' The classic example is the smoking ban in public buildings. Some smokers still moan about this, but the fact is it was foul for the non-smoking majority who had to suffer smoke-filled pubs, restaurants and the like. I don't care how much people moan about how it was better in the good old days - it wasn't. They wanted to do what they liked in public, and it caused the rest of us discomfort, distress and quite possibly harm. The smoking ban is not, as some have suggested, the nanny state, it is a matter of freedom - freedom for the non-smoking majority to go to a pub or restaurant without an accompanying smog and stink. I was drawn to an interesting parallel listening to whinging buskers on the radio yesterday. They were saying how terrib...

The periodic table is large and rich, but most of us are a touch hazy about the newest elements, the heavy substances that sit at the far end of the table and have only been around, in the case of darmstadtium, since 1994. But even after 1994, element 110 wasn't darmstadtium, it was ununnilium. Confused? Time to find out more in my latest addition to the Royal Society of Chemistry 's series of podcasts Chemistry in its Element .   Take a listen , or select darmstadtium from the list of my element podcasts below:                                             Powered by Podbean.com               

One of my favourite treats is having a meal out, and every few months I treat myself to a cooked breakfast. Today I had an hour to spare while one of the daughters was in an exam, and it's wasn't worth driving all the way home, so I popped into The Pantry coffee shop in Swindon's Old Town, were the breakfast illustrated comes in at under a fiver, which isn't bad. While eating breakfast it struck me that there are a number of ways that food snobbery in some establishments (often posh hotels) ruins this great British tradition. They are as follows: No beans - baked beans are an essential component of the full English, but often omitted in smart establishments becuase beans are what common oiks eat. They provide essential contrast and help to cut through the excessive meat content that is otherwise at the heart of the breakfast. No potatoes - I'm afraid The Pantry, as you can see, let me down here. Potatoes make or break the full English. I can understand why pos...

As I've observed previously, I've been involved in music in my spare time as long as I can remember. My particular favourite genre is Tudor and Elizabethan church music - rather specialist, I admit - though I'll happily sing (and have sung) practically anything. I also conduct a village choir, and it's indirectly from this that my concern arises. The choir is affiliated to an organization called the Royal School of Church Music , which sounds very grand (and sometimes considers itself to be very grand), but is really just a practical support group for choirs performing church music. Every quarter, the RSCM produces the imaginatively titled Church Music Quarterly . In the most recent issue it was suggested we should all investigate church music from different cultures, which is fair enough in principle. But one of the articles went further and told us that every service ought to involve a piece from another culture, preferably involving singing a language we don'...

In truth, the headline is inaccurate in practically every way. I am not an iPhone app. And strictly speaking one of my books (which is what I meant) isn't an app either, it's an ebook that is bundled with an ebook reader as an app. But the result is much the same - the fact is that US folk can get a copy of Before the Big Bang for their iPhones, iPads or iPod Touches ( you can see it here )... and I am very jealous. Because I can't. The problem is the intensely messy tangle that is the way book rights work. Before the Big Bang is published by the superb St Martin's Press in New York. They have world rights, so can sell it wherever they like. But US publishers don't usually sell into UK bookshops, because the traditional approach was to sell subrights to a UK publisher who brings out another version. When this doesn't happen, as is the case with B4tBB , Amazon sensibly sells the US version in the UK. So Amazon.co.uk is doing a roaring trade in the book, othe...

Moan disclaimer: it has been commented in the past that I moan a lot on this blog. Let it be noted that I am blogging about this topic specifically because I was asked to by my friend Helen, not because I intended to. There are bits of BBC's Radio 4 of which I am very fond. But there are certain programmes that I switch away from as fast as the radio's buttons allow - and one of these is Desert Island Discs . For those not familiar with it, a famous person (the 'castaway') is supposed to be washed up on a desert island with a solar powered music machine, a handful of records, a book and a luxury. Their choices are weaved into a discussion of their life and work, with snippets played from the records. In one sense, my aversion is pure gut. I hear that awful theme tune (see below) and I just want to run and hide. There's no logic to that, simple knee-jerk reaction. If I try to analyse the dislike, in part it's that the format is so dated. It was started in an ...

I was listening to an analysis of BP 's rising problems of anti-British antagonism in the US over the oil spill yesterday, and couldn't believe what I heard. In hindsight, said a commentator, putting (British) chief executive Tony Hayward in the US media was a mistake. They would have been better to have used an American executive to be the voice of BP. There were lessons to learn. This is a terrible excuse. It's a bit like saying after spending millions developing a perpetual motion machine , 'We should have learned the lessons of thermodynamics.' It's not news, guys, it's basic stuff. You should have known already. Have these people never watched an American movie? Generally speaking, if a man has a British accent, he's a baddy. (Women are allowed to have British accents and not be bad - this is apparently less threatening.) US culture hammers home time and again that you can't trust the British guy. Even the way they speak isn't right -...

It comes as a surprise to many people that the UK has a Space Agency - but perhaps even more of a shock is where the British version of NASA is based - in sunny Swindon. Yes, it here that you find the headquarters of the UK Space Agency . I went along there a couple of days ago with Mark O'Donnell of the BBC in our several week mission to boldly go where science and technology have had an impact in Wiltshire. After the likes of Porton Down, the Science Museum Library and Dyson I expected a rather dull trip. In the end, the Swindon centre is an administrative hub - there's no mission control or satellite building going on here. But in practice it was an engaging visit with a number of individuals for whom science and space are clearly a passion. We interviewed three of the staff, including Dr David Williams, the acting chief executive, who is anything but your average stuffed shirt administrator. Part of the joy of the visit was the richness of the projects involved. There...

I ought to start straight away by saying that the vast majority of teachers are great, and that this isn't knocking the teaching profession in any way. But I want to tell you a little story about me and history. At secondary school, I loved history. I was a leading member of the History Society for the lower half of the school. I lapped it up. And yet the last history test I did, I got 18%. They wouldn't let me near a history O-level. Now I admit, in part, this is because I was bad at memorising lots of information. This is why I loved physics O-level so much. I condensed down everything I needed to remember for this on half a sheet of quarto paper. (We hadn't got A4 back then.) Everything else I could deduce. But history wasn't like that. (There's still too much memory in the subject as taught, I'd suggest, today.) However I put my total incompetence at history down to a single teacher we suffered. He was a lovely man, dedicated to the school. In fact he ...

I'm all in favour of sanitation and hygiene. But I think there is good evidence that an obsession with cleanliness is pyschologically worrying - and that if we want children to develop reasonable natural defences, they do have to be exposed to a bit of dirt now and again. The latest weapon in the fight against dirt is a system from Dettol which provides a handwash dispenser where you don't have to touch the device to have the soap dispensed. From the manufacturers point of view it's a no-brainer. This is a way to get people to pay more for their soap, and to lock them into buying Dettol rather than cheaper supermarket own brand. (The dispenser itself is quite cheap at £9.99*, but the handwash is £2.69 per 250ml - which is decidedly expensive and where they'll make their money.) In their advertising, Dettol claims this is a great step forward, because the plunger of a traditional handwash dispenser harbours bacteria, so when you press it you get bacteria on your fing...

Now, listen and attend, for this is an important lesson. Once upon a time there was something called a PDA , a TLA (three letter acronym) for the rather pompous 'Personal Digital Assistant.' It was, in essence, an electronic Filofax . Somewhere to keep your diary, address book, notes and the like. As in reality it was a pocket computer (as sung of by Blondie ), it could also do snazzy things like display photos (though not take them), play music, record a voice and, with suitable add-on hardware, provide satellite navigation. Now the PDA is no more, thanks to the smart phone. A Blackberry, an iPhone, or one of the alternatives does pretty well everything a PDA could, some things it couldn't (take pictures, make phone calls) and often has hardware built in for GPS and more. Why would you possibly want a PDA? Okay, it was a little bit better at some of its functions because the screen might have been a bit bigger. But you wanted a phone as well, so why carry two bits of har...

Every now and then I happen to be in the car at the right time and catch one of the BBC's History of the World in 100 Objects series. It's very good - informative and entertaining, but it irritates me that the title is almost entirely incorrect. It's not a history of the world and though it is about 100 objects, it's a misleading label. I have a personal reason for complaining. They're doing this on local radio too, and I took a local object with real interest for history in a while ago - a lovely pair of ammonites from my previous garden (shown here), found in the chalk. The BBC lot thought they were wonderful, but I wasn't allowed to include them in the local set of objects. Why? Because they weren't man made. Okay, BBC, now listen very carefully. The vast majority of the history of the world has not involved human beings. And the vast majority of objects are not manmade. What you are actually doing is The History of Humanity in 100 Artefacts . That...

My friend Marcus Chown has an excellent popular science book by the name of We Need to Talk about Kelvin . But this isn't the Kelvin I had in mind. I mean Kelvin MacKenzie, former editor of the Sun 'newspaper'. This particular Kelvin was on last night's BBC Question Time to balance out Matthew Parris (nasty journo/nice journo) - don't you just love BBC balance? At one point they were discussing the Israeli attack on the aid convoy on the high seas. Our Kelvin pointed out that if he were on a British street and someone attacked him with an iron bar, then if he had a gun, he would shoot the attacker, just as the Israeli soldiers did. They were entirely in the right, he suggested. I can't understand why no one pointed out that his analogy was flawed. Try this. If he were sitting in his open topped car and a gunman from another country dropped down into the car from a helicopter, then he would have defended himself with an iron bar if he had one. That seems ...

What can you say about an element like nobelium, number 102 in the periodic table? Neither use nor ornament? Well, probably. But you can have great fun with the name. How did it get it? The story is tangled. How do you pronounce it? Even the Royal Society of Chemistry had an argument before choosing between no bell ium and no beel ium. Time to find out more in my latest addition to the Royal Society of Chemistry 's series of podcasts Chemistry in its Element .    Take a listen , or select it from the list of my element podcasts below:                                              Powered by Podbean.com                

I had a very enjoyable evening last night, speaking at the Wiltshire Words event in the library at Corsham. The idea of the event is to bring various authors, many with Wiltshire connections, along to local libraries for different events. I think this is great - it's a shame more libraries don't do this kind of evening. One of the things that was particularly enjoyable was that it was quite cosy. There was tea and cake, and we were in a compact enough space for the discussion at the end (I was covering Ecologic , which always evokes a fair amount of discussion) to be very much among the whole group, rather than just Q&A. They've had a great collection of authors along and there's still a chance to catch some if you're in the Wiltshire area. Highlights coming up include a creative writing workshop at Devizes tonight (2 June), Piers Bizony on Space Tourism (tonight in Warminster) a Roald Dahl party at Bradford on Avon tomorrow afternoon, David Aaronovitch on c...

I have to confess Derren Brown has gone up in my estimation. Just based on his shows, I thought this stage magician/mentalist was rather a pain, but his recent series investigating various paranormal claims have shown him to be an effective sceptic and (apparently) quite a nice guy. Two interesting points came out of his recent piece on ghost hunting. One was a shocking statistic. Apparently nearly 50% of the population believes in ghosts. That doesn't surprise me, it's about what I would have guessed. But was does it that it seems this has quadrupled since the 1950s. Now that is worrying. The other was when Brown was dealing with an American ghost hunter (or demonologist as he classed himself). I was fascinated by the way Buffy style fiction seems to have taken over people's lives. It's fiction folks! We had a house with demon possession, where the owner was certainly seeing things. But it was also a house with a picture of a demon on the mailbox and the word HATE...