I've been aware of the concept of interns for a long time. It was something American banks, and one or two other corporates, did. They allowed wannabe bankers to be unpaid slaves for a while so the wannabes could gain work experience, and the bank could get unpaid labour to do all the jobs no one else wanted to do. Now, not only are they over here in the UK, but interns seem to be spreading. At least two of the publishers I deal with for the Popular Science website now use interns for communicating to lowly oiks like me. Similarly, when I attended the British Science Fair in Birmingham the other week, we had a couple of people from the lovely Naked Scientists group, a team at Radio Cambridge that record a weekly science show and science podcasts, and who do the recordings for the Royal Society of Chemistry podcasts I sometimes appear on. I thought the dynamic duo at Birmingham looked young and fresh - but then everyone under 97 does these days. But when I later spoke to my u...

I've just been reading an interesting new book called Science 1001 ( See at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com ). The idea of the book is to cover all of science in 1001 easily digestible topics. Some of them are on obvious subjects - like Newton's laws. Others less so. I was particularly struck by the entry on luck. This asks why some people seem to have an endless supply of luck while others are sadly lacking. Apparently Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, has found out that people who rate themselves as lucky are often extroverts, while those who think themselves unlucky are often introverts, whose self-doubt holds them back. It's certainly true that creativity and getting on in life is, to some extent, a Pygmalion effect. If you believe your ideas are rubbish, you won't tell anyone about them, and you won't try to put them into practice. But I have two problems with the theory as presented. Firstly, self-doubt and introversion are...

The Certificate, rather wrinkly now (like its owner) Just occasionally a coincidence happens that really takes you by surprise. Many years ago, while I was doing my MA at Lancaster University, I went round for a coffee to the room of someone I had lived virtually next door to in Rochdale, but hadn't seen since I was 15. It was typical university halls accommodation, livened up a little by a few posters on the wall. One of these posters made me nearly drop my cup of coffee. 'You do realize,' I said, 'you've got my picture on your wall.' He didn't believe me initially, but he had. A year or so before, while a Cambridge undergraduate, I had taken part in a rag stunt that involved raiding a whole series of lectures. We descended on them, held the lecturer up with water pistols, announced we were the British Board of Lecture Censors and collected a 'registration fee' from the students. We then left a rating certificate on the blackboard. The lectur...

Once you have a book published, it's very tempting (if extremely tedious) to keep checking the sales rank on Amazon. Sales rank is a single number that (in theory) ranks your book for number of sales against all other books on the site. So it can go from 1 ('You may soon be a millionaire') to n million ('Don't give up your day job.') You can't read too much into this figure, but clearly every time it bobs down to a significantly lower value, you have made a sale. It really is quite possible to drive yourself mad, checking these numbers. But now there's a website to help drive you even further towards being a raving wreck. Novel Rank monitors the page rank of your book, and converts its movement into sales numbers. It's a little bit fiddly to set up. You have to draw a book to its attention by putting in the Amazon URL for it. You can then pull up a page for that book whenever you like, showing rank, sales and sales history since you added it on Am...

Cardinality: one leg per horseman, but we don't need to know how many The cardinality of which I speak has nothing to do with the Pope's visit to the UK, or even Cardinal Fang from the Spanish Inquisition sketch on Monty Python . No, it's maths, but a truly wondrous aspect of maths. Cardinality is part of set theory. It defines the size of a set. But the clever thing about cardinality is that you don't have to know how big a set is to see if it's the same size as another set. All you have to do is pair off the items in one set with the items in the other. If they have one-to-one correspondence, the sets have the same cardinality. They're the same size. This may sound trivial but it's really quite profound. I first came across this when writing my book on Infinity . It's very useful to be able to do this with an infinite set, because it's a touch tedious counting the contents - but provided you can set up a way to pair off the items in the set...

Just when you thought it was safe to put away your chemistry set, I'm back again with the Royal Society of Chemistry's Chemistry in its Element podcasts. 'But hold on there one cotton pickin' minute,' you say. 'I thought they'd done all the elements?' And you'd be right. The RSC's interactive periodic table now has an entry for every element you might like to hear about (and one or two you wouldn't). But this is series II. Yes, like Arnie in Terminator, we'll back - and this time it's compounds. We're taking no prisoners. I was given carte blanche to pick a compound, any compound, and couldn't resist starting with water. It's kind of useful stuff, after all. So click here to have a listen , or select it from my ever-growing chemistry podcast list below.                                             Powered by Pod...

Further to my recentish celebration of Curved Air , I want to consider another of the great bands of the 1970s who I think haven't had the recognition they deserve - Supertramp. They are probably best known now for their excellent album of straightforward songs, Breakfast in America , but their masterpiece was the concept album Crime of the Century . Of all the output of 70s bands, the thing that most often gets critics' upper lips curling is concept albums. It's strange when you think about it. A concept album is just an album where the songs have a running theme, or storyline. So it is, in comparison to a conventional album what a novel is to a collection of short stories. Or what a symphony is to a suite. Generally speaking, the novel and the symphony tends to be regarded as greater forms in their genre... but not so with concept albums. Now, admittedly, some prog rock bands did get very pretentious with their concept albums. But that doesn't mean the... well, conc...

Lamb's Ears Well, no, a lamb's ears couldn't save the planet alone. But the idea is a nice tag from a press release I received recently. We're not talking gory butchered bits of animal, but a broad leafed plant, known to its fans as Stachys byzantina. You can read the press release in all its glory below, but the basic idea is that you cover the roof of a building (say) with these plants and they can reduce the surrounding air temperature by as much as 1.5 degrees. So, they suggest, if we cover all the buildings in a city, we could reduce the urban heat island effect, a powerful effect that means that temperatures in cities can far exceed those in the surrounding countryside. With my Ecologic hat on, I love the idea, though I would like some more data. This 1.5 degree claim is relative to dry bare soil. But how would a roof of lamb's ears compare, for instance, with a roof covered in reflective foil to send back a fair amount of the sun's rays, reducing the...

Okay it's time to don the grumpy old man suit and make the neighbourhood safe for humanity. Listening to the radio the other day I found myself cringing at something that has always got my back up when talking to primary school teachers about maths. These days if you want to do, say, multiplication, there are a number of different techniques available. The teachers refer to these (often while speaking to baffled parents) as 'strategies.' They may even ask little Johnny 'Which strategy are you going to use, little Johnny?' No, no, no, NO! These are not strategies. The strategy is having a range of different techniques. A strategy is a broad direction, not a specific methodology. The specific approach being employed at any one time is a tactic, or a technique or a method. It is not a strategy. It is not strategic, it is tactical. Why do they do this? We've got perfectly good English words for what they want to say, but they have to distort the meaning of ...

One of the rough illustrations I've knocked up in my time I've got really mixed feelings about illustrations in the kind of books I write. They can help explain something that's difficult to put across in words - but sometimes they feel like the easy way out. And at the same time, they are a pain for the author who usually has to source photos (and pay for them!), or is required to put a line drawing together with his/her limited graphics skills which might be improved on by a professional artist or might even just used as is. However I have recently come across a situation where illustrations can have a painfully negative effect. This was in the Steven Hawking book The Grand Design , which has caused so much fuss because of Hawking's pronouncements that God and philosophy are no longer necessary. The illustrations in this book are beautiful - but I strongly suspect they were put together by an art editor without consulting the authors, because two of them are pla...

As I write, the British Science Festival (run by the organization formerly known as the BA) is still trundling along in Birmingham, ironically due to finish on 19 September, the day the Pope arrives in the city. Last night I took part in one of the most unusual science/writing events I've ever attended. I was a judge, along with fellow writers Sue Guiney and Tania Hershman (the mastermind behind the event) of an open mic session for fiction and poetry inspired by science. It took place in this rather imposing building, The Old Joint Stock, a cavernous pub in the baroque railway station restaurant style. The venue houses a theatre, but we were in a rather cosier function room, tucked away on the first floor. The judges were, to say the least, a little nervous. There had been no choice about the location, away from most of the Festival events, nor about operating without tickets (which gives no clue as to how many will turn up). In the end, a small but very interesting group j...

Invent a better mousetrap, it used to be said and they will beat a path to your door. (Whoever they are.) But what about a better shampoo? I'm not sure. When I worked at British Airways, I had someone called Chris Brown in my team a couple of times. He was (and still is) a great programmer with a laid back attitude. You can tell he was laid back because when we once made a little movie to illustrate the differences between the PC operating systems, with different individuals playing, say, Windows and OS/2 (yes, it was that long ago), Chris played the part of Unix. (And yes, weren't we wacky if geeky folk, for making such a movie? One day I will get it on YouTube, but it's 8mm cine film, so non-trivial.) At one point Chris had quite long hair and made a strong argument that the companies making new shampoo products were doing so for their own benefit, rather than the benefit of their customers. At the time, some brand or other was proudly announcing you could wash your h...

The innocent product with the sinister ad Every now and then someone asks me what I think about online advertising being targetted. (I don't know why they ask me, but they do.) You know the kind of thing. Instead of getting random ads, you are supposed to get ads for products that are more likely to interest you. So I might get book ads, or science-based stuff. I've always said I like the idea, and I do. In principle it should stop me seeing so much irrelevent stuff. But I've had two examples of doing this in a cack-handed fashion that make me wonder whether the technology can live up to the concept. The first is those Facebook ads that are pseudo-targetted. The ones that claim to have a special offer only for people over {YOUR AGE-1}. I'm sorry, those are just pathetic. But the other kind is downright scary. A couple of weeks ago I downloaded a trial copy of a program called iMindMap . I have a page on my creativity website dedicated to creativity software , and...

Why did the parent and child cross the road? I don't know, but I wish they wouldn't at the same time as I am. On the way to our local shopping centre, a mere 5 minute walk from Clegg Towers, I have to cross a dual carriageway road. This is equipped with an effective but rather overwhelming crossing system that demands some concentration, as getting from one side to the other can mean crossing as many as five road segments, each with its own button to press and red/green lights telling you when to walk. Once you get to know the crossings, it's often possible to cross quite smartly, making use of the traffic flows to ensure that various segments are safe to cross. But here's the thing. The little crossing light is often red even when it is totally safe to cross that segment. While one of the set of lights switches to green whenever's it's safe to cross, for some reason the other ones only bother to go green if you've pressed the button - and even then can ...

Image from The Book Depository, Powered by Google Maps Geographical Information Systems have been around for a while. When in Victorian times, Doctor John Snow pinpointed the source of a cholera outbreak in London to the Broad Street pump by marking outbreaks on a detailed map he was using a manual version of such a system. The geographical presentation gives a view on the data that is much richer than simply looking at a table. But such systems are coming of age with the likes of Google Maps making it easy for companies to pump data into a map, providing a visual representation of  that information. As an author, I find a particular fascination in the application set up by the online bookseller The Book Depository . You can watch in near-real time as book sales ping up around the world. (Rather confusingly, after the initial sale they seem to go backwards in time, but hey, no one's perfect.) Who is buying what, and why? See the Compedium of Crochet Techniques followed sw...

When people ask me about statistics they hear on the news, I suggest two questions they ought to bear in mind, and as a result of which they should employ appropriate scepticism. Those questions are: What does that mean? How do they know that? Let me demonstrate. You hear there has been a 100% increase in a particularly nasty crime over the previous year. That's horrendous. The world is unsafe. We'd better legislate. But hang on. What does that mean? 100% of what? It turns out the previous year there was one instance. This year there were two instances. Stand down the national guard. Another example to deploy question 2. I heard recently on the news that exports were up by so many percent over the previous year. How do they know that? I have several activities that count as exports. For instance, one of my main publishers is St Martin's Press in New York. As a result of selling them my books, money flows into the UK. This is an export, even if a physical object doesn...

Stephen Hawking is probably the most famous scientist alive. In the popular mind he has taken on the role of the new Einstein or Newton. Now there is no doubt that Professor Hawking is a good scientist - but there are two big problems with this. One is that if you compare him with those illustrious predecessors, frankly he hasn't changed our understanding of the world a lot. When he was still alive, Richard Feynman could arguably have come close, but Hawking doesn't. Yes, he has done plenty of fine work, but it really isn't comparable. The other big problem is that the media take all his pronouncements and push them out to the world as if they were great wisdom, when in fact, off topic, he often comes up with dramatic statements that frankly wouldn't be worth the time of day were it not for his media status. When the COBE satellite came up with the first images of the Cosmic Microwave Background, the so-called echo of the big bang, Hawking called the results '...

Many newbie authors think that once they've got a contract with a real publisher, they can just sit back and wait for their book to become a bestseller. Only it's not quite as simple as that. Leaving aside all the contributions the author still has to make, there will be an event on the horizon where arguably the success of your book is dependent on the presentation skills of your editor. You might imagine that once a publisher takes on a book, they simply instruct the sales force to SELL, SELL, SELL. However, the sales people don't know anything about your book. Enter the sales conference. As an outsider I have always seen this as a bizarre process. The in-house sales staff sit in a room and along troop the editors, yours included. Each editor has to pitch their books to the sales people. Depending on how those few minutes (seconds?) go, the sales staff will decide if this is a book they are going to get wholeheartedly behind or give the sink-or-swim treatment to. I ...

As someone with green aspirations (come on, I did write Ecologic ), I'm all in favour of supermarket 'bag for life' offerings, which mean you reuse your bags rather than throw them away. However, I think it is boring, and quite possibly in bad taste, to use a bag in the shop from which it was obtained. Instead, to keep the shopping experience amusing, the shopper should play a game of Bag-for-life Top Trumps® . The idea is simple. Always use a bag with snob value at the supermarket in which you are shopping. So: In Aldi/Lidl use at least an Asda bag In Asda use at least a Tesco bag In Tesco use at least a Sainsbury's bag In Sainsbury's use at least a Marks & Spencer bag In Marks & Spencer use at least a Waitrose bag In Waitrose... ... ah, yes. What to do in that doyen of supermarkets? No problem, because there is one bag that trumps them all - a French supermarket bag. In fact it's best to stick to one of these at any store, then you don't h...

Appearing on the Litopia After Dark internet radio panel show last night, I quite surprised myself how worked up I got about the futile nature of the glory given to people doing stupid things. There is something very sad about the obsession with doing things because they stretch human beings to the limit. This is what leads to attempts to trek across the North or South Pole on foot, or to climb Everest without oxygen. To any sensible onlooker, it’s stupidity. There is no scientific benefit. There is no discovery. It’s little more than risky posturing. The ultimate example of this madness is that awards have already been funded for the first person to climb Mount Olympus on Mars, to cross the Martian poles 'without airborne support or resupply' and to descend the vast Valles Marineris on Mars 'using no technological support other than that required for life support and basic mountaineering.' Leaving aside the total strangeness of these challenges (for example, what ai...

This summer we had a little expedition to France, and though the miserable exchange rate with the Euro means that the booze cruise is a thing of the past, if you are over there anyway it's well worth stocking up on wines. Apart from the usual red we were buying a bit of the pink stuff for the alleged summer days. (I've no idea why we call it rosé - it would be very pretentious to call red wine 'rouge'.) It proved absolutely impossible to avoid buying a box of the wine illustrated. Who could resist sipping a glass of Cotes du Brian ? (And it really is quite sippable.) It strikes me there's a real opportunity here. Find out the 20 most popular names in the UK (first and last) and put out wines with that name on the label. You'd get lots of sales. In case there is any suspicion that this had already happened I ought to point out that the Cotes du Brian is a real wine growing area. If you take a look at this page in Oz Clarke's Wine Atlas you will find i...

Adrian Edmondson was slagging off the new, younger comedians the other day. So many of them, he suggests, perform basically the same act, interspersed with appearances on panel shows. You could interchange them and no one would notice the difference. He has a point, but some of the bright young-ish things have a certain something (in fact Ade did acknowledge this), and among those bright stars I would include Dara O Briain . I've recently read our Dara's book Tickling the English (subtitled a funny man's notes on a country and his people ), in which he tries that popular sport, analyzing what makes the English, erm, English, in this case through observation on a tour of comedy venues. Leaving aside the somewhat biassed sample that is represented by a comedy audience, it is quite interesting, though doesn't have the insight as an observational travel book of Stuart Maconie's cracking pair of titles Pies and Prejudice and Adventures on the High Teas . There was...

I was reading in some authors' publication (I think ALCS News ) that an author who writes for the teen audience asked the young people at his talk a question about how much money they thought he earned from booksales. 'You buy a book in a bookshop for £10,' he said. 'How much of that do you think the author gets?' The most popular answer was 100% , followed by 50%, then 75%, which between them accounted for most of the replies. Now leaving aside the total lack of business sense in 100% (come on, guys, the shop has to make something out of this), it's still quite remarkable how much they believed authors get. On a paperback, it is often 7.5% of net. Let's assume the bookshop gets a 50% discount - that means that on this £10 paperback, the author gets around 37p. I have to say, when I type that, even I find it shocking. To be fair, it's not always so bad. If you sell above a set number, say 10,000 copies, you might get 10 or even 12.5%, while hardbac...