I share with many a concern that we are over-protective of children these days. Some people won't even let their children camp out in the back garden in case an evil lurker gets them. Statistically this is ludicrous. They are much more in danger every time you take them near a road. However, we shouldn't totally ignore risk either. I have to confess I did something with a group of teenagers many years ago that still gives me a cold shudder when I contemplate the dangers involved. I had done some caving while at university, and when the youth club I helped run went on an adventure holiday (this was a few years later) I offered to lead a caving experience. This was straight caving, not potholing, I should stress. I picked three caves out of a guide (I think it was the one illustrated), all easy. The first was very straightforward. A little narrow in places, but basically a straightforward walk into the hillside. The most exciting thing was getting there by car as it meant goi...

I'm currently reading for review the very entertaining book Boffinology (I don't know what US readers would make of this title - I don't think 'boffin' is a word in the States, though to be fair, it's hardly in common usage in the UK). The book consists of a series of articles on quirky aspects of the history of science. I was particularly taken by the piece on clinical stress. Apparently, when first discovered in the 1930s, the scientist in question (you can read the book if you want to know who), did not have English as a first language, and when he published a letter on his discovery in Nature , he used 'stress' where he probably meant 'strain.' (This despite pleadings from a Nature editor to change the term.) The point here is that in engineering 'stress' is the cause and 'strain' is the outcome, but in the medical term, 'stress' was the outcome. The article goes on to describe the confusion this caused when th...

I am quite saddened by the naivety of those who are complaining that the Liberal Democrats are backing tuition fee rises. Before I disappear under a pile of brickbats, let me explain that statement, and first throw in a couple of provisos: I do not agree with the increase in tuition fees. There are plenty of other ways to raise this money that would be better for the country. I think the Liberal Democrats were stupid to sign those pledges saying that if there was a LibDem government they would not increase tuition fees. BUT there is not a LibDem government. A coalition is in government, and the Liberal Democrats are the junior partners of that coalition. Anyone with an iota of brain should be able to understand that this means that the majority of policies will not be Liberal Democrat policies. Nevertheless, the coalition does mean that more LibDem policies will be enacted than if the coalition hadn't been formed, and I believe the coalition is a good thing for the country, whic...

There have been dire warnings in the press that use of the internet is putting the jury system at risk. There seem to be two components to these legal worries. One is jury members discussing a trial while it's underway on social networking, the other is the dangers of jurors researching elements of the trial online. The first of these is a genuine concern, but one that was always there, magnified by the power of social networking. It has always been possible for jurors to gossip with friends and relations about their thoughts on the trial, which clearly has potential dangers in close-knit communities. However, the social networking dimension does magnify the effect, particularly if a broadcast-style network like Twitter is involved. It has to be drummed into the jurors that it is a no-no. But the second aspect is more complex. Unless the legal system believes that jurors have totally blank minds when they come to the court, they will already have a limited set of knowledge ove...

In his classic book The Psychology of Everday Things (see at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com) , Donald Norman shows how the aesthetics of design often triumph over usability. So designers make doors you can't work out how to open, or cooker controls where you need instructions to know which control is for which ring, simply to make them look pretty. He has a section called something like 'it probably won an award', suggesting that the artefacts in question were just the kind of thing the design mafia love and give themselves gongs for, but are practically useless. I have my own suggestion for such an award. It's the spray head on the pictured kitchen cleaner from Marks and Spencer. Very pretty, but frankly it's rubbish. Firstly, at a glance it isn't at all obvious which way round you use it. Though seen from the angle of the photo it's fairly obvious, seen from other directions it's easy to think it sprays the other way round. This is because the press...

This morning on the radio we had General Sir Loudly Blustering, telling us how appalling the BBC was and how it ought to reconsider its role as a public service broadcaster. Why? Because the BBC had dared to show a drama - fiction - in which members of the armed forces were shown doing bad things. That the general should do this reflects what I feel is a very dangerous shift in our attitude to the military. I ought to say straight away that our armed forces do an important and dangerous job, and that we ought to do everything sensible to make sure that they are well treated, especially when injured. However, it really does seem that we are seeing a Princess Diana effect in the emotional attitude that is now attached to the military. This comes through in the distinction between the Poppy Appeal and the charity Help for Heroes. The Poppy Appeal is a sober, thoughtful appeal for remembrance, which raises funds to help veterans. Help for Heroes also has a very worthy cause in raising ...

Our village church has relatively recently had a new stained glass window fitted (the one pictured) and it has made me realize what an undervalued artform stained glass is. If this had been an ordinary painting, hung on the wall, I would have glanced at it once as I passed it, but probably not looked again. But in the stained glass form, time after time I've stopped and looked. The glowing colours just cry out to be stared at (much more so than in the photograph). When you think about it, this is a kind of art with so much going for it - it doesn't just deal with image and colour, it deals with raw light. This is painting with light, and a light the varies with time of day at that - it can be stunning. Back in Victorian times there was huge amount of bad stained glass produced (and some excellent stuff - quite well known artists like the Pre-Raphaelite Burne Jones indulged), which I think gave stained glass a fusty, old fashioned image. I know there has been some excellen...

Ok, it aint pretty, but the boy has passion. And a play button. I do a fair number of talks based on my books - and I have to (modestly) admit they're usually well received. I'd like to share some top tips on making talks work. My experience is with non-fiction, but I hope some of this will have a wider relevence. #1 - Prepare! The exclamation mark is justified. When I see talks that don't go very well, it's often down to lack of preparation. If it's a talk I haven't done before I will run it through around four times before giving it. And by running through, I don't mean flipping through the notes on the train, I mean acting it out as realistically as possible, which means standing up and speaking aloud. It can be embarrassing (especially if you do it on the train), but it makes so much difference. #2 - Get your notes right This isn't one where I can be prescriptive, but it is essential to get your talk into a form that works well for you when...

I heard an academic moaning on the radio the other day that some programme was about Western civilization. 'Why should we single out the West [to talk about]?' (s)he whinged. Why not? Yes, we should be fair and tolerant, but what's wrong with having a particular interest in our own culture and background? Take this down to a smaller scale. I'm more interested in my family than the Blinge family of Clacton-on-Sea. I'm sorry, but it's true - and it would be ridiculous if I weren't. I can understand the importance of being inclusive, and all those good things, but it is equally important that in the process of appreciating everyone else's culture and history we don't lose sight of our own. We have a great cultural and scientific heritage in the UK. We did things wrong. Lots of things. Just like everyone else. Only they get on with their lives and don't beat themselves up for dubious moments in history. (How often do you hear Scandinavians saying...

I used to be very restrained when it came to naughty nibbling. (Things like biscuits, I mean. Good grief.) But I have to confess I had sunk into a bit of bad habit. I felt, after I'd walked the dog, I needed a biscuit or three with my coffee just to get my energy back. And then when it came to my afternoon coffee, well, everyone knows you get low energy in the afternoon... so out came the biscuits again. I may have found a partial solution - there's a company called graze.com that sends little boxes of relatively healthy nibblables through the post. It's a cunning scheme. They supply about 100 different products, of which your box will contain four. You can filter this online, knocking out the ones you don't like, though I left it as open as possible to start with. These range from straight forward things like nuts and dried fruit to interesting chocolate coated goodies and mini flavoured breads. Our first box has definitely been a success. Admittedly there was one...

Let's face it, the University of East Anglia has not had great press of late. The first thing anyone thinks of is the supposed scandal over the climate change emails (supposed as it was rather a fuss over nothing - see earlier post ). But I had an experience there at the weekend that puts the UEA high on my list of good places. I had an invitation to speak at their Saturday Morning science lectures . Aimed at young people (roughly 8+) and their parents, this seemed a great concept... but how would it work in practice? I was deeply impressed. Firstly, the audience really stuck with it. They didn't just have to suffer me, but also had one of the University's lecturers talking on the history of medicine. That meant they were there from a 10am start to 12.30 (there was a half hour break) - pretty hard work for an eight-year-old. Then there was the audience themselves. To be honest, I wasn't sure how many would turn up, but my guestimate was around 300, of whom over half...

We all know what's tasteful and what's not, even if everyone's assessment differs. But where do our individual tastes come from? They seem to come in layers - but not for every application. Take three categories. My taste in cars was, I believe, set in childhood. Strongly influenced by Bond films back then, I would still say my dream car is an Aston Martin. Popular culture seems a strong driver here. (As more, sad evidence, one of my daughters desperately wants a black Range Rover. I can only think this is because 'celebrities' like Wayne Yobbie and his lovely wife Slobeen tend to drive them. As long as it's not because of Jamie Oliver having one.) Musically, my taste was influenced both by school days, where trendy music teachers meant I mostly heard 20th century serious music, and student days, where I picked up prog rock and Tudor/Elizabethan church music. But it really hasn't changed since. As for food, there seem to be three layers of taste (not t...

Well, no, history isn't bunk, it's very important, but you have to admire the power of the statement. There certainly are occasions when history gives a wrong steer, and I think I've just heard one. The problem is, that if you try to predict the future based on experience from history, you assume that things will continue in the future the way they did in the past - but this misses out on the way sudden major step changes can (and often do) totally throw the effectiveness of the prediction. Take one simple example - speed of human travel. Science writer Damien Broderick has apparently cited this as an example of exponential growth. For millions of years we were restricted to walking. Over thousands of years, we got a little faster by using donkeys and horses. Just 200 years ago the steam train arrived, followed by automobiles, prop planes and jets. According to Broderick, “By 1953, not even the Air Force technologists could believe what the trend curves were telling them:...

A while ago I read Stuart Maconie's excellent travel book on his tour around Middle England, called Adventures on the High Teas . Towards the end he reflects on the places he has been, and admits with candour that much though he loves the north of England, where he was born, he actually would prefer to live in one of these lovely southern towns. I can't agree more. I deeply love Rochdale, the town near Manchester where I was born and brought up (now probably best known as the home of Waterloo Road , but also the birthplace of the Co-operative movement, Gracie Fields and more). It really gives me a lump in my throat when I go back. But if I'm honest I do prefer living in southern parts. It's partly the weather, but there's something else that Maconie puts across so well, a different feel, I suppose you could call it. It's not the natives are more friendly - they aren't. But there is something about the places that makes them nicer to live in. It may be a ...

There was quite a lot on the radio yesterday about recordings of silence. It transpires that there is a new CD for the Royal British Legion which features a track of a 2 minute silence. So then they started on about the John Cage piece, 4' 33". If you aren't familiar with the composition, it consists of (you guessed it) 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence. I first 'heard' this when at school - one of our music teachers performed it in assembly. It is interesting, it probably is art, though I'm not sure it's music. As it happens, I also sell a CD with a silence track - the hymn CD site I run has a Remembrance CD which features on trumpet the Last Post and Reveille with a 2 minute silence in between, so you don't have to time it. It's a separate track because some people like to go straight from Last Post to Reveille, or otherwise shift things around. (We also do the track as an MP3, free of charge. Feel free to drop me an email if you'd like...

I am not really one to enter into the Windows versus Mac fray. I have dabbled in Windows since Version 1 (tiled Windows, anyone?), and used it in anger consistently since Version 3.0. But at the same time I used to also have a Mac on my desk at BA, and I have an iPhone. I feel no great bias between Windows and Mac operating systems - they both now do the job pretty well - but I happen to know Windows (and before that DOS) a lot more intimately, so feel safer with it. But just occasionally there's a crack in Windows that displays its roots, and then it makes you wonder why Microsoft didn't do a ground-up rewrite. Yesterday, while faffing about in a program trying to decide where to save a file, I accidentally dragged one folder into another. Easily enough done - easily enough rectified. Unfortunately, the folder I dragged was the Desktop. Although the Desktop looks like a friendly enough beast, it is in fact several folders, with underlying instructions how to give priority be...

I was giving a phone interview about my new book Armageddon Science yesterday to a US website, when Buffy the Vampire Slayer came up, the way it does. We were talking about the concept of the Singularity, originally devised by science fiction writer Vernor Vinge and later picked up by futurologist Ray Kurzweil. He believes that by 2040, computing technology will have advanced so far that hybrid human/machine species (probably fairly quickly discarding the biological bits) will push human beings out of the way. One of my doubts about this picture is how primitive robot technology is. And this is where Buffy comes in - and the lesson for fiction authors. All fiction, to a greater or lesser extent, involves suspension of disbelief. We want the reader to get away from 'this is just a story' and immerse themselves. It's a problem for every work of fiction, but never more so than with fantasy, where we have (in the example of Buffy ) to accept vampires, werewolves and the w...

As I've shown before , I'm interested in why different types of music appear good (or not). It struck me the other day, I'm not really sure how we tell the difference between different kinds of music. Specifically, how do we tell, just by listening, that a piece is pop/rock or serious? (I'm using 'serious' for what's often called 'classical' music, as I want to include music from the medieval up to the 21st century, rather than just from the classical period.) One obvious factor is the way pop/rock etc. use drums (or electronic substitutes) and guitars. But of course lots of serious music uses drums, and some pieces use guitars (if rarely the electric variety). Admittedly, though, the need to have a constant drum beat is almost entirely absent from serious music, and guitars are used in a very different way. So that's one distinction. But let's take that away, strip it down. How do we know that an a-capella boy band is pop, but an unaccompa...

There's good news, and there's bad news. The good news is that my latest book, Armageddon Science is now for sale in the US. Whoo-hoo and much throwing into the air of hats! The bad news is that it's not out in the UK until early December (though, of course you can pre-order it). And the even worse news is I haven't seen a copy yet. They are somewhere in the mystery that is translatantic shipment, hopefully due to arrive soon. What's it all about? I've a sneak preview of the opening below. But, in case you feel the urge, you can also pop over to its page on Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk . ARMAGEDDON SCIENCE - Chapter 1 Mass destruction – killing on a vast scale – is a uniquely human concern. It’s not that other animal species aren’t threatened by it. Many have been driven to extinction, and many more now teeter on the brink. But unlike human beings, even the most intelligent animals don’t worry about the possibility of being wiped out in a terrible cata...