Moral dilemmas are very fashionable in science. A number of the softer -ologies have over recent years produced some cunning thought experiments to test how we react, and why we react, to moral challenges. One of the most famous of these is the trolley dilemma. (I believe this refers to what we'd call a tram in Europe, rather than the sort of things desserts used to be served on.) Test subjects are presented with a hypothetical choice. A runaway trolley is about to smash into five people and kill them. Would the subject press a button which switched the trolley onto another track where it would kill just one person? Pretty well unanimously they answer 'Yes,' even though they are going to be responsible for that individual's death. Then the subjects are presented with an alternative. They are to imagine themselves on a bridge over the trolley track. A runaway trolley is about to shoot under the bridge and kill five people. The only way to stop it is to push a very he...

I've been inspired to write this by a post by the wonderful Lynn Price in Behler Blog , where she asks 'is your main character vanilla?' She says 'I'm not a fan of vanilla.' I know what she means, but I want to stand up for vanilla. I think it is the most fantastic flavour - subtle, yet deep. The trouble is we're used to stuff called 'vanilla ice-cream' that doesn't really taste of vanilla. Eat something with real vanilla in it and it's a different taste experience. Go vanilla!

I've written before about PLR , the system that provides cash to authors when their books are borrowed from UK libraries. But this isn't the only unexpected source of potential income for authors - another fairy godmother of the writing business is ALCS, the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society . The ALCS is a group that looks for ways to pick up all those little bits and pieces of earning that writers might have missed out on. They also act as a campaigning group for authors' rights - but what we're interested in here is pure cash. Increasingly, the ALCS is acting as a conduit for other collection vehicles. This time round, for instance, it included money from the Irish PLR for UK authors who registered for that. And it is likely to be a gateway for payments from the dreaded Google Settlement when that is finally sorted out. But the thing that fascinates me most is the bread-and-butter earnings from ALCS. This is typically when a business or school photoco...

I'm a sucker for hi-tech ideas, so was interested to see what Electrolux are predicting as the way kitchens will be in 2050. Here's what they reckon: ‘Heart of the Home’ is an intelligent, amorphous, interchangeable cooking surface that adapts to user needs. When using the Heart of the Home one simply places one’s ingredients on the surface. The appliance then analyses the ingredients and presents a list of suitable recipes. After deciding on a recipe, the user marks an area with his hand to determine how large the cooking area should be. Then the desired depth of the surface is created by simply pressing the hand against the malleable material. After achieving the required width and depth it’s just a matter of setting temperature and time with a simple touch of a finger. Hmm. It's always useful when projecting forward 40 years (say), to look back 40 years. That takes us to 1970. Let's see. Back then I was cooking (well, my parents were) on an electric hob. Now I...

McInley's Management Consultants Efficiency Optimization Analysis for Acme Homeopathic Inc. Management Summary After a month's study of the manufacturing processes at Acme Homeopathic, we are delighted to be able to offer recommendations to transform cost effectiveness. At the moment, each homeopathic remedy is produced by taking an extract of a substance, diluting it many times with complex and expensive agitation between each dilution, dripping the resultant liquid onto sugar pills which are then fed into appropriately labelled containers on a production line that has to be dedicated to a single remedy for hours at a time. Our recommendation is to remove the entire initial part of the process. Simply put sugar pills into containers, to which a wide range of labels can then be attached. Costs will slashed at a stroke. If we were to recommend this in a conventional pharmaceutical production environment, there would be serious consequences. Patients taking the drugs w...

Every day that the courts are in session, person after person tells lies in the witness box. Each will swear to tell 'the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,' and the majority will fail miserably to do so. Because the absolute truth is a tricky business to pin down. Take the case of the eye witness. I don't know how many convictions depend on the evidence of eye witnesses, but it's all too easy to assume that because someone believes they saw something, it happened. Human beings are all too fallible. Let's leave aside optical illusions and take a look at the dangers of memory. Because a witness is not describing what they saw, but what they remember they saw - an entirely different thing. Memory isn't like a video. It is a construct from many different inputs and cannot be relied on to play back an event accurately. Let's take three examples from personal experience. Last Friday I was watching the TV show Weakest Link , or to be more preci...

In my youth I did a lot of work on user interface design for computer programs - and the essence of good design was to make the program so intuitive that you could just use it without training or a manual. This is something the Apple iPhone does so well - and much technology fails on. You should be able to just pick something up and use it. If you can't, it's the designer's fault. This can sometimes be demonstrated in trivial ways. Our oven hob has four rings, like most hobs arranged rectangularly. The controls, however, are arranged in a straight line. So the manufacturer has had to include a form of manual - in this case a series of little pictures showing which ring each knob controls. I have to consult these each time I use a ring. Yet had the designer put the controls in the same rectangular layout as the rings there would have been no need for the manual - it would have been obvious which control was for which ring. So often people put themselves down when they ...

I like some maths, but I've always found the basic entity of mathematics a trifle scary. Not because it's difficult, but because it's arbitrary. When you do science, what you say has to be based on the world around us. You can always check things against reality. However, mathematics is an isolated world. You can make a totally arbitrary set of statements, and as long as they are self-consistent, then they're okay. Human beings make up the rules in maths, and that's the scary bit. Take one simple example - prime numbers. Until the 1800s, the number 1 was mostly considered to be a prime number. After all it has no divisors other than itself and 1 - so it should be. But then it was decided that one was too unique (!) - its strange properties like 1x1=1 made it somehow not a real prime number. So now 1 is excluded from the list and prime numbers start at 2. That's fine, that's the rule - but it is painfully arbitrary. If they wanted to, someone could decide t...

It sometimes feels like I'm the penultimate person on earth to see the movie Avatar. I've certainly left it late, so anything to be said about it has been said before. Won't stop me, though. You may not want to read this if you are the last person not to have seen Avatar. Yes, there are *SPOILERS* . Let's get the bad stuff out of the way first. Storyline? Full of holes and derivative. It's not an original observation, but this was Pocohontas in Space . Boring. To be fair, the way the indigenous people defeated the hi tech invaders wasn't as preposterous as it seems at first sight. We've plenty of real life examples of temporary setbacks when a big powerful hi tech nation takes on the locals. But the chances are high their victory would be short-lived. And there were far too many opportunities for the baddies to interrupt the avatar controlling process that weren't taken. Etc, etc. Oh, and where was this Pandora? Six years away in a sub-light ship? No...

In medieval times, when maps were bedecked with strange and exotic unknowns, where the corners might be inscribed ‘Here be monsters’, the most distant place that could be conceived, lying beyond the borders of the known world, was labelled Ultima Thule . Thule, officially pronounced Thooli, and sometimes Tooli, though it looks as if it should be Thool, which frankly sounds much more suitably dark and mysterious. Originally this was the classical name for a mysterious land, six day’s sail to the north of Britain, thought by the Greek historian Polybius to be the most northerly part of the world. ‘Ultima Thule’ took things one stage further – it was the farthest part of Thule. This is the opening of my latest addition to the Royal Society of Chemistry 's series of podcasts Chemistry in its Element . It's live and it's all about thulium, element 69.   Take a listen , or select it in from the list of my element podcasts below:           ...

I seem to have posted a string of rants lately. Perhaps it's something to do with it being half term this week (parents will understand). So here we are, fresh and revitalized(ish) on a Monday morning, and I think it's time to take on the bankers. No, not about the ridiculous bonuses earned by those in certain sectors of the business. Nor even about their abysmal handling of world finances leading to the recession. This is more practical everyday stuff. When will banks learn that weekends are trading days? The high street banks make a pretence of being open on Saturdays. Some even open their branches on Sundays (though not many). But this is a zombie-like facade. Underneath everything is dead. Can anyone explain to me why it is that electronic transactions made over the weekend don't go through until Monday? Is there something special about banks' computers that mean they have to rest over the weekend? Despite all the so-called modernization and the ability to put t...

It has often been observed that you can tell something of the owner of a car from the make. BMW drivers are flash self-centered twits, Mercedes drivers dull self-centered twits, Volvo drivers knit-your-own-yoghurt vegetarian whale huggers, and Hummer drivers people think a certain part of their anatomy is too small. (Note to self - who else can I offend?) But there is also a more general way of detecting one form of bad driver. If you see someone driving a car (probably a beige car) wearing a flat cap, they will inevitably be a nightmare to follow. They have two driving styles. Either they drive 10 miles an hour under the speed limit, whatever it is (luckily they've never heard of 20 miles an hour zones), or they drive at 40 miles an hour, whatever the speed limit is. When they get to a complex road feature like traffic lights or a roundabout there will be a lengthy pause, probably while they consult their Highway Code to find out what this strange thing is. Such drivers are in...

I'm sure I won't be alone in being saddened by the treatment of primary school headmistress Andrea Charman of Lydd School in Kent, who was effectively forced to resign after a hate campaign against her. What terrible thing did Ms Charman do? Did she beat the children? No. Did she embezzle funds? No. She had a lamb that had been reared at the school slaughtered . This wasn't a sudden whim, when she fancied something to go with mint sauce. It was the whole point of having the lamb in the first place - so that pupils at this rural school could get a better understanding of just what is involved in putting meat on their dinner plates. Hypocrisy is too mild a word for the attitude of the people who made Ms Charman's life hell after this very sensible act. Whether you are a vegetarian or a meat eater, you would surely encourage making sure that children had a clear idea of what happened to the lambs from the fields. And it's not as if they were taken to the slaughter ...

Over to the North London Collegiate School this morning to give my 'Faster than Light' talk. The trains seemed to conspire to almost but not quite cause problems. My train in the morning was 20 minutes late... but was 20 minutes earlier than the train I thought I'd catch. Coming back there was confusion on First Great Western after a fatality on the light near Burnham, but despite being announced as DELAYED the train I got on was only held up a few minutes. As for the talk itself, getting to the school involved a brisk walk across Canons Park (beautiful, it said on the website - possibly, but certainly freezing) on the wild North of the Jubilee Line. I've been to the school once before, and bits were familiar. We suffered a bit from having an audience of around 50 in an auditorium for around 300 in the rather impressive Performing Arts Centre (pictured left), but the talk went down fairly well. It's one I've had trouble with in the past, because it's pos...

I've just read for review an interesting book called Predictably Irrational ( you can read my review here ). It points out the flaw in the fundamental basis of economics, which assumes that human beings act rationally, and in such a way to maximize their benefit. The reality is very different. The book is full of experiments done to confirm this - showing, for instance, how we can't resist the pull of a discount even when we know it's rigged. But there is one thought experiment that I thought was a very powerful demonstration of the lack of logical consistency in our approach to honesty. Picture this situation, says the author. Your child asks you to bring a pencil home. Would you have significant pangs of conscience about bringing one home from work? Most people say 'No.' Now imagine you don't have any pencils in the office, but there's a pencil stall selling them in the foyer of the office block. Would you have significant pangs of conscience about taki...

Although we probably all know the rules, I think it's time I came up with the tablets of stone on letting children decorate their rooms, and the excuses as to why we've ignored them. #1 Thou shalt not let thy children decorate their rooms I mean, it sounds a good idea, doesn't it, letting them express themselves, and make their environment the way they want it. Forget it. You want to be able to resell the place some time. And anyway, are you prepared to spend the next six months removing streaks of paint from walls all around the house where they've touched without washing their hands? Because their hands will be covered in paint. This is a rule, even if they only use wallpaper. #2 Thou shalt not let them choose black paint I mean, come on. How much of a teenage cliché is it to have black paint in the bedroom? It's so dated. And apart from that, the streaks of paint effect will be even more dramatic. What's more, when they decide to clean their hands aft...

Just over a week ago there was a mass overdose of medication sold by responsible companies like Boots . Across the world people took vastly more than the recommended dose. And nothing happened. The reason? They were overdosing on homeopathic medicine. The campaign was known as 10:23 . The rather strange numbering refers to Avogadro's number . This is a number that delights chemists - it's the number of atoms in a mole of a substance. The actual number is around 6x10^23, where 10^23 is 1 with 23 zeroes after it. The reason this is of relevence to homeopathic medicine becomes clear when you realize how these medications are made. The idea of homeopathy, which has no scientific basis whatsoever, is that you treat an ailment with a poison that produces a similiar effect. But to avoid finishing off your patients, you dilute that poison with water. In fact you dilute it over and over again, so much so, that you have reduced it by more than Avagadro's number. The chances are t...

As a science writer, I believe I am qualified to write about life, the universe and everything. In this case it's going to be about online jewellery shopping, as online store JewelryArtDesigns (aka LuShae Jewelry) kindly agreed to let me loose in their virtual aisles provided I wrote up the experience. They sell rings , earrings and pendants , priced around £40 ($60-70) including worldwide shipping. Many of the pieces (note the easy use of the jargon there) feature cubic zirconium stones and a lot are gold or rhodium plated in finish. I toyed with a suitably bling ring, wondering if I could go for the gangsta rapper science writer look (there aren't many science writers who can pull this off), but decided on the whole I'd be better settling for something for my wife. If I'm honest, a lot of the jewellery was a bit too flashy for me, but I dithered between a simple pair of stud earrings and a rather nice looking pendant, and went for the latter. The shopping proces...

WARNING - nostalgia ain't what it used to be alert I had one of those conversations with one of the daughters yesterday. 'Did you have a car, when you were my age?' she asked. For a moment I thought this was an 'I'm 16 tomorrow, so it's time to be saving up for the following year,' type hint, but in fact she meant did we have one in the family. It must, she mused (as I drove her back home from an after-school event) be difficult to manage without a car. As it happens, we did have car, even when I was young, but it got me thinking about what we didn't have in the first few years of my life, including: A fridge or freezer (until 10) Central heating (until 11) Duvets (until 15) A colour TV (until 15) A TV remote (until 12, and that had a wire) Computers (ever) Internet (ever) Mobile phones (ever) Microwave (ever) Dishwasher (ever) Garden furniture (ever) ... and no doubt much more. But we wuz 'appy. It's remarkable how central to exi...

I was hauled over to BBC Wiltshire yesterday to speak up against rumours of the malignant influence of WiFi. Swindon is outfitting the entire town with free WiFi, and it seems there was a discussion of this on a local TV show the night before. Ranged against a single voice of sanity were apparently two people from organizations campaigning against WiFi and phone masts (who are very happy to sell you meters to detect 'electromagnetic radiation', or tinfoil hats to protect your brain), and two concerned mothers. Very measured response, BBC. I have every sympathy for the concerned mothers because the sort of information they get if they search the web and hit these campaigning organizations is really scary. To start with the websites always refer to radiation , making sure that WiFi is tarred with the same brush as nuclear reactors. They don't bother to point out that electromagnetic radiation is just stuff like light and radio. Then they cite multiple studies showing how el...

 There are certain rituals of life that seem to be unavoidable. Often these are family traditions. The family of a friend of ours, for instance, had a habit of making a silly noise every time they drove into a different county. I find that there are certain encounters that generate a near-automatic response. Whenever I see a particular thing it make me utter a (not very funny) phrase, or burst into song. Probably the strongest example of this is when we're on holiday in France. There's a restaurant chain there called Buffalo Grill (presumably pronounced 'boofalloh greel') with very distinctive buildings. I guess they're a kind of rib shack, though I've never been in one. But I can't see those big horns without bursting into Buffalo grill won't you come out tonight, come out tonight, come out tonight? Buffalo grill won't you come out tonight and dance by the light of the moon. Sad, I know, but it simply can't be avoided. Do you have similar...

Sometimes people can be tripped up in understanding the world by a basic bit of science. Yet if we can overcome that misunderstanding, suddenly an awful lot becomes clearer. One good example of this is the basic operation of forces acting on a simple ball you throw in the air. Take a moment to get answers to these three questions before reading on (ignore air resistance, as pointed out below):    Don't read on until you've mentally answered each question. No cheating - get those answers straight in your mind. When this little test was given to secondary school science teachers in the UK, the majority got it wrong (so don't worry if you did). If that sounds bad, bear in mind most UK science teachers aren't physicists. The answers? In each case, exactly the same. Just one force, downwards. The force due to gravity. Once the ball has left the thower's hand it has nothing acting on it but gravity. The acceleration is always downwards. Apart from being a useful lit...