I caught bits and pieces of the debate between the finance spokesmen for the three main UK political parties a couple of days ago. The papers generally felt that the Conservative representative, George Osborne was the weakest of the three. But what I found fascinating was the one bit where he seemed to gain a brief momentum. This was when he (repeatedly) attacked the Labour government for proposing a 'death tax'. The idea seems to be that we fund care for the elderly by taking a percentage (10% was bandied around) of the value of the estate of that person after they die. The Chancellor, Alistair Darling, was quick to point out that this was just one of many ideas considered, and that they had dismissed it for the moment anyway. I've two real problems with the attack on this idea. One is that it is pathetic that political parties should try to make political capital out of ideas simply because they have been considered. All ideas should be open for consideration. To ta...

When you listen to the people turning up for auditions for the X-Factor, many of them are attending with the intention of becoming famous. It's an end it itself. They crave fame. I can tell you here and now that being an author is, for the vast majority, anything but a route to fame. For every J. K. Rowling there are thousands of us published authors who don't really appear on the radar. So any wannabe famous authors, get in that X-Factor queue. This reality made it doubly pleasing to discover (thanks, Wendy, for pointing it out) that according to this website I am, apparently, one of the 20 most famous people to be born in my home town of Rochdale. The town is probably best known for being the place the modern format of Co-operative movement started (or these days, where the TV show Waterloo Road is set). The list includes a fair smattering of actors, mostly bit part players on Coronation Street or Emmerdale (Rochdale is handily situated between the two), though we can...

Like quite a few other men, I'm not a great enthusiast for shopping. The only real appeal of going to our local designer outlet village, for example, is the opportunity to eat out (yes, I'm so fond of eating out, I can even enjoy eating at a place like this, though things have gone downhill since the gourmet burger place closed). However I have found a website where I really could enjoy shopping. Called thinkgeek.com it has all the geekiest products you could imagine. The item that first brought it to my attention was the T-shirt illustrated. It has a built-in light up WiFi detector. How cool is that? Fussy people may wonder about how it will survive the wash (though people who wear this kind of thing may respond 'Huh? You wash T-shirts?') - don't worry, the electronic bit is removable for washing purposes. As well as 9 other interactive T-shirts (one is a guitar you can strum), there's just about every gizmo that you could imagine. Want a wooden case for ...

Punctuation is an essential tool of the trade for writers, and in the UK we seem particularly ignorant about inverted commas. They're even taught incorrectly in schools. I'm not referring to the punctuation mark that shares the same symbol - the apostrophe - but inverted commas, a.k.a. speech marks, quote marks or quotation marks. There are three regular misuses. One is the idea that there is somehow a difference between speech marks and inverted commas used to isolate something, perhaps something 'dubious.' No - same rules apply to both. The second problem is overuse of inverted commas to indicate 'terms' that we aren't really 'comfortable' with. If you find yourself doing this, go back and put in terms you are comfortable with. Using inverted commas in this way is amateurish. Finally, and this is the one schools get wrong, there is the convention on when to use single inverted commas and when to use double. In the UK the convention is to use ...

A little while ago I wrote about the book The Rest is Noise , after a recommendation to lay my hands on a copy to find out more about twentieth century music. In response to this, Icon Books kindly provided me with a copy of The Lives and Times of the Great Composers by Michael Steen. They describe it as magisterial - and this is certainly true if it means bulky - there are almost 1,000 pages in this chunky concoction. The book has chapters on most of the big names from Handel to Puccini, so roughly 1700 to the early 1900s. There are also some rather summary compound chapters taking in, for instance, the big twentieth century Russians (I think it's bizarre that as trivial a composer as Puccini has his own chapter where Stravinsky doesn't, but the author does seem to have a particular favouritism towards operatic composers ). The main chapters are full of rich historical detail - fascinating if you like this kind of context. It hadn't really occured to me until reading...

If your write about evolution or cladistics , (applying a system/structure to species) like my friend Henry Gee your work inevitably get picked up by creationists and intelligent design merchants. In an attempt to prove that everything was created 6,000 years ago, and that dinosaurs were wiped out in Noah's flood or put there to fool us by a (presumably) malicious God, they take little snippets from the words that someone like Henry writes and use them as justification for something that can't in any way be deduced from those words. I don't know if I'm pleased or saddened to have joined the 'misquoted' brigade, though in my case it's on the fascinating physics of quantum entanglement. This is the subject of one of my best selling books, The God Effect . Einstein first wrote about entanglement in 1935 in an attempt to disprove quantum theory (he failed), and called it 'spooky action at a distance.' It is quite remarkable. When two quantum particles...

Today, it seems, is Ada Lovelace day, an international day of blogging about the achievements of women in science. Although she is not my subject, I ought to say a little bit about Ada, since the day is (somewhat inaccurately) named for her. She was born Ada Byron, daughter of the romantic poet and was a long term friend of, and enthusiast for the work of, Charles Babbage, the computing pioneer. Although there was some talk about a match between Ada and Babbage, she was married off to William King who became Earl of Lovelace in 1838, so strictly Ada is Ada King, not Ada Lovelace - in full she was Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace. Ada is often described as the first programmer. This is a slight exaggeration, in part because the 'computer' she 'programmed' never existed. What she in fact did was translate a paper on Babbage's work by Luigi Federico Menabrea from the French, and added a series of notes of her own - notes so detailed they ended up longer than th...

I've recently had a go at religion, so on a brief tour of subjects you should never touch upon in the pub or on a blog, I'm moving on to politics. Before I make a remark some might think is attacking the Conservative party (even though with hand on heart I can say it's not), I ought to say I am a genuine floating voter. I have voted for all three main parties in my voting lifetime. My default inclination is towards the Liberal Democrats (not just because they have a leader called Clegg), but I'm easily swayed. Now the problem I have with the Tories is this - they are wolves in sheeps clothing, and I think they would be better off dropping the sheep costumes and saying 'there's nothing wrong with being a wolf.' Whenever anything comes up, like the recent suggestion of ex-ministers trying to make money by pretending they had influence, there is much crying from the Conservative benches about how terrible it is, the way some people are in it for what they c...

For a while now I've run a website www.organizingamurder.com which lists a whole host of downloads and boxed kits to use at murder mystery parties and other mystery events. However it's a limited field. Most kits are for a specific number of players, and there are relatively few themes that everyone who makes these things seems to revisit. To try to increase the flexibility, I've added a new ebook Make Your Own Mystery , the idea being that rather than buy an off-the-shelf mystery, you get instructions on how to put a new one together yourself. It covers both traditional role play party games - the sort where each guest plays the part of a character in the mystery - and the more flexible type of games, from treasure hunts to murders, that I provide in the Organizing a Murder ebook - games that can be played by any number of people and don't require the role play aspect. I'm sure this won't be for everyone. The thought of coming up with your own mystery can...

There is always a danger when a science writer strays into writing about religion, as Richard Dawkins has so ably demonstrated by putting everyone's backs up. But I'm afraid I just have to wade in after something I heard on the steam wireless. This wasn't news, it was a documentary, so could be refering to something that happened some while ago, but apparently some clergyman or other commented that 'Women priests are witches who ought to be burned at the stake,' (not an exactly worded quote, but that was the jist). When interviewed he admitted this was hyperbole, but his point was that he found it ludicrous that a woman could represent Christ, who was a man. Now this is wrong on so many levels, I don't know where to start. To take what he said literally, I've been represented by a woman MP for years now. So it is possible for a man to be represented by a woman. But maybe that's not what he meant. What I think he was driving at was that the vicar/pr...

Of all the figures in Greek myth, Prometheus has to be one of the most significant for science. This Titan brought fire to mankind. For that gift he was punished by having his liver pecked out by an eagle every day. Such was the reward for being an early technologist. In other legends Prometheus gave us maths and science, agriculture and medicine – or even created humans in the first place. This uncertainty of just what Prometheus was responsible for is echoed in the uncertainty of who discovered the element promethium, number 61 in the periodic table. 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 promethium, element 61.   Take a listen , or select it from the list of my element podcasts below:                                    ...

I took part in 'An Evening of Fun Science' at Burford School (glad to see it shared the motto Sapere Aude with my old school) last night as part of the Oxfordshire Science Festival. It was certainly a wide-ranging event. We started of with Mad Science , or rather a part of that franchise, with what was essentially a chemistry demonstration. There was much messing about with dry ice, most dramatically when the carbon dioxide/water vapour from a 'dry ice shower' was used to blow white marble-like soap bubbles, which burst in little clouds of vapour. Liquid nitrogen also got a look in, freezing a flower to the be crumbled. And a couple of hydrogen peroxide driven reactions provided a bit of drama. Technically their advertising 'a whizz-bang fun presentation full of explosive fun' was a little exaggerative, as there where no bangs or explosions - but it was entertaining nonetheless. Second up was me, giving a practical session on memory, covering a little about...

Okay, oxygen wasn't really first discovered in an adventure playground, but I enjoyed watching Richard Hammond's hokey but visually stunning Invisible Worlds programme last night and the presenting style has rubbed off a bit. Yesterday I had another of my outings with BBC Wiltshire to a science/technology site in the county. The target was Bowood House between Calne and Chippenham, which is known to anyone with children in the county as the best outdoor adventure playground in the vicinity. I have to admit to my shame that in all the visits I've made with the kids I never once noticed its scientific gem - the laboratory where Joseph Priestley discovered oxygen. It was a lovely sunny day for a visit to this rather odd country house. Odd because the house itself was pulled down in the 1950s, and the 'house' now available to visit was really just the service block of the departed 'big house'. Luckily, Priestley's lab was (just) out of the big house it...

If there's one thing we expect it's for computers to be able to add numbers up and get the right answer. It's their forte. They aren't so good at (say) writing novels, winning the X-Factor or developing a new scientific theory, but they really are hot on sums. This is such an obvious reality that it got me on the BBC consumer programme Watchdog in my (relative) youth. I ought to stress I was not there as a dodgy dealer, or a dubious salesman, but rather as an expert to make tutting noises about the spreadsheet on a Psion pocket computer, which had a bug that made it capable of producing basic arithmetic errors. Being Watchdog , they couldn't just interview me - I had to go to what was then a trendy location - a cyber café in London. The two main things that stick in my mind about my first ever TV interview were that they were unspeakably patronising about their audience, and they were tight. Bearing in mind they were expecting me to travel all the way to London ...

There has been much debate as to whether or not blogs, tweets and the like achieve anything concrete. I believe that they can be very effective in a number of ways, as I mentioned in this article in the Institute of Physics magazine, Physics World . Regular commenter Ian, aka Laurasdad has suggested I mention a very effective example of the power of blogging. The science blogger Frank Swain (SciencePunk) recently described finding an undeveloped film in an old camera he brought, and featuring mystery images from the film in the blog post. Before long, commenters were adding information that began to fill in the facts behind the mystery of the grave shown in the rather spooky shots. Another SciencePunk post fills in the (unsolicited) detective work that arose from his blog post. As Ian comments: I know about SETI and harnessing the power of down time on PCs and I know that the  genealogical forums can turn up all sorts of stuff on ancestors but for something so trivial to ge...

I must apologise to anyone who isn't interested in music that I seem to have had a string of musical posts lately - normal service will be resumed soon, honestly. After my recent suggestion that there hasn't been a truly great serious composer since Stravinsky , I was pointed to a book called The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross. (Thanks to the erudite Andrew Furlow of Icon Books for the recommendation.) You can see this book here at Amazon.co.uk: The Rest is Noise and here at Amazon.com: The Rest Is Noise. I'd highly recommend the book for anyone who wants to find out more about the development of serious music in the twentieth century. I had an unusually trendy music teacher, so I was very much brought up at school on Mahler, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern et al, but there was still lots there that was new to me in the early twentieth century, and more so on the more modern composers. The book isn't without fault. It's very long and I did skip read vario...

Every now and then you come across a piece of music that has been transfered to a different instrument or body of instruments to the ones it was originally written for. Often such translations are painful. Grieg's piano concerto rendered on a kazoo, say. Or to be less facetious, a brass band rendition of a string quartet. However occasionally, just one in a thousand of these perversions produces something better than the original. I can think of two examples. Purists might not agree, but I think that Ravel's orchestration of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition is better than the composer's original piano version. Even more dramatic is Samuel Barber's transformation of his Adagio for Strings into the vocal Agnus Dei . The Adagio is a striking and wonderful work, but when Barber transfered it to voices it was given a haunting, gut-wrenching quality that isn't there in the original, making it quite possibly the most emotionally power piece of music ever writ...

Of all the talks I do in schools, public events and businesses , the one I enjoy most is the one on infinity . There's just something wonderful about the mix of fascination and sheer boggledness of mind that I see in the faces and get from the feedback afterwards. This boggling is nothing new. The first person to really consider the true mathematical oddities of infinity in any depth was Galileo. In his book Discorsi e dimostrationi matematiche, intorno a due nuove scienze (Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Concerning Two New Sciences) he explores infinity in a way that had never been done before. This book is his masterpiece. Forget the one about the Earth going round the Sun that got him into such trouble, this book sets up the basis for mechanics, laws of motion, relativity and more. Written while he was under house arrest, it's in the form of a discussion between three characters. These are Filipo Salviati (named after a friend of Galileo’s who died 16 years b...

We're always being told how the hope of the planet is our young people. The media bangs on to us aged folk that young people are much more aware of green issues, and won't make the same mistakes we did. The most delicate term I can think of to describe this hypothesis is bullshit. (Good, organic stuff, bullshit.) Have the people who spread this message ever seen a teenager? Amount of brain dedicated to self 100%. Amount of brain dedicated to the planet 0%. Just as one tiny example, every morning after my children go to school I have to go around the house turning off lights and electrical devices they've left on. Given the choice of walking, talking the bus or demanding a lift in a car they will go for the car every time. Time after time I have to retrieve recyclable materials they've just dumped in the bin. Of course it could be that my children are atypical teenagers - but I don't think so. The reality is that we have been brainwashed by the media into thin...

The second recording session for the BBC Science in Wiltshire radio series I'm taking part in was yesterday at the Science Museum 's outpost in Wroughton, and it was an amazing afternoon. On the sprawling site (it was literally about five minutes drive from the gatehouse to the offices) of a disused airfield, perched over the village of Wroughton near Swindon, the Science Museum has two treasures - its large objects archive, and its library. The large objects archive is a store and conserving centre for the vast range of objects that aren't on display in the museum in London at the moment. This can be anything from the UK's first fuel cell driven bus to a cider barrel (as it happens these were adjacent to each other in the transit hangar when we took a peek in). Along with BBC presenter Mark O'Donnell, I was taken round the controlled environment store. Imagine a cross between an Ikea warehouse and that scene in the Raiders of the Lost Ark where they store ...

The Popular Science website which I run has a newsletter. You know the sort of thing - you sign up with your email address and every now and then an email update pops into your inbox. Until recently I ran this manually. It was a huge hassle, and the straw that broke the camel's back was when I switched email providers and the new one wouldn't let me send emails to large numbers of people. So I switched to a mailing service. (I had resisted this before for one reason - money - but it was well worth it.) On the recommendation of a couple of friends I chose MailChimp - and as I've documented elsewhere , it's really great. This has made sending out newsletters painless, except for one new hazard. They're very fussy about people opting out of the emails. Their software flags up how many people unsubscribe, and if it makes 1% of your list, they ask you why. It also flags up anyone who complains that your email is spam. Apparently they are required to investigate if b...

A few hundred years ago, it was assumed that the process of burning something produced a substance called phlogiston. After all, the ashes of a piece of wood were lighter than the original substance, so clearly something was given off. Roll forward to Victorian times. By now, phlogiston was considered a rather silly idea. However, Victorian scientists did think there was something called the luminiferous ether. Like phlogiston, this was a substance that was assumed to exist because it made it possible to explain a physical phenomenon, even though the substance itself had never been observed. The phenomenon in question was light. Young had shown conclusively that light was a wave. And a wave is a movement in a material. That's why you can no longer hear a ringing bell in a jar that you pump the air out of. There's nothing left in the jar to do the waving, so the sound disappears. But you can still see the bell. Light's waves seemed to be a wave in nothing and that wasn...

I seem to be in musical muse mode at the moment. I was listening to a piece on the radio about the Diaghilev ballets and it got me thinking about Stravinsky - specifically, whether there has been another great composer since. In fact, it got me to wondering if Stravinsky would be the last composer who could truly be called great. Before you rush in supporting your favourite 20th/21st century composer, let me explain. There have been plenty of composers of serious music since Stravinsky, but I would say they divide into two camps, neither of which quite makes the level of greatness. Some are good composers, writing excellent approachable music, but they haven't really changed the acceptability of something new. I'd include in this people like Ravel, Poulenc, Britten, Barber right through to the modern serious composers like Karl Jenkins. The other camp really have done something new and original, but they don't produce music that grabs the listener and makes them want ...

There's a popular game at fetes where you have to guess how many sweets there are in a jar. Making an estimate like this can be an enjoyable intellectual exercise. In a similar, but more complex, vein, the Cambridge entrance exams and the general exam sat by science students there used to feature fun little challenges. Two still stick in my head. One was A violin plays the A above middle C. Estimate the tension in the string. And the other: Estimate the distance from the North Pole to the Equator around a great circle. Under exam conditions you just had to use your brain to achieve a result - challenging but fun. (Incidentally, although most people fiddled around with geometric calculations, the second one has a very quick way of coming to a surprisingly accurate answer. Solution at the bottom of the post.) Now there's a blog dedicated to this kind of mental exercise - and it has a competition at the moment too. Run by Aaron Santos, the blog, A Diary of Numbers features c...

I heard it again on the TV the other day, that dreaded sentence It's the exception that proves the rule . If ever a sentence (and a cliché at that) wreaked havoc it's this one. The way it is almost always employed is confusing nonsense. It's likely to be something like this. Someone says 'Every time we catch the train it's late.' Someone else says 'You've got a short memory. It was dead on time this morning.' The first person nods sagely. 'Ah yes,' they say. 'That's the exception that proves the rule.' Meaning that in some way this was a one-off blip, and the rule still holds. According to this philosophy, you should expect some kind of exception to all rules, and now we can tick it off. The rule has been proved true. No, no, no! Prove here is as in proving ground . It means to test. Think The proof of the pudding is in the eating . So when we say 'The exception proves the rule' we mean that the existence of an exce...

I came across this photograph the other day and it opened up a powerful window on the past, in a number of ways. First there's the technology. Not the computers (we'll come back to them), but the photograph itself. This was taken by a professional photographer in 1988, and back then, pre-digital, the pros took test shots with a Polaroid back on the camera before putting the real film cartridge on. This photograph is such a Polaroid. Then there's the setting. This is PCHQ at British Airways. Opened on Halloween in 1988, this was a newly fitted out centre to handle everything to do with PCs in the company. It was responsible for purchasing and support, but more importantly back then, it had a role of evangelising. People didn't really get PCs at the time. Bear in mind that BA got its first PC in 1984. They were still strange objects in 1988. What we set up was a centre where you could drop in and try out the different PCs and exciting new facilities like 'Desktop ...

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp...