Umbrellas - not doing a lot of protecting With all the sad news of job cuts and redundancies I feel a strange reversal of role coming over me. When I left British Airways around 17 years ago to work for myself, lots of people said 'I couldn't do what you're doing. I'd love to be my own boss but I couldn't cope with the lack of job security.' It was a scary thought, coming out from under the protecting umbrella of an organization that paid your salary with satisfying regularity at the end of the month. It's true that over the years there have been times when things have been very tight. There are no guarantees when you work for yourself. Your next bit of earnings won't just come drifting in, you've got to go out and find it. And yet the whole idea that I was doing something risky compared with those who stayed working for a company, or a public body, assumes that there is such a thing as a guarantee. But now when I compare myself with someone...

If I'm brutally honest, I've never really understood the attraction of Dickens. Those of his books I've read have been overlong, often dull, filled with ridiculous character names and caricatures, and mawkish. But I have to confess I so far have found the latest TV adaptation of Great Expectations a delight. This is not harmed by having the wonderful Gillian Anderson in the Miss Haversham part, which she endows with a wondrous mix of otherwordlyness and downright nuttery. But it's more than that. The whole thing is both gripping and engaging. There's really only one truly silly Dickens character, the uncle with the stupid name. Bumblewick or some such gobbledygook. So maybe I was a bit premature writing Dickens off. At least in TV adaptations.

I am puzzled by a statistical blip. Quite a high proportion of our children's friends have parents who have split up. Not that surprising you might say. Yet when I look at our own friends, none of our close friends, and only one or two friends in the 'go for a drink occasionally, but not what you'd really call mates' category are divorced. All the rest just got married and got on with it. The last thing I want to do by saying this is jinx things, but luckily (?) I don't believe in such superstition, magpie greeting apart. It is quite interesting, though. Does it reflect the kind of friends we seek out, the circumstances in which we meet people, a statistical outrider or a whole combination thereof? Probably. Dunno. But it's interesting to think. And finally, as they say on the news, I gather from the excellent Mark O'Donnell on our local radio that the chimpanzee that played Cheetah in the old black and white Johnny Weismuller films has died. He was 80. ...

Although the title of this post could be general, I had something specific in mind - cathedral choirs. This time of year we get more than usual exposure to cathedral choirs and their college equivalents, and they look as if they're preserved in aspic. But recently there has been a small revolution which I heartily welcome. Traditionally such choirs have been all male, with boys taking the top treble part. There are choirs with women at a good few of the cathedrals, but they tend to be a separate, 'second league' choir. Some believe that boys and men provide the best sound there is. There's even an organization dedicated to preserving the traditional cathedral choir. But I think it's a load of tosh, which is why I very much welcome the fact we're seeing the occasional female singer joining first rank choirs. What the anti-women brigade argue is that women's voices don't have the same clear purity as a boy's. And actually, on the whole this is tru...

'LOOK WHAT THE DOG DID' Pixels on screen Brian Clegg - 2011 Although I earn my living as a writer I see this more as a craft than an art. I'm afraid I'm a bit of a philistine when it comes to the arts. Not that I don't appreciate music or painting - I just don't understand why it needs to be subsidised. But really when you look at the letters after my name, I ought to know what I'm on about. I very rarely use these - who does these days? But technically my name should be followed by M.A., M.A., F.R.S.A. Three sets of letters - and every one of these has an 'A' for art. In the first place I'm a Master of Arts in the original sense of being a 'magister artis'. There are those who moan about the fact that Oxford and Cambridge graduates only have to sit around for a few years and not go to gaol (I think the Oxford lot have to pay as well) to have their B.A. transform into an M.A. - but this misses the point. That's how it's m...

It's Royal Society of Chemistry podcast time again. I had quite a lot of fun with this one, which has had the biggest response on Twitter of any podcast I've done. It's about the dye tartrazine. Chemically it's one of the azo dyes, which are by far the most commonly used dyes, but of course it also has its controversy as a food colouring, which is why I got the Twitter flood. Unfortunately, perhaps, the RSC did a slightly flippant tweet about it saying Tartrazine might send kids crazy, but it's definitely a pretty colour - now if you actually listen to the podcast I was a lot more measured about its potential effects, but this introduction was enough not only to get significantly retweeted but also to cause the wroth of one individual who posted 7 tweets mostly along the lines of 'Ever read Nerves In Collision by Walter C. Alvarez, M.D. about the many epilepsies?' Well no, Mr Wild (with excellent nominative determinism that really seems to be what ...

A book selling online recently I see from a YouGov survey, via a report in the Bookseller than books - real, solid paper books - are 'among the most popular online buys.' I must admit, I don't find the results of the survey particularly surprising. For example we are told that customers are 'likely to use a different retailer for electronic and bricks and mortar shopping' - well, yes. It's not exactly a surprise, for example, that a lot of people buy online from Amazon and don't on the high street for obvious reasons. (Amazon really ought to buy out Argos - it would be a great fit.) Similarly, my daughters buy quite a lot of clothes online from retailers like Urban Outfitters and Abercrombie & Fitch that don't have stores in our town, so it's not surprisingly that they rarely visit these shops in the brick and mortar form. As an aside, just as the next generation has a different view of electronic communications to us oldies, they also bu...

As happens every year, I'm afraid blog posting is going to get rather erratic over the next couple of weeks. Many apologies - but I will try to appear as often as time is available. The trouble is, with the dual requirements to a) Rush around the house like mad clearing up because 'Someone* is coming round.' and b) Indulge in far too much eating and drinking and watching TV that would be painful the rest of the year but is somehow right at the festive time there really isn't enough time to blog as well. So, in honour of my choir, which did an excellent job of the carol service on Sunday, I'll leave you with one of my favourite carols instead (this, incidentally isn't my choir): * Not a euphemism for Santa Claus or Father Christmas. Just someone .

There's been quite a lot of physics in the news lately, what with the faster than light (ish) neutrinos and the possibility of a sighting of the Higgs boson (not to mention a rumoured sighting of Brian Cox). It's rather nice - it even makes up for the BBC's nautical version of the goings on at CERN, repeatedly calling the elusive particle a Higgs bosun. (It's named after a guy called Bose, folks. Get with the plot.) A very welcome sign of the interface between physics and the real world are the physics jokes doing the rounds, no longer confined to geeks and nerds. You will all have seen (ad nauseam) A barman says 'We'll have no faster than light particles in here.' A neutrino walked into a bar. ... But how about (via Calum Scott) this?: Argon walked into a bar. The barman says 'We don't serve noble gasses.' Argon doesn't react.. And thanks to Mark O'Donnell at BBC Wiltshire for this cracker: A Higgs boson goes into a church on Ch...

A shelf something could easily be got off We hear in the news that our military has wasted around £1 billion failing to come up with an armoured vehicle so had to buy off the shelf. That piece instantly transported me back to my days at British Airways. We got involved in an EU project to design a better check-in system. Great idea - check-in systems were incredibly fast, but had a terrible user interface. We went through months and thousands of pieces of paper in the set up process and finally got to the first real stage. And the Euro-powers-that-were told us the first thing we needed to do was design a computer terminal. From scratch. So that we had the best equipment for the job. We pulled out. If you want a way of interacting with a computer you grab a PC of the shelf. To design such hardware from scratch was ludicrous. Firstly it would have been extremely expensive. I think the cost per unit was four or five times that of an off-the-shelf PC. Secondly all this time, effort ...

Another of the books in the series We all like the feeling of being immersed in a book that we're reading. You could say that you get drawn into the book. Now there's a chance to have this happen literally. It's a rather fun idea from my UK publisher Icon. They produce the pocket-sized 'Introducing, a graphic guide' books, which combine punchy text with artist-created illustrations. You can see the kind of thing in this sneak peak of Introducing Relativity , though I have to say that the illustrations in the new book are much crisper and better drawn than these appear to be in the sample. Icon is running a competition to get a cameo role by being drawn in a new book by a well known popular science author (ahem), Introducing Infinity . So the winner will have themselves drawn as one of the figures in an image illustrating one of the pages. To enter all you have to do is summarize a topic that the Introducing series covers in 100 characters in a tweet which co...

They thought if they did it in Gateshead no one would notice Last week was Turner Prize time again (sorry for the delay in commenting on this, but another artform, Playboy , seems to have got in the way). Yes, it was that annual opportunity for those who have the suspicion that much of the arts is pretentious claptrap to have a field day. The slightly surprising discovery was that I really liked Martin Boyce's winning exhibit Do Words Have Voices . Admittedly I haven't seen it for real, but from what I've seen in photos/ on the TV it is very impressive, and certainly no pile of bricks or dirty bed. However the arts community can't yet emerge from its bunker grinning with relief. ('I say, Brian Clegg liked it. Can you believe it? Now we can have a happy Christmas!') Because I still heard a load of posing garbage spouted about it on the TV and radio. What particularly got me was the way the arty types were saying of various entries (including the winner) ...

Don't get too excited now, but my photograph has appeared in Playboy magazine. (December issue if you're interested.) Here it is: Okay, not necessarily what you were thinking of, but that's definitely my photo and you can take my word for it that it's a cutting from Playboy , specifically the edition shown here. I must confess that I have never bought a copy of Playboy (no, honestly), so I was always very dubious about those people who claimed that they only bought it for the articles - but I must admit there was a lot more text in it than there were dubious photographs (and they were relatively tasteful). And, of course, all the great writers had pieces published in this august journal. As the 'playbill' intro suggests, what is featured is a piece adapted from How to Build a Time Machine , so if you're a regular Playboy reader (for the articles, of course), you can get a bit of a preview of some of the material on offer. They've done quite a dramat...

The only Higgs definitely spotted Or not. There have been a lot of rumours flying around the physics world as to whether or not the latest batch of info from CERN, released tomorrow, would include a sighting of the infamous Higgs boson. Frankly, as rumours go they don't have the same bite as a good sex scandal, but, hey, this science. The search for the Higgs is, of course, one of the main justifications for building the LHC. This is a hypothetical particle that may be responsible for giving some of the other particles their mass. But something that the newspapers don't seem to grasp is that the LHC would be just as much a success if it showed that the Higgs doesn't exist. Personally, I'd prefer it if it doesn't. There are bits of physics which have a kind of neat, natural simplicity. This doesn't necessarily mean that the maths is simple. I would include the notoriously tricksy general relativity in this class. But quite a lot of the more recent physics...

It's Royal Society of Chemistry podcast time again. Although chemists can devise some impressively catchy names –‘photon’, for example was coined by the chemist Gilbert Lewis – the standard naming conventions of chemistry can be a little dull. Nitric acid seems an uninspiring name for such a powerful compound. The old name ‘aqua fortis’ – literally strong water – has a much more appealing ring to it. Have a listen to find out more about this hugely important industrial compound .

I know I've mentioned it a bit already, but I'm delighted to say that my latest book, How to Build a Time Machine is now published in the US and available in all good book stores/online. You can read more about it/buy a copy if so inclined at its web page . It also has a Facebook page for those interested/who want to discuss it and the physics of time travel. Until recently, travelling through time seemed little more than fantasy. But quantum theory and particularly relativity open up ways to make time travel possible - and I still find it remarkable that no physical law prevents it. How to Build a Time Machine explores our best understanding of time but really concentrates on how to manipulate it. There's the story of a time traveller's convention where no one turned up, and a tour through the remarkable possibilities of real time travel that emerge from quantum entanglement, superluminal speeds, neutron star cylinders and wormholes in space. ...

If I'm honest,George Monbiot has not always been my favourite environmental writer. Sometimes in the past he has come across as po-faced and impractical in his ideas. But I wholeheartedly support his Guardian article on Tuesday supporting nuclear energy. He points out the vast damage the anti-nuclear lobby is doing to the environment. How, for example, the knee-jerk panic of the Germans shutting down their nuclear programme will result in an extra 300 million tonnes of carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere between now and 2020 alone. He is also brave to point out at least two significant examples of totally spurious information being used to bolster the anti-nuclear cause. One is from an individual selling 'anti-radiation' pills whose claims have been exposed as false, yet whose 'findings' are widely used by anti-nuclear protestors. Another is the ludicrous statistics from Chernobyl, again brandished by the campaigners, claiming amongst other things th...

A Christmas tree (not this year) plus reindeer substitute I can't say I'm overwhelmed by the way people seem to be decorating their houses earlier and earlier for Christmas. I must admit I'm extreme. Given a free hand I wouldn't put anything up until a week before, but I have to give way to family pressure and go for a fortnight before. However I was quite surprised how many Christmas decorations I saw on houses in November. Days-to-Christmas-ometer It's not that I'm against Christmas jolity. And I must admit our days-to-Christmas-ometer does go up at the start of December. But I think there are good arguments for not decorating too early: If you do, you've given in to the shopkeepers. There was a time when no one would have decorations up this early. But as shops have pushed back the point they go into Christmas mode sooner and sooner, so houses have started to get their fairy lights out of the loft at an earlier date. I think we should stand up fo...

Now here's a challenge. I quite often write a bit of a blog post when an idea occurs to me, then fill it in later. Thanks to Blogger's mobile app, I can do this anywhere, tapping it in on my phone. So I'll write a title and a couple of lines of text that summarize the idea, then fill in the details later. This particular post started that way, but with a difference. All I wrote was the title. And I can't for the life of me remember what it was supposed to be about. It certainly wasn't about the sensation you get when you pull a piece of dry skin off yourself, though I do find this strangely pleasant. (I still remember when, age 10, I broke my arm and after the plaster came off the entire arm was covered in dry skin. Heaven.) Nor was it about the slightly related pleasure that comes from an unopened jar of instant coffee. You take off the lid and there underneath is that pristine seal, waiting to be broken through. For some reason I remember discussing this wit...

It's that time of year when, should you venture into a shopping mall or supermarket, you will be bombarded with Christmas music. Similarly the radio stations be increasingly groaning with Christmas tunes. Now, I like Christmas music. And I can't be humbuggy enough to point out that it's currently Advent, and Christmas doesn't start until December 25th. For some reason, Christmas music is all about anticipation. But I just wish they pumped out a bit more variety. There are about 10 Christmas carols and 10 Christmas songs (please, not Slade!) that will get circulated over and over again. But it really doesn't have to be like this. I try to buy myself a new CD of Christmas carols every year, and this year went for this one - Fear and Rejoice, O People . It's mostly quite modern stuff (in the sense of post 1900), but nothing too weird. There's a good mix of really top notch numbers, from the moving Howells Sing Lullaby that opens the disc to Tavener's hy...

Thanks to Peet Morris for this excellent example of probability running counter to common sense. Imagine I have a huge stack of coins and flip them one after another. These are fair coins, with a 50:50 chance of coming up heads or tails. First of all I flip the coins one after another (leaving the flipped coins on the table) until the sequence H T H comes up. At that point I stop and count the coins. Then I repeat this experiment many times. For the second part I again flip the coins, leaving them on the table, until the sequence H T T comes up. At that point I stop and count the coins. Then I repeat the experiment many times. On average would you expect it to take more flips to produce H T H, more flips to produce H T T or the same number of flips? Common sense says this is pretty obvious. It's the same number of flips. And certainly if I take three coins and flip them, there's the same chance of H T H or H T T coming up. But, remarkably, things are different in the...

Looking back a long (long) way to my physics degree, special relativity was one of my favourite subjects. It's weird and wonderful enough to be amazing, but (unlike general relativity) the maths is relatively easy. Don't worry though, I'm not going to throw equations at you - I just wanted to share one of the remarkable paradoxes of relativity. I've seen paradoxes defined as contradictions that can't be true, but I think a much more appropriate definition for physics is situations that appear to involve a mind-boggling contradiction, that the physics tells us really is the way things are. And special relativity is full of them. This particular one below I hadn't seen before, and I picked up from Andrew Stearne's book The Wonderful World of Relativity . (This sounds like a children's book, but actually it's a relativity primer that is probably best appreciated by those about to start a physics course at university, as it's a bit too textbooky ...

I confess I asked for a review copy of this book because it's hard not to get nostalgic about toys as Christmas approaches - waves of James May style nostalgia wash over you. I realized they were onto something good here when I opened the book to flick through it and found I'd read about 25 percent of it before I could force myself to stop. It's just good fun. My suspicions are that the reason a book like this is so attractive is that when we were young (well, at least when I was young) and there were no personal electronic goods to tempt us, toys were the prime objects of our desire. We genuinely used to look into toyshop windows and lust after these things. We used to wait with eager anticipation to see if Father Christmas (none of this 'Santa' rubbish) had delivered on the day. We hadn't been bombarded by give-aways in McDonald's Happy Meals - toys were exciting. Inevitably there are one or two favourites missing. Matchbox and Corgi cars were present,...

There is no doubt that for those interested in popular science in the UK, that the premier magazine to buy is New Scientist . I can say this with firmness as they've just published their collection of 'popular science worth giving this Christmas': I draw your attention particularly to the penultimate book on the 'shelf. Of this we read: Inflight Science : Brian Clegg, Icon Books - Everything you ever wanted to know about the science of flying - from the terrible taste of tepid in-flight tea to how we manage to defy gravity in a pressurised aluminium cylinder.  What can I say? Excellent taste guys. (And some of the other choices are pretty good too.)

If I'm honest I'm not a great fan of zombie movies (I even found Sean of the Dead a little hard going). Partly it is because I find gore-based horror sickening and in no sense entertaining. (I have to look away in bits of Casuality .) For me a great horror film is one that can scare you without showing you anything gross. And then there's the usual problem with zombie movies of the slow moving predator that somehow the prey can never manage to run away from. However, I can't deny the popularity of zombies, whether they're turning up in civil defence planning, variants of Jane Austen or in the government. So I was very interested when 'Dr Austin' provided me a copy of his Zombie Science 1Z . This is rather a neat idea - Austin Low (the real name of Dr Austin) is a Scottish performer who specializes in comedy, working with children and science. He performs a spoof lecture on 'zombieology' and this is the book of the lecture. The idea is to take t...

There's a lot to love about the new TV advert for the UK's electrical/electronic retailers of last resort PC World and Curry's. The pastiche of Star Wars is rather well done. The landing craft is believable and there's some nice acting like the almost-entirely-suppressed wince when the manager's car is crushed. Darth Vader is pretty good too. However, have they really thought through the picture this ad puts across? Here are the key messages I pick up: Our shops are run by an evil empire - buy things here and you are funding evil Our training involves fear and peril Our attitude to customer service takes its lead from Darth Vader, a (fictional) mass murderer and war criminal Our staff are massed mindless automata of a controlling state We are the bad guys All in all, is this really the image that they want? Back to the drawing board, I think. The version shown is the 'Director's Cut' which is slightly longer than the advert as broadcast

A review by some bloke I know a bit about reviews. The first paid writing I ever did was a review for PC User magazine of a brand new shiny piece of software called Excel . I quite liked it. There followed a number of years writing reviews of business software, then computer games (which really is money for old rope) and finally books. These days, apart from reviewing for www.popularscience.co.uk and for my blog, I do a fair number of book reviews for print publications from Wall Street Journal to Nature . And I have noticed a worrying trend. Probably because of the increase of easy communication through websites and social networking, people rather expect to be able to get in touch with a reviewer after reading their review. And a rapidly increasing number of authors are dropping me an email. I put these emails on a scale, from 'appreciated' to 'not a good move', and sadly there are rather too many down the bottom end. Here's how they look: Appreciated - a...

I've been revisiting post-apocalyptic Britain. (Any poor camera work was an attempt at Blair Witch style immediacy. It says here.) There's something about the cold, heartless autumnal sun that makes it particularly appropriate for one man and his dog to feel like the last survivors in a post-apocalyptic world. It's all very sci fi. But Goldie doesn't care. There might be rabbits still.

I'm the one on the right I'm inspired to write this by a point made in a discussion about the Sepp Blatter/racism in football argument on our local radio station. The host, Mark O'Donnell, recalled a diversity meeting where he asked if it was any different to be insulting to someone because they're black and because they have red hair. He didn't say what the answer was, but I think it is a genuinely important question. I admit, I'm biassed. You might not believe it now, but when I was younger I had very red hair. (And, as you can see, curly.) And I did get regular abuse because of it. Lots of name calling and nasty little remarks and even stone throwing once. I honestly can't see why there is any difference between racial abuse and this. (In fact, technically it is racial abuse, as red hair is a Celtic racial characteristic.) In saying this, I am not in any sense suggesting that racial abuse is okay because somehow it's 'just ban...

Aww, cute. Apparently it's stuffed. You might be surprised that some of the most entertaining press releases I get come from the Institute of Physics . I love them dearly, but just hearing the name 'Institute of Physics' you might think they're a bit po-faced. The reality is quite different, as reflected in the latest release, a doozy entitled Could lemmings be involved in regulating our climate? According to a paper published in the IoP's Environmental Research Letters, the greening of the Arctic may not be down to global warming alone. Although lemmings eat grass and sedge, when they are present in an area these plants actually increase their hold. There are a number of suggestions why, but the important point is that a sudden burst of extra green cover isn't necessarily a sign of climate change if there are lemmings present. I think this is quite fun, though they could have done better. The opening paragraph of the press release says: The mention of...

Faced with the question 'When does marketing become lying?' many of those who are suspicious of capitalism and business are likely to come up with the knee jerk response 'Is there a difference?' But that's not fair. Marketing is a perfectly legitimate and sensible activity. You would have to be stupid not to want potential customers to see your product or service in the best light - and as soon as you aspire to this, you are thinking of marketing. Unfortunately sometimes marketing crosses the line into deception. I posted quite a while ago about a marketing campaign where apparently hand-written post-it notes were attached to fake newspapers describing a trainer's work. I've also complained to advertising standards a couple of times about advertising that I think crosses the line. In both cases they didn't agree. One involved paper junk mail for a charity where the envelope implied it contained important personal information and it didn't. The o...

I sometimes get sent to read a book that doesn't fit with www.popularscience.co.uk but that I want to tell the world about. Such a book is The Etymologicon . I ought to get a disclaimer out of the way - this title is published by Icon , the same people who publish my Inflight Science , but don't worry, I've slagged off their books in the past. As the name sort of suggests, this is a book about where words come from, which as a writer I'm a sucker for - but anyone should find it fun. It's light, entertaining and fascinating. Did you know for instance that 'pool' as in pooling resources and playing pool has nothing to do with water and everything to do with chickens (poulets en France).This is really one of those books where you have to fight hard to resist telling anyone in earshot little snippets every five minutes. Any moans? Just occasionally I lost interest a tad, but it quickly picked up again and the flowing structure of little chapters meant tha...

Working an audience at Blackwell's, Oxford Something that's regular asked over on the Litopia website is why authors are expected to work at marketing their books (surely that's what publishers get such a large chunk of the income for?) and what authors should realistically be expected to do. The simple answer to the first part is because your book is more important to you than it is to them. I'm not saying that the publisher doesn't love it, but they've got to share that love across however many books they are publishing this season. You just have the one. It's not that the publisher won't do stuff. They will put a lot of effort into trying to get the book reviewed and mentioned in the media (including sending out typically 100-200 review copies). They will look for opportunities for you to appear at festivals and similar gatherings. They may, if it's a big book, set up a website. But don't expect too much. Specifically they are very u...

    I've always been interested in nanotechnology. In part it's because it winds up the Soil Association, who really don't like it. But mostly because there's something fascinating about technology that uses components that are verging on the quantum scale. And there's the 'Fascinating Voyage/Incredible Shrinking Man' aspect of seeng the world differently when looking from a very small perspective. As Richard Feynman said in a piece on the subject, there's plenty of room at the bottom. Although the pinups of nanotechnology are nanobots, which for the moment remain more comfortable in science fiction than in a manufacturing plant, the everyday uses are both more mundane and more realistic. Probably the most widely used at the moment is in sunblock, which makes use of nanoparticles to block the nasty UV, but I rather like the look of a nanotechology being used to make trainers and other flexible materials water repellant. Let's face it, there's n...

An award that does not get anyone sued This is a very sad story from the world of writing. A couple of years ago a company set up an awards scheme for British writers called the Brit Writers Awards. Their company's business was making money from helping starting writers, but the awards appear to have been genuinely to support new writers, and the first ones went well. I really have no problem with their aiming to make money from the services they offer to authors if they're upfront about it. Unfortunately, after a couple of years, things started going a little wrong. I have no information on what happened, but my suspicion is that they weren't making enough money out of the business to keep things going properly. At this point, when people were starting to get disappointed and suspicious, a well respected authors' site published some comments about this situation - only to be threatened with legal action. This really isn't good enough. The people running the ...

One of my fun emails this morning I'm sure I'm not the only one who gets deluged with a daily dose of spam, though I probably get more than most as a reward for having one of my email addresses on my website. On the whole I just delete it without a moment's thought. It's part of the background that I don't really notice, like breathing. I have to admit I was caught out once. I had just done something on eBay (can't remember what) and at just the right timing a spam email arrived asking me to log into eBay to check a query from my buyer. I fell for it for about 30 seconds, then hurriedly got into the proper eBay and changed my password. As far as I know nothing resulted. However, when I'm in a less easy-going mood I want to get my own back. Take just a few of today's batch. When I get told that I have 'irregular activity on my Internet banking account' at Barclays or HSBC (or some American bank I've never heard of) I want to take the ...

I've finally realized who is responsible for the current financial mess in Europe - it's J. K. Rowling. I think that the malevolent influence of her Gringotts Bank has leaked out of novel-space and is corrupting the real world. Let's look at the evidence. The way Rowling's wizarding world works is to take some aspect of the real world and twist it in such a way that it becomes odd, strange and lacking real-world logic. Just look at what has been happening with Italy lately. The financial community has concerns that Italy may not be able to pay its debts. What's the logical thing to do in such circumstances? Obviously lighten the load a bit. Perhaps temporarily reduce the interest rates they have to pay. So what do the financial wonks do? Put their interest rates up. Oh, yes, that will help them stay solvent. Logical? Only if you think quidditch makes any sense. If this kind of mad, fairytale behaviour isn't enough to convince you, just look at the rating a...

On the way to the corner shop (picture not same day) I was toddling down to our corner shop, aka the Asda Walmart superstore on Sunday on a beautiful (if chilly) blue skies morning, wondering why anyone ever drives to the supermarket if they live as close as I do. It was so much nicer to walk. At least, that's what I thought on the way. Coming back, carrying everything for a Sunday roast plus milk, cans of Coke etc. I felt like a decidedly overloaded beast of burden. Usually, though, I manage fine, using the supermarket as a corner shop and just buying what I can easily carry. It means I go more often, but I can walk and feel smugly green. The only thing is, I'm not really encouraged to do this. Asda has a deal that if you spend £40 you get £5 off your next shop - but unless you are buying high value items, it's hard to spend more than about £20 and carry it home. This isn't just an Asda problem. All the main supermarkets have deals where you have to spend £40, 5...

A simulation of a Higgs discovery. Allegedly. The recent kerfuffle about faster-than-light neutrinos has stirred an old concern in my mind. One of the essentials of good science is being able to replicate the results. Any particular experimental setup can always mislead those using it because they get something wrong that they don't realize. This is why the neutrino guys have asked other experimenters to try to confirm what they have found. A classic lesson in the dangers of relying on a single experimental setup is the one that emerges from the work of Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons. They were the people behind the cold fusion debacle in 1989. This was, as far as I can tell, a serious experiment by good scientists. They got some amazing results from their single experimental setup then did something stupid. Instead of attempting to publish in a journal and get peer review, they went straight to the press. There are two reasons this was stupid. It was partly because it...