There was a very sad story in the latest edition of our local free magazine, Swindon Link . It concerns 27-year-old Tami Brown who has been fighting cancer for seven years and has now being told it's terminal. She is hoping to raise £5,000 to take a last hope therapy. We are told about the new 'High-Dose Intravenous Vitamin C therapy': Based on research by Noble [sic] Prize winner Dr Linus Pauling there is a lot of reported success in the USA and New Zealand.  There are several problems with this statement. Taking it at face value you might think that medical researcher Dr Linus Pauling has recently won a Nobel Prize for his successful therapy. The reality is a little different. Pauling did indeed win the Nobel Prize - twice, in fact. Once the peace prize and once for chemistry. He was a chemist, not a medical doctor. In the 1970s he became interested in the idea that high doses of vitamin C could cure the common cold, and later that it could have a positive effect on canc...

Like most people running a business, I have a business bank account. This is fine for doing the various transactions of business life, but it is useless if you have any money squirreled away - for example, to pay that evil Corporation Tax bill lurking months in the future. The standard business bank account doesn't pay interest. But no problem - my bank offers a business savings account. Now when it comes to personal savings, I tend to shop around and change accounts for the best interest every year, but I've been with my current business savings account for about 10 years, so I thought it was worth looking for a bit more interest. I started searching and was horrified by what I found. If you shop around you can get maybe 2.5% on a personal instant access account for the first year (admittedly then it will typically drop to 1% or 0.5%). But if you look at the instant access business savings accounts the typical interest rate is 0.05%. No, that's not a misprint. 1/20th o...

For this week's exciting Royal Society of Chemistry podcast I'm pondering plastic - to be precise, Bakelite, the first of the truly artificial plastics and a one time favourite with everyone from jewelery makers to phone manufacturers. No one who was around in the 60s could forget the feel of those old phones. It's somehow wonderfully period, is Bakelite. Take a listen!

OneNote in action It's pretty obviously really, but whether you are a non-fiction author like me or a fiction person, you need to make notes. Traditionally writers have used nice chunky notebooks - and many still do, and that's fine. But I like the searchability and cut and paste options of a computerized notebook. For a good number of years I've used OneNote (see my post on it) and it serves me well in most respects. But one thing I've always been irritated by is a lack of a good version to have in my pocket. As it happens, there is now a version of OneNote for the iPhone - but it isn't available in the UK yet, and Microsoft's PR department is being very tight lipped about when it will be released. Once I was aware of this I started to think just how useful it would be to access and input notes from my phone. And there is an alternative - the free product Evernote . The great thing about Evernote is it's available on pretty well everything: PC, Mac, ...

On Saturday I received an envelope in the post. Of itself this isn't particularly remarkable. I often do. If it had been, say, a wallaby, I would have been surprised, but envelopes are pretty run of the mill. I opened it up. It was a batch of royalty statements, forwarded by my agent. Again, not particularly surprising, although he tends to scan and email them these days. But there was something a little odd. They were all statements from 2009. Okay, perhaps he'd been having a clear out. It happens. You have one of those piles of relatively unimportant paper that you don't get round to, things get buried at the bottom and you discover them a couple of years later. At this point I took a look at the postmark. For your entertainment and amazement I have included it here. Yes, it was posted on 27 October 2009 and arrived on 19 February 2011. Even by the Post Office's standards, this is pretty amazing. So what happened to it? In speculation it's possible to have a ...

   'What do you make of this, Watson?'    I caught the object Holmes languidly tossed in my direction from the ottoman. 'It's a slipper, Holmes.'    The great man sighed. 'Inside the slipper.'    I carefully opened the persian slipper, within which Holmes habitually kept his tobacco. But instead a most remarkable device befell my gaze. An engine of outstanding craftsmanship, like a piece of polished jet that glowed alight with the richest colours. 'It seems to be a computing engine, Holmes.'    'And much more beside. It is an iPhone, Watson. But I refer to the "app" that resides in its capacious memory. Do you recall the adventure of the Speckled Band?' I can't keep this up. What I'm setting out to do is review a new iPhone app. It's the classic Conan Doyle short story, The Speckled Band , but this isn't just a common or garden ebook. It's a new format, called by the makers a byook. (We'll come back to...

Yesterday I visited North London Collegiate School to give a talk. It's my third visit to the school and it's always a pleasure - apart from being a lovely venue, the students (and staff) are always enthusiastic, interested and supportive.  In a conversation about teaching over lunch, I started wondering why it is that here there were so many students with a real passion for science, yet at many schools this isn't the case. After all, most 10 year-olds are excited by science. Where do we go wrong? Of course NLCS isn't a typical school - it's a very good private school. Of itself, the 'private' part isn't too significant. I've been to state schools where there is a similar enthusiasm, and to private schools with little interest. Now, some of the drop off in interest in science (or the ability to sustain it) as students get older is a result of peer pressure - and though there have been doubts expressed about socialization issues with single sex sch...

Deadlines are a fact of life when it comes to writing books. Of course not everyone sticks to them. Douglas Adams famously said: 'I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.' But for most authors, particularly if it's your first book, the deadline can be a pretty scary thing. This isn't helped by contracts that contain dark threats along the lines of 'If you don't submit your manuscript by the agreed date, you will have to pay back your advance and sacrifice your first born.' The good news is that most publishers will cut you a little slack if necessary. I didn't really understand this to start with. My first professional writing was for weekly magazines, and with them, the deadline was 5pm on day X, and that was it. Then on one book I misread the deadline as the last day of the month, where actually it was the first. When I was about two weeks late, the editor mildly asked if I would be ready soon. It wasn't a problem. I...

I am delighted to announce that my book Before the Big Bang is now available in paperback. (To be more precise it is available in paperback in the US - it doesn't reach the UK until next month, so presumably a crate is bobbing its way across the Atlantic as we speak, but you can pre-order it on Amazon.) I have to confess that this is one of my favourites of my books to date, and I've been really pleased with the way it has sold in hardback, so I hope the paperback version will take off and keep up with its older sister The God Effect . It's interesting that for the cover (which has that rather nice, silky feel of many modern US paperbacks) they have chosen an image that was rejected for the hardback. I think it was a good move, because the cover on the hardback was a little dark. Okay, this is dark as well, but it does have some colour in it. This has been a problem with my books for St Martin's Press - I suppose because they often involve space or quantum physi...

According to the news (thanks to Ian C for pointing this out), Australian scientists are working on a 'thinking cap' that would help stimulate creative thought. The idea is to use electrical impulses to stimulate the right side of the brain and suppress the left, enabling more creative thought to take place. Now, for a good number of years I've been helping people be more creative about problem solving and idea generation through Creativity Unleashed . And, yes, we do discuss the two sides of the brain. But the simplistic view portrayed in this story (which to be fair, could be the fault of the news media, rather than the Australian researchers), is really not good enough. Firstly, although the brain does have two modes of operation that are labelled left brain and right brain, as illustrated in the rather pretty slide from one of my talks (it's either a brain or an enormous walnut), the left/right labels are now rather out of date. A fair amount of 'left brain...

There is much joshing from both sides of the Atlantic about differences between UK and US English. In some cases it's down to simple usage - terms, for example, that never made the voyage across with the early settlers. I was surprised a while ago when I refered to a coconut shy in a US book and editor hadn't a clue what I was talking about. But in other cases it was down to a specific urge on the part of America to be different. And one example of this is in rationalized spellings. Although the original proposals were watered down, the US consciously took some of the less obvious spellings in English and made them 'easier'. The watering down resulted in some some oddities. There is no doubt, for example, that 'colour' is an odd spelling for that word. But so, frankly, is color. They really should have gone for something like culler. However, one simplification that seems particularly strange from the UK side is the random way that some 'ph' spellings ...

Most of the time my non-fiction reading is largely around science, but in the last few months I've gone back to reading business books, and I've had a shock. When I worked in a corporate I was a big fan of business books, but coming back to them with the fresh eyes of a popular science reader and author, most of them are terrible ! The writing can be deadly dull, but this is the least of their problems. Most business books - not all, by any means, but most - seem to have a pageful of useful material scattered through a couple of hundred pages of padding. In some ways this shouldn't come as a surprise to me. A few years ago I was asked to contribute to a series of A4 laminated cards on business topics. The idea was to condense everything you needed to know into a two-sided sheet. I did this one, on time management . These cards really did deliver very well, but the trouble is few people wanted to pay the price of a book to get a sheet of A4 (even if it was laminated). We...

We're used to complaining that the teenagers of today don't read books and don't write letters. And the not reading books part is really sad. (Yes, I know your son/daughter/niece/grandchild reads lots - but on average teenagers are reading less than we did at the same age.) It's a trend I truly wish (without too much hope) will be reversed. How can I not, as a writer? But I think these are part of a significantly bigger change that will take place as the current generation grows up. Here's a couple of suggestions based on observations of nearby teens: Watches are doomed. Well, not exactly doomed, but they will become something to wear occasionally for show, rather than everyday essentials. Neither of my teenage daughters wears a watch. They have them, but they don't bother. 'Why should I? I've got my phone.' And it does so much more with alarms and all that stuff. The wristwatch looks set to go the way of the pocket watch. Cards will get their card...

There's something rather special about being the best at the world in something. It really doesn't matter what it is. I was once, briefly, the world champion at speed reciting Hamlet's soliloquy. No, really. A friend and I went through the Guiness Book of Records the way you do, looking for likely records to be able to break, and this seemed feasible. We managed to record my young voice zipping through the soliloquy faster than the time in the book. The next day that popular TV show of the period Record Breakers came on. Guess what. Someone broke my record, before we could even send the tape in. Bugger. Of course, athletics records are much more serious than speed reciting. (Why?) But sometimes the sports people get carried away with themselves. They suffer from a classic problem of the non-technical faced with data. They want to go into meaningless detail, and as a result, they produce records that don't hold up to scrutiny. Take the 5,000 metres race. Apparentl...

Would you buy a used blog from this man? I quite often get request to put advertising links on my blog or websites, and as long as they are to a reasonable website, I don't see the problem. However, I got an email a few days ago that absolutely floored me. The subject was straightforward and to the point: I want to buy your blog 'I'm sorry,' I thought, 'what?' It must be some advertising person's idea of a catchy subject line. So I read on. It told me that the author of the email was interested in buying my blog. What price would I put on it? What price indeed? Intrigued, I emailed back. 'I'm not sure what you mean by "buy my blog",' I said. 'Could you elaborate?' In theory there were two things he could mean. He might want to buy the URL - I could just about imagine that some other Brian Clegg (or company of that name) really wanted the brianclegg.blogspot blog. Or he could mean the whole thing, content and all. But s...

If I'm honest, there are probably not many children who, when asked what they want to be when they grow up, say 'A mathematician.' Similarly, while many kids want to be famous, have a hit record or play sport for their country, not too many, when asked, would admit that they would want to have a mathematical theorem named after them. But when you're a bit older, you have to admit it's kind of cool. After all, it didn't do Fermat or Pythagoras any harm. Well, now you can have a theorem named after you - without doing the hard work. A spin-off of the University of Edinburgh, TheoryMine , produces new, unique mathematical theorems which for a small fee (£15) they will assign to you, allowing you to give it whatever name you like. You might object that, since you didn't devise the theorem, your name can't be attached to it. Well, we don't know if Fermat did devise his 'last theorem' and Pythagoras definitely didn't originate his - and the...

Imagine you are a new writer and you are lucky enough to be taken on by a publisher. Before long you will be faced with a contract. It's natural to want to get it signed as quickly as possible before they realize they've made a mistake and change their mind. But hold on. You need to read it and make sure you are happy with it. This won't upset the publisher - they expect you to check it. Now it might be you have an agent. Well, good for you. But even so I would read through that contract. Because some agents are better at making deals than sorting out the fine legal detail, and in the end, it's your neck that's on the line. It might look boring and/or complicated, but you need to read every word. Just take it slowly and most of it is quite comprehensible. If you are in the UK and you already have an agent or a publishing contract I'd recommend making use of the Society of Authors contract checking service (unfortunately you need to have an agency or a contr...

When the new BMW Mini came out it was advertised as 'a Mini Adventure.' I've had the chance to drive one a few times recently, and I'm afraid it was more a Mini Disappointment. There is nothing wrong with the car. In fact it's an excellent car - smooth, sophisticated and with a luxury car feel. To be accurate, there is one thing wrong with it, one ridiculous design fault. In a burst of nostalgic style over substance, the speedometer is plonked right in the middle of the dashboard, well out of the driver's line of sight. This is so bad that there is actually a second, digital speedo in the middle of the rev counter, which is situated where the speedometer should be. But that's a minor niggle. Excellent though the Mini is, though, as a town car it isn't a patch on my usual Toyota Aygo. Over 45 miles per hour, the Aygo is pretty useless. At high speed it's sluggish and noisy. But for nipping around town it's wonderful. It's little engine is ...

We hear a lot about common sense these days. It's hard not to imagine a politician like Eric Pickles, for instance, failing to stress the importance of common sense. (For some reason, it goes with the voice.) So what is common sense? Before we answer that, consider a little problem. An airliner flies at 500 miles per hour and makes a return trip between two cities 500 miles apart. One day there is no wind. The next day, there is a 100 mile per hour head wind (so the plane is 100 miles per hour slower on the journey out and 100 miles per hour faster on the journey back). Does the journey time differ on the two days? Common sense probably says 'No, there is no difference.' But common sense is wrong. If you think about the numbers, when the wind is blowing the slowed down plane is going to take 500/400 hours - 5/4 of an hour. So it will take 1/4 of an hour longer. The speeded up plane will do the journey in 500/600 hours - 5/6 of an hour. So it takes 1/6 of an hour less. A...