An advertisement, yesterday Yesterday a nice man paid me some money to ask me about advertising. (I am quite happy to pontificate on any subject, as long as you pay me.) He had a series of queries about my response to various adverts, but failed to ask the two key questions, as far as I was concerned. The first is 'Do you pay any attention to adverts?' And the answer is 'Hardly any.' Online or on the iPad I whiz past them without ever taking in what they are advertising. If they are on the same page as text I'm reading, my eyes bounce off them harmlessly. I might take in an image - I've seen one recently with a blue zebra on it - but I have no idea what it was advertising, or what it said about the product or service. Similarly on TV these days, 95% of what I watch is timeshifted on a DVR. All adverts are skipped through. Sorry - never saw it. The second is 'Why did you rate that ad with Lewis Hamilton in so badly?' One of the ads in the intervi...

 Yesterday should have been a really exciting day. I've been pestering Microsoft's PR people for ages about when the iPhone version of their notebook software OneNote would be available in the UK. It has taken then around 6 months to convert from US to UK English (I know it's difficult guys, but you've had enough practice) and now it is available, and currently free . So I zapped OneNote on my iPhone, and it should have been like Christmas, only it wasn't. I'm a very heavy user of OneNote on the PC. I have a dual screen setup and most of the time I've got what I'm working on filling one screen and OneNote filling the other. OneNote is my work repository. If I see a scrap of information that could come in useful for a book I'm writing, I slam it into OneNote. I keep the books themselves there too, and all the articles I write, and checklists and goodness knows what. The thought of having it accessible on my iPhone filled me with delight. But it ha...

Staring down at the domes in wonder: best bit I feel really mean writing this. It's a bit like kicking a worthy old aunt who is very into good causes. But if I'm honest, the Eden Project is the most boring 'visitor attraction' I've ever come across. And this is from someone who was dragged round every ruined castle imaginable in my youth. I think in part it's one of those 'not living up to the expectation' things. You stare down at the domes from up at the top  of the quarry, and it looks amazing. Superb. Like something alien that has invaded the Cornish landscape. You can't wait to see alien invaders, pod people replacing humanity. But once you've trudged round it and experienced its viciously expensive caff, it is hard not to think 'never again.' Now I know there are people who love the place and go back again and again. And it is undoubtedly worthy. Heck, one of my books is published by Eden Project books. But no, I'm sorry....

Coventry Cathedrals, old and new I don't know why, but there are some things in life that you do, and enjoy, but decide that you really don't want do again. In some cases, once was enough. I've been to a football match and Wimbledon, for example, and that was fine. But I have no intention of going to either again. In my early 20s I had a couple of years going to a fair number of the Proms, queuing all day to get near the rail in the arena. Loved it. But you'd have to pay me to do it now. A lot. The latest activity that seems to have run its course is singing in cathedrals. Over the years I have joined visiting choirs in a fair number of cathedrals and enjoyed a unique environment to sing the most beautiful music there is. In this time I've sung at Blackburn, Chester, Manchester, Lichfield, Bristol, Portsmouth, Winchester, Salisbury, St Albans, Lincoln, Ely, Peterborough, Rochester, Canterbury, Oxford and Westminster Abbey, not to mention three years in a Camb...

It's Royal Society of Chemistry podcast time again. The subject today has me seeing double and walking on eggshells. No really, I know it's true because it says so on the RSC website. Today's subject is calcium carbonate. This may be a pretty common mineral, but it more than makes up with it thanks to some clever tricks. As Paul Daniels used to say, when it comes to clever tricks, 'You'll like it. Not a lot.' But what did he know? This isn't boring old magic, it's chemistry. Take a listen . Take a listen. Now I'm typing double as well.

Although A Brief History of Infinity has been around a while, it is still one of my best selling titles and I probably get more letters and emails about it than anything else. I think it reflects the timeless fascination of infinity. Any road up, I thought I'd bring a little brightness to your Friday with a paradox of infinity that didn't make it into the book, though it does appear on the Popular Science website. We start by thinking of the number line - let's say for simplicity, all the numbers from 0 upwards. So we've got a line, rather like the edge of a ruler, starting from zero and heading off to infinity, featuring all the numbers and fractions along its length. Now we know the rational fractions (n/m where n and m are whole numbers) have the same cardinality as the counting numbers, thanks to a proof by Cantor (it's in the book). Simply put, this means you can match off each of the of the rational fractions with a positive integer. They are the same ...

I've had a fair few books published by a fair few publishers (not because I'm fickle, but because different books suit different publishers). In that time I've experienced a whole spectrum of ways that publishers interact with authors, from the awful to the brilliant. At the awful end are those publishers that expect the only interaction to be a contract, a manuscript, proof checking and royalty statements. As far as they are concerned, the author is like a chicken that lays an egg. Why should they consult the chicken on omelette recipes? At the other extreme, thankfully occupied by my current publishers, are companies that realize two things. First that the author has a lot to offer besides writing the book. And second that keeping an author informed makes them happy bunnies. So, for example, I am often involved in writing the blurb to go on the back and in publicity campaigns. I'm kept up to date on sales and where foreign rights deals have been struck. Another ...

Like many authors I have mixed feelings about ebooks. It is always great to have people reading your books, and ebooks get to places that other books can't... but on the other hand it's rather like Aston Martin producing a competitor to a Ford Fiesta. For all their hi-tech, ebooks are rather crude because they lack the careful page layout that goes into a 'real' book, so inevitably they feel like they've been designed by a ten-year-old. Even so, there is no doubt that some people will buy an ebook version of a title they wouldn't bother to buy in paper form. (Especially when there's a sale on like the one Amazon has at the moment, with Inflight Science currently at the bargain price of £2.49 at Amazon.co.uk or $4 at Amazon.com . There are other goodies too. I'd recommend taking a look at Manjit Kumar's chunky Quantum . As you'll see from my review I've mixed feelings about the book, but at this price, who can complain? This fat tome is £...

It's traditional for those with some grasp of probability to belittle those who enter the National Lottery . 'Clearly idiots,' they say. 'These people don't understand probability, or they wouldn't play.' I must admit, I've taken this stance a little in the past. Imagine, I've said, that the lottery balls came out one Saturday as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. There would be questions in the House no doubt. A new scandal to rival phone hacking - how could the National Lottery draw be so obviously rigged? Last Saturday's draw numbers were 4, 9, 13, 15, 18, 40 (as the website kindly sorts them into numerical order, I don't know what order they were drawn in). But in drawn order, that sequence of numbers had exactly the same probability of coming up as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Our natural suspicion of the ordered set arises because it makes it more obvious just how unlikely it is that a particularly sequence will be drawn - yet the same goes for the numbers on ...

This is beige. This is what you get if you put 'Beige' into a search engine. I occasionally do a spot of journalism that requires me to get in touch with PR agencies - but because I might only be picking up on a particular topic after, say, a six months absence, I quite often find that the PR person I've been dealing with has disappeared off the electronic face of the Earth (they are rather like mayflies, PR people) and so I have to go back to the switchboard and start again. I recently wanted to get some PR information for a client of the Borkowski agency. I emailed my latest contact there - only to have the email bounce. No surprise. I looked up their website borkowski.co.uk - it wasn't there, but there was a PR agency at the bizarre address borkowski.do (apparently just so they can have the slogan 'No one can do what Borkowski do') - what the heck, I rang them, but no they don't handle the client I want - the client is now with Beige. Now, this i...

It's the big dark one Not long ago I met up with a colleague who works in the publishing arena. 'Why don't we meet at my club?' he said. Before you could say 'What ho, Jeeves?' I was rolling up at the unmarked front door of the Reform Club in Pall Mall. It was certainly an experience, remarkably like the sort of thing you see in a period TV drama. The elaborately suited lackey on the door (after relieving me of my bag, which was rather riskily left in a 'help yourself' pile) took me to the person I was meeting. We sat in low leather armchairs, seemingly designed for snoozing. And at the press of a bell push, a waiter turned up to serve tea and teacakes. ('Not coffee, sir, coffee is outside.') I can sort of see the appeal, but in some ways it was restricting. It seemed inappropriate to talk at anything more than a low pitched murmur, we weren't allowed to take our jackets off, and I couldn't demonstrate something I was talking abo...

I was rather inspired by the short series Evan Davis (one of the BBC's treasures, I feel) did on how Britain pays its way, called Made in Britain . Okay, it was a bit heavy on stunts, like Davis taking a ride in a jet fighter or a Davis-stand in doing a rooftop chase (see below) - but it was enjoyable and helpful in encouraging us to think about whether we should stand around bemoaning our loss of manufacturing, or get on with earning export revenue regardless. The programme divided the opportunities for making money into three - manufacturing, intellectual property and services. Davis argued that we actually do more manufacturing than we think - it's just that we have moved to more high end, high price manufacturing - and that we should not discount the importance of the other two. On the IP side, for example, he showed how chip designer ARM makes loads of export money without manufacturing anything. On the service side too there were hidden exports which happen within th...

I know it looks like F, but it's an E, okay? Blame the 3D shading. Recently I was watching an old QI on Dave, the way you do. (For non-UK readers, QI is a humorous general knowledge quiz, and Dave is a TV channel. No, really.) One of the contestants was a comedian with a background in physics. At one point he tried to explain some sciencey thing, I can't remember what. Within seconds, the other comedians on the panel were miming going to sleep and generally acting like bored kids at the back of a class. Now admittedly this wasn't a great exposition of science, as he was thinking on his feet, but it really didn't need this response. Suddenly I made the connection with magic on Britain's Got Talent . This TV talent show that is manipulative within an inch of the viewers' lives has a reputation for chewing up magic acts and spitting them out. The trouble is simple. The judges have the attention span of gnats. This is communicated to the audience, who similar...

Does anyone remember the giant hogweed scare? Some time in the late 70s or early 80s there was a panic that this plant, brought back to the UK by Victorian plant collectors and now escaped into the wild, could be extremely dangerous. We heard how it was phototoxic - its poison was activated by sunlight - and could cause blisters, blindness and possibly even death in children. For months, every time anyone came across an innocent but rather large cow parsley on a walk they would avoid it in a panic or attack it with sticks. It was Day of the Triffids for real. Giant hogweed was plastered across the news (quite possibly it was the silly season). And then suddenly it was gone, never to be mentioned again. What happened? Was it literally just a pointless media scare? Is the giant hogweed still out there, lurking, plotting, waiting to get its revenge? As a great fan of 70s prog rockers, I could hardly finish this post with anything other than Genesis and the Return of the Giant Hogweed...

I've recently seen an environmental comparison of using an ebook reader and paper books in an august US newspaper, and I was very impressed at how much it managed to get wrong - or at least the way it put a particular spin on things. First it claims to be comparing paper books with 'e-readers like Apple's new iPad and Amazon Kindle,' and goes to on to quote very exact amounts of resources consumed in the manufacture like '33 pounds of minerals.' Yet the iPad and the Kindle are hugely different - there is no way a Kindle would have the same manufacturing footprint as an iPad. The article is also rather sneaky in comparing e-readers with 'a book made with recycled paper.' I'm not sure I've ever seen a book made from recycled paper. I'm not even sure it's possible to do cost effectively. This is not realistic - it's cheating. Almost all books are made from trees, with possibly a small percentage of recycled paper thrown in - get over ...

Cambridge rooftops, shortly before my first visit to the Senate House From now on, feel free to address me as Senator Clegg. This all started when I got an email from a friend asking if I was going to be voting for the next Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. Apparently the candidates are the actor Brian Blessed, the politician Lord Sainsbury, the barrister Michael Mansfield and the local convenience store owner Abdul Ahrain. Now I was vaguely aware that the Chancellor was elected by the university's senate. My only rather indirect experience of this august body was when I got my degrees, ceremonies which took place in the rather stern building called the Senate House. However, on checking on the University website I see my friend was right. I am informed as follows: the Chancellor is elected by the senate, and the senate consists of holders of any Doctor's degree of the University, any Master's degree of the University, or the degree of Bachelor of Divinity ...

I first encountered the concept of online price comparison many years ago with a book comparison site called Bookbrain . At the time, I wrote in PC Week magazine that I thought this would be the killer app for the internet. It was such a simple but excellent idea. Something like a book is a commodity. It doesn’t matter where you buy it from, you just want the cheapest price. Here was a way to find that price instantly, click a few buttons and buy the book. As it turned out, book comparison hasn’t been the success I expected it to be, I suspect because most people stick with a single trusted supplier that they know will give them a good deal. By doing this it’s easy for them to buy again once they’ve set up an account. But the obvious area now where there’s a lot to be gained from comparison is sites where you can compare car insurance . I recently needed to get car insurance for a 17 year old – a scary proposition when you consider the size of some insurance quotes – and went to a...

In my teens I was fascinated with a mathematical construct called a tesseract. This is a four dimensional hypercube. A cube is constructed in three dimensions from six faces, each a square. A tesseract is constructed in four dimensions from eight faces, each a cube. Funnily both my youthful introductions to tesseracts were from fiction. The first was in Madeleine L'Engle's wonderful children's classic (still very readable for adults) A Wrinkle in Time . I know some people don't like this book because it has an underlying religious message, but for me it is one of the best children's science fiction stories ever. In it, a tesseract is a gateway for interstellar travel. But much more informative is Robert Heinlein's brilliant short story, And he Built a Crooked House , which appears in the collection The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag . Dating back to 1941, this story tells of an architect who builds a tesseract house. Now, clearly you can't build ...

I read an awful lot of popular science books (though, thankfully, not a lot of awful popular science books) to review them. One of the joys of this is when a book makes you think of something in a fresh way, perhaps something very ordinary, seeing it in a different light. The book I was reading is too early in its production to talk about, but the thing it made me think about is how strange a thing weight is once you examine it. Mass, as a concept, is pretty straight forward. It is how much stuff an object has in it. If you like to think in Einsteinian terms, it shows how much the object warps space and time. Easy enough. But weight is different. Mass is an inherent property of that object. Take it wherever you like and it won't change. But take an object to the Moon and its weight changes. That's because weight is a property both of the object and the gravitational field it lives in. Weight is the amount of force with which gravity pulls on an object, and so (and the reaso...

One of the joys of writing a blog is that years later people can still discover the articles you wrote. Recently I've had an interesting comment on a post I wrote back in 2010 on why I'm not a great enthusiast for opera . I'd like to let you see Mr/Ms Anonymous' comment in all its glory: Appalling ignorance of classical music (its history) in general, and of opera in particular. The author has NO feel for the genre, and how could he possibly understand the funding side of things unless he loved the music? He doesn't, and his ignorance fuels his rant of public support. In Europe, where opera companies and orchestras receive state funding, culture is appreciated with an understanding of its true value. Worthless article.   Now I responded as follows: Dear Anonymous, someone with your obvious cultural depth will obviously understand what 'ad hominem' means and why intelligent people regard it as the most pathetic form of argument. I am also impresse...

As I've mentioned before, I like receiving letters and emails from readers. Sometimes they are a little strange , but often they are just pleasant thank-yous. And then there are the quibbles. I received from my publisher the other day what they referred to as a piece of fan mail. But it wasn't what I'd call fan mail. It was a quibble. These happen when you get something small wrong. And of course this always happens somewhere in a book. It happens most often when I write something 'obvious' from memory, or commit an elementary slip where my fingers are busy without my brain being engaged. (I once said an alpha particle was a hydrogen nucleus, instead of a helium nucleus. It is a big mistake in a sense, but it was a small slip in terms of not watching those fingers.) Sometimes you want to say 'Get a life,' but  just occasionally you can get one up on the quibbler. In this case, an ex airline employee was taking umbrage with something I'd said about tu...