I was listening to some Labour shadow minister on the radio. 'The biggest obstacle to people setting up their own businesses is lack of capital,' he said. Utter rhubarb. The biggest obstacle that prevents most people setting up their own business is that they don't really want to start their own business. Certainly not enough to put the time, effort and money in. They want someone to give them a job. And that's fine. But Labour shouldn't imagine there are millions of people who would be entrepreneurs if they only had that startup capital. Now you may say, 'They do need some money,' and that's true. But it's often not the case that you need huge capital investment to start a business. Need a computer? - the price of 10 cigarettes a day will cover it. Need a website? - easily covered by the cost of a basic Sky subscription. Both expenditure that many people looking for jobs these days would consider part of everyday life. To be honest, I also get m...

It's Royal Society of Chemistry podcast time again. We're off to visit the compound that hair dye manfacturers delight in telling their customers isn't in a particular product. Because it's not the most beautiful of smells, reminiscent of the farmyard and animal houses at the zoo. Yes, it's ammonia. Smelly - and yet it's a chemical that is made in vast quantities every year for fertiliser and other uses. Any idea where the name comes from? It's a back formation that links camel dung and the temple of an ancient Egyptian god. Which turns up in Chaucer. Take a listen...

I have been the victim of a really shoddy bit of identity theft. Let me explain. A few days ago in the post I received two statements from a mail order company, one for more than £500 worth of goods, the other for more than £300. I had never bought anything from them in my life. I rang them up and it seems that someone had managed to slip through their anything but rigorous security checks. I'm really amazed that the company in question didn't have systems that could spot that this was a fradulent activity. They did a credit check on me to see if it was okay, but there were so many oddities in the application that it's bizarre nothing was flagged up. After all: Two accounts were set up for the same address (mine) on the same day One was for a Ms B Clegg, the other a Mr D Clegg, so neither matched me exactly for the credit check The date of birth given was wrong - again something the credit check should have picked up Two orders were place, each using up most of the cr...

The first sighting of a neutrino, only 41 years ago Oh, wow. Physics is in the news. Just for once someone at CERN other than the LHC teams has made the headlines. It seems some neutrinos have been measured moving faster than light. I have seen headlines saying 'Einstein's theory shattered!' or similar. This is baloney. Here's the reality. Neutrinos are particles produced in nuclear reactions that are almost impossible to detect. Every second about 50 trillion neutrinos pass through your body as they pour out of the Sun. They aren't exactly obvious. Neutrinos can be detected, but only indirectly as a very small percentage of them will interact with matter - what you see is that interaction, not the neutrino itself. It's telling that when a picture was taken of the Sun using neutrinos, the Sun was the other side of the the Earth at the time. Most neutrinos zip through the Earth as if it's not there. In the CERN experiment neutrinos were sent down a 732...

I was, to say the least, shocked to read a piece on the Guardian website where a journalist describes being approached in a Tesco supermarket while writing down the price of  a bottle of water. The assistant manager apparently told him: 'You're not allowed to do that. It's illegal.' When the journalist was then faced with the manager, he was told 'Look, it's company policy, you're not allowed to do it.' I found this absolutely bizarre. Clearly it's not illegal. Of course they can decide they don't want you to do something in their shop and ask you to leave if they don't like what you are doing, but you are not breaking the law. But could it really be company policy that you aren't allowed to write prices down? I emailed Tesco, and this was their response: Please be assured it is not company policy to stop customers, or journalists, checking or writing down prices in our stores. We have contacted the journalist in question to apologis...

A not-chatbot I hear that at the Techniche Festival (whatever that is) in Guwahati, India, a chatbot finally beat the Turing test (sort of). A chatbot is a bit of software that emulates human conversation, while the Turing test is supposed to show that if an artificial intelligence can fool you into thinking your are typing to a human, then the technology has finally come of age. In the test 30 volunteers typed conversations, half with a human, half with a chatbot. Then an audience of 1334 people (including the volunteers) voted on which was which. A total of 59% thought Cleverbot was human, making the organisers (and New Scientist ) claim it had passed the Turing test. By comparison 63% of the voters thought the human participants were human. This can be a bit embarrassing for human participants who are thought to be a computer (there's rather a nice description of taking part in this process in the book The Most Human Human ). I don't think this is really a success u...

When new parents moan about the cost of having a baby – buying a push chair and a car seat and a cot and so on – I nod sagely and hide a knowing smile. ‘Just wait,’ I am thinking, ‘until that baby is 17.’ For non-UK readers, 17 is the age at which our young are let loose on the road in cars. Even if you manage to resist the constant nagging to buy a car (‘Everyone else’s parents are buying them cars. Why are you too tight to buy me a car? It’s not fair!’), the expense and organization involved with making this happen is phenomenal. First there’s getting a provisional licence. Then the wallet-sapping experience of driving lessons. Tests to pay for and arrange, of course (though you can now book thes e online – but always go to the direct.gov.uk site, there are rip-off sites that charge a fee). And did anyone mention insurance? Still, it’s all worth it when they pass the test, rip up the L-plates (more expense) and you can see the smile on their faces. Well, no, it’s not really worth...

A while ago I mentioned how those who criticize people who enter the National Lottery as stupid individuals that don't understand probability miss the point, because it's a relatively low investment you can forget about, in return for quite a lot of pleasure occasionally when you do win something. We can also use the mechanism of a lottery to explore how human beings get their gratification. One of the UK's National Lottery games is called Thunderball. The player has to choose 5 numbers between 1 and 39, and a sixth number between 1 and 14. The maximum prize for matching all six is £500,000, while you get £3 for just matching the Thunderball. Imagine two strategies, both costing £14. One is to play the same set of numbers each week for 14 weeks. The other is to play 14 lines on a single night, using all the numbers between 1 and 39, shuffled, to populate the first 5 (you would have to do this nearly twice), and sequential numbers from 1 to 14 as the Thunderball. Mo...

A few years ago I wrote a couple of books on green topics ( Ecologic and The Global Warming Survival Kit ) -and the timing was terrible. In the first place, after selling a storm, people suddenly stopped buying books on climate change. I think initially it was exciting and scary - but then it began to feel hopeless, and you don't want to read about hopelessness. Secondly, the financial crash and recession hit. You can protest as much as you like that our financial problems don't make climate change go away, but they certainly make it easy to ignore. Here's the thing. I don't think we're going to do much about climate change until things get fairly dire for a sizeable chunk of the world. We're lucky in Europe that we won't get much of the really bad impacts at that stage. But a lot of people may suffer. And I also suspect that as much as possible, we are going to invent our way out of the problem, rather than go backwards and stop doing things - and this...

One of the joys of doing occasional training in creativity is that I get to meet some great people, and one of the most remarkable I've had the pleasure of working alongside is Peter Cook. Peter combines business training and rock music (not always at the same time) - can't be bad. He has just come out with a book on managing people (primarily from an HR perspective), taking what he describes as a punk rock approach. You've got to love it for the cover alone. Inside, he takes key areas of dealing with staff and gives them a serious working over. Often the 'punk rock' approach involves stripping out all the fancy stuff and getting back to basics, which is why the chapters are just double page spreads. Frankly a lot of this stuff is much simpler than HR professionals would have you believe - and Punk Rock People Managment is excellent at showing where the Emperor's New Clothes are in action. The best news is that, at the moment the book is free in PDF format ...

Yes, one book in the whole of the UK. And what a surprise, it's in London. I was interested to read about the Guardian's attempt to get us all leaving books all over the place for other people to find. Apparently they've conned 15,000 copies out of publishers which they (what, just the Guardian staff?) are going to leave randomly about the place, and they are encouraging the rest of us to do likewise. You can even download a special bookplate to paste into your book for the purposes. What's more there's a funky map showing where all the books have been left or found, though when I looked it only had one book on it, left by the Guardian's literary editor ( Gormenghast , how... literary). I really can't make up my mind if this is: A very good idea that will encourage people to read more Going to result in lots of people (e.g. staff in a cafe where you leave a book/street cleaners) picking up books as rubbish and binning them A typical wishy-washy...

Small fanfare of trumpets. I'd like to announce the arrival of a new website, www.universeinsideyou.com - like most babies, it doesn't do much at the moment. In fact it's just a placeholder really. It may gurgle occasionally, but no nappies are involved. The website is for the followup to Inflight Science . The Universe Inside You uses your own body as a vehicle to explore everything from quantum theory to the workings of the brain. The book won't be out until next April, but when it is published, like Inflight Science it will feature a range of experiments to try out. By putting some of these onto the website, they can be made more interactive and (hopefully) interesting. The other thing the website will bring is links to find out more about other books where you can read more on a topic you've got a taster of in the book.This was something several reviews of Inflight Science said would be useful. For the moment, though, it's just an opportunity to...

I'm currently reading for review Brain Bugs (my fingers wanted to type Brian Bugs , hmm) by Dean Buonomano. (I'll link to the review when it's available.) This is an exploration of the human brain, using the things it gets wrong as a way of understanding it better. On mental glitch it mentions is the McGurk effect. This is well known, so you may have come across it already, but if you haven't, it's a great one. What it demonstrates is the way that the brain's processing of sensory information can result in us receiving a false impression of what's going on. Take a look at the video below. It's important you have the sound on, as I want you to see what the guy says. Now replay the video, but this time, close your eyes as soon as you click the replay button and listen the sound of the whole clip without the picture. It's exactly the same video, and exactly the same sound 'Ba ba, ba ba, ba ba.' But when your eyes see the lips forming ...

Nothing to do with eugenics, but a note by Francis Galton that messed up Eadweard Muybridge's career I was recently reading for review Lone Frank's interesting book on gene tests and their implications, My Beautiful Genome . It makes a point that really hadn't occured to me before, raised in a discussion between Ms Frank and Armand Leroi, the author of another interesting human biology book, Mutants . And it concerns the dark side of genetics. Many aspects of science have their dark sides. Nuclear physics - wonderful... nuclear bombs - not so wonderful. Similarly, genetics has transformed biology, but its dark side is eugenics, the brainchild of Victorian scientist Francis Galton. Eugenics has a kind of logic, but most people find it distasteful. The idea is that genes alone should be enough to determine who will have the best children, and so you should use genes to determine who should breed and who shouldn't. (That's a vast oversimplification, but it giv...

Awful cover - I much prefer the older one I was reading an old Morse book at the weekend to have a break from science. Specifically Service of All the Dead . This is not my favourite of Colin Dexter's novels. The plot is ridiculously unlikely. And the attitude to homosexuality (pretty well equated with paedophilia) and women ('You're a pretty little thing,' being a commonplace and inoffensive sort of comment) seems more 1960s than 1979 when the book was written. But it did get me thinking. Specifically, at one point Morse is searching a church and Dexter says he does this boustrophedon. My immediate reaction was to think he was showing off, and this was a classic example of using a word many people didn't know just for the sake of it. As it happens I did know what it meant. It was originally a form of writing where, having reached the end of the line, the writer starts the next line at the same end, writing the next line backwards. Then starts at the usual end...

I love being an author. There's very little about it (apart from writing proposals) that I don't enjoy. And one of my favourite things is talking to people about writing, science and (yes, sorry) my books. I'm happy to discuss practically anything. But there's one subject of conversation that comes up all too regularly that does make me wince just the tiniest bit. It goes something like this: Them: 'You write books, don't you?' Me: (Slightly embarrassed, but pleased): 'Yes.' Them: 'I know what your next book should be about.' Me: 'Well, actually...' Them (Getting warmed up): 'I've got this great idea for a book, you see. You should write a book for children, make it a story, but put science in it, and...' You get the picture. If I'm really lucky they will then say something like 'But if you use my idea, I expect my cut of the royalties!' Hmm. The truth of the matter is that having ideas for books is r...

As the 60 watt bulb follows its 100 watt cousin into European illegality it's time to say a fond farewell to a light bulb that has kept our houses lit for over120 years. Admittedly the filament went from being carbon to tungsten, but this was a matter of tweaking and subtlety, not a huge change in the design. If you ask the famous man in the street (that one, standing on the corner) who invented the electric light bulb, he would probably say Thomas Edison, as would many pub quizmasters. But they would be wrong. It's certainly true that in 1879 Edison produced an electric light bulb after much fiddling around with different filaments. And he did claim to be first on the scene, but English scientist Sir Joseph William Swan had demonstrated a bulb, like Edison’s based on a carbon filament, nearly eight months earlier. Swan, much less of a businessman, hadn’t bothered with the level of patent applications that Edison had. Nor had he the same cutthroat commercial sense. Edison’s...

Diamond Light Source in all its glory It's not surprising that as a writer who specializes in science, I'm all in favour of the intersection of science and words. This can mean the sort of non-fiction writing I do, but equally could be science fiction or the rather intriguing category lablit - fiction with a science context, but not science fiction. (Take a look at the Lablit website for a clearer idea what it's about.) If you ever fancied writing either S.F. or lablit, there's a new competition called Light Reading that's just up your street. It's run by the Diamond Light Source synchrotron people, one of the UK's top physics research centres and has cash prizes from £500 downwards. What's not to love? Entries and more details at the competition website . Closing date for entries is 30 November. If you aren't familiar with Diamond, this powerful facility generates incredibly bright light from infra-red to X-rays and is used by thousands o...

The game mentioned. I still have it. I was just listening to a piece on the radio about a show that is being put together to commemorate 9/11 in the US. Listeners have been asked to select a piece of music they feel works best for such memories. By far and away the most popular choice is Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings . I agree absolutely, but can anyone explain why this piece is so visceral? How do a few notes, strung together in a particular way, manage to cut through the emotions so surgically? I know music always influences the emotions - there are plenty of songs that bring a smile to the face, for example. But Adagio for Strings (and for me, even more so Barber's vocal adaptation, the Agnus Dei ) is unequalled in its ability to manipulate. A long time ago (in a galaxy far, far away) one of the things I used to do to bring in the pennies was review computer games. It was as the backing track to the opening sequence of a game that I first came across this piec...

This is an excellent joke to spot scientists in an audience. They are the ones who laugh. A dietician, a geneticist and a physicist are arguing over how to get a horse that's good at winning races. 'It's easy,' says the dietician. 'You just feed it a carefully balanced and monitored diet.' 'No, no,' says the geneticist. 'It's all a matter of breeding for the best attributes for racing.' 'Hmm,' says the physicist. 'Let's assume the horse is a sphere...'

If there's one thing authors obsess about most it's sales figures for their books. This is often reflected in an addictive urge to check the Amazon sales rank - but that's only a substitute for the real thing. We want to know how many books are selling. Publishers typically have a lot of information about sales, but rarely share it with the author in detail, except every six months or so in the royalty statement. But thanks to a service called Book Scan, the data is out there on a weekly basis for most (though admittedly not all) retail outlets. And we're not talking orders, which can always be returned, but hard sales through the till. Amazingly Amazon now makes this available to authors with books published in the US. It's only paper books, not ebooks, but includes both Amazon and plenty of outlets. You can look back over 8 weeks data, broken down to the main selling books, a display that can either be uplifting or depressing, depending on the way the bars are...

Not the Cromwell Road Sainsbury's I gather that the supermarket Sainsbury's is trialling shopping trolleys with built-in iPad docks in their Cromwell Road store in London. When I saw the headline, I assumed that there would be some funky Sainsbury's shopping app which meant you could set up a shopping list at home and it would then guide you around the store on the best route to get all the things you need. (Yes, please, Sainsbury's.) But no. Apparently the idea, sponsored by Sky, is that you can watch things like the BBC iPlayer, music videos or, no surprise, Sky's online sports facility. To add to the fun, the dock is equipped with speakers so you can blast out your favourite tunes or catch all the dialogue in Doctor Who. Are they serious? Okay, there are going to be lots of fun opportunities for collisions (apparently the trolleys are equipped with sensors on the front to warn you if you are about to collide with another trolley or a pile of tins of be...

An author prevaricating recently I know I've written about this before, but it's important. If there is one thing authors like to do, it's prevaricate. I've never yet met an author who didn't admit to the fact that the moment they sat down to write, they felt a strong urge to do something else. Anything else. Even the dishwasher or the hoovering. Or hoovering the dishwasher. Some authors have taken this to a fine art. Douglas Adams famously had to be forced to write by locking him in a hotel room until he came up with the goods. But pretty well all of us do it. The silly thing is that once you get going, it's hard to stop. Once you are writing, you want to keep at it. I know this. It should mean that I want to get in there and start writing right now. But I don't. (Okay, I am writing this, but anything other than the book counts as prevarication.) At the moment I'm at the worst possible point in the cycle. I'm just about to take the plung...