I had the misfortune to have to listen to a bit of Radio 1 at the weekend (it's not my fault, the children made me) and suffered the new Justin Bieber record. I'm sorry to go all grumpy old man, but it's OCTOBER for goodness sake, and he's released a Christmas record. And what a Christmas record. It's as if the writers said 'How many Christmas clichés can we cram into one song?' To save you the pain of listening to it, here are the ones I spotted: Beautiful time of year [Christmas] cheer Under the mistletoe the winter snow Chestnuts roasting [on a fire] Santa's coming tonight Reindeers flying in the sky Making a list Wise men followed the star Very merry Christmas Somewhat bizarrely in the chorus he seems to be enjoying being with his 'shoddy'. Rumour has it that what he was intending to sing was the southern US slang 'shawty' for girlfriend, but I'm convinced he's singing 'shoddy' - which pretty well desc...

A Barclaycash slip - lug holes either end of blue strip On a university tour with one of my daughters the other day, after an hour of trying (and often failing) to make out what a 'student ambassador' with an impossibly thick accent was saying, I stopped at a cash machine and was overcome by a sudden wave of nostalgia. The thing is, I first used a cash machine when I was at university. But, children, we are not talking cash machines as you know them today. There was no plastic card involved. This was Barclaycash, a cross between an ATM and a chequebook. You put the slip in drawer 1, entered your pin and opened drawer 2 Customers were issued with a book of little slips and a PIN. The slips were for fixed amounts of money and had to be located on little lugs before the machine ate them and spat out the cash. Or, rather, you opened a drawer and there was cash waiting. (I had forgotten until seeing the example above that you signed the slip, just like a cheque.) Ah, h...

It's Royal Society of Chemistry podcast time again. We take painkillers like paracetamol for granted these days, but when aspirin emerged on the scene, it was a dramatic breakthrough. Its cousin might have been easing pain as powdered willow bark for millennia, but this was something special - so special, in fact, that it featured in a treaty that ended a world war. Have a listen to the rise, fall and rise again story of aspirin .

A dalek (probably not in Asda) Yesterday there was an dalek in our local Asda. Apart from offering the opportunity for a quick tweet ('Just seen a dalek at Asda. I always thought they shopped at Lidl.') it inspired me to think about what has happened to fear in children. If, at the age of 8, when I first encountered daleks on TV, I had met one rolling down the frozen food aisle, I would probably have wet myself. In practice this couldn't have happened. First we didn't have a fridge when I was 8, and second there were no supermarkets in Rochdale yet. We still did our food shopping at the Home and Colonial . But I digress. I am a member of the generation that genuinely hid behind the sofa to watch something like Doctor Who. We peered in terrified delight over the top of the couch at the rather murky images of that first Doctor Who adventure, ready to duck down if necessary. Daleks were seriously scary. In 2011, as far as I can gather, nothing much phases an eight-y...

Probably not very tasty N.B. Before reading this, please be assured I do not condone eating dogs. It shouldn't be done. I love dogs. We are in hypothetical world here. I was on one of my rare excursions to the pub the other day and the conversation turned, as it does, to potatoes (we'd just been served up with a bowl of chips). One of our number who should have known better (he has a chemistry degree) said something to the effect of 'I've always wondered how potatoes can be so varied in the way they cook. You know, some are great for mash, others for roasting or whatever.' We raised our collective eyebrows and pointed out that given selective breeding had produced such a range in dogs (for instance), it was hardly surprising that you could get different kinds of potatoes that cook differently. 'Ah, yes,' he pointed out. 'Dogs look very different. But they probably all taste the same.' Now here's the thing. In a purely hypothetical, scient...

Between 1999 and 2001, initially with Paul Birch and then on my own, I wrote a series of business books for publisher Kogan Page titled Instant X where X was something like creativity or time management. These did reasonably well - a couple are still in print (and some out of print ones are available as bargain price ebooks - one is even free). These books were written for a small advance, but some have made a steady little income through translations. To give you an idea, there are eight books in the series, but this is what my set of unique copies looks like: Those eight books have gone a long way After the first handful, the rest are all either in different languages or versions for other countries. This is lovely, but there is something of a frustration that attaches to my rather nice boasting shelf. I haven't got copies of all the translations. Every now and then I will get a letter from the publisher to say they have sold these books in Indonesian - or a new entry...

My very own, rather battered RAC key This is the story of an iconic object that has become a useless part of a bygone age. I was driving #1 daughter back from her shift in the pub kitchen the other night (if you've got children, it's only fair that they get sent out to work) and we passed a car pulled up on the verge. The owner was beside it, talking expansively into his mobile phone. 'What,' she said, as if speaking of ancient history, 'did people used to do when they broke down before they had mobile phones?' I was able to explain that once upon time there were phone boxes scattered by the roadside in out of the way places, boxes that could only be entered by those who carried the special keys issued by the AA and the RAC. That's how you would ring for rescue. A bit like a Dr Who police box, but for drivers. I'm not sure if she believed me. I don't know why, but I cherish my RAC key. It roots me in a different time. Don't get me wron...

My next book to come out is How to Build a Time Machine , which launches in the US on 6 December - expect to hear rather more about it then. It has produced a lot of interest, including an extract which is going to feature in a major US magazine (more on that later too), and I think it could do well. What has been fascinating is that it will the first of my books from US publisher St. Martin's Press that will also be published in the UK by a British publisher that has bought the rights - in this case the fiercely independent Duckworth. As I have already mentioned, they have decided that the UK edition will have a different title - Build Your Own Time Machine - and they have now gone public with the cover, which is strikingly different in style from the US version. I like both, but I'm sure some people will have a favourite. The British version is out in January - and I'm looking forward to receiving my copies of both, and, hopefully, arranging to do some talks on th...

I'm shocked. I have discovered that I'm feeling more positive about the Conservatives than I ever have before. I'm not a Conservative voter, which makes this decidedly worrying. (Apart from my very first election when, as a student, I voted that way as a protest against all the holier-than-thou preaching from the left wing students.) The thing is, my heart is Liberal Democrat, but my head is Conservative. This is why, despite voting Liberal for many years, for a couple of elections I supported New Labour. I really thought we might be getting the best of the two, while the reality seems to show we got the worst. This is also why I was very pleased to have the coalition. It's not that I agree with all Conservative policies. I think their ideas on the NHS are poor, and their approach to university fees is wrong, for example. But I've never yet come across a government that had policies 100% in line with my own - and this is hardly surprising. In the end, I am pro-b...

Ah, America. Love it or hate it, you can't ignore it. Looking from the outside it's a continent of contrasts and mysteries. Both north and south were colonized by great powers of their day, yet their histories could not be more different. I can hardly think of an American I've met who wasn't an affable, helpful, kind person - and yet American institutions have been responsible for so many unconscionable actions. Perhaps most of all, this is the continent that was once the New World but has now to face up with being the Middle Aged World as the New label moves to China and India. Given the significance of the Americas, we could all do with a better understanding of where this continent's present state all came from, which is where Charles C. Mann's book 1493 comes in. As the tag line goes it's about 'how Europe's discovery of the Americas revolutionized trade, ecology and life on Earth.' That's a big claim, but on the whole it delivers. I...

Come back Florence, all is forgiven There has been quite a lot of fuss in the news this week about terrible care taking place in hospitals. I was listening to the Health Secretary on the radio and he was saying that poor care from nurses was down to bad leadership. I'm not sure this is the whole of the answer. When they had a vox pop on the programme a little earlier, the daughter of a badly-cared-for patient was saying that she repeatedly asked for help from nurses to do basic things, but 'they didn't care - they seemed to feel it was beneath them'. And I'd suggest that this is a contributory factor. Once upon a time, nurses did basic medical checks - but their primary role was nursing . Caring for people. In the last 30 years, their training has become increasingly medicalized (if there is such a word). They are trained to be and to think of themselves more as doctors lite. The inevitable result is that some nurses feel that it really isn't their probl...

It's Royal Society of Chemistry podcast time again. My grandfather served in the first world war, lying about his age in his eagerness to sign up and fight for his country. In later years, he told many tales of warfare in Belgium. But nothing held the same horror for him as the gas attacks. Though he never experienced them first hand, they remained the ultimate bogeymen of that terrible conflict. The sulfur mustards were the final, most terrible agents of chemical warfare deployed in the first world war - and they are the subject of today's podcast. The evil compounds that most of us know inaccurately but potently as mustard gas .

I love both popular science and science fiction, and like the idea of lablit, fiction with a science setting that isn't science fiction per se. But there is another crossover between science and writing that ought to be great but that never quite makes it - this is fiction that has the intention of putting across a serious scientific message. Every now and then we get a book for review at www.popularscience.co.uk that attempts to do just this. A good example was the novel Pythagoras' Revenge by Arturo Sangalli. The idea was excellent and Sangalli nearly achieved the desired result. It genuinely did put across the maths (in this case) in a more approachable way. Unfortunately the fiction itself wasn't great. And this seems to be the challenge that most attempts at doing this fall down on. Either the fiction is poor, the science isn't very good, or the whole thing comes across as too worthy and dull. It is clearly very difficult to do well. So I had mixed feelings w...

UK news is currently full of the story of Defence Secretary Liam Fox. Doctor Fox, as he is all too frequently called (wasn't that the name of a DJ?), is in the middle of a storm of accusation because of allowing a close friend, Adam Werritty to act as if he were an official advisor and accompany Fox on a range of official visits. This doesn't look too good, especially as it's possible Werritty could benefit financially from it - something that he may not have done, but certainly could have done. What I find fascinating is the way that those who speak up on Fox's behalf - bluff Tories one and all - are producing the most irrelevent arguments. They seem to fall into two camps: Liam Fox is a nice guy -  well, yes, so are quite a lot criminals. This doesn't signify anything. They are saying this about Liam Fox because they want to do him down Let's look at that second accusation in a bit more detail. Notice that it is an argument about motive, not substance. J...

I was half-listening to the BBC radio show The Museum of Curiosity over the weekend when something caught my ear. One of the guests, popular maths writer Alex Bellos, was talking about a mechanical pocket calculator from the 1940s. One of the other guests, Jimmy Carr commented that it went out of fashion when 'everything went digital' (or words to that effect). I was expecting Bellos to jump on him from a great height, but instead he said that, yes, soon after computers took over. Not only is Jimmy Carr's statement inherently wrong, but the whole discussion is an example of (probably unintentional) historical revisionism, missing out on a fascinating stage in the development of computing technology. My dad's circular slide rule Carr's comment was so wrong because a mechanical calculator is digital. We tend to equate digital and electronic - but forget why we do this. It's because (digital) mechanical calculators were mostly ousted in science and engineer...

For UK TV viewers of a certain age, Johnny Ball is something of a legend. Sadly I never watched him as a child, but for a whole generation he made finding out stuff about how the world works fun. And I can say from personal experience that (unlike many famous people) he's a really nice guy. This is a book of 'puzzles, problems and perplexing posers' - just the thing for a Friday. They vary from classic 'if two cats could kill three mice in...' type problems, through logic problems to tricky little numbers that rely on very careful reading of the question. Inevitably, if you've been about a bit like me, you will have come across a few of them before. And there are bound to be some you just can't be bothered with. But as long as you get any enjoyment out of these types of brain teasers you are bound to find something that is truly entertaining. And, of course, Johnny Ball presents them with his characteristic charm. Just occasionally I found his 'fun...

It's very sad news that Steve Jobs has died. There will be plenty of pieces posted saying how wonderful he was, how visionary and how unique. And that's fine. He did some amazing things, and in the last few years has transformed Apple from a quirky personal computer manufacturer into the ultimate designer of personal electronic accessories. But I want to consider one point that is unlikely to be brought up in the eulogies that rightly will follow his death. How much he owed Apple's current success to John Sculley. In 1985 - just one year after the Mac was launched - Jobs was forced out of Apple, as the company headed for crisis. The man behind this was Sculley, brought in from Pepsi to make Apple a more commercial operation. At the time Jobs was pushing Apple towards producing high end UNIX technical workstations. He would set up the not-particularly-successful NEXT computer company to produce the machine he thought Apple should be making. (The only time I've ever see...

Not the picture in question. But a good one - whoever painted it. We often hear moaning about how TV has exposed us to the cult of celebrity, where people are valued simply for being famous, not for what they produce or perform. I think it's very short sighted to blame TV - the real culprit is the traditional arts, which no doubt would snootily blame TV, but actually started this cult of celebrity long before Logie Baird came on the scene. Take a point of example. We have recently heard that a 'fake' picture allegedly by Leonardo da Vinci could be real. If this is the case, the picture, which last sold for £14,000 'could be worth millions.' Now either this is a great work of art or it isn't. If it's great, it should be worth a lot of money. If it's not, it shouldn't. Why does it matter whose name is attached to it? That's just a matter of celebrity, as much as paying money for the rights to Kerry Katona's latest exploits. Who made the p...

I was browsing through the pages of that excellent magazine, New Scientist , when I noticed this advert for 'New Scientist Connect'. Yes, now scientists have their own dating site where lovers of geeks and nerds can browse for a hot postdoc (with or without marshmallows). I first became aware of this kind of thing a while ago when Classic FM started advertising a service called something like classic duets. (Geddit? Duets, classical music? Oh, for goodness sake.) I suspect they got too many complaints from people who thought it was a site to listen to, well, classical duets, not a dating site. But now it goes from strength to strength as Classic FM Romance .(It's interesting that the URL format of the two sites is similar. Surely it couldn't be the same company behind them?!) I suppose the concept has some merits. You would know you had an interest in common. Or maybe not. Perhaps on the 'opposites attract' theory, New Scientist Connect is mostly browsed by...

The naming of cars is an important and serious business. The sort of thing that pushes Jeremy Clarkson and his Top Gear buddies to the realms of ecstasy. Which is why I wonder about the sanity of those in charge at car manufacturer Volkswagen. It seems they name their models by picking nouns that look interesting out of a foreign language (i.e. English) dictionary. They are so random in their selection. For example, there's: the one named after a dog-related wild animal, (Fox/Lupo),  the pair named after hit-ball-with-stick games (Polo/Golf),  the one named after a wind (Sirocco),  the one named after a spelling mistake (Passat),  the one named after an Essex girl (Sharan)  and a couple that are so boring I can't even remember what they're called. Come on, Volkswagen. You can do better than this. A five-year-old can do better than this... Image from Wikipedia