I still can't quite believe that I recently appeared on Bulgarian TV. Speaking in Bulgarian. (Sort of.) It was all rather surreal. The interview took place via Skype, between me, sitting at my desk in my office and the glamorous presenter, Sophia Tzavella, in a sizeable serious TV studio. We discussed various weird aspects of science in English. They have then dubbed over us (presumably Sophia dubbed herself) in Bulgarian, so you hear the voice of a suitably scientific sounding Bulgarian actor. If you would like to take a look at me in action, it's available online here . I'm on from about 7 minutes 17 seconds, but I particularly like the shot at 8 minutes 4 seconds (screenshot on the left) which shows the studio in all its glory with me on a big screen in the background. All in all a fascinating experience!

Time, as they say, waits for no person. Neither do books about time machines. Because I'm delighted to say the UK version of my book on the science of time travel, Build Your Own Time Machine is now available. I didn't get my own copies until the very last minute, so it's brilliant to be able to see it for real at last. So run, don't walk to your local Waterstones and demand a copy yesterday. Or even easier, nip over to Amazon ( there are links to do so on the book's web page ) and order one up. At risk of being a touch biassed, this is one of my favourites of all the books I've written. Time travel. What's not to love? I'm glad to say the publisher was able to respond to a concern about the cover. The original version didn't have the subtitle, which meant there was nothing to distinguish it from a science fiction book. They were able to slip in 'The Real Science fo Time Travel', which is great. I'm expecting talks based on this ...

I'm currently reading for review a book called Quantum Physics for Poets (the next step, I suppose, from How to Teach Physics to your Dog ). In it, the authors comment A glass prism hanging in our window splits the white sunlight into its spectral constituents Red-Orange-Yellow-Green-Blue-Indigo-Violet (ROY G. BIV) Now, leaving aside the rather bizarre idea that 'Roy G. Biv' is somehow a useful way of remembering anything, I thought it rather sad that this book, written by a Nobel laureate and friend, passes on as wisdom without comment the idea that there are seven colours in the rainbow. It's a load of tosh, for which we have to thank Isaac Newton. If you take a look at a rainbow and look for blocks of colour, it's hard to see more than six. Alternatively, if you consider the rainbow of colours on your computer screen, it is likely to be made up of millions of subtly different hues. Either way you consider it, seven is wrong. There's a good reason for t...

Spot the contact details I do a bit of consumer/technology journalism, which means I'm frequently in touch with technology press offices and PR companies. There was a time when you relied on a little black book of contacts, but these days you just zip onto the net and type in Company X Press Office and the details pop up. Unless you are trying to contact Dell. Their press office is so well hidden it verges on farce. Go to their News Room press office contacts page and you are told the following: Dell UK and Ireland Press Office Dell Computers Innovation House Cherrywood Science and Technology Park Cherrywood, Loughlinstown Dublin 18 Ireland Note no phone, no email. Yes, the press office of one of the world's leading computer companies only provides a postal address. Snail mail. Nineteenth century at best. Admittedly they do then go on to give a telephone number for 'UK Head Office Contacts' followed by a Bracknell address. Ah ha! Got em. But no. The phone numb...

It's an iPhone - get over it As long as Apple Computer has existed it has roused strong emotions. It has been a marmite company. You love it or you hate it. We shouldn't feel too sorry for Apple. They started it. Once they had the Mac, they undertook aggressive comparative marketing, putting the savvy, smart Mac against the creaking, boring PC. And they had a point. But back then I wouldn't have touched a Mac with a bargepole. They wouldn't work with anyone else's network, they had poor file interchangeability and they were closed systems that you couldn't add hardware to, nor could you do much with the software. So it's not surprising that back then there were strong pro and anti feelings. But I think it's time we got over it. Macs are good computers - so are PCs. Android phones are excellent - iPhones are brilliant. As yet the iPad is the only decent tablet, but it won't be for long. It really quite saddens me when I see the silly, unthinkin...

I love classic science fiction and fantasies set in the real world, but I've not ventured that much into reading horror. Okay, I've got a secret pleasure in Dennis Wheatley , and my favourite fantasy writers Ray Bradbury, Gene Wolfe and Neil Gaiman can all produce a form of horror but I've rarely gone for the pure thing. Apart from Mr Wheatley, my only real experience is Steven King. I think some of his work - particularly It - is surprisingly well written and pins you in place as a reader. So it was interesting to be sent the latest book by Dean Koontz, an author I've never tried - 77 Shadow Street . To look at it's quite a chunky hardback, but I found it a reasonably quick read as it's a page turner. This is certainly my kind of horror, in the sense that it's fantasy horror, rather than simply man's inhumanity to man. The setting is very well built, and the sense of menace effectively done. It's interesting that I mentioned It earlier, as in so...

All we need now is some brains I was rather pleased to be interviewed the other day by CNN on the subject of brainstorming. It's one of those subjects that it's easy to mock, because it is often done so badly. It probably featured on The Office . Yet do it right and it's very powerful. If you want to see brainstorming done badly, just watch an episode of The Apprentice . It's almost like they follow a rule book called 'How Not to Brainstorm' (or Brianstorm as I just typed). They sit round a whiteboard and think up ideas. Some get written down, some are ignored. Many will be argued with. And they end up with some fairly feeble ideas. And go with one. Not a great advert for the process. If you are going to brainstorm I'd suggest seven steps for success: Make sure you are addressing the right problem . Don't rush in and assume you know what it is you need to do. Quickly think through just what it is you are trying to achieve and see if their are al...

I was interested to see that loveable old grumpy Richard Wilson on TV the other night moaning about all the automated systems we have to deal with. A lot of it was fair enough. I mean, who could love automated telephone menu systems? (Can anyone explain how on over 50% of the calls I make, whatever time of day, they appear to be experiencing higher than usual call volumes?)  And I agree that those systems for paying for car parking by phone are a nightmare. But there was one thing they got wrong - and the way they went about it was very naughty. Young Mr Wilson was moaning about supermarket self-checkouts. To try out (or rather to try to disprove) the claim that they are quicker to use, they took an immense sample of four people to compare self-checkout and going through a traditional till. And it was a fiasco of a test. Firstly they compared the times for the two checkout processes from the point the checkout started. This misses the whole point, dumbos! When I go into th...

A product I've never reviewed The other day I got an email from a PR agency that was more like the sort of scam that originates from Nigeria. The email (I won't name the agency to spare their blushes) said: I’m updating the finance database to ensure any future payments will not be delayed. Could you provide me your banking details, please? Although I've had information from this agency plenty of times, I've never done any work for them. Scamming apart, my immediate thought when putting 'PR agency' alongside 'payment' was around the area of bribery. It wouldn't surprise me if those who read reviews suspect that reviewers are being given lots of goodies, if not downright cash payments, to write good things. Now I've been writing reviews since the 1990s - it's how I started in professional writing - and I have to say that, on the whole it is all squeaky clean and above board. If the product has a low production cost (software, for exam...

As you may have gathered by now, I rather love my iPad and use it all the time. When, for example, I get sent proofs of my books to check through as PDFs, I tend to fling them over to the iPad and read them on there, as I find it much easier to read a document that way than on a computer screen. But the only danger is that you are at the mercy of the quality of the software interpreting the PDFs, which don't have as straightforward a file format as an image file. I discovered this recently when I was looking at the proof of a page from an illustrated book I've got out later this year. Part of one of the pages looked like this:     You can see there's a statue of Galileo to the left and to the right, bleeding across to the next page is a strange bit of hieroglyphics like something out of the Da Vinci Code . Very nice, I thought, but what does it mean?  So I sent a note to the editor, who came back swiftly, something to the effect of 'Isn't it obvious? It's Ga...

The other day I was listening to a bit of hard core, or possibly thrash metal, the way you do. At least, the way you do if your children insist on listening to Radio 1 sometime around midnight when you pick them up, even if they can't stand the music. And I had a bit of an epiphany. For a long time I have struggled to articulate why I dislike rap so much - and hearing this stuff made me realize what the answer is. I didn't enjoy the hardcore/thrash sounds that were coming from the car speakers. It really wasn't my kind of thing. The closest you'll find on my iPod is somewhere between Van der Graaf Generator and Pink Floyd at their most destructive. But I could appreciate what I was hearing as music. It clearly was someone producing music, and what they were doing had obvious antecedents in the musical tradition. What I hear when I listen to a rap 'song' has a totally different antecedent. Where those extreme forms of rock grew from heavy metal, which came ou...

With permission of the Institute of Physics The seventeenth century physicist Robert Hooke has had something of a roller coaster ride of a history. Although Hookes' law on the elasticity of springs has kept his name visible, he largely disappeared as a person in the glare of the spotlight placed on his indubitably great contemporary and rival Isaac Newton. When Hooke re-emerged onto the world stage it became briefly fashionable to belittle Newton and big up Hooke's achievements. Now we have mostly got more of a balance. Hooke did do a remarkable amount in his own right. Yet the feud between Hooke and Newton was certainly not one-sided. In fact it started when Hooke dismissed Newton's paper on light and colour without even bothering to read it. And there is good evidence that Hooke had a tendency to claim other people's ideas as his own. But there is no doubt that Hooke was a great experimenter, science populariser (his book of drawings of microscopic views is s...

It's Royal Society of Chemistry podcast time again. What can you say about a substance that brings us back time and again to a favourite treat, but is poisonous to dogs? We're talking theobromine (literally food of the gods from the Greek), the main active ingredient in chocolate. In fact this close relative of caffeine is poisonous to all mammals to some degree - us included - but you would have to eat a very large amount to suffer. Cats are even more susceptible... but they don't have a sweet receptor among their taste buds, so don't care much. Take a listen and find out more .

The original Apple Computer logo Historians of science tend to downplay 'eureka moments' when a scientist suddenly has a great idea. 'Constructed after the fact,' they mumble into their beards. 'Real science isn't like that. It's a slow grind, a team effort. Fake memories. Blah, blah...' Arguably this says more about historians of science, and their lack of imagination, than real scientists. For while all eureka moments are certainly not true, I think many are. To dismiss a couple of unlikely ones, I very much doubt that the original Archimedes jumping out of the bath story has any validity. And there's good evidence that Galileo didn't get a sudden understanding of gravitational pull while dropping balls of different weights off the leaning tower of Pisa. (The evidence for this is that Galileo never mentions it. It is only told by an assistant who was writing about Galileo near the great man's death. But Galileo was a superb self-public...

Two words. Scottish independence. Please. I'm sorry, I have no interest in keeping the Scots in the Union. The sooner they break off the better. Just think about it. No more Alex Salmond on UK television. It's worth it for that alone. No more Scottish MPs at Westminster. (It would be interesting if we had as few MPs of Scottish origin as they have MPs of English origin in the Scottish parliament. BTW, isn't Cameron a Scottish name?) No more subsidies. No more need to fund postmen and medics and other vital services to go all the way to the Highlands and Islands. No more whingeing from Scottish politicians. (Actually there would be plenty of it, but hopefully it wouldn't make it onto our news.) Of course we'd lose out on North Sea Oil revenues - but it would be worth it. As would the mangling of the Union flag. But please make it all or nothing. Any further devolution is no help. We'd STILL have all the whingeing. Still have their MPs at Westminster. And st...

I'm writing this quickly before heading off to BBC Wiltshire to talk detox. They thought this would be rather a fun thing to discuss post Christmas and the New Year, and I'm delighted to oblige. Detox is one of those subjects that really gets me irritated at the way manufacturers and health shops rip people off. As usually presented, detox is total rubbish. Let's break it down. What does detox mean? Removal of toxins - poisons - from the body. What are poisons? Pretty well anything taken in excess of an acceptable dose. Water, for example, is poisonous if you drink enough quickly. A couple of athletes have died as a result of water poisoning. (I think it dilutes your electrolyte levels sufficiently that your nervous system packs in.) Your body has brilliant systems for removing toxins - your liver and kidneys, for example - but if you shove too much in, it will have trouble getting rid of the bad stuff fast enough. So what should you do to detox? It's so boring, w...

When I was young I had an educational toy that was called something like an Electrokit (definintely not the Meccano Electrikit ). It was a set of electronic components, each protected in a chunky housing with standard split-pin plug fittings at the bottom. You then got a series of circuit boards with appropriate sockets in and you could plug the transitors, resistors etc. in place to make up real working electronic devices. I can't find a picture of the kit or the door, so here's the Science Museum As far as I can remember, and I'm really dredging the depths of memory here, it was brilliant. I feel a real nostalgia for this kit. The ultimate thing you could construct was a radio, which was quite exciting, but for me this wasn't anywhere near as good as another project. The thing is, a radio was an everyday item, but you also got the chance to build something cool of practically Star Trek wonder. Before I reveal what this project was, I ought to point out somet...

I'm a great fan of Jane Austen, and love a good detective story, so was delighted to get the P. D. James follow-up to Pride and Prejudice , the murder mystery Death Comes to Pemberley for Christmas. It was quite eerie to start reading it, as I had watched the film adaptation of P and P with Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Bennet just the evening before. It somehow made it particularly easy to immerse myself in the book - and I ought to stress that I'm not a picky traditionalist, so was not in any sense worried about what Ms James would do to the hallowed characters. (As credentials, I love Stephen Moffatt's modern day Sherlock ). Sadly, though, I can only be lukewarm about what I read. If I'm honest, P. D. James is not one of my favourite writers - I find her usual murder mysteries rather stiff and stilted. (In fact the best thing about the Dalgleish stories is the superb theme tune of the TV adaptation.) Although the Austen sequel is cleverly written, it seemed to ...

Amidst the floods of coverage of the recent successful trial of two of the attackers of the murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence, a crime committed 18 years ago, there have inevitably been a matching set of articles, TV and radio pieces on the nature of racism. I read an article that seemed shocked that there was still racism in schools after all this time. To be shocked about this is to have a very poor understanding of human beings. The fact is we are naturally disposed to distrust, and at the extreme to hate, those who are different, whether based on race, religion, appearance ( red hair, for instance ), accent - pretty well anything. If we can't find anyone who is different enough, we will set up an arbitrary difference, which to an outsider looks pathetic. In olden days, when few travelled far enough to know anyone really different, English people looking down on the Irish, those from Lancashire and Yorkshire hated each others guts (despite being almost indistinguishab...

Ok, that title I'm back - paper back didn't really work as a pastiche of James Bond introducing himself. But I am delighted to be starting the new year in the way I hope to be going on with montonous regularity, with a new book out - to be precise the paperback version of Inflight Science . If you are wise, attractive and generally wonderful enough to have already acquired a copy of Inflight Science you may be puzzled and be saying 'But it was already a paperback'. This reflects the way the first edition was in a rather strange format called 'trade paperback' which is half way between a hardback and a paperback. ( See this post for more info on the concept.) What has now come out is the mass market paperback version. This is smaller and cheaper than the original - so even handier to slip in that pocket prior to a flight. Unfortunately the publishers in their wisdom (and I'm assured there is a good reason) have only brought this version out in the UK -...

A bank. As stupid as the rest, but at least it looks interesting I can't believe the stupidity of banks. I'm not referring to all the usual reasons for hating bankers (like their bonuses and breaking our economy) - but because their computer systems are so rubbish. A lot of this stems from their philosophical inability to recognize weekends and bank holidays. 'What, us, work like normal people in a service industry? Do us a favour?' You might think they do work at the weekend. After all many banks are now 'open' on Saturdays. But that is just a shadow, a ghost of a bank, to fool you into thinking they care. All the transactions they make at the weekend or on bank holidays are saved up to go through on the next 'working day', because their computers don't believe it is really possible to work at the weekend. Here's one ludicrous example. I have a standing order that goes out on the first of the month. If I go online today, 2 January, which...