I'm breaking my usual absence of posts at the weekend to comment on the Amazon Kindle spring sale . They have a range of new books on sale at ridiculously cheap prices. I'm most interest because my latest book (which hasn't been mentioned here because it technically doesn't come out until 5 April, though it has been spotted in Waterstones) The Universe Inside You is one of these books, just 99p in the UK and $1.57 in the US . Some have questioned whether it makes good business sense to sell a book that costs £12.99 (admittedly often quite heavily discounted from this) for just 99p in ebook form. I think as long as it is a limited duration offer, as this is, it makes a very good way of drawing a new book to people's attention. After all, for 99p it is surely worth taking a punt - and with awareness enhanced, it will hopefully then be more obvious as a print book. The process started yesterday and so far it seems to be going pretty well. At the time of writing, ...

See, we have culture in Swindon Yesterday I had to hang around for about an hour on the outskirts of Swindon. I know you are thinking that sounds a bit like some sort of 'outer circle of hell' joke, but you are cruel, and indulging in a malicious stereotype. Swindon is really quite nice. There wasn't time to go anywhere with a nice little coffee shop or even Starbucks, so I popped into the nearby Holiday Inn for a quite acceptable if rather expensive cappuccino. Out came the iPad (in fact I am writing this blog on it in the Holiday Inn coffee shop right now, yesterday, if you'll pardon the time mangling). When I know I'm going to have time to kill I always take my iPad with me and that does everything I need. In fact, thanks to the ubiquitousness of free Wi-fi I don't even bother to download anything as I know all my latest work will be there on Dropbox ready to access. So I hit the Wi-fi button and up pops 'Holiday Inn Swindon Wi-fi' as you would...

A Lord Spiritual, not in the House I am not an atheist or a rabid religion basher like our good friend Dr Dawkins. In fact, like Martin Rees I am very fond of the Church of England. But I am afraid I wholeheartedly disagree with the idea, apparently supported by all the main political parties, that the reformed House of Lords should retain a built-in set of bishops. The main argument seem to be that there have always been 'Lords Spiritual', ever since the House of Lords was founded over 700 years ago. So what? Until it was banned there had always been dog fighting and bear baiting. Tradition is only a useful argument when it has some bearing on morale or makes a good profit, which hardly seems to be the case here. It's not that I think bishops should be excluded from the House. I'd be happy to see them there. I just don't think they should have reserved places, they should be elected (or whatever the mechanism) like everyone else. If they are to stay, I thin...

On Sunday I kindly offered to attempt to make my children's bookings for Radio 1's Hackney Weekend . It was an experience all too familiar to anyone who has attempted to make an online booking for a ticket for a major festival. To begin with, the site simply crashed with the sheer weight of people trying to get on it, producing error messages that suggest it didn't like your IP address, but I think were simply just its way of saying 'I can't cope!' For the next hour, every attempt put you through to a holding page that said the booking page was too busy. What was mildly fascinating about this (you take fascination where you can when you are spending an hour repeatedly clicking the refresh button) was that the design of the screen seemed to change several times. I'm not just referring to the times when it only half-loaded and you got a text version, but even when you got the whole thing there seemed to be at least three different versions of it. Then - ...

Political parties are anything but scientific (and let's face it, many politicians are totally ignorant about science). In one way, at least, it's rather good that they are so scientifically naive. If they weren't they could be even more devious. I'm reflecting on some remarkable information in an equally remarkable book, Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind ( take a look at my enthusiastic review of it ). In one of those lovely bits of research that psychologists delight in doing, a group at Princeton discovered that when people were shown pairs of photos of candidates for various political roles (the participants did not know the people, or what party they stood for) and were asked to assess which was the more competent of the two, around two thirds of the time they picked the person who actually won the political contest. It wasn't that they were always picking the most attractive person - snap judgements of attractiveness did not predict victory so well....

The only writer's block I have I saw a lovely quote a couple of days ago (thanks to Lynn Price of Behler Publishing). It was along the lines of 'Writer's block - when even your imaginary friends won't talk to you.' It's partly such a clever line, but also, for me, emphasizes the fictional nature of writer's block. You can always write - not necessarily at your best, but that's what editing is for. However, the reason I brought it up here was a completely different reason. A few weeks ago we went to see the comedian Chris Addison (the one behind the desk in the Direct Line adverts for UK readers). I'd never been to an evening of pure standup, so wondered if it could hold up for a whole show (after all, the likes of 'Live at the Apollo' are heavily edited so you only see the best bits). In fact it could, and he was great. Addison seemed particularly lucky with his audience. He asked the audience a couple of questions and hit rich seams ...

Among the mystery guests in our bodies covered in the article I've got a piece I wrote on a science subject in one of the national newspapers on Sunday. It might be a little surprising to learn that it's in the Mail on Sunday . I'll be honest, the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday aren't the newspapers that spring to mind immediately when it comes to science. The Mail has a reputation for having a constant programme of announcing that different foods and drinks either cause or prevent cancer (or both). But I have to say that with newspapers, the reality is often quite different from the caricature. I'm reminded of many moons ago when I attended the Microsoft Windows 95 launch. (As an aside, I got the best giveaway I've ever had a product launch - a Windows 95 shoulder bag that I'm still using today.) It was at a venue in Leicester Square and the audience were all sitting round tables for a meal before the event proper. I was sitting next to the Sun ...

I gather from the Beeb that 'swingeing cuts' have been proposed to NASA's robotic exploration budget. It seems that there is going to be a change in priorities away from unmanned explorers as 'The FY2013 budget proposal shifts funds to human spaceflight and space technology...' This is madness. If you think of what NASA has achieved over the years, we get far more value from its satellites and robotic missions than from human spaceflight. Manned exploration is primarily a political showcase. Of course there are always things a human being can do better - but when you weigh up the risk in human lives and the vastly increased cost to support human beings against all the benefits that we've had from satellites and probes it's a no-brainer. If they really want to seriously trim NASA's budget - and science needs to accept that it can't be exempt, even though I would argue that R and D, science and creativity are things you really don't cut in a r...

It's all about the money (money, money) It's budget day in the UK and there is much headscratching about taxation and its avoidance. There was a fascinating discussion about the morality of tax avoidance on yesterday's Channel 4 News between representatives of a conservative think tank and UK Uncut which calls itself 'a grassroots movement taking action to highlight alternatives to the government's spending cuts'. Tax avoidance is one of those things that it's so easy to have a knee-jerk reaction to - 'We need to clamp down on it!' - but when you start looking at it in detail, it's not all black and white. Tax avoidance is about keeping your personal tax burden to a minimum - realistically, who wants to pay more tax than they legally have to? At its most morally friendly, tax avoidance is putting your savings in a tax-free ISA. That way you avoid paying the tax on the interest you would otherwise pay. Few would argue this is a problem. The...

The hottest year on record? We don't know Scientists have to be precise. It is their downfall when they try to communicate. The media don't want precision, 'if's and 'but's and error bars. They want black and white 'facts'. It's not a trivial problem. If, as a scientist, you over-simplify then you are in danger of getting a twisted message across (and losing the respect of your peers). If, on the other hand, you apply normal scientific caution people switch off and your political opponents rip you to pieces. This is a problem that climate scientists face all the time. Every time they revise something or hedge their statements with probabilities, or admit there are competing theories, those with a vested interest in playing down climate change wade in and give it to them with all guns blazing. And it wouldn't surprise me if this happens again with the recent announcement that they've changed their mind about what was the warmest year on ...

Sneaky new router hiding behind the TV It's several weeks since we acquired our Apple TV box and it is getting very heavy usage. The quality of TV shows and movies from iTunes and Netflix is much better than I expected - generally indistinguishable from ordinary TV. But a problem has reared its head. Inevitably the Apple TV box takes a hefty chunk of our internet bandwidth. If one person is watching TV this way and someone else wants to download a file or watch something on YouTube, the viewing becomes pretty well impossible, with lots of pauses and hiccups. Where we live we can't currently get ultra-high speed broadband, because there is neither cable TV nor fibre optic cabling. (I find this bizarre in a yuppy estate built less than 10 years ago, but who can fathom the minds of BT and Virgin?) But luckily there was a solution. As it happens, we have two phone lines into the house, one for my business, one for home. Our internet has always come off the business line. S...

I've just put a competition on the www.popularscience.co.uk home page, giving away a copy of the excellent James Gleick's new book, The Information . When it had gone live, I was asked if I could add a link to the book trailer video. I did, but with gritted teeth. I really have no time for book trailers. In the end, a book trailer is an advert for a book. I resent spending my time watching a video for this purpose. It's probably because I'm an old curmudgeon, but I'd much rather have written words than a video. It's all a matter of scanning. If you give me a written press release on a book, I can scan the whole thing in about 10 seconds. If there's anything interesting I can then home in and read the detail I want. Video is so low tech in this regard. It's so twentieth century and linear. You have to sit through the thing in the order the maker put it in, at the speed they produced it. I want to control the input of media in my brain with this kind ...

My recent post about Stabucks versus Costa produced a surprising level of response, I think (as I indicated at the start of that post) because of a knee-jerk reaction to Starbucks-as-corporate-behemoth. But what I found fascinating in the comments was how many people don't understand the basics of the kind of business Starbucks is in, and think that it is all about selling great coffee. It really isn't. Before I was a science writer I spent a long time in business and I hope you won't mind a quick excursion into service business 101. Some companies - the no frills ones, typically - are pretty much about what they seem. So EasyJet is in the business of getting people from A to B. But many businesses are really about something else - the experience. British Airways, for instance, is not primarily about getting you from A to B. They can get away with charging as much as 10 times what EasyJet does for the same journey because this is the case. Of course they have to do the b...

The recent solar storm was a classic example of the way the impact of scientific information on our everyday lives can be misrepresented with the best of intentions (in this case to get a story noticed) but can result in more harm than good. I happened to be appearing on our local BBC radio station on Saturday with the excellent Mark O'Donnell and inevitably the solar storm was a big talking point. There was much fun had with audience suggesting things that could be blamed on the storm (e.g. The crisps were all crushed in someone's packet, Swindon Town losing to Oxford) and that's not surprising as some of the coverage suggested we could expect the end of life as we know it, where in practice no one noticed anything. The problem is that the media is terrified of using probabilities, so tends not to paint a good picture of an event which we can only predict the impact of in statistical terms. Instead we got dire warnings of the worst possible outcome, which given the rea...

Apologies to anyone who thinks my books are turning up rather too thick and fast this year - but I've got another one out! (It will be a bumper year: there are three more due out in the next six months.) On the other hand, it's very different from anything else I've done. Exploring the Universe is a book of striking photographs in an exploration of astronomy and cosmology. It's a sort of manageable coffee table book - big enough for the photos to be impressive, but small enough to be able to read with your wrists falling off. That reading part is important because although the pictures (around 100 of them) are a significant component of this book it was really important for me that the text was both readable and had plenty to say. I think a real danger with this kind of book is that they can be just a collection of pictures with some hastily assembled text. In this case I've tried to make sure that the text packs in plenty of fascinating information. So, for...

I know some people think that Starbucks are on the same axis of corporate evil as McDonalds and Microsoft, but quite like them. I've recently had the opportunity to do a bit of a head to head comparison with their main UK competitor, Costa Coffee - and I'm afraid, Costa, for me Starbucks is well ahead. It's interesting that last year Costa ran a 'we asked people to compare and 4 out 5 (or some such number) preferred our coffee to you know who.' This is falling for the dreadful Pepsi marketing error. Many years ago, Pepsi did taste tests and 'proved' that a lot of Coke drinkers prefered the taste of Pepsi. Pepsi entirely missed the point. People don't sit down, compare two colas on taste and buy the one they like better. When they buy Coca Cola, they buy the package - and when it comes to the whole ethos, Pepsi comes second best. Similarly, it wouldn't really matter if Costa's coffees do taste a little better. Because that's not an issue....

Come on, it's Friday. Take a moment to give the leetle grey cells a spot of exercise. (Shut up, Hercule.) You may have heard this problem before. Don't stop reading if it seems familiar, though, we are going way beyond the usual conclusion. Every morning a man gets into the lift (elevator) on the floor of the high rise block he lives in and rides down to ground level. Every evening he comes home, gets in the lift, rides up to the tenth floor (four floors below his own), gets out and walks the rest of the way. Why? If you haven't heard it before, think about it for a while before reading on. P L E A S E T H I N K B E F O R E S C R O L L I N G Now an extra piece of information. The man was easily tall enough to reach every button on the lift's control panel. Think about the problem some more. (I throw this in because the conventional 'right' answer is that the man is too short to reach any button higher than the 10th floor. Bu...

A Kindle - be honest, does that look exciting? There are reports about that e-book readers are in decline. Apparently Amazon has significantly cut orders of its Kindle e-book reader. This seems strange news, when you consider how we are always hearing that e-books are taking over the world, but I don't find it at all surprising. I'd say there were two factors at play here. One is that people have increasing availability of other devices like phones and tablets (particularly iPads but also Kindle Fires etc.) that work perfectly well as an e-book reader. It's true that a Kindle has some benefits - it's lighter and it has the e-ink screen which is easier to read outside, and less of a strain on the eyes (not that I find an iPad a strain). But multipurpose mobile devices have become the norm. We no longer want a pure e-book reader, any more than we want a pure mobile phone. The other factor is that e-ink is dull. I'm sorry, it is. Not only does it show you the w...

I ought to say straight away, to avoid any disappointment, that I don't have a photo of the Loch Ness Monster. Sorry. But I do have a picture that I think exhibits some of the features of many LNM (as we scientific types prefer to call Nessie) snaps. This is something that I wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't been peering at the picture quite intently. This might seem unlikely, but I happen to have this photo as a desktop background, as a result of which it tends to be in front of my nose quite a lot. And this is the first similarity I suspect with those who find pictures of the LNM (or ghosts or whatever). To do this, people are staring at a picture, in their case hoping to find something. In my picture (cunningly pretending to be a Polaroid thanks to Picasa) you see a vertical streak of sunlight on the water to the left of the scene. The question is, is there a person in the water, or is that little blob about halfway up the whole image just a rock or an effect of the ...

It might seem a little odd to review a book of Bible scholarship in a blog that's primarily about science and science writing, but bear with me. This is no normal religious book - and I came to it because it was recommended by no less than Richard Dawkins. I have to say I found this book, which looks at the way the copying of the New Testament of the Bible introduced errors into it over the years, fascinating. This was for three reasons. First because as a writer. It's remarkable to see such a study of how a series of manuscripts going back a couple of thousand years have accumulated errors and changes. Secondly it really makes you wonder about people who think the Bible is an inerrant source of guidance (Dawkins' main point) and thirdly it shows how some of Christianity's less popular aspects are probably not part of the original version. Because the book is quite thorough in detail, it helps to really be interested in language and also to have a mild familiarity w...

I spent a chunk of Saturday in sunny Brighton a week ago (actually it was raining when I arrived, but let's not be picky). I was giving a talk at the Brighton Science Festival , but then had an excellent chat with one of the owners of an independent bookshop in Brighton, City Books . I have to say I was very impressed. Their stand at the festival had an excellent collection of popular science books, and there was such obvious enthusiasm for the product, without the preciousness of some independent bookshops, where the people working there don't seem to even realize they have a product to sell. I guess that's the downside to the kind of location I live in. With Borders closed, Swindon's only bookshop is Waterstones (I'm afraid I can't count W H Smiths). Our Waterstones is very nice and friendly, but in the end, even under the new regime, they are limited in how much flexibility they can have in what they do. The nearest independent I'm aware of is the Whi...

Generally speaking you expect to find really strong acids locked away in the cupboard of a lab. So it may come as something of a shock to find out that one of the big names - hydrochloric acid - plays a big part in your everyday life. Find out why - and much more about this stomach-churning compound - in the latest Royal Society of Chemistry podcast on hydrochloric acid. Click here to listen...

One of the delights of having acquired Netflix ( see previous post ) is being able to take a look at films and TV shows that caused a big buzz when they came out, but I never got round to seeing. Last night I watched the first two hours of the first season of 24 . As everyone said at the time, the real time format is very clever and engaging. What's more, how sweet all their antique 'modern' technology is. Jack Bauer is using my old phone ! But I desperately need a 24 fan to explain to me the logic of the bad guys in those first couple of episodes. [SPOILER ALERT] Okay, it's clever of the writer to make us all think the photographer is the killer to start with. But come on. WHY does the following happen? What the bad guys want to do is replace a top photographer with a ringer, who can then get close to a target and kill them. Fair enough. The photographer is flying in to LA. So they wait for him to get off the plane, kill him and replace him quietly and efficient...