Is it a bug or a feature? I spent a fair number of years at British Airways both programming myself and working with programmers. Arguably the most fascinating sociological aspect of the computer programming environment is the concept of the bug. The error in the code that makes it do the wrong thing. I might not be rich, but I could probably afford a pint of beer if I had 10p for every time I heard a conversation between programmer and user going a little like this: User: 'There's a bug in this software. It does X and it should do Y.' Programmer: 'Sorry, that's not a bug, it's a feature.' User: '??!?' I need to briefly dive into the origins of this word 'bug' before exploring the sociology. You will see it said that the word originated from the early days of computing. A (valve) computer failed and on investigation it was found by the early computer expert Grace Hopper that there was a large insect in the machine had caused a short

I think the thing I enjoyed most about writing The Universe Inside You was the chance to explore how small aspects of the human body could help explore some entertaining science. Take skin, for instance. The outer layer of your skin is primarily the same material as your hair and nails, a protein called keratin. One of the interesting things about keratin is that it isn’t a living substance. Your outer skin, hair and nails are not alive. This means, of course that all those hair adverts claiming that a product will nourish your hair are rubbish. You can’t nourish hair, any more than you can nourish a boulder. It makes no sense. But what I find particularly interesting is the paradox of what makes you a living creature. You are, without doubt alive – yet parts of you aren’t. Many of your cells could be considered to be alive, yet on their own, they aren’t you. Where does the divide come between you and the cells that make you up? Your hair and skin are certainly part of you – but th

Got the hat. Time to feed the pigs... It sounds like a joke - Did you hear the one about someone selling top hats on eBay? - But it isn't, it's a demonstration of how flexible and innovative our farmers can be. Many farmers have had to diversify. These days, with a relatively small farm, it's difficult to make a living from agriculture alone. So, for example, some good friends of mine who farm cattle now also have a successful microlight airfield and skydiving school operating from their farmland. When I was running a creativity session for the CIME Project in Wales the other day, I came across another example of diversification at its best from a farmer. In this case he's selling things on eBay. Specifically he's apparently now one of the country's biggest seller of top hats. This, was, I hasten to add, not one of your gentleman farmer types, all Barbour and Range Rover, but a proper, hands dirty farmer. More than that he imports and sells hat adjus

If you have a website, you live in the EU and you aren't the slightest bit nervous about the European Cookie Law, you ought to be. This sounds like a 'Yes Prime Minister' plan by the EU that says we should stop calling biscuits 'cookies' (dratted American influence) and instead have to all call them biscotti. But no, the EU is trying to interfere with the internet. Cookies, as I'm sure you are aware, are little files that websites use to store information on your computer. Of itself a website has no memory. A cookie lets it keep a note of some information and come back to it next time you visit the site - essential, for example, if you want it to remember what you've put in a shopping basket. The EU has decided, in its overpaid wisdom, that sites using cookies should be forced to ask visitors whether they want cookies to be used. But isn't this stupid? It certainly is, on a number of levels. First the EU doesn't own the internet. It really sh

One of the all time favourites in any chemistry set was potassium permanganate. Those crystals look beautiful in their own right, and make a great purple coloured solution, but that's only the start. My latest entry in the   Royal Society of Chemistry  compounds podcasts takes on this simple chemical that is equally comfortable as a disinfectant and as a source of spontaneous combustion. Embrace purple!   Listen to the story of t his chemistry set star .

Despite being only a few days in, I am very pleased with the way things are going with the WordPress migration of the www.popularscience.co.uk website - I just wish I'd done it sooner.  However I do have a couple of lessons for anyone considering such a move. The first is that you will have to do something about spam. Even though the site has only been live for about a week, it already has over 100 spam comments. I originally thought it would be enough to moderate them before they went live. Obviously this stops them being seen but it still would be very tedious. Luckily the anti-spam plug-in that comes semi-preloaded works brilliantly.  The second lesson is the matter of backups. I've never bothered to back up my websites because they are created on my PC/Mac and uploaded, so the back up of the local machine keeps them safe. But now the Popular Science site is being updated online which means I have no backup on my desktop. My immediate thought was to ask the web ho

Science and beauty can be uncomfortable bedfellows. Like anyone with the vaguest ideas of scientific terminology I wince at the 'science bits' in most beauty product advertising on the TV. 'New improved CrackFilla with DNA piped light technology.' What? However there is one place that science and beauty come together effortlessly and that's in software. We all know that magazines have airbrushed pictures since... well since they've had photographs in them. And of late that touching up to make photographs look their best has all been done in software. Most of us don't have the Photoshop expertise to do this effectively manually, but I have been genuinely hugely impressed by some software that I have been sent to try out called Portrait Professional . It's described as 'intelligent retouching software' and it's remarkable. Here on the right is the picture of me I tend to use as an author photo at the moment. Andon the left is a touched up

The stately home I get a bit irritated when you get some old buffer on the TV pointing out that his family has owned a particular house for 400 years, or that she has ancestors going back to the Norman Conquest. There are two problems with this. One is that unless such folk can claim to be a non-human species, we all have ancestors going back the same extent. But the more important one is that 400 or 1,000 years is a trivial ancestry compared to the way we can all trace our origins back billions of years. As I point out in The Universe Inside You , the atoms inside you (and in the old buffers) have been circulating around on Earth since life began, well over three billion years ago. Fossils can be used to trace life back in rocks that were formed around 3.2 billion years ago, while the date can be pushed back a few hundred million years more on the basis of chemicals that suggest the existence of life. But before then, the atoms were still there. They didn’t appear out of nowher

The new look WordPress site No, when I mention 'WordPress' I'm not deserting Blogger for hosting my blog, but my oldest website www.popularscience.co.uk is in the process of moving from being a bespoke website to a WordPress site. It's all the fault of this pesky Mac I'm typing on. Almost everything I did on the PC translated across smoothly, but I knew there were two big issues to sort out. One was my business accounts, which I'd knocked up as a hand-crafted Access database back when I used to program regularly. This had become unwieldy and unmaintainable. So last summer I switched over to using SageOne , an online accounts package, which had the big advantage of being web-based, so there was nothing to migrate to the Mac. (It can also be accessed directly by my accountant, which is spooky.) The other problem was my rag-tag collection of websites. These had all been written originally in FrontPage, but I had switched over to a host that doesn't sup

In my younger and child-free days, my wife and I (ooh, posh) sang in a vocal group called Nonessence, loosely based around Slough and Windsor. There were eight singers and the musical director/arranger/keyboardist. And on our good days we weren't bad at all. It was with this bunch that I discovered a new and exciting cuisine - Mexican. At the time (we're talking the 1980s) Mexican food was pretty unusual in the UK, but lurking in a railway arch in Windsor (and yes, it was as dark and lurkacious as it sounds) was a newly opened 'Mexican cantina' called Charley's Horse . We went there a number of times, in part I suspect because it was reasonably priced, but also because of the novelty. After all, as the sign eventually and proudly stated, this was only the second Mexican cantina in all of England. What is delightful about all this, and why I mention it is that we were in Windsor last Friday to attend a creakingly painful play at the theatre. (Never did I think I

Just occasionally I get spam emails that are so hilarious that I feel I have to share them. I have just received this one 'from' the FBI. I don't know what's more funny, the idea that the FBI would send emails from an AOL account (it's quite funny anyone still uses an AOL account), or that a/the director of the FBI would write ' this is the final warning you are going to receive from the fbi office do you get me?'   Or, for that matter, manage to put the entire email in the 'Subject' field. Whatever - enjoy: From: FBI OFFICE Subject: Attn: This is to inform you that we the fbi have a warrant to arrest you if we dont hear from you immediately,this is the final warning you are going to receive from the fbi office do you get me? I hope youre understand how many times this message has been sent to you. We have warned you so many times and you have decided to ignore our e-mails we have been instructed to get you arrested immediately, and today

I sometimes have the pleasure of being sent a book for review that doesn't fit with www.popularscience.co.uk and cover it here. In this case I've got the double pleasure of both a review and a short interview with the author. The book in question, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs has been very popular in the US and should do brilliantly over here. It's the kind of fantasy that I've always found particularly appealing - one that is set in the real world, but where some strangely different things occur. In this case it's peculiar (in the sense of strangely gifted) children, living on a island off Wales, and strange manipulation of time. But despite the author noting at the back of the book that he consulted a 'leading authority on time travel,' the time travel aspects bear no resemblance to the real physical possibilities for time travel, which is one of the reasons I label this fantasy - you've just got with it and ignor

Regular readers of this blog will be aware I have become increasingly enthusiastic about Apple products. I had a Mac SE as a toy at work circa 1990, but at the time, most things about Apple irritated me. Now, though, after being eased in by iPhone and iPad (with a touch of Apple TV) I have gone all-Apple. The great thing about Apple products is that they combine style and function so well. They look good and they are a  delight to use - an irresistable (and sadly rare) combination. But there is one thing I have to seriously criticize them for, an essential for usability that they have repeatedly ignored. For years now I have used a series of ergonomic keyboards. The picture shows my last one - Microsoft's robust battleship of a board, the Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 . I didn't go for this kind of thing because it looks funky. When I switched to writing most of the time, I found that I increasingly suffered from painful wrist strain after a typing bout. I can easily type

This is me, looking constipated because I am slightly miffed. You should see me angry. I don't know about you, but I get slightly miffed when someone gets shirty in comments on my blog. I have no objection to people disagreeing with me. The posts here are my opinion, and though I am clearly always right, I accept that other people will have differing (if wrong) opinions. That is their prerogative. But I really don't like it when they get nasty about it. A good example has recently occured over an old post of mine about why I dislike opera . This was always intended to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek (not least because a good friend of mine is an opera singer), but does express some genuine dislikes I have. Realistically there is no real right and wrong about an issue like this. Whether a piece of art is good (or art at all) is purely subjective. Recently I've had a few comments from an anonymous poster and I just wanted to make a few comments about these. First ther

What do you think when you hear 'DDT'? Do you think of a dangerous chemical pervading nature, killing the birds and building up in fatty tissues of animals and humans? If so, it's down to Rachel Carson's famous book Silent Spring . But the funny thing is that Carson never advocated banning DDT, just using it in a controlled way - because this chemical saved millions of lives and could have saved many millions more had it not been for the stupid way it was used. This is the latest in my contributions to the   Royal Society of Chemistry 's podcast series Take a listen and decide for  yourself if DDT is hero or villain .

Shiny! One of my favourite TV shows, Joss Whedon's inexpicably cancelled Firefly (boo to the studio execs) invents some future slang, including the use of the term 'Shiny!' as an equivalent of 'Great!' I loved this, partly because it works so well in context, and partly because it seems to reflect the magpie-like aspect of human nature I recognize so well in myself. I can see this in my attitude to Apple products. Every time I use my iPhone or iPad, I get a little thrill out of it, because it does the job, certainly, but also because it is shiny , not in the sense of reflecting light, but rather in the way that its design lifts your heart, and using it gives you a little smile. I've recently gone through the turmoil of the decision whether to stick with Dell (after buying them for 15 years) or switch to an Apple Mac. You can talk about all the technical pros and cons (and the ridiculous Apple pricing) but if I can't help but feel i went with the Mac be

I am usually very positive about Marks and Spencers' green credentials. They really make something of it with their 'Plan A' materials plastered all over the stores. They were one of the stars of my Sustainable Business book . Many people think of M&S as the doyen of green businesses. But I think they have got it horribly wrong with their latest 'shwopping' campaign . Firstly it's fronted by Joanna Lumley, who really gets on my nerves. (Partly because of all those injury lawyer adverts she does for the radio, but also because her voice is so irritating , and she comes across as totally false, hardly ideal for this kind of campaign.) Someone must love her, she's on the TV so much, but I really don't understand why. But mostly I'm against it because the idea is awful. The concept is that if you buy a piece of clothing you can bring in an old piece of clothing to be recycled. You don't get any benefit from this - M&S just kindly recy

Brian speaking - this event will be less formal... I spend most of my time writing books and articles on science topics. I've been given the chance to put on a workshop in Cambridge (UK) to help others with the necessary skills. It's on Saturday 30 June 2012 at the St John's Innovation Centre in Cowley Road and runs from 9.30 to 3.30 including lunch. As well as my imparting words of wisdom there will be practical experience in choosing topics, getting together a pitch for an article or a book proposal and the whys and wherefores of science writing. Each attendee will be given free copies of two ebooks: Non Fiction Agent , which gives detailed guidance on putting together a non fiction book proposal and getting it submitted, and Upgrade Me , one of my popular science titles, which we will use to take a look at book proposals and the whole process of writing a science book in the workshop. Attendees will also get a free review from me of a magazine article or book pr

I am all in favour of online security, especially when dealing with banking, but I am currently experiencing the security equivalent of health and safety gone mad. My business has a business savings account (one percent interest - whoopee!) with a fairly well known brand that has recently been taken over by a big five bank. So the big five company is switching the account to their side of the business, and their online systems. Fair enough. But the paperwork and bits and pieces of stuff involved has been horrendous. So far I have received, each in a separate mailing (and I'm excluding all the leaflets, envelopes and assorted flyer type stuff): Two 'authentication cards' One Pinsentry device Two Businesscall membership cards and letters Two telephone banking passcodes Two authentication card PIN letters One 'more about the move' letter One online banking membership card and number I'm really not sure this is all necessary - and it certainly isn

A little extra post for you, with some bouncy musical listening from the band Moho Mynoki which happens to feature my god daughter (but this in no way influences me in saying it's very good). Not heavily into electro pop? Listen first, then criticize. If you like it, you can download the music or a buy an EP from their website . Have a good weekend! <p><a href="http://mohomynoki.bandcamp.com/album/orange-book">Orange Book by Moho Mynoki</a></p>

The kind of engine that pulled us to Edinburgh (a Deltic) - ugly things, but they made a great noise I heard on the radio the other day that one of the reasons that young people aren't getting as much exercise these days is because their over-protective parents don't want them to go out. It's too risky. This is very silly - young people have to have adventures. When I was fifteen, with two friends, I spent a week away from my parents on the railways. We all liked railways and we decided we were going to get the most you could out of a one week railrover, a ticket that allowed you to go anywhere on the railway network. Our timetable was superb. We even managed to include two of the great trains, the Flying Scotsman (the named train, not the engine) and the Cornish Riviera Express. From leaving a grey Manchester on that week we travelled to London (several times), Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Inverness, Glasgow, Cardiff, Birmingham, Salisbury and Penzance (amongst others). I

Not long ago I did a post about not having the patience to watch book trailers, so there is a certain amount of irony that my publisher has kindly produced one for my latest masterpiece, The Universe Inside You . At first glance this might seem a touch hypocritical. One minute I'm slagging them off, the next I'm doing one. But in the end, it was fun to do ('Hey, I'm the centre of attention, this can't be bad!'), and it does demonstrate a little bit about why I think there's so much fun to be had with the human body (settle down in the back row) and why it makes a great linking theme for a science book. So if you've got more patience than me (it's not very long), here it is:

I'm sure the title of this post would make an excellent PhD thesis. I was listening to the Archers omnibus on Sunday and struck by the remarkable sexism that was going apparently totally unnoticed. The cricket club has a very attractive new coach and we were hearing how women were attending practice just to watch him, and the gay characters were commenting on his attractiveness and how the women had turned up because they wanted to see him in his cricket whites (nudge, nudge, wink, wink). If a load of men turned up to see a new female hockey coach in her kit they would be rightly accused of being a load of perverts. So why the double standards? It's the same on TV shows judged by a panel. It seems absolutely fine for female and gay judges to keep making suggestive remarks about the men, but it would rightly be frowned on if similar comments were made about the women. I appreciate the 'You've done it to us for so long, now it's time to get our own back' arg

The sad remnant of my diskette collection I was watching the first series of 24 the other day on my mission to use Netflix to catch up with the good stuff I never saw the first time around. At one point someone needs to get information from one computer to another. She puts a black rectangular object into a drive and uses this to pass the information. I swear this is true: for just a moment, I thought 'What's that?' It was, of course, a diskette, something that was central to our computing lives only a few years ago and yet, to all intents and purposes, disappeared off the face of the planet more rapidly and completely than black vinyl records ever have. I had a sudden wave of nostalgia for floppy disks and diskettes. At one point I ran the PC department of a certain large airline whose initials include B and A. We genuinely did get those old hoary misuse stories of the 5 1/4 inch floppies. People really did occasionally staple them to a report. And one user really di