A not very popular science writer at work I write in a genre that's usually labelled "popular science" to distinguish it from the real academic stuff. In a recent Scientific American , the excellent Michael Shermer writes that popular science writing is often esteemed less than technical writing, and that he considers it very narrow and naive to regard anything other than peer reviewed papers as "mere popularization." I must admit, I've always had a bit of inverted view, thinking that, at least from a quality of writing viewpoint, most science writing other than popular science is pretty unreadable. (Someone has to stick up for the poor science writers.) Yet enthusiastic though I am about popular science, I feel a little nervous about that word "popular." Reading about celebrities like Ms Hilton is popular [ 2012 note - of course celebrities come and go - if I was writing this now I suppose it would someone from TOWIE or Pippa Middleton ],...

Don't expect much entertainment here I was listening to James Naughtie on his series about the ' New Elizabethans ', being reverential (as he always is about anything arty) about Harold Pinter and his work. There was much discussion of how Pinter's plays represented real life, with all its contradictions, without resolution, without true endings. How it's wonderful that everything is left in the air and unexplained. And it struck me exactly why such theatre isn't exactly commercial. The fact is, we can all experience real life and real conversations and contradictions and lack of resolution. We can all be left in the air and have things unexplained. It happens every day. That's where we live. We don't need to go to a theatre to experience it. The fact that Pinter encapsulates it wonderfully is a big 'so what?' It makes for theatre that is about as engaging as Big Brother. We don't want to go to a theatre to see real life, we want to b...

There's a lot of debate going on in the UK over the fact that the Chancellor of  the Exchequer (isn't that a wonderfully archaic term when you actually look at the words) has announced that he is not going to increase petrol duty by 3p from August, putting it off to January at least. Leaving aside the political insults flying about U-turns (get a grip politicians! When are you going to realise that admitting a mistake or the need for change is a good thing?), it has been useful in exposing the debate on what we should do to tax driving. There are two broad needs, to raise revenue (in principle, though not explicitly to pay for the road network and secondary costs thereof) and to discourage use of fossil fuels/high carbon emission activities/pollution. At the moment there are two weapons in the government's armoury. There is an annual car tax (formerly known as road fund licence), and there is fuel tax. The annual tax is ridiculous. Although it has gradations for emissio...

The answer was 'about four inches' - what was the question? Once you have finished sniggering in the back row, the real answer is an unreal pretence of accuracy. This mini-rant was inspired by a weather forecast, heard on the radio a few days ago for some eastern part of the UK or other. We were told that 100 millimetres of rain was expected 'which is about four inches.' Now it is perfectly reasonable to say that 100 millimetres is about four inches, as it is actually pretty close to 4.16 inches. But the point is that there weren't really going to be 100 mm of rain. In reality that '100 mm' number was just a round figure guess. There was no significant accuracy to the value. So the inches version should be a round figure too - in this case, four inches, not 'about four inches'. Otherwise it suggests a totally spurious accuracy in the original 100 millimetres. When I worked for a certain large airline with the initials BA, we used to have a...

Creativity in business is a funny thing. We all pay lip service to how important it is - but when times are tight and money is short we tend to pull up the drawbridge and say 'We can do without all this new-fangled innovation. While we're in trouble we need to stick with what we know.' In reality, of course, this is absolute tosh. The very time when you need to be most creative as a business is when things are difficult. But it's understandable that, in times of financial stress, you don't necessarily want to spend lots of money to train people in being more creative. There's an assumption in that previous sentence, of course. I'm taking it for granted that there is benefit in training people in creativity. I hope there's no doubt about the need for creativity. If everything around you stayed exactly the same, then you could carry on as you have before and thrive. But the fact is that the environment (financial and physical) is changing. Your cust...

Have you ever wondered about those strange prices that dominate the retail world? It's not £5, it's £4.99. Forget £10, it is bound to be £9.99. Just occasionally a retailer will rebel. For a brief bizarre period around 10 years ago Asda experimented with pricing CDs and the like with prices that ended with numbers like .74 or .27 - it looked much stranger than you might expect, so engrained is the notion that .99 is what nature intended. I think there is little doubt that the reason that retailers do this is psychological. We aren't hugely rational when it comes to decisions, especially when they involve those alien things numbers, which didn't exist as concepts when our current brain structure first evolved. So it doesn't matter how much you consciously tell yourself that £10 is pretty much the same as £9.99, your unconscious, shopping-powering mind will see it as considerably less. And it helps if you have to describe your purchase to a penny-pinching other half...

I was listening to some Shakespearian actor Johnnie on the radio yesterday morning talking about an arts event that is being arranged in London for the Olympics. Apparently he and 49 other actorrrrs (sic) will be spontaneously weaving quotes from Shakespeare into encounters with the public. Apparently he is a little worried about doing it himself, because people will recognise him. (He shouldn't worry, I've never heard of him, let alone know what he looks like. I think he rather overrates his fame.) But here's the thing - when he described what would happen, it didn't so much sound like art as letching. I paraphrase from memory, but this is roughly what he said might happen. I might sit next to someone on a park bench and say 'Hello, it's a nice day,' and then 'That's a nice bracelet... Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all...

It's a lazy post today. The long list has been announced for the 2012 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books (though I don't know what Dale Winton has to do with it). Take a look at my post on it at www.popularscience.co.uk with links to reviews of the listed books we've had in so far, plus the all-important set of the books that should have been on the list but were overlooked. To be fair, you really have to feel a bit sorry for the judges. They had to somehow whittle down a pile of over 100 books to 12, which is a horrendous task. Oh, the excitement.

The means we have for communicating in writing have blossomed over the last couple of decades. When I was at university it was letters or telegrams. We may have lost those exciting little brown envelopes that brought  news of disaster and triumph, but we've added email, text messaging and so much more. Which leads me to ponder the ways we sign off when writing. In formal letters it's easy - Yours sincerely if it's a named person you are writing to and Yours faithfully if it's not. But informal letters and particularly these quicker, easier means of written communication of today bring with them a whole host of options for how to end. Even text messages have this: do you end with a kiss or not? My (female) family expect this. In fact the number of kisses acts as a kind of emoticon. No kisses - you're in trouble. One or two - ordinary communication. Lots of kisses - either 'I want something' or 'Thank you so much!' But those kisses are so dangero...

I'm delighted to announced that my new book Gravity - How the weakest force in the universe shaped our lives is now available in the US. (UK readers, the proper UK version is out on 25 October, but if you can't wait that long, there are some copies of the US version on Amazon, and the UK link from my website will point to that until the official US version is out.) I have recently done a few relatively light topic books, which is hugely enjoyable to do (and, I hope, to read), but it's nice to get your teeth into something meaty, and it's interesting that my best selling physics-based book remains The God Effect on quantum entanglement, one of my more challenging titles. The great thing about doing the book on gravity is that it's a subject that is very obvious - you can avoid the effects of gravity in everyday life - and yet for most of human existence it has been quite mysterious. Then, when you get onto general relativity it becomes even more fascinating, ...

This is the fifth and last in my series of linked blog entries on my experience of being converted (or not) to intelligent design. The final evidence provided to me is from the DVD 'Where does the Evidence Lead'. Like my first source, the book "What's Darwin Got to do with it?": this is a calm, reasoned argument for intelligent design, rather than a religious rant. I don't think the DVD provides any additional arguments, going over the same material slowly with pictures. Once again, I am convinced that the reasonable inference argument means that ID needs at least considering, but that there just isn't enough evidence to unseat evolution. This DVD majors on the bacterial flagellum as impossible to explain without design. We are told that no one can explain how the various different components could have evolved, as none is useful independently. Unfortunately, it appears that the only source for this assertion is the champion of the motor, Michael Be...

This is the fourth in my series of linked blog entries on my experience of being converted (or not) to intelligent design. I had intended to do much the same with the second book as I did with the first - give a quick summary of the book in a first post, then analyze the key points in the next, but in this case there will be only one post about the book, for reasons that I think will become obvious. The second book intended to shift me into the intelligent design camp is The 10 things you should know about the Creation vs Evolution debate by Ron Rhodes. What I didn't realize when I started to read this is that it's one of a whole series Ron has written including The 10 most important things you can say to a mason and The 10 most important things you can say to a Catholic . I think this tells you where Ron is coming from. (I confess I would be fascinated to read both of these!) As the other books in the series show, this title really doesn't contribute to my journey, ...

This is the third in my series of linked blog entries on my experience of being converted (or not) to intelligent design. Here I present the key arguments from the book What's Darwin Got to do with it? by Robert Newman, John Wiester and Janet and Jonathan Moneymaker, and how I respond to them. You can't necessarily argue from small scale to large - you can't take the example of (say) all the different shapes and sizes of dogs and draw the conclusion that you can evolve something from a single cell to a complex mammal. Seems fair - certainly in physics you can't apply the same rules to different scales. Micro-evolution accepted without question. Macro-evolution requires more evidence. Peppered moths aren't enough either - the famous increase of dark peppered moths in the industrial revolution demonstrates selectivity, but not evolution of drastically different species. Can't argue with this. (Similarly finch beaks.) Similarities between species doesn't...

My  original blog  at Nature Network is due to disappear fairly soon, so I thought I would bring back one or two old posts. This week I am re-visiting a brief series of posts on evolution and the alternatives from 2008: This is the second in my series of linked blog entries on my experience of being converted (or not) to intelligent design. The first of the books I read was What's Darwin Got to do with it? by Robert Newman, John Wiester and Janet and Jonathan Moneymaker (I just love the polarity of the comments on Amazon). I mostly started with this as it was in friendly cartoon form (not unlike one of the Horrible Science books) so seemed a good way to pick up the main themes quickly. I'm going to start with two points from here: what labels to use, and whether intelligent design has any scientific legitimacy. The book is in the form of a friendly debate between two professors, and they start by ditching the terms creationism and evolution, in favour of intelligent...

My original blog at Nature Network is due to disappear fairly soon, so I thought I would bring back one or two old posts. This week I am re-visiting a brief series of posts on evolution and the alternatives from 2008: I quite often get emails and letters from readers of my books, and recently was contacted by someone who I shall call Sandy (because that's his name). He had one or two questions about my book on quantum entanglement - The God Effect which I was pleased to answer. At the end of our short discussion, because of the 'God' word in the title he asked me about my religious beliefs and went on to offer me a book exploring the arguments for intelligent design. In the end, he very generously sent me two books and a DVD. What I'd like to do in this short series of blog entries is explore whether reading these books and watching the DVD has any effect on my attitude to evolution and intelligent design. If my mind is changed, I want to share the experience, ...

I have been running a website selling organ accompaniments for hymns and organ voluntaries for a few years now. Church music is a particular interest of mine, and when I teamed up with the superb organist John Keys and his recording engineer and co-worker Wendy Williams I have been able to sell some excellent CDs and MP3s. But it has all been from my site, so it has felt a little DIY and yard sale. But now I feel like a real record producer. Thanks to a service by the name of AWAL (Artists Without A Label) I have been able to put one of our CDs in downloadable format on Amazon , iTunes and even Spotify. I don't know why, but it's immensely satisfying, being able to go onto one of these sites and think 'we did that.'

Between school and university, with a shiny new chemistry A-level under my belt, I spent the summer working in an industrial lab. As the lowest of the low, my jobs were those that no one else wanted to do. Our lab’s role was testing incoming raw materials at a plant that specialised in fatty acids. The worst job was, without doubt, being ‘lumper bumper’ - a nickname of uncertain origin for going out in all weathers and climbing up on top of chemical tankers to take samples of the hot contents. At best this meant handling sweet-smelling cocoa nut oil… and at worst, reeking tallow. After these excursions, the sampling equipment joined the endless piles of dirty labware that were also my responsibility. And that’s where I got my introduction to carbon tetrachloride. Take a listen to my   Royal Society of Chemistry  podcast on carbon tetrachloride's bumpy ride as a solvent, cleaner and dangerous substance. Click here to listen .

I have been buying Dell computers for around 20 years. Perhaps more significant for that company, as someone who ran the PC department for BA and has written for a good number of PC magazines over the years, lots of people have asked my advice on buying PCs, and I would say because of that advice Dell has sold dozens of computers. But my advice has changed - whatever you do, don't buy a Dell. This has nothing to do with my recent conversion to using an iMac - I accept that Apple isn't for everyone, and are overpriced. It's just that Dell has let me down in a big way. The reason I've recommended Dell for such a long time is not because they are the cheapest, or have the absolute best machines. It's because I've always found their service to be good when things go wrong. So when number 1 daughter wanted a laptop, I didn't hesitate to get a Dell. And because it has always worked for me, I got an extended onsite warranty. So two years in, with two years of...

Actually she wasn't. My mother was not an upright piano either literally or metaphorically. But that is the title of Tania Hershman's new collection of very short stories. (I dislike the term 'flash fiction' - I don't really even know if that's what these are.) This is not, I must admit, typical reading for me, but I like to try something different occasionally and I had very much enjoyed Tania's collection of science-based stories, The White Road (and other stories) , so it seemed a good gamble.  There were two things the stories in this book reminded me of. One was poetry. I don't know if it's intentional, but a lot of these pieces read to me like blank verse. There was the feeling that the words had been very carefully selected, the feeling that each line almost stood alone as a crafted object, rather than having the normal flow of a story, and the feeling that these stories worked best read aloud. Whatever, I had to seriously slow down my rea...

Over the Jubilee weekend it has been hard to avoid renditions of Jerusalem (And did those feet/in ancient time) - and I've heard it described on the radio as a jubilant anthem and a celebratory hymn. In fact only one of those key words loosely applies to this strangest of songs. Let's take 'jubilant' and 'celebratory' first and give them a good kicking. It's nothing of the sort. It's a whinging NIMBY protest song. When William Blake wrote the poem, they were building a factory in sight of his house (from memory it was in in Chiswick, but don't quote me), and he didn't like it one bit. This was a rant about his view being ruined. Then there's that word 'hymn'. You will admittedly find the song in both the UK's big traditional hymn books, the far superior English Hymnal and the uninspiring Ancient and Modern . But this is arguably a mistake. In structure it is more like an anthem - and it's certainly beyond most congrega...

Apparently this is the Queen's Official Birthday As I am a mild republican on the quiet (I don't want them all taken out and shot, but I am very doubtful of the benefits of paying for a royal family, even more doubtful about the benefits of having Prince Charles become king, and feel it's time we liquidated most of the royal estates) I won't be celebrating the Queen's diamond jubilee over the next few days. I will just enjoy muttering 'Bah humbug,' and taking potshots at bunting. But I thought I would put up a post that mentioned herself. One of the oddities about the Queen is that she has two birthdays. This isn't due to some biological peculiarity from inbreeding, but for some reason she has a separate 'official birthday'. (Don't ask.) Funnily, in this age of e-presence I suspect more and more of us will be like the Queen in this respect. This occurred to me when that excellent living typo Peet Morris congratulated me on my birthda...