I've kindly been sent a review copy of Chris Brogan and Julien Smith's The Impact Equation  by those nice people at Penguin (henceforth Random Penguins). I used to write business books ( this kind of thing ), but I always find it strange coming back to them after being so immersed in popular science, because a popular science book is usually so packed with fascinating information, where the actual content of business books is often incredibly sparse, with about a page's worth of useful information packaged in a whole load of woffle. Interestingly, a while ago, a company did try to do business books on two sides of a sheet of laminated A4. They genuinely did get everything in, but even though people are supposed to want bite sized chunks these days, they wouldn't pay a book price for something so slim. We are victims of our own greed. The Impact Equation doesn't entirely escape the limitation of having a lot of padding between gems, but it definitely does have s...

A Belisha beacon I was crossing the road (the way you do) on a zebra crossing and enjoying the mellifluous name of the flashing orange ball-on-a-stick that alerts drivers to its presence: a Belisha beacon. It is named, of course, after Leslie Hore-Belisha, who introduced both the driving test and these handy crossings when a transport minister in the 1930s. When you think about it, it's rather sweet, naming something after the minister responsible in this way. I think it is something we ought to see more of. Forget 'free schools' which sounds like something Victorians set up for the deserving poor. Let's have Gove schools. Or Blair wars, Brown gaffes, Osborne cock-ups and Cameron u-turns. Actually, with the exception of the schools, they're a bit vague - we need specific, detailed objects like the Belisha beacon. Perhaps a Grayling commissioner for police commissioners. They don't have to be named after politicians, of course. We might speak of a Dyson c...

I had interesting time last week trying to get my phone line back. I received a phone call which was irritatingly dead. But for once there was a caller ID number, so I called them back. At least I tried to. But I couldn't dial out because the line was blocked. Their autodialler had called me up but it hadn't released the line. Not everyone knows this, but it's the caller that 'owns' the line. If you hang up on someone who calls you and they don't hang up too, the line is still held. So no matter what I did at my end - unplugging the phone, whatever - I couldn't get my line back. I called the caller ID number on another line. A recorded message told me it was research call from a respectable market research company I've dealt with in the past. if I wanted to confirm they were legit I could call the Market Research Society. But it gave no way to contact them. So I called the MRS, who gave me the market research organization's number. Cue rambling...

My Starbucks 'office' As I type I'm sitting in our local chain coffee shop (what the hell, it's Starbucks). I've a fairly quiet day, so I thought I'd play the writer for once and have breakfast and work here a while, as I'm told this is what real writers do. On the whole, though, I'm not sure it works for me. Don't get me wrong. It's great having the sort of job where you can decide to have a leisurely breakfast and a quick peruse of the paper, but when it comes down to real work, I'd rather be sitting at my desk at home. Here there's background music, chatter, barista rattle... how is this supposed to help me concentrate? I brought with me the copy edit of my next book to check over, as I thought this might be the sort of thing I could do in a coffee shop, because it doesn't require the same level of concentration as writing, but even that I'd prefer to do in a comfy chair at home. I can only think that those who do ge...

Yes, Apple, thin is sexy... but not always practical Recently there has been an IT media frenzy on the subject of Apple's new iPad Mini. What's it for? Does it go against the better judgment of the late St. Steve? Does it make the iPod Touch redundant? In amongst all this, Apple has made another technology decision that I think in some ways is more important, yet it has hardly been noticed. The new version of their desktop all-in-one, the iMac, no longer has a CD/DVD drive. I use an iMac and I love it. You only have to see one of those huge, shiny screens to get all excited. It is a superb product. And I probably would buy one without a CD/DVD drive - but I would resent it. The reason they've done it is, as far as I can see, is primarily to make the computer wafer thin. It does look stunning because of this, but the fact is I can't get too excited about the difference in depth. In the end, I look at the front of my computer. As long as it doesn't stick out b...

We're all familiar with pay per view - the idea of paying money to watch a sporting event or whatever on TV, but now there's the inverse. Paid to view. An opportunity to be paid to watch those miniature masterpieces known as adverts. At the moment, apparently, you have to be invited, but soon I think anyone will be able to pop along to the Nectar Adpoints site  and be made rich beyond their wildest dreams by watching a few ads. Okay, I exaggerated a bit. A lot. All the payments are in Nectar points (which as cunningly worth half as much as pennies, so the impressive-sounding 500 nectar points is £2.50). There's an up-front joining award (currently 250 points), then you get an amount for watching an ad (typically 4 points), another 4 points for answering a couple of multiple choice questions and a bonus point for clicking through to the manufacturers website. So that's typical 9 points, or 4.5p per ad. As most ads lasts 30 seconds, allowing another 30 seconds for fa...

My UFO photo, possibly concealed by the MOD/FBI* On Sunday I appeared on that interesting internet literary radio programme, Litopia After Dark   (it's the 21 October show, not yet uploaded when this post was published). I was slightly thrown as I expected to be talking about publishing and books, but because of the closeness to Halloween, the topics were primarily the supernatural. At one point this strayed into the matter of flying saucers. One of the other guests was asking, if a flying saucer landed on your lawn and an alien came in for a cup of tea, what would you do? Would you tell people? This started me on a different train of thought. Flying saucer photographs. As Fermi once asked about  visitors from another world, where are they all? You might say that there are plenty of photos of flying saucers. In fact I recently reviewed a whole book of them . But in a way, these emphasise my point. Most flying saucer pictures are really, really bad or loo...

It's time for another Royal Society of Chemistry compound podcast - and today I'm an contemplating the joys of lithium carbonate. It's a surprisingly versatile molecule, even though it tends only to have one association for most of us. Take a listen and in around 5 minutes you'll find out more ... Like this? There are plenty more compounds here , not to mention the whole periodic table of the elements .

Rather worryingly I have just heard the Today programme make a total hash out of explaining a new and clean way to produce petrol. Frankly, they were very close to just laughing at what, to me sounds an excellent idea. You might say that petrol (gasoline) is yesterday's fuel - but you'd be wrong. It's today's fuel and we are a good way - 20, 30, maybe 40 years off it being seriously phased out. We neither have the infrastructure, cheap enough vehicles or good enough range on electrics to switch to hydrogen and/or electric cars. People who think it will be sooner live in cloud cuckoo land. And don't think the switch will be driven by us running out of oil. Apart from untapped oil reserves in harder-to-get-to places, many countries have coal reserves, and coal can be converted into oil. The US alone has enough coal to fulfil current oil usage for around 200 years at costs less than current oil prices. So we need ways to do petrol in a more environmentally friendly ...

brown vista with blue things It's not art. It's not anti-art. Roughly the words of the 'yellowist' who scrawled on the Mark Rothko painting at the Tate Modern. If you read the 'yellowist' manifesto  on the subject, it is either a delightful wind-up, or overinflated tosh. I am strongly reminded of the Henry Cecil book Ways and Means . In this enjoyable, if slightly dated, book a pair of conmen and their wives perform some excellent examples of what would now be known as the long con. Complicated setups where they fool people into paying them large sums of money. In one of the stories, Basil and Nicholas invent a fake school art called something like partists (I don't have my copy to hand to check the actual name) who only paint parts of the body. The plan itself is mostly a way to get round the rather limited gambling rules of the time to run a kind of football pools on paintings, but somehow yellowist always brings back the idea of this made up style -...

Like me, if you live in the UK and you are on the electoral register, you will probably have had one of these through the letterbox: an invitation to go and vote for your friendly local police commissioner. (Sorry, I just can't say that without thinking of Batman and Commissioner Gordon.) I think this is probably the most stupid thing the present government has done: electing someone to the job of police commissioner. I mean, think about it. Imagine you ran a big business and you are recruiting someone to an important position. What would you say to the HR person who came along and said 'I have a bright idea! Instead of the usual recruitment process, we'll ask each candidate to produce a glossy brochure about themselves (though you won't see all of them), and you will then give the job to the person whose brochure you like best! {Bright HR person smile}' If that happened you would be advertising for two jobs: the original one and a new HR person. So how would I ...

Nanotechnology, like genetically modified food or nuclear power, often produces a knee-jerk reaction. It’s somehow ‘not natural’ and so is considered scary and dangerous. This is primarily a reaction to words, the same way that it easy for advertisers to push emotional buttons with ‘natural’ as good and ‘artificial’ as bad. This is a silly distinction. There is a lot in nature that is very dangerous indeed – and much that is artificial protects us from that. If you doubt this, try removing everything artificial when you are flying in a plane over shark infested waters. For that matter, many of the most virulent poisons like ricin and botulinus toxin are natural. Water crammed with bacteria and faecal matter is natural. Clean, safe drinking water from a tap is artificial. Yet we can’t help reacting like puppets when the advertisers use those magic words. Sub-microscopic machines: NOT what we're talking about Some concerns about nanotechnology are down to what is at best fut...

Over the weekend we had a bit of an iTunes smackdown, watching Ridley Scott's prequel to Alien , Prometheus and the Joss Whedon produced Cabin the Woods . I can't say either was brilliant, but I definitely preferred the lower budget number. First,  Prometheus . You have to say there was great CGI - very realistic looking. Inevitably there were movie references - I couldn't help sniggering when a ship's computer with a voice like HAL addressed someone called David. That couldn't be a coincidence, even though there were no pod bay doors mentioned. And there is no doubt that Ridley Scott has a good line in creating tension. Of course if you've seen Alien (I did first time round in the cinema) once the protagonists got in the room with lots of egg-like cylinders you couldn't help feel a little nervous for them. But even though Alien was little more than hide and seek in space, it was very good, tense  hide and seek in space, where I struggled more to get en...

Where a Perishers strip would be shown if I had confidence I owned it As I think I have mentioned before, I am a great fan of the old UK comic strip The Perishers . This started, I suspect, as an attempt to cash in on the success of Peanuts in the US, but it very quickly developed a feel and approach that was all its own. Although the humour could sometimes be childish, it often had a surreal character that lifted it far above its apparent level. I don't know if Wellington's habit of remarking something like 'Colour me amazed' originated with the cartoon, but it was certainly highly appropriate for a black and white strip. However, this post isn't really about the Perishers per se but about the whole position of reproduction rights of a work of art. Specifically, if I buy an original artwork, do I own it or not? The reason I ask this is that is that many years ago, a friend who knew I loved The Perishers very kindly bought the original artwork of one of the...

I was a member of Linked-in, sometimes described as Facebook for business, before I'd even heard the term social networking, but for years did nothing with it. In fact, if someone asked me to be added as a contact, I used to reply 'Yes, but I rarely use it.' Now something has changed. I have started taking Linked-In seriously. What tipped me over the edge was an email conversation with a publicist at a publisher. I had asked said publicist if she knew what had happened to an editor at a magazine I had written for in the past, as the email address was bouncing. Oh, yes, said the publicist, according to Linked-in she (the editor) has moved to work here (a different company). And within seconds I was back in contact with said editor. The light bulb went on. I finally saw the point. So since then I have been working on expanding my Linked-in connections and making myself more visible in the environment. It genuinely is a valuable tool for keeping in touch on the business ...

Money, made easy I was standing in the queue to pay at M&S food yesterday and noticed a leaflet for their new current account. 'The only trouble with switching current accounts is,' I thought, 'it's a pain.' And despite all supposed efforts to make it easier, particularly for business, this remains the case. All the more so now most of our payments are done electronically, so a change of account means getting the finance department of every client/customer to change their systems. And we know how good finance departments are at making changes. Yet we can switch mobile phone company, transfer our number and zingo! Calls still keep coming in. As long as you have your own URL, the same goes for email address - I've changed ISP twice, but my email address hasn't altered since 1994. So why can't bank accounts be like this? What we need is to model bank account access on the public key, private key encryption mechanism. In this clever security syst...

With the exception of a post about a dubious advertising campaign that I had to take down in response to a cease and desist order, my blog post that has generated the most comments (and certainly the most ire) is one about my dislike for opera . I like to revisit it occasionally, if only to add accelerant to the flames. On Sunday I was driving back to sunny Swindon from darkest Southampton and happened to have Classic FM's chart show on, which featured a couple of operatic numbers and it struck me that there was a very useful metaphor to be had for the nature of operating singing when compared with my own favourite singing form, Tudor/Elizabethan/20th Century church music, in the manner of ice cream desserts. Operatic singing, I would say, is like a visit to Pizza Hut's Ice Cream Factory (R). As well the gooey, sweet icecream, you can pile on the hundreds and thousands and marshmallows and Smarties and sauce to make something that is over-the-top, dramatic and altogeth...

Last Friday at Oxford I had my first experience of contributing to a sort of stand up science - and it was great fun. The event, in the hallowed halls of Oxford's Mathematical Institute was, in effect, part of a book tour for Ig Nobel Prize founder Marc Abrahams' new book This is Improbable . As this is a series of short articles it is quite difficult to do a talk about, so Abrahams has hit on a brilliant way of covering the topic. His book describes a whole host of the sort of whacky papers that make you laugh and then think - the kind of thing that typify the Ig Nobel prizes. And what Abrahams does is brings along a pile of the original papers, gives them out to guest speakers like me and then each of us is given 2 minutes to read snippets from the paper as a dramatic rendition. It works surprisingly well - though some readers were better than others at what was a fairly frantic bit of preparation to make snippets from an academic paper seem entertaining. To add to the f...

I am delighted to announce that my latest book, Gravity is now available in the UK as well as the US. My first encounter with it was a bit of a shock, when I turned up at my talk in Lichfield last Sunday and there it was for sale - but I now have my own copies, so it seem real. There was one other surprise, though. I was expecting a white cover featuring Harold Lloyd hanging off a huge clock face, clearly being seriously influenced by gravity and fitting the new tag line dreamed up by UK publisher Duckworth 'What goes up, must come down.' At the time of writing, the Harold Lloyd cover is still on Amazon . But instead we have the cover shown here - about as different as you can get. I rather like the new cover. It has gravitas, which is rather appropriate. The earlier cover suffered, perhaps, from too much levity. (Gravity and levity were in ancient Greek times simple opposing tendencies. Heavy objects had an urge, a desire even, to head towards the centre of the universe, ...

The book is for teachers, but primary children need to get why physics is fun There has been much talk in the news of late, thanks to an IoP report  showing how few girls are taking physics at A level. The fuss arises because we are in serious need of more physics graduates for science, engineering and business alike. This seems to be the prime driver per se. As one of my daughters pointed out, you don't hear much moaning about how few boys take textiles at A level, so it's more about utility than equality. (Which is fair enough.) However, I think if we want more people doing physics A levels and degrees (and we do!) we need to address the rot much earlier. I've just reviewed a physics book for primary school children. As a book it's fine, but the content, driven by the curriculum, is rubbish. The first problem is that it is pure Victorian science. We teach primary school children the basics as they were understood well over a hundred years ago. There are two...

Blogs traditionally suffer from a fair number of spam comments, which try (feebly) to look like real comments, but are really just there to include a link to their own website. I didn't realize just how much this happened until I changed the www.popularscience.co.uk website into a format that allowed comments on each page and got absolutely inundated - probably at least 10 spam comments a day. So I signed up to a spam blocking service that's well-integrated with the WordPress environment I now use for that website. For months, all those comments were slammed into a holding area by the blocking service and I could see them building up more and more. But then they just stopped coming. For weeks now there hasn't been a single one. Somehow, the spam fairy is catching them before the blocker gets its hands on them. I thought initially that this was down to a change of approach by the blocker, simply trashing the spam rather than displaying its trophies. But now I'm not ...

Taken in a break on my visit to Lichfield I very much enjoyed appearing at the Lichfield festival on Sunday to speak about Build Your Own Time Machine . At the end of the talk, I opened things up to questions, as usual offering to discuss not only the subject of my talk, but any aspect of physics or science communication. And I came a bit of a cropper. I'm generally able to answer the typical questions that arise on abstruse topics like relativity or quantum theory. I cope, on the whole, with the latest news stories - I've lost count of queries about the LHC and Higgs bosons or, a little while ago, faster than light neutrinos (remember them?). But the ones that tend to catch me out have a habit of being questions that rely more on the kind of basic physics I've not had to think about for a long time. And the one that tripped me up on Sunday was just such a question. It was about magnetism. The questioner asked why is that a (permanent) magnet doesn't run out of ...

Eight booklets? No, just four, twice. I'm not Welsh, but the title of this post refers to a reflection that to do business in Wales seems to carry a painful overhead. Over the last couple of years I've been working with an excellent project called CIME which has been bringing the sort of business creativity support than can usually only be afforded by big companies to micro-businesses in the south west corner of Wales. The project has just finished, and as part of the wind up, a pack was produced with a booklet on the different contributors with hints on creativity, plus three well-written booklets on creativity techniques and applications by consultant Derek Cheshire . These are very professionally produced and look extremely smart, and probably quite expensive. Read all about me... Anywhere else, that would be it. But because it's Wales they have had to duplicate all the documentation in Welsh. So instead of getting a pack of four booklets, you get eight b...