** Grumpy old man alert ** A genuine web form There's a campaign in the US saying that every student should have the opportunity to learn to write computer code. And I agree - it is a great thing to be able to do. However I do warn people who take that step into coding that it may turn them into a grumpy person, when they know how easy it is to do something... yet discover that so many idiot coders have failed to do so. My particular gripe today is web forms that ask for telephone numbers. The standard format for a phone number in the UK is something like '01793 765432' with a dialling code,  a space, and the local number. Of course you don't type the space into your phone, but it is the correct format. Yet increasingly web forms are rejecting phone numbers with spaces in. Use one and you will get an error message pointing out the folly of your ways. But here's the thing, and the reason why I bring up coding skills in the same breath. Once upon a time I u...

You may recall a little while ago I rather revelled in being labelled a 'green heretic' . I've just come across a report that emphasises why it is so important to indulge in a little green heresy (hopefully dodging the green inquisition) and think beyond the knee-jerk reaction as I suggest we should in Ecologic . According to this piece in the The Register (usually more a source of great IT information), climate change isn't high on ordinary people's priorities. Well, that's not surprising at the moment with worldwide recession and financial difficulties. When you are trying to keep your business afloat, or to keep your house from being repossessed and your children fed, it is difficult to pay too much attention to the finer points of improving the environment - important though they remain. But the interesting thing about the data discussed in that article is that people gave climate change a similarly low importance when times were good. It's not just...

Yesterday I had a phone call from the company that makes the accounting software I use. Apparently they want to expand their offering and wondered if I'd be interested in, for instance, a CRM system. I told them politely NTY. You can do it if you communicate (If you aren't au fait with TLAs (three letter acronyms), CRM is 'Customer Relationship Management' - in essence a database of your customers that enables you to give the impression of knowing them to some extent. I made up NTY - 'no thank you.') I have two types of customer - big direct people like publishers and smaller (in terms of income, though obviously hugely important) indirect people like book readers. Neither of these really fit the CRM profile. I only interact with a handful of publishers - a 'to do' list (I use Apple's Reminders) is fine for that. As far as readers go it's a very ad-hoc relationship that doesn't need that kind of management. However, the whole b...

Have you managed to ignore the concept of 'the cloud' on your computer so far? If so, could I politely suggest that you are bonkers? Let's think of a humble file on my computer - say an article I've spent hours writing. Let's think of the pre-cloud me working with it. What happens if my computer hard disc dies horribly? Well, I will have backed it up. Probably. Certainly within the last week. Shame I only wrote it yesterday. Or let's imagine I'm 50 miles from home and suddenly need to access it. Well, tough. I can't. Now let's think of post-cloud me. My hard disc dies? No problem, the latest version of the article is in the cloud and I can access it from any other computer. Need to get it remotely? No problem again. I can get to it from my phone, my iPad or a computer. But isn't it complicated/expensive? No! It isn't. It's simple and for the kind of space you need for documents (if not photos and music) it's free. The main clo...

It's appropriate that the episode of The Big Bang Theory I watched last night featured as part of a kind of nerd Olympics a competitive game of Where's Wally (or to be precise, the US variant of the book  Where's Waldo? - why did they change the name?) where contestants were handicapped by playing without their glasses. There's something very Where's Wally? like about my topic today, which is the puzzle of where a quantum particle like an electron or a photon is when you aren't looking at it. Here's the thing. Unless you observe it and pin it down, a quantum particle's location is fuzzy. The position is described by Schrödinger equation, which tells you the probability of it being in any location, but this isn't like saying I can give a probability for where I am in the house, because in practice I actually will be in one, specific place at any one time. In the case of the quantum particle the probability is all there is. The best we can say is...

We see a steady stream of TV programmes from the UK crossing the Atlantic and being remade for a US audience. Often the result is to water down the original, or to lose the point of the show. I would be hard pressed to think of a remake done this way that was better than the original... until now. I was a great fan of the Michael Dobbs 1990 TV drama and books House of Cards with its scheming chief whip (and, eventually, Prime Minister) Francis Urquhart. Everything about it was superb. Ian Richardson made a brilliant Machiavellian villain, and the show was groundbreaking in its use of direct access to the camera, with Richardson making asides to the audience and giving us wonderful knowing looks. And, of course there was that catchphrase 'You might very well think that; I couldn't possibly comment.' Now Netflix has remade the programme from the original shortish series to a 13 part epic starring Kevin Spacey. And it is excellent. Although the original was great, this ...

My latest podcast for the Royal Society of Chemistry features the compounds we loved to boo and hiss before carbon dioxide became our favourite baddy - chlorofluorcarbons or CFCs. Remember the hole in the ozone layer? That's the one. Amazingly, the same man who came up with CFCs also was responsible for adding lead to petrol - if ever the environmental movement wanted a bad guy, Thomas Midgley was their man. Yet he got a medal for it - because at the time his work seemed brilliant. So slap on the factor 50 and hurry along to the RSC compounds site - or if you've five minutes to spare now, click to to have a listen to my podcast on CFC s.

Would you take note of an endorsement by this man? An almost inevitable feature of a new book is some gushing comment on the cover - known in the trade as a 'puff'. Publishers love these - but do they make any difference? We're all familiar with the kind of thing that is put on comedy books, where someone goes entirely over the top: Before I read this book I was in a deep depression and thought my life was pointless. Now, thanks to this book, I realize life is worth living. It is quite literally the best thing since sliced bread, and I would pay £1,000 for a copy. Or give up a lesser organ. This reflects an underlying concern - does the person giving the 'puff' really mean it? Have they even read the book? Were they paid to say nice things? And do you care what they think? There certainly needs to be careful selection of anyone endorsing a book. Some publishers seem to think 'if they're famous, that's good enough' - but it certainly isn...

The 2009 Orionid Meteor Shower (Courtesy of NASA) I dearly love QI , the BBC's quirky factoid quiz show hosted by Stephen Fry. However, as I've pointed out before , the programme's 'aren't you thick, nah nah' attitude makes it fair game when its researchers get it wrong, as they regularly do. One of their rather nice revelations on the show was that if you see a meteor crash to earth (a timely subject given the recent Russian meteor strike) and rush to pick up the resultant remains - a meteorite - it won't, as you might expect be incredibly hot, but instead it is likely to be painfully cold. This is because as it comes in through the atmosphere lots of fragments will be ablated from the surface, carrying away the heat, preventing the remnant from heating up. Unfortunately, according to NASA scientist Donald Yeomans in his book Near-Earth Objects , they haven't got it quite right. With a rocky object - which is most of them - this ablation will ...

For reasons beyond my control (as they say) this will be my last blog post for a little while - apologies to my regular readers (both of you) - I will resume as soon as I am able. In the good old days, when TV broadcasts used to break down, as they did with considerable regularity (it only seems to be Channel 4 these days), they used to be kind enough to play you some music while you wait. In that same spirit, I thought I might leave you for the moment with a piece of music. I was going to give you one of my favourite Tudorbethan masterpieces, but I thought instead I'd make it this excellent example of rather more modern but still exciting choral music:

The title of this piece may sound like the latest Young Adult bestseller (and I reserve all rights, thank you very much) but I was thinking of something a little more down to earth... yet at the same time rather more exciting. Even though it has been out for a while, I get more emails about my book on quantum entanglement, The God Effect  than almost any other. I think it is because the subject is mind-boggling even to physicists (the whole business really started when Einstein wrote a paper to the effect of 'this entanglement stuff is so weird, quantum theory must be wrong'... but it was Einstein who was proved to be in error), and because some of the applications are amazing, notably quantum teleportation, which produces an effect like a Star Trek  transporter on the scale of quantum particles. I just thought I'd give a taster for the subject by using a little extract from  The God Effect  where the scientists head for the sewers: By 2004, [Anton] Zeilinge...