A prison. Or possibly Barad-dûr. I am highly averse to sexism in any form. I confess I tend to watch out particularly for sexism that influences men, a) because I am a man, and b) because there are far more people ready to highlight sexism aimed at women. There is still work to be done in worming out existing sexist rules and regulations. But what I can't understand is why anyone would possibly introduce new sexist regulation. It has just been announced that from November, male prisoners in England and Wales will be required to work harder for their privileges. What about female prisoners? Well, 'Officials are still working on possible changes to the privilege scheme for women prisoners.' I'm sorry, that's not good enough. What I find hard to believe is that the BBC doesn't comment on this, or that it can arise in the first place. There is no excuse for any new policy being discriminatory. There should be no exceptions. As soon as anyone suggest a p...

The only kind of triple dip that matters In my new book,  Dice World , one of the subjects I cover is the way that statistics are misused by the likes of politicians and the media. For instance, the way that a politician can get all huffy about a policy having a negative effect on families with just two average earners - without pointing out that having two average earners puts a household in the top 25% of the country. Or the way the media can make a big thing about a statistic by using percentages, where the actual change is negligible. So, for instance, we might hear that pickpocketing has risen by 100%. Outrageous! Sack the chief constable! But if you hear that the number of incidents has gone up by one compared with the previous year (because there was only one instance of pickpocketing last year), the statistic has a rather different flavour. A rather more subtle statistical misuse comes with all the fuss about whether or not the UK was about to enter a triple dip rec...

There's no day like Friday when we're more in need of a little assistance to get the brain going. So here's a little mental challenge to get you going for the day. A man stands in the centre of a large field. There four horses in the field, one at each corner - a bay horse, a chestnut horse, a white horse and a black horse. For reasons we needn't go into, the man has to kill his horses. If he must remain at the centre of the field, the horses stay at the four corners and he is a perfect shot, how can he make sure that none of his horses remain alive using only three bullets? Don't read any further until you've attempted an answer. If you get one quickly, there are at least three solutions - try for another. : : : : : : : Last chance to consider your answer. : : : : : : : : One solution is that only three of the four horses are his, so he only needs to shoot three to make sure that none of his horses remain alive. A second is that ...

'Is there enough cash in here?' It's not often I agree with George Osborne. In fact counting on the fingers of one hand would probably leave a couple over for a rude salute. Yet I have to say that I have some sympathy with the UK government's recent observations on what would happen to an independent Scotland when it came to currency. The SNP was quick to point out that the Osborne observations were little more than campaigning for a 'no' vote in the upcoming referendum (which I still think should be open the all of the UK, not just Scotland), and they were probably right. And yet I am all in favour of Scottish independence, but I can still see Osborne's point. There seem to be four options available: Go into the Euro Keep the pound in some kind of 'Sterling zone' Use the pound without official sanction from the UK  Set up a separate Scottish currency Of course until recently the Euro appeared to be the desirable option to the SNP (i...

I am not a great fan of 3D movies. The 3D glasses are a pain when you wear your own specs, and the effects generally give me a headache while rarely seeming convincing. You won't see me rushing to buy a 3D TV any time soon either. However there is a very different side to 3D that I think has huge potential - 3D printing. When I visited the Dyson research centre with BBC Wiltshire  one of the outstanding aspects was the way they made trial spare parts for their vacuum cleaners using 3D printers. But it is a very new area to most of us, which is why I appreciated having the chance to take a look at Chris Winnan's book. This provides a detailed overview of the state of play of 3D printing for the rest of us (as opposed to the Dysons of this world) and gives some very interesting thoughts on the way this market will develop. Winnan suggests, I think absolutely correctly, that at the moment we are in the same state with home 3D printing as they were with the 'homebrew'...

As featured in here And now for something completely different! It's... Monty... Hall's amazing problem. (If you aren't old enough to remember Monty Python, ignore that bit.) I have mentioned the Monty Hall problem before as a great example of the way our brains struggle with probability, but in researching my latest book Dice World ,  in which it inevitably features, I was lucky enough to be given some new information by my mathematical/computing friend at Oxford University, Peet Morris. The problem (of which more in a moment) gained worldwide fame when it featured in the 'Ask Marilyn' column in Parade Magazine in 1990. The column was written by Marilyn vos Savant, whose claim to fame was appearing in the Guinness Book of Records as the person with the highest IQ in the world.  (She was born Marilyn Mach, but despite appearing to have a phoney attempt to get the word 'savant' into her name, vos Savant was her mother's surname.) What was remarka...

Image from Memoto When I was in my twenties I was a great photography enthusiast and though it was impractical with my usual SLR, I always had the intention (never fulfilled) of getting a pocketable camera which I would have with me at all times to capture those unexpected moments. Now, of course, most of us have this capability in the form of camera phones. Being able to take a photo at any time is a given assumption. When I broke my shoulder a couple of months ago, apart from asking after my well being/should they call an ambulance, the thing passers-by said most often was 'You should take a picture [of the paving slab]' - the assumption was that of course I would have then means to do so about my person. There is a more extreme possibility, though - so called lifelogging. Take, for example, the soon to be available Memoto camera . At a mere $279 this is a tiny camera you clip onto yourself and it takes pictures every 30 seconds, which are then uploaded to an online s...

Just noticed this rather fun extract reader thingie for Dice World:

I have something for a fondness of the old school science fiction of the 1930s and 40s when new elements were invented at the drop of the hat. Probably the most familiar is kryptonite (it was later redefined as an alloy, but started off as a classic 'element unknown to Earth science'). This is why I just love the sound of denatonium benzoate. Surely denatonium must be stronger than any known material, or has tendency to leave superheroes weak at the knees? But no, this is a compound that makes things taste extremely unpleasant - and it's the subject of my latest podcast for the Royal Society of Chemistry. Wash your mouth out and hurry over to the RSC compounds site to see more on this incredibly bitter product that has the capacity to save lives. If you'd like to listen straight away, just click here .

Yesterday I spent an enjoyable day in London, with an interview at the Guardian newspaper in the morning and giving a talk at Westminster School (thankfully well after the Thatcher funeral was our of the way) in the evening. In between I had a few hours to spare, so equipped with the mobile office that is my iPad and a few books I decamped to the RSA House in John Adam Street which has a pleasant library (with free wi-fi) for us privileged Fellows to work in. So there I am in a largish room with quite a few of us working at tables, mostly on laptops, a couple using the traditional (and rather clunky looking) PCs provided and two of us on iPads. Taking a look at this scene, I wonder if I see the reason why the iPad, despite its obvious superiority for many mobile tasks, has not conquered the macho business world quite as quickly as it should have. Because even though I can type almost as quickly on the iPad screen as a traditional keyboard, the curious hovering way your hands ...

Apologies for having two news media posts in the same week (and I write this on my phone on the way to Grauniad Towers to record a podcast interview) - it's events, dear boy, events. I was struck by a letter in today's i newspaper moaning about the heavier coverage of the Boston bombings than those in Iraq. 'Are American lives so much more newsworthy than Iraqis?' asks the writer. The simple answer is yes, for two reasons. (Note this is newsworthy, not valuable, a totally different question.) Firstly it's a matter of the nature of news. The unusual is more newsworthy than the usual. 'Sun does not rise,' would make a better news story than 'Sun rises.' Bombings are relatively rare in the US. Then there's the matter of closeness. A death in your family is more newsworthy than a death in the UK, which itself is more newsworthy than a death in a remote part of the world. Forget the global village, that's the way it is. And like it or not a ...

Unlike some, I am a great fan of the BBC. I naturally think nice things about them. I think they do great work and are a national treasure. Some of my favourite programmes are from the BBC, and I don't resent paying the licence fee. But they got it horribly wrong over the recent North Korea documentary scandal. In case you haven't heard/are looking at this through the mists of time when the incident is long forgotten, the BBC sent an undercover team along with a student visit to North Korea arranged by the LSE. The university and many academic bodies are protesting that the broadcaster put the students at risk, and undermined the ability of academics to be considered neutral, safe people to have working in dangerous areas. Two things strike me about this. One is a very small one, but curious. I have heard at least ten reports on this on the BBC news, and not one of them has mentioned a very pertinent fact that was in the Independent on Sunday . It seems that one of the LSE ...

I'm drinking my coffee from this mug today Last night's episode of Endeavour , the prequel to Inspector Morse , in which we see a young Detective Constable Morse learning his trade, featured one of those fiendishly complex puzzle-based clues that I am sure real-world detectives never come across (but are still fun for the viewer). Morse spotted that the set of hymn numbers on a hymn board in a church (which we had earlier seen the soon-to-be-murdered vicar putting up) were strange. The numbers were 74, 17, 18, 19. I was slightly pleased with myself to spot that this was an unusual collection of numbers and probably meant something, but kicked myself for not spotting the clues the writer had carefully provided us for doing the decoding. We knew that the vicar loved puzzles, had been a cryptographer during the war, and previously had been a chemist - there was even a framed periodic table on the wall of his house. What Morse spotted, but I kicked myself for not doi...

Ceci n'est pas une superordinateur I generally rather enjoy the slightly anarchic view of technology news provided by website The Register , but I have to confess that one of their recent articles got my dander up, though to be fair to El Reg , more because of what I presume was in a Chinese press release than because of the way it was reported. 'Chinese boffins predict iPad-sized supercomputers' screams the headline. Now, I ought to point out  for those not familiar with it that The Register has a house style of using ironic labels, so Apple lovers are usually 'fanbois', iPads are usually (though not here) 'fondle slabs' and scientists are always 'boffins'. But what I dislike here is the use of tenuous leap from an interesting bit of science to a vapourconcept (if I can generate my own Reg ism). What the Chinese scientists have done is observe the quantum anomalous Hall effect (yes, as I pointed out recently , physicists aren't very good...

In need of a dose of salts? At one time, the obvious thing to do would be take yourself off to Epsom. But magnesium sulfate, the compound behind those foul tasting waters, really could have health benefits when added to your bath - and it's the subject of my latest podcast for the Royal Society of Chemistry. Hurry along to the RSC compounds site to see why bath salts shouldn't just be for granny and much more about Epsom's most famous product - or if you've five minutes to spare now, click to to have a listen to my podcast on magnesium sulfate .

I gather from the BBC that Peter Higgs gets rather irritated when the Higgs boson gets referred to as the God particle. Leaving aside those who get miffed that Higgs himself gets the sole glory of the name, I think this is very short-sighted. Dr Higgs' objections are twofold: a) that he is an atheist and b) 'I know that that name was a kind of joke. And not a very good one I think.' To be honest, I think it might better if we had more God particles and less of the kind of names scientists tend to come up with left to their own devices. Let's get those objections out of the way first. So what if he is an atheist? Does that make the word 'god' disappear? Irrelevant. (And 'god' is used illustratively by plenty of atheists and near-atheists - Einstein and Steven Hawking to name but two.) As for the second, well yes, it was a sort of joke. But what's the problem with that? A touch of taking-self-too-seriously perhaps? According to Leon Lederman, the...

There will be much said positively and negatively about the late Margaret Thatcher over the next few days. But whatever your opinion of her policies and what they did for or to the country I have to say that, from the inside, the impact of privatization on at least one company was wonderful. I joined British Airways when it was a nationalised industry. It wasn't an unpleasant place to work - far from it - but, frankly, it was fairly low energy. I had an interesting job and I enjoyed it, but the overall feeling was of a company that had little unity and more interest in the status quo (down to the separate 'officers' mess' style management canteen) than, for instance, its customers. In the entire time I was working for a nationalized company I only saw a board member once, and that was in the run up to privitization. Privatization changed everything. There was a dramatic new energy - it really felt like somewhere exciting to be working. More to the point, the major...

One of the key points in my new book Dice World is something of a truism in the scientific world - and yet it's something that constantly trips people up (in the case of the example we've got here, literally). It's all to do with the way we interpret numbers - something that is crucial to science, but that we also do frequently in everyday life. And there we hit a problem. We interpret the world around us through patterns - and all too often we see patterns where they don't exist. If, for example two numbers move in a  similar way (they are correlated) we tend to assume that there is a cause that links the two (causality). And its very easy to forget the scientists' mantra 'correlation is not causality.' It isn’t just the person in the street who can confuse correlation with causality. In 2004 a Swedish scientist called Jarl Flensmark published an academic paper titled Is There an Association Between the Use of Heeled Footwear and Schizophrenia? What...

You shouldn't be attacked for looking like this - or any other way There was a wonderfully cringe-making piece on the often glorious Channel 4 News last night, covering the move by Greater Manchester Police to consider attacks on goths, emos, bikers and goodness knows what cultural groupings as hate crimes, putting them on a par with racist attacks. The cringe-making part was Jon Snow saying he would like to dress like a Fearless Vampire Killers band member who was one of his interviewees - but the interesting point was made by a journalist present. He was doubtful about this move because it was making an artificial distinction - and I think he was spot on. The thing is yobs (as the journalist labelled them (and, no, he wasn't from the Sun , it was a broadsheet)) will attack anyone for looking different. It all depends on context. No one is going to attack someone for dressing like a goth at an a concert for a band that has that particular look. But they might have troub...

I'm delighted to say that my latest book, Dice World is now available for sale. Subtitled 'science and life in a random universe', it's about randomness (well, duh), probability and statistics. It explores how the ‘clockwork universe’ imagined by Newton, in which everything could be predicted given enough data, was disproved bit by bit, to be supplanted by chaos theory and quantum physics. This is a world in which not only is accurate forecasting often impossible but probability is the only way for us to understand the fundamental nature of things. Where else do you get a chance to meet Maxwell's Demon, Schödinger's cat and take part in an experiment using Bayesian statistics to see how a mug on my desk alters the probability of my owning a golden retriever (no, really)? I've really enjoyed writing this book, and I hope it will be of wide interest. If you fancy buying it, it would be ideal if you could use the links below ( or from my website ). (Apolog...

Feedly in a browser I am not feeling the love for Google at the moment. I suspect the problem this behemoth of IT has, even more than Microsoft did at its zenith, is that it really doesn't care about its customers, because it gets its revenue indirectly from advertising. So it has no problem with messing its users about. Like many people I read feeds from many blogs and the like using an RSS reader - specifically the Google Reader. I don't use it direct, I use a front end app on my Mac and phone/iPad - but behind these are the Google engine. And the big-I-am has decided to pull the plug. Much wailing and gnashing of teeth ensues. I had hoped to stay with Reeder , the Mac-based app that I use most, as they announced pretty quickly that they would find a new back end. And they have - but it's a paying service, and that's something I am reluctant to do for this kind of facility. So it's time to head off in a new direction. I've tried out several alterna...

While I loved the original series of Star Trek , for me the ultimate was Star Trek, the Next Generation . With better acting, more depth of characters, much better visuals and some excellent storylines it was a transformation of the Star Trek theme. I mean, come on, Patrick Stewart as captain? What's not to love? So I was rather excited to have a chance to review a book called On Board the U.S.S. Enterprise  by Denise and Michael Okuda, which is a detailed exploration of the NCC 1701-D, both in the pages of the book and on an accompanying CD-ROM with a graphic reconstruction of various parts of the interior. I suppose I should have realized I was setting myself up for disappointment. Part of the reason for this is that if you watch an STTNG episode now, frankly they can be a bit creaky. So it's not entirely surprising that the same applies to the book. Just as graphically the TV series now looks rather fuzzy, badly coloured and crude, so do the images, mostly taken from s...