I have long been an enthusiast for Freeview+, the Freeview equivalent of Sky+ without the unseemly act of putting cash in the pocket of Rupert Murdoch, but to be honest, the first generation of Freeview PVRs was usable but a bit poor on user interface. However we have just upgraded to a Youview box and it is absolutely brilliant. What do you get for those hard earned pennies? Of course there are the usual PVR features - pause live TV, record two programmes at the same time, record a whole series with one click... But that's just for beginners. Firstly, the Youview box has a beautiful user interface. Clear, crisp text, good structure and an attractive, intuitive remote. Second you get the main 4 channels in HD. And then the biggies. You have the catchup services of all 5 main channels (plus Dave) on tap on a proper TV. (If you really can't resist giving money to Rupert you also access Sky's Now TV sport/movie service.)  But most delightful of all, the electronic pr...

Cellulose acetate, anyone? Ever wonder why old movies were dangerous? Not so much for the content of the storyline, but because they were made from a substance that was highly inflammable. Originally they were based on nitrocellulose - guncotton. Not exactly something you want to run through a hot projector with an arc lamp. But a much safer version of film would keep projectionists happy for many years: cellulose acetate. And there's a lot more to this early naturally based plastic, from the original Lego bricks to gas mask eyepieces. Time for a touch of plasticity:  hurry over to the RSC compounds site  to see more on this clear winner. If you'd like to listen straight away,  just click here .

It's interesting that in the Clegg household, we have never watched so many subtitled programmes in languages other than English than we are at the moment. Common enough in continental Europe, broadcasting this way in the UK has always been seen as a non-starter. The natives will be restless, thought the broadcasters. I think what made the change was the Danish series The Killing (originally Forbrydelsen) . We love our murder mysteries over here, but The Killing broke the mould. Where a UK show would feature one or more murders in each one hour or two hour programme, the first series of The Killing took a leisurely 20 hours of programming to examine the impact of a single murder. We saw vastly more of how ordinary lives were changed by what had happened. And we also saw in Sarah Lund a police officer main character who frankly made rather a lot of mistakes. Add in the parallel track of political intrigue and the slightly exotic, familiar-yet-not-familiar nature of Denmark and...

In my programme of scanning in old photos I have come across my first ever school photo. Taken probably in 1960 it might as well be in the dark ages, it looks so ancient. I have no idea what happened to the others who were at Smithy Bridge Infant School in that photo - I am not in contact with any of them. Probably the usual mix of hopes fulfilled and dreams shattered. I love that we've got several ties and a couple of sets of braces amongst the boys. And that the poses are anything but formal. That's the firm but fair Mrs Fielding in charge. And if you're interested, I'm the one with the seriously curly hair on the right hand end of the middle row.

The real forbidden fruit - don't pick me! In science, one of the worst sins is cherry picking. I don't mean it's a bad move for scientists to get themselves some of the fleshy drupes of Prunus avium. They are delicious. The cherry picking in question refers to picking out bits of data that support your hypothesis and ignoring the rest. A really bad example of cherry picking would be something like an experiment to measure the wibblability of cheese strings. (I can't be bothered to think up a real experiment.) Let's say they are expected to have a wibblability of 12 on the Kraft scale. A series of measurements come up as 8, 12, 7, 7, 13, 6, 8. Not encouraging... unless you only report data points 2 and 5. Naughty - but it happens. It doesn't have to be as explicit as that, though. Let's imagine you are doing a psychology test that requires considerable concentration. Half way through there is a loud bang in the street. Everyone rushes to the window to...

I was reading a typical business guru post on Linkedin in the other day. It was telling companies how to make the best of their social media presence, and it was a load of typical worthless business-speak. I'm sorry to be so blunt, but this tosh makes my blood boil. It was all about defining your goals, clarifying your vision, making sure you had a strategy roadmap, and god forbid you forgot your governance and guidelines. Does someone actually remove these people's brains and replace them with mush? Do human beings really speak like this? It was interesting to put this alongside the TV show Undercover Boss , where a senior executive from a company is secretly given a job on the shop floor (or equivalent) to see what it's really like to work there. Anyone who has a tendency to come out with business speak ought to have a go at the undercover boss game (clue - you don't need TV cameras to do this) and see if you still want to spout this garbage at the end of the proc...

I've been sent for review a delightful little book called Piering Around Britain by John Choopani. It's not exactly my usual reading fare, but it certainly makes a change from quantum physics. I was really pleased to have a chance to look at it because I love piers - a stroll down the pier really makes a seaside visit for me. The author clearly has his preferences, but I'm happy with both the extravagantly camp pleasure pier, crammed with entertainments and penny arcades, and the more old fashioned Victorian splendour of some of our 59 surviving piers. 'Surviving', it has to be said, is a close call with some of the sad specimens Choopani visits, though many others are still worth a visit. The format is a very leisurely tour with visits to piers happening as and when they fitted in with the Choopani family holiday schedule. The result is a very haphazard structure - in some ways I would rather it were either alphabetical or a sequential visit around Britain...

The other day I passed a speed trap clearly operated by amateurs rather than the police, so I stopped and went back to take a look at what they were up to. There seemed rather a lot of them to operate a speed camera - I don't know if it was for self-defence in case they were attacked by irritated motorists, though I suspect it's more likely they were the kind of people who enjoy wearing day-glo vests and appearing official. I rather expected they would object when I took their picture, but they were quite happy about it. Now I've lived in a village where people drove through too fast, and I would mouth rude things at them as they did so - but I am really not ecstatic about this kind of action. I don't think amateurs should be handling complex equipment, especially if they are going to do anything more than take a survey. There were several things that worried me about the way they were operating. I clearly have no idea if the speed camera was well calibrated - b...

I was listening to the radio the other day when former newspaper proprietor Eddie Shah was describing the trauma of being put in the dock for something he didn't do, based solely on the evidence of another person. Even if the witness is not the alleged victim, time and again we see cases that are far too dependent on witness evidence. In science there's a saying 'data is not the plural of anecdote.' We don't accept something as scientific evidence just because someone claims to have seen it. And yet witness evidence in court is nothing more than anecdote. And there are very good demonstrations that people are hopeless at providing accurate accounts. Witness evidence stinks. I give a very strong example of this in my book Extra Sensory : On December 4, 1901 there was as a horrendous incident during a seminar on criminology at the University of Berlin. As Professor Franz von Liszt gave his lecture, one of the students interrupted to give an alternative viewpoint ...

I've written two books about infinity, most recently the fun illustrated title Introducing Infinity , and it's a subject I enjoy writing and thinking about. But for physicists, infinity often means a problem. While we can conceive that the universe might be infinite, because we only ever deal with a part of it, when infinity rears its head in calculations, it usually means trouble. This most famously arises in quantum electrodynamics, the science of the interaction of light and matter on the quantum scale. The solution there has been renormalisation - in effect, putting in the real observed values of some quantities to make the infinities go away. And this works, but it's a bit uncomfortable. Elsewhere, such as at the moment of the big bang or in the heart of a black hole, the infinities are taken to mean that our current theories break down at that point and we need to find new ways to look at what's happening. However, there is another class of infinite entities t...

I watched the movie of Life of Pi the on Saturday night, and I wish I hadn't. I had avoided it for a long time because the story sounded so ludicrous, but we wanted to watch a movie, it was there on iTunes, and we hadn't seen it. Now admittedly the story makes a bit more sense when you know it's an allegory on the nature of religion - which none of the people enthusing at me to read/watch it had bothered to mention, but that doesn't justify it. I can't see the point of having a long, laboured, silly story to put across the message 'religion might be fiction, but it is a better story than the alternative.' Just write down that sentence and move on. Don't make me waste over two hours to get that rather limp, cod psychology message.  As for the film itself, I enjoyed the first bit about Pi's background a lot, but as soon as they got to the shipwreck I hated it. In part because it is just such a silly story, but also because the CGI, which eve...

That image There has been a lot of news coverage in the last day or two of the discovery of a blue exoplanet - a planet orbiting another star. It is quite a feat to detect colour at this distance, but I feel that the news coverage is tainted by a combination of misapprehension and downright naughtiness. To begin with, why should we care that the planet is blue (and hence splash it across the media)? After all, it has to be some colour. So what if it's blue? The only reason I can think for getting excited is that traditionally this colour has been associated with life. We know that Earth is primarily blue when seen from space because of its oceans and so link this with a friendly environment. What this misses is that Earth isn't the only planet in the solar system that is blue. Both Uranus and Neptune are blue too. This blue coloration is not because these gas giants distant from the Sun are ideal for life. Quite the reverse. It is because that's the right sort of c...

When I'm helping companies be more creative, one of the first things I recommend is that they get rid of any suggestion scheme. These are usually in the form of  a prize competition. You send in your ideas and if they company likes them and implements them you get a reward. It might seem these are a good idea - but they are poison. Here's my analysis from my book Creativity and Innovation for Managers : There was a time when the staff suggestion scheme was the beginning and the end of an innovation agenda in most companies. The theory seemed good. Anyone in the company could contribute a suggestion. When they had a bright idea (or brainwave, or whatever glossy term was chosen for the scheme), they filled in a form, popped it in the post and before long the best ideas would be implemented, with the idea merchant awarded a nice, fat cash bonus. It has been recognised for a long time that suggestion schemes aren't very effective, given the resource available and the mea...

The use of statistics by the media is something that constantly drives me round the bend. (At least, it does 90% of the time.) Now the BBC has wound me up by combining science, gender issues and, yes, statistics. To be fair these are not blatant errors, but rather that hoary old standard, not being scrupulous about separating correlation and causality. As we saw with the infamous high heels and schizophrenia study , even academics can be prone to this, but the media does it every day. One very common example is where they tell us on the news that the stock market went up or down as a result of some event. Rubbish. In most circumstances the stock market is far too chaotic a system to attribute a change to an event that happened around the same time. It's guesswork and worthless. Here, the misuse is slightly more subtle. 'Girls who take certain skills-based science and technology qualifications outperform boys in the UK, suggest figures' says the relatively mild headl...

Randomness and probability are at the heart of my book Dice World and they are also fundamental to quantum theory, which is why I spend some time on the subject in the book. One of my favourite aspects of quantum theory is quantum entanglement (I wrote The God Effect on the subject), which is responsible for a number of interesting technical developments including a small-scale version of the Star Trek transporter. Think for a moment of what’s involved in such a technology. On Star Trek , the transporter appears to scan an object or person, then transfers them to a different location. This was done on the TV show to avoid the cost of the expensive model work that was required at the time, before the existence of CGI, to show a shuttle landing on a planet’s surface. But it bears a striking resemblance to something that is possible using entanglement. To make a transporter work, we would have to scan every particle in a person, then to recreate those particles at a differe...

I know a couple of (fairly elderly) people who are terribly worried about the format of their own funerals. One, particularly, has about half a dozen sheets of paper scattered around friends and relations, giving precise instructions over which hymns will be sung, what organ music played, what readings read, burial or cremation and all the rest. She has gone for such redundancy because she is very worried that someone will lose the instructions and the funeral won't be as she wants it to be. Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn. And I don't know why anyone else does either. In the end, a funeral is for those left behind, not for the deceased. Whether you believe the individual concerned has gone to heaven or is simply dead and gone, either way, they aren't there to appreciate the  finer points of the service, or get irritated if the organist uses the wrong tune for 'Guide me O Thou Great Redeemer.' (It should be Cwm Rhondda, of course.) I similarly have no ...

We need more of this While 'Spaceflight Epiphany' sounds like it should be a NASA project, it is actually an account of my personal experience. I've had a big change of heart on the value of getting people into space. For many years I have subscribed to the view, supported by many scientists, that putting people in space is a painful waste of money. A manned mission costs vastly more than automated probes, which means there is much less money available to do the science. We have got most of our valuable scientific knowledge about the universe from the likes of Hubble, WMAP and Planck, not from Space Shuttle and the ISS. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg points out the way that a major science project, the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), was abandoned because the funds went instead to the International Space Station (ISS). The SSC would have been significantly more powerful than the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and would have achieved results a go...

The logo of my company, Creativity Unleashed. How about it, government? Unleash a bit of creativity... Every now and then I get really irritated with the government. I know this is not exactly news, nor uncommon. I can never remember a time when everyone was saying 'Isn't this government wonderful, aren't we lucky to have these excellent people in charge?' I think the time we've come closest in the UK in recent years was in the honeymoon period of the Blair government, and even then there were some whinges (not to mention, no doubt, moans from the likes of my friend Henry Gee, who believes that the world will one day recognize that Boris Johnson is the greatest statesman who has ever lived). But the thing of which I am complaining today is not a feature of any particular government. They all do it. I think I have moaned about this before, but it requires regular revisiting. I just get absolutely furious when the government tells us that the only way to get mo...

Apparently this is Eddie, though he sounds much better than he looks We have some great radio broadcasters in the UK, particularly on BBC Radio 4, but I think in many ways the unsung hero of the breed is Eddie Mair who presents the 5pm news magazine PM. What Mair has, and I think it is fair to say none of his colleagues have to the same degree, is a wry sense of humour that comes through strongly, even though the programme can be covering mostly serious issues. There was a wonderful example a week or two ago, which inspired this post. Mair had mistakenly referred to Istanbul as the capital of Turkey (we all know it is Ankara, don't we folks?) - he apologised for this, which is fine. But then demonstrated why he is so brilliant. A little while later he was introducing a reporter who was at a technology event in San Francisco. 'Now we're going to Bill Bloggs,' Mair said (or words to that effect), 'reporting from San Franciso, the capital of Turkey.' No ...

In my latest book, Extra Sensory , I look at whether there is a scientific basis for the likes of telepathy, telekinesis, remote viewing and precognition. When I tell people I've written this (and will be selling books at the Seriously Strange event ), particularly those from the science community, there is often a sharp intake of breath. 'You don't want to get yourself involved with that stuff,' they say. I understand the response, but I think they are wrong. It is easy to see why there is that sharp intake of breath. In a Facebook discussion of my book, where someone had generously recommended it, before long others were contributing with information about 'chi/qi' and even 'quantum healing.' There is a tendency to lump a lot of things together, not all of which sit comfortably with science. However this rather misses the point of what I'm trying to do with the book. First of all I make the clear distinction of only considering the paranorma...

Between the ages of six and my late teens I spent many of my summer Sunday afternoons playing with trains. You may be thinking at this point 'No wonder he's such a nerd, he should have been out in the fresh air,' but actually I was outside at the time. Because this was no attic train set. One of my first solo drives, not trusted yet with passengers. The engine is Lancashire Lad, one of the smaller models, but always among my favourites as it was easy to drive and very reliable. My dad was a model engineer - his hobby was building these stunning working model steam locomotives. No 0 or 00 gauge here - we are talking 3.5 and 5 inch wide track, plenty big enough to carry 10 passengers behind. As part of the Rochdale Society of Model and Experimental Engineers ( by its website, still going strong ), most Sundays we would toddle up to Springfield Park where the society's track was and indulge in a wondrous time. Of course my favourite activity was driving. The cont...