Some have boring covers, others look like the real thing, but there's usually a clue... What do you call a book that's not a book? A bound proof (or if you are American and like a good acronym, an ARC, standing for Advanced Reading/Reader Copy). It sort of makes sense. While I, as a reader, would always prefer to read a finished copy of a book, the publisher likes to get reviews in as early as possible, particularly if the reviewer is likely to provide snappy remarks to put on the cover. So quite often, before the book is actually produced, they will typeset and bind as a paperback the uncorrected proofs and send them out to eager reviewers. The reviewer reads this not-quite-a-book as usual and produces his or her words of wisdom. But what to do next? With a real book I have two choices. If I love it, I put it on the shelf for future re-reading. But shelf space is very limited and I can only do this with 2 or 3 books a year, where I review about 50. The rest, I'm...

Pronounced?.. In the old days, foreign product names were anglicised where necessary, to avoid undue confusion in the British populace. But gradually, over time, as we've got more sophisticated, we have been exposed to more of the real thing without our brains exploding. So, for instance, despite much moaning, the brand we always called 'nessuls' as in 'Nestles Milky Bar', sneakily switched to being 'nesslay' as a better approximation to Nestlé. Now, perhaps thinking that we have been prepared for the exotic by our fondness for The Killing and The Bridge , that household standard Ikea has made the risky switch from 'eye-kee-uh' to 'ick-ay-ah', presumably also closer to the original pronunciation. As far as I can tell, the Great British Public (GBP) has yet to adopt this. People still sigh and gird their loins at thought of facing the industrial-strength unfriendliness of the car park of a Eyekeeuh store. But perhaps we will end up with...

I'd just like to wish everyone a Happy Christmas and a great New Year. Posting here is likely to be suspended for the next week - see you in 2015. As a bit of passing entertainment, here's a Christmas Medley, arranged by the excellent Roger Witney and sung by the best group I've sung in, Nonessence.

I was interested to see that the  Rough Guides folk have declared that Birmingham is one of the top ten cities in the world to visit . If I am honest, my opinion of Birmingham has significantly improved lately. It used to be that I thought of it as a place of awful concrete public spaces like the Mk I Bullring. And it had this bizarre idea that it was the UK's second city, when everyone with any sense realised that the second city was actually Manchester. But I've been visiting regularly over the last couple of years and Birmingham is now genuinely a 'vibrant city' as they say in the guides. (Though still a bit of dump when you drive in down the Hagley Road.) There is, however, from my viewpoint, one strange piece of parochialism in the Rough Guides choice. Because one of Birmingham's selling points was its vast cultural diversity in restaurants and the like. Now, for me, this is certainly a plus for domestic visitors, but a turn-off for the world market. When ...

That #1 album (currently #3,529 on Amazon) No, I don't refer to my own 5 minutes of fame, though it is the anniversary of my taking part in 'celebrity' University Challenge , but that of Swindon's attempt at the X-Factor crown in 2012, Jahméne (or Jasmine, as the spellchecker would prefer it). Now, for all I know he is now revelling in the success of his '#1 Album' (that's what his website says, so it must be true), but I must admit he didn't look all that happy when I saw him this Monday. I was walking through our local Asda, where Mr Douglas used to work before his TV exposure. All I spotted to begin with was a posse of Asda staff heading in my direction, accompanied by a couple of photographers. Somewhere in the centre of the bunch was a smartly dressed young man who I assumed was a management trainee. Even after I walked straight past him about six inches away, I didn't cotton on - it's only as I was doing the self-service checkout thi...

If  you were a railway enthusiast you would know why finding this on the front of your train would be exciting... Despite having several friends who are poets (and very nice people they are too), I really don't get poetry. At least, I didn't until last Friday, when the light dawned during a village Christmas shindig. There was a pre-Christmas evening of merrymaking in a nearby village hall, and with a number of others I had been asked to come along and help support the carol singing that would intersperse the important bits of drinking, eating, nattering and more drinking. What I, and quite a lot of the audience, didn't realise is that there were also going to be poems. Three poets, apparently connected to Swindon's successful Festival of Poetry came along to give renditions of their own and others' work. I could help but observe the strange atmosphere in the hall during the poetry readings. It was, to be honest, a bit uncomfortable. People stared into sp...

Every now and then someone sends me an interesting question about science, and, while I can't guarantee to answer it, I do my best. I got one yesterday that said 'if light can be considered traveling in packets, what is between those packets? Does anything exist (in the space) at the end of one photon and the beginning of the next photon?' And this a particularly engaging question, not so much for the answer, which is pretty straightforward, but for the implications it has for the way we talk about physics. The answer, to get it out of the way, is nothing. There is nothing (in terms of the light itself) in between photons or between the 'end of one photon and the beginning of the next' - apart from anything else, photons don't really have 'ends'. A beam of light can be described as a set of discontinuous particles we call photons and there is no more something between them, linking them, than there is amongst a stream of electrons. Yet that's whe...

I've come across two very different versions of Dom Joly. One is the pleasant family guy I've seen in Cirencester's best coffee shop. The other is the 'TV personality' who has appeared in the kind of excruciatingly unfunny shows that I wouldn't watch with a barge pole. (This is not quite a mixed metaphor if you use Decartes' model of light.) Luckily, Scary Monsters and Super Creeps was written by the former Joly. Although ostensibly about hunting down famous monsters from bigfoot to the ogopogo, it is probably best read as a humorous travel book, one of my favourite genre, and the reason I bought it. There are some wonderful writers in this genre - think, for instance, Bill Bryson, Dave Gorman and Stuart Maconie. In fact, for me, the humorous travel book is far better than the serious kind. In principle, Scary Monsters ticks all the boxes. We've got a funny, self-deprecating narrator and interesting locations to visit. Not only do we get Loch Nes...

This is what laser weapons ought to look like (Image credit: NASA ) I enjoy reading science fiction (or watching a sci fi movie) as much as the next nerd, and it's fascinating to speculate on the similarities and differences between the science and technology in the fictional world and reality. In some areas we have gone far beyond the imagination of the fiction writers; in others we haven't come close. One obvious area that we've lagged pretty far behind is in lasers, phasers, blasters or whatever you want to call them. I think one of the most interesting aspects of the Battlestar Galactica reboot is that once they'd established the technology of space flight, almost every other bit of technology from fridges and phones to weaponry was pretty much late 20th century standard. So any shooting was done with old fashioned bullets. And it's certainly the way things have been in the real world - until now. The US has been experimenting with laser weapons o...

James Randi Over the years, magicians like Harry Houdini and James Randi have shown time and again that they have ideal skills for spotting and debunking fraudulent claims of magical abilities and mental powers. In the Telegraph yesterday , though, Will Storr had a go at 'debunking the king of the debunkers', demonstrating that Randi himself, now 87 (according to his article, or 86 according to Wikipedia), was not all he seemed. For me, this was a wonderful example of entirely missing the point. Storr makes three main accusations. That Randi has at some point been doubtful about the science behind climate change, that he was intolerant to drug users and that he had lied about replicating Rupert Sheldrake's dog experiments, in which Sheldrake claims to have shown that at dog was able to predict when its owner would return home. The first two, frankly, are hardly worth considering as they are classic type failure errors. Being good at debunking fraudulent psychics doe...

Whatever your religious persuasion from none to something significant, a lot of people enjoy a Christmas carol this time of year. So, as we're already getting a bit demob happy, here's the first part of an occasional Christmas quiz. As you might guess from the title, I'm going to give you a snippet from the start of five carols - all you have to do is identify them. (Apologies if you aren't from the UK - some of these tunes may not be the ones you are familiar with.) The answers are at the bottom of the post, but try all 5 first. So here we go (NB - embedded Soundcloud players may take a few seconds to load: please be patient!): Number 1 - we'll start with an easy one. Number 2 Number 3 Number 4 - probably the most obscure, so I'll give you a couple more notes. Number 5 - to make this a little different, I've the start of the introduction , not the sung part: I've taken these snippets from a sort of karaoke carol CD - if you have a s...

That book I would like to take a moment to defend James Watson. This is a dangerous thing to do, because he has shown himself to be a dinosaur in terms of his attitude to many things and to support concepts that, based on the best scientific evidence, can only be considered racist. Now he is being pilloried again because he has sold his Nobel Prize medal for several million dollars, and that clearly makes him a money-grubbing misanthrope. Let's be clear - what he has said on race and other matters is wrong. He shouldn't have said it. There is a partial defence that he is in his 80s, and in my experience of elderly family members, the majority of people who grew up in the 1930s have a social outlook that dates back before modern views, including attitudes that most people under 70 would consider racist and unacceptable. You simply can't change this, though a more sensitive person would at least conceal it. No one accuses Watson of being a sensitive person. However I ...

I'm taking part in a radio discussion tomorrow about science books of 2014. It's for a US radio show, and they've provided me with an extensive (and really interesting) set of topics to discuss from 'A book that pleasantly surprised you' to 'Which genres do you grab and which do you tend to overlook?' But one section left me absolutely cold - we're going to discuss the New York Times Bestseller List. As the only newspaper I read with any regularity (about once a week) is the i , I never see bestseller lists. I have no clue what has been on the NYT list (or the Sunday Times , or whichever newspaper in the UK does them - I have no idea about that either). And, frankly, why should I care? Of course if one of my books was on one of those lists I would inevitably be rather more interested for my own purposes, but of itself it tells you nothing but sales figures. It certainly doesn't identify the best books - or books I would particularly want to read...

An early Apple Mac - how do you open the case? You don't. I'm currently reading for review an interesting book by Matt Nicholson called When Computing Got Personal . I was reminded strongly of the debates back in the mid 1980s over the decision to make Apple's Macintosh computer a sealed unit, which the user was not expected to open up and fiddle inside. At the time, pretty much all PCs could be opened so you could add in 'expansion cards' to improve graphics handling, add network connectivity, beef up memory or whatever. The general feeling amongst professionals was that Apple were making a huge mistake. You had to be able to stick expansion cards into the chassis: it was almost part of the definition of what a personal computer was. In the end, though, it was spiky, irritating Apple that got it right and the industry heavies that got it wrong. Because the sealed unit is exactly the way the business has gone. I'm writing this on an (Apple) all-in-one tha...

Jokes are notoriously subjective. Some find a simple pun hilarious - many wince and move on. But there are some jokes that work in some parts of the country, but don't in others - which is an interesting reflection on the regionality of words and their pronunciations. Of course, the UK/US divide is an infamous one for making different use of words, even with today's shared culture. When I write a book for my US publisher, I quite often get a query about a term I've used that they simply don't get over in New York. The most recent manuscript (just in), had two such queries. What, they wanted to know is 'dross'? And for that matter, what are 'holiday snaps'? (I corrected the latter to holiday photographs, though really I should, I suppose, have made it vacation photographs.) And inevitably you say tom-ate-oh and I say tom-aht-oh. However, my favourite example of this is much more subtle. One of the few clear memories I have of junior school is our te...

As we enter that time of year when many of us have lots of presents to buy, I thought it would be a good idea to highlight some of my titles that make useful gifts - especially for those difficult-to-buy-for people. When you consider what many presents cost these days, I honestly think you can't beat a book for value. So here's my top six, in no particular order: Introducing Infinity : a great stocking filler (just £5.99 currently on Amazon, and pocket-sized), Introducing Infinity brings the mind-boggling subject of infinity alive with powerful illustrations in a unique graphic guide. Suitable from about 14 upwards for anyone with an inquiring mind. See at  Amazon.co.uk  and  Amazon.com . If your gift recipient would prefer a more in-depth, though still approachable read, there is also A Brief History of Infinity . Xenostorm: Rising : a faced-paced science fiction novel, technically for a young adult audience (12+), though it works as well for adults who like SF. ...

The publishing world is very different now to the way it was 20 years ago. Some of us still work with traditional publishers. We appreciate the professional services they offer, from editing and typesetting to getting our books into bookshops. Others choose to do it themselves with mixed results - the best self-published authors do superbly well others sell to their aunty and that's about it. But there's an interesting in-between scenario. What if you want your book professionally produced, but it's rejected by traditional publishers? It might seem there's an ideal alternative in companies that do the work the traditional publisher does, but  will accept pretty well any manuscript as long you are prepared to defray costs. This kind of operation has been going a long time, and is traditionally described as 'vanity publishing'. In principle there's nothing wrong with it - but a recent experience I've had with just such a publisher (I won't name the...

Is it art? I've always had mixed feelings about the Turing test. This is (a variant on) the mechanism proposed by Alan Turing (you know, the one who looks like Benedict Cumberbatch) to decide if computers could be considered to be intelligent. As I've pointed out previously , the way the test is administered is far too lax. And part of the problem is the requirement of a judge to decide if the entity he or she is communicating with is a person. This is inevitably a subjective decision, and highly dependent on the quality of the dialogue the judge uses. Now, though, we've got a whole new level of silliness, with a Georgia Institute of Technology professor suggesting that in testing for machine intelligence we should also 'ask a machine to create a convincing poem, story or painting.' What remarkable twaddle. Take the 'art' aspect. We can't agree on which humans can create a convincing painting, so how could we possibly use this as a test? By the st...

John Farndon, the author of  Do You Still Think You're Clever?: Even More Oxford and Cambridge Questions!  is, very sensibly, a believer in 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it.' In this follow up to Do You Think You're Clever? he takes exactly the same approach of collecting a series of the more bizarre questions asked in Oxbridge interviews and providing his own suggested answers. As Farndon says, you may not always agree with his answer - but that's part of the fun, because when you're dealing with questions like 'What makes a strong woman?' in a theology interview, it's really up to you how you answer - and what the interviewer is looking for (if he or she is any good) is not so much someone who comes up with a pat answer, but someone who can demonstrate how to think through a question, and this is something that Farndon excels at. Thankfully, the reader doesn't need to know too much about the subject. In fact I found questions lik...

When writing about science we often have to fight against irrational ideas that seem to grow on people's minds like fungi. Yet early mathematicians had the opposite problem of requiring the irrational. This was the irrational in the literal sense - a number that is not made up of a ratio. According to myth, when one of Pythagoras' merry band discovered that the length of a diagonal of a square with sides of length one (the square root of 2) was not a rational number (a fraction that's the ratio of two whole numbers), he was drowned for spreading such a malicious concept. What's interesting, as I describe in my book A Brief History of Infinity , is that there is a remarkably simple proof that  √ 2 is irrational. It requires little more than an understanding of odd and even and goes something like this: Let's assume  √ 2 can be represented by a rational fraction - we'll call it top/bottom. To keep things simple, we are assuming that top/bottom provides the ...

For a while when I worked at British Airways I was in charge of the department that did all the support for PC users - and I was also one of BA's first PC programmers - so I think it's fair to say that I know more about computers than most people of my generation. This can be handy. But the downside is that the family regard me as official PC support guy. This came home with a bang when one of my daughters reported one of the weirdest errors I've come across. Every time she tried to save something in Word the above error box came up. She couldn't save a single file. Even with the default Document1 filename. Yet other programs - Powerpoint for instance - were fine. Word is something she uses heavily on her course, so it needed sorting, but what could possibly be happening? At the time the laptop was at university and I was at home, so several local attempts were made to sort it out without success. This weekend I finally got my hands on it and spent a couple of hou...

Thanks to Peet Morris for reminding me of this little puzzle for the weekend. Multiple choice: If you choose an answer to this question at random, what is the chance you will be correct?: A) 25% B) 50% C) 60% D) 25% I'm not going to suggest a 'right' answer (though there are at least two) - I leave it up to you.

We all love a good Nobel Prize, but every now and then there is a flare up over the winners. Sometimes it is because of the arbitrary restriction to three winners who must be alive at the time of the award. Sometimes, as when Jocelyn Bell appeared to be pushed aside for her boss Anthony Hewish (much to the irritation of Fred Hoyle), it is an apparent unfairness. But most often, I suspect, in the case of the physics Prize it is due to the Prize committee's inability to decide just what physics is. There have been a number of examples of awards that were really for inventions or technology. Admittedly these inventions were usually based on physics - but it would be tenuous to call them a fundamental breakthrough in physics itself, as the inventors were making use of an existing physical concept. So, for instance, the award for the laser (or more accurately the maser, as neither Gordon Gould nor Theodore Maiman were included, arguably the key names for the laser) should arguably hav...

Image by Fir0002/Flagstaffotos from Wikipedia I've always loved the science of lightning, hence, for instance the piece I wrote for the Observer . At the time I mentioned a theory linking cosmic rays to lightning strikes as, surprisingly, we really don't know a lot about why lightning occurs. Now there's some brand new (published today) research that suggests the Sun may be playing a part in the generation of lightning strikes by temporarily ‘bending’ the Earth’s magnetic field and allowing the shower of energetic particles that makes up cosmic rays to enter the upper atmosphere. According to the IOP, 'researchers at the University of Reading who have found that over a five year period the UK experienced around 50% more lightning strikes when the Earth’s magnetic field was skewed by the Sun’s own magnetic field. The Earth’s magnetic field usually functions as an in-built force-field to shield against a bombardment of particles from space, known as galactic cosmic ...

I'm in the process of transferring the Popular Science book review site (www.popularscience.co.uk ) to a new home after getting fed up with Wordpress. The old site (about the fourth incarnation since 2004), was hosted on my own website using Wordpress, but it was a nightmare to keep up to date. They kept updating Wordpress and its plugins with nauseating regularity, and I could never get the automatic updates to work, so had to update it by hand each time. For a while it has been close to the maximum memory my ISP allocates to a virtual server, and the latest version crashed through this so that it was impossible to update the site ever again. One advantage of moving it to a new site is that I've taken the opportunity to add a couple of features missing from the Wordpress version, notably an alphabetical set of index pages by author. And what's quite surprising is how many one hit wonders there are. If you take a look, for instance, at the S authors , one of the more ...

Image from BBC website I am totally disgusted by the EU. Not in a generic UKIP fashion, but by their cancellation of the position of EU Chief Scientific Advisor, a post held by Professor Anne Glover, otherwise based at the University of Aberdeen. There are two problems with this. The first is that politicians are in dire need of science advice. We (and the EU as a whole) have very few politicians and civil servants with a science background. It is essential that they have advisors who can explain the scientific realities of a world where science and technology is central to our everyday lives. To abolish the post is madness. Secondly, the reason that Professor Glover seems to have got her marching orders is a result of a campaign by green groups, and specifically Greenpeace, which objected to her support for genetically modified crops. Just like they do for nuclear power, such groups have a knee-jerk reaction to GM that has no thought, no appreciation of the science, they just ...