Last night saw me at Swindon's Art Centre for a performance by Festival of the Spoken Nerd in their Full Frontal Nerdity tour. I mean, I was told there would be entertaining spreadsheets: how could I resist? It was great to see an audience of 150 or so really getting into maths and science with an edge - and no doubt the nerds could tell you the edge's exact angle. The trio of Matt Parker, Helen Arney and Steve Mould work well together in a combination of science demos, wryly humorous scientific songs, banter and what was alleged to be maths, although it turned out to be primarily technology, fluid dynamics (physics) and computer science. But there were truly amazing spreadsheets! Probably most impressive was the physics demos (I would say that) from the amazing electrified pickle to the revelation of the non-existent colour, but the whole was supported by well-scripted chat from all three. Even old chestnuts like breaking a glass with an amplified voice (achieved des...

One of our dual flush controls, earlier Now here's the thing. Any modernish toilet in the UK is obliged to be dual flush. The idea is that, should you not want a great deluge of water, then you can opt for a lightweight flush, thereby reducing your water consumption, saving the whale and generally being ecologically friendly and getting a gold star. And I have nothing against that. But as someone who has always taken a great interest in user interface design, the design of most dual flush controls is downright useless. Take, for example, the dual flush control illustrated, on one of our toilets (yes, we have more than one - aren't we des res?). Clearly there is a big friendly button and a smaller rectangular bit. My guess is that pressing the big button without the rectangular bit is a small flush, but pressing it with the rectangular bit is a large flush. But it is a guess, because there is nothing about the controls that indicates what they do. There's no reason wh...

I recently had the pleasure of having a meal up in London with one of my daughters. Until recently the default fare would have been something like T. G. I. Friday's, and being a sucker for US food, however chainified, I wouldn't have complained. But as my offspring are now adult(ish) and sophisticated, it was suggested that we try a trendy London restaurant. Of itself, this was a bit worrying, as trendy usually means expensive, but I was assured that in the case the main courses come in at a wallet comforting £10 a head. So my only remaining concern was a review I read, which said that the writer was the only person in the place over 30. This turned out to be approximately true for me too, but as it happened it didn't matter and I had a great meal. The venue is Flat Iron , in Beak Street, just off Regent Street, where you'd expect to pay tourist prices. But this is an ex-popup restaurant with rather original ideas of how to behave. It's no booking, which is ac...

For anyone who has missed my posts since last Thursday - apologies, but I have had a glorious unplugged weekend. We had a short break in our favourite rental holiday cottage, which amongst its best features includes no mobile phone reception and no internet. When we first went to it about 17 years ago it also had no TV aerial. There was a TV, but you could only watch DVDs - but now it's all hi-tech and TV is available. Does this mean it offers lots of activities instead? Yes and no. If by activities you mean going for a walk or... going for a walk, then, yes it does. Oh, and Saturday and Sunday you can have a cream tea, should you desire it, in the cafe which is handily but not obtrusively attached to the cottage. Anything else you would have to drive to get to, and we didn't use our car all long weekend. This might sound like hell in our zappy, connected world - but it really isn't. It is glorious. We did watch a bit of TV and read a newspaper (at the cost of a mile wa...

In my book, Extra Sensory , I describe how the magician James Randi reproduced a trick that Uri Geller did on the Barbara Walters show in the US. The source I had, involved Randi carefully not telling us how he did the trick, so in the book I speculate how he might have done it. In the trick, Walters draws a picture and seals it up. Randi concentrates, then appears to draw on a pad, then puts his pen down. Walters opens up her envelope and shows it to the camera. Randi then, almost immediately shows a similar drawing. Here's what I said: What we see when watching the show is Randi apparently drawing his copy of the picture on a pad using a ball pen, before Walters reveals her picture. It is possible, even using the technique I’m going to suggest, that Randi did do a little drawing at that point in the proceedings – if so, what he produced was probably a basic box, which he could adapt later for whatever was needed. It’s equally possible that he didn’t draw anything, but merely ...

Media City, Salford - where Londoners can't be bothered to come When I lived in Manchester, the general feeling was that the local news spent far too much time on those scouser scallywags in Liverpool. However, something I think both Manchester and Liverpool could then and can now come together in agreement on is that institutions in general in the UK are far too London-centric. I hear it time and again - the London-based chattering classes use London as a picture of what the UK is like - and yet, inevitably, the English capital is entirely different from the vast majority of the country. They assume we all have an excellent public transport system and a chi-chi smoothie shop on every corner. They assume what they experience is Britain. But it's not. Even when an organisation tries to do something about it, there are difficulties in making it work. When I went to Media City in Salford to record University Challenge I thought it was wonderful - and yet I hear that there...

Thanks to the excellent Rosy Thornton for pointing out this piece in the Guardian blogs , suggesting that we should 'make sure the next book we read is by a woman.' I find this offensive and I suspect behind the rhetoric is my favourite bugbear, a confusion of correlation and causality. I would suggest that the vast majority of people do not choose their books based on the gender of the author, even subconsciously. Instead, most of us read books in a genre or genres that we like (and there's nothing wrong with that, though I always encourage people to experiment and take a tiptoe out of their habitual genres). Here comes the correlation bit. In quite a few genres, one sex of author dominates. I happen to read mostly popular science and science fiction, which have a preponderance of male authors. If instead I happened to enjoy reading fiction the genre that is usually labelled 'chick-lit' (though I think the term is going out of fashion), I suspect I would be ...

A (relatively harmless) ingredients list, earlier Anyone with the faintest sympathy for science winces when a friend announces that they are 'Fed up of food that is full of chemicals' or 'Only buying organic food, as it's the only way to get food that is 100% chemical free.' As I'm sure we're all aware, everything we eat (and most things we don't) is totally and entirely made up of chemicals. However, when you look at the ingredients list of processed food at the supermarket, it's easy to see why people are concerned. Take this product, which you can find in any major UK supermarket: Aqua 84%, sugars 10% (of which fructose 48%, glucose 40%, sucrose 2%), fibre 2.4% (E460, E461, E462, E464, E466, E467), amino acids (glutamic acid 23%, aspartic acid 18%, leucine 17%, arginine 8%, alanine 4%, valine 4%, glycine 4%, proline 4%, isoleucine 4%, serine 4%, threonine 3%, phenylalanine 2%, lysine 2%, methionine 2%, tyrosine 1%, histidine 1%, cysteine 1...

For Christmas I was given a Blu-ray of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey . I quite often refer to this film in my books, usually to point out the dangers of making extrapolations based on the present, but it's the first time I've actually watched it properly since seeing in Cinerama in 1968, and I have to say that one segment absolutely blew me away. Effectively, it's a film in four parts. There's the first 'dawn of man' segment, which these days looks rather hokey, a second section on a space station and the Moon, the third on Discovery's voyage to Jupiter and the fourth the weird bit through the stargate that no one really understand. The part I've usually criticised is the second. Here, for instance, we see space shuttles operated by Pan Am (remember them?) and a Bell Telephone operated video phone with large screen live video - but no mobile phones. However I had forgotten just how great the third segment is. This is the part with the infamous H...

 Science, on the whole, is morally neutral. It can be used for good or evil. The same goes for many technologies, which is why you will sometimes find a new piece of technology that can engage a really uncomfortable bit of mental discomfort when on the one hand it is extremely attractive - I want it, and I want it now - yet on the other hand it has really scary and potentially nasty implications. Just such a piece of technology is NameTag, one of the products of Facial Network . First working on Google Glass, the search company's ubergeek specs, NameTag can also be expected soonish as an app for your favourite phone. What Name Tag does is spot people in the camera's visual field and tries to identify them - from social networks, online stuff and a database of criminal history. So, you just look at someone (or look at them through your phone if you aren't a Glassnerd) and you find out who they are, (assuming it works) not to mention if they are registered as not ve...

A 2p piece on the pavement (photo has been blurred in case someone recognises it and says 'it's mine') There are various bits of path I quite often cover on my daily dog walks, and I've noticed a 2p piece on the pavement now for several days. This got me thinking. Clearly a lot of people (me included) couldn't be bothered to pick up 2p. So what is the minimum we'd go for? And what if it were a lot of money? What would be the maximum you would pocket, rather than hand in? After a very unscientific Twitter/Facebook poll, it was interesting to see quite a few people would pick up any coin (some because picking up a penny is lucky), though others wouldn't bend over for less than a quarter (25¢), or 50p. Personally I think my minimum is 5p financially, but I might leave it because they're just too small and fiddly, making my actual minimum 10p. Others pointed out the condition of the coin mattered - they would only pick a coin up below a certain value ...

There has been a minor explosion of outrage in the knee-jerk political twitter/Facebooksphere telling us that David Cameron's advisor has suggested getting rid of income tax and putting VAT up to 33%. Most of this response seems to be to red top tabloid articles, which we should know better than to rely on, rather than the original blog post from Paul Kirby , so it's worth reading that (rather long and tedious though it is) first. One thing that is worth emphasising, as the headlines got it wrong, is that Kirby is not 'Cameron's advisor', he is Cameron's former advisor - and to be honest, if he still was an advisor I imagine he'd be given the push for this, as it's political suicide and I am sure Cameron wouldn't touch it with the proverbial bargepole. Let's see what Kirby's arguments are first. Yes, I know we can immediately see what's wrong with the idea - but the thing I've learned with looking at green issues is that you m...

The Garrick's rather dour exterior hides a gem of a place A while ago I commented on my visit to the Reform Club in London and how I couldn't really understand the attraction of such places. I now discover I have to rejig my thinking a little. It's still true that most of the traditional functions of a club are easily provided in other (and cheaper) ways. If I want to have a meeting up in town, a coffee shop is fine (and I get wifi). If I want to stay over, Late Rooms will find me a cheap hotel bed. And there are several of the other benefits of the club, such as a library to work in when I've a few hours to spare, or a convivial bar, provided for me by the RSA's London House, which I have access to as a fellow. However, I confess I was impressed by the charms of the Garrick Club when attending a publisher's function there last week. Despite all that tradition and yes, a certain fustiness, it seemed a lot more of a fun place than the Reform. People were ...

Give us back some controls! A New Year request to Apple: give us back some skeuomorphism. If you aren't familiar with the term, a skeuomorph may sound like a monster on Dr Who, but it's just the use of virtual real world items in a computer program user interface to make it more approachable. Until recently, Apple went a bit mad on skeuomorphism. You would get, for instance, a calendar app with a background like a sort of leather blotter. This serves no purpose and looks a bit tacky, rather like those early American electronic devices that came in a plastic casing made to look (badly) like wood. But functional skeuomorphism - making an on-screen control look like a button you can press, for instance, is very valuable because it clearly identifies which bits on the screen are active and which aren't. Take a look at the current iPhone calendar app, pictured alongside. The words 'Wednesday 8 January 2014' are not controls - they are just a label. But the word...

For Christmas I got a DVD set that took me back to my youth. It was the Granada comedy series The Lovers . I hadn't seen this programme, written by the late, great Jack Rosenthal, since it was first broadcast in 1970/71 and was a little nervous, because at the time I thought it was brilliant. In fact, despite the inevitable ageing, going on the first episode (all I've seen so far) it has in many ways stood the test of time, because it was genuinely unique in style and approach. The show features Geoffrey and Beryl, who have just got back together after going out a while before. The basic premise sounds tired and dated - Geoffrey wants to have sex, Beryl wants to get married - but the way it is handled makes it far more interesting. After all, it was a new world. As Geoffrey points out, in the trendy 70s 'everyone is at it', so why not? There are two things that made the series great - and still make it watchable, though not as funny as it once was. The first is th...

The picture in question (I'm bottom right) For my recent appearance on the University Challenge Christmas Special I was asked to provide a picture of myself while at Lancaster University, which has caused some amusement to those who saw the show (they seem surprised by the hair). What wasn't obvious is that this was actually a group photograph of those of us who shared a kitchen in Bowland College, pictured after a birthday celebration. Looking at it brought back remarkable memories of an excellent year - but also of one of the spookiest moments of my life. I was in bed, determined to finish a book I was reading that night. (Not because it was a great book, but because I just wanted to get it over with. It might have been Inferno by Niven and Pournelle, but it might not.) It was about 3 am. (What can I say? I was a student. Students do crazy things.) As I read, out of the corner of my eye I caught a movement in my room. I sat up abruptly. The only illumination was a...

I had an interesting tweet the other day from a reader of my book Gravity . Richard Atkinson said: 'reading your gravity book. P3 "the whole thing is rotating" why? If uni started from a single point what made it spin?' It's a thought provoking question. I ought to start by clarifying the quote. The 'whole thing' I was referring to was the cloud of dust and gas from which the solar system formed, not the whole universe. Whether the universe as a whole is spinning is a whole different question, where the mind struggles to get around the concept of 'spinning with respect to what' given that there may be nothing else. It is possible it does spin ( see this article ) but we certainly don't know for sure. But let's get back to the actual quote, about the solar system. What made that spin? Pretty well everything within the universe spins. Overall the angular momentum of the galaxies seem to pretty much cancel out, but for any particular galax...

One of the great puzzles for British people is that Americans seem quite like us, mostly because of a shared language and to some degree a shared culture, yet at the same time there are aspects that raise our eyebrows - and never more so than over the attitude to evolution. Thanks to US legal writer Donna Ballman for pointing out a fascinating survey on public views on human evolution in the US. I just wanted to pull out a few of the figures. The headline number that is decidedly worrying in what is, after all, the world's leading nation for science and technology is that 33% of adults believe that 'humans existed in present form since beginning' - i.e. they have not evolved over time. But what was really interesting was the way these beliefs varied significantly when put alongside a few other measures. There is, perhaps not surprisingly, a strong correlation between religious views and attitude to evolution. Unfortunately we aren't told anything except abou...

The 'quite interesting' year I refer to is not a look back at 2013, but a glimpse of the summer of 1927 given to us by Bill Bryson in his latest book. In fact a glimpse is a bit of an understatement as a description of this doorstep of a tome. As the cover suggest, one of the major themes of the book is the rise to outstanding fame of Charles Lindbergh as a result of his aerial Atlantic crossing. As Bryson surprisingly informs us, this was not actually the first crossing by air but around the 120th. It had certainly been done by plane earlier by Alcock and Brown. But somehow Lindy's flight caught the imagination of the world and he became a superstar. The rise and fall of Lindbergh occupy a fair amount of the book, but we also meet his competitors and other notables of the period in America from politics to sport (notably baseball and boxing) and bringing in everything from famous murders of the period (through to the details of their electrocution) to the sad dis...

I am indebted to Simon Singh's excellent new book The Simpsons and their Mathematical Secrets , which I recently reviewed , for providing me with what must be the longest trivially memorable prime number at a whopping 31 digits. Prime numbers are much loved by mathematicians. Of itself this is no great achievement - mathematicians are routinely besotted with numbers that only their parents could love - but primes are genuinely interesting. (For a start, the RSA mechanism that keeps your banking details safe when you buy online depends on them.) You will probably remember from school that primes are the whole positive numbers that are only divisible by themselves and 1 - so they begin 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17... You may wonder why 1 is not a prime and you would not be alone. In fact it was until a couple of hundred years ago, when mathematicians decided it was too unique (they probably missed the pun) and excluded it. Mathematicians can do this (unlike physicists), as they make u...