I feel a bit sorry for Andrew Lloyd Webber. Only a bit, you understand. But he is probably feeling a bit depressed about his latest musical, Stephen Ward , which closed at the weekend after running for less than four months with so-so ticket sales. It perhaps wasn't the most inspired of choices for the subject of a musical. Outside the UK no one is likely to have heard of the Profumo affair, and even here, what was once a national scandal has become a vague, faded memory. Yet there is no doubt that there was an interesting story there. We went to see Stephen Ward on Friday, its penultimate day, and I'm glad we did. It was no Cats or Phantom of the Opera . It wasn't packed full of memorable tunes. It only really had one lyrical song, though there were a couple of distinctly effective pieces (even if the one for the orgy scene is worryingly reminiscent of Bustopher Jones in White Spats in places - though ALW has always had a habit of reusing musical flourishes). Notab...

Like pretty well everyone else in Europe (and most of the rest of the world) I am always totally baffled by the American attitude to guns. I have friends in the US who are lovely, kind people, who will defend to the hilt their constitutional right to bear arms, and given the record of gun killings the country has, this seems bizarre. But I always hold off commenting, because in the end, it's not my country it's not up to me to decide what their laws are, or whether a constitutional amendment designed to allow for militias should apply to the general public in everyday life. However, one thing is very clear now. Given the new gun laws there, I will certainly never be visiting Georgia. Now admittedly this was pretty unlikely, as I have only flown once in the last 20 years - it's not something I do very often, so I am unlikely to visit the US at all. But while I don't think it's down to me to criticise the decision to allow ordinary citizens to carry guns in bars, r...

Subtitled 'dispatches from the anti-evolution front line', Jason Rodenhouse's book is a fascinating look at creationism from the outside. Rather than simply poke fun at silly creationist ideas, a game that palls rather quickly, Rodenhouse attends creationist and ID (Intelligent Design) conferences, visits centres and generally immerses himself in the culture, in particular its interface with science. While he does this from the point of view of an atheist, he is respectful of those he is meeting with, and in return, repeatedly emphasises that even when he asks difficult questions after a lecture, he his treated with warmth and kindness, rather than booed and heckled. In effect, the book has two different types of chapter. Some delve into the detail of creationist and ID beliefs and make strong efforts to see if there is a way to justify them. The only trouble with these chapters is that, even though they always end up coming down against the creationist view, it can be ...

I use a program called Mention to keep an eye on references to my books etc. online, and just occasionally it pulls up something that boggles the mind. Here I am in one of those weird pages that assemble text randomly from the internet for bizarre search engine purposes: I just love the surreal nature of that second reference.

It is over ten years now since I wrote my book about Roger Bacon . Purely by coincidence I find myself writing two separate magazine features with a flavour of Bacon about them - so I thought it would be interesting to blog an occasional series of posts about some of the aspects of the the great RB that won't be appearing in the articles. For this first entry in the series, I want to make one thing very clear. There is more than one kind of Bacon, and you need to get the right one. I am not thinking Kevin Bacon here. Even in the history of science there are two Bacons to contend with. When I first told a friend I was writing a book about the thirteenth-century proto-scientist Roger Bacon, he was surprised. 'Surely,' he said, 'Bacon lived in Elizabethan times?' This astonishingly original thinker has been obscured by the shadow of his inferior namesake, Francis Bacon. For the sake of clarity, there is, as far as we know, no relation between Francis Bacon and Ro...

Some while ago I covered element #1, hydrogen , in a Royal Society of Chemistry podcast. Now it's the turn of the very first compound ever to exist - and a surprising one at that. Helium hydride. With the latest science news focussed on big bang discoveries it's the ideal time to take a trip to the earliest venture into chemistry. So take a listen by clicking play on the bar at the top of the page - or if that doesn't work for you, pop over to its page on the RSC site .

Modern technology makes it possible for advertising to be more personal than we could ever have imagined a few years ago. We recently had this flyer through the door: It shows a house just down the road from us, happily sold, so we are more likely to go with that estate agent. And sure enough, that very house does have a sign outside from them. But see if you can spot the difference? The angle is different because the real board doesn't show face on, but I can assure you it's the same house, and not only is it still showing 'For Sale' it has done so for many months. I contacted Strakers (apparently there is no apostrophe, groan), the agent, to see if they feel this is legitimate, and they say that it's fine because the house is actually sold, subject to contract, but the vendors don't want the sign changed to sold until contracts have been exchanged. Even so, for me, that top picture is just slightly too far from reality to be acceptable. What do yo...

Authors are generally of the opinion that most publishers couldn't run an efficient, modern business to save their lives. (To be fair, most publishers don't have the highest opinions of authors either.) One of the main reasons for this is that publishers are really bad at communicating. Now, back in the time of the quill pen (the same time period in which most publishers' accounting systems seem to have been produced), this was fairly understandable. But not in the modern, connected internettish world. I have books with quite a few publishers, big and small. Generally the smaller ones are better at communicating with their authors, but one of the big boys has just launched a service that gets them a good, solid 8/10 on getting communication with authors right. The publisher in question is Random House (I have a couple of books with Transworld, one of their subsidiaries) and they have just launched their 'Author Portal'. For each book you get this kind of control...

I have just read Ken Thompson's book Where Do Camels Belong for review , and it's one of those rare books that demands to be talked about. In the review I make the apparently outrageous claim that this book is to ecology what Darwin's Origin of Species is to evolution. By that I don't mean to minimise the importance of Origin - of course it's far more significant, because evolution is a much more fundamental part of biology. But just like Origin , Thompson's book points out an aspect of the science that is fundamentally obvious and crying out to be acknowledged, but that the experts of the time generally deny without even thinking about it. In the case of Camels , the topic is invasive species. We spend large amounts of money trying to control foreign plants and animals that come to our country, terrified that these aliens are taking over the habitat of our natives (is this beginning to sound like a UKIP statement?), in a panic that the natural balance will...

Very occasionally someone comes up with a really impressive and exciting new idea in fiction, a phenomenon that is particularly strong in the Young Adult/crossover market. It isn't necessary for success, of course. Anyone who had read the 'Worst Witch' series would hardly consider Harry Potter to be an original concept, but it didn't stop that doing rather well. (I'm not denying JKR's books had much more to them, just talking as a basic idea.) But in his novel Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children ( reviewed here ), Ransom Riggs really hit pay dirt for originality that makes you gasp. The story was built around a series of weird and wonderful Victorian/Edwardian photographs, which worked brilliantly to give the story an unusual depth of atmosphere. Now Riggs is back with the sequel, Hollow City . When I reviewed the first book, I was a little concerned that the approach would pall in any future titles, but it soon drew me back in. In fact, the ph...

Now that's what I call a pendulum (chaotic pendulum from Dice World ) Not surprisingly, science writers tend to focus on the exciting stuff. Apart from anything else, we get a lot of the less shiny bits at school, and most of us probably don't want to hear any more. You don't get far doing a popular science book on pendulums, say. But this is a bit of a shame, because science writing isn't just about explaining concepts, it's also about context, and the difference between the 'facts' of school science and the fuzzy reality of science as it truly is. So let's take the plunge. Two favorites of the physics world are springs and pendulums, both examples of objects that undergo regular motion. Galileo is supposed to have first considered pendulums while watching a lamp swinging on a chain at Pisa cathedral. Up to then, no one had thought about the significance of a pendulum’s swing, because their ideas of motion were based on the ancient Greek concept ...

I find the deliberations over Scottish independence fascinating. It reminds me powerfully of the hokey-cokey. In fact, the referendum probably should have had the choices: In Out Shake it all about Yesterday, former prime minister Gordon Brown (hard to remember, but he really was prime minister) was suggesting that the third option was the best. He told us that Scotland should stay in the union, but with greater autonomy, for example in terms of setting taxes. I personally favour an independent Scotland, as despite the rhetoric from Edinburgh, my suspicion is that there is a net flow of cash from the rest of us to Scotland and I'd like to cut that off and see them pay for their 'extras' like free tuition and free prescriptions themselves. And I'd be genuinely excited to see what Scotland could do on its own. It's a dangerous experiment, but a brave one, typical of the Scottish character. However, should the vote be 'No', I can certainly see the ...

Another high school fusor in operation (not Jamie's) There was a big kerfuffle in the UK media last week when a 13-year-old schoolboy apparently made a nuclear fusion reactor at school. Jamie Edwards built the device at the Penwortham Priory Academy in Preston. I got several emails baffled by the TV news coverage, which was skimpy on details. So here's the home-brew fusion Q&A. Could a schoolboy really build a nuclear fusion reactor? Yes, he could. We have to be a little careful about what we mean by a reactor. We're not talking a miniature power station, we're talking a device in which a very small amount of fusion takes place. Bear in mind that all you need to create a nuclear fission reactor in the same sense is a cardboard box with a lump of uranium in it. Fission will take place in the box. It's no use, but it will happen. It's the same here (though harder to make). This type of reactor dates back to the 1960s, devised by the magnificently na...

If you use Twitter you will probably be familiar with receiving a reply to a tweet you can't remember. It's easily done. Someone sees an interesting tweet and they fire off an (ideally) witty and pithy reply. But the trouble is that reply can be altogether too pithy. So, for instance, I recently got a reply:  Now, leaving aside I don't know who or what dumpy is, being a bear of little brain, I have, by now, no clue what this was a reply to, having totally forgotten what I tweeted several hours earlier. As it happens it was: Similarly I got: Erm, yes? No? Perhaps? Here the original was: In this case, even knowing what the reply was to it's not entirely clear what the question was and I had to ask for clarification. As it happens, I use the lovely Tweetdeck to read my tweets, so it's easy to pull up the conversation that the reply was part of (it's just a matter of clicking that View link) - but there is still that initial f...

This is an ex-UPS. It is dead. It has gone to the etc. etc. A little while ago we had a power outage while I was working on my computer. I experienced a millisecond of smugness, followed by considerably longer of serious irritation. Because I should have been able to comfortably shut down my machine and save all my working - instead the whole thing just went dead. The reason for the brief smugness was a UPS - an uninterruptible power supply. It's essentially a very chunky extension lead that has built in both a surge protector and some heavy duty batteries which, with an inverter, keep the power going for about 15 minutes so you can sort things out without losing stuff.  I've had one for about 10 years now, and several times it has saved me from losing parts of a masterpiece. Of course those of you who work on laptops will be saying 'That's nothing, I can work for hours when the power goes.' And indeed you can, but I prefer a desktop. It's just the w...

Sorry, not available for killing A week or so ago there was a piece on one of the Guardian science blogs on the downside of going back in time and killing Hitler. Dean Burnett points out that this ever-popular time travel fiction theme is not necessarily a good idea. The main arguments against it seem to be the difficulty of deciding when to kill him - not as obvious as you might think (perhaps the best idea would be to make sure he's never born) and the unintended consequences argument. After all, even if taking Hitler out of the historical equation made sure that the Nazi atrocities didn't happen (not of itself a certainty), it could result in a chain of events where, say, an all-out nuclear war breaks out in the 1960s. Would you be prepared to take that risk? But the post misses the most obvious objection to going back and killing Hitler, which is that it's not possible. Now, this might seem a silly complaint. After all, almost all science fiction features techno...

Be honest, how often do you sit down and watch TV as it is broadcast, live? I have to admit that this is a very rare phenomenon in Clegg Towers these days, mostly limited to the news. And Amazon has kindly just put yet another nail (admittedly a rather small and wonky one) in the lid of traditional TV watching's coffin. When we moved house a few years ago we abandoned Sky, the price of which had gradually crept up until it was getting ridiculous, going Freeview+ across the board. Now a little payment has crept in, but we still pay around 1/10th what we used to pay for Sky in a typical month. Here's the line up: YouView box - giving us the ability to record a couple of programmes at once. As a result we hardly ever watch a programme live, except the news. If it's a commercial channel, then you have the added benefit of being able to skip through the ads. And even better - you've got 7 days catchup on the main channels from the same programme guide. So anything we d...