There has been some mention in the press in the UK recently about a council receiving complaints because builders were wolf-whistling at women as they went past a building site. This is has provoked a whole spectrum of responses from 'It's just a bit of fun'/'It makes you [the woman] feel good' to 'It is objectification'/'It makes you feel threatened.' I personally think that it should be discouraged, as I feel sexism has no place in modern society, whatever the excuse, and this seems to be suggesting there are circumstances where take a sexist attitude doesn't really matter. We wouldn't accept casual racism because it's 'just a bit of fun'. But equally, I am genuinely very uncomfortable about the casual sexism in the Diet Coke adverts that we have been subjected to, apparently for 30 years. I've included one of the latest at the bottom of the page. I honestly think if the same advert was done with a bunch of men ogling ...

Here's what happens if you type a properly formatted phone number into many a web form. The error message in red appears. In my dim distant past I did quite a lot of work on the design of the user interface between people and computers - how you interact with a computer (or these days, often, the web) - and it shocks me how stupid most software still is. When I first programmed computers professionally I soon started exploring ways to make the interaction more friendly. My earliest work pre-dated graphic user interface. The user had to type commands into a console. And, surprise surprise, people made mistakes. So I put in a little routine to capture when errors occurred to see what they were typing wrong and then modified the software so it would cope with the most obvious mistakes. This isn't rocket science. Computers are much better at sorting out basic errors than people are, as long as they are pointed in the right direction. Let me give you two examples. In the ...

One of those pictures that people pass around via Facebook has appeared on my screen several times: Apparently we are supposed to be impressed with the lateral thinking skills of the young Chinese children who worked out that the space the car is in is labelled 87 (upside down). But I think the people who are circulating this totally miss the point of lateral thinking. That was the obvious answer, but almost all real world problems (as opposed to school tests) have multiple solutions, so there certainly should not be a single 'right' answer. For example, perfectly acceptable solutions include that the space is labelled: Park here Visitor's Space Headmaster 0 (Indicating this is non-allocated parking) 42 (Because it's the answer) ... and I am sure you can think of more. To be fair to those setting the test, the original did have the question 'What parking spot # is the car parked in?' which was omitted in the way it was distributed o...

Personally, I think stars are underrated. Not the ones in the sky - if it weren't for one of them, the Sun, the Earth wouldn't exist (and even if there was an Earth, there would be no life on it because it would be far too cold). For that matter, if it weren't for stars in general there would be no atoms other than hydrogen, helium and a touch of lithium - making the whole concept of a planet (or a person) inconceivable. So the stars of the cosmos are seriously rated. Nor am I talking about the stars of stage and screen. Because, let's face it, most of them are seriously overrated . I refer instead to the habit of awarding stars in reviews. A good while ago I wrote to the journal Nature , complaining about some of the book reviews that they carried. I pointed out that the (long) reviews said nothing whatsoever about the book itself and whether it was any good - which is what the potential reader wants - instead, the review merely gave the reviewer a chance to do h...

The radio programme Desert Island Discs goes from strength to strength, but if I'm honest, it's a bit dated. If you don't know it, guests on this Radio 4 show list the eight records they would take with them on a desert island (plus various biographical bits). It's all very well, but we really wouldn't like to be so limited, would we? So I've devised a new version - Desert Island Playlist. The rules are simple. Construct a playlist of your favourite music. You can have as many tracks as you like, but you are only allowed one track per band/artist or one piece per classical composers. What would yours be like? I've listed mine below, and for those who like techno things, I've embedded a Spotify version of most of the playlist here so you can listen to them: So here we go. I warn you, it's quite long. The order is simply the order I came across the tracks on iTunes, so it's in 'no particular order', as they say: Al Stewart - Jo...

I have always been highly dubious of hydrogen fuelled cars. Okay, they're nice and eco-green because their only waste product is water. But hydrogen takes up three times as much volume as petrol for the same energy output, there is no hydrogen infrastructure, and (as the Hindenburg demonstrated) you don't want a problem at a filling station with leaking hydrogen. I would much rather we put more effort into battery technology, getting them more energy dense, and making them faster to re-charge. However I would hate to be considered closed-minded, so I share the STFC's latest idea - instead of hydrogen, use ammonia. Although ammonia itself isn't a fuel, you can 'crack' it to give off nitrogen and hydrogen, which is then used in the usual manner in a fuel cell. Or you can use it as a fuel directly with a bit of hydrogen (see below), though despite the airy hand-waving, I would point out that those NOx gasses they hope they can get rid of are worse greenhouse g...

As soon as a chemist hears the word 'pyridine' there's a natural tendency to hold his or her nose. Its odour has been described as the stink of ‘an unventilated room, full of the infirm and dying'. But there is more to this simple aromatic compound - including a refined nineteenth century battle over who discovered its structure - as you will discover in my latest Royal Society of Chemistry podcast . To find out more about pyridine, 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 .

A while ago I blogged about the accounting software Sage One - I've now been using it a couple of years, so thought it was a good point to revisit it and weigh up the pros and cons as a battle-hardened user. If you're wondering what accounting software has to do with the life of a science writer, one of the joys of being a freelance is you have keep your accounts in order to minimise payments to expensive professionals. There's no such thing as a free accountant. This is online accounting software that keeps your books in order, does VAT invoices and other such goodies (in fact it even produces your VAT return and can submit it directly to HMRandC). If your accountant is into such things, they can get access to your accounts with extra accountant-flavour handles and help prepare you accounts more easily. My accountant has reduced my annual big bill for doing the year end accounts by around twice the £120+VAT a year I pay for using Sage. Obviously that payment is the ...

One of the reasons I'm so pleased my book Dice World has been longlisted for the Royal Society Prize is that it covers probability, and we humans are terrible at getting the hang of probability - yet it comes into our lives very frequently. A great example is the way that we tend to assume that if something happens that is highly improbable there has to be something suspicious about it - but highly improbable things happen all the time. This weekend, for instance, was the culmination of an event so improbable that the chances against it happening were around 1.6 x 10 743  to 1 (where 10 743  is 1 followed by 743 zeroes). That is, frankly, the sort of event that clearly will never happen. Just to put it into context, the estimated age of the universe in seconds is just 4.32 × 10 17 seconds. Yet that event did happen. What was it? That's the chances that the particular set of winning numbers over the last year in the UK National Lottery would be drawn. ...

The idiot news people (sorry BBC ) made a splash recently by claiming that a computer had successfully passed the Turing test. This is an idea modified from an article by the great Alan Turing, who suggested that a good test of artificial intelligence is to communicate with the computer down the wire and if you can't tell whether it's human or computer, then it passes - you have AI. ( Turing's original concept is actually significantly more confusing, but this is the version usually given.) There are several problems with this story. One is that the test as described is far too easy to pass. All that is required is that the machine is 'mistaken for a human more than 30% of the time during a series of five minute keyboard conversations.' That's a pretty low pass rate. I don't think you even get a GCSE for a 30% success. (Turing actually asked 'Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is ...

This is one of the best science fiction books I've read in ages - it could have been written for me, combining as it does hard science, an element of historical fiction and some mind-boggling twists. It even nearly achieves something that had seemed impossible. John Gribbin is one of the UK's top writers of popular science books, but he proves here that he can put his hand to fiction writing with masterful ease. In Timeswitch , a device is discovered under Stonehenge that provides a wormhole style portal into the past. But it can only achieve jumps in units of 300 years, and the further back you go, the less time you have in the place you visit before you are dragged back to the present. The book's present is an alternative world, where scientific discoveries were made much earlier than in our reality (Galileo comes up with special relativity, for instance), as a result of which we were hit by global warming much earlier and the present is almost uninhabitable. The scie...

I've always been a great supporter of the Royal Society's prize for science books , and list the details on popularscience.co.uk , but for reasons that may become obvious, I thought I'd post the announcement of the books on the longlist today. The longlist for this year’s Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books  – the world’s most prestigious award for popular science writing –   is announced today (13 June). The judges selected a longlist of twelve books: Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics under Hitler  by Philip Ball (The Bodley Head) The judges said: “An incredibly interesting look at the politics of science and the decisions all scientists have to make.” Seven Elements That Have Changed The World: Iron, Carbon, Gold, Silver, Uranium, Titanium, Silicon  by John Browne (Weidenfeld & Nicolson - an imprint of the Orion Publishing Group) The judges said: “An inspired look at seven very special elements which are essenti...

There has been a lot of discussion in the media recently about what in schools is 'conservative religious practice' and what constitutes extremism. I'd suggest there are (at least) two problems here that I haven't heard mentioned. One is that, while a tolerant, open society should of course allow people to undertake 'conservative religious practice' themselves, this is not a licence to impose it on others of the same faith, different faith or no faith at all. While a school should not prevent an individual from undertaking 'conservative religious practice' as long as it doesn't interfere with the teaching activities of the school, it shouldn't be allowed to impose these practices as a standard, whether it is a faith school or not (I personally think we should get rid of faith schools, but that's a different issue). However, what I wanted to think about today, was a second potential problem, and that is the way that some religions use spec...

I came across a blog entry the other day that started with a quote from my Build Your Own Time Machine , then went on, as far as the author was concerned, to demolish my statement. (I'm afraid I've misplaced the URL, so can't link to it.) The argument went something like this. What this book says (that time travel is possible) can't be true, because the past and the future don't exist. There's only the present. You can't travel to somewhere that doesn't exist. He was half right. We only experience one present ourselves, but it doesn't stop there being other versions of 'now' - that's the whole point of special relativity: we have to consider relative positions in spacetime, not just relative positions in space. A simplistic counter to my critic's argument might be that we can see all sorts of other 'now's by looking up at the stars. We see the nearest star as it was something over four years ago, while telescopes let us ...

I can think of better incentives The recent elections may not have shown a huge surge of Green voters a la Ukip, but there certainly are more of us taking the party seriously. So it's a bit of a shame that councils are having trouble with recycling. Until recently, recycling in the UK was on the rise, but now it is dropping. This is seen as a bad thing for two reasons. Recycling can result in a reduction in use of scarce materials - or a reduction in the need to dig big holes in the ground to produce them - and it cuts down on the phenomenal amount of stuff we send to landfill. But, to be honest, I'm not at all surprised that councils aren't succeeding, because it's a classic case of an intermediary being expected to spend money on something that doesn't benefit them directly. It's pretty well all stick and very little carrot for the councils. I'd suggest there are five steps that could be undertaken to significantly increase recycling pretty well in...

What a nice book This afternoon I'm giving a talk at a primary school in Chippenham, and I'm a little nervous. Not because of the talk itself - they always make a great audience - but in case the teachers throw things. Let me explain. Yesterday I had the great pleasure of taking part in the Channel 4 programme Sunday Brunch to talk about my new book The Quantum Age . It was a really enjoyable morning, and the segment appeared to be well received. But while I may have done pretty well on attempting to get people interested in quantum physics, I put my foot in it when it comes to junior school teachers. We had discussed the way the current curriculum is essentially Victorian and I'd pointed out how it's not a problem of the subject, because I talk about quantum physics to junior school children and they lap up its weirdness with more easy acceptance than adults. What I then wanted to say was something like 'Unfortunately the curriculum doesn't make a ment...

I'm really glad to see there is some thought being put into getting less gender bias in particular types of career  - notably science - led by Jenny Willott, the UK's Women and Equalities Minister. There is certainly nowhere that this has been more obvious than in physics. To be fair, things are marginally better than they were in my day. This is my final degree year photo at the New Cavendish in Cambridge and out of that whole horde, I think there five or six women (it's difficult to tell, given the average hair length amongst the men at the time). But there is still a long way to go. That's me, circled, for your amusement Apparently a report by the IoP suggests that around half of state schools 'reinforce gender stereotypes' in terms of the subjects students study at A-level. The plan to sort this out is to send in young female scientists and engineers as role models. I have nothing against this plan - I like a good role model, but I think there s...

I'm delighted to say that my new book, The Quantum Age is now available - see it's web page for details or to buy. The premise is simple - we have had everything from the stone age to the steam age, but now we're in the quantum age, where quantum-based devices are everywhere (there at least seven different quantum technologies in a smartphone). The book combines an explanation of the basics of the science with the remarkable stories of the development of different applications from basics like electricity, through the natural world of quantum biology to lasers and superconducting magnets. As a taster, here's the introduction: The chances are that most of the time you were at school your science teachers lied to you. Much of the science, and specifically the physics, they taught you was rooted in the Victorian age (which is quite probably why so many people find school science dull). Quantum theory, special and general relativity, arguably the most significant fu...

* UPDATED 4/6/14 to include details of leather case * Sizing and positioning an image for a four-way case on the website Phone cases can be a handy present for those 'can't think of something to buy for people' - especially now that they can be personalised with photos. To date I've used the general purpose printing firms like VistaPrint for this, but I've just had a go with the dedicated case company Mr Nutcase (no, really), and was very impressed with the result. Because it is dedicated to one purpose, the site is very easy to use. There are apparently hundreds of pre-conceived designs available on there, but I can't really see the point, as it's far more fun to use your own photos. After selecting the type of phone (a huge list available) and case (more on that in a moment) there are 14 different layouts - or at least there were for my iPhone 5 - from a single image taking up the whole of the back to complex designs which incorporate up to ...