I mentioned a few days ago how much I enjoyed doing my talk based on Dice World in the John Rylands Library at the Manchester Science Festival, courtesy of the Royal Society. If you didn't make it, but would like to find out more about tossing a head ten times in a row, running a horse racing scam, why half my audience would turn down an offer of £5,000 with no strings attached and how a probability problem embarrassed a large number of US academics, you can now watch my talk courtesy of the wonders of YouTube. I can obviously only touch on a tiny part of what's covered in the book (someone bought it just to read about golden retrievers and Bayes' theorem), so if this has wet your appetite, I've links to buy it in all kinds of format from its web page , or you can even g et a signed copy direct from me (after all, it's nearly present buying season!)

One of the most interesting aspects of writing Final Frontier was the change in the nature of space exploration since the Moon landings. In science fiction, space travel was usually a private venture, but in reality it has been dominated by governments. But now things are changing. Not only are some of the supply ships to the ISS now privately run, we have the likes of Virgin Galactic soon to offer space tours around the bay (as it were), various would-be asteroid mining concerns making their plans and a pair of Mars missions, all from private ventures. When I wrote the book, both Inspiration Mars, which plans a Mars flypast by a two person craft, and Mars One which plans to land at least two groups of four on the surface, had punishing schedules. Inspiration Mars was intending to get out there in 2018, while Mars One was expecting an unmanned equipment drop in 2016, with astronauts heading out in 2023 and 2025. A lot of the media coverage has been about the way that Mars One is...

There was a time when Haynes manuals were, frankly, rather stuffy, step by step books, beloved of those who liked taking a car apart in the garage, and mocked by everyone else. But the publisher has relatively recently realised that the books' distinctive form can be applied to all kinds of different subjects. We've seen, for instance, a maintenance manual for the Death Star  and a UFO investigations manual , which took a pretty straight approach to the possibility that UFOs were indeed alien craft. However, the latest Haynes to join my reviewing shelf is unashamedly a work of fiction - though it technically never admits this, maintaining a straight-faced attitude at all times. The Alien Invasion Owners' Resistance Manual  is allegedly written by a member of the UK's 'Ministry of Alien Defence' and is packed full of entirely made up, but entertaining statistics and information on the various alien invaders, their modus operandi and just what it is they'r...

I love giving talks, whatever the setting. I am happy in a school classroom or a 1,000 seater auditorium.  (Okay, I love the buzz of a big audience, but sometimes the intimate little gatherings are the most rewarding.) But just occasionally you get a chance to speak somewhere that really feels special. That's what I call a ceiling Perhaps the most striking example I've had of this feeling of awe is the Royal Institution. It's hard not to be a little daunted and delighted in equal measures by the string of big name scientists from Davy and Faraday onwards who have lectured there. But a close second has to be the venue for my talk based on Dice World last Thursday, the John Rylands Library in Manchester. I had heard about the library a lot as youth, when going to school in Manchester, and I passed it on the bus hundreds of times, briefly noting the way it stands out from its surroundings rather like that cathedral in New York. Certainly the outside is striking. In fa...

I love the BBC TV show QI dearly, but since they so delight in the misunderstandings of others, they are fair game when they get something a trifle wrong. Recently they did just this - or to be precise, they omitted an important part and focused on an answer that, while true, was not the best picture. Specifically, they were asking about Sherlock Holmes and what kind of reasoning he employed. Inevitably, someone fell into the trap of saying 'deduction', because we associate phrases like 'And what can we deduce, Watson?' with old SH, even if never said. 'No,' said the awesome Stephen Fry, 'he used abduction.' Now I would like to suggest that this is an incorrect remark on several levels. Firstly, occasionally Holmes did use deduction. And, yes, he did sometimes use abduction. But I think his main technique was, in fact, induction. Here's a quick summary of the three, using that most delightful of reasoning tools, the logical swan. (These exampl...

Another Banksy - Shop Until You Drop I find it interesting the way that the media gets in a state of outrage when someone defaces a Banksy artwork - most recently his new Bristol work, The Girl with the Pearl Earache . There's something that feels a touch hypocritical about the whole thing. I'm reminded of the early performance of Karlheinz Stockhausen's Stimmung . This an a cappella vocal piece that lasts over an hour (typically) and features a single chord. This isn't as boring as it sounds, as the six singers come in and out of the chord at different places, make interesting vocal sounds and generally muck around with the concept of music. I'll be honest, I couldn't sit through the whole thing now, but when I was a student and significantly more pretentious, I would listen to it end-to-end (apart from the irritating need to turn over the vinyl record) in a darkened room, perhaps after a glass or two of something, and rather enjoy the experience. But h...

Halloween chez Clegg many moons ago Going on the vast quantities of tat  elegant merchandising on display in Asda, we are fast approaching Halloween, that most divisive of festivals. It's popular in the UK to moan about Halloween as an American import, but when our children were young, we used to decorate the house for a session of spookiness (usually while they were out, so they came back to a haunted house) and they loved it. In our previous house we never got trick or treaters, as we were too far off the beaten track, but we do here, and so far the experience has been good. They're pretty well always small children, accompanied by parents who wait at the pavement, have been polite and no silliness. I know it isn't always that way - and I recognize the amusement value of the image doing the rounds on Facebook (thanks, John Gribbin) which shows a small child taking sweets while trick or treating with the tag 'Ok kids, don't ever talk to strangers or take can...

Large prisms used in a tunnelling experiment In theory, science is very flexible. It is the absolute opposite of a rigid, fundamentalist religion, because there are no absolute truths in science. Theories are just as good as the evidence available - and it's entirely possible that evidence will come out tomorrow that make a widely supported theory untenable. However, scientists are also human, and have a tendency to cling on to favourite theories beyond their sell-by date. It's not that they go into fundamentalist mode and ignore the evidence - they are more flexible than that. But they will change and patch up a favoured theory so that it matches the latest data. A good example is the big bang theory, which has been patched several times as new data emerged. (And may need patching again if it turns out that inflation wasn't really the way we used to think.) This is not surprising, though it can be arbitrary in the short term. The great British astrophysicist Fred Hoy...

If, like me, you suffer from GERD and the thought of a big, tasty meal always has to be balanced against the dread of acid reflux, you'll know what friend the compound sodium alginate can be. What's more, not only does it help with gastrointestinal nightmares, it also produces some Heston Blumenthal style delights by allowing chemi-chefs to go in for spherification. (Not to be confused with spaghettification, which is what happens to you if you get too near a black hole.) Intrigued? Discover more in my latest Royal Society of Chemistry podcast about sodium alginate. Take a listen by clicking to  pop over to its page on the RSC site .

I often see complaints on Facebook and the like about the way someone's least favourite political party (insert the party of your choice, but in my feed it's usually the Conservatives or Ukip) is doing something really  stupid that doesn't make any logical sense. Similarly, those with a science background are horrified by the way politicians routinely ignore scientific evidence. But it shouldn't be a surprise. Look at the recent Scottish independence campaign, held up as a shining example of the way politics should be (apart from 'Yes' campaigners occasionally intimidating the opposition). The 'No' side were criticised for saying too much from the head and not enough from the heart. Or to put it another way, concentrating too much on fact and ignoring feeling. The reality is that 'good' politics is at least 75% feeling and fact usually comes a poor second. You can get a very clear feeling for this from one of the rare times that a governmen...

If I am honest, I am something of a stranger to having a clean screen on my phone and iPad. As you can see from the image on the right, my iPad screen, left to its own devices, has strangely straight skid-like marks, as well as lots of other fingerprinty gunge. When I have made attempts to clean the screen in the past, it has usually been a quick wipe on the shirt for the iPhone, or an attempt with a damp tissue on the iPad, neither of which is particularly effective. Those long streaks, for instance, prove pretty well impossible to shift. So I was delighted when I was offered the chance to try out some screen cleaning products that go under the odd name of Toddy Gear (no relation to Top Gear or Argentina). In essence, what we're dealing with are specialist cleaning cloths. They are apparently anti-microbial, but most obviously they have two sides, a plush grey side for cleaning and a shiny, silky side for a final polish (rarely needed in my testing) - and they work ...

I knew it was a mistake the moment I pressed the 'Send' button. I knew they would treat me like someone pointing out (spoken in nasal tones): 'You do realise, in you drama on Sunday, that a commuter train from Slough in 1967 would not included that kind of carriage, which wasn't introduced until 1968?' But I did it anyway. Here's the thing. I had watched an episode of the BBC's police drama New Tricks , a painless, brainless way of spending an hour that is to, say, The Bridge , what a McDonalds coffee is to a serious barista product. One of the suspects in the show was a physicist. Fair enough. Even physicists can be obnoxious, as he certainly was. But they showed him in his lab. This was a physicist working on antimatter. And what did we see in the lab? Chemical glassware, and him playing with cylinders of blue liquid. Wearing protective goggles. I just had to moan. See the physicist at work So I went through the BBC's byzantine complaint form...

In the past I have used my blog to say nice things about a company (for instance Ed's Diner ) or to be less nice ( Anglian Windows springs to mind). In principle companies can keep a watch for comments anywhere online and pop in and make a response - and occasionally they do - but usually such good or bad publicity goes unnoticed by them. Twitter, though, is different, because there is a communication element as much as it is about broadcasting to the world. Every company worth its salt now has a Twitter account, and used correctly it can be a huge PR coup, but getting it wrong makes your business look feeble or out of touch. The big difference from a blog post is that when tweeting it is easy to use the company's Twitter name in the tweet and hence highlight the tweet to the company (or individual) that is being being talked about. So, for instance, when someone tweets about one of my books, if instead of saying 'by Brian Clegg' they say 'by @brianclegg...

This statement is false. Discuss. "Ringedteal" by John Beniston - Taken by John Beniston. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

I have just finished reading for review one of Ian Stewart's popular maths books from 2008 (I missed it first time around), and it certainly lives up to its name Professor Stewart's Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities as it contains the most curious thing I've ever seen in a review copy of a book in all the years I've been reviewing. On four of the pages are hand-written corrections. When I came across the first one, a simple change from McMahon to MacMahon, I assumed the change was actually printed in the book, to be quirky, but no, these are pencil corrections. To understand why it's so strange, you need to be familiar with the production process for a book like this. Early editing, including copy editing, is done on bog standard Word documents (whether on a computer or printed out first). Then the book is typeset. Of course this no longer involves setting metal blocks of type in frames, but the text is imported into software that lays it out exactly how ...

Reading an Ian Stewart book to review it, I was reminded of a delightful old paradox, cast in the form of a gambling game. And as the author of a book called Dice World , I felt I had to share it. The game is played with three, rather unusual dice. There's a red one which has two 1s, two 5s and two 9s as its faces; a white one with two 3s, two 4s and two 8s as its faces and a blue one (very patriotic dice, these) with two 2s, two 6s and two 7s as its faces. The dice are not loaded. The game is simple. Each of two players picks one of the dice and rolls - whoever gets the highest number wins. The players then repeat this, typically for 20 rolls, with the same dice. Whoever gets the lowest total has to pay the other person. The person running the game says 'I want to make this as fair as possible, so you can choose whichever of the dice you want first, then I'll pick from what's left over.' What would you choose to do in order to maximise your chance of winnin...

I get lots of emails and comments on my Facebook page and Twitter about my books, most of them very positive. But occasionally people do email me to point out an error. And sometimes I have to hold my hand up and say 'Oops, I made a mistake.' Because I'm human, and it's easily done. Even on something absolutely fundamental. I have (briefly) forgotten the name of a close friend when introducing them to someone else, so it's not shocking I may occasionally have a mental blip on some obscure bit of physics. However, personally, if I was going to email someone to point out a mistake, I would do so apologetically and appreciating how easy it is to make a mistake. So it was a double blow when I got an email not just pointing out an error, but doing so decidedly aggressively. Headed Glaring Bit of Misinformation! the email read: Dear Sir, Began reading your latest book, “ Final Frontier ”, but had to quit after reading page #65, when it became obvious that you ...

When I was young, I believe a lot of people went to the Saturday morning pictures (cinema) and amongst other things, they would watch cowboy adventures in which it was very easy to tell who were the bad guys and who were the good, because the bad guys wore black hats, and the good white. When I grew up I soon realised life was more complicated. It helped, I think, that I went into the sciences, because the message there is usually 'It's more complicated than you thought', a message that sadly doesn't seem to have spread to many people's politics. I'd say the majority of my friends on Facebook are left wing politically (I will discuss my own POV at the end), which is fine, but what does irritate me it that they have the tendency to repost political propaganda that suffers wildly from the black hat/white syndrome. The other day, I had cause to raise both eyebrows when confronted with this piece of work, apparently from leftunity.org. For me, this is the worst ...

Phonetastic, pop pickers! The other day I was walking past a bus stop and paused to admire an advert for the new Amazon smartphone . I was told that I could get it for only £33 pounds a month on O2. (Actually, as was the case initially with the iPhone, you can only get it on O2.) Whoa, I thought. That's more than I pay for a real smartphone. Now I now that's a bit unfair as this is a fully featured Android phone, and I don't want to start the old iPhone/Android rivalry (though, of course, iPhones are better), but my point was this. Yes, the Amazon Fire phone is a nice smartphone with a couple of unique but hardly showstopping features. Set against which it has some limitations that make it anything but one of the best Android options. But the point is that this is a phone that, like it or not, has very strong ties to one retailer (a retailer that wants to rule the world). Which gives said retailer huge benefits by having a direct link to my pocket and activities. So,...

I was interested to see that Nigel Lawson's anti-science Global Warming Policy Foundation has been rapped on the knuckles by the Charity Commission for not meeting the requirement for an educational charity to be unbiassed (and, by implication, evidence based). I presume the same requirements don't apply to religious charities, as surely they would be in trouble too. Some while ago I wrote a post about a visit from the Jehovah's Witnesses and how their leaflet inspired me to realise that it is difficult to apply the Bible to everyday 'big questions' like 'What should we do about terrorists?' because the advice is so conflicting that it is possible to come up with pretty well diametrically opposed recommendations. Shortly after writing this I had a bit of an epiphany*. I've always struggled to understand how climate change deniers can come up with such a strangely selective view that went against the majority scientific consensus - but now it was ...

I ought to hate this book. I was writing something about instantaneous transmitters and wanted to include Ursula Le Guin's ansible. I had read somewhere that its development and how it worked was explained in this book. It turns out it gets two mentions, each all of two lines long in 319 pages. But I don't care - because it's a great book. I confess, I've never really read Le Guin apart from a not particularly enthusiastic attempt at The Left Hand of Darkness . The science fiction I largely read when I was younger was from the 1950s greats and the 1960s new wave, and while I read their later work too, and have started picking up on some newer writers, there's a big gap in my experience, including pretty well everything Le Guin wrote. The book does have some science going on - the main character is a physicist developing a theory on time (hence the ansible cropping up), which seems mainly to be based on the block universe - but it's not really what the nove...