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 ...

Part of one floor of the Atlas installation (courtesy Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC)) We are all so used to CGI that it's not even a surprise these days when the effects on Dr Who are passable. But 50 years ago, things were very different. Usually the only computer animation you could expect was watching the punched tape or cards fly through the reader. But where was the first seed planted for the future wonders of CGI that would make practically any modern science fiction or action film possible? Was it MIT? Hollywood? No, it was Oxfordshire. In the wonderful Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. Let me hand you over to Marion at the Science & Technology Facilities Council (based in sunny Swindon): UK computing is today celebrating fifty years since the launch of what was at that time the largest supercomputer in the world, the Atlas 1. When built it was the size of a large detached house.  Now that same compu...

The unfortunate Thomas Young With their media of image of being cool, emotionless brainboxes, it might be surprising to learn that scientists can be just as catty as anyone else, and though science is a collaborative business where it's par for the course to tear apart other people's theories and then go out for a drink with them, it's still the case that personal dislikes sometimes triumph over rational argument. One of the most famous scientific quotes in history, from Isaac Newton is often thought to be a masked insult. Newton, writing to his hated arch rival Robert Hooke, approximately quoted a line from Robert Burton when he wrote 'If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.' The reason many think this was a piece of nastiness was not just because Newton was making it clear that he didn't owe much to Hooke, but also because Hooke was anything but a giant physically. The scientific claws come out in all kinds of subtle ways. ...

Effortlessly editing a script in Word for iPad I do technically have a laptop, but I hardly ever use it. Ever since I've had an iPad, the tablet has been my sturdy companion when working away from home. Why would I want to carry a heavy, delicate beast like a laptop when I've everything I need in a compact package with a battery life that means I can work on it all day? I can touch type on the onscreen keyboard - okay, a little slower than a real one, but not much. It is the perfect working companion for a train journey or an overnight in a hotel. But there was a tiny fly in the ointment. And that was the lack of Office. Not having Office was, frankly, a pain. I made use of a perfectly respectable alternative, that pretty much read and wrote Office files, but like all such second-bests it wasn't quite the real deal. The Word equivalent lost some of the formatting, while the Powerpoint handling didn't show animations, which practically every Powerpoint I use has....

I'm not a great one for putting out press releases as blog posts, but this is one I can't resist sharing. So let me hand you over to the University of Manchester's press office to discover the opportunity to crack a cryptic code and win some movie goodies in honour of Alan Turing (and, yes, the new film with Mr Cumberbatch about him). Luckily, the treasure hunt won't  turn out like the infamous Masquerade book, which gave cryptic clues to the burial place of a solid gold hare, and resulted in all manner of places being dug up to the irritation of their owners and embarrassment of the publishers. Here the treasure isn't really buried (and, sadly, isn't real silver ingots as Turing is supposed to have hidden). So, over to you Manchester U: A new fiendishly-challenging online brain-teaser , featuring cryptic clues, has been launched by mathematicians at The University of Manchester.  The online cryptography competition has been designed to coincide with the ...

Should I give up Asda, 5 minutes walk away, and drive a 10 mile round trip to get to a butchers, greengrocers etc? I have a bit of a history with 'natural food' journalist Joanna Blythman. Don't get me wrong, I've never met her, and we've never argued, but I have often mentioned a quote from her in her days at the Soil Association when she came out with a statement that managed to be both an understatement and an unnecessary scare.  Writing in the Guardian , she remarked: You can switch to organic... Or you could just accept that every third mouthful of food you eat contains poison. Are you up for that? The understatement is because practically  every mouthful you eat contains poison, whether you buy organic or not. Food contain poisons both natural and artificial. Usually far more are natural - typically around a factor of 1,000. And the unnecessary scare is because the fact is that the levels of pesticide residues on non-organic food are sufficiently low...

In the wake of the Virgin Galactic tragedy, it is worth thinking a little about the realities of risk and space travel - especially as we are so bad at handling probability, which is what risk is all about. But I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to click here to pop over to my Huffington Post blog , where you will find the piece.

I'm not a great reader of historical fiction with the exception of titles where it overlaps with crime. Perhaps the greatest proponent of that crossover is C. J. Sansom, and his latest novel, Lamentation , featuring the hunchbacked lawyer Matthew Shardlake, operating in the complex times of Tudor England, is to my mind his best. Oddly, this is despite - or, rather, because - this isn't much of a crime novel. Instead what we have here is a full blown Tudor political thriller, with all the twists and turns, machinations and backstabbing (in this case sometimes literally) that you would expect in the modern equivalent. The crime that Shardlake investigates appears simple. The disappearance of a compromising manuscript written by Henry VIII's last queen (on whom Shardlake has a long-term crush), Catherine Parr. But the setting, mixing the dangerous teetering between traditionalist, near-Catholic beliefs and 'reformer' protestant beliefs with the political manoeuvrin...

I was listening to Steve Wright's show on Radio 2 the other day (I'm sorry, it was someone else's car) when an item caught my ear. They reported that a paper in Nature Neuroscience (yes, that's the kind of highbrow stuff you get on Radio 2) said that older people could reduce memory loss by drinking cocoa. Now my next book, due out in January, is all about the claims made for science (good and bad) in areas like health, diet, exercise, the brain and so forth, so it seemed worth looking into, and so I got hold of a copy of the original paper. I'll be honest, it wasn't one of the better ones I've seen. Most scientific papers are hard work to read, but this was a bit more fuzzy about some things than I would expect to be made explicit. As is often the case, while the paper was interesting, and highlighted something worthy of further investigation, what it demonstrated was more complex than the media report suggested, and at this stage it didn't offer sub...