Some have boring covers, others look like the real thing, but there's usually a clue... What do you call a book that's not a book? A bound proof (or if you are American and like a good acronym, an ARC, standing for Advanced Reading/Reader Copy). It sort of makes sense. While I, as a reader, would always prefer to read a finished copy of a book, the publisher likes to get reviews in as early as possible, particularly if the reviewer is likely to provide snappy remarks to put on the cover. So quite often, before the book is actually produced, they will typeset and bind as a paperback the uncorrected proofs and send them out to eager reviewers. The reviewer reads this not-quite-a-book as usual and produces his or her words of wisdom. But what to do next? With a real book I have two choices. If I love it, I put it on the shelf for future re-reading. But shelf space is very limited and I can only do this with 2 or 3 books a year, where I review about 50. The rest, I'm...

Pronounced?.. In the old days, foreign product names were anglicised where necessary, to avoid undue confusion in the British populace. But gradually, over time, as we've got more sophisticated, we have been exposed to more of the real thing without our brains exploding. So, for instance, despite much moaning, the brand we always called 'nessuls' as in 'Nestles Milky Bar', sneakily switched to being 'nesslay' as a better approximation to Nestlé. Now, perhaps thinking that we have been prepared for the exotic by our fondness for The Killing and The Bridge , that household standard Ikea has made the risky switch from 'eye-kee-uh' to 'ick-ay-ah', presumably also closer to the original pronunciation. As far as I can tell, the Great British Public (GBP) has yet to adopt this. People still sigh and gird their loins at thought of facing the industrial-strength unfriendliness of the car park of a Eyekeeuh store. But perhaps we will end up with...

I'd just like to wish everyone a Happy Christmas and a great New Year. Posting here is likely to be suspended for the next week - see you in 2015. As a bit of passing entertainment, here's a Christmas Medley, arranged by the excellent Roger Witney and sung by the best group I've sung in, Nonessence.

I was interested to see that the  Rough Guides folk have declared that Birmingham is one of the top ten cities in the world to visit . If I am honest, my opinion of Birmingham has significantly improved lately. It used to be that I thought of it as a place of awful concrete public spaces like the Mk I Bullring. And it had this bizarre idea that it was the UK's second city, when everyone with any sense realised that the second city was actually Manchester. But I've been visiting regularly over the last couple of years and Birmingham is now genuinely a 'vibrant city' as they say in the guides. (Though still a bit of dump when you drive in down the Hagley Road.) There is, however, from my viewpoint, one strange piece of parochialism in the Rough Guides choice. Because one of Birmingham's selling points was its vast cultural diversity in restaurants and the like. Now, for me, this is certainly a plus for domestic visitors, but a turn-off for the world market. When ...

That #1 album (currently #3,529 on Amazon) No, I don't refer to my own 5 minutes of fame, though it is the anniversary of my taking part in 'celebrity' University Challenge , but that of Swindon's attempt at the X-Factor crown in 2012, Jahméne (or Jasmine, as the spellchecker would prefer it). Now, for all I know he is now revelling in the success of his '#1 Album' (that's what his website says, so it must be true), but I must admit he didn't look all that happy when I saw him this Monday. I was walking through our local Asda, where Mr Douglas used to work before his TV exposure. All I spotted to begin with was a posse of Asda staff heading in my direction, accompanied by a couple of photographers. Somewhere in the centre of the bunch was a smartly dressed young man who I assumed was a management trainee. Even after I walked straight past him about six inches away, I didn't cotton on - it's only as I was doing the self-service checkout thi...

If  you were a railway enthusiast you would know why finding this on the front of your train would be exciting... Despite having several friends who are poets (and very nice people they are too), I really don't get poetry. At least, I didn't until last Friday, when the light dawned during a village Christmas shindig. There was a pre-Christmas evening of merrymaking in a nearby village hall, and with a number of others I had been asked to come along and help support the carol singing that would intersperse the important bits of drinking, eating, nattering and more drinking. What I, and quite a lot of the audience, didn't realise is that there were also going to be poems. Three poets, apparently connected to Swindon's successful Festival of Poetry came along to give renditions of their own and others' work. I could help but observe the strange atmosphere in the hall during the poetry readings. It was, to be honest, a bit uncomfortable. People stared into sp...

Every now and then someone sends me an interesting question about science, and, while I can't guarantee to answer it, I do my best. I got one yesterday that said 'if light can be considered traveling in packets, what is between those packets? Does anything exist (in the space) at the end of one photon and the beginning of the next photon?' And this a particularly engaging question, not so much for the answer, which is pretty straightforward, but for the implications it has for the way we talk about physics. The answer, to get it out of the way, is nothing. There is nothing (in terms of the light itself) in between photons or between the 'end of one photon and the beginning of the next' - apart from anything else, photons don't really have 'ends'. A beam of light can be described as a set of discontinuous particles we call photons and there is no more something between them, linking them, than there is amongst a stream of electrons. Yet that's whe...

I've come across two very different versions of Dom Joly. One is the pleasant family guy I've seen in Cirencester's best coffee shop. The other is the 'TV personality' who has appeared in the kind of excruciatingly unfunny shows that I wouldn't watch with a barge pole. (This is not quite a mixed metaphor if you use Decartes' model of light.) Luckily, Scary Monsters and Super Creeps was written by the former Joly. Although ostensibly about hunting down famous monsters from bigfoot to the ogopogo, it is probably best read as a humorous travel book, one of my favourite genre, and the reason I bought it. There are some wonderful writers in this genre - think, for instance, Bill Bryson, Dave Gorman and Stuart Maconie. In fact, for me, the humorous travel book is far better than the serious kind. In principle, Scary Monsters ticks all the boxes. We've got a funny, self-deprecating narrator and interesting locations to visit. Not only do we get Loch Nes...

This is what laser weapons ought to look like (Image credit: NASA ) I enjoy reading science fiction (or watching a sci fi movie) as much as the next nerd, and it's fascinating to speculate on the similarities and differences between the science and technology in the fictional world and reality. In some areas we have gone far beyond the imagination of the fiction writers; in others we haven't come close. One obvious area that we've lagged pretty far behind is in lasers, phasers, blasters or whatever you want to call them. I think one of the most interesting aspects of the Battlestar Galactica reboot is that once they'd established the technology of space flight, almost every other bit of technology from fridges and phones to weaponry was pretty much late 20th century standard. So any shooting was done with old fashioned bullets. And it's certainly the way things have been in the real world - until now. The US has been experimenting with laser weapons o...

James Randi Over the years, magicians like Harry Houdini and James Randi have shown time and again that they have ideal skills for spotting and debunking fraudulent claims of magical abilities and mental powers. In the Telegraph yesterday , though, Will Storr had a go at 'debunking the king of the debunkers', demonstrating that Randi himself, now 87 (according to his article, or 86 according to Wikipedia), was not all he seemed. For me, this was a wonderful example of entirely missing the point. Storr makes three main accusations. That Randi has at some point been doubtful about the science behind climate change, that he was intolerant to drug users and that he had lied about replicating Rupert Sheldrake's dog experiments, in which Sheldrake claims to have shown that at dog was able to predict when its owner would return home. The first two, frankly, are hardly worth considering as they are classic type failure errors. Being good at debunking fraudulent psychics doe...

Whatever your religious persuasion from none to something significant, a lot of people enjoy a Christmas carol this time of year. So, as we're already getting a bit demob happy, here's the first part of an occasional Christmas quiz. As you might guess from the title, I'm going to give you a snippet from the start of five carols - all you have to do is identify them. (Apologies if you aren't from the UK - some of these tunes may not be the ones you are familiar with.) The answers are at the bottom of the post, but try all 5 first. So here we go (NB - embedded Soundcloud players may take a few seconds to load: please be patient!): Number 1 - we'll start with an easy one. Number 2 Number 3 Number 4 - probably the most obscure, so I'll give you a couple more notes. Number 5 - to make this a little different, I've the start of the introduction , not the sung part: I've taken these snippets from a sort of karaoke carol CD - if you have a s...

That book I would like to take a moment to defend James Watson. This is a dangerous thing to do, because he has shown himself to be a dinosaur in terms of his attitude to many things and to support concepts that, based on the best scientific evidence, can only be considered racist. Now he is being pilloried again because he has sold his Nobel Prize medal for several million dollars, and that clearly makes him a money-grubbing misanthrope. Let's be clear - what he has said on race and other matters is wrong. He shouldn't have said it. There is a partial defence that he is in his 80s, and in my experience of elderly family members, the majority of people who grew up in the 1930s have a social outlook that dates back before modern views, including attitudes that most people under 70 would consider racist and unacceptable. You simply can't change this, though a more sensitive person would at least conceal it. No one accuses Watson of being a sensitive person. However I ...

I'm taking part in a radio discussion tomorrow about science books of 2014. It's for a US radio show, and they've provided me with an extensive (and really interesting) set of topics to discuss from 'A book that pleasantly surprised you' to 'Which genres do you grab and which do you tend to overlook?' But one section left me absolutely cold - we're going to discuss the New York Times Bestseller List. As the only newspaper I read with any regularity (about once a week) is the i , I never see bestseller lists. I have no clue what has been on the NYT list (or the Sunday Times , or whichever newspaper in the UK does them - I have no idea about that either). And, frankly, why should I care? Of course if one of my books was on one of those lists I would inevitably be rather more interested for my own purposes, but of itself it tells you nothing but sales figures. It certainly doesn't identify the best books - or books I would particularly want to read...

An early Apple Mac - how do you open the case? You don't. I'm currently reading for review an interesting book by Matt Nicholson called When Computing Got Personal . I was reminded strongly of the debates back in the mid 1980s over the decision to make Apple's Macintosh computer a sealed unit, which the user was not expected to open up and fiddle inside. At the time, pretty much all PCs could be opened so you could add in 'expansion cards' to improve graphics handling, add network connectivity, beef up memory or whatever. The general feeling amongst professionals was that Apple were making a huge mistake. You had to be able to stick expansion cards into the chassis: it was almost part of the definition of what a personal computer was. In the end, though, it was spiky, irritating Apple that got it right and the industry heavies that got it wrong. Because the sealed unit is exactly the way the business has gone. I'm writing this on an (Apple) all-in-one tha...

Jokes are notoriously subjective. Some find a simple pun hilarious - many wince and move on. But there are some jokes that work in some parts of the country, but don't in others - which is an interesting reflection on the regionality of words and their pronunciations. Of course, the UK/US divide is an infamous one for making different use of words, even with today's shared culture. When I write a book for my US publisher, I quite often get a query about a term I've used that they simply don't get over in New York. The most recent manuscript (just in), had two such queries. What, they wanted to know is 'dross'? And for that matter, what are 'holiday snaps'? (I corrected the latter to holiday photographs, though really I should, I suppose, have made it vacation photographs.) And inevitably you say tom-ate-oh and I say tom-aht-oh. However, my favourite example of this is much more subtle. One of the few clear memories I have of junior school is our te...

As we enter that time of year when many of us have lots of presents to buy, I thought it would be a good idea to highlight some of my titles that make useful gifts - especially for those difficult-to-buy-for people. When you consider what many presents cost these days, I honestly think you can't beat a book for value. So here's my top six, in no particular order: Introducing Infinity : a great stocking filler (just £5.99 currently on Amazon, and pocket-sized), Introducing Infinity brings the mind-boggling subject of infinity alive with powerful illustrations in a unique graphic guide. Suitable from about 14 upwards for anyone with an inquiring mind. See at  Amazon.co.uk  and  Amazon.com . If your gift recipient would prefer a more in-depth, though still approachable read, there is also A Brief History of Infinity . Xenostorm: Rising : a faced-paced science fiction novel, technically for a young adult audience (12+), though it works as well for adults who like SF. ...