When there's an outburst of indignation about a stupid remark made by an elderly person, such as the furore over Tim Hunt's comments on women in the laboratory, it's easy to forget how much we have moved on in the last 40 or 50 years. We are yet to achieve proper equality for women, but it's easy to forget just how strikingly different things were just a few decades ago. Take, for instance, the issue of calendars. When I was young, every car part manufacturer and plumber's supplier produced an annual calendar with pictures of women in relatively few, if any clothes. Most of these were pretty horrendous productions, though some had pretensions of artiness, and none more so than the calendar produced by the tyre company Pirelli. These weren't the kind of thing that were plastered on the wall of garage workshops, but sought after collectors' items. But still, in the end, arguably objectification. (I admit the line between such things and art is fuzzy. It wo...

So  Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is finished and it's hard not to add 'thank goodness'. It was never bad enough not to stick with it, but it came close. The trouble with adapting an over-long book that is intriguing and irritating in equal measures is that unless you take liberties with the script you end up with exactly the same kind of TV show. And they did. The series could have been condensed from 7 hours to 3 without significant loss. The good news for those of us who hung on to the end was that the last episode was by far the best - far more engaging than some of its predecessors. In fact, there was a lot in principle to like about the show. The CGI was surprisingly good, and the actors universally did an excellent job. There were striking set pieces throughout - it's just that for a lot of the episodes there was far more exposition and repetition than there was any real progression to the plot. The other big problem was that the two most interesti...

Valerie at a serious location, back in the black and white days As I was sitting on the bus heading for the station the other day, I contemplated the way that associations can completely change how we view a particular name. This came to mind as the bus headed past Cheney Manor. Given that name alone, my suspicion is that a rather splendid Tudor mansion would come to mind, either in beautifully laid out formal gardens, or possibly going a bit to seed as the owners couldn't keep it up. Definitely a des. res. But if you know Swindon, you will probably be aware that Cheney Manor is not a distinguished old house, but an area of the town that has seen better days and whose most notable occupant is a small trading estate. The only obvious 'Manor' is one of those not entirely welcoming looking modern pubs. All-in-all, it's not exactly a National Trust tourist destination. (Sorry to any Cheney Manor residents - I'm sure it's a lovely place to live.) Suddenly, gi...

LA 3 NET Fellow (see below for silly acronym) Jakob Cramer checking a magnetic lens for particle beams Accelerators like the Diamond Light Source and high power laser facilities are at the glamorous end of physics, so what better way to get a taster for some of the amazing career opportunities for scientists and engineers than a symposium for sixth formers exploring this remarkable world? Unfortunately the symposium at the Liverpool Convention Centre this Friday is sold out, but the good news is that you (or students you teach) can still 'attend' in a virtual way via webcast. That will be available here , and they've even got Brian Cox, so who could resist? If you'd like some more details, here is the inevitable press release: FROM PIECING THE COSMIC JIGSAW TO IMAGING PROTEINS Lasers and Accelerators symposium set to inspire next generation of accelerator scientists and engineers says Cockcroft Director “You could be working at the forefront of human ...

Having just watched the sometimes excellent movie Ex Machina , I am tempted to wonder if a lot of writers who use artificial intelligence (AI) themes are unconsciously playing out Descartian duality, assuming that we have souls and that, lacking a soul, an AI would act purely selfishly. Of course, this assumption is not true of all such fiction. In the curious Kubrick/Spielberg handover film AI , the Pinocchio-like AI's search for the chance to be a real boy has as much soul as it does schmaltz. But in Ex Machina , the Ava character (I'll try to avoid too many spoilers) demonstrates an 'inhuman' lack of concern when there was an opportunity to save someone who had cared for and helped her, at no cost to herself. Would a true AI with human-like intelligence really do this? There are good evolutionary reasons for the existence of altruism and mutualism, and to totally ignore them would not really be logical. Of course it could be that Ava was not an AI at all - one ...

This is a curious but likeable little book. That 'little' is not a condescending remark. The book is physically small - about two thirds of the width of a normal paperback - with large print that means it's almost like reading on a Kindle rather than a normal printed copy. I am always a little wary about self-published titles, which this is, but it has been well proof read, with no more typos than I see in books from mainstream publishers. What particularly attracted me to it is that it's a story involving a time machine - I love time machines - and the blurb said that it made an attempt to make the science as close to realistic as possible, which got my science writer antennae twitching... and it turns out that this is a reasonable claim. So we've some interesting science and a satisfying if fairly simplistic plot. The Time Torch  was a short enough read to get through all of it on a train journey (it verges on being a novella), and it was entertaining enough ...

I am getting decidedly fed up of the reporting of the immensely sad case of the three women and nine children from Bradford who disappeared into Turkey, and probably Syria on their way back from a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia. (I ought to emphasise that we should be doing all we can to get these children returned home.) I keep seeing press and politicians saying ‘The police didn't do enough to prevent them,’ or ‘The government isn’t doing enough to prevent radicalisation.’ Last night on the news a reporter's main question to someone in Bradford was 'Are you angry with the police?' And a couple of days ago, Baroness Warsi was quoted as saying that the Government was failing to offer sufficient collaboration with Muslim communities in Britain to ensure it could combat the threat of radicalisation. However, by the time the police need to act it’s too late - the mindset is in place. And should the government need to be thought police? Surely it’s time that a culture that ...

This year marks the centenary of Albert Einstein's groundbreaking general theory of relativity. As the C. P. Snow quote on the back of John Gribbin's excellent book on the topic, Einstein's Masterwork points out, 'If Einstein had not created the general theory (in 1915) no one else would have done so... perhaps not for generations.' Generally speaking I am in total agreement with Dr Gribbin on all matters scientific (it is dangerous to do otherwise, as he is surely the head of the UK science writing equivalent of Cosa Nostra), but there is one point on which I have to part company. John gets decidedly vexed when someone refers to 'special relativity' or 'general relativity.' He points out that the correct terms are 'the special theory of relativity' and 'the general theory of relativity', and that the contraction is an abomination, because it is the theory that is special or general, not the relativity. Now scientists are no...

The other day a van driver did his best to splatter me on the road... and I'm not quite sure who was in the right. I was at the yellow arrow, about to cross the road dead ahead from one footpath to the other, on my way to the Post Office. That's the kind of exciting daily life I have. The van had entered the roundabout at the red arrow, heading in my direction. It's not clear from the picture, but there is a lot of foliage on the roundabout, and it was only when the van reached about the 3 o'clock position that I saw him. By this time I was already part way across the road, though not past the halfway point. So the question is - did I have right of way or should I have got back off the road? As it was, I carried on and he clearly thought that I shouldn't be there as he showed no sign of slowing down and just missed me. Clearly he wasn't correct in not slowing down, whoever had right of way, but what I'm not quite sure about is whether I had rig...

At first sight you might imagine that a book titled Atheism after Christendom , written by Simon Perry the chaplain of Robinson College, Cambridge, might be a throwback to the days when it used to be joked that one thing you could be certain about with trendy Church of England vicars was that they didn't believe in God. But despite the book being in praise of atheism, it also manages to be pro-Christianity, because Perry argues that Christianity is atheist. What's more, he argues that 'New Atheists' like Dawkins and Dennett are actually theists. Confused? You may not agree with the author - and I certainly don't on all counts - but his premise is certainly interesting. There are two keys to that title, because this book depends on very careful use of words. One is 'atheism', of which more in a moment, and the other is 'Christendom'. It's 'after Christendom', not 'after Christianity.' Perry argues that where initially Christia...

I felt distinctly misled by the blurb on the back of Eleven Minutes Late . I picked the book up from a pile occupying a whole table in a large bookseller, so it must be doing well (especially as I later discovered the book first came out in 2009, and this is only a lightly updated version) and thought it sounded ideal. The bumf made it sound like 'Bill Bryson does the railways' - as a lover of both, I thought it would be excellent. It was very good, but it didn't do what it said on the tin. The author Matthew Engel, a journalist with the right kind of connections to be able to interview John Major for the book (probably because Engel had been editor of Wisden's, the cricket almanac) starts in the expected vein, taking us on a trip from Penzance to Thurso with a week's railrover ticket in hand. Just the idea of the ticket really brought back the memories - when I was 15, two friends and I bought these and spent almost all of a week on the railway network. However...

I'm no fan of press release journalism, but sometimes a title catches your eye. I mean, who could resist 'World's largest rat eradication project completes baiting'? So here we go: On 23 March 2015, despite turbulent sub-Antarctic weather, the final bait pellets were sown via helicopter on the island of South Georgia by an 18-strong group of international specialists known as ‘Team Rat’ in what is the world’s largest rat eradication project to date, funded by small UK-based NGO, the South Georgia Heritage Trust (SGHT). Only days later South Georgia was announced as the fifth UK Overseas Territory to be included in the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). This ratification to the CBD was significantly aided by the dedication and hard work of the Trust and its commitment to protect the biodiversity of the island, by ridding it of invasive rodents preying on native seabird populations. South Georgia Heritage Trust and its USA sister organisation Friends o...

A couple of days ago I blogged about the suspicious nature of very short five star reviews. However, a recent revelation, pointed out by the excellent author Sara Crowe , has made me want to return to the whole business of reviewing - specifically what reviews are for and how, as authors, we ought to respond to them. On the matter of what reviews for, I was struck by a response to my earlier post. Someone said 'Most Amazon "reviews" are not actually reviews anyway, they're about whether or not the reader liked the book, which is something different.' I'm not sure I agree with that sentiment. I'd certainly agree that there's little point a review just saying whether or not a reader liked the book - but I do think it's an important part of the mix. Some while ago I moaned to a major science journal that did book reviews that their reviews were terrible because they never told you if the book was any good at what it purported to do. All each r...

Stuff Magazine gets the wrong message I read with a total lack of delight in a techie mag that HDR may be the next big thing for TV. Here's my prediction: no it won't. The fact is that TV makers are really bad at getting into the minds of the ordinary buying public. We've already seen that disastrously with 3D TV. It is now being phased out, because very few people actually bought it. Very few people could see the benefit. Now we've got 4K TV (with a lot more pixels) and HDR (standing for High Dynamic Range) vying to be the next next big thing. And I'm not sure they are going to succeed either. The benefit of 4K is getting far higher resolution images than the current HD, while HDR, an effect you'll find on most modern camera phones, zaps up the contrast, making it less likely that parts of an image will wash out, though in exchange it can produce some very artificial looking colour palettes with an unnaturally rich mix of colours - it has a tenden...

Spot the suspicious reviews Like any other author I am delighted by good reviews and deeply saddened and wounded by bad ones. And amongst those we have to take very seriously these days are Amazon reviews. It might seem that a good review in, say, a national Sunday paper is far more important than a collection of good reviews on Amazon. And that's true over the weekend the paper was published. In fact when one of my books had huge, enthusiastic reviews in the Sunday Times and the Mail on Sunday it positively shot up the sales rankings. However, such reviews are transient. Over time a book will build up a collection of Amazon reviews, and that will be the first point of assessment for many a potential reader. Such reviews probably weigh less for books than, say, reviews of a slow cooker, because as a reader you may well know an author's work and be quite happy to get another book from the same source. However, for many, the Amazon reviews will still be extremely importan...

Yawn. Don't bother. Self indulgent stuff. Which is a shame, because I liked Stephen Fry's second autobiography. I really wonder if the Observer reviewer was reading the same book when (s)he said 'A beautifully erudite and richly entertaining page-turner,' unless they trimmed off 'this isn't.' One of only four books I've ever given up part way through. I'm not even giving you links to Amazon. It wouldn't be fair.

I spent a nervous few minutes this morning in the BBC's Swindon NCA studio, connected down the ISDN line (remember ISDN) to London to appear on the UK's flagship current affairs radio programme, Today , being grilled by the inestimable John Humphrys. Thankfully he didn't want to ask me about David Cameron's performance so far, or the antics of Sepp Blatter and friends, but instead we talked about my book The Quantum Age , which is out in paperback today. It has quickly become a favourite of my output, both because I love the weirdness of quantum physics - and I have fun exploring that - but also because few of us really think about the impact that quantum physics makes on our everyday life. At a trivial level, pretty well everything is down to quantum physics, as matter, light and electricity (to name but three essentials) are all quantum based. But there is a more significant reason for calling this the Quantum Age, just as the nineteenth century was the Stea...

What? Broadly speaking, most professional writers either use Word or a specialist program like the much-praised Scrivener, which is apparently excellent for fiction work. However, every now and then, someone asks me 'Why do you spend all that money on Office, when you can get OpenOffice for free - and you can just export a Word file when you need it?' People have been saying this kind of thing to me ever since I ran the PC department at British Airways, and my answer has always been the same. If all you are doing is handling lightly formatted text, cheap and cheerful is fine, but as soon as you use the more sophisticated aspects of a word processing program, this kind of transfer becomes risky, and simply isn't worth it. I've just had a good example of how things can go wrong using OpenOffice. I was sent a document to check as an ODT file - the file format from OpenOffice. It had a series of appended comments. The file doesn't open in Word or Pages, but ...

We're used to the Cambridge dramatic society Footlights being a breeding ground for media humorists - the source of many of the UK's comedy greats over the years from Monty Python and the Goodies to the likes of David Mitchell and Richard Ayoade. But what's not quite so well known is the distinct lack of humour exhibited by some of its members back in the heady 1970s. When I was at Cambridge, probably the most feted Footlights show was a frothy little number called Chox from 1974. The cast featured Clive Anderson (at the same college as me, though I don't think we ever spoke), Geoffrey McGivern, who played Ford Prefect in the radio version of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy , and Griff Rhys Jones. And amongst the writers was Douglas Adams himself. Now I confess that I never saw Chox - to be honest, to most of us, the Footlights crew were considered a bit up themselves, though clearly some of them turned out okay. In fact it was much more trendy to go the Me...

The other day I got a piece of junk mail that made a bit of a change from the dubious deals and diet supplements: 'THE FIRST FREE ENERGY GENERATOR' it proclaimed, and just to rub it in, 'Humiliates top scientists.' Well, there's nothing I like better than humiliating top scientists* and what's more, apparently this energy generator 'violates all the laws of physics', which is even more fun. So what would this involve? If you look up 'free energy generator' on Google you'll find lots of examples claiming to be just this - but overall it is a worrying concept. The obvious problem is conservation of energy, one of the most fundamental aspects of physics. You have to be a little careful with conservation of energy - it does require a closed system, and we patently don't live in a closed system, so it's easy enough to get 'free' energy in the sense that the Sun is pumping vast quantities of it in our direction and doesn't...