Some of my Moo cards Business cards are generally boring necessities, and like many people I've tended in the past to get my cards from the cheapest possible supplier - they might not look beautiful, but they do the job. I confess, I still do this with my 'gig handout cards' which just give details of my website, Twitter address etc. so anyone who feels the urge to follow me up after a talk can do so. But for my 'proper' cards with full contact details, I've switched over to Moo *. This company has been recommended to me for ages by fellow writers, and having got some of their products, I can see why. They feel to be a truly quality product, and they have a number of innovations, including half height cards, cards with curved corners, square cards and cards with a different, full colour photo on the back of each. They also make it easy to incorporate useful features, like phone-scannable QR codes to jump straight to your website. In fact I loved them so mu...

'Hello, I'm not selling anything, I just want to ask you a few questions...' I'm sure I'm not alone in having been pestered with calls on my mobile, telling me that I ought to get compensation for my PPI (something that, as a self-employed person I couldn't have sensibly taken out) - and just as that fad is fading, we will no doubt be hit by loads of calls for the next banking miss-selling scandal: probably Sentinel card protection insurance. I never get calls like this on my home phone, because I'm registered with the Telephone Preference Scheme. This is a brilliant service (UK-only, but there may be equivalents elsewhere, particularly in other EU countries) where you register you number and all legitimate call centres should take you off their calling lists. It's not 100 per cent perfect. It can't stop those calls from the Indian subcontinent claiming to be from 'Windows' and telling you your PC is compromised. And the occasional le...

Reflecting the exaggerated claim syndrome I mentioned a few days ago , New Scientist recently carried a quote on quantum key distribution (QKD*), where an encryption key is randomly generated when needed from a quantum source. Apparently John Rarity of the University of Bristol told the magazine that you will soon be able to pick up a batch of keys on a credit card sized device, perhaps from an ATM, and use them to login to an account, such as your bank. 'You would never need to remember a password or pin again, QKD does all the work for you.' Was the dramatic pull quote. Leaving aside the fact that most of us are less likely to use ATMs these days than we once did, what isn't all that obvious is why this is any better than, say, storing a very strong password on your phone. In either case all someone needs do is steal the device and they're in. Which means the the device needs to be protected by either biometrics or, duh, a password or PIN. So how does this ...

I am totally baffled by some statistics that are are frequently used on the average numbers of sexual partners for males and females. It has been in most of the newspapers, and I most recently saw it in New Scientist , where the common numbers of males having 12 partners and females having 8 partners came up. This seems strangely asymmetrical when there are approximately similar sized populations of male and female. And yet, bizarrely none of the articles question this oddity. Neither do the main sources the papers used: the Lancet and the Wellcome Trust . Let's see if we can make sense of these numbers using a mini model. As always with scientific models we need to be clear what assumptions are being made. Initially I am only looking at heterosexual partnerships - which may be an issue, so I will come back to this later. As we have a ratio of 3 to 2 between the numbers of partners, I'm going to try to set up my model with each male having three partners and each female two...

I've always been interested in the possibilities of psychic phenomena and ghosts - as a teenager, the books about the Borley Rectory hauntings were amongst my favourite reading material, and it was part of the reason I wrote Extra Sensory . There are, without doubt, those amongst the community investigating these phenomena who take a genuinely scientific approach. But it has struck me recently, while reading a book by a scientist on the effects of the moon on living creatures , that in this kind of field it will always be an uphill struggle to take a scientific view. Here's why. Let's take the example of physics researchers attempting to detect gravitational waves. These ripples in spacetime are predicted by the general theory of relativity, but have never been directly detected. A couple of experiments have recently failed to detect these waves, in one case (BICEP2) rather dramatically, after first claiming that they had been found. But here's the thing. In physics,...

From the paper mentioned below On the whole, science journalism is reasonably good in the UK and the US. But if there is one really bad habit that science journalists have, it is removing qualifiers to turn a weak statement into a strong one. Even highly respectable sources like New Scientist have a habit of doing this with headlines, so you'll see a splash across the front cover saying something like 'Black Holes Don't Exist.' When you read the article, it is describing an alternative theory that may or may not explain some or all of the phenomena we believe may be caused by black holes, but as yet has little theoretical or observational support. That was an imaginary example, but here are two real ones. In the last week or so we have been bombarded with articles with headlines like 'Astronomers find alien megastructure', where in reality they have found evidence for a group of smaller objects in orbit around a star, which could have many natural expla...

Image by J. Patrick Bedell from Wikipedia According to an article in the  i  and Independent newspapers, legalising cannabis could bring in £500 million annually in tax revenues in the UK, on top of removing the expensive enforcement costs, reducing the risk of buying from dubious sources and stopping a flow of cash to organized crime. Given all this, we really have to ask why on earth we are not legalising cannabis as soon as possible? I ought to say here that I have never smoked or otherwise consumed cannabis, and have no intention of doing so. But the case for legalisation is huge. I know the anti- lobby will come out with arguments about cannabis being bad for you - and I'm not disputing this. But do they argue that isn't the case for tobacco and alcohol? If so, they are very confused. Legalising cannabis is not about making it more acceptable, it's about making it better controlled. We have an impressive example in the US with the alcohol prohibition exper...

The new novel Arcadia by Iain Pears comes as a beautiful hardback from Faber with a very effective cover design (the thing that looks like a number 7 is a cut-away door in the cover, so you see through to the illustrated world within). This book is a strange mixture of fantasy and science fiction. One of the main characters, Henry Lytten, is a member of the dregs of the Oxford Inklings, the leftovers and second-bests after Tolkein and Lewis have moved on, at the cusp of social change in Britain in 1960. Lytten is writing an epic fantasy novel, creating a world unlike his predecessors where story is the governing thread, rather than magic or royalty. Interwoven with this storyline is one from the future involving a device that hovers vaguely between time machine and a way to enter alternative universes (the 'science bit' is very woffly). However, the alternative universes aspect seems increasingly to be the case as a girl from 1960 accidentally uses the technology to enter ...

I'm not a huge fan of infographics, the big chunks of text and imagery that are given out in exchange for showing an advertising slogan, but as an author I couldn't resist one about the consumption of books. Just a couple of provisos: although it's labelled 'This is how we read in the UK' the Kindle statistics are for the world/US (and, of course, refer to the reader device, not to Kindle ebooks which can be read on a much wider range of tablets etc). The other point I'd make is that though the producers get a gold star for listing sources, two of those are The Stylist , which I wouldn't necessarily regard as a beacon of quantitive journalism.

Every now and then a graphic circulates on  social media, usually making a political point, displaying a set of impressive numbers to make the case. All too often people pass these on without questioning the data. But if you do that, it is entirely possible those numbers were fictional, and instead of supporting a cause, you weaken it. The example shown here is probably the most blatantly awful such graphic I've ever seen. So much so that I wondered if it was from a comedy news site like the Daily Mash , but as far as I can tell it isn't - and it is certainly being shared as if it were serious.  I probably can't list everything wrong with this data set, but problems include: It mixes salaries and pensions - not a meaningful comparison  Even if you look at salaries, the numbers for politicians are totally fictional - the PM for instance has a salary of £142,500 and an MP of £67,000 According to this report in the Guardian (hardly a government lackey paper) t...

Although I primarily deal in non-fiction I've always written both science fiction and detective fiction as well, and I'm delighted to say that I've finally got round to making the first of my murder mysteries featuring Stephen Capel available to buy. A Lonely Height begins with a body being found on top of Glastonbury Tor, in the ruined church tower. But remarkably, on a dry summer day, in the highest spot for miles around, the victim was drowned. The body is discovered by Stephen Capel, a newly appointed vicar, who is in Glastonbury on a course. As he uncovers the mystery behind the death, discovering a link with the earlier death of a celebrity photographer and becoming involved in a complex web of relationships, Capel meets and falls for Vicky Denning, a WPC working on the case... and comes face to face with his own mortality. I wrote the novel a few years ago and never got round to doing anything with it, so have finally got it into published form and it has been...

Image from Hitachi Trains Europe via Wikipedia It's easy to be cynical when a company like First Great Western, the railway franchise serving the South West, undergoes a rebranding exercise, suggesting it's like sugar coating something inedible. But I am holding back a little before taking this view - because it can make a significant difference. Of course there is no doubt that part of it is superficial, though even that superficial part can be important. How something looks can have a big impact on our attitude to it. It's not for nothing that supermarkets tend to put their budget own brand food in pretty awfully designed and coloured packaging. They want us to feel that we are slumming it. When I get on a train, I want to have more Orient Express than Heathrow Express about the experience, and the livery is a starting point for how that experience feels. At the moment, First Great Western trains are painted a fairly sickening purple and magenta, colours that sure...

Now that England has joined other parts of the UK in charging 5p for a 'single use'* shopping bag, I thought it was worth revisiting a middle class game I brought up a while ago, especially as I have since discovered an additional, powerful card to add to the pack. As someone with green aspirations (come on, I did write  Ecologic ), I'm all in favour of supermarket 'bag for life' offerings, which mean you reuse your bags rather than throw them away. However, I think it is boring, and quite possibly in bad taste, to use a bag in the shop from which it was obtained. Instead, to keep the shopping experience amusing, the good middle class shopper should play a game of Bag-for-life  Top Trumps® . The idea is simple. Always use a bag with snob value at the supermarket in which you are shopping. So: In Aldi/Lidl use at least an Asda bag** In Asda use at least a Tesco bag In Tesco use at least a Sainsbury's bag In Sainsbury's use at least a Marks and Spen...

My new home-from-home, the Biomedical Sciences building I am now in my third week of an RLF Fellowship, so it seems a good point to comment on this remarkable institution and its work. The Royal Literary Fund is a charity that was set up in the eighteenth century to support starving authors - and it still helps those in difficulty today, but arguably its more prominent role is now educational. The fund now has Fellows, who are professional writers, in over 50 UK universities and similar institutions (you can see an impressive map of where they are here ), where their role is to help students and staff improve the quality of their writing. I'm one of two Fellows in the Science faculty at the University of Bristol, working alongside short story writer and poet Tania Hershman , and so far a summary of the experience would be 'exhausting but brilliant.'  Need to get right to the top of the road as seen here The exhausting part is partially because after 20 ...

N A week or so ago I went to the best literary festival I've ever attended. It wasn't a five ring circus like Hay, but rather a compact but imaginative mix of authors, not just speaking at events (several of them free because they were sponsored), but also spending a day in local schools. The only other festival I've ever spoken at that had the same sense of community was the marvellous Kempsford Festival in Gloucestershire. That one demonstrated that small is beautiful, while the Manx Litfest proved that you could be bigger and still have that essential link to the community. Of course, the location helped. Getting to the Isle of Man is not a trivial exercise, especially if, like me, you choose to avoid flying and instead opt for three trains and a ferry - total journey time around 9 hours. But, of course, the great thing about travelling this way is you can work as you do, so it's not wasted time. And it was an opportunity, as I walked to the ferry, to see the Liv...

When I was a teenager I absolutely loved guidebooks to weird and wonderful aspects of Britain, and though I haven't looked at one in a long time, Weird Wessex, by Paul Jackson and Andrew May, brought it all back, with its enticing combination of very ordinary British locations and very strange buildings, monuments and legends. The book consists of a series of short, factual illustrated articles. These don't tend to have too much narrative, concentrating primarily on being informative. Sometimes I felt that the text was too short - for instance, the Stonehenge section doesn't mention the increasingly strong evidence that the monument's most significant alignment is mid-winter, with the mid-summer alignment mentioned in the text being little more than an inevitable side-effect. I did spot a minor error (or possibly sanitisation) - we're told Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin married Shelley in 1814. In reality this was the year that they began their relationship, and ...