Malcolm Pryce is rightly known for his wonderful novels setting a Sam Spade-like, world-weary detective in the hell-hole of crime that is Aberystwyth, with druids as gangsters and good time girls in Welsh national costume. In these books, Pryce creates a fantasy world that is totally bonkers, and yet works remarkably well. His new creation, the railway detective Jack Wenlock, might seem at first glance to be more of the same - and the book does have some of the same kind of absurdity with, for example, a group of nuns who go mysteriously go missing from a train and rampage across Africa - but 'Hail Mary' Celeste is several degrees closer to reality than the Aberystwyth books, and both benefits and loses from this. The plus side is Pryce's affection for the Great Western Railway. His lead character might be odd in the extreme, but it's hard not share some of Wenlock's love for the old-fashioned ideals of the railway (admittedly without being given a mother fixat...

For a long time, my taste in science fiction writers was limited to the favourites from my youth. The likes of Asimov, Blish, Brunner, Clarke, Heinlein, Kornbluth and Pohl. About as trendy as I got was Zelazny. But lately I've discovered two who have re-invigorated my love of SF - Iain M. Banks and Adam Roberts, both combining style and entertainment with superb ideas that really make you think. The opening of Roberts' novel Bête  had me spellbound. The cow that a farmer is about to kill is pleading for its life - and the scene is handled brilliantly. So too are conversations exploring the borderline between AI and consciousness. If an animal is made apparently intelligent by an implanted chip, is it the chip that is intelligent or the animal... or neither? Some of the rest of the book worked well for me as well. The surreal conversations, packed with popular culture quotes (some of which I got) were fascinating. However, I'm not a great fan of disaster novels - I lov...

I've recently re-read one of my favourite SF novels from the 1970s, John Brunner's The Shockwave Rider , and it has more than lived up to expectations. Okay, like any book using future technology it gets some things wrong. Its early 21st century tech is mostly too advanced (but then they still use tapes to store information). However, this book absolutely sizzles with ideas, some taken from Alvin Toffler's far effective readable futurology book, Future Shock . Just one example - the protagonist is in the business of creating digital worms to make changes to the net. At the time (1975), not only was ARPANet, the internet's predecessor very limited, the first actual network worm wouldn't be launched for another 13 years (Brunner originated the term in this novel). Brunner also creates a stunning dystopian society, where the US government/major corporations (hand in hand) manipulate what could in principle be an exercise in effective distributed democracy - the...

There are times when I have a little twinge of nostalgia for the times when food in the UK was mostly terrible. These days we relish a huge range of cuisines (though interestingly, by far the majority are non-EU - from Europe only Italian and to some extent Spanish have a significant hold nationwide). But I'm talking about the time when cooking a Vesta curry was the height of exoticism. This was all brought back to me by an advert I've just seen for a range of frozen roast dinners. They have one unifying theme. It's not the high quality meat. It's not the beautifully cooked vegetables. It's the fact that they're all smothered in the uniform, brown-flavoured gravy of my youth, Bisto. Ah, Bisto! Wondrous memories...

Image by Transguyjay from Flickr There's a lot I like about America. But something I really can't get my head around is the US assumption that human beings are unable to cross a road without help, and treating it as an offence if they attempt to do so. As a European I struggle to understand the US attitude to gun control. To allow so many thousands to be slaughtered each year simply to uphold a small part of the constitution which is both out of date and arguably misinterpreted - a constitution that has already been amended many times - just doesn't seem right to us. However, despite this, I can admire part of the thinking behind the right to bear arms - that we shouldn't allow an overbearing government to take control of individual's decision-making more than we can help. So, bearing in mind that Americans are prepared to allow thousands of their friends and relations to be killed each year to uphold the individual's ability to stand up to the state... ...

It's that time of year when scientists get dragged into silly press releases, usually by a PR company wanting to push a product, though this one seems to be a bit different. I first heard about this from Chris Evans (n.b. I do not listen to him by choice), who announced that Einstein had finally solved the problem of how Father Christmas/Santa Claus gets round all the world's children and down chimneys. My immediate muttering was that this was pretty impressive, given Einstein's been dead over 60 years and I was going to leave it at that. But then read one of the articles based on the press release (I assume). It tells us that according to Dr Katy Sheen, a physicist in the geography department of Exeter University, it would all work if Father Christmas travelled at 6 million miles per hour. This would get him around the world in time, and, as a bonus, (enter Einstein) 'drawing on Einstein's special theory of relativity' Dr Sheen worked out that he would shri...

I'm always delighted to see statistics being mangled, as it's good fun untangling them. Sometimes, though, they're such a mess that it's hard to do anything other than mock. This was the case with a story reported by the online magazine ShortList . it claimed that '120,000 leave voters have died since Brexit.' That seemed an impressive claim, so I took a look at the analysis, apparently sourced from the Twitter feed of someone called Steve Lawrence, who is an architect: One statistical no-no jumps out here without even seeing where the data came from. We're being given figures in the 16-18 million range, based on some interesting manipulation which includes several estimates. Yet the values are given accurate to 1 - note how the big totals end in 9 and 5. You can either present a spuriously accurate number like these and provide an error range, or, less likely to mislead, you can round to your error level and still give an error range. What you can...

In a recent article in the Guardian , Alice Bell asserts that 'we're all everyday climate change deniers.' To be honest, I get a bit irritated when a journalist asserts we're all anything . Firstly it implies a ludicrously over-simplified homogeneity in society. And secondly how can she possibly know what I am? We've never met. But knowing the ways of newspapers, I am going to give Bell the benefit of the doubt that she may never even have seen that headline - because the message of the article is nowhere near as meaningless. Bell suggests that by giving in to despair and not talking about climate change, we are de facto deniers. Clearly at the most basic level even this is silly - she is talking about climate change. I am talking about climate change. So how can we all be doing this? And it's also comparable with the tendency to label anyone with political leanings slightly to the right of your own a fascist to give the label 'denier' to everyone...

A beard can clearly be seen My suspicion is that it's one of those times of year when newspapers print silly stories (actually, given this year's news, that's been all of 2016). And this mean that the PR industry goes into overdrive producing press releases to feed the appetite for the quirky. Yesterday I received a missive from BV Media, telling us that a company called London Offices surveyed 1,000 UK office workers and discovered that Beards at work are now a major turn-off say 61% of female office workers . We don't have access to the actual survey details, so it may well be low quality in sampling etc. However, I feel I have to stick up for beardies. We've had enough prejudice in the past. Infamously, when Gordon Gould was developing his laser, he was refused security clearance - and one of the reasons for the refusal was that two of his referees had beards, so were clearly subversive. In fact, when you read the detail, even the press release has to r...

This is primarily to give a thank-you to those involved in organising the Festival of Physics in Exeter on Saturday. But also to reflect on what such an event does so well. In a recent editorial for the newsletter of the Popular Science book review site , I said: I suspect you'll agree with me that science isn't boring - yet we've all got plenty of friends who turn off the moment that science is mentioned. I'd suggest that two of the reasons for this is that we teach science back to front, and we forget the importance of narrative. When I talk at schools to children under 13 or so, they pretty well all love science. But something horrible happens after a couple of years at secondary school. It becomes a drag. I think this is because we teach secondary science with entirely the wrong result in mind. We teach it as if we are preparing them to be scientists. This means starting by building up the basics, step by step, in a systematic fashion. I'm almost asleep ...

There's a strong traditional strand of British humorous writing where a male protagonist gets themselves into various scrapes as they attempt to take on the difficulties of social life - especially so when they don't quite fit. The outstanding examples of writers in this genre were Leslie Thomas, now well out of fashion, and Tom Sharpe, whose more extreme and grotesque versions of this type of situation comedy have perhaps survived better. Terry White has contributed several twenty-first century titles in the same vein. An early contribution, Till the Fat Lady's Sung (shouldn't that be 'Til?), finds his hero, Marcus Moon, struggling to balance his laddish existence with his banker-like and ludicrously heavy drinking mates, his job as a civil engineer and his life with a doctor, who he clearly loves, but for whom he struggles to have totally dedicated feelings. Moon and his girlfriend Charlie are a bit too successful and normal for a typical Thomas/Sharpe main...

I am somewhat to the right politically of many of my online friends - this isn't entirely surprising as many of them are academics, where I have a business background. But that doesn't make me a conservative with a small C. In fact those fairly close to the centre of politics on either wing are probably least likely to suffer less from conservatism on the matter of equality versus culture and religion than those who sit firmly on one side or another. Right wing conservatives want to preserve their own culture, while left wing conservatives want to preserve everyone else's culture but their own, probably due to an existential guilt over the imperialist past. However, I truly can't understand how we justify the way that we unthinkingly put religious and cultural demands above equality. Who decides which should have the upper hand? You can see why, in the past, when a particular religion had a huge hold on a country this might the case, but should that still apply in the...

After reading two entries in Paul Cornell's 'Shadow Police' series, I couldn't resist moving on to the third within days of finishing the previous title. Who Killed Sherlock Holmes sustains the approach of its predecessors, mixing the fantastic, driven by the strange capability of London to capture and magnify human remembering (and sacrifice), with straightforward police procedural. By the end of the book the mix works very well, with a lot that has been left hanging from the previous two novels resolved - but along the way it was decidedly hard work. This is because most of the main characters are, for various reasons, miserable and suffering throughout the book. Although this certainly gives the characters challenges to face, it can result in rather dour reading material. As Buffy the Vampire Slayer proved so well, by far the best way to deal with the apparently impossible challenge of integrating the fantastical and the everyday is through humour. And humour...

When I was young, an unlikely product was regularly advertised on TV which some accused of ruining a great song. It was what we'd now primarily call kerosene - aviation fuel - but then was the more humble paraffin. But it wasn't because we all had private jets back then. If you were allowed to watch commercial TV (more conservative households considered ITV to be the work of the devil and stuck to the BBC) it would only take someone to sing four rising tones in a major key to the jaunty words 'Bum bum bum bum' (no, really) to come up with the response 'Esso Blue!' This wasn't, of course, the song in question, but more of that in a moment. Esso Blue was the leading brand of paraffin in the UK and it was bought in large quantities, because back then most of us didn't have central heating. (We got it when I was 11.) In the winter, a room or two were heated by open fires, you might have had an electric wall heater in the bathroom - but if you wanted heat e...

Don't get me wrong - I'm no Trump supporter. But his anti-climate change stance could provide the pressure that's needed to get a meaningful plan put in place to tackle this pressing world problem. A while ago, a website labelled me a green heretic , by which they meant that I thought it essential we use science, technology and economics to tackle green issues, rather than relying on fluffy bunny, feel-good gestures. I was delighted. We need more green heresy - and I think Trump could be the stimulus to make this happen. Climate change is real and a huge threat to the future population of the world - I'm sorry, deniers, but the science is solid, it's only the models dealing with how fast it will hurt us that are subject to question. It will be a disaster unless we do something about it. (I ought to say, though, that you needn't worry about saving the planet. The Earth itself will shrug whatever we do off in a few million years. It really doesn't care....

In amongst the spam and oddities that appear in email there is occasionally an official one that causes some confusion - and I got such a mail today. It was from the DVLA, and as far as I can tell it was genuine. And it was advertising an auction of personalised car registrations. Impressively, it was a personalised email too, as it was suggesting my company might be interested in a specific numberplate. But the initials on the numberplate were ABR an my company initials are CUL - which seemed a pretty hefty miss. Then I realised that the targeting of the email was cleverer than I had thought. After all, the 'C' in the company's initials stands for 'creativity. I was supposed to read the whole numberplate, not just the first three letters. I don't was a personalised numberplates - I think they're tacky. But if I did, I would have got excited if I only had...

I was so impressed with Paul Cornell's London Falling , that I've had to buy and read the sequel, The Severed Streets within days - and it doesn't disappoint. In the first book, a motley crew of three police officers and an analyst discover the dark magic lying beneath London. This second 'Shadow Police' title (I'm not sure about that series name) takes them deeper into the weirdness that lies out of sight to most, as a series of rich men are slaughtered horribly with a razor. All this takes place alongside ant-capitalism riots and a police strike, leaving London a place that's best avoided. In reviewing London Falling , I said: imagine a combination of a modern version of The Devil Rides Out , a dark police procedural and a sprinkling of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere and you might come close Here were discover why that last comparison was particularly apt (I had no idea, honestly) - because Neil Gaiman is a character in this book and the suggesti...

There's been a graphic doing the rounds which, according to the Independent 'Remain supporters are using to invalidate the decision to leave the EU.' It looks like this: The yellow segment is the those who voted to leave. Look how small it is compared to the whole set of public who could, in principle have voted. (Blue is remain and the two grey bits are people who didn't register, and registered but didn't vote.) This is being taken as disproving the idea that Brexit is 'the will of the people' as worked up Brexiteers tend to blather, because it appears to be a minority decision. Unfortunately, those who use this chart simply don't understand the statistics that arise from a voting system like ours. You could never definitely say what the will of the people is for sure unless you force everyone to vote. Look at this chart below. Here the grey section is the equivalent of the yellow section above - it's the people who voted for the actual o...

 I'm really pleased I've been able to follow up my science quiz book How Many Moons does the Earth Have? with a second volume - What Colour is the Sun? It was just as much fun to write - and I hope equally enjoyable to read. What's more it's a great stocking filler - on Amazon at the moment it's just £5.49. Although it's not how most will use it, there are two pub quiz style science quizzes in there, each with six standard rounds and two bonus rounds, which combine pictorial and puzzle solving work. However, it's written to make reading through it fun. Each of the 96 main questions has the question plus some supporting factoids on one page and the answer, plus a page of further reading on the next. So you can test yourself on each question - then find out more. These aren't the kind of question you'd get in a science exam (thankfully) - they're more the quirky kind of questions you get on QI , with the bonus that science is right more often...

The moon (in case you aren't sure what we're talking about). Image from Wikipedia A seriously dodgy statistic from that renowned historian of science Cherie Blair, just had me jumping up and down in the coffee shop. She proclaimed in an article in the i newspaper: 'It took less than 40 years to put a man on the moon.' 'Really? did it really? And how the heck did you work that out?' I nearly shouted. Leaving aside whether or not it should have been 'fewer than 40 years', let's try to pin it down. The first manned moon landing was 1969, so assuming 'less than 40' is 30-39 years that puts us approximately between 1930 and 1939. I'm struggling to find anything that fits that date. Tsiolkovsky's Investigation of Outer Space Rocket Devices was published in 1903, Goddard was flying rockets by 1915 and published his paper A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes , where he suggested a rocket would reach the moon 5 years later. And, ...

I've never been a great fan of what most people think of as fantasy, typified by Game of Thrones . I can cope with a few classics like Lord of the Rings , and some variants like the Amber series, but for me, the kind of fantasy that is really exciting is set in the real world where something then goes adrift, introducing fantastical elements. And that's exactly what happens in London Falling by Paul Cornell. The first 30 pages or so could be a straightforward, gritty police procedural featuring undercover cops. But suddenly and dramatically the main characters' universe is pushed askew. It's hard to describe exactly what results, but if  you imagine a combination of a modern version of The Devil Rides Out , a dark police procedural and a sprinkling of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere and you might come close. Four individuals - a detective inspector, two recently undercover officers and an intelligence analyst - are pulled into a world where a kind of magic dependen...

Every now and then I have to sit down and breathe deeply when seeing a tabloid science headline that is about as far as the truth as is possible. Usually such headlines use a kind of bait and switch mechanism where the headline proclaims something dramatic, but the article makes much weaker claims, or points out that most scientists think this is a load of tosh. (Even New Scientist rather likes doing this.) But the Daily Express has come up with an outright winner where the article backs up the headline with a story that bears little resemblance to science as we know it. Let's see if we can spot what's a little iffy with this 'Scientists discover what existed BEFORE the beginning of the universe' article: Scientists have not 'discovered' anything. That means finding something. What has happened is someone has come up with a model that produces these results. It's a bit like confusing having a business plan with being a billionaire. We read in the ar...

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I recently had pointed out to me that all my efforts in writing How To Build a Time Machine (aka Build Your Own Time Machine ) were wasted because time travel is apparently impossible - at least according to this new theory  which suggests that 'now' is defined by the extent of expansion of the universe and new time is only created with that expansion. Thankfully, we don't need to worry too much. To begin with, the idea the theory presents of 'now' being defined by the state of expansion of the universe seems strangely detached from the fundamental idea in relativity that simultaneity is relative - the author seems to postulate a universal 'now' - which just doesn't exist. And for that matter, it's a bit late to say that time travel isn't possible, because it is always happening on a small scale - relativity makes it inevitable. Tell the Voyager 1 probe, which has travelled over a second into the future that time travel isn't possible...

I've now heard twice in a news context about the way that men are poor at 'dad skills'. I really don't care about whether or not this true. But what worries me here is how spurious the data is that produces this kind of news piece. The 'news' was based on 'a survey of 2,000 men.' But we can't tell from this the quality of that data, nor do we tend to think about how the question is asked can have an influence on the result.  In this particular case, I have seen the original questionnaire. Participants were asked to pick from a list of 50 'skills' by ticking a box (online) alongside each skill. I would be very surprised if most participants did not pick out the handful of skills they thought represented them best, producing a 'men are bad at dad skills' result. No one really wants to tick 50 boxes. I suspect the result would have been very different if they had started with all the boxes ticked and asked participants to untick the ones...

On my drive home from the centre of Swindon I pass a couple of billboards which have recently, once again, displayed a very mysterious message (one shown here*). It's a bizarre and pretty much meaningless message, yet someone has spent a lot of money on it. Billboard advertising is not particularly cheap. You might think that it means Apple is going to sue us every time we mention an apple, but according to the website that seems to be related to the posters, it is all based on a bizarre pseudo-legal claim, with no basis in law, that your birth certificate means that you handed over your name to the Crown/government, and it is then illegal to use your name without their permission. There have been absolute shedloads of discussion of these things on the internet - plus quite a few websites making the claim supporting this idea that you do not have legal ownership of your name. I'm not going to link to these for reasons discussed below, but you can easily find them if yo...

It's every teenager's duty to find music that his or her parents will hate. (I was discussing this with a daughter the other day, and it's very difficult these days, because parents' music is less different to that of their kids. My prog rock was worlds away from Bing Crosby - but unless my children liked rap, which they don't, it's hard to find any of their music which I don't find acceptable. However, I digress.) I struggled with achieving something suitably distasteful, as my first love was classical, and I was very lukewarm about the obvious rebel music of my youth, punk, except in smartened up versions like Blondie and Toyah. But I eventually discovered the perfect choice in Van der Graaf Generator . The dismal songs, the wailing sax and Peter Hammill's despair-filled rough vocals fit the bill entirely. Along with other student fancies such as difficult novels and Stockhausen, I gave up VdGG when I fully embraced adult life, but in the last fe...

A recent Guardian article made a dark comment about the past of the British royal family. Jamie Doward tells us Most royals are proud that they can trace their lineage back centuries. But princesses Beatrice and Eugenie may be reluctant to delve too far into their past. New analysis reveals that Prince Andrew’s daughters are the direct descendants of a major slave-owning family. I've got a bit of news for Jamie. He too is a descendant of a major slave-owning family. You may wonder how I know this, because I've never met Jamie, nor do I know anything about him or her. But I can make this claim with confidence because we all are descendants of major slave-owning families. One of the fascinating revelations in Adam Rutherford's book, A Brief History of Everyone Who Has Ever Lived , is that if you are of European origins, then you are a descendant of everyone alive at the start of the eleventh century who has living descendants. Every one of them. And plenty of them wou...

I am faced with a small but satisfying logical puzzle in my office at Bristol University. When I come in first thing (actually, even if I come in about 10), the alarm is often set. In fact, the first time I ever entered the building the blasted thing started beeping at me, and no one had bothered to tell me there was an alarm. So now, as I belatedly know the code, I unset it. But the puzzle is - how and when does it get set? I certainly never set it on leaving. I wouldn't know how to, and anyway I have no way of knowing if the building is empty. It's a tall, old house - my office is on the second floor and I can often spend the entire day here without seeing another inhabitant, though I regularly hear them. The same uncertainty must surely apply to any ordinary resident. So how is it done? In principle it could be automated. To be safe, there would have to be motion sensors in every room, which as far as I can tell there aren't. So if it is automatic, perhaps they ju...