Image by Zarek Tuszynski from Wikipedia I seem to have seen a lot of period dramas lately with photographers using flashbulbs like the one illustrated, most recently in last night's strangely low key Maigret . Many readers might be too old to remember these things, but when I first took photos as a boy we still used them. The bulb typically contains a magnesium filament, which burns out in a moment of glory. As it goes, it heats up the glass casing so much that it causes that familiar crunchy sound effect. So far, so good. But romantic though these old devices seem, they had one big problem - they were one shot (apart from the short-lived flashcubes etc., which were too small to be used by anyone but amateurs). So with a pro flashgun like the one in the image, the photographer had to get a handkerchief or something similar with which to remove the red-hot bulb, put the old bulb somewhere safe and insert a new bulb - a process that inevitably took several seconds. What I d...

Way back in 2012 I reviewed a product called Portrait Professional, which allowed the user to touch up a photo of a face using simple controls, rather than manually fiddling about in something like Photoshop. Now I've got my hands on its successor, PortraitPro, and it's streets ahead in both sophistication and ease of use - which can't be bad. In fact it's scary just how much it does. Facial feature identification Given a photo of a person, the software analyses the face and identifies the facial features - this process is automatic, but usually needs some slight manual tweaking, for example to make sure it exactly follows the line of the teeth - but that's just a matter of dragging lines on the screen. The software immediately applies a generic improvement, but then the fun really begins as you can modify all kinds of aspects using a set of sliders. Want to whiten the teeth? No problem. Improve skin texture and colour? Easy. Apply fake makeup? A breeze - l...

We seem to be in interesting times in British politics, with Iain Duncan Smith resigning from the government over attempts to reduce the disability welfare budget. Some suggest it's more to do with causing damage to his enemies in the in/our battle over the EU - but I tend to side with those who think that IDS was genuinely trying to do something positive for welfare, and that he genuinely cares about welfare/work. I think that in responding to this, the left wing has to be really careful about the whole business of welfare, because from something I heard at the weekend I worry that some regard welfare, and specifically in-work benefits, as a good thing in its own right, rather than a necessary evil. I was listening to Any Questions/Any Answers on the radio, and a caller was denouncing the government's apparent wish to reduce and/or get rid of in-work benefits. I personally think that working credits was a cack-handed way to introduce negative income tax, and it would have ...

Bristol is one of my favourite cities in the UK - small enough to be friendly, big enough to have all the benefits of city life. And this view has been reinforced by my two days a week as an RLF literary fellow at the university. However, it's pretty much impossible not to be aware that a lot of Bristol's money (and its better buildings) came from two sources that would now be regarded as unpalatable: the slave trade and the tobacco industry. The reason this came to mind was reading Sanjida O'Connell's essay  The Silence of the Slave , a   fascinating account of her attempt to find the voice of slaves for her writing. It's an excellent article, but one aspect disturbed me. Sanjida uses as a hook for the piece an experience while eating in Pizza Express in Bristol and realising that the building was an old bank that was funded by the slave trade. She writes: By the time my daughter’s ice cream and chocolate sauce arrived, I had a prickling sensation running acros...

Rochdale's glorious Town Hall looking a touch Impressionist last time I was there I come originally from a town called Rochdale in the North of England. And it's in the news rather a lot - usually for all the wrong reasons. In the recent list of UK towns and cities in the greatest economic decline ... Rochdale came out the worst in the country. Admittedly, the council's chief executive said it was old data, and things are being transformed now - but from all I hear it has a long way to go. When I was young, Rochdale was still a mill town - now I don't think it knows what it is, and the town centre shows it, all too horribly. Then there's the other difficulties. On a light note there was the Gillian Duffy incident that was a bit of nightmare for Gordon Brown's 2010 election campaign. But far darker is the alleged child abuse legacy of the late MP Cyril Smith and the troubles of current MP Simon Danczuk , who didn't exactly cover himself in glory b...

It's a shock when someone your know dies, and never more so than someone you knew very well when younger, but haven't seen for many years, and so they are still a young person in your memory. The PAM team - (L to R) John , Anthony, (Louis missing), me, Verity I have just heard of the death of Anthony Fennelly, a friend and colleague from my early years at British Airways. In tributes I have seen, Anthony frequently referred to using that old fashioned epithet 'a gentleman' - I think this is because he was, without doubt, a gentle man. Softly spoken, helpful and friendly, Anthony started at BA a little before me and was already established in the team I joined after my training in T108 Comet House, on the engineering base at Hatton Cross, near Heathrow Airport. From the start he helped me fit in and soon became a friend. A common sight: Anthony smiling (with Brian Grumbridge and me) We were a small team led by John Carney (who sadly died in a boating accide...

A story in the news today was a classic example of the confusion of correlation and causality. Scientists are always banging on about this, and some people wonder how this apparent statistical nicety matters - yet it's the reason that over the centuries people have been accused of witchcraft. Correlation is when two things happen in proximity - of time, space or both. Causality is when one causes the other. Because we understand the world through patterns, when there is correlation, we tend to assume causality - but without evidence, this is a mistake. In the case of witches, an old person might curse a farmer for not giving them some milk. Two days later, one of the farmer's cattle dies. Burn the witch! You might think that we are beyond such thinking in the UK, but unless there is data that wasn't presented in this news story, we clearly aren't (I read it in the i newspaper, but I'm sure it was elsewhere too.) There has been a large rise in the number of stude...

Apparently, the Department of Education has instructed moderators testing 7-year-olds' writing abilities to only consider a sentence with an exclamation mark correct if that sentence starts with 'How' or 'What' and uses 'the syntax of an exclamation.' This is one of those ideas that come about with the best of intentions but totally miss the mark. Most young writers do use far too many exclamation marks. Of course, there are no such things as hard and fast rules in writing, but like swearing, exclamation marks are generally much more effective if used sparingly and pointedly. So I can absolutely understand an urge to cut down on exclamation mark confetti. However, there are two big problems here - the age and the criteria. Whether or not you approve of testing 7-year-olds (I can see a point of doing it as a benchmark), it sounds too young to pin down punctuation. Far worse, though, are those criteria. Along with almost everyone writing since 1920, I ...

Like most of us who think having a royal family is a waste of public money and newspaper column inches, I get regular 'Yes, but what about...' retorts. Some of them are just inane, such as 'They bring in a lot of tourism.' Really? So France really has trouble getting visitors ever since they got rid of their royal family? Clearly this can't be about people actually seeing the royals - very few visitors, for instance, will see Prince William on the(mostly closed to the public) two days of work he manages to squeeze into a week. If there is any draw, it's about the pageantry and the royal palaces. Well, guess what? We can still change the guard and all that stuff - in fact if we really wanted to save money, we could even do it with cheap unemployed actors, rather than wasting our military's time. And all of the royal palaces could be open all year round, rather than bits of them at times the royals fancy it. Oh, and there'd be a lot more public access ...

Credit: NASA, ESA and P. Oesch (Yale University) The news has been full of the remarkable discovery of galaxy GN-z11, which appears to have formed just 400 million years after the origins of the universe. Definitely 'A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.' But exactly how far? Unfortunately some of those reporting the news have been a little confused on the distance to the galaxy. What do we actually know? We are seeing GN-z11 as it was around 400 million years after the Big Bang - so the light has taken 13.4 billion years to reach us. And it was discovered with a redshift of around z=11.1. (You can read the a ctual paper here.) That 'z' value represents the difference between the observed wavelength and the emitted wavelength divided by the emitted wavelength, so z=0 would mean there was no red shift at all. Unfortunately, some of those reporting this went a step too far with headlines like this: Here's a few more iffy remarks: ...

I've often moaned about the poor use of statistics in the news. Today it's more a case of a total absence of stats, which could have put a story into context and would have made it more informative. In the story shown, we learn that 'everyone says it's incredible' that a mother born on Feb 29 should have a child also born on leap year day. But if the journo could have just taken a moment to think, he or she could have put this into useful context. It certainly seems incredible if you misapply statistics and think there's a 1 in 1,461 chance of the mother being born on Feb 29, and similarly for a totally randomly occurring baby, making it a 1 in 2.13 million  chance of the double. But that's just wrong because it's telling us about the chances of a randomly picked baby being in this situation, not the chances of the situation occurring this Feb 29th. About 700,000 babies will be born in the UK this year, so with a 1 in 1,461 chance of the mother b...