It's great when you get a chance to meet an author, in part because it makes you more likely to buy a book you wouldn't otherwise. After a talk by Sanjida Kay (aka Sanjida O'Connell when writing non-fiction and historical fiction), I picked up a copy of her psychological thriller Bone by Bone - and I'm glad I did. I think there's two reasons I wouldn't normally have bought this - partly because I prefer traditional crime fiction to thrillers, and partly because the publisher has come up with a cover that seemed to hint as it being women's fiction, a category that there is absolutely no reason to straight-jacket this book with. The difficulty with this kind of story is that it's difficult to say too much without engaging in spoilers, but it features a single mother and her nine-year-old daughter. They have recently moved from London to Bristol, and the daughter begins to be bullied at school. As Laura, the mother, attempts to sort out the bully...

As I may have said already (bear with me - only two more months to go) I am fed up with the misdirection that is being used by both sides in the EU exit debate. A couple of days ago, Teresa May made an odd speech, supposedly about staying in the EU, but in practice almost entirely about the European Court of Human Rights. (Guess what. She doesn't like it.) Say after me, Teresa: 'The European Court of Human Rights has nothing to do with the EU.' And she knows that perfectly well. However, the specific topic that has aroused my ire is the response to President Obama's comment at the weekend that it could take 10 years to negotiate a trade deal with the US if we leave the EU, a response that suggests that this means that transatlantic trade will collapse. This echoes similar dire warnings that leaving the EU will mean we can no longer trade with EU countries. Let's be clear here. This is balderdash. We don't have a proper trade deal with the US at the moment....

Every now and then something turns up on Facebook that has been shared by 100 bazillion people, with a heading like '99% of people will get this wrong.' Some of these posts are just tedious (like the ones that depend on the order in which you apply mathematical operations), but the one illustrated here apparently has some merit - it looks like a straightforward reverse logic problem. But in reality it seems specifically designed to cause confusion.  The problem here is that the sequence does not have a single solution. At the very least you can make an argument for 40 or 96, and stretching things a little, 32 gets a look in. For me, 96 was the most obvious solution - the process to get the right hand value is multiply the two items on the left and add the first of the original numbers. As for 32, it comes from totally ignoring the items on the left and making the sequence of solutions progress regularly - in this case, the first two are separated by 7, the second two b...

I know there's no such word as 'adultised' - but it matches what I have in mind. When I was a kid, I read DC comics (for some reason, Marvel didn't seem to arrive in Rochdale til after I grew out of them). I enjoyed Superman, but Batman was far better. This was because an important part of reading these comics was role play. It was hard to emulate Superman without, for instance, being able to fly. But, trained though he was, Batman was just human, and so far easier to feature in pretend play. And most important of all, he had his utility belt. Oh, that utility belt. (I was spurred into writing this, by the way, after passing a police officer as I came out of Temple Meads station, thinking that her gadget-bedecked high vis jacket looked like a utility belt.) How I wanted a utility belt. And, inevitably I made one of sorts, though it didn't carry quite as impressive a collection of items as did Batman's own. I know the move of comic books to shades of grey in ...

It's green now, but I as I cross I have no idea what it is showing... We are all aware how important information is, and anyone who has designed a system or computer program also knows that feedback is an essential type of information in making things go well. Our entire physical interaction with the world is dependent on feedback to show whether or not we need to change a course of action, or how something is progressing. This is why a mechanism that tells you how far you are through a process (a progress bar or a percentage complete value) is much more effective that simply indicating that a process is underway, even if the percentage isn't particularly accurate. A Windows-style 'floaty dots to show you something is happening' only indicates that a process has started. It's a touch of feedback, but it gives no indication that things are continuing to happen - and that's bad. Feedback should continue to be updated until the process is complete. That way, ...

We're all familiar with the awful concept of road rage. Most motorists feel it occasionally, and you've never met an urban cyclist or parent of a double buggy trying to pass a car parked on the pavement if you haven't also experienced it from non-car drivers. However, this is a post in praise of the antithesis of road rage, the road grin. This morning, I was negotiating a zebra crossing across a dual carriageway (if you know Bristol, the one by St Mary, Redcliffe). As usual in Bristol, most drivers stopped immediately to let me cross. But a van driver continued as far as the traffic would allow, stopping right across the crossing. As I walked around the front of the van, I gave the driver a classic Paddington hard stare. But rather than the usual avoiding of eye contact, he looked straight at me with a sheepish grin that clearly said 'Whoops! Sorry!' I couldn't help but smile back (though to maintain Britishness, I only did this after I had looked away). It ...

A couple of newspaper websites have recently published quizzes based on How Many Moons does the Earth Have . The first was the Mail Online , which used a rather manual approach of a list of possible answers for each question, then the answers further down the page. I wasn't overwhelmed by this version, which you can see here , in part because they didn't have any useful link to the book. Newspapers tend not to pay for these kinds of extract, but this is on the basis that they make it easy to buy the book. Perhaps most entertaining here is the collection of almost uniformly negative comments, often complaining that the questions were 'general knowledge, not science.' I simply don't understand this moan: science often is general knowledge, and all the questions were science/tech based. The second version appeared on the website of the now internet-only Independent (although you can still get the excellent i newspaper in paper form), and I much preferred it. ...

I've mostly been enjoying the BBC series Undercover (Sunday at 9pm). However, there did seem to be a bit of a gaping plot hole. In it, the character Nicholas Johnson, played by the brilliant Adrian Lester, has a secret life that is gradually getting out of control. 'Nicholas Johnson' is a made up person (within the drama), adopted by Lester's character 20 years ago when he was an undercover cop. He falls in love in character and ends up living the lie. Only now his old life is intruding on him. So far, so good (if a little unlikely). When Lester's character originally devised the Nicholas Johnson cover, which we see happening in the second episode, he had to think of an occupation that didn't involve regular hours so he could turn up anywhere any time. So he plumped for 'writer'. We learn that he writes crime novels. And that it's just as well that he came up with a detailed cover story, as the people he is infiltrating run a background check on h...

I managed to irritate someone the other day. (You don't get any points for saying 'I'm not surprised,' at this point.) I received one of those emails you get occasionally from mailing lists you signed up to years ago, when life was very different. Back then, I was still involved in giving creativity training, and this was a creativity kind of newsletter. In it, the author had included a logic problem, which I shall reveal in a moment. Now, I've always been a little suspicious about logic problems when it comes to creativity. A great example is the old chestnut about the person who gets the lift down to the ground from his 20th floor apartment every workday. On the way home, he gets the lift up to the 14th floor and walks the rest of the way. The question is 'Why?' And the answer you were supposed to give was 'Because he's very short and can't reach above the 14th floor button.' When doing creativity training, I've always subverted t...

I've recently had an interesting email discussion about UFOs, which has some lessons to learn for UFO fans (and for politicians, amongst others) on what constitutes good evidence. I had reviewed a book called The Compelling Scientific Evidence for UFOs and this resulted in some discussion with its author, Erol Faruk. I'm what I'd call a hopeful sceptic when it comes to UFOs. I'd really like UFOs to exist, but I expect the evidence supporting a UFO sighting to be strong - let's fact it, this is a pretty remarkable claim, so we need strong evidence if we are to support it. A big problem I have with many UFO sightings is that they are based on either pure witness testimony or very bad photographs that just show lights in the sky or fuzzy blobs. In other cases, UFO investigators make a huge leap from 'there's something strange' to 'because it's strange, it must be caused by an extraterrestrial ship.' I'd like to give two examples that co...

I was somewhat unnerved to hear the shadow chancellor saying we should crack down on those involved in tax evasion and avoidance. Lumping the two together both dilutes the fight against the criminals and threatens to stigmatise a fair percentage of the population. As there's often confusion between the two (I certainly have to check every time I use the terms), evasion is illegal. It is engaging in deception to reduce your tax bill. Avoidance is choosing an approach within the law to reduce the amount of tax you pay. The reality is that I - and plenty of you - have indulged in avoidance. A simple example is choosing to put your savings into an ISA rather than an account where you pay tax on the interest. Of course some avoidance - such as the complex structures used by the likes of Google and Amazon - should be prevented from happening. But in the end that's a matter of sorting out the tax regime. If HMRC simplified our incredibly complex tax structure, it could slash hea...

Some while ago I started selling Organizing a Murder as an ebook. Now it's out as a physical version too. Organizing A Murder contains twelve different mysteries to solve with friends, family or colleagues. There's huge variety. Not all the mysteries are murders, and the events are graded on three different levels, from those suitable for children from around 9, up to complex mysteries that need all the cunning of an adult player. Settings vary too, from a traditional country house to a starship in deep space. Unlike the boxed party kits you can buy, there's a lot more variation in the way the each mystery is played out, from a simple treasure hunt, to a complex mystery with witness statements, clues and evidence to sift through. And because the players are all detectives, as individuals or teams, it's much simpler to organize as there's no need for costumes and embarrassing role-play. This approach means that any number of players can take part in one of thes...

Way back in 2009 I wrote here about a remarkable, large scale practical joke I took part in when at university. It was a made-up ancient ceremony, for which the traffic was stopped by the police, so that a large procession could go down King's Parade, through Trinity College and onto the backs by the river, where a bizarre ceremony took place. I recently received an email asking for any details I had, so dug out of the loft my original instruction sheet, which I thought would make an appropriate entry for 1 April. Scribbled by hand on the back of the sheet was the Latin responsory, which as a member of the choir I took part in giving the responses, as well as singing Super Flumina Babylonis during the immersion. I didn't quite remember the extract I gave in my previous post correctly, so here's the first half. The early bit about the fish was when the person playing the High Professor was slapped across the face with a fish, and for the bit about him standing in his com...