This isn't a post about Brexit per se - though I am pleased to discover that as yet the sky seems not to have fallen in - but about an interesting paradox. I was listening to David Aaronovitch's programme about how remainers feel now, broadcast on Radio 4 last night. After a range of interviews, there was a discussion with a couple of people in the studio. One of the questions asked was whether they thought that the same result would have happened in 10 or 15 years time. As Aaronovitch pointed out it's not as obvious an outcome as you might think. The typical reaction might be 'No, because many of the older voters will have died off, so the younger voters, weighted to remain would triumph.' But, of course, it's entirely possible that as younger voters got older they might change their mind - and in 10 to 15 years, the EU might be in such a mess that withdrawing would be even more popular. However, the paradox arose in a comment analysing why older voters...

My meter is dumb - and I like it that way Interesting news that British Gas is finally offering the first real benefit to the consumer of having a smart meter - 9 to 5 free electricity on either Saturday or Sunday to people on the appropriate plan. And that's great, possibly - but it also needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. I've always been a touch suspicious of the way smart meters are being sold. We have been told that they enable consumers to be more aware of their electricity use, and hence to save money. But I'm not really not convinced that seeing that your kettle uses more electricity when it's boiling water than when it's off is really a great surprise to anyone - even if we can actually see the smart meter while boiling the kettle, which often won't be the case. In practice, what these meters are primarily about is enabling the energy supply companies to get more of a real time monitoring of individual usage, which in principle could benefit...

By a genuine coincidence, I ended up reading David Laws' inside account of the five years of Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition in the UK immediately after reading the book form of  Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister - still hilarious after all these years. Although Coalition hasn't got anywhere near as much in the way of funny bits as the satire, it is genuinely readable despite its wrist-busting 600+ pages. Laws doesn't have a particularly outstanding writing style, but he comes across as genuine and the book is well structured, in relatively short, themed chunks that tend to span across months or years, rather than trying to do the whole thing in a single, chronological bore-fest. (The effectiveness only breaks down at the end, where it could have done with some serious editor's blue pencil, but that's really only in the short postscript.) I think two things are particularly fascinating. One is to get a better feel for the characters, many of them ...

The ticket as it popped up on my phone (original not pixilated) A few years ago, when I first moved over to using Apple, a friend of mine who likes to get up to his elbows in the technology, tweaking this and twerking that, said 'I could never live with that walled garden.' He wasn't talking about some rural pleasure grounds, but rather the way that Apple rigidly controls what does what on its devices. I can see the point if you are the sort of person who likes to nurgle around changing settings and writing macros and linking box X to widget Y to make things just the way you want them. And I probably was that person in my 20s. But now I just want things to work together, and with a few notable exceptions, the good thing about using Apple is that it all does. I just had an example of that. I had received an e-ticket notification from Eurostar. On the email it said 'click here to download your ticket'. I did this on my iMac. Up popped a web window showing the ...

I saw this on that unique source of information, Facebook, the other day, accompanying an image of some generic paracetamol (acetaminophen): This paracetamol is 25p but it's as low as 16p in Home Bargains. When you choose to get paracetamol for 'free' from the pharmacist or GP it actually costs the taxpayer and NHS about £10. If you want to help save the NHS choose to refuse free paracetamol when you can... It certainly would be silly to get an over-the-counter painkiller on prescription unless you need large supplies for a chronic condition. However, what raised my 'failure to understand numbers' antennae was the bit that says 'it actually costs the taxpayer and NHS about £10'. Now it's certainly true that the price of a prescription to the patient in the UK (unless they qualify for free ones) is £8.40. But price and cost are not the same thing. When you buy something in a shop, the price is the amount you pay - the cost is what the shopkeeper (...

Branches like this may be doomed (image from Wikipedia ) As Bohr almost said, forecasting is difficult, especially about the future - in fact it's pretty well always wrong. And never more so when we try to predict cataclysmic change. As I discussed in Dice World , the problem is that the systems we are usually trying to predict are so large and complex (and often mathematically chaotic) that we are almost always blindsided by major changes. So I raised an eyebrow when I saw an article claiming that within a decade, retail banks will be dead. It's certainly true, as the writer suggests, that bank branches are closing because we are doing more online banking, but I think there is far too much conservatism about retail banking to see such a massive change as the end of the familiar banks in ten years. Look how long after Europe was paying its bills with direct debits the USA was still tediously printing off cheques to pay bills. Not to mention the time it took for chip and ...

My defunct Sony laptop, designed, as the label says, for Windows 98 There has been an interesting evolution in the world of laptops - one that you might not even have noticed. It's a kind of mass extinction. Back in the old days, when luggable PCs and laptops first entered the market (yes, I can remember than far back), there were two distinct types of manufacturer involved in electronics. Computer makers, mostly American - whether traditional (IBM, say) or newly minted (Compaq, Dell etc.) made computers - while consumer manufacturers, mostly from the far east, made things like TV sets and stereos. It was a mystery why those consumer electronics giants never got into computing in a big way, but for some reason they only seriously took on one segment of the market - laptops. And they were very good at it. The first (actually, the only) laptop I ever bought was a top of the range Sony. It lasted me 10 years and was brilliant. It was also the consumer manufacturers (as oppose...

Terrified prehistoric (well, 1980s) adolescents in West Kennet Long Barrow I was interested to see in New Scientist that 'prehistoric tombs may have doubled as star-gazing observatories,' because this reminded me of one of my favourite books from the 1970s. The idea put forward in the article is that in the extended, narrow chamber of a long barrow or passage tomb, an observer would peer in darkness down to a small fraction of sky and be able to see stars around dawn that would otherwise be washed out by sky light. And it's certainly possible. I particularly liked the quote from Fabio Silva of the University of Wales, Trinity St. David, conjuring up an adolescent initiation rite: Imagine a young boy forced to spend the night in the passage – probably scared to death. In the morning he would see this star rise days before the rest of his tribe. That may have been presented as secret knowledge. The reason I find this so delightful is that it has immensely strong ec...

Although a huge fan of science fiction, I've never been overly fond of the New Wave authors of the 1960s. Their ideas were remarkable - but their stories tended to be relentlessly bleak and unrewarding - a bit like post-Syd Barrett Pink Floyd without the wonderful music. And there's no better example than Philip K. Dick. (It's Kindred, since you ask.) The sheer inventiveness of Dick's stories come through in the number of 'adaptations' of his work, from Blade Runner (taken from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? ) to The Man in the High Castle . But the negative side of his work comes across in those inverted commas round 'adaptations' - the stories usually need a lot of adapting to be less odd and nihilistic to work for a wider audience. I knew nothing about Dick himself before reading The Divine Madness , a kind of psychoanalytic biography that attempt to retro-analyse Dick's strange life and thinking. His upbringing was never going to leave h...

 I was always a fan of Pseud's Corner in  Private Eye.  These days, the most purple prose I receive is often in the form of press releases for books being offered for review. I will provide an irregular series of these, both for your entertainment and, I hope, as pointers of what not to do with the press releases for your own books.  Note that the books themselves could be brilliant... or not. But a poor press release is unlikely to generate many reviews. Names will be omitted to protect the innocent and guilty alike.  I suspect the problems are fairly self-evident, but just in case here's a few key pointers to look out for: Are you ready to be empowered? A diary-style journey? Is that a bit like a blog-style elephant? Who would have thought that India was a land of geography? Can people collectively form a wisdom? Apparently we are unlikely to read the like of the author in our lifetime. No, doesn't make any sense to me, ei...