Traditional holiday reading involves the huge, wrist-bending saga, but my favourite books to take away on a break are collections of short stories. There's something about the ephemeral nature of short stories that fits perfectly with that strangely detached-from-reality feeling of being on holiday. This year I'm opting for three very different collections:  Sandlands  by Cambridge academic and novelist Rosy Thornton,   Rogues  - a mostly fantasy collection edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois , and here  The Collected Stories of Grace Paley . A while ago on Facebook some of my friends with far more experience in good fiction than me were enthusing over the short story writing of Grace Paley, so I determined to give her writing a go. I'm glad I did - but, if I'm honest, the stories just don't work for me and I gave up about two thirds of the way through. I had two problems with these mostly short short stories set in a seedy period New York (co...

In his book Professor Stewart's Horde of Mathematical Treasures , Ian Stewart describes a number of incidents of mathematicians struggling with ordinary life. In one we find Abraham Fraenkel, a mathematics professor 'of German origin' getting on a bus in Tel Aviv that was still in the bus station 5 minutes after it should have left. According to Stewart, Fraenkel waved a timetable at the driver, who replied 'What are you - a German or a professor?' to which, he tells us Fraenkel replied 'Do you mean the inclusive or, or the exclusive or?' Interestingly, in English at least (this may not apply in other languages), the professor's snippy logic was beaten by linguistics, as his question was not necessary. Fraenkel's question distinguished the exclusive or (where something has to be one thing or the other but can't be both) from the inclusive (where it can be either or both). And had he received the question from the bus driver in writing, with...

Traditional holiday reading involves the huge, wrist-bending saga, but my favourite books to take away on a break are collections of short stories. There's something about the ephemeral nature of short stories that fits perfectly with that strangely detached-from-reality feeling of being on holiday. This year I'm opting for three very different collections:  Sandlands  by Cambridge academic and novelist Rosy Thornton,   The Collected Stories of Grace Paley , and here  Rogues  - a mostly fantasy collection edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois. Given the respective genres the editors write in, I assumed that Rogues , a fat collection of short stories edited by George R. R. Martin and  Gardner Dozois, would be a mix of fantasy and SF stories, but in fact the 21 stories (mostly fairly long, in the 30-50 page range) are predominantly fantasy with a couple of crime stories and only one solidly science fiction piece. All but a couple of the sto...

Although most of my work remains in the non-fiction arena, I'm an enthusiastic writer of both crime and science fiction, and as far as SF goes, I have a number of short stories published. The journal Nature , which carried my story Wonderful Things , put together an interesting podcast, intertwining input based on my story and reflections on an opinion piece from Nature proper, both of which concern the very long-term future handling of nuclear waste. You can read the short story here, and you can listen to the podcast here  - the segment is only a few minutes long, accessed from the 'One million years from now' play button on the left hand side of the page once you've clicked through (see illustration to right).

It's difficult to know exactly how to classify Thinking Musically . It isn't a science of music book, though it does have a small amount of scientific content. Nor can it really be considered a basic music theory book, given it never mentions musical notation. I can best describe it as a book that gives a feel for what's going on in music without getting technical, so the reader can get think through, for instance, why some music sounds happy and other pieces sad, simply as a result of choosing a particular 'palette' of notes. We start with some basics on the nature of sound and pitch. These are illustrated using wiggly side to side (roughly sinusoidal) waves to represent sound waves. Uri Bram and Anupama Pattabiraman qualify this by saying 'This is the easiest way to imagine what a wave looks like, even if it's not 100% accurate.'  That's fine, but it really wouldn't have been hard to explain that in reality sound is a compression wave, with...

I don't know about you, but I've always wondered if those clip-on lenses for smartphone cameras were worth using. I've had a chance to try a couple out, and here's what I thought: A modern smartphone has a camera that is more than adequate for most of the everyday snaps we take - and having the camera with you all the time more than outweighs any disadvantage from having a single, non-zoom lens. But there are occasions when you really would like to have a telephoto lens to get closer to the action, or to take a landscape shot, homing in on a particular detail. Although you can zoom digitally, this drastically reduces the resolution, often producing fuzzy pictures. The clip-on telephoto lens I tried, the niftily named Havit HV-MPC04, provides a decent optical 2x telephoto to get in closer to your subject without noticeable loss of quality. It's a good looking lens and produces clear, effective shots (in the photos alongside, the side-by-side photo shows the str...

Because it's from a university press, I must admit I expected Streaming, Sharing, Stealing to be a somewhat dull economic textbook - but in reality it is a great read and a cracking business book, giving the clearest explanation I've ever seen of what is happening to three arms of the entertainment business - book publishing, music and TV/film - in the face of the internet/digital revolution. In that sense the title is misleading, as it seems to suggest that a major focus is music sharing and piracy. This is certainly is covered, but is dismissed as the relatively easy part. Like most of the analysis in the book, here Michael D. Smith and Rahul Telang make sure that their views are backed up with as much experimental data as possible - and there appears to be good evidence that piracy isn't too big a deal, provided it's made easy to get access to legal digital versions in a timely fashion. It's where the publishers/networks either have poor online access or del...

If, like me, you have no interest in the Olympics (or even if you do) you might feel for the need for a distraction - and if you do,  I can heartily recommend the Ticket to Ride board game. For between two and five players, the game involves building rail routes across Europe. To build the routes you need cards with appropriately coloured wagons, picked up two at a time as a go in the game, and there are various additional considerations to cover, such as a set of specific routes you need to build if you are to have a chance of winning (allocated by randomly selected cards), and a bonus for the player with the longest single route at the end of the game. The play is an excellent balance of luck (how you build your route is dependent on which cards you pick up) and strategy/tactics, meaning that a good player will usually win, but a less skilled player can win occasionally, so doesn't feel it's pointless to try. You don't have to be interested in trains, by the way - ...

I have come across several articles in the last day or two saying that we don't need to worry about remembering impossible passwords like K@tn1p anymore, because it has been discovered that passphrases - simply longish text phrases without gaps - are just as difficult for hackers to work out as those ridiculous passwords. This may be true - but there are still some issues with passphrases. One is remembering just which of your favourite phrases or lines from poetry or whatever you used. Was it 'ivegotthisterrificpaininallthediodesdownmyleftside' or 'theearthismostlyharmless'? What if you misquote your phrase when you set it? And while a random guessing program may struggle to identify my phrase as 'allscienceiseitherphysicsorstampcollecting', might this be an easy guess to someone familiar with my writing? Most of all, though, how many times are you going to type in 'tobeornottobethatisthequestion' only to be told YOUR PASSWORD MUST CONTAIN AT LE...

MGS did me proud - but we don't need more (as it happens it's not a grammar school now) There is some talk of the government allowing expansion of grammar schools (high schools that only admit the brighter students, not the US use of the term) - which I suspect would be a terrible idea. Like Theresa May, I benefited from a grammar school education and loved it, and had I not attended Manchester Grammar School, it's highly probable I would not have got into Cambridge. But the trouble with this kind of thinking is that it's typical bad analysis driven by individual experience, rather than a proper critical assessment. As far as I can see there are two problems with grammar schools. The biggest is that they are fine for those who attend - but the remaining students who get sent of to what were called secondary moderns, in effect a second class school, suffer from this process. As a result of a single test - one that is typical of the type of test that only monitors...

Traditional holiday reading involves the huge, wrist-bending saga, but my favourite books to take away on a break are collections of short stories. There's something about the ephemeral nature of short stories that fits perfectly with that strangely detached-from-reality feeling of being on holiday. This year I'm opting for three very different collections: The Collected Stories of Grace Paley , Rogues - a mostly fantasy collection edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois - and, first, Sandlands by Cambridge academic and novelist Rosy Thornton. It's a bit of generalisation, but I'd say short stories fall into two broad categories - there are mood pieces, which don't necessarily have much of a story, but give the feel of a place or time or person, and there are twist-in-the-tail pieces, where we think we know what's happening, but at some point, often near the end, we find that things are very different from expectation. Many of Rosy Thornton'...

Cloud chamber image of the first observed positron (Source: Wikipedia ) When I was a teenager and ill I used to revert to childhood reading - Famous Five and the like. Recently confined to bed with norovirus, I found that all my brain could cope with was guff such as the output of Dan Brown, so I gritted my teeth and read Angels and Demons . As always with Brown, most of the 'fact' content of the book was anything but factual. However, I thought it would be worth a quick trip into the nature of the central McGuffin of the story, antimatter. It may be Brown's super bomb and the power source of the fictional USS Enterprise, but it is real. Antimatter is like the familiar stuff that makes up our world, but charged particle have the opposite charge (it's a little more complicated with uncharged particles). Instead of negative electrons, antimatter has positive anti-electrons, better known as positrons. Replacing positive protons in the nucleus, an anti-atom would hav...

There is often a degree of desperation in the way that some scientists try to justify expenditure on pure research by pointing out spinoff benefits. Such benefits certainly exist, but often they are spurious as a justification, because it would be easily possible to derive the same benefits for far less money. The fact is that fundamental research is important in its own right and its proponents shouldn't attempt this kind of indirect benefit claim. I was struck by this recently when reading a not-atypical defence of the expenditure on CERN, home of the Large Hadron Collider, by saying 'the biggest impact of CERN on humanity has not been the discovery of the Higgs boson but rather the invention of the World Wide Web.' The author went on to point out how much commercial business the web generates. I'm afraid this is both iffy justification and bad history of technology. I'm not doing down what Tim Berners-Lee achieved. But the web, or something like it, was a ...

This is a narrow focus review: if, like me, you are fond of church music and the Anglican cathedral choral tradition (something I was introduced to age 18 on joining a Cambridge college chapel choir), read on. Most of us are probably aware that the big cathedrals have professional organists and semi-pro choirs, working at the highest levels of musical performance. In his memoirs, Michael Smith, organist and choirmaster at Llandaff Cathedral from 1974 to 1999, gives the inside story of what was often a battle to maintain such singing standards. This might sound a touch dull - and there certainly are many small and personal events in this 400 page book, but for those who are interested there are also some fascinating stories, from a murder to legal threats, conspiracy and downright managerial incompetence. LLandaff was unique among the Welsh cathedrals in keeping up a full scale cathedral choir contribution, singing services six days a week, with a choir of boys and men. The men, a...