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...