Call that a pie? Image from Google Recent arguments on the radio about what a 'pie' is have proved very entertaining. Apparently there are those who claim something can only be a pie if it is entirely encased in pastry. They should listen to Lewis Carroll's Humpty Dumpty. The character claims words mean whatever he says they mean. He's not quite right - it's not down to a single arbiter. But words in English certainly do mean whatever they are generally used to mean. And those meanings change. A living language evolves. Try to set it in aspic and it becomes a museum piece. Those who argue for the pastry-surrounded pie are confusing language and branding. It's fine to set rules for the official name for a product or brand. But, in English, a pie means whatever people call a pie. Hence our ability to refer unashamedly to shepherd's pie or cottage pie, neither of which have any pastry whatsoever. When I give talks on writing, I point out a number of ...

Definitely not electric (image from Wikipedia ) It was a little eyebrow-raising to see that a  company called Wright Electric is claiming that they will have electric planes flying between London and Paris in 10 years. While we genuinely should never say 'never' with technology, I think the probability is so low that it would be well worth betting against it. In part, this is a simple competitive edge issue. If the technology existed, it could certainly only cope with short range hops - hence London to Paris. Unfortunately, this is already a highly competitive route because Eurostar offers a far more pleasant journey than flying with similar or better city centre to city centre times. It's not the ideal route to introduce new flight technology on. Even if London to Paris is attractive, though, this assumes, though that we have coped with 'if the technology existed.' The big problem here is battery technology. I have no doubt at all that batteries will get b...

I am a huge fan of Marjory Allingham's Campion books - but even so, I have to say this is probably one to avoid, unless, like me, you want to have read the entire canon. One of Allingham's late contributions, written in the 1960s four decades after the first Campion books, it lacks the joie de vivre of the earlier titles. It's over-long, and very slow - in fact it verges on the dull in places. That's not to say it's entirely without interest, but what interest there is remains specialist. It's a sociological museum, with its stiff, emotionally retarded upper-middle class characters, who we are supposed to sympathise with, but who mostly repel. By today's standards it is also horribly un-PC about 'mental defectives'. Some readers will, I suspect, be outraged - but you do have to see this as a fascinating uncovering of just how things were in the early 60s. We tend to look back and think of the sixties as being all hippies and free love and rebelli...

A few days ago at a talk, I mentioned in passing that in a few years' time we may no longer think that dark matter exists. (In the unlikely event you've not heard of it, dark matter is a hypothetical kind of stuff that only interacts with ordinary matter through gravity, which is thought to exist because large collections of matter, such as galaxies act as if they have more matter in them than they should have.) A galactic cluster that provides more gravitational lensing that its ordinary matter predicts. (Image from Hubble via Wikipedia ) After the talk, a handful of teenage physics enthusiasts collared me and said 'Surely you don't think dark matter doesn't exist?' After asking them not to call me Shirley, I admitted I was a dark matter sceptic. But I felt their pain. When I was their age, the steady state theory of cosmology was still an accepted challenger to the big bang, but its star was fading fast. I preferred steady state in part because it seeme...

Image from Wikipedia I always find it amusing when the bosses of large companies demonstrate an impressive lack of understanding of market forces. A few days ago, the HR director of sandwich/coffee chain Pret a Manger told a parliamentary committee 'I would say one in 50 people who apply to our company are British', citing this as a reason they need to continue having access to cheap foreign labour. She also said that she didn't think pay was an issue, despite a starting package of around £16,000 in London, as after a few years you could earn a lot more. Picking this apart, I've a few issues with this argument. I don't have any evidence for that 'I would say one in 50' (don't you find 'I would say' suspiciously vague?) - is it true at all? Is it only true of central London stores? Or is that a countrywide average? Without data it's impossible to say. But let's take it at face value. What the market is really saying is that the rewar...

Colston Hall (image from Wikipedia ) I'm coming towards the end of two years spending two days a week working at Bristol University. I've had a wonderful time, and have come to love this little gem of a city, getting to know it far better than I did before. One thing that has become obvious is the way that some Bristolians are torn apart by their heritage. Because this is a city that was, to some degree, built on two trades that are now abhorrent - the slave trade and tobacco. As you go around the city, there are names you often encounter: Colston and Wills. The first refers to Edward Colston, a prominent slave trader and the Wills dynasty was behind the eponymous tobacco company, now part of Imperial Tobacco. Such is the negative feeling that there is currently a petition (2136 signatures at the time of writing) to have the city's premier music venue, Colston Hall, renamed. But I think those who support the petition are wrong. You don't make the past go away b...

Yes, please, if Tesla would like to give me one (Image from Wikipedia ) As someone with real concern for the environment, I am convinced that electric cars are the future, and the sooner we can get rid of petrol and diesel, the better. When I was younger, my fantasy car was an Aston Martin - now it's a Tesla. However, as an official green heretic , I have to point out that, like almost all environmental decisions, it's a bit more complex than it first appears. We need to apply logic as well as emotion. Electric cars (and trains, for that matter) are great in terms of emissions - provided they use electricity that itself is produced in an environmentally friendly fashion. It has been pointed out that in Germany, which has an aggressive 'get rid of petrol cars by 2030' policy, there could be a resultant increase in carbon emissions. The trouble is that Germany is pretty well incapable of being totally green in its electricity production by 2030, because of its i...

The nation's favourite TV physicist, Brian Cox, has caused a bit of a ruckus amongst those who like a good ghost. Cox has often, if incorrectly, been represented as saying, as in this letter in the i newspaper, that ghosts don't exist because the Large Hadron Collider 'hasn't found them.' I ought to stress by the way that many headlines were misleading. The Metro , for example, led with 'The Large Hadron Collider has proved that ghosts don't exist, Brian Cox claims.' It is very difficult to  prove something doesn't exist, especially ghosts. To begin with, we need to assume that ghosts are natural rather than supernatural. If the supernatural exists, physics can't help - so as a starting point we need to make this assumption. And even then, as the old saying goes, absence of proof is not proof of absence. Thankfully, the LHC is not spending any taxpayer money on disproving the existence of ghosts. Instead, Cox was referring to a puzzle tha...