This book seemed to combine two of my favourite activities, which go very well together: good all-day walks and a pint of proper beer. And it does to an extent, as we shall see. Wild Pub Walks combines fairly strenuous hill walks, often around the 10 mile mark with some serious ups and downs, with recommendations of places to sink a pint at the end of the walk. It's divided into England, Scotland and Wales - I'll concentrate on the England section as I'm more familiar with the walks there. When opening a book like this, the natural tendency is to go straight to the overview map and look where the walks are - I must admit to being dismayed at this point as all the English walks in the Lake District, Peak District and Yorkshire Dales. That's the entire country as far as this book is concerned. That was a real disappointment - I'd have much rather they were spread around more effectively. To take the West Country as a example, you can have just as interesting a ...

All too often we see a story in the newspaper where numbers are painfully parroted without giving any consideration to what they actually mean - and all too often that means we need recite our favourite mantra, 'correlation is not causality'. Today's paper carried a wonderful example of this, citing 'research' by Lloyds Bank showing that living in the vicinity of a supermarket will have a varying impact on the price of your house 'depending on the status of the shop.' As we all know, it shows nothing of the kind. There may be a correlation between being near the shop and house prices - but it's highly unlikely it's causal. The reason we can be reasonably sure of this is that occupant of the number 4 position, Iceland. Anyone who knows their 'status of the shop' rankings knows that Iceland is the pits - certainly below Asda. I don't doubt the pulling power of Waitrose, but the fact is I'd suggest there are other causal factors at ...

For some time I've been using an Apple Airport Express to relay music from my computer to another room to plug into an old fashioned sound system that hasn't heard of Wifi. The setup works well, but it's overkill as the Aiport is a fairly expensive piece of kit that can do far more. I needed to redeploy the Airport Express for a more heavy duty use, so I looked for a good, low priced alternative to do the job - and settled on the Neet Airstream. It's a little black puck, squarish with rounded corners. It feels fairly lightweight, but seems reasonably well made. The setup process was not brilliantly described in the manual, but is reasonably straightforward, and once it was up and running it simply appeared as an AirPlay device available to computers or phones via the Wifi. The sound seems fine - I'm very happy. There are a couple of small niggles. The biggest one is that it doesn't come with a power supply. It assumes that there is either a USB outlet on y...

I've generally loved the Iain M. Banks 'Culture' novels, but was decidedly disappointed when I happened on Consider Phlebas,  (admittedly his first) - but thankfully  The Hydrogen Sonata was much more the kind of on-form writing I've come to enjoy. I will get one moan out of the way up front - it's too long. I can't be doing with these doorstop books as a whole, and quite a lot of it felt in need of a good tightening edit. But having said that, there's a whole lot to enjoy here in the complex machinations between different races and seeing different Culture ships exhibit behaviour that isn't necessarily quite what you'd expect. As usual with Banks there's plenty to ponder in the 'what if' department, here particularly around the concept of 'subliming' where individuals or whole races opt to become part of a disembodied multidimensional spacetime - probably some people's idea of heaven and others of hell. But equally...

This is primarily a thank-you to the organisers of the annual Andrew Chamblin Memorial Lecture in Cambridge. I attended yesterday courtesy of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, and it was fascinating to hear Kip Thorne, until recently Feynman Professor of Physics at Cal Tech, give an insider view on the development of gravity wave astronomy and the LIGO observatory. The lecture was packed - in fact, it appeared to be relayed into other lecture theatres by video link - with an audience that would have given a brilliant score in the I-Spy Book of Physicists (had such a book existed). Thorne began by asking how many in the audience had physics degrees, doctorates and beyond - it was a distinct majority in the main room, but he then made it clear he was addressing his talk primarily to the non-technical remainder, and managed to do so very effectively. What was particularly interesting from my viewpoint was the speaker's ability to balance the scientif...

Our railways aren't great. In fact, some of them are terrible. (As it happens, GWR, which is my usual company, isn't bad, but I know that elsewhere things are dire.) So, not unreasonably, many people feel we need to do something different, and the slogan is often 'Bring Back BR.' The only trouble is, British Rail was terrible too. I had the relatively unusual experience of working for a company that was a nationalised industry when I joined it and which was then privatised after a few years. I have to say, it became a far better company as a result, both as a place to work and in the service it gave to its customers. (These days it's not doing so well, but then it's no longer really a British company.) The reason, I'd suggest that the BA privatisation worked where BR one didn't is quite simple - we had real competition. Without that, privatisation is a joke. It can bring benefits, but unless tightly regulated it can leave us in the kind of mess the ...

I'm not quite sure where I picked up a recommendation for this book, but I'm glad I did as I've been able to add Cory Doctorow to my fairly short list of contemporary science fiction writers that I truly enjoy. In this entertaining short novel, Doctorow takes on the classic SF question of 'What if?' for something that genuinely could come to pass - the no wage economy, where everyone gets the basics they need and it's up to them, through ad-hoc arrangements, to find ways to earn social credit to get more, should they want it. In a way, the social credit (known for unexplained reasons, unless I missed it, as Whuffie) is the equivalent of the rating system in the  Black Mirror episode where everyone constantly rates everyone else. The other major change to society, which is far less likely to happen, is that when someone dies they are recreated from a clone which is imprinted with their backed up memory - so death becomes a minor irritation (unless you aren...

I see in the i newspaper that the Lib Dems, with policies I increasingly find sad, are proposing a 5p tax on coffee cups (I assume they mean treated cardboard when they say 'plastic') to try to have the same effect as the plastic bag tax, which has reduced usage of single use carrier bags by about 85%. Unfortunately, I don't think it will work unless it's thought through a bit more. The point is that the plastic bag tax works because people pay it explicitly and separately. If you use a bag you pay a visible fee. But a coffee cup charge will inevitably be absorbed into the price of a coffee because it's not really a separate item. You can't just have the coffee and not the cup. People won't notice it the same way. Admittedly, there is a kind of way to have coffee without a cup, and that's to take your own cup in. Starbucks, for example, have a 25p discount on takeaway coffee if you do this. So they are effectively imposing a 25p disposable coffee c...

You can't escape the WannaCry ransomeware attack in the news. And it's a good thing that there has been plenty of coverage. But I do wish the news concentrated a bit more on how you can keep yourself safe and less on trying to find someone (other than the hackers) to blame. There are three things that everyone should do, any of which would have prevented data loss, and two of which would have prevented the attack succeeding in the first place. Do regular backups. I know it's boring, but do it. In the very early days of PCs, I had two hard discs fail within six months, in each case losing everything on them. The first time I was unprepared and lost months of work. The second time I was backing up every day and lost nothing. These days it's really easy - with something like OneDrive, Google Drive or Dropbox you simply keep your work in a specific folder on your computer and it is all automatically backed up. As it happens, in the case of the ransomware attack, you mi...

To be honest, I don't really know who Danny Dyer is, but I was forced against my will to watch some of the BAFTA TV awards last night, and one of the clips featured him being gobsmacked that he was descended from royalty, as if this somehow makes him special. It really doesn't. Let's be clear, this isn't about my anti-monarchist leanings. What I mean is that I can guarantee that you are descended from royalty too. There's a fascinating bit in Adam Rutherford's book A Brief History of Everyone who ever Lived that shows that if you have European blood, the chances of you not being descended from the Emperor Charlemagne are negligible. (Don't worry if you aren't at all European - you'll have a royal lineage too.) In fact you are a descendent of everyone alive in Europe in the 10th century who has living relatives now. So, if you prefer your royalty British, provided they have living relatives, you are a descendent of Alfred the Great, Rhodri th...

I've just finished Elizabeth George's latest Inspector Lynley novel, A Banquet of Consequences . As always, I enjoyed it (though I really wish she could keep the length down - this one weighed in at over 650 pages). But, as always, a rather evil part of the entertainment was spotting where this American writer fails to get her English setting right. I, certainly, would never be brave enough to try this. I've had enough experience with US versions of popular science books ('What is a skirting board?' 'A coconut shy?') to realise it's almost impossible to get everything right. I'm certainly not objecting to George doing it, but as a consequence, I do think she's fair game for spotting where things just don't quite work. According to the acknowledgements, she always employs locals to ensure she gets things right, but if this is the case they are being overly nice to her, because a handful of errors always slip through - and there were severa...

The Mac version of OneNote in action For a good number of years I used Microsoft's OneNote for all my note taking. It is wonderfully freeform - a bit like having a scrapbook for anything and everything you can clip or write or type. But as I observed a whole 6 years ago , Microsoft were slow to get things going on (Apple) mobile phones and tablets - and when they did, it just didn't work with the sophisticated facilities of the desktop version. I've recently been alerted to the latest version of OneNote and I'm pleased to say that the mobile versions are now good enough that I've moved back from Evernote. Although Evernote is great, it lacks the on-page flexibility and structuring of OneNote - it's like coming home. It has taken a little while to move back, but Microsoft do provide a migration tool to get your notes in from Evernote. They then take an age to synchronise on all platforms (at least if you have 800+ notes like me), but now we're there a...

I've read a couple of things lately about time travel that just don't make any sense to me. Specifically, both said that it wasn't possible to travel into the future. One was Time Travel by James Gleick, which commented that what special relativity offers is 'just time dilation' not real travel at all, the other being Richard Muller's The Physics of Time , which I am yet to read, but according to this article  suggests that you can't travel into the future as it doesn't exist 'yet.' Both of these appear to entirely miss the point. Unlike the TARDIS in Dr Who, real time machines find travel forward in time much easier than backwards, which may be theoretically possible but is practically implausible. And the approach taken to reach the future is totally different from a time machine that disappears from 'now' and reappears at another time - but it is ridiculous sophistry to suggest that a time machine based on the special theory of rela...