Not surprisingly bought as a holiday read, Resorting to Murder was pleasant enough to pass the time, but didn't really hit the spot. Part of the problem is that by comparison with the opening Sherlock Holmes story ( The Adventure of the Devil's Foot: itself not one of Conan Doyle's best as a mystery, though decidedly an atmospheric piece of writing), it becomes obvious that a lot of the classic crime writers featured here weren't very good at crafting an entertaining story. It was fun to discover the holiday locations, many of them in the UK or France, and some of the stories worked well, but too many seemed to lack either literary or mystery value. In a couple of cases, the storyline really didn't hold together - it was difficult to make any great sense of what had happened - or the whole thing was a little too far-fetched (as in the otherwise quite entertaining mystery of the mother who disappears from a French hotel, along with the room she had been staying...

If your immediate thought on seeing a book about the Bible is 'I'm not religious, so it's not for me,' don't worry - it still could be. Without doubt, the Bible has had a huge impact on the world - and, Simon Loveday reminds us - in some forms, notably the Authorised Version (King James Bible), it is also an impressive piece of literature and a big part of our cultural heritage. What Loveday sets out to do is to see how the Bible was put together, telling us why it is in the form it is and helping us understand the combination of different types of literature that don't really correspond to modern day forms - and he does this very well. This book is to biblical scholarship what popular science is to science. Loveday is not trying to come up with a new and different analysis of the Bible, but rather to help the vast majority of us (both Christians and non-Christians) who really don't understand its geo-political context, what is historical and what is mor...

Because it works here doesn't mean it will work in your lounge (Image from Wikipedia ) I read recently that Facebook is slashing the price of its Oculus Rift virtual reality (VR) goggles, suggesting that they simply aren't selling as expected. But, to be honest, this comes as no surprise at all. I would suggest that VR suffers from exactly the same problems as 3D TV did (remember that?). There are some inconveniences we are prepared to suffer relatively briefly for the novelty experience. Think 3D glasses in the cinema or a VR experience at a games show. But for our everyday viewing or game playing, we don't want to be encumbered by attaching chunky hardware to our face. I'm not saying that VR won't happen - it probably will. But I suspect it will only really become mainstream when it can either be done passively - using a large curved screen, for example - or if the headgear is so light and unobtrusive that we really don't care that it's there. Wha...

What's it worth? There's nothing a psychologist likes better than to wind up an economist, and in the 70s psychology succeeded big time with the endowment effect. Economics expects us to give an object a value, and that value should determine how we would price it to buy it or sell it. But experiments have shown that we value something we own a lot more than the same object if we don't own it. Economists, and us sciencey types who want people to be more rational, tend to highlight the endowment effect as one of the 'errors' people suffer from in making rational decisions. But I'd suggest, as is often the case in science, it's more complicated than that. Here are two suggestions as to why the endowment effect can be just as rational as an other approach. I'm going to take a variant of the original experimental demonstration of the endowment effect to show this. In our experiment, some participants are given a mug, then later asked how much they...

I'm a sucker for consumer programmes, especially those that give us an expert opinion on everyday products, such as Channel 4's Tried and Tasted . It's cheap and cheerful stuff - but there's something highly entertaining about a panel including Michel Roux Jr and Jay Rayner blind tasting meat pies and ice cream (not simultaneously). However, this show presents us with an extreme example of the problem facing most comparative reviews - how do you choose the products to be in your sample? Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking the journalists who suffer their way through a comparative test. I once tested getting on for 70 laptops (over a year, not all at once) for a magazine, and it's an arduous job. But the fact remains that unless you try absolutely everything you can get your hands on, as I did with those laptops, there is a hidden selection process going on, which can strongly skew the results. To take a recent example, I saw in a newspaper a compariso...

Rebecca Long-Bailey (Image from Wikipedia ) Apparently, the shadow business secretary, Rebecca Long-Bailey has said that she won't use Uber, the cab company, because doing so is 'not morally acceptable.' Like many decisions that span politics, business and employment the right thing to do here is not clear cut - there are far more shades of grey than black and white certainties. Ms Long-Bailey suggests that Uber exploits their drivers by treating them as self-employed, and thus preventing them from having the rights of an employed worker. On the one hand I can see that the gig economy (effectively freelancing) has potential benefits. I've effectively been a gig economy worker ever since I left BA in 1994. I don't get any benefits like paid holiday or paid sick leave or a company pension. I probably earn less than I would have if I'd stayed working for a big company. But in exchange I have the flexibility to work when I like for whoever I like, provided I...

I know gin is very trendy at the moment, and I felt it was time to have a bit of a gin experience, sampling a new artisanal gin, JacqSon. This had all the potential for disaster. First of all, this is Yorkshire gin - and I am firmly Lancastrian. However, strong though the rivalry is between the two counties, we do generally admit that, if it can't be Lancashire, Yorkshire's the next best thing, so this proved less of a problem than it may seem. There was, however, a bigger hurdle to overcome. I don't particularly like gin. I love tonic water, but for me it tastes better without the gin in it. (My alcoholic tonic drink of choice is white port and tonic, which is wonderful. Has to be white port though, not ruby or tawny.) But there have been lots of things over the years that I didn't like, but with a bit of effort got to appreciate, from mushrooms to bitter, so I was determined to give it a go. What have we got here? It's a small run gin, made in a Yorkshire vi...