Hardly a week goes by without some report or newspaper article bemoaning the loss of traditional high street shopping. Everyone has an opinion on how to save the high street, from Mary Portas's ill-fated appointment as 'high street tsar' to the little-loved Mike Ashley's dire suggestion that the answer to the problem is to levy a 20% tax on online sales - which would simply  make the consumer pay more but is unlikely to change shopping habits. I think it's time we took a lesson from King Canute. For those not familiar with the legend of this tenth century king of Denmark, England and Norway more properly named Cnut, he is said to have tried to order the tide to stay off the beach. The tale tends to be presented these days with Cnut as fall guy, idiotically over-valuing his own ability, though it originally involved Cnut using his attempt as a demonstration to his courtiers that even a king is limited in his power compared with God's forces of nature. I ...

The college chapel choir I used to sing in, doing the Christmas thing It's that time of year when you can't go into a shop without being pounded with Christmas music, and if you are in a choir you will no doubt be polishing up the Christmas favourites. I have heard people moan about Christmas music - and, yes, the shops overdo it - but I have to confess I love it for a few weeks. I shouldn't, being a picky person, because the weird thing is we don't tend to listen to Christmas music at Christmas. Technically speaking it's Advent at the moment and Christmas starts on December 25, lasting for the traditional 12 days. But in reality, Boxing Day (26 December for those of a non-British persuasion) feels about the last day you want to hear Christmas music. I've certainly had enough by then. Christmas music divides into three chunks, and my favourite is the least well-known. Firstly we've 'Christmas songs'. The ones you mostly hear in the shops. ...

I was mildly irritated by an advert for smart meters in my newspaper, placed by ‘The campaign for a smarter Britain.’ It claimed ‘If we all had a smart meter, the CO 2 savings would be like planting more than 10 million trees a year.’ Note this says would not could - a claim that cannot be factual. The ad even emphasises this by having small print saying ‘Savings possible by customers measuring energy use and cutting waste.’ Possible is true, would be isn’t. What the ad doesn’t point out is that exactly the same savings are possible without smart meters if people cut back on their energy use. It's entirely possible that everything the smart meter could achieve in energy savings could also be obtained by giving customers a laminated card with a priority list for things to switch off to save energy. At a tiny fraction of the cost. In practice, smart meters are being pushed by the energy companies for two reasons. One is that they can save money by not employing meter read...

Before considering the contents, I ought to say what a great-looking book this is - small and beautifully formed with a really unusual cutaway front. It's a great gift book if you know someone who's into their horror. Because that's the topic we're dealing with here: ghosties, ghoulies, long-leggity beasties and things that go bump in the night. There is always a danger in having an academic write about genre fiction that it all gets a little po-faced (or, in this case, Poe faced). And, I'm afraid, Darry Jones, an English professor specialising in nineteenth century literature and popular fiction, does rather have this tendency. It's not that his analysis lacks interest, but it can be a touch short on readability. There's also a distinct over-reliance on Freud, apparently not realising his work, from a scientific viewpoint, is more fiction than science. The book is divided into sections on monsters - including, of course, vampires and zombies - 'th...

Photo by  Alex Iby  on  Unsplash I have just read an (unintentionally) hilarious article on the BBC News website . In it, Justin Rowlatt sets out arguments as to why you have (probably) already bought your last car . Aware that this sounds a little unlikely, Rowlatt starts by suggesting we'll be scoffing - I'm not. I understand the arguments - but I think they show an impressively bubble mentality. The article tell us 'tech analysts' predict that in less that 20 years we'll all have stopped owning cars and all cars will be electric. Let's leave aside the obvious point that most of us buy cars more frequently than every 20 years and look at the main arguments in the article. They are: Self-driving cars cut taxi journeys from $10 to $5 Electric cars have less moving parts so should last at least 500,000 miles Electric car prices will fall as they become mainstream, reducing self-driving journeys even further to $1 Accident rates will plummet. Within 1...

Although my main business is writing science books, I've always enjoyed writing fiction and I've recently had the chance to revisit a title I made a first draft of about 30 years ago. It's now finished and available (if you use Kindle, you can get a copy free of charge if you download it by Friday 5 October 2018 at the latest - see Kindle links here ). Called Oberland , the book is set in the Swiss alps, centring on the beautiful Lauterbrunnen valley. I wrote parts of that first draft while on holiday there, so the locations were still very fresh in my mind. In the story, when English twenty-something Jo Fuller takes a summer job on a campsite in the Swiss alpine valley of Lauterbrunnen, she does not expect her whole understanding of the world to be turned upside down. A camper dies in suspicious circumstances. With three broken individuals - Bob from America, Paula from Australia and Werner from Germany - Jo discovers a strange alternative world at the top of the Sc...

Headlines on the BBC News tell us starkly (if somewhat smugly) ' No alcohol safe to drink, global study confirms .' But like all statistically-based stories, the devil is in the detail. First port of call in any such situation is David Spiegelhalter, the Winton Professor of Public Understanding of Risk at Cambridge. And the story,  according to him , is rather different from the scare headlines. He starts by pointing out a bizarre omission in the paper quoted - they only show relative risk, not absolute risk. The trouble with relative risk is that it is often hugely misleading. Imagine the headline 'Murder rate in city increases by 100%'. Wow - that city appears to have hit the ropes, big time. However, that is a relative statistic. We don't know what that 100% represents. Exactly the same data could also be represented by the headline 'One murder last year, two murders this year.' That is a 100% increase. But far less scary sounding. So the paper'...

Not easy to clean (Photo by Steven Lilley from Wikimedia ) The other day on the radio, some government person or other was berating the poor old householder. He was asked by the interviewer why it was that a surprisingly high percentage of plastic sent for recycling ends up in landfill. He pointed out that the lazy old taxpayer often doesn't wash out their sauce bottles properly, so they can't be recycled. This made me think - I have never seen a proper environmental cost/benefit on recycling. I do recycle - I'm all in favour - but, for example, in the case of the sauce bottle, I generally send it straight to landfill. This is because there is a considerable energy use in washing out a sauce bottle - it usually takes a fair amount of hot water and quite possibly some washing up liquid. It also takes up some of my time, which also has a cost (I assume the reason the recycling companies don't themselves wash out sauce bottles is that the cost outweighs the benefit.)...

Lady Lane is a rather spooky back road in Swindon, which has been closed to traffic for a number of years and is being gradually taken over by nature. I recently discovered there what appears to be the very large mark of a horseshoe (see photo - size 9 foot for scale). There is something odd about this horseshoe print. The mark is at 90 degrees to the roadway. It has to be a rear hoof, as it's too close to the edge of the road behind it to be a front one. But one step forward would take a cart horse into the high hedge in front of it. But what if it's something very different? The other side of the hedge, straight in the direction in which the horse appears to have been heading, is the ruin of Blunsdon Abbey. The old house burned down around the end of the nineteenth century. So a picture starts to emerge. Back when an abbey that was later converted into a house was still a religious site, chances are they would have had some heavy horses for agricultural work. Could...

In a friendly, personal way, Cork Dork takes the reader into the very strange world of the American sommelier (I'll come back to the A word a little later). The author, Bianca Bosker gives up her job to investigate this bizarre sub-culture as an immersive journalist, only to end up becoming part of it. Like many, I enjoy wine (though I prefer a good real ale with a meal), but find the whole business of flowery, pretentious descriptions and ludicrously inflated prices for the better bottles off-putting and something that feels like either a con or self-deception. Bosker promises to transform our views. The book certainly made me think a little more about the whole business - and her exploration of strange people and their obsessions makes for an excellent read - but I can't say it's changed my viewpoint. While it's clear that you can train yourself to distinguish more in taste and smell than most of us do - and the sommeliers do this to extreme - that doesn't ...

In today's Observer I read 'Tories in new race row over identity checks for elections.' The article tells us that a leaked letter from the Equality and Human Rights Commission to Cabinet Office minister David Liddington raises concerns that identity checks to vote will deter immigrants and others from participating in the democratic process. Jeremy Corbyn, of course gets his views in, using this to bash the government. But is it true? Apparently the crux of the letter is that under new rules, being trialled in several local authorities at the 3 May local elections, 'people will be asked at polling stations to produce documents proving their identity - such as a passport or driving licence - before casting their vote.' But here's the thing. I happen to live in one of those trial authorities (Swindon). And it's just not true that you are asked to bring a passport or driving licence. The polling card quite clearly asks you to bring... the polling card. Noth...

I'm always on the look out for good new British crime fiction and someone recommended He's Gone by Alex Clare. To be honest, this meant I bought it without looking at too much of the detail, and my first reaction on taking a closer look was one of disappointment. The reason for this negative reaction is that it has become such a cliché for police officers in crime novels to have a personal problem - and the protagonist here, DI Robyn Bailley, looked likely to be exactly such a cliché. But I am pleased to say I couldn't have been more wrong. Firstly, He's Gone works superbly as a police procedural. It's always difficult to get the balance between giving too much detail (because in the end, most police procedure is boring) and making the whole thing trivially easy. The crimes - a missing toddler, a 3-year-old murder and a series of burglaries - are handled by Clare in a way that simply keeps the interest throughout. It's an excellent book on that leve...

Like most people these days I take a lot of photographs on my phone, and the quality can be excellent - but particularly with landscapes it's easy to get a result that's disappointing. On the other hand, I don't have time to spend hours touching up each photo - I want something that will enhance a landscape photo quickly and easily. It was a pleasure, then, to try out Landscape Pro , as it does some heavy duty work, but with relatively little effort. As a test, I used this image of the Mitchell Library in Glasgow, where I gave a talk a few weeks ago: It's a gorgeous building (not helped, obviously, by the scaffolding), but my photo did not do it justice. First step on loading the photo into the program is to identify key areas, which can be handled as one. This is done by dropping markers on them, then adjusting the coloured area to cover the edges. This a simple dragging mechanism, which copes with most boundaries well, though occasionally you may need t...

If you're wondering why I review less here, my SF reviews are now all on www.popularscience.co.uk - but this one is fantasy. Roger Zelazny has always been one of my favourite authors, so it was a delight to discover his last novel, which I'd never read. It sounds like an unlikely topic to be successful. The book is narrated by Jack the Ripper's talking dog, Snuff. It tells of the preparations for a strange Game played out when Halloween falls on a full moon - featuring some familiar fantasy characters (full marks if you spot who Larry Talbot is before it's revealed) and Lovecraftian dark forces. If this sounds an unlikely plot, Zelazny is the master of taking the unlikely and making it entertaining. And he does it here to the maximum. Although some of Zelazny's work was science fiction - the excellent Doorways in the Sand , for example - he's best known for his wisecracking fantasy series set in Amber. However, the style in A Night in Lonesome October is...

Image from Wikipedia It's interesting that many who have spent a lot of time arguing that MPs must make more decisions suddenly don't like it when they come up with an answer that doesn't apparently fit with the zeitgeist. The matter in question was whether or not to apply a 25p charge on disposable coffee cups, as used by all those coffee shops you can't avoid these days. The MPs said 'No.' And they were right. The problem is often compared with the success of the 5p charge on supermarket carrier bags. But it's a very different problem. Not only is it very easy to carry an empty shopping bag, we are much less likely to go supermarket shopping on a whim. And the 5p bag is an optional charge - I can choose whether or not to buy a bag. I can take away my purchase without one. I often do with a small shop. Try taking away your coffee without a cup. More to the point, the solution is simply economic madness. According to a Cardiff University study , appl...

Image from NHS I saw an article this weekend bemoaning Westminster's decision to make organ donation opt-out rather than opt-in in England. Tim Worstall, writing on the Adam Smith Institute's blog, suggested that it was madness to take this step. And at first glance, his argument was quite strong. Many government decisions are, frankly, guesswork. There is no good data to back up whether a change will be beneficial or not. But in this case there was some interesting data to consider. Because Wales made this decision earlier, and we now have two years of data on the outcome. According to the BMJ , 'Welsh opt-out law fails to increase organ donations.' There has been no significant increase in donation as a result of the change from opt-in to opt-out. When you think about it (and I suspect few have), this is not totally surprising - because it's relatively rare that a death will result in organs being available and suitable for transplant. It pretty much requ...

Many great TV shows have been based on single episode shows. So each week you would get a new story with a resolution at the end of the show. (Occasionally a 'to be continued' would be used to extend this to a double episode.) This didn't stop there being story arcs, where something ran in the background through a series of shows, dominating occasionally - but most individual shows still had a satisfying narrative in their own right. For me, the master of the balance between arc and individual show was Joss Whedon. (Please come back, Joss - your TV shows were far more innovative than your movies.) Of late though - I don't know if it's the influence of Scandi Noir - there's been a tendency to let the arc dominate to the extent that each episode has no standalone narrative whatsoever. They just become chunks of a vast film. And I honestly think that, in many cases, this has been a negative step. Two good examples are Suits and Star Trek . The early seasons of...

My latest book in the Icon Hot Science series is Gravitational Waves . All too often, this remarkable phenomenon get labelled in the media as if 'proving Einstein right' was its main role. There are two problems with this. In some ways gravitational waves prove Einstein wrong (he said they were so weak, they would never be detected)... and they're far more important than that. To give a flavour of why, here's the opening of Gravitational Waves : There are times when those working on a major science project receive public accolades. Typically, it’s when the data from a live science run is released, and what has been an intense period of private work becomes public property, to be dissected by the researchers’ scientific peers and celebrated by the world’s press. But on 14 September 2015, the huge team working on LIGO – more formally, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory – had no such expectations. No one realised that 50 years of fruitless work was...

How all visitors used to be able to see Stonehenge in my youth, before it was roped off I've brought this old post back to light as the latest plans for a tunnel for the A303 as it passes Stonehenge are put to the public. It might seems strange, but some British road planners have just faced the kind of dilemma beloved of Star Trek - and have made a decision I find quite sad. Anyone who has watched shows like Star Trek, Buffy, Battlestar Galactica etc. (basically any ensemble show where the characters' lives are put at risk) will be familiar with the 'Many versus the Few' dilemma. Our heroes get in a situation where they really ought to apply the dictum 'the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few'. It's what Mr Spock usually wants to do. But in this case, the 'few' at risk are their comrades, and so they invert the rule and put the lives of many at risk to save a few. (This is, of course, related to the trolley experiment I'v...

I regularly write about the fun to be found in probability and statistics - but also the difficulties we face in understanding them, because our brains don't seem to be wired in a way that adequately deals with this kind of mathematics. However, there's one misunderstanding that stands out heads and shoulders above the rest - and this is that we find it very difficult to distinguish between forecasts and facts. Data about past events can be (though isn't necessarily) accurate. Data about the future is often only accurate if you are lucky. I'm not saying all forecasting is worthless - it's the best of a set of bad options (certainly better than relying on Mystic Meg) - but we always need to be aware of its limitations. Let's take a simple personal example. My mortgage will soon be coming off a fixed rate, and the bank has kindly offered me a series of options for new fixed-rate details. To be able to decide between them, whether consciously or not, I have t...

I can think of few better antidotes to a grey and miserable English winter than Matthew Fort's Summer in the Islands . It features a food writer and TV presenter in his sixties, setting off for six months of puttering around the Italian islands on a pink Vespa, obviously bringing us the eating highlights, but much more, the enjoyment of slowing down and simply living life in a series of fascinating landscapes, rather than the everyday battling through it back home. In a puff on the back of the book, Jamie Oliver mentions the term 'midlife crisis'. Leaving aside any concerns about the definition of midlife, I'd say that Fort's adventures are the absolute antithesis of a midlife crisis. This isn't about showing off to your peers in an unsuitable sports car - it's about stepping into a different culture and gently absorbing and enjoying it. The strange thing about the enjoyment of this book is that the reader does not need any sense of wanting to be in F...