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...