There has been a lot on social media recently about the remarkable AI 'writer' ChatGPT . Many of my contacts are either academics or writers - and in both fields there has been concern about the ability of such AI software to interfere with their work.  As far as academics are concerned, the software arguably calls into doubt the value of the essay as means of assessing student knowledge (particularly the short exam-style essay, which some universities still allow to be submitted online). And some writers have worried that their jobs are at risk if, for example, a news outlet can get ChatGPT to knock up a story for free. My assessment is that the software is extremely impressive - but it has limitations that are likely to continue for a long time. Even with these limitations, it certainly could make inroads into student essays and poorly churned out journalism, but is unlikely to be a significant threat if some degree of insight or fact checking is required. Let's take a lo...

I enjoyed this book, but feel it has a relatively narrow audience that would have the same connection to it, hence the three star rating. Robin Ince is quite clearly addicted to buying books with an almost random enthusiasm, and this book is arguably more about that addiction than about the hundred bookstore tour he did that is the hook the book is hung on. My personal taste in books overlaps to some degree with Ince's - we both bought copies of Alan Frank's Horror Movies early in our book buying lives (sadly I don't seem to still have my copy, though I do have some equivalent titles on science fiction films, vampire movies and more). We both are likely to find, say, the Maleus Malificorum resting alongside a book on quantum physics next to an Edwardian hardback copy of Bessie Marchant's The Girl Captives on our shelves. I very much enjoyed the selection of books Ince discovers on his travels (often in charity shops as well as proper bookshops), and added a couple to...

This time of year I tend to read a much wider range of  books, so expect some random reviews. But one thing that will always feature over Christmas is a mystery - whether it's revisiting M. R. James ghost stories for the nth time, or a Christmas-themed murder mystery. This book certainly fits the bill with its deliberate reference to Agatha Christie's title, and Christmas thrown in. The setting is somewhat less exotic than the Orient Express - here it's the sleeper train from London to Fort William - but there's the same opportunity for a tight band of suspects and there's the convenience of a train that gets derailed in a snowstorm, isolating the suspects and the detective - in this case a newly retired Met detective inspector, heading up to Scotland because her daughter's about to give birth. Where this differs a lot from Christie is the impact of modern technology. So the detective, Roz Parker, is agonisingly kept up with the complications of her daughter...

Until relatively recently, I rather looked down my nose at Agatha Christie, but having now read the likes of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Five Little Pigs , I've realised there's a lot more to her writing than comes across in TV and film adaptations, so I recently picked up a copy of The Thirteen Problems from my local(ish) independent bookshop and was not disappointed. This is the very first book to feature Miss Marple, but rather than providing a single, book-length mystery, this 1932 title includes 13 short stories. The premise is that six people are gathered in a house and each tells a story of a mysterious happening in their past, challenging the others to solve the mystery. The guests somewhat reluctantly include the initial host's elderly aunt Miss Marple, who ends up solving every mystery. (This is then repeated at a dinner party, plus an individual consultation, to make up the total of thirteen.) What I found fascinating as a big Sherlock Holmes fan was that, ...

Image from Unsplash I gather from the i  newspaper (3 December) that music business millionaires are bemoaning their inability to have their Christmas songs thought of as classics by the public. Tom Chaplin of Keane is quoted as saying 'Getting a song in the [Christmas streaming] chart is like breaking into Fort Knox'.  I accept that streaming has made it more difficult to get your Christmas song into the canon - but, honestly, my suspicion is that the majority of songs on offer simply aren't good enough to make it. Once you get compared with the best of all time, it inevitably becomes a lot harder than it is if you are only being put up against the best from this year's crop. It's a bit like a serious music composer complaining that Monteverdi, Mozart or Vaughan Williams still get a look in. But is that really a bad thing? The fact is that songs do get added to the best of the bunch if they really stand out as far as the particularly odd calculation of what makes a...

Image from Unsplash I'm a big fan of the podcast Cautionary Tales by 'undercover economist' Tim Harford . In one episode, Tim tells us that his daughter prefers Halloween to Christmas because Halloween is more about community coming together, while Christmas is just for the family. This made me feel rather sad, but the good news for Tim's daughter is that this doesn't have to be the case. If Tim's family would like to go to a carol service - or a carol singing event - they'll get plenty of that community feel. Of course, Tim and family may well be amongst the majority of Brits, according to the latest census results, who aren't Christians. And that's fine. If they were on holiday in an exotic location, they wouldn't avoid the local culture because they don't share the locals' beliefs. Similarly, it's entirely possible to enjoy the atmosphere and community spirit of a carol service without having any belief. And singing those tunes th...

Doing something about climate change is essential. And as recent bills have shown, doing something about being self-sufficient in energy production is also essential. So who wouldn't love something that helps with both? The government's MPs, apparently. They seem to be distinctly against onshore wind turbines, a preference that also seems baked into the government's plans: A massive 64% of Conservative MPs think that most voters in their constituency would oppose wind turbines. But here's the thing. When YouGov asked the actual people, there was a very different picture: Over 70% of Conservative voters support wind farms in their local area. The overwhelming NIMBY attitude to wind turbines is a myth. Of course you can always find someone who will moan about having anything whatsoever built within a 10 mile radius of where they live. But they are in the minority on this one. From the stats, there's a vast gap between what Conservative MP think people want, and what t...

At the weekend I had the pleasure of appearing on literary agent Peter Cox's internet TV show Litopia Pop Up Submissions . In this, five brave souls provide a title, a blurb and the first 700 words of a book for comments from three industry experts and the extremely helpful online comments of viewers. This particular edition happened to have a focus on historical fiction, but I've done a few of these before and whatever the topic, one thing repeatedly comes across in that opening sample from the books - the author hasn't thought enough about how to engage their readers early on.  If you start a book with a set of facts (one example here was described as like reading a Wikipedia entry), you will rapidly lose your readers. Similarly, if the opening is totally introspective with nothing actually happening, an opening that is all tell and no show, it's hard for the reader to engage fully. The 'show don't tell' thing is a hoary old piece of writing advice - but t...

A fair number of people on Twitter have informed their followers that they have also set up on Mastodon just in case the world ends or some such. I don't doubt that Elon Musk could mess the whole thing up - but chances are things will stay fine in the Twitter world. Okay, I may lose my blue tick, which would be sad. I was told I ought to get one by an Olympic martial arts competitor, the way you do. We were at some sort of careers fair in Devizes (don't ask me why - I can't remember) and no one seemed to want to talk to either of us, so we chatted for a while and she was adamant that having a blue tick would make all the difference to my social media presence. But looking over the people I follow on Twitter, a mix do and don't have one and it's never made any difference to me - I certainly won't be paying getting on for £100 a year to keep it. That apart, the outrage seems to be because Twitter may allow various dubious characters  individuals back on. But for m...

I don't usually review two seasons of a TV show separately, but I'd like to follow up my review of the first series of The Capture , partly because the second series is better than the first (though like the first it had some credibility issues) and partly because the political context (as opposed to criminal law) brings into sharper focus the way this kind of information technology can be misused. As before, writer Ben Chanan proves good at giving us shocking scenes where deepfake videos and audio are used both to conceal what's really happening from security cameras and police radios and to replace broadcast video, totally twisting the content of a political interview. This seems to be intended to ruin rising political star Isaac Turner's career - though in reality things are far more complex. We get the same state actors - MI5, CIA and SO15 - as in the previous season, plus Truro Analytics (surely not a name that is supposed to bring Cambridge Analytica to mind?), a...

The BBC is, of course, a broadcaster rather than a publisher - yet its website, and particularly its news website, should surely be treated as if it were a publication. That being the case, it's time they got someone involved who knows how to lay out text. All too often their articles look as if they've been taken straight off the autocue. Look at the start of the 'article' from political editor, Chris Mason illustrated above. The whole thing is more than twice as long as the extract shown - and pretty well the only paragraph that has more than one sentence in it is a quote. It's horrendous. I find it really difficult to read. Please, someone at the BBC, get your act together.  Alternatively you might like to approach the Royal Literary Fund . They're really good at helping students and organisations with their writing skills - it's clear that the BBC needs some assistance as soon as possible.

Although I'm a big Neil Gaiman fan, I've never read The Sandman , as I just can't relate to comic books and graphic novels. I'm not a very visual person, and I like a story to contain (far) more words. Nonetheless, I was aware it was considered something of a big thing in the genre, so watched the Netflix version with interest. The first episode is distinctly on the slow side - I know at least one person who gave up part way through - but it's worth persevering to make your mind up, as things certainly change gear after a while. However, I do think the series has an underlying problem in the way it has apparently been painstakingly based on the individual comics. This gives an extremely episodic approach, making it almost impossible to produce a really top notch drama series. The problem is not having mostly separate stories in each episode - I like that. But if a series is take that approach, it needs two other things to support it - a group of good recurring chara...

If you don't have a website, you are probably lucky enough not to be bombarded with emails promising to improve your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). Here's a typical example that I received recently: I have looked at your website and realize your website is great design but your website ranking not good all search engine Google, AOL, Yahoo, and Bing.  Do you want more targeted visitors on your website?  We can place your website on Google's 1st page. Yahoo, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest etc.).  We also offer the most competitive rates for this service, May I send you quote? What is a bit scary (apart from the grammar) is the sheer volume of this stuff I receive. Thankfully, my spam filter is pretty good at clearing them out of my inbox, but one day this week, for example, I received 20 such emails, and rarely get fewer than ten a day.  We can only assume that some companies respond to this bombardment, or why would the spammers bother? And when ...

Image by Anne Lund from Wikipedia reproduced and modified under  GNU 1.2 I've always found the old anti-nuclear badge hilarious. It might say 'Nuclear Power? No Thanks', but its central image of the smiling sun portrays the biggest nuclear reactor within several light years. But I can't resist adapting it as a comment on the over-enthusiasm for some applications of hydrogen in green energy. Don't get me wrong, hydrogen is a wonderful element - literally the number one. There is a specific irony in my use of that image because, of course, hydrogen is the fuel of that vast nuclear reactor that keeps us alive - and, for that matter, it's one of the two component elements of the water that is essential for life. I am also not denying that hydrogen has a useful role in the future green economy. It's often mis-described as an energy source. It's actually an energy store , and as such could be useful as a way of storing away renewable energy. For example, solar...

Though hugely flawed in some ways, The Capture proved to be one of the most gripping TV shows I’ve watched in a while, thanks to the regular invocation of clever twists that make the viewer think ‘How is that possible?’ The focus throughout is video surveillance - specifically how, and if, it can be misleading or tampered with to make something that didn’t really happen appear to be the case. I’m specifically reviewing the first series - I haven’t started the second yet, but will give it its own review. The focus initially is a soldier accused of killing someone without the need to do so in Afghanistan. (This was why I didn’t watch the series when it first came out as I tend to avoid military topics.) But although the soldier in question becomes a major character throughout, it isn’t really his story. It was clever and did more than entertain, really giving the viewer an opportunity to think about the underlying moral dilemma (the details will have to wait until after the spoiler aler...

As an author, it's not uncommon to get emails or letters correcting something in one of my books. Sometimes these corrections are useful, at other times, the correspondent misses the point. But I recently had one from Ronja Denzler that was not only correct, but also highlighted something really interesting about mnemonics. These phrases to remember something can be genuinely handy - most of us can still recall those for rainbow colours or planets (often still incorporating Pluto) from school, while I distinctly remember a woman called Ivy Watts from my physics class. But the most elegant are the numerical mnemonics, where the numbers of letters in each word represents a digit. This form reaches its zenith in the mnemonics for pi - so much so that the art of producing these has its own, distinctly tortured, name of 'piphology'. When I wrote Introducing Infinity - a graphic guide  in collaboration with the excellent illustrator Oliver Pugh, I asked if he could use a fuller v...

Photo courtesy of Eva Amsen I was somewhat bemused by a thought piece by James O'Malley suggesting that we've got it all wrong with our pride in Britain's ability to put on a good queue, as exemplified by the queue for the late Queen's lying in state. O'Malley tells us 'It’s also a completely bonkers, wrong-headed way to think about Britain. When we see a queue, we should feel embarrassed.' The reason for this, he suggests, is that a queue means that we aren't being dealt with efficiently - our precious time is being wasted. He goes on to say 'when we see a queue we should want to celebrate it - we should want to eliminate it.' As someone who worked in Operational Research, and who has done quite a lot of work with queuing theory, I would respectfully suggest that he is wrong. Not in the suggestion that we should want to minimise queuing - of course no one wants to waste their time. But outside of a fantasy world we have to consider the reality ...

I despair of the Green Party here in the UK. They are still pumping out the same old knee-jerk reaction of the ex-hippies to nuclear power. It's as if they didn't realise how important climate change was. It's not just one item in a green buffet of options. It's the big one.  We need massive change to deal with the climate emergency - and that includes moving to a mix of energy generation that doesn't produce greenhouse gasses. Yes, there must be plenty of wind and solar (and ideally wave/tide too) - but we also need generation that doesn't depend on the weather and sun - for which nuclear is the obvious option. Caroline Lucas of the Green Party put out this tweet on 1 September 2022, and I don't know where to start. Of course, a new nuclear plant is not 'the solution to the cost of living crisis' (though nuclear energy is a lot cheaper than the current price of gas). It's part of the long-term solution we desperately need to put in place to comp...

John Buchan is best known for his thriller The 39 Steps , filmed melodramatically by Alfred Hitchcock in 1935. The Gap in the Curtain is another period piece, first published in 1932, but it is anything but a conventional thriller. It's sometimes presented as science fiction, but it would more reasonably be described as fantasy: although the events it covers are supposedly triggered by the work of a scientist, the mechanism is pure fantasy. We begin at a country house party, where a random selection of toffs are encouraged to take part in an experiment by the mysterious Professor Moe. By obsessing over a particular section of the Times newspaper for a while (plus the administration of a mystery drug), seven participants are set up to have a second's glance at a small section of the newspaper from one year in the future. In practice, two of the experimental subjects, including the narrator, don't undertake the final part, so five people are given a brief glimpse of the futu...

Interesting things are afoot in the world of UK news podcasts. The former presenters of the BBC's best podcast, Americast, have shifted to rival Global and have gone from a weekly-ish podcast to weekdaily one as The News Agents. Meanwhile, the BBC has just broadcast the first of a rebooted Americast. And the good news is, both are excellent. Let's start with Americast. There was a real danger that when the original leads Emily Maitlis and Jon Sopel left that we would end up with a pale imitation, as happened when the Top Gear team departed. (Admittedly that was under more dubious circumstances - I don't think either Maitlis or Sopel punched anyone.) However, rather than replace the originals with amateurs, the BBC has been clever here. They've kept the solid, American third leg of the programme, Anthony Zurcher, and replaced the duo with a pair of BBC big hitters, Justin Webb and Sarah Smith.  Going on the first episode (which was confusingly launched on the Newscast po...

Way back in the early 90s, I attended a lecture by the Austrian-born computing pioneer Hermann Hauser, one of the pair behind Acorn computers, the maker of the BBC micro. In his talk, Hauser was describing the difficulty of computers understanding a language like English, illustrating this with a pair of phrases:      Time flies like an arrow      Fruit flies like an apple Hauser pointed our the difficulties of machine translation, as long as computers had no understanding of the underlying language and context. For a computer, it would be natural to interpret those phrases the same way. As it happens, machine translation has moved on by taking a totally different direction - it still doesn't understand language, but by using vast amounts of data, it has become quite strong on context. A few years after this lecture, I received an email which brought Hauser's point back to me. At the time, machine translation was in its infancy. The email was distinctly int...