A while ago, I wrote a book called Conundrum which takes the reader through a host of puzzles and ciphers. Now and again I like to add a bonus puzzle - the latest is now available. The premise is that a spy has put the books shown here in a prominent position to send a hidden message to a confederate. To the person in the know, what you can see in the image tells when a meeting will take place. But when is it? Unlike a conventional cipher, the requirement here is not just to work out the relationship between one set of characters and another - you need to find the message in the first place. This kind of puzzle is an aid to creative thinking - you need to look for ways that the book spines can convey information and decide how to extract the required information from surroundings that are simply there to distract.  The message is concealed in a systematic way - it is not random. You are looking for a single word. As a small incentive, I will send a signed copy of my brand new book...

 I'm a big fan of Tim Harford's Cautionary Tales podcasts . In them, the economist and presenter of the BBC's excellent Radio 4 show  More or Less relates examples of where human error and misunderstanding has resulted in disaster (or, occasionally, triumph). I also love those pop psychology books such as Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational which tell us about all the ways we make bad decisions and suffer from biases, This is perhaps in part because I made a bad decision myself in my first year at university, when I wanted to take psychology as my fourth subject in Natural Sciences and instead allowed my tutor (a crystals scientist) to persuade me to do crystalline state instead, which I hated. On this morning's walk, I was listening to one of Tim's podcasts from June 2020 (I came to the series relatively late and am catching up on earlier episodes). In it, he admits that he himself did not step back and think about the implications when he first found out abo...

Thank you to those of you who currently subscribe to my personal blog Now Appearing . I'm trying out a new way to subscribe (still for free) to all my online writing - I'd be grateful if you could give it a try and see if it works for you.  Just go to authory.com/BrianClegg and sign up with your email address. You will then get notifications when I publish new pieces online, not only in this blog but also in a range of other places from Nature and Chemistry World to popularscience.co.uk . You can also take a look at anything I've published previously there. Whether or not you already subscribe, please do take a look.

On my morning walk today, I was listening to one of Tim Harford 's Cautionary Tales podcasts. In it, he mentioned the importance of design and referred in passing to one of my heroes, Don Norman. In his book, The Design of Everyday Things , Norman pointed out many examples of objects where the designer has gone for elegance at the expense of usability. A simple example he gave was the controls for a cooker hob. Take the example below (images from Unsplash): Which of the burners does the control with the arrow correspond to? It's obvious, isn't it? Because the designer thought about usability.  Now look at this hob: Again, which ring is the control responsible for? This time we can only be sure by looking for some kind of caption to the controls, because the design totally ignores the functionality, preferring to provide a neat line of parallel knobs, building in no information.  Many years ago, when I worked at British Airways, I did a non-scientific study on another examp...