It's that time when sensible people take a break from the internet. There won't be any blog posts next week, but I'll be back soon. Meanwhile, there's a great carol below... For those of us who celebrate Christmas, have a great one - and an excellent 2025 to all. Having sung in choirs pretty much all my life, I'm a huge fan of good church music. Here's one of my favourite carols, Arthur Oldham's setting of Remember O Thou Man , which I first discovered when singing at the Oxford Physics Department carol service (don't ask) - it's not very well known, but well worth a listen. If you like a bit of musical history (source The New Oxford Book of Carols ), the words date back to the early seventeenth century, appearing as 'A Christmas Carroll' in Thomas Ravenscroft's 1611 Melismata: musical phansies fitting to court, citie and country humours to 3, 4 and 5 voyces . It's not known if the tune Ravenscroft used was original or a traditional o...

The problem with much of our approach to the environment is that it's driven by fuzzy feelings, rather than logic and connected thinking. This has come up recently in respect to missing links in the renewable energy grid, but can also be seen in our approach to electric vehicles, the knee-jerk environmental reaction to nuclear, the way environmentalists embrace organic food and much more. Way back, I wrote a book called Ecologic to try to address this lack of clear thinking. It won a prize, but didn't have much impact other than getting me labelled a ' green heretic ', which I have accepted as a badge of honour. Sadly, though, bringing logic to green issues continues to be a problem. The example that brought this to mind was the news that the massive Scottish Seagreen offshore wind plant has only been able to provide one third of its potential capacity this year - it sold 1.2 million gWh to the grid, where it could have provided 3.7 gWh. The reason for the disparity i...

Watching the mildly entertaining Man on the Inside on Netflix, I was struck by a painful mirror image of the bad old days. In the series Ted Danson plays a bored, retired engineering professor who takes on a job as an undercover investigator for a PI to investigate a theft in a retirement home. We get some stereotype old people behaviour, but also some embarrassingly hypocritical sexism. I'll come back to that in a moment, but to put it into context, I've also recently been rewatching the excellent 2006/7 TV series Life on Mars . In the show, the 2006 detective Sam Tyler played by John Simm hallucinates himself into a 1970s Manchester police team after a brain injury, working under the wonderfully unreconstructed Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister). Something Tyler constantly attempts to battle is the casual sexism of the male detectives, which (allegedly) had changed significantly by 2006. Now back to Man on the Inside (made in 2024, not the distant past). Two female inhabitants of...

As a fan of Sherlock Holmes on the lookout for a Christmas mystery, this seemed an ideal purchase - and it's not bad. But it's not great either. There have been some excellent modern Holmes ventures - think, for example, of Anthony Horowitz's House of Silk , and even more so his brilliant Moriarty . And on the whole Tim Major makes a reasonable effort of fitting with the characters as we know them - but there are two issues with the way the book's written. To give it some context, this is a story featuring Irene Adler (who the TV show Sherlock demonstrated well was ideal for taking Holmes in something of a new direction), who is setting Holmes a series of puzzles, starting with an odd sounding vocal performance which he studies at some length as sheet music. All the puzzles, it appears, are to be thefts with no theft - perhaps the cleverest these involves a stolen painting that never existed. And there is some entertainment as Holmes and Watson attempt to get a grip on...

Nothing seems to suit Christmas reading better than either ghost stories or Christmas-set novels. For some this means a fluffy romance in the snow, but for those of us with darker preferences, it's hard to beat a good Christmas murder. An annual event for me over the last few years has been getting the excellent series of classic murderous Christmas short stories pulled together by Cecily Gayford, starting with the 2016 Murder under the Christmas Tree . This featured seasonal output from the likes of Margery Allingham, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ellis Peters and Dorothy L. Sayers, laced with a few more modern authors such as Ian Rankin and Val McDermid, in some shiny Christmassy twisty tales. I actually thought while purchasing this year's addition 'Surely she is going to run out of classic stories soon' - and sadly, to a degree, Gayford has. The first half of Murder by Candlelight is up to the usual standard with some good seasonal tales from the likes of Catherine Aird, Car...

REVISIT SERIES -  An edited post from December 2014 Over the years, magicians like Harry Houdini and James Randi have shown time and again that they have ideal skills for spotting and debunking fraudulent claims of magical abilities and mental powers. In the Telegraph newspaper, though, Will Storr had a go at 'debunking the king of the debunkers', demonstrating that Randi himself, now 87 (according to his article, or 86 according to Wikipedia), was not all he seemed. [Randi died in 2020.] For me, this was a wonderful example of entirely missing the point. Storr made three main accusations. That Randi has at some point been doubtful about the science behind climate change, that he was intolerant to drug users and that he had lied about replicating Rupert Sheldrake's dog experiments, in which Sheldrake claims to have shown that at dog was able to predict when its owner would return home. The first two, frankly, are hardly worth considering as they are classic type errors. Bei...

Back in 2016 I belatedly reviewed Neal Stephenson's 1992 novel Snow Crash - it seemed a good time to revisit and dive into it a little more than was possible in a straightforward review. Back then I commented 'If you like the kind of science fiction that hits you between the eyes and flings you into a high-octane cyber-world, particularly if you have an IT background, this is a masterpiece.' That certainly holds true of the first half. Perhaps the closest parallel here is the 2010 Christopher Nolan film, Inception .  Both are scintillatingly delightful, but tail off at the end. The movie, still one of my favourites, loses it somewhat when it turns into a sub-Bond action movie and then ends oddly. By contrast, Snow Crash gets distinctly bogged down by an interminable section where main character Hiro is doing the metaverse equivalent of library work on a convoluted theory that combines the Babel story and some Chariots of the Gods - like uber-speculation, which becomes som...

Jack Gatland (real name Tony Lee) has an extremely slick writing style - it feels almost like an American crime writer producing a novel set in the UK. The setting is reminiscent of a police version of Mick Herron's Slough House intelligence service novels, televised as Slow Horses . Where that series involves a set of misfit, but in their odd way highly capable, spies, here we get the brilliant rejects of the police service, collected as 'The Last Chance Saloon'. Herron's series predates Gatland's by five years - yet despite only starting it four years ago, the prolific Gatland has already produced 20 titles in the DI Walsh series, with other books alongside. You might imagine this would result in sub-standard writing. There are certainly more little errors than I would usually expect in a professionally published series, but Gatland has some excellent over-the-top plotting, and really keeps the tension up and the action flowing.  To illustrate, I can give an examp...

Not for the first time, I was inspired by listening to the excellent The Studies Show podcast . In their 26 November edition, Tom Chivers and Stuart Ritchie introduced collider bias, which is a horrible statistical anomaly that can make it seem that a study shows something entirely different from reality. What's particularly worrying is that, as the podcast demonstrates, many scientists aren't aware of this potential issue. I had assumed collider bias would be something to do with the kind of huge statistical analysis necessary to interpret what's going on in a piece of equipment like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN - but in reality the 'collision' in question is simply down to the way a pair of arrows point to the same location on a kind of flow diagram. What this statistical anomaly can produce, though, is the kind of result we love to hear (and scientists love to find) - results that make you go 'Huh? That's surprising.' Examples given included that...

REVISIT SERIES -  Edited posts from February 2010 and March 2015 I've long marvelled at the success of the wonderfully unscientific concept of homeopathy. This is a double-length post pulling together two homeopathic adventures. Just over a week ago there was a mass overdose of medication sold by responsible companies like Boots. [I'm pleased to say, since this post, Boots has stopped making homeopathic remedies, though they currently still sell a handful of products.] Across the world people took vastly more than the recommended dose. And nothing happened. The reason? They were overdosing on homeopathic medicine. The campaign was known as 10:23. The strange numbering refers to  Avogadro's number . This is a number that delights chemists - it's the number of atoms in a mole of a substance. The actual number is around 6x10 23 , where 10 23 is 1 with 23 zeroes after it. The reason this is of relevence to homeopathic medicine becomes clear when you realize how these medic...

Most of my book reviews are either science or science fiction. But December tends to be a month when I stray more into a different genre: somehow murder and Christmas make excellent bedfellows.  I know this doesn't work for everyone - I'm reminded of Paul F.'s kind words when using the link below to buy me a coffee 'I enjoy your reviews, particularly those areas in which I'm interested. 🙂' I hope that many of you will enjoy the increased number of murderous reviews (there will still be some science/SF articles) - but if it's not your thing, I can reassure you that normal service will be renewed in the New Year... and have a great December, however you celebrate (or don't). Image by Girl with red hat from  Unsplash . These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee: See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

When you really get engaged in a scientific theory, just as when you support a particular political viewpoint, it can be very difficult to let go. This might run counter to the theoretical nature of science, which supposedly delights in overturning old theories - but the reality is that scientists are human beings and don't like to change deeply held views. This need to sometimes push through a major change of viewpoint is behind Kuhn's concept of a paradigm shift - for a considerable time the old guard cling onto their theory until it become untenable and suddenly the consensus undergoes a heavy duty shift, which can be distressing to those left behind. It happened to me, not as a scientist but as a young science enthusiast, when my passionate support for Fred Hoyle and the steady state theory had to be swept aside for the Big Bang theory. Now, it's entirely possible that something similar is happening to upset the equilibrium of supporters of the existence of dark matter ...

Despite all its faults, as a science writer I have found social media wonderful - it allows me to tap into both the science and writing communities, which is excellent for someone working in a job where you don't have much opportunity to meet others in your line of work. I've been involved in this kind of thing for a while, beginning with an ancient forum (I can't remember where it was hosted) set up by the Society of Authors. I'm still in contact with quite a few writers from this, who can share a wry smile when remembering the lack of foresight from whoever set it up, that a forum titled Writers' Exchange might look a little misleading when the words are run together without an apostrophe. Until recently, by far the most useful social media site for me was Twitter. It probably still is, but X is declining in value because a number of my long-standing contacts have abandoned it out of dislike for its owner. Personally, I think this amounts to cutting off your nose...

Direct debits are wonderful things. They make it far easier when dealing with, say an energy company, where payments are regular but potentially variable. But I've reasonably discovered a downside, at least if you are involved in a charity or small organisation. I'm treasurer of a small local charity. The other day I was glancing at the bank accounts online and noticed something odd. Two direct debit payments had been made from our account, both for relatively small amounts. Each had a reference starting DVLA- followed by a car registration number. When I had a look at our regular payments there were in fact three direct debits of this kind, though one hadn't had any money taken yet. This was from an account only used for incoming payments. We had not set up any direct debits - certainly not with the UK's DVLA, which handles car licensing as there are no vehicles associated with the charity. I rang the bank and, to their credit (or, rather, ours) they had refunded the m...

REVISIT SERIES -  An edited post from October 2013 There was a lot of fuss in some sections of the news recently about runner Mo Farah having problems because someone pushing a child's buggy in the park where Mo was trying to train wouldn't get off the path to keep out of Mo's way. Now I'm sure Mo is a nice guy, and was very polite, and there certainly shouldn't have been the fight that ensued. But I also am sure that the media outrage that poor old Mo had to suffer so much by not having the path to himself because of this unreasonable father was ridiculous. Let's get the picture in perspective. Mo is very good at a game, the playground game of 'Who can run fastest?' He's one of the best people in the world at this particular game, and that's lovely for him. But compared with keeping a baby or toddler safe, it is a totally worthless activity. It's fine in its place. If he had been training on a running track and the father and started pushing...

I am a big fan of BBC Radio 3 - their serious music station*. Of late I've seen a few people complaining about it dumbing down because more of their programming has parts of longer compositions, rather than playing, say, a whole symphony or concerto. However, I think that those who moan have got it wrong. The accusation of dumbing down is partly because this is what the lighter commercial rival, Classic FM, does, and partly on the assumption that serious music lovers should stick with a whole piece as the composer intended not just listen to an edited highlight. The comparison with Classic FM, which almost always plays 'classical favourites' doesn't make much sense - Radio 3 continues to play a much wider range of music, from tudorbethan through to contemporary composers. But, for me at least, the sampler approach of often not playing a whole piece makes a lot of sense. Like many music lovers I subscribe to an all-you-can-eat music streaming service. For me, Radio 3 doe...

REVISIT SERIES -  An edited post from October 2014 I find it interesting the way that the media gets in a state of outrage when someone defaces a Banksy artwork. It feels a touch hypocritical. The image shown here has according to Wikipedia been 'defaced by a paintball gun’. Actually the 'defacing' is quite effective as it looks as if someone has shot at the people with a paint gun, which itself could be interpreted artistically (in fact, I didn't know it was 'defaced' until I looked it up). Admittedly if all someone does is scrawl a tag over it, it's not a great contribution. But even so, I'm not sure we have any right to complain. The artists in question need to expect that their audiences may abandon the reverence that is adopted by the audience for traditional art. This occurred to me when a friend was describing attending a play at Bristol's fairly avant garde Old Vic Theatre. Apparently the performance was of a Samuel Beckett radio play, and a...

I have been a fan of the British fantasy writer Alan Garner since meeting him, age 11. Garner attended the same school as me (significantly earlier), and came to give a talk, not to a huge auditorium but just a classroom of young readers.  For nearly a decade he brought out books that almost perfectly aged with me in their target audience, from The Weirdstone of Brisingamen to Red Shift (with the last we parted company as I found it too depressing). I was sufficiently fascinated by his books that I made a home movie in the late 70s visiting many of the locations used in them.  For those who remember the copper mine on Alderley Edge used evocatively in his writing as a dark underground location, a friend and I (probably illegally) explored a bit of it - which is where the photos below come from. In The Weirdstone there is a strange booming noise in the mine, coming from the goblin-like creatures, which meant we did eventually decide to leave in a hurry when we heard a simila...

At the moment I’m commuting to Bristol once a week to do some work at the university on behalf of the Royal Literary Fund . I’m very fond of Bristol as a city, but there times when I wonder if their green policies have been entirely thought through. When they first introduced rental e-scooters I pointed out that they were sometimes left in hazardous locations - this seems less the case now, though I did come across one recently nearly blocking a pedestrian crossing. But the most dangerous aspect is some of the central bike lanes. I’m all in favour of getting people out of cars and buses, but I wish there was more focus on walking. This is significantly better for you over a particular time duration than using a bike or e-scooter - but that’s not my point. Inevitably fitting bike lanes into an old city centre can be tricky. And some of them here are downright dangerous. The only time I’ve been nearly killed by a bicycle was someone coming down the steep slope of Park Street in Bristol a...

To the south of Swindon, just outside the village of Wroughton (where my daughters went to school) is what's now rather grandly known as the Science and Innovation Park . This huge 540 acre site houses the Science Museum's store facility. It's also home to the museum's amazing library, where I can be seen telling the (then) BBC's Robert Peston about quantum theory - and acted as a track for the TV show Grand Tour before it stopped being a Top Gear lookalike. Last Tuesday, I was honoured to be invited to the unveiling of the new Hawking Building a massive store housing over 300,000 items from the huge to the tiny. The scale of the building is remarkable - it really does look like one of those CGI, bigger than anything you can really imagine, store houses you see in movies. But this is for real. Walking round is quite an experience. Unlike a modern, carefully curated museum, this is a wonderful jumble, where you might find a Dalek lurking near a submarine alongside...