A while ago, I wrote a book on misconceptions in science (called Lightning Often Strikes Twice ). In it, I mentioned the inverted misconception that toast doesn't really fall butter side down. It feels like it should be a myth. But it is a real thing. Entertainingly, this myth was 'disproved' by the BBC in 1991, using a device that flipped a slice of toast in the air, rather like flipping a coin. Although it wasn't quite 50:50, not entirely surprisingly, on the whole the buttered and non-buttered sides ended up downwards roughly evenly.  But what the producers seemed to have missed is that there isn't much toast flipping going on in our kitchens. What usually happens is either that toast slips off a plate in our hands, or off a worktop. Both of these tend to occur at around waist height. And without a forced spin to get them going, the chances are high that the toast will only have time to revolve half a turn in the fall. It usually starts butter side up (that's...

In reviewing the first of Richard Coles' murder mysteries, Murder before Evensong , I remarked 'I just hope that with practice Coles can make the detective aspect more engaging'. He doesn't. In fact, although a murder is a thread running through this book, it's almost incidental - yet I didn't care because the murder mystery aspect is not really the point.  A Death in the Parish gives us two things that Coles does brilliantly: exploring the nature of British village life in the 1980s, when the country was going through a significant culture change as the old respect for authority was dying out, and giving us a novel with a realistic vicar as a central character, as opposed to the clumsy stereotypes we usually seen in fiction. I don't know if this was Coles' conscious intent, but the 'cosy murder' part feels like little more than a way to get more readers, because there is far less of a market for a novel about the realities of village life and t...

This is a bit of an oddity - it was given to me on the assumption that it is a mystery so I would like it, and there is a mystery element, but the main focus (and certainly the best part) involves an 87-year-old woman looking back over her life. Florence Butterfield is a woman from an ordinary background, but who has an extraordinary life, which is dipped into through her memories in a non-linear fashion. Susan Fletcher is clearly adept at this kind of writing, handling it well and giving Florrie some remarkable events to remember, through to the point when due to an unlikely accident with mulled wine she ends up losing a leg, in a wheelchair and moving into the assisted living part of a care home, where the key event of the mystery takes place at midsummer. The manager of the home, Renate, plummets from her third floor window with Florrie as the only witness. The manager's life is on a thread in a coma, and the assumption is made that it was a suicide attempt. But Florrie is not s...

This is the final post on the mathematical approach known as the Monte Carlo method, following ' Generating random numbers .' We have seen in previous posts why the method is named Monte Carlo, how it was first used and the difficulties of obtaining a stream of truly random numbers. This approach is now used across the sciences, as well in engineering, economics, AI and more. It's an technique that comes in useful when there is a complex mathematical problem solve, where taking repeated random samples of weighted possible outcomes will give a better understanding of a real world situation. There are far too many applications to go into detail here (you can find a length set of possibilities in the Wikipedia entry ). To see a simple one in action, take a look at this Monte Carlo-based pi generator . But I just want to pick out another application that I'm particularly familiar with from using it to help understand queues in an airport terminal. I've always thought th...

Having recently had a week with sole charge of the TV remote, I've taken the opportunity of catching up on a couple of new series in my favourite fantasy sub-genre. I'm not a fan of swords and sorcery (with the noble exception of Lord of the Rings ), but I love what you might call real-world fantasy. This is pretty much the same as urban fantasy, but doesn't have to be in a city. You could also see it as magical realism without the pretentiousness.  The idea, then, is to incorporate fantastical occurrences in the normal world. The first example of this was ITV's Passenger . This sets what should be a normal police procedural story in a weird village (Chadder Vale) in Lancashire. There are strange occurrences, some sort of unexplained dangerous creature and a cast of misfits. As such, you can see it as a mix of Twin Peaks, Stranger Things and Happy Valley . Perhaps the weirdest decision by Andrew Buchan, the man behind the series, is to set the show in the present, but ...

This is the third of four posts on the mathematical approach known as the Monte Carlo method, following ' Where did those neutrons go '. As we saw in the previous post, the Monte Carlo method depends on having a stream of random numbers. Unfortunately, randomness is not easy to generate. Ask someone for a series of random choices between 1 and 10 and they will not do well - for example, there won't be sufficient repeated values for a true random stream. In another extract from my book Dice World , let's take a look at what appears to be random whether we use a spreadsheet or a more sophisticated source: In Excel I have two random number functions, RAND, which gives me a random value between 0 and 1 (I just got 0.61012053) and RANDBETWEEN to choose a random number in a range. (My value for between 1 and 10 came out as 4.) Job done. Unfortunately, what Excel gives us is not random numbers, but pseudo-random numbers. Numbers that are random enough for, say, making a prize ...

This is the second of four posts on the mathematical approach known as the Monte Carlo method, following ' Breaking the bank...' Moving from the bank being broken at a casino to a mathematical method occurred as the Second World War came to a close. A number of scientists on the US nuclear programme were attempting to model neutron diffusion from a nuclear bomb. This was because a conventional nuclear explosion is effectively the trigger for the (then theoretical) thermonuclear explosion of a fusion bomb - and a major factor in its effectiveness is how neutrons travel out from the primary fission stage. Like his colleague John von Neumann, the Polish-American physicist Stanislaw Ulam had an interest in the game of poker and the probabilistic nature of games. The new possibility of electronic calculation using the ENIAC computer made it possible to consider a novel approach to modelling neutron diffusion. At the heart of nuclear fission is the idea of a chain reaction. A neutron...

This is the first of a couple of posts on the mathematical approach known as the Monte Carlo method. I want to start gently by taking a (virtual) trip to Monte Carlo in Monaco and its famous casino, specifically to explore a once well known phrase - the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo. The article below is extracted from my book Dice World . A roulette wheel is a physical device, and as such is not a perfect mechanism for producing a random number between 1 and 37 (or 38 in the more money-grabbing US casinos). Although wheels are routinely tested, it is entirely possible for one to have a slight bias – and just occasionally this can result in a chance for players to make a bundle. It certainly did so for 19th-century British engineer Joseph Jagger, who has, probably incorrectly, been associated with the song ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’, which came out around the same time as Jagger had a remarkable win in Monaco. The song probably referred instead to the conman Ch...

In Jo Callaghan's first book featuring Detective Superintendent Kat Frank paired up with a virtual AI detective called Lock, In the Blink of an Eye , it was arguably the science fiction aspect that came to the fore - but the (arguably better) sequel focuses more on being an excellent police procedural crime novel. Frank and Lock have been moved from cold cases to a frontline murder that rapidly becomes a national news story - the victim has been crucified. (I don't know if the release of the book was timed intentionally, but I read it over Easter.) Tension mounts as a second crucified body is found - while the team is still thrashing around trying to find a viable suspect. Where in the first book, Lock (and people's reaction to his holographic presence) featured heavily, here he becomes significantly more part of the team, and we see not only his limitations, but some consideration of how much he should be considered a conscious entity. If anything, his abilities are slight...