REVISIT SERIES -  A post from August 2011 (text updated) It has become popular in the science writing community to be slightly sniffy about Brian Cox. As spoof videos like the one below show, the style of his TV show is easy to mock, with a tendency to go to some distant location just to make a passing comment - but that says much more about the BBC's distinctly tired documentary style (I blame that nice David Attenborough myself) than it does about Brian Cox himself. Personally speaking, I think those of us who write science books should be very happy about Brian Cox's appearances It's hard not to suspect just a smidgeon of jealously amongst those who knock the Cox. But in reality, what he does gives more exposure to science and is liable to encourage some of those millions of viewers to find out more, which is where those of us with the more in-depth books can step in. (For that matter, they might move onto Cox's own excellent books with Jeff Forshaw, such as The...

REVISIT SERIES -  A post from August 2010 (text updated) A string of somewhat trollish comments in my  eariler post criticizing opera  reminds me that music can raise strong emotions. One emotion that music rarely does well is humour. Generally musicians tend to the twee or even downright painful when trying to be funny. Which is why I want to make sure no one forgets  P. D. Q. Bach , the last, least and funniest of the children of the great J. S. I don't think I give too many secrets away in saying that P. D. Q. is the invention of Peter Schickele, self-styled professor at the University of Southern North Dakota, Hoople. Schickele has put on a number of concerts and produced a range of recordings over the years celebrating P.D.Q.'s fictional musical output, which strays through many musical styles. Sometimes he can write a piece of some length and complexity without a single original musical theme in it, wonderfully and anachronistically stealing from left, right an...

There's a popular marketing approach that involves describing a book as 'X meets Y' - in the case of this new urban fantasy fairy story by Joanne Harris, we're told it's ' Neverwhere meets Stardust' -  and I've never seen such an accurate comparison. Yet Neil Gaiman need not worry: although there are strong echoes of both books here, this is never a ripoff of his work. If you've only ever associated Joanne Harris with romance (perhaps in the form of her novel/film  Chocolat ) she may seem an unlikely author for the genre - but she has form with her excellent Gospel of Loki - and, as was the case with Neverwhere , this is a romance in its own way, underlining the difference between lust (or glamour) and love. The similarity to Neverwhere is that the book features a London with a mysterious magical hidden side, including the secret nighttime market of the title, into which our innocent main character Tom is plunged, while the Stardust side comes wi...

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REVISIT SERIES -  A post from August 2014 Ten years ago I wrote about a new development in '2D' materials - a silicon equivalent of the wonderful graphene . As far as I can see, although research is ongoing as silicene has some potential benefits for making field effect transistors, we are yet to see much progress. I'm not a great one for using press releases as blog posts (although, come on, it is the silly season), but this one was so interesting, I wanted to share it. It's about silicene, which is the silicon equivalent of graphene, a single atom thick sheet of the substance. Just as graphene has proved an incredibly versatile material, the same is likely to prove true for silicene (which the spellchecker keeps trying to change to silicone - sigh). It's early days, but watch this space. Here's what the IoP had to say: An international team of researchers has taken a significant step towards understanding the fundamental properties of the two-dimensional mater...

This is by far my least favourite of Richard Coles 'Canon Clement mysteries'. Let's get the negatives out of the way first. Coles has never been a great mystery writer - his success, particularly with A Death in the Parish (his best so far), was in his engaging description of village and church life in an old-fashioned 1980s parish, which is beautifully observed. But this entry in the series has the weakest murder plot so far - there really is no sense of trying to solve the mystery alongside the detective. Everything is hidden from the reader until the solution is revealed, while the motive and opportunity are both weakly conceived. The limited mystery content is usually compensated for by the excellent village/church life aspect - but here the main character has retreated (both literally and metaphorically) to the monastery where he was previously a novice, so the social aspects are much more bitty as Coles swaps between what's going on amongst the brethren, general ...

This morning I heard Elton John's Rocket Man and noticed the line about not understanding the science and it's just a job he has five days a week. It reminded me of a sociological oddity of early science fiction films. If you watch a film about spaceflight from the 50s, say, the crew almost always included a 'working man' type. If it's a British film he'd probably be a cheery cockney, while the US would give us a wise-cracking or cynical man of the people (they were always men). The reasoning was pretty obvious - the filmmakers were basing their ideas of a spaceship crew on that of a traditional ship. Even Star Trek , despite starting well into the NASA era, fell for this idea - though they at least had a big enough crew on the Enterprise to require a whole range of roles. But those old, primarily black and white, films usually only had a small crew. So what were they expecting the role of the 'I don't know about the science, just do my job' person ...